Arbitrary Stupid Goal Read online

  I asked my dad what the phrase “life is a bowl of cherries” meant. I was maybe 8 years old. My dad said it meant life was basically the pits—we are all going to die, so you should enjoy the little sweet meat you have.

  One by one, as we were done with breakfast, we walked ourselves to school. A kid named Etan had been kidnapped the year I was born. It changed the lives of most parents in New York City, scaring the shit out of them. Not mine. This was despite the fact Etan had been walking to our elementary school when he was kidnapped, and that his little brother was in my older brother’s class.

  P.S. 3 was a public school, with fall festivals and silent auctions. It was in an old building with heavy doors and a playground on the roof.

  “This year,” one of my favorite teachers said, “we will learn all the skills needed to survive a nuclear fallout.” The teacher continued to explain: in the future there would be a nuclear explosion that made the water and air of New York City undrinkable. Our whole class would be forced to escape and live on an island in the South Seas. We learned how to clean fish, sew a quilt, do CPR, desalinate seawater, design flags, and once a week we went for swim lessons.

  Every grade had swimming lessons. The Carmine Street Recreation Center was five blocks away from P.S. 3. It had indoor and outdoor pools. The Store sat halfway between school and the pool. I would swell with pride as my whole class marched by the picture windows of The Store. I’d tap on the glass and wave to my mom. On the return, I’d hurl my wet bathing suit through The Store’s door, sometimes picking up my lunch.

  Top: Ken, Eve, Zack Bottom: Me, Charlie, Danny, Minda

  Casko’s loft was worth five times its price within the year.

  My father tries to imagine a way it would have worked—moving The Store to Fifteenth Street. It wasn’t a neighborhood up there yet. It still isn’t really our type of neighborhood, all those tall buildings, and commuters.

  No regrets is the verdict. Through dumb luck my dad had found Shangri-la.

  Willy still kept up all his separate lives. He sang at churches in Harlem, and went to orgies on Long Island. Even though Yvonne was gone, he would work for Louie’s travel agency. He still auditioned for musicals and sang at cabarets. Willy grew out of hanging with Memphis, but would still go see him and the other toughs, coming back with stories to tell my dad.

  And he still screwed 18- and 20-year-olds.

  There was a certain type of woman who seemed to be looking for Willy. They weren’t one-night stands. Some of them would be on rotation for years. Peggy was a gorgeous airline stewardess that kept a hundred-dollar bill secreted away in different parts of her body, for emergencies. Willy always knew where Peggy’s hundred-dollar bill lived.

  The women found Willy extra attractive. But he didn’t try to be the thing that made them happy, he just was.

  My father says the source of Willy’s magic is that Willy was nonjudgmental. He gave these girls a place to be comfortable being who they were, and that is why they went for him.

  That and he had a huge penis.

  It is crass to say that. But it is true. Willoughby’s penis was giant. It freaked out the nurses.

  It for sure freaked me out.

  “He would have given up a lot of his razzmatazz if he could have been happy with simpler things. He just never was,” my dad once said.

  I didn’t know that about the razzmatazz.

  But I didn’t even know Willy’s friend Mickey was a dog.

  I thought Mickey was a man—a man who died from being poisoned after he violently killed a Doberman pinscher.

  A whoosh of basement memories hit me when I learned Mickey’s real name was Mother Fucker.

  Taking home empty dishes that were licked clean save for a bit of sweet potato skin.

  Emptying sharp gray fuzz from the electric razor.

  Strings of curses at Cardinal that sounded like poems.

  Brushing teeth that were not mine.

  Breaking tablets in half, so the pillbox lid would shut.

  Laying napkins across his chest like a picnic blanket.

  Cutting Willy’s toenails more often than my own.

  I got lost in this whoosh.

  But in the whoosh I couldn’t remember why it was me filling the pillboxes.

  Then my sister, Minda, found an old Polaroid, and gave it to me as a gift.

  When I looked at the photo, the whoosh issue disappeared. The reason I took care of Willy was so simple.

  I loved him. I loved the good and the bad of him. I even loved the parts of him I didn’t know.

  Notes began to appear. They would be taped to my building every day:

  Top floor apartment:

  We order you to cease and desist hanging your laundry.

  Clotheslines are against the law.

  This is a historic district.

  We will take legal action.

  —The Residents of Morton St.

  Don’t keep people up, don’t work for the Department of Defense, and don’t have a clothesline.

  I cried.

  I wouldn’t now. I would think it was ironic, or I would just be mad like my mom and dad were.

  Mad that a block that once held enough for anyone’s existence was no longer open to anyone.

  But I just felt bad and tried to ignore the threatening notes.

  Willy said they were cocksuckas and I shouldn’t let them bully me. Years earlier he would have fixed the problem, and come into The Store bragging about how he did it.

  But he was bedridden in a basement, and no one except me even went to visit.

  Every note I tore down would be replaced by a new one.

  A lady stopped me on the street. She yelled at me, pointing up and scrunching her face. She was an adult. I was 20, but a strange mix of an old person and a child. I was at a loss for what to say.

  I told her I didn’t hang my underwear up outside, just my pants and shirts.

  The next day there was another note.

  Clearly her passion was bigger than my passion. So I just stopped hanging my wash on Morton Street.

  And when The Store was pushed out and I was evicted from the building I grew up in, it really was not as big a tragedy as it seemed.

  Morton Street, circa 1900

  Once a man named Paul invited my dad to his apartment. It was a rent-controlled basement unit on Bedford Street.

  First thing through the door, Paul said to my dad, “I want to show you something.” Paul led him to a corner of the room, opened a closet, and pulled up a trapdoor in the floor.

  They both stared down and saw rushing water.

  “That’s the Minetta Brook,” Paul said. “It is still there underneath.”

  THE ASG

  “Did the Wolfawitzes ever visit Wolf’s Lair on one of their vacations?” I asked my dad.

  “No. They are not real,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I made them up.”

  “You did not. You are fucking with me.”

  I remembered meeting the Wolfawitzes. Their children were named after herbs: Parsley, Sage, and Cumin. The father designed candy dispensers for a living, and the mother wore sleeveless shirts in the winter.

  Of course, my father made the Wolfawitzes up. It was easy to fill them in. Most of the places they visited were places we had visited.

  The Wolfawitzes were created to get across my dad’s guiding belief in ASG—Arbitrary Stupid Goal.

  A goal that isn’t too important makes you live in the moment, and still gives you a driving force. This driving force is a way to get around the fact that we will all die and there is no real point to life.

  But with the ASG there is a point. It is not such an important point that you postpone joy to achieve it. It is just a decoy point that keeps you bobbing along, allowing you to find ecstasy in the small things, the unexpected, and the everyday.

  What happens when you reach the stupid goal? Then what? You just find a new ASG.

  Customers didn’t understan
d when my dad said the best way to be was to have an arbitrary stupid goal, so he made up the Wolfawitzes.

  Unless he is fucking with me. Then the Wolfawitzes are out there right now.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  1. I would like to thank my father.

  2. It is the nature of New York City to change, but not this fast, not this lopsided toward the wealthy and Goliath. Right this moment as I type, as I typed—New York has a problem. It’s the same problem Casko’s friend Andy had with his nuts.

  New York is too hot for its sperm to live. Young, scrappy pilgrims and the fringe cannot survive.

  New York is becoming sterile.

  Maybe this is a false alarm and New York is just being its lovable, hostile self.

  Please, let that be the case. There is no jockstrap big enough to cover what New York is endowed with.

  3. This is not in any way a complete history.

  Also, my siblings were much more a part of everything than comes off in this book. The cause is a mix of respect for their privacy, and the fact that I have so many of them.

  There might not have been a Store without Willy, but without my mom its magic would never have existed.

  4. Melinda Shopsin is the best sister in the world. Without her The Store would not have survived, nor would I.

  5. I would like to also thank:

  Danny, Charlie, Zack, Jason, and Zazie

  My editor, Sean McDonald, and agent, Janis Donnaud

  Gabe Weinstein, Luke, Andy Lamphole, Paul Sahre, Rosemary Carroll, Miranda July, Vrinda Condillac, Mary Murphy and Sandy Beer (saint babysitters of me and my siblings), Casko(!), and John Hodgman (triple thanks)

  NYC Sanitation, the Parks Department, the NYPL and All Customers

  Thanks to the following sources:

  Strausbaugh, John. The Village (2013)

  Gertner, Jon. The Idea Factory (2013)

  Arnot, Michelle. What’s Gnu? A History of the Crossword Puzzle (1981)

  Shepard, Richard F. “Bambi Is a Stag and Tubas Don’t Go ‘Pah-Pah,’” New York Times, Feb. 16, 1992

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  “Mr. Quill’s Guide,” in Quill Magazine, June 1925

  Image by Jason Fulford

  James Thurber drawing, “These Are My Jewels” from “The Day the Dam Broke” within My Life and Hard Times copyright ©1933 by Rosemary A. Thurber. Reprinted by arrangement with Rosemary A. Thurber and The Barbara Hogenson Agency. All rights reserved

  Published with the permission of Norton Records

  Published with the permission of The Wolfsonian—Florida International University (Miami, Florida). Photograph: Lynton Gardiner

  A Thousand Clowns with Jason Robards, Sandy Dennis, and Barry Gordon, 1962, © The Al Hirschfeld Foundation. www.AlHirschfeldFoundation.org

  Shopsin family portrait by Max Vadukul

  95 Morton Street, n.d. (~1900), image #92844d, New-York Historical Society

  ALSO BY TAMARA SHOPSIN

  Mumbai New York Scranton

  This Equals That

  What Is This?

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tamara Shopsin is a graphic designer and illustrator whose work is regularly featured in The New York Times and The New Yorker. She is the author of the memoir Mumbai New York Scranton, the designer of the 5 Year Diary, and the coauthor, with Jason Fulford, of the photobook for children This Equals That. She is also a cook at her family’s restaurant in New York. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  A Symphony

  Wide World

  Wolf’s Lair

  A Seven-Day Pillbox

  Hole 18

  Things

  My Jewels

  Gateway Drug

  A Gift

  Whoop Whoop

  Laydee

  Order of the Universe

  The Small Pond

  The Top Floor

  Buckets of Gravy

  Raw Chicken Chunks

  Bulletproof Case

  Shangri-la

  The ASG

  Acknowledgments

  Food for Thought Answers

  Illustration Credits

  Also by Tamara Shopsin

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  MCD

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2017 by Tamara Shopsin

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2017

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:

  “Baby,” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  Owing to limitations of space, illustration credits can be found at the back of the book.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Shopsin, Tamara, author.

  Title: Arbitrary stupid goal / Tamara Shopsin.

  Description: New York: MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016059399|ISBN 9780374105860 (hardback)|ISBN 9780374715809 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Shopsin, Tamara—Childhood and youth.|Shopsin, Tamara—Family.|Greenwich Village (New York, N.Y.)—Biography.|New York (N.Y.)—Biography.|Restaurants—New York (State)—New York.|Family-owned business enterprises—New York (State)—New York.|Bohemianism—New York (State)—New York.|Greenwich Village (New York, N.Y.)—Social life and customs.|New York (N.Y.)—Social life and customs.|BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Artists, Architects, Photographers.|BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women.

  Classification: LCC F128.68.G8 S56 2017|DDC 974.7/1043092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016059399

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  This is a work of nonfiction. However, the names and identifying characteristics of certain individuals have been changed to protect their privacy.