grew up in Toronto, the eldest son of a first generation Italian household where his mother did not speak English and his father loved to sit in the backyard under a canopy of grape vines, wearing a white undershirt and straw hat as he drank coffee or grappa and embarrassing the hell out of the teenaged Vinnie. Perhaps it is more accurate to say Vinnie grew up on the street. And even though Toronto is heralded for its low crime rate, Vinnie always drove around, and likely still does today, with a small pocket knife tucked somewhere under his seat.
Vinnie joined the Star in 1988 as a “copy boy.” It was a position that has retained its name today even though the duties now entail general office administration. Since computers replaced typewriters, copy boys were no longer needed to run stories from the reporters’ hands to editors, then cram the stories into oblong containers that would be suctioned along tubes to the engravers and eventually to the printing presses.
Over the years, Vinnie got to know everyone at the Star, and everyone knew Vinnie. But it was the photographers he studied and wanted most to befriend. Vinnie learned about journalism in the newsroom, not the classroom, and in 1997 the paper rewarded him with a job as staff photographer. I loved working with Vinnie as a crime reporter because he had a gift for putting anyone at ease. I watched him charm politicians, dignitaries, housewives, ceos, drag queens (and I bet the Queen herself should he meet her), drug dealers and chiefs of police. In Compton, California, where we once did a series on gangs, I interviewed a six-foot-five Crip serving two life sentences for murder, and it was Vinnie whom the gang leader felt more comfortable talking with. Ditto the cops. Yes, Vinnie had charisma and treated everyone as equals, but if pushed too far, he also had a short Italian fuse, and on the phone that day I watched it ignite.
The editors wanted to know if he could go back to photograph Cindy again. I had to wonder what that would involve. Would we keep probing and prodding, and if that didn’t bring her to tears perhaps I would pinch her?
“No,” Vinnie said. “She’s on her way back to Toronto.”
“Could we get her here?”
The call was over.
In the end, David Barkway’s story ran on the Sunday front, the pictures inside.
A DAY AFTER interviewing Cindy, I wandered into an empty Afghan Kebab House at 9th Avenue and 51st Street and met Mohammad Nasir. Taped to the window outside the restaurant were yellow ribbons and an American flag, just like those that hung at almost every other Manhattan restaurant. But there was also a handwritten note on yellow lined paper. “To our neighbors, fellow New Yorkers and everyone affected by the terrible tragedy at the World Trade Center. Please accept our sincere and heartfelt condolences. We also feel such shock and horror.” The also was not underlined but that was the point.
Mohammad was a twenty-three-year-old waiter serving tables to help pay for tuition at New York’s City College. He told me in a soft voice that employees at the restaurant had been receiving death threats and that people would come in to stare at the flag of Afghanistan teary-eyed and shake their heads. Two of Mohammad’s friends sold coffee from carts on the top floors of the twin towers and were missing, presumed dead. But unlike other New Yorkers who shared that intense kinship in grief, Mohammad felt alone and like an outsider for the first time since he left Pakistan.
Which was ironic, because Mohammad had always felt more at home in New York than he had growing up in Islamabad.
Mohammad’s father was an officer with Pakistan’s navy who told his two boys from a very young age that he didn’t want his sons to live with the corruption of Pakistan’s ruling elite. When they were old enough, he would find a way to send them abroad to study and work. Mohammad’s chance came in 1995 when he travelled to Switzerland, where he studied hotel management, while his older brother left for Ireland. Even though he was only a teenager, Mohammad had been planning all his life (“I’m addicted to work,” he liked to exclaim, throwing up his hands as if he had an undiagnosed medical condition that he had learned to live with). He hit his stride as soon as he arrived in Switzerland, quickly securing a hotel internship, freelancing with bartending and DJ gigs at night, and learning English and German to add to his list of languages that already included Punjabi, Farsi and passable Arabic. But while his living costs were taken care of through the internship, his jobs earned little, which meant he was unable to save for the career he sought. He wanted to be a doctor. He believed there was only one place where he could do that. “To me, it was always the land of opportunities,” he said of New York. In 1998, he applied for a U.S. student visa and was delighted when he was accepted. He arrived in Manhattan soon after and found himself at the doorstep of the Afghan Kebab House, where he met Shafi Rouzy.
Shafi, the founder of the Afghan Kebab House chain, had also come to the United States in search of a new life, after fleeing his home in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan, in 1979 during the Soviet invasion. He received political asylum in the United States and became an American citizen. Shafi’s first job was selling kebabs from a pushcart on the streets of Midtown during the 1980s. One night as he wearily parked his cart in the rundown garage on 9th Avenue, he imagined what could be. By the time he was able to sponsor his wife and children to get them out of Pakistan, to which they had fled, the wily businessman had established the Afghan Kebab House and already had a faithful clientele.
When the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, Shafi was in the Middle East trying to start a chain of restaurants and had left his 9th Avenue restaurant in the care of his son Yusuf. Yusuf had slept in the restaurant for a week following the 9/11 attacks, because travelling in and out of the city was too difficult with all the road restrictions, but Mohammad thought it was also to keep his family business safe. Mosques, stores, and Arab and South Asian homes were being vandalized. Within a week of the attacks, a Sikh owner of a gas station was shot dead in Arizona (reportedly because he “looked Middle Eastern”); a Pakistani store clerk was killed in Dallas; and Hassan Awdah of Gary, Indiana, a U.S. citizen born in Yemen, survived an attack at his gas station by a masked man wielding a high-powered rifle. Mourning was giving way to vengeance.
Shafi told employees in a conference call from Kuwait that he was considering dropping “Afghan” from the restaurant’s name. He even mused that he wanted to close his restaurants and open a fried chicken chain instead.
Business was certainly bad for a long time after that, but in the end, Shafi wasn’t forced to close his chain, and the Afghan Kebab House survived.
On an unusually warm spring night in 2010, I went back in search of Mohammad. Ready to use my best investigative skills to track him down, I went first to the restaurant hoping he had a friend still working there. Instead, I found Mohammad right where I had left him almost a decade earlier, waiting tables at 9th and 51st. Yusuf was there too, in the kitchen, slicing massive white pieces of cod into cubes.
The restaurant diners that night were the usual mix of the pre-theatre crowd, tourists with aching feet and bulging shopping bags, and women in pencil skirts, looking all business above the table, but underneath they had traded their spiky office heels for flip flops or running shoes. The restaurant didn’t serve alcohol, but diners were allowed to bring their own. “Some people don’t think it’s right to have hard liquor every night. What’s with that?” a twenty-something suit at the table beside me loudly exclaimed to his workmates as they clinked their corner store beer.
I had secured the only free table and spent a few minutes watching Mohammad before saying hello. He had lost a little hair and his black vest and dress pants seemed looser, I thought. He was busy, banging back and forth through the swinging kitchen doors, returning with fragrant trays of lamb, rice and fish, filling water glasses from wine decanters and returning with empty plates. There was no fried chicken on the menu.
“You’re still here?” I said to Mohammad as I explained
