Motherless Brooklyn

by Jonathan Lethem

“Yeah.” Coney squinted through the windshield, trying to work an angle. As he edged to the right the K-car suddenly cut out of the flow, moving to the far left. We both stared for a moment. “Whuzzat?” said Coney. “E-Z Pass,” I said. “They’ve got an E-Z Pass.” The K-car slid into the empty E-Z Pass lane, and right through the booth. Meanwhile Coney had landed us third in line for EXACT CHANGE OR TOKEN. “Follow them!” I said. “I’m trying,” said Coney, plainly dazed by this turn of events. “Get over to the left!” I said. “Go through!” “We don’t got an E-Z Pass.” Coney grinned painfully, displaying his special talent for rapid reversion to a childlike state. “I don’t care!” “But we—” I started to pry at the wheel in Coney’s hands, to try and push us to the left, but it was too late by now. The spot before us opened, and Coney eased the car into place, then rolled down his window. I plopped the fare into his open palm, and he passed it over.

I shrugged, palms up toward the roof of the Lincoln. The gesture ticcified instantly, and I repeated it, shrug, palms flapped open, grimace.

Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, rottenest surface in the boroughs. Like the G train, the BQE suffered from low self-esteem, never going into citadel Manhattan, never tasting the glory. And it was choked with forty- or fifty-wheel trucks, day and night.

I paused to measure my wits, not wanting to tic out the punch line. Then I started again, afraid of losing the thread, of losing Minna. His eyes kept closing and opening again and I wanted them open. “Octopus looks the bagpipes over, reaches out lifts one pipe lets it drop. Lifts another lets it drop. Backs up, squints at the bagpipes. Guy gets nervous, comes over to the bar says to the octopus—Accupush! Reactapus!—says to the octopush, fuckit, says gonnafuckit—says ‘What’s the matter? Can’t you play it?’ And the octopus says ‘Play it? If I can figure out how to get its pajamas off, I’m gonna fuck it!’ ” Minna’s eyes had been closed through the windup and he didn’t open them now. “You finished?” he said.

oof. it is an interesting, not quite cringe, but pity-full (pitiful?) moment when a joke doesn't land (although Minna is in no condition so it's not totally his fault)

“Don’t start now,” said Coney under his breath. “Guywalks, walksinto, guywalksinto,” I said back to him helplessly.

I wasn’t damaged or ailing enough to be interesting here, only distracting, and slightly reprehensible in a way that made them feel better about their own disorders, so my oddness was quickly and blithely incorporated into the atmosphere.

The bargain had been struck, at a level beyond my control. The joke would be told. I was only a device for telling it.

“You gotta cigarette for us, Albert?” said Coney. “Can’t smoke in here, mon,” said Albert softly. “Now, that’s a good, sensible rule,” said Coney. “ ’Cause you got all these people in here that’s concerned about their health.” Coney was occasionally a master of the intimidating non sequitur. He certainly had Albert stymied now.

“That’s okay, then,” said Coney, not hearing it right. “I’m sure whatever you can do is fine, since Frank didn’t need so much in the first place—” “I’mafrayedknot.” I felt myself nearly choke, not on unspoken words for once but on rising gorge, White Castle–flavored bile. I swallowed it back so hard my ears popped. My whole face felt flushed with a mist of acids. “Ahem. We were unable to revive misdemeanor.”

man, this is great! this is so stressful, there's two stressful things going on here, it's the ER and their friend (?) is dying, and he's struggling to control his voice

It was Albert. The Thin Rastafarian Line between us and departure.

thin Rasta line hahaha

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.

I caressed the nearest penguin,

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.

Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble.

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.

was too pathetic and faggy to touch, might be better avoided.

Meantime, beneath that frozen shell a sea of language was reaching full boil.

“What do you need it to mean, Fruitloop—Living Loud?

me, uncertain how I’d gained this freshet of approval.

“Minna, that’s an Italian name?” said Tony. This was on his own behalf, obviously. It was time to get to the point. The rest of us could all go fuck ourselves.

We developed a certain collective ego, a presence apart at the Home.

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 holy 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,...

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.

we obediently filed out of the van and onto the sidewalk, into the day’s glare, the suddenly formless afternoon.

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.

fuck. what a setup. and how G and D slink away shows a lot

“Stickmebailey!” I shouted. Falling back against the car behind me, I turned my head again, and again, twitching away, enshrining the moment in ticceography.

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.

Gilbert perhaps ardently picking his nose on the sidelines.

that's right, Lethem writes about like boys a lot. Fortress of Solitude is also two young boys and their friendship.

Minna made a few more faces, wincing, chuckling silently, shaking off some invisible annoyance by twitching his cheek.

The chemicals slowed my brain to a morose crawl, were a boot on my wheel of self.

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.

it's an interesting voice. this is dirty and criminal brooklyn, but his language is so elevated. but it's true, it's not really a parody and doesn't come off as tryhard. i think that's pretty good. sheltered Torrance-raised me could not write about Compton, even though I've "been through it" and have vivid memories of BKs with glass at the cashiers and so on.

We almond-studded cheeseballs were staring like we didn’t know English

We were all four of us an arrangement around a missing centerpiece, as incoherent as a verbless sentence.

Guessfrog!—a big Polish guy—Barnamum Pierogi!

cribbed from an interview but: it's cool how he seems always to have characters with pathology/conditions in his books, and they're not clowns or their condition is not the end-all-be-all of them. the other example is the blind guys in As She Climbed Across the Table. I guess they were a bit a comic relief in their weirdness, but they did serve a purpose and did sit with the main guy for a few conversations iirc. and, what is crucial, and something that Doerr in "All the light we cannot see" did as well is not elevate or put on a pedestal these people for "overcoming their tragic condition". they just are blind, and that's all there is to it. Here with lionel, not only is he not a clown, it's not particularly funny or sad when he outburst, it just IS PART OF HIM, and Lethem explicitly describes lots of the indifference of other characters (usually by saying "it was not interesting to [whoever was sitting nearby]". i remember this distinctly at least twice) he also is the main character, or at least the most prominent out of the 4 main guys (just because it's first person doesn't mean they have to be The Main) so. knowledgeable representation is key. Lethem said he researched watchign docus and reading Oliver Sacks, and while he intentionally tried to "get it right", he did not model it after anyone he knew, nor—and this is important—is he trying to appease anyone. He was surprised that an important Tourette's association reached out to him with their appreciation, and he was surprised because he didn't write this -in order to- give representation , or signal his awareness about the condition.

I could walk down Atlantic Avenue, sit in an Arabic storefront where they knew me and wouldn’t gape, and drink a tiny cup of mudlike black coffee

“I worked for Frank. I miss him. I want to catch his killer as much as you.” “So let’s compare notes. The names Alphonso Matricardi and Leonardo Rockaforte mean anything to you?”

ohh see that's scary, he knows something but his tics mean he could say it any time

The corner was empty of cop.

Have you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered before he can step onto the page and burden you with his actual existence? Detective stories always have too many characters anyway. And characters mentioned early on but never sighted, just lingering offstage, take on an awful portentous quality. Better to have them gone.

“ ’Cause it said ‘concentrate,’ get it?” This was another thing I hated about Loomis. Years ago he’d latched on to Minna’s joke-telling contests, decided he could compete. But he favored idiot riddles, not jokes at all, no room for character or nuance. He didn’t seem to know the difference. “Got it,” I admitted.

lmao i love that he has people telling jokes and they never land what is that

I realized it sounded as if I’d actually seen him, but I let the implication stand.

I don’t know whether The Artist Formerly Known as Prince is Tourettic or obsessive-compulsive in his human life,

he likes to start segments with these little reflective pieces, but he never wallows much in them. it would be interesting if he went a little longer on these digressions, but i bet people could complain that it eats into the plot. because the rest of the material is pretty plotty and moves along at a certain clip

“Too noisy,” she said, and frowned as if it should be obvious. A city bus roared past in the distance, damaging her point.

a thwarted back window, through which an emaciated shaft of sunlight negotiated a maze of brick.

“Get this. What’s the difference between three hundred sixty-five blow jobs and a radial tire?” “Don’tcare!” I shouted. The four in the car all jumped. “One’s a Goodyear, the other’s a great year,” said Loomis proudly. He knew he’d nailed the riddle, no faltering this time, not a word out of place. “Where are you calling from?” I asked. “You called me.

LOL another joke that doesn't land i think this is hilarious

The building had a private loading zone and a subtle curb cut, though, which sang of money, payoffs to city officials, and of women’s-shoe heels too fragile to tangle with the usual four-inch step, too expensive to risk miring in dog shit.

WE’RE POLITE NEW YORKERS, WE SUPPORT MAYOR GIULIANI!

oh yeah, he's not very... at least overtly political definitely there's race talk but nothing like polemic

“Larval Pushbug,” I said softly, trying to offer my name.

"try" is such a sad verb

They’d played us like a Farfisa organ.

This was my second time imperiled in a parked vehicle in the space of three hours.

Does every conversation with you have to be the director’s cut?

the thing about being a good writer is that everyone in the story is really clever. like everyone has good phrases and wordplay like this, unless they're consciously dumb or a caricature