Other times he taunted us, playing at knowledge or ignorance-we couldn’t know which it was. He and I were alone when he said, “Essrog, Essrog. That name.” He crunched up his mouth and squinted, as if trying to remember, or perhaps to read a name inscribed on the distant Manhattan skyline.
“You know an Essrog?” I said, my breath short, heart pounding. “Edgehog!”
“No. It’s just-You ever look it up in the phone book? Can’t be more than three or four Essrogs, for chrissakes. Such a weird name.” Later, at the Home, I looked. There were three.
Minna’s weird views filtered down through the jokes he told and liked to hear, and those he cut short within a line or two of their telling. We learned to negotiate the labyrinth of his prejudices blind, and blindly. Hippies were dangerous and odd, also sort of sad in their utopian wrongness. (“Your parents must of been hippies,” he’d tell me. “That’s why you came out the superfreak you are.”) Homosexual men were harmless reminders of the impulse Minna was sure lurked in all of us-and “half a fag” was more shameful than a whole one. Certain baseball players, Mets specifically (the Yankees were m t but boring, the Mets wonderfully pathetic and human), were half a fag-Lee Mazzilli, Rusty Staub, later Gary Carter. So were most rock stars and anyone who’d been in the armed services but not in a war. Lesbians were wise and mysterious and deserved respect (and how could we who relied on Minna for all our knowledge of women argue when he himself grew baffled and reverent?) but could still be comically stubborn or stuck up. The Arabic population of Atlantic Avenue was as distant and unfathomable as the Indian tribes that had held our land before Columbus. “Classic” minorities-Irish, Jews, Poles, Italians, Greeks and Puerto Ricans-were the clay of life itself, funny in their essence, while blacks and Asians of all types were soberly snubbed, unfunny (Puerto Ricans probably should have been in this second class but had been elevated to “classic” status single-handedly by West Side Story-and all Hispanics were “Ricans” even when they were Dominicans, as they frequently were). But bone stupidity, mental illness, and familial or sexual anxiety-these were the bolts of electricity that made the clay walk, the animating forces that rendered human life amusing and that flowed, once you learned to identify them, through every personality and interaction. It was a form of racism, not respect, that restricted blacks and Asians from ever being stupid like a Mick or Polack. If you weren’t funny, you didn’t quite exist. And it was usually better to be fully stupid, impotent, lazy, greedy or freakish than to seek to dodge your destiny, or layer it underneath pathetic guises of vanity or calm. So it was that I, Overt Freak Supreme, became mascot of a worldview.
I called the Brooklyn directory’s Essrogs one day when I was left alone for twenty minutes in a warehouse office, waiting for Minna to return, slowly picking out the numbers on the heavy rotary dial, trying not to obsess on the finger holes. I’d perhaps dialed a phone twice at that point in my life.
I tried F. Essrog and Lawrence Essrog and Murray and Annette Essrog. F. wasn’t home. Lawrence’s phone was answered by a child. I listened for a while as he said “Hello? Hello?,” my vocal cords frozen, then hung up.
Murray Essrog picked up the phone. His voice was wheezy and ancient.
“Essrog?” I said, and whispered Chestbutt away from the phone. “Yes. This is the Essrog residence, Murray speaking. Who’s this?”
“Baileyrog,” I said.
“Who?”
“Bailey.”
He waited for a moment, then said, “Well, what can I do for you, Bailey?”
I hung up the phone. Then I memorized the numbers, all three of them. In the years that followed I would never once step across the line I’d drawn with Murray or the other telephone Essrogs-never show up at their homes, never accuse them of being related to a free human freak show, never even properly introduce myself-but I made a ritual out of dialing their numbers and hanging up after a tic or two, or listening, just long enough to hear another Essrog breathe.
A true story, not a joke, though it was repeated as often, tugboated relentlessly, was of the beat cop from Court Street who routinely dislodged clumps of teenagers clustered at night on stoops or in front of bars and who, if met with excuses, would cut them off with “Yeah, yeah. Tell your story walking.” More than anything, this somehow encapsulated my sense of Minna-his impatience, his pleasure in compression, in ordinary things made more expressive, more hilarious or vivid by their conflation. He loved talk but despised explanations. An endearment was flat unless folded into an insult. An insult was better if it was also self-deprecation, and ideally should also serve as a slice of street philosophy, or as resumption of some dormant debate. And all talk was finer on the fly, out on the pavement, between beats of action: We learned to tell our story walking.
Though Gerard Minna’s name was printed on the L &L business card, we met him only twice, and never on a moving job. The first time was Christmas Day, 1982, at Minna’s mother’s apartment.
Carlotta Minna was an Old Stove. That was the Brooklyn term for it, according to Minna. She was a cook who worked in her own apartment, making plates of sautéed squid and stuffed peppers and jars of tripe soup that were purchased at her door by a constant parade of buyers, mostly neighborhood women with too much housework or single men, young and elderly, bocce players who’d take her plates to the park with them, racing bettors who’d eat her food standing up outside the OTB, barbers and butchers and contractors who’d sit on crates in the backs of their shops and wolf her cutlets, folding them with their fingers like waffles. How her prices and schedules were conveyed I never understood-perhaps telepathically. She truly worked an old stove, too, a tiny enamel four-burner crusted with ancient sauces and on which three or four pots invariably bubbled. The oven of this herculean appliance was never cool; the whole kitchen glowed with heat like a kiln. Mrs. Minna herself seemed to have been baked, her whole face dark and furrowed like the edges of an overdone calzone. We never arrived without nudging aside some buyers from her door, nor without packing off with plateloads of food, though how she could spare it was a mystery, since she never seemed to make more than she needed, never wasted a scrap. When we were in her presence Minna bubbled himself, with talk, all directed at his mother, banking cheery insults off anyone else in the apartment, delivery boys, customers, strangers (if there was such a thing to Minna then), tasting everything she had cooking and making suggestions on every dish, poking and pinching every raw ingredient or ball of unfinished dough and also his mother herself, her earlobes and chin, wiping flour off her dark arms with his open hand. She rarely-that I saw, anyway-acknowledged his attentions, or even directly acknowledged his presence. And she never once in my presence uttered so much as a single word.
That Christmas Minna had us all up to Carlotta’s apartment, and for once we ate at her table, first nudging aside sauce-glazed stirring spoons and unlabeled baby-food jars of spices to clear spots for our plates. Minna stood at the stove, sampling her broth, and Carlotta hovered over us as we devoured her meatballs, running her floury fingers over the backs of our chairs, then gently touching our heads, the napes of our necks. We pretended not to notice, ashamed in front of one another and ourselves to show that we drank in her nurturance as eagerly as her meat sauce. But we drank it. It was Christmas, after all. We splashed, gobbled, kneed one another under the table. Privately, I polished the handle of my spoon, quietly aping the motions of her fingers on my nape, and fought not to twist in my seat and jump at her. I focused on my plate-eating was for me already by then a reliable balm. All the while she went on caressing, with hands that would have horrified us if we’d looked close.