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 BSCP 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.