Arbitrary Stupid Goal Read online

  One night Bert borrowed my dad’s TR3 and broke its axle. Another night Bert got in a fight with a little guy that bit his ear off.

  A week later, after his ear had stopped bleeding, Bert decided they should all go find that little guy and kill him.

  On hearing this, my dad decided it was time to go home, TR3 or not.

  The .380 Swiss automatic came back with my dad to New York.

  It was the gun that was in his ass crack when he told Raymond that Eve wasn’t going back with him, ever.

  My mom never went back to Raymond. She moved into my dad’s apartment that night and they lived together for the rest of her life.

  The apartment was at 38 Morton Street. An oblong sliver with a window that friends used as a drop box. My dad paid no rent, no gas, no electricity, and no telephone bill. He made fifty dollars a month.

  But every week he had to clean up a flooded apartment.

  Franny lived on the ground floor to the left of his door. She wore tinfoil hats, and the only place she was safe without one was in a completely full tub of water.

  Two floors above Franny lived a Japanese woman with an elderly father. The woman was a nurse that worked the midnight shift and wore heels you could hear click-clack through the whole building.

  When her father died she put him in a garbage bag and waited till Friday. That was the day you could put out big stuff like old mattresses.

  Below her was a man that had screwed a piece of wood in the ceiling and rigged a mallet to a string. Every time the nurse got ready to go to work, slipping on her heels and click-clacking, the man below would pull the string over and over, banging the wood in competition.

  Willy used to joke that my dad should get a lab coat and paint “attendant” on the back.

  Franny’s day job was to look through her peephole.

  When my dad would come home she would shout in a voice that was a cross between an old bat, a toddler, and a strangled cat.

  “Yeew fat yewish bastard,” Franny would say anytime he entered or exited.

  Every day.

  “Yeew fat yewish bastard.”

  “Yeew fat yewish bastard.”

  “Yeew fat yewish bastard.”

  “Yeew fat yewish bastard.”

  “Yeew fat yewish bastard.”

  My dad went on a diet. He lost a hundred pounds. One day he comes home and he hears:

  “Yeew yewish communist bastard.”

  He turned to the peephole, saw her eyeball, and said, “Well, thank you, Franny, you noticed.”

  When my mom moved in, Franny never said anything to her. But my mom, in a perfect copy of Franny’s voice, would stand up for my dad:

  “Yeew cwazy laydee. Lay in dee tub. Lay in dee tub. Cwazy laydee. Leeeeveee us olone. Geh awhey.”

  Eve

  Through vigilance, luck, and help from Willy’s camera equipment, my dad secured a golden ticket of an R.C. apartment for him and my mom at 54 Morton Street. It had the floor plan of a one bedroom, but was split between the basement and ground floor.

  If you walked in the apartment there was immediately a balcony that overlooked the basement level. To the left was a sleeping area and the bathroom. To the right was a stairway down to the kitchen and living room. And if you looked up you would see a French bicycle hanging on two hooks.

  My mom grew up in the Bronx. Her family was very poor. I think even poorer than Willy’s. Her father was addicted to gambling.

  He was also violent.

  It sucked all around. But it sucked most to be my mom. She was treated like a slave and her parents never gave her anything.

  But my mom’s sister was given a bike. This made my mom not getting anything feel ten times worse.

  There was no reason to it; I’m sure my mom was a good kid. She was so gentle.

  As a school project, I was assigned to make my mother’s family tree.

  When I asked my mom for help she offered this: “Mara, you’re creative, I give you permission to make it up. They won’t know.”

  I made her parents from London, gave myself an aunt named Gumby, and drew a British flag.

  I got an A, though I still don’t know my grandfather’s name.

  The French bike that hung above in 54 was my mom’s.

  My father had helped her buy it.

  Work was only a few blocks away, but my mom rode her bike there.

  She rode the bike anywhere she could. It didn’t matter where.

  She loved that bike to an illogical degree.

  But in the special logic of my family, she loved it just the right amount.

  The wheel got stolen. Just the front one. My mom was a tough cookie, but she lost it. Cried day and night. To cheer her up and keep the bike safe, my dad used some spare window weights to hook up a pulley system in the apartment.

  And my mom from then on loved hoisting her bike up every night to an illogical degree.

  John’s of Bleecker Street is famous for its brick oven and the fact that they don’t sell pizza by the slice.

  The slice thing wasn’t a problem for my parents. A whole pie was the perfect amount for the two of them.

  But John’s didn’t deliver.

  The deal was, if my mom called in the order, my dad would pick it up.

  My dad loves pizza. He loves all food, but pizza, Concord grapes, petit fours, and red Jell-O are the ones that get him emotional.

  When my dad opens the box, he sees my mom has ordered anchovies on half of the pie. And somewhere between John’s and 54 the anchovies have bled all over his side of the pizza.

  The only foreign word besides puta my dad taught me was anchovy. Anchovy is Italian for shitty little fish.

  When they went to bed, still angry, my dad tossed my mom’s pillow over the balcony.

  My mom had a thing about her pillows, and couldn’t sleep without both pillows.

  She was chewing gum, so she chewed it up faster and shoved it in his armpit.

  A few years ago I found this note from my mom:

  I told my dad about the note. He is old now. It normally takes him a while to scan through his memories and find what I’m referring to.

  So fast, in a maximum of three seconds, he said, “She wasn’t sorry at all. She was bragging to everyone who came in The Store.” Then he drifted off and missed her.

  In the 1860s George Pullman invented luxury train travel. He manufactured sleeper cars with sheets and pillows. Dining cars with ornate restaurants and full kitchens. The cars were then rented rather than sold to the railroads, complete with servants. The servants were called porters. They made the berths into beds at night, helped with luggage, served food, shined shoes, and were on call twenty-four hours a day.

  The porters were what put the “luxury” in luxury train travel. All Pullman porters were selected from a new windfall of low-paid workers: the blacks that had just been freed from slavery.

  Pullman’s cars were so successful that by 1920 his company was the largest employer of blacks in America.

  Willy’s father was a Pullman porter. Willy was one for a bit as well. It was steady pay, and the most respected job a black man could have at the time. Though it was working kin to kant, as Willy would say. From when you can see till you can’t see.

  The porters formed a union called the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP). It was founded by A. Philip Randolph.

  This is Black History Month stuff. But they didn’t teach me about it in my hippie public school where we called teachers by first names and learned about the Harlem Renaissance by memorizing poems:

  Baby

  Albert!

  Hey, Albert!

  Don’t you play in dat road.

  You see dem trucks

  A-goin’ by.

  One run ovah you

  An’ you die.

  Albert, don’t you play in dat road.

  —Langston Hughes

  Willy taught me about the BSCP in the basement. This was part of the kiddo stuff.

  The B
SCP laid the tracks for the civil rights movement, with porters providing cash to the movement, and a knowledge that you could change things if you were unified. Also there was A. Philip Randolph, who went on to organize the first marches on Washington, and then the ones led by Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Willy grew up po, but it didn’t feel like it, because he grew up during the Great Depression.

  If your father had any kind of steady pay during the Depression, you were bourgeoisie.

  By default, having a job made you better off than 40% of the population.

  There was a small deli case in The Store, filled with mostly mayo-based salads. Egg, tuna, chicken, potato, and so on. Every day my dad made a fresh roast beef and a few one-off items. The one-off items were always made with a customer in mind.

  No matter what my dad stuffed—cabbage, peppers, mushrooms, veal, zucchini, rock Cornish hen—he knew Joseph Brodsky would buy one.

  Brodsky would come in every night.

  My father loved stuffing food, and Brodsky loved eating stuffed food. They had a perfect relationship.

  “He was like a Russian heterosexual Oscar Wilde,” my father says as the ultimate compliment.

  Once Brodsky was asked what his favorite part of teaching at Columbia was.

  “July and August,” the poet replied.

  When Brodsky wanted to quit smoking, he asked my dad to be the gatekeeper of his cigarettes, doling out two a day.

  One night Brodsky came in, and my dad handed him a plastic donkey. Brodsky lifted the tail and a cigarette came out the donkey’s asshole.

  Our Store was more like an old general store than a grocery. When a customer came in, they didn’t pull things off the shelf. My mom and dad would gather their order as customers listed the items they wanted. More often than not, my parents gathered the order before the customer had even crossed the street.

  One day Willy came into The Store with a tape recorder. He pressed play, and a recording of his voice came on ordering a quart of milk.

  My dad grabbed the milk from the fridge and put it on the pink counter.

  Willy pressed play and a recording of him ordered a half pound of baloney. Then some beer. This went on till a small order was assembled.

  Lots of other customers were in The Store watching this go down.

  The tape recorder asks, How much is that?

  My dad tells him the total.

  You Jewish mother cocksucka. Us poor black people are here trying to live an … we ain’t no Eskimos. We niggas! Willy is screaming, but it isn’t Willy, it is a recording of his voice.

  The order is bagged up and Willy pays for it.

  Thank you, you fucking cocksucka, comes from the tape recorder.

  Willy then walked out with his armful of groceries.

  I think my dad had an orgasm. He took it as a gift. A gift that could only be given by someone who truly loved him.

  ORDER OF THE UNIVERSE

  “Was it a big deal to Willy, killing Cap’n Jack?” I ask my dad.

  “Well, it wasn’t, but it was because of the money, which eventually came back to haunt him. Without that money the landlord wouldn’t have taken his senility and beaten him over the head with it, and taken power of attorney, and done all the other things. That eighty K from Cap’n was all the money Willy had. He never touched it.”

  “I was so pissed that she got Willy a funeral plot.”

  “That was probably one of the good things Garrison did!”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It was complicated.”

  “When I think back, it was like there was something wrong about Willy getting scammed. Like that was the wrong order of the universe.”

  “It was wrong, Garrison knew of his other ties. She did it behind their back, on the assumption that if nobody noticed Willy was senile, then fuck them all—they didn’t care about him. And in fact, I didn’t notice he was senile, because for me he was senile his whole fucking life. I thought it was funny that he would say he was going to Germany and come back the next day and I’d ask him how the sausage was. He did things like that all the time.”

  THE SMALL POND

  As kids, my siblings and I played in traffic.

  The game was: Run into the middle of the street, put down a water balloon, haul ass back to the sidewalk, and watch the oncoming cars run over the balloon. Repeat until you had a close call or ran out of balloons.

  We also stayed up late, ate with our hands, cursed, never brushed our teeth, drank soda like it was water, and hung out at gay bars.

  There was only one rule growing up: Don’t touch the meat slicer.

  The Store was a beautiful scrubby place with white enameled fridges and vintage cookie tins. But for me, nothing was as wonderful as the slicing machine. It was a streamlined silver sculpture manufactured by Hobart. Not the 410 designed by Egmont Arens. Our Hobart was a later model with a slanted meat feed. When the machine was turned on, it sounded like a circular saw, which is basically what it was. There was a carriage that most often held fresh roast beef. The carriage was pushed back and forth the way you rock a baby to sleep. Instead of peace and quiet, you got toilet paper–thin slices of meat.

  No gory end. I have all my fingers. Loved the machine from afar until I hit 14, and the embargo was lifted. Then I loved it up close every day, eating translucent slices of turkey whether I was hungry or not.

  Hobart Model 410, 1940, designed by Egmont Arens

  Before I was born, in the earliest days of The Store, if someone came in that gave my dad a bad feeling, he would camp out by the meat slicer.

  The machine stood on rubber feet that acted like shock absorbers. They raised the slicing machine just enough so my dad’s .380 Swiss automatic could live underneath. He would go pretend to slice meat just in case the spooky person tried to stick him up.

  This was New York in 1972. It wasn’t a question of will you be stuck up, it was a question of how often.

  After a while my dad felt stupid. He got spooked by everyone and would hover behind the slicing machine like a coward. None of the people he got spooked by held him up. Even if they had, he wouldn’t have drawn the gun. He could shoot cans in the woods, but not people.

  So he ditched the gun for good and came up with a new tactic. If someone scary came in, he grabbed my mom, ran to the tailors across the street, and locked the door.

  Gabe and Rita were the tailors across the street. They had Yiddish accents and smelled like mothballs. Rita taught me and my sister to sew by saying “in and out” over and over again.

  The first time my dad fled to Gabe and Rita’s with my mom was to get away from a spooky guy with brass knuckles on both hands. Mom and Dad watched from the safety of Gabe and Rita’s as the spooky guy slunk around the counter to the register. The guy looked at them across the street and then he looked back at the register like it was booby-trapped, grabbed a six-pack of beer, and left.

  From then on, if someone truly scary came in, my parents just fled across the street. It happened maybe two times a year till The Store turned into a restaurant. The restaurant was different from the grocery store. If a customer felt wrong, my dad just kicked them out, be they robbers or yuppies.

  In hindsight, Dad’s gun wouldn’t have done any good. Almost every time my parents were stuck up it was some pleasant-looking person they never would have suspected.

  Once, a guy who looked like he was going to buy a bag of chips pulled a gun and told everyone to get on the floor.

  Our floor was covered in sawdust. The sawdust was delivered in sacks by a crippled Italian goombah from Queens. My dad had to unload the sacks from the back of the goombah’s truck himself, but it didn’t matter. He loved the sawdust. Every morning he and my mom sprinkled down the new floor. When I was little, Mom would give me a salad bowl of sawdust and I would help, dropping tiny pawfuls. If there was a spill, the sack of sawdust would come out and a thick wad of it would be laid down, turning the yellow shavings birch beer red or Coke brown.
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  At night all the sawdust was swept up. The floor sparkled because all the dirt from the day was absorbed by the sawdust. No mopping needed.

  The health department said sawdust was not allowed, and just like that sawdust became a forbidden passion. And there are many passions that have since been forbidden by the DOH—cloth towels in the bathroom, fresh warm turkey, cooking with bare hands—but nothing hurt like the sawdust. I don’t think my father has ever forgiven the City of New York.

  I wasn’t alive during this robbery, but my oldest brother, Charlie, was. He, my parents, and a few customers are facedown in sawdust. Charlie stands up and goes over to the guy with the gun who is raiding the register.

  “Are you a hand robber?” Charlie asks the thief.

  “Shut the fuck up,” replies the thief.

  “Charlie, get back here,” my dad says. Charlie turns around and lies down in the sawdust.

  The thief leaves.

  Everything goes back to normal, minus some cash.

  Later that same day Charlie is at a friend’s. Tommy the taxi dispatcher and Jeff Goldblum the actor are in The Store. My dad is telling them about how Charlie mixed up “armed robber” with “hand robber.”

  A nice-dressed guy comes in and pulls out a .45.

  There is almost no money in the register, because The Store was robbed in the morning. The guy is pissed and herds my mom, dad, Tommy, and Jeff Goldblum into the tiny bathroom in the back.

  “Give me everything you got,” the nice-dressed man says, waving his gun.

  They all empty their pockets.