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.
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.