Motherless Brooklyn

Minna emerged just as the two small yellow trucks drove up. They were Ryder Rental vans, smaller than Minna’s, and identically decorated, one pristine, the other dingy. The drivers sat smoking cigarettes in the cabs, with the motors running. Minna unlatched the backs of the trucks, which weren’t padlocked, and directed us to move the contents into his van-quick.

The first thing I laid hands on was an electric guitar, one shaped into a flying V and decorated with enameled yellow and silver flames. A cable dangled from its socket. Other instruments, guitars and bass guitars, were in their hard black cases, but this one had been unplugged and shoved into the van in a hurry. The two trucks were full of concert gear-seven or eight guitars, keyboards, panels full of electronic switches, bundles of cable, microphones and stands, pedal effects for the floor, a drum kit that had been pushed into the truck whole instead of being disassembled, and a number of amplifiers and monitors, including six black stage amps, each half the size of a refrigerator, which alone filled the second Ryder truck and each took two of us to lift out and into Minna’s van. The umber ofers and hard cases were stenciled with the band’s name, which I recognized faintly. I learned later they were responsible for a minor AM hit or two, songs about roads, cars, women. I didn’t grasp it then, but this was equipment enough for a small stadium show.

I wasn’t sure we could fit the whole contents of the two trucks into the van but Minna only egged us to shut up and work faster. The men in the trucks never spoke or got out of the cabs, just smoked and waited. No one ever appeared from the corrugated shack. At the end there was barely room for Gilbert and me to crowd in behind the doors to ride with the band’s calamitously piled equipment while Tony and Danny shared a spot up front with Minna.

We crossed the bridge back to Brooklyn like that, Gilbert and I fearing for our lives if the load shifted or toppled. After a few breathless turns and sudden stops Minna double-parked the van and freed us from the back. The destination was a brownstone in a row of brownstones on Degraw Street, red brick, stone detailing flaking to powder, genteel curtained windows. Some canny salesman had ten or twenty years before sold the entire block on defacing these hundred-year-old buildings with flimsy tin awnings over the elegant front doors; the only thing special about Matricardi and Rockaforte’s house was that it lacked one of these.

“We’re gonna have to take apart those drums,” said Tony when he saw the doors.

“Just get it inside,” said Minna. “It’ll fit.”

“Are there stairs?” said Gilbert.

“You’ll see, you chocolate cheesepuffs,” said Minna. “Just get it up the stoop already.”

Inside, we saw. The brownstone which appeared so ordinary was an anomaly just through the doors. The insides-typical narrow halls and stairs, spoked banisters, high ornate ceilings-had all been stripped and gutted, replaced with a warehouse-style stairwell into the basement apartment and upstairs. The parlor floor where we stood was sealed off on the left by a clean white wall and single closed door. We ferried the equipment into the upper-floor apartment while Minna stood guarding the rear of the van. The drums went easily.

The band’s equipment tucked neatly into one corner of the apartment, on wooden pallets apparently set out for that purpose. The upper floors of the building were empty apart from a few crates here and there and a single oak dining table heaped with silverware: forks, spoons in two sizes, and butter knives, hundreds of each, ornate and heavy, gleaming, bundled in disordered piles, no sense to them except that the handles all faced in one direction. I’d never seen so much silverware in one place, even in St. Vincent’s institutional kitchen-anyway, those St. Vincent’s forks were flat cutouts of dingy steel bent this way to make tines, that way to make a handle, barely better than the plastic “sporks” we were issued with our school lunches. These forks were little masterpieces of sculpture in comparison. I wandered away from the others and obsessed on the mountain of forks, knives and spoons, but especially those forks, as rich in their contours as tiny thumbless hands, or the paws of a silver animal.

The others shifted the last of the amplifiers up the stairs. Minna reparked the van. I stood e table, trying to look casual. Jerking your head was good cover for jerking your head, I discovered. Nobody watched me. I pocketed one of the forks, trembling with lust and anticipation, joy in my fear, as I did it. I only just got away with it, too: Minna was back.

“The clients want to meet you,” he said.

“Who’s that?” said Tony.

“Just shut up when they talk, okay?” said Minna.

“Okay, but who are they?” said Tony.

“Practice shutting up now so you’ll be good at it when you meet them,” said Minna. “They’re downstairs.”