Judge Crater starts the hearing. The judge keeps looking at my dad in the juror’s box.
Crater is waiting for him to take off the raincoat. No way my dad is even undoing one button.
The case goes on. In the middle of an 11-year-old boy’s testimony the judge halts the proceedings.
“Juror number one, did you wear a suit today?”
“May I have permission to speak freely, Your Honor?” my dad replies.
“No,” says Judge Crater.
The bailiff is ordered to bring my dad to the front of the court and take his coat off.
A navy blue suit and necktie that my dad had borrowed from Willy is revealed.
“Escort this gentleman out of the building. I’m calling a mistrial,” Judge Crater says, banging his gavel.
My dad didn’t get called to do jury duty for twenty-five years.
But it bugged my dad, and he asked friends and strangers about the judge for months after the trial.
All supers are not created equal. Some are child molesters, and others are saints who make Plexiglas furniture in their spare time. Willy and my dad were cordial to all the supers in the neighborhood, but kept the bad ones at arm’s length.
Agnes was the saint. She had graduated from Bennington and came from a wealthy family in Virginia. Always dressed in mechanic’s overalls, she was the first lesbian my dad ever met. Agnes took great care of her building, but finally quit in disgust at what a complete prick the landlord was.
Ben was a class act from the Midwest. Ran his building like a ship. He had a nice ground-floor apartment, and a landlord that cared about the tenants. Ben had a string of capable assistants. The most capable of them all was a guy everyone called “Green.”
Green would often join my dad and Willy on the stoop. He was young, but that’s not why they called him Green.
Green was just his last name.
My dad truly loved him, and wondered why a good-looking, friendly, intelligent kid like that wasn’t a doctor or a teacher. But he guessed it was ’cause Green was black and grew up poor.
Green had a wife named Noreen, though he couldn’t have been more than 19. Noreen caught Green cheating on her, and she turned him in to the draft board.
Green was sent to Vietnam and they never saw him again.
It was around the time Green left when a locksmith found out that Judge Crater’s son had been killed in Vietnam.
Tenants would sit on the stoop now and then, too. When this happened, Willy would talk about a neutral topic like what a motherfucker the landlord was, but mostly he just listened.
The first day my dad officially met Willy, they were walking down the street. A guy in a suit came up to Willy and asked, “Do you know Willoughby?”
Nope, never heard of him, Willy answered.
“Aren’t you curious what he wanted?” my dad asked after the man left.
Nope.
If he was asked, “How you doing?” Willy would answer: Fine.
If he was asked, “What do you do for a living?” Willy would answer: Things.
Most of the neighborhood only knew what they saw of him: that he was a good mechanic who was tall and liked to sing while he put the cans out.
Some people might have noticed that he was sleeping with every woman on the block.
But Willy went out of his way to limit the “inter” of all his interactions.
It was funny, because Willy knew everything about everybody. My dad did, too.
Two doors down from Willy’s stoop was a building filled with Russians.
The building was co-owned by a man named Patrick, who was the first American to sit on the board of Amnesty International, and a woman named Fran, whose husband was a famous industrialist that committed suicide.
The leftist and the capitalist’s widow. The great buddy comedy that never was.
Almost every exiled Russian that came to America stayed at the buddy building. The Village was cheap and a good place to land.
Patrick was a professor of history. Russian history. But it was his Amnesty International connection that was the source of the Russians. They were all amazing.
It is hard to know how amazing these Russians were, because they spoke mostly Russian and my father did not.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Svetlana Stalin, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Joseph Brodsky. These are names my dad knew from the many Russians that lived in the buddy building.
A girl named Rima lived there, too. Chunky, gracious, and polite, Rima had the power to take Americans to Russia. This was at a time when the only way you got there was on a guided Russian tour that had spies. No visas were given. It was an open secret that you could either go on the tour organized by the KGB or the tour organized by Rima.
Rima was best friends with a girl named Jenny, who was Llewellyn Thompson’s daughter.
Llewellyn Thompson was the ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis. When the shit was hitting the fan, JFK received two messages from Nikita Khrushchev, one after the other. The first one was polite and diplomatic. The second was aggressive and threatening.
Llewellyn advised JFK to just answer the first message and pretend the second message didn’t exist.
It worked. His suggestion maybe helped save the entire world, and it seems only fair that his daughter’s best friend could go to Russia whenever she wanted.
Twenty stoops away from the buddy building, in 1957, the director of a Russian spy network was busted.
When the news broke out, everyone on the block was interviewed.
“Did you know he was a spy?” asked the reporter from one of New York’s eight daily newspapers.
“Sure. Everyone knew that. No one cared,” said Beatnik Bob from next door.
“Why?”
“This is the Village. There’s commies, there’s queers, there’s blacks, we don’t judge.”
In order to send his secret messages, the spy needed to run a noisy generator. Because of the time difference, he sent his messages in the middle of the night.
This bothered his neighbors and they reported him to the FBI.
You can be anything you want in the Village, but don’t keep people up at night.
MY JEWELS
Jason digs the sofa. It is mission style with leather cushions. He wants to sit on it, but is afraid.
We are at the writer and cartoonist James Thurber’s historic house in Columbus, Ohio. A docent tells us it’s okay to sit. We can even play the piano if we want. The house is original but has been re-furnished in the style of 1913–1917, when Thurber lived here.
A clock sits on the mantel, a candlestick phone on the sideboard, and lace doilies under bowls. They have done a good job, but no one more so than the person who did the wallpaper.
The tour is free and self-guided. To start, we watch a video that runs on a loop in the dining room.