Next time you’re in New York, take a turn off Broadway onto East Houston. Walk on past 2nd Avenue subway station. Past Russ & Daughters fish shop and Katz’s Delicatessen. Beyond these local landmarks of the East Village, just a skip from where East Houston meets Clinton Street, you’ll see it: The Starlight Diner. A fifties throwback joint serving burgers and breakfast foods long into the night.
There’s no missing the blare of its blue neon sign. Even from a block away, you can hear the songs of Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and, house favourites, Marvin and the Starlighters spewing out of the jukebox. Step closer, and you’ll note the modest claim inscribed just above its glass frontage: Best Diner In Town.
Press your hands against the window. Peer in at the long procession of red leather booths, at the aging signs, hanging all around, for vintage sodas, malts and ice-cream floats. There’s a refrigerator stacked with vanilla cheesecake and blueberry pie, and the waitresses wear candy pink uniforms with black kitten heels.
Bernie Castillo was just twenty-two when he opened The Starlight Diner. A business decision he made about a week after John Kennedy was shot. Like many others he knew, he wanted nothing more than to return to a time before anyone understood what it meant to see a president gunned down. To a time in which rock ’n’ roll reigned supreme and gas-guzzling Cadillacs clogged up the highways. A time when America ‘stood at the summit of the world’. So, the 1950s is still in full swing at The Starlight Diner, and they serve the tastiest milkshakes in the five boroughs.
If there’s one thing Bernie’s learned in his time managing a diner, it’s that you never can tell just who’s going to walk through the doorway. But no matter who they are, no matter where they come from – whether they’re a tourist with a tripod or a local who’s ordered the same breakfast there for twenty years – they’ve all got one thing in common.
All of them, every last one, has a story to tell.
New York, 1990
That airless, August day I hobbled into The Starlight Diner like an extra from a low-rent zombie movie. A bloody cut oozed across my forehead while ‘Rock Around The Clock’ blasted out of the jukebox. Right then, the last thing in the world I needed was Bill Haley singing about an all-night party I wasn’t even invited to.
‘Oh my Gawd, Esther!’ Mona, who’d waitressed at the diner for some thirteen years, had a habit of shrieking in a crisis. A habit even less endearing after a hard knock to the head. ‘What happened?’ She stopped pouring a coffee mid-cup, tottered over in her kitten heels and shook her head at the tear in my pink diner uniform.
‘I got mugged,’ I said, slumping into a nearby stool. At this, a man in one of the counter seats lifted his head and frowned. He was one of several customers gawking at the disturbance but his stare was more intense than any of the others.
Mona put an arm around me. ‘Aw honey, now you’re a real New Yorker. They take anything valuable?’
‘Luckily I don’t own anything valuable. I was mostly concerned they’d smash my glasses – my spare pair make me look like Annie Potts in Ghostbusters.’
‘Well, they seem to be in one piece, and so do you.’
‘Yeah, they were only after my wallet.’ I dabbed my cut with a red napkin, then checked how much blood it’d absorbed. A dark, diagonal line slashed across the paper square.
You deserve this, Esther. You do. And more.
‘You want me to tell Alan you was mugged? He’ll probably want you to report it.’ Alan, Mona’s husband, was a New York cop.
‘No, no, no,’ I said. Mona jerked her head to her left and shot me a quizzical look. ‘I mean, it was silly. Just kids. No need to make a fuss. Is Bernie here yet?’
Bernie owned The Starlight Diner, a retro eatery on East Houston Street curious enough to delight tourists and locals alike. It was Bernie who’d decided on the repellent mustard seat coverings for the counter stools. It was he who ensured that the saddest song from the fifties – ‘The End of the World’ by Skeeter Davis – made it into the selection of tracks on the Wurlitzer jukebox alongside up-beat classics like ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ and ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’. It was also Bernie’s idea to emblazon the words ‘Good Times’ across the back of the uniform, a slogan that felt extra ironic post-mugging.
‘No. He’s running later than you this mornin’,’ Mona chuckled. She turned to the reflective surface of the coffee machine and scrunched up some of the shorter layers of her dark, unruly hair. It was the one thing about Mona that wasn’t neat but only because she was growing out a mullet. Her face was a perfect oval and her faultless, black skin was interrupted only by preened eyebrows and a shock of red lip gloss that, she claimed, boosted her tips. ‘You’ve got time to clean up,’ she said, turning back to me. ‘I won’t tell Bernie you was bleedin’ all over the customers and puttin’ ’em off their pancakes.’
Twenty minutes later you wouldn’t have guessed I’d been mugged – unless you looked too close at my safety-pinned uniform or spotted the electric blue plaster peeping out from under my fringe. Ever-willing to prove myself the mistress of covering things up, I poured out morning coffee like it was any other day. Flitting across the red and white chequered lino, I delivered slices of blueberry pie and stacks of waffles with extra syrup.
‘The frowner at the counter wants his cheque; it’s number twenty-seven. I gotta get four breakfasts to fourteen. Can you sort that for me, honey?’ Mona asked, juggling many more plates than she had hands.
‘Sure,’ I said, picking up the correct cheque off the pinboard.
‘Here’s your cheque, sir. Hope everything was OK.’ I recited the standard line and offered a measured smile.
‘It was just what I needed, thanks,’ the frowner said in a familiar accent. He’d clocked my accent too: there was an expectant sparkle in his blue eyes.
Further diluting my smile, I turned to walk away before anything concerning – like a conversation – could take place.
‘You’re from England, aren’t you?’ he asked.
I dropped my shoulders and turned back to face him.
‘Yes,’ I replied in the most monotone manner I could muster. My absolute lack of interest would surely signal I didn’t want to spew my origin story over the counter to some stranger in a theatrical downtown diner.
‘I’m from Putney, in West London. You?’
‘London too.’ Insert awkward pause. This was the point in the exchange where I was supposed to ask him something. What brought him to New York? How long would he be staying? Etcetera. But he was a ghost from a past life. A patriot of a place I’d done all I could to distance myself from. Inviting though his smile was, I wouldn’t go back. For anyone.
‘Excuse me.’ A woman much younger than the frowner and I, sporting a cropped, neon-yellow blazer, stepped forward. ‘Could I get your autograph?’ I looked at the bronzed beauty