Arbitrary Stupid Goal Read online

  She would put too many items on a check. My father would explode and shout that it was too much food to eat. She would let a woman order coffee and toast. My father would explode and shout that wasn’t enough food for a check.

  “Oh, Kenny,” she would say, and he would calm down.

  We had a dishwasher named Terry who was skinny with a puppet face. My dad had hired him as a favor to a friend. It was a favor because Terry was mentally disabled.

  My mom had worked with mentally disabled people when she first met my dad. She was a general counselor and speech therapist. It is what her degree from Hunter College was in. She loved the job. Then a change happened to the organization that she worked for. It began to get funding from New York State. Soon the organization was required to teach advanced math and reading. The state needed to show they were trying to make the patients normal.

  But the patients weren’t normal. What the organization had been teaching was: how to ride the bus, say thank you, use the bathroom, and chew. The patients were not capable of multiplication. They became sad and frustrated. My mother quit and got an easy office job.

  Terry would sit in the window and point his finger like a gun at strangers as they passed. He would imagine blowing them up. This was his favorite thing to do.

  One day Terry is shooting people with his finger. A cop car comes zooming around the corner.

  My dad calls over, “Ditch your gun, Terry. It’s the cops.” Terry put his gun in his left pocket, then his right, then he hid it under his apron. He couldn’t unflex his finger, he couldn’t get rid of the gun.

  My mom made great egg creams. She was not so great at paying bills on time.

  I remember losing my first tooth and putting it under my pillow.

  No tooth fairy came. I woke my mom up to complain; she said the fairy was on vacation and I should try again.

  This went on for weeks. Finally my mom reached into her tip cup and gave me four quarters. Which was a good deal because she let me keep the tooth.

  All tooth fairy transactions went like this, until I was just given permission to reach in the cup without asking.

  Customers were taught that an orange handle meant decaf; then the cups, sugar, and milk were pointed out. They got this lesson once. From then on they knew how to make their own coffee.

  If a fresh pot was brewing, my mom would show the customer the trick of swapping the coffee carafe with their cup.

  The first part of making your coffee was to push me or my siblings out of the way. The coffee area sat on top of the ice machine, which we were always reaching in. This was because nearby, the floor had a small hole that went all the way down to the basement.

  Our ice cubes were just a touch larger than the hole’s opening. I’d place a cube on top of the hole and pull my fingers away quick. My brother would then stamp the cube down to nowhere. Repeat, forever.

  After-school duties included: pulling chicken and turkey off the bone, grating cheddar, decorating the crisscrosses in a ham with cloves, emptying the ice bucket onto the sidewalk, clearing/wiping down tables, folding napkins, rotating milk, filling in bins of candy, noting when we needed more Tootsie Rolls, and taste testing soda.

  The Tootsie Rolls were for Debbie. The Peanut Chews for Tommy. All the candy was bought with a customer in mind. The Fun Dip was for me and Minda. Fun Dip = an envelope of powdered sugar that comes with a stick made of solid sugar. You are supposed to dip the stick in the powder and lick it slowly, eating the powder and the stick at the same time, enjoying the many states of sugar. My sister and I would tear the powder off and just eat the candy sticks, always putting the powder part back in the dispenser box.

  There were at least three customers that liked the powder, but not the stick. Often I would go for my Fun Dip and find sticks with the powder already ripped off.

  This was part of The Store’s magic. As far as I could tell, only a handful of people on earth would want to eat Fun Dip with no stick, and they all happened to visit The Store regularly.

  One customer that came in would tell us to pinch at his face. His skin didn’t look different, but when you pulled, it stretched off his jaw like a circus tent.

  I learned to pray from TV. I’d do it from time to time. Often, before I went to sleep on the bookshelf that was my bed, I would say to myself, hands clasped together like a roof, “Please, God, let Plastic Man come in The Store tomorrow.”

  A customer once showed me how to fold a napkin into a chicken, bunny, and erect penis with balls. Some guy who ordered a shepherd’s pie taught me to understand fractions. Not just how to do them, but why. If he had been a regular, there is a chance I might have become an engineer.

  How to fold a napkin

  When my brother Charlie was 14 he needed to learn how to wire a double throw light switch. It was for homework.

  He was in The Store, books spread on the table in the big booth.

  It seemed easy but he couldn’t figure it out.

  A double throw has two switches. It is the type of switch used at the top and bottom of stairs to control the same light.

  Sitting near Charlie was an architect named Ed. While Ed ate his soup, he tried to help. The soup was finished, but they were both lost on the switch. “I’ll be right back,” said Ed.

  Ed ran to his studio two blocks away and grabbed a folder of blueprints and diagrams, and they both learned how to wire a double throw switch together.

  At this same age Charlie was running a bulletin board, the computer kind, not the cork kind. It was a BBS (bulletin board system), a terminal other computers could connect to like a website, but this was before websites existed. It ran off our home phone line and a Supra 14.4k modem. Charlie’s board was named “Ultima BBS.” He originally called it “Ultimate BBS,” but at the time BBSs didn’t have images, all the graphics were made of text (ASCII art). When Charlie was drawing out the name, by the time he got to the “ma” of “Ultimate” he had run out of room.

  Charlie used BBSs before he ran one. He would post messages, meet users, play games, and, best of all, download pirated software.

  Though the software ended up costing money, because all this was done over the phone line, and this was back when a call to Minnesota from New York was long distance. Charlie would download all night, racking up phone bills. My parents were pretty tolerant. They had this belief in supporting us in whatever we were passionate about, even if it was self-destructive or cost-prohibitive.

  Charlie remembers he was a dick sysop. Ultima visitors had to jump through hoops. The board had different levels of access, and posting requirements. Charlie felt like God; he could watch and see whatever the users did. He had the power to disconnect them or bestow “elite status.”

  People would send him money for better upload ratios. A user named “Lord Jadawin” once sent him three hundred dollars. He used the money to buy a 44meg Syquest hard drive cartridge.

  Charlie loved hearing the clicks in the middle of the night. There were inter-BBS games, where his BBS would play another BBS like fighting robots. The phone bills went way down because people were calling him. He didn’t need to call out; all the software he could want was uploaded to Ultima.

  People uploaded shareware and pirated video games. They also uploaded thousands of dollars’ worth of new desktop publishing applications like Adobe Photoshop and Quark Express.

  In high school Charlie began typesetting The Store’s menu in Quark and printing it on our Apple laser printer, pamphlet style. My dad now through Charlie could change the menu anytime he wanted, which was always.

  One day a customer, a regular, came up to my dad and said he saw Charlie’s name on an FBI list. The list was of people the FBI was planning to investigate for software piracy.

  I know parents are supposed to feel pride when you graduate or get married. But I don’t know that from experience, I know it from movies.

  Because this moment of finding out Charlie was on the FBI watch list to this day fills my dad with that glint
in the eye.

  Charlie has no such glint. He just recalls getting a “ferocious” warning from Dad that some regular heard that his board was about to be raided by the FBI. He didn’t believe he was in danger, he thought that the customer was full of it, but he was tired of the clicks in the night, and this was a good excuse as any to shut it down.

  If you were a regular you got special treatment. Extra cranberry sauce, a sandwich named after you, a tip on an apartment around the block.

  But you weren’t safe from my father’s abuse. No one was.

  A famous musician used to come in The Store. An earnest, singular talent. He’d come in with his daughter. One day my dad shouts across The Store that the daughter was getting “fuckable.”

  I crawled under a table, no idea how my mom or the singular talent reacted.

  There were thousands of moments that made me crawl under a table.

  My dad’s spectacular bursts of anger and random acts of aggression were as much a part of The Store as the double Dutch door.

  Actually, Casko and Willy were safe from my dad’s abuse.

  At The Store there were no rules for them. Order off the menu; hell, don’t order at all. It didn’t matter. Special diet, no problem.

  Casko and Willy could have taken a shit on the floor, sprinkled sawdust over it, skipped past a line of customers, and my dad would have smiled and offered them some brisket that was just fresh out of the oven.

  Bruce Mailman had a nasal voice and was proud to be gay.

  He was managing the Village Gate, and hired Casko to help do some construction work.

  Casko had quit Bell Labs and was running his own company called Fun and Games Repair, which was mostly Casko doing contract demolition work.

  If Casko said something would be done on Tuesday and cost ten dollars, it was. Sometimes it was done on Monday and cost nine.

  So Bruce and Casko got along.

  Meanwhile, Bruce had a dream. On St. Marks Place, there was a Turkish bathhouse that was run-down and had long since turned into a gay bathhouse.

  What is a gay bathhouse? It’s a bathhouse where men go to sit in a sauna, and there are rooms to hook up. This was before AIDS.

  Bruce’s dream was to renovate the St. Marks Baths and create the largest gay baths in the city.

  Casko said he would do all the contracting work for free in exchange for part of the business.

  Imagine a hospital and all the sheets they use each day. Imagine what it takes to keep the sheets clean. Washing and folding machines. Pumps and power. The Baths needed this, too. Casko built an industrial laundry. He got all the building permits, and solved hundreds of other problems.

  The New St. Marks Baths were a huge success, and so was the partnership.

  With money pouring in from the Baths, Bruce bought a grand theater on Second Avenue. It had eighty-foot-high ceilings and was once the Fillmore East.

  Just changing a lightbulb in the place was a big deal. Bruce wanted to turn it into the largest gay nightclub in the city.

  Casko flew to London to see discos and went to Philadelphia to pick up an eight-ton, $50,000 planetarium projector.

  The theater became known as the Saint, and the stories of its creation and existence could fill an enormous loft building on Fifteenth Street.

  But Casko never told me these stories. I get the kiddo voice from Casko as well. He is still alive and is now “the world’s best grandpa” with a shirt to prove it. He volunteers for the Red Cross, preparing schools and hospitals for hurricanes. And he is still on call if something breaks at The Store, if we need a 220 outlet, or advice on what is wrong with the walk-in fridge.

  Casko was there from the beginning. The first day my father owned The Store, he and Casko set to cleaning out the basement. A giant rat ran across the floor. Casko said, “Kenny, give me the shovel.” My dad did, but regretted it right away. “Wa-wa-wait, give it back, what am I going to protect myself with?”

  Casko killed the rat with the shovel, and it became clear what was going to protect my dad.

  When my father wanted to turn The Store into a restaurant, it was Casko that made it possible.

  Casko had a friend named Andy who was in the beverage business.

  When Andy couldn’t get his wife pregnant, he asked the doctors why. They said that the temperature in his scrotum was too high for his sperm to live.

  “That’s it? I’m in refrigeration. I can fix that,” Andy replied, and created a jockstrap to keep his nuts cold. His wife got pregnant within a month.

  A large Hilton hotel in Midtown had three bars. Floors away from the bars, Andy set up a room that supplied all the alcohol.

  The room was the first of its kind. Liquor was dispensed by pipes and computers to the bars below. The computer accounted for every drop of liquor that left the room, calculating what the sales should be.

  It was created to prevent bartenders from stealing. It worked great and was widely replicated. But bartenders found it was simple to get around. They would bring in their own liquor, selling shots off the books.

  Eve’s uniform

  My mom’s tip cup was an oversize glass beer stein decorated with a St. Pauli Girl decal—we had St. Pauli and Sam Adams on tap.

  When I was nine, she taught me and Minda to pour draft beer. It wasn’t easy. You had to tilt the glass just so to get the right head.

  It was twice as hard because all our beer mugs were shaped like cowboy boots. This was typical of all the decisions my parents made.

  Her tip cup lived underneath The Store’s pink counter, across from an old art deco fridge we kept the milk in.

  The milk fridge had silver-framed glass doors with big “Bride Stripped Bare” cracks. My dad would repair the cracks with fiberglass and resin kits that were meant to fix holes in boats. We had a special toolbox that smelled like rotten eggs, full of Krazy Glue, epoxy, mesh fabric, rope, and stir sticks. Everything was always falling apart. Valves on the faucet constantly leaked and were replaced.

  Games of truth or dare always involved our main freezer, which gave electric shocks whenever you touched it.

  The slicer and juicer couldn’t be used at the same time. If they were, all the electricity went out. My mom kept a bowl of flashlights, so people wouldn’t have to eat in the dark. Our vent fan to the roof was homemade and needed the grease scooped out every other week. The little clips that held up the shelves inside the milk fridge would break, spilling pies and salsa on six-packs of beer.

  My parents would glue it all back together with duct tape or fiberglass, and The Store would keep spinning.

  The tip cup always had quarters. I wonder now if my mom left them there for us to gamble with Willy.

  Tic-tac-toe was played before and after school. I can’t remember a day at The Store without Willy.

  He was always in and out. Usually with a dustpan, toilet snake, or some other accessory.

  Kenny, I’ve got an idea for a movie.

  “What’s the idea, Will?” my father said.

  It’s a western. A cowboy walks down the stairs. As he comes closer you notice his cock hanging out. It’s huge with a throbbing erection.

  “What happens next?” my dad asked.

  That’s all I have so far.

  Willy lived for a long time with a girl named Becky. She was much younger, but Willy really liked her. Not sure what went wrong. Separate life. My dad thinks it could have been Willy’s “nothing bothers me, nothing to say” attitude. An attitude that was maybe a defense mechanism, sprung from some drama of what Yvonne did to Willy way back in St. Louis.

  A mechanism that magically didn’t apply to my dad.

  My dad doesn’t describe it as magic. He says he just never screwed Willy over.

  But it couldn’t have been that simple. They saw each other every day for forty years and never had a fight. This is an achievement with anyone, but with my father it is a miracle.

  The best explanation I can come up with is that when they met my dad was a puppy.
He didn’t have The Store. He hadn’t met my mom yet. So he followed Willy around. Willy didn’t say a sentence without cursing; soon neither did my dad. Without meaning to, Willy became my dad’s mentor.

  I don’t know if there would have been The Store without Willy. He was the reason Morton Street felt safe and warm.

  Casko got out of his tiny apartment on Morton Street and bought an industrial loft building on Fifteenth Street. He tried to get my dad to go in on it. Not because he needed help. Because you were nuts, not to get in: 15K for a whole floor. All my dad had to do was put 5K down.

  “What, am I going to commute?” was my dad’s response.

  My parents were too happy.

  They had a cheap R.C. apartment and could walk to work.

  In the mornings, me and my siblings would drip into The Store one by one, followed by my mom. I’d write a check for myself and put it on the spindle. Poached eggs on grits was my usual. My younger brother’s was chocolate chip pancakes, which my dad would shape into a “D” for Danny or a dinosaur with a raisin eye.

  Music would play from a 1920s Atwater Kent Cathedral Radio.

  The radio sat on top of the deli case next to a bag of baguettes. My father had pulled out the guts of the radio and hooked up a car’s tape deck in place of the old vacuum tubes, but from the front you would never know.

  He loved a radio show called The Big Broadcast, hosted by Rich Conaty, that played music from the twenties and thirties. Depression songs like “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee,” “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime,” and “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries.” My dad religiously taped the show, editing out Rich’s voice. The Big Broadcast tapes were the only music played at The Store, and it always seemed like the wooden radio was transmitting from the past.