He offered Dylan the El Marko. The purple-fingerprinted bottle rolled like something ripe in Mingus’s stained palm, a plum.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Tag up. Hurry.”

“How do I know what to write?”

“Don’t you got a tag yet? Make one up.”

Vendlemachine, Will-Fuck, Dose. Marvel Comics had it right, the world was all secret names, you only needed to uncover your own.

White Boy ?

Omega the Unknown ?

“Dillinger,” Dylan said. He stared, not quite reaching for the El Marko.

“Too long, man. Something like Dill Three, D-Lone.”

A Filipino baby-sitter creaked a stroller into the playground. Mingus slipped the marker into his jacket, tilted his head.

“Let’s go.”

You could flee a woman who was four feet tall and a baby lashed into a stroller, scramble away giddy and hysterical. It was only real threat that froze you where you stood, your feet like bricks, to dig in your pocket and offer up your bills and change. Go figure.

Mingus hoisted onto the fence surrounding the playground, swung a leg, dropped. Dylan, trying to follow, doubled himself on the fence. Mingus braced under Dylan’s arms while Dylan scrabbled with his foot. They fell together like cartoon cats in a sack on the other side.

“Dang, son, get off me!”

Dylan found his glasses where they’d tumbled in the grass. Mingus brushed at his pants, his jacket, like James Brown checking his suit for imaginary lint. He was grinning, lit up. A shard of leaf in the coils of his hair.

“Get up, son, you’re on the ground!” Mingus at his happiest called Dylan son in a booming voice, another quotation, half Redd Foxx, half Foghorn Leghorn.

He offered his hand, yanked Dylan to his feet.

There was something about a physical collision, a moment when fond irritation found an outlet. It wasn’t sexual, more just the routine annoyance of what you were supposed to be doing with your time being answered by the occasional pratfall.

You felt its use. The Italian kids on Court Street knocked each other down at regular intervals.

Dylan wanted to clear the leaf from Mingus’s hair but left it alone.

They trudged down a grade to a hidden patch of land, a tilted triangle of desolate ailanthus and weeds, choked in exhaust at the edge of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, cars whirring indifferently below. The patch was littered with cigarette butts, forty-ounce bottles, shreds of tires. It formed another oasis of neglect, with all the secret authority of the abandoned house. Even the Heights was shored with wreckage, the characteristic crap that underpinned everything.

Again they’d traveled in famous traces, like pilgrims. The stone wall that rose up to the Promenade was covered with six-foot letters, patient graffiti masterpieces to be viewed by the passing drivers. They backed toward the traffic to view the art, Dylan adjusting his glasses on his nose. MONO and LEE : the Dynamic Duo had struck here too.

In Dylan’s mind Mono was black and Lee was white.

Mingus leaned against the painted wall, shaded by a canopy of ailanthus, and thumbed the blue lighter, held it sideways to the tip of a small, faucetlike chrome pipe, another surprise product of the green jacket’s lining. Head tilted, eyes squeezed in concentration, Mingus sipped at smoke, held it in with thin-pressed lips. Fumes leaked from his nose. He nodded his chin at Dylan, finally exhaled.

“You want some weed?”

“Nah.” Dylan tried to keep it breezy, an incidental turndown that could have gone either way.

Below, trucks roared past, a wall in motion. They bore their own graffiti markings from other parts of the city, alien communication spread by an indifferent carrier, like a virus.

“I took it from Barrett. He keeps it in the freezer.”

These days Mingus called his father Barrett. To Dylan it was probably the key to everything, a crucial stance. Alone, he’d rehearse the possibility under his breath: Abraham, Abraham, Abraham.

“Does he know?” Dylan asked.

Mingus shook his head. “He got so much, he won’t even notice.” He flicked the lighter again, the bowl of the pipe flaring orange, crackling faintly. Dylan worked not to tip his fascination.

“You ever smoke weed?”

“Sure,” Dylan lied.

“It’s no big thing.”

“I know.”

“Everybody gets theyselves high on something—that’s what Barrett says.” Every-body gets they-selves high on some-thing carried like musical DNA a trace of Mu-tha’s gone but the boy is keeping it together.

“It’s okay, I did it before, I just don’t want to right now.”

“Before?” Mingus tested him gently.

“Sure,” said Dylan. “My mom’s a pothead.” As it came from his mouth Dylan knew he’d betrayed Rachel, tossed her out like a skully cap you played indifferently, didn’t mind losing.

Shrugging around in your own language, falsely casual, you discovered what you already knew. The stories embedded in the words like puns, waiting.

Running Crab not out of potluck.

“Yeah, well, speaking of which, my moms kicked Barrett out for smoking drugs,” said Mingus. He was compelled to chip in his own disaster, then went mute. Possibly mentioning anyone’s moms out loud, even your own, was miscalculation enough to blow an afternoon.

You were never ineligible for a screwup like that—say the unsayable word and watch it foul the sky. Dodging any mention of Intermediate School 293 or the terms white or black you might think you were in the clear, but you’d be wrong.

There ought to be a whole other language. As it was, talk of Rachel pointed like a sundial shadow to situations like Robert Woolfolk, stuff you’d worked to leave obscure. Then you were right back where you didn’t want to be. Pinned to the grid.

A white boy in sixth grade, squirming in the glare.

Yoked.

Yo mama.

Mingus made the pipe disappear into his jacket. The two of them clambered up the grade, scaled the fence easily, and in silence stalked back along Pierrepont, putting the Promenade behind them. Though Dylan was ready now to be offered the El Marko, ready to uncap the pinned-out, purple-soaked felt and feel it flow under his own hand, to discover his own graffiti name and to plop it dripping on the sides of lampposts beside Mingus’s DOSE , they tagged nothing. Mingus’s hands remained buried in the pockets of the jacket, fists pushed into the lining to grip the lighter and the pipe and the El Marko so they didn’t clank together as they bounced against his thighs.

Mingus stalking ahead. Leaf still in his hair.

Dylan wasn’t even a toy, not yet.

Probably Mingus was high too, his brain in some other quadrant, the Negative Zone maybe. That part was too much to factor. Just another revoltin’ development, to quote Ben Grimm, more commonly known as the Thing.

 

He’d learned to let the mail sit until the boy came home from school, to let the boy toss down his knapsack and sort whatever had been pushed through the mailslot and palm away the Running Crab postcard, when one had come, hide it among his private stuff, a category of the boy’s that was ever-expanding. Only after Dylan had slid the mail around with his foot, spreading it on the hallway floor and abandoning it there did Abraham Ebdus retrieve the bills, letters, exhibition announcements, whatever else might have come. So the day’s mail sat all afternoon just inside the door, and Abraham on his journeys downstairs from studio to kitchen for coffee or sandwiches did his honest best not to notice whether there might be a postcard sticking out of the pile. He didn’t want to know.

Tonight, after Dylan had passed through the hallway and moved to the kitchen to unpack his homework on the table, Abraham found a thin package pushed through the slot, return-addressed with the name of his new employer. Though he guessed its contents instantly, he held the package in his gaze for a long minute, darkness massing behind his eyes, a sort of headache of pride and rage. When he finally tore it open a shudder of self-loathing went through him, and he nearly ripped the package in half down the center, destroying the thin mass-market paperback book before it was unveiled.

Neural Circus by R. Fred Vundane, the first in a series called the New Belmont Specials, heralded as “Mind-Warping Speculative Fiction for the Rock Age.” Jacket art by Abraham Ebdus: a third-rate surrealist landscape or moonscape or mindscape of brightly colored yet somehow ominous biomorphic forms, indebted to Miró, indebted to Tanguy, indebted to Ernst, indebted even to Peter Max, and repaying none of those debts in the least. The art department of Belmont Books had overlaid his gouache-on-pasteboard with an electric-yellow sans serif font meant to resemble computer-screen lettering. Abraham wished now he’d denied them the use of his real name, substituted a pseudonym instead, as the author apparently had: A. Fried Mothball or J.R.R. Foolkiller. The colors he’d applied with his own brushes hurt his eyes.

Abraham carried the book into the kitchen, thinking he’d drop it casually onto the table in the middle of Dylan’s homework. Pique compelled his wrist and he flipped the book to the floor instead. It skidded, spinning to a spot under the table near Dylan’s feet. Dylan raised his eyebrows, looked under the table.

“What’s that?” said Dylan.

“My first published book,” said Abraham, unable to modulate the bitterness in his tone.

Dylan scooped the book up from the floor and took it into the parlor, wordlessly. Abraham moved a package of defrosted lamb chops from the refrigerator to the sink, ran the tap. Set onions on the counter, considered them. He could only bear the silence for a few minutes before peering in to see Dylan screwed into the corner of the couch, his whole body curled around Neural Circus. Dylan didn’t look up as Abraham entered. The kid read books like he was engaged in some sort of scavenger procedure, scowling in concentration, turning pages at improbable speed while he flayed away the inessential flesh of prose and inspected the skeleton of story, the bare facts or crucial nonsense. Dylan Ebdus didn’t read, he filleted.

Abraham returned to the kitchen. He sliced onions, tossed the chops in a pan. By the time he’d gotten dinner on the table and was about to summon Dylan, the boy trotted back in with the garish little book.

“Not bad,” said Abraham Ebdus’s son. His tone suggested he’d read plenty that were worse. And then, in an act of almost unbearably dry wit, the boy returned the book carefully to the spot on the floor where Abraham had thrown it, covered his mouth with his fist and mimicked a slight cough, and turned to his dinner.

The book lay there through dinner, at sea between their feet. Later, after the television was on, Dylan safely established at his pew in the church of The Six Million Dollar Man, Abraham retrieved the book and slipped it into his back pocket, carried it upstairs to his studio. There he cleared a row of ink bottles from a shelf just above eye level, at the desk where he painted film. Neural Circus would have company soon enough: he’d already painted three more jacket designs for the New Belmont Specials, and a fourth lay in rough form on a table across the room. He couldn’t consider it now.

He dipped his brush, and focused his hot, onion-stinging eyes on the small celluloid frame where he’d left off work. His film’s plot had lately turned to the banishment or purgation, by degrees, of color. By infinitesimal movements, small blottings and eclipses, black and gray were coming to dominate the zone above the horizon line at the center of the frame, and white and gray the zone below. What colors remained were muted, fading rapidly as though disheartened by the trend, their obvious death sentence. They’d seen the writing on the wall. First they came for the crimsons and I didn’t speak up, then they came for the ochres —

The New Belmont Specials were purgatory for the banished colors, Abraham decided now. By expelling onto the jacket designs his corruptest impulses—the need to entertain or distract with his paints, the urge to do anything with his paints apart from seeing through them to the absolute truth—he’d further purify his film. The published paperback art, he saw now, with a thrill that felt almost vindictive, would be a Day-Glo zombie standing in for his painting career, a corpse that walked. Meanwhile, thriving in seclusion, like a Portrait of Dorian Gray in reverse, would be the austere perfection of the unpublished, unseen film.

 

Mole-boy ventures out in springtime unprotected. Takes his chances. He folds a dollar into sixteenths and works it into a slot on the inside of his belt buckle, arms himself with a double bluff: two quarters in his pocket, and another fifty cents he’s willing to cough up tucked into his sock. Whatever it takes. This operation is routine. In his front pocket, though, the scrabbling furtive creature has a stash he’s nervous about, his hands eager, prickly. His own El Marko, jet-black, seal unbroken. At Pearl Paint on Canal Street the Saturday before, on a run for art supplies, the mole-child had gathered it up with a sketch pad and a long tin box of colored pencils. Abraham Ebdus paid for the lot, no questions asked.

It’s Saturday, not quite ten in the morning the fifth day of June. Sixth grade is nearly shed now, the I.S. 293 Annex a one-year carapace, like a gross bodily phase, a mistake. What’s the point of a one-year school? You couldn’t grow into any useful stature. Next year was what mattered now, always had been, if you’d only known. You were readying for seventh grade. The main building on Court Street, with Mingus Rude in the grade ahead. There you’d stand some chance. Maybe. Seventh grade: concentrate, bring it into being. Looking anywhere beyond that, to high school, the guilty muffled fantasy of girls, blond girls like the lost-not-forgotten Solvers, is likely unwise for a mole-creature looking to avoid getting yoked. Take it one step at a time, o creature of the depths.

Meantime, prepare to enter Mingus’s ranks. Earn your stripes, locate your name. Saturday morning you could dare to hope the kids in the projects were all still in their Jockey underwear, five to a couch, watching Merrie Melodies on black-and-white screens. The stink of the solvent factory on Bergen is the only thing loud today, the Puerto Ricans not yet assembled in front of Ramirez’s store, the vacant bus floating like a chubby mote in new-summer light toward Third Avenue. A morning like this one might be a safe time to bring your name into being, throw it up on a wall. Nevertheless, mole-boy moves with nothing short of usual caution. Day, night, doesn’t matter. Who knows how he’ll explain if he’s cornered and forced to empty his pockets, show the El Marko. The thing’s a stolen passport, a charm he hasn’t earned the right to carry.

Glancing behind, he moves up Nevins.

On the block of Pacific Street between Nevins and Third a couple of side-by-side empty lots had been converted into what was called a vest-pocket park. Really just a dent in the block’s façade of brownstones, a square of ungreen public space, full of an oddly deep sandpit and some modernistic climbing furniture made of heavily lacquered wooden beams, plus the conventional slide and swings. The vest-pocket’s floor was black rubber matting in squares, joined by jigsaw-puzzle hinges, and strewn everywhere with broken glass and stubbed cigarettes and evaporated puddles of urine that marked the site’s true life. The slide and swings and the bolted-down garbage bins and the brick of the walls that made the vest-pocket’s three sides were thick-layered with tags in spray paint and marker. A kid was widely regarded as an idiot for setting foot in that sand even in sneakers, forget barefoot. That’s if you entered the Venus Flytrap of the park at all. Mole-boy regards it as a zone he sees the less of the better, and it takes courage for him to enter it now, though a quick glance confirms he’s alone.

He fumbles the El Marko free of his pocket and looks for a clean spot.

The last square of untagged surface in the vest-pocket is low on the underside of the slide, the angle awkward-to-impossible. Knees bent, he duckwalks into the slide’s shadow and uncaps. Smells the fresh reek of the black ink. He’s got a name ready, a secret with himself, practiced a thousand times the past two weeks, ballpoint on school desk, Sharpie marker on loose-leaf binder, bare fingertip in the air.

But this isn’t going to happen today.

Because today is the day the flying man falls from the roof.

First a shadow flashing at the corner of the boy’s eyes as he crouches under the slide, an immense bird- or bat-like stretch of black against the brick wall. Flight, reversed. Then a collapsing thud, someone thrown, and the wheezing sigh, the exhale thrown from a body by force of impact. The long sigh resolving into a moan. The boy starts, grazing his head on the slide’s underside, drops the marker. Caged in the slide’s shadow, he wonders if he could somehow hide there from the whatever.

Answer’s nope, he can’t.

“Little white boy,” groans the voice. “Whatchoo doin’?”

The flying man is huge, up close. He’s seated on the rubber matting and against the wall, a few feet away, knees up, two hands at his right ankle, rubbing. The skin of his knobby, flinty hands and at his ankle, at each of his ankles, bare above ratty red sneakers— rejects, in point of fact—is scaly, psoriatic, white tracing on alligator black. He’s dressed in jeans oiled gray with filth and a formerly white shirt, cuffs shredded, a button dangling by a thread. And over his shoulder, crumpled between his wide back and the brick wall, a bedsheet cape, knotted at the neck just like the kid in Where the Wild Things Are, only stained yellow. Unavoidably the boy thinks: pee -stained. And the flying man smells like pee, even worse than the park does.

The flying man grumbles again, looks up even as he goes on rubbing his ankle. His jaw is stubbled and pitted, curls of white boiled in dark acne. His nose points sideways. And where the flying man’s eyes ought to be white they’re that same pee-stain color, as though he’s somehow urinated even into his own eyeballs.

Dylan Ebdus doesn’t speak, he stares.

The flying man nods at the fallen El Marko. “Scrawling up some nassyshit on the walls, I seen you.”

“You fell down,” says Dylan Ebdus.

“Nah, man, I flew down,” says the flying man. “Fucked up my motherfucking leg, though. Can’t land right no more.”

“How—how can you fly?”

“Hah. Ain’t ’cause of this fucking thing, that’s for damn sure.” The flying man pulls now at the sheet around his neck, sticks his blunt fingers in the knot and jerks it loose, surprisingly easily. He balls the soiled cape and tosses it to the side, into a pile of broken glass. “Tangle me up, hurt my leg, dang,” he mutters. “Got to be fallin’ all the time.”

Dylan Ebdus takes a cautious step toward the uncapped El Marko where it lies on the rubber floor of the park.

“Gohead, pick it up. I don’t give a shit ’bout no fucking graffiti, man. Least of my problems, shit.”

Dylan grabs the marker, caps it, and puts it away. The flying man seems to be talking to himself now, anyway.

“Hey, man, you got a dollar, man?”

Dylan Ebdus stares again. The flying man shows his teeth, which are small and too spacious. His gum a flare of brown and pink.

“You can’t talk, man? I axed if you got a dollar.”

The mole-boy is almost relieved to shift to such familiar turf. On automatic, he digs in his pocket. Another part of him, though, still calculates trajectories, replays that flash and thud of descent a minute before. His eyes flicker to the rooftop, three stories high. From there to here ?

Elsewhere this day’s unstarted. The park an empty bracket, no one walking Pacific Street’s sidewalk to confirm or triangulate any goings-on.

The flying man reaches up and Dylan Ebdus hands him fifty cents, stepping into the aura of stink to do it. He steps quickly back.

The flying man palms the quarters, turns a silver ring on his pinky finger, his eyes locked on Dylan’s. There’s a rime of white crusted in the fine lines of the flying man’s neck, as though he’s been beached, baked in evaporating salt.

“I used to fly good,” says the flying man.

“I’ve seen you,” says Dylan, nearly whispering, the knowledge appearing with the words.

“Can’t no more,” says the flying man angrily, then licks his lips. “Muthafucking”—here he works to find a word—“air waves always got to be knocking me down.”

“Air waves?”

“Hah. Hah. I can’t stay in the air no more. That’s the problem, man.” The flying man suddenly spots the quarters shining in his cracked palm, like shards of mirror sun-caught in a muddy curb. “That’s all you got, man? That’s all you got for me?”

Dylan nods mutely, then undoes his belt and surrenders the tiny, wadded dollar, not unfolding it but dropping it like a Chiclet into the cup of the flying man’s vast fissured hand.

“Hah. You really seen me flyin’?”

The flying man lifts his chin to point at the distant rooftops above Pacific and Nevins, the roof of P.S. 38 and beyond, to the Wyckoff Houses. Seagulls wheel in the pale sky, strayed from Coney Island or Red Hook.

Dylan Ebdus nods again, then flees the park.

chapter  7

Apostcard from Running Crab, postmarked Bloomington, Indiana, August 16, 1976. The front a black-and-white photograph of Henry Miller on the beach at Big Sur, naked apart from a loincloth so big it’s like a baby’s diaper, wrinkled chest sagging below caustic grin and sunburned brow. A statuesque, black-haired woman stands aloof behind him, in a bikini and a filmy wrap, ankles in surf, ignoring the camera.

don’t let hank fool you d

a brooklyn street kid never quits

dreaming of stickball triples

egg creams and the funnies

in his mind he’s dick tracy

she’s brenda starr

not venus on the half shell

love beachcomber crab

He stared at the tickets so long his eyeball vibes might have scoured off the ink bearing that blind coon’s name and replaced it with his own. Some fool up at Artists and Repertory had sent him two tickets to see Ray motherfucking Charles at Radio City Music Hall, as though he was likely to sit pondering a mile of the spangled white pussy known as the Rockettes—from the goddamn balcony!—just to see that haughty jive-ass banging on a grand piano hollering “God Bless America.” Never wished to play Radio City, why would he be found in the balcony ?

He’d propped his parlor windows open high. Outside, Dean Street moaned in an ailment of humidity. The heat was granular, undissolved. The sunlight on the strewn mirror blobby, swimmy. Nothing rippled the curtains, the air didn’t move. Just a steady distant Puerto Rican beat from the square in front of Ramirez’s store, might be the same song for the last two hours, the whole afternoon. Cars moved like jellyfish, barely distinguishable from their medium, a ripple where the tar met the air.

Four black kids dancing like startled spiders in the flow of a wrenched-open hydrant on Nevins and Bergen.

He tossed the tickets on the mirror, then carved out a line, taking care to point his toes outward, ten and two on the face of an imaginary clock. He’d recently developed a technique of widening his hips and knees and keeping his back arched as he leaned forward, so that breathing a line became more natural, the blow raining into his open lungs, flushing him through with cool air. Too many cats snorted while balled up, imbibing the drug ragefully, their bodies fistlike.

It was like singing, a matter of what distant quadrants in your belly and chest you could find to offer up.

Commitment on a deeper level.

From the low angle he puzzled the tickets with his eyes, exploring how they lay twinned on the mirror, dark writing inaccessibly sandwiched in shadow between the two pairs, the real and the reflected. Maybe Crowell Desmond, his so-called manager, had engineered this affront. A widely unknown historical fact was that Ray Charles had personally bounced a reel of Subtle Distinctions’ demos when he was running Tangerine, saying, reputedly, Don’t come around here with this Motown-sounding doo-wop horseshit. But could Desmond, who’d crept onto the scene only a year ago, be savvy to that fact? Not likely. Anyway, Crowell Desmond lacked initiative for such a cryptic put-down.

Barrett Rude Junior picked up a rolled dollar bill and drew a line clear into his lower gut, into his balls and dick. Felt the chill there shudder outward everywhere through his clammy, sweat-boiled carcass.

Nigger, he thought. Nig- guh, major falling to minor, an interval of sevenths.

Fugitive melodies lurked in the space between syllables, niggers themselves crouching in the dark.

No, the bestowal of the Ray Charles tickets was A&R working on its own, twitches from a corporate body which had never walked, only groveled. The resemblance to sentient life purely accidental. Someone in the offices had the wholly asinine and improbable notion they’d sweet-talk him up to Montreal to record some discofied bullshit with the German producer of the Silver Convention, wanting to turn him into Johnnie Taylor, maybe, or the Miracles after Smokey split, soul men in mirror-studded spandex bodysuits singing for horny Valley of the Dingbat housewives.

Move it up, move it down, move it in, move it out, Disco Lady! Then take me out behind the house and shoot my lame black ass.

Nihhh- gahhh, like breathing.

Could turn into a Curtis Mayfield falsetto thing, maybe.

In the same cause the sycophantic flacks had one month earlier dragged to his doorstep a slick new four-track tape recorder with a note on cream-colored gold-embossed stationery reading Barry, never forget you wrote Bothered to get me off your back, I’m still on it, Ahmet. As if that white-goateed upper-management hipster had likely even noticed the tune until the Mantovani Strings version had floated into his private fur-lined elevator.

Atlantic had ripped him off in his incarnation as the lead voice of the Servile Distinctions, siphoned royalties from his account like draining a pool. Then as final insult brought in Andre Deehorn and some no-name scab singers and built tracks around unfinished vocals, for release as a bogus final album— The Subtle Distinctions Love You More! —after he’d quit. Now they wheedled and cajoled for the chance to resume ripping him off as a solo act. Only heartfelt emotion they’d ever know, like hungry cousins ringing your phone: Come back and spread green on us again, brother! He’d stashed the four-track below, in Mingus’s apartment, its magnetic virginity intact. Now he turned the same way with the tickets, shouted down the stairwell.

“Gus, man, get up here. Got something for you.”

Mingus came upstairs in a T-shirt and his Jockey shorts, looking sleepy-eyed at one in the afternoon. He cocked his head at the drift of cocaine on the sun-mottled mirror, the smeary ghosts of inhaled lines that trailed out of it.

Kid stared at the blow like he’d never seen it before.

“What?” said Barrett Rude Junior. “You want to get high?” He waved his hand at the mirror from his big chair where he sat, felt the weight of his arm, a banner of flesh moving in the damp air.

Nihhh-gahhh, nihh-gahh, got you-self an itchy tri-ggahhh fin-gahhh. Could be a theme song for some movie about a pimp. Maybe he ought to fish that four-track recorder upstairs, shock their minds with a new track, number-one hit single on the R&B charts, first time the word nigger ’s ever been on the radio. Go fuck yourself, Omlet!

It seemed to take a thousand years for Mingus to quit staring and shake his head.

Barrett Rude Junior just laughed. “Don’t tell me you ain’t hittin’ it when I’m not around. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Lay off.”

“I know what’s wrong with you. You’re saying, Barry best get this cleaned up before Senior comes up here. Read your eyes, man.”

“I didn’t say nothing.”

“Whatever. I got these tickets for you if you want them. Brother Ray Charles, up at Ray- dee -oh City. Drinkin’ wine spo-de-o-dee, drinkin’ wine.”

“You don’t want to go?”

“Nah, not tonight. Why don’t you call up a friend, hop up there on the F train.”

Mingus took the tickets. Barrett Rude Junior rubbed his nose and upper lip with his knuckle, waiting. Him and Mingus both fine-beaded in the day’s wet heat.

“Ray Charles is the man, Gus. Big part of your cultural heritage right there, my man. You’ll be telling your kids you were there, Ne-ver fo-get the time I saw Bruth-a Ray.” He couldn’t say why he wanted the boy to go. “Plus they got some fine air-conditioning up there in that balcony, man. Go cool out with a friend, get out the heat. Take Dylan. Or that raisin-looking ghetto child you been bringing around, what’s his name? Robert. Radio City likely blow that boy’s mind.”

The talk came out of him in one breath and was strangely taxing. He closed his eyes and when he opened them Mingus stood there still looking at the tickets as though Barrett hadn’t spoken.

“You gonna go, or what?”

“You got other plans?” asked Mingus.

“What’s that got to do with it?” In truth, Barry had his eye on a double feature at the Duffield Theater up on Fulton Street, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings and Car Wash. Leverage his own ass out of the day’s heat, into some dark windowless auditorium with best-be-working air-conditioning. Just not to contemplate Ray Charles in a tuxedo. “You want the tickets?”

Mingus shrugged. Scratching himself in his underwear, eyeballing his father, trying to figure the angle.

“Take them, think it over, give Dylan a call.”

“You don’t care if I sell them?”

Barrett Rude Junior eyeballed his son in return. “Nah, man, I don’t care.” His disappointment was irrational, huge. “But once you’re all the way up there, why not check it out? It’s bread you want, I’ll give you bread, Gus.”

His pushing only stoked Mingus’s own resistance, he saw now. If your old man doesn’t want to go see Ray Charles why should you want to go? Too much effort all around, this day especially. Brooklyn was a tropical place, faint marimba notes suspended in the yellow air, now a Mister Softee truck’s incessant, circular tune, rising and falling like an ambulance whine as it positioned itself on Bergen, Bond, Dean, Pacific, drawing sluggish kids like ants to a soda spill. Manhattan seemed a thousand miles away, another city.

Barrett Rude Junior could have done with a soft-dipped cone himself come to think of it.

Getting one was another whole story altogether.

Didn’t see himself standing at no ice-cream truck.

Under the marimba and the Mister Softee jingle he breath-chanted nihhh-gahhhh, nihhh-gahhh, the tune, let’s admit it now, going nowhere, unfolding into nothing but itself. Nigger would be a song unsung, more dust blown away. Besides, the four-track recorder was impossibly distant, a rumor as farfetched and unlikely as the ice-cream cone, as Manhattan.

You don’t fetch what’s too far. Hence the phrase.

Now, how was it that blow always make him want to close his eyes? Made no sense at all.

And why couldn’t Mingus answer one simple goddamn question?

When Barrett Rude Junior opened his eyes again hours had passed. He’d been wallowing there all afternoon and into the dusk hour, Mingus long gone wherever with the tickets. He awoke entombed in the dark, heat-glazed to the leather chair, the folds of his chin and neck chafed with sweat. The curtain flapped lightly in a useless breeze which had quietly worn the knoll of cocaine and chased grains to the edges of the mirror. Probably on the carpet as well.

He’d already spilled it on the water bed the night before, a new layer of sheen between his body and the sheets. Let it cover the whole house in a layer—it would be there when he’d need it, he’d run his fingers over the walls, snort the carpet. He’d bring a woman home and use her like a sponge to pick it up and get high cleaning it off her body.

True enough, he’d need to get this part of his life stashed away before Barrett Rude Senior got sprung and came up north.

Now haul your ass up splash water on your neck get out the damn house already, it’s nighttime.

The Duffield was a grand ruin of an Art Deco movie palace, an experiment in what happened if you never cleaned a place for fifty years, just sold tickets and stale candy to stick to the floor and flat cola to erode the hinges of the sprung upholstered chairs when it spilled. One chair in four was upright enough to sit in. Others looked like they might have been attacked, stabbed by angry gangs. The walls were panels of torn crimson felt between gold-painted cherubs and rosettes, now blackened and nose-chipped into dingy gargoyles. The place was unnaturally dark. Red exit signs hovered in the murk, cigarette haze floated up through the projector beam to nest in the massive wrecked chandelier, below the peeling vault of the ceiling, the misaligned film played over the edges of the heavy rotting curtain at both sides of the screen. The screen itself showed bullet holes and was prominently tagged by Strike and Bel II.

Barrett Rude Junior paid for his ticket and went inside, found a seat under the balcony. Bingo Long was started already, maybe half over. The air was cold and rank. The place was two-thirds full, heads clustered in groups to the distant reaches of the giant room, all smoking and laughing and talking back to the movie. Squeals and moans in the darkest corners. A woman could be giving birth to twins in the balcony, nobody’d know. Barrett Rude leaned back, tested his springs, settled in. He’d had the foresight to ferry in a brown sack with a forty-ounce Colt, not troubling to hide it from the indifferent ticket ripper. Now he eased the cap off. It voiced a quick shuffff of freed carbonation, answered by an envious murmur from those in the Duffield near enough to have heard: Wish I’d thought of that, damn.

Bingo Long was no good. It stunk, in fact, full of cloying Dixieland jazz and Billy Dee Williams in a three-piece suit like he thought he was Redford in The Black Sting. Plus too little Richard Pryor, too much James Earl Jones making like Paul Robeson, that tired nobility jive. Didn’t matter. It was half over and soon Car Wash would start and the crowd was good and the air was cold and the liquor was cold. He only had to stretch it out, not drink it up before the second feature. Everyone was here to see Car Wash in the first place. Not that they’d be any quieter then.

It was at the break when the lights rose that he saw them, the nappy dark head and the straight and nearly blond-haired head beside it, the two of them slumped twenty rows closer, at the front where the screen surely loomed like a sky they couldn’t see to the edges of, their identical blue Pro Keds thrown up across the seats in front of them. Mingus had rounded up Dylan, sure—probably dragged him uptown to Radio City to scalp the tickets too. Unloaded them on some white folks in evening dress, no doubt. Then hauled ass back to Brooklyn, like he’d read Barrett Rude Junior’s mind, for the double feature. Shit, it didn’t take a mind reader. Anyone in their right mind for a mile around was at the Duffield tonight, and if you’d delivered free Ray Charles tickets to their mailboxes that morning it wouldn’t be any different. Who wouldn’t want to be here jeering through Bingo Long in the dark, anticipation just making things better, waiting for Car Wash, all that Norman Whitfield–Rose Royce pizzazz on the soundtrack? Only proved the boy had sense.

 

It was entirely possible that one song could destroy your life. Yes, musical doom could fall on a lone human form and crush it like a bug. The song, that song, was sent from somewhere else to find you, to pick the scab of your whole existence. The song was your personal shitty fate, manifest as a throb of pop floating out of radios everywhere.

At the very least the song was the soundtrack to your destruction, the theme. Your days reduced to a montage cut to its cowbell beat, inexorable doubled bass line and raunch vocal, a sort of chanted sneer, surrounded by groans of pleasure. The stutter and blurt of what—a tuba ? French horn? Rhythm guitar and trumpet, pitched to mockery. The singer might as well have held a gun to your head. How it could have been allowed to happen, how it could have been allowed on the radio ? That song ought to be illegal. It wasn’t racist—you’ll never sort that one out, don’t even start—so much as anti- you.

Yes they were dancing, and singing, and movin’ to the groovin’, and just when it hit me, somebody turned around and shouted —

Every time your sneakers met the street, the end of that summer, somebody was hurling it at your head, that song.

Forget what happens when you start haunting the green-tiled halls of Intermediate School 293.

September 7, 1976, the week Dylan Ebdus began seventh grade in the main building on Court Street and Butler, Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music” was the top song on the rhythm and blues charts. Fourteen days later it topped Billboard ’s pop charts. Your misery’s anthem, number-one song in the nation.

Sing it through gritted teeth: WHITE BOY!

Lay down the boogie and play that funky music ’til you die.

 

When Dylan Ebdus first spotted Arthur Lomb the other boy was feigning pain in the far corner of the schoolyard. At some distance Dylan heard the cries and turned from the entrance of the school to look. Catching sight of Arthur Lomb was like noticing the flight and fall of a bird across a distance of leaf-blurred sky, that flicker at the corner of vision, the abrupt plummeting. Like the flying man too, something Dylan did and didn’t wish to have noticed. It occurred at that moment of slippage after the bell had rung and the gym teachers who patrolled the yard had returned inside, ahead of the flood of students, so the yard became a lawless zone, that terrible sudden reframing of space which could happen anywhere, even inside the corridors of the school. Nevertheless it was a clumsy mistake for the boy now cringing on the ground to be caught so far from the yard’s entrance, a mistake Dylan felt he couldn’t forgive. He wouldn’t have forgiven it in himself.

Arthur Lomb fell to his knees and clutched his chest and keened. His words were briefly audible across the depopulating yard.

“I can’t breathe! ”

Then, each syllable riding a sharp insuck of air, “I! ” Pause. “Can’t! ” Pause. “Breathe! ”

Arthur Lomb was pretending asthma or some other weakness. It was an identifiable method: preemptive suffering. Nobody could do much with a kid who was already crying. He’d become useless, untillable soil. He had no spirit to crush and it was faintly disgusting, in poor taste. Anyway, this weirdly gasping kid might not know the rules and talk, tattle to some distant cloddish figure of authority what he imagined had been done to him. He might even be truly sick, fucked up, in pain, who knew? Your only option was to say Dang, white boy, what’s your problem? I didn’t even touch you. And move on.

Dylan admired the strategy, feeling at once a cool quiver of recognition and a hot bolt of shame. He felt that he was seeing his double, his stand-in. It was at least true that any punishment Arthur Lomb endured was likely otherwise Dylan’s, or anyway that a gang of black kids couldn’t knock Dylan to the pavement or put him in a yoke at the exact moment they were busy doing it to Arthur Lomb.

From that point on Arthur Lomb’s reddish hair and hunched shoulders were easy to spot, though he and Dylan had different homerooms, and schedules which kept them from overlapping anywhere except the schoolyard at lunch hour. Arthur Lomb dressed in conspicuous striped polo shirts and wore soft brown shoes. His pants were often highwaters. Dylan once heard a couple of black girls serenading Arthur Lomb with a couplet he hadn’t himself elicited since fourth grade, snapping their fingers and harmonizing high and low like a doo-wop group: The flood is over, the land is dry, so why do you wear your pants so high ?

Arthur Lomb carried an enormous and bright blue backpack, an additional blight. All his schoolbooks must be inside, or maybe a couple of stone tablets. The bag itself would have tugged Arthur Lomb to the ground if he’d stood up straight. As it was the bag glowed as a target, begged to be jerked downward to crumple Arthur Lomb to the corridor floor to enact his shortness-of-breath routine. Dylan had seen it done five times already before he and Arthur Lomb ever spoke. Dylan had even heard kids chanting the song at Arthur Lomb as they slapped at his reddened neck or the top of his head while he squirmed on the floor. Play that fucking music, white boy! Stretching the last two words to a groaning, derisive, Bugs-Bunnyesque whyyyyyyyboy!

There were just three other white kids in the school, all girls, with their own girl factors to work out. One shared Dylan’s homeroom, an Italian girl, black-haired and sullen and tiny, dwarfed by the girls all around them who exploded with hormonal authority. The black and Puerto Rican girls had risen to some other place where they were rightly furious at anything in view, jostling at one another and at the teachers in a rage of sex. However, their very size offered an approach: it was feasible to pass unseen below. Homeroom was a place for honing silence in a theater of noise and so the Italian girl and Dylan never spoke. As for Arthur Lomb, Dylan supposed he and the other boy had been kept apart intentionally by some unseen pitying intelligence, to avoid making both more conspicuous in their resemblance. This was a policy Dylan endorsed heartily, whether it existed outside of his own brain or not. Even at that remove, Arthur Lomb bore the mingled stink of Dylan’s oppression mixed with his own, so that it was hard to tell where one began and the other left off. Dylan wasn’t in any hurry to get closer. Really, he wanted no part of Arthur Lomb.

It was the library where they finally spoke. Dylan and Arthur Lomb’s two homerooms had been deposited there together for a period, the school librarian covering some unexplained absence of teachers for an afternoon, a blip in the routine nobody cared about anyway. Most kids sent to the library never arrived there, ended up outside the building instead, taking the word as a euphemism for class dismissed. So the I.S. 293 library was drab but peaceful, an eddy of calm. Below a poster advertising A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich, a book the library didn’t actually offer, Dylan placed himself against a wall and flipped open issue number two of the Marvel Comics adaptation of Logan’s Run. As the period ticked away glacially, Arthur Lomb buzzed him twice, squinting to see the title of the comic, then pursing lips in false concentration as he mimed browsing the half-empty shelves nearby, before stepping close enough for Dylan to hear him speak in an angry, clenched whisper.

“That guy George Perez can’t draw Farrah Fawcett to save his life.”

This was a startling allusion to several bodies of knowledge simultaneously. Dylan could only glare, his curiosity mingled with the certainty that he and Arthur Lomb were more objectionable, more unpardonable, together than apart. Up close Arthur Lomb had a blinky agitated quality to his features which made Dylan himself want to knock him down. His face seemed to reach for something, his features like a grasping hand. Dylan wondered if there might be a pair of glasses tucked in the background somewhere, perhaps in a side pocket of the monumental blue backpack.

Dylan hurried the comic book into his binder. He’d bought it on Court Street at lunchtime and debated allowing it to be seen inside the school, a breach of general good sense. It was a lousy comic, though, stiff with fidelity to the movie, and Dylan had decided he wouldn’t care anymore than he’d be surprised if it was taken away. This, a conversation with his homely double, wasn’t the price he’d expected to pay. But Arthur Lomb seemed to sense the dent he’d made in Dylan’s attention and pressed on.

He smirked again at the comic book where it had vanished into the binder.

“Seen it?”

“What?”

“Logan’s Run.”

Fuck you looking at? Dylan wanted to shriek at Arthur Lomb, before it was too late, before Dylan succumbed to his loneliness and allowed himself to meet Arthur, the other white boy.

“Not yet,” Dylan said instead.

“Farrah Fawcett is a fox.”

Dylan didn’t answer. He couldn’t know, and was only chagrined that he even knew what Arthur Lomb was talking about.

“Don’t feel bad. I bought ten copies of Logan’s Run #1.” Arthur Lomb spoke in a hurried whisper, showing some awareness of his surroundings, but compelled to spill what he had, to force Dylan know to him. “You have to buy number ones, it’s an investment. I’ve got ten of Eternals, ten of 2001, ten of Omega, ten of Ragman, ten of Kobra. And all those comics stink. You know the comics shop on Seventh Avenue? The buildings on that corner are all brand-new because a plane crashed there, you heard about it? A 747 tried to crash-land in Prospect Park and missed, no kidding. Big disaster. Anyway, guy runs that shop is an a-hole. I stole a copy of Blue Beetle #1 from him once. It was pathetically easy. Blue Beetle is Charlton, you ever hear of Charlton Comics? Went out of business. Number one’s a number one, doesn’t matter. You know Fantastic Four #1 goes for four hundred dollars? The Blue Beetle might be an all-time record for the stupidest character ever. He was drawn by Ditko, guy who created Spider-Man. Ditko can’t really draw, that’s the weird thing. Makes everything look like a cartoon. Doesn’t matter, it’s a number one. Put it in plastic and put it on the shelf, that’s what I say. You use plastic, don’t you?”

“Of course,” said Dylan resentfully.

He understood every word Arthur Lomb said. Worse, he felt his sensibility colonized by Arthur’s, his future interests co-opted.

They were doomed to friendship.

chapter  8

Three weeks earlier, Dylan Ebdus had stood on the slate in front of Mingus Rude’s stoop, waiting.

Women trudged little kids to kindergarten at the Y or moved alone up Nevins to the subway. Two gays from Pacific Street tugged leashed dachshunds, in another world. A bunch of black girls swept up from the projects to gather Marilla, who was in high school now, at Sarah J. Hale, down on Third Avenue. They shared a cigarette for breakfast, rumbled around the corner in a ball of smoke and laughter. All under the angled morning light, distant Jersey haze, merry solvent-factory stink getting you mildly high, the pillar of the Williamsburg Savings Bank clock tower organizing the sky, time different on its two visible faces but either way it was time to go, today the first day of school everywhere in the world, possibly. This day when summer ended was as hot as summer, even at eight in the morning.

Only one thing wrong with this picture, as the block cleared, the bus breathed past, a dog barked in a cycle like code. Dylan standing in long pants and with his backpack full of unruined binder pages and dumb pencils and hidden glasses and still-virgin El Marko. He felt like an apple skinned for inspection at the new school, already souring in the sun. Those dogs could tell and probably anybody else too, he stank of panic.

If Mingus Rude would walk with him up Dean Street to Smith or Court, walk through the doors of the school with him, side by side, it might be different.

Dylan went to the shuttered basement window and rapped. Mingus’s own entrance under the stairs had no doorbell.

Dylan should have planned it with him in advance, he saw now.

Up the stoop, he rang the bell.

He rang it again, shifting in his Keds, anxious, time ticking away, the day and the prospect of seventh grade rapidly spoiling with him in the sun.

Then, like an irrational puppet, panicked, he leaned on the doorbell and let it ring in a continuous trill.

He was still ringing it when the door opened.

It wasn’t Mingus, but Barrett Rude Junior in a white bathrobe, naked underneath, unhidden to the street, arms braced in the door, looking down. Face clotted with sleep, he blinked in the slanted, scouring light. He lifted his arm to cover his eyes with shade, looking like he wanted to wave the day off as a bad idea, a passing mistake.

“Hell you doing, Little Dylan?”

Dylan took a step back from the door, to the first step down.

“Don’t never be ringing my doorbell seven in the morning, man.”

“Mingus—”

“You’ll see Mingus at the got-damn school.” Barrett Rude was waking into his anger, his voice like a cloud of hammers. “Get out of here now.”

Seventh grade was where it turned out when you finally joined Mingus Rude in the main building Mingus Rude was never there. As if Mingus walked another Dean Street to school, another Court Street, had actually all this time gone to another I.S. 293 entirely. The only evidence in the opposite direction was the proliferation of DOSE tags on lampposts and mailboxes and on trucks which moved wearily through the neighborhood, Mingus’s handiwork spread in a nimbus with the school building at the center. Every few days, it seemed, produced a fresh supply. Dylan would covertly push a forefinger against the metal, wondering if he could measure in the tackiness of the ink the tag’s vintage. If his finger stuck slightly Dylan imagined he’d followed Mingus by minutes to the spot, barely missed catching him in the act.

For three weeks Mingus Rude was like the flying man, a rumor with himself Dylan couldn’t confirm. Mingus’s vacancy from his own schooldays, and from Dylan’s, was the secret premise of an existence which was otherwise unchanged except by being worse every possible way. Seventh grade was sixth grade desublimated, uncorked. It was the Lord of the Rings trilogy to sixth grade’s The Hobbit, the real story at last, all the ominous foreshadowed stuff flushed from the margins and into view. It wasn’t for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area.

Bodies ranged like ugly cartoons, as though someone without talent was scribbling in flesh.

The biggest shapes were the angriest. That’s what they were, shapes—between hiding your glasses and averting your gaze you were Mr. Magoo now. The less you met anyone’s eyes the less chance you’d ever risk doing it, a self-fulfilling program.

Chinese kids had apparently gotten some warning well in advance, and had thoroughly disappeared.

Puerto Rican or Dominican kids seemed to be tiptoeing away from the scene of everything. They decorated themselves differently and spoke more Spanish each passing hour. The way they occupied space in homeroom or gym class they were there and not there, an operation of mass adjacency.

The scariest fights were between two black girls.

On Court Street and Smith Street it wasn’t even clear who was and wasn’t in your school. Other bodies floated around, loose elements. A couple of black kids might corner you and ask, “You Italian or a white boy?” and all you’d know for sure was not to point out that the Italian kids were white. A black kid might be scared of something, might be watching his back on Court like an Italian kid watched his on Smith, but whatever they were scared of it was never going to be you. Anyway, no Italian kid would’ve answered I’m Italian. He’d have said Fuck you think I am? Or just grabbed his dick through his pants and sucked his teeth, flared his nostrils.

You, you were a million miles from any such procedure.

More in the market for a case of fake asthma.

 

The day after Dylan Ebdus and Arthur Lomb spoke of the Blue Beetle in the library, Mingus Rude resurfaced. At three o’clock, the hour when the doors were thrown open and the school exploded onto the October-bright pavement, when Court Street shopkeepers stood arms-crossed in doorways, their jaws chewing gum or nothing at all, just chewing under narrowed eyes. Dylan used the Butler Street entrance, looking to be lost in the flow of anonymous faces as he left the building, hoping to be carried a distance down Court Street disguised in a clot of anybodies before exposing himself as a solitary white boy. Today he stopped. Mingus sat cross-legged on the rise of a mailbox on the corner of Court and Butler, regarding the manic outflow of kids with a Buddha’s calm, as though from an even greater height than the mailbox, another planet maybe. He might have been sitting there placidly for hours, unnoticed by the school security guards or the older Italian teenagers who roamed Court, that’s how it felt. Dylan understood at once that not only hadn’t Mingus been inside the school today, he’d never crossed its doors since summer, since the start of his eighth-grade year.

“Yo, Dill-man!” said Mingus, laughing. “I was looking for you, man. Where you been?”

Mingus unfolded his legs and slid off the mailbox, pulled Dylan sideways out of the crowd, like there was never a question they left school together, like they’d done it every day for three weeks. They crossed Court, into Cobble Hill, Dylan hitching his backpack high on his shoulders and trotting to keep up. Mingus led him up Clinton Street to Atlantic Avenue, kids from I.S. 293 all left instantly behind. There the neighborhood opened out, the shipyards visible under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the avenue tilting down to the yellow-glinting water. It was as though Mingus knew paths from the school Dylan in his stupefaction couldn’t have plotted for himself.

“I haven’t seen you—” Dylan began.

“Whenever you call me, I’ll be there,” Mingus sang. “Whenever you need me, I’ll be there — I been a-round! Here.” He crumpled a couple of dollars into Dylan’s hands and nodded him to the Arab newsstand on the corner of Clinton. “Get me a pack of Kools, Super-D.” He tipped his head again. “I’ll be over here.”

“I can’t buy cigarettes.”

“Say it’s for your mom, say she always comes in there. He’ll sell it to you, don’t worry. Better let me hold your backpack.”

Dylan tried not to turn his head at the rack of comics as he stepped into the narrow, darkened corridor of a shop.

“Uh, pack of Kools. It’s for my mother.”

The operation unfolded precisely as scripted. The guy raised an eyebrow at the word mother, then slid the Kools across the linoleum counter with nothing besides a grunt.

Back outside, Mingus stashed both cigarettes and change in his jacket-of-mystery, then led Dylan back along Clinton, toward the park on Amity Street.

“Dill-Man, D-Lone, Dillinger,” Mingus chanted. “Diggity Dog, Deputy Dog, Dillimatic.”

“I haven’t seen you anywhere,” Dylan said, unable to check the plaint in his voice.

“You all right, man?” Mingus asked. “Everything cool with you?”

Dylan knew precisely what everything Mingus meant—all of seventh grade, whatever went on or didn’t inside the building which was apparently no longer Mingus’s problem.

According to Mr. Winegar, science teacher, the universe was reportedly exploding in slow motion, everything falling away from everything else at a fixed rate. It was a good enough explanation for now.

“Everything cool?” Mingus demanded.

They were together and not together, Dylan saw now. Mingus Rude was unreachable, blurred, maybe high. There wasn’t going to be any communing with his core, that vivid happy sadness which called out to Dylan’s own.

Dylan shrugged, said, “Sure.”

“That’s all I want to know, man. You know you’re my main man, Dillinger. D-Train.”

It was a rehearsal and now Dylan learned what for. As they slipped into the park Mingus exaggerated his ordinary lope, raised a hand in dreamy salute. Arrayed at the concrete chessboard tables were three black teenagers in assorted slung poses. One more chaotically slung than the others, a signature geometry of limbs which caused Dylan’s heart to guiltily, madly lurch. Nevertheless he strolled beside Mingus into the thick of it, accepted whatever was meant to unfold in the park from within his own sleepwalker’s daze, which, perfected at the new school, covered even the resurrection of Robert Woolfolk as a presence in his life.

“Yo,” said Mingus Rude, lazily slapping at hands, humming swallowed syllables which might be names.

“What’s goin’ on, G?” said Robert Woolfolk.

Robert Woolfolk called Mingus G, for Gus, Dylan supposed. Did it mean he’d also met Barrett Rude Junior?

Then Robert Woolfolk recognized Dylan. He flinched with his whole face, his sour-lemon features hiding nothing, yet didn’t alter the arrangement of his limbs an inch.

The park was full of little white kids with bowl haircuts, maybe second or third graders from Packer Institute or Saint Ann’s. They ran and screamed past the chessboard tables, dressed in Garanimals, arms loaded with plastic toys, G.I. Joes, water pistols, Wiffle balls. For all they inhabited the same world as Dylan and Mingus and Robert Woolfolk they might as well have been animated Disney bluebirds, twittering harmlessly around the head of the Wicked Witch as she coated an apple with poison.

“Shit,” said Robert Woolfolk and now he smiled. “You know this dude, G?”

“This my man D-Lone,” said Mingus. “He’s cool. We go back, he’s my boy from around the block.”

Robert looked at Dylan a long while before he spoke.

“I know your boy,” he said. “I seen him from before you were even around, G.” He flicked his eyes at Dylan. “What up, Dylan man? Don’t say you don’t remember me because I know you do.”

“Sure,” said Dylan.

“Shit, I even know this dude’s mother,” said Robert Woolfolk.

“Oh, yeah?” said Mingus, carefully blasé, downplaying any further speculations. “So you down, right? You cool with my man Dylan.”

Robert Woolfolk laughed. “What you need me to say, man? You can hang with your white boy, don’t mean shit to me.”

At that the thin, worthless pretense of Robert Woolfolk’s fondness for Dylan was shattered in hilarity. The other two black teenagers snorted, slapped each other five for the words white boy, as ever a transport to hear said aloud. “Ho, snap,” said one, shaking his head in wonderment like he’d just seen a good stunt in a movie, a car flipped over or a body crumpled in a hail of blood-spurting bullet thwips.

Dylan stood frozen in his stupid backpack and unpersuasive Pro Keds in the innocent afternoon, his arms numb, blinking his eyes at Mingus.

Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.

“We going down to bomb some trains or we sit here all day talking ’bout this and that?” said Robert Woolfolk.

“Let’s go,” said Mingus Rude softly.

“You bringing your homeboy here?”

Suddenly a woman stepped into the thick of them. Out of nowhere she made herself present where they sat and stood around the tables. It was a shock, as though she’d ruptured a bubble, disturbed a force field Dylan hadn’t thought was permeable, one where their talk, no matter how many times the word fuck was included, was sealed in a glaze of distant car horns and bird tweets and the younger kids’ sweet yells.

The woman was a mom, surely, one of the running kids had to be hers. She was maybe twenty-five or thirty, with blond hair, matching blue-jean jacket and bell-bottoms, and granny glasses—she might have been familiar from one of Rachel’s parties. Dylan could see her now, waving a joint around, making some passionate digression about Altman or Szechuan, aggravating men accustomed to holding the floor. Or Dylan might have been kidding himself. There were probably a million like her, false Rachels who’d never known his.

“You okay, kid?”

She spoke to Dylan alone, there was no mistaking. The rest of them, Mingus included, were one thing in her eyes, Dylan another. Dylan felt Robert Woolfolk had somehow called the nearest thing to Rachel into being, as though white women everywhere were charged with bearing Rachel’s one crucial intervention however far into the future it needed to go.

Of all times, it would have to be now. Dylan had wished what felt like a million times for an adult to step up, for a teacher or a friend of his mom’s to turn a corner on Bergen or Hoyt and collide with one of his unnameable disasters, to break it open with a simple question like You okay, kid? But not now. This disaster sealed his status as white boy with Robert Woolfolk forever, precisely when Mingus had been working to change it.

Mingus, it was clear, had been communicating a message to Dylan by his three-week vanishing act, his elusiveness: that at the new school Dylan was on his own. Nobody had his back. It simply wasn’t possible. It had taken every day of those three weeks for Dylan to abandon the fantasy that Mingus would float him through seventh and eighth grades. Mingus cannily showed himself only after the message was sunk in: I can’t carry you, son, it’s beyond my power. Then, in a compensatory statement of equal clarity, he’d guided Dylan into Cobble Hill to the park on Amity Street to meet and make a pact of being down with Robert Woolfolk in order to say, Where I can help, I will. I’m not actually blind or indifferent here, Dylan. I’m looking out.

“Hey, kid? Something wrong?”

Dylan had turned to her, helpless, gaping. There was no way to tell her how right and wrong she was at once, no way to make her evaporate. All the worse that she was beautiful, gleaming like the cover of one of Rachel’s MS. magazines which stacked up scorned by Abraham in the living room for Dylan’s eventual guilty perusal of illustrated features on bralessness. Dylan wanted to protect the blond woman from Robert Woolfolk’s eyes. She shouldn’t have popped out of the other world, the Cobble Hill world of private-school kids and their caretakers, it was a misunderstanding. He wanted to send her home to entice Abraham from his studio, that was where she might have done some good.

Of course, Robert Woolfolk didn’t really matter. He was only an enemy, finally. The worst thing the woman had done was humiliate him with Mingus.

“They’re my friends,” Dylan said feebly. As it was out of his mouth it occurred to him he’d failed another test, another where the correct answer was Fuck you lookin’ at? That phrase, robustly applied, might have actually transported them all back in time to a moment before Robert Woolfolk had said the words white boy. Dylan might have then been invited to trail the others to a transit yard or wherever else they were going in order to bomb some trains, a richly terrifying prospect. Dylan craved to bomb some trains as fiercely as if he’d heard that phrase for years instead of just once, moments ago. And he had the El Marko in his backpack to bomb them with, if he’d only get a chance to produce it.

No one else piped up to say Lady, mind your own fuckin’ business and Dylan saw that Robert Woolfolk and his two companions, Robert’s laugh track, were missing. Gone. Dylan had slipped a gear in staring perplexedly at the blond woman, lost a moment in dreaming, and in that moment Robert Woolfolk had shunted away, out of the blithe park which seemed intended to contain anything but him. As though making a silent confession of whatever it was the woman suspected was going on. Only Mingus remained, and he stood apart from the table where the others had sat, and from Dylan.

“Do you want me to walk you home?” asked the woman. “Where do you live?”

“Yo, Dylan man, I’ll check you later,” said Mingus. He wasn’t fearful, only uninterested in contending with the blond woman and anything she thought she knew. Dylan felt her irrelevance to Mingus. Mingus’s own mother having been cleanly bought off with a million-dollar payment, he was immune to echoes. “Be cool,” Mingus said. He held out his hand, waiting for Dylan to tap it with his fingertips. “I’ll check you on the block, D.”

With that Mingus hunched his arms around his jacket pockets as though leaning into a strong wind and ambled into the sun-blobbed trees in the far corner of the park, toward Henry Street, the BQE, the shipyards, wherever he was going where Dylan wasn’t going to be swept along now. His gait was mock-infirm, a quotation of something amusing and profound you’d seen somewhere but couldn’t place, Mickey Rivers or Weird Harold or Meadowlark Lemon. He seemed a figure cut out of one kind of day and plopped into another, a cartoon squiggle or bass line come to life.

That’s my best friend, Dylan wanted to tell the blond woman, who the longer he didn’t reply to her offer was more and more squinting at Dylan like she might have miscalculated, like he might be a thing spoiled by the company she’d found him in, a misfit, not a kid worth her rescue in the first place.

And that’s what he wanted to be to her, spoiled, stained with blackness.

Racist bitch.

Where do I live? In his fantasy Dylan replied, I live in the Wyckoff Gardens, the housing projects on Nevins and Third, that’s where. You know the ones, they’re always on fire. If you want to walk me home, lady, let’s go.

 

Arthur Lomb and his mother lived on Pacific Street between Hoyt and Bond, the far side of the hospital. Arthur’s block was eerie, kidless, no bus, the hospital’s laundry stack cascading silent white steam to the sky, the bodega on the corner another sidewalk congregation of old men on milk crates but graver, less amused, less musical than Old Ramirez’s bunch. On Pacific the men grumbled in some middle distance, leathery fingers shifting dominoes across felt. Everything on Pacific including a gray cat darting across the street seemed farther away and more pensive. The block might have been the Bermuda Triangle of Boerum Hill, a space arranged the precise distance from the Gowanus Houses, the Brooklyn House of Detention, and Intermediate School 293 to fall under no domain whatsoever. Not a long-term solution to anything, Arthur Lomb’s stoop nevertheless formed a kind of oasis on certain October afternoons when he and Dylan would tiptoe there unharassed and set out a chessboard under the furling shadow of the hospital’s steam.

“You’re in Winegar’s science class, huh? I feel sorry for you. He’s a worm. You see the way he toys with his mustache when he’s talking to the Puerto Rican girls with developed breasts? It makes me want to vomit. Doesn’t matter, pretend you like him. Science teacher’s your ticket out of here, that’s my view. Don’t move that bishop, it’s the only thing keeping me from crushing you. I told you a thousand times, link your pawns.”

Arthur Lomb sat with one leg folded under his body like a kindergartner. His monologues were all brow-furrowed and lip-pursed, craven machinations cut with philosophical asides and vice versa. His jabber had a glottal, chanted quality, seemingly designed to guide you past the territory where you might wish to tell him to shut up already or even to strike him, into a realm of baffled wonderment as you considered the white noise of a nerd’s id in full song. Arthur Lomb had been at Saint Ann’s until the day his parents divorced and his mother could no longer afford the private school. Now he was intent on getting into one of the specialized public high schools, one of those with academic requirements, entrance exams. Arthur Lomb never pined for the lost school behind him, for the company of other white children whom Dylan could only surmise had loathed him in their way as acutely as the black kids at 293. He was all grim necessity, a soldier in open ground casting for his next foxhole.

“Only thing that matters is the test for Stuyvesant. Just math and science. Flunk English, who gives? The whole report card thing’s a joke, always was. I haven’t gone to gym class once. You know Jesus Maldonado? He said he’d break my arm like a Pixy Stix if he caught me alone in the locker room. Gym’s suicide, frankly. I’m not stripping down to my underwear anywhere inside the four walls of this school, I’m just not. If I have to BM, I hold it until after school.”

Arthur Lomb and his mother lived in an apartment on the top floor of a brownstone and Arthur Lomb had the back bedroom. His comics were stacked on low shelves in neat piles, all in plastic. He handled them with somber disdain, and radiated disapproval when Dylan turned pages too quickly to have read certain essential thought balloons. Though carefully archived, his comics bore faint marks where Arthur Lomb had placed thin paper over the pages and traced the breasts of the Wasp and Valkyrie with a ballpoint pen. The resultant page of blue parenthetical breasts was stashed like secret Chinese writing in Arthur Lomb’s desk drawer. There Dylan found it one day while Arthur Lomb prepared a plate of graham crackers.

“Just pass that test. Your life depends on it. You think this is bad, wait until high school. If you don’t get into Stuyvesant or at least Bronx Science you’re dead. That’s how the test works, highest scores get into Stuyvesant, next highest Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech’s a last resort. Sarah J. Hale or John Jay, those places are practically like prison. A teacher got shot at Sarah J. Hale, it was on TV. Algebra, geometry, biology. Get Winegar to give you a practice test, I’m telling you out of kindness. Make him think you like him. Say you want to enter some kind of project in the science fair. You don’t really have to do it. If he knows you want to go to Stuyvesant maybe he’ll call someone. Do whatever it takes.”

On the same shelves as his comics Arthur Lomb kept mass-market paperback editions of Al Jaffe’s Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions and Dave Berg’s The Lighter Side. The snippy irony of the Mad Magazine cartoonists seemed perfectly matched to Arthur’s bitter views, everything funny in a not-funny-at-all kind of way. Sarcasm as something you practiced like karate. Later concealing your mute fury when nobody fed you the opening lines.

Arthur Lomb’s bedroom windows faced the rear entrances and neglected, ailanthus-choked backyards of the stores on Atlantic Avenue, the rear windows of apartments above the stores, the Brooklyn House of Detention above the rooftops, the municipal buildings and courts of downtown Brooklyn behind the jail, the trace of Manhattan’s high teeth visible past downtown Brooklyn. Arthur Lomb gazed out of his bedroom with a pair of binoculars. Fading evenings after their inevitable chess Arthur and Dylan would gaze through the binoculars in turn, spying on nothing in particular, in silence for once, until Arthur snapped on his radio, which was tuned to an AM station permanently playing “Dream Weaver” or “Fly Like an Eagle.”

Mostly, though, they sat on the stoop, studying Pacific Street’s failure to acknowledge its connection to Bond or Hoyt. On certain summer days they might have made up the contents of a diorama in the Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side, creatures shot by Theodore Roosevelt, then stuffed and mounted in a case: Dylan Ebdus, Arthur Lomb, Homo sapiens, Pacific Street, Brooklyn, 1976. Days were falsely still, gelled in slow motion, Dylan not thinking of Mingus Rude or Dean Street at all, just studying the gray cat as it skittered under a car, the hypnotic tumbling cloud of hospital steam, the mailman reading magazines on another stoop halfway down the block, wondering how long weird detachment could cover losing a thousand chess games in a row to Arthur Lomb’s blunt but remorseless rook play.

Arthur Lomb using both hands to knead sensation back into his folded-under leg, brain whirring behind consternated gerbil eyes as he dialed up another digression.

“It makes no sense to be a Mets fan, not when you look at the facts. Few people our age have actually considered the record, but the Yankees are simply the greatest team in the history of baseball based on sheer championships, players in the Hall of Fame, etcetera. The whole Mets things is a very recent development. But so many kids like you have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. I maintain you can’t argue with the Yankee legacy.”

“Hmm.”

“You’ve probably wondered why I always wear shoes. I had a pair of Pro Keds and some kids took them from me, made me walk home in my socks if you can believe it. My mother bought me another pair but I keep them at home. My sources tell me Pumas are actually what’s coming next. If you go in for that sort of thing: wearing what everyone’s wearing just because they’re wearing it. I don’t, really.”

“Hmm.”

“Mel Brooks’s funniest film is The Producers, then Young Frankenstein or Blazing Saddles. Terri Garr is hot. I feel sorry for any kid who hasn’t seen The Producers. My dad took me to all the humor movies. The best Panther is probably Return. The best Woody is Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.”

Positioning, positioning, Arthur Lomb was forever positioning himself, making his views known, aligning on some index no one would ever consult. Here was Dylan’s burden, his cross: the accumulated knowledge of Arthur Lomb’s smug policies on every possible question. The cross was Dylan’s to bear, he knew, because his own brain boiled with pedantry, with too-eager trivia ready to burst loose at any moment. So in enduring Arthur Lomb Dylan had been punished in advance for the possibility of being a bore.

“Develop your pawns or Hulk Will Smash.”

Now and again Dylan saw a shutter wink open, a glimpse into the furnace of anger inside Arthur Lomb. Dylan didn’t mind. He regarded himself as deserving, according to the same principle of similars which had dictated their friendship in the first place. Just as Dylan should absorb the ennui of Arthur’s poseurdom because of that kernel which thrived inside himself, so again with those glimpsed coals of rage.

“I couldn’t help but notice the other day you were talking to that Mingus Rude kid after school. Ahem, keep your eye on the board, you’re going to be shocked again. It’s going to be bad for your health until you learn to start castling. As I was saying, I noticed you talking to Mingus Rude, he’s an eighth grader, how’d you get to know him? Not that he’s in school much, huh. Still, it must be advantageous to be friends with, hurrh, that sort of person.”

Arthur Lomb’s speech bore like a small puckered scar a characteristic hitch of intaken breath in that place where he’d omitted the word black from a sentence but not from the thought which had given rise to the sentence. And that hitch of breath, it seemed to Dylan, was Arthur in a nutshell, making such show of a card unplayed that he tipped his whole hand.

“How’d you know Mingus’s name?” Dylan heard himself say. He’d been concentrating on the game for once, waiting for Arthur to castle as he always ostentatiously castled, but ready this time, with something in store. Distracted, he’d blurted a question which confessed his possessiveness of Mingus, his jealousy. Listen to Arthur Lomb for a month of afternoons and your own talk would be stripped of disguises, that was the price you’d pay.

“Oh, various kids talk about him,” said Arthur airily.

Dylan couldn’t imagine which various kids would ever be seen speaking to Arthur Lomb in school, as opposed to browsing his pants pockets for loose change. Dylan himself shunned Arthur inside the school building, only met up with him afterward for their mutual creeping to the safety of Pacific Street. He understood Arthur’s acceptance of the humiliation of Dylan’s silent treatment at school as a clear measure of Arthur’s desperation and loneliness. So, which various kids?

“Yeah, well, I knew him before,” said Dylan, shutting up before it was too late. Let Arthur fish. Dylan advanced his knight in reply to Arthur’s castling. He made the move lackadaisically, but his heart pounded. Arthur was blind to knights, it had only taken the first thousand games to see it.

“Before what?” said Arthur with thin sarcasm. He pushed a pawn absently, scowling past Dylan and the chessboard, toward Hoyt Street, perhaps mentally groping for a suitable Snappy Answer.

“Check,” said Dylan.

Now Arthur frowned at the board, his eyes racing hectically to consider this unanticipated turn.

“Is this pawn here or here ?” he asked.

“What?”

Arthur pointed, Dylan leaned in. Suddenly the board rattled, jarred at the corner. Then the ripple among the chessmen became an explosion, and the board was lost, pieces tipping, rolling, Arthur’s doomed king clattering atonally down the stoop toward the street, revealed as plastic.

“Look what you made me do,” said Arthur Lomb.

“You knocked it over.”

Arthur opened his palms: sue me.

“I was going to beat you.”

“Now we’ll never know.”

“You win every time and you couldn’t stand letting me beat you once!”

Arthur Lomb stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Actually, I do think we were headed for a stalemate. You shouldn’t get overexcited, Dylan, it may be a while before you beat me. But your game is improving. I congratulate you. You’ve definitely picked up a few things. Speaking of which, har har, would you pick up that king? My leg seems to have fallen asleep.”

 

Two men, two fathers. Two fathers expelled from their lairs, headed to Manhattan for a change, dressed for a day threatening rain, having shaved their chins to make some nominal impression at their target destinations, tightened scarves with momentary vain glances at hallway mirrors before flushing themselves out of hiding, onto the street. Two fathers each sighing as they plunge down stairwells to underground trains, to endure the shoulder-jostling crowds which mill on platforms and pass through the jerky opening doors, then hang wearily from straps or clutch poles in the blinking, grinding trains. One carrying evidence, a black pebbled-cardboard portfolio with lace ties, the other empty-handed, his instrument his throat and lungs, carried in the valise of his chest. Two fathers ride a while on two separate trains, then, stations attained, Times Square for one, West Fourth for the other, two fathers again put shoe leather to pavement, out on the big island now, two fathers negotiating Abe Beame’s crumbling, deranged infrastructure in the year of the Tall Ships. Two fathers blinking in confusion, each startled how reclusive they’ve become, drifted into their Dean Street solitudes, Brooklyn a mind-state peeling further from Manhattan each day, like continental drift. Two fathers briefly and involuntarily recalling other less morbid and sensitized selves as they move dazed through strobing faces in the late-October streets, two fathers each realizing he alone is distracted by a slide-show sequence of false recognitions— You! Didn’t you go to City College? Ain’t you Charles What’sisname? —among dulled millions trudging Manhattan daily, millions jaded out of such free-associated overstimulation. Two fathers shake it off, forcibly raise the thresholds of their own naïveté, get back to their twin metropolitan missions in the chill-now-beginning-to-rain. Two fathers bearing down, recalling their work-selves, their places in the world. Two fathers here after all for a reason, to do some business, no fooling around.

One father stops abruptly, ducks beneath an umbrella to trade fifty cents for a hot dog from a street vendor, another lost ritual unavailable in his part of Brooklyn, his circumscribed rounds. He juggles the portfolio full of painted boards to one arm, then frees both hands, crumples wax paper back and consumes the mustardy dog in four chunks more swallowed than chewed. The snack glowing nicely in stomach’s pit but, breath possibly fouled, conscious again of the impression he’ll make, the hot-dog-gobbling father halts again at a newsstand for mint chewing gum. Forty-one blocks south, the other father’s got similar pangs and is tempted to stop by the siren odors, suspended in misty cold, of a similar cart with hot dogs in boiling water and greasy knishes on the grill, in fact pats his stomach at the smell but pushes on, relying in anticipation on the spread he’s been promised waits at the recording studio, corn bread and barbecued brisket and red beans and rice trucked down from Sylvia’s, that’s the word.

Two fathers come to their respective thresholds, pause. Rain’s falling sideways now, borne on wind, hastening them to curtail reflection. Two fathers exhale deeply. One steps inside the elevator in the lobby of the Forty-ninth Street office tower and pushes the button for the eighteenth floor. The other squints through a porthole window, then rings the buzzer at the door of the squat recording studio on West Eighth Street, the place known as Electric Lady.

To be in this place is to admit you exist.

To be in this place is to admit you want something.

Or maybe tell yourself you’re doing it for the kid.

One father paces at the reception desk, stands rather than sits waiting for the art director of the second-largest publisher of science fiction in mass-market paperback in the city, no fly-by-night Belmont Books offices now, Belmont Books with its three-months-late checks and Fashion District office of six guys in Chinese-food-stained shirts, no, this is publishing proper, dour receptionist with butterscotch sucking candy in a jar and a phone with three blinking lines. Other father, downtown, is welcomed off the street of leather outlets and white teenage vagabonds into the odd brick fortress of a building by the soundboard man, apologetic, telling him the others are late, no sweat though, come in. Guy knows your name and is a big fan of your work, actually says it, rare for one of these guys not to disguise any awe, hoarding their technician’s seen-it-all cool. Fine, fine. Downtown father nods coolly, taking it out on the guy, feeling like an ass for being early, for being first.

So, two fathers each given more time for stewing than they’d banked on. Then the art director emerges to pump the hand of the one father uptown, guy in a sweater-vest and chewing an unlit pipe, well-fed corporate hipster head-to-toe, while downtown at that same moment the doors to Electric Lady burst open and piling in from a white limo parked at the curb is the whole gang in their Elton John glasses and pimp hats and boas, the bassist in his spaceman outfit of puffy satin shoulder pads and belt, dressed this way just because that’s the way they’re dressed, not for stage or a photo session but because they’re a bunch of freaks who think they’re Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone and Marvin the Martian rolled into one—and the father reminds himself he knows these guys, they like him and that’s why he’s here, they come from the same place. Shit, they all—every one of these jokers and himself—were signed to Motown back in the day.

Taking his elbow and steering him inside, saying, Really good to meet you, Ebdus. I have the feeling we’re both going to be glad you called.

Slapping his hands high and low, insisting on the whole circuit of bullshit, saying, Hey, man, we just couldn’t get out of bed this morning! But we’re here now! You’re gonna luuuv this motherfuckin’ track, man.

You outgrew Belmont before you started working for them, Ebdus. Don’t think everyone didn’t notice your work the minute it appeared. This isn’t a big industry, not once you’re in it. It’s like high school, everybody knows who the cool kids are. I frankly don’t understand why you didn’t come to us in the first place.

Forget the legal bullshit, man. We’ll put some other name on the sleeve, call you, huh, Pee-Brain Rooster. You like that? Anyone with ears is gonna know it’s you the minute you open your mouth, man. Minute you let out that motherfucker of a voice. We’ll sort out the legal shit some other time, can’t let that trouble us.

What one father doesn’t say is that being here means admitting that what he’s engaged in is some sort of career. The arrangement with Belmont, he’d always told himself, with admittedly perverse logic, was a sort of favor to Perry Kandel: permitting his old teacher to imagine he’d welcomed him back into the world. It was a lark. Plus the notion of the New Belmont Specials suggested a sort of limited engagement, a run to some conclusion. But to make this call and keep this appointment was to grant that he’s a paperback painter now, a commercial artist. And being welcomed so eagerly here meant despite the contempt dripping from his brush he’d done acceptable work. The seduction of craft had led here, to the seduction of praise. In the elevator he’d sworn he’d heard Perry’s bitter wheezing laughter.

What the other father doesn’t say is that though he envies these men dressed as cartoon pimps and superheroes their freedom, that though a part of him thinks Shit, why didn’t I haul out the overt freak shit myself, why did I always stay so buttoned down in the goddamn Philly system, another part just doesn’t think the singing and playing on the backing track is any good. Funk is soul on acid, for better and for worse; today worse. This track sprawls to no purpose, slack, in its way, as disco. Pornographic disco, that’s really what it is. He’s expected to doodle over a harmonizing backdrop but the harmonizing isn’t any good, and for the first time since leaving the Subtle Distinctions he misses their sweet uptight voices, the way they provided him such a smooth clean cushion of sound from which to launch his rhapsodies, his flights.

You want a cup of coffee? It’s not too bad, actually.

Hey man, food’s gonna get here. Need a little blow?

Something the matter?

Just say what you need, man.

Fathers, fathers, why so grim? Today you emerged from your houses, your hiding, and were warmly welcomed. Smile, fathers. Relax. Today this world wants you in it.

chapter  9

At the end of another winter, lion giving way to lamb, he comes to lie there one day in the long sun and shadows and stays for good, curled into a ball at the corner of Atlantic and Nevins, at a spot on the pavement just short of the street, in front of the never-closed liquor store and the never-open locksmith. Fouled in himself, baked in vomit and urine and sweat, his pants black with it, he lies still as a bog man or mummy preserved in a glass case, eyes shut and mouth rigid, arms wrapped around his middle, fighting the chill of one week before, when he first took the position. He’s huddled as if against time itself, enduring the winter that’s already past, his pose a record of pain, a full-body grimace frozen in sunlight. Over his shoulders and tucked under his ass is a child’s thin synthetic sleeping bag, feeble cover though if he’s alive it must have gotten him through. The sleeping bag’s two corners are peeled away in torn strips, exposing cottonoid filler stained gray with street filth, and the two strips meet in a knot under his white-grizzled chin, so the thing weirdly resembles a superhero’s cape.

The flying man, grounded for the foreseeable future.

Guy looks dead if you ask me.

How? Why’s it allowed? Isabel Vendle’s Boerum Hill was declared “The City’s Best-Kept Secret,” New York Magazine, September 12, 1971. Gentrification—say the word, nothing to be ashamed of, only what’s this alcoholic coma victim doing here in plain sight? How likely no one expresses concern or touches his shoulder to see if he still moves, still lives, how likely no one even calls the cops?

Is it because he’s black?

Maybe Atlantic Avenue between Nevins and Third isn’t quite Boerum Hill. Maybe it’s Gowanus or some other thing without a name. Anyway this gentrification is strange and slow and not at all as coherent as Isabel Vendle might have hoped. There’s a cluster of antique shops now on Atlantic between Hoyt and Bond, new families on Pacific and Dean, Bergen too. Not Wyckoff, Wyckoff’s too close to the projects, no point hoping. Then there’s the communes. Assuming no one stashes Patti Hearst in a Dean Street basement they’re harmless enough, an acceptable placeholder. Some eager beaver’s opened a French restaurant on Bergen and Hoyt, jumping the gun perhaps but worth a shot. Even State Street, so close to Schermerhorn and the House of Detention and the eye-agonizing blight of downtown Brooklyn, even State’s got a tender little boomlet of brownstone renovation.

Yet it exists under a spell, a pall. The white families appear continuously these days, now too many to count, but collectively they’re still a dream, a projection conjured up by Isabel’s will. The renovators—that’s a politer word for them—they’re a set of ghosts from the future haunting this ghetto present. They’re a proposition, a sketch. Blink and they might be gone.

Ghetto? Is that the name for it? Depends which block in this patchwork you have in mind. Rise up, the way the flying man no longer can. Look. Here Fourth Avenue’s a wide trench of light-industrial ruin, oil-stained auto-body shops and forlorn, graffitied warehouses, sidewalks marked with sprays of broken glass which trace the shape of nighttime incidents in front of Chinese take-out places, liquor stores, bodegas, all of them serving their customers through slots or sliding drawers in shields of Plexiglas. At the opposite end, Court Street’s an old Italian preserve, the side streets south of Carroll hushed in the grip of Mafia whispers, old ways enforced with baseball bats and slashed tires, down to where the looming, curling Brooklyn-Queens Expressway forms a steel curtain severing what used to be Red Hook. South, the Gowanus Canal is a wasteland of buried or sunk toxins and smoldering strips of rubber, while Ulano, the solvent factory, is a block-long engine, its windows like slit eyes, pumping out fresh invisible toxins and accompanying legends of nerve damage and brain tumors. The projects, Wyckoff Gardens and Gowanus Houses—well, they’re projects, their own law, like meteors of crime landed in the city’s midst, still unapproachably hot. The jail’s called a House of Detention, a thin euphemism nonetheless worth clinging to. So, the brownstone streets which span these margins—Wyckoff, Bergen, Dean, Pacific—a ghetto?

Call it “The City’s Best-Kept Secret.”

Nevins has unique properties, venting at the top to Flatbush Avenue and running south smack into the Wyckoff Gardens, on the way threading the halfway house, the Department of Motor Vehicles, Schermerhorn Park, and the Nevins Day Care Center, on the steps of which drunks gather to greet welfare moms as they pass in and out of the center, yanking bawling kids’ arms like yo-yo strings. And widely known but rarely spoken of is this: Pacific Street at Nevins is a place where prostitution’s tolerated. Some default in authority has chased it to this corner, where after eleven o’clock a lone streetwalker or sometimes a pair can be spotted in the shadow of Public School 38, heard cooing enticements to lone strollers on a quiet night. Outraged calls to local officials gain promises and nothing more. At that inexplicable level where such civic deals are struck this one’s irrevocable, even as the neighborhood on all sides is gentrifying fast. So the police are revealed as skeptics, insensible to the concerns of realtors. This zone’s on their official map—never displayed to the public—of Hopeless.

So, perhaps it’s by this same principle that the no-longer-flying man has been allowed to rest undisturbed for weeks in his fetal curl on the corner of Nevins and Atlantic. He’s still there the last Saturday of March, when the black kid and the white kid go by. Yes, they’re together again, that uncanny sporadic pair, their solidarity a befuddlement to passersby, a shred perhaps of utopian symbolism, sure, something Norman Rockwell might have chosen as a subject, but not outweighing the fact that the two look furtive, maybe stoned, unmistakably headed for if not already deep into all kinds of black-white-combo trouble. Even those who don’t happen to spot them slipping blunt felt-tipped markers sopped with purple ink in and out of their jackets sense the likelihood that something’s not right. This is Brooklyn, nothing integrates innocently. Who’s fooling who? If the cops were on the ball they’d likely split up this pair just on general principles.

The white kid and the black kid take turns playing lookout while the other tags up. Things are radically simplified: the white kid’s stopped looking for his own moniker, been encouraged by the black kid to throw up his perfect replication of the black kid’s tag instead. DOSE , DOSE , DOSE . It’s a happy solution for both. The black kid gets to see his tag spread farther, in search of bragging points for ubiquity, that bottom-line standard for a graffiti writer’s success. The King of the C Line, for instance, is just a lousy tagger with too much time on his hands who’s thrown up the unimaginative tag CE on every window of every car of the trains that run that line. A success of this type is as impossible to dispute as it is mechanical, crude. Graffiti writers compete like viruses, by raw proliferation.

What’s in it for the white kid? Well, he’s been allowed to merge his identity in this way with the black kid’s, to lose his funkymusicwhiteboy geekdom in the illusion that he and his friend Mingus Rude are both Dose, no more and no less. A team, a united front, a brand name, an idea. The white kid’s control of line, honed in a thousand Spirograph spirals, and his gift for mimicry—Can You Draw Tippy?—both have served him well. His rendition of the DOSE icon is clarified, perfected, automatic—in fact cleaner and more sure in its lines than the black kid’s. Just a trick of the hand, nothing anyone couldn’t learn if they practiced it a gazillion times waiting for this moment.

The marker’s in the black kid’s hands now. The white kid’s the lookout. The black kid puts DOSE on the base of the traffic light at the corner of Atlantic and Nevins, and on the locked-up locksmith’s rolling metal gate. Then he turns and considers the curled figure near the curb. They both consider the figure. The bum—the word they’d find if they bothered to find a word—has been sleeping or dead on this corner for long enough now that they’ve both noticed him at different times. This is the first time together, though, and being together forces them to acknowledge the figure in a way they wouldn’t apart.

The white kid has one set of feelings, the black kid another. The white kid’s seen this particular bum on better days, seen him in the sky, idiotic as that sounds. He’s got no idea whether his friend Mingus has this information, and no idea where he’d begin explaining it if he wanted to try. He’s just locked into a permanent state of stupid wonder here, along with a slug of fear.

The black kid’s curling his lip, suffering a ripple of sudden shame: of course it’s a black guy who’d be lying here in the street, goes without saying. Not a Latin guy. No matter how many Hispanic drunkards might spill out of Dean Street’s rooming houses, they always wobble home, sleep in beds, change clothes, cash government checks, and begin again. And he’s no white guy, no need to even think about it.

“Watch this,” said the black kid.

“What?” says the white kid.

The black kid dashes forward with splendid daring, taking the white kid’s breath away. He’s got the marker uncapped. The plasticky sleeping bag stretched across the bum’s back has a sheen despite the grime, a slickness to welcome the marker’s slide. The black kid kneels at the stinky form and tags up, managing despite the drag of the felt on the blackened synthetic: in a moment the thing is done and they both spring away, amazed.

The bum’s back reads DOSE .

“Run!”

“He’s not moving. Ho, shit! Look at that!”

“Come on!”

That’s it, they’re done tagging for the day, nothing could top this anyway. The two of them scramble down Nevins, gasping with laughter, drunk on the atrocious prank, on the demonstration of their dangerous new ability to reach out and plop a logo on the maybe-dead of this world.

 

They arrived late and had to take single seats a distance apart. Dylan sat near the front, in the second row. His father had insisted Dylan take the nearer seat, had himself taken one farther back and at the far left side of the lecture hall. Dylan understood he was meant to appreciate this up-close glimpse of the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, whom Abraham regarded soberly as a great man, a beautiful man. The topic, generally, was paint on film. Dylan hadn’t known before this moment that painted film existed, apart from Abraham’s. Let alone that the topic could draw a crowd to fill a hall full of uncomfortable metal folding chairs.

In fact, Dylan found Brakhage, when he spoke, enthralling, though he understood zip of what he said. Brakhage was charismatic and orotund and evoked Orson Welles on television. Like Welles he suggested a greatness both distant from itself and fully at rest, in this case scarcely bothering to taste the air of adulation in the room. The problem with the presentation was that Brakhage rarely spoke. He sat sipping water and blinking rapidly, examining the audience, remaining largely silent in favor of a panel of younger men who in laborious turns pronounced on the significance of Brakhage’s films. Their spiky, resentful tones failed at concealing (or were perhaps not designed to conceal) the implication that they alone understood the filmmaker’s work. Dylan was bored, as Rachel would have said, shitless.

“I would rather see my work as an attempt to clear aesthetic areas, to free film from previous arts and ideologies,” said Brakhage when he was permitted. His words rippled through the room, resonating in minds so straining toward their speaker that they practically boiled. Dylan felt it himself. He looked back at his father, who sat straining too, in love and anger toward the stage. “Perhaps to leave it clear to be of use to men and women of various kinds which might help evolve human sensibility.”

The fluorescent-lit, plaster-crumbled lecture hall in the Cooper Union basement was full to capacity now, to standing room only. Dylan twitched, but he wasn’t alone. The man in the seat beside him was tearing a Styrofoam cup into a thousand dandrufflike shreds which floated down to form a drift between his tapping feet. The Styrofoam-tearing man might have been in an agony of suppressing some question he wanted to cry out to the men on the stage. Perhaps he thought he belonged on the stage. Everywhere chairs creaked.

“I believe in song,” said Brakhage. “That’s what I want to do and I do it quite selfishly, out of my own need to come through to a voice that is comparable with song and related to all animal life on earth. I am moved at the whole range of songs that the wolf makes to the moon, or neighborhood dogs make, and I in great humility wish to join this.”

When the tension in the room was at its height and the Styrofoam cup had been wholly processed the shredder beside Dylan jumped up and shouted into the panel’s droning, “What about Oskar Fischinger? None of you are acknowledging Fischinger!”

Having thrown this gauntlet he stood trembling, perhaps expecting to find the crowd at his back, enraged, ready to rush the dais.

“I don’t think anyone’s denying Fischinger,” said one of the men on the panel, in a tone of draining sarcasm. “I don’t think that’s really the point at all.”

“Never mind Fischinger,” came another voice. It was Abraham Ebdus. He spoke from the corner of the room without rising from his chair, and more quietly than the shredder, who still stood. “Maybe at this point someone should mention Walther Ruttman.”

Silence on the podium, marked only by Brakhage’s slight and unsurprised nod, which seemed to say, Ruttman, yes, Ruttman. The shredder took his seat, humbled.

Then, from the back of the hall another cry pierced the breath-inheld tension: “Fuck Ruttman! What about Disney ?”

This brought a roar of relief, since no one actually relished the burden of understanding how little they knew of the careers of Fischinger and Ruttman. The moment was now lost in a calamity of babble and laughter. Then Brakhage smoothed everything, began taking questions from the crowd. Hostility slowly dissipated as the panelists were rendered equal to the audience by Brakhage’s authority. Silent, the younger men could be more-or-less forgiven for being onstage.

Forgiven perhaps by all but Abraham.

Afterward Brakhage was mobbed at the foot of the stage. Abraham found Dylan in the swirling mass of bodies, took his hand, and together they pushed to the exit. Dylan felt his father’s smoldering inarticulate fury, felt enclosed in it as in a cocoon as they descended the subway stairwell at Astor Place and as they waited on the platform, then boarded the 6 train, felt it shut them out against the other night riders, whose heads lolled with the train’s movements on the weary sticks of their bodies, felt it shut them against the whole city everywhere around them.

Dylan breathed his father’s embarrassment. Something had gone wrong in Abraham’s demonstration to his son of Brakhage’s greatness, and of his, Abraham’s, kinship with the great filmmaker, this man who was Abraham’s secret tutor, his North Star. Perhaps the hall had been too full. Perhaps it would have been too full if there had been even one other soul there apart from Brakhage and Abraham Ebdus and his son. The evening was essentially ruined as soon as it was obvious Brakhage wasn’t only not as lonely for recognition as Ebdus but wasn’t lonely for recognition in the least.

Or maybe it was just that asshole shouting Disney for an easy laugh.

The mood lasted as they waited at Brooklyn Bridge for the 4 train, that extra indignity of the 6’s refusal to bother entering Brooklyn, lasted as they emerged at Nevins to walk in silence toward Dean Street, toward their beds, oblivion for their demolished evening. It might have gotten them home, Abraham’s bubble of muted rage, if it hadn’t been for the tagged bum still in his self-clench on the corner of Atlantic.

Dylan glanced as they passed. The once-flying man’s mummified pose was unchanged, though he seemed nearer to the gutter now. DOSE gleamed on the billboard of his back, spotlit by the streetlamp.

Abraham Ebdus raised his eyes from his dark contemplation of the pavement at his feet and followed Dylan’s gaze to the bum’s back. He halted in his steps.

“What’s that?”

“What?” blurted Dylan.

“That.” Abraham pointed, unmistakably, horribly, at the spotlit DOSE on the bum’s sleeping bag.

“Nothing.”

“What’s it say?”

“I don’t know,” said Dylan, hopelessly.

“You do,” said Abraham. “You write it on your notebook.” Certainty rose in Abraham’s voice, his fog of anger given shape. “I’ve seen it. That’s the word you and Mingus write on everything. You think I don’t notice ? You think I’m stupid ?”

Dylan couldn’t speak.

“Let me see your sneakers.”

Abraham Ebdus took Dylan’s shoulder, his hand clawlike, a startling assertion of force between them. Abraham’s disapproval or affection were usually aspects of a floating arrangement of father-notions, largely sonic: footsteps pacing overhead, a voice descending stairs. Abraham was a collection of sounds bound in human form by gloom.

Now they stood in the cool night on the corner of Atlantic Avenue, connected by Abraham’s grip. The streetlamp’s nimbus on the shape at their feet, a stinky outcropping of the gutter ignored for weeks and improbably come to human attention at last. Abraham turned Dylan by the shoulder and squinted to examine his son’s sneakers like evidence in a murder.

Eyes behind passing windshields could care less.

A block away, a whore paced to the corner of Pacific. She called to some old man walking a dog, no illusions, just out of boredom.

Spring was coming, though, a general thaw, she could feel it.

“What’s that?” Abraham said, his grip fierce. “It’s the same, isn’t it?”

There was no way to hide. The fat white margin at the sole of each of Dylan’s Pro Keds was crammed with miniature tags. The mushy rubber took a blue ballpoint like butter under pressure of a fork’s tine, a discovery which had enraptured Dylan’s attention during a crushingly dull math class. Though technically he was destroying his prize 69ers, Dylan couldn’t stop himself. At least it rendered them not worth stealing.

“Mingus wrote it,” Dylan heard himself say.

Abraham freed Dylan’s shoulder and they sprang apart, a physical renouncing as sharp as the contact itself.

“Look at us!” Abraham said, squeezing his eyes and forehead with one hand. It wasn’t clear that he was speaking to Dylan.

Dylan waited frozen.

“What could this possibly mean?” said Abraham, his voice erupting from him now. “Is this what I raised you for? This disrespect for a human life? What do you and Mingus do out on the streets, Dylan? Just run like feral animals? Who taught you this?”

“I didn’t—” But Dylan couldn’t offer Mingus’s name again.

“Maybe this is just a terrible place. Maybe in these streets right and wrong are confused, so you and your friends run insane like animals that would do this to a human person.” Rachel went omitted, unnamed, but both knew that to speak of this place was to speak of her, however little they wished to. Possibly Dylan and Abraham only remained in Gowanus for Rachel, holding down her spot. Now they’d tiptoed together to the brink of an implication that Rachel had outlawed. Some shadow lurked in the word animals that shamed Abraham deeply.

“It’s this time in the world,” said Abraham, groping for some epic sentiment to blur the thought that had come over them both. “We’re in hell, that’s the only explanation.” The body on the street with DOSE on his back could be ascribed to Gerald Ford or Abe Beame, perhaps the Shah of Iran.

In a city commanded to drop dead it wouldn’t be improbable for a few of its citizens to do so literally and in full view. Especially on Nevins Street.

“This neighborhood is killing us, it’s my fault, Dylan, I’m sorry. These choices I’ve made.” At last and almost mechanically, Abraham was turning on himself, with every resource of disappointment and loathing. He might have farmed humiliation from the Cooper Union lecture hall and beyond, from who knew where. From Rachel. It was no relief to Dylan. “Look at us, God,” Abraham moaned. Previously he’d covered his eyes; now he widened them.

Absolution lay in one direction only. At their feet.

“Is this man even alive ?”

“I don’t know,” said Dylan.

Abraham knelt and embraced the form’s shoulder through the wrapped sleeping bag. Nudged, then rolled the body slightly. Dylan watched, horrified. “Are you—” began Abraham, stupidly. What question was appropriate? Did you ask a corpse if it was okay, comfortable? Abraham resorted to “Hello?”

Incredibly, the man on the ground unkinked, rustled his limbs. Then spoke, in a snorelike groan: “Fuckin’! ”

The man on the ground twisted his neck, beat at the air with wrists and elbows doubled, resembling a T. rex scrabbling with tiny forelegs. However long his nap, the man woke into resumed conflict, warding something or someone away. The movement stirred his odor, made his size apparent. Abraham jerked his hand back, startled.

They’d thought he was dead, really. Dylan and his father blinked, appalled to see they’d been talking over a live body. The fallen man might even have been listening.

“Hold on, man,” said Abraham, his voice hollow, rushed. To Dylan it sounded as if Abraham thought the man on the pavement had been fine a moment before, had only fainted, as though this spell on the street corner didn’t define a man’s life but was only an interruption, a hiccup. “We’ll get an ambulance.”

The whore, pacing uncommonly far in her boredom, reached the avenue. Atlantic was quiet, no cars at the lights which changed red-to-green with a chunk-chunk just audible above the insect hum of the streetlamps. She teetered halfway across the intersection and called out to the three, the small man and the thin tall one and the thick black one on the ground:

“Any y’all need a date?”

 

The best colors all have the best names: Pastel Aqua, Plum, John Deere Yellow, Popsicle Orange, Federal Safety Purple. A blind guy could steal the right paint just hearing the monikers. These colors are the necessities for throwing up a burner, a top-to-bottom masterpiece of flaming 3-D letters studded with rivets or bleeding from gashes, surrounded by clouds of stars, lightning bolts, and a Vaughn Bode wizard or Felix the Cat character standing to one side like a master of ceremonies. A burner comes into life either on the panels of a stilled subway car or on a handball court or schoolyard wall, an unsimple matter of five or six hours in the dead of night, two guys spraying paint, the more talented one handling outlines and fade effects, the lesser doing flat fill-ins, usually two more guys looking out at the end of the block or the entrance to the train yard. Plus ruining a set of clothes, coming home pore-and-tear-duct-clogged with pigment. Plenty more obvious than drugs, to a vigilant parent; the potheads have it easy.

First, though, you’ve got to assemble the paint.

That means racking at McCrory’s.

Today it’s the Dean Street Crew: a temporary, maybe one-time agglomeration, led by Mingus Rude. The crew consists of Lonnie, Alberto, Dylan, and Mingus. Mingus the oldest. The four have a scheme, a plan of attack, which, like the expedition itself, is Mingus’s original conception—or if Mingus learned it from another kid he’s not giving credit. The scheme feels brilliantly original to the Dean Street Crew, feels fine. In fact they’re high on it, jangled, dancing.

McCrory’s is the feebler of Fulton Street’s two department stores. The other, a block away, is A&S—Abraham and Straus—an eight-story Art Deco monolith, a gilded time machine into some glorious shopping Utopia. It’s also intimidating and Manhattanesque, with its uniformed elevator operators and old ex-cop guards. On floor six of A&S there’s a gourmet shop with rows of hand-dipped chocolates, on the eighth there’s toys, puzzles, a counter selling collectible coins and stamps. Also an enclosed record store, four walls within four walls, out of which no kid’s yet claimed to succeed in boosting records. Gangs roam clear of A&S, perhaps embarrassed by memories of parent-guided expeditions to sit on Santa’s lap. That place, it’s just a little too dreamy.

McCrory’s is the department store they understand and deserve, McCrory’s is a tad more approachable. It’s a Woolworth’s knockoff, really, with butter-sour popcorn smells and costume jewelry in Plexiglas cases and a photo booth and a desolate sandwich counter where a sharp-eyed kid can order a milk shake and pay for it with tips he’s slid away from other placings on the counter, if he drinks the shake slowly enough. The main floor’s acres of underwear and baby clothes and brandless reject sneakers in bins. Back-to-school specials give way to orange crepe-paper pumpkins that give way to half-dim strings of Christmas lights that give way to Valentines and Easter crap and summer bargains, all flacked by a recorded drone from unseen speakers. Downstairs is the hardware department. That’s their destination today, the Dean Street Crew. They’ve cased the joint the afternoon before. They’re ready.

According to the scheme Dylan Ebdus now stands waiting alone, a still figure in the passing crowds, mostly black ladies with young kids in tow, on Fulton Street. He’s wearing his glasses for once, plus a green-and-white striped Izod shirt—ironically not his but Mingus Rude’s—buttoned up to his neck, to complete the picture of harmless private-school nerd. He’s also wearing a backpack, empty but fluffed out from inside with a bent wire hanger to appear, they all hope, heavy with schoolbooks.

Lonnie, Alberto, and Mingus, they’re already inside McCrory’s basement, shifting cans of spray paint from one aisle to another, secreting them in less closely watched sections, behind IF YOU DON ’ T SEE WHAT YOU WANT, ASK signs and vinyl wood-grain photo albums. The three of them, two black kids and one Puerto Rican, are drawing attention from McCrory’s security staff, plenty. That’s fine: their very presence is a silent alarm going off in the store, meant to be. They’re happy to be spotted picking up Krylon and wandering with it into the other aisles, more careful to be undetected stashing the cans here and there. A few times they even enact an empty-handed pantomime of stuffing paint into their baggy coats, sniggering. This crimeless crime, this game of baiting racist expectation that they’re robbing the place blind, is good value entertainment.

Now comes Dylan, trailing into the basement five minutes later, and doing nothing to acknowledge any connection to the two black kids and the one Puerto Rican. Eyes slitty, he orients himself on the field of play, the bright-lit confusion of aisles, shoppers, guards, plus his homeboys. Inhales the popcorn perfume, gulps. The security staff, mostly enormous Jamaican women, are in their predicted tizzy, trailing Mingus and Lonnie and Alberto deeper into the hardware section, to a high aisle of garbage pails and brooms and rakes, preselected for low visibility. Suck-ahs! Dylan scowls, adjusts his glasses, wanders innocuously into aisles designated the day before. Here’s the scheme’s payoff. Dylan’s the collector. His breath clicking in his throat, he gathers the Krylon from the various stashes in the innocent aisles and, electric fear in his fingertips, plops them into his backpack: Tangerine, Chrome, Surf Blue.

Today you’re a white boy for a reason.

Leave it to Mingus Rude to recuperate their differences for his own purposes, for Robin Hooditry in art’s cause.

Dylan goes for the exit. The cans of Krylon clunk and ping seductively in his knapsack, treasure for sure. Spreading gratuitous confusion now, the other three chart divergent paths through the aisles, leave separately. Mingus, the broadest performer, is halted and frisked by a couple of guards. Alberto screams into the doorway behind him, “Fuck you! ” No reason, just because he can.

Back on Fulton they regather in the shade of the parking garage, all out of breath before they’ve even begun their run, hearts thrilled. The paint is quickly weighed, shaken to reveal the shuttle’s promising clatter, then parceled out to coat pockets, stuffed in sleeves. Let some superhuman guard chase them, he’ll never catch all four. They scramble down Hoyt Street, pretending to be pursued, laughing and shouting: “Oh, shit! Book, man! Can’t you run? Something wrong with your legs?”

Animals, Abraham? We can give you animals.

 

They shared a long walk in silence across Flatbush, up St. Felix, to the red brick hospital wedged against one side of Fort Greene Park. A Saturday afternoon in early April, first blush of heat in the air, the rutting birds and sun-stoned children in the dizzying, near-vertical park screaming in unison, bombarding the hospital windows with a shrill hail of sound. The flung-open windows couldn’t decant the detox ward’s deep linoleum-urine rot, an air of body poisons overlaid with disinfectant and sharp wafting farts from the recently destarved. No fear a bird would fly into the hospital. They’d be knocked back by a wall of odor as though butting a glass pane.

Dylan hung in the doorway. A Jamaican nurse stood beside him, one eyebrow cocked. Abraham went to the bed. The man was a draped hulk, wrists buckled into cloth restraints to the aluminum bed frame, hands hanging below, pitiful and large. One scabby foot was flung past the bed’s lip, the other curled inward like a dancer’s, tucked beneath the sheeted bulk of knee. His left cheek and brow were knit in a petrified wink. An intravenous line dripped something green-yellow into his arm, something that had also made a green-yellow stain on the sheet. Spills were his nature, even here. Hard to fathom he’d negotiated the sky.

Abraham frowned at the bound wrists, the crust at the IV’s point of connection, the unsavory smell. This care wasn’t good, not good enough. Perhaps Abraham was compensating: nothing could be good enough for the man in the bed. He needed to be treated like a human being, not a bum or a scoundrel, for by still breathing when he should have been dead he’d become a symbol of possible atonement. The Jamaican nurse stood in the corner and watched. She frowned too, showing her disagreement with Abraham Ebdus’s implication that the hospital wasn’t doing its job with this drunk fool, who was killing himself like many thousands of others and deserved no particular special notice for having happened to be checked into this ward by a white man.

“Does he eat?” asked Abraham finally.

The nurse rolled her eyes. “He eat if he want to. He spit in da meal at breakfast. We can no make anybody eat you know.”

“I want to speak to a doctor,” Abraham concluded peremptorily.

“Doctor come at four o’clock, no here now.” She budged Abraham aside to fuss with the dial regulating the IV’s drip, showing her command. “Is no need of a doctor here.”

“Your supervisor, then.”

The nurse clucked, said nothing. She and Abraham Ebdus went together into the hall, the nurse’s white sneakers shrieking on the tile. Dylan was left alone with the man in the bed.

Abraham might be this man’s champion, but he’d never done more than groan a curse or two at Abraham. Dylan he knew, and seemed to sense now; they’d spoken before. His bruised lids fluttered open.

“Little white boy.”

Was Dylan going to be asked to surrender his spare change? What use could the captive flying man have for fifty cents or a dollar here in the hospital, strapped to a bed frame? Instinctively Dylan felt in his pockets, didn’t find anything.

“Get up here. Cain’t see.”

Dylan obeyed.

“You seen me.”

No question, but Dylan nodded.

“Hah. Hah. Go in that drawer.” Not unscrewing his screwed-up eye, he nodded at the small cabinet beside the bed, where flowers would be set if anyone were setting flowers. “Yass, that drawer, get in it!”

Dylan tugged at the drawer, fearing to find some hellish hypodermic the flying man would want stuck in his arm.

Only a corroded plastic wallet, thin like a bus-pass holder. Driver’s license, issued in Columbus, Ohio, 1952, to Aaron X. Doily.

And the silver ring the flying man had worn on his pinky.

“Thassit, thassit.”

“The ring?”

“I’m done, I’m through, man. Cain’t fight the air waves.”

“You want—?”

“Take it, man.”

 

By the time Abraham Ebdus and the nurse ran back to the room the man in the bed was deep into his screaming throes of withdrawal or D.T.’s or whatever, sweat broken everywhere on his body, contortions wrenching the bed frame. The bounds held, so that body and bed became one shape rattling, shivering in agony. He found the IV pole and knocked it to the floor, bag bursting yellow spill everywhere. The kid was pressed to the far wall, but not panicked, watching coolly. Nurse harrumphed to broadcast her unsurprise: this only went to show and was all in a day’s etcetera. Abraham, having achieved no satisfaction from the higher-ups at the nurses’ station in the corridor, gathers the poor kid, who’s been punished enough by now you’d have to think, gets him out of there. The man’s bellowing is insane. It’s frankly hard to take.

Dylan Ebdus with a ring gripped in his first, the fist buried deep in his pants pocket, the ring itself pulsing in his sweaty fingers as though it were a token, a tiny fragment of the mad paroxysm of the man in the hospital bed, now borne covertly away into the breezy Fort Greene afternoon.

“What was he saying?” Abraham asked his son gently, once they’d gone a few blocks, the yellow insanity of the hospital receding into dream.

Dylan Ebdus just shrugged. The flying man, he’d said a lot of things.

The last—it couldn’t actually have been “Fight evil! ” could it?

chapter  10

Summer’s start, 1977: various persons are sprung, various terms and sentences completed. For instance here’s Barrett Rude Senior, six years served on a ten-to-fifteen, now paroled on good behavior, dressed in the green sharkskin suit and worn wingtips he’d been tried in, at a Greyhound’s window seat as it courses a circular ramp into the guts of Port Authority, midtown towers doubled in the smoked glass’s reflections and dancing with the engine’s vibration. His only baggage, a hard leather briefcase tucked upright between his ankles, contains legal papers, a certificate of ministry in the Church of the Parlor of God, and a pair of photographs—teenage Barrett Junior and his then-thirtyish, now-late mother in one, fifth-grade school head shot of Mingus grinning in a mortarboard and tassel the other—in a frame constructed of ingeniously woven cigarette packages, Parliament emblem alternated with Marlboro. Plus mother-of-pearl cufflinks, rolled tie, and gilt-leather Bible. Mingus Rude’s been sent to meet this bus, to guide his grandfather to a cab, and by cab to Dean Street. He’ll offer to carry the briefcase and be refused. No offense, little man, but Reverend Barrett Rude Senior can handle his own stuff.

Cut to Aaron X. Doily, passing through this same bus station a week later. He’s got a bus ticket for Syracuse pinned into the breast pocket of one of Abraham Ebdus’s old herringbone jackets, one Abraham wore to Franz Kline’s last one-man show during Kline’s lifetime, as it happens, and this jacket is stretched tight as a canvas and near to splitting across Aaron Doily’s shoulders. In Syracuse he’ll be met by the local Salvation Army and installed in a shelter, given three squares and a bunk on the guarantee of his attendance at the local Alcoholics Anonymous, where among the hard-bitten, laid-off-lathe-operator types he’ll be the sole black face. That’s if he gets aboard the Syracuse bus; see him now, eyeing the ticket counter, knowing he could probably cash the ticket. Bottle of Colt’s in five minute’s reach, easy. But let’s not truck in false suspense: Aaron Doily finds strength to bypass this possibility, boards the bus. Sits blinking atop the humming engines in the dark garage, absently twisting with his right thumb and forefinger a phantom ring on his left pinky. He’s uncertain how and when he lost the ring but figures it might be just as well gone. Let’s leave him, he’s no mysterious flying man anymore, just an incomprehensibly lonely alcoholic with a funny name, risen from pavement in spring to find himself restored to the daily world, sponge-bathed clean and tagged with a plastic wristband, now pointed out of town.

Peek ahead further, another two weeks: there’s Dylan Ebdus himself climbing aboard a bus, destination sign reading SAINT JOHNSBURY , VERMONT. Abraham Ebdus nodding goodbye through the tinted pane. Abraham’s got a grudge against the city these days, and a new penchant for exiling those he wishes to protect, first the detoxified Doily and now his own son, to the north, to New England’s countryside. Dylan’s signed up to be a Fresh Air Fund kid this summer. What was good enough for Rachel, a Fund-ee back in the fifties, ought to be good enough for Dylan. This scheme she would have approved; father and son both sense it, impossible not to. Abraham’s hunch will seem brilliant after the July blackout, the subsequent looting and mayhem which comes as near as Ramirez’s bodega, whose sprays of smashed shopwindow will be kicked up and down Dean’s slate for days after, and the spree and capture of Berkowitz. These give that season an air of disaster, and Dylan, safe in his idyll, will miss it.

But wait, Dylan’s not bound for Vermont, not yet. He’s not even thinking about it. Today’s the first morning after the last afternoon of seventh grade. Spring is sprung, and so is he. I.S. 293 is behind Dylan Ebdus for now, he can go three months not crossing Smith Street if he likes. Eighth grade’s a distant rumor, a tabled issue, and Dylan knows from experience that the summer between might change anything, everything. He and Mingus Rude too and even Arthur Lomb for that matter are released from the paint-by-numbers page of their schooldays, from their preformatted roles as truant or victim, freed to an unspoiled summer, that inviting medium for doodling in self-transformation. Who knows how it’ll come out, what they’ll resemble by the end of it? All Dylan knows is he’s giddy, loosed, flying.

It’s flying how far that remains to be seen.

Today, first day of freedom, he’s keeping a date with himself. Abraham’s out so Dylan’s free to climb the ladder out of the painting studio, unhook the hatch to their roof and push it aside, crawl out across the mushy tar paper into the new summer’s morning.

Dylan wouldn’t have said he feared heights, but the brownstone’s roof has always made him dizzy, not so much the view to the ground as the view across rooftops, out to Coney Island and beyond. Easier if you gaze on Manhattan’s towers. Those place you, fix you in a firm relation of puniness and awe. Easier still to kneel at the roof’s edge, hands gripping the ankle-high rim of masonry, and stare down at the contents of your own yard: ailanthus, brick pile, shoots of weed, a dirty spaldeen you can just make out like a speck of flesh. The grainy reality is reassuring.

What’s unsettling is to put Manhattan at your back and face the borough. Up from the canyon floor, out of the deep well of streets, gazing out into the Brooklyn Beyond is like standing in a Kansas prairie contemplating distance. Every rooftop for miles in every direction is level with that where you stand. The rooftops form a flotilla of rafts, a potential chessboard for your knight-hops, interrupted only by the promontory of the Wyckoff housing projects, the skeletal Eagle Clothing sign, the rise of the F-train platform where it elevates past the Gowanus Canal. Manhattan’s topped, but Brooklyn’s an open-face sandwich in the light, bare parts picked over by pigeons and gulls.

A sky full of pigeons and gulls and you standing there with a flying man’s ring on your finger.

Dylan stands at the front edge, as close as he’s stood, then closer. Shifts a toe onto the cornice, bends his knee like George Washington in the prow. He can just see down into the pit of Dean Street, the tops of new-planted trees, the roof grilles of the passing bus, but the feeling’s vertiginous. He steps back. No good staring and daring yourself: the will to fly sours, leaks away. That may have been Aaron Doily’s mistake. It needs a running start, a glorious oblivious leap to the opposite rooftop, not the dying quail of a fall that would surely result from long and woozy contemplation.

Close your eyes, reach out and feel the air waves, if there are any. Use the force, Luke.

Okay, okay. Dylan charts with backward steps an invisible runway he’ll retrace. Five steps ought to be enough. He’s retreated to the center of the roof. Anyone watching would think he was cowering, but it’s just the opposite—he’s spring-loaded, expecting to fly. Then, as though smacked by a vast hand from the sky, he crumbles to his knees in terror of the thing he’s proposed for himself. Fingers balled in one doubled fist around the ring, Dylan Ebdus huddles, shivers, and slowly and without resistance pees his pants. The urine runs inside his jeans leg to his ankle, drips into his sock and sneaker and onto the gummy, sun-warmed tar.

Here might be the ring’s only spell, to induce self-pissing.

Got to give it up to the flying man: it’s not that easy to throw yourself off a roof.

 

The Dean Street bus, unable to slip past the white stretch limousine double-parked in front of Barrett Rude’s place, nestled at its bumper instead, humming like a refrigerator, traffic behind stacking to Bond Street. The bus carried just two passengers, one intermittently asleep, but the thing still had its dumb round to make, its loop. The driver kneaded his horn, bleats cutting the drowsy, humid afternoon. The chauffeur had abandoned the limo, snuck to Ramirez’s for a bottle of Miller and a ham-and-cheese.

So anyone on the block not already eyeballing the limo through parlor or upstairs windows was alerted to the anomaly, the bright unlikely event plopped into their June’s last afternoon. Nobody saw it come, but they’d be damned if they weren’t going to see it go, to learn who’d climb inside. Men on stoops wrinkled new bags open just to the lips of bottles, no farther. Women leaned clubby arms on sills, watching for something to unfold. Behind a basement window grille La-La knit Marilla’s hair in cornrows, jerking her head back with increasing force until Marilla said, “Dang! You got a problem?”

A white man with a rake scraped a day’s new crop of wrappers and bottle caps out of his forsythia, muttering under his Red Sox cap.

Abraham Ebdus daubed gray on a frame of celluloid, totally unaware.

Dylan missed the limousine too. He sat sequestered in ailanthus shade in his backyard, speedily turning the pages of The Pod Thickens, a New Belmont Special written by Semi Chellas, cover art by A. Ebdus.

The chauffeur popped out of Old Ramirez’s, sandwich already half unwrapped, then took in the sight of the clogged-up bus and nearly dropped his beer, performed a corny double take with his elbows, sensing his audience. The line of backed-up drivers horn-serenaded him as he fumbled key into ignition, muttering, “Hold up, baby, hold up.” The limo cornered Nevins, loosing the clog.

The street grew calm. For a moment it was as though the watchers had dreamed it, they might be returned to their lives, only mystified. Then the white car rounded Bond, sharklike, and resettled at Barrett Rude’s address. The driver stuck at the wheel now, gnawed his sandwich there, a lazy hand dropping balled butcher paper to the asphalt, then rising to adjust rearview for a spell of toothpicking.

Blobs of yellow-green sun refracted through trees grew elliptical, spanned the white hood, moved on.

The chauffeur was asleep, what a life.

When the door at the top of Barrett Rude’s stoop opened it was like a Sunday newspaper flipped open to the funny pages. The figures poured out one after another, cartoon pimps, Batman villains, outsize mercurial goofs impossible to fix in vision. The Funk Mob, singers, players, and what passed for an entourage, a couple of freakazoid chicks. They’d dropped in to visit Barrett Rude Junior, en route to a promotional appearance at the Fulton Mall and in utmost regalia: mauve feathers, star-frame glasses, padded silver-foil shoulder pads, lightning-bolt headgear, spaceman boots, six-inch heels, King Tut beards, the works.

They burst out of the house loud and happy and moving with zany grace, a Ralph Bakshi cel in the open air, high on Barrett Rude’s hospitality and cocaine, both powdered and cooked into base. To Dean Street they resembled nothing so much as a slice of human graffiti, a masterpiece in motion like a train car gone before you could check it out. This vision, too, quickly evaporated, each band member hand-slapping Barrett Rude farewell where he stood in his boxing robe and satin pants at his door, then piling into the back of that clown-car-in-reverse. The smooth white container swallowed the whole chaos of glints and textures and jiving walks behind tinted windows. The chauffeur rubbed his eyes, turned the key, revved the engine. The limo coursed down the block, gone.

Barrett Rude Junior stood in his robe on the top of the stoop, chuckling, shaking his head, kneading at his coke-frozen nose and lips with the back of his hand. He might have basked for a second or two in Dean Street’s eyes on him: Shouldn’t they know he was a star? Damn, time they learned. Problem with being in a group, no one ever knew your name, just the group, the Distinctions, like White Castle or Oldsmobile.

White and Puerto Rican motherfuckers around here probably never even heard his million-selling songs, probably thought he was a pimp or gangster coming in buying up a house on renovator’s row, right in their faces.

He stood, hands on hips, for a long assertive minute, grinding his jaw, staring at nothing, taking the pulse of the block before he turned and went inside.

It was after his door had shut, Dean Street at last absented of limousine and costumes and singers in satin robes, that eyes might have found the figure below, in the well of the basement entrance under the stoop, one foot and knee propped out in late sunlight, the rest of him in shadow, watching. An old man with coiled salt-and-pepper beard on grave-lined cheeks, arms ropy in a sleeveless white T-shirt, gold Star of David on a chain hung to his sternum: Barrett Rude Senior. It had been hearsay up until now that a third generation was arrived in the Rude house. This was the first sighting. Only, Senior had been watching the whole time, watching for days already, peering through the half-sunken basement windows, seated in a low chair beside the paint-chipped radiator, eyes level with the knees of passersby on Dean’s slate. He’d been watching Marilla and La-La across the street, watching the new wave of ballplayers who’d inherited Henry’s stoop, watching dog walkers furtively toe piles of shit to the gutter. He’d watched the Funk Mob come and go, heard their hoots of laughter through the ceiling. Now he watched Dean Street watching him, fine with it, as willing to be seen, in his half-seen way, as his son.

 

The ring wasn’t helping him win chess games with Arthur Lomb, that much was for certain. He toppled his king in surrender three times an hour, the two of them hunched on the stoop in sunlight, lizards on a rock. Dylan prayed for Arthur to ferry down the red juice and turkey sandwiches and raisin cookies his mother wrapped in wax paper and packed into the refrigerator each day before leaving for work. Their lunch break, which was the only relief from Arthur’s bearing down with his phalanx of pawns, and behind them his thuggish rooks ready to surge and crush Dylan’s limp knights, dozy bishops, naked king, spirit. Arthur’s mother figured on Dylan’s presence, made double sets of sandwiches now. It was pitiably easy to fall into a routine with a kid when you were his only friend and his mother knew it. Dylan suspected the sandwiches and cookies were a bribe. Perhaps Arthur suspected it too, perhaps that was why he chewed them with a morbid gnashing intensity which resembled his chess. As if Arthur were trying to pulverize the mornings and afternoons of the new summer into crumbs, defeated pawns to be swept away.

The problem was he never actually did sweep the pawns away, only set them up again as quickly as he’d crushed them, flogging Dylan to the next match, and the next. Arthur, as ever both slavish and sadistic, always reorganized both their chessmen. If the Yankees or Mets had a day game afternoons were more tolerable, Arthur’s transistor tuned to Lindsey Nelson or Phil Rizzuto, the Mets going nowhere, the Yankees stacked with hired guns and bound for glory. Otherwise it was another tight rotation of “Afternoon Delight” and “Right Back Where We Started From” on one of the Top 40 AM stations which were Arthur’s fixation.

“This is really quite an interesting song,” said Arthur whenever “Convoy” played. He never explained. The ritual comment was intended as self-evident.

Dylan didn’t ask, didn’t fall for it, just fiddled with the ring on his hand. He was immune, off elsewhere in his mind, in diving flight.

Arthur began saying breast for check. “Breast. Breast. Breast mate.”

For relief they scored the latest Fantastic Four and Defenders and Ghost Rider from the newsstand on the traffic island on Flatbush. They read them in five minutes, then Arthur put them in plastic and began setting up the pieces again.

The day Dylan began to hallucinate that Arthur’s furrowed, sweat-beaded brow was actually ticking like a bomb, he toppled his king and said, “Let’s go see if Mingus is home.”

Arthur stared up from the board. “Did I hear you correctly?”

“Sure.”

“You’ll introduce me to Mingus Rude?”

Arthur’s expression mingled astonishment and gloat. It was as if the entire dull ten-day stand of chess demolitions had been intended to produce this one specific result.

“Why not?” said Dylan.

“You won’t hear any objection from me,” said Arthur.

Dylan shrugged, not wanting to suggest in his response that he’d given anything valuable away. In fact he’d vowed never to bring Arthur Lomb around to Dean Street, at least never when any of the Dean Street kids, such as remained hanging around the block, would possibly see. Hell, it was only another promise to himself broken, nobody else would ever know. If the Dean Street kids confused Dylan with Arthur Lomb at this late date it was hopeless anyway. Arthur’s whiteness couldn’t rub off on Dylan, couldn’t make him any whiter than he was. The taboo was pointless.

Anything, anyway, not to see his decimated pawns clapped back on their squares.

Mingus was home. In fact he was sitting on his own stoop, halfway up to catch the shade thrown by the house, staring dazedly at what he held between his two hands like a treasure, or perhaps a small live thing which required his protection: a fresh spaldeen, its pink flesh unscuffed, as though it had never had contact with the street, as though every latent bounce remained sealed inside it, pure potential.

He looked up when Dylan and Arthur approached and Dylan understood instantly that Mingus had been into Barrett Rude Junior’s freezer pot stash, had gotten deeply stoned, a solo afternoon jaunt. His eyes were dewy with it.

“I found it,” he pronounced, raising up the spaldeen.

“This is Arthur,” said Dylan lightly, making the introduction he’d never meant to make, but tossing it off. “From Pacific.”

Mingus snapped to exaggerated attention, reached to shake Arthur Lomb’s hand. “Yo, Arthur, how you doin’?”

“Okay,” said Arthur sheepishly.

“Pa- cif -ic,” said Mingus, measuring it with his dope-thickened tongue, tasting the syllables. “You got your own homeboys up around Pacific, Arthur?”

“There, uh, aren’t any other kids my age on my block.”

“Oh yeah?” Mingus looked impressed. “All right, I think I know what you mean, yeah. So, what you think—some little kid lost this ball, man?”

“I guess that’s most likely,” said Arthur. He looked stymied to be interviewed by Mingus Rude, pushed out of his ordinary range of operation. He might fear himself on the verge of a stupid answer to a snappy question, that was what his eyes seemed to say.

“You think we ought to play stoopball?”

Arthur made a helpless face, looked at Dylan.

“What you think, D-Man?”

“If you even remember how,” said Dylan. He savored a certain hard-boiled flavor in his reply, pleased to assert before Arthur Lomb the deep and weary history between himself and Mingus Rude, a history extensive in ways Arthur couldn’t begin to imagine.

“I’ll throw a home run on your ass, boy.”

“Let’s see you,” said Dylan.

Maybe the summer was only waiting for them to resume their places, the light and heat waiting to gel around them. The block was like an open-air museum of their former days, the slate cracked and skewed in all the usual places, the abandoned house still theirs any time they wanted to reclaim it. It had taken Arthur Lomb’s presence, though, to rouse the effort. They’d silently partnered to show him what Dean Street meant, the old essential traces. If it had been only Dylan and Mingus they would have been off tagging DOSE on lampposts, away from headquarters on some undercover operation.

Arthur Lomb, and the beacon of the fresh spaldeen. It had something to do as well with the pink ball which appeared in Mingus’s hands like a problem unsolved, an old itch.

There were only the three of them at first. Mingus at the abandoned stoop, turned sideways as he wound up to slam the ball high off the steps. Dylan on the opposite sidewalk, beyond the parked cars, playing the outfield. Arthur Lomb placed between, in the street, under the canopy of trees, to play infield and flatten himself to one side to make way for the rare car.

“Mother fucker !” Mingus shouted when Dylan made a perfect catch. Consoling himself, he rattled a double up the middle, chattering too-late encouragement: “Block it with your body, Artie, Arthur Fonzarelli, Fonzie, A-Boy.”

Dean Street’s kids were drawn out-of-doors, or back to the block from some other place by magnetism, a weird call. Nobody knew they were nostalgic until they saw Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude in the golden leaf-light that covered the middle of the block, a dream of a summer ago, ripened into history while nobody noticed. Plus here’s this new gawky grim-faced white boy in the street, knees tangling as he tried to stop the screaming rifle-shot grounders and line drives Mingus kept winging off the stoop.

Irresistible not to look. And then to wander over.

“King Arthur, man, you done fell down!”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t sorry me, son! Sorry is for snakes. Catch the damn ball!”

Mingus arched one high over the parked cars, destined for number 233 Dean’s sunken concrete yard, the shallow where a stoop had been demolished. Dylan leaped to intercept, found the spaldeen cool in his palm, transmitted from Mingus’s hand to his by way of the stoop and the air. He tossed it back casually, over Arthur. Mingus shook his head, medium-impressed, unwilling to exaggerate.

Alberto drifted up, hands in pockets. He quickly sussed the situation, then set himself behind Arthur to gather what dribbled or zinged through, just wanting to put his hands on the ball. Next came Lonnie, then a couple of young Spanish kids whose names nobody could stop forgetting. Mingus waved them into place, the infield turned into a mob. He kept throwing.

Marilla and La-La arrived, elbow-perched themselves on Henry’s stoop, trying not to look like they cared.

Henry himself had gone off to Aviation High School in Queens, was never around. Just a ball-game ghost, the name given a particular stoop.

In theory five catches got a kid up to bat, in practice today who knew? Mingus was writing the rules. Arthur and the little kids, they didn’t know any better. Alberto was deferential, easy. Dylan, Mingus’s conspirator, was camped in the outfield, not saying. He knew Mingus’s druggy adamancy, had seen him go into a zone, tagging, or just making some point aloud, talking in circles. He’d stay at the stoop until he threw a home run.

Arthur Lomb shot Dylan paranoid eye-bolts from within the crowd of kids jostling in the street for up-the-middle position.

Dylan if he bothered to notice was one of the older kids around Dean Street now.

He was more aware of his feet leaving the ground as he reached for another line shot, robbed another long bomb out of 213’s yard. Perfect catch numero tres.

Marilla sang, high falsetto, I used to go out to parti-i-ies, and stand around —

He’d hung in the air just as long as it took, matched the flight of the spaldeen exactly. Then came down soft, unjarred.

White boy was some kind of catching machine today.

You were flying.

’Cuz I was too nerv-uh-us, to really get down —

Arthur Lomb kicked a grounder down the street sideways and they all stood head-lolled watching him corral it.

“Yo, Mingus,” said Lonnie, falsely breezy. “I seen all of the Funk Mob visited your pops the other day.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mingus deadpanned.

“You must of seen it, Mingus, man. They had a big white limo all in the street. They looked like superheroes, man.”

“What drug you on, Lon?”

“Don’t say you don’t know what he’s talkin’ about,” said Marilla.

Dylan had heard Earl and a couple of kids mention it the day before—the limousine, the wild-costumed musicians that had poured out of it.

“I saw nothing,” said Mingus, increasingly pleased with himself, thriving on the absurdity of denying it.

“That boy’s lying,” said La-La, shaking her head.

Mingus reared, the spaldeen shot into the sky. A dark smudge wobbled to describe the pink ball’s torque against the background of sun-stained leaves.

“Take that !” taunted Mingus.

Dylan flew and found it in his hand again.

The ring and the ball in some kind of partnership of magical objects.

You between them: the beneficiary, airborne.

“Dang! My man can jump !”

Dylan flipped the ball back past gapes of astonishment in the street.

“Watch your boy D-Lone, King Arthur man. Learn a thing.”

“I’m taking notes,” said Arthur Lomb sourly.

Marilla flopped her head and rolled her eyes, resumed singing, syllables stretched in petulance, But my bod-dee-ee, yearned to be—freee —

By the time Robert Woolfolk arrived Dylan had robbed nine of Mingus’s sure home runs, was perhaps assembling a legend, some kind of miraculous stand patrolling the far sidewalk, the air above. The game had become nominal, just an elaborate contest of wills between the stoned Mingus, the flying Dylan. The others were stranded, monkeys-in-the-middle, feeding off scraps.

Marilla and La-La chose not to note Robert Woolfolk’s saunter past their place on the stoop, his bid for their eyes. Robert couldn’t bring Dean Street crumbling to attention just rounding the corner anymore, that’s what their taunting voices claimed. I got up on the flo-oo-or board, somebody can—choose—me —

Inspired, street-flippant, Dylan decided not to fear Robert Woolfolk today, not on his own block, not wearing Aaron Doily’s ring. Besides, Arthur Lomb was here, official weakest link. You could practically feel Robert measuring Arthur’s neck for a yoke, like Wile E. Coyote replacing the Roadrunner with a roast chicken in his mind’s eye.

It seemed to Dylan now that Robert Woolfolk’s argument was with Rachel. Who was gone from their lives, even if Robert Woolfolk hadn’t grasped it. That wasn’t Dylan’s problem. There were days he hardly thought of Rachel once.

Today, for one.

“Yo, Gus, man, let me see the ball for a minute,” said Robert. He tilted his head, moved his eyes sideways, checking his back. “I’ll give it back, man, you know I will.” Another kid could ask to join a ball game: Robert Woolfolk had to hustle in. His basic premise was criminal. It wasn’t something he could leave behind when it happened to be unnecessary.

Mingus cocked his head, stared at Robert Woolfolk like Robert was speaking Martian. The younger kids wandered off, half-intimidated, half-bored, never touching the ball. Arthur Lomb frowned at Dylan, his trademark glare-of-despair. He might be calling up an asthma attack any minute now.

“Aight,” said Mingus suddenly, and bounced the spaldeen to Robert Woolfolk, home run forgotten, stakes evaporated. Mingus could do that, flip like a switch. “You can find me in the outfield,” he announced. “Me and my man Dee.”

Dylan shifted to his left and Mingus joined him, two center fielders in rivalry for anything in the air. Robert’s first throw, slung underhand, knuckles nearly grazing pavement, produced a line drive at eye level which banked off the car between infield and outfield, nearly taking Arthur Lomb’s head off coming and going. Robert Woolfolk remained a source of bizarre ricochets, like a busted pinball machine left for years in the arcade and still eating your quarters.

“My mother said I have to go home, Dylan,” said Arthur Lomb glumly. The non sequitur betrayed his discomfort. Who’d said anything about mothers ?

“Okay,” said Dylan, uninterested.

“All right then, I’ve got to go.” Arthur seemed to think Dylan ought to walk him home, or at least break off playing to acknowledge the fact of his departure.

“See ya.”

“Hey, King Arthur,” said Mingus, picking up the thread. “Catch you on the rebound.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Give my regards to Pacific Street, man—and your mother.”

Alberto and Robert Woolfolk busted an instantaneous gut. Mingus and Dylan deadpanned, pretended nothing was unusual. It was hilarious in a way you couldn’t pin down, Mingus essentially saying yo mama without saying it.

Mutual assured deniability.

Arthur Lomb just slumped and moved down the block, a crushed pawn.

And Marilla sang No more stand-di-ing beside the wall —

Robert wound and unwound himself again and the ball struck high on the stoop and flew the farthest yet.

Albert leaned on a car, not imagining for a moment this was his to catch. He turned to watch Dylan and Mingus jostle elbows together, preparing to leap.

I done got myself togeth-a, baby —

As he rose, Dylan saw the block complete. He nestled easily in the air, under the branches, above the cars. He was aware of Mingus beside him, rising not quite so high. The pink ball found Dylan’s left hand, his catching hand, ring hand, met palm of its own volition. Dylan simply there to keep the appointment. He had time to glance around, Marilla’s song slowed, to, geth, a, ba, by, from above Dylan saw that Robert Woolfolk had what couldn’t actually be a bald spot, but a bare place, an off-center patch of scuff or mange on the top of his head. The ball compressed in Dylan’s palm as if sighing. At the corner of Dylan’s vision Arthur Lomb sagged home along the slate. The boy can’t catch, ain’t nothin’ you can do about it. Dylan noticed La-La’s nice tits, was amazed he had the term nice tits ready the first time he’d noticed any. In truth he probably owed it to Arthur Lomb, the availability of that concept, not that he’d ever give Arthur the credit. So who needed the Solver girls, anyway? Maybe your life wasn’t bereft, your fortune robbed before it could be spent. Maybe life, sex, everything that mattered, was right here, on Dean, not gone elsewhere. At his side, Dylan felt Mingus Rude nestled slightly below him, their bodies clunking sweetly as Mingus tried to match Dylan’s leap and fell short, minus the advantage of the flying man’s ring. Mingus rising not quite so high as Dylan.

At perihelion Dylan felt himself to be a note of music, one delayed, now floating upward. They might all be notes in a song, the Dean Street kids. Mingus was Dose. Though Dylan had been tagging the name it belonged to Mingus wholly. Mingus had his drug thing, his access to Barrett’s stash, and it was okay, it was cool. Robert Woolfolk, his part was to be skulky and scary. Robert was criminal-minded, Dylan couldn’t begrudge it. You allowed for the kid from the projects, steered a berth. Arthur Lomb, he was the white boy, slotted into place. Even Arthur was okay, he just didn’t know it yet.

As for Dylan, he had the ring. Befuddled witnesses were only part wrong, Dean Street possessed superheroes: not musicians in a limousine but Dylan, the flying kid. He’d sew a costume and take to the rooftops, begin bounding down on crime and they’d know then what they couldn’t be allowed to know yet. Today it had to be disguised: the Discovery of Flight, right under their noses. On his maiden bound, though, he already felt love and sympathy for all as he swam in the air, his view rearranged.

Then Marilla completed the line, hands waving for syncopation, the beat only she heard, I done got myself togeth-a, baby—now I’m havin’ a ball! Dylan landed, Keds squeaking softly, a millisecond after Mingus, though they’d jumped in tandem. The ball in Dylan’s cool palm. Elsewhere sweat had broken everywhere on his thrilled body while aloft.

“Kangaroo boy!” barked Mingus. “Been takin’ his vitamins, dang!”

La-La answered Marilla’s falsetto call with a jeering response:

Got to give it up, baby!

Oh, yeah: Got to give it up!

 

It would be the throwdown of the summer of ’77 though it was still just the start of July: Grandmaster DJ Flowers is coming with his crew from Flatbush to spin discs in the schoolyard of P.S. 38 after the block party on Bergen. Word’s gone out. Hottest day of summer so far only nobody complains, nobody’s tired, the sun plummets on Manhattan and the harbor, making orange light, but the day hadn’t started yet, not if you knew what was about to go down. You couldn’t drink enough beer to cool off or get sleepy. The block party itself is just preliminary, the white renovators grilling chops in their front yards, trying to get to know their neighbors, couple of Spanish guys playing steel drums, nothing special. The little kids run wild, girl and boy, Spanish, black and white mixed the way they did at that age. They spend themselves in the sun, winning and losing shitty prizes, Super Balls, green-haired gremlins, sucking sweet juice through shaved ice in paper cones, getting face-painted by a clown who’s really somebody’s mom roasting in a Day-Glo Afro wig. The young ones shriek and run, are pooped and whining by four o’clock. The older kids are stalling for night. They kill the afternoon stoop-sitting, eyeing that balloon-filler’s huge canister of helium, eating dollar-fifty plates of paella.

By six o’clock the first kids have begun to group in 38’s yard, though Flowers won’t show until nightfall. The local crews are here in the meantime, setting up a minor skirmish to whet the appetite. P.S. 38 is the domain of the Flamboyan Crew, since their celebrated DJ Stone operates out of the basement of the Colony South Brooklyn youth center next door. Indeed, it was Flamboyan Crew’s invitation to Flowers which resulted in tonight’s plans. That doesn’t mean nobody disputes Flamboyan’s primacy here, though. Geography dictates the 38 schoolyard’s really a nexus between different forces, the Atlantic Terminals kids crossing down from Fort Greene, the Wyckoff Houses element coming up Nevins. Plus the tough Sarah J. Hale High School kids, drawn to the neighboring block of Pacific from all over.

So, up from Red Hook are the Disco Enforcers—they’ve heard about Flowers’s visit and demanded a turn in the proceedings. Flamboyan’s found itself backed into a battle of the jams when all they’d intended was to host Flowers with themselves as the warm-up. No sweat, though, Stone’s up to it. He’s so sharp on the crossfader he might be Brooklyn’s king if not for Flowers. The rival crews work together to set up, to steal juice out of the nearest streetlight base and run it down to the far end of the yard for their turntables and amps. At the same time trying to conceal from one another their crates of twelve-inches, thinking to maintain some edge of surprise. The secrecy’s a bit of a joke, though: they’re all, including Flowers when he gets there, certain to be spinning the same fifteen or twenty cuts.

The Enforcers go first. They’re an all-black crew, Enforcers compensating easily for any faggy associations in the first part of their name. Similarly, their partisans dance on roller skates— uprocking, that’s what they call it—and nobody’s laughing. They balance kneebends and one-heel spins against a series of crotch-grabbing and fist-clenched poses, an in-your-face aspect. One mimes feeding you an endless firehose of dick. The Red Hook DJ leans on “Fatbackin” by the Fatback Band and Babe Ruth’s “The Mexican” but also stumps the crowd with Alvin Cash and the Registers’ “Stone Thing (Part 1),” an unfamiliar jam. On the drum breaks the line of roller-skated dancers freaks for the crowd, a storm of limbs, skates striking sparks on the cement.

If you managed to meet the eyes of the dancers, though, you’d find them flinching, shy. To actually get out there and uprock isn’t easy. Far easier to stand pouting with arms crossed, head perhaps bobbing slightly as you stake out your chosen proximity and consider what unfolds.

The beat’s a sonic clatter resounding down Pacific, down Nevins and Third Avenue, a clarion to any who might have missed word: Something’s happening up at thirty-eights, yo.

Flamboyan takes over next. Those who recalled anything beyond Flowers’s appearance that night would later grant DJ Stone blew the Disco Enforcers out the yard. Stone not only finds the break, he wears it out. Plus, where the Enforcers’ DJs provided their own exhortations to the crowd—a scant few Evveybody git down! ’s—Stone’s got a boy on a vocal mic calling out to the crowd, one who must imagine he’s Flowers’s kid brother. The scrawny boy, who calls himself MC Ruff, just won’t quit with the chants and rhymes.

Flamboyan Crew doesn’t provide its own dancers—Stone’s breaks and Ruff’s shouts merely turn the whole yard into Soul Train. No big surprises, just “Paradise Is Very Nice” and “Love Is the Message” sliced a hundred different ways. Those are the grooves get people off the wall. “Love Is the Message” in particular. It’s by MFSB, house band of the Philly Groove. Their name ostensibly stands for “Mother, Father, Sister, Brother,” though those hip know it really means “Motherfuckin’ Sons of Bitches.” No DJ is without three or four copies of the precious twelve-inch, it’s the staple of any set and nobody complains.

Two hours later they hear “Love Is the Message” again from Flowers. In his hands it sounds just as good, better. Flowers in person casts a spell, he’s some kind of heavy Jamaican or West Indian dude, beyond affiliation or strife, like Kung Fu. Flowers is one of the discoverers— the isolators —of the break, one of those who proved how furiously people could be made to dance to a section of song unencumbered by vocals or melody. And proving it again tonight.

By this time the card tables and crepe paper back on Bergen have long been cleared. Here is the only place you’d want to be. Maybe three hundred kids spilled around the turntables and amps, dancers at the front, hard-asses clustered according to faction: Atlantic Terminals, Wyckoff Gardens, Spanish dudes from Fifth Avenue. Nobody wants to be the fool who starts a ruckus, though pride requires vigilance against anyone gazing too long at you or your lady. Rivals form Apache lines and dance their aggression, throwing moves. Sure, there’s a scuffle or two. But this gathering’s peaceful, hardly calls for the cops to come shutting it down just before midnight, stripping one group of kids of sock-hidden steak knives, one cop snapping a pair of nunchucks over his knees, everyone sent streaming out of the schoolyard still buzzing, barely gotten started.

Nevertheless, Flowers’s set runs long enough to carve the night into legend. The Jam of ’77, just before the blackout. The dark yard lit by the glow of the DJ’s flashlights as they cued up grooves, ran breaks together: it merges in memory with that night of flares and candles a week later. In memory, that is, of all but the white kid, the one white face in the whole yard, brought there by, and hewing close to the side of, his homeboy Dose. No blackout for whiteboy. He’s lost his last chess game, eaten his last of Mrs. Lomb’s turkey sandwiches, tomorrow he’s boarding a Greyhound for Vermont. The Fresh Air kid.

Dylan’s gone unhassled tonight. Who knows why unless it’s evidence of the jam’s benignity. He’s stood all night soaking it up, one in the mob of flickering bodies and animated faces, even shouting out Ho-o! and Ow! when Flowers called for it, though this does garner stern looks from some bruthas standing nearby. Still, he skates through. Maybe this night’s just lucky, maybe he’s passed through some flame and come out the other side. Maybe it’s the ring. Maybe the ring has made him invisible. Maybe the ring has made him black. Who can say?

 

A black-and-white photograph of Fidel Castro in a baseball uniform, standing on a pitcher’s mound:

if the mets had to trade seaver

for a red

they should have shipped him

to cuba for this guy

better fit for che stadium

so saith commissioner crab

The postcard slipped from between the gallery flyers and Chinese takeout menus stuffed through the mail slot and landed on the hallway carpet, message side up. Abraham Ebdus didn’t raise an eyebrow, only dropped it onto the small pile accumulating on the parlor’s side table. He trusted there was no urgency to the Running Crab postcards by this point, nothing in any way timely. The boy could wait to read them when he returned. Abraham himself never even glanced at the things anymore.

chapter  11

Fish mouthed the pond’s surface, seeming to sip air. Mist clung to the long grass curling from the banks and in the tops of the trees beyond the grass. The short, rotten dock where the boy from the city sat floated inside a gray-green smear, like a corroded photograph of a cloud. Easier to see through the pond’s lens to the baublelike sunfish and the broccoli-bright fronds growing underwater than through air to the opposite bank.

“Fish in the rain,” Buzz, the delinquent teenage son of the city kid’s host family, the Windles, had said that morning. “I’ll set you up. You can’t miss.” Buzz had begun sloughing off the boy from the city with bogus rural assignments, stuff he likely wouldn’t touch himself if you paid him. Buzz at sixteen had a small mustache and was hot to rejoin his Vietnam-vet pals chain-smoking over the open hood of a theoretically souped-up, in truth inert, Mustang. The city kid had trailed along for an afternoon and an evening before Buzz cut him loose. In an oil-stained, weedy driveway Buzz’s grown friends flicked glowing butts at a lame golden retriever, urinated into empty bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and joked in a language the boy from the city couldn’t understand.

It was only malicious to wrench fish through that lens to drown on mushy planks. The boy had no interest in reenacting Buzz’s hasty demonstration. The pole rested in the curved grass at the dock’s base, hidden like a comb in hair. The boy hunched in borrowed yellow slicker, back turned from the path up to the fields behind the house, painting a figure of solitude for anyone approaching, for his own mental eye: Brooklyn-bereft in Vermont, 1977.

Anyway, he might have an audience for ostentatious kindness to fish. Heather, the Windles’ daughter, thirteen to his twelve. He’d felt her trailing him with her eyes. The bookish way the boy talked to their parents and his long, bowl-cut bangs, turnoffs to Buzz, had aroused her curiosity.

She was blond like a Solver.

She darted on her bicycle in quick silence like a figure in Brueghel or De Chirico.

You might murmur to a girl on a dock in the summer, what you’d never dream of trying in school.

You might be one lucky motherfucker.

Heather Windle picked her way down the path. Her legs had outgrown her own yellow raincoat so it rode high, giving her a Morton Saltish aspect. She hopped side to side on the wet rocks, and slapped, fingers splayed, at a cloud of gnats.

So the kid from the city had completed the transfer, brother to sister.

“Hi, Dylan.”

“Hi.”

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

She stood at the top of the dock, glanced at the pole in the grass.

“Are you sad?”

“Why would I be sad?”

“I don’t know, you just look sad.”

Maybe he was. Not, though, if the rest of July could be theirs, on the dock, in the field, in the mist, anywhere but out in the oily, pull-tab-strewn driveway, the 7-Eleven lot full of pickups. Dylan Ebdus was ready to vanish out of Buzz’s Vermont into a girly world, into Heather’s hair. He wanted to ask her if he could simply breathe the oxygen of her blondness, nose the wisps at her cheek.

“I was waiting for you,” he heard himself say.

She didn’t speak, just clambered to sit beside him at the rain-puckered window of the pond.

“Are you sad because you have no mom?” she said eventually.

“I said I wasn’t sad.”

“That’s why you came to stay here, though, right?”

Dylan shrugged. “Plenty of Fresh Air kids have moms,” he said. He’d been justifying the Fund to a stoned man with an eye patch the night before, and the spiel came easily. “The whole point is for city kids to, you know, spend the summer in the country. For variety’s sake. I guess your parents thought it was a good idea.”

“I know,” she said. “We had one last year, but he was black.”

“My best friend is black,” said Dylan.

Heather thought for a minute and then leaned into him. Raincoat elbows squeaked together. “I’ve never been to New York City.”

“No?”

“Not yet.”

“You have no idea.” A glow in Dylan replied to the pressure of her body. He felt her curiosity as a kind of enclosing radiance, a field.

Sure, he’d be sad, accept pity, work with whatever came his way.

At that moment he decided to tell his secret, show her the costume he’d brought hidden in his knapsack, the ring, his secret powers.

“You know what graffiti is?” he asked.

“Uh-uh.”

“Motion-tagging?”

“What’s that ?” she said, delighted.

“You do graffiti on a moving train,” he said. “Instead of in the yard.”

“But what’s graffiti?”

Yes, he’d reveal the costume, he’d wear it for her. First, though, they sat inside a cloud and he told her about Brooklyn.

 

When after dinner Heather’s mother called to where they played and whispered in the sharply pitched attic Dylan felt a bolt of guilt, as though accused of what hadn’t yet happened, as though his yearnings were films projected on the walls downstairs. He’d anticipated Buzz’s scorning gaze all afternoon, but when Buzz missed dinner no one even spoke his name. Dylan had felt himself and Heather to be invisible under the Windles’ eyes, attic mice, dust balls. Now at her mother’s voice he and Heather shared one luscious gaze of complicity, then moved in silence to the stairs.

“You’ll want to call your dad, if the phones are getting through,” said Heather’s father from his recliner, in the room lit by the television’s glow. He spoke without turning his head from the spectacle. In shades of blue, New York was in the dark and on fire.

The phone rang four times before his father answered.

“I wouldn’t care to be on Fulton Street,” said Abraham Ebdus. “There’s no sign here, though, just fools yelling. Ramirez parked his station wagon on the sidewalk blocking his shop window. He’s standing with a bat, I can see him. I suspect he’ll be disappointed.”

Dylan nearly asked about Mingus, didn’t.

“It’s been so hot, it’s really a blessing. I’m in my studio, I’ll paint the stars, you never see them. Or I’ll paint Ramirez. I’ll be fine, don’t worry.”

“Okay.”

“Everything well with you, Dylan?”

“Sure.”

“Put Mrs. Windle on.”

Dylan handed over the phone and turned to Heather. To show provenance over the distant riot he said, “It’s no big deal.” Then, a bit wildly: “This actually happens all the time, it just doesn’t usually get on the news.” This drew a look of perplexity from Heather’s mother, who’d just replaced the receiver.

The television never returned to the blackout. Still, those rapid-flashed shots of spilled glass and running figures trumped his father’s report. Dylan lay dreaming awake of the city on fire.

 

While Mrs. Windle shopped, the three wandered together to the magazine rack in the broad, white-lit aisle of the supermarket. There Buzz marked his indifference to the new order. Dylan and Heather knelt at the comics rack and murmured in low tones, Dylan patiently explaining the mysteries of Marvel’s Inhumans while Buzz leafed at hot-rod magazines and High Times, then wandered away.

As he did, Dylan saw Buzz was trailed by a middle-aged woman with a dirty blue apron and a sticker-gun dangling in one hand like Dirty Harry’s Luger. She leaned on her hip to follow Buzz’s progress around the aisle’s corner, then strolled after him. Dylan smiled to himself, returned to the comics. Heather was oblivious.

Followed in a shop like a black kid.

Dawdling through checkout behind Mrs. Windle, Buzz labored at innocence, shrugging, poking at a rack of gum, making small talk, doomed. The woman with the gun and a bald, stern manager hung near at a closed register, biding time until it was official, until Buzz moved for the exit without plopping whatever he had in his pants and sleeves onto the scudding rubber belt. Only Mrs. Windle and Heather were surprised when the manager corralled them just through the automatic doors.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Windle.” The manager squinted in the pounding sunlight, his tone full of sorrowful inevitability. “We gotta ask Buzz here to step into the back, please.”

“Oh, Buzz,” moaned Mrs. Windle.

Buzz stood pouting sarcastically, shifting from leg to leg, player in a script he was too dull to resist.

“Why don’t you younger kids come along. This lesson couldn’t hurt you to learn.”

In a narrow, windowless office they watched as Buzz dutifully produced Hot Rod, Penthouse, and a box of shotgun shells from the hunting and fishing aisle.