The Wiz has left the building. Stalag 9 has lost part of its soul, and as a result I have too much time with little or nothing to do, save talking about nothing of much substance with Surfer Girl.

We were hanging out in Stalag 9, which is still too antiseptic these days, even more so now that The Wiz is a land owner type of guy and has moved into his new house. There’s nobody around to help me trash the apartment and spill red wine on the carpet. You may think that not spilling red wine on the carpet is a good thing, but it really isn’t. It added color to the place, which it needed.

Surfer Girl and I were sitting around the place, each of us doing our own thing, when she started asking me about my previous life in the far North. Surfer Girl gets curious about things from time to time, especially when she gets bored, which she was, and I was, so we talked about it.

I told her about Hell’s Kitchen and Geschlevsky and a lot of other trivial stuff which is really not of any consequence in my life these days.

To make a long story short, I ran her off I guess and she got on her board and surfed away for the afternoon, leaving me alone with Miller and memories of a semi sordid past.

Hell’s Kitchen was managed, (and partly owned), by Guido. As you may have guessed he was just a little bit Italian at the time, which he probably still is, because Italian does not go away, no matter how hard you may try.

Guido was a tough taskmaster who ran a tight ship. Guido didn’t take any lip from anyone apparently. One of the waiters who had worked for him for years told me that.

Well he didn’t take any lip until Geschlevsky, Harry and I started working for him. To tell the truth it wasn’t even our fault. He asked us to work for him, we didn’t approach him for a job, he approached each of us for some twisted reason that he never bothered to share with us. He was probably bored with all the suck ups that he had surrounded himself with and he needed a challenge or something ridiculous like that.

Harry was probably the “good” bad guy. He didn’t hang around there too long, likely because he knew that Geschlevsky and I were making Guido a crazy man. So Harry, who was a nice crazy guy, left Hell’s Kitchen to try his luck at being an airline stewardess. Looking at it now, Harry was probably responsible for them changing the title from stewardess to flight attendant. After he had gone on to his new career in the airline industry, Geschlevsky and I would revel in every opportunity to tease him unmercifully. Harry would get all bent out of shape when we’d ask him how life as a ball bearing stewardess was going. Guido, as straight a guy as he was, would get a huge kick out of the verbal abuse which we directed at Harry The Stewardess when he would come into Hell’s Kitchen for a cold one after a long flight. Guido thought it was hilarious to see Harry being tormented. I think he particularly enjoyed it because he felt it was due payback for the re-worked rendition of the Christmas Carol, “Guido The Hooked Nosed Dago” that Harry and I were singing around the beer taps one particularly busy lunchtime rush. Guido thought that the evil Harry had written it. Being a humble guy, I never took the credit for it, which probably saved my job at the time.

Guido was, and still is, bald. I think he took particular exception to the line that went, “Guido with your dome so bright, won’t you guide my tray tonight”, a personal favorite of mine.

So I started thinking about Geschlevsky and those halcyon days as I sat with Miller that afternoon.

Geschlevsky was German, or at least that’s what he told everyone. He said he was fluent in German, but I had to take his word on that, being completely un-fluent in the language myself. Geschlevsky and I had been buddies since the age of eight, and even though he was what some people considered to be weird, he was one of my best pals. He did a lot of bizarre things, which I appreciated immensely. I particularly liked the time that he decided that stop signs, which were plentiful on Sherbrooke Street, where we lived, became optional after eleven at night, a decision that saved us about twenty seconds of travel time on our drive home. It would have been dangerous, but it was a sleepy little suburb in which Geschlevsky and I were the only people awake at that hour.

Besides being weird, he had another finely honed talent. He would inevitably end up drinking too much beer and go to the nearest eatery and eat far too much food that was anything but nutritious. Apparently it was not only anything but nutritious, it didn’t mix well with too much beer either.

Geschlevsky may have been a multi-talented guy, but the one thing that he had mastered over the years was the Technicolor yawn.

Hey I worked in a bar, and since we were all males, one of us, which would inevitably wind up being me, would have to venture into the ladies room after one of them had done their impersonation of Geschlevsky’s Technicolor Yawn thing.

To be honest it was pretty gross at times, but it was also the only part of the building where a guy could meet a pretty girl without having to fight off a hundred other guys.

I probably should have shared that with Geschlevsky, I wasn’t that hard up, and it was exactly the type of scenario he could have scored in.

Naw! Probably not, everybody’s safer with him being single.