Parker of the Decade
GOODMAN, WALTER
Parker of the Decade Tepper Isn't Going Out By Calvin Trillin Random. 224 pp. $22.95. Reviewed by Walter Goodman Murray Tepper, the hero of Calvin Trillin's flavorsome new novel, is...
...Exactly...
...The Mayor's polls go into a slump compared to those of his perennial rival, a country singer from Queens who is known in Hasidic neighborhoods as Der Mishugana...
...So it is with a man named Milledge who hates canned elevator music and is being driven to take desperate steps...
...Milledge shakes Tepper's hand...
...Why are you parked here today...
...If you hadn't said that, I would have looked for a whitef ish that's been sitting there since last Tishah b'Ov, an old, greasy,fershtunkene whitefish...
...Most of the New Yorkers who cross Tepper's path discern some principle in his practice, and he always has time to ask them to join him in his front seat and to listen patiently to their laments...
...So there's good reason to be here at least until I get my money's worth...
...it was inevitable that Ducavelli would crack down on what he saw as outright anarchism...
...Further elucidation is not forthcoming...
...Tepper responds mildly to provocations like "Hey, are you going out ornot, man...
...That really sets him off...
...That naturally invites other desperate parkers to intrude on his quiet privacy: "Is that where you live...
...Exactly...
...So much for his vocation...
...As the book's title proclaims, his true calling is refusing to go out...
...Well, it's a happy ending...
...Take, for example, the fish slicer at Russ & Daughters: Queens of Lake Sturgeon, a Lower East Side institution near where Tepper likes to park of a Sunday morning...
...Ducavelli gives up trying to indict Tepper for aggravated loitering...
...So G m paid up...
...But he has been known to certify that "between Lexington and Park is very convenient...
...He is a whiz at discovering marketable connections between, say, commodities traders and people who buy books of elephant jokes, or between accountants and weavers of designer jeans, or between wine snobs and backgammon players...
...A swell cast of New Yorkers has been shrewdly assembled by Trillin, who has made a career of his city's eccentrics and eccentricities, as well as its taste in edibles whether sushi or smoked fish...
...To friends and relatives who are bemused or perplexed by his solitary and pretty sedentary forays, Tepper is frank yet enigmatic...
...New Yorkers come to admire him without quite figuring him out...
...Reviewed by Walter Goodman Murray Tepper, the hero of Calvin Trillin's flavorsome new novel, is a partner in Worldwide Lists...
...Although Tepper takes care to always obey the regulations, which he knows by heart, the Mayor lumps him with the UN's Ukrainians as threats to civilization...
...Ditties are written about him: "But if you're here to write a little blurb,/ Just tell them Tepper isn't going out./ Though he alone knows what it's all about,/ Just tell them Tepper isn't going out...
...People who do such things, he announces in a typically intemperate explosion, are deeply flawed human beings, irredeemably flawed human beings, worthless, despicable...
...Even the prosecutor admits that the report of someone being hit in the eye with a pickled herring has no basis in fact whatsoever...
...Actually, Tepper puts in, "I was going to pick up some herring salad and a whitefish...
...As a columnist observes, the Mayor is to vindictiveness what the early Mets were to infield errors...
...After the East Village Rag spread the news of Tepper's success in not going out...
...Suddenly Tepper finds himself with a subpoena "for being in contravention of the city ordinance against unlicensed demonstrations or exhibitions that could, because of crowds or other effects, be a danger to the public or the public peace...
...No herrings were thrown...
...And Tepper, a victor in his mysterious and indomitable campaign, sells his car...
...The big exception to the general admiration is the city's chronically irritable Mayor...
...he asks...
...witha finely practiced finger flick, not discourteous but not negotiable...
...Is that car, like, rent-controlled...
...No, I'm not going out," says Tepper...
...Well, I'm glad you said that because I wasn't going to get you a nice whitef ish...
...Ducavelli assigns the job of prosecution to the city's attorney, Victor Hessbaugh (a k a Yesboss...
...Asked what he is doing parked on Houston Street, he replies mildly, "I was reading the paper...
...What makes you think he isn't in the market for some pickled herring...
...Because it's a legal spot," replies Tepper, "as long as you put a quarter in the meter...
...Exactly...
...Then he adds that he read somewhere the aggregate value of unoccupied time left on meters by New Yorkers is the equivalent of the gross national product of 38 different countries, but that doesn't leave Linda any wiser...
...And do you intend to leave...
...He also discovers that the people who admire him will buy anything on any list...
...An order-obsessed control freak named Frank Ducavelli, he blockades himself behind concrete, barbed wire and Plexiglas, and is convinced that double parking and hailing taxis in midblock are at the root of urban disorder...
...Tepper explains, if explanation it is, "Well, now I've got a dollar and a half invested in this spot...
...He confesses that for her, even after all these years, if she wanted to go somewhere and he had a spot that was good for an entire week because it was one of those years when the Solemnity of the Ascension and Memorial Day and Shavuot all felljustright, he would move his car...
...This is an entirely different situation...
...Tepper is unfailingly sympathetic if not particularly helpful...
...You go from the office to the garage that you pay for by the month, you get your car out and you park it where you have no particular reason to be...
...cries Milledge...
...Anyway the people he encounters are a pleasure in themselves...
...Using his infallible knowledge of New York City's parking regulations, he can be found most evenings sitting in his Chevy Malibu in a legal space, reading the New York Post...
...Although readers are likely to be unsatisfied with Tepper's bland literalism ("I put a quarter in the meter...
...To many he is an inspiration...
...The slicer delivers a soliloquy on his exasperation with customers who can be depended on time and again to order "a nice whitef ish...
...He wants to put homeless shelters in their neighborhoods...
...As perfected by Tepper, the gesture contains authority yet lacks aggression...
...He is named Parker of the Decade...
...Tepper winds up as the cover boy on Beautiful Spot: A Magazine of Parking, and the subject of a website called Tepperisn'tgoingout.com...
...It is only a matter of time and tabloid journalism before Tepper is discovered and celebrated and New Yorkers of all stations are waiting in line to talk to him...
...The only exception to the Tepper rule is made in behalf of his wife of 35 years...
...Hastening to Tepper's defense is a big literary agent who promises Tepper a quick fortune, and a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who demands, with references to the Magna Carta, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution of the United States, the European Charter of Human Rights, and Rosa Parks: "What makes you think my client is here to contravene the order against unlicensed demonstrations or exhibitions...
...Nor is she enlightened by his report that the parking he did in his younger years was alternate-side parking: "This is meters...
...His daughter Linda pulls up alongside him in her Volvo and says: "Let me get this straight...
...His standard answer to complaints about bosses, customers and so forth is, "There is always something...
Vol. 84 • November 2001 • No. 6
