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 York 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.