Motherless Brooklyn

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.