Motherless Brooklyn

by Jonathan Lethem

To tugboat was to try Minna’s patience. Any time you pushed your luck, said too much, overstayed a welcome, or overestimated the usefulness of a given method or approach, you were guilty of having tugged the boat. Tugboating was most of all a dysfunction of wits and storytellers, and a universal one: Anybody who thought himself funny would likely tug a boat here or there. Knowing when a joke or verbal gambit was right at its limit, quitting before the boat had been tugged, that was art (and it was a given that you wanted to push it as near as possible—missing an opportunity to score a laugh was deeply lame, an act undeserving of a special name). Years before the word Tourette’s was familiar to any of us, Minna had me diagnosed: Terminal Tugboater.

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.