Lost in Translation

“You want to know why we got animosity in this country?” he tells me one day, standing in the back of his spotless shop. (And I do mean spotless — no matter what you think of him, you could perform surgery in this place.) “Because we’re always bending. We gotta be nice. No, no, no. Play … by … the … rules.”

Play by the rules. Of all of the sound bites Joey Vento has perfected over the past year, this is his absolute favorite. He says he has nothing against Mexicans, nothing against immigrants, nothing against immigration — after all, weren’t his grandparents immigrants? But he has a very big problem with people who don’t wait in line, who don’t fill out the paperwork and do the things they’re supposed to do to get into this country legally. He finds the phrase “undocumented workers” laughable. They’re illegal, he says. “People don’t wake up until it’s too late,” he says. “And that’s what’s going to happen to this country.”

But Joey’s sign did wake people up. He’s gotten letters from all over the country, praising him for standing up for America. Many people sent money for his legal defense. (He returned it.) He keeps all of the correspondence organized in plastic sleeves, locked into meticulously labeled orange binders that match the color of his shop. From Elmira, Oregon: “Don’t let them talk you down. You are right!” From Chandler, Arizona: “It’s about time someone with courage took a stand.” From Las Vegas: “You are not alone in your feelings about America!” An online MSNBC poll taken a week after the story broke netted more than 27,000 responses — 88 percent backing the sign. Joey Vento had lit a match under the anti-immigration forces. Or the racists, depending on how you look at it. “When the whole thing broke, I was getting some of the nastiest, foulest e-mails I’ve ever gotten, from places like Texas and Oklahoma and Southern states,” Jim Kenney says. “That showed me that when you send a hater­message, the haters come out.”

Talk-show host Michael Smerconish, for one, isn’t surprised. “There was a chord that was struck,” he says, adding that he was stunned the CHR took up the case in the first place. “That’s not me playing the windbag saying, ‘Oh, can you believe they’re going after Joey Vento.’ It’s me saying, ‘Is this all they’ve got? This shitty little sign and they think it’s worth their time to go after this guy?’” So what does Smerconish think this is really all about? He pauses. “I think it’s somebody in city government who’s got a hard-on for Joey.”

After 41 years of feeding the seemingly never-ending line of customers waiting outside his window, Joey Vento still takes almost boyish delight in deftly showing how it’s done, maneuvering his shiny stainless-steel spatula with the deftness of a maestro, flipping small slices of raw red beef as they bubble on the griddle to the color of dry mud. A squirt of water, a fizz of steam, and the spatula flies the meat, piece by piece, with acrobatic flair, onto a long Italian roll. Outside, “The Halls of Montezuma” is blaring on a loudspeaker. Seems fitting.

Joey turns to me. “What kind of cheese?”

He sees my eyes move to his left, to the vat of gelatinous ooze that is the day’s ration of Cheez Whiz, which is ordered by almost 80 percent of Geno’s customers. I’m about to dive in — when in Rome, right? — when he cuts me off.