Motherless Brooklyn

I was never overfond of the butt trust. In fact, I hated Loomis-let me count the ways. His imprecision and laziness maddened my compulsive instincts-his patchiness, the way even his speech was riddled with drop-outs and glitches like a worn cassette, the way his leaden senses refused the world, his attention like a pinball rolling past unlit blinkers and frozen flippers into the hole again and again: game over. He was permanently impressed by the most irrelevant banalities and impossible to impress with real novelty, meaning, or conflict. And he was too moronic to be properly self-loathing-so it was my duty to loathe him instead.

Tonight, as we roared across the metal grating of the Brooklyn Bridge’s roadway, he settled into his usual dull riff: The sanitation force gets no respect. “You think they’d know what it’s like for a cop in this city, me and those guys are on the same team, but this one cop keeps saying, ‘Hey, why don’t you come around my block, somebody keeps stealing my garbage.’ If it weren’t for Gilbert I would of told him to stick it-”

“What time did Gilbert call you?” I interrupted.

“I don’t know, around seven or eight, maybe nine almost,” he said, succinctly demonstrating his unfitness for the force.

“It’s-Tourette is the stickman!-only ten now, Loomis.”

“Okay, it was just after eight.”

“Did you find out where Ullman lived?”

“Downtown somewhere. I gave Gilbert the address.”

“You don’t remember where it was?”

“Nah.”

Loomis wasn’t going to be any help. He seemed to know this as well as I, and immediately launched into another digression, as if to say, I’m useless, but no hard feelings, okay? “So you heard the one about how many Catholics does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

“I’ve heard that one, Loomis. No jokes, please.”

“Ah, come on. What about why did the blonde stare at the carton of orange juice?”

I was silent. We came off the bridge, at Cadman Plaza. I’d be rid of him soon.

“ ’Cause it said ‘concentrate,’ get it?”

This was another thing I hated about Loomis. Years ago he’d latched on to Minna’s joke-telling contests, decided he could compete. But he favored idiot riddles, not jokes at all, no room for character or nuance. He didn’t seem to know the difference.

“Got it,” I admitted.

“What about how do you titillate an ocelot?”

“What?”

“Titillate an ocelot. You know, like a big cat. I think.”

“It’s a big cat. How do you titillate it, Loomiseemed D; “You oscillate its tit a lot, get it?”

“Eat me Ocelot!” I screamed as we turned onto Court Street. Loomis’s crappy punning had slid right under the skin of my symptoms. “Lancelot ancillary oscillope! Octapot! Tittapocamus!”

The garbage cop laughed. “Jesus, Lionel, you crack me up. You never quit with that routine.”

“It’s not a-root-ocelot,” I shrieked through my teeth. Here, finally, was what I hated most in Loomis: He’d always insisted, from the time we met as teenagers to this day, that I was elaborately feigning and could keep from ticcing if I wanted to. Nothing would dissuade him, no example or demonstration, no program of education. I’d once shown him the book Minna gave me; he glanced at it and laughed. I was making it up. As far as he was concerned, my Tourette’s was just an odd joke, one going mostly over his head, stretched out over the course of fifteen years.

“Tossed salad!” he said. “Gotcha!” He liked to think he was playing along.

“Go touchalot!” I slapped him on the thickly padded shoulder of his coat, so suddenly the car swerved with my movement.

“Christ, look out!”

I tapped him five more times, my driving steady now.

“I can’t get over you,” he said. “Even at a time like this. I guess it’s sentimental, like a way of saying, if Frank were still here. Since that routine always did keep him busted up.”

We pulled up outside L &L. The lights in the storefront were on. Somebody had returned since my jaunt to the Sixth Precinct.

“I thought you were driving me home.” Loomis lived on Nevins Street, near the projects.

“You can walk from here, gofuckacop.”

“C’mon, Lionel.”

I parked in the open spot in across from the storefront. The sooner Loomis and I were out of each other’s presence, the better.

“Walk,” I said.

“At least lemme use the can,” he whined. “Those jerks at the station wouldn’t let me. I been holding it.”

“If you’ll do one thing for me.”

“Whuzzat?”

“Ullman’s address,” I said. “You found it once. I need it, Loomis.”

“I can get it tomorrow morning when I’m back at my desk. You want me to call you here?”

I took one of Minna’s cards out of my pocket and handed it to him. “Call the beeper number. I’ll be carring it.”

“Okay, all right, now will you lemme take a leak?”

I didn’t speak, just clicked the car locks up and down automatically six times, then got out. Loomis followed me to the storefront, and inside.