Barely 8, my brother Charlie had the day off from school. He told my mom that he wanted to go to the Museum of Natural History. She gave him ten dollars and explained how to take the train to 81st Street.
Charlie crossed the avenue and made his way to the subway.
At the West 4th Street station he paid his token and went to the uptown platform.
But he caught the A train and it didn’t stop at 81st.
It didn’t stop at 86th or 96th or 103rd.
Charlie got off the train and found a payphone on the platform. It cost a dime.
“Hey, Mom, I’m in Harlem. I’m on 125th Street,” Charlie said.
My mom didn’t freak out. She told him to go to the downtown side and catch the local C train.
And that is what Charlie did.
At the museum he saw dinosaurs, ran the ramps of the carpeted gem room, ate lunch at the cafeteria, and bought a ruler in the gift shop.
And then he took the train home.
Home was The Store. My mom was not waiting on a nervous edge for Charlie. She was waiting on tables.
When me and my twin sister were older, maybe 11, we would cover shifts for my mom; say, if she needed to go for a parent-teacher meeting. This was always because she had five kids.
Minda was much better at waitressing than me, but we got to split the tips evenly. The tips were huge. We had passbook checking accounts and credit cards.
Whenever my mom was pregnant she’d rub her belly and sing that The Store was about to get a new dishwasher.
On TV I saw kids complain to their parents about doing the dishes and I’d think: fuck, they’re only washing one cover, two at most. My brother Danny never complained and he worked whole shifts, whole summers.
He never complained even though I cleared tables like a thoughtless prick, throwing half-full glasses in the bus tray, filling it with a mix of soda and beer.
He did spray me.
None of us thought of working at The Store as a chore.
My dad was the cook. Customers came to talk to him and my mom as much as to eat. It was a forum of philosophy and hot sauce.
Then there was Willoughby, Willy, whose mystery is the reason for this book.
On Mother’s Day Willy would poke his head in The Store’s double door, a hanger wrapped around his neck. This was his way of celebrating the holiday.
Tic-tac-toe was a quarter a game. Me and Minda were allowed to go into my mom’s tip cup for it. Sometimes Willy would let me win, but usually we tied. We played it every day until he taught me craps.
Willy taught my father to curse. If you ever met my dad you know what an achievement that is.
My dad
Albert was a communist, a sailor, and a superintendent. He and my dad were friends and would hang out at a diner on Sheridan Square called Riker’s. They’d do the crossword puzzle and eat pastries. This was before The Store and before my mom.
My dad was lost.
Albert suggested he become a super because you didn’t have to do much and you got free rent.
So my dad became the live-in super of 38 Morton Street.
In New York at the time, if you had more than five units in a building you needed a live-in super. There was a loophole. You could hire a super that lived within five hundred feet of the building, known as a traveling super. So my dad picked up two more buildings—one on Seventh Avenue and another on Morton Street.
Willy hung around Riker’s, too, but at that point, Dad didn’t really know him.
It was hard to really know Willy.
He was black, but his skin was silver-white. As a graphic designer now, I can see it as a 10% tint of black. He had a deep voice made for singing without a microphone, and always wore a newsboy cap. He was a senior citizen by the time I was born.
When my oldest brother, Charlie, was little, Willy dubbed him “The Reverend Chuckie Joe” and tried forever to turn him into a boy televangelist.
“But, Willy, I’m Jewish,” Charlie would say.
That’s better, you a sinner but you seen the light, Willy would reply.
The weekly deposits for The Store were made by Willy. He’d set off with a wad of twenties wrapped in a rubber band and a deposit slip. If there were more twenties than the amount on the slip, Willy got to keep the money.
My mom and dad would mess up now and then. Willy would come back from the bank singing and buy me and my twin sister scratch-off Lotto tickets to celebrate.
My parents put the extra twenties in on purpose.
Mom had no problems with us seeing movies rated PG-13, R, even NC-17. But the skinny dude who worked at the Waverly Theater gave not a shit about what Mom thought, rule is a rule: an adult must accompany you if a movie has a rating above PG. All the movies my brothers wanted to see were above PG.
Willy would take them to see whatever film they wanted. It didn’t feel like he was doing them a favor. It felt like a friend, even if they were seeing Airborne, a movie whose action sequences involved teenagers rollerblading through Cincinnati.
When it snowed, me and my siblings helped shovel and salt the sidewalk. Not just The Store’s sidewalk, but also the sidewalks of the buildings that Willy took care of.
It was Morton Street. That was how my dad and Willy got close. They were both live-in supers.
Very early in my dad’s relationship with Willy, they were walking down Morton Street. A man stopped them. “Do you know Willoughby?” the man asked.
Nope, never heard of him, Willy answered.
Time spent with Willy was a lesson. My dad doesn’t really know who made the first move in their friendship, but it is safe to assume it wasn’t Willy.
World Wide Photo was an image bank and photo-assignment agency. In the 1960s, Willy was looking them up in the phone book. He swapped the name by mistake, searching for Wide World Photo. There was no listing. So he called up the Yellow Pages, bought Wide World Photo, and put his number and address next to it.
In the background of his life, he fielded calls for Wide World. Image requests would come in, he’d turn around and call World Wide, buying the image at a lower rate. He kept popular images on hand.
Willy was, in a way, an artist. He would rather steal ten cents than earn ten dollars.
I found an old stack of photos of the Pope once when I was dropping lunch off at Willy’s apartment. It was strange and kind of scared me, because normally I would find photos of tits and ass. I asked my dad, and that’s when he told me about Wide World.
Wide World would get calls for photo assignments, too. Assignments to photograph people like Nelson Rockefeller or Cardinal Spellman. My dad would go as Willy’s assistant. They’d make fake press passes and have a good time. Willy was a decent photographer. He kept a darkroom in his apartment and had a friend with a stat camera.
My husband, Jason, is a photographer. Some of our first dates were photo jobs where I tagged along as his assistant.