It performed a couple of bars of ominous, pulsing violin when it came out of his pocket, like the occasional music titled GUN for an old radio show. - Jonathan Lethem

Or were they bound in slow-cooking love-hate, a folie à deux obscure to anyone outside their secret system?

Someday I'd change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.

The desires our little family couldn't afford to indulge had never seemed important, only snobbish and silly and somehow misplaced, like Thurston Howell's priorities on Gilligan's Island. Besides, I'd had as much or more money than most kids I'd known in Brooklyn, if somewhat less than the majority of my Manhattan schoolmates at Stuyvesant, so figured I was somewhere in the middle. Yeah, sure, that was it: I was middle class.