Arbitrary Stupid Goal Read online

  Standing in Willy’s apartment, I was scared. Maybe he fell down somewhere. Could he be in Paris? The place was a mess, but it was always a mess. His dresser drawers were half full, but I’d never looked in his dresser drawers. There was a box of condoms and a photo of Yvonne. How could Willy go to Paris when he rarely crossed Seventh Avenue?

  I walked the half a block to The Store. “He’s not there,” I said, shaking my head.

  My dad told the waitress (my mom) to hold the checks, finished the soup he was cooking, and left the kitchen.

  Wearing his apron and sweatband, a pencil tucked behind his ear, my dad walked up and down Morton Street.

  Here it falls apart in my head. I think my father found Willy after walking up and down the block upset.

  He found him in the same crummy basement apartment Willy had lived in decades ago. The apartment with the window that guns were dropped in and where everyone took their secret lovers.

  Willy told my dad that the new building owner had moved him down there because there were less stairs. Then he said to deposit the check because he didn’t want the doctors to get it. Which was maybe illegal. Which makes this story true to me, because Willy was always on a scam.

  But I don’t really know. All the events surrounding Willy are foggy.

  I know my dad was pissed that Willy had let himself be moved down there. My dad had worked hard to make sure Willy had an R.S. apartment with a lease.

  I visited Willy in the basement and brought him a bowl of chili. He called me sugar pie and asked why I didn’t bring a birch beer. No talk of Paris, though he did mention Josephine Baker’s tits.

  But the next day he was on another planet. I left through the narrow hall, up the steps beneath the best stoop on Morton Street, and thought that I’d come back later and he would be Willy. And that is what happened, but I knew he was now liable to disappear at any moment.

  The check didn’t go through. Someone had frozen the account.

  That someone was the landlord. The Garrisons had recently bought Willy’s building. It was a trio of sisters who owned a bunch of other buildings.

  In the midst of this I was commuting to college upstate, learning about things like Herbert Bayer’s Universal Alphabet—a typeface that had mixed lower- and uppercase letters in an attempt to make typography more efficient. In my downtime I read thick books about vaudeville.

  Herbert Bayer’s 1925 Universal Alphabet in use

  This was before cell phones. Maybe some people had them, but no one in my family.

  Somehow we found out that it was specifically Denise Garrison who had moved Willy to the basement and now had power of attorney.

  I was visiting Willy two times a day with food, newspapers, and porno magazines wrapped in brown paper. My dad was fat and could hardly fit in the hall that led to Willy’s apartment. Even if he was thin I don’t think he would have visited more.

  My dad got a lawyer who said he needed to take power of attorney back. So my dad squeezed down there with the lawyer, and Willy signed power of attorney over to my dad. No problem.

  And the next thing we knew, Willy was in the Village nursing home. And Denise Garrison had power of attorney again.

  My mom was just a peanut in all this. She wasn’t close with Willy. They had never been mean to each other, and they had no harsh thoughts of the other, but there was no relationship between them.

  The kindest soul. No one kinder on the planet. That is what fills my brain when I think of my mom. I should give an example of why this is so, but my mind goes blank. We were not that close, and we will never be.

  She died in a blink when I was barely twenty-three.

  My sister, Minda, was my mom. She was the one I told when I got my period. I told Minda and Minda told Mom. That was the way it worked.

  I got my dad to visit Willy at the nursing home.

  Just to visit.

  And we shot the shit and that would have been it.

  But as we were leaving, a curtain in Willy’s room opened to reveal an old woman sleeping with a single rose in a vase. The curtain was opened by a thin guy who introduced himself as Hazel. He told us a woman was here signing my grandpa up for Medicaid and a cemetery plot yesterday. Then he added that the woman was up to no good. Hazel asked to exchange phone numbers so he could tell us if the woman named Denise came back.

  This changed things.

  It might not add up in a neat package but these are the things I remember.

  Willy was getting healthier. I signed him out for a walk. We sat in the park and he told me about this shithead friend he had as a kid who would use snakes as lassos and snap their heads off.

  From the bench I saw a bank.

  My relationship with Willy was not one where I could talk about what I wanted. We never talked about Bayer’s Universal Alphabet or Harpo Marx. And I couldn’t bring up the registered check he gave my dad or power of attorney.

  It felt a little illicit. But this was the way Willy liked things to feel.

  I asked Willy if he wanted to go to the bank tomorrow and he said he did.

  A few days later, me and my sister signed Willy out and met my dad at the bank across from the home. I am not sure how my dad still had the check Willy gave us like it was brand-new, but he did. And the four of us sat with an agent and talked about opening an account.

  The agent was female with a low-cut blouse and Willy hit on her the whole time. If she had asked for the $80,000 he would have given it to her.

  I am not sure what we were doing at the bank. Whatever it was didn’t take. All I know is, Willy left with a hard-on and had peed all over the bank’s chair.

  My sister’s memory of this day is even more foggy than mine, but she remembers the pee as well.

  My dad hired another lawyer. This one wrote a threatening letter to the Garrisons. It accused them of taking advantage of an old man, moving him out of his R.S. apartment, and stealing his money. It alluded to the fact that the grace which they performed this act was too great for it to have been the first time. It said Willy didn’t need to be in a nursing home and that he better have an apartment to live in when he got back.

  In the mail my father received a $60,000 check from Denise Garrison’s personal account, and the paperwork for the cemetery plot she had signed Willy up for.

  Willoughby was released and moved back into the basement, to which I was given a set of keys.

  Morton Street went back to normal, except I now picked up Willy’s prescriptions, and once a week would split the medicine into a seven-day pillbox.

  And every night I brought him dinner.

  Sweet potatoes, chili, fresh turkey, tuna salad, steamed broccoli, whole wheat toast, egg salad on rye, sloppy joe, BLT, pea soup, brisket, pulled pork, roast beef, potato chips, and pecan pie. Always with a birch beer.

  There were other dishes, but these were his favorites. It all came from The Store.

  The pie was baked by me. I baked two a week, my mom paid me eight dollars a pie. She sold it for $2.25 a slice with fresh whipped cream. It was a good deal for me because I didn’t pay for the ingredients.

  Willy would sit at the table in the small shitty basement apartment with half a window and none of his stuff. He would eat his sloppy joe, happy as fuck. And it was like the whole episode never happened. He didn’t ask about Denise or his things.

  So I never asked either.

  And maybe the fact that we didn’t talk about it all was proof that Willy still had some badass in him.

  I regret not asking where his photos went.

  I had to buy a pillbox with bigger compartments.

  Willy’s hands started to shake. We bought him an electric razor.

  He couldn’t make it down the block on his own anymore. His cane was replaced with a walker. I got him a phone with giant buttons to call us if he wanted to leave the basement, and taped this note to his wall:

  KENNY & MARA

  924-5160 / 414-9674

  I commuted to class three days
a week. My twin sister, Minda, went to the same school, SUNY Purchase, but she lived up there like a normal student.

  My twin sister had the first cell phone of us all. I wasn’t allowed to call it. She did a study abroad year in London, and the phone was only for an emergency. There was a landline in her dorm I could call with a calling card. I’d spend ten minutes dialing and then if I was lucky enough to reach her, we’d speak till the card ran out. This was hours, not minutes. It was the farthest I had ever been from her and it hurt.

  Recently the Dollywood road trip came up. My sister remembered it differently than me.

  In her version my dad pulled up to the gate and let Mom out of the car to check the ticket price for two adults and five kids.

  Three hundred dollars was the cost. My parents debated this figure, while we kids held our breath.

  It was decided the three hundred dollars was a good investment. We all cheered.

  We are going to Dollywood!

  Then came the parking lot in the middle of nowhere that cost ten dollars, the car full of crying kids, my mom humming “9 to 5” as we drove away forever.

  Minda also recalls that after we had stopped crying and humming “9 to 5,” we passed a firework store.

  “That is where we got the pagoda,” my sister said.

  Me (left) and Minda in Washington Square Park

  And just like that I realized her version was righter than mine; memories flooded in.

  My dad made a U-turn. He and my mom didn’t even need to discuss it. It was just a fact. The earth rotates around the sun; the Shopsin family needed to buy three hundred dollars’ worth of fireworks.

  Seven baskets were filled with blackjacks, roman candles, silver fountains, paper tanks, and more than a child can imagine. Then bottle rockets were added on top to round us up to exactly three hundred dollars.

  That night we set them all off.

  An octagon-shaped firework was lit. It spun, spitting out sparks in a coil. When the smoke cleared it had popped up into a five-story structure.

  The firework was called the “Friendship Pagoda.” Me and Minda had picked it out together. It was the undisputed winner of the night.

  I gave all the time I didn’t spend with my sister to Willy.

  Willy spoke to me differently than he spoke to other people. It always had a sweet kiddo vibe to it, even if he was talking about Madonna’s thighs.

  There was this big truck

  Filled with apples

  All that stood between me

  An them apples was a gate

  So I just loosened the gate

  A little

  Gently

  G e n t l y

  G e n t l y

  So all the fucking apples come out

  Spill out all over

  But nobody seen me

  So I hides behind a tree

  Just when I hear a man comin

  “God damn!

  Look at

  That

  Can’t have anything”

  So I go out like I just

  Come upon him

  An help him pick up them big

  Red apples

  An then to pay me back

  for picking up the apples

  he gives me a dollar an some apples

  Willy you’re bad

  Huh

  But I picked em all up

  But he gave you a dollar

  Yeah

  An the apples was so big

  An yummy, too

  Almost good as this time I decided to steal some watermelons

  Willy

  So I put em in my little wagon

  But they was too heavy

  I couldn’t pull it

  So I only took threee

  When I got home my aunt asked

  Where’d I get those watermelons

  I said, “The guy down the street there

  Well well why he gave em to me”

  I told a big lie you know

  So I took em in the backyard

  I had a big butcher knife

  An I sliced em

  Oh god

  Oh god

  They was good

  They was good

  Good

  The juice red

  An such a beautiful color red

  Oh man I ate em with seeds an everything

  Ahhh god all of it running an sweet

  And my aunt asked again

  Don’t you know those days always somebody gave me something

  Willy you’re bad

  Well

  Shit

  I had to live somehow my father never gave me nothing

  I was always in trouble

  You know

  Always always always

  But one time

  One time

  I went to church

  And the preacher was preaching

  Preaching preaching preaching preaching a sermon

  He was talking about going to hell an all these things

  I got real scared

  An then I told a friend of mine

  He scared me bad

  An my friend said I don’t think he’ll do anything to you

  You didn’t know any better

  Oh yeah I says

  That’s right

  I didn’t know any better

  I didn’t know any better

  The sweet kiddo vibe was double thick in the basement. He talked about his friend Mickey a lot. We’d play blackjack for nickels, but he’d get tired fast. Willy was losing weight. His limbs had become rigid like a paper skeleton with grommets for elbows.

  Sometimes before I left he’d grab my hand and wouldn’t say anything. He would squeeze softly, and we would smile at each other.

  I never squeezed back. I was afraid I would crush his fingers.

  Now and again a story would go super blue, the kiddo voice would disappear, and a truckload of curses would be unleashed.

  When this happened Willy felt like my grandpa.

  Not my real grandpa, who wore a hat with a ferret painted on it. My dad’s dad, who seemed to hate us foul-mouthed dirtballs.

  Willy liked it when I cursed. It was easy to make him smile. All I had to do was call something or someone “motherfucker.” And every time I said “motherfucker” I would wonder if my dad had come from Willy instead of the ferret.

  We got Willy a part-time nurse named Sonia. Willy loved her; well, he loved that she had breasts and was fair game.

  I was off-limits, not because I was young, but because I was Kenny’s kid and for all intents and purposes Willy’s granddaughter. It also helped that I looked and dressed like a 12-year-old boy.

  I wish I could remember one of the thousand lines he used on Sonia. More often than not it was funny and harmless, with Willy winking as he said it. Sometimes it worked and Sonia would flirt back. But other times it was relentless and creepy. When she’d help him bathe he would be hard as a rock, smiling. So she quit. I didn’t blame her.

  I didn’t blame Gladys either. Or Anya or Mary. I would have quit, too. Finally the service had to stop sending women.

  And if I had realized what it meant, I wouldn’t have gone along with it, but it didn’t occur to me that pussy was what was keeping Willy present.

  The thing I hated most was the pillbox. I was afraid I would mess up. There were so many pills, and each had specific instructions.

  That’s not true. Dementia was what I hated most.

  One day Willy hit on me as I was changing his diaper. He asked why we couldn’t have a quick fuck.

  The nurse that lasted the longest was named Cardinal. He was from the West Indies, short with a thick accent. He had a beautiful Spenserian script handwriting that was sometimes impossible to understand.

  Cardinal was always reading the Bible. He only talked about Jesus, salvation, and keeping the bathroom clean. Willy hated him.

  I would try to bring other videos, but there were just three Willy ever wanted to see: The Snows of Kilimanja
ro, The Josephine Baker Story, and a bootleg cam video of Notting Hill, starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant.

  When I’d start to play a new video, he would say, You ever see that one with Julia Roberts?

  Yeah, Willy, I have a copy of it here.

  Then what we watching this shit for?

  In 1983, the Bottle Bill (aka, the Returnable Container Law) was enacted.

  Under the law, if you bought a bottled or canned beverage you paid a five-cent deposit. Any business that sold bottled or canned beverages had to be ready to give anyone five cents back in exchange for the bottle or can. The same hokeypokey was then performed between the business and the city.

  The law was meant to encourage recycling. And it did.

  With homeless people.

  My dad wanted nothing to do with the law. He didn’t want the empty sticky bottles attracting roaches and he didn’t want to deal with the lines of homeless people with shopping carts full of cans and bottles.

  So he called up Coca-Cola and asked about soda fountain machines.

  “I can solve your bottle problem, and make you fifty thousand dollars a year,” said the salesman.

  “You don’t make fifty thousand a year, do ya?” my dad asked.

  “No.”

  “Then why don’t you buy a soda machine?”

  “Well, you can’t sell someone soda unless they are already in your place as a customer. You have a nice line for your deli. People buying sandwiches, gum, chips. A soda machine is what you need.”