van’s motor. The jobs varied enormously. We’d load merchandise, like the cartons in the trailer, in and out of storefront-basement grates all up and down Court Street, borderline shady activity that it seemed wholesalers ought to be handling themselves, transactions sealed with a shared cigar in the back of the shop. Or we’d bustle apartmentloads of furniture in and out of brownstone walk-ups, legitimate moving jobs, it seemed to me, where fretting couples worried we weren’t old or expert enough to handle their belongings-Minna would hush them, remind them of the cost of distractions: “The meter’s running.” (This hourly rate wasn’t reflected in our pay, of course. It was twenty dollars whether we hurried or not; we hurried.) We put sofas through third-story windows with a makeshift cinch and pulley, Tony and Minna on the roof, Gilbert and Danny in the window to receive, myself on the ground with the guide ropes. A massive factory building under the Brooklyn end of the Manhattan Bridge, owned by an important but unseen friend of Minna’s, had been damaged in fire, and we moved most of the inhabitants for free, as some sort of settlement or concession-the terms were obscure, but Minna was terrifically urgent about it. When a couple of college-age artists objected to our rough handling of a pile of damaged canvases the firemen had heaped on the floor, he paced and seethed at the delay; the only meter running now was Minna’s own time, and his credibility with his friend-client. We woke at five one August morning to collect and set up the temporary wooden stages for the bands performing in the Atlantic Antic, a massive annual street fair, then worked again at dusk to tear the stages down, the hot avenue now heaped with a day’s torn wrappers and crumpled cups, a few fevered revelers still staggering home as we knocked the pine frames apart with hammers and the heels of our shoes. Once we emptied an entire electronics showroom into Minna’s truck, pulling unboxed stereos off shelves and out of window displays, disconnecting the wires from lit, blinking amplifiers, eventually even taking the phone off the desk-it would have seemed a sort of brazen burglary had Minna not been standing on the sidewalk in front, drinking beer and telling jokes with the man who’d unpadlocked the shop gates for us as we filed past with the goods. Everywhere Minna connived and cajoled and dropped names, winking at us to make us complicit, and everywhere Minna’s clients stared at us Boys, some wondering if we’d palm a valuable when they weren’t looking, some trying to figure the angle, perhaps hoping to catch a hint of disloyalty, an edge over Minna they’d save for when they needed it. We palmed nothing, revealed no disloyalty. Instead we stared back, tried to make them flinch. And we listened, gathered information. Minna was teaching us when he meant to, and we didn’t.
It changed us as a group. We developed a certain collective ego, a presence apart at the Home. We grew less embattled from within, more from without: nonwhite Boys sensed in our privilege a hint of their future deprivations and punished us for it. Age had begun to heighten those distinctions anyway. So Tony, Gilbert, Danny and myself smoothed out our old antipathies and circled the wagons. We stuck up for one another, at the Home and at Sarah J. Hale, our local high school, a required stop except for those few who’d qualified for some special (i.e., Manhattan) destination, Stuyvesant or Music and Art.
There at Sarah J. we St. Vincent’s Boys were disguised, blended with the larger population, a pretty rough crowd despite their presumably having parents and siblings and telephones and bedroom doors with locks and a thousand other unimaginable advantages. But we knew each other, kept an eye on each other, bad pennies circulating with the good. Black or white, we policed one another like siblings, reserved special degrees of scorn for one another’s social or institutional humiliations. And there we mixed with girls for the first time, about as well as chunks of road salt in ice cream, though ice cream might be a generous comparison for the brutal, strapping black girls of Sarah J., gangs of whom laid after-school ambushes for any white boy daring enough to have flirted, even made eye contact, with one inside the building. They comprised the vast majority there, and the handful of white or Latin girls survived by a method of near-total invisibility. To pierce their cone of fear and silence was to be met with incredulous glares of resentment. Our lives are led elsewhere, those looks said, and yours ought to be too. The black girls were claimed by boyfriends too sophisticated to bother with school, who rode by for them at lunch hour in cars throbbing with amplified bass lines and sometimes boasting bullet-riddled doors, and their only use for us was as a dartboard for throwing lit cigarette butts, a frequent sport. Yes, relations between the sexes were strained at Sarah J., and I doubt any of us four, even Tony, so much as copped a feel from the girls we were schooled with there. For all of us that would wait for Court Street, for the world we would come to know through Minna.
Minna’s Court Street was the old Brooklyn, a placid ageless surface alive underneath with talk, with deals and casual insults, a neighborhood political machine with pizzeria and butcher-shop bosses and unwritten rules everywhere. All was talk except for what mattered most, which were unspoken understandings. The barbershop, where he took us for identical haircuts that cost three dollars each, except even that fee was waived for Minna-no one had to wonder why the price of a haircut hadn’t gone up since 1966, nor why six old barbers were working, mostly not working, out of the same ancient storefront, where the Barbicide hadn’t been changed since the product’s invention (in Brooklyn, the jar bragged), where other somewhat younger men passed through constantly to argue sports and wave away offers of haircuts; the barbershop was a retirement home, a social club, and front for a backroom poker game. The barbers were taken care of because this was Brooklyn, where people looked out. Why would the prices go up, when nobody walked in who wasn’t part of this conspiracy, this trust?-though if you spoke of it you’d surely meet with confused denials, or laughter and a too-hard cuff on the cheek. Another exemplary mystery was the “arcade,” a giant storefront paneled with linoleum, containing three pinball machines, which were in constant use, and six other somen video games-Asteroids, Frogger, Centipede-all pretty much ignored, and a cashier, who’d change dollars to quarters and accept hundred-dollar bills folded into lists of numbers, names of horses and football teams. The curb in front of the arcade was lined with Vespas, which had been in vogue a year or two before but now sat permanently parked, without anything more than a bicycle lock for protection, a taunt to vandals. A block away, on Smith, they would have been stripped, but here they were pristine, a curbside Vespa showroom. It didn’t need explaining-this was Court Street. And Court Street, where it passed through Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill, was the only Brooklyn, really-north was Brooklyn Heights, secretly a part of Manhattan, south was the harbor, and the rest, everything east of the Gowanus Canal (the only body of water in the world, Minna would crack each and every time we drove over it, that was 90 percent guns), apart from small outposts of civilization in Park Slope and Windsor Terrace, was an unspeakable barbarian tumult.
Sometimes he needed just one of us. He’d appear at the Home in his Impala instead of the van, request someone specific, then spirit him away, to the bruised consternation of those left behind. Tony was in and out of Minna’s graces, his ambition and pride costing him as much as he won, but he was unmistakably our leader, and Minna’s right hand. He wore his private errands with Minna like Purple Hearts, but refused to report on their content to the rest of us. Danny, athletic, silent and tall, became Minna’s trusted greyhound, his Mercury, sent on private deliveries and rendezvous, and given early driving lessons in a vacant Red Hook lot, as though Minna were grooming him for work as an international spy, or Kato for a new Green Hornet. Gilbert, all bullish determination, was pegged for the grunt work, sitting in double-parked cars, repairing a load of ruptured cartons with strapping tape, unfastening the legs of an oversize dresser so as to fit it through a small doorway, and repainting the van, whose graffitied exterior some of Minna’s neighbors had apparently found objectionable. And I was an extra set of eyes and ears and opinions. Minna would drag me along to back rooms and offices and barbershop negotiations, then debrief me afterward. What did I think of that guy? Shitting or not? A moron or retard? A shark or a mook? Minna encouraged me to have a take on everything, and to spit it out, as though he thought my verbal disgorgings were only commentary not yet anchored to subject matter. And he adored my echolalia. He thought I was doing impressions.
Needless to say, it wasn’t commentary and impressions, but my verbal Tourette’s flowering at last. Like Court Street, I seethed behind the scenes with language and conspiracies, inversions of logic, sudden jerks and jabs of insult. Now Court Street and Minna had begun to draw me out. With Minna’s encouragement I freed myself to ape the rhythm of his overheard dialogues, his complaints and endearments, his for-the-sake-of arguments. And Minna loved my effect on his clients and associates, the way I’d unnerve them, disrupt some schmooze with an utterance, a head jerk, a husky
