Here it falls apart in my head. I think my father found Willy after walking up and down the block upset.
He found him in the same crummy basement apartment Willy had lived in decades ago. The apartment with the window that guns were dropped in and where everyone took their secret lovers.
Willy told my dad that the new building owner had moved him down there because there were less stairs. Then he said to deposit the check because he didn’t want the doctors to get it. Which was maybe illegal. Which makes this story true to me, because Willy was always on a scam.
But I don’t really know. All the events surrounding Willy are foggy.
I know my dad was pissed that Willy had let himself be moved down there. My dad had worked hard to make sure Willy had an R.S. apartment with a lease.
I visited Willy in the basement and brought him a bowl of chili. He called me sugar pie and asked why I didn’t bring a birch beer. No talk of Paris, though he did mention Josephine Baker’s tits.
But the next day he was on another planet. I left through the narrow hall, up the steps beneath the best stoop on Morton Street, and thought that I’d come back later and he would be Willy. And that is what happened, but I knew he was now liable to disappear at any moment.
The check didn’t go through. Someone had frozen the account.
That someone was the landlord. The Garrisons had recently bought Willy’s building. It was a trio of sisters who owned a bunch of other buildings.
In the midst of this I was commuting to college upstate, learning about things like Herbert Bayer’s Universal Alphabet—a typeface that had mixed lower-and uppercase letters in an attempt to make typography more efficient. In my downtime I read thick books about vaudeville.
Herbert Bayer’s 1925 Universal Alphabet in use
This was before cell phones. Maybe some people had them, but no one in my family.
Somehow we found out that it was specifically Denise Garrison who had moved Willy to the basement and now had power of attorney.
I was visiting Willy two times a day with food, newspapers, and porno magazines wrapped in brown paper. My dad was fat and could hardly fit in the hall that led to Willy’s apartment. Even if he was thin I don’t think he would have visited more.
My dad got a lawyer who said he needed to take power of attorney back. So my dad squeezed down there with the lawyer, and Willy signed power of attorney over to my dad. No problem.
And the next thing we knew, Willy was in the Village nursing home. And Denise Garrison had power of attorney again.
My mom was just a peanut in all this. She wasn’t close with Willy. They had never been mean to each other, and they had no harsh thoughts of the other, but there was no relationship between them.
The kindest soul. No one kinder on the planet. That is what fills my brain when I think of my mom. I should give an example of why this is so, but my mind goes blank. We were not that close, and we will never be.
She died in a blink when I was barely twenty-three.
My sister, Minda, was my mom. She was the one I told when I got my period. I told Minda and Minda told Mom. That was the way it worked.
I got my dad to visit Willy at the nursing home.
Just to visit.
And we shot the shit and that would have been it.
But as we were leaving, a curtain in Willy’s room opened to reveal an old woman sleeping with a single rose in a vase. The curtain was opened by a thin guy who introduced himself as Hazel. He told us a woman was here signing my grandpa up for Medicaid and a cemetery plot yesterday. Then he added that the woman was up to no good. Hazel asked to exchange phone numbers so he could tell us if the woman named Denise came back.
This changed things.
It might not add up in a neat package but these are the things I remember.
Willy was getting healthier. I signed him out for a walk. We sat in the park and he told me about this shithead friend he had as a kid who would use snakes as lassos and snap their heads off.
From the bench I saw a bank.
My relationship with Willy was not one where I could talk about what I wanted. We never talked about Bayer’s Universal Alphabet or Harpo Marx. And I couldn’t bring up the registered check he gave my dad or power of attorney.
It felt a little illicit. But this was the way Willy liked things to feel.
I asked Willy if he wanted to go to the bank tomorrow and he said he did.
A few days later, me and my sister signed Willy out and met my dad at the bank across from the home. I am not sure how my dad still had the check Willy gave us like it was brand-new, but he did. And the four of us sat with an agent and talked about opening an account.
The agent was female with a low-cut blouse and Willy hit on her the whole time. If she had asked for the $80,000 he would have given it to her.
I am not sure what we were doing at the bank. Whatever it was didn’t take. All I know is, Willy left with a hard-on and had peed all over the bank’s chair.
My sister’s memory of this day is even more foggy than mine, but she remembers the pee as well.
My dad hired another lawyer. This one wrote a threatening letter to the Garrisons. It accused them of taking advantage of an old man, moving him out of his R.S. apartment, and stealing his money. It alluded to the fact that the grace which they performed this act was too great for it to have been the first time. It said Willy didn’t need to be in a nursing home and that he better have an apartment to live in when he got back.
In the mail my father received a $60,000 check from Denise Garrison’s personal account, and the paperwork for the cemetery plot she had signed Willy up for.
Willoughby was released and moved back into the basement, to which I was given a set of keys.
Morton Street went back to normal, except I now picked up Willy’s prescriptions, and once a week would split the medicine into a seven-day pillbox.
And every night I brought him dinner.
Sweet potatoes, chili, fresh turkey, tuna salad, steamed broccoli, whole wheat toast, egg salad on rye, sloppy joe, BLT, pea soup, brisket, pulled pork, roast beef, potato chips, and pecan pie. Always with a birch beer.
There were other dishes, but these were his favorites. It all came from The Store.
The pie was baked by me. I baked two a week, my mom paid me eight dollars a pie. She sold it for $2.25 a slice with fresh whipped cream. It was a good deal for me because I didn’t pay for the ingredients.
Willy would sit at the table in the small shitty basement apartment with half a window and none of his stuff. He would eat his sloppy joe, happy as fuck. And it was like the whole episode never happened. He didn’t ask about Denise or his things.
So I never asked either.
And maybe the fact that we didn’t talk about it all was proof that Willy still had some badass in him.
I regret not asking where his photos went.
I had to buy a pillbox with bigger compartments.