The Wrecking Ball

Walter Hamilton stood across the street and watched them take the building apart.

It was a Tuesday in late June, 1973, and the crew had been at it since seven in the morning, two men on the roof pulling off the tar paper in long strips while a third fed the strips into the bed of a flatbed truck parked in the alley behind the building. The wrecking ball had not come yet. This was the quiet part, the stripping, the work before the work.

The building was at 260 Lake Street, next to the Southern Pacific depot, in what used to be Chinatown and was now just a block of low commercial buildings between the railroad tracks and the casino corridor. The sign was already gone. The sign had said NEW CHINA CLUB in neon, red and green, and it had been the first thing Walter saw when he walked up to the kitchen door twenty-one years ago with his discharge papers in his back pocket and his knives in a canvas roll under his arm.

He was fifty-three. He had cooked in that building for seventeen years, from the fall of 1952 until 1969, when Bill Fong scaled back the kitchen and Walter took a job at a hotel restaurant on Virginia Street. Seventeen years of prep at five in the morning, the grill lit by six, the lunch rush and the dinner rush and the late crowd that came in after the other casinos closed, because the New China Club never closed, because Bill Fong believed that a door should be open or it should not be a door.

Fong had hired him on the first day. Walter had applied at six casinos before that, six kitchens, and each one had looked at his hands and his knives and his references from the Army and then looked at his face and said no. Not in those words. In other words. We are not hiring at this time. We have filled the position. Come back next month. He had come back. The position had not been filled. He went to the next one.

Fong had not looked at his face. Fong had looked at his knives. Walter unrolled the canvas on the prep table and Fong picked up the chef’s knife and tested the edge with his thumb and set it back down and said, “Six o’clock tomorrow,” and that was it. No speech. No ceremony. Walter showed up at six and Fong put him on the line and the line was the line, the heat and the oil and the tickets and the clock, and the color of his skin was not a thing that mattered in front of a grill at a hundred and ten degrees. What mattered was the food and the speed and the clean plate.

The casino floor was the same way. Fong had built the place as a club where anyone could walk in, and anyone did. Black servicemen from Stead Air Force Base who could not gamble anywhere else in town. Chinese families from Lake Street who had been in Reno longer than most of the people who refused them. Mexican railroad workers. White ranchers from Sparks. Card players and keno runners and people who just wanted to eat a meal without being told they were in the wrong room. The New China Club was the right room. It was the only room in Reno where everyone was in the right room.

Walter’s daughter Adelaide had asked him once why he stayed so long. She was in college then, at the university, studying sociology and asking questions that had answers she already knew. Walter had told her: Because it was the first place that let me in.

Adelaide had nodded, and then she had gone back to the university and occupied an office for four days to get the Black Student Union a room of their own, and Walter had understood that the lesson she took from his story was not the one about staying. It was the one about the door.

Now the door was coming down. Harrah’s had leased the lot. The New China Club had been closed for two years, the gaming license surrendered, the kitchen dark. Fong was still in town, running a restaurant on the east side, but he had not come to watch the demolition, or if he had he had come and gone before Walter arrived. Walter did not blame him. There were things you did not need to see happen.

A man on the roof pulled a section of flashing loose and it came away with a sound like a long exhalation, the metal separating from the wood it had been nailed to for forty years. The roof underneath was dark with age. The joists were visible now in places where the decking had already been removed, and through the gaps Walter could see the interior of the building, the ceiling of the main room where the tables had been, the room where he had carried plates and bus tubs and once, in 1955, a birthday cake for a five-year-old girl whose parents had nowhere else to take her because every other restaurant on Virginia Street would have seated them by the kitchen door or not at all.

He thought about the fan tan table. Fong had run the first legal fan tan game in Nevada, and the first pai gow, games from Canton that no other casino owner knew or cared to learn. The dealers spoke Cantonese and the players spoke Cantonese and the game moved in a rhythm that was older than the state of Nevada, older than the town, and Walter had watched it from the kitchen window during his breaks and never understood the rules and never needed to. The game was not for him. The kitchen was for him. The game was for the people whose parents and grandparents had played it in a country ten thousand miles away and who now played it in a low building next to a railroad depot in a desert town, and that was enough. That it existed was enough.

The crew broke for lunch at noon. They sat in the shade of the flatbed and ate sandwiches and drank from a thermos, and Walter stood on the sidewalk across the street and watched them eat. He had packed himself a sandwich too, out of habit, because Walter Hamilton did not go anywhere without something to eat, because a cook who did not eat was a cook who did not care, and Bill Fong had taught him that on the first day.

He unwrapped the sandwich and ate it standing up. Ham and Swiss on white bread, mustard, no lettuce. A cook’s lunch. Quick and plain.

The crew went back to work at twelve-thirty. By two o’clock the roof was stripped to the joists and the north wall had a hole in it where a section of brick had been pulled away by a cable attached to a truck. Through the hole Walter could see the kitchen. His kitchen. The stainless counter where he had prepped ten thousand meals. The hood vent that had never worked properly and that Fong had never fixed because fixing it would have meant closing the kitchen for a day and Fong did not close.

Walter finished his sandwich. He folded the wax paper and put it in his pocket. He looked at the building one more time, at the hole in the north wall and the stripped roof and the men working steadily to undo what other men had built, and then he turned and walked north toward the depot, toward the bus stop, toward Sparks where his house was, where Lavinia would be writing a letter to someone about something that needed to be better than it was, because that was what Lavinia did, and Walter would sit at the table and tell her about the building and she would listen and then she would say something about the next thing, because Lavinia always knew what the next thing was, even when the last thing was still falling down.

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