Motherless Brooklyn

“I don’t know, I was thinking maybe Greek,” said Minna. “I used to know this Greek guy went around knocking up the Italian girls down Union Street, until a couple their older brothers took him out under the bridge. You remind me of him, you know? Got that dusky tinge. I’d say half Greek. Or maybe Puerto Rican, or Syrian.”

“Fuck you.”

“Probably know all your parents, if you think about it. We’re not talking the international jet set here-bunch of teen mothers, probably live in a five-mile radius, need to know the goddamn truth.”

So it was, with this casual jaunt against Tony’s boasts, that Minna appeared to announce what we already half suspected-that it was not only his life that was laced with structures of meaning but our own, that these master plots were transparent to him and that he held the power to reveal them, that he did know our parents and at any moment might present them to us.

Other times he taunted us, playing at knowledge or ignorance-we couldn’t know which it was. He and I were alone when he said, “Essrog, Essrog. That name.” He crunched up his mouth and squinted, as if trying to remember, or perhaps to read a name inscribed on the distant Manhattan skyline.

“You know an Essrog?” I said, my breath short, heart pounding. “Edgehog!”

“No. It’s just-You ever look it up in the phone book? Can’t be more than three or four Essrogs, for chrissakes. Such a weird name.” Later, at the Home, I looked. There were three.

Minna’s weird views filtered down through the jokes he told and liked to hear, and those he cut short within a line or two of their telling. We learned to negotiate the labyrinth of his prejudices blind, and blindly. Hippies were dangerous and odd, also sort of sad in their utopian wrongness. (“Your parents must of been hippies,” he’d tell me. “That’s why you came out the superfreak you are.”) Homosexual men were harmless reminders of the impulse Minna was sure lurked in all of us-and “half a fag” was more shameful than a whole one. Certain baseball players, Mets specifically (the Yankees were m t but boring, the Mets wonderfully pathetic and human), were half a fag-Lee Mazzilli, Rusty Staub, later Gary Carter. So were most rock stars and anyone who’d been in the armed services but not in a war. Lesbians were wise and mysterious and deserved respect (and how could we who relied on Minna for all our knowledge of women argue when he himself grew baffled and reverent?) but could still be comically stubborn or stuck up. The Arabic population of Atlantic Avenue was as distant and unfathomable as the Indian tribes that had held our land before Columbus. “Classic” minorities-Irish, Jews, Poles, Italians, Greeks and Puerto Ricans-were the clay of life itself, funny in their essence, while blacks and Asians of all types were soberly snubbed, unfunny (Puerto Ricans probably should have been in this second class but had been elevated to “classic” status single-handedly by West Side Story-and all Hispanics were “Ricans” even when they were Dominicans, as they frequently were). But bone stupidity, mental illness, and familial or sexual anxiety-these were the bolts of electricity that made the clay walk, the animating forces that rendered human life amusing and that flowed, once you learned to identify them, through every personality and interaction. 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.

I called the Brooklyn directory’s Essrogs one day when I was left alone for twenty minutes in a warehouse office, waiting for Minna to return, slowly picking out the numbers on the heavy rotary dial, trying not to obsess on the finger holes. I’d perhaps dialed a phone twice at that point in my life.

I tried F. Essrog and Lawrence Essrog and Murray and Annette Essrog. F. wasn’t home. Lawrence’s phone was answered by a child. I listened for a while as he said “Hello? Hello?,” my vocal cords frozen, then hung up.

Murray Essrog picked up the phone. His voice was wheezy and ancient.

“Essrog?” I said, and whispered Chestbutt away from the phone. “Yes. This is the Essrog residence, Murray speaking. Who’s this?”

“Baileyrog,” I said.

“Who?”

“Bailey.”

He waited for a moment, then said, “Well, what can I do for you, Bailey?”