Motherless Brooklyn

by Jonathan Lethem

  “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 The effect was deliberate: Minna knew the value of the gift he’d withdrawn.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 fo
ught 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.