Waitressing At Magoo’s © Jane Sherry March 2021
This is a story set in motion by a winter’s dream,
having nothing to do with Magoos. In the
dream, there was a mountain view at a party I
‘crashed’ where camellia blossoms fell on my head;
winter’s red flowers.
From that mountain-scape dream I found other
remembrances of the lands I’ve worked and lived
and loved; and to the singular jobs I’ve held- waitress,
bartender, topless dancer, personal assistant to a
celebrity drug dealer, wandering artist with
many more tales to tell.
The storybook of my grown up life begins so far from
the mountain view in that dream, so different from the
wild urban spectacle of my early twenties. This is one
of those stories.
Once upon a time I stole red tulips from New York’s City Hall.
I always was a flower thief.
I was young and in love with a city broke and dirty,
rent I could afford and flirting flirty; madly inspired
with my ponytail swinging I served up chili, burgers
and ratatouille, a waitress job to remember forever.
We were poor artists, soon-to-be-famous-artists, to
never-to-be-known-artists, forgotten artists. I served
their wives, their lovers and their children, to their
looks of dismay and approval.
It was NYC in the 1970’s, where there was an endless
party at Magoo’s, an artists-for-artists hangout on the
corner of 6th Avenue and Walker, down Tribeca way,
when rent was still cheap and love was easy,
booze, burgers and ratatouille; artists with bar tabs
and lots of promiscuity, and city hall rats made
backroom history at Magoos.
Pandy, the owner’s daughter, took me back there and
told me the story, it was like a fairy tale; in whispers
she made history re-membered; City Hall bigshots,
who paid for women in the back room; of everyday
corruption, and only later, did I hear of grand juries
and paltry fines
that finally closed that oasis of a gone-gone era
of cheap drinks and burgers for art; leaving artists
stranded, maybe missing that food and easy times
with their bar tab too, as the city kept changing.
Gentrification was creeping further downtown
and the artists diaspora-ed to the lower east side,
to Washington Heights, to Brooklyn and beyond;
to fame, infamy and oblivion.
Was it women of the Night? Call-girl or whore, I don’t
recall her exact words; the language she used for
the ladies of the night, in her story about city hall
big-shots, amidst the booze and ratatouille, the endless
soiree that was Magoos Restaurant in New York City
down Tribeca way.
What did she call them, I don’t remember; only that
her father, Tommy, (not Magoo), pimped women to
they-shall-remain-nameless, men from NY’s City Hall.
Tommy called them “high class prostitutes”, the
beginning of his fall.
It was more like a closet hidden off the dining room;
which housed storage for restaurant flotsam, for
those red lumpy candle holders too- ugly even then,
in that hidden-hidden room.
John Torreono gum-drop painting on the wall.
Bill Jensen was kind and soft spoken, even then.
There was Farb and Minter and Rifka, her not so
kind glances and others’ work I don’t recall,
traded for bar tabs and food.
Julian Schnabel, not yet art-crock-myth-maker
would drop in to Magoos for cheap coffee; he’d sip
it real slow, then little by little added milk from the
small pitcher that came with it. He’d sit there
and sit there and drink his milky coffee,
always alone until the pitcher was emptied.
That’s what I seem to remember. And then there was
Spencer, a kind-giant-of-a-man, a friendly ‘regular’, who
lived a block from Magoos, on the corner of Canal
and West Broadway; after my shift, we’d go for a quick
toke on a joint, then off to the clubs for me. All those artists,
all that art, who does it feed? Who has it now?
NYC streets were my art supply store. I found pieces of fabric
outside sweat shops and glittering debris from the streets.
From the dark and dusty scientific supply down on Chambers
street, like a museum really, I found crescent shaped early
20th century surgical needles which took pride of place by
test tubes, old spectacle lenses, glass slides and beakers,
tubes and petri dishes.
These I placed alongside the piles of red petals, stamens and
pistils stolen from the park at City Hall; peach pits and
glass slides, petals and papers from my gleanings
of the city streets. My Nature was gravity on that granite
island; the sense of place created by those two rivers,
named East and Hudson.
Those red and blue-black piles, of petals and pits, evidence
still, that there was a natural world in my beloved city,
as they sat on the shelves in the wood framed,
glass display case from a Brooklyn bakery that the
mother-of-my-Polish-boyfriend offered to me.
I always was a flower thief.
He brought it to the room I illegally rented, in the financial district
on John street, down from the dark Trinity Church, with a
bathroom down the hall and a shower stall six flights up,
the luxury of showering, a cost shared amongst the women
artists who lived there.
We played and performed at the beach on the-then-defunct
West Side Highway and on the plaza of those monoliths,
the buildings-in-progress later called The Twin Towers, which
forever became a kind of compass, a way to find south
in the city. Another kind of gravity.
My Polish boyfriend found his shimmering supplies as
he and his camera both watched the sky out the north
facing windows of the American Thread Building, across
from Magoos, capturing the changing light and shadow
frame by frame in his Stan-Brackhage-inspired movies,
making his New York beautiful in abstract yet figurative
portraits of the city that I loved, night into day.
I placed my venerable treasures to rest on those bakery shelves
where Poppy seed rolls and Chruściki (fried angel wings)
dusted with sugar once sat, now filled with bright red tulip petals,
dried blue-black stamens and pollen dusted pistils next to broken
glass, and a crushed up topaz gem from a pendant
my grandmother used to wear.
That was my garden – the jewels from the trash of the city in
my little studio, where I lived with two cats, one named Sapphire,
the other’s name I forget; and with artists and musicians and poets
all around. There were legal tenants, too, like the jewelers, whose
lost wax works I could smell at night, with offices down the hall.
I remember the hole I made in the floorboards when I used
a hammer to smash that topaz into glittering shards, not
knowing it had a hardness of 8 on the Moh’s scale.
One Magoos night, when I worked the dinner shift, some guy I
didn’t know, looked all intense, right into in my eyes, and he said,
in all earnestness: “I saw you last night at the mile high church”.
And I didn’t know why. I walked away puzzled but kind of
stunned, some nerve struck like a tuning fork. I wondered
if maybe I dreamt him sitting there, saying such a strange thing.
Perhaps, that was the church I went to each night.
That was Magoos in the 1970’s on 6th Ave and Walker,
down Tribeca way. I worked making art and made life
my subject; danced to Television, Patty Smith and more;
gone now the Ocean Club, Tier 3, the Mudd Club, the art bands,
the New Wave, the No Wave, the Punk Rock and all those regulars.
At some point, memory fails me, I left Magoos (my shifts there ended),
for jazz up to Sheridan Square working for the mafia and
the hippie owners at The Sweet Basil Restaurant, now and
then gone too. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.
A waitress story for another day.
I was young and in love with a city broke and dirty,
rent I could afford and flirting flirty; madly inspired
with my ponytail swinging serving up chili, burgers
and ratatouille.
photo credits polaroids from John Street, Manhattan, by Aline Mare