The Curse of the Crystal Palace

(Another writing exercise)

In a crumbling section of Cicero sits the Crystal Palace Restaurant, an eatery once frequented by none other than Al Capone. When that mobster went to jail for tax evasion, legend tells of a celebration hosted by his enemy, Bugsy McGillicuty, at the Crystal Palace (which after that night was renamed, for a few months, the Palace of Broken Crystals for reasons you will learn in a moment. Capone might have been behind bars but his henchmen were not).

A grinning Bugsy had just raised his glass to his imprisoned enemy, or so the story goes, when a bullet shot the goblet out of his hand. It was embarrassing to be interrupted like that right in the middle of a gloat. Everyone dove to the floor except Bugsy, who was determined to finish the toast, despite the obvious presence of a hit man. He had been working on the speech for days, had committed it to memory, and didn’t want to see all that work go to waste, come what may. Faced with such determined courage (some might, and did, call it idiocy), the hit man stopped his work for one stunned moment. Bugsy was enormously flattered. “Here’s to that piece rancid pastrami who is now behind bars, will likely rot there, and so can’t do anything else to hurt any of u—”

His last word was cut short by the assassin’s bullet who, though a killer, was a very honest man, and couldn’t bear to hear a lie being told, especially in a public place. It would have been an extremely embarrassing moment for Bugsy, had he still been alive, to know that not one person clapped for his toast. They were all dead or fleeing into the parking lot.

From that moment on, anyone who ever raised a glass at the Crystal Palace suffered some sort of  public humiliation. There was the woman who swallowed her glass eye while toasting her doctor; the tiny elderly man who fell out of his elevator shoes when announcing his betrothal to his tall fiance; and the young girl who, while toasting herself at her 15th birthday party, suffered something akin to face rearrangement. She had spent hours applying her makeup but had unfortunately forgotten to take her antihistamine, so, during one enormous sneeze her false eyelashes fell off and landed above her lip, of all places. While she had earnestly hoped that her beautiful image would reverberate throughout the revered temple of social media, she couldn't have possibly foreseen that this would come to pass only because she appeared to be wearing a mustache.

The following year, her cousin suffered an even more cruel public humiliation. As she began to toast her beloved mother on the event of that woman's 41st birthday, she reverted to her odd second language, as she always did when she was nervous. Lifting her trembling goblet into the air, she began: “Etslay allyay aiseray ourhay lassesgay…” Crushed with the realization that she wouldn’t be able to speak anything but Pig Latin for the rest of the evening, she ran, weeping, into the bathroom and refused to come out, wishing to the dark skies above that she had believed her mother’s warnings about the curse of the Crystal Palace.