Tepper Isn't Going Out: A Novel

by Calvin Trillin

  “Not for a year,” Linda would say, with a mischievous smile. “It’s good for a year. So you have a perfect spot, except, of course, you can’t use the car, because if you do you might lose the spot. Oh, no! I just thought of something. You’re going to have to move it for the state safety inspection in just a few months. I guess this is not such a great spot after all.”

  Now he was in a similarly remarkable spot in the East Seventies, and he smiled as he thought of the days when Linda was still at home to tease him about his parking triumphs. He read the Post for a while, and then spent a while watching a man across the street who had pulled into a spot and then appeared concerned about whether his car was parked too close to a fire hydrant. First, the man stood as far from the car as he could get, his back pressed against the wall of an apartment building, and tried to judge the distance between his front bumper and the hydrant. Then he came forward and paced off the distance. Then, apparently satisfied, he started to walk away. Then, after a few steps, he returned and, instead of pacing, measured by putting one foot directly in front of the other, in an awkward little mincing step between his car and the hydrant. Then, he got what seemed to be some ribbon out of his car, and started measuring with that, turning it over and over, since it was only about two feet long. Finally, he was able to walk away.

  A few minutes later, Tepper heard a car slow down. It seemed to be stopping next to his Chevy. He pretended to be looking for something in the glove compartment. Then the honking started—honking unlike Tepper had heard before. There was a series of short, staccato honks followed by a long wail. Tepper was too surprised to disguise his interest. He sat up and looked over at the car.

  “Twenty-two shorts and a long,” the driver said. “The secret fraternity honk.”

  “Hello, Jack,” Tepper said. “I thought you might be around sooner or later. What secret fraternity honk, by the way? We were never in any fraternity.”

  “Sh-h-h,” Jack said, putting his finger in front of his mouth and looking around in mock concern that someone might overhear them. “That’s the secret. I don’t suppose you’re going out soon, are you, Murray? That’s a hell of a parking spot you’ve got there. Won’t have to move until eleven o’clock Thursday morning. That’s the sort of rare East Side spot that used to tempt you, I know, even if it was late at night and you were actually on your way back to the West Side to go home.”

  “No—sorry.” Tepper said. “I’m not going out just yet.”

  “Hold it just a minute,” Jack said. “I’m going to park this thing across the street, and then I’ll join you for a minute.”

  “That’s a hydrant across the street,” Tepper said. “You better leave your flashers on.”

  “And draw attention to myself? Not a chance. I always park in front of hydrants. The secret is to park smack in front of them rather than just too near them. You have to go all the way. If you’re just too near them, you get a ticket. If you’re smack in front of them, the cop rolling down the street can’t see that there’s a hydrant there at all. You have to be brazen. That’s my motto, in parking and in life: be brazen. I know you don’t feel that way, Murray. I’m aware that, when it comes to parking, you like to play rough but clean, like the West Point football team. Not me. I’m brazen. Hold on. I’ll be there in a second.”

  Jack parked his car across the street, pulling in just ahead of the car whose owner had been so concerned about being too close to the hydrant. Then he crossed the street and slid into the passenger’s seat of the Chevy. For a long time he didn’t say anything. At least it was a long time for Jack. Tepper had known Jack since childhood—they’d become close in Miss Goldhurst’s class, in fifth grade—and was not accustomed to silence when Jack was around.

  “I guess it’s a nice quiet place to read the paper,” Jack finally said. “Except for people asking you all the time if you’re going out.”

  “It’s okay,” Tepper said. “And, as you say, it’s good until Thursday.”

  “Anything special bothering you, Murray?” Jack said. “You and Ruth okay? She sounded a little worried when she called.”

  “Ruth?” Tepper said. “Ruth’s fine. Still doing her painting. Yes, Ruth and I are okay.”

  “She says your son-in-law told her that what you might be doing is ‘trying to exert some meaningful control over your environment,’” Jack said.

  “Richard repeats a lot of phrases he reads in magazines,” Tepper said. “He probably got that one out of an article on why it’s good to make your kids clean up their rooms. My grandson’s three years old, and it wouldn’t surprise me if his father tells him to clean up his room because it’s important to exert some meaningful control over your environment.”

  “Maybe he meant it in a nice way,” Jack said. “Maybe when one of his tennis buddies says in the locker room, ‘My father-in-law just did a fifty-million-dollar deal,’ he says, ‘Hey, that’s nothing: Linda’s dad is trying to exert some meaningful control over his environment.’”

  “All those years I worried that Linda might marry a drunk or a thug or something,” Tepper said. “I kept my eye out for some hood driving up on a Harley-Davidson. To this day, when I hear that roar that a big motorcycle makes, I think some big hairy slob wearing greasy blue jeans—what I believe they now call a biker dude—is coming to try to marry Linda. So what happens? No biker dude comes anywhere near Linda. A guy drives up in a Volvo and she marries him and he talks about ‘meaningful control over your environment.’ I feel like I was blindsided.”

  “That’s not why you’re here, though,” Jack said, making it into more or less a question.

  “No. Not really.”

  “Everything okay at the office? Are those turkeys still hiring you to sell their tchotchkes? They haven’t caught on yet?”

  “Yeah, it’s all okay at the office,” Tepper said. “Well, it’s the same.”

  “I keep telling you that it’s amazing you’re still in business. First came computers. Now the Internet. That means that you and Howard are now at least two communications revolutions behind the times. You guys are operating a biplane there, Murray, in the middle of a lot of jumbo jets.”

  “We’re flying below the radar,” Tepper said. “There’s always a little business below the radar.”

  “Is it the Dodgers, Murray? That’s the only thing I could think of. Are you out here because you’re still mad that they moved the Dodgers to L.A.? If you are, you know, it doesn’t make any sense. You want to know why it doesn’t make any sense? Because then you should be parking in Brooklyn, not on Seventy-eighth Street. So are you lost or what?”

  Tepper smiled. “Jack,” he said. “You were the one who got so mad when they moved the Dodgers to L.A.”

  Jack thought about that for a moment, and then nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “The bastards! But you don’t find me still mad about it, right? I don’t even care about them anymore. They lose a close one in the ninth, I couldn’t care less. I care so little I even forgot that I was the one who was mad.”

  Jack didn’t say anything for a while. A Honda honked behind them, and Tepper waved it on without looking back. “Nice place for a chat, guys,” the driver of the Honda shouted, as he slowed to a stop in front of them. “Whatever happened to having a chat on a park bench? Whatever happened to having a chat on the stoop?” Then he moved on.

  “Murray,” Jack said, “there are a lot of little things that irritate all of us. Look, today, I paid my credit-card bills, and every single one of the envelopes had an ad attached that you had to tear off before you could seal the envelope. Here I am trying to send in a check for what I already bought, and before I can do it I have to tear off an ad for an attaché case that turns into a bridge table or some goddamn thing.”

  “A foldout computer table,” Tepper said.

  “What?”

  “A foldout computer table. The attaché case turns into a foldout computer table. We handled that one.”

  “Right, a foldout computer table,
” Jack said. “Whatever.”

  Tepper nodded sympathetically. “There’s always something,” he said.

  “But, Murray,” Jack went on, “if you’re irritated about something, there are really more direct ways to make your feelings known.”

  “You mean I should write letters, the way you wrote the owners of the Dodgers when they were talking about going to Los Angeles?”

  “Because this doesn’t really have any connection to the people who are responsible for anything,” Jack said. “That guy who just got so pissed off because you weren’t going out almost certainly isn’t the guy who puts ads on the envelopes for credit-card bills. He didn’t move the Dodgers to Los Angeles.”

  “Probably not the Dodgers,” Tepper said. “He seemed too young. Also, the people who moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles don’t need a spot. There’s valet parking in Los Angeles. You drive up to the door of the restaurant and some kid from Honduras drives your car away for you. You don’t even know where it is. You know, it’s conceivable that there are people in Los Angeles who have never actually seen their car when it’s parked, except when it’s inside their garage. That’s very strange.”

  “That bastard from the Dodgers never even answered me,” Jack said. “So does that mean I should go sit in my car in Times Square?”

  “Times Square is all No Parking Anytime,” Tepper said.

  Jack considered that. “On the other hand, you’re not harming anybody,” he said. “I mean, they all find a spot eventually, or they give up.”

  “If they can figure out how,” Tepper said.

  “It’s not like you’re walking around with a sandwich sign like some nutso,” Jack said. “Or calling in bomb threats.”

  Tepper didn’t say anything. They sat in silence for a while. Finally, Jack shrugged, and said, “I don’t see the harm.”

  “Is that going to be your report to Ruth?” Tepper asked. “You don’t see the harm?”

  “Well, I might dress it up a little,” Jack said. “But, yeah, basically, that’s going to be my report: I don’t see the harm.”

  “Good,” Tepper said.

  “So you want to have a beer?” Jack asked. “It’s early yet, and I found this bar on Third Avenue that doesn’t treat mature gentlemen such as ourselves like old coots whose false teeth are about to fall into their beer. It’s what they call a yuppie-free environment.”

  “Thanks anyway,” Tepper said. “I’m not going out.”

  7. Poker Night

  “OKAY, MOISHE IN THE MIDDLE,” CHUCK GOLD SAID, starting to deal the cards.

  “Moishe in the Middle?” Mike Shanahan said. “I don’t believe I’m familiar with Moishe in the Middle.”

  “What are you, Shanahan—some kind of rube?” said Gold, a City Hall reporter for the Times. “Everybody knows Moishe in the Middle. It’s five-card draw except there’s a card in the middle that can be used as a wild card. First you bet, then you draw, then you bet—just like regular five-card draw. Then you bet with the card down, then with the card showing.”

  “That’s all?” Shanahan said.

  “Then with the card down again.”

  “But we’ll already know what it is,” Shanahan said. “Why would you bet with the card down again?”

  “Because the rules of Moishe in the Middle call for that,” Gold replied, continuing to deal. At the Monday night poker game held at Ray Fannon’s brownstone on East Seventy-eighth, the final hand was always some wild variety of poker that the dealer had learned in high school—an effort to attach a rather zany end to an evening that had consisted of hand after hand of purist five-card draw and five-card stud and seven-card stud. Moishe in the Middle was, in fact, a relatively calm game for the final hand, which often featured games with names like Shipwreck and Indian and So’s Your Mother.

  When the hand of Moishe in the Middle was over, nobody moved. At Fannon’s, players tended to linger at the table after the last hand had been played. Toting up the chips was accomplished at a stately pace. For anybody who wanted to tell an anecdote, this was the first opportunity of the evening to get all the way to the punch line without worrying about people saying, “Hey, I thought we came here to play poker!”—although there was still likely to be an interruption for some other reason. Chuck Gold, apparently feeling that he still held the floor from having presided over a hand of Moishe in the Middle, began reminiscing about a former mayor who liked to tell anybody he met how much he respected them—to the point that Fannon, in his Daily News column, had defined the mayor’s goal as “making each and every resident of this city feel like the don of the Corleone family.” The mention of a former mayor led naturally to a discussion of Frank Ducavelli. Those gathered around the table made predictions about how the taxi-hailing restrictions were likely to go. They discussed what could possibly make the mayor think that he could get away with blocking the promotion of one of his critics at City University on the grounds of “reckless insolence.” They compared theories on what had happened to the mayor’s campaign to enforce regulations requiring sidewalk hot dog vendors to wear gloves and to extend the regulations to a number of other occupations—a campaign that hadn’t been heard of for a while, even though as recently as the previous January it had dominated the mayor’s State of the City address.

  “Jesus, I had almost forgotten that speech,” Steve Lopez, a City Hall reporter from one of the local news channels, said. “The Naked Hands Speech!” In a column on the State of the City address, Ray Fannon had imagined the mayor unable to sleep at night, tossing and turning as he thought of all the naked hands in the city—hands that were kneading dough or selling subway tokens or receiving bank deposits or shaking other naked hands.

  “Reluctant as I am to credit any of my clients with any sense at all,” Shanahan said, “I do think it’s possible that hizzoner may have realized that requiring gloves is not some sort of magic bullet in the battle for public health. The problem is that these guys wear gloves but they wear the same gloves all day. They handle the hot dogs with the gloves. They make change with the gloves. They scratch their ass with the gloves. As long as they’ve got gloves on, they think everything is dandy.”

  “You don’t think dropping the glove business means that he might be thinking of running for governor or senator instead of mayor, do you?” Bart Adams, a political consultant, asked, as he made uniform stacks of the chips in front of him. “I mean, if you were going to run for senator you wouldn’t want to be identified with some pissant issue like whether hot dog guys wear gloves.”

  “You mean as opposed to a substantial issue like whether people should hail taxis from the sidewalk instead of the street?” Fannon said. “Or a monumental, senatorial-level issue like whether there should be a zero-tolerance policy backed up by prison terms for display of butt-crack in a public park.”

  “I can’t imagine him not running for mayor again,” Shanahan said. “He loves being mayor.”

  “But will the Wacko run against him?” Gold asked. Bill Carmody, the man Ducavelli had defeated to become mayor, was also known as the Woodside Wacko or the Queens Cowboy or, in the Hasidic neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Der Mishuganer.

  “I hear the Wacko has been working on more songs,” Steve Lopez said. “That’s a sure sign. Somebody told me he has a whole series of songs about subway stations—I suppose lines like ‘My life began to be a mess / when I just missed the downtown express’ and that sort of thing.”

  Apparently, Carmody had become a singing mayor after reading about Jimmie Davis, who had sung right through a term or two as governor of Louisiana. Ray Fannon had felt compelled to point out in print that before turning to politics Davis had made his living as a country singer and songwriter—someone who’d composed such classics as “You Are My Sunshine”—while the mayor had made his living as a Queens lawyer who specialized in real estate matters, particularly those that could best be taken care of by knowing some people at the Department of Buildings. Carmody had never seemed at all impressed by Fanno
n’s reasoning. “It’s true that I’m just an amateur songwriter,” he’d said, in response to such criticism, “but I’m a pro when it comes to being mayor.”

  “I have to say that it’s hard to forget that traffic jam lament he did at the Press Banquet—‘We’ll Never Be Bumper to Bumper Again,’” Fannon said.

  Steve Lopez and Chuck Gold broke out in a loud, toneless rendition of everybody’s favorite couplet from “We’ll Never Be Bumper to Bumper Again”: “I knew I had lost my sweet little Midge / When she said, ‘I told you we shoulda took the bridge.’”

  Carmody’s urge to perform could come upon him at wildly disparate moments—while welcoming a visiting dignitary from a country whose officials normally didn’t sing in public, for instance, or presiding over a long session with Jewish community leaders on the question of whether the Bronx needed its own Holocaust museum. Although he might hit a chord now and then on a guitar, the accompaniment was usually provided on the piano by an old Tin Pan Alley song plugger named Maxie Allen, who put Carmody’s words to music. Maxie’s work clothes consisted of a shiny black suit, a white shirt whose collar seemed too big, a tie decorated with musical notes, and false teeth of shocking whiteness. While Maxie Allen somehow wrung a country beat out of his tinny upright, the mayor sang of star-crossed lovers living out their days in separate rent-controlled apartments that they couldn’t afford to leave (“until that sweet old man—so sad, so shy— / Was finally called by the great decontroller in the sky”). He sang songs of triumphs on Wall Street and unrequited love at Upper East Side singles bars. Someone had described his style as “borough country.”

  “Remember that great exchange with the cardinal at the Catholic Charities dinner?” Lopez said.

  The presence of the cardinal had always seemed to inspire the mayor to song. The cardinal was a tall, highly cultivated, distinguished-looking man. He was the son of an Irish fireman, and he was a champion of the city’s working poor. But when he appeared in front of his flock, in the cathedral on Sundays or at the dinner of a Holy Name Society or the annual dance of an Irish county society practically any evening, he carried himself so regally that it was common for someone to comment that he looked like the Episcopal bishop who had wandered in by mistake.