Arbitrary Stupid Goal Read online

  One day Bill and my dad did the puzzle together, and they both had a great time. From then on my dad and Bill found each other on the Metro North platform each morning, pencils in hand.

  They would celebrate each victory together by crumpling up the completed crossword and throwing it in the trash.

  When summer ended, my dad started doing the puzzles alone. Which sounds sad, but it wasn’t. He had found a passion.

  My dad met Margaret by mail when he ordered some puzzle constructor paper with a preprinted grid. He didn’t use the paper the way you were supposed to. The way my dad made puzzles was he just took old puzzles and filled them in with new words and clues. Then he copied the puzzle onto the special paper.

  Margaret’s telephone number came with the special paper.

  The number came with the constructor paper because there are a shit ton of rules to construct a New York Times puzzle. Rules that were all created by Margaret. Maximum % of black squares, diametrically symmetrical, slang is okay, obscure words are not, you can’t use clues that have been used before (“repeaters”), no diseases allowed, and on and on.

  The puzzle fever had long died down. Bridge was now king. There couldn’t have been more than a hundred or two constructors. My dad was paid fifteen dollars a puzzle, more for a Sunday puzzle, but not much.

  There is a twinkle when my dad remembers Margaret. He never met her in person, but all the puzzles she rejected or accepted came with a full-page letter and annotated clues.

  “You could just call her anytime?” I asked my dad.

  “No one else must have called her. She always answered right away. What a sweet lady,” my dad says, and tells me he has an embroidered pillow his mom made with the last puzzle he ever constructed.

  The puzzle was published a few months before Margaret retired.

  See here for answers. FYI: Puzzle is unedited.

  When my dad moved to the Village, his first apartment was on Christopher Street. Margaret Farrar was still the puzzle editor. Every night he would go to the Riker’s near his home at 10:15 p.m., when the late edition of The New York Times came out.

  Riker’s was a chain of twenty-four-hour coffee shops. The one near my dad had a guy named Garry that ran the night shift. Garry was straitlaced, likely had a wife at home and went to church on Sundays.

  But Garry loved transvestites. A large crew of them would come in and hang out. Garry would treat them special.

  Not in a creepy sex-for-donut way. He just dug them and learned their names.

  So my dad was there every night. Ostensibly to do the crossword puzzle, but also because he really liked the place and the mixed crowd that hung out there.

  Eventually he met a guy named Roger that made his living as a perfume expert. They started doing the puzzle together every night.

  Roger introduced my dad to Albert Donati. Albert was two decades older with big muscles and an anchor tattoo. Despite these differences, my dad and Albert got to be close friends.

  Albert is the one that told my dad about being a super and set him up with his first building.

  Albert was a sailor. Well, he had once been a sailor.

  He got very active in the sailors’ union, the NMU (National Maritime Union).

  Then he had a falling-out with the union’s leader. A guy named Joseph Curran. And the way Curran dealt with people that gave him a problem was to report said person to the FBI as a communist.

  And poof, Albert wasn’t a sailor anymore.

  In fact, Albert was a communist. But that is beside the point.

  Almost everyone in the 1930s and 1940s was a communist.

  —my dad

  Every job Albert had after the NMU, two guys in fedoras would show up and flash badges to his boss. The two guys would say, “Did you know you’re employing a communist?”

  The FBI paid agents a salary to go around and do that. They did it to Albert for twenty years.

  Albert loved it.

  Because:

  1. Most of the people he worked for were commies anyway.

  2. He had so plainly lost the fight, but that they still considered him an enemy made him feel good.

  A woman named Ilsa walked fast and worked nights as an elite typist. My dad says her daughter, Nora, was the best-behaved kid he ever saw.

  I don’t think he meant this as a compliment.

  Nora played violin and went to Our Lady of Pompeii on Bleecker Street. She wore the same uniform as everyone else, plaid skirt and knee socks—but she wore it better.

  Not better as in cool kid with upturned collar; better as in more historic. Like a perfect black-and-white photo of a European schoolgirl taken in front of the Alps.

  Ilsa was born and raised in Switzerland. She was the star of that historic photo. Most of her free time was spent taking Nora to recitals and practice. They both were always neat and put together.

  Before Morton Street, Ilsa had lived on Ibiza. I don’t know what she did there. Likely worked as a laser-accurate typist. On Morton Street she lived next to the buddy building.

  Her building had a problem with cockroaches.

  It happens.

  An exterminator was called, and everyone’s problem was fixed.

  Except Ilsa’s.

  She kept complaining, but nobody else had the problem anymore.

  So the exterminator goes back to her apartment.

  It is spotless, hands-and-knees clean.

  The exterminator looks at all the places he put the spray for the roaches. They are all gleaming. You could lick the corners and cabinets without a worry, and that is just what the bugs were doing.

  Ilsa had scrubbed all the poison off as soon as the exterminator left.

  The first time my dad bought drugs was from a guy named Junior that had lived on the block all his life. Junior was Italian, connected with the Mafia, and he pronounced “Jewish” as “Jooich.”

  When my dad went to pay, Junior starts screaming:

  “What are you, fucking stupid? I’m a drug dealer, you gonna pay me by check? You got rocks in your head?”

  Junior starts to kick the shit out of my dad.

  Willy walks by and pulls Junior off my dad like he was a piece of lint.

  Willy didn’t drink or smoke, but when he did one he did the other.

  He’d bum cigarettes off my dad, but never bought them because he didn’t smoke.

  But after a scotch or two he did.

  When Willy wanted to lose weight, he would buy a big can of cheap sardines. Then he’d make a rule that for two days all he could eat was sardine sandwiches.

  Halfway through the first sandwich, Willy would get disgusted and lose his appetite for two days.

  There were lots of things like that with Willy. He would let himself drift, and then pull himself back to what he considered to be the right place.

  Cap’n Jack was a super you kept at arm’s length. He took care of an insane amount of buildings.

  Any more than four buildings at a time was insane to my dad and Willy. The whole point of being a super was to not work.

  You had to deal with the garbage and mopping the halls. Once you went over four buildings it was like you had a real job. And if you were willing to have a real job, there were a lot better ways to make money.

  Cap’n Jack took care of twenty or thirty buildings, but this isn’t what made him seem insane.

  Mostly it was the smell.

  He always had on the same outfit that he wore till it fell apart. Lots of denim and fur. It seemed more like two outfits than one. He never washed his clothes, and never bathed, though part of his outfit was a shower cap.

  Wearing his shower cap as a blindfold, Cap’n Jack’s hands were always full like Lady Justice’s. In one hand he carried a scratched-up cane, and in the other was a plastic bag full of plastic bags. Symbolizing not justice and objectivity, but what a total whack job he was.

  Cap’n worked hard. Too hard. His buildings were not just little brownstones but big co-ops with a hun
dred tenants. He made a lot of money being a super.

  But Cap’n didn’t really spend money on anything. Certainly not his clothes. And he had a rent-controlled apartment. Which is like an R.S. apartment but five hundred times better. The rent never goes up and the only way to evict you is if you die.

  Some New Yorkers have borne children just to pass down their R.C. apartments. As though the R.C. apartment is an eternal flame that will let them live on in proxy.

  My dad knew a guy named Nick that had a sweet R.C. apartment on Barrow Street.

  $135 a month, forever.

  During World War II Nick had developed the technology that paved the way for whipped cream in a can. He made his first fortune by inventing automated baking machines.

  The machines turned out hundreds of loaves and rolls a minute, and destroyed the traditional baking industry.

  Nick made his second fortune with spray foam. The type you use for home insulation.

  Armstrong, and lots of other brands, had been in the industry for a while. But it was discovered that the formulas they were using caused cancer.

  Somehow aware of this, Nick had bought the rights to the one spray foam formula that was noncarcinogenic. He discovered, along the way, the same foam with some dye in it was a good way to mail seedlings.

  And that was how Nick made his third fortune.

  He had a huge house in Westchester, but kept the R.C. apartment all his life. His daughter may still have the place.

  The list of rich and rent-controlled is long. BFD.

  Plenty of people truly needed their R.C. and R.S. apartments. Scrappy orphans, single mothers, poets, seniors, and nutso couples that had five kids.

  But there was a flip side to R.S. and R.C. apartments. You got trapped by the low rent and never bought your own piece of New York.

  Whatever the faults, R.C. and R.S. kept the Village diverse with a banker, baker, and candlestick maker all on one floor.

  It wasn’t a perfect system. But neither is life.

  At some point, property sharks started buying all the buildings in the Village. Emptying them of working-class and poor tenants, bending the rent stabilization laws till they broke.

  The sharks then either flipped the buildings for an instant profit or ran them as cash machines, raising the rents up and down the block.

  And the Village changed. Some people think it’s better. You can lick the corners and cabinets of it without a worry.

  But that hadn’t happened yet.

  The fringe people still found a home on Morton Street.

  A GIFT

  When it snowed, Cap’n Jack would be fucked. So he would hire Willy to shovel half his walks. My dad would always be pulled in to help.

  They cleared the walks for extra cash, but also because Cap’n Jack was part of the block, and he was drowning.

  Besides, if his walks didn’t get shoveled and salted, no one could get down the street.

  People looked out for each other even if it was a pain in the ass. This might have been because the Village was more dangerous and hardscrabble, because people lived there longer, were in more need, or just talked to each other more.

  Note: I wasn’t born yet.

  Plenty of fucked-up shit went on. There was a gang of boys that lived on Eleventh Street who would beat up black people for fun. Drug addicts sleeping the day away. Homeless people living in children’s playgrounds. The smell of piss on the street. It is easy to cite the bad in the filthy chaos of New York before luxury condos. It is harder to express the spirit, life, and community that the chaos and inefficiency bred.

  Mr. King Kong, this is your last warning: YOU MUST HAVE A TICKET

  On top of this, things were still made in NYC. The cost of rent for workers and businesses was lower, so paper factories dotted Tribeca. Garments were made in the Garment District, and The New York Times was printed in the New York Times Building near Times Square.

  The transistor was invented in the West Village at the Bell Labs Building on Bethune Street. Lots of things were invented there under the umbrella of improving telephone service. Amplifiers, vacuum tubes, solar panels, etc. And during the world wars, the labs helped perfect radar and other essential military electronics like voice scramblers.

  But if the only thing that ever came out of the huge building with the freight train running through it was the transistor, that would be plenty.

  My dad had a best friend called Casko that lived on Morton Street. He had a wife named Jean, kids, and a Chevrolet Corvair that he was always fixing. Willy wasn’t my dad’s best friend; they were more like a married couple.

  Willy’s best friend was Memphis.

  Memphis was a mythical scarred-up tough with a pilot’s license and a vicious dog. Memphis’s dog knew not to bark at my dad, and Casko got an X-rated Christmas card from Willy once, but for the most part their friends didn’t mix.

  Casko was an engineer, hired in the last days of the Bethune Street Bell Labs. Weeks after he was hired, the whole operation moved to a new compound in Holmdel, New Jersey. Casko would commute daily by motorcycle to program giant computers and work on defense contracts.

  My dad says Casko was calculating missile trajectories. I’ve never heard these words come out of Casko’s mouth. He doesn’t talk about it so much, but he did tell me he was at a party on the block once when a hip lady asked what he did for a living. Casko answered that he “worked on defense technologies.” The woman said, “That’s a shame, man,” and walked away.

  Don’t keep your neighbors up; don’t work for the army. Other than that, a very tolerant place.

  Cap’n Jack would offer Casko clothes from the garbage. The clothes were almost brand-new. They came from the condos Cap’n took care of. He would comb an insane amount of trash before he put it out on the street. Cap’n would then give his finds away to anyone in his path.

  “I didn’t know he was a pervert. Jean did. She never let him near the kids. She had a feeling about stuff like that,” Casko once told me.

  It took my dad and Willy ten years to know.

  They maybe kind of knew before. There were lots of lowlifes, and in the scheme of things Cap’n didn’t seem that bad.

  But one day they are all on the stoop when Cap’n expresses his interest in a close friend’s 8-year-old daughter.

  Disgust sets in.

  “That is weird. You are going to get arrested and go to jail,” my dad says to Cap’n. Cap’n sort of shrugs and changes the topic.

  They still shoveled Cap’n Jack’s walks. They still said “hello,” but they blocked him from the girl, and they warned anyone who had a daughter.

  My dad was working part-time in the Church Street Post Office twenty hours a week. The part-time employees there were all kind of broken. He made friends with one named Frank.

  Frank had a day job at a designer fabric store on Broadway. He was a compulsive gambler that was always being threatened by someone he owed money to.

  Dad made the mistake of lending Frank a hundred dollars. He did this so Frank wouldn’t get beat up.

  Finally my dad got angry and told Frank it was time to pay him back. It wasn’t right; he had helped him out of a jam. Frank says, come see me at work.

  My dad goes over to Broadway. This is when there were factories above and textile stores up and down the block near Canal Street.

  Frank’s shop is fancy, with high ceilings, plaster details, and bolts of fabric as far as the eye can see.

  Dad goes to the counter; Frank wraps something up and writes out a slip. He hands it to my dad and says, “Now we are even.”

  When my dad unwrapped the package at home he found a brocade bedspread in gold and red. Similar to the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters but with tassels. It must have been worth a fortune, but my dad had no use for it. So he gave it to Willy and just called it even with Frank.

  A month later my dad asked, “Hey, Willy, how you like the bedspread?

  Great, I sold it. Got a hundred and a quarter for it
.

  “I gave that to you as a gift.”

  You know what a gift is?

  “What?”

  When you give it to somebody it’s theirs. I used it how I wanted to use it.

  My dad accepted that.

  Dad didn’t give a shit about the blanket in the first place, and in the end it was worth the hundred bucks to give Willy the joy of putting one over.

  Willy deserved that happiness. He always took care of his tenants no matter what a piece of work they were. There was a team of elderly people Willy brought food and newspapers to. This was before the rise of restaurant delivery and the Internet. If someone got sick, he visited them in the hospital and brought them their mail.

  It was hard to really know Willy but it was easy to know his good parts.

  When Memphis went to prison, he asked Willy to watch his German shepherd, whose name was Mother Fucker. “No problem,” said Willy to taking care of the meanest dog in Manhattan.

  Willy fell in love with Mother Fucker.

  They went everywhere together, and within a week he had changed the dog into a softie named Mickey. He just was so kind to the dog it forgot how to be a motherfucker.

  When Memphis finally got out of jail, Willy didn’t want to give Mickey back, but he knew he had to.

  Memphis took one look at Mickey and said he wanted nothing to do with a pussy dog like that.

  Willy and Mickey lived together happily ever after.

  Except years later, a Doberman was being a dick at the park. Went after a poodle or something. Whatever it did, Mickey snapped and turned back into Mother Fucker and killed the Doberman.