Brooklyn Crime Novel by Jonathan Lethem EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
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- Author: Jonathan Lethem
- Language: English
- Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction
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Quarters, Part 1
(1978)
A first story. The start of our inquiry.
Two white boys, in a second-floor apartment above a storefront on
Court Street, between Schermerhorn and Livingston streets.
The boys, both fourteen, gleefully labor at something captured in the
teeth of a small, table-mounted vise. They labor at this thing with a
hacksaw. The tool, the vise, the whole tabletop workshop, belongs to the
divorced father of one of the boys, a man who lives alone in this apartment
except during those days when his son visits. The father works as a
therapist but aspires to make jewelry. Hence the vise, the hacksaw. The
father is absent this morning.
THE STOREFRONT BELOW the apartment features an Italian restaurant called
The Queen. A small dining room with red plush curtains, eight or ten tables
crowded together. This place has a reputation among some as a throwback,
a place for “fine dining” of a sort cherished only by probable mobsters, or
by nostalgists for a version of Brooklyn that is already, by this point, quaint.
Though hardly vanished.
Mobsters may also be nostalgists. Probably so, in many cases.
The restaurant’s proprietors own the building. It’s to them the father
pays his rent. The Queen also has a twin, The Queen Pizzeria. A thriving
slice joint, two addresses away. Wedged between the two, the tablecloth
Queen and the pizza-counter Queen, is a mid-sized pornographic movie
theater. The proprietors of the pornographic movie theater pay rent to the
owners of the storefronts on either side of it, the pizzeria and the tablecloth
restaurant. Two of these businesses, the porn movies, the slice joint, are
required to keep the third—the tablecloth restaurant—afloat.
A slice of pizza costs fifty cents.
A subway token costs fifty cents.
Hmmm. Is this some golden law of affiliation? The city an oblique,
untranslatable system? Or might the sole religion here be the price of
things?
Let’s return to the boys. What’s the thing in the vise?
The vise holds a coin. A U.S. twenty-five cent piece, a Washington
Quarter dated 1968, from the Denver mint. The therapist-jeweler’s son
wields the hacksaw. He runs it diligently in its groove, until the quarter is
cut in half. The boys grin, sharing a nerve-wired, chortling delight. The vise
is loosened, just long enough to turn the half-quarter in its grip, then
tightened again. The hacksaw is applied anew. The slim blade rips through,
halving the half-coin. The other boy seizes up the result for scrutiny. All
that’s left is Washington’s proud forehead and nose and the letters LIB. The
boys have made a quarter-quarter.
The two fresh quarter-quarters are moved to the table, where we see
them now added to the results of this afternoon’s industry: a pile of ruined
coins. Nearly all twenty-five cent pieces, some halved, some quartered. A
couple of nickels, too, have been sawn in half. Dimes? Too small. Pennies,
not worth the trouble. The room is sharp with the scent of hot metal, of
microscopic shreds of coin.
They are doing this superbly pointless thing off the back end of a
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