There was already too much space between them and The Store. Why bother walking the extra blocks to be sure.
My dad must’ve tried to buy every building on Morton Street. The timing was never right. The minute the buildings were cheap enough, my parents couldn’t afford them. And when they had money, the buildings cost too much.
There is a class of people in New York City whose funds move in inverse proportion to the ability to buy a building. I am in this class. My parents were, too.
The only way to overcome it is to overspend to get what you almost want, and then sacrifice to keep it. Knuckle down for fifteen years. No theater tickets. No dining out. No travel. The desire to have the house has to be unreasonable. People in this class who end up owning a piece of the city have given up their youth.
RAW CHICKEN CHUNKS
Patsy wore two earrings, but in the same ear—one was a stud and the other a tiny silver hoop. She had a faint mustache that never worried her. I didn’t think of her as our babysitter, but as my dad’s good friend.
Later, Patsy became a second cook at The Store. This put her in a small club of men named Steve, Steve, and Colin. She wrought Patsy’s Cashew Chicken—a dish that has never left The Store’s incessantly changing menu.
Pieces of chicken breast are coated in flour and sautéed in hot butter. The raw chicken chunks get browned on the outside with a crisp skin, while remaining uncooked in the center. The hot pan is deglazed with lemon juice, soy sauce, and chicken stock, which coats each bit of chicken in a glaze. Chopped scallions and whole cashews are added to the pan. It is cooked just till the chicken center is no longer raw. So the crisp skin is kept, the scallions are soft, and the cashews warm. This all is then poured over a bed of rice in a silver pedestal dish, and topped with a lid.
My mom is the one who said the dish needed lemon juice. My dad added the stock because customers complained there wasn’t enough sauce for the rice. But the rest was Patsy.
Kate the waitress and Patsy were like sisters. Kate needed a sister. She had run away from home at 16.
Kate had a new boyfriend that had asked her to move into his place. She was dumbstruck by love, but not so dumb she would give up her apartment. The solution was to sublet her place to Victor from Missouri.
Victor looked like a troll doll, but with more hair. He was the son of a woman from St. Louis who worked for a journalist named Linda.
Linda was a Store regular and close friend to my mom and dad. This put Victor in the trustworthy column.
It didn’t end well, with the boyfriend or Victor.
Kate came home to a destroyed apartment.
Victor had stopped paying the landlord rent. In all the months he stayed he had never paid the gas or electric bills, which were in Kate’s name. She was left with a mound of debt and a huge mess.
Kate soldiered on. The Store blacklisted Victor, and Willy put a curse on him for five dollars with a juju man in Harlem.
We lost everybody.
—my dad
Morton Street saw AIDS early. No one knew what it was, where it came from, how to prevent it, or if there was a cure.
Perry lived next to The Store. He was in seven or eight times a day, and my dad always wished he came in more. One of the funniest men in the world, Perry was a musical and comedic genius. That’s what he did for a living.
His boss was talented, but cheap, so he had a side gig. A hobby that turned out to be a cash cow. The side gig involved placing poetic ads in the back pages of The Advocate magazine and installing mirrors on his ceiling.
The ads were the first of their kind in the magazine. They offered tag team S&M sex for money. Perry and his boyfriend worked almost every night.
These facts about Perry seem private.
But there were no secrets with my dad. People come into The Store, and before their drink arrives, my dad has found out they lost their virginity to an aunt.
“Wonderful.” This is the word my dad says over and over when he describes Perry. It was Perry who first told my dad about AIDS. He called it Kaposi syndrome. I gotta stop fucking everybody or I’m going to die, was how Perry explained it. And Perry stopped cold, but it was too late.
People who made the Village, people who my parents loved, started to disappear.
The Village kept going.
My parents didn’t understand what was happening. AIDS snuck up on them like it did everyone else.
Murder, tragedy, love, it didn’t matter, my parents got up in the morning and went to work. It wasn’t their nature to worry.
When it was in full bloom and called AIDS, Patsy would spend all of her free time at the hospital holding babies.
They were AIDS babies whose parents had died. The babies would die soon, too, but they still needed to be held.
Less than two blocks from The Store was the shop of a sign painter named Dave. Dave painted in the traditional way with a maulstick, fast brushstrokes, and a talent for gold leaf.
My dad had him paint the windows of The Store. Wedged between the gilded words DELIVERY COFFEE FINE GROCERIES HOME COOKING FRESH SALADS was:
Every time my parents had a kid they would hire Dave to come over and paint the baby’s name around the hearts.
Lots of people hired Dave. Even people that didn’t really need signs, like Felix.
Felix lived in the wilderness of Alaska for five weeks out of the year. The rest of his time was spent replacing burnt-out bulbs in New York City streetlamps.
Around this time there was a Polish joke:
Three drug addicts go into an alley with one needle. The Chinese addict sterilizes the needle, swabs it with alcohol, and shoots up. He passes it to the Jewish junkie, who sterilizes the needle, swabs it with alcohol, and shoots up. He then passes it to the Polish addict, who sticks the needle straight into his arm.
“Are you nuts? Aren’t you afraid of AIDS? You’ll get sick, man!” yell the first two junkies.
“Don’t worry,” says the Polish junkie, “I’m wearing a condom.”
Felix hired Dave to paint a sign that read, “ALL OUR COOKS WEAR CONDOMS,” and gave it to my dad as a gift.
Dad put the sign up. After a while it wasn’t funny, so my dad took the sign down.
Felix walked in one day, saw the sign missing. “I could’ve figured that,” he said, walked out, and never came back.
“Hey, Pats, did you hear the good news?” my dad said, leaning on our fire hydrant outside The Store.
“What,” asked Patsy.
“I heard that shit Victor is back in Missouri, and he’s got AIDS.”
Patsy didn’t think this was funny.
She ignored and avoided my dad for two years. Finally Patsy forgot or forgave him. But it wasn’t the same. My dad was afraid he would say something stupid or honest again, and they gently stopped being friends.
BULLETPROOF CASE
Jason is late, and I’m early.