Florent was a restaurant, but people went to it for the waiters more than the food. They all acted like they were onstage, twirling, shouting, and singing, performing a mix of spoken-word poetry, stand-up, and sashay.
The seven of us left the groceries to melt in the car and walked to Florent. We had a great time, ate some couscous and left the waiter a huge tip. By the end of it all I felt lucky we had gotten in a car crash.
The Store was open from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. There weren’t all-night grocery stores in the Village. But my mom and dad were close with their customers, so they gave them sets of keys. The customers could go in The Store any time of night. Take what they wanted and just write it down. Most of the customers had floating credit with us.
The city may have been more dangerous, but it was a less hostile place. Everyone knew each other. The rent stabilization laws were hard for landlords to beat, so people weren’t forced to move out. They lived on the block forever. And that forever built a neighborhood.
Once, though, there was a crime wave.
Gabe and Rita kept getting robbed at night. They didn’t keep any cash in the shop after the first time, so the thief stole silk shirts and pinking shears.
We got hit every week, too. The Store had a small window on Morton Street with an exhaust fan, and giant picture windows that looked out on Bedford Street.
Someone tiny kept crawling in the fan window at night, stealing cigarettes and cash. And when no cash was there they stole cigarettes and meat. Finally my dad put bars on the tiny window.
Next time the crook just shattered one of the picture windows. It cost three months’ rent to replace, and in the end my dad wished he hadn’t put the bars in.
In order to protect the big windows, my parents installed metal roll-down gates. It stopped the robberies, but the gates were so difficult and loud to raise that The Store had to stop being open twenty-four hours.
A woman named Nancy lived across Seventh Avenue by the taxi garage. She had a boyfriend my dad calls “Fagin.”
He calls him Fagin because the guy ran a “school” out of Oliver Twist. Each week a van would unload a bunch of kids, and Fagin would tell them what places in the neighborhood to hit and how.
There was really nothing to do except for Gabe and Rita to get gates as well. Everyone on the block did, and the crime wave ended.
Our roll-down gates were like giant washboards that would make a kind of hillbilly music when they were pulled up and down. I couldn’t open or close them till I was 15, but me and my sister always prepped the gates for my dad. We’d unlock the padlocks and pull the pegs—or the reverse at night, throwing them in a brass bucket that was full of dings and dents.
Willy never got stuck up. No one would pull that shit on him.
But he was robbed.
He won a competition in Missouri to play Crown in Porgy and Bess on Broadway.
He and Yvonne took the train to New York on one-way tickets, paid for by the producers of the opera. When he showed up to the theater they told him they were sorry, but his skin was too light to play Crown.
It wasn’t news to him. He was always too light or too dark.
It never stopped him from going to auditions. He’d come in The Store singing, practicing, serenading.
My mom would sing to wake us up for school.
? “Rise and shine! And give God your glory, glory! Rise and shine!” ?
But the way my mom sung it was awful. We would all cover our ears and leap out of bed. Her song was a threat, like: if you don’t wake up, I am shipping you kids to a Christian cult in Waco.
If Willy had sung it, we would have woken up and sat mesmerized.
The thought of Willy singing “God’s glory glory” makes me cry.
In the cabaret circuit Willy was a big fish. The whole club would hush when he sang. He did a trick where he’d hold a note forever. The note would be pure and echo off the walls, adding to itself over and over again.
But he wasn’t happy to be in the small pond, and was always searching for a big break.
All my dad wanted was to stay in his small pond.
There were two businesses on Morton Street. Both were grocery stores. That’s how and why my dad decided to run a grocery.
The owners asked the same price to buy their businesses, even though one store was twice the size of the other. The larger one had newer fridges and more inventory. The smaller one was half a block closer to Willy’s stoop.
My dad chose the smaller one.
My parents wore aprons and wrapped cold cuts in wax paper. They sold Wonder Bread, and mayonnaise. They rotated the milk and butter, putting the newest stock in the back.
An old cash register would ring every time a sale was made. It seemed like a regular store.
But it really wasn’t.
My parents were freethinkers, keyed into gonzo journalism and drugs.
The grocery store they ran was a wonderful, fucked-up cartoon version of a general store. Even Mr. Magoo could see it; there were a hundred and two clues.
Prime retail space was taken up by a big rocking chair that was often filled with Willy.
Whatever my dad put near the door got shoplifted. So he created a community bookshelf. Take a book leave a book, or just take a book.
On Wednesdays my parents gave away plastic dinosaurs to kids. You didn’t need to buy anything, really, you just needed to walk by and be under 12.
Everybody seemed to know each other’s name, and if they didn’t, my mom or dad introduced them.
The biggest clue was the feeling of the place. It wafted at you that my mom and dad loved stocking cans on the shelves. And it was cool if you just wanted to buy some Brillo pads or Ivory Snow, but that wasn’t all you were supposed to get out of the exchange.
Also, there were the antique gumball machines that took up half the counter. They all worked and cost a penny each. If one jammed, the world stopped, and my dad wouldn’t slice baloney till it was fixed.
It started small. A red Pulver machine found at a flea market—the wall-mounted type that used to be found in every subway station. The machine had a smiling cop made of pressed tin holding a sign. When you put your penny in, the sign turned from “stop” to “go,” and a piece of wrapped gum dropped down.
It was just that one machine for a while, not such a big clue.
But then my dad found Billy the Baker Boy. He found him at a junk store in New Jersey.
The machine looked like a kid’s drawing of a house, with a roof made of gumballs, and a big window that revealed a chef whose hand was permanently attached to an oven door.
After you put your penny in and turned the lever, Billy would open the oven, scoop out a gumball, drop it into a trough that was connected to a pipe; then the gumball would drop out of the pipe into your hand.
The machine was special. It wasn’t an ironic interpretation of life. It was life. Billy was at work, he had a job. His job was, when you put the penny in, he had to get you a gumball. It wasn’t make-believe like the cop machine; Billy really did his job and you got a gumball as proof.
And with that my dad was hooked. Everywhere he went he looked for gumball machines.