Read Online Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem - Free Book Online Page A

Montrose’s arm, or even to kiss him, another entirely to walk up and call him Shefawn Mongoose, or Lefthand Moonprose, or Fuckyou Roseprawn. So, though I collected words, treasured them like a drooling sadistic captor, bending them, melting them down, filing off their edges, stacking them into teetering piles, before release I translated them into physical performance, manic choreography.
    And I was lying low, I thought. For every tic issued I squelched dozens, or so it felt—my body was an overwound watchspring, effortlessly driving one set of hands double-time while feeling it could as easily animate an entire mansion of stopped clocks, or a vast factory mechanism, a production line like the one in
Modern Times
, which we watched that year in the basement of the Brooklyn Public Library on Fourth Avenue, a version accompanied by a pedantic voice-over lecturing us on Chaplin’s genius. I took Chaplin, and Buster Keaton, whose
The General
had been similarly mutilated, as models: Obviously blazing with aggression, disruptive energies barely contained, they’d managed to keep their traps shut, and so had endlessly skirted danger and been regarded as cute. I needn’t exactly strain to find a motto: silence, golden, get it? Got it. Hone your timing instead, burnish those physical routines, your idiot wall-stroking, face-making, lace-chasing, until they’re funny in a flickering black-and-white way, until your enemies don policeman’s or Confederate caps and begintripping over themselves, until doe-eyed women swoon. So I kept my tongue wound in my teeth, ignored the pulsing in my cheek, the throbbing in my gullet, persistently swallowed language bac like vomit. It burned as hotly.

     
    We rode a mile or two before Minna’s van halted, engine guttering to a stop. Then a few minutes passed before he let us out of the back, and we found ourselves in a gated warehouse yard under the shadow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, in a ruined industrial zone. Red Hook, I knew later. He led us to a large truck, a detached twelve-wheel trailer with no cab in evidence, then rolled up the back to reveal a load of identical sealed cardboard crates, a hundred, two hundred, maybe more. A thrill went through me: I’d secretly count them.
    “Couple you boys get up inside,” said Minna distractedly. Tony and Danny had the guile to leap immediately into the truck, where they could work shaded from the sun. “You’re just gonna run this stuff inside, that’s all. Hand shit off, move it up to the front of the truck, get it in. Straight shot, you got it?” He pointed to the warehouse. We all nodded, and I peeped. It went unnoticed.
    Minna opened the big panel doors of the warehouse and showed us where to set the crates. We started quickly, then wilted in the heat. Tony and Danny massed the crates at the lip of the truck while Gilbert and I made the first dozen runs, then the older boys conceded their advantage and began to help us drag them across the blazing yard. Minna never touched a crate; he spent the whole time in the office of the warehouse, a cluttered room full of desks, file cabinets, tacked-up notes and pornographic calendars and a stacked tower of orange traffic cones, visible to us through an interior window, smoking cigarettes and jawing on the telephone, apparently not listening for replies—every time I glanced through the window his mouth was moving. The door was closed, and he was inaudible behind the glass.At some point another man appeared, from where I wasn’t sure, and stood in the yard wiping his forehead as though he were the one laboring. Minna came out, the two stepped inside the office, the other man disappeared. We moved the last of the crates inside. Minna rolled down the gate of the truck and locked the warehouse, pointed us back to his van, but paused before shutting us into the back.
    “Hot day, huh?” he said, looking at us directly for what might have been the first time.
    Bathed in sweat, we nodded,