Motherless Brooklyn

Over the next two years I grew larger-neither fat nor particularly muscular, but large, bearlike, and so harder for the bantamweight Tony or anyone else to bully-and I grew stranger. With the help of Minna’s book I contextualized my symptoms as Tourette’s, then discovered how little context that was. My constellation of behaviors was “unique as a snowflake,” oh, joy, and evolving, like some micro-scoped crystal in slow motion, to reveal new facets, and to spread from its place at my private core to cover my surface, my public front. The freak show was now the whole show, and my earlier, ticless self impossible anymore to recall clearly. I read in the book of the drugs that might help me, Haldol, Klonopin, and Orap, and laboriously insisted on the Home’s once-weekly visiting nurse helping me achieving diagnosis and prescription, only to discover an absolute intolerance: The chemicals slowed my brain to a morose crawl, were a boot on my wheel of self. I might outsmart my symptoms, disguise or incorporate them, frame them as eccentricity or vaudeville, but I wouldn’t narcotize them, not if it meant dimming the world (or my brain-same thing) to twilight.

We survived Sarah J. Hale in our different ways. Gilbert had grown, too, and grown a scowl, and he’d learned to sneer or lurch his way through difficulties. Danny coasted elegantly on his basketball skills and sophisticated musical taste, which had evolved through “Rapper’s Delight” and Funkadelic to Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes and Teddy Pendergrass. If I saw him in certain company, I knew not to bother saying hello, as he was incapable of recognizing us others from deep within his cone of self-willed blackness. Tony more or less dropped out-it was hard to be officially expelled from Sarah J., so few teachers took attendance-and spent his high-school years on Court Street, hanging out at the arcade, milking acquaintanceships made through Minna for cigarettes and odd jobs and rides on the back of Vespas, and getting lucky with a series of Minna’s ex-girlfriends, or so he said. For a six-month stint he was behind the counter at Queen Pizzeria, shoveling slices out of the oven and into white paper bags, taking smoking breaks under the marquee of the triple-X theater next door. I’d stop in and he’d batter me with cheap insults, un-Minna-worthy feints for the amusement of the older pizza men, then guiltily slip me a free slice, then shoo me away with more insults and maybe a slap on the head or a too-realistic fake jab to the spleen.

Me, I became a walking joke, preposterous, improbable, unseeable. My outbursts, utterances and tappings were white noise or static, irritating but tolerated, and finally boring unless they happened to provoke a response from some unsavvy adult, a new or substitute teacher. My peers, even the most unreachable and fearsome black girls, understood instinctively what the teachers and counselors at Sarah J., hardened into a sort of paramilitary force by dire circumstance, were slow to get: My behavior wasn’t teenage rebellion in any sense. And so it wasn’t really of interest to other teenagers. I wasn’t tough, provocative, stylish, self-destructive, sexy, wasn’t babbling some secret countercultural tongue, wasn’t testing authority, wasn’t showing colors of any kind. I wasn’t even one of the two or three heedless, timid, green-mohawked and leather-clad punk rockers who required constant beatings for their audacity. I was merely crazy.

By the time Minna returned Gilbert and I were about to graduate-no great feat, mostly a matter of showing up, staying awake, and, in Gilbert’s case, of systematically recopying my completed homework in his own hand. Tony had completely stopped showing his face at Sarah J. and Danny was somewhere in between-a presence in the yard and the gym, and in the culture of the school, he’d skipped most of his third-year classes and was being “held back,” though the concept was a bit abstract to him, I think. You could have told him he was being returned to kindergarten and he would have shrugged, only asked how high the hoops were placed in the yard, whether the rims could hold his weight.