Tamara Shopsin, author of Arbitrary Stupid Goal.
Their business, Shopsin’s, or for those in the know, “The Store,” was housed for roughly three decades in a storefront on the corner of Bedford and Morton. In 2002, forced out by rapidly rising rents, Shopsin’s moved a couple blocks over to Carmine Street; then, a few years later, the restaurant moved again to its current home in Essex Market on the Lower East Side. Eve passed away in the mid-aughts. Kenny, The Store’s burly, famously bellicose chef, still mans the kitchen with his son Zack.
“Whatever the opposite of helicopter parents, that’s what my parents were,” Shopsin remarks. Her childhood was refreshingly free-range; the Shopsin kids soaked up the magic of The Store—the only rule was don’t touch the meat slicer—bounced around the neighborhood, and consorted with its many characters. “Things the rest of the country found odd or disgraceful were welcomed with open arms in the Village,” she writes. “It became a symphony of oddities, and acted as a magnet for the country’s fringe people.” One of the main subjects of this book—in some ways its reason for being—is the Ur-fringe person: a local building superintendent/musician/golden-hearted con man named Willoughby who became something of a mentor to Shopsin’s father, and something of a grandfather to the author. Born in St. Louis, Willy belonged to White’s third New York; “He was,” Shopsin writes, “the reason Morton street felt safe and warm.” She chronicles his exploits (many of them sexual), his decline, and his eventual, somewhat mysterious, demise in the book.
Shopsin’s in its original location on Morton street.
Now in her mid-thirties, Shopsin is small and childlike in the way she presents herself. She has a helmet of short dark hair, streaked with the occasional strand of gray, and she’s wearing a flouncy skirt, saddle shoes, and a red Nike T-shirt printed with a repeat of tiny sneakers. She’s eating an English muffin and drinking an orange juice. “This orange juice is really good,” she says. It’s a throwback order: In the book she describes coming to Waverly Restaurant for fresh-squeezed orange juice as a kid in the 1980s on “walk nights,” solo expeditions that each Shopsin sibling would take with their dad. These were an opportunity for one-on-one time, and also occasion for Kenny to impart his somewhat nihilistic philosophies. The book’s title refers to one such theory, which he described for the camera in the 2005 documentary I Like Killing Flies: “The way that I choose to function is to pick an arbitrary stupid goal, become totally involved with it, and pursue it with vigor,” Kenny explained. “And what happens to you in that pursuit is your life.” The goal might be stupid, in other words, but pursuing it is not. It’s how you inject meaning into an otherwise meaningless existence.
The chaos is actually quite clever. One reviewer called the book a “patchwork quilt.” At a launch party earlier this week, a bookseller referred to it as a “mosaic.” I think of it, rather, as a crossword puzzle: Each section another clue to the broader theme of the Arbitrary Stupid Goal.
Crossword puzzles are integral to the origin story of Arbitrary Stupid Goal, which Shopsin discusses only after I repeatedly ask (it’s part of a family-wide allergy to PR; for more on that read Calvin Trillin’s iconic New Yorker piece about The Store). Back to E.B. White: In 2012, Shopsin and Fulford moved to San Francisco so that Shopsin could accept a fellowship with Code for America. (“I’m very computer-y and technical.”) It was also an experiment in whether they could make their life on the West Coast.
Shopsin and Fulford eventually left San Francisco. “There’s things I love about it,” she says, “but it’s too small and it’s not New York.” They now live in a small apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Shopsin both loves her new neighborhood—“the park is totally goose bumps–inducing magic”—and wishes she could live closer to The Store, where she still works the brunch shift most weekends. She gets in and out of the city on an electric bike, and steers well clear of the triangle around Morton Street. Getting too close clearly pains her.
Across the street, the New York Studio School, housed in the original Whitney Museum of Art building, beckons, but we’re told we can’t take a tour without finding eight more people to join us. Shopsin surprises me by saying she’s a fan of the new Whitney. “I think I was like, this is such a bad idea, and then in actuality, I was like: Nice work, Whitney! I was wrong and you were right.” We hang a right down Fifth Avenue and enter Washington Square Park. “The fountain was never working,” she tells me. “And there were always street performers in there, like the most amazing jugglers, comedy performances. They can’t be as good as I’m remembering, because they would have been superstars.” We wander over to what Shopsin calls “the humps,” a playground swarming with kids, built on top of undulating mounds in the southwest corner of the square. Now the mounds are carpeted in astroturf. In her childhood, Shopsin remembers, they were asphalt, and surrounded by what she calls "pirate-ship birds’ nest towers”—platforms about three stories high that you could climb. “I can’t believe nobody every plummeted."
“New York is?” asked Fulford. Shopsin, embarrassed, dropped her shaggy head into her hands and shook it. Then she popped back up, and quietly finished the sentence.