#109: My Dinner With André

I met Chase, Peggy, and Marge at Union Stripe just as Happy Hour was in full swing and turning into the dinner pre-symphony and theater rush. Because Marge and I used to work there, the hostess treated to the front table in the window facing Woodward Avenue.

#106: Drawing Board Booty Call

On my way out of Chas’s apartment building the next morning, who do I run into on the landing at the foot of the steps but Peggy, the rich white Grosse Pointe girl slumming in Detroit and studying literature at Warren Woodward University, returning from her escapades out on the town. The look on her face told me immediately she knew the kinds of sleazy things Chas and I had been up to the night before. “How is the undiscovered genius, anyway?” she asked dismissively. “Haven’t seen him crawl out from under his rock lately.”

#59: Mona Lisa Outer Drive

After Thanksgiving, things were hopping at the Union Stripe Café. A lot of businesses along Woodward Avenue booked our “banquet hall”—basically, another storefront adjacent to and about the same size as our regular dining room—for holiday parties. Even the professionals from the medical center, notorious for being stingy tippers, had to pay up—a fifteen-percent gratuity was automatically added to their collective bill. Some patrons got so drunk they still left change—only a few percent, but gravy for us wait staff. Some nights I was walking out of the restaurant with more than a hundred bucks in cash—good money in the early eighties.