Authors: Carol Ross Joynt
Howard built the stacked back bar with a group of friends in 1969 when he first got the place. They had been, he had happily reported, “on a colossal bender.” His goal was a wall of liquor on both sides of the center cash register. “When a customer walks in a bar he wants only one thing, to know you have what he drinks. I wanted people to walk in and know that, and to see nothing but liquor bottles.”
My morning routine became almost as methodical as Georgetown’s. Spencer and I would get in the car and I’d drive him the short distance to his pre-K, just up the hill, and then I’d head back down the hill and make a pit stop at Nathans before heading across town to CNN. Typically, outside Nathans, someone would be washing the sidewalk. Like most of the staff, I would enter through the side door. It put me in the kitchen, where the cooks had stockpots brewing and other prep work under way. On my way to the dark basement I dodged deliverymen pushing dollies stacked high with boxes of carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, fish, meat, beer, liquor, aprons, and tablecloths.
The office, far in the back and literally under the floor of the dining room, was a valiant attempt by Howard to create a habitat where he would be comfortable. Like the upstairs bar it looked like a yacht club, with ship prints and other nautical touches. There were three mahogany desks: one for me, one for Doug, and one for the office manager. But however much the office aspired to being livable, it didn’t appeal to me. I liked windows, for one thing. This sunless room with its low ceiling made me feel trapped. In fact, I was trapped. I had to be there to learn how the restaurant worked.
Because I could write a script did not mean I could write a menu. Because I could perform under pressure and meet a news deadline did not mean I could convince a belligerent drunk that it was time to pay his tab and go home. Because I could sense which congressional aide was most likely to betray his boss and give me a scoop did not mean I could interview a college student and sense whether he could wait
tables, and because I could get Sharon Stone to pop Larry King’s suspenders on live television did not mean I could convince Mr. Garcia, whose trucks picked up the trash each morning, that he should wait another day for his overdue check. Nope. None of that computed. My skills here were useless. Mr. Garcia had all the leverage. “Pay me or let the rats pick up the garbage.”
The ire of vendors taught me to be afraid of answering Nathans’ always jangling telephones. With monthly taxes getting paid, and legal fees, the once fat bank balance—or slush fund—was shrinking fast. But angry suppliers could not always be avoided. Take, for example, the morning of my first plumbing crisis. I saw it as an opportunity to get involved, to be useful. Doug gave me the name and phone number for the plumber, and I jumped on the case. What I didn’t know was that we were behind on our account.
“We need you. When can you come?” I asked.
“When I can get there,” he said.
“Well, we need you right away.”
“I’d like to get paid right away,” he said. “When are you going to pay us?”
“We paid you,” I said, hoping against hope that we did.
“No, Howard paid us. You don’t pay us. Howard always paid his bills. You’re a deadbeat.”
I wished I had had the moxie to shout, “Yeah, Howard paid his bills all right but he didn’t pay the payroll taxes, you asshole!” But I didn’t. I kept my trap shut. I needed the plumber on my side. And I wondered why, with all the lawyers and accountants and managers working for me, nobody ever told me we didn’t pay the plumber.
Howard’s routine was to call the restaurant every night at ten o’clock, no matter where he was. He checked in to get a report from the night manager. How many dinners? What’s the take? Who are the customers? Any problems? That’s what he wanted to know. I did the same thing, putting up a good front, as if I knew what I was talking about. Most of the time the news was routine. The dining room sat about 65 people comfortably. The barroom, even when 3 or 4 deep at the bar, sat another 20 or so at tables along the big windows. On a good night, when the tables turned twice, that translated to 120–140 dinners, a solid performance. On the other hand, 35–45 dinners meant bring
in the body bags. Dead. I learned to roll with it. As with the stock market, a restaurant owner tracks the long-term averages, but when funds are shrinking, what matters is the daily bottom line. It costs a certain amount just to open the door. If that amount of money is met and exceeded, the restaurant turns a profit. If it isn’t met, the day is a loser. Even before Howard’s death, the restaurant’s volume had started to drop. There were many reasons, but chief among them were more competition in a changing Georgetown and customer fatigue. Tastes change, something new comes along, people move on.
Bars attract a motley crowd, that’s for sure—some of them behind the bar, some with their belly up to it. A night without an “incident” was rare. A woman claimed her fur coat had been stolen but no one on the staff could remember her arriving in one. A bouncer pummeled a customer for being unruly. The customer claimed he wasn’t unruly, just a little frisky. An intoxicated sports star grabbed a woman’s breasts “just for fun.” The woman didn’t get the joke. Two young women vomited all over the ladies’ room before passing out in the muck. A waiter wrote in his own tip on a customer’s credit card charge. The customer didn’t like that. Another waiter tried to get out the back door with a live lobster in his shirt—a risky move, to say the least—but the manager caught him before the lobster did. A regular bar patron, a generally calm fellow, ripped the men’s urinal off the wall because he was having a “bad night.”
But the standout of my ten o’clock calls came one Saturday night when the floor manager, Bob Walker, told me that the coat-check girl had gone after one of the cooks with a knife in the middle of the busy dinner service. The fight had started in the kitchen and ended up in the basement with Bob, a bartender, and a waiter struggling to pull the women apart. Apparently the white female cook, in a dispute over the staff bathroom, called the African-American coat-check girl a racial epithet, and the fight was on. Fortunately, the patrons remained unaware of it. Half my job, I sometimes thought, was keeping the lid on so diners could enjoy a meal without somebody chasing through the place with knife in hand or lobster at chest.
In all my years in journalism I had seen some tense newsroom arguments but nobody had ever pulled a knife. Bob said the coat-check girl planned to file an equal-opportunity complaint against Nathans.
“You’ll probably want to talk to her,” he said. “Maybe try to talk her out of it.”
This was exactly the kind of mess in which I was loath to get involved. I had no expertise, no training in how to handle staff fights, particularly of a racial nature and potentially involving liability. Professionally I didn’t shirk from confrontations, but dodging tear gas covering a story was better than this.
“Please call Doug and ask him to handle it,” I said.
“I did call him,” Bob replied. “He said that since you’re the owner it’s your responsibility.”
I fell back on my pillow and sighed.
I
DEALT WITH
the stress by getting away from it. One way was to hop the train to New York, check into a good hotel—on expense account, thank God!—and lose myself in meetings with celebrities or book publicists on behalf of
Larry King Live
. In New York I could pretend life was as it had been. The city bolstered my battered ego. The people I knew there, friends and professional contacts, saw me as a successful TV producer, as a go-getter, a winner. Even with that welcome lift, on the train home, somewhere between Wilmington and Baltimore, the gloom would descend as I went from top of the world back to tax fraud defendant and owner of a very troubled saloon. I liked feeling like a winner. I didn’t like feeling like a loser.
The gloom would also bring troubling thoughts about my dear dead husband. I’d left the stage of shock but was still in denial. Howard couldn’t be this bad guy, could he? He wasn’t the kind of person who would leave his wife and young son holding the bag, would he? If he was this bad guy, how did I not see it? The rolling countryside speeding by the train windows had no answers. No one did.
S
OMETIMES
N
ATHANS HAD
its perks, though. I would often invite Martha to dinner. She was becoming a close friend. We would sit in my favorite booth, number 26, and try to cheer each other up. From the moment she’d first learned of the mess Howard had left me, she’d been dismayed. She didn’t go deep into the subject with me. It was as
if she were watching a house on fire, paralyzed, transfixed by the flames, and unable to do anything but stare. She really didn’t know what else to do. Years later she would ask, “What was the hurt in Howard that no one could reach?” but in the early days of coming to grips she was, like me, in a state of mystification. When we talked about Howard, every conversation ended with Martha asking the same question: “What was he thinking?”
Thinking?
Is that what you call it? Maybe he was thinking about the merits of Iranian versus Russian caviar; he certainly wasn’t thinking about the survivors who would have to clean up the mess he left behind.
While some friends with whom I’d shared the dirty laundry were beginning to show anger toward Howard, I wasn’t there with them—yet. He had died while we were in love. Love just doesn’t turn off, or it didn’t in my case, even with the avalanches of dreck that were landing squarely on my head and in my heart. The love had become different, though. As I slogged through one pile of his crap after another, it shifted more to the kind of love a parent has for a child who is self-destructive and always in trouble. It’s still love but no longer unconditional. It becomes colored by frustration, regret, and heartache. The way I saw it, there was nothing I could do but pick up the pieces and survive. Making sense of it would have to wait.
Some nights I checked out of my new reality. I would invite Martha and a group of girlfriends for an after-dinner dance party—ten to fifteen women, all mothers, married, near to middle age, usually at least one pregnant, jumping around to Top 40 dance hits spun by a Nathans deejay until midnight. My anthem was the hit “Tubthumping,” with the lyrics “I get knocked down, but I get up again, you’re never going to keep me down.” It was as if Chumbawamba wrote it with me in mind. The dance parties lasted for a year. I wish they’d lasted longer. The whirling, jumping, and sweating cleared my head and boosted my spirits.
The best way to get away from the constant stress of my life was spending time with Spencer. My goal was to wrap my arms around us and our home, to protect us from the government, from problems at Nathans, problems with lawyers—from the horrible way our lives had
been upended. I couldn’t get enough of Spencer nor give him enough of me. Hand in hand, we’d take walks along the C&O Canal, wander aimlessly (me, not him) through FAO Schwarz, catch an afternoon movie, or go for ice cream. Occasionally I’d pile him and the dog in the car for a drive without any particular destination in mind. From the backseat I’d hear, “Now, remember, I don’t like mommies who cry.”
The car became a place for us to talk. It would be that way for years. As a little boy, Spencer would begin the same way every time—“Mommy, tell me about Daddy”—and when I did tell him about his father I had to remember that in his eyes, the man was God: not flawed, not fallen. It was that glorious, funny, and—above all—loving father I recalled for him in story after story. Only down the road—well down the road—would I begin to dole out the truth. Sometimes our car talk turned to loopy discussions about life and death. “Can you have a baby and have the baby be Daddy and he can come back that way?” Then, just like that, he’d fall silent and stare out the back window, sucking his thumb and cuddling Baby. I’d stare ahead into traffic, sneaking glances at him in the mirror. When he fell asleep, that’s when I’d cry—not about any one thing, just everything. It was a release.
Howard, literally, had left us all alone. He’d brought me into his world, took me to an enchanted place where I’d be safe, and assured me everything would always work out because he had my back. Then he left me there. The reality he left us was not enchanting and not safe, but dangerous and frightening. There was no one who could bail us out and no one to turn to, only lawyers. His parents were dead. My mother was dead and my father was in poor health. My friends and colleagues were supportive, but the IRS was too intimidating. This was bigger than all of us. I had no special talent I could suddenly market for a cool million or two. I knew I’d only blow what little was left if I tried to beat the odds in a Vegas casino. I wasn’t a Bonnie and, anyway, there was no Clyde. The burden was on my shoulders. Everybody else—especially the lawyers and Nathans staff—looked to me for answers, solutions.
So I had to come up with some.
I knew this: Howard and I had got Spencer off to a good start and I wanted to keep our lives on course no matter what. We were dedicated
to giving him the sound, balanced world neither of us ever had. Howard had screwed it up big time, that’s for sure. Maybe he wanted us to have the best of everything? That didn’t wash. “The best of everything” was why we were in this mess, why I was a defendant in a federal tax fraud case, why I felt lost, and, day by day, why I was moving from denial toward anger.
“Y
OU SHOULD GO
to court. You’d be great on the witness stand,” Bob Woodward said to me across the table in his Georgetown kitchen. Spencer and I were having pasta with Bob, his wife, Elsa Walsh, and their two-year-old daughter, Diana. Bob and I had met covering the antiwar movement in 1970 when Bob was working for a suburban newspaper and I was with UPI. Not long after that he moved to the
Washington Post
and the rest is history. I met Elsa soon after they married in 1989. Both of them were friends of Howard’s and mine.
“A civil court in D.C. will rule against the IRS because the jury’ll be with you,” Bob said. Elsa nodded.