Cardinal was always reading the Bible. He only talked about Jesus, salvation, and keeping the bathroom clean. Willy hated him.
I would try to bring other videos, but there were just three Willy ever wanted to see: The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Josephine Baker Story, and a bootleg cam video of Notting Hill, starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant.
When I’d start to play a new video, he would say, You ever see that one with Julia Roberts?
Yeah, Willy, I have a copy of it here.
Then what we watching this shit for?
In 1983, the Bottle Bill (aka, the Returnable Container Law) was enacted.
Under the law, if you bought a bottled or canned beverage you paid a five-cent deposit. Any business that sold bottled or canned beverages had to be ready to give anyone five cents back in exchange for the bottle or can. The same hokeypokey was then performed between the business and the city.
The law was meant to encourage recycling. And it did.
With homeless people.
My dad wanted nothing to do with the law. He didn’t want the empty sticky bottles attracting roaches and he didn’t want to deal with the lines of homeless people with shopping carts full of cans and bottles.
So he called up Coca-Cola and asked about soda fountain machines.
“I can solve your bottle problem, and make you fifty thousand dollars a year,” said the salesman.
“You don’t make fifty thousand a year, do ya?” my dad asked.
“No.”
“Then why don’t you buy a soda machine?”
“Well, you can’t sell someone soda unless they are already in your place as a customer. You have a nice line for your deli. People buying sandwiches, gum, chips. A soda machine is what you need.”
Sometimes a salesman tells the truth.
The soda machine not only solved the Bottle Bill problem, it freed up refrigerator space. No more restocking said fridge, no chance of it being shoplifted, no sell-by dates because it was made fresh, but most of all it made money. The profit margin on fountain soda is like a superpower.
Miniature garden hoses ran from The Store to the basement below, where the carbonator and tanks of syrup lived. Before I learned to tie my shoes, I knew how to detach and reattach the syrup nozzle of our soda machine.
You could control the taste of the soda by adjusting a screw on the fountain head. The perfect ratio of syrup to soda became my dad’s undying passion.
Every time the syrup was changed, we all tasted the soda and compared notes.
The Store was full of these little passions. My parents were happy.
They were running their own place, their way, with customers they loved.
Then the landlord raised the rent, big-time.
The Store as it was couldn’t make that amount of money ever, not on cat food and Cheerios.
So my parents decided to turn The Store into a restaurant. Not because they didn’t love running a grocery store or had some long-harbored chef fantasy.
They changed The Store to a restaurant because my dad thought it would sell more soda.
The restaurant thing worked; we sold lots of soda and paid lots of rent.
And The Store was still special and full of little passions. We still called it The Store even though it was a restaurant.
On Saturdays I helped my dad shop. We’d supplement The Store’s wholesale orders with a produce market on Hamilton Avenue, a supermarket in New Jersey, and a cash-and-carry where we mostly bought candy.
After anybody ate at The Store they were allowed to take free candy from a huge display that ran down a pink marble counter. Candy of every type: Tootsie Rolls, Junior Mints, Smarties, gummies, peanut butter cups, Hershey’s Kisses, Mr. Goodbar, Nerds, and on and on. Once someone said they couldn’t eat candy because of their rotten teeth. My dad added a jar of disposable toothbrushes. The kind with the toothpaste inside. When you squeezed the handle the paste would squish through the plastic bristles.
Customers that traveled would bring gifts back for us, maybe as a way to repay the candy debt. Things like: A glass soda bottle from Asia that had a marble which regulated the flow of soda to make sure you didn’t guzzle.
A candy called “ant piss” from Amsterdam that tasted just like sawdust and lemon concentrate.
A soft tan drawstring pouch made from a kangaroo’s balls.
An origami shirt made of Japanese yen my mom taped to the fridge.
A floaty pen of Ronald Reagan that when you turned it, his clothes came off.
One of the supermarkets where my dad and I shopped was decorated with plastic grapes. They were placed in every aisle like Easter eggs. All kinds: red, green, Champagne, Concords, Muscats. Some with little green ivy leaves and tendrils, others with brown stems pressed with fake wood grain.
One bunch at a time, the grapes started coming home with me.
I hung them all in the entrance to my bathroom, making the grapes dangle above.
At the time I washed all my clothes in the bathtub. I loved it to an illogical degree.
Channeling photos of old New York with clotheslines strung across every building, I ran one on a hypotenuse from my fire escape to my farthest window.
Washboards had become expensive antiques that decorated bed and breakfasts, so I’d fill the tub, roll my pants up, and stomp and swish as if I was Lucille Ball making wine.
And the grapes set the scene, semitranslucent with the sun shining through.
At the cash-and-carry, I started buying Willy Ensure, a beverage that a doctor had recommended to help him gain weight. It was a complete meal in a can.
For a while it was liquid all day, and I’d bring solid food at night and feed him like you do a baby.
Then he could only eat liquids. So I’d bring a birch beer as a treat.
His deep voice became a whisper. Sometimes he would have me lean in close and he’d tell me Yvonne was at the window trying to get in.
She come to steal my money. That fucking bitch.
Willoughby had an attack and went to the hospital by ambulance. The doctors thought it was only going to get worse and it was best to send him to a home.
I never visited him. I don’t think. Maybe once me and my dad went by motorcycle. Maybe it was awful and he didn’t know who we were.
I know I never went down to the basement again.
My bathroom entrance grew to include the bathroom ceiling. I strung wire, not string, knowing in a few months the string would snap from the weight.
At bunch No. 70 it got harder to steal the grapes.
This was because No. 70 was the last bunch of grapes in the supermarket, not because security had cracked the case.
No one at the supermarket seemed to notice the grapes had ever existed.
This was good: I never got caught. This was bad: nobody ever came to replace them.
I was sad.
And it gave me pause.
But then I passed a wine shop.
The window had hundreds of plastic grapes.
The collecting continued.
I can’t remember when Willy died. My dad got the call and I was shocked, because I thought Willy was dead already.