Jonathan Lethem - Motherless Brooklyn

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?”