First place: Epitaph for ‘El Toro’

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/01/2011 (5586 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sitting here alone on the worn red stool, waiting for the restaurant equipment scavengers to descend and pick clean the “best truck stop in town.” It is probably fitting that I should be the one to officiate at this last ceremony, since, initially, I hated the place. Ten years later, I end up caring more about its demise than anyone else who worked here. Ten years later, I can appreciate the lessons of life I absorbed in this strange school.

My parents had been in the restaurant business for 20 years, and that meant that their children were, too. They worked hard, and had moved up the business ladder from a hamburger and fries place to a thriving Portage Avenue restaurant. Then partnership with a trusted relative led to disaster.

Just before Christmas the year I was 17, I came home from school to find my parents sitting at the kitchen table together. Ashen-faced, they gave me the news that they were bankrupt.

My father found a job cooking on the railway and was gone frequently for the next few months. The paycheques were a lot smaller than what the restaurant business had brought in at its height. It was a terrible winter, with the sound of arguing at night when Dad came home. As for me, I had been planning to go on to university in the fall. There was clearly no money for that now.

One sunny day in March, my parents announced that they were opening a cafe again. The owner of Modern Dairies, who had supplied their milk products for years, had heard of their plight and offered an interest-free loan on a handshake. We were back in business.

But when the bus pulled up in front of El Toro’s, I nearly didn’t get off. El Toro’s Cafe was a small, ugly building plunked down in the middle of a three-acre lot at the junction of two major thoroughfares on the edge of the city. It was surrounded by meat-packing plants, abattoirs and hide-tanning sheds. I wrinkled my nose in disgust at the awful smell. The early morning sun shone on a quagmire of mud, my white work shoes sinking into the gumbo. I quietly cursed, “What a dump!”

Once inside, I was too busy to see past the flow of coffee steaming into cups, of hot platters of bacon and eggs, or to hear beyond the clatter of silverware and the stream of admonitions: “Don’t forget the jam!” “Did you serve the table in the corner?” or “You forgot the man’s toast.”

Dad did all the cooking, while Mom handled the front. Besides watching like a hawk over the well-being of her customers, she looked after the cash register and the sale of cigarettes. Her first priority was to provide the fastest service for the customers. In this place, unlike our previous restaurants, we often knew what a man wanted before he walked in. Our customers were creatures of habit.

“It’s Bill,” Mom would say as a truck rumbled into our pothole-filled parking lot. Then she’d call out ham or bacon and eggs, press down the toast, and pour his coffee. By the time Bill had washed up and sat down, his coffee in front of him, his food would appear. Mom had drilled into us that these men had only a few minutes to eat and we’d better get that food out there.

On Portage Avenue, we had been used to serving doctors, lawyers, business and professional people who worked downtown. I learned to treat each mud-caked, unshaven truck driver, each manure-booted farmer, each bloody-fingered abattoir worker, as well as the odd millionaire who owned businesses nearby, with the same respect. “What would you like, sir?” and “Will there be anything else, sir?” And most of them treated our family the same way.

The patrons of our cafe were a varied lot. Truck drivers made up the largest group, but within this category, we soon recognized a hierarchy of importance and pride. Drivers of semi-trailers, those massive denizens of the road, were the acknowledged kingpins, as they wheeled their great chariots around the lot. Then there were those who drove cement trucks or bulldozers, as well as ordinary truckers hauling gravel or garbage. Covered with dust mingled with sweat, or plastered with mud, they would nearly all button up their shirts and pass hands over hair before coming in, then quickly head for the washroom to remove the most offensively visible dirt.

One day when I arrived for my shift after school, the place was locked and empty. Shocked, I went home to learn that a bailiff had arrived and removed half the equipment.

The customers asked my father, “Joe, do you want us to throw them out of here?” He thanked them and said no, then closed the place up.

Despondent but not beaten, my parents went out and replaced the equipment and were back in business on Monday.

As for my university dreams, the nuns at my school found money for a bursary for my first-year tuition, and I ecstatically registered at college that fall. I didn’t really want to work at the cafe after that because I was afraid that some of my new college friends would ask me where I worked… and I realized that I would be ashamed to tell them.

Despite that attitude, I wonder sometimes which had the greatest influence on me: college life or El Toro life.

I loved the university, the courses, the ideas flying wildly about… but the harsh realities of life as seen at the cafe made sororities seem frivolous and phony. I remember the dances, the classes, the boyfriends, the professors… but just as vivid is my memory of the spectacular sunrises over the abattoirs and farm-implement sheds when I worked the 6 a.m. shift. The air smelled fresh and clean then and the golden mist softened the harsh outlines of utilitarian buildings.

I met my husband there, driving a truck to put himself through college. My sisters and brothers took their turns working at El Toro’s over the next 10 years, until the day my parents announced they were going to open a restaurant in a new hotel in Calgary.

The opening of “Joseph’s” was only weeks away, with only one thing holding them back. Efforts to sell El Toro’s had so far been futile. Finally, my husband and I agreed to operate it for two months and keep trying to sell it.

I wish I could say we sold it for them. Our customers queried us daily.

“How are the folks doing out West? Must be rolling in the dough, eh? Well, they deserve it, they sure worked hard enough.”

But as September approached, we all knew it was no use. So here I sit, on my worn red stool, waiting for that equipment buyer to show up. He’ll look around disdainfully at the antiquated gas stove, the worn-out silver grill, the tables and mismatched chairs, the old cash register and the chugging, wheezing ice-cream freezer. Then he’ll say, “Not worth much, just a lot of old junk.”

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