Tepper Isn't Going Out: A Novel

by Calvin Trillin

  “Your Honor,” Tepper said, “it would be my pleasure.”

  30. The List

  ON A TUESDAY, TWO WEEKS AFTER JUDGE BERNARDI granted a permanent injunction preventing the city from using the unlicensed-demonstrations ordinance to keep Murray Tepper from parking in a legal spot, Tepper arrived at Worldwide Lists an hour later than usual. At home that morning, he’d had two calls from reporters who wanted to know whether he was going to resume parking if, as expected, the circuit court turned down Victor Hessbaugh’s appeal. Jeffrey Green had phoned to discuss the pros and cons of putting his plans for political reporting aside to become a ghostwriter. There had also been a call from Tim Singer, the young man who published Beautiful Spot: A Magazine of Parking. Tepper and Singer had become acquainted around the time of the first altercation on Houston Street, when Singer phoned to announce that Beautiful Spot was planning to put Tepper on the cover as Parker of the Decade. Mainly because of the publicity surrounding the mayor’s attempt to ban its sale in city-owned buildings, Beautiful Spot was making great strides in both circulation and advertising revenue. Singer wanted to talk to Murray Tepper again about whether a magazine that had spoken so contemptuously about parkers who were tempted to “sell out to the garage interests” could accept advertising from parking garages without, as Singer put it, “doing violence to our entire raison d’être.”

  In the weeks that Tepper had been, as the tabloids tended to put it, “off the street,” honoring Judge Bernardi’s request to suspend his parking forays voluntarily, interest from reporters and agents and entrepreneurs had only grown. The day before, Tepper had heard from a couple of agents who wanted to represent him and from a man who had an Internet site he wanted Tepper to endorse—a site that, for a small subscription fee, would give a member access to the parking regulations on every street in the five boroughs plus information on special holiday parking rules, techniques for fighting parking tickets, and the leading body shops for bumper repair in each borough. Sy Lambert called constantly, outlining new permutations of the Murray Tepper Money Machine and impressing upon Tepper the necessity of striking while the iron was hot. The letters and phone calls and e-mails of support continued to flow in. Somebody had started a website called Tepperisntgoingout.com and was forwarding literally thousands of e-mails on to Worldwide Lists.

  When Tepper finally walked into his office, he found Howard Gordon and Arnie Sarnow waiting for him, sitting at the table that was, as usual, strewn with rate cards. “Gentlemen,” he said, as he removed his coat and hung it on a hanger on the back of his office door. “Are we having a meeting?”

  Sarnow and Gordon remained silent. They looked across the table as each waited for the other to begin speaking. Then Tepper looked more closely at Howard Gordon.

  “Howard?” Tepper said. “Do my eyes deceive me, or are you smiling?”

  Gordon shrugged, as if modestly taking in a compliment, and his grin grew wider.

  “Don’t tell me,” Tepper said. “You have finally figured out why the list of people who buy the nose-hair-clipping device is the best list for Kiplinger’s newsletter.”

  “No, that’s not it,” Gordon said, still miraculously smiling. “You tell him, Arnie.”

  “Murray,” Arnie Sarnow said, rather formally, “it gives me great pleasure to inform you that your list is the magic list.”

  “My list?” Tepper said. “What do you mean by my list?”

  “The list of people who wrote or e-mailed their support,” Arnie said. “You told me to do a Taunton test on it. Remember? Well, I did. The Taunton people were bowled over. They’d never had results like this since they started doing tests. So they did more tests. And we kept adding names, of course. You were in the middle of this law case, and Howard and I decided I shouldn’t distract you with this until I was absolutely sure. So now I’m sure. These people will buy anything. They’ll buy life insurance. They’ll buy scuba lessons. They’ll buy nonstick cookware. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they would buy Barney Mittgin’s map-pillow.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Tepper said.

  “Here’s the report,” Arnie said, picking a thick document off the scattering of rate cards on the table and leafing through it as he spoke. “It’s all here. They’ll buy genealogical charts. They’ll buy the jelly bean of the month. The Taunton people have had time to do two of their extrapolations, and the results are nearly as strong.” What the Taunton company called an extrapolation was a way of extending the numbers of a list by analyzing the people on the list according to measurements such as age and median income—measurements available from the fine dicing of census tract information—and then extending the list with people who seemed similar. If extrapolations worked, the size of the list could be tripled or quadrupled in fairly short order.

  “But I don’t understand,” Tepper said. “What’s the connection?”

  “What’s the connection between accountants and designer jeans?” Howard Gordon said. “What’s the connection between the nose-hair clipper and the newsletter? Who knows? The connection doesn’t make the difference. The percentage of return makes the difference. The percentage of return makes this list a gold mine. That’s already obvious from the calls.”

  “We’ve had calls?” Tepper asked.

  “Apparently, somebody at Taunton must have talked,” Gordon said. “I got a couple of calls late yesterday from people who said they heard we got some special magic list. More important, the first thing this morning—half an hour ago—I got a call from a lawyer who specializes in mergers and acquisitions who said he just wondered if Worldwide Lists is in play.”

  “In play?” Tepper asked.

  “In play,” Gordon said, somehow smiling even more broadly. “I told him that maybe it was in play and maybe it wasn’t in play. It depends. That answer seemed to make him happy. He said he’d talk to his principals and be back to me.”

  “His principals?”

  “His principals.”

  “And what did you say about your principals?”

  “Murray,” Howard Gordon said. “You and I own Worldwide Lists, Inc. We are our principals.”

  Gordon and Sarnow looked at Murray Tepper closely, as if waiting for a response that hadn’t yet appeared. Finally, Arnie Sarnow said, “Murray, this is it. This is the jackpot. What’s the matter?”

  “I just hadn’t thought of that list in exactly this way,” Tepper said. “These people wrote in to support me. Do you think it’s all right to rent out their names?”

  “But Murray, renting out names is what we do,” Howard Gordon said. “That’s the business we’re in. This is America. If you’ve got something you can sell and it’s legal, you sell it. We live in a . . . what do you call it?”

  “A free-market economy,” Tepper said, nodding. “I suppose you’re right. We live in a free-market economy.”

  31. Response

  EXACTLY A WEEK LATER, THE UNITED STATES CIRCUIT Court of Appeals rather brusquely dismissed the city’s appeal of Judge Bernardi’s permanent injunction against using the 1911 peace ordinance to cite Murray Tepper when he parked in a legal spot. The judges declined even to schedule a hearing on the matter. Mayor Frank Ducavelli responded to that decision by holding an impromptu press conference on the steps of City Hall—a press conference that proved difficult for City Hall reporters, since the concertina barbed wire that had begun on the lawn was now crawling up the steps, like a vine that threatened to take over, and this greatly limited space close enough to the mayor to hear what he was saying. There was some disagreement among the press, in fact, over whether Ducavelli had used the word “screwy” or “phooey” when discussing the decision, although everyone heard him say clearly that the judges of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals were “a bunch of crazies.” As soon as the press conference was over, Mayor Ducavelli had informed Victor Hessbaugh and Mike Shanahan that they were expected in an hour to discuss the legal and political implications of the decision.

  “Ok
ay, strap me in,” Shanahan said to Teresa as he entered the mayor’s outer office, passed successfully through the iris scanner, and walked toward the Body Orifice Security Scanner.

  “Listen, I’ve been thinking about it,” Teresa said. “I’m sorry I embarrassed you that time about your retainer.”

  “It’s all right,” Shanahan said. “You’re entitled. Should I just sit down in this thing?”

  “Don’t bother,” Teresa said. “He’s expecting you, and Yesboss is already in there.”

  “How do you know that I haven’t secreted in one of my body orifices a tiny penknife with which I intend to carve out the mayor’s gizzard?” Shanahan said.

  “I trust you. Also, the mayor was born without a gizzard.”

  When Shanahan entered, the mayor was pacing in front of his desk. Victor Hessbaugh sat facing him. After a few seconds, the mayor suddenly quit pacing, as if he’d run up against an idea so powerful that it had stopped him in his tracks. “Loitering!” he almost shouted at Hessbaugh. “We’ll get him for loitering. Maybe aggravated loitering.”

  “Well, I could go back over some of the nineteenth-century ordinances,” Hessbaugh said. “But I think there’s a problem with loitering. If you can arrest somebody for loitering in his own car, then it sort of follows that you can arrest somebody for loitering in his own house. I think we’d have even stronger constitutional problems using a loitering ordinance than we had with the ordinance they just kept us from using.”

  “The man’s a menace,” Ducavelli said. He had started pacing again. Shanahan, whose presence still hadn’t been acknowledged, sat down next to Hessbaugh.

  “As your legal adviser, Mayor, I have to tell you that some of the things you said about Murray Tepper on the steps this morning are probably actionable,” Hessbaugh said. “We could argue that he is now a public figure, which makes it harder for him to sue for libel, and I suppose you could claim that it was fair comment to call him an agitator. But Trotskyite?”

  “A menace,” the mayor repeated. “The man’s a menace.” He looked over at Mike Shanahan and said, “What do the numbers look like?”

  “Well, again, the long and short of it, Mayor, is that you were a lot better off attacking Ukrainians,” Shanahan said. “It’s been about two months since you first took notice of Murray Tepper—that was when you were in Phoenix and you called him a ‘leech on the body politic’—and your approval rating has fallen six points in those two months.”

  “What did I tell you!” Ducavelli said. “The man’s out to destroy me.”

  “Right now,” Shanahan continued, “your head-to-head against Carmody—who, as you know, has gone out of his way to identify himself with Tepper—gives you a lead of fifty-two to forty-eight, which is getting near the margin of error.”

  “And you think this is from Tepper?”

  “He’s a very popular man in this city. In fact, when his name is on a survey question, a lot of people actually say that they’d like to see him run for mayor himself.”

  “So how do you suggest that I handle this Tepper problem?”

  “By not calling attention to it, Mayor,” Shanahan said. “When you call attention to Murray Tepper, you just play into the hands of the Wacko. On this issue, I would counsel a sustained period of inertness.”

  The mayor went behind his desk and sat down. He seemed to be considering the possibility of accepting that advice, although it was also possible that he was simply building up steam for an explosion. “Parking is the key to urban order, and I can’t seem to get parking under control,” he finally said, in a calm voice. Shanahan had never before heard the mayor acknowledge that there was anything he couldn’t control. “I haven’t been able to figure out how to nail the Ukrainians,” the mayor went on. “And now this Tepper has been able to flout my authority with impunity.” Then the mayor fell silent.

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

  32. Packing Up

  “COME RIGHT IN, MR. FANNON,” TEPPER SAID, HOLDING open the apartment door. “It’s nice to meet you. I’ve read your column for many years.”

  “Sometimes while sitting behind the wheel of a parked car, I hope,” Ray Fannon said, extending his hand as he entered the Teppers’ apartment.

  “Oh, yes, indeed, many times while sitting behind the wheel of a parked car.”

  Tepper led Fannon into the living room, showed him to a chair, and asked him if he’d like something to drink.

  “Oh, no thanks,” Fannon said, getting his notebook out of the side pocket of his suit jacket. “I won’t take much of your time. I see you’re packing.”

  “Yes, we’re going to England for a while,” Tepper said, waving toward a couple of suitcases in the hall. “We’re hoping to find a cottage there for part of the year, now that I don’t have any more business responsibilities.”

  “Then the sale of Worldwide Lists doesn’t entail you and your partner staying on to run it for a period of time?”

  “Oh no. They’re going to give Arnie Sarnow a chance at that. I suspect it’ll work out. He’s an intelligent young man, and he’s a little more up-to-date than my partner and I are. The development of the list that the purchasers were interested in was really Arnie’s work. My partner and I decided that we were ready to retire.”

  “And no series of advice manuals? No speaking tour?”

  “No,” Tepper said. “I decided that wasn’t for me. Mr. Lambert was disappointed. He said fame was fleeting. But I told him that, as they say in England, I was glad to see the back of it. Actually, you’re the first newspaperman I’ve heard from in quite a while. There was a lot of press interest after the city’s appeal was rejected and the mayor called the appeals judges all those names. That next Sunday, when I was free to park again, there were so many people waiting for me on Houston Street that I actually did feel that I could be the cause of a disturbance. You might say I started sympathizing a little with Mr. Hessbaugh’s argument, after the fact. The police were very nice about controlling the crowd, but having so many people there, all of them knowing what was supposed to happen, made it all seem less, well, natural. So I didn’t go back.”

  “Well, the point had been made,” Fannon said. “I’m not saying that making a point was what you were trying to do, but the point had been made. You showed Il Duce that you couldn’t be bullied.”

  Tepper shrugged and said, “I suppose.”

  “And, if I might ask, where will your car be while you’re in England?”

  “Oh, I sold the car,” Tepper said.

  It took Fannon a couple of moments to register that. Finally, he said, “That must have been difficult. You’ve been driving a car around the city for a long time. You’re the only person I know of who managed to turn parking into a sort of—what shall I say?—philosophy.”

  “Well, things move on. Years ago, I didn’t think I could ever give up alternate-side parking and keep my car in a garage, but I did. Now I find I can give up my car altogether. If we’re going to be here only part of the year, it really doesn’t make sense. We can always rent a car if we want to go to the country.”

  For another ten or fifteen minutes, Fannon asked more questions—questions about the legal case, questions about where the Teppers intended to go in England, questions about the meaning of the entire episode. (“I was in a legal spot,” Tepper responded to those. “I was always in a legal spot.”) Then, putting his notebook back in his pocket, Fannon got up to go. “You know,” he said, as Tepper also stood up, “now that I’ve seen you up close I’m pretty sure I saw you near the beginning of all this. On Seventy-eighth Street. Reading the paper in a parked car.”

  “Well, Seventy-eighth Street was where I got one of my citations.”

  “No, I saw that, too. But I mean even before that. One night, as I showed people out of my house after a poker game. It’s been bothering me since all of this started. There was a man parked, reading the Post, and I think it was you.”

  Tepper shrugged. “
It’s possible,” he said. “I often parked in that neighborhood.”

  “Not just in that neighborhood, but on that particular street,” Fannon said. “And it finally dawned on me that it might not be a coincidence that Seventy-eighth Street is the street you parked on more than once and is also the home of the columnist who, if I may be so immodest as to say so, has most relentlessly used his column to make underhanded, snide, disrespectful, and maybe even unfair comments about the mayor. So I got out all the newspaper stories and made a list of every parking spot of yours mentioned. I found an interesting pattern. I mean, not a pattern that proves anything. And maybe it’s just a coincidence. But on Forty-third Street, you often parked close to the Century Club, where a lot of people who work for places like The New York Times and The New Yorker show up regularly. Russ & Daughters, on Houston Street, also attracts a certain number of media people. And then you would occasionally park way over on West Fifty-seventh, which turns out to be the block right across from CBS television news. And one of your places was Cooper Square, pretty far downtown from the other spots—a little out of your area, one would think. You did used to park some times on Cooper Square, right?”

  “That’s right,” Tepper said. “It’s No Parking, seven to seven, on the west side of the street, but I’d park at the meters on the east side.”

  “I’m sure you’re correct about that,” Fannon said. “But what is also interesting about Cooper Square is that’s where the office of The Village Voice is. What I’m getting at, Mr. Tepper, is if you put all of these spots together a certain pattern emerges. A cynical person could come to the conclusion that, given where you chose to park, if Jeffrey Green hadn’t found you, somebody else would have. In other words, that Murray Tepper may be not someone who happened to come to attention and therefore became a folk hero but someone who decided to become a folk hero and therefore came to attention. Maybe in order to cash in on his fame and finance his retirement. And maybe the discovery of the magic list made cashing in unnecessary. What would you think of that theory?”