A Little Risky and Wry

It’s 11:30 a.m. and Calvin Trillin slides into a booth at the Fog City Diner and orders scotch and water. The waitress asks what kind of scotch he would like.

“Any rotgut,” he replies, before launching into a typical self-deprecating spiel. “People switched to white wine,” he says. “I stuck with scotch. People switched to marijuana. I stuck with scotch. People switched to Perrier. I stuck with scotch. So now people can point to me sodden in the corner and say, ‘There’s a man of character.’”

Trillin, of course, is quite a character. He’s a peripatetic author, who has called the New Yorker home for 40 years, crafting wry pieces on everything from crime to food to memoir to fiction. He once said that he would want his obituary to read that he was the funniest man named Calvin.

Although he went to Yale and has lived most of his life in Manhattan, Trillin’s sensibility remains that of a Missouri-bred son of a grocer who might live in the Village but isn’t likely to be mistaken for a native. For one thing he owns a car. “If you find someone in the U.S. who is an adult and doesn’t drive,” he says, “they’re a New Yorker.”

He drains his scotch and orders a beer.

Part of Trillin’s Midwestern upbringing (see his book “Messages from My Father”) is a reluctance to waste anything, whether it’s the last spoonful of his tortilla soup or an idea. In 1985, for instance, Trillin wrote a short story for the New Yorker about a man who parks a car and sits in it for no apparent reason. Now he’s written an entire novel about that guy, the recently published “Tepper Isn’t Going Out” (Random), which he is touring to promote.

“I kept thinking one day I’d write a novel and find out what he was doing,” Trillin says. “I had a couple of false starts--and, depending on whom you listen to, a false finish. A parking novel is a pretty dubious venture.”

Murray Tepper is the retirement-age owner of a mailing list company who (like Trillin) keeps his car in a garage but regularly goes out and parks his Chevrolet Malibu on the street, loads up the meter and proceeds to read the newspaper, unmindful of the catcalls of angry drivers looking for parking. “Without looking up from his newspaper,” Trillin writes, “he would flick his fingers in the direction of the inquiring parker. It had taken some time to find precisely the right velocity of flickering--a movement that contained authority but lacked aggression.”

Trillin digs into a plate of Chinese chicken salad.

“I’d like to say I was the guy in the car,” Trillin says. “But I was one of the guys circling, [ticked]-off at that guy. You pass these guys all the time. Who is he? What is he doing?”

Naturally, in New York, Tepper becomes a celebrity. An alternative newspaper writes a story about him. People line up at the curb to seek his Delphic advice. “There’s always something,” is about as helpful as it gets. A publisher guarantees him a series of bestsellers.

The crowds bring down the wrath of authoritarian Mayor Frank Ducavelli (think Rudy Giuliani on a bad day before Sept. 11), who bans people from stepping into the street to hail a cab and orders a dress code for public parks. The celebrity parker then becomes a cause celebre.

“Could I get some jalapeno cornbread, please?” Trillin asks the waitress. “I want it bad.”

The book was in the proof stage when the terrorist attacks occurred and Trillin made some minor changes to place the story before those events. “I changed probably 100 words,” he says. “Just so people didn’t think Sept. 11 was going to come in the middle of the book.”

That triggers a rare moment of seriousness.

“I assumed that Sept. 11 had destroyed the book along with a whole lot of things more important,” Trillin says.

“But New York now is not that different from what’s in the book. An event of that magnitude becomes a clause in every story,” Trillin says. “Since no one can write anything without saying, ‘since Sept. 11,’ it may give the impression that New York has changed more than it has. I don’t find it different now.”

A more personal tragedy occurred the next day when Trillin’s wife, Alice, died after a long fight with lung cancer. Alice Trillin, a TV producer and writer, was well-known to her husband’s readers as his muse and foil in such books as “Alice, Let’s Eat.”

“I wrote this for Alice,” is the dedication in “Tepper.” “Actually, I wrote everything for Alice,” it continues.

The couple had two daughters, Abigail and Sarah, one now a children’s advocate lawyer in San Francisco, the other a social worker in Los Angeles. Trillin seems somewhat confused how his daughters developed such social consciences. Every morning at breakfast, he remembers, he used to read them the weather report and the starting salary at a big New York law firm.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that their father writes for the left-leaning magazine the Nation. (He pens perhaps the only weekly current events poem published in the country.)

“I write for the Nation,” Trillin says, “because it’s the closest magazine to my house.”

Of course, like a true son of the Midwest, Trillin insists on the right to drive his VW Passat when he leaves his house, as when he ventures uptown for a reading group that sometimes meets in the apartment of some of its members on the Upper West Side, where parking is not good. “They’re nice people,” Trillin says. “But I’ve asked them to drop out of the group or move.”

Even leaving New York offers no surcease from the pain of parking--especially when, as is often the case, Trillin is looking to park so that he can eat.

“Dim sum time in Chinatown is particularly bad,” he says of San Francisco. “So is burrito time in the Mission. Last night we found a great parking spot and I said, ‘Now the burritos will have to be really great to beat that.’”

Perhaps not surprisingly, Trillin was once co-editor of a publication called Beautiful Spot: A Magazine of Parking. The first issue was published in 1962. So was the last one.

“The second issue hasn’t come out yet,” Trillin admits. “We’ve had some production difficulties. We hope to get it out very soon.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

A New Yorker’s View of Parking in L.A.

“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 from 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.”

From “Tepper Isn’t Going Out”