Dishwashers Jesus and the Worm
Genghis
By: Gregory Light and Rafael Mahdavi - Oct 01, 2025
Genghis
Rafael: The first night working at the bar, the manageress helped me a little. After that first night I was on my own. I cleaned the glasses from the previous night, and by cleaning, I mean not only washing but also drying each glass with a dishtowel. I had brought up the wine and hard liquor from the basement. Then we ate supper, waitresses, the dishwasher, and salad maker. I looked forward to the communal dinners, it was a moment of banter and relaxation, and you were always coming up with jokes and puns that had us roaring with laughter. By seven, we were at our posts, the waitresses in front of the bar and I behind it. You were in the kitchen with your hands deep in the dishwater. I know you hated it.
Greg: I can’t say I hated it. Some of it, of course, was unpleasant. Who likes standing over a deep sink, sweat pouring down their face? It was an assembly line which consisted of just me, one dish after another slopping through the process: scrape, dunk, scrub, rinse. I was a machine. On the other hand, the dishes did air dry, so I did not suffer the torment of wiping down a wine glass or two. More importantly, it paid the bills. Money was scarce. You may not remember but up until the time Leroy hired me, my main source of income was as a live-out au pair, taking care of four-month-old Clemence for six hours a day, three days a week. Wonderful little girl with terrific parents but even with her nap times, it did not leave much time for writing. I vastly improved my diaper skills, and my babbling, both of which came in handy later with my three boys. Dishwashing, on the other hand, afforded me Orwellian aspirations and vaguely adult conversation around the dinner table.
The salad making part of my duties provided some relief. It gave me a little escape time from the fiery heat of the kitchen, down the narrow hall into a kind of purgatory, from where I could just see and hear the bubbling commotion and enjoyment in the dining areas. That is also where Leroy would sit when he was in. He enjoyed preparing the different salad fixings, but, even more, I think he enjoyed eavesdropping on the clientele and watching them engage with the soul food ambiance he had created for them in his restaurant. First and foremost, he was theatrical: in his film work, in his stories, and in his restaurant. Once he had prepared all the ingredients, the salads were easy for me to throw together, and we would often talk. Depending on his mood or the depth of his hangover.
Rafael: Hangovers. Years later my hangovers were what I dreaded. I loved the buzz and the loosening up of my brain when I drank; and even as I was having a good time, I told myself this time it’ll be different, I won’t have a hangover like a truck. Or, I am drinking single malt whisky tonight, good scotch doesn’t give you a hangover. And so on.
Greg: You were young. Your bad nights were not as bad as his. Not then. On bad nights he was morose and quiet, sometimes mean but never hurtful. On good nights he was great. It was on one of those nights he told me my favorite Leroy story. It happened when he was living in Chicago: during Prohibition. I think he said he was about 12 or 13 years old. Leroy was born in 1914 so that would place the incident sometime in the mid-nineteen twenties. Al Capone days. Back then, he helped his father who had a job cleaning a speakeasy in the morning. They would drive into the city, some distance from wherever they were living, in an old third or fourth-hand car––‘a jalopy, mostly made of rust’, is how I remember him describing it. His father called it ‘Jesus’, hoping I assume that a little spiritual help would keep the pieces of the car together another day.
One morning the rust didn’t quite hold together. The car broke down, still miles from its destination. It took hours to repair it sufficiently to sputter the rest of the way in, hoping they still had a job. When they arrived, the speakeasy door had been blown off its hinges by an explosive attached to the lock, ignited by the key. Its force killed the assistant manager who opened the speakeasy that morning. Normally, Leroy and his father would have been first there to open up and start the cleaning. But on this day the breakdown of their car had spared their lives. At this point in the story, Leroy smiled broadly, his eyes twinkling, his actor’s voice resonating in a spiritual tone, and he said: “so nobody can tell me Jesus don’t save. I know he does. He saved my black ass!” and he would roll back on his chair in laughter, as did I and a couple of the waitresses who had stopped to listen.
Rafael: What a great story! A car called Jesus.
Greg: And I am sure it is mostly true. I wish I could do the tale justice. He was a natural storyteller. Dishwashing and salads beat making cocktails on those nights. Although making cocktails could be fun.
Rafael: You want to know about the cocktails?
Greg: Remind me.
Rafael: I have forgotten many of them. I do recall making Sidecars, Whisky Sours, Brandy Alexanders, Manhattans, Tequila Sunrises, Blue Lagoons, classical Martinis, Gin Fizzes, and there was the artichoke liqueur Fernet Branca, vile stuff, but good for hangovers, and the poetically named feuille morte, made of pastis and grenadine, never liked it myself, and the kirs, champagne with crème de cassis was called kir royal, with white wine simply kir, and with red wine un carabinier.
There were more brews and mixtures; some were stirred, others shaken, and garnished with Angostura bitters, olives, onions, cherries. Whenever somebody ordered a pure tequila with the lemon and side dish of salt, I would first point out the worm in the bottle before serving the drink, just to make sure the clients knew what they were drinking. That turned off some of the would-be tequila boozers.
Greg: That was a particularly rare kind of tequila called Mezcal. I remember it had a rough bite, and I don’t mean from the worm. I don’t know where Leroy got it, but it certainly made an impression at the bar.
Rafael: I even taught myself, with an empty bottle mind you, to spin the bottle as I tossed it into the air and caught it behind my back right before I poured the liquor. I thought such bartender tricks might impress some of the women. They didn’t even look in my direction. And there were no cell phones in those days to distract them from observing the world around them. But my bottle tricks? Nothing.
Greg: One night, more than a year into my time at Chez Haynes, I finally got a few nights of work behind the bar. It was very exciting; even without a Norse goddess to show me the ropes of crafting le cocktail parfait. You had talked me through the basics of the Blue Lagoons and the Brandy Alexanders and Sidecars and a dozen more of the most popular drinks. Still, when I was finally let loose on my own, I knew next to nothing. American, Canadian, and British customers tended to know their cocktails well enough, and usually what they wanted. They could be tough. Ironically, the best client was the guy (almost always a man) who insisted on taking me step-by-step through a complicated concoction no one had ever heard of before. I also quickly learned that cocktails were clearly not the domain of the average Parisian. Back then, most of the French clientele had no clue. But they loved the idea of coming to an American restaurant, especially one with the soul and ambiance Chez Haynes provided, and that included a cocktail. It was part of l’événement. To them I was a maestro of the concoction by virtue of having a towel over my shoulder and a stainless-steel shaker in my hand. When I asked them what they wanted, they would say ‘un cocktail’. I would ask them which one they had in mind, and they would just say ‘un cocktail, un cocktail’’ as if that was the name of the drink without any need of further description. I got into the habit of simply making them a Tequila Sunrise because it was easy to make, looked pretty with layers of color, a little paper umbrella, a cherry on a stick and a slice of orange on the rim. And the tequila made for a very pleasant evening all round. For many hundreds of Parisians in this speakeasy, ‘un cocktail’ was a Tequila Sunrise and a Tequila Sunrise was ‘un cocktail’. My revenge for ‘under the mountain’?
Rafael: And then there were the drunks, the lushes, who came in to drink their supper as the saying goes. Most of them wanted to talk, and most of them were men, at least the ones who came to the bar. They spoke to me quite openly, and it was often dull and sad at the same time. And sometimes even embarrassing. I didn’t dare give any advice. I was sure they just wanted to have a listener. By my listening they hopefully assumed that they were right about everything they recounted, especially the parts where they thought they had been ‘done wrong’, victimized I suppose is the correct word here.
Greg: I think these were the same guys who talked me through the crafting of their drinks. Often changing one cocktail for another as they ploughed their way through the evening on one of the bar stools. Lots of words. Occasionally even coherent. Often profane swear words. Too often. Even Leroy mentioned it. He probably swore as he did so. So, I cleaned out an old coffee can, took the label off and put the can on the bar under the lamp which sat on the corner.
Greg: I told regulars they had to donate a franc every time they swore. It slowed down the swearing and gave us an extra income stream to put in the tip jar. The regulars thought it was funny. I would tell them ‘The can is listening; you shouldn’t defy the can’. Which soon became known as “the Great Can” or, as I came to refer to it, “the great Khan.” Very quickly that morphed into ‘Genghis Khan is listening’. And eventually to just “Genghis”. Everyone soon knew who Genghis was, and they respected it. It went on for a few years, tempering the bar talk and, I like to think, raising our level of wit and fun. Genghis also raised quite a bit of loose change. Enough for an occasional Sunday dinner near the L'Odéon. Vive Genghis!