"Christmas, Frank," said Gerard Minna absently, not looking at his brother. Instead he was making short work of the four of us with his eyes, his hard gaze snapping us each in two like bolt cutters on inferior padlocks. It didn't take long before he was done with us forever-that was how it felt.

"Yeah, Christmas to you," said Minna. "Where you been?"

"Upstate," said Gerard.

"What, with Ralph and them?" I detected something new in Minna's voice, a yearning, sycophantic strain.

"More or less."

"What, just for the holidays you're gonna go talkative on me? Between you and Ma it's like the Cloisters up here."

"I brought you a present." He handed Minna a white legal envelope, stuffed fat. Minna began to tear at the end and Gerard said, in a voice low and full of ancient sibling authority, "Put it away."

Now we understood we'd all been staring. All except Carlotta, who was at her stove, piling together an improbable, cornucopic holiday plate for her older son.

"Make it to go, Mother."

Carlotta moaned again, closed her eyes.

"I'll be back," said Gerard. He stepped over and put his hands on her, much as Minna had. "I've got a few people to see today, that's all. I'll be back tonight. Enjoy your little orphan party."

He took the foil-wrapped plate and was gone.

Minna said, "What're you staring Eat your food!" He stuffed the white envelope into his jacket. The envelope made me think of Matricardi and Rockaforte, their pristine hundred-dollar bills. Brickface and Stucco, I corrected silently. Then Minna cuffed us, a bit too hard, the bulging gold ring on his middle finger clipping our crowns in more or less the same place his mother had fondled.

Minna's behavior with his mother oddly echoed what we knew of his style with women. I'd say girlfriends, but he never called them that, and we rarely saw him with the same one twice. They were Court Street girls, decorating poolrooms and movie-theater lounges, getting off work from the bakery still wearing disposable paper hats, applying lipstick without missing a chew of their gum, slanting their heavily elegant bodies through car windows and across pizza counters, staring over our heads as if we were four feet tall, and he'd apparently gone to junior high school with each and every one of them. "Sadie and me were in the sixth grade," he'd say, mussing her hair, disarranging her clothes. "This is Lisa-she used to beat up my best friend in gym." He'd angle jokes off them like a handball off a low wall, circle them with words like a banner flapping around a pole, tease their brassieres out of whack with pinching fingers, hold them by the two points of their hips and lean, as if he were trying to affect the course of a pinball in motion, risking tilt tilt. They never laughed, just rolled their eyes and slapped him away, or didn't. We studied it all, soaked up their indifferent femaleness, that rare essence we yearned to take for granted. Minna had that gift, and we studied his moves, filed them away with silent, almost unconscious prayers.

"It's not that I only like women with large breasts," he told me once, years later, long after he'd traded the Court Street girls for his strange, chilly marriage. We were walking down Atlantic Avenue together, I think, and a woman passing had caused his head to turn. I'd jerked my head too, of course, my actions as exaggerated and secondhand as a marionette's. "That's a very common misunderstanding," he said, as if he were an idol and I his public, a mass audience devoted to puzzling him out. "Thing is, for me a woman has to have a certain amount of muffling muffling, you know what I mean? Something between you, in the way of insulation. Otherwise, you're right up against her naked soul."

Wheels within wheels was another of Minna's phrases, used exclusively to sneer at our notions of coincidence or conspiracy. If we Boys ever dabbled in astonishment at, say, his running into three girls he knew from high school in a row on Court Street, two of whom he'd dated behind each other's backs, he'd bug his eyes and intone, was another of Minna's phrases, used exclusively to sneer at our notions of coincidence or conspiracy. If we Boys ever dabbled in astonishment at, say, his running into three girls he knew from high school in a row on Court Street, two of whom he'd dated behind each other's backs, he'd bug his eyes and intone, wheels within wheels wheels within wheels. No Met had ever pitched a no-hitter, but Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan both pitched them after being traded away-wheels within wheels. The barber, the cheese man, and the bookie were all named Carmine-oh yeah, wheels within wheels wheels within wheels, big time. You're onto something there, Sherlock.

By implication we orphans were idiots of connectivity, overly impressed by any trace of the familial in the world. We should doubt ourselves any time we imagined a network in operation. We should leave that stuff to Minna. Just as he knew the identity of our parents but would never reveal it to us, only Fran Minna was authorized to speculate on the secret systems that ran Court Street or the world. If we dared chime in, we'd surely only discovered more wheels within wheels wheels within wheels. Business as usual. The regular fucking world-get used to it.

One day in April, five months after that Christmas meal, Minna drove up with all his windows thoroughly smashed, the van transformed into a blinding crystalline sculpture, a mirrorball on wheels, reflecting the sun. It was plainly the work of a man with a hammer or crowbar and no fear of interruption. Minna appeared not to have noticed; he ferried us out to a job without mentioning it. On our way back to the Home, as we rumbled over the cobblestones of Hoyt Street, Tony nodded at the windshield, which sagged in its frame like a beaded curtain, and said, "So what happened?"

"What happened to what?" It was a Minna game, forcing us to be literal when we'd been trained by him to talk in glances, in three-corner shots.

"Somebody fucked up your van."

Minna shrugged, excessively casual. "I parked it on that block of Pacific Street."

We didn't know what he was talking about.

"These guys around that block had this thing about how I was uglifying the neighborhood." A few weeks after Gilbert's paint job the van had been covered again with graffiti, vast filled-in outlines of incoherent ballooning font and an overlay of stringy tags. Something made Minna's van a born target, the flat battered sides like a windowless subway car, a homely public surface crying for spray paint where both private cars and bigger, glossier commercial trucks were inviolate. "They told me not to park it around there anymore. Then after I did it a couple of times more, they told me a different way."

Minna lifted both hands from the wheel to gesture his indifference. We weren't totally convinced.

"Someone's sending a message," said Tony.

"What's that?" said Minna.

"I just said it's a message," said Tony. I knew he wanted to ask about Matricardi and Rockaforte. Were they involved? Couldn't they protect Minna from having his windows smashed? We all wanted to ask about them and never would, unless Tony did it first.

"Yeah, but what are you trying to say?" said Minna.

"Fuckitmessage," I suggested impulsively. I suggested impulsively.

"You know what I mean," said Tony defiantly, ignoring me.

"Yeah, maybe," said Minna. "But put it in your own words." I could feel his anger unfolding, smooth as a fresh deck of cards.

"Tellmetofuckitall!" I was like a toddler devising a tantrum to keep his parents from fighting. I was like a toddler devising a tantrum to keep his parents from fighting.

But Minna wasnt distractable. "Quiet, Freakshow," he said, never taking his eyes from Tony. "Tell me what you said," he told Tony again.

"Nothing," said Tony. "Damn." He was backpedaling.

Minna pulled the van to the curb at a fire hydrant on the corner of Bergen and Hoyt. Outside, a couple of black men sat on a stoop, drinking from a bag. They squinted at us.

"Tell me what you said," Minna insisted.

He and Tony stared at one another, and the rest of us melted back. I swallowed away a few variations.

"Just, you know, somebody's sending you a message." Tony smirked.

This clearly infuriated Minna. He and Tony suddenly spoke a private language in which message message signified heavily. "You think you know a thing," he said. signified heavily. "You think you know a thing," he said.

"All I'm saying is I can see what they did to your truck, Frank." Tony scuffed his feet in the layer of tiny cubes of safety glass that had peeled away from the limp window and lay scattered on the floor of the van.

"That's not all you said, Dickweed."

That was the first I heard Minna use the term that would become lodged thereafter in my uppermost tic-echelon: dickweed dickweed. I didn't know whether he borrowed the nickname or invented it himself on the spot.

What it meant to me I still can't say. Perhaps it was inscribed in my vocabulary, though, by the trauma of that day: Our little organization was losing its innocence, although I couldn't have explained how or why.

"I can't help what I see," said Tony. "Somebody put a hit on your windows."

"Think you're a regular little wiseguy, don't you?"

Tony stared at him.

"You want to be Scarface?"

Tony didn't give his answer, but we knew what it was. Scarface Scarface had opened a month before, and Al Pacino was ascendant, a personal colossus astride Tony's world, blocking out the sky. had opened a month before, and Al Pacino was ascendant, a personal colossus astride Tony's world, blocking out the sky.

"See, the thing about Scarface," said Minna, "is before he got to be Scarface he was Scabface Scabface. Nobody ever considers that. You have to want to be Scabface first."

For a second I thought Minna was going to hit Tony, damage his face to make the point. Tony seemed to be waiting for it too. Then Minna's fury leaked away.

"Out," he said. He waved his hand, a Caesar gesturing to the heavens through the dented roof of his refitted postal van.

"What?" said Tony. "Right here?"

"Out," he said again, equably. "Walk home, you muffin asses." We sat gaping, though his meaning was clear enough. We weren't more than five or six blocks from the Home anyway. But we hadn't been paid, hadn't gone for beers or slices or a bag of hot, clingy zeppole. I could taste the disappointment-the flavor of powdered sugar's absence. Tony slid open the door, dislodging more glass, and we obediently filed out of the van and onto the sidewalk, into the day's glare, the suddenly formless afternoon.

Minna drove off, leaving us there to bob together awkwardly before the drinkers on the stoop. They shook their heads at us, stupid-looking white boys a block from the projects. But we were in no danger there, nor were we dangerous ourselves. There was something so primally humiliating in our ejection that Hoyt Street itself seemed to ridicule us, humble row of brownstones, sleeping bodega. We were inexcusable to ourselves. Others clotted street corners, not us, not anymore. We rode with Minna. The effect was deliberate: Minna knew the value of the gift he'd withdrawn.

"Muffin ass," I said forcefully, measuring the shape of the words in my mouth, auditioning them for tic-richness. Then I sneezed, induced by the sunlight. I said forcefully, measuring the shape of the words in my mouth, auditioning them for tic-richness. Then I sneezed, induced by the sunlight.

Gilbert and Danny looked at me with disgust, Tony with something worse.

"Shut up," he said. There was cold fury in his teeth-clenched smile.

"Tellmetodoit, muffinass," I croaked.

"Be quiet now," warned Tony. He plucked a piece of wood from the gutter and took a step toward me.

Gilbert and Danny drifted away from us warily. I would have followed them, but Tony had me cornered against a parked car. The men on the stoop stretched back on their elbows, slurped their malt liquor thoughtfully.

"Dickweed," I said. I tried to mask it in another sneeze, which made something in my neck pop. I twitched and spoke again. I said. I tried to mask it in another sneeze, which made something in my neck pop. I twitched and spoke again. "Dickyweed! Dicketywood!" "Dickyweed! Dicketywood!" I was trapped in a loop of self, one already too familiar, that of refining a verbal tic to free myself from its grip (not yet knowing how tenacious would be the grip of those particular syllables). Certainly I didn't mean to be replying to Tony. Yet I was trapped in a loop of self, one already too familiar, that of refining a verbal tic to free myself from its grip (not yet knowing how tenacious would be the grip of those particular syllables). Certainly I didn't mean to be replying to Tony. Yet dickweed dickweed was the name Minna had called him, and I was throwing it in his face. was the name Minna had called him, and I was throwing it in his face.

Tony held the stick he'd found, a discarded scrap of lath with clumps of plaster stuck to it. I stared, anticipating my own pain as I'd anticipated Tony's, at Minna's hand, a minute before. Instead Tony moved close, stick at his side, and grabbed my collar.

"Open your mouth again," he said.

"Restrictaweed, detectorwood, vindictaphone," said I, prisoner of my syndrome. I grabbed Tony back, my hands exploring his collar, fingers running inside it like an anxious, fumbling lover.

Gilbert and Danny had started up Hoyt Street, in the direction of the Home. "C'mon, Tony," said Gilbert, tilting his head. Tony ignored them. He scraped his stick in the gutter, and came up with a smear of dog shit, mustard-yellow and pungent.

"Open," he said.

Now Gilbert and Danny were just slinking away, heads bowed. The street was brightly, absurdly empty. Nobody but the black men on the stoop, impassive witnesses. I jerked my head as Tony jabbed with his stick-tic as evasive maneuver-and he only managed to paint my cheek. I could smell it, though, powdered sugar's opposite made tangible, married to my face.

"Stickmebailey!" I shouted. Falling back against the car behind me, I turned my head again, and again, twitching away, enshrining the moment in ticceography. The stain followed me, adamant, on fire. Or maybe it was my cheek that was on fire. I shouted. Falling back against the car behind me, I turned my head again, and again, twitching away, enshrining the moment in ticceography. The stain followed me, adamant, on fire. Or maybe it was my cheek that was on fire.

Our witnesses crinkled their paper bag, offered ruminative sighs.

Tony dropped his stick and turned from me. He'd disgusted himself, couldn't meet my eye. About to speak, he thought better of it, instead jogged to catch Gilbert and Danny as they shrugged away up Hoyt Street, leaving the scene.

We didn't see Minna again until five weeks later, Sunday morning at the Home's yard, late May. He had his brother Gerard with him; it was the second time we'd ever laid eyes on him.

None of us had seen Frank in the intervening weeks, though I know that the others, like myself, had each wandered down Court Street, nosed at a few of his usual haunts, the barbershop, the beverage outlet, the arcade. He wasn't in them. It meant nothing, it meant everything. He might never reappear, but if he turned up and didn't speak of it we wouldn't think twice. We We didn't speak of it to one another, but a pensiveness hung over us, tinged with orphan's melancholy, our resignation to permanent injury. A part of each of us still stood astonished on the corner of Hoyt and Bergen, where we'd been ejected from Minna's van, where we'd fallen when our inadequate wings melted in the sun. didn't speak of it to one another, but a pensiveness hung over us, tinged with orphan's melancholy, our resignation to permanent injury. A part of each of us still stood astonished on the corner of Hoyt and Bergen, where we'd been ejected from Minna's van, where we'd fallen when our inadequate wings melted in the sun.

A horn honked, the Impala's, not the van's. Then the brothers got out and came to the cyclone fence and waited for us to gather. Tony and Danny were playing basketball, Gilbert perhaps ardently picking his nose on the sidelines. That's how I picture it anyway. I wasn't in the yard when they drove up. Gilbert had to come inside and pull me out of the Home library, to which I'd mostly retreated since Tony's attack, though Tony had shown no signs of repeating it. I was wedged into a windowsill seat, in sunshine laced with shadows from the barred window, when Gilbert found me there, immersed in a novel by Allen Drury.

Frank and Gerard were dressed too warmly for that morning, Frank in his bomber jacket, Gerard in his patchwork leather coat. The backseat of the Impala was loaded with shopping bags packed with Frank's clothes and a pair of old leather suitcases that surely belonged to Gerard. I don't know that Frank Minna ever owned a suitcase in his life. They stood at the fence, Frank bouncing nervously on his toes, Gerard hanging on the mesh, fingers dangling through, doing nothing to conceal his impatience with his brother, an impatience shading into disgust.

Frank smirked, raised his eyebrows, shook his head. Danny held his basketball between forearm and hip; Minna nodded at it, mimed a set shot, dropped his hand at the wrist, and made a delicate O with his mouth to signify the swish swish that would result. that would result.

Then, idiotically, he bounced a pretend pass to Gerard. His brother didn't seem to notice. Minna shook his head, then wheeled back to us and aimed two trigger fingers through the fence, and gritted his teeth for rat-a-tat rat-a-tat, a little imaginary schoolyard massacre. We could only gape at him dumbly. It was as though somebody had taken Minna's voice away. And Minna was his voice-didn't he know? His eyes said yes, he did. They looked panicked, as if they'd been caged in the body of a mime.

Gerard gazed off emptily into the yard, ignoring the show. Minna made a few more faces, wincing, chuckling silently, shaking off some invisible annoyance by twitching his cheek. I fought to keep from mirroring him.

Then he cleared his throat. "I'm, ah, going out of town for a while," he said at last.

We waited for more. Minna just nodded and squinted and grinned his closemouthed grin at us as though he were acknowledging applause.

"Upstate?" said Tony.

Minna coughed in his fist. "Oh yeah. Place my brother goes. He thinks we ought to just, you know. Get a little country air."

"When are you coming back?" said Tony.

"Ah, coming back," said Minna. "You got an unknown there, Scarface. Unknown factors."

We must have gaped at him, because he added, "I wouldn't wait underwater, if that's what you had in mind."

We were in our second year of high school. That measure loomed suddenly, a door of years swinging open into what had been a future counted in afternoons. Would we know Minna whenever it was he got back? Would we know each other?

Minna wouldn't be there to tell us what to think of Minna's not being there, to give it a name.

"All right, Frank," said Gerard, turning his back to the fence. "Motherless Brooklyn appreciates your support. I think we better get on the road."

"My brother's in a hurry," said Frank. "He's seeing ghosts everywhere."

"Yeah, I'm looking right at one," said Gerard, though in fact he wasn't looking at anyone, only the car.

Minna tilted his head at us, at his brother, to say you know you know. And sorry sorry.

Then he pulled a book out of his pocket, a small paperback. I don't think I'd ever seen a book in his hands before. "Here," he said to me. He dropped it on the pavement and nudged it under the fence with the toe of his shoe. "Take a look," he said. "Turns out you're not the only freak in the show."

I picked it up. Understanding Tourette's Syndrome Understanding Tourette's Syndrome was the title, first time I'd seen the word. was the title, first time I'd seen the word.

"Meaning to get that to you," he said. "But I've been sort of busy."

"Great," said Gerard, taking Minna by the arm. "Let's get out of here."

Tony had been searching every day after school, I suspect. It was three days later that he found it and led us others there, to the edge of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, at the end of Kane Street. The van was diminished, sagged to its rims, tires melted. The explosion had cleared the windows of their crumbled panes of safety glass, which now lay in a spilled penumbra of grains on the sidewalk and street, together with flakes of traumatized paint and smudges of ash, a photographic map of force. The panels of the truck were layered, graffiti still evident in bone-white outline, all else-Gilbert's shoddy coat of enamel and the manufacturer's ancient green-now chalky black, and delicate like sunburned skin. It was like an X ray of the van that had been before.

We circled it, strangely reverent, afraid to touch, and I thought, Ashes, ashes Ashes, ashes-and then I ran away, up Kane, toward Court Street, before anything could come out of my mouth.

Over the next two years I grew larger-neither fat nor particularly muscular, but large, bearlike, and so harder for the bantamweight Tony or anyone else to bully-and I grew stranger. With the help of Minna's book I contextualized my symptoms as Tourette's, then discovered how little context that was. My constellation of behaviors was "unique as a snowflake," oh, joy, and evolving, like some micro-scoped crystal in slow motion, to reveal new facets, and to spread from its place at my private core to cover my surface, my public front. The freak show was now the whole show, and my earlier, ticless self impossible anymore to recall clearly. I read in the book of the drugs that might help me, Haldol, Klonopin, and Orap, and laboriously insisted on the Home's once-weekly visiting nurse helping me achieving diagnosis and prescription, only to discover an absolute intolerance: The chemicals slowed my brain to a morose crawl, were a boot on my wheel of self. I might outsmart my symptoms, disguise or incorporate them, frame them as eccentricity or vaudeville, but I wouldn't narcotize them, not if it meant dimming the world (or my brain-same thing) to twilight.

We survived Sarah J. Hale in our different ways. Gilbert had grown, too, and grown a scowl, and he'd learned to sneer or lurch his way through difficulties. Danny coasted elegantly on his basketball skills and sophisticated musical taste, which had evolved through "Rapper's Delight" and Funkadelic to Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes and Teddy Pendergrass. If I saw him in certain company, I knew not to bother saying hello, as he was incapable of recognizing us others from deep within his cone of self-willed blackness. Tony more or less dropped out-it was hard to be officially expelled from Sarah J., so few teachers took attendance-and spent his high-school years on Court Street, hanging out at the arcade, milking acquaintanceships made through Minna for cigarettes and odd jobs and rides on the back of Vespas, and getting lucky with a series of Minna's ex-girlfriends, or so he said. For a six-month stint he was behind the counter at Queen Pizzeria, shoveling slices out of the oven and into white paper bags, taking smoking breaks under the marquee of the triple-X theater next door. I'd stop in and he'd batter me with cheap insults, un-Minna-worthy feints for the amusement of the older pizza men, then guiltily slip me a free slice, then shoo me away with more insults and maybe a slap on the head or a too-realistic fake jab to the spleen.

Me, I became a walking joke, preposterous, improbable, unseeable. My outbursts, utterances and tappings were white noise or static, irritating but tolerated, and finally boring unless they happened to provoke a response from some unsavvy adult, a new or substitute teacher. My peers, even the most unreachable and fearsome black girls, understood instinctively what the teachers and counselors at Sarah J., hardened into a sort of paramilitary force by dire circumstance, were slow to get: My behavior wasn't teenage rebellion in any sense. And so it wasn't really of interest interest to other teenagers. I wasn't tough, provocative, stylish, self-destructive, sexy, wasn't babbling some secret countercultural tongue, wasn't testing authority, wasn't showing colors of any kind. I wasn't even one of the two or three heedless, timid, green-mohawked and leather-clad punk rockers who required constant beatings for their audacity. I was merely crazy. to other teenagers. I wasn't tough, provocative, stylish, self-destructive, sexy, wasn't babbling some secret countercultural tongue, wasn't testing authority, wasn't showing colors of any kind. I wasn't even one of the two or three heedless, timid, green-mohawked and leather-clad punk rockers who required constant beatings for their audacity. I was merely crazy.

By the time Minna returned Gilbert and I were about to graduate-no great feat, mostly a matter of showing up, staying awake, and, in Gilbert's case, of systematically recopying my completed homework in his own hand. Tony had completely stopped showing his face at Sarah J. and Danny was somewhere in between-a presence in the yard and the gym, and in the culture of the school, he'd skipped most of his third-year classes and was being "held back," though the concept was a bit abstract to him, I think. You could have told him he was being returned to kindergarten and he would have shrugged, only asked how high the hoops were placed in the yard, whether the rims could hold his weight.