Dishwasher Dialogues Cave and Knife
The Godess Astrid
By: Gregory Light and Rafael Mahdavi - Sep 03, 2025
The Norse Goddess
Rafael: I had gone to Chez Haynes to find out about that possible job. At 3 Rue Clauzel, I pushed open the saloon doors. A beautiful, blond woman strode out from behind the bar.
“How can I help you? We aren’t open yet.”
I asked about the job opening. She said she was the manageress. She told me her name was Astrid. And yes, she strode. She strode everywhere. That was how she moved through her life. Now she came up to me and said:
“Yes, we’re looking for a bartender. Come by the lamp here on the bar, open your mouth.”
She grabbed my chin in one hand, and a spoon in the other, and rattled it around my mouth. Clickety-clack, my molars took a beating.
“Good breath, good teeth, good bite, I was a dental assistant once,” she explained, “I know about these things, anyway, you’re hired. Have you ever tended bar?”
“No,” I said, “but I’m a fast learner.”
“It doesn’t matter. I like you, she said. You start on Monday. Get yourself a book on mixology.”
“Mixology?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s a fancy word for mixing cocktails which is another fancy word for making drinks to screw with people’s heads. If you’ve never heard of the cocktail a client wants, then ask me or make it up. You’re a good-looking kid, you know that? See you Monday at five in the afternoon. You prepare the bar, wash the glasses, get the wine and the hard stuff from the cave–that’s the basement in French. We feed you, the restaurant opens at seven; we close at two in the morning.”
And when I told her I didn’t know much about oenology she said:
“Don’t worry honey, a simple rule, I don’t care what people tell you, the more the wine costs, the better it is.”
Greg: Astrid was not there when I first visited the restaurant. Which would have been unusual because Chez Haynes was an obsession with her. Or was that with you? She did appear to like you. Whatever. There was no beautiful woman behind the bar when I stepped through that door for the first time. You were behind the bar. I can still recall the dusty red velvet curtain I had to push through after entering through the log-veneered saloon doors. I am sure the curtains were put there to keep out the draughts, but clearly not the riffraff. Let’s face it, I was close to riffraff.
Rafael: I want to say a few words about the saloon doors and curtains. The floor behind the bar was slightly elevated so I had a good view as soon as the curtains parted and before the saloon doors swung inward. Above and under the saloon doors I saw the clients’ heads and feet before their bodies. I learned to size up people quickly. A white Russian sable hat? Ferragamo shoes? I knew what to expect from people wearing stuff worth thousands of dollars; I would nod to the waitresses and quietly say, ‘check this out’.
Greg: There were no sable hats when I pushed through the curtains. There was the Tiki hut over the bar. And behind that bar, you, this brooding artist-type guy who said little, but over the next few hours let me know he was a painter and not a full-time bartender. I remember you said it with confidence. All these years later, I picture you in a dark turtleneck, but it could have been a white T-shirt. I ordered a beer; you gave me a Heineken in a Stella Artois glass and eventually, we started talking about art and philosophy—which is what I came to Paris for and what you were apparently doing. It was a tremendous argumentative dialogue which I recall taking us through the night. It was also punctuated with Leroy coming out and telling you he didn’t pay you to talk to poor white writers (or something like that) and telling me he hoped I wasn’t looking for a free beer and then telling you to give me one anyway. I think he said ‘or whatever he wants’ — you gave me two or three. Or did some of that about Leroy come later? Lots came later. A month later, Leroy hired me; one night a week to start. Anyway, that’s how I met you, and that’s how I first came to Chez Haynes. No manageress. No mixology. No dental checkup.
Rafael: But, hell, you know how the manageress was; you worked in the kitchen.
Greg: My memory of Astrid was that she was all about business. She never sat down with us to eat. Not because she thought she was above us but because she was always moving. Yes, striding. Couldn’t stop. When we asked her to join us or to take a load off and enjoy the evening meal, she would retort ‘some people live to eat, but I eat to live’. When it came to food, function trumped form. And this in Paris of all places!
Rafael: But Greg, you washed dishes, you made the salads, and Don was right there, he was the cook, remember? Don loved Astrid.
Greg: Oh, yes, I do remember that. Astrid, Don and you. A lively entertainment.
Rafael: Don had lived with the manageress at one time. And one Saturday after work, Astrid, asked me out, and we went to a bistro nearby. We drank a few glasses, and she said we should skip supper and spend the night together. I told her I didn’t think it was a good idea, but I did find her attractive. I was touched by what she said to me later that evening, after even more drinks. She said, ‘you can just paint, I’ll let you paint, and I’ll make the money, I’ll take care of you, of everything’. It was soft and moving. I didn’t say anything, and in the following days and weeks, she never brought it up again. But when I went down to the cave in the evenings to get the wine for the night, she would flounce down the stairs, laughing and lifting her skirt, knickers ahoy, and she’d say, ‘here, it’s all yours, take it away’. And Don must have noticed she was flirting with me. He’d stand by the kitchen door and watch the steps going down to the cave, and he held a carving knife behind his back. You told me all that.
Greg: You had a right to know.
Rafael: Scared the daylights out of me, every time I went down there for the wine, she’d come hopping down, and I imagined Don with that knife. I always wondered how she handled him. She must have told him something, after all.
Greg: Probably not. But he wasn’t blind. Even though they were no longer a formal couple, he still loved the woman. On occasion, he would leave the kitchen—apron stained with blood from cutting up chicken and spareribs all evening—walk past me to the end of the hallway and survey the dining room. If I suggested he was watching you when you and Astrid descended into the cave, that was probably true. And if I said he did often have his knife in hand, sometimes behind his back, that was also true. So, the path to your demise, bleeding out behind the bar, was certainly there. Although when I told you of his macabre intentions, I may have been embellishing them to suggest more interesting dramatic possibilities than the evidence would support. The fact is you survived intact.
Rafael: Some evenings when there was a lull in the dinner conversation, you’d say, I wonder if one of us will be dead by this time next year. That freaked out most of the staff, except for Leroy, who would let out a loud guffaw.
Greg: I think I said something like ‘statistics suggest that this time next year one of us around this table will be dead. And since you are the oldest, Rafael, it will probably be you’. At the table, you went ghostly white. Neither of us mentioned Don, although I think some of the waitresses knew.
Rafael: And let’s face it, the waitresses were all beauties, and Leroy knew many clients came into his joint to gawk and stayed to dine and got plastered trying to chat up the girls.
Greg: However eccentric Leroy was in his own life, he stayed true to gender roles in the restaurant; men behind the bar, in the kitchen and over the sink, and women were servers and managers. It felt somewhat odd in Paris where waiters were predominantly men.
Rafael: Astrid had a strange way with the clients, too, especially those who tried to show off. When one asked about the chili con carne, whether it was spicy and hot, she would say, ‘Hot? Are you fucking kidding me? It’ll pop your hemorrhoids like there’s no tomorrow and make the ladies’ nipples stand up like machine gun barrels, take my word for it’, and she’d dare the men to say otherwise, as she stood there in her volcano-shaped fifties bra. And man, did the clients come back asking for more? They loved her.
Greg: She certainly was a feature. And I grant you she was attractive, but possibly not stunning. You must remember, (how do I put this delicately), you are five years older than me, Rafael. And she was a good eight years older than you. So, to me, she was old. Or oldish. Good-looking oldish. Norse-goddess-beautiful. Tall, long blond hair, usually piled up on her head, statuesque and with large breasts accentuated, as you say, by whatever she was wearing under her sweater. The closest I ever got to your experience was preparing salads in the narrow hallway between the kitchen and the dining room. She would go into the kitchen to say something to Don, return along the hallway, turn sideways to squeeze by me, pause, shove her breasts into my back, rub them back and forth and then fly off to attend to a customer. I cannot say it was disagreeable. Not like Helen, the exceptionally large Welsh waitress, whom Don called the ‘fullback’, and who was unable to pass by me without her body shoving me face-first into the espresso machine. When I saw her coming, two or three plates delicately balanced, I would have to duck into the toilet to let her by.
Rafael: Those first days I was on the qui vive, I wasn’t going to screw up this job. Stay alert, see how things flow, learn the unspoken rules and rituals. This job allows me to paint during the day. ‘Don’t forget that’ I told myself over and over again.
Greg: You always had your eye on the goal. ‘Focus’ and ‘organization’ were your mantras. There was a reason we were all there. And Norse goddess or not, you took it seriously.