Willy lived for a long time with a girl named Becky. She was much younger, but Willy really liked her. Not sure what went wrong. Separate life. My dad thinks it could have been Willy’s “nothing bothers me, nothing to say” attitude. An attitude that was maybe a defense mechanism, sprung from some drama of what Yvonne did to Willy way back in St. Louis.
A mechanism that magically didn’t apply to my dad.
My dad doesn’t describe it as magic. He says he just never screwed Willy over.
But it couldn’t have been that simple. They saw each other every day for forty years and never had a fight. This is an achievement with anyone, but with my father it is a miracle.
The best explanation I can come up with is that when they met my dad was a puppy. He didn’t have The Store. He hadn’t met my mom yet. So he followed Willy around. Willy didn’t say a sentence without cursing; soon neither did my dad. Without meaning to, Willy became my dad’s mentor.
I don’t know if there would have been The Store without Willy. He was the reason Morton Street felt safe and warm.
Casko got out of his tiny apartment on Morton Street and bought an industrial loft building on Fifteenth Street. He tried to get my dad to go in on it. Not because he needed help. Because you were nuts, not to get in: 15K for a whole floor. All my dad had to do was put 5K down.
“What, am I going to commute?” was my dad’s response.
My parents were too happy.
They had a cheap R.C. apartment and could walk to work.
In the mornings, me and my siblings would drip into The Store one by one, followed by my mom. I’d write a check for myself and put it on the spindle. Poached eggs on grits was my usual. My younger brother’s was chocolate chip pancakes, which my dad would shape into a “D” for Danny or a dinosaur with a raisin eye.
Music would play from a 1920s Atwater Kent Cathedral Radio.
The radio sat on top of the deli case next to a bag of baguettes. My father had pulled out the guts of the radio and hooked up a car’s tape deck in place of the old vacuum tubes, but from the front you would never know.
He loved a radio show called The Big Broadcast, hosted by Rich Conaty, that played music from the twenties and thirties. Depression songs like “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee,” “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime,” and “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries.” My dad religiously taped the show, editing out Rich’s voice. The Big Broadcast tapes were the only music played at The Store, and it always seemed like the wooden radio was transmitting from the past.
I asked my dad what the phrase “life is a bowl of cherries” meant. I was maybe 8 years old. My dad said it meant life was basically the pits—we are all going to die, so you should enjoy the little sweet meat you have.
One by one, as we were done with breakfast, we walked ourselves to school. A kid named Etan had been kidnapped the year I was born. It changed the lives of most parents in New York City, scaring the shit out of them. Not mine. This was despite the fact Etan had been walking to our elementary school when he was kidnapped, and that his little brother was in my older brother’s class.
P.S. 3 was a public school, with fall festivals and silent auctions. It was in an old building with heavy doors and a playground on the roof.
“This year,” one of my favorite teachers said, “we will learn all the skills needed to survive a nuclear fallout.” The teacher continued to explain: in the future there would be a nuclear explosion that made the water and air of New York City undrinkable. Our whole class would be forced to escape and live on an island in the South Seas. We learned how to clean fish, sew a quilt, do CPR, desalinate seawater, design flags, and once a week we went for swim lessons.
Every grade had swimming lessons. The Carmine Street Recreation Center was five blocks away from P.S. 3. It had indoor and outdoor pools. The Store sat halfway between school and the pool. I would swell with pride as my whole class marched by the picture windows of The Store. I’d tap on the glass and wave to my mom. On the return, I’d hurl my wet bathing suit through The Store’s door, sometimes picking up my lunch.
Top: Ken, Eve, Zack Bottom: Me, Charlie, Danny, Minda
Casko’s loft was worth five times its price within the year.
My father tries to imagine a way it would have worked—moving The Store to Fifteenth Street. It wasn’t a neighborhood up there yet. It still isn’t really our type of neighborhood, all those tall buildings, and commuters.
No regrets is the verdict. Through dumb luck my dad had found Shangri-la.
Willy still kept up all his separate lives. He sang at churches in Harlem, and went to orgies on Long Island. Even though Yvonne was gone, he would work for Louie’s travel agency. He still auditioned for musicals and sang at cabarets. Willy grew out of hanging with Memphis, but would still go see him and the other toughs, coming back with stories to tell my dad.
And he still screwed 18-and 20-year-olds.
There was a certain type of woman who seemed to be looking for Willy. They weren’t one-night stands. Some of them would be on rotation for years. Peggy was a gorgeous airline stewardess that kept a hundred-dollar bill secreted away in different parts of her body, for emergencies. Willy always knew where Peggy’s hundred-dollar bill lived.
The women found Willy extra attractive. But he didn’t try to be the thing that made them happy, he just was.
My father says the source of Willy’s magic is that Willy was nonjudgmental. He gave these girls a place to be comfortable being who they were, and that is why they went for him.
That and he had a huge penis.
It is crass to say that. But it is true. Willoughby’s penis was giant. It freaked out the nurses.
It for sure freaked me out.
“He would have given up a lot of his razzmatazz if he could have been happy with simpler things. He just never was,” my dad once said.
I didn’t know that about the razzmatazz.
But I didn’t even know Willy’s friend Mickey was a dog.
I thought Mickey was a man—a man who died from being poisoned after he violently killed a Doberman pinscher.
A whoosh of basement memories hit me when I learned Mickey’s real name was Mother Fucker.
Taking home empty dishes that were licked clean save for a bit of sweet potato skin.
Emptying sharp gray fuzz from the electric razor.
Strings of curses at Cardinal that sounded like poems.
Brushing teeth that were not mine.
Breaking tablets in half, so the pillbox lid would shut.
Laying napkins across his chest like a picnic blanket.
Cutting Willy’s toenails more often than my own.
I got lost in this whoosh.
But in the whoosh I couldn’t remember why it was me filling the pillboxes.
Then my sister, Minda, found an old Polaroid, and gave it to me as a gift.
When I looked at the photo, the whoosh issue disappeared. The reason I took care of Willy was so simple.
I loved him. I loved the good and the bad of him. I even loved the parts of him I didn’t know.
Notes began to appear. They would be taped to my building every day: Top floor apartment:
We order you to cease and desist hanging your laundry.
Clotheslines are against the law.
This is a historic district.
We will take legal action.