Arbitrary Stupid Goal Read online

  The lawyer returns wearing a necktie and the trial begins. Immediately the small girl is called to the stand. She speaks very softly. It is not a whisper; it is more she is scared to death.

  “If you don’t speak up, I am going to throw your case out of court,” the judge screams at the girl.

  So the girl speaks up, and does her best to stay loud, even as she must expose exhibit A to the courtroom. Exhibit A is her little naked scarred-up backside, including her bare ass.

  The case goes on; they interview a few more people. It’s time to go home, but the case isn’t complete.

  My dad leaves the courtroom. He is in the hallway waiting for the elevator. The bailiff comes out, calls him over, and says, “Judge Crater would like you to wear a suit tomorrow.”

  “Tell Judge Crater to go fuck himself,” says my dad.

  The elevator shows up, my dad gets in and leaves the building.

  Outside, two cops stop him and bring him back upstairs to Judge Crater’s court.

  “You people all belong in jail,” the judge screams, and then rants and raves about the Columbia riots.

  The Columbia riots had just happened—mass protests against Columbia University’s support of the Vietnam War and their plan to build a new gymnasium in a public park. The gym was to have a front entrance for students (mostly whites) and a back basement entrance for local residents (mostly blacks and hispanics). The students and citizens shut the university down for more than a week, taking over the whole campus, chanting “GYM CROW MUST GO” and “PEACE NOW.”

  “You will come here tomorrow dressed in a suit and tie or I will throw you in jail,” Judge Crater threatens.

  The next day my dad wore a raincoat buttoned to his Adam’s apple.

  Judge Crater starts the hearing. The judge keeps looking at my dad in the juror’s box.

  Crater is waiting for him to take off the raincoat. No way my dad is even undoing one button.

  The case goes on. In the middle of an 11-year-old boy’s testimony the judge halts the proceedings.

  “Juror number one, did you wear a suit today?”

  “May I have permission to speak freely, Your Honor?” my dad replies.

  “No,” says Judge Crater.

  The bailiff is ordered to bring my dad to the front of the court and take his coat off.

  A navy blue suit and necktie that my dad had borrowed from Willy is revealed.

  “Escort this gentleman out of the building. I’m calling a mistrial,” Judge Crater says, banging his gavel.

  My dad didn’t get called to do jury duty for twenty-five years.

  But it bugged my dad, and he asked friends and strangers about the judge for months after the trial.

  All supers are not created equal. Some are child molesters, and others are saints who make Plexiglas furniture in their spare time. Willy and my dad were cordial to all the supers in the neighborhood, but kept the bad ones at arm’s length.

  Agnes was the saint. She had graduated from Bennington and came from a wealthy family in Virginia. Always dressed in mechanic’s overalls, she was the first lesbian my dad ever met. Agnes took great care of her building, but finally quit in disgust at what a complete prick the landlord was.

  Ben was a class act from the Midwest. Ran his building like a ship. He had a nice ground-floor apartment, and a landlord that cared about the tenants. Ben had a string of capable assistants. The most capable of them all was a guy everyone called “Green.”

  Green would often join my dad and Willy on the stoop. He was young, but that’s not why they called him Green.

  Green was just his last name.

  My dad truly loved him, and wondered why a good-looking, friendly, intelligent kid like that wasn’t a doctor or a teacher. But he guessed it was ’cause Green was black and grew up poor.

  Green had a wife named Noreen, though he couldn’t have been more than 19. Noreen caught Green cheating on her, and she turned him in to the draft board.

  Green was sent to Vietnam and they never saw him again.

  It was around the time Green left when a locksmith found out that Judge Crater’s son had been killed in Vietnam.

  Tenants would sit on the stoop now and then, too. When this happened, Willy would talk about a neutral topic like what a motherfucker the landlord was, but mostly he just listened.

  The first day my dad officially met Willy, they were walking down the street. A guy in a suit came up to Willy and asked, “Do you know Willoughby?”

  Nope, never heard of him, Willy answered.

  “Aren’t you curious what he wanted?” my dad asked after the man left.

  Nope.

  If he was asked, “How you doing?” Willy would answer: Fine.

  If he was asked, “What do you do for a living?” Willy would answer: Things.

  Most of the neighborhood only knew what they saw of him: that he was a good mechanic who was tall and liked to sing while he put the cans out.

  Some people might have noticed that he was sleeping with every woman on the block.

  But Willy went out of his way to limit the “inter” of all his interactions.

  It was funny, because Willy knew everything about everybody. My dad did, too.

  Two doors down from Willy’s stoop was a building filled with Russians.

  The building was co-owned by a man named Patrick, who was the first American to sit on the board of Amnesty International, and a woman named Fran, whose husband was a famous industrialist that committed suicide.

  The leftist and the capitalist’s widow. The great buddy comedy that never was.

  Almost every exiled Russian that came to America stayed at the buddy building. The Village was cheap and a good place to land.

  Patrick was a professor of history. Russian history. But it was his Amnesty International connection that was the source of the Russians. They were all amazing.

  It is hard to know how amazing these Russians were, because they spoke mostly Russian and my father did not.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Svetlana Stalin, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Joseph Brodsky. These are names my dad knew from the many Russians that lived in the buddy building.

  A girl named Rima lived there, too. Chunky, gracious, and polite, Rima had the power to take Americans to Russia. This was at a time when the only way you got there was on a guided Russian tour that had spies. No visas were given. It was an open secret that you could either go on the tour organized by the KGB or the tour organized by Rima.

  Rima was best friends with a girl named Jenny, who was Llewellyn Thompson’s daughter.

  Llewellyn Thompson was the ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis. When the shit was hitting the fan, JFK received two messages from Nikita Khrushchev, one after the other. The first one was polite and diplomatic. The second was aggressive and threatening.

  Llewellyn advised JFK to just answer the first message and pretend the second message didn’t exist.

  It worked. His suggestion maybe helped save the entire world, and it seems only fair that his daughter’s best friend could go to Russia whenever she wanted.

  Twenty stoops away from the buddy building, in 1957, the director of a Russian spy network was busted.

  When the news broke out, everyone on the block was interviewed.

  “Did you know he was a spy?” asked the reporter from one of New York’s eight daily newspapers.

  “Sure. Everyone knew that. No one cared,” said Beatnik Bob from next door.

  “Why?”

  “This is the Village. There’s commies, there’s queers, there’s blacks, we don’t judge.”

  In order to send his secret messages, the spy needed to run a noisy generator. Because of the time difference, he sent his messages in the middle of the night.

  This bothered his neighbors and they reported him to the FBI.

  You can be anything you want in the Village, but don’t keep people up at night.

  MY JEWELS

  Jason digs the sofa.
It is mission style with leather cushions. He wants to sit on it, but is afraid.

  We are at the writer and cartoonist James Thurber’s historic house in Columbus, Ohio. A docent tells us it’s okay to sit. We can even play the piano if we want. The house is original but has been re-furnished in the style of 1913–1917, when Thurber lived here.

  A clock sits on the mantel, a candlestick phone on the sideboard, and lace doilies under bowls. They have done a good job, but no one more so than the person who did the wallpaper.

  The tour is free and self-guided. To start, we watch a video that runs on a loop in the dining room.

  There is archival footage of Thurber. He talks about his cartoons being rejected fifteen times by The New Yorker, and tells how the writer E. B. White stuck up for him. This means E. B. White gets a shout-out from Thurber thirty, possibly forty times a day. The New Yorker went on to publish hundreds of Thurber’s drawings.

  We go up the same stairs Thurber’s aunt threw shoes down. She did this at night to scare off imaginary burglars.

  Thurber’s actual typewriter sits under a gooseneck lamp. The last thing he typed was “Please. Do Not Touch.”

  Another item that really belonged to Thurber: his magnifying loupe. It is placed in front of a photo so we know what the thing is. The photo is of Thurber wearing the loupe drawing a cartoon. He is two inches away from the paper.

  When Thurber was a kid he lost an eye playing “William Tell” with his brother.

  I don’t know how much being half-blind affected Thurber’s drawings. The film explained one of the reasons he was first rejected by The New Yorker was his drawing of a seal did not look like a seal. E. B. White argued that a Thurber seal was better than a real one.

  E. B. White did more than argue; he pulled Thurber’s drawings out of the trash. Recognizing value where others had not. He fought to make people understand that though the work was crude, it was special. And he won.

  We stop at a wall of autographed eight-by-ten photos. They are writers that once had residencies here. Our favorite is a guy whose name we can’t make out because he has signed his face.

  Next to the kitchen is the gift shop. I ask the cashier where we can find the “These Are My Jewels” statue. She is polite but has no idea.

  The statue is from a chapter in My Life and Hard Times. Columbus gets hit by an imaginary flood. A woman, trying to escape, climbs the town’s Civil War monument. “These Are My Jewels” is inscribed on the statue. Thurber drew a cartoon of the woman on top of the bronze soldiers who watch “with cold unconcern.” She wasn’t naked in the story but is in the cartoon.

  “Maybe it’s by a courthouse?” Jason asks.

  “That could be. It’s worth a try,” the cashier says.

  Drawing by James Thurber from “The Day the Dam Broke”

  The center of downtown: Sherman, Stanton, Grant, and Sheridan are there as described. So is the phrase “These Are My Jewels.” But instead of an empty pedestal above them, there is a sculpture of a lady. She isn’t naked, but you can see nipples through her dress. I look up and think about how back at the house, Thurber is probably saying nice things about E. B. White right now.

  GATEWAY DRUG

  Clue: Game changer Farrar?

  Straight out of college, Margaret Petherbridge got a job as a secretary to the Sunday editor of the New York World.

  This was 1919.

  It wasn’t part of her job description, but one of Margaret’s duties was helping Arthur Wynne edit the Sunday crossword puzzle.

  The first crossword puzzle was actually published by the New York World in 1913. It was created by Arthur Wynne and was labeled “Word-Cross Puzzle.”

  A few weeks later the typesetters messed up and set the title as “Cross-Word Puzzle.”

  So when Margaret went to work, crosswords were a new thing. The New York Times looked down its nose at them. Other papers just thought they were too much work.

  Even the New York World thought the puzzles weren’t worth the trouble and tried to stop printing them, but the readers revolted, threatening to switch to one of the twenty-five other New York daily papers (none of which had crossword puzzles).

  As it turns out, Margaret was put on this earth to edit crossword puzzles. Little by little, she improved the structure and rules. She wasn’t trying to make the puzzles harder; she was trying to make them more enjoyable. The clues got less dry, the grids more attractive, and the challenges more satisfying.

  Around this time Richard L. Simon had an aunt that was hooked on the New York World’s crossword puzzles. She asked him to find her a book of just crosswords. Richard found such a book didn’t exist, so he decided to make one with his partner, Max Schuster.

  They asked Margaret to help.

  The Cross-Word-Puzzle Book came out in 1924 with a pencil attached as a sales gimmick. It was the first book of crosswords ever printed.

  People caught puzzle fever. Dictionary and thesaurus sales rose. Library encyclopedias got a workout. Everyone all the sudden knew what a gnu was. And Simon & Schuster overnight became a major publisher.

  Hundreds of thousands of The Cross-Word-Puzzle Book sold within the first year.

  More crossword books by Margaret followed. Checkered clothes became popular, and newspapers across the country were forced to carry crossword puzzles.

  Except The New York Times, which called them a “primitive mental exercise” and feared the crossword would be a gateway drug to comics.

  Then World War II hit. A memo was sent around The New York Times offices suggesting that crossword puzzles be added to the paper. The Sunday editor thought it would give people something to do if there were blackout hours, and might help lighten people’s mood.

  The memo included a correspondence with Margaret, who had been contacted for advice.

  The Herald Tribune runs the best puzzle page in existence so far, but they have gotten into a bit of a rut. Their big puzzle never ventures even one imaginative definition, and lacks the plus quality that I believe can be achieved and maintained … We could, I dare to predict, get the edge on them with the above plan.

  The above plan was to have “meat and dessert” on the Sunday page. A challenging puzzle that gave “real satisfaction,” plus a smaller, more humorous puzzle that acted as the banana split.

  Arthur Hays Sulzberger was the owner and final decision maker of The New York Times. He loved crossword puzzles and was sick of buying the Herald Tribune.

  Margaret was hired as the editor, and the first New York Times crossword puzzle ran February 15, 1942.

  A puzzle editor doesn’t construct the puzzles. The puzzles are sent in by hobbyists. This situation was set up by Arthur Wynne from nearly the get-go. People wrote to him criticizing his first puzzles, saying that they could make a better puzzle. Go right ahead, I dare you, was Wynne’s response, saving himself a ton of work.

  Margaret’s job was to set rules, make the puzzle the right difficulty, check facts, add life, and find great puzzle constructors.

  She assembled a Delta Force of elite puzzle constructors that were brilliant and poetic. Her rules weeded out any mediocre grids, and from its beginning the New York Times puzzle was seen as the best.

  Every source I’ve read calls her a “puzzle pioneer.” At a time when women all over the country were giving their jobs back to men, Margaret was kicking ass.

  In 1926 Margaret married John C. Farrar, one of the founders of the Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishing house. John was born in Vermont, went to Yale, spoke out against censorship, and published the writer Flannery O’Connor.

  I bring John up because from what I’ve read he was a great man and the least talked-about letter of FSG, but mostly because Margaret’s last name changed to Farrar.

  Margaret Farrar’s Delta Force of puzzle constructors came from all walks of life: musicians, prisoners, sea captains.

  And high school students.

  My dad would call Margaret up directly. She would explain that a person
of good intelligence should be able to finish the puzzle in the time it takes to get from Scarsdale to New York City.

  The first New York Times crossword puzzle constructed by my dad was printed in 1959 while he was a senior at White Plains High School.

  Kenneth Henry Shopsin (my father) was born 1942, in the Bronx. His father, Morris, owned a paper factory with his brother, Sydney, that was located on Vandam Street in downtown Manhattan.

  As a kid my dad would get beat up for being Jewish. His neighborhood in the Bronx was mainly Irish, Italian, and racist.

  When my dad was 12, black people started to move into the neighborhood. My grandpa Morris wanted to leave right away. Not because he was racist. Because he was a Jew. He knew his property value was going to go down.

  But he waited for two or three years to sell. He didn’t want to be the first one on the block to sell to black people. He didn’t want the neighbors to say, “Ah, those fucking Jews, they will do anything for money.”

  Morris came home one day with a big smile. He had learned that the Irish guy three doors down had sold to blacks, which gave him permission to sell to blacks, too.

  The Shopsins moved to White Plains, New York, a few blocks from the border of Scarsdale.

  In summer my dad regularly took the train down to work at the paper factory.

  He ended up on the same schedule as a man named Bill.

  Bill was an executive at Union Carbide that was three times my dad’s age, with a wife, two kids, and an office designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. He wore a suit and did the New York Times crossword puzzle every day.