THE BREAKFAST CROWD has cleared out, and only the regulars remain at Nate ’n’ Al’s. There is the ring of silverware in the kitchen and the sound of laughter in back, where the boys are still talking about Brooklyn. Dishes are scattered across the table. Here and there a scrap of bagel or a strip of lox catches the sun. Grease pools at the edges of plates. The waitress, Kaye, has come twice to clear the table and has twice been waved away. “Get outta here,” says Asher, holding up a hand. No one will admit the meal is over. Herbie is still picking, coming up with strange food combinations. For Herbie, any collection of plates is a buffet.
“What the hell,” says Larry. “French toast and white fish?”
“It mixes in the stomach,” says Herbie. “Mind over matter.”
Asher undoes a button in his pants, and Larry is already talking about lunch. Sid asks for the check. “Okay,” he says, standing. “Let’s break outta this joint.”
The men walk slowly toward the register, knuckles dragging on tabletops. Eyes follow them through the room. Each man grabs a toothpick. On the street they are men with toothpick mouths, patting their bellies. They have come to prize comfort and all day long walk around like Mafia dons, in bright-colored sweatsuits. At night they go to dinner in silky Hawaiian shirts decorated with fish or race cars or flowers. It’s as if they passed right from the short pants of their youth, to the uniforms of their young adulthood, to three-thousand-dollar, made-for-me-special-in-Hong-Kong suits, straight out to John Gotti at the Ravenite Club—the comfort-all-the-time look you get only with a truly tacky sweatsuit. They look up Beverly Drive to Wilshire, cars streaming by, all those suckers off to work. Ahead of them lie at least ten more good years, meals, vacations, sprees. They are like the gangsters had the gangsters done like Lepke said and stayed out of town. The story of their lives is, after all, an expatriate story, men who have settled far from home, who talk of the past because the past tells them who they are. Just before everyone goes their separate ways, Sid smiles and says, “Same time tomorrow. Last one through the door, pays.”