Free Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

victims, vanquished most recently by Bucky Dent’s famous home run. We’d all watched it on television.
    “Luckylent,” I said, remembering. “Duckybent.”
    Minna erupted with laughter. “Yeah, Ducky fucking Bent! That’s good. Don’t look now, it’s Ducky Bent.”
    “Lexluthor,”
I said, reaching out to touch Minna’s shoulder. He only stared at my hand, didn’t move away. “Lunchylooper, Laughyluck, Loopylip—”
    “All right, Loopy,” said Minna. “Enough already.”
    “Lockystuff—”
I was desperate for a way to stop. My hand went on tapping Minna’s shoulder.
    “Let it go,” said Minna, and now he returned my shoulder taps, once, hard. “Don’t tug the boat.”

     
    To
tugboat
was to try Minna’s patience. Any time you pushed your luck, said too much, overstayed a welcome, or overestimated the usefulness of a given method or approach, you were guilty of having tugged the boat.
Tugboating
was most of all a dysfunction of wits and storytellers, and a universal one: Anybody who thought himself funny would likely tug a boat here or there. Knowing when a joke or verbal gambit was right at its limit, quitting before the boat had been tugged, that was art (and it was a given that you wanted to push it as near as possible—mising an opportunity to score a laugh was deeply lame, an act undeserving of a special name).
    Years before the word
Tourette’s
was familiar to any of us, Minna had me diagnosed: Terminal Tugboater.

     
    Distributing eighty dollars and those four business cards was all Minna had to do to instate the four of us forever—or anyway, for as long as he liked—as the junior staff of L&L Movers. Twenty dollars and a beer remained our usual pay. Minna would gather us sporadically, on a day’s notice or no notice at all—and the latter possibility became incentive, once we’d begun high school, for us to return to St. Vincent’s directly after classes and lounge expectantly in the schoolyard or recreation room, pretending not to listen for the distinctive grumble of his 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. Orwe’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