Arbitrary Stupid Goal Read online

  Sometimes a salesman tells the truth.

  The soda machine not only solved the Bottle Bill problem, it freed up refrigerator space. No more restocking said fridge, no chance of it being shoplifted, no sell-by dates because it was made fresh, but most of all it made money. The profit margin on fountain soda is like a superpower.

  Miniature garden hoses ran from The Store to the basement below, where the carbonator and tanks of syrup lived. Before I learned to tie my shoes, I knew how to detach and reattach the syrup nozzle of our soda machine.

  You could control the taste of the soda by adjusting a screw on the fountain head. The perfect ratio of syrup to soda became my dad’s undying passion.

  Every time the syrup was changed, we all tasted the soda and compared notes.

  The Store was full of these little passions. My parents were happy.

  They were running their own place, their way, with customers they loved.

  Then the landlord raised the rent, big-time.

  The Store as it was couldn’t make that amount of money ever, not on cat food and Cheerios.

  So my parents decided to turn The Store into a restaurant. Not because they didn’t love running a grocery store or had some long-harbored chef fantasy.

  They changed The Store to a restaurant because my dad thought it would sell more soda.

  The restaurant thing worked; we sold lots of soda and paid lots of rent.

  And The Store was still special and full of little passions. We still called it The Store even though it was a restaurant.

  On Saturdays I helped my dad shop. We’d supplement The Store’s wholesale orders with a produce market on Hamilton Avenue, a supermarket in New Jersey, and a cash-and-carry where we mostly bought candy.

  After anybody ate at The Store they were allowed to take free candy from a huge display that ran down a pink marble counter. Candy of every type: Tootsie Rolls, Junior Mints, Smarties, gummies, peanut butter cups, Hershey’s Kisses, Mr. Goodbar, Nerds, and on and on. Once someone said they couldn’t eat candy because of their rotten teeth. My dad added a jar of disposable toothbrushes. The kind with the toothpaste inside. When you squeezed the handle the paste would squish through the plastic bristles.

  Customers that traveled would bring gifts back for us, maybe as a way to repay the candy debt. Things like:

  A glass soda bottle from Asia that had a marble which regulated the flow of soda to make sure you didn’t guzzle.

  A candy called “ant piss” from Amsterdam that tasted just like sawdust and lemon concentrate.

  A soft tan drawstring pouch made from a kangaroo’s balls.

  An origami shirt made of Japanese yen my mom taped to the fridge.

  A floaty pen of Ronald Reagan that when you turned it, his clothes came off.

  One of the supermarkets where my dad and I shopped was decorated with plastic grapes. They were placed in every aisle like Easter eggs. All kinds: red, green, Champagne, Concords, Muscats. Some with little green ivy leaves and tendrils, others with brown stems pressed with fake wood grain.

  One bunch at a time, the grapes started coming home with me.

  I hung them all in the entrance to my bathroom, making the grapes dangle above.

  At the time I washed all my clothes in the bathtub. I loved it to an illogical degree.

  Channeling photos of old New York with clotheslines strung across every building, I ran one on a hypotenuse from my fire escape to my farthest window.

  Washboards had become expensive antiques that decorated bed and breakfasts, so I’d fill the tub, roll my pants up, and stomp and swish as if I was Lucille Ball making wine.

  And the grapes set the scene, semitranslucent with the sun shining through.

  At the cash-and-carry, I started buying Willy Ensure, a beverage that a doctor had recommended to help him gain weight. It was a complete meal in a can.

  For a while it was liquid all day, and I’d bring solid food at night and feed him like you do a baby.

  Then he could only eat liquids. So I’d bring a birch beer as a treat.

  His deep voice became a whisper. Sometimes he would have me lean in close and he’d tell me Yvonne was at the window trying to get in.

  She come to steal my money. That fucking bitch.

  Willoughby had an attack and went to the hospital by ambulance. The doctors thought it was only going to get worse and it was best to send him to a home.

  I never visited him. I don’t think. Maybe once me and my dad went by motorcycle. Maybe it was awful and he didn’t know who we were.

  I know I never went down to the basement again.

  My bathroom entrance grew to include the bathroom ceiling. I strung wire, not string, knowing in a few months the string would snap from the weight.

  At bunch No. 70 it got harder to steal the grapes.

  This was because No. 70 was the last bunch of grapes in the supermarket, not because security had cracked the case.

  No one at the supermarket seemed to notice the grapes had ever existed.

  This was good: I never got caught. This was bad: nobody ever came to replace them.

  I was sad.

  And it gave me pause.

  But then I passed a wine shop.

  The window had hundreds of plastic grapes.

  The collecting continued.

  I can’t remember when Willy died. My dad got the call and I was shocked, because I thought Willy was dead already.

  HOLE 18

  The entryway has a rack of tourist pamphlets: rafting, go-karts, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.

  Jason comes out of the bathroom. He’s surprised I didn’t know Fallingwater was in Pennsylvania. A quote on the brochure describes Fallingwater as “a house that summed up the 20th century” and Wright’s “most sublime integration of man and nature.” Jason calls the ticket office.

  There is only one tour opening. It begins in forty minutes. We can make it but would have to leave right now. This makes the decision easy, though I’ve heard Fallingwater’s gift shop has a few gems.

  We are standing on top of the largest cave in Pennsylvania, but we’ve actually come for what is advertised in the putt-putt pamphlet.

  Opened in 1999, Kavernputt was built to be a wheelchair accessible cavern with “the broader purpose” of an eighteen-hole miniature golf course.

  I give the cashier a ten, and she gives me two balls and two putters. We go through a wooden saloon door with a snap spring.

  It’s dark and the walls and ceilings feel like the fake rocks you hide keys in. It is way better than I imagined. There is a little bit of a grandpa’s basement smell. But if it weren’t for the Astroturf and ADA-compliant pathways, Kavernputt could look like a real cave.

  The golf course is difficult, mostly because it is very dark. There are no windmills, only rock formations.

  My night vision kicks in and I get a hole in one. Jason gets a hole in six. This can’t last.

  It doesn’t.

  All of the holes have a geological theme and employ different tricks. They are charming and inspired. The hole about echoes has voice-activated lights. I repeat “echo” over and over, making them flicker.

  In ancient Greece, Zeus was saved by a cave. His mom, Rhea, hid him in one. She did this so Zeus’s father, Cronus, wouldn’t eat him. Rhea then wrapped a rock in swaddling clothes and gave it to Cronus.

  Cronus swallowed the fake baby ASAP, because it was foretold that one of his sons would overpower him.

  My father would never have eaten the rock baby.

  One of his core beliefs is that as a parent you shouldn’t try to be too wonderful. Being perfect makes it so your children can’t compare and gives them a complex.

  If you set the bar low your kids are sure to at least be more successful than you.

  Zeus grew up to overthrow Cronus. He also grew up to swallow his unborn baby and wife.

  I point out a homemade stalagmite that slumps like a soft penis. Jason laughs but still sinks the putt.
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  We love the course and consider it a work of art, but are both relieved as hole 18 swallows our balls for good.

  THINGS

  As kids my dad would take us each on walk nights. There were five of us, and rather than try to give us all attention at once, he would split us up. Every night was a different kid.

  A walk could be simple as crossing Seventh Avenue to the Mexican restaurant called Caliente Cab Co. Not to eat—they had a giant plastic margarita bolted onto the wall. It hung twenty feet above with a permanent tidal wave of dripping foam. My dad would stand under it, head tilted back and tongue sticking out. He would rub his belly and say how good it tasted. And I would do the same, only more. Squinting my eyes, pulling on his hand as I tilted back, saying it was the best margarita I had ever tasted.

  That was my brother Zack’s favorite walk. He was forever asking, “Can we go drink the margarita?” We all had our favorite spot.

  My brother Danny loved to go to the Chinatown arcade, where he would pay a quarter to lose to, and one time tie, the tic-tac-toe-playing chicken. Minda loved to go to a bar on Seventh Avenue named McBell’s and drink a Shirley Temple while my dad drank Diet Coke.

  Mine was the Waverly Diner. I’d pick our seats at the counter, and Dad would ask what I wanted as I hopped on the stool.

  But he knew what I wanted: a fresh-squeezed orange juice.

  Across from us was a fully automated orange juicing machine. The oranges sat in a cage on top. When we would order, the waiter in a black vest would flip a switch. The machine would come to life and 8-year-old me would float above the earth with delight.

  Once a man was sitting next to us. He got a hot water with lemon and nursed it. Then he added sugar to his ice water and dropped his used-up lemon wedge in. Dad and I were at the diner a long time and left at the same time as the hot-water guy. His check was twenty-five cents and he left a five-cent tip. Our check was fifteen dollars and my dad left a five-dollar tip.

  My dad never really taught us to believe in God. He did teach us: If you like the service, leave a good tip. If you like the restaurant, buy a soda or an iced tea.

  I’m sure we both had fountain Diet Cokes along with my fresh OJ. The check was likely filled out by an English muffin, a goblet of red Jell-O cubes, and a cup of chili.

  Hot-water guy and us walked south on Sixth Avenue. As we approached St. Joseph’s my dad switched places with me so he would be the one next to the vagrants on the steps. There was always a mess of them because St. Joseph’s gave away free soup.

  We were behind hot-water guy, who we had decided was a mooch and wouldn’t ever let him sit in our restaurant making lemonade from our sugar.

  Then hot-water guy stopped and talked to the panhandlers. He put a dollar in each of the bums’ cups. And my dad’s jaw dropped.

  We didn’t give money to bums. We gave money to small businesses because we knew how hard it was to make rent in New York.

  My dad would tell that story a thousand times. Each time drawing a new and deeper meaning, positioning himself as an ignorant asshole, speculating that this might be the root of our problems as a nation, that we don’t feel enough sympathy for people who are not like us.

  The meat and potatoes of a walk night was going to and from the target. We’d hold hands, and Dad would ask questions and life would just fall out.

  My dad learned about walks from Willy. When they first started hanging out they would walk to the hardware store together, or to buy film, stupid errands.

  Most of the buildings on Morton Street had a single-pipe steam heat system.

  Radiators in each room and a boiler in the basement. Steam would be made in the boiler and rise through a pipe that ran up the building.

  A big problem the single-pipe system had was as the steam went up, its heat would be absorbed by the cold pipe. So by the time it got to the third or fourth floor, it wasn’t so steamy anymore.

  Sometimes it wasn’t steam at all; it would be so cold that the steam condensed into water and dropped down, not heating the top floor at all.

  This made the floors get progressively cooler, the higher they got.

  It also made a racket. As the water (aka ex-steam) dripped down the pipe, it hit the new hot steam coming up. The water bounced off the steam, hitting the sides of the pipe like a pinball. But it didn’t sound like pinball. It sounded like a crazy person banging on the pipe with a cast iron skillet.

  If the system was going all the time, the pipes wouldn’t get cold and it all worked well enough, though the first floor was always a sweatbox.

  Landlords by law have to heat a building. In New York City the law was something like 68 degrees in the day and 55 degrees at night. So almost all boilers were on a timer to save money.

  Because the pipes got cold each night, the single-pipe system almost never worked right.

  Willy was the traveling super of number 40 on Morton Street, a six-story building with single-pipe heat. The apartment in the top floor was perpetually vacant.

  Bullshit.

  An empty apartment in New York City?

  In the WEST VILLAGE?

  Yes, this was way back. Before I was born. Before my dad knew Willy.

  A musician named Charlie was broke and homeless. He and Willy were friends, so Willy let him live in the top floor of 40, and the apartment became perpetually occupied.

  Winter rolls around and it is a bitter, awful cold.

  It isn’t the city’s responsibility to clear the sidewalks of snow and ice. It is the property owners’. If an old lady falls because the walk is covered in ice, the landlord is held responsible for her broken hip.

  But physically, it is the super’s responsibility.

  At the first hint of snow, a smart super gets out there and salts. If it is really bad the super only digs out a narrow path. Some supers only do paths. Willy always tried to do the whole sidewalk.

  In addition to shoveling the walk, a super still needs to make sure the halls are clean.

  And no matter how many scraps of cardboard you lay down in the entryway, the snow still gets dragged in and up the stairs.

  Willy is cleaning the first floor of 40 when he hears shouting at him from the sixth floor.

  It was a stair where you could see all the way up the center. Willy looks up and Charlie is hanging over the railing, screaming: “It’s freezing. What you trying to do. Us poor black people are here trying to live and we ain’t no Eskimos, we niggas!”

  Willy said he would try to fix the problem.

  The next day Willy introduced Charlie to a 45-year-old widow that lived across the street. She looked like a minister’s wife but with better tits.

  Charlie moved in with the minister’s wife and the top apartment in 40 became perpetually vacant again.

  By the time I was born, all the garbage can lids on Morton Street were chained to walls or fences. This was so they wouldn’t fly away, get stolen, etc. If there were more than three inches of snow, Willy would unchain them for neighborhood kids.

  Rome, Athens, and San Francisco boast seven hills. Greenwich Village had three. They were all located in Washington Square Park and were more like camel humps covered in asphalt.

  In winter the humps were covered in snow and everyone under forty inches would sled down them on garbage can lids, crashing into the middle.

  When summer came my sister and I would give each hump a belly flop hug. Face pressed to the warm asphalt, hoping no one skateboarded into us.

  For a little while Willy ran a “whorehouse” on Morton Street. He was the traveling super of a big white brick building.

  It was the first building on the block with an elevator and air conditioner sleeves below the windows. This made the rents higher, so there were always vacancies. Willy would fix up the empty apartments and rent them out to prostitutes.

  He wasn’t really a pimp, though he offered one of the girls to my dad. A beautiful one named Lucy who all you had to do to sleep with her was ask. My dad never asked her, but he wa
s touched by the offer.

  The first time my dad had jury duty he was selected to be on a liability case in civil court.

  Jury duty in New York City today is a dream. Free Wi-Fi, snack breaks, and places to plug in a laptop. Civic pride radiates from the walls. Plus, if you are not picked to be on a jury, it is over in one or two days.

  The first time I had jury duty I remember being thirsty and hungry, feeling threatened, confused, and that I was being punished for stealing plastic grapes.

  When my dad served as a juror in 1968 it was worse. There was a popular joke: How can you expect justice from twelve people who can’t even get out of jury duty?

  On the first day of the case my dad took his place in the juror box, wearing chino slacks and a white button-down shirt.

  A young black girl was suing the super of her building. She was small, no more than twelve.

  The case was about an incident that had happened a few years before:

  It was summertime in a slumlord building. The superintendent didn’t like kids hanging around his turf, so he sprinkled plumber’s lye on the stoop. The small girl sat on the stoop, not noticing the white powder. Water was thrown at her from an unknown source. The water mixed with the lye and splashed up and down her little back, burning and scarring her body.

  The bailiff introduces the honorable Judge Crater, who starts the proceedings.

  Judge Crater berates the little girl’s lawyer for wearing a bow tie. Only neckties are allowed in his court. The trial will not continue unless this situation is resolved. The girl’s lawyer leaves.