Tepper Isn't Going Out: A Novel

by Calvin Trillin

  “What was the exchange with the cardinal?” someone said, to Lopez’s obvious delight.

  “Just before the program, Carmody said, ‘Maybe you’d like to hear a little tune I thought of after I was in a bad traffic jam just on the other side of the Midtown Tunnel, Your Eminence.’” Lopez said, “And the cardinal said, in that plummy, high-class accent of his, ‘For a man in my position, Mr. Mayor, just about anything but “Danny Boy” would be a most welcome change of pace.’”

  “I’ve got to say I sort of miss Der Mishuganer,” Chuck Gold said.

  “I don’t miss that phony bastard at all,” Brian Higgins, a News assistant city editor, said.

  “You just didn’t like the fact that he showed how powerless and irrelevant we jackals of the press really are,” Gold said. “Every other week you’d send a reporter to Queens to find people who were baffled at how a man who had seemed like such a conventional schlub as a lawyer and a city councilman had somehow become the Woodside Wacko. And you’d run the story thinking, ‘Everybody’s going to see now how contrived all this is,’ and, instead of denying anything about his past, the Wacko’d say something like, ‘It’s absolutely true that I was once a normal human being. This job would turn anyone into a nutcase.’ And that would be that.”

  “Well, you’re right that nobody seemed to care that Carmody wasn’t really wacko,” Higgins said. “Any more than anybody seems to care that Ducavelli really is wacko. So much for the power of the press.”

  “Il Duce is getting more paranoid by the minute,” Fannon said.

  “It’s true that the last time I went in to see him I had to first confirm my identity on an iris matchup machine,” Shanahan said. “But I’m proud to say that I passed quite nicely. I’m who I am.”

  “We’ve got something in the paper tomorrow about City Hall ordering one of those chairs you sit in and a buzzer goes off if there’s anything hidden in a body orifice,” Higgins said.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Fannon said.

  “You mean it can spot a guy with a bug up his ass?” Gold said, and began to cackle at his own joke.

  Everyone else groaned and got up from the table. As Fannon showed them out, they stood on his stoop for a few moments, happy to be in the spring evening’s air after a couple of hours in the closed and smoky atmosphere of Fannon’s parlor. Silently, they watched a sort of standoff across the street involving two parkers who had been going for the same spot. Apparently, one of the parkers had pulled up one car ahead of the spot to back in and the other had approached from the rear. Both cars were about a third of the way in, and both drivers were out of their cars. “I’m prepared to stay here all night, if necessary,” one of them was saying.

  “It figures,” the other one replied. “What else would someone like you have to do?”

  Three or four cars behind the standoff, a man was reading the Post while sitting behind the wheel of a parked Chevrolet. “Very clever of you to hire somebody to read the Post outside my house,” Fannon said to the crowd at large. “Otherwise, I might get the impression that nobody at all reads that rag.”

  8. Jeffrey Green

  THE DRIVER OF THE TOYOTA SEEMED ANGRY BEFORE HE even asked the question. He had pulled his car even with the Chevy Malibu that was parked in front of Russ & Daughters. He was scowling, and his voice, as it boomed out of the Toyota’s front window, had an angry edge to it. “Are you going out or not?” he said.

  Tepper smiled and shook his head—a small shake of the head, like a bidder at an auction responding in the negative when the auctioneer meets his eyes as a way of asking whether he wants to top a bid that has just topped his. Tepper had been practicing almost imperceptible headshakes.

  “You’re not going out?” the man in the Toyota said, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  Tepper shook his head again, still smiling.

  “Whadaya—live there?” the man shouted. “You one of these homeless bastards, except you’ve got a car?”

  Tepper didn’t answer, and the Toyota pulled away. Tepper went back to his paper. He was reading a story about a dispute between Frank Ducavelli and the editors of a publication called Beautiful Spot: A Magazine of Parking. In its latest issue, Beautiful Spot had published a long article entitled “How to Beat It”—an article that included step-by-step instructions on how to avoid paying each type of parking ticket issued by the city. The mayor, calling the article “a recipe for lawlessness,” had banned the sale of Beautiful Spot at all newsstands in city buildings. Unsurprisingly, the magazine’s editors had gone to court, citing First Amendment rights to free speech. The mayor had replied, “There is no right to sedition. There is no right to lawless anarchy.” He’d reiterated his oft-stated belief that respect for the parking laws was the bedrock upon which modern urban civilization had to be built. Meanwhile, Beautiful Spot was unavailable in the newsstands of city buildings and, of course, sold out everywhere else. The headline on the story was IL DUCE INSISTS NO SPOT FOR PARKING MAG.

  Tepper heard a knock on the passenger-side window and looked over. The counterman he’d met the week before was standing on the sidewalk. A young man stood next to him. Tepper rolled down the window.

  “It’s me,” the counterman said. “I guess you’re not going out—huh?” He smiled and winked in a knowing way.

  “No, I’m not going out,” Tepper said.

  “Listen, that was a great talk we had last week,” the counterman said. “I want to thank you for your help.”

  “I really didn’t do anything . . .”

  “No, no, what you said about that soaking compound not selling—that was like a gift to me,” the counterman said.

  “If stories about what didn’t sell are considered gifts, someone in my line of work could be a great philanthropist,” Tepper said.

  “Listen, there’s someone I’d like you to meet,” the counterman said, nodding at the young man next to him. “This is my nephew, Jeffrey Green. My grandnephew, really. From Cleveland. But he lives here now. He wanted to meet you. Would it be okay if he sat with you for a few minutes?”

  “Why not?” Tepper said, opening the door.

  The counterman went back into the store, and Jeffrey Green got into the car. He was a cheerful looking young man in his early twenties, dressed informally but neatly. He had sandy hair and blue eyes and a sort of open expression that made him look as if he were always about to say, “Really! No kidding! How interesting!” He smiled at Tepper and shook hands. “I told my Uncle Irv I’d really be interested in meeting you,” he said.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve got something you want to sell through the mails,” Tepper said.

  “Oh, no,” Jeffrey said.

  “A scheme for marketing StediSoke to Generation X?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Jeffrey said. “I’m sort of a reporter.”

  “Sort of?” Tepper said. “You mean you report part of the story and let the readers imagine the rest, or do you mean you don’t have a job?”

  “I guess it’s closer to not having a job. At least a regular job. I’m a freelancer. I write feature stories mainly, around New York. But what I want to be is a political reporter. I’d like to cover congressional campaigns, maybe even presidential campaigns—that sort of thing. I did my thesis in journalism school on campaign coverage. I’ve got some ideas about political reporting that I’d really like to try out someday.”

  “I have one question I’ve been waiting to ask someone with your specialty,” Tepper said. “Why is it that reporters covering an election campaign write almost exclusively about who might win, even though we’re all going to know that the night of the election anyway?”

  Jeffrey thought about the question for a while. Then he said, “I can’t imagine.”

  “You sound like a sensible young man,” Tepper said. “I was afraid you might think you know. What can I do for you?”

  “I’d like to interview you for a story.”

  “My politics are simple.
I’m a regular voter, and I usually regret my vote.”

  “No, the story wouldn’t be about politics.”

  “Not about politics?”

  “No. What I thought would be interesting to write about was what you’re doing here.”

  “I was reading the paper,” Tepper said.

  “No, I mean why you’re here, in this parking spot,” Jeffrey said.

  “Oh, it’s a legal spot,” Tepper said. “I’ve got thirty minutes left on the meter.”

  “Well, then, that would be in the article,” Jeffrey said. “I think it’s an interesting story, and I think I might be able to place it in this neighborhood paper I sometimes write for—the East Village Rag.”

  “The paper calls itself a rag?” Tepper asked.

  “Well, yes,” Jeffrey said. “The editor thought of that. He says it’s very postmodern.”

  “Postmodern?”

  “I’ve never been quite sure what that means either,” Jeffrey said. “The editor keeps saying that part of being postmodern is being self-referential. Also ironic. So the paper refers to itself, ironically, as the East Village Rag.”

  Tepper nodded. “You might say the East Village is postmodern itself,” he said. “Just a few years ago, in what we all thought were modern times, there wasn’t any East Village. There were just a lot of blocks above the Lower East Side, some of them full of Ukrainians, a few Poles. The same buildings are still there, but the real estate people realized you could charge more rent if it had a name, maybe a name that suggested Greenwich Village. Presto: the East Village. This is postmodern. Also, since nobody ever referred to those blocks as the East Village before these people who owned the buildings started doing it themselves, you could say that it was self-referential.”

  “The paper circulates in other neighborhoods, too,” Jeffrey said. “Although I can’t claim the circulation is very large. Of course, all this is completely up to you, Mr. Tepper.”

  Tepper looked at Jeffrey Green for a while without saying anything. Then he said, “Why not?”

  9. Name in the News

  TEPPER WAS FLIPPING THROUGH SOME RATE CARDS THAT had just come in—pausing now and then to study the attributes of a mailing list made up of “24,000 cash and charge customers of exclusive men’s shop” or “16,000 executives in chemical management”—when he heard from the door, “Can I interrupt you for a moment, Murray?” Glancing at his watch as he looked up, Tepper saw that it was eleven-fifteen. Arnie Sarnow was pretty much on time.

  “Why not, Arnie,” he said. “Come in.”

  “What about lettuce dryers?” Arnie said, without bothering with the usual morning greetings.

  “Lettuce dryers?” Tepper repeated. “You’re thinking that Barney Mittgin can sell his map-pillows with a list of people who have sent away for lettuce dryers?”

  “What? Oh, no,” Arnie said. “This isn’t about Barney Mittgin.”

  “Oh, sorry. I misunderstood,” Tepper said. “Now that I think of it, Barney Mittgin was selling a lettuce dryer for a while. It could be used to spin the lettuce dry, but it also converted into something that could be used to play roulette, or maybe it was spin the bottle. I suppose that’s what made me think we were talking about Barney Mittgin. That and our previous conversation about the airplane pillow.”

  “Oh, no, I was talking about the magic button,” Arnie said. “The one we’ve talked about before.”

  Tepper and Arnie Sarnow had indeed talked often about what Arnie called the magic button—so often, in fact, that Tepper was beginning to regret having brought up the subject in the first place. Their first magic-button conversation had taken place not long after Arnie Sarnow came to work for Worldwide Lists. Tepper was telling Arnie how in the old days there were a couple of lists—the customer list of a wallet company, for instance, and the subscription list of a health magazine—that seemed to work for selling a broad variety of products. Arnie had been struck with the possibility of finding a single item that, probably for reasons nobody understood, marked true consumers—people who might not have any other common interest or even a common income bracket but did have in common an insatiable itch to respond to the offers they received through the mail. He believed that someone who figured out what that item was could, simply by building a list of people who had bought it, sell absolutely anything—portable saunas and life insurance and matched luggage and attaché cases that turned into foldout computer tables.

  “It would be like having a magic button,” Arnie often said. “You press it, and money comes out.” Fairly regularly, Arnie would get a strong hunch about one item or another. If he could come by a list that was limited to that item alone—a list of people who had bought lettuce dryers, for instance, instead of a kitchen supply list that included people who had bought lettuce dryers—he’d sometimes persuade Tepper or Howard Gordon to approve what was called in the trade a Taunton test. For a good deal of money, a company called Taunton Direct Mails would do an accelerated test of a list, using e-mail and phone banks to get results that would have taken weeks or months by ordinary mail.

  “Lettuce dryers,” Tepper repeated. “What was it last time we talked—gardening gloves?”

  “Adjustable shower heads,” Arnie said. “The time before that was gardening gloves. High-quality gardening gloves. I think this would be better than either one of those. For one thing, I think the magazine would be stronger.”

  “Magazine?”

  “Once we got a start on the list, we’d use it to send out a subscription pitch for a new magazine called Spin: The Magazine of Salad Drying. Then we’d have that subscription list to build on, but also we could sell ads for a fortune.”

  “There’s enough to write about lettuce drying to have a magazine?” Tepper asked.

  “I think you can hire people for that,” Arnie said. “They’ve got magazines for everything now, Murray. There are magazines about nothing but ice-cream scoops. Putting out magazines for ferret owners is a competitive field.”

  “Well, that’s an interesting idea—lettuce dryers,” Tepper said. While he was trying to think of something more specific to say about lettuce dryers, Howard Gordon came into the office in what was, for him, a state of excitement.

  “Did you ever hear of a newspaper called the East Village Rag?” he said, waving a newspaper that he held in his hand. “What kind of name is that for a newspaper anyway?”

  “It’s postmodern,” Tepper said. “But not in a way that’s easy to explain.”

  Howard Gordon looked puzzled for a moment, and then tossed the newspaper onto Tepper’s desk. The paper was opened to the fourth page, which had a headline right across the top: QUIET WISDOM IN A CHEVY MALIBU. The byline was Jeffrey Green’s. There was a picture of Murray Tepper, seen through the window of the driver’s side, reading a newspaper. A story below the picture took up the rest of the page:

  Murray Tepper is always in a legal spot. On Sundays, his dark blue Chevrolet Malibu is often parked in front of Russ & Daughters appetizing store on Houston Street. During the week, it can sometimes be found on one of the side streets near the theater district or on the Upper East Side. When someone slows down and asks if Mr. Tepper is going out, he always says no. Murray Tepper is not going out until he’s good and ready.

  Nobody knows why Murray Tepper is there. He doesn’t seem to have any business to conduct in the neighborhood. He doesn’t leave his car. When asked recently what he was doing parked on Houston Street, in front of Russ & Daughters, he said, “I was reading the paper.”

  Is Murray Tepper one of those people who is mad as hell and isn’t taking it anymore? If so, he doesn’t show it. Mr. Tepper gives the impression of a very even-tempered man. He’s a mailing-list broker by trade—a partner in Worldwide Lists, which has offices in the West Twenties. Is he trying to escape from a messy situation at home? Apparently not. He says he’s a happily married man. He lives with his wife, a watercolorist, in an apartment on West End Avenue. He has a married daughter and one grandson.r />
  Although he is uniformly courteous, he doesn’t offer any clues as to his motives. When he was asked last Sunday why he was parked on Houston Street without any apparent business in the neighborhood, he said, “I’ve got another twenty minutes on the meter.”

  Mr. Tepper has been subject to some harsh language now and then by people who want his parking spot, but other people find his presence a comfort. Apparently, Murray Tepper approaches some of life’s other problems with the directness he employs in parking, and talking to him can be a soothing experience. One employee of Russ & Daughters, Irving Saper of Brooklyn, said, “I spent some time in there with him not long ago, and I’ve never felt better in my life. I wouldn’t be surprised if pretty soon you’re going to find a line of people waiting to get into that car.”

  The possibility that Mr. Tepper may be gifted with special insights was also raised by one of his clients, Barney Mittgin, of BarnEsther Novelties, a firm in Roslyn, Long Island. In an interview in the outer office of Worldwide Lists, Mr. Mittgin said, “Murray Tepper has some way of seeing things that other people can’t see. He sees the connective tissue of our society. People in the industry call him Magic Touch Tepper.”

  But Mr. Tepper apparently can’t see into the future, at least when it comes to parking. Asked by a reporter if he would be in front of Russ & Daughters again next Sunday, he replied, “If I can find a spot.”

  Tepper put the newspaper down. “‘Connective tissue of our society?’” he said. “When did Barney Mittgin start talking like that?”