Motherless Brooklyn

“I’ve heard of that,” said Kimmery. “But yours is, I don’t know, like a beer can that’s been crushed, like for recycling.”

So it was for me. In my paltry history I’d never been unveiled without hearing something about it-freak shows within freak shows. Whatever Kimmery thought, it didn’t keep her from freeing me from my boxer shorts and palming me, so that I felt myself aching heavily in her cool grasp. We made a circuit: mouths, knees, hands and what they held. The sensation was okay. I tried to match the rhythm of her hand with mine, failed. Kimmery’s tongue lapped my chin, found my mouth again. I made a whining sound, not a part of any word. Language was destroyed. Bailey, he left town.

“It’s okay to talk,” she whispered.

“Uh.”

“I like, um, I like it when you talk. When you make sounds.”

“Okay.”

“Tell me something, Lionel.”

“What?”

“I mean, say something. The way you do.”

I looked at her open-mouthed. Her hand urged me toward an utterance that was anything but verbal. I tried to distract her the same way.

“Speak, Lionel.”

“Ah.” It really was all I could think to say.

She kissed me gaspingly and drew back, her look expectant.

“One Mind!” I said.

“Yes!” said Kimmery.

“Fonebone!” I shouted.

Another key contributor to my Tourette’s lexicon was a cartoonist named Don Martin, first encountered in a pile of tattered Mad magazines in a box in the Ping-Pong room in the basement of St. Vincent’s when I was eleven or twelve. I used to pore over his drawings, trying to find what it was about his characters, drawn with riotously bulging eyes, noses, chins, Adam’s apples and knees, elongated tongues and fingers and feet that flapped like banners, named Professor Bleent, P. Carter Franit, Mrs. Freenbeen and Mr. Fonebone, that stirred such a deep chord in me. His image of life was garish and explosive, heads being stretched and shrunk, surgeons lopping off noses and dropping brains and sewing hands on backward, falling safes and metal presses squashing men flat or into boxlike packages, children swallowing coat hangers and pogo sticks and taking on their shapes. His agonized characters moved through their panels with a geeky physicality, seeming to strain toward ther catastrophic contact with fire hoses, whirring blades, and drawbridges, and his sophomoric punch lines mostly hinged on reversals or literalizations-“The kids are upstairs with their ears glued to the radio”-or else on outright destruction. Mad often held the concluding panel of a Don Martin cartoon to the following page, and part of the pleasure of his work was never knowing whether the payoff would be a visual pun or verbal riff or merely the sight of a man in a full-body cast falling out a window into the path of a steamroller. Mostly, though, I recall the distortion, the torque in the bodies he drew: These characters had met disaster in being born onto the page, and their more extreme fates were only realizations of their essential nature. This made sense to me. And Fonebone made sense, too. He had a name I could get behind. For a while he almost supplanted Bailey, and he was lastingly traceable in my tendency to append phone or bone to the end of a phrase.

When I had sex with another person and my body began to convulse and move faster, my toes to curl, my eyes to roll, I felt like a Don Martin character, a Fonebone, all elbows and bowlegs and boomerang penis and gurgling throat in a halo of flung-off sweat drops and sound effects: Fip, Thwat, Zwip, Sproing, Flabadab. More than Daffy Duck, more than Art Carney, more than any other icon of my discomfort. Don Martin’s drawings throbbed with the suggestion that disruptive feeling was all sexual. Though his venue denied him any overt reference his characters overflowed with lewd energies, which had to be manifested instead in tics and seizures, eruptions and deformations. His poor doomed Fonebones seemed to chart my path from twitch to orgasm, the way sex first smoothed away tics, then supplanted them with a violent double: little death, big tic. So perhaps it was Don Martin’s fault that I always expected a punishment after sex, cringed in anticipation of the steamroller or plummeting anvil to follow.

Possibly Kimmery sensed it in me, this dread of a page about to be turned, revealing some ludicrous doom on the last panel of my cartoon. Another fact about Don Martin: He never used the same character twice-each was an innocent pawn with no carry-over from one episode to the next, no understanding of his role or fate. A Fonebone was a placeholder, a disposable clone or stooge. A member of the Butt Trust.

“Is something the matter?” she said, stopping what she was doing, what I was doing.

“Everything’s fine. I mean, better than fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“Just one thing, Kimmery. Promise me you won’t go back to the Zendo. At least for a few days.”

“Why?”

“Just trust me, okay?”

“Okay.”

With that, her magic word, we were done talking.