Featured Prose | April 21, 2020

Welcome back to our new series of prizewinning “viral” prose for these days of social distancing. The TMR staff wishes you a happy week. Dave Zoby’s 2013 Jeffrey E. Smith Prize-winning essay “Cafe Misfit” is today’s piece, which evokes the insular community of workplace relationships with more than a touch of humor.

 

Café Misfit

By Dave Zoby

Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.

—Baudelaire

 

Suddenly one summer Joe and Oscar appeared in the Fan neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia, with the idea that they could open a bistro on the ground floor of the old Windsor Building, an aged apartment building situated mere yards from the humanities compound at Virginia Commonwealth University. Oscar and Joe believed they could attract wealthy academics, administrators with refined palates and deep pockets, visiting professors of modern art. They hired a fleet of waitresses and released colored balloons for their grand opening. They hired a chef of reputation and a passable sommelier fluent in Portuguese. They had thought of almost everything. But what they didn’t know was that professors are the worst kind of customers in the world, the very bottom. They don’t tip for squat, and they don’t socialize as much as you think.

They called their bistro Old Virginia Café. (Oscar, already betraying a vision conflicting with Joe’s, campaigned for Black Stocking Café, or Zingers.) But Joe had more money invested, and he insisted on the understated Old Virginia. They were Italians from Philly; there was no hiding it. They drove imposing black sedans with tinted windows. They wore the tight mustaches of card dealers and circus barkers. Even their shirts, silk and buttoned low enough to let their wiry chest hair escape, told a story of strange migration. One of the first things they did was to stroll with their lady friends along Monument Avenue to take pictures of the old Southern generals. I saw them halted under the gaze of Jefferson Davis, snapping photos like mad of a statue aged by passing traffic.

No one knew how they had decided on Richmond. They had run several lucrative businesses up north. There was mention of a limousine service, a dry cleaning supply business. Joe owned a Cessna and taught private lessons. Oscar co-owned a concrete outfit. Out of thin air, with no prior experience, they had decided to open a restaurant. Ripening in their late fifties, they said they had always wanted to have their own place. They loved to cook and drink, so the obvious next step was to open a restaurant. But they didn’t need a restaurant, and that would prove to be a problem. The only good restaurateur is a desperate one.

I kept my eye on Old Virginia for a year without going in. I locked my bike up to the rack across the street on my way to literature classes. Frequently, I spotted Joe placing menu boards on the sidewalk, advertising the daily specials: fried shad roe, calamari salad, ribeye sandwiches. His café was empty save for a few pairs of lunching ladies and a disquieting number of ferns he had spread around the windows for charm. Ferns like that, they won’t survive the winter, I wanted to say. And your prices are too high. No one is going to pay $10.95 for a stuffed flounder.

But I didn’t say anything; I just watched, expecting any day to see him close down like the ones before him.

 

The Fan, in 1993, was in ruins. Bricks were loose and falling from buildings. Roots buckled the sidewalks from underneath. Warehouses were shuttered. Over on Grace Street, where I lived, roofs were water-damaged and leavened. There was a handful of underemployed prostitutes who worked the corner of Broad Street and Boulevard. Rude bands played in some of the old bars that still thrummed with life. But on most nights, as I pedaled my bike back toward my rented room, the Fan seemed permanently vacant, a failed experiment, an apology.

How Joe and Oscar thought they could waltz down South and take our money I never fully grasped. I was infuriated to see Joe emerge one spring with his menu board: Virginia ham with peanut gravy; beer-battered rockfish nuggets, braised split quail and spring greens. I’d thought the last ice storm had cleared him out. I had not spied Oscar’s black Cadillac for months. I had just received the overwhelming good news that I had won a teaching assistantship. My tuition would be waived. And I would earn over three thousand dollars a semester, a staggering amount of money at the time. I swaggered into the café and sat at the huge horseshoe bar. Joe came out and offered me a menu. I ordered a German beer off the tap and settled on the burger, which was “hand-shaped” and came with fresh-cut “Virginia fries.”

Nearly thirty minutes later, Joe returned with my burger. He had spared no expense or labor. The roll it rested on had come from one of the local bakeries. He had even pounded out his own homemade horseradish as a bonus. The burger bled weakly on my plate while Joe poured himself a beer, leaned back against his beer coolers and asked me why I was studying literature.

“I love all of those guys—Shakespeare, Keats, Byron—but I don’t see how you can make a career of it,” he said.

“This is the best fucking burger I have ever eaten,” I said.

“I know it,” he said. “But how much does a professor make, anyways?”

My mind was elsewhere. I noticed that Joe’s dishwasher, Scott Black, had stepped onto the back porch, apparently, to smoke. But what he was really doing was looking for his dealer, Ramon. Joe’s chef, Freddy Macintyre, came in as I was finishing my meal. I had seen him many, many times in the grottoes of the Village Café, where he ran an all-men’s AA meeting. Freddy, a former chef for D.C. ambassadors and various diplomats, had lived the tumultuous life of a celebrity cook. These days he was clean, but he shook uncontrollably at the slightest crisis. He was distraught already because he had ordered crayfish and they had not been delivered. He was fretting and looking out the window for the deliveryman. I noticed things. And, most importantly, I noticed a gaping absence at the corner of the bar where Oscar used to lean.

Joe gave me my bill and went back to work on a cheesecake. He took a beer with him. With the bill in my hand, I rounded the horseshoe bar and looked into the kitchen through the tiny pane of glass. Joe stood at a huge stainless steel prep table. I pushed open the door and entered a cathedral of sunlight on metal. There was a nearly new Hobart dishwasher that belched and hummed through a cycle, its gills rows of fresh white plates. It breathed the sweet breath of bleach and steam. There was a rotisserie with ceramic bricks, two convection ovens, fryers large enough to bathe in, various pestles and their corresponding mortars and a grill to keep two chefs busy. Steel mixing bowls, iron stock pots, milky white ramekins, room-sized walk-in coolers, refrigerators that reflected my image like a fun house mirror: it was as if Joe and Oscar had imagined the most expensive kitchen they could think of and decided to improve upon it. Joe must be terribly underwater. Or, it occurred to me, he must have been rich to begin with.

Joe looked up from a dozen yolks he was whipping. He grinned.

“Do you need a bar manager?” I said.

We agreed on a small salary. I would work Thursday through Saturday nights and order the liquor for the restaurant. He gave me a key—I wouldn’t have given me a key. And then he said there would be no W2s; we would “work something else out.” Before I left, I refilled his beer and brought it to him.

“You’ll like it here,” he said. “We have all kinds of things planned for the menu.”

As I was leaving I bumped into his waitress, hurrying to make her shift. She had fresh bruises on the nape of her neck. Her blue eyes were wrecked with signs of alcohol poisoning. She had short red hair and deep charcoal stains on her fingertips: the telltale signs of an art student. “Joe is going to kill me,” she said—to me?—in a rough voice. But I had never spoken to her in my life, so she must have been talking to herself or to that arbitrator we all talk to when we are ashamed.

Why offer fried cod on your menu when you can go to pains to acquire blue catfish from a dealer near Yorktown and then drive out there to pick it up yourself, the white flesh in loaves, still smelling definitely of the river, of brackishness, a wet copy of The Richmond Times-Dispatch serving as a cover? Or maybe you don’t drive out there yourself, but you send one of your lackeys or Chef Freddy himself, with orders to stop by LaPrell Nursery for several trays of fresh herbs, chives and cilantro specifically. Freddy, if you forget the goddamn cilantro don’t even bother coming back. Just keep driving to Utah, Joe might say. And Freddy would fall apart with the shakes, not knowing whether it was a joke or not. Why serve your shad roe on toast when you can spend the morning driving around Richmond to the various bakeries until you settle on the white baguettes from Mechlers? And for God’s sake, don’t use store-bought bacon with your roe; call a farmer in Culpeper and have him slaughter a young hog for that purpose specifically. Go there and stand in the smokehouse, ruining your clothes forever. And your sauces: Are you going to make them all at once like some hack, or are you going to take down the copper saucepans which came from the French countryside of Flaubert and make each sauce upon order? Why would you do it any other way? These were some of the questions Joe sought to answer about the Old Virginia. The customers, confused by the length of time it took to get their orders of lamb meatloaf (he ground it himself) served in a red wine and rosemary reduction, looked at Joe with something related to pity. I served them a glass of wine on the house to apologize for the forty-five minutes they had sat there by the windows overlooking the skateboarders enjoying a session on the nearly vacant campus across the street. In June, I was giving away more booze than I was selling. Scott Black, the implacable dishwasher, would come out and sit at the bar and stare. He didn’t cringe at the long spans of time it took Joe and Freddy to serve a meal. Scott Black would ask for his shift drink—usually an expensive whiskey he liked to order just to say the name. The customers, meanwhile, looked at their watches and sighed.

“Joe,” I said one night as he was unwinding from a burst of late orders of cheese fries (a dish he loathed, a remnant of Oscar’s uninspired vision) “People are calling your place the ‘the old vagina.’ The food takes too long.”

He sighed heavily.

“I didn’t want to tell you, but it’s the truth. And Annie said she’s not coming back. She’s gone back to dancing.”

“Who is Annie?”

“The redhead.”

Joe got up from his chair and came behind the bar where I was refilling the sink with hot, sudsy water. He poured himself a shot of Basil Hayden and dropped in an ice cube. There was a thunderstorm swaying the trees along the avenue. He seemed dazed by the rain coming in sheets.

“Why don’t the professors come over? I always thought we’d get more business from those fucks. I don’t understand it.”

Joe sat and began to tell me some of the challenges he was facing with the restaurant. “Oscar’s loopy. He’s crazy as hell,” said Joe. “To tell you the truth, I am glad he’s gone. All he did was drive the waitresses away.” Then there was a problem, in Joe’s mind, with getting quality meat in Virginia. He wanted to age it himself, and nothing he could find was quite right. He had been flying his Cessna back and forth between Philly and Richmond with loads of prime beef, sausages, pork butts, which Freddy would drape obscenely in the walk-in. He was outraged at what passed for charcuterie in Richmond. And there was another issue: the Cessna needed an inspection, and no one out at Byrd Airport could do it. He didn’t want to fly it down to Atlanta just for an inspection, but he would if push came to shove. And good help was hard to get in Richmond, Joe complained. But what vexed Joe the most was the cold shoulder he was getting from the faculty at VCU.

“Is there some way I could get my place reviewed? Could you get someone from the English Department to come over?” he whined.

“Joe, you don’t want that.”

He poured another drink.

“I went to a place in South Richmond called Red’s this weekend, and they were eating goddamn gravy with coffee in it. The blueberries were artificial. The syrup was fake. And the place was full, packed with well-dressed people, the kind of people I want in here.”

Finally, Joe was learning something about the South.

 

My tenure as the bar manager at the Old Virginia Café was an innocent one. Perhaps I was not experienced enough to face the world. I was shocked when one of the waitresses took me to her apartment and popped in a sex tape before she poured me a glass of wine. Money was always a problem for me, even with the teaching position. I worked nights while my fellow students went to readings and art shows. I reveled in the unfairness of it all. Depressed for days when I learned the dean of Humanities was sleeping with one of my fellow grad students, I went into the Carriage House Book Store and approached the clerk with a copy of Baudelaire. “Kid, you don’t really want that,” he said. And it was true. So I put it back on the shelves. Riding my bike along Monument Avenue, the odor of hot pavement thick in the air, I marveled at the white statues of Civil War generals and a culture that revered their swords, their bad shoulders, their bladders cast in stone. I would often sit on the stoop beside the restaurant reading my graduate-school texts, and between the scurrying pigeons and the strolling pairs of academics, I would be approached by the same drug dealer day after day. He wore a navy blue skullcap through the blaze of summer.

“Need anything?” he’d say.

Was it that obvious?

“Get yourself laid,” Joe would hiss, and he’d give me a fifty under the table. But that was the problem with Joe: he was too invested in the visceral pleasures, the petty venalities of the world. He roared too much about “free-market capitalism.” He had no intellectual ambitions, as I had, unless you counted his desire to impress college faculty with his tricky cuisine. He went on and on about making love to various women. Dipping his Cessna over the fall foliage, he once told me, was like an extended orgasm. He never invited me along. He took waitresses up for short flights, and they would come back red-faced, giddy, as if they had witnessed a rare bird. He took them all up as a sort of application process.

Meanwhile, I plodded along with my bar rag in my pocket and a poem in my head. Late nights, I would try to tell Joe about the existential pitfalls of being midtwenties and studying literature. He didn’t want to hear it. “You’re doing it all wrong,” he’d say when he discovered me reading Leaves of Grass. “Why don’t you go out and fuck someone?” When I told him I wanted to write, he frowned a bit, shook his head. “Jesus Christ, can’t you do both?” Then he went back into the kitchen to check on his cheesecakes.

 

Joe, over the late summer, spent a great deal of time with his friends at the bar. Buzzed, they wandered down to the farmer’s market. Outside of town, the crops were ripening and the outdoor markets were resplendent with obscene eggplants, carrots the hue of sunsets, huge heads of white cauliflower and broad-leaved cabbages stacked like cannon balls. Joe, stumbling along the stalls of sweet corn, stood no chance. He bought everything in reach and let his lackeys tote it along, especially bags of sweet onions with clods of Spotsylvania County dirt still clinging to the roots. Fish mongers offered fat flounders from Knott’s Island. Tilefish? Littlenecks? Are you serious? The oystermen shucked their huge shellfish into Joe’s cupped hands, allowing great flows of milt to overflow and spill upon the ground. Joe stood no chance. When he returned to the restaurant, he was woozy, accompanied by a troop of new friends, each carrying a sack of food. They would all enter the kitchen, a dozen men, and within minutes, Chef Freddy, pissed off and intruded upon, would clock out and leave. Patrons at the bar would take note of the incredible volumes of beer and liquor and, always, laughter flowing from the kitchen and the outbursts that rose up from there. I discouraged paying customers from wandering back there, for once they met Joe, they became one of his friends and never paid for another drink, though their lives improved radically.

Around this same time Joe traded in his black sedan for a pickup. He bought one with an extended cab, so he could sleep there when he came back from his adventures in the countryside. I often saw him silhouetted in the truck, his neck cranked back, his mouth sadly agape, and I would feel sorry for him. I brought him cups of water and aspirin. But he was out of it, unable to say much. Hours later he would startle awake, start the truck, allow it to idle for twenty minutes while he regained his bearings and drive away, back into the Virginia countryside in search of adventure, or something related to it.

Joe kept land notices around the bar, and I often found him reading about upcoming auctions. He and the beer distributor would go out on Smith Mountain Lake to fish a bass tournament, or he would go to the cheese monger’s Blue Ridge cabin to throw hatchets and drink homemade whiskey that landed him in the hospital for three days. He’d flirt with the true nature of Southernness, then scare himself and buzz back to his wife and daughter in Pennsylvania. And the more he left, the more I found myself running the Old Virginia Café. The key burned in my hand, and I sometimes found myself there in the dark restaurant with nothing but the ferns to keep me company and the sound of the walk-in freezer doing its thing.

On one of Joe’s prolonged absences I fired Scott Black. He was two hours late and stoned. I said, “My only regret is that I can’t fire you twice.”

“Joe will hire me back,” said Scott, and he shook off his apron and flung it at me. It was incredibly clean, dry, hardly used. He pounded the Hobart with his small fists on his way out; the dishwashing machine seemed his only friend, yet he had punched it in the face.

With one phone call I hired a fellow poet and grad student supreme, John Venable, and within hours he was pumping the Hobart, steaming his hair into a pile of fibers. His skin turned pink, and I could see by his expression that he would not last long. He brought with him a radio/tape player, and he played rude Lou Reed concerts, bootlegged editions no one else could get or wanted. Immediately, he asked about vacations and sick leave. “I do bring a lot of experience to this position,” he said. He even had the nerve to ask about his shift drink, this within hours of being hired. I wanted to fire him, too, but I was already shorthanded. And in the restaurant business no one fucks with the dishwasher, or at least they begin with a certain patina of holiness, and it erodes from there. Besides, Chef Freddy was in another one of his moods, complaining about late orders and trying to close the kitchen at 9:00 PM.

“Freddy, goddamn it, you know we serve a late menu.”

But with Joe gone, the chef felt he could do as he wanted. He walked out. Luckily, one of Joe’s new friends, Gary, was seated at the bar. He was pretending to read a three-day-old copy of the Times-Dispatch, a crumpled pane of it in one hand. His bar tab was already becoming symbolic in nature.

“Sheeeet, I could do that man’s job twice as well,” said Gary. I was slightly disappointed that Joe was missing this display of outward Southern confidence, a fault of ours. Joe could learn a lot from Gary.

“Gary, tell me what do you know about cooking,” I said, playing along.

“After Vietnam I lived in Paris for five years, walking distance to the Bastille. I worked them tiny kitchens. I can cook like a motherfucker, stocks, breads, cassoulets. Shit, man, I can show you some stuff round here,” he said, and he stood, wobbly. I saw this as a grand opportunity to recover some of his outstanding debts. He was hired on the spot. But I had to pay him cash out of the register, one hundred bucks a night, because he didn’t want his old lady to know he had a job.

Gary fell into his duties and began to crank out homestyle Southern food with a touch of French. He baked Cornish hens and served them with a bed of mustard greens and collards. He made little pizzas christened with dollops of barbecued beef. He made a cassoulet of white beans and pork butt. He said, “People don’t want to be confused by the food they eat; the world is confusing enough for damn sure,” and he drank prodigious amounts of beer. You must remember that this was back in the early ’90s, before the proliferation of food shows—whole channels devoted to people stuffing their pie holes and making culinary postulations, before the widespread celebrity of Mario Batali, Wolfgang Puck and the rest of them. One day, as I was wiping the bar, I heard Gary order a new keg of Miller. “That German stuff ain’t selling for shit,” he said to Arnie, the distributor. He poured himself an inaugural glass of Miller and took it in like smoke; here was a doer, a leader, the assistant manager I had longed for. I had a key made for him immediately, and when Scott Black came around looking for Joe, I told him to talk to Gary.

“This place still owes me a shift drink,” he said on his way out.

Of course Joe, upon returning with a crate of Maine lobsters and cases of white burgundy, immediately undid all my moves. Freddy came back, sanguine and aloof as always. He had discovered photography in his brief romance with unemployment and asked Joe for an eight-hundred-dollar cash advance to buy a lens. And Scott Black, in the dusty, wee hours of the previous night, had snuck in and regained his old position at the Hobart. There were not enough dishes for one dishwasher on most nights, but both John and Scott stood around in the steam and took frequent breaks where they drank Miller on the stoop and spoke with the drug dealers and history professors who wandered by. They began to drink so much keg beer that I offered to run a line back to the kitchen so they could pour it themselves. Joe, not knowing I was joking, said he would call Arnie and look into it.

Freddy was smug when I tried to apologize. I found him one September afternoon playing with two live river eels he was going to cook in a strawberry and champagne sauce, Joe’s dinner. He was tormenting the pair of fish, grabbing them so that they panicked and wrapped their jade-colored bodies around his forearm like bracelets. I told him that I had only fired him because he had done the unforgivable—walked out on a shift. This is the rule in restaurants from Baltimore to Shanghai: if you walk out on a shift, keep walking, man, and don’t even look back.

“It’s the rules,” I said to Freddy. He held a cleaver in his hand, and he cudgeled the first eel but only stunned it.

“I’ve been in kitchens longer than you’ve been alive,” he said. He struck again. This time he killed the eel, and it spewed a shock of orange roe onto the cutting table. “Don’t tell me about rules.”

 

A flat of soft-shelled crabs arrived the next morning, alive and weakly protesting. They were in neat rows like soldiers, and they were strung with wet seaweed to keep them alive. Gary breaded one and fried it for Joe’s breakfast. The two men were terribly hung over. Seafood seemed to pick them up some. Venable wandered in with love bruises on his neck. Gary fried him a crab too, its legs kicking as it went into the butter.

“Joe, why don’t you just fire Freddy?” I asked.

“Fire Freddy? Have you ever tasted his bouillabaisse? The man’s a genius, a saint!”

“Well, seems like people like what Gary cooks—”

Gary seemed embarrassed.

“So I will keep them both. What’s it to you?”

“Well you gave him eight hundred bucks for a lens. I don’t see how he’ll ever pay you back.”

“When you get your own place, you can do whatever you goddamn well please.”

I was hurt by Joe’s directness. He was right; the Old Virginia was his place, not mine. I went back out to the bar and wiped the bottles down, the odd liquors that nobody ever orders, the Pernod, the Drambuie, the Galliano. A few minutes later, Scott Black came in and punched his time card. And why did I care? In one year I was going to graduate and move to Colorado or some other mountain state.

But I was hurt. I avoided Joe for weeks. Finally one night, he sat at the bar as I closed the place. He told me that he trusted me.

“Well, you should back me up when I get rid of these folks.”

“But where would they go? Freddy is a mess. Scott—he’s a child.”

“Even if they cost you money?”

“It’s all they have,” he said. He finished his drink and went back into the office to count the drawers.

I had never thought about it before, but it was true. The Old Virginia was not a restaurant but a place for lost souls who needed the dignity of a job, even a symbolic job, to tether them to the world. I pedaled my bike over wet leaves toward my apartment on Grace Street and thought about this revelation. There was a new waitress, Stephanie, a single mother, who told her customers all the details of her ugly divorce. There was Venable, who was so distraught over a recent breakup that I wondered if one day he would not show up at all and I would have to go downtown to identify his body. And the men who sat around the horseshoe bar, they were all destroyed and broken in various ways: window salesmen, realtors, plumbers with six-pack-an-hour habits. They were cheats and scoundrels, braggarts and bastards. And what about me? If Joe was in the business of collecting the truly miserable and giving them jobs, wasn’t I cast among them? Joe had come to Virginia to gather and study us losers.

Recently, I had been snooping in the books. I had discovered that there were names of people on the payroll who did not exist, folks I had never met. Oscar was still being paid a ridiculous sum. There were inflated salaries (47K for Freddy and 45K for Gary). I saw lists of cases of wine and booze that never arrived at the café. Fuel costs and maintenance for the Cessna were included in Joe’s accounting. And there, in the bottom columns of the ledger, I saw that the expenses far exceeded the profits. The Old Virginia Café, I realized, was meant to lose money. Sometime, I am not sure when, the restaurant had become something intended to fail. I had a suspicion that there was a twin restaurant in Philly where the cases of wine and liquor were going. There were parties there that I would never attend. The Old Virginia was a ruse and always had been, an illusion like Joe’s oddball reflection in the refrigerator doors, like my kiss-ass overtures toward high-minded literature and the balding, old professors of English who seemed permanently out of breath.

I pedaled down Grace Street and stopped at Annie’s apartment. She was home, fresh from a shift at the Red Light. She was washing the ridiculous makeup from her face. One of her roommates was watching movies, so we went into Annie’s room. It was cluttered with canvasses and frames, squirts of paint on her bureau. She said she was disappointed with her portfolio, that she was thinking of moving back to Virginia Beach and working at her father’s car dealership. She asked about the café, if things had gotten better for me there. We crawled into bed with little fanfare. She said to be careful with her knees because they were bruised.

“You know,” she said afterward, “those same guys who come into the Old Virginia also come into the Red Light. Joe tips like a fool.”

She showed me some of her charcoal drawings. There was Chef Freddy with a venison sauerbraten, Gary smoking one of his cigarillos, Joe standing by his Cessna (I realized he must have taken her for a flight, which probably meant she had screwed him.) and a few of me behind the bar. I was dark, brooding, and she had captured something about me that was unsettling. There were too many of me.

“I look so unhappy,” I said.

For a few weeks after our rendezvous, Annie came in and sat at the bar by herself. She drank the same thing, expensive tequila on the rocks. I never charged her. “She’s a good girl,” Joe said, “you should go with her.” I stayed as far away from her as possible and spent my time cleaning bottle necks and scooping buckets of ice. And after her one drink she’d say, “Stop by after work,” but I never did because I was working feverishly on a backpacking memoir, a real piece of shit that would never see the light of day. Joe and Gary were out looking at land. They had been AWOL for weeks, and the spring was becoming possible, and after that, graduation, and the rest of my life, whatever that meant. The old professors loved my latest work and said it was “illuminating and moving.” They told me that I was at the height of my power. Gary bought me a book about Colorado from the Carriage House and left it behind the bar wrapped in simple brown paper.

One day, just as Annie was leaving, John Venable came out of the kitchen and watched her go. He poured himself his shift drink and popped a cigarette in his mouth. I was days away from leaving Virginia forever. I asked him if all the dishes were done and the silverware sorted. He looked at me in surprise.

“What happened to you, man?” he said, and he kept looking at me until I had to turn away. See, John had bought the Baudelaire.

 

I have lost all of them. Only John takes it upon himself to call me and inform me of the relevant tragedies. He called recently from Pittsburgh to tell me that Joe was dead, that the Old Virginia had become academic offices. Stomach cancer is what got Joe. When they buried him, Venable says, there was virtually no one from the café there, none of the old buddies, and the food at the reception was nothing Joe would have accepted. But Oscar was there, tall and gray-headed, stoic in a long black jacket.

We cried on the phone for a few minutes. Then we hung up.

And all I could think about was that time in the spring when Joe had asked me to come and look at some land. He had never taken me along before. I drove Gary’s truck with a john boat in the bed. I drove all night through southern Virginia, past battlefields and bights of dark, abandoned land and arrived just in time to pick up Joe and Gary at a rural airstrip. We drove through stands of timber to a small lake where Gary sculled us along all day and we caught tremendous large-mouthed bass.

“I think I will buy this place,” said Joe, threading a fish on the stringer, “Or I won’t. What’s the fucking difference?”

Joe and I left in the Cessna. Gary waved to us from the tarmac. And then we were up above the blue tree line, and I could soon see Richmond rising in the distant haze, the Blue Ridge to the west. As we flew over the city, I could see the Fan, water trapped on the tops of apartment buildings in pools, the James River brown with spring rains. It was too loud to talk in the cockpit. Still, I tried to get Joe’s attention to show him the huge amount of water tumbling over the falls. But he had something else on his mind. He drove the throttle down and pointed the small plane toward the trees. The Cessna began to tremble, and the trees were roaring up at us, blurring from the vibration. Papers began to stir and float around our faces. The bass slid around at my feet. We were seconds from death. We both smiled wickedly as the plane fell from the sky. But I wasn’t afraid. I had a shift that night. There were bottles of white wine specifically for this occasion, and the sea salt and spices stood in cones, ready for the touch of a chef’s hands.

 

Dave Zoby was born in Norfolk, Virginia. At VCU he earned an MFA in poetry.  Dave has published poems in 64 Magazine, the Southern Poetry ReviewGeorgia State ReviewBlackbird, the South Dakota Review and others.  His creative nonfiction has appeared in Ninth Letter, the Sun MagazineGray’s and the Missouri ReviewFire on the Beach (2001) was published by Scribner. This work of nonfiction tells the previously untold story of Richard Etheridge, an African-American coastal hero who led daring rescues of shipwrecked mariners along North Carolina’s storm-swept coast.  His latest book is an essay collection, Fish Like You Mean It.

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