By Laurie Woolever

Photo: ZUMA Press, Inc. /Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo

On a chilly November morning in 2001, a day off from work, I walked to Cibao Deli, on the corner of Avenue B and East 4th Street for a self-serve coffee. The man behind the counter had his radio tuned to 1010 WINS, the AM news station.

As I passed my dollar across the counter, I heard the radio announcer say that an American Airlines plane bound for the Dominican Republic had crashed a short time ago in Queens, minutes after taking off from JFK, and that all 260 passengers and crew, plus a dog, were presumed dead. The bridges and tunnels were closed, all the New York City airports shut down.

It had been two months since 9/11, and parts of downtown still smelled like a tire fire. You’d occasionally see people wearing gas masks on the street or selling American-flag-printed T-shirts with terrible slogans like I SURVIVE [sic] THE ATTACK or SEPTEMBER 11, 2001: I CAN’T BELIEVE I GOT OUT. Most days, a wiry white man stood directly under the arch in Washington Square Park, yelling about how the hijacked planes had been chartered by Steven Spielberg, Mariah Carey, and the New York Mets.

We would learn within a few days that the crash had been a tragic accident, not a terror attack. The plane had wobbled after takeoff, the inexperienced co-pilot badly overcorrected, the vertical stabilizer came dislodged, and the plane fell out of the sky and into peoples’ yards and houses, instantly exploding in a fireball. Later investigations would show a design flaw in the rudder.

It was the second-deadliest aviation disaster in U.S. history, and yet because it was an accident, there was, in the atmosphere, a weird collective sense of relief about the whole thing, and a doubling down on the notion that “life is short” and “anything can happen,” which caused people to act in unpredictable ways, running full-speed toward, or swiftly away from, danger and uncertainty. Among people I knew, there were sudden breakups and ill-advised marriages. If I hadn’t already decided to quit my job as Mario Batali’s assistant, I would have done it then.

He’d offered me the job two and a half years earlier, for an annual salary of $26,500, with health insurance after six months. It never occurred to me to negotiate for even a dollar more. I was so relieved, so thrilled. He would later tell me that I was the only person who’d applied for the job. I had been at the right place at the right time; I’d get to work on a cookbook, and get right up next to the magnetic heat and excitement of the restaurant business, while avoiding the risk and damage inherent to the endeavor. On my first day, within 30 minutes, he’d given me the nickname Woolie.

The day after the plane crash, I was back at work, editing recipes at Babbo’s bar. Across the room, I could hear Durim, the new service manager, talking to a young phone girl.

“What did I tell you about blondes wearing pink?” he said, playacting at scolding her. “I can hardly control myself around you!”

The girl, an NYU freshman, smiled up at Durim from the banquette where she was seated, taking call after call. Her face was sheepish, her laugh light. She was wearing a blush-colored oxford shirt that was buttoned to the top of her sternum.

Durim had been on the job for about six months. When he first started, I wondered if he was too polite and softspoken for the loose, fun, dirty-talking culture of the restaurant staff. The busboys made fun of his Albanian accent, a combination of Italian and Slavic with a bit of the Bronx, and the waiters pushed back against his stiff notions of fine-dining service, which he’d honed in various four-star dining rooms. Durim must have spent some time quietly observing the prevailing horny ethos, because now here he was, pretending to be upset with a young employee because he found her fuckability a distraction.

It wasn’t just Durim: Mario’s vocal horniness had set a tone for everyone who worked at Babbo. His grabby hands and constant dirty jokes and innuendo signified that it was okay, even encouraged, to flirt with and grope each other. No one called it harassment, except perhaps when making jokes about it. I had a stack of publicity photos of Mario in a two-handed finger gun pose, a slight smile on his face. One morning before he came in, I took one from the stack and used a Sharpie to write the words “Free breast exams!” on it. I showed some female co-workers, to get a laugh. Then I put the photo in my bag and took it home, to be safe.

It was an open secret that Mario pawed at the women on staff.