Jonathan Lethem - Motherless Brooklyn

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.