Diswasher Dialogues, Day of the Dead
El Dia de Los Muertos
By: Gregory Light and Rafael Mahdavi - Jul 27, 2025
Rafael: The Day of the Dead, el día de los muertos. In France, la Toussaint. And of course, here we go, Halloween rolled around, and the staff dressed up in costumes.
Greg: Yes! Halloween à la Chez Haynes! Great night. We threw ourselves into it. Well, a few of the waitresses, if I am to be honest, initiated the idea and organized the costume part. We went along with it, reluctantly to begin with, if I am to be honest a second time. I think I dressed up as a hobo; that was my go-to outfit, soot covered face and Leroy-type trousers. Actually, to be honest yet again, I can’t remember what I wore.
Rafael: We ate a light dinner, and I put on a mask with a skull over my face, and I wore a black tee shirt. I was surprised at how people, men, and women, asked to see my face. Who is this dead bartender? For non-Americans, the dinner, turkeys, yams, sweet potatoes, and the entire ritual were exotic and fun.
Greg: There is a photo somewhere. All of us standing together, posed for a color picture. It was blown up and hung on the back wall with the photos of the ‘greats’ who had come to the restaurant. Many years later, after Leroy had died, I visited the restaurant and was delighted to see that photo was still hanging on the wall. It had met a test of time, or possibly just everyday inertia. Nothing in the restaurant had changed. The spiral columns, the pink walls, table five on its raised platform. I think the Kon-Tiki roof over the bar may have finally fallen and gone its separate way.
Rafael: For the staff this evening was, above all, a lot of hard work, running back and forth, but the festive atmosphere got to us. I couldn’t open wine bottles fast enough. The waitresses opened the bottles at the tables. The manageress had taught us to hold the bottle at a forty-five-degree angle, that way the cork would pop loudly but the champagne stayed in the bottle, and only the air came out, no spilling, no waste. There were, of course, some macho assholes who wanted to spray the bubbly all over the waitresses, but Leroy had made it very clear - no messing around.
Greg: These special American holidays did attract a crowd, and Halloween was as festive an American holiday as there was back then. All in the name of death. In a cool American restaurant with a cook, waiters and waitresses, barman and a dishwasher who all looked and sounded authentically American. We never fully realized how little we were being paid to play the American characters we in fact were. Leroy knew what he was doing. He was an impresario par excellence. Even for celebrations of the end of days. Not one of your preferred topics.
Rafael: My existential questionings had never abated since college. I had always been like that. I was and still am a metaphysical mechanic, tinkering and groping for tangible answers where they are few. I had always battled against philosophical depression and fear of my own end, as I have mentioned.
Greg: It is true you were a deeply emotional ‘philosopher’. Certainly not a rationalist, nor an empiricist. And not particularly analytic. So, not very American. And not very French, either, despite the latter’s claim to giving the world existential angst and post-modernist madness. We used to say we sat between existential angst and middle age crisis. Now, we are well beyond both. On a good day, I call it pre-death rumination. You always seemed to be in some version of that stage.
Rafael: This feast of celebrating the dead––and death, of course too––was a good jab into my coddled heart, and a solid fuck-you-and-the-nag-you’re-riding aimed at the grim reaper. After the clients finally left way past closing time, the entire staff, all rather worse for fatigue and drink, sat down for our own special Halloween dinner.
Greg: Without the bags of candies and treats extorted from neighbors under threat of a trick, like when I was a kid. Back then Halloween was a battleground. We soaped windows, let the air out of car tires or put flaming bags of dog-poo on the front steps of those who refused or simply forgot to provide us treats. Of course, some, the goblins said, exacted revenge with razor-blade-laced fruit or, in one urban myth from my childhood, with LSD. That shed a whole new light on Halloween and prepared me for Paris all in one go.
Rafael: About a month later there was Thanksgiving dinner at Chez Haynes, that American Rabelaisian eating binge, but there were no costumes for this evening. Again, the clients had reserved long in advance and, as with Halloween, loved being part of an American tradition.
Greg: Same menu but the drink was more serious. If the reserve flowed at Halloween, Mouton Rothschild surfaced at Thanksgiving.
Rafael: One of us always bought the International Herald Tribune, and we took turns reading Art Buchwald’s famous Thanksgiving column out loud and laughing our heads off. It was the same article every year, explaining the origin of Thanksgiving, Merci Donnant, to the French and how a certain Miles Standish, Kilomètres Deboutish, tried to seduce a particular Priscilla. The column had become a classic among American ex-pats in France.
Rafael: After we left Chez Haynes, we went for a last drink at Le Trafalgar. We told ourselves it was the last drink to unwind from the evening’s bustle, and we too tried in vain to explain to the late-night French drinkers what we had been celebrating. They observed us, happy and drunk, as we explained capitaine Kilomètres Deboutish and the massacre of turkeys, dindes, in the New World, le nouveau monde. One of the French women said, ‘and you helped us beat the German Wehrmacht, with commanders like capitaine Deboutish?
Greg: Little did she realize that capitaine Deboutish had a legacy of indigenous genocide and massacre of his own to draw upon when facing the Wehrmacht. And, as we drank and laughed and enjoyed the merriment, neither did we realize. I am sorry to close the chapter on such a shameful note. But it is about el día de los muertos; and it needed to be said.
Rafael: Yes, you’re right.