House of Pies
(Part II)
(there’s even more)
And then, of course, there was my first girlfriend, Kathryn or, as she called herself Kayson, a waitress there. She was funny and cute. She had a way of throwing her hip to the side and putting her hands on her hips to indicate mock surprise or displeasure. (Her hips seem to figure prominently in my memories of her.) Her father was a newspaper editor in Minnesota. She said he smoked 7 packs of cigarettes a day, which I figured out in a moment of idleness meant he chain smoked from waking until he slept--puffing straight through meals. (Not surprisingly, an internet search reveals he is dead now.)
Spunky and wise-cracking, Kayson announced to me early on that she never wanted to get married. That was fine with me. Then six weeks later, she asked me something: did I want to get married?
So our relationship ended abruptly. And now, all these years later, poking around online, I see she traveled the world, returned to Minnesota, and--yes--married--and had a daughter named Kathryn.
And then, writing this, I discovered something else online: she died in 2009.
In 2009, no cosmic rumbling reached me, no diminishment of light, no comet streaking across the dark. But here in 2026, across the decades, I felt a pull of sadness.
I had been assuming--without even examining it--that her life was running on, a vault with memories that only I shared. And now, those memories survive only in me.
Over years, Kayson became Casey. Her obituary says after high school she worked as a waitress and lived at the beach in California. From a Minnesota perspective I guess this is true.
I know she lived in a tiny place on 14th Street, a good mile or two from the beach. I smile at the thought of her telling her Minnesota friends about her dream beach house. Why not move that place in her memory?
And then there was the sad death of a young African American hostess named Val. By bitter irony she upped and headed to Nicaragua just in time to be struck down by an earthquake.
Pulling at these strands of memory, I sense that my almost-accidental entry into The House of Pies brought me into a whirlwind of life. But then, life in a restaurant is life under pressure--one minute belting out happy birthday to strangers, dashing from order to order, glancing at the line streaming out the door. Laughing at the silly stunts--a guy sticking a push pin in his last bite of pie, hoping to get free dinners for a group of four.
Then there was Bernie, who sat at the counter every afternoon and ordered blueberry pie with soft ice cream and a cup of coffee, made tan by a glug of half-and-half. No matter the weather, Bernie wore one of those flat caps, a chubby man friendly to all. He drove a taxi around town, but in his true life, he was an artist.
If Bernie were alive today, he’d be driving at Uber and rifling through his paintings on his phone, hustling up some interest. In those days, of course, there were no pictures, just Bernie’s descriptions which engaged Kayson and me enough that we met up with him in his studio one afternoon.
Canvases hung in every available spot, and were stacked in rows on the floor. I bought a bright green streetscape (for $45, I think). I banged a nail in my room at home and hung it right up. And my initial happiness--an actual painting, painted by an artist I knew--Bernie--that happiness slipped some over the months as I gazed at the painting, its perspective and lines not quite right, something askew. Still I hung on to that painting for awhile until its fate became as cloudy as the fate of Bernie himself.
Oh, there are other memories--of Sandy (who seemed to want to go out with me, after I broke up with Kayson: why didn’t I?), of Jerry, a trim Englishman (Mary’s husband) who seemed to have lived his life managing restaurants.
But I have one final memory, different from the rest--being a customer at the House of Pies in Hollywood. I don’t recall just how I wound up there with six of my friends, but we went on a Friday night, the place was packed and abuzz, and we squeezed into a booth.
The unwitting star that night was Mike Ogle. He kind of lived up to the name Mike Ogle: he was excitable, wacky, happy to make a fool of himself if it ingratiated him, the subject himself of ogling. (And Mike, I’m sure over the decades you’ve become a fine, upstanding person--forgive this portrait from our youth.)
So there we were packed into a booth in the packed restaurant, and I leaned over and said, “We should do something fun that will get everyone’s attention. At the count of three, let’s each act like an animal at the zoo!” Ogle, of course, was all for it, and with varying degrees of enthusiasm, everyone agreed.
“I’ll whisper in your ear which animal you’ll be.”
And so I moved around the booth, whispering, first to the guy on my left, “Don’t do anything,” then to the next guy, “don’t do anything.” When I got to Ogle I whispered, “act like a monkey.” And then to the rest, “don’t do anything.”
One, two, three. Six guys leaning around the table, expectant. And then Mike Ogle jumped up, and at the top of his lungs screeched, “ Oooh, oooh, ooooh,” accompanied by his hands going up under his armpits.
Like a crowd silenced before a performance, the diners at the Hollywood House of Pies stopped talking and gazed at Ogle, now settling back into the booth.
“Come on, you guys!” he excitedly whispered. “Let’s do it!”
Seizing the unexpected opportunity I called out, “Let’s try it again! One, two, three!”
Ogle again jumped up and began his monkey screeching to a perplexed gathering of pie eaters. Our table burst out laughing. Crestfallen, Ogle finally tumbled to the prank.
And then a man in an orange jacket strode quickly to the table, assumed an angry-teacher voice and told him no further outbursts would be tolerated.
I recount these memories of mine, but I suspect that waitresses and waiters, busboys and cooks, front of the house and back--all of us have experiences shaped by the intense cauldron of restaurant life. The tension of people working hard so others can relax, the satisfaction of doing a small task well--just for its own sake--these create memories that bring solace and smiles and, yes, a tinge of sadness at those moments passing.
