“What’s the matter, whiteboy?”

“Your friends leave you all alone?”

“What, you can’t go home? You lost?”

“You crying, whiteboy?”

“He ain’t talkin’.”

“Boy’s stupid or retarded.”

“Check his pockets.”

“You do it, man.”

Dylan looked up and they danced back. There was really no chance they’d touch him. He wasn’t Aeroman, but he’d gained in gravity, was something middle-sized, neither gull nor mole.

“Ooh, ooh, he’s mad now.”

“He’s gonna grab you, man, you better book!”

“Nah, he’s going back to his crying.”

“He a stupid whiteboy.”

“He stoopid.”

“Stoo -pid.”

“Nigger’s a faggot.”

It was enough to make you miss Robert Woolfolk. The situation minus fear was only idiotic. Dylan was sick of it, the racial rehearsal. He’d been identified as whiteboy a thousand times and there was nothing more to learn. Another option, Manhattan, was so prominent it was nearly sticking in his eye. If Aaron X. Doily’s ring was gone Dylan might be done with Brooklyn for a while, be done vindicating fifth grade, be through with Mingus’s fucked-up mysteries and ready to complete his escape.

The two black kids grew bored of him and wandered, maybe to find some Packer or Saint Ann’s kid and work off steam, pick up a dollar or two.

A barge grunted from the docks with a three-color throw-up by Strike on its side, a strong piece of work.

He sat and sat, chanting Clash songs in his head, “I’m So Bored with the USA,” “Julie’s in the Drug Squad,” records he’d never played for Mingus Rude because they embarrassed him on Dean Street, because he didn’t know how. Then the Talking Heads, Find myself, find myself a city to live in. He sat and measured skyscrapers through bars and when he was done sitting the sun had fallen, squinting its narrowed orange beams through towers and bridges, the honey light flared and grew dull, and Dylan had missed Abraham’s dinner, he’d sat all day.

In darkness he returned to the block and tried Mingus’s door.

 

Mingus Rude appeared at the gate of the basement entrance, himself, intact, dope-eyed. He showed no particular objection to Dylan being there.

“D-Man. What up?”

“Where’s the ring?”

“I got it, it’s cool, don’t worry.”

“Where?” Dylan looked up and down the block, fearing surveillance of some kind. There was nothing, his paranoia wasn’t even mirrored in Mingus. Two nights later nobody cared, Aeroman or Errorman was a joke, a name passed along stoops before fading from memory.

“I hid it away.”

“Did the police see you fly?”

“The cops, man? They think I sprung out a tree.”

“What—”

Mingus put up his hand to say Enough, not now. “You wanna come in? I got King Arthur here.”

The shelf was empty, no costume, no ring, just the football helmet, Manayunk Mohawks, its bowling-ball curve now tagged in soppy marker by Art and Dose. “Get Off” was on the stereo, the needle hadn’t actually plowed the music off the vinyl yet though it sounded like it was getting close. Arthur Lomb lay on his side on the bed, his cruddy Pumas on the bedspread, sifting seeds from a nickel bag in the gatefold crotch of the Spinners’ Pick of the Litter. Crumpled rolling paper lay balled in a loose circle around him, failed tries, like some ring of dubious enchantment. He grinned at seeing Dylan: Welcome to my chamber, bluh-hah-hah!

Arthur Lomb had become a foul gnome. He seemed smaller. That was likely an optical illusion, a matter of losing himself inside titanic hooded sweatshirts and droopy military pants which could have held dozens of his pipe-cleaner legs. Arthur’s clothes were growing though he wasn’t. He completed a joint at last, repulsively swooping it through his mouth to cauterize the paper with saliva. He only spoke after it was lit, in order to demonstrate expertise in speaking through gagged breath, his voice helium-dwindled with effort:

“You heard Gus got arrested?”

“Shut up, Arthur.”

Arthur handed the joint to Dylan, his own held toke exploding in a gust from his lips. “He went to the Myrtle Avenue projects at midnight and jumped out of a tree in his underwear. I suppose if you’re tripping on LSD or heroin it might strike you as a good idea. I saw something like that on The FBI once. A girl ate the bark off a tree in a vacant lot. She was pretty hot, too.”

“I’m right about to kick your ass.”

“Do it, superhero.”

“When I do you’ll be weeping.”

“I’ll look forward to that day, it’ll be worth seeing you dress up in your homo suit, Arrow Man. ”

Arthur needled like he moved rooks, unashamed of the obvious. He was monotonous and punishing, easy to tune out. Mingus had seemingly acquired the skill.

“What’s your power going to be, Dylan? Because we all need powers now, we’re Superfriends. I was thinking maybe I’d be able to undress people with my mind, I mean like their clothes would really actually vanish, criminals would be humiliated and surrender on the spot. I’ll call myself Fig Leaf Man.”

Mingus didn’t meet Dylan’s eyes when they handed off the joint. Questions remained simpler to leave unanswered, Mingus flying solo, Aeroman’s agenda at the Walt Whitman Houses. If he’d wanted to bust up a drug deal he only had to go as far as Bergen, or Atlantic, the foyer of the prostitute hotel. Or upstairs, for that matter, to Junior’s apartment, where deals occurred on a daily if not an hourly basis.

But maybe that was the dilemma which had spun Aeroman off his usual orbit—the risk of meeting someone familiar in a local deal. Up to and including Barrett Rude Junior or Senior.

“Yo, D-Man, you got to hear this record ‘King Tim Personality Jock’ by Fatback—” Mingus began. He moved to the stereo, marking the conclusion of his two-night’s-ago adventure as a topic, announcing the resumption of the real story: they lived in a famous era where heroic advances in musical styles, the discovery of a new break previously unheard, could happen at any moment. “Shit is seriously dope, check it out.”

Mingus only turned away briefly to punch Arthur Lomb on the arm. Arthur shouted “Mother fucker! ” and stroked the punched spot, but didn’t shift from where he lay sprawled, a cackling, smoke-numbed dwarf on the bedspread.

Aeroman was dead or at least on hiatus, a serious layoff. He’d likely never appear in the same form again. Dylan was certain the costume was lost or destroyed. The costume was irrelevant anyway. With its bedsheet stripes and wobbly Spirograph emblem it had been too personal, too tender for the street, Dylan understood that now. Aaron X. Doily was right to renounce his cape, Dylan had missed the hint. Now Doily’s ring was hidden and it should be. The ring was an enigma to contemplate, a subject for further review. The costume was likely just as stoopid as Arthur Lomb made it sound but the ring wasn’t a part of Arthur’s story, or for that matter the cops’, or The New York Times ’s.

They got stoneder and stoneder and quit talking.

The three together might have been a normal occasion if you didn’t think about it too hard. From one perspective it was odd it hadn’t happened before.

But Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude still had secrets, even if those were on ice, hidden somewhere unspecified behind Mingus’s thousand-yard stare.

Dylan Ebdus told stories and drew pictures, Arthur Lomb carped and needled, but Mingus Rude possessed a greater force, moods which prevailed, moods like laws. He cold-shouldered whole unwished regions of existence, his scowl chopping down fathers, grandfathers, schools. It wasn’t an argument. For now, Aeroman was vanished, painted out.

 

Three white high schoolers cavort along West Fourth Street, returning from J&R’s Music World to an apartment on Hudson where a certain divorced mom’s not home, where they’ve got keys and the regular afternoon run of the place. All three are armored against late-fall weather in black motorcycle jackets, the Brando-Elvis-Ramones variety, leather skins studded with chrome stars and skulls, buckles dangling loose and fronts unzipped against the chill. The three grab-ass, swing incompetently from lampposts, talk in private tongues, nerd-punk argot.

November 1979: “Rapper’s Delight” has just cracked the top forty. It’s also cracked the attention spans of the white kids at Stuyvesant, including this bunch. The song is on the radio and on the street, leaking from stores and passing shoulder-hoisted boom boxes, a different sound, and impossible to miss.

But to really hear it for yourself someone’s got to lay down cash and bring the thing home.

The Sugar Hill Records twelve-inch in its generic sleeve is bagged with their other purchases, Eno, Tom Robinson, Voidoids, Quadrophenia soundtrack. “Rapper’s Delight”’s place on the pop charts is as a novelty single, late entry in the lineage of “The Streak,” “Convoy,” and “Kung Fu Fighting,” and it’s in this spirit these white boys have made their purchase: the record strikes them as inconceivably stupid and killingly funny, two concepts lately the opposite of mutually exclusive, Gabba Gabba Hey.

Self-loathing worn inside out as a punk’s moron pride.

If one of these three knows more, he’s not telling.

But put it this way: if one of those shops on St. Marks Place retailing punk fashion sold T-shirts reading PLEASE YOKE ME you’d buy one in a minute.

Then zip your jacket wearing it home from Manhattan.

Now, in the safety of the apartment, the other records are put aside while the twelve-inch is plopped on mom’s turntable for instant-gratification hilarity. The needle is stopped and shifted backward a dozen times for incredulous confirmation of some sequence of chanted rhymes, I don’t care what these people think, I’m just sittin’ here makin’ myself nauseous with this ugly food that stinks. The three white boys bust up, barely able to breathe for laughing.

“The—chicken—tastes—like—wood! ” one gasps.

Jackets are shed. Divorced mom’s boyfriend left a six of Heinekens in the fridge, the fool, and these are swiftly drained. A box of Nilla Wafers is demolished, down to the crumbs at the bottom of the wax liner, which are shaken out and inhaled. “Rapper’s Delight” is played again, the punks doing an antic dance, pogoing on the couch, playing at break dancing, striking poses.

The record includes among others a passage mocking Superman, the rapper calling himself Big Hank mock-wooing Lois Lane with boasting couplets. He may be able to fly all through the night, but can he rock a party ’til the early light? An excellent question for Superman or any other flying personage, really.

That’s if flying wasn’t the last thing on your mind.

Now the three begin quoting favorite lines, trying to mimic the rappers’ inflection while keeping straight faces. “I understand about the food,” says one, nearly weeping with pleasure. “hey, but bubba, we’re still friends! ”

Two of these harmless, pink-cheeked punks are Manhattan-born, were privately schooled until the year they switched to Stuyvesant to spare their parents the expense. For all they know this record might have been cut specifically for their private anthropological enjoyment, and they hear it with detachment suitable for an artifact fallen from the moon. They’ve never heard anyone rap before, anymore than they’ve met Fat Albert or Sanford & Son walking down the street. Consensus might be that what makes “Rapper’s Delight” and black people in general so criminally funny is their supreme lack of irony. Hey, it’s not racist to find blacks earnest as hippies, broad and embarrassing as a comic book. These boys is punks, and punks sneer. That’s what they do, deal with it.

Lack of irony’s scarcely a problem for the third in the room, the punk from Gowanus.

Tied in splendid baroque knots, that’s him. Ready to pass any and all litmus tests for self-partitioning. But hey, if standing in your Converse All Star high-tops on the couch cushions rotating hips in awkward parody you recall Marilla’s curbside hula-hoop instruction a million years ago, recall too your disappointment Marilla wasn’t a blond Solver, your guilt at this disappointment, your shame at your body’s inexpressiveness, its unfunky failings— so what ? Laughing at “Rapper’s Delight”’s no revenge, and anyway it wasn’t your idea, and anyway it’s funny. Dean Street’s another story, a realm of knowledge inapplicable here.

You’ve just about finished leaving Dean Street, and Aeroman, behind.

If this means avoiding the one who protected your ass all through junior high, the one you once ached to emulate, the one whose orbit you were happy just to swing in—if it means leaving the million-dollar kid’s regular phone messages in Abraham’s precise handwriting unreturned—that’s a small price to pay for growing up, isn’t it?

This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no foolin’ around.

It’s the end, the end of the seventies.

chapter  16

Though Barrett Rude Junior had it in mind all along, grist for his own heart’s musing, the evening’s theme was kept a mystery to those in attendance. That hadn’t slowed them delving into the spread, the sliced meats and cheese and olives and egg bread and rye and cherry cheesecake he’d dialed in from Junior’s, the Seagram’s, the dope. This posse of freaks, Horatio, Crowell Desmond, the three girls, they never needed an excuse to party. When finally he made the announcement he got only a faint echo back, most of the crowd already too wasted by then to do more than nod sweetly and spacily, raise a glass with ice if they held one. Barry’s hyped about something, Whose birthday? Whatever, that’s cool. But the one girl, whose name he’d forgotten, said:

“How old?”

She’d given him a shy smile when she came in, one of three numbers on Horatio’s arm, all jingling earrings and Egyptian eyelashes, tan skintight slip-sheer dress to her pumps, nearly fifty buttons on one side, ankle to armpit, bottom dozen undone. Prime Horatio specimen, but new and unfamiliar. Picture her answering the phone, Horatio saying, Wanna meet Barrett Rude? Singer from the Distinctions? Wear something nice, baby. Standing at a mirror counting how many buttons up from the floor to undo, nothing’s accidental.

It talks without talking.

Brother, it sings if you listen.

Right through the door she’d started fussing, dimming the overheads digging in his drawers looking for candles, until he told her there weren’t any. Then she’d thrown her shawl on his lamp, made a web of shadow that stretched across the ceiling like a groaning mouth with tassel teeth.

“You down with some Fleetwood Mac gypsy type of thing there, girl?”

Again she’d smiled without speaking, then gone and sucked up a line Horatio had laid out on the kitchen counter.

All elegance, one nail-painted finger pressed aside a nostril.

Pinky high like she was sipping Earl Grey.

He ignored her, slipped something mellow on the turntable, Little Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. Then got to sampling Horatio’s product himself, did a line while waiting for the base to get cooked for the pipe. One of the other girls asked him about the gold records on the mantel and he told her there ought to be four more up there, if the truth be known. He didn’t even get angry, it was just a story now. While he told it he kept half an eye on the quiet girl, as she watched and pretended not to, the usual game. No hurry, the quiet ones always came around. Like a timer going off. Now she showed some curiosity about his having a son, the procreational instinct.

Fine, girl, we can work with that. That’d be a direction we could definitely explore. He said: “Seventeen, you believe that shit? I’m an old man, damn.”

Barrett Rude Junior sat in his butterfly chair, arms flung behind his head, spread open to the air the way he preferred, not caring if the girls on the rug were seeing up his gym shorts. Exhibit A, help yourselves. Y’all came here to see me, make sure I’m real.

“Well, if it’s his birthday, where is he?” Her voice was girlish, purring, porny.

He lifted his eyes to the door to the basement apartment. “Why don’t you call him up here? Name’s Mingus.”

Outside a thunderstorm had eased the June night, a tide of cool coming through the parlor windows, flapping the curtains.

Night the kid was born it was raining too, 1963.

The girl glanced at the door, surprised, like he was keeping some damn prisoner. “Whole downstairs to himself,” he said in defense. “I called him before but he was out doing his own thing. Motherfucker lives for the street. Storm likely blew him home, though. Or it will.” He shut his eyes and sang in falsetto, tonguing his palate for an Al Green lisp, “I can’t stand the rain—against my window—bringing back sweet memories—hey windowpane— ”

Taking the dare, she went to the basement door and called the name, tentative, like she didn’t believe it. A minute later the birthday boy arrived, was suddenly in their midst like a dog on the carpet in his stained fatigues and napped hair, his proto-dreadlock nubbins. The girls all looked him over as if on cue, went mm mm, vamping for the sake of the grown men.

“What?” said Mingus.

“Hey, Gustopher, man, how you doin’ ?” said Crowell Desmond, leaning over the counter and sticking out his palm for a slap Mingus gave half-willingly. “How come I never see you, man?”

“Gus only come upstairs steal my records and the dope out my freezer,” said Barry. “He don’t deign to hang with us no more.”

“You father said it’s your birthday,” said the gypsy-looking girl, still skeptical.

Mingus nodded.

“You looked stoned, boy. You asleep? Intro duce yourself to the woman.”

She held his hand. “Yolanda.”

“Yo. Mingus.”

“Yolanda, Yomingus,” said Barry. “Y’all a couple of twins.”

Desmond Crowell, standing over by the sink where Horatio was cooking up some base in a glass tube, laughed like a horse.

“Yeah, that’s funny, Barrett,” said Mingus softly.

“Don’t go calling me Barrett, boy. Look at you, all in your hippie Vietnam shit. You ought to be stealing my clothes.”

Yolanda returned to the couch where the girls were arrayed and Mingus was stranded on the long fringe of the rug. The album side was finished, needle crackling to the label, hollow clunk of the tone arm’s return, silence. Now all in the room grew attentive, the birthday concept perhaps penetrating dim brains at last. Or else they’d sensed a crackle in the air, summer lightning. Barry felt rebuked and scorned, though he’d hardly alerted Mingus to his plans. But such feelings lay beyond sense.

You commune with a boy in genetic vibrations and no one but you knows the full history, not even the boy himself who wasn’t born when vibes originated.

The mother half of vibes being an uncontrolled factor.

Under his grubby clothes Mingus was a hunch-shouldered man. Lean, coiled, his eyes slanting to the street where he’d likely rather be. When had Barry last looked him over? Couldn’t say. Not looking was a reciprocal deal, struck who-knew-when. He didn’t want to picture himself in his son’s eyes—or for that matter in the eyes of the girl Yolanda—him with his fingernails grown horny, pudding thighs, thickened neck veiled in muttonchop whiskers. Only cocaine kept him from bloating up entirely, turning into some fleshy Isaac Hayes cartoon.

He should be dancing around the room, instead he felt weighed to the chair, a thousand pounds of ballast.

It was that world-feeling coming over him again. That was the only way he’d ever been able to describe it.

“Only fooling on you, Gus, lighten up. Take a seat. We’re here to toast a man’s birthday, people. Desmond, put on a damn record.”

Mingus twisted on his sneaker soles in the middle of the rug.

“You got one of your friends hiding downstairs? Don’t be all furtive now, bring ’em up.”

“Nope, just—”

“See, Yolanda, Mingus digs white boys.”

He just said it, no big thing, let it mean what it wanted to mean. Silence, though, had crept over everything, bugging him. The room was full of ions, thunderstorm stuff, and Barrett Rude Junior felt himself to be a massive leaden presence. He ought to dance but there was no music, and as his world-feeling increased his forearms and thighs seemed to grow mountainous. If the girl Yolanda came to him she’d be like a mewling kitten, crawling on the landscape of him. On a television nature show a kangaroo’s pink larva had squirmed from birth to pouch, the parent a planetary form. That was his proportion now. The longer he didn’t get off his ass the bigger he grew.

Mingus just stood, playing at being eerie like the kid in The Shining, mooning at his father.

Meantime something good was happening over at the sink, a sizzled stink, a smell with promise. It buoyed him immediately, made him want to sing.

“Don’t immolate yourself in some Richard Pryor deal, now, Horatio. Get that pipe loaded up and bring it here. And pick some music, Desmond, you good-for-nothing flunky. Gonna write you a theme song, Good-fo-nuthin’ flunky man, he can’t book me a gig I bet somebody else can —”

Perhaps motivated to stop Barrett’s improvisation Desmond at last picked a new record. Prince’s For You, nothing too grating.

If Barry wasn’t looming in size like a bloated planet, Horatio and Desmond and Mingus and the girls all tiny and floating in orbit around him, everything would be fine.

“Desmond, I ever tell you about how this feeling comes on me, like I’m getting bigger while everyone else is getting small?”

“Nah, man.” Desmond sounded baffled.

“We all gonna be gettin’ small,” said Horatio. “Nothin’ wrong with that.”

“My former wife the mother of this boy here used to tell me I was getting grandiose, but there’s nothin’ grand about it. Just at times I feel like my fingertips is a thousand miles away.”

“Crazy, man,” said Desmond, afraid of saying anything specific or controversial.

“Yeah, crazy,” said Barrett Rude Junior, seeing the futility in trying to explain. “It’s some crazy shit all right. Yo, give the kid his present, ’Ratio.”

“What?”

“Don’t play like you don’t remember.” His voice crept from within the tomb of his chest and made its way into space, where the curvature of his own ears retrieved and confirmed it. He trusted that he’d actually spoken.

Eyes widened, Horatio came from behind the kitchen counter and reached in his inner vest pocket for the slip of folded foil, the gift he might have been unsure Barrett Rude Junior wasn’t joking about. He’d prepared it anyway: never could have too much product on you, partying with Barry.

“They you go. A gram of your own. You don’t have to go jumping out no trees now.”

Mingus only stared.

“That’s for you, take it. You want a line now Horatio cut you up some of his.”

Mingus slipped the packet into his baggy thigh pocket and shook his head.

“Happy Birthday. You a man now.”

Then Barrett Rude Junior, swimming back inside himself, his voice and mind more and more a speck within the sea of his body, saw the gift was incomplete. Sure Mingus was ungrateful, he should be. The gram wasn’t enough. His father had to give him the girl, Yolanda. Barry had no use for her himself, not tonight with these brick-heavy limbs. The girl would be crushed if he somehow mounted her. And if she offered him head she’d be undetectable, miles off, beneath the horizon of the real. Tonight was the boy’s turn.

“Horatio, you done already? Bring me the pipe because I swear like Old King Cole I’m too damn lazy get out this chair. Hey, Yolanda?”

“Yes?” she said, surprised to be named by him now, a bit prim.

“How’d you like to go downstairs and check out Gus’s crib?”

He’d spoken easily, like she’d know his thinking, one thing flowing from the next. But nobody else saw the essential grace of the handoff, father to son. They all got on him at once.

Yolanda said, “What’s that supposed to mean?” She didn’t leave the couch, but crossed her legs, guarding the prize, and angled her body resentfully to the door.

“That’s fucked up, Barrett,” said Mingus in a low and pitying tone.

“Barry, be cool,” added Horatio, like he had any say in this house.

“I don’t mean anything, relax y’all. Damn. What if I make you a bet, though? How old are you, little Yo- landa ? If you’re closer to his age than mine, what about you go downstairs? Do a few lines of birthday blow with my son, it’s only fair.”

“She can’t,” said Mingus flatly.

“Wait up, Gus, let’s hear from the girl. What about it, baby? Year of the Dragon or Rat or what?”

“You’re a sweet-looking man, Mingus,” said Yolanda defiantly, refusing to look at Barrett. Her voice was layered with sex, mothering, other mystical woman shit meant to shame Barry and let him know what he’d missed. For he’d missed it, blown it, she was gone. “Don’t let your father ruin your birthday for you. I’ll come see your room if you want.”

But Mingus ignored her. “She can’t come downstairs,” he said again.

“Why is that?” said Barry.

“Senior’s in the front. I heard him in there.”

“He snuck back in?”

“What you expect? You didn’t take his key.”

Barry was resigned to the world-feeling now. This was how it felt: he’d become a planet and his population swarmed like gnats, flitting in and out of sight. So his old man was back, the skulker! Senior’d done something to get himself in bad with the pimps and dealers running the Times Plaza Hotel, talked some girl into his room and tried to baptize her, or maybe just fulminated too long in the lobby—anyhow, got himself unwelcomed, then crept back here to the basement. Mingus and Senior were two of a kind, creatures ungrateful by nature and grown as remote from him as his own distant hands. Horatio, Desmond, son, father, pussy, gold records, all flew in a cloud, godforsaken and tinny.

What he needed was a hit on the pipe. A line or two lines or a dozen wasn’t going to do it tonight, wasn’t going to shrink his unendurable weight or expand the other inhabitants of the room from irritant size.

Outside, rain misting on the day-baked tar.

Pipe, bowl, and be damn sure the Fiddlers Three don’t weasel themselves a co-writer’s credit.

 

It was the fact that the venue was the New School, a name he associated with pinkish causes and the hiring of scantily credentialed professors, which had beguiled him to committing this mistake. That and the Dutch collector of original paperback art who’d enthused through his telephone a half-dozen times until Abraham relented. Perhaps also some morbid curiosity to encounter his colleagues: one Howard Zingerman and one Paul Pflug, incredible as the names might seem. Likely his own name Ebdus struck others the same way and it was the oddness of their monikers which had caused them to drift into this enterprise. Perhaps Abraham had accepted out of vanity. Certainly vanity. The term pop culture, thrown around so freely by the Dutchman. He was pop culture now. So let him go and see what that meant and let him meet Zingerman and Pflug. What harm to sit on a panel?

Well, he’d learned what harm, what cost to be baited out of hiding. The New School auditorium was no insurance against humiliation. The small crowd, fewer than fifty, nearly all of them lurching males with complex facial hair, had come expressly to meet Pflug. Pflug was himself perhaps thirty, had a long ponytail like many of his admirers, and appeared to be a weight lifter, though he also wore the wispy beard of an old man, or possibly a wizard.

Pflug worked in the style which had succeeded Abraham’s in time and overwhelmed it in popularity. That was, if Abraham’s style had in fact ever enjoyed any real popularity except with art directors, who had for a few years vied to hire Abraham himself and, when he proved unavailable, commissioned bald imitations of his work. This no longer happened. Though Abraham still worked, the vogue for arty psychedelia was done. Pflug was typical of what replaced it. He painted dragons and strongmen in the fashion of the posters of certain recently popular films, his skies full of billowy Maxfield Parrish clouds, his barbarians and gladiatrixes and even his dragons rendered with a uniform photorealist gloss, down to each feather and scale, down to each blond, blow-dried strand of their anachronistic haircuts.

In fact, it became clear it was Pflug who’d created the poster for one of the recently popular films. This explained the resemblance, and also the existence of his fans. They’d barely concealed their impatience through the brief panel, waiting for the chance to mob Pflug with posters, now reverently uncurled from cardboard tubes, which they hoped he’d autograph. No one here cared about paperback cover art, and why should they? It wasn’t a thing to care about.

The exception was the Dutchman who’d single-handedly organized this event, God help him, coming from Amsterdam to do so. And it was Zingerman he cared about, exclusively. The Dutchman, younger than Pflug even, was clean-cut and shaven. He’d sounded older on the phone, but in person was soft-spoken, dumbstruck with reverence. Zingerman was his hero. He’d been buying Zingerman originals from the warehouses of defunct paperback houses, from thieving art directors, from catalogues which circulated among aficionados like himself. The Dutchman was authoring a monograph, a catalogue raisoné, and sought Zingerman’s blessing. His Atlantic crossing should have been a direct pilgrimage to the feet of his master but he’d been shy, it now seemed, and so had arranged this whole sham panel, Zingerman-Pflug-Ebdus, “The Hidden World of Paperback Art,” as a blind.

Zingerman the painter had a certain integrity, a kind of Ashcan school realism. He was painterly in the mood of the Soyer brothers, or, if you were generous, even the earliest Philip Guston. Zingerman’s milieu was urban gothic, characters caught at heights of expressive torment, men tearing shirts from women and vice versa, but also moments of tenderness or even pensiveness. Small dogs and rusted cans lay in the gloom of Faulknerian porches. The women were only always a tad beautiful, Playboy bunnies in disarray, slumming. Hands, faces, and cleavages were all in clean focus, while much else was lost in chiaroscuro, a signature style which also saved man-hours and was surely far less wearing than Pflug’s autistic micro-detail in the long run.

The examples on hand, books sealed in protective plastic sleeves and two of the paintings themselves, were all from the Dutchman’s collection. The titles spanned four decades, from the forties, Paul Bowles and Hortense Calisher beside outright pornography—Zingerman’s treatment was consistent. He’d conceded to the seventies only his sfumato palette of grays and browns, brightening his tones and adding Laugh-In -style paisley bikinis and unbuttoned print shirts to his girls’ wardrobes, fluffy sideburns to his protagonists’ clenched jaws.

Zingerman the human? He was toxic. Maybe seventy, he stooped from a basketballer’s height, his enormous frame draped in a dust-colored suit and folded awkwardly behind the table they shared. Hair sprouted from his French-cuffed sleeves like he wore an ape suit beneath, but the skin of his hands and face was papery, drained of vitality. Against the auditorium’s posted prohibitions he chain-smoked cigars thick as his clubby fingers. He coughed frequently around the cigars. Hard to picture those fingers with a brush—but then so many things were hard to picture and yet were, like this evening’s occasion.

Zingerman wanted no part of Pflug, and barely seemed to tolerate the Dutchman, his Boswell. Perhaps they lay beyond some age requisite for Zingerman’s attention. As Pflug autographed posters—another artistic task he handled in excruciating detail, lavishing each with cartoons and inscriptions—Zingerman stretched in his chair, offered Abraham a cigar, and wholesaled his life’s philosophy.

“Lay the girls.”

“Sorry?”

Zingerman’s voice was graveled and abrupt and possibly Abraham had mistaken a baroque cough for speech.

“Lay the girls, every one of them.” Zingerman gestured at the paperbacks on the table before them, then back at the large originals hung on the curtain. “The models. That was my only consolation for staying in this dirty stinking business, and that’s why I can’t fathom a guy like you goes on painting these whatever-you-calls, geodesic forms. What are you, going to lay a geodesic form? That’s a lonely road.”

“Your models? You took them to bed?”

“To the bed, to the couch, right in the middle of the room with a leopard-skin outfit, in a mermaid costume, with fake fangs, with a toy gun in their hands, with paint all over my fingers, lay them, lay them, lay them. Strict policy. Hire the boy, hire the girl, arrange the pose, snap Polaroids, send the boy home, give with an excuse to start touching the outfit, fix the collar, hand on the ass, lay the girl, lay the girl, lay the girl, thirty-five years.”

“Like Picasso,” was all Abraham could think to say.

“You bet your ass. I couldn’t bear to paint those pictures any other way, I’d put my head in the stove. I tried telling my friend Schrooder, he thinks I’m joking. I’m not joking. You a married man?”

“I was.”

“We all were. These kids have no idea. That one there? You think he lays them? He’s too busy painting hair, painting feathers, painting the shine on bubbles. If I got one of those girls with the swords and the hair in my room I’d know what to do. Him, see those arms? I think he’s looking harder at the boys.”

“Or the dragons.”

“Or the dragons. So you, what? You screw forms? At least Picasso started real. After he laid them both eyes were on one side. He made them walk funny. You, it’s like looking in a microscope. You’re not lonely, just you and your germs?”

Abraham thought: ladies and germs. Which was pretty much Zingerman’s vintage. So this was what it came to, Ebdus the bridge between Ashcan school schlock and photorealist dragons, a momentary interlude. Just him and his germs.

No, the film would not be discussed here, the film would not be considered, not be thought of.

“I’m lonely,” he said honestly.

“Of course you are, you stink of it.”

“A big career mistake, biomorphism.”

“Now you’re talking. Take a leaf from my book,” said Zingerman. “Live. Lay the girls.”

“I will.”

Here Zingerman lowered his voice, to conclude the lesson, to share what he’d earned, what he really knew. “Look,” he said. “Don’t tell Schrooder.”

“Yes?”

“Riddled.” He passed his cigar magically over the length of his body.

“Sorry?”

“Started lung, so they cut lung. Doesn’t matter where it started. Gone lymph, gone brain, gone bloodstream.”

“Oh.”

“I shit cancer. Doesn’t matter, don’t pity me. You know why don’t pity me? One guess.”

“Lay the girls?”

“Give the man a cigar.”

bad december

no joke kid

i haven’t slept a wink

put a rose at the door

of the dakota for me

i am the walrus crab

 

“Horatio, fuck you been, man?”

Pause.

“Oh, hey, what up, Barry?”

“You got so much action you can’t even respect a nigger’s phone calls?”

“I’m sorry, baby, I was gonna ring you. Ain’t no thing. What’s goin’ on?”

“I need you to set me up with a piece.”

Pause.

“You talkin ’ ’bout, Barry?”

“You watch television, Horatio?”

“Sure, I watch television, black man, what’s with you?”

“You know what a Beatle is?”

“What? Oh, yeah, yeah.”

“I got to pack some weight. Simple matter, Horatio. Now can you come through for me? That’s the question.”

“Man, you crazy? That shit got nothing to do with you.”

“I seen that Chapman-ass motherfucker walking around on Dean Street staring at my house just last week. Wasn’t him it was his cousin. White motherfucker had a list.”

“You serious ?”

“You know how many forces want me out the picture, get they hands on some four-track tapes? I don’t even trust Desmond, shit. Must be five or ten smash number-one records on them tapes, you think people don’t know that? I’ve got enemies, ’Ratio, on the streets, in the executive boardrooms, no shit, even under my floor boards. The question is can you help a brother out or do I have to go elsewhere? Whatever you say to me, be for real.”

Pause.

“No sweat, Barry. That what you want I got you covered.”

“Now you’re speaking words I can understand.”

chapter  17

Stately Wayne Manor is scheduled to go on between Miller Miller Miller & Sloane and the Speedies, the whole lineup a battle of high-school bands, the members all from Music and Art and Stuyvesant and City-As-School and Bronx Science or Dewey, wherever it is the Speedies go to school or had dropped out of. The Bowery sidewalk is thronged, nobody checks IDs, there are twelve-year-olds, junior high schoolers around. The girls are incredible, sensational, they teem outside CBGB in print dresses and fifties lipstick shades and teased hair, zits sunk in foundation, cupping cigarettes against light wind, bare arms goose-pimpled. They light up the night, birds of paradise to induce trembling in grown men but there are no grown men here apart from a few flophouse dwellers suffering already from delirium tremens. 1981, sixteen-year-olds could rule the Manhattan night, puff joints openly, and inside the hole-in-the-wall club order beer in plastic cups. Twos or threes of boys in leather and jeans mutter around the mobs of girls, faking hand stamps with ballpoint pen and pushing inside toward the stage, or stalling outside, passing bagged bottles of something harder, occasionally shoving one another to the curb in a hail of shouts, bluffed hostility. Somebody arrives and stickered amps and guitars come out of a trunk. Everyone admires the guitarist’s bandaged fingers, he’d punched a car window and broken three knuckles, just raging at something some girl had gotten away saying unanswered. He’s playing tonight anyhow, with mitts for hands, a show-biz hero.

In a nearby lobby a man enters a cage elevator, returning to a single room he’s lived in since 1953.

A black-and-white curbed on Rivington jiggles slightly, a cop getting blown in the cage while his partner on the Bowery’s corner looks out and waits his turn. Likely there’s some code for this operation, a stroller, or an O-five-O.

Walls here show punk graffiti, another type entirely, the letter A circled for anarchy, jerky uppercase remembrances of bands like the Mice and Steaming Vomit perhaps the one lasting impression they’ll make.

Tonight’s a bigger than usual deal in the Stuyvesant crowd, with somebody’s apartment parent-vacated for the weekend and mass plans to drop acid there. Weekend, it all happens on the weekend, as if school isn’t twenty-four hours away, as if your life has changed one iota. You could fight the structure, on a Tuesday or Wednesday night go to shows or to Bowl-Mor, the all-night alley on University Place which advertised “Rock-’n’-Roll Bowling!”—but down that road lay too much cutting, failing out, the rock-bottom destinations of City-As-School or your local high. Like Tim Vandertooth you might never be seen again.

So dress up and pretend you won’t all see each other in gym outfits Monday morning, hungover and sheepish as shit.

Inside, Miller Miller Miller & Sloane conclude their set. Their famous encore is a comic cameo, drummer emerging from behind traps to sing Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” which can be safely adored inside the ironical brackets of Upper West Side whiteboys playing the most famous punk club in the world.

Admittedly it’s a pretty great song, which everyone will be humming the next day if LSD doesn’t brainwipe all recollection.

Stately Wayne Manor is on in fifteen minutes.

Dylan Ebdus mills in the crowd at the base of the riser, though he’s only heard this band play about a hundred times already, between small gigs and practices at the rehearsal space on Delancey. His friend Gabe Stern plays bass in Stately Wayne Manor—he taught himself onstage, like Sid Vicious. Dylan, he’s like Manor’s fifth member, he knows their tiny set by heart, hand-letters their posters, listens in confidence to their girlfriends’ grievances.

Sometimes makes out with their girlfriends.

Might one day get laid by their girlfriends.

Girlfriends present and future make a sizeable portion of the crowd which packs the bar like the soda counter in an Archie comic. The three bands lack a sole fan over eighteen. Every kid here would surely claim they’d seen Talking Heads on CB’s tiny stage and be lying, since they were twelve or thirteen last time that happened. You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all. Talking Heads nowadays play the tennis stadium in Forest Hills: buy a seat at Ticketron in the basement of Abraham and Straus and take the subway to Queens like any other schmuck.

The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn’t.

Tripping on acid tonight’s just the nearest example.

Now Dylan’s friend Linus Millberg appears out of the crowd with a cup of beer and shouts, “Dorothy is John Lennon, the Scarecrow is Paul McCartney, the Tin Woodman is George Harrison, the Lion’s Ringo.”

“Star Trek,” commands Dylan over the lousy twangy country CB’s is playing between sets.

“Easy,” Linus shouts back. “Kirk’s John, Spock’s Paul, Bones is George, Scotty is Ringo. Or Chekov, after the first season. Doesn’t matter, it’s like a Scotty-Chekov-combination Ringo. Spare parts are always surplus Georges or Ringos.”

“But isn’t Spock-lacks-a-heart and McCoy-lacks-a-brain like Woodman and Scarecrow? So Dorothy’s Kirk?”

“You don’t get it. That’s just a superficial coincidence. The Beatle thing is an archetype, it’s like the basic human formation. Everything naturally forms into a Beatles, people can’t help it.”

“Say the types again.”

“Responsible-parent genius-parent genius-child clown-child.”

“Okay, do Star Wars.”

“Luke Paul, Han Solo John, Chewbacca George, the robots Ringo.”

“Tonight Show.”

“Uh, Johnny Carson Paul, the guest John, Ed McMahon Ringo, whatisname George.”

“Doc Severinson.”

“Yeah, right. See, everything revolves around John, even Paul. That’s why John’s the guest.”

“And Severinson’s quiet but talented, like a Wookie.”

“You begin to understand.”

Dylan’s the bagman for tonight’s LSD run, holding everyone’s folding money, a hundred and ninety bucks which from habit he clutches tightly, hand within his pocket. Pride resists deeper habit’s call to transfer the roll to his sock. The task of copping acid has fallen to Dylan and Linus Millberg for two reasons: 1. They’re regular customers of the dealer, a gay on Ninth Street who sells Stuyvesant kids nickels from his apartment. 2. They’re not in the band.

Linus Millberg is a freak math prodigy, a sophomore running with juniors, formerly shy.

“If we go now we can catch the Speedies’ set,” says Linus.

“Okay but wait a minute.”

“We should have gone an hour ago.”

“Okay I know but wait a minute. Go get me a beer.”

Linus nods and dips back toward the bar.

Dylan is absently gratified by Linus’s puppy-dog servility, perhaps because in the Stately Wayne Manor crowd it serves to mask his own. There’s plenty that might be considered cool about being to one side instead of in the band itself. Mostly, though, it sucks. That’s the self-loathing root of his dawdling: Stately Wayne Manor has never played CB’s before, and Dylan’s reluctant to surrender the borrowed glamour of their debut.

You could not be on the stage and still be on the stage.

It’s not unrelated to standing beside Henry while he roofed a spaldeen you’d fetched from the street.

There’s drama too: whether Josh, the singer, will show up drunk or if Giuseppe, the guitarist, can play with bandaged hands. Though Manor’s chords are such that you might shape them on a Stratocaster’s neck with an elbow or foot.

“There’s the Gawce, she’s looking great.”

Linus has returned with the beers.

“The Gawcester’s here, Ebdus,” he said again. “You better do something this time.”

Linus has a valid point: another factor in dawdling is Liza Gawcet. Liza’s a new freshman Dylan Ebdus maybe-likes. She had a well-publicized curfew, so she wouldn’t be along afterward tripping or bowling: this was his only chance. Dylan had leaked acknowledgment of the spell cast by her blond, mute, new-developed, fishnet-bound cuteness through a network of go-betweens, amazed and appalled that this system of proxy flirtation worked for him as it did for so many he held in contempt. But the system, oblivious to his superiority, had worked. She maybe-liked Dylan in return—that was the message Liza’s girl squad leaked back.

He’ll talk to her tonight if he can split her from the gaggle, a dicey operation.

The way Liza’s fishnets show through knee- and ass-torn OshKosh B’Gosh’s is killingly childish and hot, like she’s slipped the punky leggings on beneath outfits unchanged since fifth-grade hopscotch spills.

You could be sixteen and still suspect yourself of pederastic lusts.

The whole band’s lately sniggering about Liza, infuriating their junior-year girlfriends, but Dylan’s got an inside track.

Linus says, “You’re good-looking in the face and Josh has a body and Gabe’s in the band and I can start a conversation with anyone—if we were combined in one person we could fuck any girl in the school.”

“Shut up.”

“Yeah, but do something.”

“Go see if she wants to meet a drug dealer.”

The miracle of Linus is he tends to oblige. This isn’t a matter of daring, just Gumby pliancy. For instance, at Gabe’s command he’d grabbed a boxed pizza cooling on the counter of Famous Ray’s and scrambled all the way to Washington Square. Now Dylan watches as Liza Gawcet and her friends listen to Linus’s exuberant proposal. Linus points at the door, then at his hand stamp, explaining how they’ll be readmitted, no problem.

And Liza Gawcet is nodding.

Stately Wayne Manor’s amps are set up and the band’s in the back room, smoking pot, acting like a band, making the crowd wait. Fuck them. Dylan hears the opening chords, the false starts and in-jokey banter, in his head. Gabe will play and not see Dylan at the stage and later ask and Dylan will say, Didn’t see Gawcet either, did you? Let him wonder.

Hey, maybe he’d really luck out. Maybe they’d get high at the dealer’s and Liza would break curfew.

He’s glad, anyway, to shield her from Manor’s moment of glory. No shock finding jealousy of the band roiling in his heart, he’s got every shit feeling catalogued there if he glances.

On the sidewalk they fall to a boy-boy, girl-girl-girl formation, Dylan having yet uttered zip to Liza directly. But he and Linus are leading the freshmen away from CB’s, up across St. Marks Place, holy shit.

Through the city’s night they move in a giddy bubble. Older teens, men with shopping carts, taxicabs, all of it recedes to the margins, invisible.

“Mary John, Lou Paul, Murray George, Ted Baxter Ringo.”

Linus will do this until he’s told to stop, but Dylan doesn’t wish him to, it’s serving a nice purpose of keeping their mouths moving. “Good one.”

“I didn’t make this shit up,” says Linus. “It’s like some essential human grouping pattern.”

“So you’re saying that’s why Stately Wayne Manor’s doomed—bad Beatle dynamics.”

“Oh yeah, it’s painfully obvious.”

“Andrew thinks he’s John, nobody wants to be Paul.”

“They all think they’re John. They’re four wannabe Johns. They’re like four Georges. With no Ringo to lighten things up.”

“Not one real John?”

“Maybe Giuseppe. Doesn’t matter. Without Paul to play peacemaker, John’s just as bad as George.”

“I thought George wasn’t bothering anybody, he just wants to, you know, write one song per album and play his sitar.”

“No, no, George is evil, he wants to usurp John, that’s his nature.”

Chewbacca wants to usurp Han Solo? But never mind. Dylan says: “They have to break up, then.”

“Indubitably.”

“We’ll go back and tell them.”

The girls become attentive. “Stately Wayne Manor’s breaking up?” asks Liza Gawcet.

“Tonight,” jokes Dylan, and the amazing thing is he’s honestly never thought it before. Not for a minute had he doubted the band would be signed, famous, an exclusive quadrangle for life. Now realizing that’s unlikely, his jealousy eases into generosity: Stately Wayne Manor’s going nowhere, so let them play CBGB tonight. Hell, let them last a month more and get that Halloween gig opening for Johnny Thunders’s Heartbreakers at the Roxy.

Meanwhile Linus attempts to explain Beatle dynamics to the girls, using his ungainliest example yet. “—the reason they’ll never get off the island is Skipper’s such a weak Paul and Gilligan’s a John who’d rather be a Ringo. He’s like, practically fighting Mr. Howell for Ringo status. Plus Professor’s such an overbearing George, they’re completely screwed up—”

When one of Liza’s friends says, “What about the girls?” Linus impatiently replies “The girls don’t matter ” before he can stop himself.

Dylan decides to step into this breach. “A rock band requires a certain alchemy,” he says ominously. “You saw Quadrophenia ?”

“Sure.”

“Like that, you know—the four faces of the Who.”

Liza stares blankly, as if she might have regarded Quadrophenia more along the lines of that movie with Sting in it. Dylan feels despair rising. Fishnet tights do not a cultural vocabulary make. To the ironized, reference-peppered palaver which comprises Dylan’s only easy mode of talk former prep-school girls have frequently proved deaf as cats.

“I think I mostly like bands with one strong personality,” she says. “Like the Doors.”

Dylan’s triply whiplashed. Liza’s found the gist of Linus’s conceit through the smokescreen of the Gilligan’s Island example, then just as quickly dismissed it, which is nimble as hell. Alternately, and fully depressing, she’s into the Doors. Worse, though—if he’s grasped the implication—does she think someone in Stately Wayne Manor has a strong personality ?

But they’re at Ninth Street and Second Avenue now, nearly to the connection’s stoop, and Dylan means to shift focus to his own status as criminal savant. She said she wanted to meet a drug dealer. “I can’t take this many people up, it’s not so cool,” he says. As though it’s an arbitrary selection he adds, “Uh, Liza, you come up with me. Linus can stay downstairs with you other girls.”

Linus gets it, and, hunching his shoulders and slanting his eyes, adds, “We’ll keep a lookout.”

“A lookout for what?” says one of Liza’s pals, instantly spooked.

“Nothing,” says Dylan, with quick exasperation.

“Why can’t we stay together?” whines the spooked girl.

“Don’t worry.” Dylan’s always found the notion of streetwisefulness in Manhattan a joke, has trouble not sneering at his West Side– or Chelsea-born friends who cross streets to duck clusters of homies, as though shit ever happens here. The East Village is too full and frenzied to be dangerous, and, truthfully, cops are everywhere. His friends don’t know fear, they’ve got no idea. Though, go figure, now here’s a black kid in a drawn sweatshirt hood sitting legs-wide on the gay’s top step and looking not at all intimidated to be stranded from his usual turf.

Then a glance down Ninth reveals two in eyebrow-low Kangol caps and baggy pants walking with deliberate slowness across the street and the vibe’s not great but this is getting stupid : Dylan’s spooking himself. And now’s no time for hesitation.

“We’ll be down in five. You can go around to St. Marks and get a slice but come back.”

“Uh, Dylan?” says Liza, once they’re buzzed inside. At the second-floor landing they wait for the dealer to unbolt his door.

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think the door downstairs closed all the way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like someone put their foot in it.”

“Relax. Linus is just hysterical, it’s catching.”

Dylan’s screwy secret is he likes visiting Tom’s apartment, despite the pervasive odor of unfresh kitty litter. The gay dealer recalls someone Dylan might have found sitting in Rachel’s breakfast nook on afternoons when he returned from P.S. 38. Like Rachel, Tom smokes not in the hammily clandestine manner of adolescents, that huffing and crouching and voice-squeezing which Dylan privately despises, but grandly, legs crossed, waving a joint and talking uninterruptedly through inhalations, unmindful of conserving the smoke. The satin shorts Tom sports year-round show too much hairy thigh, but Tom’s okay. Two or three times Dylan’s loafed around his place listening to albums and even meeting other buyers, and Tom’s never bartered to suck anyone’s cock, contrary to legend.

Tonight’s different: all’s appalling here, and Dylan can’t think of why on earth he’s brought Liza upstairs. He sees only the filthy pile carpet and chintzy decor, Coca-Cola glasses, framed Streamers poster. And Tom looks like a boiled lobster, all red for some reason. Dylan only wants to score and leave, but Tom can’t be rushed.

“You know this record?” Tom asks. And the colored girls go doo, doo-doo, doo, doo-doo-doo, doo, doo-doo, doo, doo-doo-doo, doo, doo-doo is what’s coming out of the stereo and certainly Dylan’s heard it before, but at the moment, distracted partly by strobe visions of Marilla and La-La, he can only imagine that’s the song’s title : “The Colored Girls Go Doo-Doo-Doo,” etc. Which can’t be right. So he gives out a gruff nod which Tom translates easily: I’ve got no idea.

“Lou Reed, how soon they forget.”

“Sure,” says Dylan. In Dylan’s mind Lou Reed dwells with Mott the Hoople and the New York Dolls in a hazy Bermuda Triangle between sixties rock, disco, and the punk which has supposedly demolished both. The music’s brazen sophistication irritates category. The simple solution, particularly from the vantage of Tom’s pad, is to call the phantom genre gay. This is gay music. Pretty catchy, though.

“You and girlfriend aren’t planning to gulp all this blotter by yourselves, I hope.”

“No.”

Tom’s gray Maine coon cat has crept into Liza’s overalled lap, and now she’s curled around it, head ducked, cooing. She’s less than present, off communing with things female and feline.

“Oh gee, I shouldn’t have said girlfriend. I’m always opening my yap. Just a minute, I’ll get the door.”

Don’t, Dylan wants to say, but fails.

The door’s chain snaps and Tom stumbles backward into the living room.

It’s the two in the Kangols and the one in the hooded sweatshirt, and they’re in Tom’s apartment immediately, yelling, “Sit down, motherfucker! Sit the fuck down! ” Tom stumbles to the couch and plops there between Dylan and Liza, his bare thighs touching them both.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Tom moans.

“Shutup,” says one of the Kangols.

A few things are simultaneously notable about the man-boy in the hood, the lurker Dylan and Liza passed coming up the stoop:

He’s holding a pistol. Waving it. The pistol’s small, dark, unshiny, totally persuasive. All three on the couch watch it and the three black teens watch it too, even the one who holds it. Even the cat. The optics of the room seemingly distort toward the dull fistlike object, as though it were sucking light.

He’s the obvious leader.

He’s tall and moves with weird angularity.

He’s not just any random black guy with an Adam’s apple big as an elbow, he’s one in particular.

“Robert? ” says Dylan incredulously.

“Ho, shit,” says one of the Kangols softly.

Robert Woolfolk stares from under the hood, as stunned as Dylan. There’s no plan, that’s apparent. This is some godless universe’s dumb notion of a joke.

“You know him?” says Tom.

“Who this whiteboy, nigga?” wonders a Kangol.

Liza’s hugged around the ball of fur, trembling.

Robert Woolfolk just shakes his head. He has instantaneously processed the surprise. What’s left is just lip-sucking disappointment, spiked with pure rage. “You one lucky motherfucker,” he says quietly.

“Get out of my house, all of you.”

“Shutup, faggit, I ain’t even talkin’ to you. Come over here, Dylan, what you got for me, man?”

Robert explores Dylan’s jeans with ancient and tender familiarity, seeming to find the wad of twenties, tens, and fives unremarkable, his due. These pockets and Robert’s fingers have journeyed on parallel tracks from Brooklyn for this unlikely rendezvous: Why shouldn’t something extraordinary come of it?

Then, sparing Dylan any violence or even the mildest of jibes about Rachel, Robert Woolfolk disappears the gun into his waistband, deep-muffled beneath a sweatshirt that’s nearly to his knees, and waves his homeboys to the door and out into the hall. Perhaps Robert’s forgotten the origins of the prohibition against his harming Dylan. Perhaps as in Chariots of the Gods he goes on obeying a deity he can no longer name or even properly recall.

All that’s heard is a last: “Who the whiteboy, Robert? ” and the reply: “Shutup, nigger.” And they’re gone.

Dylan stares at Tom in bewildered silence.

“Get out of my house.”

“But—”

“You brought this here, now get out.”

Dylan touches Liza’s shoulder and she slaps him away, expelling the cat in the same motion. Is it possible for a cat to have peed in fear at the sight of a gun? For the ammoniac stink seems nearer than the bathroom now, and Liza’s got a wet patch on her OshKosh B’Goshes.

Oh.

On the stoop comes the fear that Robert Woolfolk’s still around, that the episode’s not over. As the outer door clicks shut behind them Dylan’s vibrant with this possibility, a plucked string. But no, here’s Linus, just walking up nibbling the tip of a wax-papered slice and saying, “Hey, what’s the problem?” Dylan wants to turn to Liza and plead don’t tell but she floods past Linus, crying now, hands cupping pants seat where urine pooled, seeking the consolation of her gaggle—she never should have left their side, never should have come on this expedition, probably never should have graduated Dalton’s eighth grade and allowed her parents to talk her into taking the Stuyvesant test, the cheapskates. Dylan’s searching, almost hopeful, but Robert Woolfolk’s gone, there’s no trace, no proof, nothing but the tale he dreads to tell, the implausible, unworkable, unlikely confession.

Brooklyn’s stranded thirty punks in an apartment unpsychedelicized and they’ll be needing an account of why.

Brooklyn’s chased you to the ground and nobody’s going to comprehend except that you’re marked, cursed, best avoided.

Brooklyn’s bepissed your blond destiny.

You’d strain pee from fishnets with your teeth to make it up to her but fat chance.

Maybe Liza Gawcet and Linus Millberg can be enlisted in the cause of explaining it to the others in Beatle-dynamic terms: how Dean Street’s George Harrison tonight spared the life of Dean Street’s Paul McCartney. If you’re willing to tell it all—Mingus Rude, Arthur, Robert, Aeroman—it might be enough, one hell of a story, worth two hundred bucks, an acid trip of its own. But that’s an awful lot of telling, and it opens to realms you’ve diligently left gray to yourself. Be real: it ain’t gonna happen.

 

The four-track recorder was secure at the pawnshop on Fourth and Atlantic Avenues, not in the window but deep in the back, on the shelves behind the counter. It would wait for him there: Who’s got use for a four-track hereabouts? The tapes themselves were stashed beneath the loose floorboard under the water bed, along with pipe, silk rope and handcuffs, gun, and assorted drug detritus, though nothing left to smoke or snort or he would’ve smoked and snorted it. At times he was unsure whether the tapes weren’t actually blank, whether he’d demoed any of those compositions floating through his mind. Elsetimes he was positive he slept above a McDuck vault of riches, future sonic gold.

Either way, nobody pillaging the basement closet was gonna find shit, whether pillager came through a window or door or was already there, an inside man, a mole. They’d have to storm his citadel upstairs. If someone were to force him to reach inside his stash hole it wouldn’t be magnetic tapes he’d come up with in his hand, it’d be the forty-five.

And he didn’t mean no seven-inch record. Damn straight.

The Times Plaza Hotel was on the way back from the pawnshop and that was where he stopped on his way home, figuring to buy himself a treat out of the fresh money. There was always some deal cooking in the lobby there. He’d only had to stop by twice, looking for Senior, to suss the general atmosphere.

“Hey, honey, I know you.”

“Nah, you’re mistaken. You don’t know me. But we can change that.”

“I know you because I know your daddy and your little boy. I just never seen you around here before, but I know you.”

“Baby, I come ’round here all the time, you just missed me.”

“You a singer.”

“That’s right.”

“See, I would of seen you if you come around before, because I know your daddy. He a religious man. He tole me all about you.”

“That so?”

“Mmm hmm. I don’t even want to tell you what he said though.”

“Maybe he told me about you too.”

“See, now you just talkin’ shit.”

“Listen, baby, you know these Trinidadian dudes come around here sometimes?”

“Maybe I do.”

He made it songlike and seductive, dropped register: “I know you know everybody, that’s the reason I ask.”

It’s 1981: nobody’s heard the term crack. They won’t for two or three years, at least. What’s slipped lately onto the street from Jamaica, Trinidad, from the Leeward and Windward Islands, is called variously base-rock, gravel, baking-soda base, and roxanne. The stuff’s not pure as home-cooked, and in a few years its erratic Columbia-Hollywood-New York-Caribbean-Miami-and-back genealogy will be neatly concealed by the new name. Crack will be eligible then to be taken for a deadly meteorite from an unknown planet, ghetto Kryptonite. In this current epoch of transition, though, confusion reigns. Some folks will tell you base-rock and freebase aren’t the same thing at all, and Barrett Rude Junior, who feels a certain proprietary interest— Shit, man, I was there at the birth, me and them Philly cats might of practically invented freebasing! —is half inclined to agree with them.

But the point wasn’t to debate chemistry or semantics or authorship. It would hardly be the first of his inventions for which he’d received no credit or royalties. The point now is to figure out what this woman calls the stuff and whether she can lay hands on any now.

“You gonna bring me to party along with you, girl?”

Party : the word was like Open Sesame. “Of course I am, baby. I just need you to show me where the party is at.”

 

Sometimes when you walked around the neighborhood now it was like you were already a visitor from the future.

The pavement, the slate’s not changed, but though you’d never flown higher than one precocious spaldeen catch you might be drifting now, a released balloon, too far off to discern distinctive cracks formerly memorized, let alone rain-rinsed skully ghosts.

Three college applications were in the mail, Yale an unlikely joke, UC Berkeley a safety net at Abraham’s urging but he’d never go, Camden the only one he cared about, with its weird disreputability and allure of pure dollars. If a kid from Gowanus goes to the most expensive college in America maybe he’s from Boerum Hill after all. If not Brooklyn Heights.

Running Crab with her romance of poverty can go fuck herself.

Last postcard came you-can’t-remember-when, anyhow.

It only meant working after school every day senior year of high school and all the summer before college to blunt the cost—loans and scholarships and work-study and your own pathetic savings, all these would be required to meet that famous $13,000 tuition, the number like a crazy carrot dangling in the sky. Abraham almost shit his pants when he heard, he had to sit down and breathe slowly.

The big breakout costs big.

So Dylan Ebdus in a red apron scooped ice cream at the Häagen-Dazs on Montague for the girls from Saint Ann’s he’ll soon be at college with, a twelve-year wait to be a private schooler at last. Don’t spit in their cones if they’re not glancing your way—it’s always darkest before blond dawn.

Winter months no one came in but moms needing hand-packed quarts for birthday parties. Dylan daily made himself ill on tasting spoons of double chocolate, cranked his Specials cassette to the limit during cleanup, afterward glowered home along Henry Street all the way to Amity, only cut across Court and Smith at the last possible minute. Dean Street’s nothing but a route now, no life in it, and Dylan kept his head bowed against the risk of recognizing a kid from before.

It did happen occasionally, some lanky mustached Puerto Rican calling out “Hey, Dylan!” who turned out to be Alberto or Davey. Certain persons never left the block, maybe never would.

Impossible to explain they shouldn’t greet you because you’re not really there, you’re gone. Easier just to say Hey, Alberto, what’s up, man?, fake a smile or hand slap. Then realize maybe that’s all anyone does—fake it. Maybe there were pavement zombies like you all over the place.

Given how often he bumped into Mingus Rude, he might as well have been teleporting back to Abraham’s house. Dylan’s choice of hours returning to the neighborhood or streets chosen for walking, a system formulated at deep needful levels, thwarted all encounters.

One morning at breakfast Abraham said:

“I saw your friend Mingus.”

“Mmmh.”

“He always asks where you’ve been, why he never sees you anymore.”

What Dylan couldn’t say was that Mingus’s needs scared him now. Mingus’s black-man’s drugs, Mingus’s dark filthy room, these were impossible realms, quarantined in the past. When Dylan felt guilty for assiduously avoiding his best friend—which was only every single day of his life—he just had to recall that Mingus had the ring.

Aaron X. Doily’s Cracker Jack prize was a sort of buyout, a seal on what Dylan Ebdus couldn’t risk contemplating anymore.

“He didn’t look so well to me,” said Abraham. “When I asked he laughed it off, only suggested I give him a dollar.”

“Did you do it?”

“Of course.”

“You got yoked, Dad.”

“Sorry?”

“Never mind.”

Mondays, on his way to Montague, Dylan stopped to deposit last week’s minimum-wage Häagen-Dazs check at Independence Savings on the corner of Court and Atlantic. There was a couple thousand marked in the passbook, representing one season plopping flavors on cones with a blunt instrument. He’d double that sum by the end of the summer, then turn it over in a lump, to Abraham. So that particular February day, Dylan, Brando-collar flipped against the wind, perversely unhatted, ears red, trudged past blackened curb-rinds of snow along Atlantic.

As Dylan passed Smith Street, a guy putting gas in his car at the Shell station pointed with a finger at the jail, the Brooklyn House of Detention, his mouth hung open in some kind of look, up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane posture of astonishment.

Doesn’t he know there ain’t no such thing as a Superman ?

Maybe Buddy Jacobsen, the girlfriend-murdering horse trainer from Long Island had broken out again, bedsheeting from a high window. News of that escape had put the House of D on the map for a week two years ago, the neighborhood’s blight suddenly plastered all over the five o’clock news. It might have been Isabel Vendle’s worst nightmare, a decade of public relations undone in a stroke.

So Dylan glanced at the jail tower.

There on the vast glass-brick and concrete face, maybe ten stories above the street and three stories tall, was a brazen impossibility, the biggest tag in the history of tagging. The lines were broken and wobbling as they’d have to be, spray-painted from the open window of a hovering helicopter, which was the only way the tag could have got there in the first place, right? Right? Still, however ragged, the thing was a masterpiece, dwarfing Mono’s and Lee’s old bridge stunt, and meant to shock the viewer’s brain with the obvious question: How the fuck DID it get up there?

Four letters: D, O, S, E.

The tag was a cry, a claim, an undeniable thing. The looming jail which no one mentioned or looked at and the trail of dripping paint that covered the city’s every public surface and which no one mentioned or looked at: two invisible things had rendered one another visible, at least for one day.

(In fact it would be ten days before it was gone. Who knew how to clean the exterior of a twenty-six-story jail? And after, a phantom DOSE remained etched in scrubbed concrete.)

Dylan stared up in stupid guilty wonder, trying to figure it out, wondering what now ensued in the world he’d abandoned. Puzzling the message in the four letters. Puzzling whether it was a message.

Or just a tag.

Someone’s betrayed someone but you can’t say who.

Someone’s flying and it isn’t you.

chapter  18

One hot July afternoon, six weeks before he departed the city for college, Dylan Ebdus looked up from Hesse’s Steppenwolf to find Arthur Lomb leaning on the Häagen-Dazs counter, pinching a sweat-drenched white T away from his body, sighing and puffing his cheeks at the chill of the air-conditioning. The little shop was empty, just the two of them, Dylan leaning over the book in his glasses, his chocolate-smeared smock over a polo shirt, his Remain in Light tape just audible over the hum of the coolers. Arthur Lomb had gained his height at last. In fact he swayed, a beanpole with jeans loose like banners from his legs, in maroon suede Pumas, a cigarette behind his ear. His eyes were red and small and wrinkled like those of some fetal animal, a blind mole rat or cauled calf. It shouldn’t have been such a shock to see him there: a Gowanus kid could stroll into Brooklyn Heights any time he cared to, they’d all proved it a million times.

Dylan sat up, removed his glasses, flopped the book over on its cracked spine.

“Yo, D, lemme get a taste of that, um, macadamia.”

He gave Arthur a spoon.

Arthur tipped his chin at the paperback. “What are you reading that for?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Those guys suck. Yo, I hear you’re going to college.”

“From who?”

“Oh, you know, around. I think your dad told Barry.”

“Yeah. Vermont.”

“Cool, cool. I’m going to Brooklyn College. I’m just doing some summer school to make up a few credits at Murrow.”

So even Arthur had trudged through high school, the nerd in him a flame Dean Street couldn’t entirely extinguish. Probably his mother had ridden his back.

“Nice setup here,” said Arthur. “Hot days you must rake it in, huh?”

“It’s not like a taxi. I get paid the same if no one comes in.”

“You’re socking it away for college, I guess.”

Dylan’s mental fingers tightened around his mental passbook.

“I only mention it because I’ve got a proposition I thought you might be interested in,” said Arthur slyly, lapsing into his old routine, boy huckster. “I just thought I’d give you first crack before I haul it over to the comics shop on West Third Street. Because I’m liquidating the collection. All those number one’s. I figured you might still be interested in that kind of stuff.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I remember you always said you were going to buy X-Men forever, unless Chris Claremont quit writing. I always thought of you as like the ultimate collector.”

Demoralizing how Arthur owned him, like a stink you couldn’t wash off. True enough, Dylan still picked up the new X-Men. Not every month, but sometimes. Other month’s issues he didn’t take home, just skim-read beside the spinning rack at the cigar shop on Fourteenth. Like making out with an ex-girlfriend at a party, grudgingly, a chip on your shoulder that you had nothing better to do. Which was exactly what Dylan and Amy Saffrich had been doing all summer, clinching in hallways and bathrooms in the desultory wake of their term’s-end breakup. The months between high school and college were a time of glum derangement, everyone half-spun to new destinies and arrived nowhere yet, living at home, infantile. It only followed that Arthur Lomb would wander into this breach to assert his thin claim.

“No,” Dylan said now. “I mean, why sell.”

“Oh. Heh. I’m just trying to raise some—funds.” Arthur spoke airily. “Now seemed like a good time to get out.”

“Right, right,” said Dylan, pretending to mull.

“I’m sure it’s pretty valuable by now. Everything’s still in fine or near-fine condition.”

“Uh huh.”

Dylan’s plan dawned in curiosity, no notion it would lead to Mingus and the ring, no inkling it was born in the betrayal and rebuke of seeing DOSE on the prison. It began merely as an impulse to see inside Arthur Lomb’s house one last time, to see inside his room, to see Arthur’s mom again, maybe. Nothing more. Dylan was safe already, he was gone, scot-free to Vermont. Why not tour what he’d left behind?

“When can I stop by and take a look?” he said lightly.

“Tonight?”

Arthur looked like he couldn’t believe his luck. His proposition had been a potshot, a lark.

So, like all the best deals, each would believe they were gypping the other. “I’m off at eleven,” Dylan said. “Be at home.”

 

The apartment was the same, a time capsule: carpet, piano, addled tortoise-shell cats. Arthur Lomb’s mom braless in a batik T, listening to WBAI. She greeted Dylan with gushy gratitude, seemingly awed to find him still associating with her son. Dylan was generous, her manner seemed to say, just allowing her to consider Dylan Ebdus and Arthur Lomb still some version of two-of-a-kind. Arthur, meanwhile, had already sneered into his room and shut the door.

“Off to college?”

“Camden.”

“That’s wonderful, Dylan. I’m so happy for you. God, you’re so grown up.”

Disgusting to realize he was flirting with Arthur’s mom, to realize, now that he grokked girls, he’d always been flirting with Arthur’s mom. Worse, she was fuckable.

“I, um, I’ve got to look at some stuff Arthur’s got for me.”

“It’s good to see you, Dylan.”

“Yeah.”

The collection was buried in Arthur’s closet beneath balled underwear and a heap of brand-x porn mags, mostly Players and Hustler. Arthur seemed unembarrassed at the spill of black centerfolds, their purple-backlit Afros and cocoa aureolae. Was he practicing being black? Dylan didn’t want to know. Arthur tugged the plastic dairy crates full of mylar-sealed comics into the center of the room and sprawled back on his bed, lit a Kool.

“Good as gold.”

Dylan knelt self-consciously on the carpet, which was full of pot seeds and blackened matchheads, and browsed the crates. He felt he’d been reduced to something, propelled back in time to bug juice and chess disgrace, but pushed it from his head. The collection looked mostly status quo. Arthur had massed a surprisingly strong war chest of mint number one’s: five or ten each of Peter Parker, The Eternals, Kobra, Ragman, Mister Machine, Nova. For what it was worth.

“You want to sell the whole thing?”

“Yup.”

“What, uh, what number did you have in mind?”

“Five hundred.”

“You’re insane.”

“Four.”

“I’m not even making an offer unless you put back the Howard the Ducks and Omegas. Plus X-Men #97. I assume that’s what’s under your bed.” Dylan had spotted the plastic sleeves glinting there.

Arthur was impossible to shame. “Sure. Four for everything, Howard, Omega, whatever.”

“I’ll give you a hundred bucks.”

“You must think I’m a chump.”

“One-fifty.”

“You shitface. When can you get it?”

“I’ve got it with me. But you have to help me carry them home.”

They fished the hidden cache from under the bed, then each hoisted up a crate. They slipped downstairs, to Arthur’s stoop. In the glow of money Arthur would be incautious, boastful. Now would be safe for Dylan to confirm what he suspected, that the trail of funds led to Mingus. As he counted out twenties he said:

“So—funds for what?”

“Gus and Robert and me are gonna buy a quarter kee and cut it up and make some real money. From Barry’s connection.”

“Cocaine?”

Arthur pounced. “No, we thought we’d go into your line—chocolate sprinkles.”

“So you guys are pooling cash.”

“Uh huh.”

“Do you think Mingus would be interested in selling his comics, too?” Dylan asked.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Arthur. “Those comics are ruined.” As if the interior pages of his own didn’t feature breast-tracings and Sea-Monkey ads adorned with oversize cock-and-balls. But Dylan let it go.

“Yeah, I know they’re in bad shape but he’s got some titles I’m interested in.” Let Arthur think him crazy, suspect what he liked, he’d never grasp Dylan’s real angle here, behind the blind of the comics. No worry, anyway: dollar signs served in place of Arthur Lomb’s eyes and, behind them, his brain.

“I suppose he’d listen to a reasonable offer.”

Dylan milked it. “I’d have to get some more cash from the bank.”

“That’s an excellent idea, so you can finish the transaction right there.”

“But mention it to him.”

“I’ll do that.”

Only six weeks. Arthur Lomb’s two crates of number ones relocated to his own closet’s depths, Dylan Ebdus in his loft bed stewed in self-contempt, and the only solace was the escape so near he could hear it like a distant throb, a summer boom box on a Puerto Rican patio or a DJ in the Wyckoff Gardens courtyard. He might seem momentarily to have been drawn back into Arthur and Mingus’s morass but it was only to conclude some old business, the thing left undone to earn his vanishing from Dean Street. Six weeks: he could scheme, be craven as Arthur, didn’t matter. He was waving goodbye.

He jerked himself to sleep to thoughts of Arthur’s mom, a tribute he’d owed for years.

 

Arthur, playing liaison now, set it up for the following night, a Friday. He was pretentiously vague and spooky on the phone, as though Dylan and Mingus couldn’t manage an encounter without his help.

“We’ll meet you on the stoop and let you in. Don’t knock, you’ll wake up Senior.”

“I know Mingus’s grandfather, Arthur.”

“You haven’t seen him lately.”

“No, not lately.”

“Just take my word for it.”

Arthur and Mingus were on the stoop at the appointed time. Mingus greeted Dylan with a hug, butted his head into Dylan’s shoulder, phantom-boxed him. “Dillinger, where you been, man? My boy’s done got all grown, damn !”

Dylan told himself he’d have returned the hug if he and Mingus were alone. Under Arthur Lomb’s gaze he felt brittle, iced over. Whatever punkish stature Dylan had assembled in Manhattan didn’t register in Arthur’s eyes: reflected there Dylan saw a cone scooper, a whiteboy. So in defensiveness he shrugged Mingus off, was all business. Best for now to emphasize the transaction. Anyhow, Dylan had conceived a plan in which this was only a dry run: buy comics now, buy something else later.

Any sentiment could be reserved for the return visit Dylan had projected, one where Arthur would be absent.

“I hear you’re trying to put together some cash,” Dylan said.

“Yeah, yeah, D-Man, you want in on this deal we got going?” Mingus seemed immune to any slight.

“I might take those comics off your hands.”

The room was a cave, kept dark. Whatever damage the comics had suffered surely wouldn’t include sun-faded inks, but rot was a possibility. Dylan raised his eyes enough to see the shelf over the door had been tugged down, its hardware scarring the plaster. No football helmet or anything else. He averted from the rest, the sprayed walls and ceiling, didn’t care to take it in. Then someone in the shadows moved, shifted, hitched trousers from knees and tugged at crotch in sitting up straight. Robert Woolfolk. The party of the third part, it only figured. Robert nodded, barely. Dylan back. Mingus recranked the volume once the door was shut, some pulsing funk. Arthur scraped and tapped with a razor blade at a jagged chunk of mirror, its sharp edges rimmed in black electrical tape. He sniffed a line and offered the rolled dollar to Dylan.

Dylan shook his head.

“Good stuff.”

“No thanks.”

Arthur handed the dollar to Robert, who tipped his upper half out of shadow and over the mirror.

“You know Robert, right?” said Arthur coolly, tauntingly.

“Sure,” said Dylan. “He stole my bike once.” He’d grant nothing after: no Rachel, no pizza slice, no East Village ambush. Let Arthur and Mingus each muse on the allusion to the block’s prehistory. Robert wouldn’t contradict him. Dylan was certain of the bargain of silence they’d struck locking eyes in the gay dealer’s apartment or even earlier, the lifelong misunderstanding they’d forged in the P.S. 38 schoolyard. Robert Woolfolk wouldn’t contradict Dylan because whatever he might be he wasn’t a liar, or a lion.

“But that was a long time ago,” Dylan added with munificent sarcasm. “How’s it going, Robert?”

“Yo,” said Robert Woolfolk murkily, as he sucked a slush of coke down the back of his throat.

Mingus had quarried the comics from his closet, scooting them into hasty piles. He’d likely not laid eyes on them for years. “I never did get these in no plastic bags,” he said apologetically, dazedly. He flipped open an issue of Fantastic Four and grew transfixed in nostalgia. “Dang, I even wrote my name in all these, check it out.”

Mingus was talking to himself. His nostalgia was a non sequitur, no one was interested in the comics.

“I’ll give you a hundred and fifty.” Dylan spoke not looking at Mingus but staring bullets at Arthur, who made himself busy with the razor blade.

Robert Woolfolk only reclined in the low chair, grew hooded in shadow.

Mingus frowned in mock deliberation, a performance dying in the thin air of the bullshit transaction. “Well, I guess that would be fair.”

Dylan tossed the money on the mirror. He relied on their understanding how puny the sum was to him. This was a demonstration to all three of them, as representatives of Gowanus, that Dylan was no longer of this place.

In reply, Robert Woolfolk only scooped up the cash, produced a thick-curled roll and layered Dylan’s bills to the outside of it.

“I brought a knapsack,” Dylan said. “I don’t need any help.”

Mingus nodded and blinked, defeated by Dylan’s efficiency. “Okay, then, that’s chill.”

Turning his back to the three of them, Dylan shoveled the marker-tagged, fingerprint-worn comics into the sack. He was tangled in rage, to be there on the floor on his knees. In an irrational gesture he scooped up one of Mingus’s Afro picks too, and pushed it into the mouth of the sack, on top of the comics. Then he remembered his cool, how he’d thrown down the money. He had a larger purpose here, his plan. The comics were only a joke. Dylan was like the garbage man of their entire youth, come at last. He might have been acquiring a collection of roofed spaldeens, or old cum-gummed socks.

“Walk me out,” he said when he’d stood.

“Yeah, yeah, sure.”

Again they tiptoed past Senior’s crypt. At the apartment’s gate Dylan whispered:

“Call me tomorrow. When Lomb and Woolfolk aren’t around.”

Lomb and Woolfolk, like Abraham and Straus or Jeckyll and Hyde, an old association. Dylan almost laughed.

Mingus widened his red eyes, but Dylan left him hanging. Two could play at spurious mystery, or three, or four: anyone could be spooky, bogus street rap was no commodity in Gowanus. Dylan had survived Dean Street when Mingus Rude was a Philadelphia Boy Scout, Arthur Lomb a private-school dork. Only Robert Woolfolk held any real fear, and Rachel Ebdus had taken care of that, Dylan was untouchable. The other two were newcomers and comic-book collectors forever, and if they wanted to play at being players Dylan could play too. He assumed his demonstration was adequate to show it was the one with the fat passbook who held the cards.

 

Eleven in the morning, heat already gripping the day like a vise, it nearly went wrong right at the start, Abraham walking in as Dylan counted money. “Goodness,” Abraham said.

Dylan shuffled it into the pocket of his yellow-checked shorts, Ska -wear for the concrete jungle.

“How much have you got there?” said Abraham.

“Three hundred,” Dylan lied.

“Doesn’t it belong in the bank?”

“It’s none of your business.”

Abraham grew consternated, and tried to formulate a stern reply, an effort Dylan always pitied.

“I’d say it is my business, Dylan. What’s the money for?”

“I need to lend it to Mingus,” said Dylan lamely, landing too near the truth.

“Why does Mingus need three hundred dollars?”

“I don’t know.” Dylan moved to the door.

“Dylan?”

“Treat me like a grown-up, Abraham,” said Dylan coldly. “I told you how much I’d contribute at the end of the summer, and it’s not the end of the summer yet.”

Not summer’s end, no: summer’s crotch. Yoo-Hoo, Rheingold, Manhattan Special, everywhere bottle caps were massaged irretrievably into caramel tar by inching cars with gauges in red. Coming up Nevins passenger-siders jerked windows to block tin-can vented streams: some vigilante had again wrenched a hydrant open to belch the city’s supply, and nobody rallied heatstruck brains to summon cops or firemen. By noon every house, every window was jammed open to suck air from the street. Pointless, though. The air was dead.

With five hundred in his pocket, his final offer determined in advance, Dylan Ebdus strolled to Mingus Rude’s, casual as shit, sweating bullets.

Arthur Lomb and Robert Woolfolk weren’t among the creatures slugging at minimal speeds along the heat-watery sidewalk. Dylan recognized nobody, his eyes walled.

Sunday, Senior was at the Parlor of God Ministry on Myrtle Avenue, so Mingus had the basement to himself, doors all flung open.

Dylan followed the music inside.

Mingus lay tumbled in baggy shorts and a grayed undershirt on his bed, sheets kicked to the foot, pillow doubled under his neck, dozing in daylight and loud funk. Possibly he’d started his day two or three times and lagged back, nothing on the agenda until Dylan arrived, sleeping off a night or series of nights, still sleeping off high school. The mirror was stowed somewhere, the room in midday light unmysterious, just a room. The walls and ceiling had been rolled black, maybe the only shade which would cover silver Krylon and Garvey Violet.

Mingus rubbed his eyes with balled fists like a newborn.

“Yo, D.”

Dylan replied self-consciously, “Yo.”

“So, my boy wants in the deal after all.”

“Maybe.”

Mingus swung his feet from the bed, gestured Dylan to sit down, kneaded his muzzle and smacked his lips.

“Master Dillinger has concerns,” Mingus said, mock-pompous. “Things he needs to know. He’s operating on a need-to-know basis.”

Dylan didn’t speak.

“I keep trying to make you bust a smile, D-Man. What? You afraid Robert wants to mess with you? Because you know I’m looking out.”

“I’m not afraid of Robert.”

“Aight, cool. I didn’t mean to say you were.”

Dylan wanted to get to business. “How much are you short for the deal?”

“We could be short nothing. The question is how much you want to come in?”

“Two hundred.”

“Two hundred.” Mingus ruminated. “Right. I see no problem with that.” Antenna up now, he waited for the kicker. “We can cut you in for two bills, that’s not that big a deal one way the other.”

“But I want something else.”

“Ah, something else.”

“The ring.”

“Ho, shit.” Mingus covered his face with his fingers, laughed grimacing behind them, shaking his head. “Dude come round here talking about this and that, whole time he wants the ring back.”

“You still have it?”

“So we on that basis. You had me thinking this was about, I don’t know, comic books, or a drug deal, or some shit.”

Mingus’s laughter was bitter. It was as if Dylan had asked to buy their friendship back, all their secrets with it, Aeroman and the bridge and things which had no right name. As if on six or seven summers he’d put a price tag of two hundred dollars, eight twenties, the wage of a week spent shaving pistachio and butter pecan curls out of frosted tubs. Perhaps he had.

Pushing off with hands on bare knees Mingus stood, stumbled out into the hallway without a word. Through open doors pee bombed into porcelain.

“I still got it, yeah,” he said when he returned. “You know, you only had to ask me for it back.”

“Okay, give it back.”

“What, now you ain’t gonna pay me?”

There was a terrifying satisfaction in hearing Mingus’s anger, at last. “No, I appreciate your keeping it for me,” said Dylan, voice still cold, face growing hot. “I’m glad to pay.”

“Damn straight.”

“Who knows about the ring?” asked Dylan. He’d only waited all of high school to ask it. Now he’d paid for the right.

Mingus turned away.

“You told Arthur?”

“Nah.”

Of course not, who would? “Robert?”

Silence.

“Motherfucker, you told Robert.”

“He was with me when I jumped the cop at Walt Whitman,” said Mingus. “I had to give it to him to get it off me when they took me in.”

“Did he ever—try?”

Mingus shrugged. “He was like you.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Means he tried.”

Of course. The ring was not a neutral tool. It judged its wearer: Aaron Doily flew drunkenly, and Dylan flew like a coward, only when it didn’t matter, at the Windles’ pond. So it had attuned to Robert Woolfolk’s chaos.

“Don’t tell me,” said Dylan. “He flew sideways.”

Mingus left it vague. He’d always made it his habit to protect their honor against one another—Dylan, Arthur, Robert. To say nothing.

Dylan stood and placed two hundred dollars on the stained sheet. Mingus frowned at it.

“Looks light to me,” he said coldly.

It was a moment before Dylan understood.

“What do you want?” he asked, his voice a husk.

Mingus almost smiled. “Let me see what you got on you.” The phrase was a cue from a yoking script— let me see it, let me hold it for a minute, I’ll give it back, man, you know I wouldn’t take nothing from you —the stony authority over whiteboys Mingus never exercised. Mingus had let him hear it: their difference, finally.

For the first time Dylan considered all Mingus might have spared him. His cheeks flushed as he felt for the remaining three hundred in a pocket which might as well have been made of glass. Just because the ring never bestowed X-ray vision that didn’t disprove X-ray vision’s existence.

Sweat had broken everywhere on Dylan’s body. Now it trickled into his eyes.

“All right.” Mingus yanked a dresser drawer and added Dylan’s bills to a heap of money there. Perhaps it was Robert Woolfolk’s roll, perhaps another supply, impossible to say. Mingus left the drawer open, expressing indifference, perhaps daring Dylan to risk pilfering his college funds back.

All through Gowanus fortunes were being massed by enterprising young men, who knew?

Isabel Vendle would have been proud. She’d always told Dylan to put every dollar into a drawer and see what grew.

“I have to get it from upstairs,” said Mingus.

“Upstairs?”

“It’s hid in Barrett’s stash,” said Mingus. “Don’t bug out, it’s safe. Anyway, Barrett wants to see you, I told him you were coming around. He’s always asking why you never come around.” Then, unable to keep from twisting the knife, he added: “You see anything else ’round here you want? But then I guess you out of folding money.”

They went upstairs.

The gold records were gone from the wall, leaving faded rectangles topped with nail holes. Little else had changed, only been worn, neglected. Barrett Rude Junior stood behind the counter pouring Tropicana into a wide tumbler and the lip of the tumbler was chipped in three places and the tiles of the counter were loose in crumbled grout, crunching where he set the carton. His silk robe was thready, wide sweat stains under each arm. It hung on him too loosely. He’d shrunk, his bulk gone. His beard was still trimmed into boxy chops but they were asymmetrical, gray-coiled. His fingernails and toenails were thick and yellow as claws. The skin below his eyes had retreated, sunk in.

A fan whirred in the bedroom. There was no music apart from what leaked with the dead air from the street.

“Little Dylan, damn.”

Dylan was stunned, dumb.

If Abraham was going to grow this old he didn’t want to know.

“Been too long, man. I don’t even recognize you, big man. Look at you.”

“Hey, Barry,” Dylan managed.

“Good to see your skinny ass, boy. I see your father all the time, I never see your ass. Day’s shaping up hot like a motherfucker, ain’t it? Y’all want some cold juice?”

“Nah, I’m good,” said Mingus.

“No thanks,” said Dylan.

“Need to drink OJ, Gus, restore your vitamins. See you don’t get all depleted, boy. Sit down, you both making me nervous. Look like a couple of cats on a mission.”

“I need something from your room,” said Mingus.

“Get it then, what’s the problem? Dylan, sit down. Take some juice with ice, don’t say that don’t sound good in this heat. Check out the Yankee game? Five minutes, Ron Guidry, man. Best pitcher in the world.”

Mingus went into the back. Dylan sat on the couch, behind the coffee table. Barrett Rude Junior’s mirror was maybe the only unbroken surface in the room, powder splayed like a galaxy. A plastic straw lay to one side.

Barrett Rude Junior caught him staring at this pinwheel of dust, said, “Don’t be shy.”

“Oh, no, thanks.”

“Don’t be thanking me, baby, help yourself.”

“Go ahead,” said Mingus, emerging from the bedroom. “Do a line, D.”

“It’s all right.”

“What, you never got high before, man?”

“Leave him alone, Gus. Little Dylan can do what he wants. He’s my boy, he’s going to college, damn, I can’t believe how the time goes, can you believe it, Gus? Little Dylan’s taking off to college, the boy can’t get high because he’s keeping his shit together.”

While Barrett Rude Junior improved this lyric, a variation on the old song—call it “Little Dylan Is the Man, Part 2”—Mingus Rude plopped beside Dylan on the couch, knees touching as they sank together to the middle, and without saying a word opened his hand, so that Aaron X. Doily’s ring clanked gently into a clear spot on the cokey mirror.

Barrett Rude Junior set down two tumblers of orange juice, with half-moon ice drifting like bellied fish.

“What’s that?” Junior asked.

“Just something I was keeping for Dylan in your floorboard. He’s taking it with him to Ver- mont, where the girls go swimming without any clothes and niggers work in gas stations.”

“Oh.” This was lost on Junior. He arranged himself in the butterfly chair, his robe curtaining to show boxing trunks and wasted chest, his sternum like a tent pole.

A mansion of a man had been scooped out, done in as if by termites.

Dylan palmed the ring, got it into his pocket. Half thinking, he lifted his fingers to his nose, sniffed where they’d skimmed the glass.

“There you go,” said Junior. “Cool you right out.”

“See, he wants it,” said Mingus, “he just doesn’t know he wants it.”

Ring safe in his pocket, Dylan suddenly heard his own song, the one he’d been humming to himself all summer, “Little Dylan’s Almost Gone.” He recalled his basic condition: Not In Jail, Just Visiting. Let Mingus lead him one more new place before he ejection-seated to Camden College, Camden, Vermont. He’d dropped acid, popped a quaalude in a bowling alley, mushroomed at Jones Beach, so what’s this hesitation? Arthur wasn’t here to witness, to call him on the bluff. He’d get away with taking a sniff of the cocaine. Only recall the routine, pretend it wasn’t your first time.

Dylan moved the straw from the mirror to his nose and sucked like he’d seen.

And Mingus Rude did a line.

And Barrett Rude Junior did a line.

And they all did another line and Dylan Ebdus was doing coke with Gus and Junior, just another summer afternoon on Dean Street, no biggie. It was like a visit to an alternate life, one where he’d never abandoned the block, never quit visiting this house. The drug rained through Dylan and streamlined the illusion, scoured away doubt.

Your body could be cooled from inside, sweating like an iced glass.

A bass line never sounded so profound as when Barrett Rude Junior dropped a needle on Bunny Sigler’s Let Me Party with You, and orange juice loosened the slushy trickle in the back of the throat surprisingly well.

“You like that?” said Junior. His bearded skull spread in a smile. Dylan might be getting used to it.

“Yeah,” said Dylan honestly, his eyes open.

“That’s nice stuff, right?” said Mingus. His tone softened, as though he’d only wanted Dylan to join him all this time, only wanted his oldest and best friend to ratify him in the medium of cocaine.

“Yeah,” said Dylan again.

Maybe it was possible to be forgiven. Maybe you’d misunderstood and everything was actually completely cool. The ring was in your pocket now. You were hanging out with Mingus and Junior and you were also just weeks, days away from leaving for the most expensive college in the world. The two weren’t mutually exclusive, your fear was wrong.

Maybe everything was perfect but even as you thought it Barrett Rude Senior came up the stairs and popped into the room, astonishing them all, no one more than himself.

Despite the day he was in his black suit, his gold tie clip and cufflinks, white handkerchief.

He smelled heavily of flowers, of roses.

Mingus was the one caught with his face to the mirror. He dropped the straw and smoothed at his nose with a finger.

“This what goes on any chance I’m out the door,” said Senior, his voice quavering. “Corrupting the morals of another neighbor child.”

“Get downstairs, old man,” said Junior simply, not looking at his father.

“Messing with the white folks’ child you’ll bring down cataclysm on this house.”

Dylan failed to recognize himself or anything he knew about Gowanus or the world in this. It was suddenly so funny he almost guffawed. Mingus elbowed him.

“Why you home early on a Sunday anyway?” said Junior. “Sister Pauletta finally kick you out for taking a pinch on one of her flower girls?”

“Lord forgive the twisted soul who was formerly my little boy.”

Barrett Rude Junior rose, pulled his robe tight, went past his father to the sink. “I came twisted, old man. The twist got handed down. So why don’t you take a load off, baby. Loosen your tie, day’s too hot. You want some blow, help yourself.”

“I praise God every day your mother never lived to see it.”

Barrett Rude Junior turned and said softly, “You praise God, is that right? Over the name of my mother ?”

“I do.”

“And what’s God say back to you, old man? When that name comes up?”

Mingus said quietly, “Go to your room and pray, Granddaddy.”

“Each day and night I pray beneath the feet of sinners,” said Senior. “One fine morning I’m coming out of my hiding to say what I’ve seen.”

“Go now,” said Mingus, pleading.

“I’ll cry it to the hills.”

Dylan didn’t know how it was possible for Barrett Rude Junior to cross the room as quickly as he did, and gather his father’s suit lapels in his two fists to slam him back against the stairwell’s wall. A sigh came out of them both, Junior and Senior, seemingly one sound. Then Senior was gone, down the stairs, and Junior had again turned his back to the couch, was running water at the sink.

Dylan bowed in guilty silence at seeing it. Mingus just shook his head and returned to the straw and the mirror.

Dylan felt his pulse beating everywhere in his skin: the drug, probably.

The music went on playing and for a moment it was as if nothing had happened. One moment, then the room refilled with the scent of roses, Senior was at the top of the stairs again and it was instead as if he’d never gone and the moment of peace had been an eye blink. Except Senior had made a trip to the basement apartment: proof was in what he’d retrieved there and now displayed in his two hands. The left gripped a bouquet of twenties, which he immediately flung before him so they twirled to the carpet. The right was filled with a gun.

From the speakers Bunny Sigler sang on, oblivious.

“You don’t lay hands on your father,” said Barrett Rude Senior to his son. “It says so in the book. Now I got the evidence you been using children for your dealing ways. The boy’s room is full of your dirty money. You got no shame, I got to teach it to you, boy.”

“Mingus has his own money,” said Junior quietly, watching the gun waver in his father’s hand.

“You teach sinning ways and you got to pay for laying a hand on your own father.”

“Lay down the gun, old man.”

“Call me father, now. The gun’s to put some fear in you.”

“You got to ad-mit, you an old man. ” It was another of Barry’s impromptu melodies, the last Dylan would hear.

Mingus hurdled from the couch, and ran to his father’s doorway. He turned, before vanishing into the back, and shouted, “Go home, Dylan!” Protecting him still.

Dylan Ebdus never would remember getting from the couch to the door, from door to stoop, stoop to gate, to the sidewalk. A part of him was still inside, beating like a pulse behind eyes staring at the faces, at the gun, at Mingus framed for an instant in the doorway before turning away, moving inside his father’s bedroom. Dylan Ebdus still heard the music and felt the scuff in his nostril, still puzzled at the missing gold records on the wall, the missing flesh in Barrett Rude Junior’s face. So the blazing day into which he’d been ejected made no impression. Still, he was outside. Mingus shouted at him to go and he’d gone and he was intact, ring in pocket, five hundred college dollars scattered from Barrett Rude Senior’s fist to the floor, mission accomplished. He wasn’t inside. He was on Dean Street, teetering on a square of slate, when he heard the shot.