The guitar player raises a beer mug above his head. “Saturday night at Brown’s Diner. You will know that you are here by the plushness of the carpet and the sip in your Champagne.”
I sit at the bar with a cheeseburger and the only beer that Brown’s serves on draft, the King of Beers — Bud, or “Butt-Wiper,” as Rocco calls it. Dead tired from cooking the day shift, I stare down at the “plush carpet” beneath my barstool. Decades of foot traffic have peeled away brown linoleum tiles, exposing a pattern of buffalo plaid.
Behind the bar, Rocco the bartender and cook is dancing under Christmas lights. He wears cutoff pajama pants, a faded T-shirt and a beret. He is sick. With a grin spreading wide across his face, he claps twice and is out the door in the rain smoking before anyone knows otherwise.
A lot of people idle their lives away in an office. Line cooking is not a profession the average 9-to-5 white-collar mind can understand. The work demands that you never stay still. Shift hours can be odd. It isn’t hard to see why once cooks clock out they tend to degenerate quickly. It’s a profession meant for the kind of person who doesn’t mind handling sharp blades, getting dirty or spending the hottest days of the summer sweating over a grill.
After all, as Rocco will tell you, cooking is not a job intended for those who color inside the lines of societal norms — it’s a better fit for thieves, cutthroats and pirates. Rocco says that at one time, he actually cooked aboard a boat that chased albacore around the Pacific, an experience he makes sound as savage as the events of Moby Dick. His ship never sank, but the crew did threaten to throw him overboard, more than once.
You used to be able to find Rocco behind the bar at Brown’s Diner. He is an entertainer and impersonator for tips, a watercolor painter, a singer and, like most of the others who frequent Brown’s, a songwriter. And before he got sick, he was the cook. Rocco is the man who taught me that the trick to cooking is timing. He showed me how to hold a knife the right way. How to make chili. And how to tell when food is ready in the deep fryer. (It floats.)
The guitar player clears his throat and begins bellowing a Bob Dylan tune from across the room. Rocco is back, refilling mugs. His voice is on its way out. It sounds like the muffled rasp of a blown speaker. He too clears his throat and then says to me as he sets the beers on the bar, “Because I can’t really talk these days, I find myself clapping a lot more.”
Two years after the Grand Ole Opry’s first broadcast and the Belcourt Theatre began showing silent films, Brown’s Diner opened out of the husk of a boxcar on the hill at the corner of 21st Avenue South and Blair Boulevard. The establishment proudly possesses the oldest beer license in Nashville. The interior is nothing short of a Norman Rockwell painting, if Rockwell were struggling with a case of delirium tremens while painting. Photos of musicians and patrons deck the walls. In one corner, there’s a jukebox next to a Golden Tee arcade game. On the other side of the bar there are amps and microphones, and often a performer of some kind using them.
On this particular rainy Saturday afternoon, the player is an old songwriter covering his favorites and mixing in some originals. Above the bar hangs a lit-up model of Budweiser Clydesdales hauling a beer wagon. Bottle caps tile the rubber floor behind the bar. The back of the house contains a dining room with walls the color of a pool table’s faded felt.
Brown’s is frequented by Hillsboro Village and Belmont neighbors, among others. Longtime patrons claim the taste of Brown’s food comes from fryer oil that’s been circulating since 1927. That’s just urban legend, though — they replaced most of the oil last fall when a night cook accidentally emptied it all into a pickle bucket before letting it cool. The oil melted through the bucket and rippled across the kitchen floor. Staff slipped and slid across the kitchen for weeks.
Now Rocco banters with a woman waiting for her to-go order. Today is his last shift before surgery, so he is pulling out all the stops. To a person, Brown’s employees detest to-go orders. Rocco lets it slide because she has a nice smile. Trying desperately to make her laugh, he busts out some of his best impressions. “You mean you don’t know Joe Pesci?” he wheezes, throwing up his hands as she walks out.
He turns to me, “Technically, I’m not allowed in the kitchen anymore. Doctor doesn’t want me cooking. Says it could make the cancer worse.” He coughs a bit then giggles, “But that might not be true.” Seeing a beer mug almost empty, he yanks it from its owner and scuttles away to fill it so the head spills over the brim. Then another for me and another for a friend at the end of the bar. He slides the last mug across the bar. On its way, the mug hits a basket of French fries and sends foam all over the bar. Everyone explodes with laughter. Rocco fills another.
Rocco has served burgers and tended bar at Brown’s for more than a decade, a fact that makes him simultaneously the establishment’s most senior cook and its greenest bartender. As two customers exit, Rocco studies the barroom. “I’ll still come around,” he says, as if it were a promise. “Maybe tend bar on Saturday nights.”
“Some have called me an inspiration,” he tells me as we both watch the guitar player. He coughs again, then his eyes bulge. “I think that’s funny, considering how close I have come to robbing banks.” As we both reflect on this comment, more customers arrive. Rocco dashes back to the freezer for frosty mugs. There’s something of a drunken sailor’s gait to his walk. He comes back and the phone rings.
“Yeah, four days,” he wheezes into the phone. “Vanderbilt Hospital. Doctor says not to worry. The operation wasn’t what it was 20 years ago.” Another grin streaks across his face, but his eyes are closed. “Maybe I’ll sing through a voice box.”
More than a few customers have opined to me that whoever cooks Brown’s cheeseburgers makes the city better one patty at a time. I picked up the job one day as a customer sitting out on Brown’s patio. “You got any cooking experience?” Rocco had asked between puffs of a cigarette. In high school, I spent a summer as a dishwasher scrubbing coagulated macaroni and crème brûlée out of Le Creuset cookware in the back of a Colonial Williamsburg tourist trap. “Yeah,” I told him. “I have French bistro experience.”
The truth was, apart from making vast amounts of PB&Js for 8-year-olds as a camp counselor and the reliable ramen-noodle dish I had honed in my years without a girlfriend, I had zero cooking experience.
On my first Sunday morning, Rocco burst through the back kitchen door wielding a handle of Aristocrat Vodka over his head. As he mixed his drink with orange soda, he eyeballed me suspiciously. “You don’t know how to cook, do ya?” I was stirring the deep fryer with a spatula. “Nope, not a lick.” He took a sip from his drink, puffed up his chest and spat into the sink. “Watch and learn.” I watched. He chopped onions. “You’ve gotta use the knife like it’s an extension of your arm.” He molded patties and held one up. “Here’s a proper Brown’s patty.” Steam gushed from the bun toaster when buns were black and crispy. “Ah, crap, the buns!” He dropped a steady stream of patties onto the grill and let them sizzle until he put them on the bun. “I’ll save this black one for myself.” There was a rhythm to it. Plates clacked on the kitchen window when orders were ready. The Solo cup was sipped between orders. When a catfish dinner to-go order came in from the bar, he tossed the frozen fish into the fryer, cursing, and walked out for a cigarette. Timing was everything.
When I started, I was almost irreversibly incompetent. I undercooked burgers, burnt fries, couldn’t find the cheese, and suffered enough grease and oil burns to temporarily lose all feeling in my hands. But gradually, I reached a level of spastic burger-flipping that let me eke by until the end of my shift, when much to the celebration of everyone I worked with, Alex took over. With his booming Salvadoran laugh and grace under the greasiest of culinary pressures, Alex became a kind of kitchen hero to the rest of us. His strangely slow yet methodical cooking style vexed me. He was easily the most impressive line cook in the kitchen after Rocco’s shift ended.
Restaurant work is laborious, and can be quite dysfunctional. The bond between Brown’s employees is a kind of camaraderie formed around a shared set of experiences that only they and other food service workers can or should appreciate. They manage drunken mobs during Titans games, even when the waitress quits. They understand that taking the time to get to know Rocco’s latest girlfriend is usually pointless. When tourists from Iowa stumble in at 10 p.m. on a weeknight, it is second nature to keep the bar open, because the Iowans will tip as though it will somehow mitigate their hangovers of tomorrow.
Aside from the burgers and beer, live music is what brings customers to Brown’s Diner. It may just be the establishment’s greatest asset. It’s what brought me here, to see my friends The Cameroons play. Typically, the bar features two acts per day: one act in the afternoon, a second in the evening. The lineup fills up at least a month in advance, and stays full unless someone cancels. Songwriters play every day, but Monday night is their special night. There’s a jazz group Wednesdays. On Saturdays, Uncle Tony’s Townhouse Band runs through some portion of the classic rock canon. Sunday showcases the gamut of performers, from Brown’s bartender Gordy’s country-rock group to the folky father-daughter duo Emily and George.
Until he lost his voice a few months ago, Rocco was the frontman for a group called The Detonators. He tells people his voice was a “rusty mix of Lou Reed and Joe Cocker.”
Rocco’s origins are murky. He was born in Columbus, Ohio. Named after the military heroes Gen. Douglas MacArthur and T.E. Lawrence, Rocco’s real name is Douglas Lawrence Wyman. He watches Lawrence of Arabia at least once a month. Often he shouts his favorite quote, “Nothing is written!”
Before he dropped out of high school, he was offered a painting scholarship at the Columbus School of Art and Design. Instead, he hitchhiked to Texas telling people he was a Protestant fleeing a family of orthodox Catholics. He learned to cook from a red-faced German wino who took post-bender naps in the walk-in cooler. Years later, Rocco began work on an autobiography titled The Road to More-Rocco. Though the work remains unfinished, he has admitted that having a manuscript lying around has been good for his ego.
As a bartender around Nashville in the ’90s, Rocco got proficient at earning tips by impersonating celebrities. He did a gushy, Prince of Tides-era Nick Nolte, his version of Burgess Meredith as Rocky’s surly fight coach Mickey, and a not-quite-right-but-still-hilarious Clint Eastwood. But of all his characters, Rocco specializes in the Joe Pesci/Robert De Niro gangster types from Martin Scorsese films.
When a friend opened a nightclub downtown named after the famous gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond, the owner asked Rocco to be general manager. This new nightclub, called Jack Legs, was to have a “classy gangster” vibe. The friend’s only condition: Rocco would have to assume a gangster persona. So Rocco became an amalgamation of his impressions, an abrasive wise-guy caricature. Such a two-dimensional character proved comic fodder for honky-tonk tourists.
At Jack Legs, every day but Monday, from 4 p.m. to 3 a.m., Rocco greeted customers at the door, then served them drinks at “Rocco’s Corner.” “Hay, ’ow youse doin’? Welcome ta Jack Legs.” Less than a year after its opening, Jack Legs became one of the busier clubs in Nashville. Rocco quickly became a star. People discovered his home phone number, and he’d answer the phone like he was a Mafia hitman. “Hallo, ’ow youse fuckin’ doin’?” Rocco’s persona became his business, and business was good. When the ball dropped on New Year’s Eve 1998, Rocco profanely gave the countdown live from Jack Legs over WKDF’s airwaves: “Happy fuckin’ New Years!”
The act took its toll. Flush with extra capital, Rocco got into cocaine. He pilfered cash from the register to fuel his habit. The gangster-general-manager-on-cocaine bit lasted almost two years before Rocco quit. Stardom was not his thing. Two months later, Rocco beat his cocaine habit on a steady diet of cherry cheesecake. Not long after, he ended up at Brown’s.
It’s gotten dark outside. The rain continues, and I’ll stick around for the remainder of Rocco’s final shift. The night waitress — a mad, impish woman — slaps a large to-go order on the bar and Rocco shakes a fist. Still in the corner by the door, the singer is tuning his guitar for one last set. Through the bar window, I see that the dining room is filling up for the dinner hour.
Rocco remains nimble behind the bar. At 61, he can still make empty threats like Joe Pesci and pour drinks like Tom Cruise in Cocktail, but there’s no need for it at Brown’s. He can play a full range of characters, but here, he’s best at playing himself; that grinning half-civilized human being who carries a lot more than what is initially seen.
He’s worked countless restaurant jobs, some for less than six minutes. One memorable sous chef gig in Minnesota ended abruptly: After six weeks without a day off, he was ornery; he was fired for brandishing a cooking whisk and threatening the general manager — a friend — in the walk-in freezer. Rocco told me that when he cooks, everything else fades away. He claims that hunger is what made him want to be a cook in the first place. The hunger came to him at age 20 while working as a dishwasher at a Red Lobster in Austin, Texas. He was gripping a ham sandwich. Across the kitchen he saw a cook gnawing on a New York strip. By the time Rocco had finished his sandwich, he still felt the hunger, but he’d decided on his next profession.
The best Rocco story comes from a chilly November in 2005, when he manned the Brown’s Diner kitchen for a week straight. His last day before relief turned out to be the finale of Vanderbilt’s football season. It was also the last college game for Vandy’s Jay Cutler. Vandy played Tennessee at Knoxville and improbably defeated their arch rivals 28-24. On this Saturday, Brown’s exceeded fire marshal-mandated capacity from noon until sometime after midnight. Locals who couldn’t fit into the boxcar massed out front on the hill in lawn chairs smoking cigarettes, blasting radios and tailgating. By 2 p.m. everyone was intoxicated and hungry. The line cook on duty finally got so fed up with the amount of orders that he disappeared without saying a word. According to Rocco, assisted by only one waitress, he almost single-handedly worked as bartender and cook for the rest of the day and part of the night.
At 7 p.m. Brown’s had run out of everything. Rocco had cooked more than 220 burgers. After he served that final burger and Brown’s was officially out of food, he walked out the back of the kitchen and left everyone else inside to fend for themselves. Half an hour later, a songwriter and friend was sent to find Rocco. The friend found him — squatting in the alley behind Friedman’s Army Surplus petting a stray cat. Wordlessly, Rocco lit a cigarette, walked back inside Brown’s, and kept the bar running until 3 a.m.
The guitar player raises his glass. “Let’s give it up for the man who put the ‘pro’ in profanity, the black sheep of the Muppets, Rocco!” As the only other person still at the bar, I clap and cheer. The player eases back into his seat, then begins playing the song “Dead Flowers.” As patrons come and go from the drizzly night, Rocco collects their mugs. The cook has all but lost his voice, and soon a surgeon will remove his cancerous vocal cords entirely. Still I wonder when he will return to Brown’s, if at all.
Epilogue
I haven’t seen Rocco since his surgery. About the third time I called him, someone picked up but didn’t say anything. Months later, while scrubbing a beer mug behind the bar, Gordy relayed that he had seen Rocco, that the surgery had gone well and that his cancer is in remission. In time, he told me, Rocco would have a speaking apparatus. Another patron reported that Rocco had gone back to his hometown in Ohio. He would soon be coming back to Nashville with his middle-school sweetheart, Heidi.
We’re meeting at Brown’s Saturday afternoon. All are welcome.
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