Motherless Brooklyn

MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

I grew up in the library of St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, in the part of downtown Brooklyn no developer yet wishes to claim for some upscale, renovated neighborhood; not quite Brooklyn Heights, nor Cobble Hill, not even Boerum Hill. The Home is essentially set on the off-ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge, but out of sight of Manhattan or the bridge itself, on eight lanes of traffic lined with faceless, monolithic civil courts, which, gray and distant though they seemed, some of us Boys had seen the insides of, by Brooklyn’s central sorting annex for the post office, a building that hummed and blinked all through the night, its gates groaning open to admit trucks bearing mountains of those mysterious items called letters, by the Burton Trade School for Automechanics, where hardened students attempting to set their lives dully straight spilled out twice a day for sandwich-and-beer breaks, overwhelming the cramped bodega next door, intimidating passersby and thrilling us Boys in their morose thuggish glory, by a desolate strip of park benches beneath a granite bust of Lafayette, indicating his point of entry into the Battle of Brooklyn, by a car lot surrounded by a high fence topped with wide curls of barbed wire and wind-whipped fluorescent flags, and by a redbrick Quaker Meetinghouse that had presumably been there when the rest was farmland. In short, this jumble of stuff at the clotted entrance to the ancient, battered borough was officially Nowhere, a place strenuously ignored in passing through to Somewhere Else. Until rescued by Frank Minna I lived, as I said, in the library.

I set out to read every book in that tomblike library, every miserable dead donation ever indexed and forgotten there-a mark of my profound fear and boredom at St. Vincent’s and as well an early sign of my Tourettic compulsions for counting, processing, and inspection. Huddled there in the windowsill, turning dry pages and watching dust motes pinball through beams of sunlight, I sought signs of my odd dawning self in Theodore Dreiser, Kenneth Roberts, J. B. Priestley, and back issues of PopulMechanics and failed, couldn’t find the language of myself, as I failed to in watching television, those endless reruns of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie and I Love Lucy and Gilligan and Brady Bunch by which we nerdish unathletic Boys pounded our way through countless afternoons, leaning in close to the screen to study the antics of the women-women! exotic as letters, as phone calls, as forests, all things we orphans were denied-and the coping of their husbands, but I didn’t find myself there, Desi Arnaz and Dick York and Larry Hagman, those harried earthbound astronauts, weren’t showing me what I needed to see, weren’t helping me find the language. I was closer on Saturday mornings, Daffy Duck especially gave me something, if I could bear to imagine growing up a dynamited, beak-shattered duck. Art Carney on The Honeymooners gave me something too, something in the way he jerked his neck, when we were allowed to stay up late enough to see him. But it was Minna who brought me the language, Minna and Court Street that let me speak.

We four were selected that day because we were four of the five white boys at St. Vincent’s, and the fifth was Steven Grossman, fat as his name. If Steven had been thinner, Mr. Kassel would have left me in the stacks. As it was I was undersold goods, a twitcher and nose-picker retrieved from the library instead of the schoolyard, probably a retard of some type, certainly a regrettable, inferior offering. Mr. Kassel was a teacher at St. Vincent’s who knew Frank Minna from the neighborhood, and his invitation to Minna to borrow us for the afternoon was a first glimpse of the glittering halo of favors and favoritism that extended around Minna-“knowing somebody” as a life condition. Minna was our exact reverse, we who knew no one and benefited nothing from it when we did.

Minna had asked for white boys to suit his clients’ presumed prejudice-and his own certain ones. Perhaps Minna already had his fantasy of reclamation in mind, too. I can’t know. He certainly didn’t show it in the way he treated us that first day, a sweltering August weekday afternoon after classes, streets like black chewing gum, slow-creeping cars like badly projected science-class slides in the haze, as he opened the rear of his dented, graffitied van, about the size of those midnight mail trucks, and told us to get inside, then slammed and padlocked the doors without explanation, without asking our names. We four gaped at one another, giddy and astonished at this escape from our doldrums, not knowing what it meant, not really needing to know. The others, Tony, Gilbert and Danny, were willing to be grouped with me, to pretend I fit with them, if that was what it took to be plucked up by the outside world and seated in the dark on a dirty steel truck bed vibrating its way to somewhere that wasn’t St. Vincent’s. Of course I was vibrating too, vibrating before Minna rounded us up, vibrating inside always and straining to keep it from showing. I didn’t kiss the other three boys, but I wanted to. Instead I made a kissing, chirping sound, like a bird’s peep, over and over: “Chrip, chrip, chrip.”

Tony told me to shut the fuck up, but his heart wasn’t in it, not this day, in the midst of life’s unfolding mystery. For Tony, especially, this was his destiny coming to find him. He saw more in Minna from the first because he’d prepared himself to see it. Tony Vermonte was famous at St. Vincent’s for the confidnce he exuded, confidence that a mistake had been made, that he didn’t belong in the Home. He was Italian, better than the rest of us, who didn’t know what we were (what’s an Essrog?). His father was either a mobster or a cop-Tony saw no contradiction in this, so we didn’t either. The Italians would return for him, in one guise or another, and that was what he’d taken Minna for.

Tony was famous for other things as well. He was older than the rest of us there in Minna’s truck, fifteen to my and Gilbert’s thirteen and Danny Fantl’s fourteen (older St. Vincent’s Boys attended high school elsewhere, and were rarely seen, but Tony had contrived to be left back), an age that made him infinitely dashing and worldly, even if he hadn’t also lived outside the Home for a time and then come back. As it was, Tony was our God of Experience, all cigarettes and implication. Two years before, a Quaker family, attendees of the Meeting across the street, had taken Tony in, intending to give him a permanent home. He’d announced his contempt for them even as he packed his clothes. They weren’t Italian. Still, he lived with them for a few months, perhaps happily, though he wouldn’t have said so. They installed him at Brooklyn Friends, a private school only a few blocks away, and on his way home most afternoons he’d come and hang on the St. Vincent’s fence and tell stories of the private-school girls he’d felt up and sometimes penetrated, the faggy private-school boys who swam and played soccer but were easily humiliated at basketball, not otherwise Tony’s specialty. Then one day his foster parents found prodigious black-haired Tony in bed with one girl too many: their own sixteen-year-old daughter. Or so the story went; there was only one source. Anyway, he was reinstalled at St. Vincent’s the next day, where he fell easily into his old routine of beating up and befriending me and Steven Grossman each on alternating days, so that we were never in favor simultaneously and could trust one another as little as we trusted Tony.

Tony was our Sneering Star, and certainly the one of us who caught Minna’s attention soonest, the one that fired our future boss’s imagination, made him envision the future Minna Men inside us, aching to be cultivated. Perhaps Tony, with his will for his Italian rescue, even collaborated in the vision that became The Minna Agency, the strength of his yearning prompting Minna to certain aspirations, to the notion of having Men to command in the first place.

Minna was barely a man then himself, of course, though he seemed one to us. He was twenty-five that summer, gangly except for a tiny potbelly in his pocket-T, and still devoted to combing his hair into a smooth pompadour, a Carroll Gardens hairstyle that stood completely outside that year of 1979, projecting instead from some miasmic Frank Sinatra moment that extended like a bead of amber or a cinematographer’s filter to enclose Frank Minna and everything that mattered to him.

Besides me and Tony in the back of Minna’s van there was Gilbert Coney and Danny Fantl. Gilbert then was Tony’s right hand, a stocky, sullen boy just passing for tough-he would have beamed at you for calling him a thug. Gilbert was awfully tough on Steven Grossman, whose fatness, I suspect, provided an uncomfortable mirror, but he was tolerant of me. We even had a couple of odd secrets. On a Home for Boys visit to the Museum of Natural History in Manhatt, two years before, Gilbert and I had split from the group and without discussion returned to a room dominated by a enormous plastic blue whale suspended from the ceiling, which had been the focus of the official visit. But underneath the whale was a double gallery of murky, mysterious dioramas of undersea life, lit and arranged so you had to press close to the glass to find the wonders tucked deep in the corners. In one a sperm whale fought a giant squid. In another a killer whale pierced a floor of ice. Gilbert and I wandered hypnotized from window to window. When a class of third- or fourth-graders were led away we found we had the giant hall to ourselves, and that even when we spoke our voices were smothered by the unearthly quiet of the museum. Gilbert showed me his discovery: A munchkin-size brass door beside the penguin diorama had been left unlocked. When he opened it we saw that it led both behind and into the penguin scene.

“Get in, Essrog,” said Gilbert.

If I’d not wanted to it would have been bullying, but I wanted to desperately. Every minute the hall remained empty was precious. The lip of the doorway was knee-high. I clambered in and opened the flap in the ocean-blue-painted boards that made the side wall of the diorama, then slipped into the picture. The ocean floor was a long, smooth bowl of painted plaster, and I scooted down the grade on my bended knees, looking out at a flabbergasted Gilbert on the other side of the glass. Swimming penguins were mounted on rods extending straight from the far wall, and others were suspended in the plastic waves of ocean surface that now made up a low ceiling over my head. I caressed the nearest penguin, one mounted low, shown diving in pursuit of a delectable fish, patted its head, stroked its gullet as though helping it swallow a dry pill. Gilbert guffawed, thinking I was performing comedy for him, when in fact I’d been overwhelmed by a tender, touchy impulse toward the stiff, poignant penguin. Now it became imperative that I touch all the penguins, all I could, anyway-some were inaccessible to me, on the other side of the barrier of the ocean’s surface, standing on ice floes. Shuffling on my knees I made the rounds, affectionately tagging each swimming bird before I made my escape back through the brass door. Gilbert was impressed, I could tell. I was now a kid who’d do anything, do crazy things. He was right and wrong, of course-once I’d touched the first penguin I had no choice.

Somehow this led to a series of confidences. I was crazy but also malleable, easily intimidated, which made me Gilbert’s idea of a safe repository for what he regarded as his crazy feelings. Gilbert was a precocious masturbator, and looking for some triangulation between his own experiments and generic schoolyard lore. Did I do it? How often? One hand or two, held this way, or this? Close my eyes? Ever want to rub up against the mattress? I took his inquiries seriously, but I didn’t really have the information he needed, not yet. My stupidity made Gilbert grouchy at first, and so he’d spend a week or two both pretending he hadn’t spoken, didn’t even know me, and glowering to let me know what galactic measures of pain awaited if I ratted him out. Then he’d suddenly come back, more urgent than ever. Try it, he’d say. It’s not so hard. I’ll watch and tell you if you do it wrong. I obeyed, as I had in the museum, but the results weren’t as good. I couldn’t yet treat myself with the tenderness I’d lavished on the penguins, at least not in front of Gilbert (though in fact he’d triggered my own private explorations, which were soon quite consuming). Gilbert became grouchy again, and prohibitively intimidating, and ater two or three go-arounds the subject was permanently dropped. Still, the legacy of disclosure remained with us, a ghostly bond.

The last boy in Minna’s van, Danny Fantl, was a ringer. He only looked white. Danny had assimilated to the majority population at St. Vincent’s happily, effortlessly, down to his bones. In his way he commanded as much respect as Tony (and he certainly commanded Tony’s respect, too) without bragging or posing, often without opening his mouth. His real language was basketball, and he was such a taut, fluid athlete that he couldn’t help seeming a bit bottled up indoors, in the classroom. When he spoke it was to scoff at our enthusiasms, our displays of uncool, but distantly, as if his mind were really elsewhere plotting crossover moves, footwork. He listened to Funkadelic and Cameo and Zapp and was as quick to embrace rap as any boy at the Home, yet when music he admired actually played, instead of dancing he’d stand with arms crossed, scowling and pouting in time with the beat, his expressive hips frozen. Danny existed in suspension, neither black nor white, neither beating up nor beaten, beautiful but unfazed by the concept of girls, rotten at schoolwork but coasting through classes, and frequently unanchored by gravity, floating between pavement and the tangled chain-mesh of the St. Vincent’s basketball hoops. Tony was tormented by his lost Italian family, adamant they would return; Danny might have coolly walked out on his parents one day when he was seven or eight and joined a pickup game that lasted until he was fourteen, to the day Minna drove up in his truck.

Tourette’s teaches you what people will ignore and forget, teaches you to see the reality-knitting mechanism people employ to tuck away the intolerable, the incongruous, the disruptive-it teaches you this because you’re the one lobbing the intolerable, incongruous, and disruptive their way. Once I sat on an Atlantic Avenue bus a few rows ahead of a man with a belching tic-long, groaning, almost vomitous-sounding noises, the kind a fifth-grader learns to make, swallowing a bellyful of air, then forgets by high school, when charming girls becomes more vital than freaking them out. My colleague’s compulsion was terribly specific: He sat at the back of the bus, and only when every head faced forward did he give out with his masterly digestive simulacra. We’d turn, shocked-there were fifteen or twenty others on the bus-and he’d look away. Then, every sixth or seventh time, he’d mix in a messy farting sound. He was a miserable-looking black man in his sixties, a drinker, an idler. Despite the peekaboo brilliance of his timing it was clear to everyone he was the source, and so the other riders hummed or coughed reprovingly, quit giving him the satisfaction of looking, and avoided one another’s gaze. This was a loser’s game, since not glancing back freed him to run together great uninterrupted phrases of his ripest noise. To all but me he was surely a childish jerk-off, a pathetic wino fishing for attention (maybe he understood himself this way, too-if he was undiagnosed, probably so). But it was unmistakably a compulsion, a tic-Tourette’s. And it went on and on, until I’d reached my stop and, I’m sure, after.

The point is, I knew that those other passengers would barely recall it a few minutes after stepping off to their destinations. Despite how that maniacal froglike groaning filled the auditorium of the bus, the concertgoers were plainly engaged in the task of forgettig the music. Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble. The belching man ruptured it so quickly and completely that I could watch the wound instantly seal.

A Touretter can also be The Invisible Man.

Similarly, I doubt the other Boys, even the three who joined me in becoming Minna Men, directly recalled my bouts of kissing. I probably could have forced them to remember, but it would have been grudgingly. That tic was too much for us to encompass then, at St. Vincent’s, as it would be now, anytime, anywhere. Besides, as my Tourette’s bloomed I quickly layered the kissing behind hundreds of other behaviors, some of which, seen through the prism of Minna’s rough endearments, became my trademarks, my Freakshow. So the kissing was gratefully forgotten.

By the time I was twelve, nine months or so after touching the penguins, I had begun to overflow with reaching, tapping, grabbing and kissing urges-those compulsions emerged first, while language for me was still trapped like a roiling ocean under a calm floe of ice, the way I’d been trapped in the underwater half of the penguin display, mute, beneath glass. I’d begun reaching for doorframes, kneeling to grab at skittering loosened sneaker laces (a recent fashion among the toughest boys at St. Vincent’s, unfortunately for me), incessantly tapping the metal-pipe legs of the schoolroom desks and chairs in search of certain ringing tones, and worst, grabbing and kissing my fellow Boys. I grew terrified of myself then, and burrowed deeper into the library, but was forced out for classes or meals or bedtime. Then it would happen. I’d lunge at someone, surround him with my arms, and kiss his cheek or neck or forehead, whatever I hit. Then, compulsion expelled, I’d be left to explain, defend myself, or flee. I kissed Greg Toon and Edwin Torres, whose eyes I’d never dared meet. I kissed Leshawn Montrose, who’d broken Mr. Voccaro’s arm with a chair. I kissed Tony Vermonte and Gilbert Coney and tried to kiss Danny Fantl. I kissed Steven Grossman, pathetically thankful he’d come along just then. I kissed my own counterparts, other sad invisible Boys working the margins at St. Vincent’s, just surviving, whose names I didn’t know. “It’s a game!” I’d say, pleadingly. “It’s a game.” That was my only defense, and since the most inexplicable things in our lives were games, with their ancient embedded rituals-British Bulldog, Ringolevio, Scully and Jinx-a mythos handed down to us orphans who-knew-how, it seemed possible I might persuade them this was another one, The Kissing Game. Just as important, I might persuade myself-wasn’t it something in a book I’d read, a game for fevered teenagers, perhaps Sadie Hawkins Day? Forget the absence of girls, didn’t we Boys deserve the same? That was it, then, I decided-I was single-handedly dragging the underprivileged into adolescence. I knew something they didn’t. “It’s a game,” I’d say desperately, sometimes as tears of pain ran down my face. “It’s a game.” Leshawn Montrose cracked my head against a porcelain water fountain, Greg Toon and Edwin Torres generously only shucked me off onto the floor. Tony Vermonte twisted my arm behind my back and forced me against a wall. “It’s a game,” I breathed. He released me and shook his head, full of pity. The result, oddly enough, was I was spared a few months’ worth of beatings at his hands-I was too pathetic and faggy to touch, might be better avoided. Danny Fantlher my move coming and faked me out as though I were a lead-footed defender, then vanished down a stairwell. Gilbert stood and glared, deeply unnerved due to our private history. “A game,” I reassured him. “It’s a game,” I told poor Steven Grossman and he believed me, just long enough to try kissing our mutual tormentor Tony, perhaps hoping it was a key to overturning the current order. He was not spared.

Meantime, beneath that frozen shell a sea of language was reaching full boil. It became harder and harder not to notice that when a television pitchman said to last the rest of a lifetime my brain went to rest the lust of a loaftomb, that when I heard “Alfred Hitchcock,” I silently replied “Altered Houseclock” or “Ilford Hotchkiss,” that when I sat reading Booth Tarkington in the library now my throat and jaw worked behind my clenched lips, desperately fitting the syllables of the prose to the rhythms of “Rapper’s Delight” (which was then playing every fifteen or twenty minutes out on the yard), that an invisible companion named Billy or Bailey was begging for insults I found it harder and harder to withhold.

The kissing cycle was mercifully brief. I found other outlets, other obsessions. The pale thirteen-year-old that Mr. Kassel pulled out of the library and offered to Minna was prone to floor-tapping, whistling, tongue-clicking, winking, rapid head turns, and wall-stroking, anything but the direct utterances for which my particular Tourette’s brain most yearned. Language bubbled inside me now, the frozen sea melting, but it felt too dangerous to let out. Speech was intention, and I couldn’t let anyone else or myself know how intentional my craziness felt. Pratfalls, antics-those were accidental lunacy, and more or less forgivable. Practically speaking, it was one thing to stroke Leshawn Montrose’s arm, or even to kiss him, another entirely to walk up and call him Shefawn Mongoose, or Lefthand Moonprose, or Fuckyou Roseprawn. So, though I collected words, treasured them like a drooling sadistic captor, bending them, melting them down, filing off their edges, stacking them into teetering piles, before release I translated them into physical performance, manic choreography.

And I was lying low, I thought. For every tic issued I squelched dozens, or so it felt-my body was an overwound watchspring, effortlessly driving one set of hands double-time while feeling it could as easily animate an entire mansion of stopped clocks, or a vast factory mechanism, a production line like the one in Modern Times, which we watched that year in the basement of the Brooklyn Public Library on Fourth Avenue, a version accompanied by a pedantic voice-over lecturing us on Chaplin’s genius. I took Chaplin, and Buster Keaton, whose The General had been similarly mutilated, as models: Obviously blazing with aggression, disruptive energies barely contained, they’d managed to keep their traps shut, and so had endlessly skirted danger and been regarded as cute. I needn’t exactly strain to find a motto: silence, golden, get it? Got it. Hone your timing instead, burnish those physical routines, your idiot wall-stroking, face-making, lace-chasing, until they’re funny in a flickering black-and-white way, until your enemies don policeman’s or Confederate caps and begin tripping over themselves, until doe-eyed women swoon. So I kept my tongue wound in my teeth, ignored the pulsing in my cheek, the throbbing in my gullet, persistently swallowed language bac like vomit. It burned as hotly.

We rode a mile or two before Minna’s van halted, engine guttering to a stop. Then a few minutes passed before he let us out of the back, and we found ourselves in a gated warehouse yard under the shadow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, in a ruined industrial zone. Red Hook, I knew later. He led us to a large truck, a detached twelve-wheel trailer with no cab in evidence, then rolled up the back to reveal a load of identical sealed cardboard crates, a hundred, two hundred, maybe more. A thrill went through me: I’d secretly count them.

“Couple you boys get up inside,” said Minna distractedly. Tony and Danny had the guile to leap immediately into the truck, where they could work shaded from the sun. “You’re just gonna run this stuff inside, that’s all. Hand shit off, move it up to the front of the truck, get it in. Straight shot, you got it?” He pointed to the warehouse. We all nodded, and I peeped. It went unnoticed.

Minna opened the big panel doors of the warehouse and showed us where to set the crates. We started quickly, then wilted in the heat. Tony and Danny massed the crates at the lip of the truck while Gilbert and I made the first dozen runs, then the older boys conceded their advantage and began to help us drag them across the blazing yard. Minna never touched a crate; he spent the whole time in the office of the warehouse, a cluttered room full of desks, file cabinets, tacked-up notes and pornographic calendars and a stacked tower of orange traffic cones, visible to us through an interior window, smoking cigarettes and jawing on the telephone, apparently not listening for replies-every time I glanced through the window his mouth was moving. The door was closed, and he was inaudible behind the glass. At some point another man appeared, from where I wasn’t sure, and stood in the yard wiping his forehead as though he were the one laboring. Minna came out, the two stepped inside the office, the other man disappeared. We moved the last of the crates inside. Minna rolled down the gate of the truck and locked the warehouse, pointed us back to his van, but paused before shutting us into the back.

“Hot day, huh?” he said, looking at us directly for what might have been the first time.

Bathed in sweat, we nodded, afraid to speak.

“You monkeys thirsty? Because personally I’m dying out here.”

Minna drove us to Smith Street, a few blocks from St. Vincent’s, and pulled over in front of a bodega, then bought us beer, pop-top cans of Miller, and sat with us in the back of the van, drinking. It was my first beer.

“Names,” said Minna, pointing at Tony, our obvious leader. We said our first names, starting with Tony. Minna didn’t offer his own, only drained his beer and nodded. I began tapping the truck panel beside me.

Physical exertion over, astonishment at our deliverance from St. Vincent’s receding, my symptoms found their opening again.

“You probably ought to know, Lionel’s a freak,” said Tony, his voice vibrant with self-regard.

“Yeah, well, you’reall freaks, if you don’t mind me pointing it out,” said Minna. “No parents-or am I mixed up?”

Silence.

“Finish your beer,” said Minna, tossing his can past us, into the back of the van.

And that was the end of our first job for Frank Minna.

But Minna rounded us up again the next week, brought us to that same desolate yard, and this time he was friendlier. The task was identical, almost to the number of boxes (242 to 260), and we performed it in the same trepidatious silence. I felt a violent hatred burning off Tony in my and Gilbert’s direction, as though he thought we were in the process of screwing up his Italian rescue. Danny was of course exempt and oblivious. Still, we’d begun to function as a team-demanding physical work contained its own truths, and we explored them despite ourselves.

Over beers Minna said, “You like this work?”

One of us said sure.

“You know what you’re doing?” Minna grinned at us, waiting. The question was confusing. “You know what kind of work this is?”

“What, moving boxes?” said Tony.

“Right, moving. Moving work. That’s what you call it when you work for me. Here, look.” He stood to get into his pocket, pulled out a roll of twenties and a small stack of white cards. He stared at the roll for a minute, then peeled off four twenties and handed one to each of us. It was my first twenty dollars. Then he offered us each a card. It read: L &L MOVERS. NO JOB TOO SMALL. SOME JOBS TOO LARGE. GERARD & FRANK MINNA. And a phone number.

“You’re Gerard or Frank?” said Tony.

“Minna, Frank.” Like Bond, James. He ran his hand through his hair. “So you’re a moving company, get it? Doing moving work.” This seemed a very important point: that we call it moving. I couldn’t imagine what else to call it.

“Who’s Gerard?” said Tony. Gilbert and I, even Danny, watched Minna carefully. Tony was questioning him on behalf of us all.

“My brother.”

“Older or younger?”

“Older.”

Tony thought for a minute. “Who’s L and L?”

“Just the name, L and L. Two L’s. Name of the company.”

“Yeah, but what’s it mean?”

“What do you need it to mean, Fruitloop-Living Loud? Loving Ladies? Laughing at you ers?”

“What, it doesn’t mean anything?” said Tony.

“I didn’t say that, did I?”

“Least Lonely,” I suggested.

“There you go,” said Minna, waving his can of beer at me. “L and L Movers, Least Lonely.”

Tony, Danny and Gilbert all stared at me, uncertain how I’d gained this freshet of approval.

“Liking Lionel,” I heard myself say.

“Minna, that’s an Italian name?” said Tony. This was on his own behalf, obviously. It was time to get to the point. The rest of us could all go fuck ourselves.

“What are you, the census?” said Minna. “Cub reporter? What’s your full name, Jimmy Olsen?”

“Lois Lane,” I said. Like anyone, I’d read Superman comics.

“Tony Vermonte,” said Tony, ignoring me.

“Vermont-ee,” repeated Minna. “That’s what, like a New England thing, right? You a Red Sox fan?”

“Yankees,” said Tony, confused and defensive. The Yankees were champions now, the Red Sox their hapless, eternal victims, vanquished most recently by Bucky Dent’s famous home run. We’d all watched it on television.

“Luckylent,” I said, remembering. “Duckybent.”

Minna erupted with laughter. “Yeah, Ducky fucking Bent! That’s good. Don’t look now, it’s Ducky Bent.”

“Lexluthor,” I said, reaching out to touch Minna’s shoulder. He only stared at my hand, didn’t move away. “Lunchylooper, Laughyluck, Loopylip-”

“All right, Loopy,” said Minna. “Enough already.”

“Lockystuff-” I was desperate for a way to stop. My hand went on tapping Minna’s shoulder.

“Let it go,” said Minna, and now he returned my shoulder taps, once, hard. “Don’t tug the boat.”

To tugboat was to try Minna’s patience. Any time you pushed your luck, said too much, overstayed a welcome, or overestimated the usefulness of a given method or approach, you were guilty of having tugged the boat. Tugboating was most of all a dysfunction of wits and storytellers, and a universal one: Anybody who thought himself funny would likely tug a boat here or there. Knowing when a joke or verbal gambit was right at its limit, quitting before the boat had been tugged, that was art (and it was a given that you wanted to push it as near as possible-mising an opportunity to score a laugh was deeply lame, an act undeserving of a special name).

Years before the word Tourette’s was familiar to any of us, Minna had me diagnosed: Terminal Tugboater.

Distributing eighty dollars and those four business cards was all Minna had to do to instate the four of us forever-or anyway, for as long as he liked-as the junior staff of L &L Movers. Twenty dollars and a beer remained our usual pay. Minna would gather us sporadically, on a day’s notice or no notice at all-and the latter possibility became incentive, once we’d begun high school, for us to return to St. Vincent’s directly after classes and lounge expectantly in the schoolyard or recreation room, pretending not to listen for the distinctive grumble of his van’s motor. The jobs varied enormously. We’d load merchandise, like the cartons in the trailer, in and out of storefront-basement grates all up and down Court Street, borderline shady activity that it seemed wholesalers ought to be handling themselves, transactions sealed with a shared cigar in the back of the shop. Or we’d bustle apartmentloads of furniture in and out of brownstone walk-ups, legitimate moving jobs, it seemed to me, where fretting couples worried we weren’t old or expert enough to handle their belongings-Minna would hush them, remind them of the cost of distractions: “The meter’s running.” (This hourly rate wasn’t reflected in our pay, of course. It was twenty dollars whether we hurried or not; we hurried.) We put sofas through third-story windows with a makeshift cinch and pulley, Tony and Minna on the roof, Gilbert and Danny in the window to receive, myself on the ground with the guide ropes. A massive factory building under the Brooklyn end of the Manhattan Bridge, owned by an important but unseen friend of Minna’s, had been damaged in fire, and we moved most of the inhabitants for free, as some sort of settlement or concession-the terms were obscure, but Minna was terrifically urgent about it. When a couple of college-age artists objected to our rough handling of a pile of damaged canvases the firemen had heaped on the floor, he paced and seethed at the delay; the only meter running now was Minna’s own time, and his credibility with his friend-client. We woke at five one August morning to collect and set up the temporary wooden stages for the bands performing in the Atlantic Antic, a massive annual street fair, then worked again at dusk to tear the stages down, the hot avenue now heaped with a day’s torn wrappers and crumpled cups, a few fevered revelers still staggering home as we knocked the pine frames apart with hammers and the heels of our shoes. Once we emptied an entire electronics showroom into Minna’s truck, pulling unboxed stereos off shelves and out of window displays, disconnecting the wires from lit, blinking amplifiers, eventually even taking the phone off the desk-it would have seemed a sort of brazen burglary had Minna not been standing on the sidewalk in front, drinking beer and telling jokes with the man who’d unpadlocked the shop gates for us as we filed past with the goods. Everywhere Minna connived and cajoled and dropped names, winking at us to make us complicit, and everywhere Minna’s clients stared at us Boys, some wondering if we’d palm a valuable when they weren’t looking, some trying to figure the angle, perhaps hoping to catch a hint of disloyalty, an edge over Minna they’d save for when they needed it. We palmed nothing, revealed no disloyalty. Instead we stared back, tried to make them flinch. And we listened, gathered information. Minna was teaching us when he meant to, and we didn’t.

It changed us as a group. We developed a certain collective ego, a presence apart at the Home. We grew less embattled from within, more from without: nonwhite Boys sensed in our privilege a hint of their future deprivations and punished us for it. Age had begun to heighten those distinctions anyway. So Tony, Gilbert, Danny and myself smoothed out our old antipathies and circled the wagons. We stuck up for one another, at the Home and at Sarah J. Hale, our local high school, a required stop except for those few who’d qualified for some special (i.e., Manhattan) destination, Stuyvesant or Music and Art.

There at Sarah J. we St. Vincent’s Boys were disguised, blended with the larger population, a pretty rough crowd despite their presumably having parents and siblings and telephones and bedroom doors with locks and a thousand other unimaginable advantages. But we knew each other, kept an eye on each other, bad pennies circulating with the good. Black or white, we policed one another like siblings, reserved special degrees of scorn for one another’s social or institutional humiliations. And there we mixed with girls for the first time, about as well as chunks of road salt in ice cream, though ice cream might be a generous comparison for the brutal, strapping black girls of Sarah J., gangs of whom laid after-school ambushes for any white boy daring enough to have flirted, even made eye contact, with one inside the building. They comprised the vast majority there, and the handful of white or Latin girls survived by a method of near-total invisibility. To pierce their cone of fear and silence was to be met with incredulous glares of resentment. Our lives are led elsewhere, those looks said, and yours ought to be too. The black girls were claimed by boyfriends too sophisticated to bother with school, who rode by for them at lunch hour in cars throbbing with amplified bass lines and sometimes boasting bullet-riddled doors, and their only use for us was as a dartboard for throwing lit cigarette butts, a frequent sport. Yes, relations between the sexes were strained at Sarah J., and I doubt any of us four, even Tony, so much as copped a feel from the girls we were schooled with there. For all of us that would wait for Court Street, for the world we would come to know through Minna.

Minna’s Court Street was the old Brooklyn, a placid ageless surface alive underneath with talk, with deals and casual insults, a neighborhood political machine with pizzeria and butcher-shop bosses and unwritten rules everywhere. All was talk except for what mattered most, which were unspoken understandings. The barbershop, where he took us for identical haircuts that cost three dollars each, except even that fee was waived for Minna-no one had to wonder why the price of a haircut hadn’t gone up since 1966, nor why six old barbers were working, mostly not working, out of the same ancient storefront, where the Barbicide hadn’t been changed since the product’s invention (in Brooklyn, the jar bragged), where other somewhat younger men passed through constantly to argue sports and wave away offers of haircuts; the barbershop was a retirement home, a social club, and front for a backroom poker game. The barbers were taken care of because this was Brooklyn, where people looked out. Why would the prices go up, when nobody walked in who wasn’t part of this conspiracy, this trust?-though if you spoke of it you’d surely meet with confused denials, or laughter and a too-hard cuff on the cheek. Another exemplary mystery was the “arcade,” a giant storefront paneled with linoleum, containing three pinball machines, which were in constant use, and six other somen video games-Asteroids, Frogger, Centipede-all pretty much ignored, and a cashier, who’d change dollars to quarters and accept hundred-dollar bills folded into lists of numbers, names of horses and football teams. The curb in front of the arcade was lined with Vespas, which had been in vogue a year or two before but now sat permanently parked, without anything more than a bicycle lock for protection, a taunt to vandals. A block away, on Smith, they would have been stripped, but here they were pristine, a curbside Vespa showroom. It didn’t need explaining-this was Court Street. And Court Street, where it passed through Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill, was the only Brooklyn, really-north was Brooklyn Heights, secretly a part of Manhattan, south was the harbor, and the rest, everything east of the Gowanus Canal (the only body of water in the world, Minna would crack each and every time we drove over it, that was 90 percent guns), apart from small outposts of civilization in Park Slope and Windsor Terrace, was an unspeakable barbarian tumult.

Sometimes he needed just one of us. He’d appear at the Home in his Impala instead of the van, request someone specific, then spirit him away, to the bruised consternation of those left behind. Tony was in and out of Minna’s graces, his ambition and pride costing him as much as he won, but he was unmistakably our leader, and Minna’s right hand. He wore his private errands with Minna like Purple Hearts, but refused to report on their content to the rest of us. Danny, athletic, silent and tall, became Minna’s trusted greyhound, his Mercury, sent on private deliveries and rendezvous, and given early driving lessons in a vacant Red Hook lot, as though Minna were grooming him for work as an international spy, or Kato for a new Green Hornet. Gilbert, all bullish determination, was pegged for the grunt work, sitting in double-parked cars, repairing a load of ruptured cartons with strapping tape, unfastening the legs of an oversize dresser so as to fit it through a small doorway, and repainting the van, whose graffitied exterior some of Minna’s neighbors had apparently found objectionable. And I was an extra set of eyes and ears and opinions. Minna would drag me along to back rooms and offices and barbershop negotiations, then debrief me afterward. What did I think of that guy? Shitting or not? A moron or retard? A shark or a mook? Minna encouraged me to have a take on everything, and to spit it out, as though he thought my verbal disgorgings were only commentary not yet anchored to subject matter. And he adored my echolalia. He thought I was doing impressions.

Needless to say, it wasn’t commentary and impressions, but my verbal Tourette’s flowering at last. Like Court Street, I seethed behind the scenes with language and conspiracies, inversions of logic, sudden jerks and jabs of insult. Now Court Street and Minna had begun to draw me out. With Minna’s encouragement I freed myself to ape the rhythm of his overheard dialogues, his complaints and endearments, his for-the-sake-of arguments. And Minna loved my effect on his clients and associates, the way I’d unnerve them, disrupt some schmooze with an utterance, a head jerk, a husky “Eatmebailey!” I was his special effect, a running joke embodied. They’d look up startled and he’d wave his hand knowingly, counting money, not even bothering to look at me. “Don’t mind him, he can’t help it,” he’d say. “Kid’s shot out of a cannon.” Or: “He likes to get a little nutty sometimes. Forget about it.” Then he’d wink at me, acknowledge our conspiracy. I was evidence of life’s unpredictabiliy and rudeness and poignancy, a scale model of his own nutty heart. In this way Minna licensed my speech, and speech, it turned out, liberated me from the overflowing disaster of my Tourettic self, turned out to be the tic that satisfied where others didn’t, the scratch that briefly stilled the itch.

“You ever listen to yourself, Lionel?” Minna would say later, shaking his head. “You really are shot out of a fucking cannon.”

“Scott Out of the Canyon! I don’t know why, I just-fuckitup!-I just can’t stop.”

“You’re a freak show, that’s why. Human freak show, and it’s free. Free to the public.”

“Freefreak!” I hit him on the shoulder.

“That’s what I said: a free human freak show.”

We were introduced to Matricardi and Rockaforte at their brownstone on Degraw Street one day in the fall, four or five months after meeting Minna. He’d gathered the four of us in the van in his usual way, without explaining our assignment, but there was a special degree of agitation about him, a jumpiness that induced a special ticcishness in me. He first drove us into Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge, then underneath the bridge, to the docks near Fulton Street, and I spent the whole time imitating the nervous jerks of his head as he negotiated traffic. We parked in the middle of a concrete yard in front of one of the piers. Minna disappeared inside a small, windowless shack made of corrugated steel sheets and had us stand outside the van, where we shivered in the wind coming off the East River. I danced around the van in a fit, counting suspension cables on the bridge that soared over us like a monstrous steel limb while Tony and Danny, chilliest in their thin plaid jackets, kicked and cursed at me. Gilbert was nicely insulated in a fake down coat which, stitched into bulging sections, made him look like the Michelin Man or the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland. He stood a few feet from us and methodically tossed chunks of corroded concrete into the river, as though he could earn points by cleaning the pier of rubble.

Minna emerged just as the two small yellow trucks drove up. They were Ryder Rental vans, smaller than Minna’s, and identically decorated, one pristine, the other dingy. The drivers sat smoking cigarettes in the cabs, with the motors running. Minna unlatched the backs of the trucks, which weren’t padlocked, and directed us to move the contents into his van-quick.

The first thing I laid hands on was an electric guitar, one shaped into a flying V and decorated with enameled yellow and silver flames. A cable dangled from its socket. Other instruments, guitars and bass guitars, were in their hard black cases, but this one had been unplugged and shoved into the van in a hurry. The two trucks were full of concert gear-seven or eight guitars, keyboards, panels full of electronic switches, bundles of cable, microphones and stands, pedal effects for the floor, a drum kit that had been pushed into the truck whole instead of being disassembled, and a number of amplifiers and monitors, including six black stage amps, each half the size of a refrigerator, which alone filled the second Ryder truck and each took two of us to lift out and into Minna’s van. The umber ofers and hard cases were stenciled with the band’s name, which I recognized faintly. I learned later they were responsible for a minor AM hit or two, songs about roads, cars, women. I didn’t grasp it then, but this was equipment enough for a small stadium show.

I wasn’t sure we could fit the whole contents of the two trucks into the van but Minna only egged us to shut up and work faster. The men in the trucks never spoke or got out of the cabs, just smoked and waited. No one ever appeared from the corrugated shack. At the end there was barely room for Gilbert and me to crowd in behind the doors to ride with the band’s calamitously piled equipment while Tony and Danny shared a spot up front with Minna.

We crossed the bridge back to Brooklyn like that, Gilbert and I fearing for our lives if the load shifted or toppled. After a few breathless turns and sudden stops Minna double-parked the van and freed us from the back. The destination was a brownstone in a row of brownstones on Degraw Street, red brick, stone detailing flaking to powder, genteel curtained windows. Some canny salesman had ten or twenty years before sold the entire block on defacing these hundred-year-old buildings with flimsy tin awnings over the elegant front doors; the only thing special about Matricardi and Rockaforte’s house was that it lacked one of these.

“We’re gonna have to take apart those drums,” said Tony when he saw the doors.

“Just get it inside,” said Minna. “It’ll fit.”

“Are there stairs?” said Gilbert.

“You’ll see, you chocolate cheesepuffs,” said Minna. “Just get it up the stoop already.”

Inside, we saw. The brownstone which appeared so ordinary was an anomaly just through the doors. The insides-typical narrow halls and stairs, spoked banisters, high ornate ceilings-had all been stripped and gutted, replaced with a warehouse-style stairwell into the basement apartment and upstairs. The parlor floor where we stood was sealed off on the left by a clean white wall and single closed door. We ferried the equipment into the upper-floor apartment while Minna stood guarding the rear of the van. The drums went easily.

The band’s equipment tucked neatly into one corner of the apartment, on wooden pallets apparently set out for that purpose. The upper floors of the building were empty apart from a few crates here and there and a single oak dining table heaped with silverware: forks, spoons in two sizes, and butter knives, hundreds of each, ornate and heavy, gleaming, bundled in disordered piles, no sense to them except that the handles all faced in one direction. I’d never seen so much silverware in one place, even in St. Vincent’s institutional kitchen-anyway, those St. Vincent’s forks were flat cutouts of dingy steel bent this way to make tines, that way to make a handle, barely better than the plastic “sporks” we were issued with our school lunches. These forks were little masterpieces of sculpture in comparison. I wandered away from the others and obsessed on the mountain of forks, knives and spoons, but especially those forks, as rich in their contours as tiny thumbless hands, or the paws of a silver animal.

The others shifted the last of the amplifiers up the stairs. Minna reparked the van. I stood e table, trying to look casual. Jerking your head was good cover for jerking your head, I discovered. Nobody watched me. I pocketed one of the forks, trembling with lust and anticipation, joy in my fear, as I did it. I only just got away with it, too: Minna was back.

“The clients want to meet you,” he said.

“Who’s that?” said Tony.

“Just shut up when they talk, okay?” said Minna.

“Okay, but who are they?” said Tony.

“Practice shutting up now so you’ll be good at it when you meet them,” said Minna. “They’re downstairs.”

Behind that clean, seamless wall on the parlor floor lay hidden the brownstone’s next surprise, a sort of double-reverse: The front room’s old architecture was intact. Through the single door we stepped into a perfectly elegant, lavishly fitted brownstone parlor, with gold leaf on the ceiling’s plaster scrollwork, antique chairs and desks and a marble-topped side table, a six-foot mirror-lined grandfather clock, and a vase with fresh flowers. Under our feet was an ancient carpet, layered with color, a dream map of the past. The walls were crowded with framed photographs, none more recent than the invention of color film. It was more like a museum diorama of Old Brooklyn than a contemporary room. Seated in two of the plush chairs were two old men, dressed in matching brown suits.

“So these are your boys,” said the first of the two men.

“Say hello to Mr. Matricardi,” said Minna.

“Yo,” said Danny. Minna punched him on the arm.

“I said say hello to Mr. Matricardi.”

“Hello,” said Danny sulkily. Minna had never required politeness. Our jobs with him had never taken such a drab turn. We were used to sauntering with him through the neighborhood, riffing, honing our insults.

But we felt the change in Minna, the fear and tension. We would try to comply, though servility lay outside our range of skills.

The two old men sat with their legs crossed, fingers templed together, watching us closely. They were both trim in their suits, their skin white and soft wherever it showed, their faces soft, too, without being fat. The one called Mr. Matricardi had a nick in the top ridge of his large nose, a smooth indented scar like a slot in molded plastic.

“Say hello,” Minna told me and Gilbert.

I thought mister catch your body mixture bath retardy whistlecop’s birthday and didn’t dare open my mouth. Instead I fondled the tines of my marvelous stolen fork, which barely fit the length of my corduroy’s front pocket.

“It’s okay,” said Matricardi. His smile was pursed, all lips and no teeth. His thick glasses doubled the intensity of his stare. “You all work for Frank?”

What were we supposed to say?

“Sure,” volunteered Tony. Matricardi was an Italian name.

“You do what he tells?”

“Sure.”

The second man leaned forward. “Listen,” he said. “Frank Minna is a good man.”

Again we were bewildered. Were we expected to disagree? I counted the tines in my pocket, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four.

“Tell us what you want to do,” said the second man. “Be what? What kind of work? What kind of men?” He didn’t hide his teeth, which were bright yellow, like the van we’d unloaded.

“Talk to Mr. Rockaforte,” urged Minna.

“They do what you tell them, Frank?” said Rockaforte to Minna. It wasn’t small talk, somehow, despite the repetitions. This was an intense speculative interest. Far too much rested on Minna’s reply. Matricardi and Rockaforte were like that, the few times I glimpsed them: purveyors of banal remarks with terrifying weight behind them.

“Yeah, they’re good kids,” said Minna. I heard the hurry in his voice. We’d overstayed our welcome already.

“Orphans,” said Matricardi to Rockaforte. He was repeating something he’d been told, rehearsing its value.

“You like this house?” said Rockaforte, gesturing upward at the ceiling. He’d caught me staring at the scrollwork.

“Yes,” I said carefully.

“This is his mother’s parlor,” said Rockaforte, nodding at Matricardi.

“Exactly as she kept it,” said Matricardi proudly. “We never changed a thing.”

“When Mr. Matricardi and I were children like yourselves I would come to see his family and we would sit in this room.” Rockaforte smiled at Matricardi. Matricardi smiled back. “His mother believe me would rip our ears if we spilled on this carpet, even a drop. Now we sit and remember.”

“Everything exactly as she kept it,” said Matricardi. “She would see it and know. If she were here, bless her sweet pathetic soul.”

They fell silent. Minna was silent too, though I imagined I could feel his anxiety to be out of there. I thought I heard him gulp, actually.

My throat was calm. Instead I worked at my stolen fork. It now seemed so potent a charm, I imagined that if I had it in my pocket I might never need to tic aloud again.

“So tell us,” said Rockaforte. “Tell us what you’re going to be. What kind of men.”

“Like Frank,” said Ty, confident he was speaking for us all, and right to be.

This answer made Matricardi chuckle, still toothlessly. Rockaforte waited patiently until his friend was finished. Then he asked Tony, “You want to make music?”

“What?”

“You want to make music?” His tone was sincere.

Tony shrugged. We all held our breath, waiting to understand. Minna shifted his weight, nervous, watching this encounter ramble on beyond his control.

“The belongings you moved for us today,” said Rockaforte. “You recognize what those things are?”

“Sure.”

“No, no,” said Minna suddenly. “You can’t do that.”

“Please don’t refuse our gift,” said Rockaforte.

“No, really, we can’t. With respect.” I could see this was imperative for Minna. The gift, worth thousands if not tens of thousands, must absolutely be denied. I shouldn’t bother to form nutty fantasies about the electric guitars and keyboards and amplifiers. Too late, though: My brain had begun to bubble with names for our band, all stolen from Minna: You Fucking Mooks, The Chocolate Cheeseballs, Tony and the Tugboats.

“Why, Frank?” Matricardi. “Let us bring a little joy. For orphans to make music is a good thing.”

“No, please.”

Jerks From Nowhere. Free Human Freakshow. I pictured these in place of the band’s logo on the skin of the bass drum, and stenciled onto the amplifiers.

“Nobody else will be permitted to take pleasure in that garbage,” said Rockaforte, shrugging. “We can give it to your orphans, or a fire can be created with a can of gasoline-it would be no different.”

Rockaforte’s tone made me understand two things. First, that the offer truly meant nothing to him, nothing at all, and so it could be turned away. They wouldn’t force Minna to allow us to take the instruments.

And second, that Rockaforte’s strange comparison involving a can of gasoline wasn’t strange at all to him. That was now exactly what would happen to the band’s equipment.

Minna heard it too, and exhaled deeply. The danger was past. But at the same moment I turned a corner in the opposite direction. My magic fork failed. I began to want to pronounce a measure of the nonsense that danced in my head. Bucky Dent and the Stale Doughnuts-

“Here,” said Matricardi. He raised his hand, a gentle referee. “We can see it displeases, so forget.” He fished in the interior pocket of his suit jacket. “But we insist on a measure of gratitude for these orphan boys who have done us such a favor.”

He came out with hundred-dollar bills, four of them. He passed them to Frank and nodded at us, smiling munificently, and why not? The gesture was unmistakably the source for Frank’s trick of spreading twenties everywhere, and it instantly made Frank seem somehow childish and cheap that he would bother to grease palms with anything less than a hundred.

“All right,” said Minna. “That’s great, you’ll spoil them. They don’t know what to do with it.” He was able to josh now, the end in sight. “Say thanks, you peanutheads.”

The other three were dazzled, I was fighting my syndrome.

“Thanks.”

“Thanks.”

“Thanks, Mr. Matricardi.”

“Arf!”

After that Minna got us out of there, hustled us through the brownstone’s odd hallway too fast even to glance back. Matricardi and Rockaforte had never moved from their chairs, just smiled at us and one another until we were gone. Minna put us all in the back of the van, where we compared hundred-dollar bills-they were fresh, and the serial numbers ran in sequence-and Tony immediately tried to persuade us he should caretake ours, that they weren’t safe in the Home. We didn’t bite.

Minna parked us on Smith Street, near Pacific, in front of an all-night market called Zeod’s, after the Arab who ran it. We sat and waited until Minna came around the back of the van with a beer.

“You jerks know about forgetting?” he said.

“Forgetting what?”

“The names of those guys you just met. They’re not good for you to go around saying.”

“What should we call them?”

“Call them nothing. That’s a part of my work you need to learn about. Sometimes the clients are just the clients. No names.”

“Who are they?”

“They’re nobody,” said Minna. “That’s the point. Forget you ever saw them.”

“They live there?” said Gilbert.

“Nope. They just keep that place. They moved to Jersey.”

“Gardenstate,” I said. “Yeah, the Garden State.”

“Garden State Brickface and Stucco!” I shouted. Garden State Brickface and Stucco was a renovation firm whose crummy homemade television ads came on channels 9 and 11 during Mets and Yankees games and during reruns of The Twilight Zone. The weird name of the firm was already an occasional tic. Now it seemed to me that Brickface and Stucco might actually be Matricardi and Rockaforte’s secret names.

“What’s that?”

“Garden State Bricco and Stuckface!”

I’d made Minna laugh again. Like a lover, I loved to make Minna laugh.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s good. Call them Bricco and Stuckface, you goddamn beautiful freak.” He took another slug of beer.

And if memory serves we never heard him speak their real names again.

“Makes you think you’re Italian?” said Minna one day, as we all rode together in his Impala.

“What do I look like to you?” said Tony.

“I don’t know, I was thinking maybe Greek,” said Minna. “I used to know this Greek guy went around knocking up the Italian girls down Union Street, until a couple their older brothers took him out under the bridge. You remind me of him, you know? Got that dusky tinge. I’d say half Greek. Or maybe Puerto Rican, or Syrian.”

“Fuck you.”

“Probably know all your parents, if you think about it. We’re not talking the international jet set here-bunch of teen mothers, probably live in a five-mile radius, need to know the goddamn truth.”

So it was, with this casual jaunt against Tony’s boasts, that Minna appeared to announce what we already half suspected-that it was not only his life that was laced with structures of meaning but our own, that these master plots were transparent to him and that he held the power to reveal them, that he did know our parents and at any moment might present them to us.

Other times he taunted us, playing at knowledge or ignorance-we couldn’t know which it was. He and I were alone when he said, “Essrog, Essrog. That name.” He crunched up his mouth and squinted, as if trying to remember, or perhaps to read a name inscribed on the distant Manhattan skyline.

“You know an Essrog?” I said, my breath short, heart pounding. “Edgehog!”

“No. It’s just-You ever look it up in the phone book? Can’t be more than three or four Essrogs, for chrissakes. Such a weird name.” Later, at the Home, I looked. There were three.

Minna’s weird views filtered down through the jokes he told and liked to hear, and those he cut short within a line or two of their telling. We learned to negotiate the labyrinth of his prejudices blind, and blindly. Hippies were dangerous and odd, also sort of sad in their utopian wrongness. (“Your parents must of been hippies,” he’d tell me. “That’s why you came out the superfreak you are.”) Homosexual men were harmless reminders of the impulse Minna was sure lurked in all of us-and “half a fag” was more shameful than a whole one. Certain baseball players, Mets specifically (the Yankees were m t but boring, the Mets wonderfully pathetic and human), were half a fag-Lee Mazzilli, Rusty Staub, later Gary Carter. So were most rock stars and anyone who’d been in the armed services but not in a war. Lesbians were wise and mysterious and deserved respect (and how could we who relied on Minna for all our knowledge of women argue when he himself grew baffled and reverent?) but could still be comically stubborn or stuck up. The Arabic population of Atlantic Avenue was as distant and unfathomable as the Indian tribes that had held our land before Columbus. “Classic” minorities-Irish, Jews, Poles, Italians, Greeks and Puerto Ricans-were the clay of life itself, funny in their essence, while blacks and Asians of all types were soberly snubbed, unfunny (Puerto Ricans probably should have been in this second class but had been elevated to “classic” status single-handedly by West Side Story-and all Hispanics were “Ricans” even when they were Dominicans, as they frequently were). But bone stupidity, mental illness, and familial or sexual anxiety-these were the bolts of electricity that made the clay walk, the animating forces that rendered human life amusing and that flowed, once you learned to identify them, through every personality and interaction. It was a form of racism, not respect, that restricted blacks and Asians from ever being stupid like a Mick or Polack. If you weren’t funny, you didn’t quite exist. And it was usually better to be fully stupid, impotent, lazy, greedy or freakish than to seek to dodge your destiny, or layer it underneath pathetic guises of vanity or calm. So it was that I, Overt Freak Supreme, became mascot of a worldview.

I called the Brooklyn directory’s Essrogs one day when I was left alone for twenty minutes in a warehouse office, waiting for Minna to return, slowly picking out the numbers on the heavy rotary dial, trying not to obsess on the finger holes. I’d perhaps dialed a phone twice at that point in my life.

I tried F. Essrog and Lawrence Essrog and Murray and Annette Essrog. F. wasn’t home. Lawrence’s phone was answered by a child. I listened for a while as he said “Hello? Hello?,” my vocal cords frozen, then hung up.

Murray Essrog picked up the phone. His voice was wheezy and ancient.

“Essrog?” I said, and whispered Chestbutt away from the phone. “Yes. This is the Essrog residence, Murray speaking. Who’s this?”

“Baileyrog,” I said.

“Who?”

“Bailey.”

He waited for a moment, then said, “Well, what can I do for you, Bailey?”

I hung up the phone. Then I memorized the numbers, all three of them. In the years that followed I would never once step across the line I’d drawn with Murray or the other telephone Essrogs-never show up at their homes, never accuse them of being related to a free human freak show, never even properly introduce myself-but I made a ritual out of dialing their numbers and hanging up after a tic or two, or listening, just long enough to hear another Essrog breathe.

A true story, not a joke, though it was repeated as often, tugboated relentlessly, was of the beat cop from Court Street who routinely dislodged clumps of teenagers clustered at night on stoops or in front of bars and who, if met with excuses, would cut them off with “Yeah, yeah. Tell your story walking.” More than anything, this somehow encapsulated my sense of Minna-his impatience, his pleasure in compression, in ordinary things made more expressive, more hilarious or vivid by their conflation. He loved talk but despised explanations. An endearment was flat unless folded into an insult. An insult was better if it was also self-deprecation, and ideally should also serve as a slice of street philosophy, or as resumption of some dormant debate. And all talk was finer on the fly, out on the pavement, between beats of action: We learned to tell our story walking.

Though Gerard Minna’s name was printed on the L &L business card, we met him only twice, and never on a moving job. The first time was Christmas Day, 1982, at Minna’s mother’s apartment.

Carlotta Minna was an Old Stove. That was the Brooklyn term for it, according to Minna. She was a cook who worked in her own apartment, making plates of sautéed squid and stuffed peppers and jars of tripe soup that were purchased at her door by a constant parade of buyers, mostly neighborhood women with too much housework or single men, young and elderly, bocce players who’d take her plates to the park with them, racing bettors who’d eat her food standing up outside the OTB, barbers and butchers and contractors who’d sit on crates in the backs of their shops and wolf her cutlets, folding them with their fingers like waffles. How her prices and schedules were conveyed I never understood-perhaps telepathically. She truly worked an old stove, too, a tiny enamel four-burner crusted with ancient sauces and on which three or four pots invariably bubbled. The oven of this herculean appliance was never cool; the whole kitchen glowed with heat like a kiln. Mrs. Minna herself seemed to have been baked, her whole face dark and furrowed like the edges of an overdone calzone. We never arrived without nudging aside some buyers from her door, nor without packing off with plateloads of food, though how she could spare it was a mystery, since she never seemed to make more than she needed, never wasted a scrap. When we were in her presence Minna bubbled himself, with talk, all directed at his mother, banking cheery insults off anyone else in the apartment, delivery boys, customers, strangers (if there was such a thing to Minna then), tasting everything she had cooking and making suggestions on every dish, poking and pinching every raw ingredient or ball of unfinished dough and also his mother herself, her earlobes and chin, wiping flour off her dark arms with his open hand. She rarely-that I saw, anyway-acknowledged his attentions, or even directly acknowledged his presence. And she never once in my presence uttered so much as a single word.

That Christmas Minna had us all up to Carlotta’s apartment, and for once we ate at her table, first nudging aside sauce-glazed stirring spoons and unlabeled baby-food jars of spices to clear spots for our plates. Minna stood at the stove, sampling her broth, and Carlotta hovered over us as we devoured her meatballs, running her floury fingers over the backs of our chairs, then gently touching our heads, the napes of our necks. We pretended not to notice, ashamed in front of one another and ourselves to show that we drank in her nurturance as eagerly as her meat sauce. But we drank it. It was Christmas, after all. We splashed, gobbled, kneed one another under the table. Privately, I polished the handle of my spoon, quietly aping the motions of her fingers on my nape, and fought not to twist in my seat and jump at her. I focused on my plate-eating was for me already by then a reliable balm. All the while she went on caressing, with hands that would have horrified us if we’d looked close.

Minna spotted her and said, “This is exciting for you, Ma? I got all of Motherless Brooklyn up here for you. Merry Christmas.”

Minna’s mother only produced a sort of high, keening sigh. We stuck to the food.

“Motherless Brooklyn,” repeated a voice we didn’t know.

It was Minna’s brother, Gerard. He’d come in without our noticing. A fleshier, taller Minna. His eyes and hair were as dark, his mouth as wry, lips deep-indented at the corners. He wore a brown-and-tan leather coat, which he left buttoned, his hands pushed into the fake-patch pockets.

“So this is your little moving company,” he said.

“Hey, Gerard,” said Minna.

“Christmas, Frank,” said Gerard Minna absently, not looking at his brother. Instead he was making short work of the four of us with his eyes, his hard gaze snapping us each in two like bolt cutters on inferior padlocks. It didn’t take long before he was done with us forever-that was how it felt.

“Yeah, Christmas to you,” said Minna. “Where you been?”

“Upstate,” said Gerard.

“What, with Ralph and them?” I detected something new in Minna’s voice, a yearning, sycophantic strain.

“More or less.”

“What, just for the holidays you’re gonna go talkative on me? Between you and Ma it’s like the Cloisters up here.”

“I brought you a present.” He handed Minna a white legal envelope, stuffed fat. Minna began to tear at the end and Gerard said, in a voice low and full of ancient sibling authority, “Put it away.”

Now we understood we’d all been staring. All except Carlotta, who was at her stove, piling together an improbable, cornucopic holiday plate for her older son.

“Make it to go, Mother.”

Carlotta moaned again, closed her eyes.

“I’ll be back,” said Gerard. He stepped over and put his hands on her, much as Minna had. “I’ve got a few people to see today, that’s all. I’ll be back tonight. Enjoy your little orphan party.”

He took the foil-wrapped plate and was gone.

Minna said, “What’re you staring Eat your food!” He stuffed the white envelope into his jacket. The envelope made me think of Matricardi and Rockaforte, their pristine hundred-dollar bills. Brickface and Stucco, I corrected silently. Then Minna cuffed us, a bit too hard, the bulging gold ring on his middle finger clipping our crowns in more or less the same place his mother had fondled.

Minna’s behavior with his mother oddly echoed what we knew of his style with women. I’d say girlfriends, but he never called them that, and we rarely saw him with the same one twice. They were Court Street girls, decorating poolrooms and movie-theater lounges, getting off work from the bakery still wearing disposable paper hats, applying lipstick without missing a chew of their gum, slanting their heavily elegant bodies through car windows and across pizza counters, staring over our heads as if we were four feet tall, and he’d apparently gone to junior high school with each and every one of them. “Sadie and me were in the sixth grade,” he’d say, mussing her hair, disarranging her clothes. “This is Lisa-she used to beat up my best friend in gym.” He’d angle jokes off them like a handball off a low wall, circle them with words like a banner flapping around a pole, tease their brassieres out of whack with pinching fingers, hold them by the two points of their hips and lean, as if he were trying to affect the course of a pinball in motion, risking tilt. They never laughed, just rolled their eyes and slapped him away, or didn’t. We studied it all, soaked up their indifferent femaleness, that rare essence we yearned to take for granted. Minna had that gift, and we studied his moves, filed them away with silent, almost unconscious prayers.

“It’s not that I only like women with large breasts,” he told me once, years later, long after he’d traded the Court Street girls for his strange, chilly marriage. We were walking down Atlantic Avenue together, I think, and a woman passing had caused his head to turn. I’d jerked my head too, of course, my actions as exaggerated and secondhand as a marionette’s. “That’s a very common misunderstanding,” he said, as if he were an idol and I his public, a mass audience devoted to puzzling him out. “Thing is, for me a woman has to have a certain amount of muffling, you know what I mean? Something between you, in the way of insulation. Otherwise, you’re right up against her naked soul.”

Wheels within wheels was another of Minna’s phrases, used exclusively to sneer at our notions of coincidence or conspiracy. If we Boys ever dabbled in astonishment at, say, his running into three girls he knew from high school in a row on Court Street, two of whom he’d dated behind each other’s backs, he’d bug his eyes and intone, wheels within wheels. No Met had ever pitched a no-hitter, but Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan both pitched them after being traded away-wheels within wheels. The barber, the cheese man, and the bookie were all named Carmine-oh yeah, wheels within wheels, big time. You’re onto something there, Sherlock.

By implication we orphans were idiots of connectivity, overly impressed by any trace of the familial in the world. We should doubt ourselves any time we imagined a network in operation. We should leave that stuff to Minna. Just as he knew the identity of our parents but would never reveal it to us, only Fran Minna was authorized to speculate on the secret systems that ran Court Street or the world. If we dared chime in, we’d surely only discovered more wheels within wheels. Business as usual. The regular fucking world-get used to it.

One day in April, five months after that Christmas meal, Minna drove up with all his windows thoroughly smashed, the van transformed into a blinding crystalline sculpture, a mirrorball on wheels, reflecting the sun. It was plainly the work of a man with a hammer or crowbar and no fear of interruption. Minna appeared not to have noticed; he ferried us out to a job without mentioning it. On our way back to the Home, as we rumbled over the cobblestones of Hoyt Street, Tony nodded at the windshield, which sagged in its frame like a beaded curtain, and said, “So what happened?”

“What happened to what?” It was a Minna game, forcing us to be literal when we’d been trained by him to talk in glances, in three-corner shots.

“Somebody fucked up your van.”

Minna shrugged, excessively casual. “I parked it on that block of Pacific Street.”

We didn’t know what he was talking about.

“These guys around that block had this thing about how I was uglifying the neighborhood.” A few weeks after Gilbert’s paint job the van had been covered again with graffiti, vast filled-in outlines of incoherent ballooning font and an overlay of stringy tags. Something made Minna’s van a born target, the flat battered sides like a windowless subway car, a homely public surface crying for spray paint where both private cars and bigger, glossier commercial trucks were inviolate. “They told me not to park it around there anymore. Then after I did it a couple of times more, they told me a different way.”

Minna lifted both hands from the wheel to gesture his indifference. We weren’t totally convinced.

“Someone’s sending a message,” said Tony.

“What’s that?” said Minna.

“I just said it’s a message,” said Tony. I knew he wanted to ask about Matricardi and Rockaforte. Were they involved? Couldn’t they protect Minna from having his windows smashed? We all wanted to ask about them and never would, unless Tony did it first.

“Yeah, but what are you trying to say?” said Minna.

“Fuckitmessage,” I suggested impulsively.

“You know what I mean,” said Tony defiantly, ignoring me.

“Yeah, maybe,” said Minna. “But put it in your own words.” I could feel his anger unfolding, smooth as a fresh deck of cards.

“Tellmetofuckitall!” I was like a toddler devising a tantrum to keep his parents from fighting.

But Minna wasnȉt distractable. “Quiet, Freakshow,” he said, never taking his eyes from Tony. “Tell me what you said,” he told Tony again.

“Nothing,” said Tony. “Damn.” He was backpedaling.

Minna pulled the van to the curb at a fire hydrant on the corner of Bergen and Hoyt. Outside, a couple of black men sat on a stoop, drinking from a bag. They squinted at us.

“Tell me what you said,” Minna insisted.

He and Tony stared at one another, and the rest of us melted back. I swallowed away a few variations.

“Just, you know, somebody’s sending you a message.” Tony smirked.

This clearly infuriated Minna. He and Tony suddenly spoke a private language in which message signified heavily. “You think you know a thing,” he said.

“All I’m saying is I can see what they did to your truck, Frank.” Tony scuffed his feet in the layer of tiny cubes of safety glass that had peeled away from the limp window and lay scattered on the floor of the van.

“That’s not all you said, Dickweed.”

That was the first I heard Minna use the term that would become lodged thereafter in my uppermost tic-echelon: dickweed. I didn’t know whether he borrowed the nickname or invented it himself on the spot.

What it meant to me I still can’t say. Perhaps it was inscribed in my vocabulary, though, by the trauma of that day: Our little organization was losing its innocence, although I couldn’t have explained how or why.

“I can’t help what I see,” said Tony. “Somebody put a hit on your windows.”

“Think you’re a regular little wiseguy, don’t you?”

Tony stared at him.

“You want to be Scarface?”

Tony didn’t give his answer, but we knew what it was. Scarface had opened a month before, and Al Pacino was ascendant, a personal colossus astride Tony’s world, blocking out the sky.

“See, the thing about Scarface,” said Minna, “is before he got to be Scarface he was Scabface. Nobody ever considers that. You have to want to be Scabface first.”

For a second I thought Minna was going to hit Tony, damage his face to make the point. Tony seemed to be waiting for it too. Then Minna’s fury leaked away.

“Out,” he said. He waved his hand, a Caesar gesturing to the heavens through the dented roof of his refitted postal van.

“What?” said Tony. “Right here?”

“Out,” he said again, equably. “Walk home, you muffin asses.” We sat gaping, though his meaning was clear enough. We weren’t more than five or six blocks from the Home anyway. But we hadn’t been paid, hadn’t gone for beers or slices or a bag of hot, clingy zeppole. I could taste the disappointment-the flavor of powdered sugar’s absence. Tony slid open the door, dislodging more glass, and we obediently filed out of the van and onto the sidewalk, into the day’s glare, the suddenly formless afternoon.

Minna drove off, leaving us there to bob together awkwardly before the drinkers on the stoop. They shook their heads at us, stupid-looking white boys a block from the projects. But we were in no danger there, nor were we dangerous ourselves. There was something so primally humiliating in our ejection that Hoyt Street itself seemed to ridicule us, humble row of brownstones, sleeping bodega. We were inexcusable to ourselves. Others clotted street corners, not us, not anymore. We rode with Minna. The effect was deliberate: Minna knew the value of the gift he’d withdrawn.

“Muffin ass,” I said forcefully, measuring the shape of the words in my mouth, auditioning them for tic-richness. Then I sneezed, induced by the sunlight.

Gilbert and Danny looked at me with disgust, Tony with something worse.

“Shut up,” he said. There was cold fury in his teeth-clenched smile.

“Tellmetodoit, muffinass,” I croaked.

“Be quiet now,” warned Tony. He plucked a piece of wood from the gutter and took a step toward me.

Gilbert and Danny drifted away from us warily. I would have followed them, but Tony had me cornered against a parked car. The men on the stoop stretched back on their elbows, slurped their malt liquor thoughtfully.

“Dickweed,” I said. I tried to mask it in another sneeze, which made something in my neck pop. I twitched and spoke again. “Dickyweed! Dicketywood!” I was trapped in a loop of self, one already too familiar, that of refining a verbal tic to free myself from its grip (not yet knowing how tenacious would be the grip of those particular syllables). Certainly I didn’t mean to be replying to Tony. Yet dickweed was the name Minna had called him, and I was throwing it in his face.

Tony held the stick he’d found, a discarded scrap of lath with clumps of plaster stuck to it. I stared, anticipating my own pain as I’d anticipated Tony’s, at Minna’s hand, a minute before. Instead Tony moved close, stick at his side, and grabbed my collar.

“Open your mouth again,” he said.

“Restrictaweed, detectorwood, vindictaphone,” said I, prisoner of my syndrome. I grabbed Tony back, my hands exploring his collar, fingers running inside it like an anxious, fumbling lover.

Gilbert and Danny had started up Hoyt Street, in the direction of the Home. “C’mon, Tony,” said Gilbert, tilting his head. Tony ignored them. He scraped his stick in the gutter, and came up with a smear of dog shit, mustard-yellow and pungent.

“Open,” he said.

Now Gilbert and Danny were just slinking away, heads bowed. The street was brightly, absurdly empty. Nobody but the black men on the stoop, impassive witnesses. I jerked my head as Tony jabbed with his stick-tic as evasive maneuver-and he only managed to paint my cheek. I could smell it, though, powdered sugar’s opposite made tangible, married to my face.

“Stickmebailey!” I shouted. Falling back against the car behind me, I turned my head again, and again, twitching away, enshrining the moment in ticceography. The stain followed me, adamant, on fire. Or maybe it was my cheek that was on fire.

Our witnesses crinkled their paper bag, offered ruminative sighs.

Tony dropped his stick and turned from me. He’d disgusted himself, couldn’t meet my eye. About to speak, he thought better of it, instead jogged to catch Gilbert and Danny as they shrugged away up Hoyt Street, leaving the scene.

We didn’t see Minna again until five weeks later, Sunday morning at the Home’s yard, late May. He had his brother Gerard with him; it was the second time we’d ever laid eyes on him.

None of us had seen Frank in the intervening weeks, though I know that the others, like myself, had each wandered down Court Street, nosed at a few of his usual haunts, the barbershop, the beverage outlet, the arcade. He wasn’t in them. It meant nothing, it meant everything. He might never reappear, but if he turned up and didn’t speak of it we wouldn’t think twice. We didn’t speak of it to one another, but a pensiveness hung over us, tinged with orphan’s melancholy, our resignation to permanent injury. A part of each of us still stood astonished on the corner of Hoyt and Bergen, where we’d been ejected from Minna’s van, where we’d fallen when our inadequate wings melted in the sun.

A horn honked, the Impala’s, not the van’s. Then the brothers got out and came to the cyclone fence and waited for us to gather. Tony and Danny were playing basketball, Gilbert perhaps ardently picking his nose on the sidelines. That’s how I picture it anyway. I wasn’t in the yard when they drove up. Gilbert had to come inside and pull me out of the Home library, to which I’d mostly retreated since Tony’s attack, though Tony had shown no signs of repeating it. I was wedged into a windowsill seat, in sunshine laced with shadows from the barred window, when Gilbert found me there, immersed in a novel by Allen Drury.

Frank and Gerard were dressed too warmly for that morning, Frank in his bomber jacket, Gerard in his patchwork leather coat. The backseat of the Impala was loaded with shopping bags packed with Frank’s clothes and a pair of old leather suitcases that surely belonged to Gerard. I don’t know that Frank Minna ever owned a suitcase in his life. They stood at the fence, Frank bouncing nervously on his toes, Gerard hanging on the mesh, fingers dangling through, doing nothing to conceal his impatience with his brother, an impatience shading into disgust.

Frank smirked, raised his eyebrows, shook his head. Danny held his basketball between forearm and hip; Minna nodded at it, mimed a set shot, dropped his hand at the wrist, and made a delicate O with his mouth to signify the swish that would result.

Then, idiotically, he bounced a pretend pass to Gerard. His brother didn’t seem to notice. Minna shook his head, then wheeled back to us and aimed two trigger fingers through the fence, and gritted his teeth for rat-a-tat, a little imaginary schoolyard massacre. We could only gape at him dumbly. It was as though somebody had taken Minna’s voice away. And Minna was his voice-didn’t he know? His eyes said yes, he did. They looked panicked, as if they’d been caged in the body of a mime.

Gerard gazed off emptily into the yard, ignoring the show. Minna made a few more faces, wincing, chuckling silently, shaking off some invisible annoyance by twitching his cheek. I fought to keep from mirroring him.

Then he cleared his throat. “I’m, ah, going out of town for a while,” he said at last.

We waited for more. Minna just nodded and squinted and grinned his closemouthed grin at us as though he were acknowledging applause.

“Upstate?” said Tony.

Minna coughed in his fist. “Oh yeah. Place my brother goes. He thinks we ought to just, you know. Get a little country air.”

“When are you coming back?” said Tony.

“Ah, coming back,” said Minna. “You got an unknown there, Scarface. Unknown factors.”

We must have gaped at him, because he added, “I wouldn’t wait underwater, if that’s what you had in mind.”

We were in our second year of high school. That measure loomed suddenly, a door of years swinging open into what had been a future counted in afternoons. Would we know Minna whenever it was he got back? Would we know each other?

Minna wouldn’t be there to tell us what to think of Minna’s not being there, to give it a name.

“All right, Frank,” said Gerard, turning his back to the fence. “Motherless Brooklyn appreciates your support. I think we better get on the road.”

“My brother’s in a hurry,” said Frank. “He’s seeing ghosts everywhere.”

“Yeah, I’m looking right at one,” said Gerard, though in fact he wasn’t looking at anyone, only the car.

Minna tilted his head at us, at his brother, to say you know. And sorry.

Then he pulled a book out of his pocket, a small paperback. I don’t think I’d ever seen a book in his hands before. “Here,” he said to me. He dropped it on the pavement and nudged it under the fence with the toe of his shoe. “Take a look,” he said. “Turns out you’re not the only freak in the show.”

I picked it up. Understanding Tourette’s Syndrome was the title, first time I’d seen the word.

“Meaning to get that to you,” he said. “But I’ve been sort of busy.”

“Great,” said Gerard, taking Minna by the arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

Tony had been searching every day after school, I suspect. It was three days later that he found it and led us others there, to the edge of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, at the end of Kane Street. The van was diminished, sagged to its rims, tires melted. The explosion had cleared the windows of their crumbled panes of safety glass, which now lay in a spilled penumbra of grains on the sidewalk and street, together with flakes of traumatized paint and smudges of ash, a photographic map of force. The panels of the truck were layered, graffiti still evident in bone-white outline, all else-Gilbert’s shoddy coat of enamel and the manufacturer’s ancient green-now chalky black, and delicate like sunburned skin. It was like an X ray of the van that had been before.

We circled it, strangely reverent, afraid to touch, and I thought, Ashes, ashes-and then I ran away, up Kane, toward Court Street, before anything could come out of my mouth.

Over the next two years I grew larger-neither fat nor particularly muscular, but large, bearlike, and so harder for the bantamweight Tony or anyone else to bully-and I grew stranger. With the help of Minna’s book I contextualized my symptoms as Tourette’s, then discovered how little context that was. My constellation of behaviors was “unique as a snowflake,” oh, joy, and evolving, like some micro-scoped crystal in slow motion, to reveal new facets, and to spread from its place at my private core to cover my surface, my public front. The freak show was now the whole show, and my earlier, ticless self impossible anymore to recall clearly. I read in the book of the drugs that might help me, Haldol, Klonopin, and Orap, and laboriously insisted on the Home’s once-weekly visiting nurse helping me achieving diagnosis and prescription, only to discover an absolute intolerance: The chemicals slowed my brain to a morose crawl, were a boot on my wheel of self. I might outsmart my symptoms, disguise or incorporate them, frame them as eccentricity or vaudeville, but I wouldn’t narcotize them, not if it meant dimming the world (or my brain-same thing) to twilight.

We survived Sarah J. Hale in our different ways. Gilbert had grown, too, and grown a scowl, and he’d learned to sneer or lurch his way through difficulties. Danny coasted elegantly on his basketball skills and sophisticated musical taste, which had evolved through “Rapper’s Delight” and Funkadelic to Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes and Teddy Pendergrass. If I saw him in certain company, I knew not to bother saying hello, as he was incapable of recognizing us others from deep within his cone of self-willed blackness. Tony more or less dropped out-it was hard to be officially expelled from Sarah J., so few teachers took attendance-and spent his high-school years on Court Street, hanging out at the arcade, milking acquaintanceships made through Minna for cigarettes and odd jobs and rides on the back of Vespas, and getting lucky with a series of Minna’s ex-girlfriends, or so he said. For a six-month stint he was behind the counter at Queen Pizzeria, shoveling slices out of the oven and into white paper bags, taking smoking breaks under the marquee of the triple-X theater next door. I’d stop in and he’d batter me with cheap insults, un-Minna-worthy feints for the amusement of the older pizza men, then guiltily slip me a free slice, then shoo me away with more insults and maybe a slap on the head or a too-realistic fake jab to the spleen.

Me, I became a walking joke, preposterous, improbable, unseeable. My outbursts, utterances and tappings were white noise or static, irritating but tolerated, and finally boring unless they happened to provoke a response from some unsavvy adult, a new or substitute teacher. My peers, even the most unreachable and fearsome black girls, understood instinctively what the teachers and counselors at Sarah J., hardened into a sort of paramilitary force by dire circumstance, were slow to get: My behavior wasn’t teenage rebellion in any sense. And so it wasn’t really of interest to other teenagers. I wasn’t tough, provocative, stylish, self-destructive, sexy, wasn’t babbling some secret countercultural tongue, wasn’t testing authority, wasn’t showing colors of any kind. I wasn’t even one of the two or three heedless, timid, green-mohawked and leather-clad punk rockers who required constant beatings for their audacity. I was merely crazy.

By the time Minna returned Gilbert and I were about to graduate-no great feat, mostly a matter of showing up, staying awake, and, in Gilbert’s case, of systematically recopying my completed homework in his own hand. Tony had completely stopped showing his face at Sarah J. and Danny was somewhere in between-a presence in the yard and the gym, and in the culture of the school, he’d skipped most of his third-year classes and was being “held back,” though the concept was a bit abstract to him, I think. You could have told him he was being returned to kindergarten and he would have shrugged, only asked how high the hoops were placed in the yard, whether the rims could hold his weight.

Minna had Tony in the car already when he drove up outside the school. Gilbert went to the yard to pull Danny out of a three-on-three while I stood on the curb, motionless in the rush of students out of the building, briefly struck dumb. Minna got out of the car, a new Cadillac, bruise-purple. I was taller than Minna now, but that didn’t lessen his sway over me, the way his presence automatically begged the question of who I was, where’d I come from, and what kind of man or freak I was turning out to be. It had everything to do with the way, five years before, I’d begun discovering myself upon Minna’s jerking me out of the library and into the world, and with the way his voice had primed the pump for mine. My symptoms loved him. I reached for him-though it was May, he was wearing a trench coat-and tapped his shoulder, once, twice, let my hand fall, then raised it again and let fly a staccato burst of Tourettic caresses. Minna still hadn’t spoken.

“Eatme, Minnaweed,” I said under my breath.

“You’re a laugh and a half, Freakshow,” said Minna, his face completely grim.

Soon enough I would understand that the Minna who’d returned was not the same as the one who’d left. He’d shed his old jocularity like baby fat. He no longer saw drolleries everywhere, had lost his taste for the spectrum of human cmedy. The gate of his attention was narrowed, and what came through it now was pointed and bitter. His affections were more glancing, his laugh just a wince. He was quicker to show the spur of his impatience, too, demanded less tell your story, more walking.

But at that moment his austerity seemed utterly particular: He wanted us all in the car, had something to say. It was as though he’d been away a week or two instead of two years. He’s got a job for us, I felt myself think, or hope, and the years between fell instantly away.

Gilbert brought Danny. We took the backseat; Tony sat in front with Minna. Minna lit a cigarette while he steered with his elbows. We turned off Fourth Avenue, down Bergen. Toward Court Street, I thought. Minna put his lighter away and his hand came out of his trench-coat pockets with business cards.

L &L CAR SERVICE, they read. TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. And a phone number. No slogan this time, and no names.

“You mooks ever get learners’ permits?” said Minna.

Nobody had.

“You know where the DMV is, up on Schermerhorn? Here.” He dug out a roll, scrunched off four twenties onto the seat beside Tony, who handed them out. For Minna everything had the same price, was fixed and paid for by the quick application of twenty dollars. That hadn’t changed. “I’ll drop you up there. First I want you to see something.”

It was a tiny storefront on Bergen, just short of Smith Street, boarded so tightly it looked like a condemned building. But I, for one, was already familiar with the inside of it. A few years earlier it had been a miniature candy store, with a single rack of comics and magazines, run by a withered Hispanic woman who’d pinioned my arm when I slipped a copy of Heavy Metal into my jacket and ducked for the door. Now Minna gestured at it grandly: the future home of L &L Car Service.

Minna had an arrangement with a certain Lucas, at Corvairs Driving School, on Livingston Street-we were all to receive lessons, free of charge, beginning tomorrow. The purple Caddy was the only vehicle in L &L’s fleet, but others were on their way. (The car smelled poisonously new, vinyl squeaking like an Indian burn. My probing fingers investigated the backseat armrest ashtray-it contained ten neatly clipped fingernails.) In the meantime we’d be busy getting our licenses and rehabilitating the ruined storefront, fitting it with radios, office equipment, stationery, telephones, tape recorders, microphones (tape recorders? microphones?), a television and a small refrigerator. Minna had money to spend on these things, and he wanted us along to see him spend it. We might look for some suitable clothes while were at it-did we know we looked like rejects from Welcome Back, Kotter?-the only thing to do was drop out of Sarah J. immediately. The suggestion didn’t ruffle any feathers. In a blink we’d fallen into formation, Pavlov’s orphans. We listened to Minna’s new tonalities, distrusting and harsh, as they warmed into something like the old, more generous music, the tune we’d missed but not forgotten. He rolled on: We ought to have a CB-radio setup, this was the twentieth fucking century, had we heard? Who knew how to work a CB? Dead silence, punctured by “Radiobailey! Fine, said Minna, the Freak volunteers. Hello? Hello? We almond-studded cheeseballs were staring like we didn’t know English-what exactly had we been doing for two years anyway, apart from researching how many times a day we could clean out our fish tanks? Silence. Spank our monkeys, rough up our suspects, jerk off, Minna meant-did he have to spell it out? More silence. Hello? Hey, had we ever seen The Conversation? Best fucking movie in the world, Gene Hackman. We knew Gene Hackman? Silence again. We knew him only from Superman-Lex Luthor. It didn’t seem likely Minna meant that Gene Hackman. (Lexluthor, text-lover, lostbrother, went my brain, plumbing up trouble-where was Gerard, the other L in L &L? Minna hadn’t said his name.) Well, we ought to see it, learn a thing or two about surveillance. Talking all the while, he drove us up to Schermerhorn, to the Department of Motor Vehicles. I saw Danny’s eyes dart to the Sarah J. boys playing basketball in the park across the street-but now we were with Minna, a million miles away. We ought to get limousine-operator’s licenses, he went on. They only cost ten dollars more, the test is the same. Don’t smile for the picture, you’ll look like the Prom Date Killers. Did we have girlfriends? Of course not, who’d want a bunch of jerks from nowhere. By the way, the Old Stove was dead. Carlotta Minna had passed two weeks ago; Minna was just settling her affairs now. We wondered what affairs, didn’t ask. Oh, and Minna had gotten married, he thought to mention now. He and his new wife were moving into Carlotta’s old apartment, after first scouring the thirty-year-old sauce off the walls. We jarheads could meet Minna’s bride if we got ourselves haircuts first. Was she from Brooklyn? Tony wanted to know. Not exactly; she grew up on an island. No, you jerks, not Manhattan or Long Island-a real island. We’d meet her. Apparently first we had to be drivers who operated cameras, tape recorders and CB radios, with suits and haircuts, with unsmiling license photos. First we had to become Minna Men, though no one had said those words.

But here, here was the beauty part. By Minna’s own admission, he’d buried the lead: L &L Car Service-it wasn’t really a car service. That was just a front. L &L was a detective agency.

The joke Minna wanted to hear in the emergency room, the joke about Irving, went like this:

A Jewish mother-Mrs. Gushman, we’ll call her-walks into a travel agency. “I vant to go to Tibet,” she says. “Listen lady, take my word for it, you don’t want to go to Tibet. I’ve got a nice package tour for the Florida Keys, or maybe Hawaii-” “No,” says Mrs. Gushman, “I vant to go to Tibet.” “Lady, are you traveling alone? Tibet is no place-” “Sell me a ticket for Tibet!” shouts Mrs. Gushman. “Okay, okay.” So she goes to Tibet. Gets off the plane, says to the first person she sees, “Who’s the greatest holy man in Tibet?” “Why, that would be the High Lama,” comes the reply. “That’s who I vant to see,” says Mrs. Gushman. “Take me to the High Lama.” “Oh, no, you don’t understand, American Lady, the High Lama lives on top of our highest mountain in total seclusion. No one can see the High Lama.” “I’m Mrs. Gushman, I’ve come all the vay to Tibet, and I must see the High Lama!” “Oh, but you could never-” “Which mountain? How do I get there?” So Mrs. Gushman checks into a hotel at the base of the mountain and hires sherpas to take her to the monastery at the top. All the way up they’re trying to explain to her, nobody sees the High Lama-his own monks have to fast and meditate for years before they’re allowed to ask the High Lama a single question. She just keeps pointing her finger and saying “I’m Mrs. Gushman, take me up the mountain!” When they get to the monastery the sherpas explain to the monks-crazy American lady, wants to see the High Lama. She says, “Tell the High Lama Mrs. Gushman is here to see him.” “You don’t understand, we could never-” “Just tell him!” The monks go and come back and they’re shaking their heads in confusion. “We don’t understand, but the High Lama says he will grant you an audience. Do you understand what an honor-” “Yes, yes,” she says. “Just take me!” So they lead her in to see the High Lama. The monks are whispering and they open the door and the High Lama nods-they can leave him alone with Mrs. Gushman. And the High Lama looks at Mrs. Gushman and Mrs. Gushman says, “Irving, when are you coming home? Your father’s worried!”