Middlesex

In Detroit, in 1950, the Black Bottom ghetto was bulldozed to put in a freeway. The Nation of Islam, now headquartered at Temple No. 2 in Chicago, got a new minister by the name of Malcolm X. During the winter of 1954, Desdemona first began to talk of retiring to Florida someday. “They have a city in Florida you know what it is called? New Smyrna Beach!” In 1956, the last streetcar stopped running in Detroit and the Packard plant closed. And that same year, Milton Stephanides, tired of military life, left the Navy and returned home to pursue an old dream.

“Do something else,” Lefty Stephanides told his son. They were in the Zebra Room, drinking coffee. “You go to the Naval Academy to be a bartender?”

“I don’t want to be a bartender. I want to run a restaurant. A whole chain. This is a good place to start.”

Lefty shook his head. He leaned back and spread his arms, taking in the whole bar. “This is no place to start anything,” he said.

He had a point. Despite my grandfather’s assiduous drink-refilling and counter-wiping, the bar on Pingree Street had lost its luster. The old zebra skin, which he still had on the wall, had dried out and cracked. Cigarette smoke had dirtied the diamond shapes of the tin ceiling. Over the years the Zebra Room had absorbed the exhalations of its auto worker patrons. The place smelled of their beer and hair tonic, their punch-clock misery, their frayed nerves, their trade unionism. The neighborhood was also changing. When my grandfather had opened the bar in 1933, the area had been white and middle-class. Now it was becoming poorer, and predominantly black. In the inevitable chain of cause and effect, as soon as the first black family had moved onto the block, the white neighbors immediately put their houses up for sale. The oversupply of houses depressed the real estate prices, which allowed poorer people to move in, and with poverty came crime, and with crime came more moving vans.

“Business isn’t so good anymore,” Lefty said. “If you want to open a bar, try Greektown. Or Birmingham.”

My father waved these objections aside. “Bar business isn’t so good maybe,” he said. “That’s because there’s too many bars around here. Too much competition. What this neighborhood needs is a decent diner.”

Hercules Hot Dogs™, which at its height would boast sixty-six locations throughout Michigan, Ohio, and southeastern Florida—each restaurant identified by the distinctive “Pillars of Hercules” out front—could be said to have begun on the snowy February morning in 1956 when my father arrived at the Zebra Room to begin renovations. The first thing he did was to remove the sagging venetian blinds from the front windows to let in more light. He painted the interior a bright white. With a G.I. business loan, he had the bar remodeled into a diner counter and had a small kitchen installed. Workmen put red vinyl booths along the far wall and reupholstered the old barstools with Zizmo’s zebra skin. One morning two deliverymen carried a jukebox in the front door. And while hammers pounded and sawdust filled the air, Milton acquainted himself with the papers and deeds Lefty had haphazardly kept in a cigar box beneath the register.

“What the hell is this?” he asked his father. “You’ve got three insurance policies on this place.”

“You can never have too much insurance,” Lefty said. “Sometimes the companies don’t pay. Better to be sure.”

“Sure? Each one of these is for more than this place is worth. We’re paying on all these? That’s a waste of money.”

Up until this point, Lefty had let his son make whatever changes he wanted. But now he stood firm. “Listen to me, Milton. You haven’t lived through a fire. You don’t know what happens. Sometimes in a fire the insurance company burns down, too. Then what can you do?”

“But three—“

“We need three,” insisted Lefty.

“Just humor him,” Tessie told Milton later that night. “Your parents have been through a lot.”

“Sure they’ve been through a lot. But we’re the ones who have to keep paying these premiums.” Nevertheless, he did as his wife said and maintained all three policies.