Motherless Brooklyn (8 page)

The last boy in Minna’s van, Danny Fantl, was a ringer. He only looked white. Danny had assimilated to the majority population at St. Vincent’s
happily, effortlessly, down to his bones. In his way he commanded as much respect as Tony (and he certainly commanded Tony’s respect, too) without bragging or posing, often without opening his mouth. His real language was basketball, and he was such a taut, fluid athlete that he couldn’t help seeming a bit bottled up indoors, in the classroom. When he spoke it was to scoff at our enthusiasms, our displays of uncool, but distantly, as if his mind were really elsewhere plotting crossover moves, footwork. He listened to Funkadelic and Cameo and Zapp and was as quick to embrace rap as any boy at the Home, yet when music he admired actually
played
, instead of dancing he’d stand with arms crossed, scowling and pouting in time with the beat, his expressive hips frozen. Danny existed in suspension, neither black nor white, neither beating up nor beaten, beautiful but unfazed by the concept of girls, rotten at schoolwork but coasting through classes, and frequently unanchored by gravity, floating between pavement and the tangled chain-mesh of the St. Vincent’s basketball hoops. Tony was tormented by his lost Italian family, adamant they would return; Danny might have coolly walked out on his parents one day when he was seven or eight and joined a pickup game that lasted until he was fourteen, to the day Minna drove up in his truck.

Tourette’s teaches you what people will ignore and forget, teaches you to see the reality-knitting mechanism people employ to tuck away the intolerable, the incongruous, the disruptive—it teaches you this because you’re the one lobbing the intolerable, incongruous, and disruptive their way. Once I sat on an Atlantic Avenue bus a few rows ahead of a man with a belching tic—long, groaning, almost vomitous-sounding noises, the kind a fifth-grader learns to make, swallowing a bellyful of air, then forgets by high school, when charming girls becomes more vital than freaking them out. My colleague’s compulsion was terribly specific: He sat at the back of the bus, and only when
every head faced forward did he give out with his masterly digestive simulacra. We’d turn, shocked—there were fifteen or twenty others on the bus—and he’d look away. Then, every sixth or seventh time, he’d mix in a messy farting sound. He was a miserable-looking black man in his sixties, a drinker, an idler. Despite the peekaboo brilliance of his timing it was clear to everyone he was the source, and so the other riders hummed or coughed reprovingly, quit giving him the satisfaction of looking, and avoided one another’s gaze. This was a loser’s game, since not glancing back freed him to run together great uninterrupted phrases of his ripest noise. To all but me he was surely a childish jerk-off, a pathetic wino fishing for attention (maybe he understood himself this way, too—if he was undiagnosed, probably so). But it was unmistakably a compulsion, a tic—Tourette’s. And it went on and on, until I’d reached my stop and, I’m sure, after.

The point is, I knew that those other passengers would barely recall it a few minutes after stepping off to their destinations. Despite how that maniacal froglike groaning filled the auditorium of the bus, the concertgoers were plainly engaged in the task of forgettig the music. Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble. The belching man ruptured it so quickly and completely that I could watch the wound instantly seal.

A Touretter can also be The Invisible Man.

Similarly, I doubt the other Boys, even the three who joined me in becoming Minna Men, directly recalled my bouts of kissing. I probably could have forced them to remember, but it would have been grudgingly. That tic was too much for us to encompass then, at St. Vincent’s, as it would be now, anytime, anywhere. Besides, as my Tourette’s bloomed I quickly layered the kissing behind hundreds of other behaviors, some of which, seen through the prism of Minna’s
rough endearments, became my trademarks, my Freakshow. So the kissing was gratefully forgotten.

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. I’d begun reaching for doorframes, kneeling to grab at skittering loosened sneaker laces (a recent fashion among the toughest boys at St. Vincent’s, unfortunately for me), incessantly tapping the metal-pipe legs of the schoolroom desks and chairs in search of certain ringing tones, and worst, grabbing and kissing my fellow Boys. I grew terrified of myself then, and burrowed deeper into the library, but was forced out for classes or meals or bedtime. Then it would happen. I’d lunge at someone, surround him with my arms, and kiss his cheek or neck or forehead, whatever I hit. Then, compulsion expelled, I’d be left to explain, defend myself, or flee. I kissed Greg Toon and Edwin Torres, whose eyes I’d never dared meet. I kissed Leshawn Montrose, who’d broken Mr. Voccaro’s arm with a chair. I kissed Tony Vermonte and Gilbert Coney and tried to kiss Danny Fantl. I kissed Steven Grossman, pathetically thankful he’d come along just then. I kissed my own counterparts, other sad invisible Boys working the margins at St. Vincent’s, just surviving, whose names I didn’t know. “It’s a game!” I’d say, pleadingly. “It’s a game.” That was my only defense, and since the most inexplicable things in our lives were games, with their ancient embedded rituals—British Bulldog, Ringolevio, Scully and Jinx—a mythos handed down to us orphans who-knew-how, it seemed possible I might persuade them this was another one, The Kissing Game. Just as important, I might persuade myself—wasn’t it something in a book I’d read, a game for fevered teenagers, perhaps Sadie Hawkins Day? Forget the absence of girls, didn’t we Boys deserve the same? That was it, then, I decided—I
was single-handedly dragging the underprivileged into adolescence. I knew something they didn’t. “It’s a game,” I’d say desperately, sometimes as tears of pain ran down my face. “It’s a game.” Leshawn Montrose cracked my head against a porcelain water fountain, Greg Toon and Edwin Torres generously only shucked me off onto the floor. Tony Vermonte twisted my arm behind my back and forced me against a wall. “It’s a game,” I breathed. He released me and shook his head, full of pity. The result, oddly enough, was I was spared a few months’ worth of beatings at his hands—I was too pathetic and faggy to touch, might be better avoided. Danny Fantlher my move coming and faked me out as though I were a lead-footed defender, then vanished down a stairwell. Gilbert stood and glared, deeply unnerved due to our private history. “A game,” I reassured him. “It’s a game,” I told poor Steven Grossman and he believed me, just long enough to try kissing our mutual tormentor Tony, perhaps hoping it was a key to overturning the current order. He was not spared.

Meantime, beneath that frozen shell a sea of language was reaching full boil. It became harder and harder not to notice that when a television pitchman said
to last the rest of a lifetime
my brain went
to rest the lust of a loaftomb
, that when I heard “Alfred Hitchcock,” I silently replied “Altered Houseclock” or “Ilford Hotchkiss,” that when I sat reading Booth Tarkington in the library now my throat and jaw worked behind my clenched lips, desperately fitting the syllables of the prose to the rhythms of “Rapper’s Delight” (which was then playing every fifteen or twenty minutes out on the yard), that an invisible companion named Billy or Bailey was begging for insults I found it harder and harder to withhold.

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.