Arbitrary Stupid Goal Read online

  I don’t know the details, but the next week Mickey died. The owner of the Doberman had somehow poisoned Mickey.

  Mickey being poisoned was the only story Willy ever told in the basement that made him cry.

  Cap’n Jack was sick in the hospital.

  Willy went to see him.

  Why did he go see a pervert? To talk about covering his super work. To say he could not cover Jack’s buildings. To bring him some mail or news. Pick one. They are all likely true. Even if he was a pervert, Cap’n was the neighborhood pervert and Willy cared about the neighborhood.

  Miserable Jack. The nurses had bathed him and taken away his shower cap. He misses his routines and hates being clean. He starts to weep and cry that he wants to die.

  Jack whispers to Willy, “Kill me.”

  No fucking way, Willy replies.

  “There is eighty thousand dollars in cash hidden in my apartment. Kill me and it is yours.”

  You ain’t got that money. Prove it.

  Jack gave Willy the keys to his apartment.

  Willy and my dad are walking. They have been walking for a while.

  Kenny, Willy says.

  “Yes, Will,” my father answers.

  Words start falling out.

  In Jack’s pigsty of an apartment there is eighty thousand dollars hidden under the mattress.

  Jack is on death’s door.

  If it were Willy, he would want to die as well. Jack is no good, nobody is going to miss the sick fuck.

  What would a pastor say? Maybe put it all in the tithe tray.

  My dad just listens. He didn’t say what to do.

  He never told Willy what to do.

  The conversation in my dad’s memory doesn’t seem like a big deal. He let Willy bounce shit off him all the time.

  On the next walk my dad and Willy took there were less words, but they poured out the same.

  Willy had killed Cap’n Jack in the hospital, and put all the money in the bank.

  Nobody ever found out about the “whorehouse” Willy ran. Apartments in the Village became more valuable, and the landlord of the white brick building had no trouble renting them all out.

  The building needed a live-in super, so one named Rosemary was hired to replace Willy. She lived there with her husband, Bruce.

  Bruce had been a fighter pilot in the Korean War. Flew a P-51 Mustang and had been celebrated in adventure magazines, but now Bruce could hardly navigate across the street. He was a mess with big square feet that looked like he forgot to take the shoes out of the box.

  Rosemary met Bruce at a bar. They were the last ones there. It wasn’t love at first sight. Rosemary was getting old, and her clock was ticking. So they married and Rosemary got her baby, but Bruce was a drinker and it was only getting worse.

  It’s not fair to sum them up that way. In the limits of a situation there is humor, there is grace, and everything else.

  Above Rosemary and Bruce lived a short, Satanic-looking drunk named Raymond and his girl, Eve.

  Eve was barely twenty but had a good full-time job with vacation days.

  Rosemary decided my dad would be a better match for Eve than Raymond. Eve agreed.

  Rosemary knew my dad from the super circuit. She knew he had a part-time job at the post office and had hung out with him just enough to know he liked diet pink grapefruit soda.

  Rosemary invited my dad to a poker game, and when he arrived, there was Eve, drinking a diet pink-grapefruit soda. But Eve was living with Raymond. So that was that.

  In the middle of the night there was a ring at my dad’s bell.

  It’s Eve. She is crying but also pissed off. She vows that Raymond has beaten her up for the last time.

  The bell rings again. My dad’s apartment was on the ground floor. He and Eve could see it was Raymond outside. Raymond starts to lean on the buzzer. My dad grabs his gun and tucks it in the back of his pants along his butt crack.

  Dad won’t let Raymond go past the vestibule.

  “Sorry, Ray, Eve says she is not going back, ever,” my dad warns.

  Raymond left without a to-do, pretty much just accepted it and walked it off.

  The next day on the stoop my dad gave Willy the rundown.

  Willy looked my dad in the eye and said: Wow, you’re gonna go and have the whole catastrophe, aren’t you?

  WHOOP WHOOP

  A lighted sign says “Hi” as we turn in.

  There are sticker machines and a security guard. It is almost midnight. We have just returned from a photo job in Paris.

  Paris, Missouri.

  A sweet girl behind the counter asks what we want. Eight things are on the menu.

  I tell her we need more time.

  We flew in last night.

  At 6:30 this morning Jason was using a do-it-yourself waffle maker in the hotel’s breakfast room while I picked out a road that wasn’t too big or small.

  It was three hours to Paris. The drive was perfect, with a peacock made of hay bales and a clapboard house decorated with a mysterious “E.”

  When the drive got boring, I read a manuscript aloud in preparation for the job.

  The job was to make photos for a book cover of a memoir. A memoir about a man who returns home from a big city to the small town he grew up in. He returns to take care of his aging mother, Betty, who is struggling with dementia.

  The man’s name was George. He was very nice and greeted us at the door offering fruit salad.

  It was a ranch home with freshly vacuumed carpet.

  Betty was 92 but looked much younger, maybe 80 or 82. She didn’t notice Jason and me till George introduced us.

  The only portrait Jason had to take was the back of Betty as she played the piano. That was the first of two setup images Jason needed to nail or the art director might get fired. A still life of a dresser was the other.

  George was nervous about the piano shot. He’d only told Betty he wrote the book a few days ago.

  We did the still life first.

  It was not so still, because it involved a dog named Raj that scared the crap out of me.

  Books were stacked waist high. George explained the books were all his; there was not a lot to do in Paris on Saturday nights.

  I asked if a big mirror above the piano could be moved. This was so that there would be a clean area in the photo for the designer to place text.

  “Betty is not going to like this,” George said as he helped us move the mirror.

  Jason framed the shot. I acted as Betty’s stand-in and pretended to play the piano.

  Before Betty even entered the room she wanted to know where the mirror was.

  I clapped. It seemed a magic trick for Betty to play the piano like that. Jason nodded at me, and I knew the art director would not get fired.

  George drove us toward Main Street, pointing out places that were mentioned in his book.

  He also pointed out the meth houses, explained that sheets as curtains was a sure sign of drugs, and that the only sign surer was a blown-off roof.

  The land that surrounded Paris was once full of small family farms. All the farms are now owned by one company. This is one of many reasons Paris’s Main Street is dying.

  George was 8 when his family decided to move away from his birthplace of Madison, Missouri. He was excited, hoping for Chicago, San Francisco, or St. Louis. His family moved fifteen miles up the road to Paris.

  “You are very lucky,” George told me when he heard I was born in New York City.

  “There are roughly three New Yorks,” E. B. White wrote in “Here Is New York,” an essay written with so much love and grace its words become fact.

  There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New Yor
k in quest of something. Of these trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.

  White failed to mention that the third New Yorker, the non-native, takes a thing for granted, too. The third New Yorker knows they can live somewhere else. They have done it once, deep down if need be they can do it again.

  The first New Yorker has no such reservoir.

  On the way back from lunch George gave a kind of soft pitch for us to move to Paris. You could buy a nice house for 40K, food was cheap, the sky was beautiful.

  Boy, oh boy, I can’t wait to get to dee Big Apple!

  Jason decided we should book it back to Kansas City. This had nothing to do with the lack of humans in Paris. It had to do with the lack of BBQ.

  We took the interstate.

  Our order is up.

  Jason and I start to go left. The checkout lady tells us the dining room is to the right. We come to a sauce bar with plastic soufflé cups. Beside it is a beverage station that has free water and coffee. A sign asks: “Please DO NOT use coffee cups FOR SAUCE.”

  “I like my coffee black,” Jason says in a robot voice.

  “I lyke mah coffee blaghk,” I say back at him.

  Low light from a wagon wheel chandelier sets the mood.

  A waitress passes by, looks at Jason’s plate, and makes the most sincere “mmm” I’ve ever heard.

  Jason is impressed; she works here every day and still feels that way.

  He is less impressed after he starts to eat.

  When Jason was 24 he had a job designing video boxes for soft-core porn films. Tired of Photoshopping strategic shadows onto lesbian vampires, he quit and took his camera on a long motorcycle trip. He traveled down the Mississippi River guided by gas station maps.

  Upon entering Kansas City, he found an overlook with a view of an industrial area known as “West Bottoms.”

  West Bottoms was full of warehouses and crisscrossed with train tracks. Jason was drawn to it and drove down to see if he could find a café.

  He parked his motorcycle in front of an old factory. A man yelled from a window above, “What are you doing?” Jason looked up and shouted, “Just looking around.”

  “Do you want a coffee?” the man called back.

  The man was named Davin and was the same age as Jason. His apartment was a crumbling brick semi-fixed-up loft. It was similar to one that Jason lived in back in Brooklyn, except Davin had the whole three-story building, and there had been a fire, so half a floor was missing.

  The loft was Jason’s fantasy come true, complete with a pack of roommates that didn’t mind him crashing on the couch.

  The couch felt good. Jason had been on the road for a while. Each morning he would wake up and decide to stay one more day.

  All the roommates had jobs, but they worked on different days. So every day Jason got to hang out with a different roommate.

  Roommate #1, Harriet, took him to see the Alligator Lady.

  Alligator Lady was a black sheep of a wealthy family.

  Her house was a big Victorian with ornate wood moldings, patterned wallpaper, and floors rimmed with green garden hoses. Every room had a filing cabinet, and a big cage.

  In the filing cabinet were Xeroxes of articles and evidence against water fluoridation. In the cages were live alligators that the A.L. would carefully hose down. Interns from the local art school floated in and out of the rooms with freshly cut trays of dead chickens.

  Roommate #2, Neal, took Jason to a record shop and introduced him to Hasil Adkins.

  Roommate #3, Leo, took Jason to a BBQ place.

  Actually, Jason took Leo to the BBQ place.

  Leo couldn’t explain how to get to it, just that it was worth the trip.

  So Jason had Leo get on the back of his motorcycle, and the way you find a light switch in the dark, they found the BBQ place.

  The light revealed a run-down gas station with a smoker whose doors had welded-on the initials “LC,” junkyard style. When the doors opened, half a foot of black crust was baked to them, and inside were shelves of sweet meat.

  Jason went back to the place the next two days so he would never forget where it was.

  This is not that place. That place closed two hours ago.

  We will go there tomorrow.

  This is my second time in Kansas City. The first time was also with Jason. We drove in very late at night.

  The first thing he did was take me to the West Bottoms overlook.

  Snow on the ground and visible breath, I got out to join him.

  “Whoop whoop,” I said, universal code for please lock the car door.

  “We don’t need to. There is no one here. Come on,” Jason answered.

  “Whoop whoop.”

  “It’s fine. We’ll be here for ten seconds.”

  “Whoop whoop.”

  “It’s silly. It is just over this wall. Come on, I want to show you.”

  “My laptop and your camera are in there. C’mon, just lock it.”

  He was unmoved.

  We then muttered “so stubborn” at the same time. I got in the car and he climbed a stone wall.

  Jason froze his nuts off looking at the West Bottoms. Longer than he or I wanted.

  Finally he opened the car door, still sore.

  “You ruined that.”

  “You ruined that. I’m not going to leave our shit in the car unlocked.”

  He pointed out that he was twenty feet from the car at all times. I pointed out that I was from New York.

  LAYDEE

  “What do you mean, the whole catastrophe?” my dad asked Willy.

  Well, you gonna get married.

  You gonna have kids.

  You gonna buy a car.

  Get a house in the suburbs,

  And have a goddamn station wagon with four gallons of mayonnaise in the back.

  Willy kept going on about the catastrophe that was about to befall my dad.

  Minus the suburbs, he was right. Eve became my mom.

  Willy had a Triumph. A green TR3 that he kept parked at a friend’s garage. He couldn’t leave it on the street. The car might get stolen, and, more than that, good luck finding a spot.

  In New York City, parking your car is a blood sport. The sport was a little different during the 1960s. Meter maids hadn’t taken steroids yet, and there was only one parking regulation sign on each block.

  The sign on Morton Street originally read:

  On Saturdays Willy took the TR3 out of the lot and parked it in front of his building. He would always give it a good wash. Sometimes he’d let a girl have a ride. Mostly he stood next to the car and looked cool.

  Willy could park in front of his house because one day he climbed a ladder and painted over “SAT.” on the parking sign with white enamel.

  The car was another connection between Willy and my dad. Dad once had the same car, but his was baby blue, and he had abandoned it in Oklahoma.

  After dropping out of college, before Morton Street, my dad drove his TR3 across the US. He would hit a big city, get a job, and stay till he felt like leaving.

  When he reached Oklahoma City, my dad drove to the center of town to look around.

  Near city hall his car starts getting pelted with buckshot. It wasn’t someone shooting at him. The pellets were just falling from the sky. He drives around the other side of city hall and sees these guys with dogs scaring pigeons up to the sky. As soon as the pigeons get high enough, there is another crew that blows them away with shotguns.

  The men shoot straight up so the bullets spit over the capitol dome and then land on the other side like hail.

  In Oklahoma City, you could go to Woolworth’s and buy guns over the counter next to peppermint sticks and sunflower seeds. If you weren’t tall enough for the counter, they had kid-height bins full of squirrel g
uns.

  So my dad bought a .380 Swiss automatic pistol.

  He rented a room in a double-wide building downtown. Most of the other tenants were Native Americans. All the rooms had screen doors rather than regular doors. The building had long hallways with one bathroom per floor. There was a sink in each room and no air-conditioning.

  It was summer and hot, hot, hot.

  Cars didn’t used to come with air conditioners. Dealerships and garages would install the ACs. Each car type was different and required a special mount. If you wanted an air conditioner you needed the right bracket. My dad got a job making those brackets.

  He learned electro-welding, how to set up jigs, follow drawings, and not to duck under the drying brackets as hot paint dripped off them.

  One day my dad is at work and in the office a guy is cleaning his gun.

  “Hey, is that a .380?” my dad asks.

  “Yeah,” the guy answers.

  “I have the same exact gun.”

  “Where?”

  “Right here,” says my dad, and he pulls the gun out of the back of his pants.

  “Nice. It’s a good one. How come you carry a gun?” asks the guy.

  “How come you carry a gun?” asks my dad.

  The guy pulls out a badge and says it is because he is a detective.

  “Oh.”

  “That’s how come I carry a gun, what about you?”

  “I’m stupid,” says my dad.

  “Well, you shouldn’t show it around,” the detective says, and leaves it at that.

  There was a gang of Oklahoma City guys my dad hung out with. Stupid guys with guns. The leader of them was named Bert. They would sneak into Tinker Air Force Base and go to drag races.