I’m a little foggy, and what I write may unintentionally lack the whole truth. Names changed, facts left out, facts put in. Memory is unreliable, especially with an event that can’t be seen from the other side.
This I know: Willy must have been with two thousand girls just on Morton Street. Married women, young, old, white, black, long-term, short-term, crazy, sane. They all loved Willy, and when I say loved I mean fucked. He only was really married to Yvonne, and she was a bitch that broke his heart and she was dead. He had no children. He hated his family, and his mother, father were definitely dead.
Willy and my father had been together for decades. He was our blood. There was always an understanding my dad would take care of Willy, but I don’t think any of us imagined there would be a day when Willy couldn’t take care of himself.
At this point I was 19 and lived by myself in an apartment above The Store. I was sort of the super of my building. I swept the halls, took care of the trash, changed fuses, but I paid rent because I had a rent-stabilized apartment.
In NYC some apartments have regulated rents that keep them affordable and give the tenant rights that make it hard to be kicked out. Willoughby had swapped his illegal basement apartment for a rent-stabilized apartment as well.
Basically, an R.S. apartment is a golden ticket that allows you to live in a city you love but could not afford otherwise. It is not fair, but neither is life.
The best stoop on Morton Street was Willy’s building. It was wide, so you didn’t need to stand up as people entered or exited. Before he had The Store, my father would sit on that stoop and shoot the breeze with Willy all day. The building used to be owned by Judge Massey, who lived on Park Avenue.
On the second floor lived Don, a singer, with his wife, who was a great pianist. Willy used to sing duets with her. One day she wasn’t feeling well. The one day turned into twenty. So she went to St. Vincent’s, they told her she had a virus and should go home and just rest.
That night her appendix ruptured and she died.
Don survived the eviction trial because they were married.
On the third floor lived the Strauks. Arnold and Margaret had two or three boys. Arnold made his living cleaning Jewish temples. Margaret was Scottish and baked great shortbread cookies. Before The Store became a restaurant it was a neighborhood grocery, and my dad would sell Margaret’s cookies.
The Store sold baked goods from lots of people over the years. All of them lived within a few blocks. Lester worked for the board of education and baked linzer tortes on the side. Crystal was a hippie and it was her main source of income, but she never made the same kind of cookies twice. And Kathleen baked the best chocolate chip cookies ever made.
Kathleen fell deeply in love with baking chocolate chip cookies. She took care in the tiniest details, like how you crumble the brown sugar. If the weather was humid she would crumble less.
People were hooked on Kathleen’s cookies and would stop into The Store throughout the day looking for them. The cookies were how Robert De Niro beefed up for Raging Bull.
Because of the way the cookies were made she could only bake twelve at a time. So she had them baking in the background all day. She lived three doors down and would bring them over in her bare feet.
Kathleen never wore shoes. She ran a school from her house, had three kids who broke all the IQ tests, was a full-time professor and accomplished author, but to us she was “the cookie lady.”
Margaret Strauk made a lot of money on the cookies my dad sold, but the Strauks never bought anything in our store. The Store really wasn’t expensive. We sold cans of tuna fish and jars of jam. The fanciest thing was melon ball salad. But the Strauks were the cheapest people on the planet.
All the bathrooms in Willy’s building were in the hall. Not a strange thing at the time. The toilet seat in the third-floor bathroom was so old that the enamel had worn off. Arnold wouldn’t buy a new seat because he thought it was the judge’s responsibility.
One day my dad and Willy are on the stoop. Arnold starts hounding Willy about the toilet seat. Willy finally just says something like:
The judge has got a penthouse and a servant. How you going to fuck him up by getting splinters in your ass? He ain’t going to give you no toilet seat. He wish you would all fuckin’ leave, an’ he get more rent; he is one greedy cocksucker!
I don’t know if Arnold took the hint and bought one, but he didn’t bug Willy about the seat anymore.
Years later my dad hired Arnold’s son Brian to be a delivery boy. An order came in and Brian was sent with it.
But Brian came back with the order. He couldn’t find Clarkson Street. My dad explained to him it was a block away from Leroy Street, but he still didn’t understand where it was. Finally my dad mentioned it was near the park with the pool, and Brian understood.
Brian was 15 years old and didn’t know any street names.
My dad didn’t interpret this as Brian being stupid; he understood that Morton Street and the blocks it touched were more than enough for anyone’s existence.
Actually, Willy was married four times.
Yvonne was the first and the only real one. They were wed in St. Louis. She was awful. Cheated on Willy with Joe Louis. Gambled or snorted away his money.
Next came Pilar. Who Willy described like so: She offered me three thousand dollars. Sure, what the fuck. I’ll marry ya. I’ll have your kid for another five hundred.
And then he did two more citizenship marriages, one in New Jersey and another in Pennsylvania.
The courts weren’t very on top of it at that point, or Willy knew who to grease. He never got divorced once.
Immigration didn’t come after him, but he was ready if they wanted to interview him. He had slept with all his fake wives. Not as part of the sham; they didn’t need to. Willy just charmed them into it.
There was a yellow bank check for $80,000 with dot matrix printed numbers and my father’s name. Willy had given it to my father a month earlier with some kind of instructions. I don’t know what they were, but the gist of it was, don’t cash it until I tell you to or I die. Looking back, this should have been a huge red flag, but my dad was running a restaurant, had five kids, and Willoughby was always up to something.
Standing in Willy’s apartment, I was scared. Maybe he fell down somewhere. Could he be in Paris? The place was a mess, but it was always a mess. His dresser drawers were half full, but I’d never looked in his dresser drawers. There was a box of condoms and a photo of Yvonne. How could Willy go to Paris when he rarely crossed Seventh Avenue?
I walked the half a block to The Store. “He’s not there,” I said, shaking my head.
My dad told the waitress (my mom) to hold the checks, finished the soup he was cooking, and left the kitchen.
Wearing his apron and sweatband, a pencil tucked behind his ear, my dad walked up and down Morton Street.