He subscribed to a monthly magazine called Antique Trader. The magazine was, at its heart, classified ads. He would scan the coin-operated section like a junkie.
“What is wrong with those assholes looking for frogs and ceramic owls? I can’t believe those jerks wasting their time when there are all these great gumball machines.”
Pikes Peak was a trapezoid-shaped machine. You had to get a metal ball to defy gravity by turning one knob back and forth just so. It didn’t give gum. If you won you just got your penny back.
There was a nickel machine. It held chocolate-covered peanuts in a big glass dome. When you turned the knob it would play “Pop Goes the Weasel,” and it wouldn’t give you your peanuts till the end of the song. The last note of the song was the sound of peanuts hitting the trapdoor. The song was so long that when the peanuts finally came it was a shock, like a jack-in-the-box.
My dad had to start rotating the machines, because there wasn’t enough room. Nights were spent winding and greasing the clockworks.
Not only were the machines mostly a penny, but if a customer asked “Do the machines work?” my dad just handed them twenty pennies.
He didn’t care that the machines were worth money, that they were antiques and sometimes one of a kind. The machines were there to be played. He loved them and took care of them like they were his children. Sharing their small pleasures, movements, and minor victories with whoever walked in.
“Get the fuck off my machine. Get the fuck out,” my dad would shout.
That was if you were lucky.
One little girl was particularly rough with a machine. My dad told her parents, “If she hits my machine like that one more time, I’m gonna hit her just the same way.”
The girl and her family never came in again.
As soon as my dad started having kids he stopped buying gumball machines.
The machines were still in The Store, but the collection started to shrink rather than grow.
I remember my dad selling them when we needed money, like a rainy day fund—if my brother needed a root canal or a compressor broke. But my dad says he just sold them because after we were born, he all the sudden didn’t give two shits about them.
Eventually the gumball machines were sent to the basement, and replaced with some new clue that The Store wasn’t a regular store.
Yvonne was a hole you threw money into.
Even though she was pretty much married to another guy named Louie, Willy and her never divorced. They were separated for sure, but they didn’t sever ties till she died.
Dad would tell Willy stories about the butcher, and Willy would tell my dad about Yvonne.
She was always trying to get Willy to do something risky, dangerous, stupid, or evil, but he never stopped talking to her.
Yvonne and Louie lived in Harlem. Louie ran a travel agency that catered specifically to black people. It was one of the first agencies to do that, so he did really well.
Louie was pussy-whipped, and the money just went straight into the Yvonne pit.
Willy would go up there a lot. I don’t know what he did. But I know Yvonne gambled, did coke and amoral acts, because that is all Willy wanted to talk about with my dad when he got back to the Village.
Yvonne died playing poker. Collapsed on a card table, face full of chips. She overdosed and had a heart attack in the middle of a hand.
“I guess she died happy,” was my dad’s response to the news.
What a stupid fucking bitch doing coke with a heart condition, Willy replied.
But my dad knew he was shattered about it.
Coke and amoral acts may just have been what my dad liked to hear about. And maybe that’s why Willy didn’t talk about the other stuff.
The other stuff was likely music.
Willy was wrapped up in it all his life. My dad had no interest.
When they talked about Willy playing Arthur’s Tavern, they talked about his regular gig in winter as a spotter.
Customers would come to the club wearing big, heavy coats. There was no coat check; this was the Village. Everyone hung their coats on a row of hooks at the back of the room.
Willy would sing a set, but he also hung out all night.
Even onstage he was watching the room, trying to spot a type—a man or woman that came in wearing no coat.
After he spotted one, he’d track them till they left, making sure they didn’t leave with someone else’s coat.
The stories Willy told my dad about singing at the Five Spot were mostly about how the bartenders stole. You could be standing right next to them and have no idea. The stories always ended with a universal truth: there is nothing anyone can do to stop a bartender from stealing.
They talked about anything but music.
And I wonder if Willy’s pond really was so small.
The Arvell that Willy hit with a pipe as a kid was Arvell Shaw, Louie Armstrong’s bassist. A lot of the boys that beat up Willy went on to become famous musicians. St. Louis at that time was crawling with talent and clubs. Willy became a figure in the scene.
When he met Yvonne they became the heart of a musicians’ clique.
I can’t imagine anyone cooler than Willy.
He must have seemed like he was from space with his red hair and freak voice. A voice that sounded like Paul Robeson’s, only softer. But just as powerful and sad.
Then add to him the uninhibited Yvonne, who was nut-sack-busting gorgeous. There is a photo of her I remember. She wore pearls, a low-neck blouse, and Egyptian-style eyeliner. She was mixed race with smooth skin that was darker than Willy’s.
They were hot shit.
And this didn’t change when they got to New York. They fell into the same type of circle, but even more talented and hip. The “we ain’t no Eskimos” Charlie from building 40 was Charlie “Bird” Parker.
I know nothing about jazz, but I know who Charlie Parker is. He is the top floor.
THE TOP FLOOR
“That’s nothing, tell Jason he’s a pussy,” Zack says, and turns his arms over at me. Burns and scars line them. The scars are exactly like mine, except he has more. Milky Way–shaped marks that are concentrated below the wrists.
“It’s out of hand. You need to talk to your dad. You need to figure something out,” Jason told me last night, the fourth thing he said after three weeks away. “You should wear a long-sleeve shirt” was the fifth.
Zack stops cooking for a second, turns, and says, “When you get home just tell Jason … this is a fucking kitchen.”
That is what I told Jason last night, followed by: A long-sleeve shirt standing in front of a 350-degree slab of steel? I’d rather get burned.
I don’t notice them.
The marks have been on my arms for half my life. Longer than I’ve been with Jason.
He notices them every so often. Not in a sweet concern for my well-being, more in “be careful, you stupid idiot.”
Zack calls out to my dad and says, “Jason is being a pussy.”