Motherless Brooklyn (9 page)

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?”

“Just the name, L and L. Two L’s. Name of the company.”

“Yeah, but what’s it mean?”

“What do you need it to mean, Fruitloop—Living Loud? Loving Ladies? Laughing at you ers?”

“What, it doesn’t mean anything?” said Tony.

“I didn’t say that, did I?”

“Least Lonely,”
I suggested.

“There you go,” said Minna, waving his can of beer at me. “L and L Movers, Least Lonely.”

Tony, Danny and Gilbert all stared at me, uncertain how I’d gained this freshet of approval.

“Liking Lionel,”
I heard myself say.

“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.

“What are you, the census?” said Minna. “Cub reporter? What’s your full name, Jimmy Olsen?”

“Lois Lane,”
I said. Like anyone, I’d read Superman comics.

“Tony Vermonte,” said Tony, ignoring me.

“Vermont-ee,” repeated Minna. “That’s what, like a New England thing, right? You a Red Sox fan?”

“Yankees,” said Tony, confused and defensive. The Yankees were champions now, the Red Sox their hapless, eternal victims, vanquished most recently by Bucky Dent’s famous home run. We’d all watched it on television.

“Luckylent,” I said, remembering. “Duckybent.”

Minna erupted with laughter. “Yeah, Ducky fucking Bent! That’s good. Don’t look now, it’s Ducky Bent.”

“Lexluthor,”
I said, reaching out to touch Minna’s shoulder. He only stared at my hand, didn’t move away. “Lunchylooper, Laughyluck, Loopylip—”

“All right, Loopy,” said Minna. “Enough already.”

“Lockystuff—”
I was desperate for a way to stop. My hand went on tapping Minna’s shoulder.

“Let it go,” said Minna, and now he returned my shoulder taps, once, hard. “Don’t tug the boat.”

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—mising 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.

Distributing eighty dollars and those four business cards was all Minna had to do to instate the four of us forever—or anyway, for as long as he liked—as the junior staff of L&L Movers. Twenty dollars and a beer remained our usual pay. Minna would gather us sporadically, on a day’s notice or no notice at all—and the latter possibility became incentive, once we’d begun high school, for us to return to St. Vincent’s directly after classes and lounge expectantly in the schoolyard or recreation room, pretending not to listen for the distinctive grumble of his van’s motor. The jobs varied enormously. We’d load merchandise, like the cartons in the trailer, in and out of storefront-basement grates all up and down Court Street, borderline shady activity that it seemed wholesalers ought to be handling themselves, transactions sealed with a shared cigar in the back of the shop. Or
we’d bustle apartmentloads of furniture in and out of brownstone walk-ups, legitimate moving jobs, it seemed to me, where fretting couples worried we weren’t old or expert enough to handle their belongings—Minna would hush them, remind them of the cost of distractions: “The meter’s running.” (This hourly rate wasn’t reflected in our pay, of course. It was twenty dollars whether we hurried or not; we hurried.) We put sofas through third-story windows with a makeshift cinch and pulley, Tony and Minna on the roof, Gilbert and Danny in the window to receive, myself on the ground with the guide ropes. A massive factory building under the Brooklyn end of the Manhattan Bridge, owned by an important but unseen friend of Minna’s, had been damaged in fire, and we moved most of the inhabitants for free, as some sort of settlement or concession—the terms were obscure, but Minna was terrifically urgent about it. When a couple of college-age artists objected to our rough handling of a pile of damaged canvases the firemen had heaped on the floor, he paced and seethed at the delay; the only meter running now was Minna’s own time, and his credibility with his friend-client. We woke at five one August morning to collect and set up the temporary wooden stages for the bands performing in the Atlantic Antic, a massive annual street fair, then worked again at dusk to tear the stages down, the hot avenue now heaped with a day’s torn wrappers and crumpled cups, a few fevered revelers still staggering home as we knocked the pine frames apart with hammers and the heels of our shoes. Once we emptied an entire electronics showroom into Minna’s truck, pulling unboxed stereos off shelves and out of window displays, disconnecting the wires from lit, blinking amplifiers, eventually even taking the phone off the desk—it would have seemed a sort of brazen burglary had Minna not been standing on the sidewalk in front, drinking beer and telling jokes with the man who’d unpadlocked the shop gates for us as we filed past with the goods. Everywhere Minna connived and cajoled and dropped names, winking at us to make us complicit, and everywhere Minna’s clients stared at us Boys, some wondering if we’d
palm a valuable when they weren’t looking, some trying to figure the angle, perhaps hoping to catch a hint of disloyalty, an edge over Minna they’d save for when they needed it. We palmed nothing, revealed no disloyalty. Instead we stared back, tried to make them flinch. And we listened, gathered information. Minna was teaching us when he meant to, and we didn’t.

It changed us as a group. We developed a certain collective ego, a presence apart at the Home. We grew less embattled from within, more from without: nonwhite Boys sensed in our privilege a hint of their future deprivations and punished us for it. Age had begun to heighten those distinctions anyway. So Tony, Gilbert, Danny and myself smoothed out our old antipathies and circled the wagons. We stuck up for one another, at the Home and at Sarah J. Hale, our local high school, a required stop except for those few who’d qualified for some special (i.e., Manhattan) destination, Stuyvesant or Music and Art.