Motherless Brooklyn

by Jonathan Lethem

  “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 bo
th 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.