Motherless Brooklyn

by Jonathan Lethem

  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 l
ong, 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, t
hen, 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.