“Last time we said next time we’d call the sheriff, Buzz.”

“Say something,” Buzz’s mother commanded.

“I should’ve called the sheriff, after how Leonard treated me last time,” mumbled Buzz. “Shit, I shouldn’t even come in here anymore.”

“Afraid that’s right, Buzz, you shouldn’t. Leonard’s got nothing to do with it.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Buzz, locating his rallying cause. “You need to have a word to him about getting off my back, man.”

“What did Leonard say to you?” said the manager, his face instantly growing red.

“You kids go wait at the car,” said Mrs. Windle, nodding at Heather and Dylan.

They drove in silence, Buzz in the Rambler’s passenger seat, forlornly leveraging elbow, head, and neck, as much of himself as possible out the window, his mother rigid with fury at the wheel. Heather and Dylan slumped low and traded grimaces beneath the horizon of the long front seat. Dylan lifted his shirt as in a striptease and flashed the copy of Inhumans #7 and the two Nestlé’s Crunches tucked at his waist. Heather widened her eyes obligingly, put her hand to her mouth. Home, they ate both bars of chocolate together in the attic while downstairs Buzz reckoned with his father.

Vermont was permeable to Brooklyn ways. Nothing simpler, really, than racking the chocolate and the comic book with Buzz in the role of the black kid, drawing heat.

Buzz had set a pick for Dylan—that’s what Mingus would have called it.

 

Afternoons had a dazing slackness. You dropped a bicycle in the grass or on the gravel, wherever you were sick of it, stripped off your T-shirt and kicked away flip-flops and resumed swimming, since you’d been cycling in your drying trunks in the first place. Heather’s tits were plums in the armholes of her tank tops and there was always the possibility of an angle, another take on that subject. You compiled views until the postulated form burned in mind’s eye, gathering obsessive force like an advertisement you’d passed over forever until the day you just had to know, Sea-Monkeys or X-Ray Specs.

Blackflies and boners, each were solved by immersion.

Dylan mentioned he’d turn thirteen in August at least twice a day.

It was natural enough in those humid, bug-drunk afternoons, the house, pond, field, gravel front yard all Dylan’s and Heather’s alone, that they’d find themselves sprawled in their suits making wet ass-prints on the sofa one minute, side by side, panting heavily and laughing hysterically in rapid alternation, and then a moment later kneeling barekneed on chairs at the counter, stirring up a Tupperware quart of lemonade crystals and cold tap water. Equally likely to next be ferrying ice-filled beading glasses to the attic, which in daylight boiled with a psychedelic swarm of dust swimming in angled light.

Half naked on the checkered bedcover they again lay side by side, sucking ice.

“I can’t feel my lips.”

“Me neither.”

“Feel this.”

“Cold!”

“You now.”

The country-city premise freed them to pretend anything was a surprise. Maybe ice didn’t work the same in New York City.

“Kiss where I kissed.”

A pause, then the attempt.

“I can’t feel anything.”

“Kiss my lips.”

Though they’d been mashing iced lips to wrists, the first was a graze, a bird’s peck.

“I’m numb— dumb.” They cracked up.

“Okay, again.”

“Ah.”

She’d closed her eyes.

They rolled away. Dylan flopped onto his stomach, quashing a throb in his trunks. “You ever suck laughing gas from whipped cream?” he asked to keep up the stream of distractions, a permitting air of larkiness.

“Noooo,” she said. “Buzz did though.”

Buzz, code for all things crude, contemptible, townish. Dylan and Heather were beings of the pond and the distant-recalled city, nothing between. Forget laughing gas.

“You want a back rub?”

“Sure.”

“Turn over.”

She obeyed, keeping their deal: nothing was related to any other thing. They were sprites who’d banished taboo and were also a bit stupid, willingly dim. The kiss was on one planet, the back rub another.

He kneaded and pinched, gave her spine a noogie, whatever seemed artful.

Inside the arrangement of her flung arms on the bedspread her tits bulged, third-moons. He earned a grope through extensive rib work, lingered just enough to find them disappointingly lozengelike, hamburger-hard. Her eyes fluttered inside their lids.

When his fingers curved slightly inside the tight band of elastic at her hips she twisted away, sat up.

“I can’t breathe in here.”

They tumbled out and onto the bicycles and raced down the gravel shoulder, just two local kids killing time as far as dozing passersby in any passenger windows might care, Heather ratcheting ahead madly, knees flashing in and out of bronze shadow, Dylan chasing, relieved, mouth wide gobbling the moist air, the infinite Vermont afternoon.

 

Mr. Windle parked the Rambler at the rear of the drive-in lot to shorten his walk across Route 9 to the Blind Buck Inn. There, Buzz predicted, he’d not stir from the bar through the entire double feature— Star Wars, The Late Show —and emerge so crocked he’d pass the keys Buzz’s way for the three-mile drive home. The lot was two-thirds empty, maybe fifty cars hooked as if on life support to units thrusting at angles from weed-cracked pavement.

Space in the city, like time, moved upward. Here the direction was sideways, into the trees.

At blue twilight figures browsed car to car, leaning through windows for a light, making mock of an overfull backseat, a social moment before hunkering down.

“I’m taking a pass on the first feature,” Buzz said, not looking at Dylan. With the ten Mr. Windle had floated their way and Buzz confiscated, Heather’s brother had magnanimously bought Cokes for Dylan to convey back to the car, then pocketed the change. He was humped over the Evel Kneivel pinball machine in the concessions hut, intent on making it tilt a hundred or a thousand times. Or possibly there was an agenda beyond pinball, say a four-foot bong in a trunk. Likely accomplices milled nearby.

Always there was a pond or quarry rumored through the fields, where the real action went on.

Buzz tipped his chin at the distant screen. That scuffed blank billboard was the least interesting place to rest your eyes in the whole sky, which was full of what looked like feathers the color of bruises. “You can stay in the backseat with my sister if you want.”

Dylan stood dumbly clenching the paper frame full of Cokes. A week kissing Heather every stolen moment had made him faint and dreamy, incapable of reading either sincerity or scoffing in Buzz. This might actually be some rough blessing.

He nodded and Buzz grinned.

“Bet about now you’re thinking the Avoid Nigger Fund’s the best deal you ever had in your life, huh?”

They did watch from the backseat. Dylan steered Heather’s attention to crucial details, though Star Wars didn’t carry the same impact here, flashing like a View-Master slide in the pinpricked bowl of night, as it did at the Loew’s Astor Plaza on Forty-fifth Street. Dylan had seen it four times there, the last two alone, a dwarfed figure growing amazed as the frames pulsed in his eyes, feeling in his subvocal anticipation of certain lines, his sense-memory of certain actorly gestures, the possibility of floating up and intercepting the light halfway, of being a human projector secretly responsible for the existence of the images.

“Parsecs measure space, not time,” he droned, unable to quit though the point felt unworkable, Arthurish. “Some claim it’s a mistake but I’m sure it’s intentional, Han Solo’s pretending—”

“Dylan,” Heather whispered.

“What?”

She closed her eyes. Dylan completed the sentence silently, groping for a relation between speech and the passage of breath in two mouths, the miasmic world created at the junction of two faces. As in the dusky cool of the attic, as at the noon-blazed pond, there was nothing between, the rupture was total, bliss speechless.

’Nuff said.

It was only hard to believe it wasn’t illegal. But shut up already and kiss her.

Then he opened his eyes.

The Windles’ car was rocking.

Four sets of ass cheeks like blond lunar pancakes pushed the Rambler’s windows in gentle alternation, side to side.

 

Their hair flash-dried in horns and Superman spit curls as they swam and kissed. The sun-dazzled heads were calm, bobbing like floes while an eye-level dragonfly described chess problems on the table of the water. Just below, animal bodies thrashed in green cold. The boy had grabbed the girl everywhere by now, his demented hands inventorying shapes there in the Negative Zone, where nothing counted. Twice he’d felt her fingers graze his pond-numbed prong and practically drowned.

He was returning to Brooklyn tomorrow.

“Your dad might send you to private school,” said Heather, breath rippling pond between them. She ducked lower, water past her nose, blue eyes floating doubled in reflection, pupils near invisible.

“What are you talking about?”

“Buzz heard him talking to my mom. Buzz says you’re struggling with a black influence.” She’d plainly rehearsed the phrase, dared herself to speak it.

“Buzz is struggling with a moron influence,” said Dylan. “I think he’s losing the struggle.”

“He said you got beat up.”

Dylan dove, plunged fully into the silt and shadows of the Negative Zone. He’d taught himself to open his eyes underwater these past weeks. The pond didn’t punish eyeballs like the chlorine-poisoned Douglas Pool, down behind the Gowanus Houses, where he’d gone swimming with Mingus a couple of times. You also didn’t need to wear sneakers underwater for fear of broken glass. He’d have liked to see Buzz contend with that.

Now he rushed in echoless slow motion at Heather’s seal-like body, her red one-piece, limbs glowing like milk in the bent emerald-yellow light. She cycled afloat, not fending him off. Wrapping one arm around her middle, he mashed his mouth into her stomach. A fugitive hand found a tit. She didn’t thrash, or even pull away. Anything under water was between him and her body, apparently.

When he’d come up for air and they lay panting and dripping on the dock, gaze squinted through fingers to protect their eyes from the sun, Dylan said, “I’ve got something to show you.”

“What?”

“Surprise.” He’d meant to reveal the costume today anyway. Now it seemed a correction too, to Buzz’s garbage.

“Where is it?” she said.

“Go on your bike. Get some Mountain Dews. Meet back here.”

She nodded, spellbound, guileless.

In the Windles’ guest room he slipped the ring onto his finger, then bundled the costume under his arm. Paranoid he’d be seen, he moved sideways through the kitchen and out, then slipped through the fields.

On the dock he spread the costume out and looked at the thing for the first time since riding the Greyhound bus out of the city.

He’d had his father teach him the simple stitches he’d used to sew it together, though he hadn’t said what for. The cape, cut out of a worn Dr. Seuss bedsheet featuring A Lion Licking A Lemon Lollipop, was attached at two corners of the neck of the sky-blue T-shirt which formed the costume’s body. He’d centered the lion, a suitably enigmatic logo, as nearly as possible in the middle of the cape. The sleeves of the T he’d extended with brightly striped bell-bottom legs scissored off a pair of his mother’s abandoned pants, scavenged from the heap at the bottom of her closet where only Dylan ever visited. They hung imperially, his hands extending through a fringe of threads like the clapper in a bell. Impractical, but this was only a prototype. A showpiece. The shirt’s chest he’d stretched flat over cardboard and decorated using the Spirograph, the rusty pins, the balky cogs, a clumsy labor with imperfect results. The emblem was an oscillated circle, the widening path of an atom traced a thousand times through space to form bands of power. At any distance, though, it blurred to a fat zero.

The boy from the city wriggled into the elaborate top and stood on the yawning dock in a veil of tiny insects, waiting.

A moment later the girl appeared at the top of the path, two green bottles clanking where she had them cradled at her belly, head bowed as she placed bare feet on rocks.

At the foot of the dock she set the bottles of soda in the grass and stood considering.

“Well?”

“What is it?”

“What does it look like?”

She didn’t seem to know.

He fluffed the cape with his elbows, wishing for a wind. The weight of it dragged the neck of the shirt back so it rode against his throat, a design flaw. He’d attach the next cape at the shoulders, maybe.

“This is who I really am,” he said.

She still didn’t say anything, just stood.

“Aeroman.”

“Who’s that?”

“It means flying man. Dylan Ebdus is my secret identity.”

Forehead knit, she said: “Well, I don’t like it.”

“What do you mean?”

“It looks weird.”

“When it’s done it’ll cover my legs. This is just the top half.”

“Where did it come from?”

“I made it.” He said nothing about the ring, about Aaron X. Doily.

She nudged the Mountain Dews, her bare toes cast in green shade by the sunstruck bottles. “It doesn’t seem like you.”

“Well, it is me,” he said, adamant. He realized now he wanted Heather to tell her brother, so Buzz would understand he could presume nothing about Dylan or Brooklyn.

She sat, folded her legs in the grass. He stood, still looking for the sign she comprehended the importance of what he’d shown her.

“Dylan?”

“What?”

“If you stayed here you wouldn’t have to go to private school.”

He was stupefied. The remark was so irrelevant and appalling, he didn’t even know where to start.

“I’m not staying here,” he said simply, perhaps cruelly.

Heather abruptly stood, her face red and shocked, as if he’d slapped her.

“Take it off,” she said. “I don’t like it.”

“No.”

She moved to the path, abandoning the bottles which lay in the grass.

“What about the surprise?” he said. There was a breeze suddenly, and he felt the cape flutter and snap perfectly at his back, like a stadium flag.

“I don’t care,” she said without turning.

“I haven’t even shown it to you yet,” he yelled, but she was gone.

After a moment he moved, anyway, to the end of the dock, there bent his knees, pointed his hands straight from his body, preparing what he’d planned for weeks. Heather might be watching from high in the grass at the field’s edge; it was possible. Or not, didn’t matter now. He didn’t need to be known in Vermont, this null area that was only measured in its distance from the city, its use as a restorative, a place to get your act together before returning to the real world. In his case, to prepare to be thirteen in the city, to kiss city girls, to be the flying boy who fights city crime, shit incomprehensible to anyone from Vermont.

He dove in air. The mirrorlike surface dazzled his eyes as he executed a pinball circuit, like one of those dragonflies, inches above. He trained on the far bank to keep from dizziness, flew near and turned, brushing the high grass there, springing an explosion of waterstriders snoozing deep in roots.

He toured the water twice around. When he landed running on the dock he took a splinter in his heel: never fly without proper footgear. And the corner tips of the cape had dangled and were soaked. That’s how close he’d been. So: 1. Wear sneakers. 2. Hem cape. One way or another, you were always learning something.

chapter  12

The church was a garage, set back on Dekalb Avenue behind a low white picket fence that fooled no one, being flush to the busted slate sidewalk and wedged between an ironworks and a plumber’s shop. On a Saturday the ironworks was in full operation, oblivious to the services next door, rolling gate up to reveal a man in a welder’s mask dipping an acetylene torch against a window grille, sparks spilling on the concrete floor. The block also included an auto body shop, its windows showing a 1967 pinup calendar; a “record” store, glass papered with empty album jackets to conceal the interior from the street, protecting sellers of something likely not records; and two boarded lunch counters with thirties vintage Coca-Cola signs intact, emblazoning forgotten names. The church, whitewashed cinder-block exterior decorated with a handpainted tin sign reading PARLOR OF GOD , “ IN HIS BOSOM WE ARE REVEALED,” REV . PAULETTA GIB , PASTOR and decorated with a golden Star of David was absolutely a garage, plywood doors open to expose five rows of backs and nodding heads of sitters in folding chairs facing the woman with the microphone at the front of the room. August sun blazed down, baking the churchgoers. Ties were tugged loose at necks, knees eagled to ventilate genitals, cuffs hitched. The pastor’s floral dress was soaked at the belly and where the wattles of her upper arms pressed against her ribs. As she paced at the front she expertly flipped the mic’s cord across the floor at her feet, keeping it looped far from her high, thick-heeled shoes, which bore a print to match the dress.

The two men, father and son, each boiling in a suit and tie in the midmorning heat, moved through the gate of the picket fence and took seats at the back, just inside the shade of the garage.

“We had better strive to emulate the five virgin brides,” the woman said at the pitch of her talk. “Keeping our wicks cropped close, keeping our oil clean, preserving the flame, oh yes.”

“Oh yes,” came the murmured and shouted reply.

“Keeping that light in the window so when the robber bridegroom arrives he can see us waiting faithfully in the window, oh yes, all in our fine things, in our finery all untouched, not one fingertip soiling our garments, not one.”

“Not one, not one.”

At the end, as the tiny congregation milled through the picket fence and onto the sidewalk, the pastor found her way to the strangers who’d arrived late and seated themselves in the rear, Barrett Rude Senior and Junior. They stood as she approached.

“Welcome,” she said, holding out her hand. “Pauletta Gib.”

“That’s a fine service, Sister Gib,” said Senior, bowing deeply. His tie was still knotted tightly at his neck, despite the heat.

She nodded at him, then opened her hands, and they stepped out together into the glare. Pauletta Gib turned to the son. “You’re that singer with the Distinctions,” she said.

“Barrett Rude Junior, ma’am. No longer with the group.”

“I’d heard word you were raised within the Parlor.”

“Raised by my father in the church, yes.” The singer softened his voice, spoke as humbly as he could. The pilgrimage to the garage-front church today was for Senior, not a concession but a gift.

But Pauletta Gib had eyes for the tall man who wished today only to stand in his father’s shadow. “Your singing’s given a lot of easement to folks,” she said.

Barrett Rude Junior lowered his head as his father said: “My son is not a worshipful man, Sister.”

Pauletta Gib arched an eyebrow. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, Mr. Rude, that a worshipful man is measured one Sabbathday at a time. Today I find your son here within my walls.”

“I have only just joined him here in the city. He had no idea of the existence of your temple.” His choice of words conveyed hesitation over the setting, the dressed congregation lingering on the sidewalk where men from the ironworks now misted a section of grille with black Krylon. The paint settled to form a blurred negative of the grille on the pavement.

“Yet you found us today, praise be to God.”

The father at last found voice for what he wanted her badly to know: “I once had a ministry of the Parlor of my own in Raleigh, North Carolina.”

Her frown seemed to go through the older man, to pass over his tight-knotted tie, his fresh shave, his keen and defiant expression, to ask How long ago was that? And what transpired in between?

What she said, though, revealed nothing of her conclusions at the going-over her eyes had conducted: “Love sets up a Parlor wherever it wanders.”

To that Barrett Rude Senior could only add, grumpily, “Praise God.”

The woman took the son’s hands in hers, gazed deep in his flinching eyes. “Would you sing in our church next Sabbathday?” The tone suggested it was a kindness she offered the singer, not the request for a freebie it should seem to be.

But it was the father, now shifting his weight from squeaking shoe to squeaking shoe, who ached to be at Pauletta Gib’s microphone.

“I don’t know,” said Barrett Rude Junior sincerely, not certain what his father would prefer to hear, mostly wishing he could cause the question to be unasked.

“Don’t speak to it at present,” said Pauletta Gib, patting the singer’s hand. “Your heart will clarify the question in your sleep.” Then she turned to the father, her tone slipping an octave. “I trust I’ll see you next week, Mr. Rude. Unless you’ve already set up a temple of your own.”

“Hrrph.”

Barrett Rude Senior turned and pouted, squinting into the sun. He checked his cuffs, picked a nonexistent thread off the breast of his jacket and examined it briefly before tossing it toward the curb, elaborate dandyish mime.

Inevitably, Pauletta Gib had begun to remind Senior and Junior of their deceased wife and mother.

Like the woman they both remembered, she disfavored the father for the son.

Now two of Pauletta Gib’s flock who’d hovered at the edge of the talk came forward with an envelope and a ballpoint pen and pressed them into the hands of Barrett Rude Junior. A girl in a print dress, bare dusky arms with a trace of talcum powder, her young brother a twig in a pale peach suit. The boy stood shy at his sister’s hip, so the girl had to make the request. They wanted nothing much, though it was a thing the singer hadn’t given in nearly two years: just an autograph.

 

“Yo.”

“Yo, man.”

“What up?”

“Nothin’, man. What you doin’?”

“What you think, man? Same as you—gettin’ some ink.”

“Cool, cool.”

Samuel J. Underberg’s, Inc. Food Store Outfitters is a boxy, pale-green five-story building on the other side of Flatbush, beyond the newsstand on the traffic island, in the region of flattened lots and stilled warehouses in the shadow of the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower. The area is a big zero in most senses, a region of lack. Past the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Long Island Rail Road terminal, there’s nothing doing, nobody home. In fact, though no one seems to know it, this is the site once slated for Ebbets Field’s relocation, before the Dodgers defected. They got as far as knocking down a lot of old brick and putting nothing up in its place. Nobody smells beer and peanut ghosts here because the ballpark never arrived. The flattened region is a sort of brick-dotted outline tracing a phantom limb. As far as a wandering crowd of kids would care, housing projects–wise, it’s beyond the safety zone of Wyckoff Gardens, well into the turf of Atlantic Terminals.

Strange groups on the bare sidewalk give uneasy props all around, heads bobbing and nodding, eyes averted.

All gaze is deferred to the warehouse wall, the splendid explosion of graffiti there.

At the center of this dead land Samuel J. Underberg’s is a site of mysterious life, one to which the family-owned business is oblivious. It’s nothing to do with their real profitability, which is mainly in supplying new shopping carts, replacements for those stolen by the homeless or wrecked in parking lot collisions. Every day Underberg’s trucks dozens of carts out of their warehouse to supermarkets all over Brooklyn. From the warehouse they also shift big-ticket items like registers and rubber matting and display carousels. Call it a niche. At least it keeps a number of men employed, cousins, many of them.

None of this remotely explains the special magnetism of Underberg’s for the kids who congregate there. The secret’s inside the dinky showroom, practically an afterthought, which features the trimmings a supermarket needs to dress itself as a stage set for the play of shopping: fake parsley-sprig barriers to lay between different cuts of meat inside coolers, fake plastic salamis and gourds of cheese to bulk up displays of real goods, vinyl and laminate signage cut in shapes of fish and pigs to stick in the fronts of delicatessen trays, hot-pink and orange fluorescent signs blaring SPECIAL!

“Yo, man, check it out, that’s Strike, man.”

“Strike? Really?” This a whisper of disbelief that the King of the Broadway Line would materialize in human form.

“Check it out man, he’s tagging up.”

“Ho, snap, man. Strike.”

“I’m gonna get him to sign my book.”

The Underberg’s showroom is the sole place in Brooklyn where a walk-in customer can buy, no questions asked, an eight-ounce bottle of Garvey Formula XT-70 Violet, an industrial ink comprised of ethanol, butyl ether, and polyamid resin, formulated specifically for stamping prices on frozen cellophane and plastic-wrapped packages of slimy meat. Garvey Violet’s unique grabability extends also to grime-covered windowpanes—the panes in question being those of subway cars. For use in the homemade markers of graffiti artists Garvey Violet is an irreplaceable elixir, and that, in turn, makes lowly, oblivious Underberg’s a destination. It also ensures that the sides of the building form a constantly updated museum of tags from every corner of the borough, a showcase for rival tribes in temporary collaboration.

The skull-capped men at the showroom counter have sussed out this much: Garvey Violet is stacked well behind the counter, so it can only be purchased, never shoplifted. And the counter it hides behind is a glass case filled with cutlery, boning knifes, fat cleavers. At $5.99 a bottle Garvey Violet’s enough of a bargain the writers pony up—the only other option, anyway, would be to storm the place with shotguns. Their acting out inside the showroom is more covert: stealing fake fruit and scribbling tiny tags here and there on the cardboard displays.

But apart from this the writers tend to shift in and out glumly, one at a time plunking cash on the counter and mumbling the request, their braggadocio damped until back on the street.

“Yo, man, you hear that? He said Jew want a bag for that ?”

“Ah, shut up, man.”

“I swear man, he said it. I’m not making it up.”

These wary groups pass around drawing books bound in pebbly black board, full of their own and others’ tags, as well as full-color felt-tip blueprints for top-to-bottom burners they hope someday to dare to reproduce on a train. Underberg’s is a place for displaying books, for gathering autographs from all over, though the risk is always abasement or mockery if a group of older, stronger writers decides to bully some younger faction.

From up Flatbush Avenue, off the D train, from up Fourth Avenue off the N and the R at Pacific Street, wandering up from the projects, small groups arrive in waves and mingle jostling on the sidewalk there, blocking the Underberg’s men from loading their truck. They come and go noisily, the groups themselves like a form of human scribbling.

This day two white kids stand hoping to be inconspicuous in the gabble of activity that’s suddenly all around them, a simple run to Underberg’s not so simple after all. One’s frozen in the act of tagging up.

“Check out the white boys, man, think they bad.”

“What you write, white boy?”

The white kid with the marker is silent, shoulders bunched against his harassers, but with a certain plodding integrity he finishes marking his tag on Underberg’s wall, in the small space he’s found between larger, spray-painted throw-ups.

“Whazzat say? Art? A-R-T?”

“Dude’s tag is Art, man. That’s wack.”

“Your name Arturo, dude? You don’t look Puerto Rican to me.”

“Shut up, man, leave the guy alone.”

“He’s a toy.”

“Leave him alone, man.”

“I’m not messin’ with the dude, yo, I just want to see what he’s writin’. You with a crew, Art ?”

Question’s rhetorical: What white kid could be with a crew? For that matter, what self-respecting crew could contain a white dude, let alone a small, ferrety white dude like this one, let alone two white dudes? Not to mention two like these, beginning to cower instinctively against Underberg’s wall in the manner in which negotiating the halls and schoolyard and adjacent streets of Intermediate School 293 has tutored them.

Ritualized cringes buried millimeter-deep in the psyches of the two white kids, mock-asthmatic seizures and other forms of beseeching, are ready to surface when the nearest thing to a crew these guys could ever hope for pops back out of the showroom with a fresh-purchased bottle of Garvey Violet: Mingus Rude.

Mingus’s assessment of the situation is so instantaneous and smooth his remark seems to emerge from his mouth even as he himself emerges from Underberg’s, while at the same time he slips the bottle of ink into the fat thigh pocket of his military-surplus pants. He doesn’t address the four black kids who are tightening the lasso of themselves around Arthur Lomb and Dylan Ebdus, instead speaks as if all but Arthur and Dylan are invisible, his tone one of annoyance.

“Fuck you doin’, Art man? I tole you them other dudes are waiting for us. Ain’t time to be foolin’ around here, man, we got to go.”

A reference to other dudes is magic. The lasso slackens. Arthur and Dylan nod obediently to Mingus, duck their heads, eyes cast down on the sidewalk as they follow him.

The three escape together, leaving the Underberg’s pavement to other confrontations.

Across Flatbush, Arthur Lomb skips up excitedly beside Mingus, while Dylan lags behind. Arthur’s eager mimicry produces a twee, mechanical version of Mingus’s hunched lope. He really is, in this sense, a toy : he’s turning himself into a Mingus-puppet. “Yo, them dudes were talking about Strike, man, they said he was there tagging up, but I didn’t see him. Could be wishful thinking, just like everybody claims they saw Son of Sam. Anyway, Strike’s okay, but I prefer Zephyr, I think he’s really got the most original tag, yo, man, you know what I mean?” Mingus only grunts and stalks on, but that’s encouragement enough for Arthur. “Man, that one guy was trying to act real scary, but I could see his face, he looked like a baby, his lips were all blubbery. Yo, I probly could of taken him if you hadn’t come out just then. Lucky for him I’d say, yo.” Arthur’s careful slurring of certain words, in contrast to his sharply nerdish pronunciation elsewhere, is wincingly obvious to Dylan, who wonders why Mingus doesn’t just smack him upside the head and command him to stop. But Mingus tolerates Arthur’s parroting talk, accepts this transformation Arthur’s accomplished, somehow, in the month Dylan’s been away. Arthur Lomb, it appears, contains multitudes: he’s managed this utter self-reformatting with the same sleazy facility with which he earlier dumped the Mets for the Yankees. “Couple white boys could of taken their paints and shit off them, I bet, that is if they had anything worth taking, which I doubt, yo, judging from the poor condition of their sneakers.”

“Be cool,” says Mingus now, as without glancing sideways he throws out an arm to slow Arthur’s pogo-ing gait. There may be no stopping the flow of Arthur’s talk, not once he’s on this kind of roll. At least, though, he might quit hopping.

Arthur does slow. He allows Mingus to move ahead, giving him some room to glower in his own irritated headspace, often a necessity when Mingus hasn’t smoked a joint in a while. Arthur turns to Dylan instead. “What you think, we could of taken them, yo?”

“Don’t yo me,” said Dylan.

 

He crouched in darkness at the top of the abandoned house’s stoop, hearing distant sirens. Nearer by, voices at Bond Street, a laugh knifing through the humidity, floated to the sky. Though the night was hot he wore a sweatshirt. Underneath was the costume, the cape crammed up into the back like a soft turtle’s shell, bell-bottom sleeves doubled around his wrists. He sweat furiously, it couldn’t be helped. The ring he kept like a folded dollar, hidden in his sock: the possibility of being yoked while still on the ground was very much with him. Perhaps he should have begun on rooftops, but access to his own was through Abraham’s studio, and Abraham was painting frames of film tonight. Dylan had opened the studio door to find his father planted under a single clip-on floodlamp, fingers crabbed around a tiny brush, transistor radio tuned low to gooselike jazz, the barely audible squonks of Rollins or Dolphy.

“I’m going out.”

“Tonight?”

“Just for an hour.”

“Shouldn’t you sleep?”

“Just an hour.”

It was the evening of the day before eighth grade.

It was somewhat unclear how to begin.

Mingus Rude and Arthur Lomb were off painting a burner on the side panel of an abandoned police truck in the city salvage yard at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. The expedition had been planned for days, a wake for summer’s death, a last fling. Dylan involved himself in preparations, including the harvesting of Krylon from McCrory’s and the assembling of a sheaf of marker sketches in full color, then bowed out of the jaunt itself at the last second. This ensured that tonight he wouldn’t bump into Mingus or Arthur. Anyway, Dylan was exhausted with the whole Mingus-Arthur situation. He’d begun to wonder if he was encouraging it by his own presence. Let them be alone together, let Mingus endure the raw, grasping force of Arthur’s sycophancy without Dylan around as a buffer, and see how he liked it.

Besides, the two would be painting Dylan’s design on the police truck, Dylan’s hand was inherent in the sketches. Mingus might be Dose, but Dylan was Dose’s auteur.

Teenagerdom was a secret identity in the first place.

At thirteen you’d begun to leave traces, occult names and signs proliferating, sheets you fiercely insisted on laundering yourself.

Like a Spirograph cog your wobbling path made messes.

Aeroman was a bolder route, only he was proving hard to bring out of his sweatshirt shell.

Where in Gowanus did a fresh-minted superhero go to find the sort of crime in which he could meaningfully intervene? Dylan huddled on the abandoned stoop, ear cocked to the damp howl of the late-summer wind as it bore voices through the night. The gays walked their dog, otherwise the block was empty. Dean Street wouldn’t cut it. Nevins, that was too much, the prostitutes, the old men on Ramirez’s corner, the chance of Wyckoff kids ranging up from the projects. Smith Street, same problem. He needed an isolated nightscape, an alley, a woman yelling for return of her stolen pocketbook, the classical Spider-Man mugging scenario: exactly what he’d never seen in his life. A superhero spliced criminals from victims. In Gowanus things tended to be more mixed up.

He needed height, perhaps. To rise above.

He roused himself from the stoop and walked to the corner, then up Bond Street, to the subway, the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station, knowing it was a place he’d never go at this time of night if conditions weren’t changed, and they were barely changed. He resembled himself, not Aeroman, until he shed the sweatshirt. And Aeroman didn’t walk, he flew. Until he brought himself to fly down from a rooftop he wasn’t Aeroman, he was a kid in a costume in a sweatshirt, walking. The ring was in his sock—he reached down and confirmed it. A white boy on the corner of Bond and Schermerhorn at eleven at night. The place was desolate enough, barren parking lots and basketball courts, darkened municipal buildings, the street’s wide lanes silent. Too desolate, maybe. Places you feared most were empty, your fear of them theoretical. You wouldn’t be caught dead there, so you didn’t go, so no one went because what was the point?

In truth the action was below, in the long urine-stinking subway tunnel beneath Schermerhorn. The token booth there was buried deep in the block, the path to it a terrifying gauntlet, a home for beggars who slumped against the dimmed windows of subterranean displays, relics from a time before Abraham and Straus figured there was no one worth advertising to in the stations underground, and no way to protect the merchandise displayed there. The tunnel was a famous danger.

He caught himself, though: What use was a flying man in the subway? A novice mistake, barely outsmarted. He felt a degree of accomplishment in avoiding it. Aeroman’s first triumph, a prudent hesitation. It was a relief not to enter the tunnel.

Maybe Smith Street was a better bet after all.

Tomorrow eighth grade began.

Aeroman wanted to emerge before it was too late, but he needed crime to call him out.

Beneath his feet the pavement rumbled as the A or GG slowed at the underground platform, then a handful of lonely figures leaked from the station into the night. He stood beneath the lamppost across Schermerhorn, watching. One white woman glanced in his direction, eyes darting, surveying the empty street. She turned down Bond, then onto State Street.

Sweating, hunchbacked, Aeroman followed.

Maybe something would happen. He was magnetized by her fear, a thing he understood. Seeing it reflected in the woman was acutely thrilling. Here was precisely what Aeroman meant to combat, the hectic, accelerating heel steps in darkness, on a block where the canopy of limbs masked the streetlights. He reached down, not breaking stride, and palmed the ring up from his ankle, slipped it onto his left forefinger. The voices of hidden paper-bag drinkers drifted from the recessed stoops, idle jaded watchers who’d never help a woman in danger.

She was underdressed, rape-able, regretting she’d ever heard the word Brooklyn, let alone nibbled the bait of the reputed astonishing rents here, the hardwood floors.

Just one catch: the scene sorely lacked a villain. No one followed the girl apart from him.

He was chasing her down the block. It was his footsteps she fled.

It was a mugging like an egg on a roosterless farm, unfertilized, incomplete.

When she began actually running he stood still in the middle of State Street and let her go, made dumb with chagrin. Should he fly ahead, somersault over and intercept her, perhaps, to apologize? But he’d only scare the shit out of her worse than he already had.

Aeroman had met the enemy, and it was Aeroman.

Now he trudged to Smith Street.

He went unnoticed here in his humped shirt, his hands bunched at his waist, right covering left, the finger with the ring. Happy enough for the moment to be scaring no one, to be a part of the crowd. The summer night was alive, Puerto Ricans spilling from social clubs in groups of four at sidewalk domino games, younger men in Yankee shirts tuned to the game. The entrance to the Bergen subway station was clotted with Gowanus Houses kids, teenage boys in stocking caps, angry girls he might or might not recognize from school. School, ready to resume, ready to pin him in place. He felt urgently again the need to find a meaningful crime, something he could handle. He slunk past the crowd of Gowanus kids at the subway, certain there was less than nothing for him there.

He was hungry. Looking both ways, he fished in his other sock for the dollar tucked inside. It was soaked. He transferred the dollar to his pocket and rubbed it against the cloth at his thigh to dry it. At Bergen and Smith was a pizzeria, also thronged with older teenagers, a place he and Arthur Lomb had braved one afternoon on the way from school to Pacific, to Arthur’s stoop, in the early days of their friendship. It seemed possible now his friendship with Arthur Lomb had peaked in the first month of that summer, during the deplorable chess marathon, that he would never taste Arthur’s mom’s red juice or turkey sandwiches again. He couldn’t permit himself to be nostalgic. Arthur was a phony, and Mingus would know soon enough. He imagined Arthur saying, Yo, Mister Machine sucks, Jack Kirby can’t draw anymore, dang, but a number one’s a number one, yo, seal it in airtight plastic and put it on the shelf, that’s my policy, yo. He went into the pizzeria and ordered a slice, spread his moist dollar on the counter.

A hand clapped over the two quarters change as they appeared in place of the dollar. Dylan looked up. Robert Woolfolk scooped the coins into his pocket. The men at the pizza counter were uninterested: the event occurred at the teenage stratum, which they filtered at a preconscious level. Dylan or Aeroman was a little uninterested himself. He kinked the slice of pizza at the crust, folding it so it supported the floppy weight of its own tip, fluffed the sheet of translucent paper underneath, then shook garlic salt onto the pizza’s surface, tan grains which saturated instantly in pooled oil. With the slice he stepped into the populated street. Robert Woolfolk followed. Robert had a companion along, a small version of himself, dark and rangy, whom Dylan had never seen before.

“Don’t bite that, man,” said Robert.

“Why not?”

“Take it off him,” Robert told the other boy, who was smaller than Dylan.

“What you talkin’ about?” said the younger boy, disbelieving the obvious.

“Take his slice.”

Among yokings, this was a familiar format to Dylan: the master instructing apprentice, commanding Take it off him or Check his pockets, man. Call it the Batman-and-Robin.

Never for a slice, though. That was fairly original.

“C’mon, man,” implored the protégé, not looking at Dylan.

“Take it, man. Do it.”

Dylan bit the pizza’s tip. Chewing open-mouthed to ventilate molten cheese, he sought out the younger kid’s eyes. He felt a peculiar cheer at the animal bewilderment he inspired there. Yes, I am your first whiteboy. Gaze on me. You’ll know many before you’re through. Some you’ll be large enough to handle, some you’ll even terrify.

He took a second bite.

“Don’t eat it, I told you,” said Robert, his voice rising. “Take the slice,” he directed again.

“Awww, he’s bitin’ on it,” said Robert’s trainee, misery in his voice.

Robert pointed at the pizza. “Quit now, man, or I’ll fuck you up!”

Dylan swallowed, sank his teeth in again. Robert Woolfolk was hamstrung by his intractable sidekick—if he reached for the pizza himself it was an admission of failure. The slice was dwindling anyway, so the principle was all that remained, if there’d been anything apart from principle in the first place. Dylan understood he functioned as a passing occasion here, object in an obscure ritual which had for once nothing to do with Dylan himself. The young black kid would take the brunt tonight, be bullied through a series of low-end quasi-criminal stunts.

The kid knew it too. He sulked in the background as Dylan’s bites made the slice irretrievable. Robert Woolfolk turned to Dylan now, but was jangled, distracted, with only a minute more to spare, seemingly a bit out of his skin.

Last day before school could get to practically anyone.

“I’m still gonna kill you one day,” Robert Woolfolk said.

Dylan chewed, facing Robert with a dope-eyed, cowlike aspect.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

Dylan shrugged, only certain Robert wasn’t killing him tonight.

“Fuck’s the matter with yo back, man?”

“Nothing,” said Dylan between bites.

Robert looked harder. “Lemme see that ring for a minute.”

“It’s a present,” said Dylan. “From my mother.”

“Fuck your mother, motherfucker.” Now Robert Woolfolk danced as though attacked by invisible insects. The ring, anyway, was clearly off-limits, tainted with Rachel-magic. Robert twitched like a bot moving in circles, his circuits blown.

“Think Gus be gonna proteck you forever?”

No, Aeroman be gonna proteck me forever, thought Dylan, swallowing unchewed chunks of pizza defiantly.

But Aeroman hadn’t flown tonight, there was no pretending.

Dylan had now gnawed all the way to the ragged crust, which he held at his mouth like a jack-o’-lantern smile.

Robert herky-jerked his arm out and slapped the crust from Dylan’s hand. Like hilltop observers musing on a distant nova they watched it tumble to the gutter, officially ruined. Robert’s worst excess of tension was spent in the act. He could return to his protégé who stood abjectly to one side.

Robert Woolfolk pointed a finger at Dylan as they parted, but his voice was lost, his menace dispelled by the conundrum of this encounter.

On Smith Street alone, ignored by the Puerto Rican social club members in their floral shirts and straw porkpies, the humpbacked, overdressed, and sweating thirteen-year-old turned onto Dean and strolled home along the shadowed slate, weirdly satisfied.

Aeroman had not flown, had remained tucked into Dylan’s sleeves and waistband, in chrysalid form.

Nevertheless, two happenings, incomplete in themselves, somehow clicked puzzle-ishly together to form a whole, the phantom image of a mugging averted, Gotham’s streets made safer.

The running woman on State Street had been the one afraid tonight, not Dylan. That was something, a crack of daylight in the night. Aeroman would slip through that crack, he just wasn’t ready yet.

 

Eighth grade, right, you could almost grasp the shape now. A given day was a model of the grade in miniature, something to get through. Just perfect one single day and you’d have a method to apply to the whole.

Abraham did his part scraping toast while Dylan worked math problems at the table, a take-home test due in fifteen minutes, first period.

Barrett Rude Senior might be lighting a breakfast cigarette in the well of his basement entrance, stroking white stubble, patrolling the morning.

Ramirez rolling up his gate, moms tugging first graders to P.S. 38.

Henry was in his second year at Aviation in Queens, he’d grown a foot and a half and was the man you saw sometimes on the block who’d high-five with younger kids. Recalling he’d been in a fistfight with Robert Woolfolk was useless. There was no history of kids on a block, such facts you couldn’t impart in a way to make anyone care.

Whacking off was a new organizing principle, the rare thing completely under your own command. You might get hard on the way home from school, clutch it in your pocket, anticipating an afternoon session.

Aeroman’s new outfit-in-progress was simpler, cape lighter and shorter and secured at the shoulders, sleeves tight at the wrists.

It progressed slowly, stitch by stitch, no hurry this time.

When the weather cooled Dylan and Arthur took the A to Canal Street. They browsed bins full of lucite knobs, drank egg creams at Dave’s Famous, then made their way to the army surplus store. With money for coats they’d cadged off Arthur’s mom and Abraham they purchased green fatigues like Mingus Rude’s, jackets with heavy vented pockets, strange loops for military knives or rounds of ammunition, who knew. Maybe dudes in Nam had died in the jackets, you couldn’t exclude it, though they lacked telling bullet holes.

Returning to the subway they paused to flip through some worn Beatles LPs for sale on the sidewalk, Let It Be, Abbey Road. Dylan found a name he recognized. The name was superimposed on a photograph of four grinning, beardless black men in peach suits and ruffled shirts seated on stools of various heights, backlit in blue and arranged like a bouquet in a photographer’s studio: The Deceptively Simple Sounds of the Subtle Distinctions.

Dylan showed it to Arthur. “That’s Gus’s dad.”

Arthur looked unimpressed. Dylan bought the record and took it home, but it was scratched, unplayable.

For a week Dylan and Arthur wore the jackets to school pristine. Then one day Arthur appeared with his jacket glamorously ruined with gold and silver paint, sleeves laminated in Krylon, burner scars, evidence. Arthur smirked, Dylan said nothing. That night he retired his virginal jacket before Mingus caught him in it.

Mingus himself was a random factor, a shade or rumor now, only glimpsed. He’d vanish for weeks, then you’d meet up, get high in his basement, and go to the Rex on Court Street to take in a Charles Bronson double feature, sit in darkness for hours not speaking a word apart from dang and ho snap.

Mingus was flush erratically, blew cash in a hurry. Later you’d catch him fluffing cushions for change, palming pennies from the dish Abraham kept at the front door, scraping up enough for a nickel bag.

Nobody took fifty cents or a dollar from Dylan that he didn’t see coming a mile off. One day in the basement Dylan applied Abraham’s hacksaw to a couple of quarters, then strolled with fragments jingling, waiting for the inevitable frisk. When with a dumb grin Dylan offered the sawed half-quarters and quarter-quarters the Gowanus kids who’d cornered him walked off shaking heads, pained, as if he’d spoken Chinese or wriggled an antenna.

You knew this game of days like the back of your hand, if the back of your hand was changing like a werewolf’s.

One day Dylan came home to find Abraham with a package on the kitchen table, an upright bundle wrapped in layers of butcher paper and twine. Abraham shredded at it with a steak knife, freeing the hidden object, unpeeling onion layers of newspaper insulation like Humphrey Bogart unpacking the Maltese Falcon. Dylan imagined it might be something from Rachel, perhaps a statuette depicting A Crab, Running. Then Abraham exposed the top of the prize inside: the gleaming golden nose of a 1950s-style rocketship.

“Don’t worry, I won it fair and square,” said Abraham. “Sidney accepted on my behalf.”

Words on the gilded rocket’s base explained, at least partly. HUGO AWARD , BEST NEW ARTIST , 1976 , ABRAHAM EBDUS .

“Recognition creeps up on one,” said Abraham darkly.

Dylan hefted the thing, scowled.

“You want it for a doorstop?”

Dylan considered, nodded.

“Just don’t say I never gave you anything.”

chapter  13

The song could be heard on New York radio for a week or two, mid-February 1978, not yet charting high but picked to click, scored on the R&B chart at number eighty-four with a bullet—it was asserted to be with a bullet each time that discouraging number was mentioned aloud—and slipped into rotation between Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Serpentine Fire” and Con Funk Shun’s “Ffun”: “(Did You Press Your) Bump Suit” by Doofus Funkstrong, a three-minute, forty-second single edited out of the sprawling eighteen-minute jam that covered side two of the band’s Warner Brothers debut, Double-Breasted Rump. DJs solicited phone calls weighing in—bold or cold, smash or trash, funk or junk? A few dozen requests could still tip a song up regional charts and push it toward a national breakout. Anyone trusting their ears knew Doofus Funkstrong was a disguise for the legally hamstrung, hence recording-under-pseudonyms Funk Mob—for those less sure, a look at the psychedelic Pedro Bell jacket art did the trick. Fewer ears would place the name of the vocalist whose melismas decorated just the last thirty-eight seconds of the single edit, credited on the album jacket, as according to plan, as Pee-Brain Rooster: under his own name Barrett Rude Junior was a voice from radio’s middle distance, years out of rotation, not yet an oldie. If a few formed the question Ain’t that the singer from the Distinctions? it was only a passing thought—how likely, anyway, that the tenor voice of the smooth and mellow Distinctions should show up riding the crest of that distorted synth bass line?

Then the song died. No explanation was called for—certainly none was given. Songs die, this one did. Figure it freakish that it charted at all, with refrains like Up jumped the globster, caught her with a mobster! and Goof a wedgie up your rump pocket! There are limits. So it died; call Doofus Funkstrong an album-oriented act, euphemism for Who cares? Performance royalties trickled through a legal maze, never enough to fight over should Pee-Brain Rooster choose to consult a lawyer. For a few weeks you heard the song or you didn’t, while nerd connoisseurs were left to savor it later, to champion or slag it in their endless tinny dialogue. History, basically, wasn’t made. Marilla and La-La would never be heard chanting this song in their front yard, not skipping rope nor braiding hair nor teasing boys with their fresh-grown hips. That test it couldn’t pass: the song, musicianship aside, lacked a hook.

 

When Mr. Winegar asked him to remain after class he sat imagining that he’d somehow become known, that the science teacher had taken it upon himself as gravity’s local spokesman to pronounce on the matter: Young man, human flight is sheerly impossible! Renounce it at once! Instead Mr. Winegar took a letter from his drawer and handed it across his desk, sat twisting the end of his mustache as he watched Dylan Ebdus absorb its contents: test scores permitting entrance to Stuyvesant.

Outside it snowed, jigsaw chunks which piled on the ledge, clotted the grate which covered the window. The school had poured out into the white-muffled afternoon. Staying late Dylan had lost his chance to sneak across Smith in a protective mob of bodies in motion, would instead be snowball target prime for anyone prowling near the school.

“Only kid in the school to make it,” said Winegar. “But then only six even tried the test. I requested the chance to tell you in person, don’t mind saying I’m proud of how you’ve applied yourself.”

Winegar’s mustache-torturing and puzzled gaze contradicted this potted speech: he’d retained the letter in order to glimpse the freak, the reverse-retard who’d surfaced unexpectedly in the ocean of screaming, proto-criminal souls that made up Dylan’s classmates, made up for that matter all five periods of science teaching in his day’s schedule—made up, come to think of it, his entire blighted career. If I’d known you’d pull this I’d have flattered myself by noticing you sooner.

But caretaking Winegar’s astonishment wasn’t one of Dylan’s priorities.

“What about my friend Arthur Lomb?”

Winegar frowned. “I shouldn’t discuss anyone else’s results with you.”

It could only mean one thing. Dylan found himself pained for Arthur, felt an unexpected throb of empathy.

“He must of gotten into Bronx Science, though,” he suggested to the teacher.

Winegar looked hurt. “Certain persons—” he began, and broke off. Dylan understood: not Bronx Science, not even Brooklyn Tech. Arthur Lomb, chess demolitionist, whiz mimic, master strategist of escape, hadn’t honored his own advice and studied for the test. Perhaps he thought a last-minute asthmatic seizure would carry the day, perhaps proudly held a bowel movement through the test period, perhaps thrown a few yos their way. All useless in the teeth of algebra. Houdini had drowned inside his padlocked cabinet.

From Winegar’s tone it was plain Arthur had bragged to the teacher in advance, worked up expectations with a series of snappy answers and arch asides.

“Well, Sarah Hale is right by my house,” said Dylan, impulsively sadistic. He adopted a moronic, grating monotone, tribute to Arthur Lomb, fallen soldier. “I mean, it does seem like all my friends are going there.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I only took the test to see how I’d do. I might not go.”

Winegar looked traumatized. Sarah J. Hale High School was the next grim repository, following Intermediate School 293 by rote. You could cut class for two years straight, as in the case of Mingus Rude, and they’d eventually palm you off to Sarah J. just to free up the chair in your homeroom for someone else. Dylan might as well have said I think I’ll just go straight to the Brooklyn House of Detention. “I’d hate to see you neglect an opportunity—”

You’re white! Winegar wanted to scream.

Man can fly! Dylan wanted to scream.

“I’ll think it over,” said Dylan.

“You’ve shown an aptitude—”

You should see my altitude.

“I have to talk to Abraham. My dad.”

The mustache might dissolve in Winegar’s fingers if Dylan didn’t show a little mercy. “Certainly. Please let your father know I’d be glad to answer any questions—”

“Okay.” He glanced outside. Brooklyn was captured in a net of false calm, the school drowned. Dylan was bored with Winegar now, prepared to meet his ice-ball fate.

Snow-thick roofs could be a fine place to study cornice-hopping, leave inexplicable footprint trails, jumpings-off to nowhere.

Aeroman, you understand, works locally, like his predecessor.

 

Marijuana was Rachel Ebdus’s totem fume. To inhale it was communion, a forgiving and being embraced by her smoke-form. Dylan Ebdus learned slowly, first faking when Mingus Rude handed him a joint, making sucky sounds around the damp tip as wisps wreathed his head. Then not faking but getting nothing for his trouble apart from a raw impression that his throat was an overpicked nostril. It was only later, the sixth or seventh time he sincerely inhaled, that Mingus’s room slowly widened outward from pinprick size, the thing Dylan had pretended to feel all along.

At that moment Rachel joined him there, in Mingus’s room with the towel stuffed at the bottom of the door and the back windows vented to the icy air. Whether in the drug or in Dylan, she’d seemingly lurked in one to be catalyzed by the other. Or perhaps it was simpler: as while listening to her records, the Modern Jazz Quartet and Nina Simone and Three Dog Night, Dylan could still be just getting acquainted with Rachel, through her appetites, her puns, her drugs.

Dylan stored the Running Crab postcards, maybe thirty-five or forty now, in order by postmark, pinned upright between Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and the New Belmont Specials numbers one through sixteen—a run halted when Abraham had quit painting their covers—on a shelf bookended by the Hugo Award statuette. Dylan archived the postcards alongside Abraham’s commercial art not only to ensure Abraham’s irritation, should father sniff into son’s Batcave while son was at school, but also because it felt deeply right: the objects made a voodoo poem of Abraham-and-Rachelhood, of his parents’ DNA, their semivoluntary sheddings like fingernails or hair, mixed on a shelf.

Dylan determined now to reread the whole sequence of postcards stoned, to start at the beginning again and with the assistance of the drug decode Rachel’s vanishing.

“Check this out,” said Mingus Rude, after he’d fanned the smoke into his backyard and shut the windows. The cold didn’t matter, Mingus always wore his stained army jacket indoors. He was always just passing through, ready for action even when he never stirred from the room for hours.

Now he slipped Rhythm Heritage’s “Theme from S.W.A.T.” extended-mix seven-inch from its sleeve and smoothly to the turntable, moved the needle to the groove.

As crackle gave way to the opening break, Mingus began shifting the record back and forth under the needle, isolating the beat. Under his breath he rapped calls to an imaginary schoolyard audience in a rubbery voice of cartoon affront, the Bugs Bunny of the ghetto.

Dylan nodded appreciatively.

“That’s bad, right?” said Mingus.

“It’s fly,” Dylan ventured.

“All the cuts them DJs can’t even find, I just snuck upstairs and stole out of Junior’s collection. Wanna hear some more?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s right my boy wants to hear more, you bet he does.”

This time Mingus set the needle on Dennis Coffey and the Detroit Guitar Band’s “Scorpio.” Again he scratched it back and forth, again he mumble-rapped along with the song, shy eyes slanted downward.

Mingus might not be ready to take it to the schoolyard, but he had the tracks. They might be the only two kids in Brooklyn with a collection of vinyl beamed direct from Planet Superfly.

Mingus’s room had changed. The Philadelphia Flyers’ Dave Schultz and the Miami Dolphins’ Mercury Morris were gone, the Jackson Five was gone. All three posters had been autographed in real ink, gifts to Barrett Rude Junior. No matter: they’d been ripped from the wall, leaving only shreds under tacks. Just one poster remained, one permanently creased in sixths from its life as a giveaway inside a double gatefold LP: Bootsy Collins and his Rubber Band, in chrome tuxes, platforms, pink smoke. It was autographed too. On a visit upstairs to see Barrett Rude Junior Bootsy himself had been directed to the basement apartment, had stood in Mingus’s room to sign the poster in dripping Garvey Violet, a messy slogan that half-covered his spangled, star-shaped guitar: Love Ya, Bootsy! More recently the poster had been half-covered in silver spray. Mingus had begun tagging inside his room. Too lazy or stoned to go out and put it in the public eye, the tags still flowed from him, DOSE , DOSE , DOSE . Silver loops sprawled over the walls, across molding, touching the ceiling, silver mist even touching the glass of the back windows. The radiator was tagged, a puzzle in three dimensions. If you stood sideways so the radiator’s grille formed a single surface you could read the tag: ART . From other angles it dissolved into stripes, empty code.

Farrah Fawcett-Majors was gone too, the red one-piece and erect nipple and blond tilted grin which had been pinned at telling eye level to Mingus’s single bed. Instead, a clutch of Barrett Rude Junior’s hand-me-down Playboy and Penthouse magazines were inadequately hidden beneath the bed, tattered centerfolds torn from their staples and flapped out like the tongues of exhausted dogs. A white bloom of balled Kleenex failed to conceal a jar of Vaseline.

“You never told me about the girl in Vermont, man.”

“What girl?” Dylan was turning the pages of Defenders #48, ogling Valkyrie in her blue sleeveless armor, her chain-mail brassiere. Mingus’s comics were in tatters, he’d tagged their slick covers with black El Marko.

“King Arthur said you were bragging about it, man, so don’t even try to lie.”

“I didn’t tell Arthur anything. He’s full of it.”

“Look at my boy, trying to cover up! Arthur said you done got over. You can’t hide from me, D-Man, you know you’ll be telling me in a minute.”

Dylan thought for less than a minute and said, “Her name’s Heather.”

“There you go.”

“We went swimming.”

“I heard more than swimming.”

Despite cutting class for two years, Mingus had graduated to Sarah J. Hale. Like a sundial shadow he’d crept into the next time zone, the next phase. His room had changed, his body had changed, he’d grown gruffer and larger, when he loped down Dean Street he chanted rhymes under his breath, disc jockey patter. He had his own stereo. He scored his own pot, nickel bags through a slot in the door of a tenement on Bergen, no longer raiding Barrett Rude Junior’s freezer stash. His room was a sanctum. Though Barrett Rude Senior had moved into the front of the basement apartment Mingus’s room seemed remote from any authority beyond his own. The rooms of the duplex had become fortresses, the three generations of Rudes barricaded into their dominions in an unspoken war. Mingus called his grandfather Senior and never stepped into his front room, which when it was seen through a half-open door looked barren, as though Senior had forgotten how a large room might be filled. Senior sat by the radiator and stared through the bars of the basement windows onto Dean Street as through the bars of a cell. Sometimes he burned candles. Mingus called him Senior, and he called his own father Junior. Mingus’s room smelled of Vaseline and something else. The jacket of the Ohio Player’s Fire, which depicted a girl’s impossibly hot torso with a firehose snaking obscenely between her legs, was sticky with something, resin maybe, and seeds and stems from rolling joints on the jacket were stuck in the something. It was a bit disgusting, but also fascinating, like a leaf stuck in hair or a smear of food on chin you didn’t want to point out.

Junior’s rooms upstairs smelled of something else, something wicked, heated foil, singed crystal grains. Senior melted candles and chain-smoked Pall Malls, frequently igniting the next with the stub of the last, Mingus and Dylan, sealed into the sanctum with the towel at the door, puffed pot, while upstairs in the parlor which nobody entered Junior burned freebase cocaine in a glass pipe.

Barrett Rude Junior and the Famous Flames.

“Don’t think I forgot you was telling me about Heather, man.”

“You wish.”

“How old is she?”

“Thirteen.”

“Older woman—always said that’s the way to go.”

“I gave her a back rub.”

“Oh yeah. There you go. I know you didn’t stop at no back rub.”

“We kissed, in the attic.” Saying the words Dylan smelled the place, recalled groaning wooden stairs, blond light. “All she had on was her swimsuit.”

“Get serious now. She a old thirteen or a young thirteen?” Mingus’s open hands described fullness in the air.

Dylan thought oranges, said, “Grapefruits.”

“Damn !” Mingus’s pleasure was so great he scowled. “Hold on a minute.” He pushed himself up and put Sly’s Fresh on the stereo, cranked the volume. Then he slumped back on his bed, fingers spread wide on thighs. Between thighs and spread fingers, tenting his corduroys, a boner.

“You were saying.”

Something moving in the brain of a doer sang Sly in a lubricious, dozy drawl.

“I’ll show you,” said Dylan. “Turn over.”

Mingus nodded, and obeyed.

Dylan was the storyteller here, he understood now that Mingus had no way to contradict him, was only waiting for the story to continue.

Mingus waiting facedown on his bed as though it had only been a matter of time until Dylan understood how to make him quiet.

Dylan’s palms on Mingus’s shoulders through his green jacket.

“So, you’re the girl, right?”

“Uh huh.”

“They’re bulging out on the sides and I’m going crazy.”

“Uh huh.”

“But I go slow.”

“Then I’m grabbing around the sides.”

“Shit.”

“She doesn’t say anything or try to stop me.”

“Uh.”

“Then I try to get inside her pants.”

The world was unnamed, you wore disguises, were Inhumans. Mingus’s room was another Negative Zone, under water, under the house, detached from Dean Street and whirling away to another place. It had been from the day Mingus stood in his Scout uniform and ran his fingers over merit badges, passport stamps from distant realms.

You built fires, marked bridges and trains, jerked into tissues and socks.

A hand molding Mingus’s ass through his pants didn’t need explaining, it wasn’t a faggot thing, just a story you were telling: the pile of Playboy s under the bed, the massing thunderhead of tits everywhere, of wanting women’s bodies in your life, the horizon breaking into shared view.

Anyway, if you caressed Mingus after all this time you’d only want to take a pick to his nappy-ass ’Fro, you’ve always yearned to know what it would feel like to cradle his head and pluck at it with that mysterious fork.

But tuck weird tenderness away, this is boy time.

“Just touching her ass I was hard like a rock.”

“No shit.”

“She didn’t let me get inside, though.”

“You must of been dying!”

“Uh huh.”

“I’d a said: Yo ! Wait a minute!”

“Well, that’s what I did,” said Dylan, inventing with abandon, unmoored. “I told her look at the condition I was in, what was she going to do about it?”

“Don’t say what I think you about to say.”

They were side by side now, as Dylan and Heather had been side by side in the sun-smashed attic then, stretched on the bedspread, draining lemonade from sweaty glasses, icing their forearms. Only Dylan and Mingus lay stoned, sprawled head-propped on Mingus’s drooly pillows, each grappling through pockets and pretending not to notice. Their breath lengthened, Mingus’s sigh rattling like a small snore.

Mingus reached to the stereo and turned the music up another notch so they were swarmed in funk, stupefied deeper.

“Tell me.”

“We didn’t have a rubber so she had to give me a blow job.”

“Damn!”

They were silent a while. When Mingus spoke his voice was quiet and intent:

“You shoot white or clear?”

“White. It use to come out clear.”

“Yeah.”

Then, after further silence:

“How’s it feel in a girl’s mouth, man?”

“Best feeling in the world,” Dylan lied with certainty.

“I heard that.”

“I wish I had a girl sucking on me right now.”

Another pause, then Dylan said: “You can take it out if you want.”

Mingus’s penis was hued dun-to-rose, like his palms. He trembled in his own hand.

“Close your eyes,” said Dylan.

“No shit?”

“Hands behind your head.”

Dylan let himself get in whispering range before chickening out, close enough to smell the air of Mingus’s legs, the pubic tangle in his jockey fly.

“Do it with your hand,” said Mingus.

When the door flew open Dylan and Mingus were caught Vaseline-fisted, their pants irretrievably down, bunched like mufflers over their Pumas. There wasn’t remotely time to do anything but stare back at Mingus’s father as he stood in the doorway barefoot in his blue satin bell-bottoms and a white designer T cut wide on his shoulders like a girl’s blouse. Barrett Rude Junior dressed more and more like a man who never left the house, his whole parlor floor a sort of self-harem, a region of pajamas. Mingus and Dylan might have been termites or mole-men who’d burrowed underneath the Playboy mansion and now were caught, a spade breaking into their burrow, filling it with daylight. Pants down, they were still more dressed than Junior, Mingus in his jacket, Dylan in his sweater, both in their street shoes. They’d only have to jerk the pants back over their bared thighs and be out on the street again, in motion, rats scurrying, street beings. They pulled them up. Dylan looked at the floor.

“Turn that music down, Gus, man.”

Mingus rolled the dial until it was tinny, faint like Junior’s own music now heard arguing through the ceiling.

Mingus’s father regarded them with narrow, sleepy eyes, smacked lips in slow motion, scratched goatee with one blunt finger’s untrimmed nail. His nostrils flared, perhaps sniffing the medicinal goo on their hands and dicks. He lingered, seeming to wait for the right beat to come in on, not from the stereo but instead following his own inner music. When he spoke again it was low, tossed-off, melodic.

“I don’t really care what you motherfuckers get up to down here, but you got to keep it down, man.”

His weary delivery implied encompassing knowledge of anything they might bother to think they’d invented for themselves, along with a smidgen of affectionate distaste for their clumsy disarray, their poorly upholstered love nest. Maybe Dylan and Mingus ought to have lit incense and worn purple dressing gowns—whatever, it was none of his business. He took the door handle.

“You best know you one lucky soul, Gus, it was me not someone else walked in here. Get a lock for this goddamn door, man.”

Then he was gone.

His few sentences might have been the kindest words Dylan had heard spoken in his life.

“Shit,” said Mingus softly to the closed door, mildly disgusted with his father’s presumption once he could afford to be.

Dylan only watched Mingus and waited. Perhaps he bugged his eyes a little.

“Don’t worry, Junior won’t say anything to your pops. I walked in on him doing way more wack shit than this and he knows it.”

“Really?”

“Don’t even ask.”

That was the end of it, it was as if they’d never been discovered. Mingus flipped the record over, defiantly tweaked the volume upward.

Ten minutes later, sputtering into one another’s fists while Sly’s whole band groaned Que sera, sera, the future’s not ours to see, Dylan was flushed with new understanding: he and Mingus were restored. They had secrets again, ones shored by risked accusations of faggotry, secrets from Arthur Lomb and Robert Woolfolk, absolute secrets from anyone. Even Barrett Rude Junior’s complicity was consoling, they were sealed by it as a lump of wax seals an envelope. Not faggots, of course: best friends, discoverers. Dylan could trust Mingus, they were again sole and extraordinary. Dylan had kept a secret and been poisoned by that secret, he now understood. But it was safe, it was okay: he could tell Mingus about the ring. He could show him the costume.

 

A lone figure on the pavement, a white kid, makes nervous tracks along the block of Atlantic Avenue between Court Street and Boerum Place. It’s a chilly April Tuesday night, just past twelve. In isolation and seeming undersized, a puppet on a human stage, the boy casts shrinking and again lengthening shadows as he moves through streetlight pools. The natural question: What’s he doing there? This block’s bounded on the Court side by Atlantic’s Arabic shops, at Boerum by St. Vincent’s Home for Boys. Across Boerum looms the glass-brick monolith of the Brooklyn House of Detention. The block where he walks is a nullity, though: only a parking garage, a concrete embankment of ramps four levels high. On the other side of the street a Mobil station, closed.

The boy strolls to the garage’s one corner, then the other, as though penned, a gerbil in an invisible Habitrail. What he’s doing there’s really inexplicable, the longer you consider it, which no one does. The block’s a lousy choice for a midnight stroll, something bad is bound to happen.

Exactly the point.

To the corner and back again: hurry up and happen already.

Now it does. Attackers come in their expected fashion, two black teenagers, one tall and one stubby, each wearing a net of stocking wrapped on their thin-shaved skulls—a doo-rag, that’s the term—a pair out of central casting for their part in this tableau. They’re roaming down Boerum Place after who-knows-what diversion up in the Fulton Mall, maybe a late movie at the Duffield or the Albee, or maybe they’ve just scored a nickel bag at one of the pot stores on Myrtle-otherwise-know-as-Murder Avenue. Anyway, their whiteboy radar’s operative tonight. Tonight’s dish is served up a bit too rare to be believed: under the shadow of the vast garage they can afford to take their time, have some fun. There’s really no one around for miles. White boy this stupid deserves whatever comes, only hope he’s not some retard who starts crying too quick.

“Yo, let me talk to you for a minute.”

The white boy only blinks. The two are strangers, unknown to him from school. This is a first encounter. It ought to be one they’ll remember.

“What, you don’t hear him talkin’ to you, man?”

“Nigger’s deaf or some shit.”

“Maybe he don’t like the color of your skin, man, maybe that’s the problem.”

Then’s when it comes out of the night sky, the blur in cape and mask. The leap begins three stories above, on the roof of the garage, and for the first moment looks to be nothing better than a headfirst plummet, a suicidal drop. The black teenager wearing the home-stitched outfit and with the ring on his finger has been practicing for weeks, in backyards and on roofs—this is the first time, though, he’s taken it to the street.

No problem, he’s a natural. Whatever it is flying requires—balance, poise, unhesitation, an organ for sensing air waves —he’s apparently got. His swoop begins just below the garage’s second story, two balled fists leading the charge as he curves from the expected collision with the pavement, first falling aslant, then unmistakably horizontal. By the time he collides with the white boy’s would-be yokers he’s rocketing upward, back toward the sky. The flying boy batters at shoulders and doo-ragged crowns with his fist and again with his knees and lastly with his sneaker toes as he soars over—a perfect and bewildering assault from the sky. The two victims stumble cowering to the ground, incredulous, swearing, caressing their bruised noggins.

“Fuck was that ?”

“Shit, man, you clocked me!”

“I didn’t touch you, man, fuck you talkin’ ’bout?”

The flying boy rolls in air, soars down again, leading with his knuckles. His white cape flutters and flaps dramatically at the elbows of his Spirograph-decorated long-sleeve T. He’s wearing a sewn white mask too, one tied behind his ears and open at the top to vent his Afro to the air, like Marvel’s Black Goliath.

“Book, man, let’s get out of here!”

“Go!”

Seconds later they’ve vanished, fled down Boerum Place, toward Bergen, home to the Gowanus Houses most likely. The costumed boy lands beside the white boy on the pavement and yells at the departing shadows: “Run, motherfuckers! That’s right! You don’t mess with Arrowman!”

“Aer -o-man,” corrects the white boy.

“That’s what I said—Arrowman.”

chapter  14

Someone had painted the interior walls here a lush medical pink in semigloss, a shade like Kaopectate, or the representation of a suffering brain before its relief by a headache pill. On this dirty, leak-warped surface was pinned bank-giveaway calendar, mimeographed schedule, yellowed fifties-vintage Alcoholics Anonymous recruitment flyer, not much else—nothing, say, like a placard reading YOU DON ’ T HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO WORK HERE BUT IT HELPS, certainly no snapshots of wives or pets or children. The wooden desk on either side of which the two men sat showed coffee-steam rings, paperclip scars, thirty years of gouges in its cherry-blond veneer: it had been reassigned from a nearby public school for its use here. On the side of the desk which faced the door of the pink office the desk bore a few nervous tags, graffiti or scratchiti accomplished with ballpoint or key tip or pocketknife at discreet knee level, where resentful hands could be hidden from their questioner’s view while an earnest listening expression was maintained on the face above.

A folder lay open on the desk between the two men.

It was July 1978. Each wore a tie: the thirtyish white man over a white, short-sleeve shirt with no jacket, the tie a fat powder-blue number, color like an inflamed nerve in the pink brain of the office. The elderly black man wore an unfashionably thin black tie, clipped neatly inside the vest of his newly thrift-store-purchased gray pinstripe three-piece, a banker’s suit except for clownishly wide lapels. The vest’s five buttons were done up, sealing thin torso like a sausage in casing. No air-conditioning here, so a lace-embroidered handkerchief got some use blotting brow, nose tip, and corded well of throat, visible just above the firm knot of the tie.

“I tell you, there’s goings-on in that house,” said Barrett Rude Senior.

“Why make it your business?”

“A man of God is duty bound.”

“This man of God ought to make three years clear of the girls on Pacific before he gets on anyone else’s ass,” said the man behind the desk. “Just because some rookie took pity and didn’t book you doesn’t mean the write-up didn’t find its way to my desk. Don’t play like you’re getting over, Barry, don’t think for a minute I don’t know what goes down.”

The man behind the desk might have seemed young to speak this way to the elder Rude, or to anyone: his hard-boiled tone a tad unearned, street dialect feigned. If so, explanation for his arrogance wasn’t in the pistol holstered on his ankle, evident as he hitched his pants to cross one leg over the other, nor in the handcuffs which dangled from his belt; really, these were all symptoms of one thing, all indicative of a type of person likely to fall to this particular line of work. An incarcerated man would call the type a cowboy. Like bail-bounty hunters or prison guards, cowboys were the type of men too sadistic or willful to make the conventional police force. Among parole officers the scattering of do-gooding Serpico types are a tiny minority; cowboys are the norm. To them busting your balls is daily static, nothing remarkable.

If the halfway house and rehab center and DMV weren’t sufficient to explain a certain thuggish vibe on Nevins between Flatbush and State, here’s the secret: a parole office carefully unadvertised on the second floor of a building on the corner of Schermerhorn Street, six offices off a waiting room, kitchen converted to a lab for on-the-spot urinalysis, windows of one back room heavily barred for use as an impromptu holding cell. Barrett Rude Senior had been making his weekly trudge to this place since the morning he first reported, the day after getting off the Greyhound at Port Authority, never less than impeccably decked out. His officer didn’t return the favor, dressing with his shirt untucked, beard stubble unshaved, with redolent sandwich wrappings unfurled on his desk.

“You misunderestimate an old man,” said Barrett Rude Senior. “I was attempting to bring those girls the blessings of Jesus.”

“You and Jesus keep your blessings off Pacific Street at one A . M., that’s my advice. You got a signature for me?”

Barrett Rude Senior was made to produce an autographed sheet, certifying hours of community service under supervision of Pastor Gib at the Myrtle Avenue Parlor of God Ministry. In lieu of employment a parolee needed some clock to punch; this was his, personally selected. He nonetheless felt it as a humiliation. Each week a bolt of rage split his countenance as he fished with skeletal fingers in his breast pocket for the required proof.

“I go out walking,” he said, rigid with damaged pride, not letting the point go. “Spend too much time in that house I got to air out my mind.”

“Take afternoon walks, not midnight. Feed the ducks.”

“Sounds come through the ceiling nobody should hear because nobody should be making.”

“What am I supposed to say, Barry? Wear earmuffs.” The parole officer glanced at the page and handed it back.

“I got to be relocated out of that house because the devil is making trouble in my mind. Knowing that boy’s getting warped up and not doing anything.”

“Terms of your transfer up from Carolina were habitation in your son’s apartment.” He spoke as though reciting some dull recipe: two parts water to one part rice. “We can talk about sending your file back to the Raleigh office and you with it, if that’s what you want. Your being in New York City where miniskirts walk the streets all night depends on maintaining current residence and you know it.”

“I’m going on the record as it’s not good for my rehabilitation to be around hard narcotics and funk music. Write it down.”

“C’mon, Barry. Be straight with me.”

“I regret to say my only son is courting Satan. Put it in your report. He and I will come to blows or worse. I’m asking a relocation for the good of everyone involved and you’re responsible. I’d take the child with me but he’s already half a man himself and will have to fight through it on his own. I pray nightly, when I can hear myself over the bellows and groans and the crackle of the pipe.”

“We’re concerned here with you keeping together what you need to keep together and you’re not talking to me. I’ve heard this stuff before, it’s old tunes. I’m not going to have your son arrested and I’m not a religious man, so far as I can hear you haven’t said a word yet.”

“I want to get a room in the Times Plaza and take the pressure off.”

“Who’s paying?”

“I believe the devil will pay to have me out of his hair.”

“That old fleabag hotel’s no better than a jail. Half the rooms are filled with cons killing time between bids.”

Barrett Rude Senior stiffened again as though he’d been misunderstood. “From the church I know a man there, a fine saintly man. He gazes out his window and he doesn’t see filth all around him.”

“The Birdman of Alcatraz, eh?”

Senior only returned a look of unshrouded disdain. In his glare he summoned for one moment the mummified eloquence of a legacy of chanting men in cotton fields, sweat-bathed parishioners, masked riders, galley ships from Africa, all the parole officer with his Dion and the Belmonts Bronx accent couldn’t pretend to fathom. For one moment it was as if Senior had ridden into this meeting on a mule, as if the baying of beagles as they crashed through swampland had leaked into the room.

Whatever grain of tenderhearted Serpico resided in the parole officer’s cowboy psyche was touched for just that moment. “It’s really shitty between you and your son, huh, Barry? I have to figure you’re not kidding me to want to move into that dive the Times Plaza.”

“I seen women on women and other counternatural things.”

“Enough already, you’re giving me hives. Let me see what I can do.”

 

“Born in Babylonia, moved to California—”

“We are the knights who say Ni !”

“Get all excited and go to a yawning festival.”

“You—must—bring—us—a—shrubbery!”

“Hey, let’s go get Blimpies, I’m so hungry I could beat a dead horse. Ow, shit, what’s that for?”

“I said I’d punch you the next time you said Blimpie.”

“You bloody bastard!”

In ragged, rasping voice: “It’s the blimp, it’s the blimp, it’s the mothership!”

“C’mon.”

Falsetto, as they crossed the street from school: “Basketball Jones, I got a basketball Jones —”

Gabriel Stern and Timothy Vandertooth ranted in a vocal graffiti of impersonations: Steve Martin and Marty Feldman and George Carlin, Devo, Python, Zappa, Spock, The Prisoner. Gabe Stern had memorized the songs of Tom Lehrer, Tim Vandertooth could do Liverpool, Wild and Crazy Guy, Peter Sellers–Swami. Induction into the company of Gabe Stern and Tim Vandertooth had begun the second week of school, Monday, just after three o’clock. Gabe and Tim surrounded Dylan before he reached the subway station on Fourteenth Street and bought him a slice of Original Ray’s, extra cheese. Then they went to Crazy Eddie’s showroom and played the demonstration model of Pong, writhing in fake agony at each loss, oblivious to customers or staff.

“You bastard!”

“Revenge, I swear revenge.”

“I fart in your general direction.”

Gabe, broad-shouldered, dark, and curly-haired, had blistered nuclei of acne on each cheek, as though acid had been dripped there and was eating through. Tim was sandy, angular, walked hippily, seemingly steering his lean, high body like a kite in wind. Beside them Dylan was smaller. He’d grown, had private developments, weird fists of hair, but with Gabe and Tim felt childlike and possibly invisible. Anyway everyone’s body betrayed them in different ways, it was all forgiven and never discussed.

Dylan folded into the unit of Gabe and Tim as a redundant third: arbiter, audience, appendix. One day Gabe and Tim might seem to be playing to Dylan, wooing him, as though he’d be capable of adjudicating a conflict they’d been trying all their lives to resolve: Which of us is funnier, louder, more irresistible? Those days Dylan felt that it was essential he balance the two in their mania, that if he chose or even slightly favored either Tim or Gabe the other would die sizzling on the pavement like the Wicked Witch of the West. Other days their energies were exclusive, circuit complete between themselves, Dylan might as well have been watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon on television, head propped in his hands, antics reflected in his glasses.

Gabe and Tim would abruptly fall to wrestling on the sidewalk in front of school, knapsacks skidding to the curb as if attacked, yoked. This was different, though, from real hostilities, which drew instantaneous crowds. Anyone besides Dylan knew not to pay attention. When either Tim or Gabe got the other subdued, knees on chest, head clamped in elbow, arm wrenched high behind back, he’d demand some idiot password.

“Say Fanta.”

“No. Ow! Dr. Pepper!”

“Not Dr. Pepper, Fanta.”

“Tab!”

“Fanta.”

“Mr. Pibb! No. Shit, stop! Bastard, bloody bastard!”

“You know what I want.”

“Okay, ow, okay, okay—Fanta!”

“Now Sprite!”

“No! Never that! Let go!”

Stuyvesant drew high-scorers from all five boroughs, a migration hidden under the skin of rush hour, subway floods of Lacoste-clad Upper West Siders who’d known each other since kindergarten, dazed black math geniuses from the South Bronx who slumped in the hallways wondering if they’d ever recover from the shock, studious Puerto Rican nerds from Stuyvesant Town who’d only crossed the street to attend school and were still in thrall to local bullies from their pre-high-school lives, diligent Chinese achievers from assorted immigrant neighborhoods, Greenpoint, Sunnyside, usually in sequences of siblings, an older sister in an upper grade nearby to grab an ear if a younger began to trickle toward the mass of kids who cut class almost from day one, smoking joints and playing frisbee in Stuyvesant Park down the block. The lemmings gathered from every corner of the city, some unlucky souls coming from Staten Island on the ferry every morning had to set their alarms for five or six or some wilder hour.

Gabriel Stern and Timothy Vandertooth lived on Roosevelt Island, had met three years before when their families moved to the new housing there. Roosevelt Island was an enigma, carless and dogless, haunted by the ruins of a tuberculosis sanitorium on the southern shore. Residence there was like cult membership. The science-fiction tram on pulleys which dangled beside the span of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and which Tim and Gabe rode to school and home together every day stood nicely for their resolute and impenetrable best-frienditude: they were freaks beamed daily to the island of Manhattan from their own subordinate, moonlike isle, no wonder they spoke a private language, nanu-nanu, live long and prosper.

Stuyvesant was Jewish white, wasp white, hippie white, Chinese, black, Puerto Rican, and much else but crucially it was nerd, nerd, nerd, nerd, the great family of those able to ace the entrance test. Pencil chewers, teacher’s pets in glasses, the Arthur Lomb in everyone unbound now, no longer having to cower. It was pathetic to think of Arthur himself, on course for this natural destination all those years at Saint Ann’s, then derailed by Dean Street only six months or so short of his goal. The mystery was how so many who’d toed the line, favored studies over socialization in order to pass the test, then within a few weeks of freshman orientation broke out Jim Morrison– and Led Zeppelin–painted jean jackets and began loafing all day in the park, immaculate scholastic careers ruined overnight.

Timothy Vandertooth and Gabriel Stern didn’t drift into stoner affiliation, not exactly. The sole class they cut was gym, and though they did spend that period and lunch hour and some after-school hours in the park they were inept with frisbees and retained their short haircuts and were uninterested in Hendrix or Morrison or Zeppelin, music too blunt and earnest to be swallowed straight. The languorous, slack-haired park girls paid Tim and Gabe no attention at all, seemed unable to parse jokes in any register.

“I swear she almost looked at you when your voice cracked. You ought to talk like that all the time, get a tank of helium.” Tim and Gabe discussed matters in full voice as if girls were deaf, lame payback for the silent treatment they themselves received.

“I think she was distracted staring at your pants, actually. Check your fly, maybe there’s a spot of chocolate milk or scum or something.”

“It’s because of the zucchini I’m concealing in my underwear, my new method which I highly recommend. I offer it free, you don’t owe any royalties. The cold wears off eventually.”

Tim and Gabe would smoke pot or not. Either way they didn’t fit, were tourists, comic relief to the longhairs in the park who were comic relief to them in turn, never clear who ought to be laughing at who, only that Tim and Gabe were moving at a faster clip, their movements and thoughts hectic, jerky. Those first months of high school Tim and Gabe waited for something else to complete them, or the reverse, something waited to complete them. They were stalled like robots, incanting their encoded frustration.

“Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Open the pod bay doors, Hal.”

“I am not a number. I am a free man! ”

You waited too, feeling it.

Another sensibility agitated in periphery, one located in the conjunction of the midnight movies at the Eighth Street Playhouse and the Waverly, on Sixth Avenue: Clockwork Orange, Pink Flamingos, Rocky Horror, Eraserhead. Within six weeks you’d seen all but Eraserhead, the prospect of which was too terrifying, though you’d never admit it, just fumbled out an excuse about being grounded that night. In fact you’d never been grounded in your life, wondered where you’d even picked up the word.

One guy came to class in Tim Curry pancake whiteface and black-varnished nails every day, the focus of scoffing laughter and secret awe.

Each morning you passed Max’s Kansas City on your way from the Fourteenth Street subway to school, talismanic site of what exactly you weren’t sure.

The band Devo might have to do with the new something in the air, lyrics about mongoloids and swelling itching brains offering some ironic back door into animal nature, a way to evade the appalling, head-on Jim Morrison route.

The main problem any kid faced if he could have found the word was how to find himself in any way sexy. Forget girls themselves for the time being, the problem was between you and the mirror.

Manhattan thankfully didn’t give a shit about you.

What about Mingus and Aeroman, though?

Dylan crept as he reapproached Dean Street in the perishing light of afternoons spent with Gabe and Tim bouncing in and out of Crazy Eddie’s and Ray’s Famous and Blimpies and J&R Music World and Washington Square Park, crept in his mind, furtive like an escapee returning nightly for meals in his old cell. The block was dead as far as he could tell. He’d killed it by graduating from I.S. 293 and leaving for Stuyvesant. It wasn’t only Mingus. Henry, Alberto, Lonnie, Earl, Marilla, and La-La had all fled the scene or been so transformed they might not be recognizable. Some days you passed in silence some kid you’d known, they had a mustache or tits and they were black and you were white and you didn’t say a word.

There was no new crop of kids unless you counted the scruffy batch, mostly Puerto Rican, who didn’t even know you were meant to gather in Henry’s yard or at the abandoned house, they didn’t even know Henry’s name, they squatted like bugs on the sidewalk and were as little able to carry forward the block’s work as bugs would have been. One day Dylan saw one scratching some primitive botched skully board, not on a slate but on a pebbly square of poured concrete, hopeless, like a fallout survivor dim with radiation sickness sketching a blueprint for reinvention of the wheel. One day Dylan passed the buglike kids and one called out “Honky” in a voice so tentative Dylan died laughing at the sweetness of it. The abandoned house wasn’t even abandoned anymore. It wore a sign reading CINDERELLA #3 , A PROJECT OF BROOKLYN UNION GAS , and one day they punched through the cement blocks and replaced them with dull aluminum-frame windows, dumb eyes. The site of mystery was destroyed. For a few months bums resolutely drank and passed out on the stoop anyway, then moved on.

Maybe every other week, though, Dylan would find Mingus seated on his own stoop, like a bum, with a forty-ounce in a bag. Mingus ruled his own yard again, now that Barrett Rude Senior had shifted into the welfare hotel on Atlantic Avenue, several blocks away. He’d greet Dylan in the old manner, as though they’d been interrupted a minute before.

“That Parlet record I was telling you about? I just scored it.”

“Oh yeah?”

“That shit is serious, I’m telling you, Dillinger, you need to check it out now.”

Dylan and Mingus met according to no plan or reason, might have been darts hitting a calendar, a roulette of days. He and Mingus would go into the basement apartment and get high and Tim and Gabe, Dylan’s whole Stuyvesant world, would evaporate, Manhattan unlikely as Neptune or Vulcan, restored to its status as an unexplored planet, the future.

Hallway and bathroom were tagged now, the whole basement a subway tunnel. Senior’s room was still off-limits, though, an abandoned shrine which stank of dust-rotting candles.

Mingus chugged beer now, Colt and Cobra, a regular thing.

Dylan didn’t, only got high.

Dylan knew Mingus still hooked up with Arthur Lomb too, saw Arthur’s practice tags in ballpoint on scattered pages around Mingus’s room, sometimes saw Arthur himself. Arthur Lomb had the curse of puniness: he still looked eleven or twelve, no number of what-ups and yos, no degree of street slaunch in his walk, no green suede Pumas could compensate. After flunking the Stuyvesant test Arthur’s mother had falsified their residence to get him transferred to Edward R. Murrow, a white high school deep in the Irish Italian heart of the borough. It was too late, though, he might as well have been at Sarah J. Hale from the look of things. Arthur had become yucky, his sleeves always crusted with Krylon, his red hair slack and ratty, jeans black. Arthur was a pothead now, often looked red-eyed, glazed with an afternoon’s doping. His street credibility was all he had and it was direly thin.

Arthur’s being seen with Mingus was a gift Dylan wouldn’t begrudge him now: it was a thing Arthur needed much worse than Dylan ever had. Let Arthur imagine a parity. In fact, Dylan knew, their two friendships with Mingus, his and Arthur’s, were vastly different. Dylan and Mingus lived in a motherless realm, full of secrets. Aeroman, for one thing. Certain other things, for another. Dylan doubted Arthur even had pubic hair yet. Plus Dylan and Mingus knew each other’s dads, and Mingus went into Dylan’s house. Dylan was certain Arthur wouldn’t ever want Mingus to see inside his own mommified sanctuary of Hi-C juice and Hydrox cookies.

When Mingus was a dollar short of a nickel bag he and Dylan might scrape for loose change in Dylan’s kitchen or even climb the stairs to Abraham’s studio. There Mingus waited at the door, dim transistor jazz seeping through, while Dylan cadged folding money. Abraham, always sensing the lurker in the corridor, would ask:

“Is that Mingus?”

“Yeah.”

“He doesn’t need to hide. Tell him to come say hello.”

In Abraham’s presence Mingus Rude grew courtly, called Abraham Mr. Ebdus, asked about the progress of his film. Abraham would sigh and produce some opaque riddle.

“As well ask Sisyphus, my dear Mingus.”

“Cookypuss ?” Mingus would be quick with a free-associated reply. He and Abraham had hatched some running joke of mishearing one another. They couldn’t get enough of it.

“Ah, Cookypuss. Maybe Cookypuss for one is showing some progress. I’d like to think so.”

On the other hand, the two no longer went upstairs to Barrett Rude Junior. The stairway between basement and parlor floors might as well have been sealed now. Dylan saw evidence Mingus avoided the upstairs kitchen, cans of Chef Boyardee heated on Senior’s hot plate, Slim Jim wrappers in the bathroom garbage pail. When they cranked Mingus’s stereo, though, Dylan felt himself expecting, even yearning for Junior at the door singing Fuck you doin’ Gus?, his sweet disapproval a fragment of melody you pined to hear whole.

But no amount of volume drew Junior to the door, in Mingus’s apartment they were mole-men now for sure, on their own deep exploration.

Foxy’s “Get Off” they played fifteen times in a row, louder each time, trying to destroy the distance between that rubbery, fleshlike bass line and themselves, as if the song was a photograph, a Playboy centerfold they enlarged by degrees until they could enter the frame, walk into the picture.

They also stared at certain photographs until they might have left sheddings from their blistered eyeballs strewn on the pages, then exchanged relieving hand jobs without making a particularly big deal of it.

Mingus kept the ring and the costume, Aeroman was officially him. Both were stashed on a shelf high above the door, with a hockey trophy and Mingus’s old football helmet, ring out of sight above eye level, costume balled behind the helmet, nothing any random visitor to the room, Arthur Lomb, say, would bother remarking on. Whether Mingus ever donned them out of Dylan’s company went undiscussed. Afternoons passed when Aeroman wasn’t mentioned, the ring wasn’t handled or even seen, Dylan sat on Mingus’s bed and glanced at the shelf between joint tokes but nothing happened, they’d hit the street or catch a Kung Fu flick or Dylan would only go home stoned to whatever supper Abraham had prepared. Then Aeroman might as well have been the lead in a quickly canceled Marvel title like Omega or Warlock, or a murdered sidekick, quickly avenged then forgotten, or a name from the Golden Age, perhaps, like Doll Man or the Human Bomb: in other words, no superhero at all, not really, not one anyone remembered.

Other days he’d have told Abraham he was having dinner at Mingus’s house, or slipped out after wolfing dinner at Abraham’s table to return to the basement apartment, and then after a certain hour Mingus would glance at the shelf too, and say:

“Fight crime?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“Uh huh.”

Mingus would grin and say, “Look at you, you’re like, I thought you would never ask.”

Aeroman flew six or seven times that fall, was perhaps involved in eight or nine incidents, could claim maybe three bona fide rescues, legible crimes authentically flown down on and busted up. On State Street near Hoyt they halted a six-foot Puerto Rican showing a steak knife to a small Chinese guy, who was busy pulling balled wadded dollars from his pockets, magicianlike, in terrified surrender. Mingus-Aeroman swooped from a fire escape and scissored legs around the knife-wielder’s neck, torque twisting them both to the pavement, Dylan scooted from an apartment building’s entrance to pounce on the knife, plucking it from the ground and surrounding it with his body as though it might detonate. Puerto Rican and Chinese both fled in shock. Though Dylan waved the fluffy bills and called after the victim, he didn’t turn. Breathless and amazed at confiscated weapon and money, Dylan and Mingus stuffed Aeroman’s outfit and mask into a paper sack and walked to Steve’s Restaurant on Third Avenue, celebrated with midnight cheeseburgers and chocolate shakes, adrenaline and marijuana buzz given way to a ravenous appetite, adolescent cells howling for lipids. Waiters gave the hairy eyeball all through the meal, suspecting a scarf-and-run, but Dylan and Mingus didn’t care. They had the dough, even left an ostentatious fuck-you tip.

On Smith Street, howling an unrehearsed cowboys-and-indians woo-woo-woo as he descended, Aeroman spooked drunks boxing at the door of a social club, sole duty at the tail end of a long night’s stalking around, prowling for gigs, killing time tagging on metal doors. On Third Avenue in a cold mid-October rain he foiled a holdup attempt at one of the Plexiglas-barrier Chinese joints, leaving a spilled mound of orange fried rice trampled to pudding at the entrance. At the far end of the Heights Promenade, under cover of darkness, he was cooed at in his costume by men rendezvousing on park benches, men who didn’t need his protection. On Pacific Street near Court, Dylan and Aeroman found roof access to a tenement and lay on their bellies, in costume and street clothes, peering over the cornice, memorizing the life of the unfamiliar block, every girl screaming “Mira, mira! ” at someone who wouldn’t reply, every boy slapping a spaldeen into the joint of a wall, every grandmother window-perched on Buddha arms, watching just as Mingus and Dylan watched, absorbed, doing nothing.

The bridge crossing after dark was a sure spot, a famous mistake to walk there at night, so they took it to the bridge: Dylan standing as bait by the massive shoring tower still bearing Mono’s and Lee’s fabulously weathered autographs, Mingus in costume flown to a perch on the high, swaying cable. Below, on the streets, it was late summer, but here above the city winter was arriving, swept off the ocean. Dylan was mugged in minutes, it was comically predictable, almost corny when two homeboys lurched out of the gloom beyond the tower and said: “Hey, whiteboy, lemme borrow a dollar off you, man.”

Dylan gladly played at reaching into his pockets for money, his attackers fish in a barrel. Only Mingus didn’t shoot the fish, he didn’t swoop.

“What you checkin’ around for, man?”

Dylan had made them nervous. They smelled setup in his hesitation and followed his gaze to the bridge, the sky-harp of spun lines. So all three saw the caped figure struggling in the gust which had torn it from the cable, saw Mingus cycling in air, trying to reclaim a footing, nearly doing so before being wind-wrested into the breach between the bridge and the water, the wild void. All three watching lost sight of him below the line of the bridge’s roadway. He was just a twinkle, mask, cape, Puma soles maybe, then nothing at all.

He’d been blown from the bridge.

Dylan turned on the walkway’s planks and bolted for the Brooklyn end, abandoned the scene exactly as Rachel had always told him to do— Just run, kiddo, use those pogo sticks, they can’t catch up with you! —and which he’d never done once in a thousand yokings. For Mingus he found his legs, he ran. He nearly tumbled dodging a beat cop staked at the foot of the stairs, waved a quick hello-I-must-be-going to the cop’s dull glower, then panted on, limbs wheeling. Cabs curled off the bridge, faceless, cornering through Cadman Plaza to Henry Street, Clinton Street, to placid brownstones with mock gaslight fixtures. There wasn’t anybody to appeal to for help, Dylan was alone, Mingus, Aeroman, ring all drowned, smashed on the water. Dylan veered to the dark paths below the bridge, seeking the edge of the river, the junk-strewn wasteland where the city hid crashed police cars and looted parking meters and other evidence of helplessness.

Mingus sat hunched and dripping at the base of the anchorage, twisting water from the tips of his cape, stain spreading on the concrete embankment like a snow angel. Dylan arrived gasping, hot-faced, couldn’t speak before Mingus said: “Ho, shit, man.”

“You’re okay?”

“I was swimming, man. I don’t even know how to swim.” He spoke with quiet amazement, nodding his head at the water.

“What do you mean?”

“Like a fish, D-Man.”

“You’re saying the ring gave you the power of swimming ?”

“Or flying underwater, don’t ask me. I was up to some serious Aquaman shit, though.”

They slunk to Dean. The staged rescue left unfinished on the walkway and the plummet from the wires, both were put behind them, though Dylan and Mingus and Aeroman skirted the bridge after that. Aeroman, having been laid flat to dry, mellowed on the shelf for weeks, regathering his wits and bravado, perhaps, shaking off effects of the fall. Mingus didn’t reach for the costume and Dylan didn’t push. Dylan instead became briefly obsessed with clandestine powers in the ring. Why imagine Aaron X. Doily had plumbed them all? Possibly Aeroman was named prematurely, had more to offer. Dylan wore the ring and immersed his head in Mingus’s filled tub, hoping to breathe underwater. He snorted a flood into his lungs, came up hacking, nearly puked, bathwater scalding his nostrils.

The ring also conferred no X-ray vision, though they spent one thrilled night persuading themselves, scowling hard at dresses, black hos working Pacific and Nevins, white Saint Ann’s girls massed at the Baskin-Robbins on Montague.

“Wait, wait, I see something.”

“My turn now.”

“Oh—sweet—Jesus. She’s wearing no panties.”

Aeroman’s last venture that first season of high school was in a light, freak-early midnight snowfall two weeks past Thanksgiving, Dylan walking State Street, Mingus hopping the rooftops above, keeping pace. Ever since the Chinese victim who’d dropped his money, State between Hoyt and Bond was their lucky mugging strip, safe distance from anyone they’d know on Dean or Bergen, dark with a smashed streetlamp, close enough to the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway stop that dumb junkies frightened of venturing into the Heights considered it safe prowling for renovators’ wives, trembling whiteboys, geezers. Tonight, though, a snowball was all Dylan drew. A lone, tall Puerto Rican kid leaning on a car scooped a windshield-mass of fresh stuff and flung an unerring bull’s-eye in Dylan’s back. When Dylan whirled he said: “Try it, motherfucker, I dare you throw one.”

At that moment Mingus descended with a cradled armload, shoveled it into the tall kid’s collar.

Then Mingus landed softly beside Dylan and they ran together hooting, Mingus stripping the costume and cape off over his head, momentarily bare-chested in the snowfalling night.

Mingus afternoons, Aeroman nights, they were untellable the next day at Stuyvesant, if he’d even wanted to try, if he’d somehow corralled Tim Vandertooth’s and Gabriel Stern’s ears for the attempt. Dylan had no interest in telling. Mornings after, he felt himself an orbiter on reentry, his hidden knowledge sealed in flame. Mingus and Aeroman were a million miles away, another realm, Brooklyn. Besides, the thing coming for Tim and Gabe had found them.

Once it arrived it was obvious, had a common name already known: punk. Or new wave. They were related strands: Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, Cheap Trick. Discerning their difference, articulating your precise relation, that was part of the point, a continuum of the now it was suddenly clear anyone could be placed on. Even the longhaired stoners in their refusal were anti-punk, defining something.

Tim came to school one day with a point-studded dog collar. He showed them how it worked, a simple snap. Gabe taunted him uneasily for a week, then went out and bought a Ramonesian leather jacket loaded with zippers and buckles, smelling of preservatives and sizing, almost like one of Abraham’s canvases. Gabe slapped the jacket against a rock in the park, trying to age it. They studied the results. The jacket looked new as licorice. Or the problem was themselves, their bangs, hair curled over their ears. The next week Tim and Gabe returned from Roosevelt Island having fucked up their hair with children’s scissors. The jacket looked slightly improved.

Tim smoked cigarettes now.

Gabe etched a tiny swastika on his forearm with a razor blade. “You know what my parents would do to me if they saw this? ” he whispered darkly, like he’d been kidnapped by Satanists and forced to recite a pledge.

The girls with short black-dyed hair were suddenly visible. Sarcastic, pale, and titless, they were a different flavor, previously overlooked.

A few even had tits, which might violate punk aesthetics but you’d consider making an exception.

Dylan shunted knapsack-loads of Rachel’s Blind Faith and Creedence Clearwater Revival records to Bleecker Bob’s record exchange, embarrassed to see them in the house, returned with the Clash’s Give ’Em Enough Rope.

Steve Martin was for children.

There wasn’t much terror. Fourteenth Street, First Avenue, they were scungy but populated, jostling with drug traffic but not a lot of yoking. Maybe you’d outgrown victim size, though it was hard to imagine there could be universal consensus on that point, you had to stay alert. A girl your age was pushed from a subway platform on her way to Music and Art, a cellist who lost her arm under the train and had it reattached in a miracle surgery. The incident made a brief noise of panic among white kids on subways and their parents, but that was 135th Street, Harlem. Poor kid but what did she expect? Thank God you hadn’t gone to Music and Art. To escape the outer boroughs only to soar on the subway past Manhattan’s safe zones all the way into Harlem was ironic, one crazy mistake you’d at least avoided.

It was the leather jacket which caused the only piece of trouble. For once it wasn’t Dylan’s trouble. A Puerto Rican perhaps eighteen or nineteen—mustached and tall and particularly thick around the middle, pearish, apparently self-appointed one-man gang patrolling Fourteenth Street between Second and Third—isolated Gabe in his new leather from among the hundreds of other streaming Stuyvesant kids and stepped up to block his path on the sidewalk. Something affronted him and he demanded reciprocal understanding from Gabe.

“You wanna fight me?”

“What? ” Gabe squinted in fierce incredulity.

“Think you’re tough, you wanna fight me?” He poked Gabe’s shoulder. Gabe looked to Tim and Dylan, who both stepped back.

Gabe enunciated with Maxwell Smart precision. “I actually don’t think I’m tough, no.”

“You in a crew ?”

This was a problem of codes, the self-loathing ironies of punkism not sufficiently conveyed yet to the Puerto Rican–gang quadrant of the universe. The guy himself wore just a jean jacket, wasn’t particularly fitted out or flamboyant. A red handkerchief knotted on his belt loop was maybe significant. Again Gabe’s glance sought Tim or Dylan but they’d melted away. Throngs parted around Gabe and his confronter, uninterested.

When Gabe spoke again sarcasm curdled to a whine. “I’m just wearing it, it doesn’t mean anything.” Dylan detected scars in Gabe’s cringe-readiness, schoolyard mortifications they’d never have discussed. His tone wasn’t so far from Arthur Lomb pleading I can’t breathe.

“Don’t come around here wearin’ that, man, or I have to take it off you.”

The fact of their being lost in a crowd was no help, only added a lunatic degree of humiliation. So despite Tim’s mockery, Gabe diligently obeyed the Puerto Rican. He required Tim and Dylan to accompany him the long way around that block every day for weeks. Even taking that precaution he was spooked, now hustled through subway stations and down certain blocks peeking over his shoulder, wore his jacket with doomy fear—not a bad accouterment, actually, to his punk aura.

Incredibly, the one day they defied the edict, again in what should have been a protective swarm, the guy’s radar guided him from nowhere to square against Gabe. He chest-bumped him out of Tim and Dylan’s company and to the curb.

“I tole you. Now we gotta fight.”

Gabe’s face was hot red and he spoke quietly under a strain of absurdity. “I’m not fighting you.”

It wasn’t Dylan or Aeroman who rescued Gabe, but Tim, in a delicate maneuver Dylan barely understood. Stepping out to where Gabe and the guy stood in the street he reached into the vest pocket of his own jean jacket and showed his Marlboros.

“Smoke?” He inserted a cigarette in his own mouth and held out the pack. As the Puerto Rican stared, weighing the offering, Tim said:

“Give him a break, man. He doesn’t mean anything, he can’t help it.”

Seemingly the Puerto Rican had only needed Gabe’s deep objectionability confirmed by an outside source. He accepted a cigarette. “Tell him not to come around here,” he said, ignoring Gabe, all violence leached from his tone.

“Sure, sure.”

For the first time Dylan and perhaps Gabe really noticed how Tim was taller, cooler, maybe really cool, in fact. He’d quit wearing the dog collar. His hair took the choppy haircut well, unlike Gabe’s curls. He triumphed each time those two wrestled, when you thought of it—only Gabe ever had to cry out Sprite or clitoris. But anyway, they hadn’t wrestled for months. Tim now cut all classes, was flunking madly, while Gabe like Dylan clung to respectability. One day in the park Tim appeared wearing sloppy eyeliner, and a James Dean slouch that dared you to mention the eyeliner. You didn’t. Tim smoked pot with the hippies at eight in the morning before class, while Gabe stood angrily aside in his useless jacket, the jacket he couldn’t defend without Tim’s help.

Maybe Gabe and Tim didn’t even like each other, you realized now. They barely spoke and never joked, didn’t necessarily arrive or leave school together, rode separate trams. In algebra Mr. Kaplon gestured at Tim’s empty seat and said, “Mr. Stern—any notion as to the whereabouts of our friend Mr. Vandertooth?” and Gabe said “Why ask me?”—summing it up pretty well. By Christmas vacation Gabe and Dylan played demonstration Pong at Crazy Eddie’s in rageful silence and you’d never even picture Tim Vandertooth being there. It wasn’t his kind of thing.

Mingus Rude, Arthur Lomb, Gabriel Stern and Tim Vandertooth, even Aaron X. Doily: Dylan never met anyone who wasn’t about to change immediately into someone else. His was a special talent for encountering persons about to shed one identity or disguise for another. He took it in stride by now. Maybe Rachel-Running-Crab had taught him that art.

 

4/3/79

viewed from space radioactive

nostrils want a kleenex

if sneezy they might blow

brooklyn to merrie england

however bad molten core might itch

don’t pick down there too deep

or you’ll toast your shell

infrared like mine

meltdown crab

chapter  15

Two sons might think two fathers never budged from their hiding places apart from runs to Ramirez’s or Buggy’s for bare necessities—toilet paper, Tropicana, cold cuts at gouging prices, whatever.

Two sons might think fathers utterly unschooled in the craft of stoop-sitting—might suppose them ignorant equally of their neighbors and of the delirious nature of sunshine spilled into the chasm of brownstones.

Two sons might be wrong all over. Abraham Ebdus and Barrett Rude Junior had their own Dean Street, the eleven A . M. weekday edition.

Abraham Ebdus was up for hours by then, having packed off to school a mute and bleary Dylan, half-eaten toast in his fist, then ferried a thermos of coffee upstairs for a session painting celluloid frames under natural light. Abraham made film early mornings and late nights, his best hours, reserving lunch-dulled afternoons for painting outer spacescapes and electrical gremlins from the fourth dimension, whatever the latest art director required. Book jackets took care of themselves; he could be half asleep. Drowsiness dulled rage and good taste, unnecessary functions. The film required his sleep-purified, caffeine-honed eyes and mind. From eight-thirty he might accomplish five or six seconds of footage and by eleven be ready to unkink his limbs, rinse the thermos, wander briefly from the house. Dean Street at that hour was pensive, transitive, those with jobs and school all scurried away, idlers just rousing. The first of Ramirez’s corner-men would have found a milk carton, or not. Half a block away a landlord might be brooming his portion of slate. And Barrett Rude Junior would have woken, tucked feet in slippers, moved to his stoop for a gander at the day, a first gulp of air and light.

Junior, on waking, often staggered first to the stereo whose red lights still glowed, to re-drop needle on whichever long-player had lullabyed him the night before, so when in robe or pajamas he took possession of his stoop it was with strains of Donny Hathaway’s Extension of a Man or Shuggie Otis’s Inspiration Information at his back. If the volume was sufficient and the Dean Street bus nowhere near, Abraham Ebdus, five doors away, could hear the music, faintly. Junior came sound-tracked, wore a halo of music like a wafting smell, literal funk. No actual bodily odors reached Abraham at that distance, but it wasn’t much of a leap to suppose they clung to those frayed silks in concentrated form.

Seeing Mingus Rude’s father at eleven cheered Abraham. He couldn’t have said why. It happened every few mornings: no pattern but an accumulation, or a long polyrhythm. They lorded from the height of respective stoops, the block’s true kings. On warmer mornings they’d each sit, in cold or rain they might be outdoors less than a minute. Either way, Abraham made an effort to keep the appointment and imagined Barrett Rude Junior doing the same. No way to know, since they only nodded, chins tipping upward, sometimes waved.

Abraham never saw the old man anymore and wondered slightly.

Bus purring through leaf-blotched shadow.

Run-on sentence of cracked slate.

Cornices a horizon, lintels slag in a canyon or quarry wall.

Dean Street of course infiltrated the work, it couldn’t not. Abraham painted row-house façades, then blacked them over, presences drowned in abstraction. The film was among other things a record of methods disguised, a graveyard of strategies. He startled himself one day brushing in a figure, a stoop-wanderer, an armless pylon limned in gray rays. The anomalous form, Barrett Rude Junior taking the morning air, jiggled and danced in place through two weeks’ work, a minute of film, before censure. Abraham didn’t blot the figure retroactively, though. He let it stand. The sprite simply inhabited space for a minute, then turned and went inside. Gone like that.

The film devoured days and years and Abraham let them be devoured. He’d optical-printed earlier sections and now and then ran them in his hand-cranked splicer, not editing so much as dwelling in his own work in progress. At sea. He could no longer relate the motifs in earlier sequences to raw dates, facts in his life. Watergate, Erlan Hagopian, Rachel’s leaving. The film floated above his routine, coffee cups, newspapers, the kid growing. The rest was trivia, moods, implementation. A body moving through days, serving higher purposes.

Abraham Ebdus was reasonably certain he was demolishing the concept of time.

For that reason, and not because of any fetish for death, he savored obituaries. They might be the only news that mattered, quiet closings on forgotten accounts, revealing lives lived decades past their ostensible peaks, their nodes of fame. He turned to them over breakfast and quoted with exaggerated relish, a touch of hammy gusto. “Lived in Mexico as one of Trotsky’s bodyguards and later edited Popular Mechanics —isn’t that amazing, Dylan? These lives, so full and crazy, so contradictory, and you never learn this stuff until they happen to die. You might not even know they’d existed !” The more Dylan met these ravings with silence the more his father hectored: “Jean Renoir, his father was the painter Renoir, you know,” or “Listen: Al Hodge, he played the Green Hornet and Captain Video—incredible.” Charles Seeger, Jean Stafford, Sid Vicious, the names stacked up, a breakfast litany. If nothing else it was a way to chase the boy from the house and onto the IRT. Dylan owed a sterling attendance record to the obituary page, probably. “The best-written part of the newspaper, these guys are geniuses, listen—”

So it was dumb luck the kid was still at the breakfast table that particular morning: nobody good died. The page was a rare bore. Abraham survived this slight disappointment and turned to the Metro section, and there it was, a photograph of Mingus Rude in a weird shirt, surplus cloth bunched around the collar.

“Huh, huh. Wow. Dylan, you’ll want to see this.”

The kid ignored him, mouth-breathing through a cud of Cheerios, par for the course.

Abraham quarter-folded the section and handed the article to Dylan so he couldn’t miss it. The item was smart-alecky, sloppily reported, and full of holes and questions begged, no obituary by a long shot, but it contained its own amazements.

DRUG STING NETS CAPED CRUSADER
BY HUMBOLT ROOS

B ROOKLYN,M AY 16. An undercover operation at the Walt Whitman Houses in Fort Greene was tripped up by the efforts of a teenage vigilante dressed as a superhero late Monday night, according to police at the 78th Precinct.

The costumed do-gooder, later identified as Mingus Rude, 16, was apparently concealed in a tree on housing complex grounds when he assaulted an undercover detective conducting a drug transaction with known dealers, presumably mistaking the officer for a criminal. The attempted citizen’s arrest resulted in a literal headache for plainclothesman Morris, who was treated for minor injuries on the scene, and a paperwork headache for officers filing reports. The surveillance operation, a complex sting in preparation for several weeks, was unsuccessful, and no arrests were made.

All narcotics detectives got for their trouble was the consolation prize of Mr. Rude, later released into his parents’ custody with a warning, but no charges. Dressed in a hand-decorated mask and cape, and giving his name as “Aeroman,” Mr. Rude initially refused to answer questions without the presence of an attorney. Detectives confirmed that several local incidents had been reported recently involving the would-be hero—

And so on.

Dylan had turned bright red. “Can I take this?”

“Sure, sure.” Abraham spread his hands. “Why not?”

The kid hustled the folded newspaper into his knapsack and swept in a mad rush from the table, nearly upsetting his abandoned glass of OJ and his unfinished Cheerios floating in a half-bowl of milk, with face averted, ears blazing like taillights.

“Bye!” he shouted from the hall.

And was out the door.

Questions? Sure, Abraham had questions. Do you know something about this, son? Is there anything you might like to share with me? Just where do you and Mingus Rude go all day and all night, anyway?

For that matter, is Brooklyn itself a geographical form of insanity?

Are we, do you happen perhaps to know, my darling boy, cursed by God?

But who in this day and age got answers to his questions?

 

He did what he never did: cut school. And a thing he hadn’t done for years: searched Mingus out instead of relying on chance to bring them together. First, though, he squirmed through morning classes, knowing Mingus wouldn’t necessarily even be out of bed before ten, unwilling to risk waking Barrett Rude Junior, and not wanting policemen, truant officers, security guards, gangs, whomever, to draw an absolute bead on him as he imagined they would if he went straight to Mingus’s school, whiteboy with a knapsack on the curb outside Sarah J. Hale after morning bell, nine in the morning. So he rode the train to Stuyvesant and agonized in his seat, swallowed anxiety through French and physics and history, slid the folded newspaper out of his binder for horrified reconfirmation, yes, it happened, Aeroman was arrested, perhaps a hundred, perhaps a thousand times. At least they’d gotten the name right! At lunch period he split, took the IRT back to Brooklyn and prowled the blasted land of Sarah J. Hale’s sidewalk and schoolyard seeking after Mingus Rude. His reward was about what his guilty, panicked heart might have felt it deserved: Robert Woolfolk.

Robert and a couple of his homies occupied a Pacific Street stoop across from Sarah J. Hale. All three had tallboys of beer concealed in their sleeves for furtive slugs when the coast was clear—just another Wednesday afternoon in late-spring glare, life was sweet. The block was vacant, no guards, cops, gangs, no vibrations from within the building, Robert Woolfolk still the human neutron bomb of Gowanus. Dylan got a blissful crooked smile out of Robert as he approached. The scene was the opposite of what Dylan had imagined, Sarah J.’s sidewalks teeming with cutters like the park across from Stuyvesant. Instead Pacific Street was like a cartoon desert, Dylan crawling across the expanse with cartoon buzzards overhead, Robert and his crew like a batch of cartoon banditos you met on your knees.

We don’t need no stinking badges.

Dylan halted on the sidewalk, but Robert didn’t move. Nobody seemed much impressed at what had bumbled into their laps. This crew might find motivation another time to resume careers as criminals or at least harassers, menaces, inspirers of fear: this day they’d got a thirty-year head start on the men who sat on rooming-house stoops or in the entranceway of the Colony South Brooklyn Daycare Center on Nevins, mellow lackadaisical observers of life’s passing streams, Thoreaus at Walden. They were drunk off their asses.

Life’s passing streams might be urine trails from doorways to the curb, but never mind.

“Hey, Robert?” said Dylan.

“Yo,” said Robert Woolfolk, his eyes glazed. He didn’t object to being addressed by Dylan, not today: We’re on the same planet, might as well admit I know you.

“Have you seen Mingus?”

Robert tilted his head back and to the side, Ali ducking a jab. Or possibly he mimed a braying laugh, but no laugh came out.

One of his homeboys extended a hand to slap and Robert Woolfolk slapped it. Dylan had stepped into some slow sculpture, a frieze in motion. Though he’d penetrated the frieze’s reality, barely, he nonetheless couldn’t hurry it along.

“Have you seen him?” he asked again, helpless, his morning’s panic only mounting.

“You lookin’ for Arrowman ?” said Robert Woolfolk.

He made it sound like errorman.

Dylan didn’t offer a correction.

Now came braying laughter, in triplicate. Robert’s cohorts squirmed in their spots as though brutally tickled, immediately gasping for air, begging for release from the excess of hilarity. Hands were again slapped, Robert accepting congratulations for his rapier wit.

“Ho, shit,” said one of Robert’s homeboys, shaking his head as he recovered.

“Nah, man, G ain’t come around here today,” said Robert. “You want me to tell him something for you?”

“That’s okay.”

“I’ll tell him a message, man. What, you don’t trust me?”

“Just that I came around looking for him, I guess.”

“Aight. You was lookin’ for him, cool.”

Dylan mumbled thanks.

“Yo, Dylan, wait up man. You got a dollar you could lend me?” No one budged from slanted attitudes on the stoop. Someone drained a bag-sheathed tallboy, tossed it aside. Robert Woolfolk might have been addressing the sky, Dylan wasn’t worth settling eyes on. “Because you know I’m good with you, man. These dudes don’t know you, I had to stop them coming down throw a yoke on you. I told them you were my man, we practilly grew up together, you’s like my little brother.”

The logic was airtight. Certainly Robert’s homeboys weren’t saying otherwise, though neither looked inclined at this moment to yoke anything larger than a cat. Dylan emptied his pockets, his despair absolute, the dollars negligible for passage out of here.

One thing transfer of funds always did accomplish was a turning of the page.

He walked to the Heights, knowing he couldn’t risk being seen on Dean Street before three, figuring no authority would doubt the legitimacy of a white kid with a knapsack in Brooklyn Heights being home early from school. There he took up station on a bench at the south end of the Promenade, sat chin-propped, pancaked between sky and the truck traffic roaring underfoot, the exhaust-flooded Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. He abandoned himself gazing into the bay, ferries slugging across to Staten Island and the Statue, garbage scows loaded up for Fresh Kills, the whole watery mouth of the city. Every reeling gull was Mingus Rude tumbling from the bridge again, white wings like cape ends tipped to the water, Dylan’s eye fooled a thousand times.

The sky was full of Aeroman, except it wasn’t.

Dylan had never flown in Brooklyn, if the ring was gone. They’d meant to swap it back and forth, the changing from black to white one of Aeroman’s mystifying aspects, another level of secret identity, but it had always been Mingus in the costume, always Dylan crouched behind a parked car or dangled as bait while Mingus flew. Now this, Mingus heroing into the projects on the far side of Flatbush Avenue, where Dylan would never go. Dylan had sewn Rachel’s scraps together and told a story and then clothed in those tatters Mingus had launched himself onto a cop in a drug deal. If the newspaper was to be believed. Of course it had to be understood before it could be believed.

There was something in the story not to understand.

Or maybe something you didn’t want to know.

What did Aeroman care about a drug deal ?

Two black kids found Dylan there at the end of the bench faced out to the island and the water and the sky. Lodge in any one place long enough and they’d find you, drawn like flies. These were just about as problematic as flies, too small to yoke him, fifth or sixth graders probably, a couple of mugging Robins lacking a Batman to back them up. If they’d roamed to the Heights from wherever, I.S. 293 probably, it had to be after three, school out.

They circled as if Dylan were a beehive, daring themselves to prod.