In the attic room I called my office sat a daybed that was usually spread with paper, the press packets which accompanied promotional copies of CDs and the torn bubble wrap and padded mailers the CDs arrived in. This morning, though, the bedspread, bathed in sideways seven A.M. September light, Indian summer light, was clear of packaging husks, clear of publicity. Instead the daybed held two things: a CD wallet, with plastic sleeves to hold twenty-four discs, and Abigale Ponders, in threadbare Meat Puppets T-shirt (mine) and Calvin Klein men’s underwear (not mine, she bought her own), her limbs bent in sleepily elegant disarray. Only one of the two would be joining me on the nine-thirty flight to Los Angeles. Discman and headphones were already packed, along with a single change of clothes, in a small overnight satchel waiting at the door downstairs.
It wasn’t usual to see Abby in my attic office. In truth, I was peevish to have her there. I’d been hoping to slip from the house while she was still asleep in the room below. Instead she’d trotted upstairs after me. There, in slanted light, her white shorts glowing against her skin and the maroon bedspread, she made a picture-one suitable, if you discounted the Meat Puppets emblem on the thin-stretched white shirt, for the jacket art on an old Blue Note jazz LP. She resembled a brown puppet herself, akimbo, head propped angled, mouth parted, lids druggy. I would have had to be a scowling Miles Davis to feel worthy of stepping into the frame. Or, at least, Chet Baker. Abby’s whole being was a reproach to me. I loved having a black girlfriend, and I loved Abby, but I was no trumpet player.
Shopping at my wall of CDs, I opened a jewel case and dropped Ron Sexsmith’s Whereabouts onto the spread beside the wallet.
She yawned. “Why are you staying overnight, anyway?” Abby counted on groggy insouciance to break the stalemate of the night before. We’d been in a silent war, worse than ever. This was worth a try-I rooted for her, even if I couldn’t cooperate.
“I told you I’ve got a friend to see.”
“Are you going on a date?”
I mumbled the lie out. “An old friend, Abby.” Bill Withers’s Still Bill was my next choice. I flipped the disc to the bedspread without looking away from the shelves.
“Right, old friend, dinner, I forgot. Oops.” The CD clattered to the floor. “I kicked it.” She laughed for an instant.
I caught the disc still spinning, and slid it into the wallet, near her toes.
“I’m trying to make you talk to me.”
“I’ll miss my plane.”
“They leave on the hour, I’ve heard.”
“Right, and I’m expected at Dreamworks at one. Don’t fuck this up.”
“Don’t worry, Dylan, I won’t fuck anyone. Is that what you said?”
“Abby.” I tried scowling.
“Not even you. So don’t be jealous of yourself, because you’re not getting any.”
“Go back to bed,” I suggested.
She yawned and stretched. Hands on her bare thighs, elbows dipping toward her middle as if seeking to meet. “If we were fucking anymore, Dylan, maybe that would help.”
“Help who?”
“The nature of fucking is it involves both people.”
I tossed Brian Eno’s Another Green World onto the bed and envisioned a row to myself at sixty thousand feet.
She ran thumbs under elastic. “I made myself come last night after you were asleep.”
“Telling someone else about masturbation involves two people, Abby, but that doesn’t make it fucking.” This sort of stuff passed easily between myself and Abby. The tang of déjà vu to the banter made it a simple task to carry on browsing my record collection.
“Do you want to know who I was thinking about when I came? It’s gross.”
“Could you see the whites of his eyes?”
“What?”
“Never mind. I’m interrupting.”
“I’ll tell you if you tell me the name of your secret date in L.A. ”
“We’re swapping a real person for an imaginary one? That’s supposed to be a good deal?”
“Oh, he’s real.”
I didn’t answer, but made another couple of quick CD selections-Swamp Dogg, Edith Frost.
“I was half dreaming, really. Guy d’Seur was putting his froggy little hands all over me. Isn’t that stupid, Dylan? I’ve never thought of him that way, not for a minute. When he took out his dick it was enormous.”
“I’m not surprised.”
I wasn’t. Not at d’Seur’s appearance in Abby’s fantasy or at the size she’d granted his apparatus. Guy d’Seur was more than Abigale Ponders’s thesis advisor, he was a Berkeley celebrity. Forget being a rock critic-forget even being a rock musician. The professors of the various graduate departments were the stars that wowed this burg. To walk into a Berkeley café and find seated before a latté and scone one of the Rhetoric or English faculties’ roster of black-clad theorists-Avital Rampart, Stavros Petz, Kookie Grossman, and Guy d’Seur formed the current pantheon-was to have your stomach leap up into your throat. In Berkeley these were the people who hushed a room. Their unreadable tomes filled front tables at bookstores.
Abigale Ponders was the sole child of a pair of black dentists from Palo Alto, honorable strivers through the middle classes who’d only wanted to see her attain a graduate degree and then been completely bewildered at the result. Abby’s thesis, “The Figuration of the Black Chanteuse in Parisian Representations of Afro-American Culture, from Josephine Baker to Grace Jones,” had led her, two years earlier, to come calling on the one working journalist in Berkeley who’d interviewed Nina Simone. I’d made my humbling pilgrimage to Simone on behalf of Musician Magazine in 1989, and Abby had proved she could research a bibliographic index with the best of them. That day, I’d charmed Abby out of interview mode by playing rare Simone records, until it was late enough to suggest a bottle of wine.
We’d moved her into my little Berkeley house three months later.
“Now you owe me one,” she said. “Who are you seeing in L.A.? What’s worth a hotel room you can’t afford?”
“The hotel room is in Anaheim, and it isn’t costing me anything,” I said. “I guess that’s a clue.” I’d resigned myself to giving up the secret.
“You’re being paid for sex? With a Disney character?”
“Try harder, Abby. Who in life, when you visit them, insists on paying for everything?”
She fell silent, just slightly shamed.
I took my advantage. “You’re dreaming about d’Seur because you owe his froggy little hands a chapter draft, you know.”
“Fuck off.”
“Okay, but why not use this as a chance to get back to work?”
“I’ve been working.”
“Okay. Sorry I said anything.”
She sat up and crossed her legs. “Why is your father going to Anaheim, Dylan?”
“He’s got business there.”
“What kind of business?”
“Abraham is the guest of honor-the artist guest of honor-at ForbiddenCon.”
“What’s ForbiddenCon?”
“I guess I’m about to find out.”
A pause. “Something to do with his film?” She spoke this softly, as she ought to have. Abraham Ebdus’s unfinished life’s work was no laughing matter.
I shook my head. “It’s some science-fiction thing. He’s winning an award.”
“I thought he didn’t care about that stuff.”
“I guess Francesca convinced him.” My father’s new girlfriend, Francesca Cassini, had a gift for getting him out of the house.
“Why didn’t you tell me he was coming?”
“He isn’t coming. I’m meeting him there.” Our tone was rote and flat, a comedown from Abby’s sexual provocations. Those now drifted off as easily as fumes from a solitary cigarette.
I took Esther Phillips’s Black-Eyed Blues from its jewel case and slid it into the wallet. The light outside was altered. An airport shuttle van would come in half an hour.
Abby tugged at one of the short dreadlocks at her forehead, twisting it gently between her knuckles. I recalled a baby goat scratching tender, nubby horns against a gate, something I’d witnessed in Vermont a hundred or a thousand years ago. When she felt my gaze Abby looked down, stared at her own bare knees. Her mouth worked slightly but formed nothing. I thought I could smell that she had made herself a little excited hectoring me.
“You seem a bit down,” I said.
“What?”
“A little depressed again, lately.”
She looked up sharply. “Don’t use that word.”
“I meant it sympathetically.”
“You have no right.”
With that she suddenly took herself out of the room, peeling the Meat Puppets shirt off over her head as she descended the stairs and moved out of sight. I only got a flash of back. A minute later I heard the shower. Abby had a seminar today, the second of the new semester. She ought to have spent the summer months writing a segment of her dissertation-as I likely should have been drafting my screenplay. Instead we’d fought and fucked and, increasingly, lapsed into separate glowering silences in our two rooms. Now, just as Abby was going in to face her mentors more or less empty-handed, I’d be winging down to Los Angeles to talk out a hot notion for which I’d not scribbled even the first hot scrap of note.
My sometimes-editor at The L.A. Weekly had arranged the pitch meeting, my first. Over the last two years I’d slowly ground myself into $30,000 of credit card debt as a freelancer, my recent livelihood consisting mainly of the work I’d been doing for a Marin-based reissue label, Remnant Records. My dealings with Remnant’s owner, a graying beatnik entrepreneur named Rhodes Blemner, vexed me. So today’s pitch was a bid for freedom.
I must have lapsed into some kind of fugue, because the next thing I knew Abby was dressed and back at the top of my stairs. She wore jeans and a black sleeveless top and knee-high boots which raised her above my height. The boots still needed to be laced through their elaborate upper eyelets. She stood rubbing moisturizer into her palms and elbows and regarding me with steely fury.
“I don’t talk about the hardest parts of my life only to have you throw them back at me,” she said. “If I’ve ever been depressed at least I’ve had the nerve to admit it. I don’t want you to ever use that word with me again, do you understand?”
“Sure you’ve got a nerve. Apparently I touched it. That’s called letting someone know you intimately, Abby.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s it called when you don’t know yourself intimately?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why didn’t you tell me your father was coming, Dylan? How could you let me twist like that?”
I stared.
“You’re depressed, Dylan. That’s your secret from yourself. You don’t let it inside. Your surround yourself with it instead, so you don’t have to admit you’re the source. Take a look.”
“It’s an interesting theory,” I mumbled.
“Fuck you, Dylan, it’s not interesting, it’s not a theory. You’re so busy feeling sorry for me and whoever, Sam Cooke, you conveniently ignore yourself.”
“What exactly do you want, Abby?”
“To be let inside, Dylan. You hide from me, in plain sight.”
“I suppose that’s another way of describing one person sparing another their violent shifts of mood.”
“Is that what we’re talking about here? Moods?”
“One minute you’re jerking off on the carpet, now this outburst. I can’t take it, Abby.”
“You think you’ve spared me your moods? What do you think it’s like for me, living under your cockpit of misery, here?” She gestured at the wall I’d been contemplating, covered with fourteen hundred compact discs: two units each holding seven hundred apiece. “This is a wall of moods, a wall of depression, Mr. Objective Correlative.” She slapped the shelves. They rattled.
“Wow, you’ve really drawn up an indictment.” I was fumbling for breathing room, nothing more.
“That’s what you call it when I won’t play depressed for you? You switch to your little Kafka fantasies? I don’t have the power of indictment, Dylan. I’m just the official mascot for all the shit you won’t allow yourself to feel. A featured exhibit in the Ebdus collection of sad black folks.”
“That’s unfair.”
“Let’s see, Curtis Mayfield, “We People Who Are Darker Than Blue”-sounds like depression to me.” She chucked the CD to the floor. “Gladys Knight, misery, depression. Johnny Adams, depression. Van Morrison, total fucking depression. Lucinda Williams, give her Prozac. Marvin Gaye, dead. Johnny Ace, dead, tragic.” As she dismissed the titles she jerked them from the shelf, the jewel cases splitting as they clattered down. “Little Willie John, dead. Little Esther and Little Jimmy Scott, sad-all the Littles are sad. What’s this, Dump? You actually listen to something called Dump? Is that real? Syl Johnson, Is It Because I’m Black? Maybe you’re just a loser, Syl. Gillian Welch, please, momma. The Go-Betweens? Five Blind Boys of Alabama, no comment. Al Green, I used to think Al Green was happy music until you explained to me how fucking tragic it all was, how he got burned with a pot of hot grits and then his woman shot herself because she was so very depressed. Brian Wilson, crazy. Tom Verlaine, very depressed. Even you don’t play that record. Ann Peebles, I Can’t Stand the Rain. Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, blecch. “Drowning in the Sea of Love,” is that a good thing or a bad thing? David Ruffin, I know he’s a drug addict. Donny Hathaway-dead?”
“Dead,” I said.
“The Bar-Kays, it sounds happy, but I get a bad feeling, I get a bad vibe from this disc. What’s going on with the Bar-Kays?”
“Uh, they were on Otis Redding’s plane.”
“The Death-Kays! ” She overhanded it to shatter against the far wall and rain onto the pillow.
“Okay, Abby.” I held out my palms, pleading. “Peace. Uncle.” My spinning brain added, Sprite! Mr. Pibb! Clitoris!
She stopped, and we both stared at the crystalline junk around her feet.
“I have some happy music,” I said, dumbly adopting her terms.
“Like what?”
“‘You Sexy Thing’ is probably my favorite single song. There’s a lot of disco-era music I like.”
“Terrible example.”
“Why?”
“A million whining moaning singers, ten million depressed songs, and five or six happy songs-which remind you of being beaten up when you were thirteen years old. You live in the past, Dylan. I’m sick of your secrets. Did your father even ask if I was coming down with you?”
My face was hot and no speech emerged.
“And all this shit. What is this shit, anyway?” Alongside the box sets on the shelf above the CD cases were arrayed a scattering of objects I’d never shown off or named: Aaron X. Doily’s ring, Mingus’s pick, a pair of Rachel’s earrings, and a tiny, handmade, hand-sewn book of black-and-white photographs titled “For D. from E.” Abby’s unlaced boots crackled in the broken plastic cases as she walked. “Whose little shrine is this? Emily? Elizabeth? Come on, Dylan, you put it there so I could see it, you owe me an explanation already.”
“Don’t.”
“Were you once married? I wouldn’t even know.”
I took the ring from the shelf and put it in my pocket. “This is all stuff from when I was a kid.” It was a slight oversimplification: E. was the wife of a friend from college, the gift of the book commemoration of an almost which was really a just-as-well-not.
Mingus’s comic books were in a box in my closet, mingled with mine.
She grabbed the Afro pick. “You were already taking souvenirs from black girls when you were a kid? I don’t think so, Dylan.”
“That’s not a girl’s.”
“Not a girl’s.” She tossed the pick onto the bed. “Is that your way of telling me something I don’t even want to know? Or did you buy this off eBay? Is this Otis Redding’s pick, stolen from the wreckage? Maybe it belonged to one of the Bar-Kays. I guess the truly haunting thing is you’ll never know for sure.”
I lashed out. “I guess I have to listen to this shit because you don’t feel black enough, Abby. Because you grew up riding ponies in the suburbs.”
“No, you have to listen to it because you think this is all about where you grew up and where I grew up. Listen to yourself for a minute, Dylan. What happened to you? Your childhood is some privileged sanctuary you live in all the time, instead of here with me. You think I don’t know that?”
“Nothing happened to me.”
“Right,” she said with heavy sarcasm. “So why are you so obsessed with your childhood?”
“Because-” I truly wanted to answer, not only to appease her. I wanted to know it myself.
“Because?”
“My childhood-” I spoke carefully, finding each word. “My childhood is the only part of my life that wasn’t, uh, overwhelmed by my childhood.”
Overwhelmed-or did I mean ruined?
“Right,” she said. And we stared at one another for a long moment. “Thank you,” she said.
“Thank you?”
“You just told me where I stand, Dylan.” She spoke sadly, no longer concerned to prove anything. “You know, when I first spent a night in this house, you don’t think I didn’t walk up here and check out your shit? You think I didn’t see that pick on your shelf?”
“It’s just a pick. I like the form.”
She ignored me. “I said to myself, Abby, this man is collecting you for the color of your skin. That was okay, I was willing to be collected. I liked being your nigger, Dylan.”
The word throbbed between us, permitting no reply from me. I could visualize it in cartoonish or graffiti-style font, glowing with garish decorations, lightning, stars, halos. As with the pick, I could appreciate the form. Most such words devaluate, when thrown around every day on the streets by schoolboys of all colors, or whispered by lovers such as myself and Abigale Ponders. Though it had been more than once around the block of our relationship, nigger was that rarity, an anti-entropic agent, self-renewing. The deep ugliness in the word always sat up alert again when it was needed.
“But I never was willing to be collected for my moods, man. You collected my depression, you cultivated it like a cactus, like a sulky cat you wanted around to feel sorry for. I never expected that. I never did.”
Abby was talking to herself. When she noticed, a moment after I did, her expression curdled. “Clean up your room,” she said, and went downstairs.
The airport shuttle’s horn had been sounding for some time now, I realized. My room would have to wait to be cleaned, and the five or six CDs I’d selected would have to be enough. The Syl Johnson record, Is It Because I’m Black, had skated to the top of the small heap of discs and plastic left behind where Abby had been. I fished it up and added it to the wallet.
At the kitchen table Abby stood, one boot up on a chair, cinching the endless laces. She’d already refreshed the Africanoid jewelry in her piercings. It would seem an absurd costume for a student in a classroom, if I hadn’t known how hard her fellow students dressed for the same occasion. The boots were only a little obstacle to the art of dramatic exitry-she’d surely meant to be out the door before me, meant her last words upstairs to be conclusive.
I grabbed the bag at the door. Her face, when she looked up, was raw, shocked, unmade. The van honked again.
“Good luck today,” she said awkwardly.
“Thanks. I’ll call-”
“I’ll be out.”
“Okay. And Abby?”
“Yes?”
“Good luck, too.” I didn’t know if I meant it, or what it was meant to apply to if I did. Was I wishing her good luck in leaving me? But there it was, our absurd coda completed, good luck on all sides. Then I was gone.
It was September 1999, a season of fear-in three months the collapse of the worldwide computer grid was going to bring the century’s long party to a finish. Meanwhile, as the party waned, the hottest new format in radio was a thing called Jammin’ Oldies. Los Angeles ’s MEGA 100, recently reformatted (or in radio parlance, “flipped”) to the new trend, was playing in my cab-the song was War’s “Why Can’t We Be Friends?”-as I instructed the driver to take me to the Universal Studios lot and we swung away from the LAX curbside, into palm-lined gray traffic. The trees looked thirsty to me.
San Francisco had a Jammin’ Oldies station too. All cities did, a tidal turning of my generation’s readiness to sentimentalize the chart toppers of its youth. Old divisions had been blurred in favor of the admission that disco hadn’t sucked so bad as all that, even the pretense that we’d adored it all along. The Kool & the Gang and Gap Band dance hits we’d struggled against as teens, trying to deny their pulse in our bodies, were now staples of weddings and lunch hours in all the land; the O’Jays and Manhattans and Barry White ballads we’d loathed were now, with well-mixed martinis or a good zinfandel, foundation elements in any reasonably competent seduction. From the evidence of the radio I might have come of age in a race-blind utopia. That on the other end of the dial hip-hop stations thumped away in dire quarantine, a sort of pre-incarceration, no matter. Not today, anyway, not for one borne in the backseat of a taxicab helmed by one Nicholas M. Brawley, through sun-blanched smog, toward a meeting with a Dreamworks development executive, nope.
“You like this song?” I asked Nicholas Brawley’s fortyish gray-coiled neck.
“It’s all right.”
“You know the Subtle Distinctions?”
“Now see that’s some real fine music.”
At the guard-post gates of the Universal lot was proof I was expected, so Brawley’s cab could be waved through, to wend past the curbed Jeeps and the long windowless hangars and the brick huts which appeared to have been thrown up just that morning. Dreamworks’ building resided what felt to be a mile or so inside the compound, behind a tree-sheltered parking lot requiring a special pass for entrance. None had been issued, so Brawley dropped me at the inner gate.
“You have a card?” I asked him. “I’ll need a ride out of here in, I don’t know-maybe an hour?”
He jotted a number on the back of the company’s card. “Call my cell phone.”
As I crossed the shade-spangled lot to the entrance a well-dressed lackey was just crossing it in the other direction, moving for a break in the eucalyptus trees. He carried an Oscar. Palms cupping the statuette’s base and shoulders, he appeared to be looking for someone to bestow it on. I wondered if his whole job was to cross this lot all day with the golden prize, back and forth, reminding any visitor of the local stakes.
Inside, I was directed upstairs, where I gave my name to a pretty girl with a headset. She fetched me a bottled water before abandoning me to a flotilla of couches and magazines. There I plopped my sad little overnight bag, hitched up my pants to cross my legs and tried not to look too demoralized beneath the smirk of framed posters. Time passed, phones rang, carpets sighed, someone whispered around a corner.
“Dylan?”
“Yes?”
I dropped Men’s Journal and a boy in a sharp-creased suit took my hand. “You’re the music guy-right?”
“Right.”
“I’m Mike. Great to see you. Jared’s just ending a call.”
We moved to Mike’s little office, an intermediate space, a staging area, apparently, for encounters with Jared. You had to meet Cats-in-the-Hat-A-through-Z before you got to the One True Cat. At least we were all on a first-name basis.
“Mike?” said an intercom voice.
“Yes.”
“I’m ready for Dylan.”
Mike gave me a thumbs-up endorsement to cross Jared’s threshold, and a wink for luck.
The room had earth tones to spare. No posters here, nothing jarring-it was like a shrink’s office. Sunlight sliced through a couple of potted rubber trees, to ornament the carpet. Jared launched from behind his desk. He was jacketless, blond, thick and soft and relaxed in his body, a gym junkie, I guessed. I’d have kicked his ass at stoopball, though.
A conclave with Jared Orthman was meant to be the next best thing to an audience with Geffenberg himself. A thousand or a million writers hungered for what I had today. I hoped not to blow it, not so much on their behalf as on that of my own shriveled prospects and swollen debt.
“Here, let’s sit here.” He guided me away from the desk, to a pair of facing love seats across the room, the pitch zone. I dropped my bag, which sagged like a Claes Oldenberg sculpture, seeming to stand for an artist’s impotence in corporate surroundings. I wished I’d packed my Discman and change of underwear in something more like a briefcase. We sat, smiled, crossed legs.
Jared frowned. “Did you get water? Did they give you water?” he asked anxiously.
“I left it outside.”
“Do you want something? Water?” He looked ready to provide the vital essence if he had to wring it from stones.
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“So.” He smiled, frowned, widened his hands. We studied one another and tried to remain friendly. Jared and I were probably the same age but otherwise had traveled from opposite ends of the universe to this meeting. My black jeans were like a smudge of ash or daub of vomit in this cream-and-peach world.
“I’m a friend of Randolph ’s,” I reminded him. “From the Weekly.”
“Riiight.” He nodded, considering it. “Just… who is Randolph?”
“ Randolph Treadwell? The Weekly?”
He nodded. “I think I know who you mean.”
“Well, he, uh, set this up.”
“Okay. Okay. So, uh, what are you doing in my office?”
“Sorry?” The question was so bald. I was astonished as if he’d asked Why do I hold this job, as opposed to, say, anyone else? Can you explain that, please?
“Just a minute,” he said, holding up one finger and springing from the love seat. He leaned over his desk and pushed a button. “Mike?”
“Yes.”
“What’s Dylan doing in my office?”
“He’s the music guy.”
“The music guy.”
“You remember. He’s got a movie.”
“Ahhhh.” Now Jared turned and smiled at me. This was all pleasure. A movie! How perfectly unexpected. “Who’s Randy Treadmill or something?” he said to the intercom.
“He’s that guy you met when you were talking about the thing.” Click, buzz. “On the boat.”
“Ahhhh. Okay. Okay.” He released the intercom. There was a hierarchy of remembering here, I understood. Mike remembered for Jared the sort of things Jared had once remembered for someone else, on his way up through the ranks. Someday Mike would have someone remembering things for him as well, and be free to abandon the skill.
Jared returned to the love seat and again pointed a finger at me, but now it was a happier finger.
“You’ve got a movie,” he said warmly.
“Yes.”
“I’ve been wanting to hear this.” He didn’t know the first thing about it, I saw now. I could have offered him a comedy about a rookie vibraphonist for the Boston Pops, or a thriller about a spy who kills by ultrasonic whistle, any of the many things a music guy would be likely to concern himself with.
“I’m closing my eyes,” said Jared. “It means I’m listening.”
I was left to consider his tanned lids, immaculate desk, twin rubber tree plants. I was the ant who had to move them, apparently.
“Your movie is about-?” This was a just-because-my-eyes-are-closed-doesn’t-mean-there’s-no-hurry situation.
“A true story,” I said.
“Okay.”
“In Tennessee -”
“ Tennessee?” Jared opened his eyes.
“Yes.”
“What happened in Tennessee?”
I started again. “In the fifties, in Tennessee, there was this singing group called the Prisonaires. Because they were in prison. But they had a career anyway. They recorded at Sun Records, where Elvis Presley was discovered. That’s the name of the movie- The Prisonaires.”
“Did you know that both my parents came here from Tennessee?” He made it sound like Crimea, or Mars. “Or is that just some kind of coincidence?”
“I didn’t know.”
“Okay. Okay. Wild. What’s it called?”
“The Prisonaires.”
“Okay, tell me again.”
“Let me set it up,” I’d been advised to “talk in scenes.” “I’d want to start the movie inside the prison. The lead Prisonaire is a guy named Johnny Bragg. He’s the songwriter, the lead singer. He’s been in jail for years, since he was sixteen. On trumped-up charges. So he and another convict are out in the yard, walking, in the rain, literally, and one says to the other. ‘Here we are, walking in the rain, I wonder what the little girls are doing?’ And Johnny Bragg starts singing the line, a mournful little song, ‘Just Walkin’ in the Rain.’ Which became their first hit. Maybe it could be playing over the opening credits.”
“That reminds me of something else.”
“You’re probably thinking of ‘Singing in the Rain.’ ”
“Oh yeah, sure. He wrote that?”
“Different song.”
“Okay, let me get this: he’s wrongfully imprisoned. What’s the charge?”
“Well, actually it was six convictions for rape. Six ninety-nine-year sentences, with no possibility of parole.”
“Ouch.”
“The cops set him up. He was an arrogant, good-looking kid, and they had it in for him. They pinned a bunch of unsolved rapes on him.”
“Brad Pitt, Matthew McConaughey.”
“I forgot to say black.”
“These are black people?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” Jared waved his hands, reluctantly brushing Pitt from the room. “Start again with black people. How does he get out of jail?”
“Well, he doesn’t. I mean, he does later, but not right away. He starts a singing group in jail, prison, the Prisonaires. That’s the gimmick-they’re still in prison. They’re let out for recording sessions and live performances.”
“I don’t get it. In or out?”
“That’s the movie. The Prisonaires were so famous in Tennessee that the governor was under pressure from both sides-to free them, to keep them locked up as an example. A few got pardons, but Bragg was still locked inside. It’s a great story, full of dramatic highs and lows.”
“You’re freaking me out.”
“I am?”
“Because we don’t make movies with dramatic highs and lows.”
“Sorry?”
“Just kidding, man.”
It was becoming possible I’d pitch myself across the gap between our love seats and throttle Jared.
“Look, if I could just describe it without any interruptions I think I could make you see.”
“Dylan, that’s not nice.”
“It’s just-I’m dying to tell you this story.”
“I like you, mister.”
I waited until it was clear he had nothing to add, then said, “Thank you.”
“Five minutes.” He spread his fingers to show me five, then stretched back and closed his eyes again.
“The Prisonaires are one of the great unknown stories in pop-culture history,” I said. The language was dead on my tongue, but I blundered on. “Five black guys in prison in the 1950s, some serving hundred-year sentences, some on briefer stretches, all victims of prejudice and economic injustice in the Jim Crow South. Five jailbirds who form a singing group just for the love of the music. But they’re so good they sing themselves into an audition. The warden issues special passes just so they can visit Sun Studios-this is in 1953, the same point when a weird little kid named Elvis Presley is hanging around Sun, trying to get a session. But the star of the movie is Johnny Bragg, the lead singer, the lead Prisonaire. When Bragg was sixteen he got railroaded-a woman with a grudge, maybe jealous because he was playing the field, called the cops on him. She screamed rape. And the white cops pinned six convictions on him, just to clear their books. Six unsolved cases, wham. Johnny Bragg gets six hundred years in prison.” Nearly everything I had was cribbed out of Colin Escott’s liner notes from the Prisonaires CD, or fantasized out of my own musings on a handful of newspaper clippings I’d unearthed myself. But it was enough. I was beginning to inspire myself, to remember what I’d had in mind in the first place, the screenplay I ought to have been researching and writing for the past year. “On the early-morning bus ride to Sun Studios Bragg looks out his window and sees an empty drive-in movie theater, and he says ‘Wow, look at that crazy cemetery.’ He’s twenty-six-been in prison for ten years.”
“Bad deal,” mused Jared.
“So they record. Cut a single, two sides. Elvis Presley is there. In the studio, hanging around. Just a kid they tolerate around the place. He and Bragg make friends, this is all true, by the way. Great chance for a cameo, like when Val Kilmer plays Elvis in Mystery Train.”
“Never saw it.”
“It’s okay, not great. Anyway, Bragg and the Prisonaires cut a record, two sides, and go back to the joint. End of story, right? Except the song, ‘Just Walkin’ in the Rain,’ is a hit. A big hit, people calling in requests to radio stations. Meanwhile, the Prisonaires are back inside. They don’t have radios, they don’t know, but then they start getting letters in the prison, letters from strangers. They’re becoming stars. And the prison officials start getting involved. You’ve got the warden on the phone to the governor, everybody trying to figure out how to handle this thing, whether to encourage it, how to spin the story.”
Jared nodded and rocked slightly, seeming to approve, perhaps envisioning white actors in supporting roles, Gene Hackman, Martin Landau, Geoffrey Rush.
“The authorities decide to go the liberal route, and claim the Prisonaires as a sterling example of rehabilitation. They start letting them out to make radio appearances, do live shows, cut more sides at Sun. There’s a lot of sentiment building up, people calling for pardons. Not least the Prisonaires themselves-they cut a song extolling the governor, called “Frank Clement, He’s a Mighty Man.” Basically just a raw bid for mercy. Not everybody’s happy though. The same heavy dudes that set Bragg up in the first place haven’t forgotten him. They’re biding their time, waiting for the Prisonaires to stumble. When the governor’s up for reelection things start getting interesting. These guys are becoming a political football. You can just picture the racial politics involved.”
“I’m thinking KKK, that’s what I’m thinking.”
“Uh, yeah. Just about. The thing about Tennessee in the fifties, Jared, is that the Klan didn’t always necessarily wear a hood.” I was winging it here. But that was okay. The facts would surely have to be bent to make a movie. This was what I’d come here to do: bend these facts into Hollywood ’s ear. “So the governor’s under pressure on both sides, he’s been encouraging these boys, raising their hopes. He begins making plans to release the Prisonaires, talking about them on the radio, milking it for publicity. And his Republican opponent is working the other angle, turning it into a scare story. ‘The good citizens of Tennessee better hope that not all of its convicted killers can sing’-shit like that.”
“Wow. This is good stuff.”
“Let me describe one scene for you. I see this as a real centerpiece. There are photographs of a Prisonaires show from just before the first pardons-remember, these guys have families, they’ve left women behind, and the only time they get out is onstage. They can’t mingle. There’s probably armed guards at the edge of the stage, that sort of thing. These pictures, I should have brought them along, they’ll blow your mind, Jared.” By force of will I was leveraging the Prisonaires’ reality, their sweat and pain and love, into this pallid room, into Jared’s pallid mind. I’d make it stick, here where nothing stuck. I understood now that I was born for pitching. I had only to be let into the room. “It’s like the Beatles at Shea Stadium, Jared. Or Elvis. Women weeping, breaking down. But these aren’t just a bunch of teenage girls. They’re the Prisonaires’ mothers, grand mothers, aunts, girlfriends holding babies. They’re falling apart, tearing up handkerchiefs, crawling on the floor while these guys sing. The music is so beautiful, it’s just tearing people’s hearts out. Maybe you’d even have the girl who set Johnny Bragg up, probably she’d be there too. She’s sorry for what she did, she’s still in love. And she’s in this crowd of women, just falling to pieces.”
“Holy shit.”
“That’s just half of it. When this crying wave hits the audience, the Prisonaires lose it too. They try to go on singing but they can’t. They’re separated from these women, from their mothers, everyone, by the distance of the stage. And they start bawling too. They’re clinging to each other, clinging to microphones and chairs. Trying to reach out, but the guards push them back. It’s like, I don’t know, like Guernica, Jared. It’s a scene you don’t forget.”
“I can really see this.” Jared sounded astonished at his own powers of visualization.
“Of course you can. Okay, so, back up: the governor. He’s getting reports on this stuff. He’s riding a tiger and he’s afraid it’s going to eat him alive. So he springs a couple of the guys. His opponents are roasting him alive, but he springs them anyway. And that’s when a plan emerges. The governor’s got a crafty little aide, a Kissinger type, who suggests they leave Johnny Bragg inside. Bragg’s the one carrying the heavy sentence, and he’s the songwriter, the lead voice-the genius. Split the band away from him and maybe the story can be allowed to die out.”
“No.”
“It’s horrible, but yes. That’s how they play it. They pardon all four of the other Prisonaires, one by one. Everybody’s waiting for Bragg to come out and join them. Looks like a happy ending, but it’s too good to be true. The governor’s enemies on the right have him in a box. So he makes a show of being tough on crime by leaving Bragg inside. The warden cuts off his privileges. The hope is that without the music, this thing is destined to blow over.”
“Jee sus.”
Jesus, yes. Where was I unearthing this crap? I was pitching the Oliver Stone version.
“But Bragg doesn’t quit making music. With all his Prisonaires on the outside, he forms a new prison group, the Marigolds. Years are going by here, you understand. They’re squeezing the life out of this man. In ’56 Johnnie Ray records a cover of ‘Just Walkin’ in the Rain,’ and Bragg gets a check in prison for fourteen hundred dollars-he tells them just to put it in the commissary, he thinks it’s for fourteen dollars. He’s never seen so much money in his life. But he’s got no way to spend it. The Marigolds record a few numbers for Excello Records, but nothing really hits.”
“What’s with Marigolds?”
“There was a craze for flower groups, the Clovers, the Posies, stuff like that. Just like everybody had to be bugs a few years later-the Crickets, the Beatles.”
“Ah.”
“Bragg doesn’t get parole until ’59, six years after the Prisonaires’ first hit. And then he only lasts a year before they set him up for another fall. He’s charged with robbery and attempted murder-for stealing two dollars and fifty cents. Pathetic. White women come forward again, claiming he tried to attack them. He’s a magnet for these kinds of accusations. It’s classic race panic, and Bragg’s this symbol that pushes everyone’s buttons. The man must have had some kind of presence, some pride when he walked down the street, that these white authorities couldn’t abide. They just had to put him back inside, it was their way of coping.”
“I don’t know if you’ll like this but I’m totally picturing Denzel Washington.”
“Listen: that year Elvis Presley, fresh out of the army, detours his trip home to visit the state prison to hang out with Bragg. Picture it, the same weird little kid who was hanging around the studio admiring the Prisonaires harmonies is now the biggest entertainer on the planet. And he remembers Bragg, it matters to Elvis. The thirty-year-old black con and the King. The visit gets publicity, but only for Elvis. No one remembers Bragg’s case anymore, and the Prisonaires are a distant memory. Elvis offers to pay for a lawyer, but Bragg says it’s okay, he’s cut a deal. There’s nothing on paper, no proof, but Bragg’s promised the warden not to push the case to the Supreme Court in return for a promise he’d be out in nine months.”
I paused, then, to set it up.
“Yeah?”
“They kept him another seven years.”
“You’re killing me, Dylan.”
“It goes on and on. In the sixties he re-forms the Prisonaires again, this time with a white guy in the group-it’s the era of integration now. But the other prisoners don’t like it, he gets attacked in the yard. Later he gets out again and marries a white woman, and the cops arrest him for walking down the street with her-”
“Stop, okay? Stop. Don’t tell me any more.”
Jared had been growing steadily more agitated for some time, and now he sprang from his seat, bugged his eyes, and paced to the desk.
“Is something the matter?”
“Everything’s great, Dylan. It’s just-who else knows about this?”
“You’re the first.” I assumed this was the answer Jared had to hear. Needless to say, the Prisonaires story had only been sitting around for thirty-odd years, waiting to be plucked up. It didn’t belong to me. For all I knew another writer was turning in a polished third draft of his version in the office next door.
I dared ask, “You like it?”
“Are you kidding? It’s pure dynamite. I’m just thinking, okay? I’ve got to think. This is Friday, right?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Okay, practically speaking, that means I’m not going to find anybody until Monday.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Where are you going from here?”
I suspected ForbiddenCon wasn’t a reply Jared would easily make sense of. It wasn’t that easy for me to make sense of myself. “Back to my hotel.”
“Don’t shit me.”
“I’m not.”
“Because a part of me, wow, a part of me doesn’t want to let you out of my office until I know what we’re doing with this, until I get something from you that I can take into a meeting and a promise you’ll give me a couple of days from the weekend. Forty-eight hours at least. Do you want a tissue, mister?”
“Sure.” I’d tear-streaked my face, evoking Johnny Bragg’s dilemma. I wonder how many of Jared’s pitches wept in this office. Maybe all of us, by the end.
Jared plopped his tissue box on my love seat, then leaned over his desk, onto the intercom.
“Mike?”
“Yes?”
“Mike, I just heard something great. This is what I’m always telling you-you never know how it’s going to happen. Some boat-guy’s friend just walks into my office and it’s this writer Dylan and Dylan has something really great, really really great.”
“That’s incredible,” said Mike.
“No, it’s really incredible.”
“Wow.”
“Mike, I need Dylan’s agent right now.”
“Sure.”
Jared turned from the desk. “I know this is moving fast but I just want to say, Dylan, you and I are going to be putting our kids through college on this.”
“Okay.” I blew my nose.
“If I can’t make this movie I’m going to kill myself.”
“I guess that means you have to make the movie.”
“That’s exactly what it means. Holy shit.” He was amazed at himself, understandably. Large events were occurring, and he was at their center. “I need something on paper.”
“I don’t have much written down,” I bluffed.
“I need to be able to explain. I have to make other people get it. I need something on paper, like what you said. What you said was so amazing. It has to be like that.”
“It wouldn’t take long.”
“You’re saying there’s nothing?”
“Not yet.”
“This is bad, Dylan. I really, really need this so I can make someone else see.”
The intercom clicked. “Jared?”
“What?”
“I don’t have an agent for Dylan.”
“I thought I told you always to get contact information. You remember me telling you that?”
“It’s my fault,” I stage-whispered, wanting to protect Mike.
Jared released the intercom. “I’m not into games,” he said.
“Neither am I. Just let me call my agent first, okay?” I had no agent, nor the remotest notion where I’d begin looking for one. “He doesn’t actually know a lot about this whole thing.”
“If you think I’m letting you walk out of my office with this movie in your head you’re crazy. I need something from you, Dylan. Don’t screw me, man. This is my movie. I feel this one.”
“It’s great,” I said, holding up my hands, hoping to slow the madness. “We’re both excited. Just tell me what should happen next.”
“Call your agent from here.”
“What?”
He held up both hands. “Sit at my desk. I promise I won’t listen. I’ll go out in the hall.” He paced madly. “Just sit and call him from here.”
“I-”
“I’m giving you my office, man. Go. Sit.”
There was no refusing. I took his chair. He shut himself out in Mike’s antechamber, first pointing at me from behind the half-closed door. “Tell him I’m holding you hostage until I have something I can take into a meeting.”
“Okay.”
When he’d sealed the door I dialed my home number. It rang through to the machine, of course. Abby was at school. I hung up without leaving a message, then retrieved my address book and rang Randolph Treadwell at the Weekly. I got him.
“Help,” I said.
“You had the meeting?”
“I’m in the meeting. He left the room so I could call my agent, only I don’t have an agent. I’m at his desk.”
“Interesting.” Randolph ’s voice was neutral.
“Is Jared always so, uh, volatile?”
“I don’t really know him that well. Why?”
“He’s seems to think we’re about to have a baby together. A solid-gold baby.”
“That’s the way these things go,” said Randolph, unimpressed. “It’s sort of like a faucet. If it’s on, it gushes. Now you have to keep it open.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“You want to come by the office after this? How long are you in town?”
“I have to go see my dad, in Anaheim.”
“What’s he doing in Anaheim?”
Jared barreled through the door. “I gotta go.” I hung up the phone.
“What’s the ending?” said Jared.
“Sorry?”
“I was trying to do it for Mike, the whole thing, the black guys, the jail, Elvis. And I forgot if you told me the ending.”
“I… think we didn’t get to the ending,” I said carefully.
“And?”
“Well, Johnny Bragg was in and out of prison a couple more times, I think. He made music whenever he could. No big hits, though.”
“The Prisonaires?”
“They died, I think.”
“Could we have, like, a big comeback?”
I shrugged a why not? I couldn’t bring myself to pronounce the words, though. Was there any aspect of Johnny Bragg’s story I hadn’t dishonored by my pitch? What further harm would a little comeback bring? Or a big one?
“What about Elvis? Elvis is really important to this whole thing. That was a really great part, when Elvis visits and you were crying, remember?”
Maybe Elvis could return and bust the warden in the jaw, then personally break Bragg out of prison. Or the two of them, Bragg and Presley, could be shackled together at the ankles and sent to break up rocks. The singing would be amazing, anyway.
“Well, the story doesn’t really have a big ending,” I said. “It just sort of goes on and on. I’m sure we can figure out a good place to end it, though. Maybe Johnny Bragg walking through the gates, a free man. The last time.”
“It has to be good.”
“It can be good.”
“Do they catch the guys who really did it?”
“Did what?”
“You know, killed all those women.”
“There aren’t any dead women. There wasn’t a big legal showdown or anything. Eventually he was just old and they stopped picking on him, I guess.”
“How old?”
I’d wondered when this might come up. “He might even still be alive,” I said. At the time of Colin Escott’s liner note, nine years ago, Johnny Bragg was still alive and giving interviews. His anecdotes were the source for half my pitch. For years I’d been planning a visit to Memphis to try and interview him myself. That visit waited, with so many other speculative projects, for an entity like Dreamworks to bankroll. Anyway, that was my excuse.
“Alive? ”
“It’s possible.”
“Possible? ”
Yes! Alive! Possible! I wanted to scream. “He’d be in his seventies.”
“You don’t know?”
“I’ll find out.”
“This is a serious problem, Dylan.” Jared raked his hand through his hair and frowned, under stress I couldn’t possibly understand. “Can I have my desk back, please?”
“What do you want me to do?” I asked as we swapped places.
Scowling, he settled back, crossed his legs, and with two fingers kneaded the bridge of his nose and then the periphery of his jaw. He appeared to be recovering from a sort of bender, coming down as after an orgasm or a hit of crack. I wondered how often he indulged.
“You just came in here and pitched me someone’s life story, a living person,” he said, not angrily, but with deep regret. “Well, we’d have to option life rights. That can get really sticky.”
“He’d want it told,” I suggested.
“Yeah, yeah, of course. I don’t know about the ending, though, Dylan. I’m not happy about that ending.”
He spoke as though The Prisonaires was already filmed and edited and he’d just screened it and been disappointed. Now we were left with the sorry task of mopping up, cutting our losses. “It’s so vague, he gets out, he goes back, the band never reunites. And I kept expecting something to happen with that woman, the one in the audience, you know? The crying one.”
Inescapably, absurdly, I fell to the same tone. “I guess we could end it sooner. After the first parole.”
“Oh, I doubt that would work.”
“Okay,” I said, helpless.
“Listen, I don’t want to-I don’t want to tell anyone about this thing until we pull it together. It should be perfect. A slam dunk. You and I should both think really hard about the third-act problems and do nothing until we’ve cracked them. If I bring this upstairs I want it to be airtight, you know?”
“That makes sense.”
“Did you talk to your agent?”
“He, uh, feels the same way, actually.”
“Of course he does. He knows how these things work.”
“So-” I was baffled. “What happens next?”
“The question is what you do next. This is all in your hands.”
“Uh, okay.”
“I’m not easily discouraged, you know. I believe in you, mister.”
“Thanks.”
“There’s nothing wrong with taking some time, by the way. This isn’t going anywhere. It’ll happen when it’s meant to happen.”
“Okay.”
“So, do you have a driver? Because I need to have you out of my office now.”
“I can call-”
“Yes, but use Mike’s phone.”
In the middle chamber I handed Nicholas Brawley’s card to Mike and asked him to call.
“Jared was really knocked out,” Mike whispered, eyes wide at what I’d accomplished inside.
“I think he’ll recover,” I said.
I waited with my overnight bag in the shady lot for a long fifteen minutes before Nicholas Brawley’s cab pulled up again at the gate. The man with the Oscar never came back. Brawley’s radio was still tuned to MEGA 100, and the station was broadcasting my old nemesis of a theme song, Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music.” Of course, the thirty-five-year-old rock critic knew what the thirteen-year-old scrap of prey on the sidewalks outside Intermediate School 293 never did: Wild Cherry was a bunch of white guys. The tune which had been enlisted as an indictment of my teenage existence was in fact a Midwestern rock band’s rueful self-parody. I’d wondered many times since then whether knowing would have helped. Probably not. Anyway, it struck me now in a different light, as being yet another bit of personal meaning which had been taken from me, stripped off like clothes I’d only borrowed or stolen. I had maybe the least persuasive case for self-pity of any human soul on the planet. Or anyway, the most hilarious.
Abraham and Francesca stood together in the lobby of the Anaheim Marriott, still as sculpture. All around them the lobby boiled with arrivals, misshapen travelers clad in black and purple, peering nervously side to side as though concerned with the impression they made as they wheeled suitcases in agitated confusion to the check-in desk. Others lurched or darted through the vast open space of the lobby, gathering briefly in groups of four or five to hug and talk, to crinkle brochures with circled program items, or present one another with buttons or ribbons to affix to suspenders or knapsack straps. Some wolfed sandwiches, licking gummy fingers unselfconsciously. Many wore plastic-frame eyeglasses or floppy hats or molded jewelry, others T-shirts with proud enigmas emblazoned: MORE THAN HUMAN, DONATE YOUR BODY TO SCIENCE FICTION, I USED TO BE A MILLIONAIRE THEN MY MOTHER THREW OUT MY COMIC BOOK COLLECTION. Photocopied signs, taped inelegantly to corridors and glass doors, offered suite numbers for hotel parties, advertised special events, and directed attendees to the registration table or the art show or the first aid station. Certain laminated name badges were labeled PRO or VOLUNTEER. Voices rose and were lost in a babble of others-monotonous harangues, kooky laughter, anxious questions, hysterical reunions. ForbiddenCon 7 was under way in all its glory. I only had to figure out what it was, or else not bother. I didn’t sense it needed me to know.
Francesca saw me first. “There you are!” she cried out. Abraham nodded and they surged toward me as I came through the revolving door. I hurried forward, trying to save them the trouble. “You’re late!” said Francesca. “We’re practically going to miss Abe’s panel.”
I’d promised to meet them in the lobby at three-it was almost four. Nicholas Brawley had laughed and shaken his head when I gave him the destination. “You should have rented a car,” he said, and by the time we’d crossed the ocean of suburb between Hollywood and Anaheim I saw his point. The fare was $114.00. Now, however, stepping into the lobby of the convention hotel, I considered the even greater conceptual distance I’d covered, moving from Jared Orthman’s office to ForbiddenCon. Brawley’s fare was a bargain.
“Dylan,” said my father. We embraced, and I felt him sigh against my body. Then I turned and dipped to Francesca, just in time to be enveloped in her swarming attack, not soon enough to plan where on my exposed surface the lipstick would be delivered. It landed north-northwest of my mouth, a misaligned mustache in beet purple. I swabbed it with my thumb and said, “Sorry I’m late.”
Francesca’s badge was unadorned, while Abraham’s bore a special purple ribbon, reading GUEST OF HONOR.
“They need Abraham in the greenroom,” she said gravely.
“Lead the way,” I said.
“That’s all you have?” said Abraham, looking at my bag. He seemed disappointed. “You’re staying the night?”
“Of course.”
“You’re registered already,” said Francesca. “Zelmo took care of everything.” She scrabbled in her purse as we moved through the lobby. “Here’s for your room. It works like a credit card-you swipe. The key’s for the minibar.”
“I’ll be hitting it hard,” I joked, taking the keys.
“Oh, you won’t have time,” said Francesca. “Zelmo Swift, the committee chair, is taking us to dinner.” She goggled her eyes at the honor.
“He knows you’re coming,” added Abraham. “I asked and was told it’s fine.”
“You’re being foolish, darling,” said Francesca. “You’re the guest of honor, why wouldn’t your family be invited?”
“It’s an extra body at dinner. I asked.” He turned to me. “We’ll talk there if Zelmo lets us get in a word. Now I have to do this thing. I hope you won’t mind sitting.”
“Mind?” said Francesca, taking my arm. “He’ll be proud!”
My father had lived alone for fourteen years after I left Dean Street for college in Vermont. Little changed in those years-he’d gone on painting paperback-book art to cover his mortgage and shopping, and gone on pouring every spare hour on the clock and spare ounce of energy in his frame into his epic, endless, unseen film. In 1989, at last granting the absurdity of having three floors to himself, he’d converted the brownstone to two duplexes, adding a small kitchen to the second floor and renting out the parlor level, with the basement, to a young family. What remained untouched was the upstairs studio, the monk’s quarters where he daubed out days in black paint on celluloid. The neighborhood, in fits and starts, gentrified around him, Isabel Vendle’s curse or blessing realized in lag time. For Abraham it was primarily a matter of raised property taxes. He’d never asked what the rental market would bear-the duplex was always leased at a bargain.
There were never women, that I heard of. If Abraham knew how to seek for that part of his life, after Rachel, he didn’t know how to mention it. Then he’d come to the attention of Francesca Cassini, a fifty-eight-year-old receptionist working in the offices of Ballantine Books. This man slumping into the offices with his latest jacket art tucked into a pebbly black pressed-board portfolio tied together with black laces, this man slumping from the elevator dressed humbly, in his Art Students League proletarian garb, fingertips slightly stained with paint, his demeanor mordant, as ever-this man had caught the eye of the fresh widow from Bay Ridge. A woman who, despite her immigrant’s name, had lived all her life among the postwar generation of New York Jews, Francesca spoke in their manner and recognized them as one recognizes oneself. She’d lost a Jewish husband six months earlier, a career accountant, a man bent, I imagined, over a lifelong column of figures likely as dear to him as the world’s longest abstract film in progress was to my father. Abraham, jacket-art celebrity, butt of corridor jokes for his Bartelbyesque mien, didn’t stand a chance. If ever a man cried for Francesca’s salvaging, here he was. She’d announced herself. She’d attached herself. One winter I visited Brooklyn and there she was, moved into the Dean Street house. I couldn’t complain. Francesca organized my father, and she seemed, in a peculiar way, to make him happy. She made him visible to himself, by her contrast.
The greenroom had been set up in a small conference room off the lobby, guarded from the ordinary public by a volunteer at the door. In breathless tones Francesca explained we were a guest of honor’s entourage, and we were allowed into the sanctum. It held two urns containing coffee and water for tea, and a sectioned plastic dish full of cubed cheddar and Triscuits. A pair of volunteers sat behind a tray of blank badges and their plastic holders. From them Francesca demanded a pass “for Abraham Ebdus’s son,” then clipped the result to my shirt pocket.
It wasn’t clear what we were waiting for. My father stood, stalled in consternation, in the center of the room, while Francesca dithered around the edges.
“Mr. Ebdus?” ventured a volunteer.
“Yes?”
“The other program participants went upstairs. For your panel. I think it’s beginning now.”
“Without him?” said Francesca.
“The Nebraska Room, I think. Nebraska West.”
We hurried out. “I told you we could go direct,” said Abraham to Francesca as we went up the wide central stair to the mezzanine.
“Zelmo said meet at the greenroom.”
Abraham just shook his head.
Everyone moved awkwardly in this space, drifting as though rudderless, then abruptly accelerating, in explosions of tiny steps. Crossing paths they’d glare, mutter, wait for apologies. Through this fitful human sea we made our way to Nebraska Ballroom West. A sign taped to the door announced the program as “The Career of Abraham Ebdus,” as though this were self-explanatory. I supposed it was, or would be by the time the panel accomplished its work.
We entered at the back of the room. At the front, four figures already occupied the elevated dais, behind table microphones and sweating pitchers of ice water. The dais was covered in maroon bunting which matched the acoustic padding of the ballroom’s walls and the thin upholstery of the stackable chairs that were arranged in rows, wall to wall. A crowd of perhaps fifty or sixty sat, attentive and respectful, scratching, coughing, crossing and uncrossing legs, wrinkling papers.
“Good of Abraham to honor us with his presence,” said one of the panelists into his microphone, with heavy sarcasm. It drew a burst of relieved laughter from the audience, then a scattering of applause.
“Up,” egged Francesca, and my father obeyed. She and I took seats at the aisle, Francesca clutching my arm in her excitement.
The moderator, who’d wisecracked at our entry into the room, was a balding, sixtyish man, distinguishable at this distance from Abraham himself primarily by a garish blue ascot. He introduced himself as Sidney Blumlein, formerly art director for Ballantine, and if not exactly Abraham Ebdus’s discoverer then at least his main employer and patron during what he called the crucial first decade of my father’s work. “I’ve also been his apologist for longer than he’d want me to remind you,” Blumlein continued. “I’m not ashamed to say I protected his art from editorial meddling a dozen times, two dozen. And I talked Abe out of refusing his first Hugo.” Another warm chuckle from the crowd. “But truly, it was always an honor.”
The others introduced themselves: first Buddy Green, who blinked through thick glasses and couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, editor of an on-line zine called Ebdus Collector, dedicated to the purchase of the rare original painted boards of my father’s designs. I’d blundered across Green’s Web site a few times, Googling the name Ebdus to search my own archived journalism. Next was R. Fred Vundane, a tiny, withered man in a Vandyke beard and mad-scientist glasses, author of twenty-eight novels, including Neural Circus, the very first for which my father had painted a jacket. Then Paul Pflug, another paperback painter, a fiftyish biker-type, fat in leather pants, with a blond ponytail and eyes concealed by dark wraparounds. Pflug seated himself at the far edge of the dais, leaving an empty chair and unfilled water glass between himself and Vundane.
The tributes and anecdotes weren’t so terribly interesting that I couldn’t mostly study my father and his reactions. I didn’t recall ever seeing him this way, onstage, at a distance, held in a collective gaze. The result was a kind of nakedness I realized now he’d always avoided. Green spoke gushingly in a high whine, claiming Ebdus as the successor in a line of science-fiction illustrators from Virgil Finlay through Richard Powers-names which meant less than nothing to me-and it was evident Abraham took pleasure in it, however masochistically. Vundane spoke with aggrieved vanity-perhaps he yearned for a panel on “The Works of Vundane”-about Ebdus’s deep and uncommon insight into the surrealist nature of his, Vundane’s, writing. And when Pflug’s turn came he reminisced, gruffly, about meeting my father at the beginning of his career, and claimed Abraham’s seriousness, his regard for standards, as an example which had altered the course of his, Pflug’s, career.
Abraham didn’t speak, just nodded as the others alternated on the microphones. But his distaste for whatever it was Vundane and Pflug had accomplished-or failed to-was painfully obvious. For that matter, it was unmistakable that nobody on the dais liked Pflug. I wondered how he’d come to be invited.
“I’ve told this story many times,” said Buddy Green. “I was trying to trace the provenance of the original art for the Belmont Specials-his first seventeen paintings. They weren’t in the hands of any of the major collectors. They weren’t in the hands of any of the minor collectors. Unfortunately, they weren’t in my hands. I kept writing to the Belmont people and they said they didn’t know what I was talking about. I thought they were stonewalling. So, being a little slow on the uptake, it finally occurred to me to ask Abraham. And he explained, like it was no big deal, that he destroyed them. He couldn’t imagine anyone cared.”
Abraham’s eyes scoured the crowd, looking for me, I permitted myself to imagine. I wondered how it felt to hear those called his first seventeen paintings.
“It’s true,” said Sidney Blumlein, with great avuncular gusto. “When I hired him away from Belmont, Abe was systematically destroying the work.”
This drew oohs and aahs, a kind of titillated awe from the crowd.
“This man is the only one your father respects,” whispered Francesca. “None of the others. Not even Zelmo.”
“Zelmo?”
“The chair. I mean, of the whole convention. You’ll meet him at dinner. He’s a very important lawyer.”
“Ah.”
Now the microphone was retaken by Blumlein, whom Francesca had claimed as Abraham’s only friend on the panel. Being moderator, Blumlein took it upon himself to prize open the jaws of the clam-to find a way to force Abraham Ebdus to acknowledge and address his admirers.
“For more than two decades Abe has graced our field, and I do mean graced. All well and good. But at this time of celebration there’s no reason to pussyfoot around the question-he’s done so at a remove. His background isn’t science fiction, and in that he’s an exception from the vast majority of professionals at this gathering, at any gathering in our field. We’re fans, our interests begin in the pulp-magazine tradition, however we might like to hope we’ve elevated it.”
Pflug sneered. Vundane took a pitcher and topped off his untouched glass.
The audience was stilled, silenced from its murmurs of approval and recognition, perhaps less certain now that everything they were hearing fell safely in the vein of an Elk Lodge testimonial dinner.
“Abraham Ebdus, let’s not kid ourselves, had no interest in elevating it. He was looking to make a buck to support his art-what he regarded as his real art. As perhaps some of you, perhaps many of you may know, Abe is a filmmaker, an experimental filmmaker, of terrific seriousness and devotion. This is how he spends his days, when he’s not painting jackets for books. It has nothing to do with science fiction. What’s miraculous-what we’re all here to celebrate-is that being a real artist, one of depth and profundity, Abe brought to the books a visionary intensity that did elevate. That contained beauty and strangeness. Because he couldn’t help himself.”
I saw how well Sidney Blumlein knew my father. He was urging Abraham into the weird light of this roomful of celebrants, baiting him with the possibility of an audience worth addressing. I didn’t know whether I wanted him to succeed.
“This is what, Abe? Only your fifth or sixth time at a convention?”
My father hunched, seeming to wish he could reply with his shoulders. Finally he leaned into the microphone and said, “I haven’t counted.”
“I first dragged you to a LunaCon, in New York, in the early eighties. You weren’t happy.”
“No, it wasn’t to my taste,” said Abraham reluctantly.
The crowd tittered.
“And wouldn’t it be fair to say, Abe, you rarely if ever read the books under your jackets?”
Now a collective gasp.
“Oh, I’ve never done,” said Abraham. “I say it without apology. Mr. Vundane, your book, what was the title?”
“Neural Circus,” supplied R. Fred Vundane, his jaw so clenched it mashed the vowels.
“Yes, Neural Circus. I was always stopped by that title. It seemed, I’m sorry, vaguely distasteful to me. You speak of surrealists-I suppose you mean the poets. It feels a very poor shade of symbolist imagery, actually. Rimbaud, maybe? No, I was asked to envision other worlds, and I did. Any congruence with the work is happenstance.”
I’d read R. Fred’s book. I recalled a troupe of genetically altered acrobats residing in a hollowed asteroid.
Blumlein rode in to the rescue now, perhaps pitying Vundane, who’d shrunk even smaller in his chair. “This is just an example, I think, of the wider context, the erudition, that Abe brings to what he touches. In our field he’s a comet streaking past, whom we’ve managed to lure into our orbit. A fellow traveler, like a Stanley Kubrick or a Stanislaw Lem. He disdains our vocabulary even as he reinvents it to suit his own impulses.”
“I have to interrupt, Sidney, to say you’re overstating the value of what I do.” Here was a subject to rouse Abraham’s passion. “You throw names, Kubrick, Lem. And Mr. Green, god bless him, throws Virgil Finlay, whom I’ve never had the good fortune to encounter. Let me throw a few names. Ernst, Tanquy, Matta, Kandinsky. Once in a while, the early Pollock or Rothko. If I’ve accomplished one thing, it’s been to give a rough education in contemporary painting, or what was contemporary painting in 1950. The intersection of late surrealism and early abstract expressionism. Period. It’s derivative, every last brushstroke. All quoted. Nothing to do with outer space, nothing remotely. Honestly, if you people hadn’t put such a seal on yourselves, if you’d visit a museum even once, you’d know you’re celebrating a second-rate thief.”
“You stopped at pop art?” asked Blumlein.
“Please. You have Mr. Pflug for that. That’s all there was when I began doing jackets-pop art.”
Blumlein and Ebdus had begun to seem a kind of vaudeville act, scripted at the expense of the fall guys who’d made the mistake of joining them onstage. The audience ate it up.
“Yet here you are, Abe, among us. LunaCon wasn’t to your liking, but you’ve spent a career among us, sharing your gift. You’re the guest of honor.”
“Look, that’s fair. You want an explanation. It isn’t pretty. If I were a stronger person I wouldn’t be here. I’m tempted by flattery, so I come. My work on film is hardly known. It’s unknown. You people have been very kind, too kind. I’ve grown fond, despite myself. My companion enjoys travel. There isn’t one explanation, there are several.”
“Do you feel a part of the field, warts and all?”
Abraham shrugged. “It’s a bohemian demimonde, like any other. There are similar convocations in the world of so-called experimental film, but I’ve always declined to go. Some attend imagining they can further themselves. But the work, the true work, is of course carried on elsewhere. Perhaps for me the stakes there are too high, so I accept your invitations instead. I don’t ponder these things. An event like this is an accident, not necessarily a happy one. I frankly marvel at the oddness of a room gathered in honor of a forgotten man, a nobody. Perhaps I can wake you from the trance you’re in, but I doubt it.”
Fifty people laughed in delighted recognition, and a light spontaneous applause broke out. I heard a woman in the row ahead whisper appreciatively, “He always says that.”
“I’m ashamed of myself,” said my father.
The applause grew. Buddy Green shot upright from his chair and led the clapping. Only Pflug refused the consensus, turning in his chair.
“I’ve wasted my life.”
This was the last thing I made out before my father was drowned in the ovation. A two-way masochism was at work here, made possible by the total insularity of the gathering. The bohemian demimonde, as Abraham called it. My father was their pet heretic, their designated griever for lost or abandoned possibility. The way he brandished his failure thrilled this crowd, and they’d obviously known it was coming. By accepting his contempt like a lash on their backs, the Elk Lodge of ForbiddenCon 7 could feel ratified in their unworthy worthiness, their good sense of humor about themselves and their chosen deficiencies.
And yet I felt his not entirely withheld affection too. Through his eyes I could even share it. I thought of my namesake’s “Chimes of Freedom”- tolling for the aching whose wounds cannot be nursed, for the countless confused accused misused strung-out ones and worse, and for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe! Certainly I’d witnessed gatherings of rock critics or college-radio DJs, on panels at the South by Southwest conference or the CMJ, which were no less self-congratulatorily marginal. Only the costumes were different. I flashed on a vision of a world dotted with conferences, convocations, and “Cons” of all types, each an engine for converting feelings of inferiority and self-loathing into their opposites.
The panel was over. Another man had made his way to the front and taken the left-hand microphone from Sidney Blumlein. Now he tapped it repeatedly to get our attention. The new arrival was as eccentrically dressed as anyone in the room, but to an entirely different effect. His clean blue pinstripe shirt with white collar and red bow tie, natty mustache and slicked hair-all suggested a Republican senator who’d run a calculatedly old-timey campaign bankrolled by dark and secretive private interests. His voice was incredibly loud.
“This is my first chance to welcome you to ForbiddenCon 7,” he barked. “What a beginning, hey? Mr. Ebdus is too modest so I’ll remind you myself, we have the privilege of a special screening of a portion of his film, tomorrow at ten in Wyoming Ballroom B. Really, don’t miss this, it’s a rare opportunity.”
“Him,” whispered Francesca. She tugged my arm. “He loves your father.”
It’s you who loves him, I thought but didn’t say. You’re projecting, Francesca, you see it everywhere. Seated beside her, the Cumulus of Love, I felt enveloped in perfume and emotion. Nevertheless, I contemplated this bow-tied man at the microphone, the one who stirred my father’s girlfriend to such a peculiar excitement.
“One more big hand, ladies and gentlemen, for our artist guest of honor, Abe Ebdus!”
It was my first glimpse of the man Francesca had called Zelmo the Chair. The important lawyer. An unlikely emissary for secrets pertaining to my whole existence, but he had a few.
The restaurant, Bongiorno’s, was bad and didn’t know it. Everything was presented with a passive-aggressive flourish, as though we probably weren’t savvy enough to appreciate the oregano-heavy garlic bread, the individual bowls for olive pits, the starched napkins stuffed into our wineglasses, or the waiter’s strained enunciation of a long list of specials. Zelmo Swift seized control of the wine list and addressed everyone by name, making sure we took the whole episode personally. “This is on me, not ForbiddenCon,” he stressed. “They wouldn’t know food if it bit them on the ass. They’re happy with that crap in the hotel. I know how gruesome that whole scene can get, so I always try to take the guests out once.”
“Nice,” I lied. At the table Zelmo still barked, his voice shockingly large. And he was master of the sudden conversational stop which demands tribute, his whole face and chest near to bursting with his readiness to resume once he’d been endorsed with a No kidding? or You devil, you!
“Dinner and real conversation,” he said now. “Real life. That hotel is full of mummies. God love ’em.”
Yes, and aren’t you the King of the Mummies? I wanted to ask. But I understood it was precisely Zelmo’s superiority to the gathering at the Marriott that our candlelit dinner was meant to authenticate.
“Also, I knew Madame Cassini would appreciate the best Italian food in southern California.”
Francesca, seated to Zelmo’s right, twinkled at the flattery. I was pretty sure her Italian heritage went not much deeper than knowing the difference between a Neapolitan slice and a Sicilian square in the pizzerias of outermost Brooklyn. But then I was pretty sure this wouldn’t be the best Italian food in southern California. Maybe in Anaheim.
Zelmo’s costume and manner had initially disguised the fact that he was, like me, and like Jared Orthman, in his thirties. It was the second time in a long day I’d been forced to see that my dress and affect, contrasted with peers in other professions, was less that of a grown, employed man than of a gas-station attendant or homeless person. The scruffy credibility my gear signified in my native habitat was lost on the Jareds and Zelmos, my antique wire-frame glasses only suggesting I couldn’t afford contacts. Los Angeles held this lesson around every corner, I suspected. Berkeley, still in its dream bubble of the sixties, never did.
The wine arrived, and Zelmo tasted it. “That’s the one,” he proclaimed. Then he confided in me specially: “You’ll love this.” Apparently the son wouldn’t be allowed to float in a funk through the meal. I required winning over.
My father sat beside me, separated from Zelmo by Francesca. Inserted between Zelmo and myself sat Zelmo’s date, Leslie Cunningham. That Leslie in her gray suit perfectly resembled an actress playing a legal intern on a certain television show didn’t prevent Zelmo’s announcing that she actually was a legal intern, one who worked in Zelmo’s firm. At Bongiorno’s we were past irony’s county line. I didn’t trouble myself to wonder what nestled behind the trim tailoring; I refused to desire Zelmo’s woman. In Berkeley I wouldn’t have glanced at her, I told myself. She’d have been a bank teller, an office manager, just another style-deaf California blonde. I also didn’t trouble wondering what she was doing on Zelmo’s arm, figuring the best things in life are free, but, as well, you can leave that to the birds and bees.
The women on either side of Zelmo bubbled along on his stream. My father sat in grave silence. I suppose we made two of a kind, only he’d earned his supper by two decades of service to the field. I was expected to at least act impressed and grateful. It was Abraham’s trademark, I’d learned at the panel, that he wouldn’t.
The sommelier filled our glasses. I had mine to my lips when Zelmo said: “A toast.”
“To you!” said Francesca. “Your generosity!”
Zelmo shook his head. “I have a toast. When I invited Abe to be ForbiddenCon 7’s artist guest of honor, I could have hoped the man would be as wonderful as his work. He is. But how could I have known he’d bring along a beautiful, magical lady! Francesca and Abraham, your story touches me. To have found one another, so late in life.” Zelmo was nearly bellowing by the time he raised his glass to the table’s center. “To the human heart! ” Diners at other tables glanced to see what the matter was.
We clinked, a plate of fried calamari was set down, and the celebrated couple fell to some low squabbling. Zelmo put his arm across Leslie Cunningham’s shoulders and leaned to face me. “So how was it growing up in the home of the great man?”
I’m sure the look on my face was awful, and Zelmo said, “You don’t have to answer that. Abraham’s a tough bastard. That’s the only way anything gets done in this world. Too few people understand what toughness is. Nobody back at that hotel has any idea.” He laughed. “Leslie here doesn’t know why I bother running the convention year after year. She wouldn’t set foot in a place like that. Isn’t that right?”
“I don’t like science fiction,” she obliged.
“Well, I grew up loving it, honey. I didn’t discriminate. Star Wars, Star Trek, I loved it all. Abraham wouldn’t want to hear it, but it’s true. Later, I developed taste. That’s how it happens, Les-it develops, like film. And in the great men of the field I saw the same toughness that got me where I am. Only nobody pays your father six hundred thou a year-do they?”
“No,” I agreed, just to kick him loose again.
“I wanted to give something back. So I created ForbiddenCon. It’s my puppy. Seven years. You think I need this, dealing with the committee, those types? They hate me but they need me. A night like this is what makes it worthwhile.” He was still making certain I knew he mostly despised his puppy.
“Why ForbiddenCon?” I asked.
“You’ll find this hard to believe, but ours is the classiest of the conventions. Real talent goes begging at a majority of these things. Your father, he’d be pearls before swine.”
“I mean why the name? What’s forbidden?”
“It stands for things hidden, occult, revealed. The rare, the taboo, the seldom seen. Elusive or neglected wisdom. Acquired tastes, like caviar, or single-malt scotch.”
“I see.”
“Also it’s a reference to Forbidden Planet, the greatest science-fiction film bar none. Many people would catch that implication.”
“Ah.”
“I go all out. You think Fred Vundane has been to a convention in the last twenty years? He couldn’t afford the badge to get in, let alone the plane ticket. I had him flown out here, just for the privilege of Abe saying he never read the book.”
“A painful moment,” I suggested.
Zelmo waved his hand. “A man like your father should have whatever he wants.”
I couldn’t disagree, but I wasn’t sure Vundane’s public shaming had been high on the list.
“What do you do?” asked Leslie, leaping into the breach.
Zelmo took charge of this, too. “Dylan’s a writer,” he said proudly. “A journalist.”
“I write about music,” I said. “Lately I package collections for Remnant Records.”
I gazed into Leslie’s blue, stupefied eyes. I wished to have met her in a singles bar on my last night on earth, not in this moronic conversation.
“Remnant’s a reissue label. I put together collections on various themes, write the liner notes, stuff like that.”
“Give us an example,” said Zelmo, gesturing with his wineglass munificently, as though if I said the right words he’d whip out his checkbook and bankroll something. Again I was pitching.
“Well, The Falsetto Box is one you might have seen. It got some press. Four CDs of, you know, the history of falsetto soul-Smokey Robinson, Curtis Mayfield, Eddie Holman. And some unexpected stuff. Van Morrison. Prince.”
“We missed that,” said Zelmo, speaking for Leslie. “What’s another one?”
“Some of it’s pretty gimmicky,” I admitted. “Remnant has sort of a novelty slant. So, uh, one example is we did a disc called Your So-Called Friends -all the songs that have that phrase.”
“I don’t understand,” said Leslie flatly.
“It’s just a vernacular phrase that shows up in different lyrics- so-called friends. Like, you and your so-called friends. Elvis sings it in ‘High Heel Sneakers,’ Gladys Knight in ‘Come See About Me,’ Albert King in ‘Don’t Burn Down the Bridge,’ and so on. It’s like a meme, a word virus that carries a certain idea or emotion…” I trailed off, humiliated.
Our entrées were set in front of us. “I’ll want to hear more about this,” Zelmo warned, wagging a finger at me.
But the lawyer was too busy presiding over the women’s meals, and I slipped his bonds for the time being. Instead I turned to my father, and over our twin plates of spaghetti and meatballs-had Abraham and I had the same instinct, to deflate the pomposity of Bongiorno’s list of specials with the downscale entrée?-we at last shared a moment of privacy.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked.
“Sure. You?”
He only raised his eyebrows. “Before I forget, this is something I wanted you to read.” He palmed me a triple-folded sheet from his inner jacket pocket and passed it to me covertly, at the level of the table. I unfolded it in my lap. It was a photocopy of a clipping from Artforum. “Epic Crawl: The Hidden Journey of an American Titan,” by Willard Amato. It began:
What chance that the most dedicated abstract painter in the United States abandoned canvas in 1972? Or last showed in 1967, in a two-man show of figurative work which was barely reviewed? As likely that the most profound avant-garde filmmaker of our time would never receive a single screening in his native burg of New York, or that the last monumental modernist artifact should be eked out secretly, in an unnameable medium, through the long heyday of modernism’s toppling. Each of these improbabilities leads to the same place, an attic studio in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, where-
“Read it later,” he begged. “Keep the copy, I’ve got others.”
So the forgotten man, the nobody, wasn’t quite content to be. It wasn’t news that Abraham’s aspirations still burned, but the clipping was a surprise. I stuffed it into my pocket.
“Tell me, how is Abby?”
“She’s okay.”
“Too bad she couldn’t be along.” I suddenly saw our table in another light: two couples and a broken third. I had no idea where Abby was tonight.
“She’s got school,” I said, hearing my own defensiveness, unable to stop it.
Francesca overheard and announced, “I wish we could have seen her, Dylan. She’s such a sweet girl!” This drew Zelmo and Leslie’s attention. “She’s a black American,” Francesca explained, wide-eyed in sincerity. Francesca and Abby had met just once, when Abby and I passed through New York on our way to a music conference in Montreal. “You should meet her,” she gasped to Leslie. “Such lovely skin.” Francesca’s good intentions vaporized conversation. We were left seated at our pasta and veal like obedient soldiers.
“Still in school?” said Zelmo at last, with pious sympathy: yes, my absent black girlfriend was underage too. Count a grown-up, employable blonde in the same category as bow ties, contact lenses, and wing tips: appurtenances Dylan Ebdus was not yet mature enough to brandish.
“Graduate school,” I said. “She’s completing her dissertation.”
“That’s wonderful,” said Zelmo, turning it into a congratulation to Abby’s race that she should be in such a position. I understood it was impossible to squirm from beneath Zelmo’s patronage. Artists were his broken, defective flock, and he’d herd as many as he could into the safety of his care-a plate of meatballs and a ticket to ForbiddenCon. And black people were pretty much artists by definition.
“Darling,” said Francesca to Abraham. “Tell him about his friend’s father.”
“Eh?”
“That poor man down the street, Abe. You said he’d want to know.”
Abraham nodded. “Your old friend Mingus-you remember his father, Barry? Our neighbor?”
Barrett Rude Junior, I corrected silently. Francesca’s logic was endearingly bare: Dylan has a liking for black Americans lead directly to That poor man down the street. I promised myself I’d be patient, though hearing Abraham begin so ploddingly made me want to scream. Our neighbor! Mr. Rogers has neighbors-we had a block. I merely grew up in that house, I wanted to say. I merely wrote the man’s biography in my liner note to the Distinctions’ box set. But the first I wouldn’t mention because Abraham would feel it as a rebuke. And the latter he didn’t know of, because I hadn’t mentioned it or sent him a copy.
Barrett Rude Junior couldn’t be dead, I was certain of that. I’d have heard. Rolling Stone would have called on me to write the obit-my guess was they’d ask for about four hundred words.
“His kidneys collapsed,” said Abraham simply. “Awful. They came in an ambulance. He was on a machine to keep him alive.”
The subject was too remote, and perhaps too vivid, for Zelmo Swift. He threw another conversational gambit at Leslie and Francesca, and my father and I were left to ourselves.
“He’d been alone in the place for weeks, basically dying there. Nobody on the street had any idea. He’s lived among us so long, but since the shooting, he’s very rarely out of the house.”
Abraham and I had never discussed what he called the shooting, either in the two weeks of summer that remained before I decamped to Vermont for college, or after. Mingus and Barrett had left my name out of any conversations with the police. My presence in their house that day had been kept secret from anyone but themselves, so far as I knew.
I recalled for the thousandth time those heaps of white powder- of course his kidneys collapsed. What had they been waiting for? I began writing those four hundred words in my head.
“At that point a miracle occurred. Your friend Mingus was found. In a prison upstate. They got a court order, and he was released to a hospital, to give a kidney.”
“What? ”
“They made a special provision-Mingus was the only possible donor. He saved his father’s life by submitting to the operation. And was returned to prison.”
I brought my wineglass up, a phantom toast, then sucked down what remained inside. Behind the glass my head was heating, and my throat tightening, so I nearly choked on the mouthful of Burgundy.
“So, Mingus is back inside,” I said.
“You thought he wasn’t?”
“Last I knew, Arthur said he was out. But that was maybe ten years ago, more. I don’t know what I thought, honestly.”
“Barry is a very sweet man,” said Francesca, leaning in, selecting her moment. “Very quiet. I think he’s awfully sad.”
“You know him?” I managed. Why shouldn’t she? It all seemed equally likely now. A mist fogged my glasses.
She nodded at Abraham. “Your father and I bring him food sometimes. Soup, chicken, whatever we’ve got extra. He doesn’t eat. Sometimes he just sits, out on the stoop. Sometimes he sits in the rain. The people on the block don’t know him. Nobody talks to him. Only your father.”
“Excuse me,” I said, and tossed my napkin on my chair. I was able to reach the men’s toilet before I wept or vomited into my meatballs. I was unwilling to brandish this new misery of mine before the lawyer who appreciated single-malt scotch and Forbidden Planet. Let my tears remain occult, elusive, seldom seen, ineligible for display in Zelmo’s Museum of the Pathetic alongside R. Fred Vundane.
He saved his father’s life by submitting to the operation. Every once in a while, every decade or so, I was forced to know that Dean Street still existed. That Mingus Rude wasn’t a person I’d only imagined into being. I took a minute to be shamed and then I pushed Mingus back to where he’d been, where he always was whether I bothered to contemplate him or not, among the millions of destroyed men who were not my brothers.
Then I rinsed my glasses, blew my nose, and returned to the table, where through the latter courses I ignored my father and Francesca, though they were my only reason for being there. Instead I did my honest best to get potted on expensive cognac and to demolish Leslie Cunningham with my wit and charm, my roguish innuendo. I think I might even have made an impression on her, but it was all wasted on Zelmo Swift. I would have had to bend her over the table to dent his implacability.
Zelmo took me aside as we rose from the table. My father had wandered off to the men’s room. “You’re staying for the film tomorrow?”
“Of course.”
“It means a lot to your dad.”
It must be hard to strangle a man using a bow tie. That might be the reason for them. “I’ll try not to do anything embarrassing,” I said.
Zelmo frowned as if to suggest he hadn’t been worried, but now would reconsider. “What time is your flight?”
“Right after.”
“LAX?”
“No, my flight’s out of Disneyland. Goofy Air.” The joke soured in my mouth; it was indebted to one of Abby’s, earlier this endless day.
“Har har. I’ll drive you, if you’ll let me.”
Maybe I’d had more to drink than I realized, but this confused me. “I can take a cab,” I said angrily.
“Let me save you the fare. We can talk.”
Then Francesca was beside me, whispering. “Go with him, Dylan.”
“Talk about what?”
“Shhhh,” said Francesca.
I lay on one of the Marriott’s twin doubles in my underwear and spun channels, watched crocodiles fucking and Lenny Kravitz. Twice I rolled over to the phone and punched in my number in Berkeley; twice I hung up on my own voice on the machine. I tried to focus my eyes on the Artforum photocopy.
– Ebdus abjures the comparison to the Wittgenstein-like protagonist of Thomas Bernhard’s Correction , who labors for years in the forest constructing a mysterious, unseen “cone,” just as he rejects any conceptual or philosophical reduction of the essentially material, “painterly” nature of his exploration. All in Ebdus’s work proceeds from the purely physical nature of pigment on celluloid, and of light through the gate of a projector. A more fertile comparison might be made to the decades-long, meditative (not to say obsessive) journey of modernist composer Conlon Nancarrow, who during a blacklist-inspired exile in Mexico explored the unique compositional possibilities of the player piano, developing a unique and painstaking method of hand-punching the rolls which operate the mechanical keyboard. Two or three years of Nancarrow’s effort was required to produce a five- or ten-minute composition, a rate only marginally slower than that of Ebdus in his painted film…
I was glad for my father, but my attention wasn’t held. My sick heart swirled with distraction. When I closed my eyes it felt as if Mingus Rude was in the room, perhaps on the second bed or in the bathtub. I borrowed from some grisly urban legend an image of a man packed in ice, robbed of his kidney by a gang of organ bandits. Alternately, despite a room party chattering and clunking through the wall, and the fact of my own father in a suite five floors above, I felt the possibility that my hotel room was detached in the void, a plush sarcophagus with cable television, drifting in space. This second hallucination jolted me from my daze on the bedspread, to reach for the key to the minibar.
I’d emptied my pockets on the dresser. Now I saw what was arrayed there. Beside the minibar key, the room’s keycard, and some crumpled dollars, lay Aaron X. Doily’s ring. I’d pocketed it that morning, to rescue it from Abby’s interrogation of my stuff.
I wondered if the ring still worked, and, if it did, whether its powers had changed again. Before I was done wondering I’d pulled on my pants and slipped the keycard into my pocket and the ring onto my finger. In bare feet I crossed the carpet to the door, and out into the corridor, to stand blinking in the bright light.
I couldn’t see my hands or feet, but then I was drunk too. It wasn’t until the elevator door opened and I stepped into its mirrored interior that I was certain. I was alone there, and the elevator’s cab appeared empty. I pressed my hands to the mirrors and blew breath around them, saw invisible fingers outlined in visible steam. No matter that I’d left the ring alone for years: this was still its power. Mine, when I chose to wear it.
Upstairs, I’d lain tripping on misery for what felt like hours. So I expected the lobby to be empty. Instead it was full of gabbling Forbiddenoids. So was the hotel’s bar. I crept in, easily dodging the usual collisions. I’d become a skilled invisible man ten years before, and the expertise was ready in me.
The convention’s denizens surrounded the bar’s round tables in gathered chairs, groups of ten or fifteen. Their conversations had a sprung, argumentative quality, like regurgitated panel discussions. But they were human; they imbibed, galed with laughter. Some would probably pair off tonight, like the crocodiles. I was glad to be invisible. The bar itself, an island in the center, was mostly empty. I overturned a glass of melted ice at one end to make a diversion, then, as the bartender groused over to swab it up, snuck behind him to grab a third-full bottle of Maker’s Mark. As I clutched it to my chest it was enclosed in my transparency. I tiptoed back through the lobby. Paul Pflug was there, pinned on a couch between identical women in leather bustiers, and high-laced boots not so unlike Abby’s. I toasted him with the invisible bottle, then brought the whiskey up to my room, to render invisible by other means.
Ten was too early, but at least the room was dark. My father dithered angrily, threading the projector, insisting on doing it himself, while the pair of hotel staff who’d wheeled it into the room were exiled to one side. I sat with Francesca in the front row, unable to completely avoid the knowledge that only a scattered fifteen or twenty filled the seats behind us, in a room which wanted a hundred. The audience waited patiently, more patiently than I. Some drew orange juice from small boxes through straws, others munched Danish. Zelmo wasn’t in evidence, not yet.
Under my starchy lids a film of hangover already played. I’d barely showered and made it out of the room in time to find Wyoming Ballroom B. I was relying on coffee and a bagel on the plane, for now an Advil from Francesca’s purse. My floppy bag was repacked and stuffed under my chair, Aaron Doily’s ring returned to my pocket. The emptied bottle of Maker’s Mark I’d hidden in the minibar-it took some jostling to get it inside.
“I’ll show two sequences,” my father explained, beginning without any warning. “The first is from 1979 to 1981 and lasts twenty-one minutes. The second is more recent, from 1998. About ten minutes, I think. If it’s all right I’ll leave any remarks or questions for the end.”
No one objected. No one but myself or Francesca could have known a reason to. The small population of hardcore Ebdus fans shifted in their chairs with that rote hushed excitement which proceeds the start of any film, even one shown at ten in the morning in the Wyoming Ballroom of the Anaheim Marriott. They had no idea.
I cared about the film. What choice did I have? I’d cohabited with that presence longer than any other, apart from my father himself. In my childhood life the film was a sort of crippled, mute god, one nursed upstairs like a demented relative. I knew the twenty-one-minute 1979-81 section well-I’d attended its one other public screening, at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, four years ago, and watched it twice in practice runs during the same week. It was a sequence Abraham thought particularly definitive. A landscape lit by an unseen moon, the horizon splitting the screen, the ground brighter than the sky-though Abraham would have rejected the terms “landscape,” “horizon,” and “ground.” Nevertheless: the sky gray-black, the ground gray-gray. The effect more or less that of a thousand late-period Rothkos, stacked in time, and vibrating in projected light. The years 1979 to 1981 were just two in a half-dozen when Abraham had painted this one image-black and gray wrestling in fierce tandem. The ground might rise, or roll slightly, as though an ocean had swelled and waved. The black might leak from the sky and briefly roll across the lower frame-the moments when it did were shocking action in the dazzling, dancing stillness. Just once a red-and-yellow pulse moved like an occluded sun behind the black, then dissolved in shards. Had Abraham secretly gotten his ashes hauled that particular week, so long ago? I’d never dared ask.
As it happened, I was reasonably sure that the twenty-one-minute segment included my sole contribution, a single frame I’d forged one day after school, during my senior year. I’d come home to find Abraham out, perhaps shopping. Later I couldn’t remember the exact circumstances, only the compulsion which had come over me, to sneak into his studio and paint the frame. Abraham’s brushes were wet-he’d just been working. The empty frame was centered in the sprockets, and I would only have to ratchet it one position farther to conceal my addition. The chance was handed to me on a platter, but still I barely dared. With a loaded brush tip I trembled over the frame, not setting the pigment down: the irreversible act. I was terrified of authority -not Abraham’s, but my own.
I painted it-laid down black, laid down gray. Then broke out in a fearful sweat and fled the scene. I spent a week waiting to be accused, and wasn’t. Whether I was caught I’d never know. My father was more than capable of detecting the forged frame and opting not to speak. Leaving it in or splicing it out, but saying nothing. Now, though, I permitted myself to imagine he’d left it in. One twenty-fourth of a second in twenty-five years: mine.
Now I cadged a painkiller from Francesca and tried to ignore the pressure of my dehydrated brain against the top of my eyeballs. The room was silent apart from the film’s clicking passage and the whine of the projector’s fan. It was hard to give the film its due (whatever that was), between hangover and my sense of Abraham, back with the projector, watching us watch from across a distance of empty seats. Hard not to feel his disappointment in this venue on the back of my neck. I waited for that one strange flare of yellow and red: there it was. Twenty-one minutes passed.
“This is how your father tortures these people who love him,” whispered Francesca. “By subjecting them to such darkness.”
I didn’t reply. I could have used even more darkness at the moment.
The second excerpt was a surprise. A dispatch from the frontier: my father had discovered a green triangle with blunted corners, one trying and failing to fall sideways against the phantasmic, blurred horizon.
The triangle occupied perhaps a quarter of the frame’s area. It trembled, tipped a degree, nearly kissed earth, jumped back. Progress was illusion: two steps forward, two steps back. Impossible, though, not to root for it. To feel it groping like a foot for purchase. Daring, hesitating, failing.
I was unexpectedly moved, forgot the room, forgot my headache, suddenly wept for the triangle’s efforts, a tragedy in no acts. Francesca handed me a tissue from her purse. Prisonaires, triangles, I was a pushover these days. Then it was done, and the lights came on. No one clapped-they’d forgotten how, or perhaps the film had persuaded them to fear that their hands, urged together, would fail to meet.
Zelmo Swift appeared at the front and taught us to be brave: a clapping sound could indeed be produced. He led the way. We applauded and my father came to the front, was seated before another microphone, though he hardly needed it to be heard in the sparse room. The few questions that came were either timid or inane. Abraham took them politely.
“Have you ever considered adding a soundtrack?”
“You mean conversation? Or music?”
“Uh, music. It would give you something to listen to.”
“Yes, it would do that. And then, yes. We’d be listening to music.” He paused. “It’s something to think about.”
Another asked about the progress of the film since the second excerpt. What did it look like now?
“I find a paraphrase almost impossible. Some progress has been made. You’d see a superficial resemblance to this sequence, I think.”
“Is the triangle-” This is what the questioner had really wanted to ask. “Is the triangle, uh, lower? Has it finished falling?”
“Ah,” said Abraham. He paused a while. “The green, yes. It continues in its struggle. More or less as you saw.”
There was a hush within a hush.
“Will it ever -?” someone managed. The question on everyone’s lips. That unfinished falling had broken a lot of hearts, not only mine.
“I prefer not to speculate,” said Abraham. “That’s the daily task, in my view. A refusal to speculate, only encounter. Only understand.”
Zelmo, waiting in the wings, could stand it no longer. He swept up the microphone. “In other words, folks, stay tuned. Abraham Ebdus isn’t done yet. Pretty amazing.” Yes, the film had gone into extra innings, but Zelmo the Chair, Zelmo the Connoisseur, he wasn’t one of those philistines getting a head start to the parking lot, no sir.
With that the spell was broken. My father’s fans drifted from the ballroom, checking their pocket schedules. Maybe somewhere in the building R. Fred Vundane was seated on another panel, if they were lucky. Abraham hurried back to prevent the hotel’s employee from rewinding the film incorrectly, and Zelmo and Francesca surrounded me again.
“You’ve got a plane to catch,” Zelmo said merrily.
“There’s plenty of time.”
“Sure, but my car’s waiting downstairs. So-”
“You better go, dear,” said Francesca.
I was too blurry to fight. Zelmo was a thug by nature, and Francesca a thug of love, and together, in the name of convenience and some irritating secret agenda, they would cheat me of a half hour more in my father’s company. He’d fly back to Brooklyn and another year or decade would go by. But I’d made no use of the visit so far, and there wasn’t a lot of potential in half an hour at the Marriott, not with Zelmo and Francesca and my hangover all circling, making their claims. I slung my bag over my shoulder.
“Son.”
“Dad.”
“It was good to see you. This-” He waved. “Impossible.”
“The new segment was beautiful.”
He closed his eyes. “Thank you.”
We embraced again, two bird-men briefly touching on a branch. I’d showered but already reeked again of the liquor working through my pores. I wondered if my father thought I’d come to Los Angeles in the middle of a breakup, or a breakdown. I wondered if he’d be right to wonder.
Then I smudged Francesca’s face and was escorted downstairs, through the lobby, and into the backseat of Zelmo Swift’s chauffeured, window-tinted limousine.
Disneyland was distantly visible from the gray suburban freeway strip, a clutch of spires like a sinking ship in the industrial sea.
“You don’t like me,” announced Zelmo, with no regard for the driver’s hearing. On the leather-plush seat there was plenty of room between myself and the lawyer. I suppose it seemed I wanted to climb out the window.
“What do you want me to say?” I needed orange juice, a toothbrush, a blood transfusion, a Bloody Mary, Abigale Ponders, Leslie Cunningham, a Thneed, someone to watch over me, a miracle every day-anything but a moment of truth between myself and Zelmo Swift. I needed a volume knob on Zelmo Swift.
“Nothing. I’m doing this out of respect for your father and Francesca.” He took an envelope from his jacket and placed it beside my hand.
“What is it?”
“An accident. You’ll understand when you look. I go all out for my guests, Dylan. Whatever you might think of ForbiddenCon, it’s a moment in their lives, I like to make it a big one. We usually do a ‘This Is Your Life, Abraham Ebdus!’ kind of thing at the Saturday banquet. Surprise appearances from the past, very sentimental.”
I opened the envelope. A single sheet, two typed paragraphs. Some legal secretary’s notes, unsigned. Nothing official, but dry legalese aspiring to the official, language dead with indifference to its subject.
Ebdus, Rachel Abramovitz, conviction for forgery, conspiracy, Owensville Virginia, 10/18/78, sentence suspended. Subsequent arrest and indictment, Lexington, Kentucky, 5/9/79, accomplice armed robbery; bail flight, whereabouts unknown; warrant issued 7/22/79.
And:
Ebdus, Rachel A., last verifiable address, 2/75: #1 Rural Route 8, Bloomington, Indiana, 44605.
“I hope you don’t feel I was prying,” said Zelmo. “We have an excellent research staff at my firm. What they discover is out of my hands.”
“Why am I seeing this?” What I meant, really, was: Why am I learning this from you? Why in your limousine, Zelmo?
He understood. “Abraham wanted me to destroy it. He wasn’t interested. Francesca spoke to me privately.”
“So Francesca’s wishes prevailed over my father’s?”
“She’s well-intentioned, Dylan. She thought you had a right.” His voice rose to a declamatory, courtroom-finale level. “You shouldn’t be furious with her. It’s difficult coming into a family, knowing what’s right to do.”
I glanced at the sheet again, and felt Zelmo’s eyes on me. I wanted to fly at him in my rage, but I sat. Fuck you looking at? I wanted to ask, then throw him in a yoke.
But I sat, a white boy saying nothing.
“Forget it, if you want,” said Zelmo. “I’ll destroy the traces.”
“I don’t care what you do. Just don’t bother Abraham with it again.”
“Assuredly.”
I put the sheet in the envelope, the envelope in my bag. We fell to silence, Zelmo gratefully for once. I wondered if he’d ever been so little rewarded for what he regarded as his generosity.
Still, it was hardly his fault a legal researcher in his firm knew more about my life than I did.
Destroy the traces. I’d never tried to do that. Instead I’d lived in their midst for thirty years, oblivious, a blind man fancying himself invisible.
Perhaps every male animal has an idea what he’ll do with himself the evening of the day he comes home to a newly empty house-rooms which show signs, as mine did, of a hurried start to permanent departure. Perhaps every man has a consoling, self-abnegating fantasy lined up for such a moment, a rabbit hole down which to plunge. Anyhow, I did. I only had to stretch out on my daybed for a few hours, dozing slightly as light turned to dark in the trees outside, the jewel-case shambles of Abby’s tantrum still decorating the floor at my feet, to have my chance. Once night fell I only needed to change my shirt, splash water on my face, and walk a few blocks south through the cool evening to put my plan under way. My scheme of self-wreckage was that near at hand, that much in my back pocket all the time.
Shaman’s Brigadoon, on San Pablo Avenue, was a Berkeley institution, a dingy, poster-layered blues-and-folk nightclub where for some thirty-odd years black musicians in dark suits, narrow ties, and freshly blocked fedoras came to sit on a tiny stage and perform for an audience of white people wearing berets, fezzes, ponchos, and dashikis. As a music journalist known to Shaman’s longtime floor manager I could rely on being waved in free of charge. I always fulfilled the two-drink minimum at the candle-in-mason-jar tables, though-it was worth it for a seat nearer the stage, and lately for the sweet, slow-cooking flirtation I’d been engaged in with one of their typically zaftig young cocktail waitresses, a wide-faced, green-eyed, cigarette-raspy blonde seemingly just arrived from Surferville, named Katha.
Katha had been born in the late seventies but her flippant smile, easy banter, and the pitch of her sturdy hips as she moved with a tray, all were film-noir vintage, whether she knew it or not. Though I gobbled her up with my eyes, she was only an easy, impersonal icon of sexual cheer in my life the first dozen times she waited my table. I took her friendly provocations for nothing more than an aspect of her art, and tipped accordingly.
As has sometimes been the case for me, it was one woman who focused my attention on the reality of another. “You and that girl really get a kick out of each other, don’t you?” Abby said one night in May, as we walked home from a Suzzy Roche show.
“She’s got a Drew Barrymore smile,” I joshed, denying by not denying.
“She’s got Drew Barrymore jugs,” said Abby, and punched me on the arm. We laughed, chummy, jaded cohorts in my self-deception. And that was the last night Abby and I went together to a show at Shaman’s Brigadoon.
My next visit I learned Katha’s last name, and a few other things. Katha Purly only looked nineteen-she was twenty-one. Despite appearances, she wasn’t up from some beach town, but down, from Walla Walla, Washington. Flying in the teeth of cliché, she was an aspiring singer-songwriter waitressing at a joint where she hoped someday to headline. She lived in a commune in Emeryville, along with two of the other waitresses from Shaman’s who’d come south with Katha at the same time. No, the three weren’t a band, just friends. I couldn’t keep from asking the questions but after I learned the answers I pretended I didn’t know them. My sincerity had almost spoiled our breezy, effortless repartee, but on my next visit we fought our way back. And that was where we’d left it, until this night.
Onstage was a trio of African musicians, an organist, xylophonist, and bongo player, billed as the Kenya Orchestra Vandals. They weren’t creating a lot of excitement, and I wondered if a major portion of the orchestra hadn’t been detained at the Nairobi airport. There were free tables near the riser, but I didn’t sit as close as I could have. Instead I picked the quietest corner of Katha’s section.
“Hiya, buster,” she said, and dropped a menu on my table.
“Katha, Katha, Katha.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing at all. Just saying your name. It sounds like panting, actually.”
“I guess, if you’re a dog. You drinking?”
She brought me scotch and I pretended to admire the band. Whenever she was near enough I made jokes about Walla Walla and tried to make her sit at my table for a cigarette break. Once I succeeded, I said: “So what are you doing later, anyway?”
“Who, me?” Katha’s tone of delighted surprise was all I wished to inspire in her, or for that matter in any other living human, ever again. When two bodies felt the raw uncanny instinct to be joined, and before any damage had been exchanged, it was so easy for one to make the other smile.
“You. You and your so-called friends. You and what army.”
She squinted. “What about the horse I rode in on?”
“The horse especially.”
“You want to party with me, Dylan?”
“I want to hear you play your guitar.”
I felt her hesitation, avoiding a trap. I will not trap you ever or tonight, I willed.
“I’m not off until one-thirty,” she said.
I shrugged and she began to know that I was serious.
“Some people are showing up later,” she said, precisely vague. “But if you don’t mind coming along we could get some hanging-out time.”
I wasn’t much into the Kenyans, so I took a walk to the marina. Mexicans fished off the pier by night, hunched against the indifferent skyline, the Orwellian Transamerica pyramid. I went as far as the pier’s crumbled tip, where lovers walked, though I couldn’t decide whether to count myself as one.
Then ten blocks back to Shaman’s, to an alley door Katha had told me to use. A rap beat pulsed from a small boom box on a kitchen shelf, playing Digital Underground’s “Foghorn Leghorn,” a song which happened to include a few sampled bars of Doofus Funkstrong’s “Bump Suit.” You could hear Barrett Rude Junior’s tenor moan deep in the sample, if you listened hard. The lights in the kitchen were up, the chairs in the darkened front room already turned on the tables. Katha and one of her friends counted the till, mumbling numbers aloud like a prayer, hurrying through the work. The third girl had drawn lines of cocaine on the counter with a kitchen knife.
“Deirdre,” said the girl with the knife, and handed me a rolled bill. Hair had fallen to cover her face as she concentrated over the drug and now she swept it back behind her ear.
“Dylan. Thanks.”
“You know Katha-?” She left it for me to fill in.
“Just from here.”
“Cool.”
The quick onset of alliances were the stuff of these girls’ days, that was the impression Deirdre gave. She’d make a place for me, mildly weird older guy, if I’d make a place for myself. So it was here, as elsewhere, Gowanus, Hollywood, ForbiddenCon 7, other secret zones of belonging. Entry points between zones are hidden until they aren’t, until they become as obvious as a lit kitchen door in a club’s alley, behind which three young women from Walla Walla pool an evening’s tips. And as so often in my experience, passage between was eased by alcohol or marijuana or cocaine, those boundary medicines. Line, Mr. Mildly Weird Older? Of course I’d like a line, and to cross one too, please. How could I not find myself doing Barrett Rude Junior’s drug before this weekend was behind me? That was precisely what I’d come here to do, without knowing it. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Katha. I wanted her badly, but now I’d sensed that the price for having her would be a reschooling in the provisionality of my being, in the futility of my illusions of control. And I wanted to pay that price as much as I wanted Katha herself.
“You really write for Rolling Stone?”
“I have.”
“Who’d you meet?”
“Uh?”
“Like, did you ever meet Sheryl Crow?” The questions were flat, unashamed.
“Nope.”
“R.E.M.?”
“I was backstage with R.E.M. once, at the Oakland Coliseum.” How to explain that I’d spent the time talking to the dB’s-the opening act?
“What are they like?”
“Well, Michael Stipe was sucking from an oxygen tank after the show.”
“Wow.”
Katha was at the wheel of her Ford Falcon, Deirdre beside her, up front. I was being interviewed by Jane, third and youngest, in the backseat, as we whistled down San Pablo Avenue into Emeryville. A bag of bottles from Shaman’s sat on the seat between us. Velocity, the company of girls as brash as Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh, and revelatory after-hours views of streets I took for granted in daytime, these were the intoxicants I was high on, as much as the cocaine. Or at least I couldn’t parse my other thrillments from the drug. Katha hadn’t spoken to me directly, back in Shaman’s kitchen, only taken the rolled bill from me with a wry, welcoming smile before doing a line herself. And she ignored me in the car, left me to Jane’s questions. That was another thrillment. The silence seemed consent that we’d taken a step. That this night was already earned. We could rest the banter for now.
We slowed in front of a big, turreted, three-story Victorian, set back from the street and with a low white gate around its weedy yard. Bare bulbs and postered white walls blazed from behind curtains of bedsheet and hippie tapestry, so the commune stood out like a piñata from the two-story cookie-box apartments which slumbered on all sides. The cars parked on the street included two that weren’t going anywhere, and one that looked lived in. As my eyes focused I made out a black man in a white undershirt, seated in a lawn chair under the carport of one of the neighboring apartments, and crumpling a paper bag around a bottle. His gaze followed the sputtering progress of the Falcon into the alley beside the commune, impassively.
“You wanna meet Matt?” Jane asked, as Katha parked.
“That’s just her polite way of saying goodbye,” said Deirdre from the front. “Jane and Matt pretty much just fuck all the time.”
“Shut up! ” said Jane, and slapped at Deirdre’s head.
“You can’t deny it because you know it’s true.”
On the porch Katha smiled at me again, as though she knew she was handling a man in a trance. “Go ahead,” she said. “My room’s on the second floor. You’ll find it.”
Jane and Matt lived in the attic, reachable only by ladder from the commune’s third-floor landing. When Jane summoned him Matt didn’t come down, just peeked his bare-chested torso over the edge of the loft. Despite a Christian beard he also wasn’t past nineteen.
“Hey,” he said.
“Dylan knows R.E.M.,” Jane told him. “He’s Katha’s friend.”
“Cool,” said Matt, blinking, waiting, if I believed Deirdre, to fuck.
“Okay, bye,” said Jane to me, shy now for the first time. She climbed the ladder, squirrel-like.
I turned back down the grand ramshackle staircase, which was lit by a bare violet bulb. Music seeped from behind various doors, and the air of the house was stale with fumes-laundry, cigarettes, old beer. This was my chance: I could have crept past the second floor, found my way out and to a cab on San Pablo. I didn’t.
Katha’s two rooms formed a suite at the back of the second floor, and with their built-in bay-window seats and ornate ceilings and mosaic parquet they would have been grand rooms in a grand house, if the house were anywhere but Emeryville. As it was, the ceiling was water-stained, the parquet warped, and I was sure the landlord was grateful to have tenants to fill the place, even if they mostly used strings of Christmas lights for lamps. Katha’s guitar case leaned against a wall near a CD boom box; a shelfless, doorless closet was heaped with clothes. The smaller second room was empty except for a tapestry-draped single mattress. There was nothing at all on the walls.
In the main room Deirdre kneeled on the floor, slicing more coke, on a mirror now, with a taped blade. Katha, tucked into one of the bay windows, spoke on a telephone, low murmuring not audible over the Beck on the boom box. Another couple sat, knees up, on a futon against the wall, a light-skinned black with a large Afro, faint mustache, and mild eyes, and his girlfriend, a somewhat older-looking woman with choppy short black-dyed hair who, when she spoke, disconcertingly revealed a German accent. Sprawled in a butterfly chair was a Mexican-appearing teenager, fifteen or sixteen at most, gangly in oversized hip-hop trousers, his hair in a blue handkerchief. Deirdre didn’t offer any introductions. Sultry and hollow, she seemed a player in a Warhol film of the mind. Rolando and Dunja, the couple on the futon, gave their names and smiled pleasantly. The teen in the butterfly chair said, “Yo,” and presented for a black-power handclasp. I took his hand and he chewed his name: Marty or Mardy or Marly, I couldn’t be sure.
It was the least of the uncertainties which gave shape to my long night in Katha Purly’s rooms. Katha’s slighting me in the shuttered nightclub and again in the car had turned into a policy. We weren’t together in any sense that I could tell. I did coke and talked with Deirdre and Rolando and Dunja. Maybe-Marty refused, his expression haughty, full of childish disdain, like a housecat preening to avenge an indignity. Maybe-Marty was silent, though when the last track of the Beck ended he moved over and found N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton in Katha’s small collection, then twisted the volume up. The rest of us raised our voices to be heard. Asking some innocent question I unleashed talkative Dunja, who was, it turned out, an Israeli German, raised both in Germany and on a kibbutz. Her life wasn’t a history lesson or an allegory to her, only a story. I listened, marveling that I had followed my waitress crush to a ghetto mansion in Emeryville to sit, cross-legged and stoned in Christmas-bulb light, learning of a sixteen-year-old German girl’s losing her virginity on a moonlit Middle Eastern soccer field to an émigré Russian engineer. Meanwhile, elsewhere in California, Abby slept or didn’t sleep, and in Anaheim, my father had a few hours earlier been treated to his banquet.
Katha made a couple of calls and left the room. She returned, perhaps half an hour later, with a six-pack of Corona, and trailed by someone she introduced as Peter. Peter was twentyish as well, demure and chubby, maybe gay, I thought. Katha took a line of coke, but Peter waved it off, instead helped himself to a beer. He seemed to know the others, or anyhow he was comfortable with Deirdre and Rolando, and began explaining to them how he’d had a fight with his roommate and now refused to return-that was where Katha had gone, to pick him up. Meanwhile Dunja went on telling me of kibbutz days, her cokey tales like an encyclopedia entry, devoid of highs or lows. Katha offered me a beer, the first words she’d spoken to me inside the commune. I took one, just to rinse my gummy throat. It was sweet and sharp, a treat I hadn’t anticipated. Maybe-Marty did some shy, tentative break-dancing in the corner near the boom box. No one watched. The time was three in the morning.
I leaned away from Dunja and the others, to Katha. She still sat to one side, distracted-on duty, it seemed to me.
“Play your guitar,” I said.
“You want to hear me play?”
“Something you wrote.”
We moved off, sat in one of the bays. Under a humming, sneaker-draped streetlamp the street was dead calm, poverty calm. The lights were out even in the lived-in car. Katha told Maybe-Marty to turn the music down-not off, just down-and he did, then flopped back in his butterfly chair. The others, Deirdre, Peter, Dunja, and Rolando, paid us no attention, went on murmuring. Rolando rubbed Dunja’s shoulders; she talked with her eyes shut. I saw Peter had changed his mind, accepted a line. The supply was low. Deirdre shaved the mirror in an obsessive, mechanical action. Katha tuned her guitar, not looking at me.
She began suddenly. Her voice was deep and gorgeous, the lyric remorseless:
Psychedelic twitches in my mood
I’m getting down I’m gonna have to get high soon
I didn’t mean to smoke your last cigarette
I love you baby but sometimes I forget
It was the drugs that made me lose my mind
It was the drugs that made me so unkind
It was the drugs
That made me love you in the first place
And:
Last thing I remembered before I passed out
Were your needful eyes staring from across the couch
I never look at you like that
I guess I don’t need you, I just need you to need me back
It was the drugs that made me lose my mind
It was the drugs that me so unkind
It was the drugs
That made me want you in the first place
Maybe-Marty’s hip-hop selections throbbed on in the silences. The talk had quelled, though. Katha tuned again, then began a simple blues. She bluffed some verses, humming, but sang the refrain clear.
I don’t need you to tell me I’m alone
don’t you think I know I have no home?
I just want to call my mother on the phone
I just want to call my mother on the phone
“That’s new,” she said, interrupting herself.
Peter got up sobbing, both hands on his face, and left the room. To my dismay, Katha put down her guitar and followed him into the hall. Dunja too, jumped up and went after them.
Maybe-Marty turned up the music.
Rolando switched to kneading Deirdre’s shoulders, which I wanted not to resent. Deirdre had been doing an awful lot of coke and reminded me more of an anorexic raccoon than anything alluring, but the dishonorable truth was I yearned to be touching one of the women by now, and I felt a little bitter about Rolando’s access. I wandered over for another beer and peeked into the violet-hued stairwell, but it was vacant. I heard thin trails of music from other floors, nothing I was tempted to follow. I ducked back inside.
“Yo.”
It was Maybe-Marty. I’d gotten used to pretending he wasn’t in the room, the universal strategy here, it seemed.
He’d switched off the music. “You wanna hear my shit?”
“Sure,” I said, helpless.
“Okay, but hole on, I gotta get set.”
“Okay.”
I sat against the wall near the boom box. In the silence I could hear Deirdre’s breath sighing from her as Rolando labored over her shoulder blades. Maybe-Marty shrugged his wrists together and cocked his head, then planted one foot ahead of the other and dipped his knee like Elvis onstage. He pushed the words out in a stream, his high voice slurring the syllables, popping for emphasis on the p’s and g’s.
Check it out like this and then like that
Li’l gangsta M-Dog with that smoov-ass rap-
“Hole on, hole on, I gotta start over.” He spread his hands in an appeal, as though he’d been challenged. When he resumed he went on tossing out poses, but his eyes were closed in shy concentration.
Check it out like this and then like that
Li’l gangsta M-Dog with that smoov-ass rap
Y’know it goes like this and then like this
’Cause when I bus’ my gat I never miss
I’m good in the hood with my homie Raf
So if you step in our path you might get blown in half
Don’t laugh ’cause I’m ill from Emeryville
Where if you don’t survive then your memory will
“How you like that?” he said defiantly.
“Let’s hear it again,” I said.
He rewound into his starting pose, absolutely ready to oblige. The second run-through was more confident and precise, and fiercer, or mock-fiercer. Maybe-Marty looked younger each minute to me, twelve or thirteen now, despite gangstas and gats.
I’d spent fifteen or twenty years being angry at rappers, black and white equally, for their pretense, for claiming the right to wear street experiences, real or feigned, like badges, when mine were unshown. I’d spent fifteen or twenty years senselessly furious at them one and all for not being DJ Stone and the Flamboyan Crew in the yard of P.S. 38, for being ahistorical and a lie, for being ignorant of Staggerlee and the Five Royales, for not knowing what I knew. M-Dog, with his bashful Mexican face and utterly derivative rhymes, couldn’t offend me this way. Perhaps Katha would have said it was the drugs, but I adored him. He’d never lived in a rapless world, I understood. M-Dog’s cobbling a rhyme of his own wasn’t pretense-and now it seemed terrible that I’d ever been so punishing in my judgments. His reaching for this language was as elemental as wishing to be able to roof a spaldeen.
At some point Katha had returned, and when M-Dog finished again she said, “That’s great, you wrote that?”
“Me and my homeboy worked it out, yeah.”
“It’s nice.”
“There ain’t nothing on paper,” he said, eager to be understood. “I got it all up in my head.”
Katha took my hand. Something had changed. I’d done something right, soliciting M-Dog’s performance-or at least admiring it, as I had. It was as though Maybe-Marty’s presentation was what we’d been waiting for this night, as though it had broken some stalemate and freed Katha’s movement toward me. Perhaps the change was in myself. I felt now that instead of being sharpened to the icy edge of cocaine, I’d been bathed in some river of love-as if I’d taken ecstasy, a drug whose effects I’d only imagined, often resentfully, with the same sort of grudgingness M-Dog’s rhymes had just overwhelmed in me.
Katha and I returned to our bay, without the guitar. Maybe-Marty put on another disc. Showtime was over.
“What’s up with Peter?” I whispered.
“He’s in love,” said Katha. Her tone suggested that to be so was a rare and passing condition, to be met with both skepticism and sympathy. “Dunja’s putting him to bed.”
“That sounds nice,” I said, surprising myself. It did sound nice.
She was willing now to hear a little smutty implication in that, one I’d only half intended. “I’ll chase everyone out of here soon.”
I nodded at the empty side room, suggesting the mattress there. “We could just disappear. Let them go on with the party.”
“No, that bed is-not for that.”
“Not for what?”
“Not for anything but my little sister.”
“What sister?” I asked, stupidly.
“She’s still with our foster parents, in Washington. Sometimes I bring her down for a weekend. I’m trying to get her transferred to a school here, but she’s only fourteen.”
“If she’s fourteen shouldn’t she stay with your parents?”
“It’d be better for her here.”
This level pronouncement finished the topic. I sipped my beer while Katha sent Maybe-Marty home, and dislodged Deirdre and Rolando from the futon where they were still engaged in a long massage, Deirdre’s head curled down between her knees, as though Rolando had committed to smoothing the long night’s worth of cocaine shivers from her body with his palms. After they’d slumped from the room, Katha, undaunted by the obvious, put on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. I was grateful, but also afraid of that album’s particular scalpel-like quality. I was near enough to bare as it was.
Now we were alone. Katha lit a joint from the tip of her cigarette and handed it to me. She closed the door and we moved to the futon.
“So, what are you doing here, Dylan?”
I’m here to party with you? I thought. No words came out.
“What about that lady you’re with?”
“You mean Abby?”
“If Abby’s your beautiful black girlfriend, yeah. I see her on Telegraph Avenue, you know.”
“You do?”
“Just going into bookstores, whatever. She doesn’t know me.”
“She’s in a hurry,” I said, picturing Abby moving on that crowded street, past the teen beggars in their hundred-dollar leathers-if I ran it like a video clip in my mind’s eye, the soundtrack might be Central Line’s “Walking into Sunshine” or some other not remotely depressing disco cut. Meanwhile in Emeryville it was darkest before dawn, and Van Morrison and the sacred fumes of sex and marijuana beckoned me into the slipstream.
“She looks kind of angry to me,” said Katha, startling and delighting me. “But it’s none of my business.”
“It’s okay,” I said, marveling that she’d said it. “Maybe she is. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what a person is like, when you’re up close.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Like your song.” I was shameless. “Sometimes you understand all at once, in a flash.” I was so grateful to Katha for calling Abby angry. I wanted to reward her, stroke her, call blessings of orgasms down upon her for pardoning my bungled life with that passing observation.
Years ago, I’d read a novel, a thriller in which glamorous people destroyed themselves by sexual intrigue. One character was another’s shoals, that was what I’d remembered about the book-and the character who’d wrecked the other had explained how she was infinitely dangerous because she was damaged. This character’s damage made her an involuntary criminal, the book seemed to say. Her damage-orphanhood, abuse, I couldn’t remember what it was-made her unfit to mix with those who’d been luckier, who’d squeaked through life innocent of such knowledge. The story was enthralling bunk, impossible not to finish even as I’d loathed it for its implicit assertion that the undamaged ought to bolt their doors against the damaged ones, who would hurt them if they could, who couldn’t help wishing to. When I read the book, I’d never met anyone undamaged. I still think I never have.
Suddenly Katha Purly seemed to me a refutation of that book, refutation I hadn’t known I’d needed until this instant. I’d raged against the silly, trashy novel because of the nerve it twinged-my shame at my own hurt, my fear that it made me an untouchable, poisonous to others. Katha made nonsense of that. I’d thought I was following a dangerous angel to her lair, that I’d been drawn by some offer of destruction. But Katha was only an ordinary angel. Her sister’s room was evidence, and so was M-Dog, and so was Peter. But the best evidence was my own presence here. She’d taken me in when I’d needed her to.
Katha was only as good as her damage. It formed the substance of what she knew. What made me dangerous, or at least awful, wasn’t my damage, but the way I’d denied it. What I’d left undone. Katha sheltered her sister and M-Dog, Mingus surrendered a kidney, and Abraham and Francesca brought Barrett Rude Junior soup and chicken. In my visionary state I could see the Tupperware containers, could see a skeletal Barry as he smeared hot mustard on a fridge-gummed thigh or drumstick. Meanwhile, Abby and I conducted a witty war to prove which of us was truly depressed. Shunning my damage I’d starved my life, it seemed now. I was lost in feints and skirmishes three thousand miles from the homefront. Katha had a bed made, waiting for her sister in Walla Walla -I had The Falsetto Box and Your So-Called Friends.
When, ten months before, I’d delivered my Subtle Distinctions box-set liner note to Rhodes Blemner of Remnant, he’d let two weeks pass without calling to confirm he’d received it. Finally I cracked, and called him myself.
“You got it?”
“Sure, I got it.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter. We’ll run the note in the box, I sent it to the art department. It’s scheduled.”
“How’d you like it?”
“It’s not your best work, Dylan.” Rhodes had perfected a lethal hippie frankness, after the manner of his heroes, from Bill Graham to R. Crumb. “I was disappointed, given how you pushed so hard for the reissue. It wasn’t what I expected.”
“I think it’s exactly my best work.”
“Well, it conveys the impression you think that. It’s full of big thoughts, if that’s what you mean. But I personally think it’s also full of shit. Beginning with the quotes up front, all that Brian Eno stuff, which I cut.”
“Fuck you, Rhodes. Send it back to me.”
“We’ll run it. What do I know? You’ll win a Grammy, that’s my prediction. For best hot air.”
I defended. “I had to create a context-”
“It’s a false context. The piece reads as if you sat in a small room listening to nothing but Distinctions records for a year and then postulated the history of black music. It reads like you were avoiding something. Maybe you were avoiding your research. You quote Cashbox, for crying out loud. That’s like something one of these British writers would do-write a note on living musicians and quote an interview somebody gave to Cashbox in 1974.”
Now, here on Katha’s futon, layering pot over coke at the outer reaches of a binge which felt stolen from time, my hand beginning to explore the waitress’s knee in automatic lust, Rhodes Blemner’s cavil to my liner note seemed completely of a piece with every other revelation. My failure to provide Jared Orthman an end to the Prisonaires’ story held the same message for me as M-Dog’s rhymes, as Katha’s sister’s empty room, as my father’s green triangle-I was halted in a motion half-completed. My facts were no good. I’d been scooped by Zelmo Swift’s interns, out-researched by Francesca’s soup. The man himself is still alive, I’d written, but I hadn’t believed it, had to be told again and again by the Jareds and Rhodeses and Zelmos. The man himself, and his son too, even if they only had one pair of kidneys between them.
Katha and I talked and kissed while my thoughts raced, and until they didn’t. My waitress and I had months of teasing in the bank, and we drew on them now. On the sticky tapestry-covered futon, in the streetlamp light which streaked the wall above our heads, with Van Morrison moaning Celtic inspiration, our addled bodies pushed and gnawed at one another. Hot blunt hands got stuck under blue-jean waistbands until we sighed and tugged apart the snaps. Katha’s flesh was smooth and sheeny, so rubbery I wondered if it was somehow an effect of drug-dust between my fingers and her skin. She was plush and uncreased, like a marzipan animal. An elegant margin of hairs rode the curve from her navel into her pubic tangle.
I paused where I always do, melancholy at the threshold, a make-out man. Thinking, We could stop here. This could be fine, this could be enough. I’m often more certain I want to be held than engulfed.
“I’ve got something,” whispered Katha. “I’ll be right back.”
“Okay,” I said.
My blondes had always been those Leslie Cunninghams, striding the world undamaged, or seeming so, impassive goddesses who regarded me dubiously. Or Heather Windle, or the Solver girls, forever circling away on bikes and skates, forever packing and moving from the neighborhood of me. Now I had my blonde in Katha Purly. At last one had given herself to me, completely and without bargaining, but she was different, realer, rich with damage. This was an ordinary, rapid-fading epiphany, the last of my dozens: my young waitress wasn’t a fantasy because nobody was. People were actual, every last one of them. Likely even the Solver girls, wherever they were.
I had my blonde now, yes, but I couldn’t stay hard inside her. It was the drugs-I couldn’t feel myself inside her from within the condom she’d unrolled. But Katha Purly was unbearably generous with me. In the pale daylight now infecting the room, long-shadowing the crumbs in the stale corners and the silent boom box, the streets below noising to dawn life, the house around us still and full of sleeping bodies like an interstellar ship, Katha touched herself, gorgeously gave herself the orgasm I’d wanted to provide, made her own face and throat flush red, temples pink beneath pale eyebrows, while exhorting me to give tribute onto her superb pooled chest, championing me with her voice, cooing me forward. I managed to do it, just.
When I woke it was in sweat, sun blazing over me and Katha in that barren room, our bodies peeled out of their embrace to opposite sides, sheets squirmed down around our ankles. Katha woke a little and said I could stay, but I couldn’t. I dressed and left, walked home into Berkeley along San Pablo Avenue. It was ten in the morning. I couldn’t stay at Katha Purly because Katha Purly wasn’t, after all, a place. Neither, for that matter, was Abigale Ponders. Or California itself, not for me. They weren’t Dean Street, specifically, weren’t Gowanus, and that was where I was going. I had to get back to where I once belonged. I phoned an airline and booked a coast-to-coast flight, then showered, then slept. When I woke the second time I packed another bag, and again I took along the ring.
I remember almost nothing of the few weeks which remained of summer between Barrett Rude Senior’s death by shooting and my Greyhound ride from the city to begin my first term at Camden College. The tragedy became the communal property of Dean Street, of course, and my own close knowledge of it was a secret. So my sense of it was soon blunted into the pell-mell of general gossip. I spared little sympathy for Mingus, who was under arrest and being charged as an adult; I was a fierce rocket of denial awaiting escape velocity from the scene. The killing only gave a clear name and shape to my fog of reasons for wanting to leave Brooklyn. Anyway, I was scared of Mingus. He’d killed someone with a gun. That hadn’t happened before. This was 1981, before drive-bys made shootings commonplace. It was still a time of knives and baseball bats, of homemade nunchucks, of yokes. I’d seen guns brandished, but never fired.
Vermont was my antidote. I’d only been there once since my thirteen-year-old Fresh Air Fund voyage, and that just seven months earlier, in late January, for my entrance interview at Camden. Still, though the green hills of the Vermont landscape were fresh-quilted with snow, whiter than any I’d seen, and the wind on the vacant campus bit through my fake down coat, I felt stirrings everywhere of Heather Windle-ghosts, of my dragonfly-and-swimsuit summer. I bought a single cardboard-and-cellophane-boxed leaf of maple-sugar candy in the bus depot in Camden Town and when I melted it on my tongue as Heather had once taught me to do I got the most innocent and yearning erection I’d had in four years.
Camden College wasn’t Heather Windle’s Vermont, though. At Camden Heather would have been a townie, a girl glimpsed at the Brass Cat or Peanut’s, one of those small-town bars Camden students sometimes dared themselves to frequent on their sorties from the idyllic walled preserve, the bucolic acres of the campus itself. Inside that trimmed-green sanctuary was a sort of collective solipsistic laboratory, where high-strung urban children were allowed to play however they liked. Dressed in leather and fur and batik they and I-for I was briefly one of them-roamed an environment one part New England farmland, complete with white clapboard dorms, twisted apple trees bearing inedible fruit, low lichen-covered Frostian stone walls wending nowhere through the woods, and tattered cemetery plots with burial dates in the 1700s: one part experimental arts college, founded in the 1920s by passionate Red-leaning patrons, and legendary for its modern dancers and faculty-student marriages; and one part lunatic preserve for wayward children of privilege, those too familiar with psych counseling and rehab to follow older siblings to Harvard or Yale, and which recapitulated in junior form the tribal rituals of Mediterranean resorts and East Hampton summers and the VIP room of Studio 54.
I understood none of this. I was class-dumb, protected from any understanding of money by my father’s artisan-elitism and, paradoxically, by Rachel’s radical populist pride: I’d been raised by a monk and a hippie, each of whom stood willfully outside any hierarchy of class. The desires our little family couldn’t afford to indulge had never seemed important, only snobbish and silly and somehow misplaced, like Thurston Howell’s priorities on Gilligan’s Island. Besides, I’d had as much or more money than most kids I’d known in Brooklyn, if somewhat less than the majority of my Manhattan schoolmates at Stuyvesant, so figured I was somewhere in the middle. Yeah, sure, that was it: I was middle class.
The truth was, few Camden students had ever set foot inside a public school, much less attended one. And I’d never set a foot inside Brooklyn Friends or Packer Collegiate or Saint Ann ’s. A handful of students formerly from those schools, Brooklyn Heights kids mostly, were introduced to me by others, in those first weeks, as being “from Brooklyn too,” yet they were strangers, and when I admitted that I’d gone to P.S. 38 and I.S. 293 they knew, better than anyone else at Camden, what a freak I was to be in their midst here. Across this gulf of experience my new acquaintances and I stared, as though at denizens of a looking-glass world.
In a gesture which could be taken for either a muddled kindness or a cruel segregation, I’d been given a roommate who was also on financial aid. Matthew Schrafft was from Keene, New Hampshire, a town much like Camden, only lacking a glamorous college. He’d attended Manhattan prep schools until sixth grade, but his family’s fortunes had tumbled, his father abandoning a career as a junior producer at CBS News in order to live in a small town and write a novel. For this reason I suspect Matthew felt dangerously near to being a townie. We became friends, and it was a solace that my roommate and friend was, like myself, sometimes to be found on the wrong side of the dining hall’s counters, wearing a white apron, spooning hot waffles and sausages and eggs from steel vats onto our fellow students’ trays. Food server was one of the less hidden or euphemistic work-study jobs-those other charity cases who were tucked away quietly research-assisting or working in the alumnus office could afford to pity Matthew and me as they lined up for their meals.
Matthew and I had also been awarded an unusual housing arrangement, for a pair of freshman: Oswald House Apartment. Oswald was famously the rowdiest and druggiest of the dormitories which surrounded the Commons. Each of these eight clapboard buildings included one central “apartment”: a suite of connected rooms with a fireplace and a private bathroom. These upscale digs were ordinarily reserved for a graduate student or visiting professor, only no one expecting a moment’s peace would have accepted placement in Oswald. The floors in the living room there reeked continuously of cleanser-scrubbed beer spills, the carpet was riddled with burns, the doors decked with thumbtacked porn and spiky, punk-style graffiti. Oswald House was like a pirate ship sailing the apple-strewn lawn, one which blared Grateful Dead more or less around the clock in late summer, when speakers could be mounted facing outward in first-story windows and students sprawled on the grass. The Oswald Apartment had been the domain of a legendary pair of bearded, Belushi-esque partyers, and I think the Housing Office had a notion that by replacing these ringleaders with two fresh-faced, short-haired scholarship students they’d effected a kind of heart transplant on Oswald-that Matthew and I would temper the place from the inside out. That wasn’t exactly how it worked out, but I’m sure the established Oswaldites were every bit as dispirited to see us moving into the Apartment that September as the administration might have wished.
Matthew and I ironized our discomfort by sublimating it in culture. Devo, a band I’d never cared for in high school, became an emblem of our difference, not only from the Camden hippies, but also from the chic, Bowie-loving punk types who had subscriptions to Interview and vacationed in Paris. Devo expanded the nerd-brainiac ethos of a band like Talking Heads in a usefully hostile direction. Loving Devo, it was possible to indulge our class resentment by masking it as anticapitalist satire. They became an adjective: Certain things were awfully Devo around this school, weren’t they?
One balmy afternoon that first week in Vermont, still stunned at catapulting out of our high-school lives and knowing no one, Matthew and I attended an out-of-doors afternoon talk by Richard Brodeur, the new president of Camden. Brodeur seemed as terrified of the place as we were. Like Matthew’s father, he’d thrown over a corporate career for something more real, and his descriptions of why he’d wanted to preside at Camden sounded a tad defensive. In fact, Brodeur was an efficiency expert brought in to repair damage done by a charismatic and tolerant seventies type. Nobody but us gullible freshmen had bothered to attend his talk.
“There’s a story I like to tell,” said Brodeur. “When I was a boy I used to love pizza, and whenever my father took me to the pizzeria I’d order two slices. And I’d sit and he’d watch me wolfing down the first slice with my eyes on the second. I wasn’t even tasting that first slice. And one day my father said to me, ‘Son, you need to learn that while you’re eating the first slice of pizza, eat the first slice. Because right now you’re eating the second slice before you’ve finished the first.’ And a year ago I realized that I needed that lesson again. I took a look at my life and realized I had my eye on the second slice of pizza.”
The parable wasn’t completely lost on me, though I couldn’t keep from recalling the day Robert Woolfolk and his little friend had tried to mug me for my pizza on Smith Street. I wondered if Richard Brodeur knew of any approach to the problem of the one slice. I suspected not.
Afterward Matthew and I drifted back to the Commons lawn, where, beyond the outermost row of dorms, the mowed rim plunged out of sight-the place was known as the End of the World. There a gaggle of our housemates tapped an early keg. We lined up for plastic cups of frothy beer, against a backdrop of green hills dimpled with sunset shadows.
“What did you take away from that?” said Matthew.
“When you think you’re eating the first slice, you might really be eating the second slice?”
“Something like that. Anyway, it made me hungry.”
This would be a running joke: when he and I began sleeping in late in the Apartment and missing classes we called it eating the first slice. My career at Camden, as it turned out, wouldn’t involve a second.
That week we experienced our first of the famous Friday-night parties. Dorms were provided with a booming sound system, and plastic cups and kegs of beer from the food service-the administration had a stake in keeping its tender wards out of Vermont bars on weekend nights. Camden, truthfully, wasn’t an accidental hothouse, but a deliberate one, an experiment like the Biosphere. So by eleven o’clock two or three hundred of us throbbed in one mass to Rick James’s “Super Freak” on the sticky living-room floor of Fish House, another party dorm only slightly less notorious than Oswald. That easy appropriation of dance-floor funk was a first taste, for me, of something I desperately wanted to understand: the suburban obliviousness of these white children to the intricate boundaries of race and music which were my inheritance and obsession. Nobody here cared-it was only a danceable song. The Rick James was followed by David Bowie, the Bowie by Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, and the OMD by Aretha Franklin. I threw myself into the dance, briefly freed.
A couple of hours later Matthew and I brought two girls back to the End of the World. Now the mowed edge plunged into mist-laced darkness, the nickname explained. Aimee Dunst and Moira Hogarth were, like us, freshman roommates, and suitably punkish, with eye shadow and gelled hair. Matthew had met them in a class on Milton and Blake. We four had talked or tried to talk in the spilling craze of the party, the penumbra of retching and squirming bodies, then ferried our plastic cups of grapefruit juice and vodka out into the chirping dark.
Aimee was from Lyme, Connecticut, and Moira was from Palatine, a suburb of Chicago. Hardly anyone, I’d learned, was really from a city. If they said Los Angeles or Chicago or New York they meant Burbank or Palatine or Mount Kisko.
As a trick of flirting I’d been boasting of my inner-city knowledge, turning discomfort inside out.
“Were you ever mugged?” asked Aimee.
Aimee, like anyone who ever asked me this question before or since, was thinking of a stickup in an alleyway, an adult transaction, a transaction of strangers. She was thinking of Death Wish and Kojak. The nearest I’d come was Robert Woolfolk’s holdup of the drug dealer. That event was beyond explanation.
“I was yoked,” I said instead. “Ever been yoked?”
“What’s that?”
“I’d have to show you.”
They giggled, and Matthew stared, not knowing any more than they did.
“I don’t know,” said Aimee, trailing backward, her footfalls stumbling.
“Okay, forget it.”
“Do me,” said Moira, boldly.
“You sure?”
“Uh huh.”
“It doesn’t really hurt. But you should put down your drink.” We nestled plastic cups in dewy grass. Straightening too quickly, I grew dizzy. The Vermont oxygen was like another drink, a chaser.
“Fuck you lookin’ at?”
All three turned their heads, fooled by my sudden volume and hostility. But we were alone there, at the End of the World. It was the only place I could ever have put on my mummery, my minstrel show.
I kept my eyes locked on Moira. The others were irrelevant. “That’s right, girl. Don’t look around, I’m talkin’ to you. Fuck you think you lookin’ at?”
“Stop,” said Aimee. Moira just stared back, rattled but defiant.
“See, that’s all right. I don’t mean nothing. Come over here for a minute.” I pointed to the ground at my feet. “What, you afraid? I ain’t gonna do nothin’. Just let me talk to you for a minute.” My drunken self was astounded at how well I knew the drill. These words had never come from my mouth.
Moira stepped closer, taking the dare, Bacall to my Bogey. I might have liked to quit already, but the script demanded I play it all the way. There was rage nestled in the script, urgency I’d never tapped.
“See, I’m your friend, right? You know I like you.” I threw an arm around Moira’s shoulders and tugged her close. “You got a dollar you could lend me?”
“Don’t give it to him!” howled Matthew, getting the joke now. Only it was barely a joke.
“No,” said Moira.
Trapping Moira gently as possible in the triangle of fist-elbow-shoulder, I dipped her, as I’d been dipped a hundred times. Not far. To my chest. “You sure? Lemme check your pockets for a minute.” I frisked the front pockets of her corduroys, found bills and plucked them out. Then Moira twisted against me and I took pity and loosed my hold. She sprang back angrily toward the others.
I raised the curled bills. “It’s just a loan, you could trust me. You know we was just foolin’ around, right?”
Moira rushed and tackled me into the grass. I felt the fury in her body at being handled as I’d handled her, a fury I knew precisely, from her side. But she was also drunk and excited and putting our hips back in conjunction. Yoking Moira, I’d also chosen her. A thick shock of sex was in the air-as it had been on the dance floor at Fish House. It was everywhere at Camden, only waiting for anyone to slice off a portion for themselves, and now Moira and I had done so. In all of high school I’d never kissed a girl without long spoken preliminaries, yet here it was simple. When she grabbed the bills in my hand I grabbed her hand and we returned the money to the pocket of her corduroys together, rolling on the wet lawn, kissing wildly, missing one another’s faces, kissing ears and hair. Beyond where we lay, Matthew and Aimee had gone past the End of the World and vanished in the dark.
What I could never have explained to Moira was that the sexual component of a yoking was present before she and I enacted it, was buried in the practice, as I knew it, at its roots.
Moira Hogarth and I spent that night in her and Aimee’s room in Worthell House, while Aimee and Matthew took Oswald Apartment. Moira and I were a couple for two weeks from that night-an eternity at Camden, where rehearsals of adulthood were rendered miniature by a compression of time and space. A whole relationship could be enacted in a weekend, wounds nursed before the next Friday night. In our case, by Halloween Moira and I wouldn’t be speaking. Then again, by Thanksgiving we were confidantes, whispering and laughing our way across Commons and spending nights in bed together so that everyone was certain we were a couple though we were in fact sleeping with others. Then before the end of the term we’d fucked and fallen out again. And so on: there was nothing notable, at that school, in the close recycling of the same few sympathetic souls. There were too few to waste.
My yoking of Moira, out at the End of the World, became the origin of a scheme: I’d throw Brooklyn down like a dare. I needed something. I’d been set up to feel like a square at Camden, where my short haircut and cardigan-and-loafer style, so decisively David Byrneish or Quadrophenia mod at Stuyvesant only looked ordinarily preppy to those who’d actually been to prep school. But nobody could question my street credibility here, where nobody had any street credibility whatsoever. I earned my stripe at Camden by playing a walking artifact of the ghetto. I pretended to be ignorant of what Baja and Aspen were, or why schoolmates named Trudeau or Westinghouse might be particularly well-heeled. I smoked Kools, I wore a Kangol cap, I called my friends “Yo”-and this, long enough before the Beastie Boys made it widely familiar, was funny enough to a couple of Oswald House upperclassmen, a pair of hipsterish coke dealers named Runyon Kent and Bee Prudhomme, that they made a version of it my nickname: I was Yoyo to them. Basically, I turned myself into a cartoon of Mingus. The shtick was a splendid container for my self-loathing, and for my hostility toward my classmates. And it made me popular.
I became adept at beguiling and mocking the wealthy, right to the point of their tolerance. I cadged, shamed them into floating me meals and haircuts and cartons of Kools, flattered and appalled them by mentioning what they’d already spent years preparing to spend lifetimes never discussing-their money, the trust funds that kept them in BMWs and designer clothes and brunches and dinners at Le Cheval whenever the dining-hall fare didn’t thrill them, the checks which kept coming though there was nothing, really nothing, to purchase in rural Vermont. Except drugs. And drugs were the other way I earned my stripe.
Camden provided us with free beer and movies and contraception and psychotherapy. These were spoken of, joked about freely. But the school provided other things, not named, which were free as well, like a class called Unorthodox Music, run by a benevolent white-haired professor named Dr. Shakti, and widely known to be a guaranteed pass no matter how rarely you attended, or the books and cassettes which could be boosted hand over fist from the campus store because someone had decreed that nobody’s transcript ought to be blemished with accusations-presumably the administration quietly compensated the vendor’s losses. Of course, our parents would have laughed bitterly to hear these things called “free”: the costs were folded into the absurd and famous tuition, our experience made seamless. Camden was so lush with privileges that it was easy to overlook the fact that a handful of us weren’t rich. We all rode in the first-class compartment, even if some of us also swabbed the deck.
As for drugs, the school didn’t actually supply them, but the blind eye they’d turned was understood as another privilege. Dealers like Runyon and Bee operated with abandon. Joints were smoked openly on Commons lawn, and parties at Pelt House were famous for acid punch concocted in an in-house lab. William S. Burroughs was nominated as commencement speaker, and during screenings of Eraserhead or The Man Who Fell to Earth a cloud of smoke rose through the projector beam in the tiny campus auditorium. Though it was considered polite to shut your door while doing a line of coke or meth few bothered to rehang mirrors afterward, and some kept them propped on crates as permanent coffee tables, much like Barrett Rude Junior.
I was a skunk for coke. It was part of my act. Afternoons when we should have been in class or the library Matthew and I played basketball with Runyon and Bee, out at the largely unused court which was carved deep into the woods at the edge of campus, beyond the unused soccer field- Camden was an unathletic place. Runyon and Bee enjoyed the way I tried to juke and fake, all the moves I’d absorbed and never dared attempt in the gymnasiums of my youth. Matthew and I became Runyon and Bee’s adoptees, their mascots. Like them we wore Wayfarer sunglasses on the court, played slack or nonexistent defense, and, between half-court games, snorted and smoked in the pine-carpeted shade at the perimeter of the asphalt. That I couldn’t pay for my share was irritating or endearing to the dealers, depending on their mood, but hardly important. Evenings I hung around Runyon and Bee’s rooms upstairs, and when another student casually drifted by to cop a quarter gram I’d be included in the obligatory tasting. Once I earned my keep by typing a paper Runyon had written on As I Lay Dying; it was shockingly riddled with grammatical errors. I rewrote it, as I suspect he’d hoped I would, and we got an A together.
Three or four afternoons that autumn, high on something at an uncommonly early hour, and cut loose from whomever I’d partied with, Moira or Matthew or the dealers upstairs, unable to stem whatever it was that surged in me, I went into the woods and flew. I no longer had the costume, and I wasn’t really Aeroman anymore, just a kid from the city uncorked in the woods and venting crazy energy by soaring between branches. That I wasn’t Aeroman was probably why it was possible, after so long, to fly. I’d never flown in Brooklyn, not apart from one spaldeen catch. I’d been physically cowardly, but also too burdened with what I needed Aeroman to accomplish, with notions of heroism and rescue. Here there was no one to rescue from anything, unless it was all of us from ourselves, and a flying eighteen-year-old couldn’t have attempted that. So instead I wandered into the trees east of the End of the World, below the soccer field and the basketball court, screwed Aaron Doily’s ring on my finger, found a high rock to leap from, and rode air. To rise slightly above the campus, to glimpse the stopped clock on the Commons tower from afar, was to attempt to believe in my luck, in my improbable, intoxicating escape from Dean Street. I tried to make the hills real by confronting them alone and head-on, make the branches mine by grazing them with my fingertips. I don’t know if it worked or not. I’ve never been certain I could taste freedom, not for longer than the fading buzz of a line or the duration of a given song. And a song, when you press repeat, rarely sounds the same. Still, white powder, menthol fume, pine breeze-those flying afternoons my nostrils seemed reversed, so I could smell backward to my own minty-fresh brain.
One of those afternoons, having landed, I was startled in my stroll back up through the trees to Commons lawn by Junie Alteck. Junie was a sylphlike Oswald hippie, a durable partyer who could be found decorating Bee’s room late, after others had folded their tents. We suspected Bee slept with her but he’d never admitted it. Runyon liked to call her “Aspect.” She’d been walking alone in the woods. I understood from her expression that I’d been spotted.
“What were you doing?” she said dazedly.
“Performance-art project,” I said.
“Oh.”
“Pretty good, huh?”
“Uh, yeah!”
Cocaine and black slang and headfakes and flying: everything unsafe all my life was safe here, suddenly, and why not. Camden was designed to feel safe. It was in that state of mind, late one evening in the first days of December, that I took the call at the Oswald pay phone, from Arthur Lomb.
Arthur’s story tumbled out in a hurry. The odd entrepreneurial partnership forged between Lomb, Woolfolk, and Rude in the last months before the shooting had survived Mingus’s conviction for voluntary manslaughter, and his sentencing, in October, to ten years at Elmira, a prison upstate. The result was an even odder partnership: Arthur and Robert. They’d taken the money I’d paid for the comic books and the ring, and the rest they’d scraped together and bought their quarter kilogram. Then successfully dealt it. Barry being a primary customer, I also understood. And Arthur and Robert had kept from consuming the profits, held enough in reserve to cop another quarter kee and begin again. Only now they’d fallen out. Robert had come around Arthur’s place with a pair of cohorts from the Gowanus Houses, demanding money, and Arthur’s mother had freaked out and called the police. Now Robert had promised Arthur he would kill him if he didn’t produce a certain sum by a certain time, only Arthur couldn’t go alone to Gowanus to deal the stash, not with Robert’s friends knowing his white face and the stash he’d be carrying; meanwhile Barry had taken a trip over Thanksgiving, to visit a doctor in Philadelphia, and not returned-
I stopped him, not needing to hear more. In fact, it mattered to me that I seem uninterested in the details of that distant morass.
“No Mingus to protect you,” I said, with satisfaction.
In reply came only Arthur’s breathing on the line, and I detected a little phantom of fake-asthmatic seizure in his genuine panic.
“Buy a Greyhound ticket,” I said. “We’ll unload the stuff in a couple of days, no problem. You’ll come back with his money.”
It didn’t take much to persuade Arthur. The next day, a Tuesday, the first light snow of the season drifted down as I waited at the depot in Camden Town. The bus curled in the wide lot, making virgin treadmarks in the fresh accumulation. It sighed to a stop and the driver emerged to pop the undercarriage, but Arthur hadn’t stowed anything. He tiptoed through the snow with an Adidas gym bag slung on the shoulder of his inadequate bomber jacket, blowing into cupped hands and looking bewildered.
“This is your school?”
“This is the town. School’s three miles out.”
He regarded me blankly.
“It’s an easy hitch,” I boasted. This was another secret perk: someone from the school, an upperclassman or a graduate student with a car, sometimes even a professor, invariably recognized the style of dress which distinguished you from a local and picked you up on the side of Route 9A, to ferry you from the dying industrial center of Camden, past the strip malls which had vampired the town’s life, and into the woods, up the long driveway behind the college’s gates. I wanted Arthur cowed by the full effect. I hoisted his Adidas bag and we trudged across a Dunkin’ Donuts lot, to the gray-sleeted roadway.
As it happened, the car which stopped for us belonged to Richard Brodeur, president. Maybe he’d gone into town for a slice of pizza. As we climbed into the car I introduced Arthur as a friend visiting from New York. Brodeur greeted him uneasily, and reminded me of the official policy requiring overnight guests in dorms to register with the office. And of the three-day limit for such visits. I assured him we’d comply. Brodeur seemed aged from the man I’d seen deliver the pizza speech-I wondered if his first three months at Camden could have been as full as mine. I felt sorry for him, actually. Picking us up on the road seemed evidence of a desolate wish to be liked, to find a place for himself in the casual atmosphere, one he hadn’t found, yet.
Snow bunched at the windshield’s edges, smashed into crumbling pillars by the wipers, and flakes swam up madly to speckle the glass.
“Are you in college, Arthur?”
“Nah. Uh, I’m going to Brooklyn. City, I mean. But I, uh, gotta pick up a couple of credits first. So I’m taking the year off.”
This contradictory blurt didn’t leave a lot of room for a follow-up. Brodeur smiled and said, “You’re a bit underdressed for this Vermont weather, aren’t you?”
“Nah, I’m cool,” said Arthur. “Sir.”
Brodeur drove us all the way to the door of Oswald Apartment, when anyone else would have dropped a rider just past the guard’s booth. I had a ridiculous impulse to invite him in. I wondered if he’d been inside a student’s dorm room in his time here-probably not. And Matthew would be impressed. It would have been a very Devo move. It wasn’t likely any drug paraphernalia or stolen campus property was sitting out in plain view, but I figured I couldn’t take the chance and let the whim pass.
“Enjoy your time here, Arthur. Maybe you’ll want to transfer.”
“Uh, yeah, cool. Thanks.”
In the space of two days Arthur Lomb was locally famous. If I was the Cat in the Hat, I’d now revealed the more unlikely Cat hidden under my headgear. With his baggy jeans and fat laces and clumsy patois, his constant references to rap and graffiti, and his unvarnished, bug-eyed awe at the place he’d come to, Arthur struck my Camden friends as riotous confirmation that whatever it was I alluded to, with my ghetto shtick, I wasn’t completely kidding. Ironically, Arthur struck them as something real. When he insisted on counting their money before handing over the drugs-he and I and Matthew had spent the waning hours of that first afternoon divvying Arthur’s quarter kee into Camden-sized portions in folded paper sleeves-they were titillated out of themselves by his street sincerity. An actual drug dealer had come to campus at last. And though Arthur was the joke, he also got it, and pushed its limits. No one could have said who was laughing harder at the other’s expense.
Arthur’s third day on campus Runyon and Bee drove us to Camden Town ’s hardware store, where we boosted a batch of Krylon and Red Devil. The four of us spent the small hours of that night spray-painting the sides of Oswald, then the campus pub and the arts complex for good measure. Arthur and I adorned the buildings with “authentic” Brooklyn graffiti, reproducing tags of FMD and DMD members, the gangs who’d toyed our own feeble tags out of existence. Those runes meant nothing here, though if we’d dared appropriate them on Brooklyn walls we’d have soon afterward seen the inside of the emergency room at Long Island College Hospital. Runyon and Bee wrote KING FELIX in erratic block letters a few times-the name was a private running joke of theirs-but after they saw our dexterity with the spray cans they mostly didn’t bother.
Arthur must have felt as though he’d been dropped into a Saturday Night Live skit: “Samurai Drug Dealer,” or maybe “Cokeheads in Vermont.” I dedicated myself to acting as though I’d fit in this atmosphere all along, as if I found it unremarkable, needing to make sure Arthur got the message: Dylan Ebdus had been a sort of prince in pauper’s clothing on Dean Street, waiting to assume his rightful place. I assuredly didn’t want to discuss what had happened between Mingus and Barry and Senior. I refused to reminisce, or even acknowledge how long I’d known Arthur. I doubt I mentioned Abraham, unless it was to scoff at how little my father knew of my life at this school. Abraham, who was of course footing the bill-but that was an inconvenient detail.
Friday we woke to find we’d scrawled the tags of our enemies all among the pastoral buildings. It was actually shocking to see the fresh red paint against the white clapboard in the morning light, as though Arthur and I had imported our urban nightmares in some sleepwalkers’ compulsion. The dining hall was buzzing with theories as to who’d done it, but Runyon and Bee, in whispered voices, persuaded me it was no big deal. We’d redecorated our playpen, that was all. Camden was ours to deface.
Arthur should have been put on a bus back to New York that day, to honor the rule, but the rule was far from our minds. I wanted him to see a Friday-night party-tonight’s was at Crumbly House-and, though word had spread among the campus cokeheads that I was holding a fire sale out of Oswald Apartment, and Arthur had already covered Robert Woolfolk’s payment, we needed another big night, a party night, to shift the last of his stash.
We had the Apartment mostly to ourselves. Matthew had lately been sleeping with his sophomore girlfriend in an off-campus house in North Camden, and Arthur had taken Matthew’s place in the bedroom in the rear of the suite. My bed was in the big common room, with the fireplace and couch. That afternoon Arthur and I lounged stuporously in that front room as the thin December light dimmed in the bare apple trees outside, the two of us recovering from the night before, waiting for the night to come. Arthur didn’t like the Devo and Wire and Residents records Matthew and I had in constant rotation those days, and he’d dug deep in Matthew’s collection to find something he liked better: Genesis’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. We slumped in the dark, me on my bed and Arthur on the couch, and the hysterical symphonic glamour of that music seemed to speak for the rich absurdity of our circumstance so well it felt as though we’d never need to utter a word again.
The first knock on the door wasn’t a customer for Arthur’s wares but a member of the cleaning staff, a woman I’d seen a dozen times before but without any name that I knew. Pale and thick and stooped, she seemed to me a kind of crone, though she was surely no older than forty. It was her job to scour the Oswald bathrooms, most of which were common spaces, adjoining public corridors. But once a week she had to clean the private bathroom in our apartment, and so we let her in. With barely a nod at Arthur she vanished through Matthew’s room, into the back of the suite. I flipped the record and sagged back on my bed.
The woman was typical of an army of gray locals who maintained the buildings and grounds at Camden. They had none of the color or defiance of the usual townies, but were true servants, perfecting the art of deference to the point of invisibility. We knew the names of a few of the older men, those who’d served for twenty-five or thirty years and, having seen generations not only of students but professors come and go, achieved talismanic status. They had snaggly grins and names like Scrumpy or Red and were hailed as they bumped past on a mower or snowplow. But the toilet-scrubbing, Morlockian women never spoke. Runyon liked to call them little people, and I once saw him raise a beer and say, “I’d like to thank all the little people, especially the one that mopped the puke off the landing Saturday morning while I was still blissfully passed out.”
Before the album side was finished playing I had to rouse myself to answer another knock. Now it was Karen Rothenberg and Euclid Barnes. Karen and Euclid were friends of Moira’s, from Worthell House, and I suppose they were mine also. Now they were also customers-had been, already, during the three-day binge surrounding Arthur’s arrival. Euclid was a tall, soft junior with loose dark bangs that tumbled into his eyes. He was resignedly, mopily gay, never found anyone to have sex with, complaining bitterly of his isolation in Vermont. Karen was his protector and solicitor, a dark-haired, heavy girl who wore gothy makeup and affected a jaded exhaustion. In relentlessly pitching Euclid at various boys it seemed to me Karen was really protecting herself from a terror of her own desires. One desultory three A. M., weeks ago-which was to say, in Camden time, eons past-I’d fended off a double advance from Karen and Euclid. Now they were both openly obsessed with Arthur, the wild child of Brooklyn.
Euclid shook out of his pea coat and threw it over a chair, then immediately began fumbling with his cigarettes. “What are you listening to?” he said.
“Genesis,” I said.
“Nonsense, this sounds nothing like Genesis. Take it off.”
“Where’s Moira?” said Karen.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“She said she’d meet us here.”
“Okay, but I didn’t hear about it.”
Karen plopped herself on the couch at Arthur’s feet, startling him from his doze. This spree might be more wearing for him than I’d realized.
“I’m absolutely tapped,” Euclid muttered around his cigarette. He tossed four twenties onto the dresser. “My parents are late with a check, blame them. This has to be the last.”
“We’re almost out anyway,” I said. Arthur was sitting up, rubbing his eyes.
Euclid frowned, disapproving my unworldliness. “Isn’t there always more?” His eyes slid to Arthur, now understood to be cocaine’s personal escort in its inevitable passage from New York to Camden. For the first time it occurred to me this needn’t be a one-time thing. I’d thought of my dealerhood as a kind of paraphrase, a larkish appropriation of Runyon and Bee, upstairs. But then maybe Runyon and Bee had been ironic when they began too.
“This music is agony. It sounds like troll music.”
“What’s troll music?” said Arthur.
“It’s the music trolls listen to,” said Euclid. He shook his head to show that if you didn’t understand this it couldn’t be explained. “I always predicted Dylan and Matthew would succumb to the pressure of living in Oswald, but I’m sorry to see it happen so quickly.”
“This place is a hotbed of trolls,” I agreed.
“Ooh, play this, I like this,” said Karen, sing-songing for her pleasure like a child. She’d been flipping through a pile of LPs and now held up the Psychedelic Furs.
“Dang, I hate that shit,” said Arthur with dopey sincerity, and we all laughed.
“Do it yourself,” I told Karen. She replaced one record with the other, then cranked the volume. Richard Butler snarled Yaaah fall in love and as if on that cue Moira came in without knocking and joined us there as we sat, all of us on my bed now, while Arthur sliced lines of coke on a duct-taped scrap of sheet steel Matthew and I had liberated from the welding studios. In four days Arthur had come a long way toward the Camden manner of dealing cocaine, the casual sampling which surrounded every act of throwing down bills as Euclid had just done. In Arthur’s idiom the dealer was meant to be above partying with his customers, but that distinction was meaningless here.
I was happy to see Moira. The binge with Arthur and Runyon and Bee had been boyish, and I missed her. I was glad she’d invited herself with Euclid and Karen, glad she’d known to enter without knocking. In fact, as she slid in beside me, under that roar of guitars which made conversation unnecessary, I decided I probably loved her, that I’d need to be more than her confidante. In fact it would be two nights later, after Arthur had finally gone, that Moira and I slept together again, a costly mistake in a December of costly mistakes. Now I just smiled, assuming she felt what I did.
We all did lines. When Arthur objected that we’d given away too much I silenced him by buying an eighth myself with my share of our profits. In fact, everything I did was meant to chagrin Arthur. That I treated him so casually as my sidekick masked an obsession with Arthur’s witnessing eyes. While we did the lines Euclid and Karen plied Arthur with questions: Why were the laces on his shoes never done up? How he could walk with his jeans so low? Was anyone ever tempted to pull them down around his ankles? When Arthur looked to me for help in his bafflement, I looked away, pulled Moira closer, only laughed. See me get the girls, Arthur, and get the friends, and get the jokes, see how hip I am-if you’d grasped how I was on the brighter path all along you never would have thrown me over for Mingus. You and Mingus never would have thrown me over for one another. Arthur and I were still playing chess, two wretched nerds on his Pacific Street stoop, and now I’d toppled his queen but let him go on playing, hobbled and bound to lose. See, see? In another day or two I’d exile Arthur back to Brooklyn, to Robert Woolfolk. But first he had to take a good look at what he’d lost and I’d won.
It was five o’clock. The first wave of students would be lining up with their trays in the dining hall. The party at Crumbly wouldn’t be under way for hours but it was already dark and we were high and the music was loud. Our party was under way. Probably we’d skip dinner. If we were hungry Karen Rothenberg would be willing to drive us into town, we’d pile into her Toyota. Soon others would attach to our core, be led into the Apartment for drugs. We’d see Matthew, surely, and his new girlfriend, though she was a bore and making Matthew boring too, that was the consensus. We’d visit Runyon and Bee upstairs, tip back their six-foot lucite bong. Our ranks would grow, then split like a paramecium, we’d drink flavorless drinks, see all our friends and enemies, visit the dance floor, transmute yet remain ourselves. At some point Euclid would commit a sulky pass at Arthur, humiliating them both. Consoling Euclid would be a rich drama, occupying us deep into the dawn hours. Anyone could see it all coming and no one could possibly stop it and that was the beautiful thing. Friday night was open wide and writ in stone.
The cleaning woman barreled out with her body protecting her yellow bucket of cleaning supplies like a tiny fullback. She must have been cowering in the bathroom, her work completed, listening as the party developed, praying we’d disperse for dinner. Then, as the minutes ticked past, it would have dawned, with horror, that we weren’t going anywhere, that she had no alternative but to make her mad run. To get from Matthew’s room out of the apartment she needed to thread between the five of us arrayed on the bed and the couch, and sidestep a heap of LPs Karen had spread across the floor. This she did very nimbly, with the harried grace of prey. She might have muttered Excuse me, but not audibly. Whether she’d understood the references in our talk, or the scrape of razor against steel, she evidenced understanding by her fear, the way she’d dunned her rabbity eyes against seeing as she passed through.
Then she was gone, leaving us shocked into silence under the buzz-saw music.
Karen dropped the rolled dollar she’d held and covered her mouth in theatrical astonishment.
Euclid spoke first: “What. Was. That. ”
“Ho, snap,” said Arthur. “That’s fucked up.”
“I totally forgot she was there,” I whispered to no one in particular, my mind reeling at the insane mistake.
“Did she see?” said Karen, her black-ringed eyes wide like a bird’s.
“Of course she saw,” said Moira. “What do you think?”
We knew what we thought, but none of us knew what it meant. A famous Camden story-I was certain Moira at least also knew it-concerned a student dealer at Fish House, a few years earlier, who’d been discreetly warned by the school of an imminent bust by the Vermont Police. A sympathetic faculty member had suggested the dealer lock his door and take a long weekend off campus. The point being: Camden had a monumental stake in protecting us from tangles with the law. Talented and eccentric children shouldn’t be judged by society’s harsh adult standards. Let them be eased through their difficult years-this was the deal implicit in the huge tuition, and in the school’s quarantine deep in the woods.
So what did it mean if one of the little people knew I dealt coke from Oswald Apartment? Maybe nothing. She might not tell. She might not have caught the full implication, anyhow, might not have seen money change hands. It was easy to imagine nothing crucial had occurred, only something freakish and funny. I could hear Runyon’s voice in my head, urging me to understand it that way. I tried not to race through recollection of the words we’d said aloud, the words she might have overheard.
“Well, I consider it appalling,” said Euclid, breaking the long silence. “The notion of keeping a cleaning woman locked in your bathroom as some kind of sexual pawn. I can’t imagine how you thought you’d get away with it.”
“Ew, she was definitely not my sexual pawn,” I said.
“Of course she was,” said Euclid. “You and Arthur both, you’re animals. It’s lucky we created a diversion so she could escape. Were you even intending to give her any food? Were you even intending to give her any drugs?”
“Hey, man,” said Arthur, getting with the joke now. “Everybody pays.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” said Euclid.
“Well, I’m glad she’s gone,” said Karen. “Because I have to pee.”
“That would have been a shock,” said Moira.
“Go see if she built a fire,” directed Euclid. “She probably tried to send smoke signals, to others of her kind.”
“Maybe she ate the soap,” suggested Arthur.
The scandal passed, and we resumed our evening’s plot. When Matthew appeared, we recounted the story, competing to exaggerate the details: the woman’s demented scurry, Karen’s nearly wetting her pants, Arthur certain it was narcs and ready to swallow his stash. The five of us were still laughing about it over ten o’clock cassoulet at Le Cheval, courtesy of Karen Rothenberg’s mother’s Mastercard. The next day I described the incident to Runyon, who, as I’d expected, waved it off. And so it was forgotten.
Two weeks later Arthur’s visit was a distant memory for us all, folded behind a dozen other dramas. Moira and I had had our third fling and imploded in misunderstanding, each hurt in a way we could never have articulated, each consoled by newer friends. And as the campus, wreathed in cold and dark, prepared to shut down for the long winter break, the whole term just past dwindled into twee irrelevance. Where were you spending January, that was the question now. Mustique? Steamboat? Well, I was going to Dean Street, but never mind. The future hurtled toward us-who would be our new lovers, in February, when we returned? We had our eyes on a few alluring prospects, ones we’d somehow overlooked the first time. The past term was already mute, and our glories and mistakes there were mute as well.
That was how it felt the afternoon of my conference with my faculty advisor, Tom Sweden, the last day of classes. Sweden was also my sculpture teacher, and he was a typical Camden sculptor, a gruff, inarticulate chain-smoker in a permanent proletarian costume of work boots and plaster-clogged jeans, a bit of a Marlboro Man. We didn’t like one another-I had as much use for his romance of faux poverty and mock illiteracy as he did for mine of faux privilege and mock sophistication. Yet somehow I’d imagined my wit and vigor put Sweden on my side of a line dividing the hipster students and teachers from the square administration. I don’t really know why I thought this, except that I was drunk on college.
Sweden was seated in his wreck of an office in the basement of the arts complex, ringed in a chaos of scrap dowels, overrun ashtrays, and unsorted paperwork. When I arrived, ten minutes late, he was already scowling at a sheaf of pink forms, final evaluations from each of my four classes that term. So he knew, as I did, that I’d failed sociology outright and taken an incomplete from my English professor.
“This ain’t so great,” he said, wrinkling the papers.
“I’ll take care of the incomplete,” I said, approaching the meeting like a negotiation. “I’ve got the paper half-written.” I didn’t have it begun.
Sweden rubbed his bristly chin with stained fingers. Like Brando, he was superior to the part he was playing, and it pained him. He couldn’t fit his deep thoughts to the banal language at hand, so he only frowned.
“I was just more excited about sculpture this term,” I said, trying flattery.
“Yeah, but…” He trailed off, leaving us both guessing.
“And I passed Unorthodox Music,” I pointed out.
Sweden raised an eyebrow. “Dr. Shakti?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, but that ain’t really a class, is it?”
If Sweden didn’t know he was the only one on campus. I kept silent.
“Was there anything…” Sweden kept glancing at the door. “Was there anything, ah, bothering you this term, Dylan?”
“No, I just think it was a period of adjustment and I’ll probably focus better when I come back. On classes and stuff. But nothing’s wrong.”
He scratched his chin again. Perhaps my little speech was enough to get us both out of the conference-he seemed to be weighing this. Then there came a knock on his door.
“Yeah, come in.” Sweden sounded disgruntled, but not surprised.
It was Richard Brodeur, president.
“I thought I’d just run these over myself,” he said, showing Sweden a clutch of folders. Sweden grunted, gestured at his desk. Brodeur dropped the folders into the mess there.
“Richard, uh, Dylan Ebdus,” mumbled Sweden, painfully reluctant with his lines. “We’re just, uh, having ourselves a conference here.”
Brodeur reached for my hand and, as he gripped it, looked deep into my eyes. “Yes,” he said gently. “We’ve met.”
“Sure, hi,” I said.
“Gave you a lift on 9A, didn’t I? In the snow.”
“Yes,” I said.
“How’s your friend?”
“Fine, I think. Fine.”
“Well, look, I shouldn’t interrupt,” said Brodeur abruptly to Sweden. “Those papers aren’t urgent. Get to them whenever.”
“Right,” grimaced Sweden.
There was nothing to interrupt. With Brodeur gone Sweden had little to say. He managed to wish me a happy holiday, and good luck with the paper. He had to light a cigarette before he succeeded in telling me to take care, man. That was apparently all he’d wanted to get across.
The letter arrived less than a week later, in Brooklyn. It was addressed to my father. We were at the breakfast table when Abraham turned it over to me, replaced in its torn envelope, with no more than a dry, “This is for you, I believe.” But the letter had come the day before-Abraham had taken it upstairs and contemplated it for an afternoon and evening before deciding to say nothing.
The letter was on Camden ’s embossed cream stationery and bore Richard Brodeur’s signature. It explained regretfully that for my violations of the school’s policies on overnight guests and narcotics possession, I was subject to a mandatory one-term leave of absence, followed by a student council hearing. More to the point, really, my scholarship had been suspended because of my failure to sustain a minimum threshold of academic excellence. After a specified period I would be invited to reapply for the scholarship.
The legend of the dealer at Fish House who’d been warned to close up shop wasn’t misleading, not really. Yes, Camden College could, and would, protect itself from the Vermont narcotics squad. It could also protect itself from me and Arthur Lomb. I stuffed the letter into my jeans, eyes cast low to dodge Abraham’s. My father went on clinking saucers and scraping toast, then in a flurry of excitement, read me an obituary of Louis Aragon, French Poet, eighty-five. With that I could have been off, up Nevins to the 4 train, my knapsack loaded with undone homework and photocopied flyers for Stuyvesant bands. Dean Street was intact as I’d left it, the letter in my pocket the only evidence I’d been anywhere else.
The University of California at Berkeley would still have me. That was far enough to suit my mood, a distance from which Vermont receded into that gnarled mass of old states no one on the bright coast could ever be bothered to tell apart. My Camden credits were useless in the transfer, so I began again as a freshman with a clean slate, so-called. More like a clean chip of slate on my shoulder. The school was Camden ’s reverse-an Asian, Mexican, black, and white sea of students, a bayside city in place of Camden ’s evergreen art-school hothouse. At Camden, classes had been ten or twelve around a long oak table, all bantering and debating, all preening and being acknowledged. Here a professor muttered into a microphone on a far-off platform while a stadium of freshmen jotted notes, arms synchronized like assembly-line robots. For the first time in my life I learned to study.
The best thing for miles around was the campus radio station, KALX. The gang of DJs there had been freed by the station’s open format to obsess in any direction they liked, and the results were splendidly motley. Many DJs had been allowed to keep their slots for years past graduation-it was this exception to the usual rule which gave KALX its special depth, the depth of an anarchic family, the members all with nicknames to distinguish their shows: Marshall Stax, Gale Warning, Commander Chris, and Sex For Teens were a few of my favorites. Their charismatic, caustic, and homely voices punctuated the seasonless Berkeley days and nights. In my dorm room, on the twelfth floor of an ugly high-rise, above the sightline of the palm trees which dotted a path to the bay, their voices were my only regular company.
The source was a tiny building on Bowditch Street, white cinder block with the station’s call letters painted in a blue stripe. KALX was iceberglike, mostly submerged-the booths and record collection were in the basement, upstairs just a spare office, desks with rotary telephones, and a waiting room full of thrift-store couches leaking foam through cigarette burns. I visited at the first chance, volunteering to man phones during a fund-raising marathon. My shift was in the earliest hours of the morning, and the DJ looked at me like I was a loser for taking it. He explained the drill: for pledging more than twenty-five dollars a caller could visit the station and claim a T-shirt; for more than fifty I could gift them with one of the lousy records clogging the station’s in box. Through the shift I took fifteen or twenty calls. I listened to the DJ’s voice piped from below as he grudgingly fit the fund drive into his format, but I wasn’t admitted into that basement chapel.
Afterward I asked about becoming a DJ and was given little encouragement. It took a hundred hours of dull volunteer work to get on the list for training. Then the waiting list, for even the meagerest twilight slot on the roster, was usually a year. I’d be trained by other DJs, who’d prefer if I didn’t waste their time-I should be serious, or not bother. KALX was, true to Berkeley ’s ideals, a real volunteer collective, but managed without any Berkeley sanctimony or mysticism, instead with a stoical punk exhaustion. This was March of 1983. By the end of that year I’d claimed a show, from two to six Thursday mornings. I kept the slot for three years. That was a trifle by KALX’s standards, but it was as large a commitment as I’d managed in my new grown-up life.
I called myself Running Crab. If I’d had a vague suspicion that in transferring to Berkeley I’d mimicked Rachel in her long-ago westward dash, now I bitterly joked with myself that she’d be within hearing range of my broadcasts. She could wonder who he was, her phantom double. I played Ian Dury’s “Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3,” a Monty Pythonesque white rap, at the start of every show, and declared it my anthem. But my bitterness, like my playlist, was soon hung out to dry. My show was bad. However many favorite songs I’d thought I had, they looked threadbare after a few repetitions. I was trying to make an impression, to stake a personality, as Matthew Schrafft and I had by wearing Devo on our sleeves.
It was impossible to hide from the fact: those lonely hours before dawn were either void or mirror. I was talking to nobody, or myself. So I began again, in a mode of fumbling and discovery. Before each show I excavated forgotten albums from the station’s musty library, and on-air I stirred my own curiosity, played cuts I’d never heard and always wondered about. What I cared for, when I permitted myself to know it, was doo-wop, rhythm and blues, and soul. Stax and Motown, but also Hi and Excello and King and Kent, the further reaches. Otis Redding and Gladys Knight but also Maxine Brown and Syl Johnson. And groups-I loved harmony groups. I loved the Subtle Distinctions.
I turned myself into a vinyl hawk, scouring record shops for out-of-print LPs, studying them with Talmudic intensity. The music I loved would all be dug out of studio archives and put onto CD within a few years, but then it was still scratchy and moldy and entirely my own. I read Peter Guralnick and Charlie Gillett and Greg Shaw and forgot which opinions were received and which were mine, and then I made them all mine by playing the records, by playing the records, by playing the records-I learned to shut up and play the records. I’d intersperse the music not with my own comments but with readings from the vintage liner notes on the LP jackets, like Richard Robinson’s for Howard Tate’s Get It While You Can:
Yes, Howard is black underground, white folks only admitted by insight. He’s got the true emotion of soul which is only out of sight because you’re not listening with your heart. That’s what Howard and his music are all about: the indifferent earth and the long crawl between breaking day and darkening night.
Who could top that, who would want to try? I’d read a liner note, then play a side at a time. For in KALX’s basement I discovered I had all the time in the world. There I learned that to find one’s art is to kill time dead with a single shot. I felt akin to Abraham. I built a path of two- and three-minute cuts through the night like my father in his cold studio daubing paint on a ladder of film.
The station wasn’t a social place. Staff meetings were gruffly efficient, and the DJs made a hermetic community at best. You might bond with those whose shows bookended your own, literally in passing. But I befriended a group of current and former DJs who played softball together. They called themselves the People’s League. We gathered every Sunday at a place called the Deaf School Field for a ramshackle co-ed game with no balls and strikes, no score kept, and plenty of beer and grilled food. Ten years of lunging at spaldeens with a broomstick had made me a pretty good hitter, though one exclusively capable of line drives up the middle. The other DJs mocked me for my predictability: everything looped over the second baseman’s head.
It wasn’t easy to explain to them the narrow, flattened diamond of Dean Street, with car handles on either side for first and third and a distant manhole for second. To pull a ball in Brooklyn was to smash a parlor window and end the game. The DJs were from California and had never played in a street. As it happened, the Deaf School Field’s irregular shape gave it a cavernous left field, while a stand of trees in center made my tic an advantage: the league’s sluggers boomed three-hundred-foot fly outs to left, while my drives scooted into the glade and were lost. As the center fielder beat in the carpet of eucalyptus, searching for the ball, I’d dash around the bases for an easy home run. Once, with a girl there I wanted to impress, I hit four tree-assisted home runs in a single afternoon. It might have been the happiest day of my life. Certainly it would have been if Mingus Rude had been there to witness it.
My people’s League heroics were accomplished without help from Aaron Doily’s ring. The thing was shelved. I’d forgotten my identity as the world’s most pathetic superhero, become a Californian instead. I had California girlfriends, a California apartment, and, after I’d dropped out of classes from sheer disinterest, a California newspaper career, as music critic for the Alameda Harbinger, the job an extension of some work I’d done revamping KALX’s moribund gazette. It was three years before I reached for the ring, took Aeroman out of mothballs. What happened was I got yoked, on a bus.
I’d taken Lucinda Hoekke to see Jonathan Richman at Floyd’s, a tiny stage in downtown Oakland. Lucinda was a transferred sophomore from St. John’s in Annapolis, a KALX groupie; this windy night in March was our third date. After the show we boarded a lonely bus on Broadway, pointed back into Berkeley, and sat too near the rear. I may have been trying to show Lucinda Hoekke or myself that I wasn’t afraid of the sole other rider, a tall black kid slouched in the corner, down coat puffed from beneath his arms like water wings. So we took a twin seat, our backs to him. Between woolen hat and striped scarf I sported heavy, black-rimmed glasses, a Buddy Holly/Elvis Costello prop signifying rock hipness. That’s what they signified to me. To the kid I surely looked like a caricatured victim: Woody Allen had stepped onto his bus. He threw the yoke on general principles, tipped my jaw with his elbow just long enough to show it could be done.
“I’m just messin’ with you, yo. This your girl?”
Lucinda blinked. The windows might as well have been painted black. The bus whirred down the avenue, the driver impassive in his cage. My face grew red.
“You got a dollar you could lend me?”
The script was identical coast to coast. Maybe I had it written on my back. I grabbed Lucinda’s mittened hand and drew her up to the front. We sat across from the driver, who barely glanced.
“Are you going to tell him?” whispered Lucinda.
I shushed her.
“See, you don’t gotta be like that,” called the kid in the back. “You can’t even talk to me, man?”
He pulled the cord, then stepped through the back stairwell, loudly smacking the bus’s side panel in farewell. We rode on in silence, the driver and I complicit in shame, Lucinda cowed. I saw incomprehension in her eyes: Had we been mugged? Why was I enraged-why did I seem angry at her? The conundrum was unaltered since I’d met it last, on some pavement in the vicinity of I.S. 293. A yoking was a koan-it could perplex forever and never be solved. What it had to teach couldn’t be named. I never called Lucinda Hoekke again. I also never wore those glasses after that night.
Aeroman’s costume was long gone, moldering in some police evidence crate, or disposed of. Just as well. This time I favored something less flamboyant, away from the caped Superman or Omega the Unknown model, nearer to those masked, nattily dressed urban avenger types, the Spirit or the Green Hornet. The change represented an incorporation of my recent fondness for forties and fifties film noir, allied with a general sense of embarrassment at the candy-striped Marvel costumes, which in my mind were now bundled in a seventies-style trash heap with Kiss and T. Rex and the uniforms of the Houston Astros. Our capes-Mingus’s, Aaron Doily’s, mine-had never helped with flying anyway. So I began shopping in Berkeley consignment shops for a really fine vintage two-piece with narrow lapels, something dashing and memorable and worthy of Aeroman’s high intentions: brown sharkskin, maybe, or forest green. Then I discovered the search was unnecessary: Aeroman no longer had an appearance, was no longer capable of dressing up, or down. The ring had changed since my soaring in the Camden woods.
I learned it in open air, in twilight, no mirrors nearby. I’d climbed Berkeley ’s hills, to a bluff where I could gaze on the rooftops of luxury homes braced on stilts against the grade, the green steppes above campus, including the Deaf School Field and the skirt of flatlands that spread to the marina. I’d gone into the woods to bolster courage, remind myself of the only flight I’d experienced worth recalling, not on city streets where the action was but alone among trees and ponds. I thought I’d work my way down the hill, perhaps light on the Deaf School Field to begin with. And I wasn’t stalking injustice tonight. I didn’t have a costume or plan of attack. This was just practice.
I only had to don the ring to instantly feel the difference. The ring wasn’t drawn to the air-that part of it was dead. Now it didn’t confer flying, but something else. My hand was invisible. So was the rest of me, that I could see. I stumbled on the rocky path there, tangling invisible feet as I twisted around, trying for a glimpse of myself, anywhere. As long as I wore the ring there wasn’t a glimpse to be had. I could scuff earth with my shoe, I could cough or yell and be heard, could feel my own breath against my palm, could lick a fingertip and feel saliva evaporate in the bay wind. I merely couldn’t be seen.
I don’t know why it changed. I’ve wondered if it was a California thing, the ring’s nature linked to geophysical forces and altered by its transportation there. Or it might be some passage of age-the ring’s, not my own, since Aaron Doily had flown, albeit lamely, in his fifties. In the end I accepted it on personal terms. When I was twelve and the ring first came into my hand I believed that flying was the denominator, the bottom line of superheroic being: any superhero flew, even if they had to cheat by vaulting or floating on bubbles of conjured force or riding in hovercraft. So it was a flying ring. By the time I wore it again on that Berkeley hill I knew differently. Invisibility was what every superhero really had in common. After all, who’d ever seen one?
In truth, if it was still a flying ring I might never have tangled with Oakland, might only have flown in the hills and retired the ring again. My cowardice was ritual by now. The fury at being yoked on the bus in front of Lucinda Hoekke might have been expiated by a bit of zipping around, a refreshment of my irrelevant secret power. But this change in the ring seemed a message that Aeroman had grown up. Invisibility was sly and urban and might just do the trick. I was made ready for something.
As I stood dazzled by my transparency, a small bird, a sparrow, attempting to land on what must have appeared to be an empty bluff, swept from the sky and punched me in the temple, hard. We both fell. I crumpled to my hands and knees in panic, not sure the surprise attack wouldn’t continue until I spotted the stunned bird lying on its side in the dust. I thought it had killed itself against me, then it began whirring feet and wings, swimming a tiny circle before righting, to stand, head cocked. I pulled the ring from my finger and looked at my palms, found them scraped pink. When I touched my temple I found blood in my hair-my own, not the sparrow’s.
The bird stared. It didn’t seem entirely surprised I’d become visible. I suppose it had proved my existence by other means. It hopped a short distance, examined me again. Then-satisfied? stupefied? pissed off?-it turned, and we each walked, not flew, from the site of the encounter.
The first CDs came in long boxes, to stack in the bins left behind by the vinyl CDs had displaced. The great first wave of box sets were disguised as vinyl too: discs or cassettes, either might lurk in packaging which mimicked a carton of LPs. It might even be LPs-you read the fine print to know. Rick Rubin put guitars in a rap, and MTV put the rap on television. His group, Run DMC, found their best success with a cover of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” only Aerosmith was brought in for the chorus, as rappers didn’t sing. Cocaine bifurcated, and blacks were awarded crack, beneficiary of the best marketing campaign since-LSD? The Ayatollah Khomeini? In Berkeley, deep in the decade of Reagan, students at Malcolm X Elementary took their lunch hour in Ho Chi Minh Park.
My epic project that year, never to be completed, was something called Liner Notes: The Box Set. The container would be one of those LP-square boxes so beloved by collectors like myself. Inside, loose sheets bearing the greatest liner notes of all time, in fine reproductions of the original designs. They’d include chestnuts by Samuel Charters, Nat Hentoff, Ralph Gleason, and Andrew Loog Oldham, as well as notes written by musicians themselves: John Fahey, Donald Fagen, Bill Evans. Landmarks like Paul Nelson on the Velvets Live 69/70, Greil Marcus on The Basement Tapes, Lester Bangs on the Godz. Joe Strummer on Lee Dorsey, Kris Kristofferson on Steve Goodman, Dylan on Eric Von Schmidt. James Baldwin on James Brown, LeRoi Jones on Coltrane, Hubert Humphrey on Tommy James and the Shondells. The Shaggs’ father on the Shaggs, Charles Mingus’s psychiatrist on The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Above all, the uncanny found poetry of the endorsements I’d been reading aloud over the KALX airwaves, like Deanie Parker’s for Albert King:
If you’ve ever been hurt by your main squeeze, deceived by your best friend, or down to your last dime and ready to call it quits, Albert King has the solution if you have the time to listen. Maybe you’re just curious… he’ll get through to you… put Albert on your turntable… put your needle in the groove… now drown yourself in the… blues.
That it might be regarded as a disappointment to find not a single note of actual music inside Liner Notes: The Box Set never dawned on me. I can’t say why, exactly, except that a wish to place the writing on a par with the music was the purloined letter of intent at the project’s center. People like to be fooled, and they like to fool themselves. I was twenty-three, and believed to my heart that music fandom needed Liner Notes: The Box Set. Similarly, I persuaded myself that the crack epidemic, then reaching its local pitch in Oakland and Emeryville, was a job for Aeroman.
I went where scared me the most. That was a bar on Shattuck Avenue near Sixtieth Street, called Bosun’s Locker, a place where everyone knew it was easy to score and an excellent place not to be caught dead if you were white. Edgy groups of young black men could be seen milling on the sidewalks there, in a way which reminded me, when I’d glimpsed it from a passing bus, of the corners near the Wyckoff Gardens or Gowanus Houses, back in Brooklyn. Drive-by shootings were now a famous problem in the poorer suburbs of the Bay Area, Richmond, and El Cerrito, but I was a typical New York expatriate, still without a driver’s license, and the suburbs surrounding Berkeley on three sides felt impossibly remote. Besides, I found it hard to envision how an invisible man would halt a drive-by shooting. He’d need an invisible car. I went to the place I could walk to that scared me the most, and that was the big gloomy pool joint on Shattuck.
I walked in visible at seven on a Tuesday night, fingering the ring in my pocket. I was sure I could get myself mugged-by now I was sure of nothing so much as that. And sure that with the ring I could free myself of a mugging as well. But contriving to rescue the same old whiteboy wasn’t right. Aeroman’s vanity required somebody to protect. Maybe in some recess of my mind it was a Rude, Mingus or Barrett Junior, someone I’d abandoned. But maybe Rachel too. For Mingus had abandoned me as I’d abandoned him, and I think I had the two, abandoning and being abandoned, confused. This was the fog I carried with me into Bosun’s Locker, and the reason my invisible adventure was destined to be so foggy. But I wasn’t invisible, yet.
Every head turned, though that was only four. The muttonchopped bartender, large enough to be his own bouncer, two fiftyish pool shooters weighing angles on the farthest of three tables, and a boy, or man-he was my age, and I believed I was a man, then-seated at the bar’s corner. He wore a tan suede-front cardigan under a wool coat, and a Kangol cap, the costume of a player. I was the only white face. Nobody spoke, or anyway nothing I could make out over the jukebox cut, the Blue Notes, Teddy Pendergrass intoning Bad luck, that’s what you got -
“Help you?”
“Anchor Steam, please.”
“Bud, Miller, Heineken.”
“Okay, uh, Heineken.”
My bar companion had been staring, so I raised my bottle before I sipped from it. There were five stools between us. He turned his head to the window as if sickened, and nodded to the music, not me.
I went over. “Hey-”
“Yo, don’t be steppin’ up on me.”
“I just wanted to ask-”
“I’m only saying don’t be steppin’ up, shock a brother like that.”
“Can I ask-”
“Nah, man, just get away from me.”
I went back to my seat. A minute later he slid over to me. “What you wanna ax me, man?”
“I’m looking to get high,” I said.
He wrinkled his nose. “Fuck you on about, man?”
The word crack felt too on the nose. Newsweek and 60 Minutes were those days likening crack to the plagues of the Middle Ages. “I want to freebase,” I said. “I’m looking to score some rock.”
“Yo, shut the fuck up. The fuck you think I could help you score some rock?”
“Sorry.”
“You lookin’ for trouble, man?”
Well, I was, wasn’t I? This was the essential point. In this moment he’d seen me clearly.
“No,” I said.
“You wouldn’t come around here if you wasn’t looking for trouble.” But he grinned. “Listen, man, feebase and rock two diffint things entily.” Despite feebase and diffint and entily, he genuinely wanted me to understand.
“Sorry,” I said again.
He looked to see who might be watching, then offered a handclasp. I took it.
“What your name?”
“ Dee,” I said.
Again he glanced around the room. Nobody was in earshot, bartender giving berth, pool shooters oblivious. “You could just call me OJJJ.” Oh-Jay-Jay-Jay. I supposed OJ and OJJ had been spoken for, in OJJJ’s neck of the woods.
“You cool?” he asked me. “You my boy?”
“Sure.” I wondered if he thought I was a cop, and if so, why he didn’t ask that.
“You wanna get high?”
“I’ve got money.”
He winced, leaned in closer. “Dang, man, shut up. You don’t need money you want OJJJ get you high. Just ax.”
“Okay.”
“Aight.” We clasped hands again. OJJJ fought the urge to glance over his shoulder at the window every few seconds, lost, won, lost again. Meanwhile, I caught the bartender checking us out, squinting his distrust. My imagination wrote a voice-over: What’s OJJJ doing with that white boy? I was certain anyone here was a regular. And that anyone would audition me for cop. In fact, according to what I soon read in the Oakland Tribune, the bartender had never seen OJJJ before in his life and never wondered for a moment if I was a cop. That wasn’t how I struck anyone, apparently.
OJJJ led me into the bathroom, past the pool table, the shooters who still didn’t think us worth a look. The place was utilitarian, with a steel trough urinal, and a floor pitched around a central drain, for easy sluicing. Graffiti hadn’t completely blackened the lime walls. The stall doors had been taken off, but we hid in a stall, each with our back to the divider. It stank of ammonia there, nothing worse. Then OJJJ opened his coat to pull out a glass pipe and I did smell something worse: the acridity of his sweat, infusing the layers of his fancy sweater. I wondered how many days it had been since OJJJ had bathed, or even gone home, wherever home was. Later I’d know it was the chemistry of his fear.
Now his acridity mingled with the tang of crack, seared in a glass pipe lined with a tiny copper screen. I watched OJJJ and tried to do as he did. I’d never smoked cocaine, only seen it done by Barrett Junior. I think OJJJ knew he was teaching me, and was glad to be. I think it gave him courage. He showed me what was a rock and what was a pebble and a twig. He and I smoked a few of these and once or twice I felt I grasped it, felt the cold rush threading me. But the nature of the high was elusive, impossible to savor, only chase. Then OJJJ took the pipe and showed me the big rock he’d been saving. I watched him smoke it and then he asked to see my money. I offered him forty dollars and he told me to hold it, that we’d need it where we were going, if I wanted to come. I saw he wanted me to. I wondered when I was going to become invisible.
There were women at the bar when we came out, made up for the night, and as we passed one of them said to OJJJ, “Hey, where you goin’, pretty man?”
“Aw, shut up, bitch.”
The bartender shook his walrus head, but we were gone, we didn’t care what he thought. OJJJ led me around the corner, down the dark residential block. The poorest parts of Oakland looked the same to me as the rich parts, like suburbs, lawns and driveways, nobody on the sidewalks. Only the cars told the tale of what was inside. The cars on Sixtieth Street were twenty years old, Cadillacs with rotted vinyl roofs, Olds and Chryslers calicoed with rust and mismatched fenders.
OJJJ had been charging ahead, egging me to follow. He seemed to want to keep some momentum, sparked by his hit off the big rock. Midway down the block, he halted. Hand in pocket, I tickled the ring. OJJJ nodded at a free-standing garage, with pink siding to twin it with the home on the left. Yellow light and bass beats leaked from beneath the wide door.
“Ready?”
“Sure, yeah.”
Up the drive we found our way to a side door. OJJJ rapped and the door opened on a chain. A face looked us over.
“Yo, it’s me.”
“Who that? OJJJ?” The voice came from somewhere behind the silent face, which only peered at us.
“Shut up-let me in.”
“What’s up with your boy?” said the peering face at the chain.
OJJJ nodded at me. “He cool.”
“Don’t keep my man OJJJ standing,” said the hidden voice. The door shut again long enough to free the chain, and then we pushed inside. A yellow party bulb cast its glow over a loose ring of men on folding chairs, around the grinning coils of a space heater. The four of them were more than OJJJ had expected-one more in particular. OJJJ turned back for the door the instant he saw the man he hadn’t wanted to see, but it was too late, we were in, and the door was blocked.
The man stood and smiled at OJJJ and held out his hand. OJJJ ignored it, didn’t face him directly, but turned to another in the circle and made a wheedling appeal. “Damn, you let Horton come here just to set me up? That ain’t right.”
“Horton said how you took him off, OJJJ.” The same voice had invited us in. “That ain’t seem exactually right to us.”
“Shut up, man. Fuck you even listen a ill thug like Horton?”
Horton let his hand fall. “I ain’t no thug like you, boy.”
“You come round here to take us off, OJJJ? Who your ghost-face friend?”
With that OJJJ had reached the limits of language-that was what his grimace seemed to say as he tugged the pistol from the interior pocket of the coat, from which the glass pipe had come and returned. It was a snub revolver, as dated as the cars on the street. OJJJ might have bought it at the same thrift shop where he’d bought the suede-front, if thrift shops sold pistols. He fired it, or anyway it fired, on its way out of the coat, shattering plasterboard panels on the ceiling. Dust rained, chairs clattered, the report seemed to ruin my eardrums, only they lived to pulse in pain with the music. Between the first shot and the next every man had time to shout fuck, but after the second anything was drowned by Horton’s bellowing. Blood seeped through Horton’s interlaced fingers as they gripped his knee, and as in a child’s game he moaned “You got me, you got me, you got me!”
I put on the ring and became invisible. No one noticed. OJJJ stood inert, enthralled by the work he’d done on Horton’s knee, but the gun went on moving, jerking back and forth, shaking in tensed fingers, not firing for now. Someone chanted shit, shit, shit. I moved to OJJJ and in the great act of physical courage to that point in my life kneed him in the balls and twisted the gun from his hand-he doubled and vomited so quickly it was as though I’d relieved him of the task of withholding the bile, as though vomiting had been his purpose here from the start.
The pistol was gulped into my invisibility for an instant, but it seared my hand, heated from the combustion of firing-it was a primitive thing, barely more than a nugget of steel and dynamite made for flaring fire in a certain direction, for giving out its jolt, and it had done its work and was a coal. It burned me and I dropped it. Only it wasn’t done. It fired once more as it cracked to the floor, then spun there to a stop in OJJJ’s splash of thin green puke. The third bullet found OJJJ’s neck. He gulped and flopped backward and grasped his neck as Horton had his knee, and as he gulped his body flopped and spasmed, and his mouth shaped words which likely didn’t exist. Or if they did he couldn’t say them. That bullet shut him up.
Me, I ran, I booked. I was ten or twelve blocks down Shattuck, past whining sirens, when I smashed face-first into the shoulder of a tall black woman who’d lurched into my path and realized that the series of magnificent collisions I’d barely avoided were the fault of my invisibility. She was twisted around by the impact, and I staggered and nearly fell. As I recovered I wriggled the ring into my palm. When the woman spotted me she swung out in instinctive anger the blow and boxed me in the eye with a heavy jeweled ring, which served nicely as brass knuckles. “Watch where you’re going, child!” I couldn’t blame her and couldn’t explain, only rasp bewilderment. I put my hand to my eye and ran again, Doily’s ring in my pocket now. The sparrow on the hilltop had borne a message for me, if only I’d listened: nature, or at least birds and women, abhorred the invisible man.
Orthan Jamaal Jonas Jackson survived. His and Horton Cantrell’s stable condition at Herrick Hospital’s intensive care unit was reported on the city page of the Oakland Tribune the next morning. The item, headed TWO WOUNDED IN NORTH OAKLAND, included a tantalizing note that the police were searching for a white gunman. Both victims were familiar to the police, bore a record of detainments and, in Cantrell’s case, a conviction and suspended sentence for narcotics possession. Neither faced charges in the current investigation. The item was perfunctory, giving no sense of the architecture of the incident, the fact that Cantrell and Jackson had begun as foes before being wounded by the same weapon. It wasn’t, probably, the most compelling of stories. The milieu was familiar, drugs and guns, and had it ended there the eyes of the world might have remained glazed over.
But Thursday the story had grown, and graduated to the front page. MYSTERY SHOOTER DESCRIBED AS URBAN AVENGER, that was the hook. The two victims had given witness now, and, with the brothers Kenneth and Dorey Hammond, owners of the house and garage, all on the scene concurred: the mystery white boy had come in with gun blazing, having trailed their distant cousin and good friend Orthan Jackson from Bosun’s Locker. The bartender weighed in with a description of my scrawny, nervous demeanor, confirmed that I’d been behaving strangely and had approached OJJJ first. OJJJ, who’d been photographed in hospital gown and a bulging white patch from ear to clavicle, explained that he knew I’d been looking for trouble from the start. Though he hadn’t been fooled for a moment, I’d been pretending to be a nark, had inquired about the local dealers. He should have known, he said, that I was another crazy white motherf****r gaming to cap some n****rs. If it was the journalist, Vance Christmas, who in the following paragraph coined the phrase “ Oakland ’s Bernhard Goetz,” OJJJ had led him there deftly enough. Vance Christmas would have had to be no journalist at all not to coin it. Goetz was still very much in the air those days.
I moped around KALX for hours before doing that night’s show, a mechanically thorough tribute to Bobby “Blue” Bland I’d prepared weeks before. The grim purple welt on my eyelid I explained, to those who asked, by recounting the collision on Shattuck, leaving out the part about invisibility. My time in the Hammond garage itself had left me unmarked. After the show, I bought the Friday papers. I scanned the Tribune, found it mercifully clear of reference to the Tuesday-night shooting. Then I curled in a ball and slept until dark.
This false calm lasted until Sunday, when Vance Christmas had his way with me on the weekend op-ed page. EAST BAY AVENGER, LIKE NEW YORK SUBWAY SHOOTER BERNHARD GOETZ, BETRAYS A LYNCH-MOB SENTIMENT NEVER FAR FROM SURFACE took its inspiration from a scattering of letters in support of the mysterious white gunman the Tribune had received since its Wednesday coverage. The long piece began as a psychological exposé of Goetz, New York ’s soft-spoken would-be quadruple murderer. It was an aging story, but Christmas gave it fresh life and a local angle by cobbling the bartender’s and OJJJ’s quotes into a speculative portrait of an “East Bay Avenger” cut from Goetz’s cloth. There was no mention of what Horton Cantrell and the Hammonds (the fourth man had vanished from the story entirely) might have been doing in the garage, apart from waiting for OJJJ, and for their fateful moment of terror at the hands of the warped vigilante. The initial encounter at Bosun’s Locker was given peculiar emphasis. Christmas wondered: Had the Avenger any idea that Bosun’s Locker was the same bar where Bobby Seale and Huey Newton once sat together drafting the Black Panther Manifesto? (I hadn’t.) This led to a digression on the poor state of black radicalism, the rise of drug lords and gangstas in the Panthers’ former place of pride in the community. Had white scaremongering-and episodes like Goetz and the Avenger-been partly the cause of the substitution? Christmas’s conclusion was a pregnant perhaps.
The Oakland Tribune was a black-owned paper, in a city with a black mayor, and when on Monday I telephoned the newspaper from a pay phone in the Cal Students Union building and asked the switchboard for Vance Christmas, the Panther-obsessed journalist, I expected a black man’s voice on the line. His name sounded black to me. But Christmas was white, I could tell immediately by his voice. I told him he had the story wrong.
“Hmmm, yeah, how’s that?” He was chewing something.
“Orthan Jackson fired the gun.”
Christmas wasn’t terribly interested. “He shot himself?”
“It fell.”
“Right, huh, and what’s your name?”
“I can’t tell you my name.”
He was quiet for a moment. “So how would you know this?”
“I’m in a position to know.”
“Why would I believe you knew anything?” There wasn’t any note of hostility-it was a sincere question.
“The gun fell in vomit,” I said. There’d been no mention in any article, that I’d seen. “Check the police report.”
“Would you hold for a minute?”
“No. Give me your direct line and I’ll call back.”
He asked for ten minutes. I hung up, bought a blueberry smoothie from a cart on Bancroft, found another phone booth and called again.
Now Christmas said: “I’m listening.”
“They’re dealers.” In my mind I was on a tight clock: as in a million movies, police experts were tracing the call to this booth, and soon SWAT teams would swarm the building. I only wanted to say enough to put an end to it-or I told myself that was all I wanted.
“Sure,” he said gently. “They’re known dealers, you’re right. The question is, what are you?”
“I only wanted to help. OJJJ was messed up on crack, and I think he’d been stealing from those guys. He might have been planning to start shooting before we went in.”
“Who were you trying to help?”
“Help catch them,” I said impatiently.
“By killing them?”
“I didn’t shoot anyone. I’d never fire a gun.”
“You mean, like Batman?”
“What?”
“That’s what Batman always vowed: that he’d never fire a gun.”
This stopped me. I tried to picture Vance Christmas, but nothing came. I suppose we were each trying to picture the other. His breathing was calm on the line while he waited for me to speak again-perhaps he knew he had me hooked-but I could hear something like a frantic whisper in the background: a pencil’s soft scribbling on a page.
No, I wanted to say, Batman’s DC, and I like Marvel. DC sucks.
“So you really didn’t mean things to turn out the way they did.” Christmas didn’t force the tone of sympathy. He seemed to be musing on the misinterpretation which had snared us both. “That’s why you called, to set things straight.”
“Sure.”
“You don’t hate black people, then?”
For a moment, it nearly poured out of me: the yearning to compensate for “Play That Funky Music,” the desolation which had once birthed Aeroman and now brought him back to life. But that path from Dean Street to Bosun’s Locker was too much. I only said, “No.”
“It must be pretty strange to find yourself in this position, huh?”
Now I felt I was being patronized. “What I’m trying to do isn’t easy,” I said. “I screwed up, that’s all.”
“You’ve had better days.”
“Plenty.”
“A history of successes, then?”
Vance Christmas had begun to remind me of a computer program designed to mimic a psychiatrist, or a scratch on my cornea: he’d follow anywhere. So I led. “When it goes well, someone like you wouldn’t even learn about it,” I said. “The satisfaction is in helping.”
“You eschew publicity.”
“Ordinarily I do.”
“Well, I’m lucky,” he said. “You’ve given me a big exclusive.”
“Don’t call me the East Bay Avenger.”
“What can I call you?”
“Aeroman.”
“A-R-R-O-”
“No, no.” I spelled it for him.
“When is your next scheduled, uh, event?” he asked.
“I go where I’m needed.”
“Wow, yeah. Of course. Listen, do you have an, um, a distinctive appearance? I mean, would a person know you if they saw you?”
“Definitely not.”
“And you wouldn’t be someone already known in the community? Like the way, you know, Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne are.”
“No.”
“Not a name I’d know? Because it’s funny, but your voice seems familiar.”
My heart began pounding. Could Vance Christmas be a night-owl KALX listener? Again I tried to see him: racial muckraker, Batman fan-how old was he? Once I’d had the thought I couldn’t bring myself to utter another word. So I hung up the phone. I’d said too much, stayed on too long, as it was. But no SWAT team ringed the Student Union, and I figured I’d gotten away with it.
Christmas’s exclusive ran above Tuesday’s fold. None of my attributed quotes were outright lies, but their context was awfully bad: “ I GO WHERE I’ M NEEDED”/ AVENGER TO TRIB: I ’ LL STRIKE AGAIN. Oakland, according to Christmas, ought to brace itself, for a fantasizing madman was running amok. I’d bragged of a legacy of covert attacks, reserving a righteous vigilante authority while admitting to a slight “screwup” in this case. I denied my hatred of blacks-sure. Still, I took “satisfaction.” And, though I’d acted as judge and jury in accusing Jackson and Cantrell of being “dealers,” the story’s new wrinkle was a report I’d been using crack in the Bosun’s Locker rest room prior to the shooting. Aeroman’s name didn’t appear-it might be the only word I’d uttered which didn’t. Perhaps that was Christmas’s bait. He’d sensed my eagerness on that point, and hoped I’d call in again to push for the correction. He was almost right.
Wednesday it crossed the Bay. An Examiner editorial scolded Avenger and Christmas alike for creating a sideshow, one dwarfed by the real crisis engulfing Oakland. Meanwhile, Herb Caen’s column asked: “ Oakland ’s East Bay Avenger and Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle… have they ever been photographed together?… Just wondering…” Those were the mentions I found, before I lost heart and quit looking. There may have been others.
Christmas hadn’t forgotten the name Aeroman. On the contrary, he’d taken it and done some good work with a microfiche. A week later, after I’d begun to believe the story’s coals were damp, the Tribune ’s front page boasted an NYPD mug shot: Mingus Rude, front and profile. They’d been taken later that distant Sunday afternoon, the day of the shooting-this was Mingus caught exactly where I’d left him. AVENGER LINK TO NEW YORK KILLER? was the slug along the top.
Mingus was still in prison at Elmira, I learned from the paper. His first parole hearing came in three months, and he’d been nowhere near Bosun’s Locker anytime lately. Nevertheless, exclusive sources pointed to a connection. Aeroman’s name was still coyly withheld. Instead, Vance Christmas proposed it as a puzzle, and the paper had put up a reward for the solution: a thousand dollars to anyone who could connect the dots between a six-year-old incident in the Walt Whitman housing projects in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and the fresh atrocity on Sixtieth Street, between this pathetic black face in lockup and our elusive white maniac on the loose. Had Rude taken a fall for the Avenger, so long ago?
Christmas had called me out, but I was staying in. The reward was one I wouldn’t collect, the question one I couldn’t begin to answer. I retired the ring. My Bosun’s Locker jaunt was essentially the last time I touched it, until that morning when Abigale Ponders plucked it out of a mess of memorabilia and returned it to my attention.
Arthur Lomb asked me to meet him at a restaurant called Berlin, on Smith at the corner of Baltic. The place was one of a run of glossy new restaurants and boutiques on the old Hispanic strip, dotted in among the botanicas and social clubs, and the shuttered outlets full of dusty plastic furniture and out-of-date appliances. Abraham had tried to explain it a dozen times, but there was no understanding until I saw with my own eyes: impoverished Smith Street had been converted to an upscale playground. I suppose it was susceptible to such quick colonization precisely because so many stores had been boarded and dark. The street would be barely recognizable for how chic it had become, except the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans had stuck around. They were refugees in their own land, seated on milk cartons sipping from paper bags, wheeling groceries home from Met Food, beckoning across the street from third-floor sills, trying to pretend gentrification hadn’t landed like a bomb.
Arthur wasn’t at Berlin when I arrived. It was eleven in the morning and I was the first customer. The place showed evidence of a fresh, expensive renovation, one hip to the virtues of a century-old shopfront. They’d preserved the tin ceiling and exposed and varnished the brickwork on each side wall. The floor was glistening blond hardwood, quite new.
The maître d’ had been smoking at the back bar when I entered, but he stubbed it quickly, and faked a smile. He was tall and slouchy, a little glum for so early in the day. He offered me a window table and a minimalist menu: one soup, one sandwich, one crepe, today’s oyster. I still felt the effects of my two-night’s-before binge with Katha Purly, and of my overfeeding, last night on arrival from La Guardia, at the hands of Francesca Cassini. When the maître d’ returned I only asked for a cappuccino, and studied him more closely. The shock of black hair was gone, trimmed close and salted white, but it was Euclid Barnes.
He went and worked the foam-hissing machine himself. When he set the coffee down he caught me looking, and looked back.
“Do I know you?”
“Dylan Ebdus.”
He blinked.
“We went to school together.”
“Dylan from Camden?”
“Right.”
“I never thought I’d see you again.”
I didn’t point out that he was working in my backyard, my stomping ground. I’d visited Boerum Hill three or four times in nearly two decades, and the place wasn’t mine anymore, obviously.
“Are you in touch with anyone from before?” I asked. I realized I was a little dumb at seeing Euclid again-at being served a cappuccino by Euclid Barnes at a fancy café a block from Intermediate School 293.
“God, I don’t know. Every one, no one, you know how it happens.”
“Sure.” I said, though of course I didn’t. I’d never heard from any Camdenites again. Moira Hogarth and I had been off speaking terms at the end of that one semester.
“Can I sit down?” Euclid asked.
“Please.”
“Smoke?”
“Go ahead.”
He was dressed in a black turtleneck, a bit hot for this September, which had been warm on both coasts. He tugged it from his neck and I saw how soft the skin around his throat had become: Euclid was nearly chinless. Apart from that, and from a deep weariness around his eyes, he’d retained his mournful glamour, had gained, even, for the way flesh had slightly sunk from his high cheekbones. The sparkle of beard at his lips showed gray, as mine did when I let it appear.
Seeing him, a flood of useless memories returned, hard on top of those I’d just triggered walking the distance from Abraham’s house to Smith Street. It was of course Dean Street that had provoked the deepest calamity of resonances. But I’d come here to invite those. Euclid was an unexpected factor.
He stared at me as he lit a cigarette. “What happened to you?”
I understood what he meant. “I dropped out.”
“I remember you but I don’t,” he admitted.
“The feeling’s mutual,” I said, though it wasn’t as hard for me, I knew. In my life Camden was a singular episode, a window in time. Euclid had been there for four years, among cohorts from his boarding-school life, and others he’d carried on knowing after. I was a blip.
“I transferred to Berkeley,” I told him. “Then stayed in California. I’m just visiting back here.”
“What do you do?”
I was briefly tempted to claim I was writing a movie for Dreamworks. “I’m a journalist,” I said. “Mostly music stuff.”
“Smart boy.”
“And you? You own this place, or just run it?”
“Why own a restaurant when you can wait tables?”
“Ah.”
“I used to get shifts at Balthazar, but a certain person decided I wasn’t charming anymore, and I got canned.”
“So you moved out here?”
“Christ, I haven’t been able to afford Manhattan for years. I can barely hack Boerum Hill.”
Of course. From my lousy vantage I’d seen the wealth at Camden as an edifice, seamless, without variations. But it wasn’t. It was a milieu, a money style, sustained even in cases where money itself was gone. Euclid’s parents’ checks were always late, I remembered now.
“This neighborhood’s gotten pretty swanky,” I said, still playing possum.
“I hate it, it’s too trendy. In just like six months everybody came and spoiled it. Smith Street just got listed in some German tourist book as ‘the new Williamsburg.’ They’re like real estate vampires.”
“You’re part of the old guard around here.”
“I’m old, anyhow. Thanks for noticing.”
“This place looks like it opened yesterday.”
“This place is a fucking fake,” he stage-whispered. Since I’d ordered nothing the chef had wandered from the back and taken Euclid’s place at the bar, but Euclid wasn’t really concerned about being heard by the chef. “The owner’s the landlord,” he explained. “He owns the whole block. He saw his tenants were all getting two stars from Eric Asimov in the Times and thought he’d make a killing with his low overhead. He’s just some fat local fuck. Everybody in this community despises him.”
By community I understood Euclid meant the true foodies, chefs who’d risked their careers to open doors in this hinterland.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” he asked.
“Meeting an old friend. He’s late.”
Perhaps Euclid saw some expression cross my face, for now he remembered. “You’re from Brooklyn, aren’t you?”
“Right around here.” I did feel weirdly bitter, but it was hardly Euclid’s fault. My possessive feelings were silly. I saw meanings encoded everywhere on these streets, like the DMD and FMD tags still visible where they’d been sprayed twenty years before. I saw the changes here in terms of Rachel’s war on the notion of gentrification, which had been conducted mostly in the battlefield of my skull. I walked an invisible map of incidents, shakedowns, hurled eggs, pizza muggings, my own stations of the cross. But imagining those terms should be relevant to the hipsters who’d colonized this place was like imagining that “Play That Funky Music” heard on a taxicab’s radio was a message of guilt and shame intended for my ears. No, Isabel Vendle was dead and forgotten, and Rachel was gone. Euclid’s Boerum Hill was the real one. The fact that I could see Gowanus glinting under the veneer wasn’t important, wasn’t anything more than interesting.
“How’s Karen Rothenberg?” I asked, shifting to safer ground.
Euclid goggled. “She quit calling when she came back from Minneapolis-rehab. Now she’s got this custom hat shop on Ludlow Street. They look like hemorrhoids, if you ask me. But Dashiell Marks-you remember Dashiell?”
I lied and said I did.
“Dashiell got Karen’s hats listed on the Best Bets page of New York magazine, so everything’s hunky-dory.”
Euclid liked reminiscing. He lit the next cigarette from the butt of the last and told me of other classmates, rehearsing grievances which seemed as fresh as if he’d left Vermont yesterday. In the gush of names I learned that Junie Alteck art-directed Cypress Hill and Redman videos, Bee Prudhomme had been knifed to death by a lover in a ski chalet outside Helsinki, and Moira Hogarth was a performance artist known for being censured by a Midwestern senator.
Then Euclid began stubbing his cigarette and waving off the smoke and standing from the table, all at the same time. Arthur Lomb had come through the door, and now I understood why out of the host of Smith Street eateries Arthur had picked Berlin for our meeting. It was like him to underplay and show off at the same time. Arthur wasn’t so much fat as leadenly fleshy, along the coke-bottle lines of his growth spurt at seventeen. Still, I could see why, without anything to suggest a connection to that distant week of cocaine trafficking in Vermont, Euclid hadn’t recognized my old friend as his loathsome employer.
The ashtray palmed unconvincingly away, Euclid scuttled into the back, and I saw what ten or fifteen years of waiting tables had done to the fragile homosexual prince I’d been so intimidated by, that first year of college. At Camden Euclid hadn’t asked to be liked, but he’d yearned to be pitied. I’d never managed before now.
Chunky, bearded Arthur Lomb scowled at Euclid’s retreating back, then brushed real and imaginary ashes from Euclid’s place at my table, and sat.
“You don’t want to nosh? It’s on me.”
“I heard it’s your place.”
“Right, I’m bleeding cash all over the place. What’s a little more?”
“I’m good, I want to hit the road.” My rental car was sitting on Dean Street. I was anxious on behalf of its disc player.
I’d invited Arthur to drive up to the Watertown prison with me, to visit Mingus. He’d declined. He’d already visited, earlier in the summer. But he wanted to see me, and proposed we drop in on Junior together. That was our mission this morning, and now that I’d put aside the distraction of Euclid I was impatient to have it done.
“Okay, after you,” said Arthur. “Coffee’s on my tab, kids,” he shouted into the back.
I took my package and we stepped together onto Smith, the block Euclid claimed all belonged to Arthur: a smashed barbershop with an old glass pole, a botanica, window full of votive candles and folk art, with ghetto apartments above it, and four or five of the understated, sexy little bistros Berlin was meant to undercut. The aesthetic was awfully precise, cute serifs hand-painted on tiny signs or directly onto the discreetly curtained windows. In acts of kitsch or voodoo they’d appropriated local-historical monikers: Breuklyn, Schermerhorn, Pierrepont. One called itself the Gowanus Tart Works, exhuming the name Isabel Vendle had worked so hard to bury.
“Fuck you talking to my faggot waiter for?”
Arthur wore a Yankees cap. I still hadn’t forgiven him his flip-flop from Mets fandom when we were twelve. That betrayal stood, in my mind, for Arthur’s easy adaptation to black style, his glomming onto Mingus Rude. The same inhibition that stuck me to the losing Mets had barred me from the minstrelry which would have allowed me to follow Mingus where he was going.
It was a form of autism, a failure at social mimicry, that had kept me from the adaptations which made Arthur more Brooklyn than me, in the end. I’d had to hide in books, Manhattanize, depart. So it only followed that Arthur Lomb would still be here, gobbling up Smith Street’s commercial real estate just in time to cash in on the yuppie entrepreneurs, a fat local fuck.
It was too much trouble to blow Arthur’s mind making him recall that the faggot waiter had once fondled his then skinny, narcotized ass in a dorm stairwell in Vermont. Lomb and Barnes could recover their small history, or not, without my help. I had no difficulty keeping secrets from Arthur. I’d done it my whole life, in the case of the ring.
I said, “He told me you own the block.”
“I’ve got five buildings, sure. You believe what they tell you, I’m Smith’s Don Corleone.”
I wondered if it mattered to Arthur that his holdings were around the corner from our old school. Probably not. Probably you had to leave and come back, as I had, to feel the juxtaposition, the crush of time, as we now retraced our sixth-grade walks home to Arthur’s chessmen and graham crackers. Once upon a time me and Arthur Lomb cornering Smith onto Dean were merely the most yokeable pair of humans on the planet.
The evening before I’d been given a Francesca Cassini-guided tour of my own life. “Imagine the two of you alone in this big house! ” she’d cried repeatedly, and I wanted to reply: I don’t have to! She’d rounded up some fugitive snapshots of myself and Abraham and created a new family album, one to follow the last of those Rachel had assembled and abandoned, the ones showing me in my mother’s arms, and Abraham, younger than I’d ever seen him, standing at his easel before paintings that were sold or lost before I or the film was conceived. Francesca’s album gathered school photos, my desperate grins against powder-blue backdrops, as well as a few from my Fresh Air summer, me and Heather Windle, pond-wet hair twisted into horns. The last pages showed Abraham and Francesca on an Italian holiday, my father shading his eyes on hotel terraces, restaurant patios, in vineyards. This was a satisfactory conclusion to the tale which preceded it-the two men alone in the house.
More interesting to me were the new paintings, ten or so, hung in the corridor and stairwell. These were on boards, like my father’s jacket art. The style had no relation to his book designs, though. It recalled the paintings on those easels, and others, the nudes. These weren’t nudes but portraits: small, penetrating studies of Francesca with her glasses off. They weren’t flattering, but they weren’t exposés, either. What struck me was the lack of any strain to make the paintings differ. Several were nearly identical. In that sense they resembled the film, or, anyway, were indebted to the film in their diaristic patience. Something here might or might not change, they seemed to say. I have no particular stake one way or another, but if it occurs I will be here to record it.
I couldn’t ask my father about them that night, couldn’t get words in edgewise. Francesca was overexcited at my being in the house, and her chatter was something all three of us could only wait out. My father went to bed. Francesca ran a while before exhausting herself. Once she did, I rang my own number twice, checked my messages. There were none from Abby.
Francesca slept in. I’d asked Abraham to wake me for my date with Arthur at Berlin. He and I sat alone with coffee, but I couldn’t remember anymore what I’d meant to ask about the portraits. I told him I liked them.
“Thank you.”
“Are you going to try to show them?”
“I never think of it.”
“You still work on the film?”
Abraham shot me a look of stern Buster Keaton panic. “Of course, Dylan. Every day.”
The abandoned house wasn’t abandoned. I had to count stoops from Henry’s yard to know which it was. Brickwork all along the block was repointed, the brownstone lintels and steps refreshed, the gatework repaired and reblacked-the block was like a set for an idealized movie that fudged poverty into sepia quaintness. Even the slate was straight and neat, repointed like the brick, where it hadn’t been replaced with poured concrete.
I was gazing dizzily at the cornices, wondering how many rotting spaldeens still clogged gutters, when Arthur called to me; I’d drifted past him. He’d stopped to talk with a black woman on Henry’s stoop, or what had been Henry’s stoop, and though like Euclid she was no longer skinny, I knew the woman was Marilla. Her braids had grown long, and were bundled in a nest atop her head. She had a morning drink in a brown bag by her side on the bottom step.
“You remember Dylan?”
“What you talking about, Artie? I knew Dylan before I even knew you.”
The claims of provenance poured from us, like vows to a great cause. If Marilla hadn’t said it, I might have. It was barely different from writing, as I once had, No one who’s ever heard Little Willie John’s “Fever” ever need bother with subsequent recordings of the song. Maybe I’d first found it on Dean Street, my rage for authenticity.
“You a big old man, Dylan. Where you been at?”
“I live in California,” I said.
“La-La went to California. You ever seen her?”
“No,” I said, my voice almost failing me. “I never ran into La-La.” I considered the joke of La-La in La-La Land, figured it wouldn’t go over.
“No?”
“It’s a big place.”
“I got to see that for myself one day.”
Marilla wasn’t the least surprised to see me, only that it had been a while. I gathered she hadn’t left the block, that Arthur might be an adventurer who’d roamed far, by her measure. I wanted to convey my astonishment that she was still here, that after where I’d been she could still recognize me, but nothing I babbled about Berkeley or Vermont, about Jared Orthman’s office or ForbiddenCon 7, could have conveyed anything except, well, babble. My astonishment, really, was at my own denial of this place. Standing here with Arthur and Marilla it felt that to stay was the obvious thing.
“Henry still live here?” I croaked.
“He comes around,” said Marilla. “You should see these white people stare at us on his own street. They want to call the police and Henry is the damn police.”
“The new type of people in the neighborhood don’t really get the whole stoop-sitting thing,” said Arthur apologetically.
“Henry’s a cop?” I asked.
“Actually, Alberto’s a cop, Henry’s an assistant D.A.” Arthur mused on this. “Pretty much everybody’s either in jail or a cop. Except for you and Dylan, Marilla.”
“I know some people who should be in jail.”
Arthur laughed. “We’re going to see Junior, Marilla.”
“Junior? Damn. He first on the list.”
Rhodes Blemner’s art director had gotten a startlingly early photograph from the Michael Ochs Archive for the cover of Remnant’s Bothered Blue box, one I’d never seen until finished copies of the set’s first pressing had arrived at my Berkeley doorstep a few weeks before, shipped direct from the Canadian factory. It showed Barrett Rude Junior at a microphone in the Sigma studio, ringed by admiring Distinctions, one hand to his ear, mouth bellowed wide like a bragging Ali. From the look it was one of their first sessions together, the Distinctions still awed by the jewel that had dropped into their setting.
I wonder if a stranger could have squared that broad, strong face and those neat fingernails and geometric ’Fro, that sharp-knotted tie against paper-white shirt, the whole authority and predatory ease of the thirtysomething Barrett Rude Junior, with the Fu Manchu mustached, yellow-clawed, shrunken-apple-form who accepted the box as a gift from me now. It wasn’t that he should look as good- nobody had ever looked as good as the man on the box. But I don’t know how I could have fathomed time’s work on Barry’s face without my advantage of knowing son and grandfather. That was the gap the man and the box spanned. The singer in the photograph was Mingus at eighteen, on a good day. As for the man clutching the gift, shaking my hand, nails scoring my palm-well, if it was less than a revelation it was more than a joke, the line that came into my head: Junior was Senior now. He even wore Senior’s Star of David necklace, webbed in white at the gap in his robe. When I saw him lower his eyes to the box and discover himself I wanted to tear the thing from his hands and toss it in the street, only it was too late.
“I wrote the notes,” I said.
“Oh?”
“Inside, there’s a book, a little essay about your career. I wrote it. I hope you like it.” I somehow hadn’t until this moment weighed the odds of Barrett Rude Junior reading my tribute. Now there were a few sentences I might prefer his eyes glossed over. Again, too late.
“I like it already, baby,” said Barry. He put the box on the couch beside him where he sat. He’d ushered us in, no more surprised than Marilla had been. The apartment was barely changed, only corroded by twenty years of neglect. Barry took up a considerably lesser portion of it. I’d swear certain LPs were right where I’d last seen them, in piles on the floor by the stereo, half out of their sleeves.
“See, Arthur,” he said, taking just a glance from the television, which was tuned to Judge Judy. The television was new, and I sensed it got more use these days than the stereo. “I always told you Little Dee would do us proud.”
“Sure,” said Arthur. “Here, Barry, I brought you something too.” He slapped at his pockets until he found it: a fresh pack of Kools, which he tossed to Barry’s lap. “You know that warning about how smoking is bad for your health? Very few people realize I actually wrote those words.”
“Y’all a couple of gifted children, I’ll give you that.”
“Of course, they changed them all around, took out most of my best stuff.”
“That’s their prerogative, though, isn’t it, Arthur?”
“Yeah.”
“You got to grant them their pre rog ative.”
“I guess so.”
“I heard that.” Barry reached to graze fingertips with Arthur, still not neglecting the television show. He’d pushed the cigarettes off with the box set.
“You want to hear the CDs?” I said stupidly. “They sound really great.” Barry’s publishing stake meant he’d see some money from the box, eventually. It should add to the trickle of royalties which presumably kept him in the house. Maybe I was wrong to think he should be proud of the monument too. Maybe the Barry I wanted to be able to give the box to was the Barry of 1975. That man, like the one in the photograph, was as inaccessible to Barry now as he was to me.
“I know what all them old records sound like.”
“Yeah, but-”
“I’ll check them out some other time, man.” He spoke slowly and carefully, and I knew I should drop it. “I don’t have no CD player, anyhow.”
I just nodded.
“You know that Fran, that girl your old man took with?” Changing the subject, his voice grew gentle again. “She’s all right. She’s been looking out for me, you know.”
“I heard.”
“He’s lucky, find a girl like that.”
“I know.” Everyone agreed, from A to Zelmo. I only hoped Abraham did too. It was then that I remembered what I’d wanted to ask my father about the new paintings. Were the portraits of Francesca an excuse to stare, to try to see through the skin of his new situation, this woman who’d taken Rachel’s long-abandoned place? Was he trying to fathom Francesca? Or had she asked him to paint her, requested he look with that intensity? Who’d sought the confrontation the portraits recorded?
There was a long silence, filled by the television’s yammer. I began to think of the rental car again, and the road I meant to cover this day. My heart was bogging on Dean Street, but it was Mingus I had to see.
Barrett Rude Junior focused his eyes on mine for the first time in nearly twenty years, perhaps reading my mind. His gaze at last pierced the caul that had covered it even when he’d found us at his door, and through his short inspection of the photograph and words on the box set’s cover.
“What brings you round to see this old washed-up singer, Little Dylan?” he said. He gave washed-up singer some of his old melodic juice, and I felt a twinge in my saliva glands, as though I’d dipped my tongue to cocaine.
“I just wanted to give you the records,” I said. I couldn’t call them CDs now.
“You done that,” he said, a little coldly.
“And we’re going up to visit Mingus. I mean, I am.”
“Huh.” Barry clouded. He grimaced in concentration at something in Judge Judy’s realm, perhaps a ruling going the wrong way. Someone had to keep a watch on such stuff.
“Maybe if you’ve got any message for him-”
Barry chopped with a clawed hand. Mingus in Watertown was too distant, that was what the gesture seemed to say. Dean Street was real, Francesca and Arthur were real and worth acknowledging. One brought soup, the other cigarettes. Judge Judy was real enough: she was in front of his eyes. I’d come and proposed that Barry consider California and 1967 and Watertown and those were all too remote, too tiresome.
“You know I’m watching my morning shows,” he said, addressing Arthur. “I’m not awake yet, man. Come around tonight and we’ll party.”
“Okay, but Dylan’s gotta head,” said Arthur. “He just wanted to say hello.”
“Tell the boy I’m watching my morning shows.”
Arthur walked me to my car, and apologized. “I should have told you not to mention Mingus,” he said. “It sort of shuts him down.”
“What did Mingus do to him?”
“It’s not that simple.”
I’d stashed my bag in the rental’s trunk already, and said my goodbyes, promising Abraham and Francesca I’d spend a day with them on the other end of my jaunt upstate, before I returned to California. I was ready to go.
“Here,” said Arthur. He frisked himself again and produced an unsealed envelope full of cash, evidently counted in advance. He slapped it into my hand. “You can’t give it to them directly, they can’t have money inside. You have to contribute it to their commissary accounts, then they, you know, take it out in cigarettes, or whatever. Hundred apiece.”
“Who’s they?”
“You know how I was saying to Marilla it seems like everybody’s in jail?”
“Sure.”
“Robert Woolfolk’s inside too. Watertown, same joint as Mingus.”
I was an amateur here, as much a neophyte crossing these thresholds as I’d been in L.A., penetrating Jared Orthman’s sanctum. Only now I was an amateur among professionals. All the black and Hispanic moms and grandmoms, all the stolid grown-up homeboys visiting homeboys, all but me knew how to visit a prison. Their expertise began to be shown just past the parking area, still well outside the outermost ring of wire, where taxicabs from the Watertown train station and the Greyhound terminal turned in a circle, where the chartered bus from New York, full of prisoners’ families, off-loaded and waited, the driver smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and picking tobacco from his teeth. There the visitors fell into a line, to trudge through a long shack, a small aluminum trailer on concrete blocks. It had been raining the afternoon before, as I drove out of the city, raining when I took my motel room just outside downtown, raining just a bit more this morning, as I breakfasted on sausage patties at a Denny’s. Now gray-green clouds wheeled above the prison and were mirrored in the puddled gravel at our feet. No one but me glanced up at the sky or down at the ground as I hurried in to take a place. Inside the trailer three guards- correctional officers, they were called-ran a bureaucratic outpost, one where we displayed ID, signed this form, then that one, giving address, stating relationship to prisoner, avowing comprehension of rules, etcetera. All but me knew the prisoner’s number they’d come to visit. I knew only Mingus’s name, causing a bored captain to have to flip open a fat binder to locate the corresponding digits. The bathroom in the trailer was our last chance to pee. Everyone took it, knowing the drill. I took my cue, fell in line. The trailer’s single pay phone was the last we’d see, and it too was in continuous use. I thought of calling home, trying for Abby. But the line of callers was too long.
The drill the visitors knew was above all that of waiting, in total deference. Complaint had been worn out of them some time ago. We waited in one secured zone after another, as we progressed by degrees inside the Watertown facility. First, approved by some unseen hand, we were taken from the trailer, along concrete paths marked with fluorescent orange-and-yellow paint. I found it impossible not to fear being rifle-shot from a high tower for crossing the painted stripes, for we were now under the gaze of the concrete towers, having put the trailer and parking lot, the whole of Watertown out of sight behind us. Then we passed through what was called an “A/B door”-a metal cage, wired so door A and door B couldn’t be unlocked at the same time. After we were inspected from within a windowed office there came a joltingly loud buzz to switch the circuit. Bolts slammed through the door behind us, and the door ahead opened to permit us to pass from the box.
With that we were inside, sort of. The prison wasn’t, as I’d pictured, a single edifice, a stone Gormenghast or iron Deathstar, but a sprawled compound of structures and fences and gates, a bleak ranch for human livestock. Between everything, safe zones, moats of speckless concrete, protected by razor wire. And, through doors unlocked for us by gray-clad, dronelike officers, the interiors were dully institutional, like 1960s-era school buildings or hospital emergency rooms, full of mint-green tile and wooden paneling worn to matte. Each place we encountered in this visitor’s gauntlet felt provisional, refitted for this temporary use, though they’d likely been used this way for years.
I later understood each prisoner had to be located, cleared, brought to the visiting room hidden deep inside the walls-there was no motive for the guards to finish processing us until the prisoner had been escorted to wait for us in that room. This was a place of canceled time: it had no value. We weren’t customers, to be pleased or reassured. Yet for all the waiting, I was always guiltily startled when my name was finally called, was always gazing in the wrong direction, distracted by the stuff pinned to the walls, yellowed notices, ten-year-old memos requiring block sergeants to remain at posts until the arrival of replacement block sergeants or forbidding visitors skirts higher than 2 inches above the knees or “bear midriff,” advertisements for shuttle services and child care, twelve-step and pregnancy clinic solicitations, and a long, hypnotic list, photocopied into a runic blur, of commissary items: toothpaste $1.39, comb 19¢, ketchup packet 19¢, jar chicken $1.79, jar lima beans 89¢, jar instant coffee $1.59, peanut butter $1.39, conditioner $1.29, hairnet 29¢, bun 25¢, chocolate bun 30¢, and on and on from there-the list was schemeless, incantatory, horrible.
“Ebdus.”
“Yes.”
“Belt and shoes off, contents of pockets in the wooden box.”
I waddled up, the only one who needed to be told.
“All in the box.”
I scooped out my pockets, offered them my shoes and belt.
“No pens.”
I shrugged helplessly.
“You can throw it out here.”
“Sure.” I put my ballpoint in the green steel garbage pail. Other visitors streamed through the metal detector while I fidgeted with my crap.
“What’s this ring?”
“Wedding ring.”
“Why ain’t you wearing it?”
“Uh, it’s my mother’s wedding ring. I just carry it around, it doesn’t fit.” Don’t make me put it on, I prayed. The officer squinted, frowned, let it pass. Something else was more interesting.
“What’s that?”
“What?”
She pointed to a single pale-orange conical earplug which had sprung to the top of the change and rental-car keys I’d heaped into the wooden tray along with the ring. The plug had unsquished, breathed open as foam shapes will do.
“Earplug,” I said.
“What for?”
I considered the appearance of the earplug, the vaguely sexual fitted form, through the officer’s eyes. “For the airplane,” I said.
She looked at it closely. Now I wondered if it more resembled drug paraphernalia.
“That’s for an airplane?”
“For blocking out the sound of the engines. So I can sleep.”
“Just one?”
“I guess I lost the other one.”
“Huh.”
I’d never pondered the bourgeois implications of an earplug. The officer scowled, but placed my tray full of stuff on the far side of the barrier. “Give me your right hand, sir.” From a stamp pad she marked my knuckles with some invisible stuff. “Take your box, sir.”
Once through, I began slipping into my shoes, repocketing my stuff.
“Sir, not here.”
“What?”
“You can’t stay in this area. Take your box to the bench in there.”
Five of us were called, to have our hands examined with a black-light wand that exposed a purplish emblem. The keys on the fistlike ring at the escort officer’s belt varied in size and shape, some as modern as my rental car’s ignition key, others as medieval as those wielded by the Wizard of Id ’s bailiff. As our group strode the corridor I learned another subtle art, of slowing so that the officer, who’d lingered to relock the door behind us, had time to overtake us and open the door ahead.
I tried to absorb the others’ expert docility, as a balm. We were being transformed into inmates, I began to understand, as our reward for asking to go inside. We’d crossed seven or eight levels of lock-in before I was led to meet Mingus Rude in the visitor’s room, a bleach-redolent chamber of pale blue tile. There, we were sealed from one another by a Plexiglas window covered with minute scratchiti, and allowed to converse on telephones.
He had to speak for both of us, at first. I couldn’t find a word.
“D-Man. I can’t believe it’s you, shit.”
I nodded.
“Check you out. Boy done growed up. Hah!”
I’d journeyed back, from that distance at which Mingus had sometimes seemed an implausibility, a myth. Now he was before me, in the all-too-human flesh. His skin was skull-tight, the whites of his eyes sickly yellow, he wore his father’s ridiculous Fu Manchu mustache and a filthy red sweatshirt, his wide grin revealed a chipped incisor, his raised eyebrows a thin scar seaming his eyelid. Still, I persuaded myself he didn’t look bad, or so different from the man I remembered. In Junior’s photograph on the Bothered Blue cover I’d seen a resemblance to Mingus, but now, despite the mustache, I didn’t see Mingus in terms of his father. Mingus was only Mingus, the rejected idol of my entire youth, my best friend, my lover. Seated across from him, I knew he’d already grown into a man at some point before the last time I’d seen him, the day of the shooting. I hated to recall the boy I’d encountered in the mirror when I first arrived at my Camden dorm-the frightened boy, desperate to impress with his fresh punk haircut, who’d go on spend his life pretending not to have seen and known so much.
“I can’t believe it. Where you been, son?”
He spoke as though resuming where we’d left it, my year before graduation from Stuyvesant. As though I’d been at high school in Manhattan these decades, and now we only hadn’t run into one another, to exchange a quick handclasp on Dean Street, for a few long months.
So where had I been? I answered, “California.”
“Yeah, yeah, I heard from your pops you was out that way. Someday I got to get out there myself- the Golden State, damn.” Like Marilla, Mingus merely hadn’t gotten around to it. “Dillinger’s gone way out west, checkin’ out the Golden State. Yet despite how the boy’s livin’ large, he don’t diminishize his roots, he comes back to represent.”
Mingus was authoring a romance, wrapping my awkwardness in his old raconteur’s warmth. It was nonsense and a gift I took gladly. No mention of the special nature of the setting for our reunion, though his jive happened to be piped over an intercom. The setting didn’t bear mentioning. His smile’s warmth, the way he beamed himself across that thickness of Plexiglas, suggested a capacity for a binocular vision which excluded surroundings. Recalling how the city had reeled from us as we stood on the Brooklyn Bridge’s walkway gazing at spray-painted stone, I thought now that that had always been one of Mingus’s talents.
“Arthur couldn’t come,” I said, as if Arthur were the unfaithful one. “He sent up some money for the commissary, though.”
“Arthur’s always lookin’ out for a brother,” said Mingus. He didn’t mean to sting me, only to bathe Arthur, too, in beatific gratitude. “I know I let Arturo down a bunch of times, but my man always picks up the phone.”
“I count on him for news of you,” I lied. I hadn’t been any more in touch with Arthur than I had with Mingus. And I hadn’t heard news of Mingus until Abraham and Francesca raised the subject in Anaheim, at dinner with Zelmo Swift.
“Little brother’s doing fine for himself, too,” said Mingus, freeing me from this line of talk. “Done got fat and happy.”
“Well, fat.”
Mingus wheezed, too much laughter for the joke. “Ho snap,” he said, putting on a show. “I heard that. I been tellin’ the boy he got to shed some poundage he wants to snag himself a wife.”
The word was peculiarly silencing: heading to forty, we’d fallen laps behind life’s course. We had no wives. Mingus, at least, had an excuse for why he hadn’t been dating lately. About Abby there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t sound self-pitying or fatuous. I felt the distance between Dean Street and my Berkeley life as an unbridgeable gulf.
At the lapse I tuned in the murmur around us: one-sided talk into the visitors’ telephones, the unself-conscious yakking of two corrections officers at the door, and, from one of the booths, a voice gummy with weeping.
“I saw Junior,” I said.
“At the house?”
“Yesterday. With Arthur.”
“My old man,” said Mingus. He spoke simply now, his gaze shy. “He’s hanging in there.”
“It was good to see him,” I said.
“He must have been glad to see you.”
I couldn’t fathom a reply, so we fell to silence a second time. Mingus had abandoned his patois, and the trumped-up garrulity that had gone with it. I was ashamed to want it back.
Mingus smoothed his long contrails of mustache, stroked his chin. There were flecks of spittle on his side of the glass between us, evidence of his actor’s enthusiasm, now gone. I met his rheumy eyes and saw a stranger. I could no more ask Mingus who he’d become-whether incarceration had broken him the first time, at eighteen, or what had led him back inside after his first release, or what his life had meant to him in the time between his two sentences-than I could imagine how to confess myself to him. I was helpless to say who I’d become in California, or to let him know I remembered everything between us despite it all.
“Arthur says Robert’s inside too,” I said, despising myself for the false casualness, for my use of inside. My heart was thudding now.
“Plenty of brothers you’d recall from the old days inside now,” said Mingus. There might have been rebuke in his words, I wasn’t certain. “Donald, Herbert, whole bunch of them.”
I didn’t remember Donald or Herbert. Perhaps Mingus knew this.
“You and Robert see a whole lot of each other?” Dopey questions poured from me, helplessly.
“I put myself out for Robert until I couldn’t afford to no more.” Now there came a steely note of institutional savvy in Mingus’s voice, and his gaze blinked from mine. “Our boy Robert put himself in the way of some trouble. They had to shift him into protective custody.”
“Oh.”
“I told him but the poor-ass snake can’t listen.”
To divert the anger that seemed to be unstoppering, I said, “Actually, Arthur sent cash for both of you.”
“Put mine to Robert’s name. Boy could use it.”
“Really?”
“It’s not too late for him to pay his debt down. Anyway, I’m in a protest with these motherfuckers, they took my stamps.”
“Stamps?”
“For letters. Postage stamps, man.”
“What happened?”
“I had thirty dollars of stamps in my bunk down at Auburn. When they moved me up here they were supposed to be transferred-” Here Mingus launched into a torturous account of a paperwork error. The Watertown facility prohibited stamps because they resembled paper money, could be used as scrip. The postage had been meant to be dissolved into Mingus’s commissary account, had been placed instead with belongings to be returned to him after release. Mingus filed protest forms, but the seized stamps were stranded in a limbo between the two prisons, the two sets of rules. Mingus retailed this story with a joy-in-persecution that could only be called Kafkaesque. In a world of deprivations, I suppose the smallest might become a fetish. It made my head hurt. I wanted to scream Forget the stamps, for God’s sake I’ll buy you thirty dollars’ worth of stamps if you want! But the stamps were Mingus’s cause, and so he railed on. What was thirty dollars compared to a cause? Too, in this place a talker’s gifts were only encouraged in one direction, to stanch the wound which bled hours, days, years. I tried not to lose patience with the monologue.
“I brought you something else,” I said, when Mingus paused for breath.
He scowled confusion.
I dug in my pocket as discreetly as I could. “I’ve been keeping it for you,” I said, and pushed the ring to the edge of the Plexiglas, like a checker I wanted Mingus to king.
“Put that away,” he said. He waved, a low flat gesture which seemed to say Keep it under the table. “They’ll confiscate it.”
I covered the ring with my palm. Still, I couldn’t keep from avowing my mission of rescue. “This is why I came-I mean, I wanted to see you. But the ring belongs to you.”
“It never did.”
“It does now, then.”
“Shit.”
Mingus had grown cold and wary, as though I’d asked him to recall things he couldn’t afford to.
“How can I get it in to you?” I said, thinking moronically, If I’d known about the hermetic seal, I’d have baked a cake.
“Put it away.”
“You could use it to break out of this place,” I said quietly.
His laugh now was bitter, and authentic.
“Why not?”
“You couldn’t even use that thing to break into this place.”
The rest, until my time was up, was small talk. Mingus wanted news of my father, so I described the honor he’d received in Anaheim. I mentioned Abby, omitted her color. We even talked over the stamps again. Mingus asked questions and didn’t listen to my answers. A wall had fallen between us. Afterward, I was led out, my knuckles inspected again for the phosphorescent stamp of a free man. On my way out I deposited two hundred dollars into Robert Woolfolk’s commissary account, keeping my promise.
Invisible in twilight, my eyes picked out stuff I’d missed the first time crossing the yard.
On concrete clean of the slightest scrap of litter or leaf, a single latex glove, flipped inside out in the haste of its removal.
Pinned to the fence, a hand-pained sign: DON ’ T FEED THE CATS!
Past the fence, shadow-blobbed trees. Sensuous unreachable hills. The moon a pale disk snuck into sky before sunset.
It wasn’t either day or night when I crept back inside the gates of Watertown Correctional, but something in between: daynight, the hour of the changing of the guards.
I’d only had to lay on my motel bedspread flipping cable channels for half an hour-Mets game; Emeril; Sunburn, with Farrah Fawcett and Charles Grodin; and Teddy Pendergrass: Behind the Music -before Mingus’s words penetrated my brain in their full profundity: You couldn’t even break into this place. I’d heard them as merely scoffing, when in fact they spoke of my whole life’s flinching from what mattered most-not California, dummy, but Brooklyn. Not Camden College, but Intermediate School 293. Not Talking Heads, but Al Green. “No way out but in” (cf. Timothy Leary, 1967). “The old way out is now the new way in” (cf. Go-Betweens, Spring Hill Fair, 1984). Behind the Music, sure. But I needed to go behind the walls. My first pass at the prison had been too cursory, a tourist’s, as ever. I had to earn Mingus’s escape with my own willingness to go inside, to show it could be done. I’d known Aeroman had one last mission: now I saw it couldn’t be conducted by surrogate. I’d wear the ring myself, once more.
This certainty came like a fever. The motel room seemed to pitch, the walls to crawl, like Ray Milland’s in The Lost Weekend. I broke a sweat, felt my bowels loosen dangerously. Lying still, apart from the twitching of my thumb on the remote, I sought a channel to distract me from my intent, uselessly. So I sprang from the bed, rinsed the clammy perspiration from my throat, and spent five minutes or so under the motel sink’s fluorescent, trying to stare myself out of what I was about to do. Then I repacked my small bag and checked out.
I hid my rental car in the stadium-sized lot of a shopping mall at the edge of town, camouflaging it in a sea of like models. Recalling the metal detectors, I slid off my belt and watch and left them under my seat, then locked my wallet in the glove compartment, not wanting to carry it inside, either. I also removed the car’s key from its bulky ring and tucked it into my shoe, like sixth-grade mugging money. Finally I slid on Aaron Doily’s ring and walked invisible out of the mall lot, then made my way to the prison along two miles of well-groomed highway shoulder, past signs reading DO NOT STOP FOR HITCHHIKERS.
CO parking was down the hill, behind the trailer where I’d begun my first voyage inside, earlier that day. There, the evening shift trickled in, one or two at a time, in ten-year-old compacts and pickup trucks, to receive perfunctory badge checks at a manned booth, and a glance into bag lunches for signs of contraband. I had no trouble slipping past the cyclone-fence gate behind a Datsun-it felt as though a visible man could have done it, cloaked in haze and exhaust. My guide-Datsun took its place in a scattering of cars. Its driver was a pearishly short man with Elvis sideburns, wearing a Bills jersey. He paused in his open door for long-sighing finish of a smoke before crushing the butt into the gravel lot, then headed for the entrance. I fell in close behind him, matching my invisible footfalls to his own crunching steps. I staggered slightly, and recalled the special nature of invisible clumsiness, the inner-ear panic that seemed to go with appearancelessness. Aping Mr. Pear’s low-center-of-gravity lope helped me find my rudder, though.
The officers had their own A/B door, where they scrutinized one another through a glass partition. This required a hairbreadth maneuver: ducking through, I was almost clipped by the B door, and in hustling to avoid it grazed the heel of Pear’s shoe with my Converse high-top’s toe, nearly giving him what in grade school we would have called a flat tire. Pear whirled. I backed to the gate, clammed my mouth. Pear squinted, saw nothing, believed his eyes, carried on. I let out breath. The prison groaned and hummed, deep in the floors, and the air was full of a distant cascade of clanking-enough to cover an invisible man’s inopportune gasps for air.
So I trailed my unknowing escort across the moon-pale yard. We passed into a low bunker showing lit offices behind unbarred windows, a building I hadn’t glimpsed in my official visit, one with no cell blocks that I could see. Pear turned through an unlocked doorway, headed for a door marked MEN ’ S LOCKERS. It was there I realized he’d played his full part, that I had no reason to follow him farther. I’d need to find other bodies to trail-it would have been impossible dumb luck if Pear had happened to lead me to the exact block where Mingus was celled.
I parted from him there, and wandered through into the offices. The air here was free of the tang of authoritarian fear I’d smelled in the visitor’s hall. Instead the place was as innocuous as a small-town Department of Motor Vehicles. Two CO’s flirted at a coffee machine, the woman with a black crew cut, but zaftig in her uniform. Two more sat with clipboards, yawning at paperwork. Another pair, one slurping a Coke, the other tapping down a pack of cigarettes, watched a clock-radio-sized television, showing late innings of the same Mets game I’d glimpsed in my motel. Lime-green walls were disguised with school photos, newspaper cartoons, garage calendars. Ten years ago they might have featured pinups, but the presence of female guards prevented that. I supposed there were still pinups in the men’s lockers, though.
While I stood flattened just through the doorway, Pear, now in his well-ironed grays, and belt loaded with baton and keys, waddled into the room.
“Yo, Stamos,” said the CO standing by the coffee machine.
“Yo,” said Pear-Stamos. “Whatchoo doing?”
The guards were all Caucasian. Yet even here, podunk nowhere, everything was yo, yo, yo.
“Looking for you,” said the male guard, and now his female companion peeled away from the coffee machine with something like a look of disgust. “Metzger wants us up at the shoe for deadlock. Crappy birthday to you.”
“With ice cream on top,” said Stamos in a dead voice.
“Be careful what you wish for.”
“Christ almighty, don’t let me get shitted tonight.”
“I’ll protect you, sweetheart.”
Stamos and his friend shook their heads as they departed the oasis of the offices, bound for whatever grim duty the shoe represented. “Force be with you,” said another from his desk, waving farewell without looking up.
I let Stamos go. I wasn’t hugely fond of him, anyway. I assumed I’d be able to shadow one or another CO making rounds through any given building if I was patient enough to hover at locked doors, and cool enough to suck in my breath and still my heartbeat while I waited for keys to turn, for my chance to glide through on their heels. My problem was how to locate Mingus in the small dystopian city of the prison, where the streets had no names-at least, no street signs.
His coordinates might be on those clipboards, or in a binder like the one the guard in the trailer had flipped through. So I began ghosting among the desks to peer over shoulders at exposed paperwork, even rifling through pages on vacant desks when I thought I could afford to. Nothing was revealed. The one column book I found was filled not with names but with timed entries in indecipherable jargon: 4:00 secure ATT/4:25 Sgt. Mortine on G-Building LFF/6:30 Inmate Legman, Douglas 86B5978 requests mattress cover per RLH Orderly, etcetera. On another desk I spotted a copy of CPO Family, trade journal of the Correctional Peace Officers Foundation, its lead feature titled simply “Outnumbered!”
Then I saw a stack of folders marked with inmate names and numbers, on a low shelf away from the desks, top pages fluttering in breeze from an open window. If invisibility was good for nothing else it had freed an old infantile delight at making things spill: with the breeze for an excuse, I splashed those folders wide over the linoleum.
“Jesus, crap,” said the Force-Be-With-You CO, who was nearest.
Flirting Woman stood at her desk to gawk at the mess.
“Clean it up, Sweeney,” Star Wars told her.
“Clean it up yourself.”
“Nah, I’m going up to the gallery. You should have filed that crap last week.”
“It’s not my crap, it’s Zaretti’s.”
“Sure, but it was you used astral projection to knock it off the shelf, just to jerk my chain. Take it upstairs already. And shut that draft, we’re all getting the flu.”
Surprising me, Sweeney did as she was told. Kneeling, her grays cinching to unveil a margin of floral-print underwear, she scooted the folders into rough order before I’d had a look at them. I battled an urge to spin the last papers from the floor in imaginary gusts, to cavort with their files and cause merry chaos in this dead zone, to show them the invisible-man’s mania I felt throbbing inside. Instead I waited while grumbling Sweeney bundled the stack into her arms. Star Wars ignored her. A tinny Mets announcer was the only peep over the ventilator’s rumble. When Sweeney took the files from the room I trailed her like a stalker, following the decorated panties, that spot of brightness.
The room Sweeney led me to, a private office full of filing cabinets behind a pebbled-glass door, also held a large wooden desk with a telephone, and a few framed citations and newspaper photos-it might be the warden’s office, if I believed in such things as wardens. I remembered my surprise, as a Brooklyn kid, discovering that the small towns in Vermont actually harbored sheriffs, when that was for me as corny and fictional an honorific as knight or caveman. A warden was a figure from a Lenny Bruce routine, or a Slick Rick rhyme. So, say, the lieutenant CO’s office. Sweeney snapped on the light and began tugging open long drawers and replacing those files in alphabetical sequence by prisoner’s name and I knew I’d blundered into what I sought-only right at the moment I wasn’t interested anymore. I hewed close to Sweeney, closer than I needed, pretending for a moment I wasn’t lost deep within a prison. Sweeney was a little stocky, but I loved her. I loved her purely for being female in this man-built, man-patrolled hell, and for letting me see London, for showing me France.
This was new for me. I’d never once explored invisibility’s perverse opportunities-never been one for strip clubs or porn, let alone window peeping. I identified with the figure of the subway frotteur about as much as I did with Bernhard Goetz. Now, here to renounce and abandon the ring and my secret powers, and alone in this upstairs office with a woman, a weird last-minute greed came to me, and I practically mounted Sweeney’s substantial thigh as I leaned close to capture a whiff of her hair’s perfume. She hummed Cher’s “Believe” to herself, and farted too, but these couldn’t deter me. I imagined whispering Be still, Sweeney, don’t scream, and let the invisible hands of the invisible man invade your mannish uniform. I had a hard-on, now inches from Sweeney’s gray polyester ass, a better one than I’d managed with dear Katha. The onset of this lust was surely one final denial that I was going to do what I was already in the middle of doing-that my lonely life and Mingus’s had come to this. It was a call to a life unlike the one I’d lived, one full of women and foolishness, one troubled by less troublesome forms of trouble. Fuck all this dire manly courage! Fuck going “inside” barbwire boundaries and ancient conundrums! Fuck prisons, let’s fuck! Sweeney, let me take you from all this.
Sweeney rolled out the R-S-T drawer and there it was: Rude, Mingus Wright, 62G7634. And that was all it took to deflate me. I might have been a moment or two from asinine calamity, from letting Sweeney feel my breath or erection against her. Now I backed to a corner and watched her complete the task of filing. Sweeney was blithe, unaware of our close call, still humming atonal disco. When she clicked off the overhead on her way out, I left it off. Enough light leaked in from the yard’s floodlamps for me to find the drawer again, and the file inside the drawer.
I sat at the desk and had a look.
The file was fifteen, maybe twenty sheets thick. The first and by far most substantial document dated to 1978-the year Mingus began at Sarah J. Hale, while I was still behind at I.S. 293-on stationery headed by Frank J. Macchiarola, Chancellor of Schools.
PSYCHOLOGICAL EVALUATION: The overall test results suggest a young man of very superior intellectual capacity whose verbal skills are considerably more effective than his practical problem-solving skills. Some limitations in attention, concentration, and awareness… It may be speculated that these limitations are the result of distracting feelings, tensions, and inner upsets. Projectives testing reveals a mildly suspicious young man who tends to view the world in a guarded manner, tends to deny his affective needs but who is then vulnerable to emotional stress-
And:
D EVELOPMENTAL: Mingus was a full-term baby. A breech delivery, he was born fighting, and knocked the instrument from the doctor’s hand-
And:
I NTERVIEW: Mingus feels he does not understand what has happened to him. He stated that as far as he can remember his problems started when he was in preschool-
And:
He has problems because of the “gang” elements in and around his school. He has little social life and finds it hard to explain what he does with his time-
And:
TEST RESULTS: Mingus entered the test situation readily. There was noted, however, a tinge of mild annoyance with the evaluation process connoting an attitude of condescending disinterest… effectiveness varies from the Low Average to the Very Superior range with the exception of a Deficient score in a rote copying task which is seen as spurious in that he appeared not to be applying his full efforts-
And:
His thinking tends toward secretive and foreboding themes (i.e., on card V a camouflaged butterfly against a tree, card III two people working over a pot, a witches’ brew, card IV a dragon with wings coming down on you)… suggestive of an apprehensive and at times suspicious view of his experience and surroundings-
And:
Mingus’s typical style and manner is likely to dispose him toward sarcasm and verbal bouts of a negativistic and oppositional posture to do combat with authority figures in a covert manner-
The jargon described a Mingus I barely recognized, sulking under the shrink’s gaze-in those same days he ebulliently commanded my world, out on Dean Street. I flipped to the end of the document, and underneath found Mingus’s “yellow sheet,” his at-a-glance arrest and conviction record. First, five or six graffiti detainments, from our high-school days. Before Ed Koch’s graffiti-specific laws, arresting officers had been reduced to euphemistic charges:
3/2/78: Criminal Mischief, Criminal Trespass
4/14/78: Criminal Mischief, Criminal Trespass
9/27/79: Criminal Mischief, Loitering, Possession of Burglar Tools
And so on. Those burglar’s tools were presumably bolt cutters, for breaking into the train yards. No mention of Mingus’s leaping, costumed, from a tree in the Walt Whitman Houses courtyard-he’d been released to Junior’s recognizance that night. His teenage jeopardy was all graffiti related. To that point Mingus had had the freedom to smoke and snort in his own home, when it was being forced onto the street that led to possession arrests.
Those would come, soon enough. First, the parade of scofflaw-charge dismissals ran over this cliff:
8/16/81: Murder 2, Handgun Possession
And its disposition:
10/23/81: Felony Conviction, Involuntary Manslaughter
The long shadow of Senior’s slaying was a six-year silence on the yellow sheet, before the resumption, in 1987, of Mingus’s arrests. By that time the street had undergone its crack revolution:
11/23/87: Criminal Possession of Controlled Substance (stimulant)
This was successively shrunk by some bored typist with a fondness for capitals:
10/3/88: CPCS (stimulant), Simple Misdem.
2/12/89: CPCS (stim.) Misdm.
6/3/89: CPCS (stim.) Misdm.
The sequence was interrupted by the now-expanded penal code:
8/8/89: Possession of Graffiti Instruments
And then:
4/5/90: Larceny 1
Time after time in those court-swamped years Mingus had been held beyond the length of his sentence while awaiting trial at Riker’s, and so been sprung on conviction, his time served. In the years between Elmira and his current bid he’d never left the city, never been exiled upstate. Elsewhere, his charges had been dismissed. Perhaps superior verbal skills -what I knew as his famous persuasiveness-had kept him afloat. Anyway, no one could claim he’d not received his warnings:
8/5/92: CPCS (stim.) Misdm.
1/30/94: CPCS (stim.) Misdm., Possession of Paraphernalia
Again it had the quality of a train wreck or cliff plummet, to see where this orderly conga line of misdemeanors was headed:
8/11/94: Felony Possession of a Stimulant with Intent to Sell, Handgun Possession
And the punch line:
Felony Conviction, 4-to-Life.
With that, Mingus’s yellow sheet had run out. It was as though the state had been nibbling him, tasting him, before committing to a mortal bite.
The rest were documents generated by his present incarceration: his initial classification, dooming him to high-security institutions, based on the previous manslaughter conviction-first Auburn, and then, after his own transfer request, here to Watertown. I’d later understand that he’d swum against a tide: inmates from the city usually pushed southward, trying to shrink the distance for their visitors.
Here too were carbons of infraction tickets Mingus had been written by the COs on the galleries-his “small beefs.” I puzzled the handwriting on a few before growing numb:
Inmate refused to come out of cell for inspection
Contrabanned materials, magic marker
Inmate cooking soup with heating element
Drawn on t-shirt
Excessive news paper
Inmate climbs on bunk, states he is Superman
Contraband materials, pipe
So there it was: the inadequate liner note to Mingus Rude’s whole existence. I memorized his block and gallery numbers and replaced the file in the drawer. Then, before resuming my spook’s jaunt through the facility, I sat at the desk and was tempted by the telephone there. Perhaps it was a lingering whiff of my encounter with Sweeney, perhaps another stalling action, but I yearned for Abby.
I’d grown so accustomed to the empty ringing, though, and the blurred click of my machine’s pick up, that it was a shock when she actually answered.
“Abby?” I said, to her hello.
“Yes.”
“You’re home.”
“Well, I’m in your apartment,” she said cautiously.
“Is that an important distinction?”
“I’m just pointing out that you’re not.” She let this sink in briefly, before asking: “Still enjoying Disneyworld?”
“Disneyland. But no. I mean, I’m not there.”
She waited. I slowly grasped that all the time I’d been ringing the apartment in search of Abby, she might have been doing the same in search of me, with the same result.
“I’m not in Anaheim,” I said. “I came back to Brooklyn.”
“Is your father sick?”
At first I was stumped. It took a moment to grasp that this was Abby’s most generous guess to explain my absence. She’d spared me her worse ones.
“No… no,” I said.
“So you’re on some pathetic Iron John quest, huh? In the woods beating on a drum?”
“Not exactly.”
“Searching for the guy with the Afro pick?”
“Maybe sort of.”
“Why are you whispering?”
“I can’t really talk now,” I said. “I actually wasn’t expecting you to pick up.” I wanted to add I’ve been calling a lot, but it was too late for that. I kept an eye on the murky light which penetrated the door’s pebbly glass, fearing patrollers in the corridor. Anyone alerted by my murmurs would have seen the phone’s cord hammocked between the handset on the desk and a receiver glommed into invisibility close at my head.
“You don’t really want to talk to me now, is that what you’re saying, Dylan?”
“I’m sorry.”
I heard her consider my silence. “You’re in a bad place, aren’t you?” Her tone was gentler, barely. “Our big talk really fucked you up.”
“I’m in a bad place,” I said, agreeing with the part that was obvious.
“I believe you.”
“Thank you,” I said quietly.
“I guess you’ll call again when you can really talk.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then. I suppose I can wait.”
“Thank you,” I said again.
“I’m staying here now,” she said. “Call anytime.” She was babying me, easing us both off the phone.
“Abby-”
“Yes?”
I wanted to say something before we were done, wanted to have something to say. But where would I begin? Instead I defaulted, to a factoid I’d been holding in reserve for her to admire, the sort of talk we’d enjoyed in better days. “You know how I was always wondering about the Four Tops, about why they didn’t ever break up or get new members, after all those decades? When every other vocal group fell apart?”
“Yeah?”
“Here’s the thing, I found out the reason, it’s kind of incredible. I forgot to tell you. The reason the Four Tops never broke up is they all go to the same synagogue. They’re Jewish. Isn’t that kind of moving?”
“That’s what you called to say? The Four Tops are Jewish?”
“Well-”
“Dylan, I thought you always said that the fact that you happened to be Jewish was, like, the least defining thing about you.”
“Well, sure. But, it’s a… a pretty amazing thing to know about the Four Tops.”
“Hmmm. I guess getting enthralled with negritude still beats self-reflection every time, huh? They must surely have a couple of those black Jewish girls hidden away in Crown Heights somewhere. Good luck on your quest, soul brother.”
With that she clicked off the line. It wasn’t the worst finish I could imagine, only a tad one-sided.
And with that, I had nothing left but my purpose here. Or take Abby’s word and call it a quest: go to Mingus.
He never wanted to be King of the A, the CC, or King of any of the IRT lines, never wanted to be King of any line at all. It wasn’t like that for Dose: counting tags, bragging, marking turf. No, you might strike deals with the crews who fought dumb wars for dominance-Dose finally joined FMD as a matter of least resistance-but this was only to free you to practice your art. The days of Mono and Lee and Super Strut-the legends who’d operated in a wide-open Gotham that needed to be taught what a tag or throw-up or top-to-bottom was, what graffiti was in the first place apart from primordial bathroom-wall gags and faggot phone numbers-were over. Gone. A million kids tagged and nobody knew the stories. The kids might figure it was always this way: eat and breathe, watch TV, join crews, do tags.
You needed a feel for the lonely art. It was the line and the language of a fuzzy-gushy flow of pigment settling into vibrant evidence against stone or steel that Dose hungered for. The line and the language, the startlement a perfect tag carved into the city’s face. Let alone a blazing top-to-bottom car rocketing through a station: holy shit! This world might be a dungeon these days, but a few voices called out to a few others. Graffiti never was a popular movement, despite a fog of pretenders. Like Jackie Wilson to Sam Cooke to Otis Redding to Barrett Rude Junior, the real stuff formed a most rarified continuum, a constellation.
Barry might not understand, but Dose knew his own art brought them, father and son, closer.
Cocaine might do the same thing-Barry seemed to think so, by the way he welcomed Dose to it.
A drug was a long study, nothing to take lightly. You might die before grasping what it had to tell you.
His father Barry and his friend Dylan-they couldn’t know how alike Dose saw them, in the end. He felt the weight of their high expectations, of Dose, and of the world. Pops and Dillinger were dreamers, it made them shy. Weak. He wished to protect them from knowledge that would crush them, even if at times it seemed that might be any knowledge at all. Stuff Mingus knew just because his eyes were open. When he abandoned Dylan to his fate at I.S. 293, it wasn’t in ignorance. The opposite: he couldn’t bear knowing the grievance Dylan was destined to absorb, couldn’t face his own inability to stem it. Certain days he wanted to ring the doorbell and roar at Abraham: Send the whiteboy to Brooklyn Friends School already! Get him clear of there!
And flying? He’d mainly just tried not to disappoint.
Black Panther, Luke Cage, Arrowman, sure. Like what Gowanus needed was a black superhero.
Dose read between the comic-book panels, where Dylan failed to, and knew they were only extras in this urban scene. A soon-to-be-canceled title.
Half the yoke artists they clocked were chumps Dose knew from around the projects anyway.
Barry and Dylan, both lingered in a romance of Dean Street. Dose saw the block for the fragile island it was, at sea in the larger neighborhood-knew it as a flying man might, aerial view. He saw Nevins and Hoyt and where they led. Nobody, apart from maybe Marilla, knew how Dose protected the block from thirsty brothers from Wyckoff Gardens and Gowanus Houses, from Robert Woolfolk’s young uncles and their like. Nobody knew how he sheltered the Dean kids, even Alberto and Lonnie, even chest-puffing Henry, from being beaten, from having skateboards and bikes ripped off countless times. Defended the brownstones from the gang on Bergen and Third, who pried basement-window bars with car jacks and slipped inside. Selling them herb, he’d overheard and petitioned against their plotting on the renovators: Ain’t nothing to steal, man! You think those white folks got cash? They a lot of hippies , man! Had a choice you think they’d settle here ?
A fair question, actually. Did the renovators think this was Park Slope? Or what?
Why should Dose have to carry them?
Abraham and Dylan was one thing, but some of those brownstoners, David Upfield, Isabel Vendle, the Roths, wouldn’t look him or Junior in the eye, seemed to begrudge their place on the street. Upfield, out there each day in his Red Sox cap and handlebar mustache, picking litter from his yard. Glaring at PRs on crates in front of Ramirez’s store, like they were ever going to quit tossing bottle caps and empty packets of plantain chips in his forsythia.
Possibly it was shifting from Philly that made him alert to the lines of force. Shedding Boy Scout uniform, football jersey, he’d had to tear down and start over. The whole middle-class assumption that was untenable here.
Junior could stay indoors and buff gold records. You, you were going to have to be able to move along the sidewalk.
There were mornings he just took off down Montague Street, strolled though the crowds of Heights kids rushing to make the bell at Packer and Saint Ann’s, to steal away and get high at the Bridge’s pilings. No teachers or school guards, no Dylan, no Arthur, no Robert. He’d be deaf to the call. No Flamboyan Crew, not today. No Savage Homicides, who wanted him to run Red Hook way, no Tomahawks, who wanted him to run Atlantic Terminals. Gone, all gone, like smoke to the Bridge’s span, while he sat in the city scrap yard among the crumpled cop-car fenders and smashed parking meters and the heap of Board of Ed typewriter carcasses, keys gnarled in a knot at the platen, as if trying to blurt some unsayable word. Gone. Junior gone, Senior gone, Mingus gone.
Senior, he was more like Dose, in a way. Though rabid like a mongoose, he had eyes.
A few times Dose trailed Senior up Nevins for his parole dates, then afterward, to the Avery Bookstore on Livingston Street, where, in the aisle between the astrology magazines and civil-service test books, Senior spent an hour pawing through a bin of mildewed sixties Playboy s, until the old Jew told him he had to buy something or get out.
One day Senior pinched his arm in the hallway of their basement apartment, said, I feel you in my footsteps, son, hope you’re learning something.
What he recalls of the Sunday of the shooting, though, is abysmal shame, wanting to hide the white boy’s eyes.
Remorse in him wasn’t what they’d said it ought to be. If he mentally rewound, it was only to bag Senior by night, entrap him with the whores on Pacific, put a silver one through that vampire heart.
Really, though, his grandfather wasn’t worth the bullet. If Dose could have somehow wielded a scalpel instead of the.45, he’d have bisected Senior from Junior. He’d meant to save his father. That would have been worth the bid he’d drawn.
Spofford.
Barry missed Dose’s arraignment and bail hearing. He’d fled the scene, it turned out, returned with Senior’s body to North Carolina, and left Dean Street behind, the apartment with its stained floor, coke dust melting into the cushions. Nobody arranges for Dose’s release, nobody’s got the money-what’s Arthur Lomb going to do, deal to put up a bond? Take up a collection on Nevins? Ask his horrified mom?
Nobody knew Dose had turned eighteen. So he was first thrown into a dormitory at Spofford Juvenile, up in the Bronx, alongside thirteen-year-old heroin runners, fourteen-year-old transvestites, child child-molesters. He met a couple of slayers, neither even pubescent. They’d killed other kids. Dose already shaved, and he’d shot an old man. Spofford’s boys treated him like an elder statesman. Ten days later somebody in Philly pulled up his birth certificate and the mistake was repaired. He was shifted to Riker’s.
Nevertheless, if he flashes to August ’81, it’s Spofford he recalls: a twelve-year-old bunkmate from Bed-Stuy who heard voices he described as “Bugs Bunny in my head,” who’d kidnapped a third-grade white girl from the yard at P.S. 38 and in the brick-strewn lots behind BAM and the LIRR terminal pulled off both their clothes and forced her to eat his feces, and who now spent nights keening for his mommy. Nobody mocked Bugs-his night song might have been on all their behalfs.
Riker’s.
His knowledge overwritten a dozen times, Dose can no longer retrieve a first impression of this place. Mastering the island is one of his life’s accomplishments, for what it’s worth. So, likely he’s purged the terror of his first glimpses by necessity. Building 6, sick with the special panic of the newly incarcerated: Dose is always already an old hand here.
There’s nothing worse than scared homies, seeking to prove they’re hard. You’d opt for a bid at any upstate prison over a spell in 6, once you saw how it worked. Upstate, men eased into sentences. Less uncertainty, fewer fresh crackheads, a general attitude of take your bid and do it, no unnecessary beefs. In Building 6, waves came in off the street. Young chumps, steeling for what they imagined they faced upstate, and making Riker’s worse than any upstate yard. Word went out: better get yourself a reputation as a hard case, straight out the gate. So they’d play razor tag in the long unpatrolled hallway to the commissary. The bubble-the COs’ glassed-in station-was so distant from the action it was humorous.
Everyone knew the adolescents were scarier than any grown man.
The fear method spares courthouse time. Every brother lands in Building 6 swearing to request a jury trial this time, vowing never to plea out again. Can’t abide another conviction on the record- Anyway, yo, I’m innocent! Then, after six months of dodging homies slicing on each other in the commissary line, your court-appointed mentions a deal. Felony parole and time served, or one-to-five upstate, and you take it. The risk of a dime-to-life, a Rockefeller bid, is too much. Surprise: you’re busted down again.
Nothing serves the system more than the system frying out of control around the edges.
Touring the island from every vantage, Dose has seen its works, like a clock pried open. When crackheads first get inside, they aim for a bunk and nobody lets them settle. Reeking, skinny, they’ll never get over, never convince anyone of anything. Older hard cases or young studs, anyone says the same thing: Damn, motherfucker, you stink!
Get with them derelicts, boy, don’t sleep here!
You’ve been the one carrying your blanket to the derelict quadrant, exiled to Riker’s own Bowery to bunk with the leather-scabbed, finger-split winos. Crushed men, eyes flickery from decades of cringing.
Next you get the whole Horatio Alger bit. Guys taking interest in their appearance for the first time-they’ve never before had an hour to themselves, never gotten clean, never went a day without drugs. Walk in howling for a hit of rock, but it’s not coming. That first lockup is a glimpse in the mirror. The older men have ways, ideologies-jailhouse lawyer, Muslim, player or pimp, or the national gangs, Latin Kings, Nietas, Bloods-and every soul’s got a rap, talking endlessly about respect. Nobody’s without a hustle or an affiliation, even as they speak of self-preservation by relying on nobody. Maintaining your space, staying out of debt. No arrears to anyone, that’s the universal principle. So naturally everyone’s trying to loan you cigarettes the first day, two-to-one interest: that’s arrears, son.
Every body’s got a layer of muscle too. Then there’s you, scrawny freak from the street, ninety pounds once you beat the cold turkey.
You’re thinking no arrears but the Riker’s barber gives you a good haircut and then whispers You owe me half a pack, brother, and you don’t even argue, you’re just grateful, because you looked so screwed up before he fixed you.
Rikers provides the first audition: What’s your hustle to be? Watches? Faggots? Drugs? Or just broker advice and cigarettes, narrate stories that don’t ever finish, Jailhouse Scheherazade?
This island’s best scam Dose stumbled into, though, his first time, between sentencing and transfer upstate. That September, with a nod to Senior’s ghost, Dose had checked Hebrew on his intake form. The CO didn’t blink, just told him when and where services were held. Dose forgot it completely until the winter holidays, when he was issued a box of kosher matzo at dinner and allowed to take it back into the dorms. Some rabbinical authority must have leaned hard to get this perk grandfathered in-whatever the source, the matzo’s an absurd windfall, each day a full box that could keep him snacking a week.
Dose’s bunkmate that December was a hard-ass he knew from the neighborhood, a cat he used to see looming around the Albee Square Mall, selling cakes and pushing pamphlets, dressed like Malcolm X. Just a bullshit Five Percenter out on the street, the dude had actually taken to the study of Islam when he got inside: every five in the morning he and his homies are in the dayroom going Allah, Allah on their knees. Now it’s Ramadan, and the motherfucker is starving, since during festival week the Muslims can’t eat before sundown. At Riker’s this means missing all three meals, sitting on your bunk while everyone else is taken out for the five o’clock dinner. So Dose slips him a box of the matzo, and then another for his friends-he’s got a supply under his bunk by now-which wins those cats over quick. He doesn’t even ask for packs in return, figuring he’ll have the Nation watching his back from now on. So a fake black Jew plays Santa Claus to a bunch of famished Muslims: Riker’s logic.
Elmira.
Each institution carries previous incarnations, like sluggish rivers with another century’s silt at their bottoms. Correctional reforms, innovations in prisonology tested and discarded, all these old uses for the same walls leave vibes. Everyone knows Sing Sing’s the juice house, home of the chair, even when capital punishment was abolished the place just has death-row radiation in its steel. Auburn and Philadelphia’s Eastern State are the birthplaces of solitary, stone tombs for driving men into self-hells-though the new supermaxes are working to make Auburn look silly.
Attica’s just bat shit, like Apocalypse Now.
Elmira was once juvenile detention, and though it’s officially phased out, they still lean to the young there, like they’re doing you a favor. More lately it’s replaced Sing Sing as the state’s reception center, where you’re tested and classified for placement elsewhere. Your educational level, plus your score on a gross aptitude test, determines what you’ll be paid the entire time you’re employed inside-forty cents, seventy cents an hour. You might be a janitor or trusty, hand out the soap on the block, for ten years, based on an hour’s scrutiny here. Then, having been scoured for hints of gang colors, you’re scattered to the far corners, away from any suspected homeboys. Men serve whole terms at Elmira, not uncommonly; nevertheless, this presumption of just passing through, combined with an air of boys’ prison, makes Elmira You-Ain’t-Seen-Nothing-Yet House. There’s an undertone of Shut up, boy, count yourself lucky you here. As though it could get any worse.
Dose spent four years inside Elmira’s walls, like turning the pockets of his youthful self inside out. As on Dean Street, he made himself an old hand, an inside-track man, overnight. He was extravagant with lore, goofy with it, telling men twice his age how to operate the system he’d hardly seen firsthand. All Dose needed to know, really, he learned his first day on Elmira’s yard, at the bench, when he found the free weights fused to the crossbar, so they couldn’t be stolen or used to crush a skull. In other words, you’d best have gotten pumped quickly at Riker’s or you wouldn’t even be able to budge the set here. Plus if you weren’t already a certain size the dudes around the bench won’t let you near it. So much for the illusion your fate was yet untold. Any forking path was further behind you on your journey, further back than you dared guess.
Career.
At Elmira Dose turned himself into a jailhouse artist. Like Riker matzos, the career was a thing he stumbled into. At a table in the dayroom, he’d been curled in an introspective shell around a series of notebook pages, sketching, in blue ballpoint, elaborately rendered designs for train cars of the mind, in blazing colors supplied only by the mind. He’d been working the hardest at a top-to-bottom with a Valentine’s theme: goopy bulging hearts speared by feathered arrows, shot by a Porky Pig cherub in Nike high-tops.
A stony-eyed brother in net muscle shirt and doo-rag, one Dose had so far assiduously avoided, suddenly lurched at his shoulder, startling him. The brother pushed a forefinger at the Valentine page.
“Yo, that shit’s nice.”
“Thanks.”
“You could do me something like that? For my girl?”
“Sure, I guess.”
“Put me and her name together. From Raf to Junebug.”
“Sure.”
“Put it around the edge of a paper, man. So I can write inside.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“How much?”
Dose shrugged.
“Four packs,” grunted Raf.
Raf was one of those who, having likely neglected or even slapped around his girl in his free life, became a romantic inside. What, apart from love talk, flowery letters, promises of marriage, did a man have to offer, if he wished to keep a woman visiting, or from making time with Jody or running away with his kid? Raf had gone through his little vocabulary of woo in a phone call or two, so gestures like the decorated stationery were increasingly urgent. Possibly he felt Junebug turning from him. Possibly her visits had slowed. He commissioned from Dose a series of ornately inscribed love cards, graffiti Hallmark.
One evening Dose had the wit to say: “This one’s free, man.”
Raf narrowed his eyes: No arrears was the message flashing in them. Don’t play me, man.
“Just don’t mail it right away, okay? Show it around to the brothers.” Raf sat at the Bloods’ table at dinner, an unapproachable zone of latent violence. “Say who did it for you.”
Raf smiled now, getting it. “Aight, Dog. I could do that f’you.”
Dose hadn’t taken long to see that the hand-drawn posters and logos and primitive porn scotch-taped to so many bunk walls were the work of just a few prisoners, and the rest of the population customers of those few. No reason not to crack this wider market-his cards for Raf were head and shoulders above the usual crap, which mostly resembled tracings from 1950s comic books. Graffiti stylings, those were what elicited the oohs and ahs.
Sure enough, a little promotional savvy brought the flood. Dose found himself doodling borders for any number of love letters-the sheer flood of woo being pointlessly pitched from behind stone walls and steel bars could make you dizzy if you dwelled on it. Every one of these retrofitted paramours was a former ho-slappin’ mack daddy, now down on one knee. Dose tried not to learn too much about who was really getting mail back, or visitors, or even their phone calls answered.
But Valentines were only a feature of the market: Dose did hand-over-fist business in cardboard frames for photographs of loved ones, and burner-style name tags on notebook sheets for personalizing bunk spaces-anyone who saw one would say Yo, I gotta get down with that, and get in line during next rec. He manufactured custom porn, homemade Tijuana Bibles featuring, for instance, Crockett and Tubbs nailing Madonna, whatever the customer wanted, the customer was always right. He drew prototypes for tattoos, which ballpoint-pen tattooists transferred to biceps and thighs and chests. Dose would see men he didn’t know in the commissary line, wearing his tags on their bodies. Call him King of Elmira. Sometimes it threw him back to Boy Scout days, as if he could get a merit badge for Tit Art or Tattoo.
A Puerto Rican kid asked Dose to personalize one of the system’s standard-issue white T-shirts. He wanted a cartoon of himself, palms turned outward in an expression of helplessness, and the slogan TEN TO LIFE?!? Sad but true, the kid wished to wear it, so Dose knocked it out, bestowed the kid big oval Felix the Cat eyes, not bad if he said so himself. The next day an older black CO named Carroll, ordinarily a stand-up dude, appeared at Dose’s cell.
“Stand out for search,” said Carroll.
“What up, man?”
“Put a sock in it and stand out.”
Carroll emerged from his bunk search with all of Dose’s art supplies, plus ten packs of coffin nails Dose had stockpiled. “I have to seize these materials and write you up,” he said. “Holding more than six packs is an infraction.”
“Dang, take the butts, but that’s my drawing shit.”
“Listen, Rude. You make this shirt?” Carroll showed Ten-to-Life’s T, which he’d had balled in his back pocket.
“What if I did?”
Carroll shook his jowly head, weary with all he’d seen in his days. “You’re risking seven years for attempted escape for altering a garment.”
Dose started over, assembling new materials on credit, and leaving all garments unaltered this time around. The second assault on his enterprise came a few weeks after he resumed, at the hands of the Astacio brothers: two older Hispanic jailhouse artists, either real brothers or not, maybe cousins. No one knew, though both were short and chubby, and both wore their hair in a net with an oily knot at the neck. The Astacios worked in a truly pathetic Coney Island-tattoo style, their lettering of any slogans or monikers as crude as a woodcut. Without troubling to notice, Dose had been suffocating their livelihood, so the brothers began stepping up on him, in the food line, in the commissary line, on the yard. They’d growl animalistically, something about quit stealing their customers-as if Dose was expected to screen requests: You don’t happen to be clientele of the esteemed Astacios?, some shit like that. Dose only pretended not to understand, like they were speaking Spanish. Then Ramon Astacio stepped up on him at a urinal, in an abruptly vacated F-gallery shower.
Ramon hemmed in near to Dose, now seeming not to have the use of language at all, only body English. He opened his smile and showed why: he was twirling a razor blade in his mouth, flipping it with his tongue like a cheerleader knuckling a baton.
Dose flipped, a year’s accumulated fear brimming in him, the first rage he’d opened himself to feel since expelling the bullet in Senior’s direction. He threw an elbow and hung Ramon on the jaw, causing him to bite on the ritually displayed blade. The move was triumphant and a mistake. As in a yoking, there were rules to follow, an art of encounters. Threat had a rhetoric. Ramon might have a mouthful of his own blood, but Dose had surrendered the rudder of the moment.
A man didn’t just hit another man unless he could go all the way and kill him, and this was not the place Dose had staked out for himself.
Now he rushed from the shower, past Noel, the other brother, sentry at the door.
At dinner that night Ramon was absent and the word buzzing through the hall was he was getting his mouth sewn. Noel sat at the Nietas’ table and he and some of the Nietas were offering heavy glares. Dose knew he would have to move eventually and saw no margin in waiting, so he went right at the unthinkable, and approached the Bloods’ table. Not directly to Raf, but to the place where King Blood sat. It took gulping back his heartbeat to do it.
“I want to apologize for disturbing your meal,” he told King Blood. “But I’ve got trouble and I have to ask if I could speak to Raf.”
King Blood didn’t look from his tray, as if they were all working from a script too familiar to bother dramatizing.
“This a question of mercy, or you looking to do business?”
“Business,” said Dose.
“Go ahead,” said King Blood, only after an appreciable pause, time enough for any pair of eyes in the room to see it was Dose who’d come to them and been made to wait trembling for an answer.
So it was that Raf became Dose’s protector and broker, taking fifty percent out of any payment, and stockpiling a certain vein of big-titted poster work for private dispersal among the Bloods network. In an unseen deal some top-level Blood had a word with some top-level Nieta and the Astacios melted away. The brothers only shot Dose dartlike glances when they were certain no one saw, Ramon salaciously licking his teeth with his scarred tongue, wanting Dose to see the badge he’d awarded and consider its implications.
But Raf was big and strong, and devoted, and so Dose’s safety at Elmira was secured. Dose was one of his several mules; the others dealt “trees”-tight-rolled cheeba sticks, cut with mentholated tobacco to stretch the ingredient-and he would slip Dose a fistful of these once in a while, a small perk. Dose had arrived at a policy of no dope inside, witnessing the rapid spiral of arrears this led to, but getting stoned on the gratis trees was a safe exception. Raf also turned out not to be so faithful to the recipient of his incessant Valentines that he didn’t want his dick sucked a couple of times, and then to suck Dose’s in return once they trusted one another. The Bloods had a broom closet permanently bought for more or less this exact purpose. Dose learned to admire how Raf could want to stretch a suckjob out to defeat time, like relishing a shaggy-dog story. If he even came to crave it a little, in both directions, find himself as entranced by the tensing in Raf’s lifter’s thighs as he was by the avidity of a mouth, that was fine, neither here nor there, not particularly telling. If there was one thing Dose had learned from his father-the Love Man resting on his laurels, lazily taking what came to the house, Horatio’s women or, on occasion, Horatio-it was that it wasn’t a big deal to suck a little dick now and then, so long as nobody girled you out. That had been Dose’s understanding the day Barrett Rude Junior walked in on his son with Dylan Ebdus: there were more things under the sun than what cats might get up to with one another if there were no women on the scene.
Not that Dose spent a lot of time thinking of Dean Street, or of the days before Senior had come to the house, with Barry still in full polymorphous splendor, before things got paranoiac and eerie all over, in the basement and upstairs and out on the street. In those days when it still seemed Barry might resume making music, might fall in with that crowd of funk superheroes.
The four-track the secret machine under the floorboards, not the.45.
In that brief margin between renouncing his Boy Scout uniform and taking up with FMD and Robert Woolfolk, and spurning Dylan Ebdus, or being spurned by him, whichever it was, Dose could still be enticed by the simplest games, stoopball, wallball, skully, boosting skin mags from the newsstand on the triangle at Flatbush and Atlantic, committing each syllable of Sugarhill Gang’s “Eighth Wonder” or Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks” to subvocal memory.
Or lie in a breeze from the backyard window and page through The Inhumans, waiting for their mute leader Black Bolt to open his mouth and bring it all crumbling down, with one shattering doomsday utterance: the bridge, the towers, the schools, all the public concrete Mono and Lee and Dose had tagged with spray paint for future demolition.
When Black Bolt at last sang it would level the city and there’d be only the subway running underneath through its theorem of tunnels, the one true neighborhood.
Dose could lie on his bedspread in the rotten-ailanthus breeze and dream it for hours.
Or, alternately, rush onto the street on the broilingest of days to join in directing, with a tin can open at both ends, a stream from a wrenched hydrant through the window of a passing car. Driver hectically rolling it if he saw what was in store, never fast enough.
But the stories you told yourself-which you pretended to recall as if they’d happened every afternoon of an infinite summer-were really a pocketful of days distorted into legend, another jailhouse exaggeration, like the dimensions of those ballpoint-crosshatched tits or of the purported mountains of blow you once used to enjoy, or how you’d bellowed an avenger’s roar when you squeezed the trigger of a pistol you’d actually brandished in self-pissing terror. How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end.
As for flying, Dose never even glanced at the sky. Flying was a summer within a summer, a whim. So why think of it at all?
In the years between Elmira and Watertown Dose’s life on the street was a shadow, a pale dream between bids.
One release blurred into another, a Twilight Zone recurrence of being dropped by the Riker’s shuttle at Queensboro Plaza. There the bus stopped under the el tracks and the driver doled out subway tokens, one per man, the system’s laconic parting gift. Up on the platform, Dose would wait in the middle of a gaggle of freaked-out felons, each pretending not to be in the company of the others, each with panic in their eyes. The releasees chewed gum frantically, spit, tugged too-tight street clothes over new biceps and pecs, every last one of them as conspicuously ill-armored for this world as lobsters loosed in an open field.
From Queensboro Plaza Dose made his way back. He’d ride the 7 to Grand Central and change for an express to Nevins if he was feeling bold, hoping to see some fresh top-to-bottom work on the trains, hoping to run into someone he knew. On more sheepish days he’d walk the two blocks to Queens Plaza instead, for the G’s slog through Greenpoint, Bed-Stuy, Fort Greene, thirteen subway stops nobody used, an hour in the tunnels to calm your thoughts.
Sing a song of returning: Ya miss me, sucker? Well I’m back!
Back in the New York groove, sure.
On discharge from Elmira Dose aimed, by prearrangement, for Arthur Lomb’s crib on Smith Street. Barry had rented the basement rooms; no question of a homecoming there. His first season of freedom Dose worked for a hippie contractor named Glenray Schurz, replacing window frames in the rotting brownstones, complicit in renovation, making Boerum Hill of Gowanus. Those early days Dose visited Barry at lunchtimes, still covered with plaster dust, his particle mask around his neck. He’d stop in with a bag of sandwiches from Buggy’s, the hot mustard Barry used to adore. Only now Barry never ate a bite. Dose sat on the couch with him, trying to know his father, but they’d hardly talk. Just watch TV, Phil Donahue, Mission Impossible, or Sunday afternoons sit and groan at the Jets blowing another tackle.
Outside the block was dead, no kids at all.
Henry every once in a while saying yo in a suit and tie.
Barry putting the sandwich in the refrigerator and twisting the cap off his malt-liquor lunch while the fridge door was open.
He’d see his father on the street too, on Atlantic, at the Times Plaza Hotel. There Dose would choose not to be seen, just witness, as Barry hung at the entrance waiting for a deal to unfold.
Later, when Dose had returned inside and been released again, his cycling through Riker’s under way, crackhead days birthing crackhead months birthing crackhead years, years spent on a mission, Arthur Lomb grew too uptight to offer his couch. Arthur would spot Dose coming a mile off on the street and pull his wallet out, stuff a five-spot into his palm for their handclasp when they collided, pity money Dose had become too unproud to refuse. Those days, dropped at Queens Plaza, Dose wouldn’t head back to Gowanus, not to Brooklyn at all. He’d shortcut to Manhattan, Washington Square, seeking cats he recognized, or word of a club or a private affair, and by after-hours be crashing with some woman desperate enough to join his desperate ride, foolish enough not to see where it went: a trail of her pawned possessions, like bread crumbs, pointing to the day of his next arrest.
The song of returning blurred into a mumble, all you recalled were a few phrases from the chorus: I ain’t never going in the joint again, damn straight!
Girl, you like to party?
Later still, near the finish, before he’d found his way to Lady’s apartment in the Gowanus Houses, Dose would begin his time of freedom as he knew it was fated to end: nights at the disused public swimming pool on Thompson Street. There he’d hide and sleep beneath the pool’s platform, in a crawl space through a curled-aside section of Cyclone fence, one no derelicts had claimed, likely because John Gotti’s social club was just up the block.
Nothing but a crackhead and a booster, then. Just boosting day and night, harder work than anyone knew, racking CDs, racking clothes, racking belts and shoes and small electronics, until there weren’t any stores left open to boost from. Then find an all-night restaurant and try to steal tips off the counter.
Living dawn to dusk, pawn to pipe.
There was only one rescue possible in those years, and that was arrest. Dose came to yearn for it like a changing of seasons, his chance to quit starving in plain sight. He’d smoke himself to ninety pounds, then eighty, become a scarecrow man sleeping in gutters, and begin to beg for recapture: God’s sake, throw me in Riker’s before I die!
Invisible in a throng of invisible men, Dose had to step out to get what he needed. Solicit an undercover, or work a routine, the same spot every day, a marathon in the alley behind Tower Records or the doorway of OK Harris Gallery, until someone finally requested the police buff this broken human signature from the urban façade.
Wherever you wandered in Dinkins’s boroughs, then Giuliani’s, this archipelago city was always changed after your intervals on Riker’s, the exile island.
Fuck did the graffiti go?
What was happening when a motherfucker can’t even light up a joint on Eighth Street?
Not to call yourself a zombie. But you did stalk an unreal city.
Windsor Weather Stripping.
It was Arthur who set Dose up with Glenray Schurz, brought Dose around to the hippie commune on Pacific, one of the last left in the neighborhood now. Schurz was bearded, pinwheel-eyed, but in overalls and no shirt showed only gristle and vein, a vegetarian strongman. Schurz had been a furniture builder, Utopian Woodstock style. Then, coming to Brooklyn, a cabinetmaker, taking kitchen jobs in the neighboring brownstones. Only it was too much hassle finally, the ceaseless answering to housewives’ magazine fantasies. Schurz hit on a simpler life: applying Windsor Weather Stripping to the air-leaky sashes of the decaying row-house windows, the double-hung frames which dated to the 1860s and 1880s-work as repetitive as changing tires, but the renovators were at his mercy. The shade of Isabel Vendle could lure them to the neighborhood, beguile them into perilous mortgages, but no Vendleghost nor anybody else would be there to soothe them after the first winter’s Brooklyn Union Gas bills came in: Yikes! Then they’d sheepishly ask around and be told: Windsor Weather Stripping. There’s this carpenter guy on Pacific who’ll lay it in, forty dollars a window plus materials, pays for itself in six months. He’s a bit seedy and a bit creepy but -
So Dose became Schurz’s assistant. Twice a week they’d gather a load at the mom-and-pop factory down Fourth Avenue that manufactured the zinc linings. Quick run next to Brook Lumber for fresh bullnose molding to replace the bad strips they’d surely find on the job. Then in, often under the flitty eyes of a woman alone at the house, her husband having struck the deal-she likely thinking Did he have to bring an ahem? Should I hide my purse? -to set up their little industrial operation. First unhang the window, lay sash weights and pulleys to one side. Then cut zinc to fit the frame. Router grooves in top and bottom sashes. Line zinc into the header and the sill while the sashes were free. Then the tricky part, which if a renovator attempted himself always proved their dependence on Schurz’s expertise: rehanging those ancient sash weights into the air pockets concealed at each side of the frame, so the windows were balanced on their pulleys. Pity the soul who let a weight slip from his fingers to thud to the bottom of the pocket. They’d have to demolish a molding to fish it free again.
Oriented correctly, the two sashes sealed, the zinc airtight at the seam. On a good day they’d get through eight frames. Dose detected Schurz’s secret satisfaction at the job well done, though Schurz did nothing but sneer at the work as corrupt and at those who’d hired him as bourgeois pigs.
Glenray’s communal housemates were ceding their neighborhood to the yuppies as much as the blacks and PRs. In a gentrification some white people-say Glenray, or Abraham Ebdus, or Arthur’s mom-might only bridge to another kind. Some of the latter of whom were not above niggerfying the former.
Sometimes one of their clientele recognized Dose and just noted it with their eyebrows. Life’s eternal lesson: people return in new guises.
You learned it and taught it at the same time.
One day Dose passed Abraham Ebdus on the street and looked away.
On a few occasions, busting through hundred-year-old plaster and lattice Glenray and Dose discovered stashes of browned newspapers left by long-dead laborers, baseball scores and ship sinkings from the century’s start. Once they found a sealed bottle of brandy tucked deep in a wall, its label so dark it was only readable like a photographic negative. On their break they sat on the building’s stoop and swapped the dust-shouldered bottle like it was Night Train. The stuff was sweet and thick and moldy, mustified by time.
Elsewhere they’d find just pencil marks, names and dates left by the workers who preceded them, Jno. Willson 2.16.09. Then Dose would take Glenray’s carpenter’s pencil and tag Dose 1987, a little enigma to send down history’s line before they sealed the wall.
On other breaks Dose and Glenray climbed fire escapes to rooftops, and smoked the commune’s petty-cash sinsemilla. They’d gaze out past Wyckoff Gardens, past the F-train platform where it camelbacked over the canal, gaze out toward Coney and the alleged ocean. Dose never spoke of knowing the scheme of streets from the air.
Glenray said: “That Ulano factory is giving us all testicle cancer. If someday it burns down in the dead of night you’ll know it was me.”
Glenray said: “I’d like to build a yurt on top of the Brooklyn House of Detention.”
Glenray said: “Your old man opened for the Stones? Your old man’s a fucking god, man.”
Glenray said: “Once I was on mescaline and I whacked off into a liverwurst sandwich, just because I read about it in a book.”
And one day Glenray said: “It’s weird, I’ve got a million connections for brown leafy drugs but none at all for white powdery drugs, which I am totally in the mood for right now. Any chance you could help me with that, Mingus?”
On a mission.
All he ever got out of recovery-Alcoholics Anonymous, group therapy at Riker’s-was a name for what it felt like when he was on the street and pushing toward the next high: Dose was on a mission. The term encompassed the thousand-and-one things he’d find himself doing, his crafty diversity of scuffles and scams, scalping tickets at the Garden, racking art books at St. Marks and shifting them at the Strand, pawning some girl’s hair dryer or clock, or just slumping around Washington Square watching for some dealer he knew enough to persuade to allow him to shift some rock in return for a rock commission. These might seem to be many activities but were all only one thing, Dose on a mission: intent, monomaniacal, autistic in craving.
His weirdest brush with recovery wasn’t either in the city or inside, but in Hudson, a dying industrial river town upstate, at a program called NewGap. One January night he’d taken refuge from subzero in a city shelter where a social-services worker was scouting. Dose began talking with her for the cup of coffee, and found himself inking block letters on a form. Next thing he knew he was whisked on a bus to the crumbling-brick facility, a refitted TB asylum. The NewGap regimen consisted of some unholy blend of Gordon Liddy fascism and Werner Erhard brainwash, its inductees reconfigured at every level of the social self in order to break self-loathing habituation. Dose and the other “freshmen” were denied the use of speech without written permission, through an elaborate system of note-scribbling and hand-raising, a vast twenty-four-seven parlor game with drill sergeants barking fury at the slightest mistake.
Dose played the game for two weeks. The day he went AWOL he found his way to Hudson’s crackhouse within an hour of hitting the streets, radar working fine after building up his strength on NewGap meals. Invariably, those years, any town had its own microcosmic crackidemic: dealers, whores, every element that the rest of the country righteously decried as big-city symptoms were right up their armpit anywhere you troubled to look.
Indeed, it was in Hudson where Dose met with what he’d always consider his all-time-low glimpse of degradation. In the city proper it was not unknown to hear a dealer humiliate a desperate crackhead, one pleading for free rock: Yo, you want a rock you could suck my dick for it. If it was a cracked-out woman, the dealer might or might not be for real; if it was a man, it was for the laugh, to see the flicker of shame in the human skeleton before giving the charity or kicking him out. Nevertheless, however much debasement might be the real language of the encounter, garbing it in sex kept the players in that drama above a certain threshold, in the realm of greed, desire, human things. Dose understood this when he saw what he saw in Hudson: how much lower one human being could wish to take another.
“You need a rock, man?” the Hudson dealer had told the crackhead in question. “See that roach over there?”
Dose saw it, bigger than a roach in fact. A doleful waterbug, shining yellow-brown under a shattered sink. Dose saw the begging crackhead see it too.
“Eat that bug, I give it to you.”
The skeleton had reached for the waterbug, nabbed it, gulped. And been given his hit, to the cackling enjoyment of the dealer and others. Dose only turned his eye, bewildered at what had so suddenly been flayed from all their souls. They were each dead there in that paint-peeling room, and only Dose knew.
When Hudson cops caught Dose in a sweep they didn’t arrest him, only put him on a Greyhound back to the city. A month or two later, after his next city arrest, Dose sat on a Riker’s bunk and told the Hudson story. Incredibly, one of his listeners offered triangulation. They’d seen the same once, the eat-a-bug shtick, on a jaunt down in Florida.
All agreed: such grim hick shit would never go over here. New Yorkers had too much self-respect for that.
Lady’s.
That night in June in Barry’s front room was the first and only time Dose ever saw Lady out of her own crib. You’d be stretching to call it a party: Dose and his father, plus Horatio, Lady, and some skinny crabby other girl who struggled to keep her head up.
Dose had full-circled with Barry, to sharing the pipe.
If crackheads were an extended family, as hateful with one another as true relations, why exclude his father?
Smoke scribbled in the air between them, like exhausted language, Senior’s unmentioned name etched in fume.
Once in a blue moon Dose brushed dust off an album jacket and placed the tonearm over a groove Barry hadn’t aired in ten years-Esther Phillips, Donny Hathaway-treasures moldering in disuse. The evening when Dose met her, though, there in the half-light of Barrett Rude Junior’s parlor sarcophagus, Lady had already been at the old vinyl and made a selection- Curtis Live, “Stare and Stare,” “Stone Junkie,” Mayfield laughing in falsetto at his drummer’s stuttering breaks.
Lady featured the hugest capacity Dose had seen. He never knew anyone could smoke more rock than him, let alone a woman. She partied three, four days in a row, hardly nodded, and never more so than that first time, beginning after Barry kicked them out, four in the morning. Horatio and the floppy girl went up Nevins to the IRT, and Lady led Dose to her crib in the Gowanus Houses, a public housing apartment turned crack den.
Her true name was Veronica Worrell, though he never heard it from her lips. She offered what everyone called her: Lady. The name encoded her formal airs, a tinge of severity. She was nobody’s girl and nobody’s mother, but everyone’s Lady, well known as such.
If walking down Dean with her that night Dose might have mistaken what kind of pickup she’d made, what it was Lady had spotted in his eyes, seeing her crib dispelled any uncertainty. Her door opened to the Hoyt Street face of the projects, in sight of traffic, cars rolling by with the booming systems, backbeat rattling windows, the cops cruising too, ominously hushed in their Giuliani Task Force vans. Lady kept a lookout, a crackhead schooled in two hand signals, all they could keep track of: fist for a white man, or an unfamiliar black, a maybe-cop, open hand for a recognized customer or any obvious pipehead, too young or skeletal to be a threat.
He didn’t know it but Dose had come in for his last mission, homing like a pigeon.
The place was a factory geared for one purpose, support of Lady’s own habit. The volume of enterprise out of a three-bedroom public unit was staggering, a feat to make Henry Ford or Andy Warhol envious. Any space was rentable, not only bedrooms to girls for turning tricks, kitchen to dealers cutting up their shit, but closets for stashing quantities in transit, corridors and couches for slumping against. You might not sleep anymore-many didn’t. Dose couldn’t recall authentic sleep by the end of two months at Lady’s. But if you didn’t sleep you nodded, if you didn’t nod you rested with your eyes open. At Lady’s, you paid to rest.
Dose paid the only way he could, by bringing people back to Lady’s crib. If they bought product he was settling his debt. This was Lady’s specialty, her adding-machine brain. Even as she smoked more than he thought a human body could tolerate, Dose never knew her to drop a digit in her calculations. She’d tell him when he was ahead enough to earn a rock. Or more, ahead enough to be allowed to pitch some rock himself. He remade himself as an entrepreneur four or five times in his months under Lady, taking vials of product onto Hoyt or up to Fulton, to the Albee Square Mall, or just into the courtyard in the project’s interior. Then he’d fail, smoke it all, not be able to afford another vial, and when he’d nod he’d be in debt for the extent of wall he took up. It was a tough system, but fair. Nothing could be held against Lady, she was so obviously looking out for her people, the pipeheads. Nobody stole your shoes or your clothes when you closed your eyes at Lady’s.
This was the true love affair, Dose misunderstood no longer. Lady saw into his soul and found an appetite for rock there, all the way down to the bottom.
That was his last summer, a long nod against her corridor wall. And smoking until by arrest he was thinner than he’d ever been, maybe seventy pounds light.
Let’s get small, everybody get small.
That same June, on Smith Street, one measly block away, Sans Famille, the first of the area’s upscale French restaurants, opened its doors. The bistro drew a star from the Times, the first tick of Smith’s gentrification time bomb, precursor to the cafés and boutiques which would leverage out botanicas and social clubs, precursor to Arthur Lomb’s counterfeit Berlin.
Sans Famille’s busboys and dishwashers weren’t unwitting of the action on Hoyt. More than a few made their way to Lady’s threshold on their city-regulated ten-minute breaks.
Once he proved himself untrustworthy for taking vials on the street, Dose accepted his obvious fate, the slot for which Lady might have pegged him the moment they met. He ran her door. Not the lookout window, he’d not plummeted to that ignoramus level. He was a dealer still, just one trusted to go no farther than his hand could reach through the security-chained door. Money in and product out, Dose touched it all as it passed and kept barely anything.
He unchained the door for the cops when they came. They came just in time. He was going to die if he kept Lady’s pace.
The gun was nobody’s in particular, hidden in a drawer, but it stuck to him. Dose had to be philosophical. It was in the nature of an arrest situation that a floating gun attached to the individual bearing a manslaughter rap.
He’d been six months at Riker’s and was up to a hundred and thirty pounds when he pled out and was moved upstate to Auburn, then Watertown.
Auburn.
His first tour, Dose had been prodigal, an advance man for a generation destined inside. Now it wasn’t just Riker’s which brimmed with faces from the neighborhood or the yards. It was the big upstate houses like Auburn, too, as though the system was inadvertently reassembling the city and its factions here, 1977 trapped in the amber of incarceration. Writers were reunited with their crews, none having seen each other since back in the day, since they’d spun from teenage affiliations into lives more burdened and serious. Yet those adult lives seemed stripped away by their failure. What remained were thirty-year-old teenagers joshing in prison: Ho, shit, man, it’s you! This my boy Pietro, from DMD! Or: Damn, I used to see your shit on the 6 line, you were with Rolling Thunder Crew, right?
Lines of enmity dissolved. Any connection was a good one, here in the woods. Dose met a couple of boys from a once-upon-a-time-terrifying Coney Island gang. Some summer ago, Dose and two others from FMD had gotten on the Coney crew’s bad side by making a dumb mistake: they’d tagged inside a bunch of apparently clean D-train cars in a yard’s dim moonlight, using black ink from heavy-flowing fat mops. When the trains ran the next day, Dose and his mates saw with horror what moonlight hadn’t revealed: the D-train interiors had already been covered with the Coney Island crew’s clunky tags in pink ink. Black now overlapped the pink everywhere. How to explain the pink hadn’t even been visible? Impossible. They thought Dose had deliberately backgrounded them. Dose spent that summer watching over his shoulder for the Coney gang, marked as prey.
Now it was all hunky-dory, good for a laugh. Dose was one of the famous names, so the Coney crew recalled the incident as evidence they’d once been significant writers.
Dose was ambulatory history, and brothers wished to claim some for themselves.
“Yo, Dog, you remember me? I wrote Kansur 82, you used to background me all the time.”
“Sure, sure, I remember you,” Dose would say, if he was in a generous mood.
Other times he’d withhold the glory of being linked to his name, just to see their frustration: “Why would I trouble to background you, blood? What was you to me?”
“I was a toy, I know-you was right to go over my tags.”
Dose would deny it, tormenting their minds: “You claiming you got up somewhere before me?”
“You used to go over me!” the younger writer would insist.
“Nah, man. You used to go under me.”
Surgery.
Of course it would be Horatio, clownier than ever, who turned up in Auburn’s visitor’s room talking around the subject, not saying what he meant. Barry was illing-well, Dose knew that already. No, truly illing, like in the Long Island College emergency room a couple of times. His father needed Dose now, in some way Horatio wouldn’t explain. Dose agreed without understanding what he’d agreed to.
A week later he was escorted to Auburn’s infirmary for consultation with a surgeon who acted like Doolittle among the savages, brow furrowed in reproach even as he spoke at moron rpm. Did Dose grasp what he was offering? Yes, sure, though he hadn’t until then. There was no certainty it would work, Doolittle warned. Tests were required, to check the match. His and his father’s candidacy had to be examined. Dose, old hand in passivity by now, submitted to three weeks of fluid donations, spinal, bile, and shit. The results: Dose was a hundredth-percentile shoe-in to rescue his father’s putrefying blood.
Doolittle, chafing at being instrument of a back-channel exception, prison strings pulled by Andre Deehorn and others in the Philly scene, advised Dose against the procedure. The kidney could fail within five to ten years-that was a successful outcome.
Dose would have given heart, or hands, or eyes.
Recovery took six days in Albany Presbyterian Hospital. Dose and his father lay in side-by-side narcotic slumber, with a holstered guard in the room patently thrilled with the assignment, full of Playboy dreams of nurses.
The day before he was returned inside, with both Dose and Barry up and running, having demonstrated renal function to Doolittle’s satisfaction, the four of them-son and father in cotton pajamas, and Horatio, and the guard-escaped through fire doors to the hospital’s roof.
There they smoked a joint Horatio’d smuggled in, conducting their own tests on that new kidney-what else was it for?
There, as they squinted in the glare off Albany’s toy skyline, his father’s fund of disappointment was proven bottomless. Barry could help himself to Dose’s extra kidney and still not meet his eyes.
When he learned how famous the organ donation made him at Auburn, Dose wanted no part of it, and requested the transfer to Watertown, to finish his bid in anonymous peace.
Watertown.
Dose shed it all. No jailhouse artistry, he’d left that behind years back-a million guys could execute the graffiti style now. He had no illusions about stockpiling cigarettes. Old-school eminence held nothing he wanted, it signified zip to the time he had to do, played no real factor in the endurance of the mind. Claiming this or that alliance outside- Yo, I know that dude, younger brother of Fitty Cents, that nigger’s King of Wyckoff Gardens, he gonna set me up when I’m sprung -looked thinner every day. Duck ensnarements and arrears at any level, this was Dose’s campaign. Beguiling COs was of use only if you wanted something a CO could give you. They could give you nothing. A protector like Raf mattered only until you understood there was nothing to protect.
Invisibility, intangibility, Teflon eyes.
Yet he had one last error of affiliation in him.
Robert Woolfolk was the same hectic proposition he’d ever been, only stretched and torn by fifteen years more on the street and inside. Gold-toothed, arm-crook scarred from vein hunts, one ear nipped, Robert staggered on, decades beyond adventures that ought to have been his finish if he hadn’t had so many lives, like Wile E. Coyote still climbing out of the crater and dusting himself off, rubbing his hands and grinning in conspiratorial glee. You wanted to put the man to bed.
Dean Street had come to Watertown, like a radio signal wandering through space, a hit song from 1976 become sole sign of life in the galaxy.
So Dose took him under his wing, as though he had one.
Robert Woolfolk was dealing trees within a few weeks of appearing at Watertown, against Dose’s advice. If you wished to smoke, smoke. Be a customer, laying low. Nope: Woolfolk began dealing two-for-ones, betting against guys’ commissary checks coming in on time, juggling debt. Then slicing trees open and stretching them with stale tobacco. This was tolerable, a line Dose had seen men walk for years, a line he’d walked a few times himself, merely to keep himself amused at Riker’s.
Then Robert found the market in spitback sacks, and lost his interest in trees.
A spitback sack was a parcel of liquid drugs. Methadone, smuggled from the dispensary by signed-in junkies, by the method of concealing a few fingers of a Saran Wrap glove in the throat or the cheek to catch the spitback. This art, of pretending to swallow yet retaining the drug in the slippery sack, wasn’t simple. Not every junkie who wished to mule could be trained into it. Those few were a commodity. A finger of ninety-percent methadone sold for six packs of smokes. This was a trade all contained inside the walls, no outside connection necessary, no dependence on the gangs.
Who you stole your mules from-now that involved a degree of difficulty apparently beyond Robert Woolfolk’s finesse.
The day the Latin Kings stepped up on Dose in the yard he felt the charge in the air a minute before it happened. He’d become a barometric instrument of a prison’s weather without even noticing. Those bumping on either side against him were men he’d ignored and been ignored by for years, but the new intimacy was undeniable, three years of flinched glances gone up in smoke.
It was the old story, weary beyond telling, Robert in arrears on all sides, and Dose to answer for it, and it all went down as scripted since One Million B. C.
Except for one thing.
That one day, Dylan Ebdus came and offered a ring.
I asked Mingus the time: a quarter to one. I’d been seated on the gallery floor for five hours, my shoulder wedged against a thin lip of wall between Mingus’s cell and the next, my temple close at the bars, and his close beside mine, so we could talk. I felt our ears graze once or twice. I’d shown myself just once, slipping the ring loose and then vanishing again, when I explained how I’d snuck in and found him. We conversed in low murmurs, which drowned in the cavernous block’s slurred surf of illegal radios, inmate talk, ventilation. As the block dimmed to a murmur itself, we whispered.
In the last hours it was Mingus who spoke. I listened, and tried not to drown along with our talk. I’d never been invisible for so many hours, for one thing. Seated on the chill concrete, I felt a recurrence of my childhood micropsia, a night terror I thought I’d left behind at age eleven or twelve, in my bedroom on Dean Street: the sensation that my body was reduced to speck size in a universe pounding with gravitational force, a void crushing against me on all sides. The ailanthus branches brushing the back windows had seemed to me then like the spiraled arms of distant galaxies. Later, in the years after I retired the ring, I’d blamed my inability to fly from a rooftop, my preference to look away from the sky, on the micropsia hallucinations. Now they’d returned to undermine my heroism in the prison. My heroism was used up. I had only enough left to flee the place, and fling Aaron Doily’s curse once and for all into the brush at the side of the highway, then reclaim my rental car and vanish gratefully into the ordinary angst I’d earned as a grown-up Californian. I was an author of liner notes, an inadequate boyfriend. How could I have thrown over these attainments for this chimera of rescue? All I felt was the submarine pressure of the room, the special claustrophobia of a cathedral vault parceled into rat cages. The room had climate, a muggy stink of curdled human years. After lights-out, a planetarium show of cigarette ends pulsed on the galleries above and around us, reproachful failing stars. Go, they said.
I suppose I was trying not to drown, too, in the beauty of Mingus’s voice, as it reeled through jivish yarn spinning to the brokenest kind of confession, the kind which didn’t know it was broken at all. Mingus had borne his own life a hundred or a million moments longer than I could bear to. I tried not to drown in the consolation and guilt of having him back and being an instant from losing him again, of being about to steal invisibly away.
The ring was useless to him. So Mingus wished me to understand. He explained how he was doing good time, hadn’t been written up in years, despite Robert’s tangling with the Latin Kings. He’d felt a prospect of mercy in his last review, and might be near release, in a year, two. Perhaps the kidney had made an impression on the board. Anyhow, the life of an escapee and permanent fugitive, visible or not, held no allure.
When Mingus made me know what he wanted, it felt that he’d had it in mind from the start, that he’d begun bringing me along ten hours earlier in the visitor’s room. I’d offered a way to spare Robert Woolfolk falling into the Kings’ hands. It wasn’t a shoe I’d heard mentioned in the offices, but a SHU -a special housing unit, protective custody for those either threatening the safety of the regular population, or needing protection from it. There our homeboy from Gowanus was celled. I’d take the ring to him-Mingus would tell me how to find my way there, and where guards could be found napping on cots, with stealable keys. Like hitting a broomstick home run, Mingus knew I could do it. Mingus knew I would.
I had a few questions before I left him. Before I decided whether or not to fail him-I had scant interest in the SHU and Robert Woolfolk. Either way, I was nearly done here, the Proust’s madeleine of “Play That Funky Music” eaten. I had just crumbs to savor.
“Mingus,” I said, “did you have any idea how often I was getting yoked?”
“You mean brothers putting you in a headlock?”
It was a point of clarification, not mockery. He didn’t mean to shame me by contrasting my complaint with his withheld lamentations. He hadn’t asked for pity, not once. I’d shamed myself, but I still wanted an answer.
“Putting me in a headlock and frisking me for money,” I said. “Sometimes practically every day for the three years I was at I.S. 293. Calling me a whiteboy.”
“Them niggers took me off a few times too.” He took my inquiry more seriously than I probably deserved. “Dudes from Gowanus Houses, Whitman, Atlantic Terminals, man, they were always robbing, grubbing, didn’t know any different. At Manhattan clubs everybody’d say look out for them crazy Brooklyn homeboys, those motherfuckers are just stick-up kids, always waving a piece.”
Fair enough. I’d been a crash-test dummy for real crime, nothing personal.
“Wasn’t so much a black-white thing,” Mingus went on. “Those motherfuckers were just thirsty people.”
Thirsty people. That about said it. Now I was meant to go to the thirstiest-thirsty for my bicycle, thirsty for my terror-and free him from his cell.
“Mingus?”
“Yeah?” I heard in his voice that he was as tired as I was. He’d given me my task, now I should go. He’d been talking all night, trying not to disappoint, working to shelter my ludicrous expectations, to make something of my incursion here that we could both live with. He’d come this far, to Watertown, out of easy visiting range of the city, in order to stop carrying Barry, Arthur, anyone else. How far should he have to carry me tonight?
“Did you ever yoke a whiteboy?”
He dredged his last reply from some weary place, yet I caught a note of puzzlement, in his tone, at what he found. “Yeah,” he said. “Once. I mean, I didn’t throw a headlock. Nobody had to.”
“How?”
“Me and some homies from Terminals wanted to score some cheeba. Brother said we should go up to Montague and take money off some Packer boys or whatnot. We cornered a couple of kids with braces, on the Promenade, broad daylight. I hung in the background, just looking ill while them other brothers checked their pockets. But I knew I was doing what it took.”
“Which was-what?”
“What I said. I went to the Heights, I made the mean face.” He pressed close to the bars, and the dim gallery light, pruned his chin and brow for demonstration: the mean face. A Sylvester the Cat scowl, yet the volt of panic it struck in me was one of my life’s companions.
What age is a black boy when he learns he’s scary?
Mingus showed it for an instant, then backed into shadow.
I think I went a little crazy when I wandered from there. Invisibility and Mingus’s voice had flayed me bare. I had no secrets to conceal. I had no mean face, or any face at all: no wonder Zelmo Swift had treated me like a moron child! Zelmo Swift and Jared Orthman made adequate nemeses for a man without a face to turn to the world. I felt I couldn’t leave the Watertown facility without completing my mission, and yet couldn’t imagine surrendering the ring-it had become a part of me, become the truth about me. So for a while I split the difference, and meandered. In fact, I made my way to where Mingus had claimed I could acquire keys to the SHU, only I didn’t tell myself this was what I was doing. I moved recklessly, reeling past COs who opened doors for me, a live disturbance in the air waves, a poltergeist sick with ambivalence. It was easy to steal a fat ring of keys. I used them heedlessly, rattling through options until I fumbled the right key into a lock. I left doors swinging behind me as I moved through the compound. Maybe I thought they’d remain open for me when I needed to retrace my steps, maybe I only thought they ought to be open. I wasn’t thinking-my brain was invisible to itself.
I passed back through the yard. Now the moon was gone. Like a puppet under Mingus’s guidance I found the SHU, a squat three-story building, more a hospital annex than an arm of the prison proper. The look didn’t suit my mood. The beast at the heart of the maze ought to be captive in an open-air cage, or at the bottom of a pit, staked to a post. The SHU looked soft. They might as well have cordoned the Lord of Elbows, He Who Can Throw A Spaldeen Sideways, in a gingerbread house, where he could gnaw his way free.
I let myself in. The lower level housed a special ward for incarcerated paraplegics-dying AIDS junkies, spinal gunshot victims with maximum-security designations. On the second floor, protective custody, the rooms were Inspector Clouseau loony bins: barred windows, knobless doors with slots for the exchange, I supposed, of trays or papers. There, Robert Woolfolk and I had a tiled corridor to ourselves.
I needed to raise my voice to wake him.
“Will Fuck!” I called.
I removed the ring and stood where he could see me in the light, then came nearer to the mesh grille of his door.
“Dylan?”
“Yes, Robert.”
“Fuck you doing here?”
It was him, Robert Woolfolk, figment of my hatred turned real once more. With his jumpsuit and shaved head, and the long, disgust-lined sneer of his features, his eternal Mean Face, he resembled Scatman Crothers come for the garbage. Those limbs, now draped in prisoner’s orange, had tangled with Rachel’s on Bergen Street. I despised and envied him for having been embraced by her fists.
“Mingus sent me,” I mumbled.
“You must of thought I was sleeping, right?”
“You were sleeping.”
“Nah, I ack like that, but I was awake. Nobody could sneak up on me, man.”
“Whatever,” I said.
“You know what I was doing?”
This wasn’t the conversation I’d intended. “What?” I said.
“Writing rhymes in my mind. I wrote a whole album in my mind. None a these fools know what I’m doing, think I’m crazy ’cause I always got my eyes closed, my head be nodding-I’m a be bust out with this shit someday, shock all they world.”
Bust out sooner than you know, I thought.
“You want to hear?”
“Uh, sure.”
You know my name, read it off the liner notes
Pussy rappers with vagina throats
Get snatched out they designer coats
For trying to float concrete boats in the Gowanus
Talk about a battle but they really don’t want this-
His delivery was gruff and leaden, the lyrics growled incoherently-or perhaps the incoherence was in me.
Maybe your queer ass better wait till the fear pass
’Cause I could see your teeth chatter thru your jaw like it was clear glass-
“Robert, stop.”
“What?”
“I don’t have time.” I pushed the ring at his eyes, impatient. I’d wanted him to ask for it (Yo, let me see that ring for a minute, let me take it around the block, what, you don’t trust me?). Now the game was over.
“You remember this?” I asked.
“Ho, shit. That’s G’s.”
I hadn’t been able to get Mingus to accept the ring as belonging to him, but Robert made the call instantly. There was odd satisfaction in this. “Right,” I said. “He told me to bring it to you.”
“Ho, shit.”
“You can use it to get out.” I pushed it through the slot, to plop into his cupped hands. The instant it was free of my fingers I felt a tidal panic wipe all giddiness from me: I was drunk on nothing now. I had to go from here.
“Why don’t G want it for himself?” Robert asked.
“He wanted you to have it.”
“How’s it work?”
“You’ll figure it out.”
Robert puzzled on this briefly, then his mind slid to another question. “Yo, Dylan, man, you got keys?”
“I need them.”
“Unlock this shit, though.”
I stared at him, for what must have been a long moment.
“Yo, Dylan?”
“What?”
“Fuck you, motherfucker.”
Prisons slept. I had transit of the Watertown facility by now-three, four in the morning, whichever it was. The familiar music of clanking deadbolts and jangling keys alerted no one. I was only certain the A/B doors were my limit, a test I couldn’t pass visible. In my previous plan-just hours old, though it felt like another world-I’d intended to ask Mingus to wait a few days before using the ring, to give me a head start in getting clear. I doubted I’d get the same consideration from Robert. Anyway, I hadn’t asked for it.
I held to that previous plan nevertheless, which consisted of getting as near to the visitors’ room as I could. If I had to be found inside the compound, I figured innocence by association was my best hope-a civilian, I’d go to where civilians could be found, from time to time. There I’d wait out the last few hours of the night, then try to blend in with the morning’s first wave of visitors, maybe claim to have accidentally blundered through the wrong door. I still hadn’t scrubbed my ultraviolet-inked knuckles, and could reasonably hope the mark would still register in the COs’ scanners. I’d offer that up, with my whiteness, as sign I wasn’t part of the population. And, after all, I wasn’t. They’d have to let me go.
I reentered the green-tile pavilion which led to the visitors’ room, found my way to a corridor I’d passed through, one in sight, through wide Plexiglas windows, of the chamber where I’d removed my belt and shoes and had my earplug puzzled over. There I found a doorless room, really only a vestibule leading nowhere, with a pair of bright-lit Pepsi machines, another vending machine offering cellophane-wrapped Oreos and Cheez-Its at the end of corkscrew spirals, and a high-mounted television set, angled as though for a bedridden patient.
I slid the ring of keys into the dust deep between the feet of the Cheez-Its machine. They’d be retrievable if I needed them, but should I be caught, they’d hardly aid my case. Then I slumped inside the doorway, tucked my feet close, drew myself out of sight of the corridor from every angle I could calculate. Exhaustion was toxic, and my head began to nod. Not nodding in time-I wasn’t composing and committing to memory a lost masterpiece of a rap album, only nodding off. Anyone could sneak up on me who liked to. The black eye of the television glared down, but it wasn’t intelligible, wasn’t Vader or Big Brother. There was no authority here, malign or otherwise. The Pepsi machine glowed, but no one was home.
I woke, to bright sunlight and an aching urge to pee, to find the Plexiglas window across the corridor full not of sluggish morning visitors but an agitated glut of COs, Watertown city policemen, and a handful of other middle-aged white men in dark suits, a few of them jotting on stenographer’s pads. Then I was startled by someone nearer: a young CO in the vestibule with me, back turned as he fed dollars into the machine, one after another, and gathered an armload of Pepsi. The rolling clunk of a can into the machine’s gullet was what had jerked me awake. The CO hadn’t spotted me, but turned now, abruptly.
“I, uh, dropped some change,” I said, blinking awake, and pawing with my hands on the floor.
“How the hell’d you even get in here?”
“Through that door,” I bluffed. “It was open.”
“Holy Hell, if Talbot saw you!”
“It was Talbot who told me I could come in here,” I tried. “I think I’m a little confused. Where’s the bathroom, anyway?”
Now the CO squinted down at me, sensing something irregular. He had to straighten his shoulders, and reorganize the freight of soda cans in his crooked elbow. He was the youngest I’d seen, evidently a gofer, though his belt was laden with keys, plastic baton, and, I was pleased to see, ultraviolet scanner.
“You’re a newspaperman, right?” he asked.
“Surely you remember me, young man.” I stood, brushed myself off, and affected a transatlantic tone of befuddled impatience, casting myself as Cary Grant, him as Ralph Bellamy.
“What’s your name again, though?”
I searched and came out with: “Vance Christmas.” He was the only newspaperman I could think of in my condition, besides Jimmy Olsen. I supposed Christmas deserved any belated trouble Aeroman could bring him.
“Right, yeah, but from where?”
“Albany,” I said. “I’m with the, uh, Albany Herald-Ledger. You know, we’re doing a special feature on the state of the prisons.”
“But you came in with those other guys, right?” The fog of uncertainty between us was an irritation to this man, my diffident captor-he wanted me to supply a right answer as badly as I wanted to supply one, so he could resume his uncontroversial errand.
“Sure, Talbot invited me to tag along,” I said. I supposed those other guys were the ones just on the other side of the window. If I was made to join them perhaps I would be allowed to tag along and, eventually, shuffle out. “Because of the special feature thingee, the supplement.” This fiction was becoming distractingly real to me-I imagined a shattering exposé, Pulitzers for the underdog Herald-Ledger -so I neglected to wonder why reporters, real reporters, were here in the first place.
I’d made a mistake, though, in trying a second time to claim the unseen Talbot’s blessings. Gofer squinted harder, and arranged the cans of soda along the top of the machine to free his hands. He rubbed the crook of his arm to restore feeling to the chilled flesh, and cleared his throat, reassembling dignity and command.
“Can I see some I.D.?”
“Look, listen,” I said, lowering my voice. “I didn’t really come in with those other guys.”
“How’d you get here, then?”
“I spent the night. I came in as a visitor, yesterday-here, check my hand stamp, you’ll see.”
“Well, I don’t know about that…” He seemed about to panic and seek help. We were still unnoticed by the congregation in the search room. This was my margin, my breath, and it was rapidly vanishing.
“Listen, wait,” I said. “I really am a reporter for the Albany Tribune.” Had I bollixed my credential? No matter: “I persuaded a couple of guards to smuggle me in here-you know Stamos and Sweeney?”
“Yeah?”
“I didn’t want to get them in trouble, that’s why I was stalling. They let me stow away, for my investigation.”
“Stamos did that?”
“Yup.”
“Christ, they’re idiots!”
“I know, I know.”
“Talbot’s going to murder them.”
“Maybe not, if you can get me out of here. Just slip me back through to the lot. I’ll never involve any of your names, I promise you that.”
“Jeez Louise!”
“Check my hand.”
Shaking his head, Gofer unclipped his scanner and shone it on my knuckles. The purple emblem seemed to hover, a tiny hologram.
I tried to hustle him past deliberation, by acting as if he’d already agreed. “Let’s make a move now, they’re not looking.”
“Jeez-”
“Only I really need to stop in the bathroom, I was stuck there all night.”
“Oh, brother.”
When I emerged from the men’s toilet Gofer regarded me pityingly, my threat all dissipated now. “Guess it was unlucky for you this whole thing went down today,” he said.
“Crazy unlucky,” I agreed.
“Teach you to try that again.”
“Indeed. Never.”
“It’s not funny.”
“I’m not laughing.”
At the A/B doors I whispered, “Probably you should just say I left something in my car.” Gofer made a face, then leaned through a sliding window.
“This guy’s got to go back to the lot,” he said, his tone morose, like a bullied boy. “I’m taking him out.”
“Okay,” came the bleary reply. The cage’s bolts slammed open and shut, each in turn, and we moved through.
“Hey, so what exactly did go down in there?” I asked Gofer at the entrance to the lot. The dawn’s early light, still combing through the treeline, shocked my crummy orbs. I caught a whiff of myself, an ordinary all-night stink. Three disgruntled crows jogged across the gravel as we approached, then flapped aloft to barely clear the razor curls atop the Cyclone fence, and winged for the highway and the strip mall beyond it. The birds made shabby harbingers of my freedom: the prospect of my rental car’s AC, some McDonald’s coffee.
“Holy Moses,” said Gofer, incredulous I’d been so near yet missed the breaking story. “Nothing apart from a fellow up in the SHU fooled an officer into opening his door, made a run for it. I guess he had some stolen keys, so we’ve got a whole headache about it now. Talbot’s having a cow.”
“Guy escaped?” I was blessed, I understood now, in being one headache too many this morning. Hence my easy ticket out. No one, least of all Gofer, wished to see Talbot further inflamed. I couldn’t have scripted Robert Woolfolk’s role better if I’d tried.
“Killed himself.”
“What?” I blurted.
Gofer shut his eyes and stuck out his tongue.
“They killed him, you mean.”
“Nope.” He staged-whispered for effect. “Suicide. Got loose, then did away with himself, poor crazy son of a gun.”
“Why would he kill himself if he got free?”
Gofer shrugged. “This fellow leaped off a gun tower, highest point on the yard. Gunnery officer said he was hooting like an eagle. He hit a sloped concrete embankment, landed sideways, I guess. It was pretty sickening. They were taking pictures out there but nobody’s going to use them. Craziest thing I’ve ever seen-his arms got tangled under his body, so he sort of crumpled up and broke in half as he slid down that bank. Didn’t even look human by the time he came to a stop.”
The Hoagy Carmichael Room, a mock Midwestern parlor with carpet and furniture and vitrines full of Carmichael ’s own scrapbook memorabilia, was open only by appointment, but I was able to make one on the spot. I didn’t sense the room’s keepers had too much demand. The formalities were only to be certain no intruder seated themselves at Hoagy’s upright piano and started playing, or swiped hand-scrawled notes from Bix Beiderbecke or Governor Ronald Reagan. The key-bearer was a middle-aged secretary down the corridor, in the Archives of Traditional Music, there in Morrison Hall. She hovered nervously beside me in the room, until I persuaded her I was a good bet. Then I was left alone, to balm my soul in contemplation of the original sheet music for “Ole Buttermilk Sky” and “My Resistance Is Low” and a ribbon-bound screenplay of To Have and Have Not autographed by Bogart, Faulkner, and Hawks. Afterward I went to the listening room and spent some time on headphones, exploring lost acetates, rare masters of Carmichael ’s music. The Collegians, Carmichael’s Indiana University fraternity band, had recorded a stomp called “March of the Hooligans”-careening hot jazz with a fiddle solo to peg it as Hoosier. I played that tinny, miraculous bit of schoolboy art five or six times, then returned to dwell some more in the Zen garden of the room.
I’d driven all day and far into Sunday night from the mall lot in Watertown, committing topological penance across western New York and into Pennsylvania, on a flat, three-lane interstate which judged or forgave nothing, only left me wholly to my own judgment. Now I understood: I’d wakened Aeroman to kill Robert Woolfolk. It was a collaboration that had taken Mingus and the ring and my half-conscious hatred years to devise, though the seed of inspiration had been unmistakable, in Aaron X. Doily’s plunge into the Pacific Street vest-pocket park, twenty-three years ago-what goes up comes down. Aeroman was nothing if not a black body on the ground. I hadn’t even played fair and told Robert of the ring’s switch to invisibility. I wondered if he’d discovered it. I wondered if the guards on the tower had only told themselves they’d seen the man who screamed like a raptor on his way down, if there’d been anything to see until he’d smashed to pieces on the embankment.
For so long I’d thought Abraham’s legacy was mine: to retreat upstairs, unable or unwilling to sing or fly, only to compile and collect, to sculpt statues of my lost friends, life’s real actors, in my Fortress of Solitude. To see the world in a liner note: I am the DJ, I am what I play. But here I’d catapulted across the country in an airplane seat, a deranged arrow-man of pure intention, to uncover Mingus and Robert at Watertown-they hadn’t asked me to come. Maybe I’d underrated the Rachel in me, the Running Crab ready to destroy and bolt, to overturn lives and go on the lam.
So now I had to move on the ground, touch the earth. I needed to follow her crab footprints exactly, make no mistake in whom I was tracking this time. I drove just over the limit, anonymous in the flow, but inside the space of the car I was a vigilante, a low rider. I drove without music, my CD wallet on the backseat, untouched-no soundtrack to prettify the ugly scene of me. I stopped only to stretch my legs, gas up, and piss, and to make a handful of calls, letting Abraham and Francesca know I wouldn’t be returning to Brooklyn, contacting the airline to cancel a ticket and the rental office to say I’d be returning the car to Berkeley in a few days, not La Guardia tomorrow. No one was pleased, but I didn’t give anyone a choice in the matter. I didn’t call Abby, because I didn’t have anything to tell her, not yet.
I lost my wits on the road at around three. The sporadic lights coming the other way seemed always about to veer into mine, despite the wide grassy divider between us. I found a Howard Johnson’s then, at the entrance to Ohio, and slept for a few queasy hours, showered, hit the road again. I made Indiana by midmorning-a left turn at Indianapolis, past Larry Bird’s auto dealership, south to Bloomington. Campus parking was a bitch, so I settled for a faculty spot. I’d killed a man last night-I could stand a campus parking ticket.
At a terminal in the library I made my discovery: my quarry not only still lived in Bloomington, he worked on campus. I wouldn’t even have to repark my car. The researcher at Zelmo Swift’s law firm had traced Running Crab’s last known address to Bloomington, 1975, before she’d dropped off the map after bail flight in Lexington, Kentucky. But Abraham had refused even to look inside Zelmo’s manila folder of “This Is Your Life!” data, and neither Zelmo Swift nor Francesca Cassini could have known, as I did, another name to use to pick up the Bloomington trail.
The Archives of Traditional Music and the Carmichael Collection shared Morrison Hall with a portion of IU’s English and psych departments, and with the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, which occupied two of the hall’s upper floors. It was at the Kinsey Institute that I’d located Croft Vendle. He worked in their Office of Public Affairs. I called him from a phone in the library, and he told me to come by.
When I arrived, the Kinsey secretary explained that Croft was on a call. So I sat in a waiting room and read brochures. From the evidence, the institute was still struggling to defend its first, half-refused gift of knowledge to the American mind, and teetering always on the brink of exile from the campus by Indiana’s priggish legislature. The walls around me held the single biggest repository of “erotic materials” in the world, Alfred Kinsey having forged deals with police departments all over the country to quietly cart away seized materials, sparing the expense of their storage or destruction. For all this, the offices were homey, walls lined with neat-framed fifties-vintage smut, black-and-white photos as sunny as Topps baseball-card photography. Beside the receptionist’s desk hung an honorific row of studio portraits of past directors, beginning with bow-tied Alfred himself, and continuing through a charming sequence, leading to the present day, of thoughtful eyeglass-frame-gnawing psychologists, gentle stewards of freaky reality.
Croft was a man I barely recognized, in a rust corduroy two-piece, maroon tie, and milk-chocolate Earth shoes. His ruddy features swarmed with wiry silver beard, all trimmed to an exact length, even where it sprouted from his ears. He resembled a diet or exercise guru, someone usually seen only in running shorts but temporarily got up in a suit for a book-plugging appearance on Today. It was a shock. In my mind’s eye only Abraham aged; Rachel and her lover were still verdant, in 1974 bodies forever.
“I’ve got this call on hold,” Croft said apologetically, gesturing back toward his office. His voice was helium-high, another thing I didn’t remember. He seemed to take my appearance more in stride, despite my hints of road-weary desperado: three-day beard and sunburned forearm, Vietnam-vet walleye. Perhaps he’d been expecting me for years. “It’s this wealthy gay collector in Los Angeles, he’s been dangling this donation for months, a stash of Japanese erotica, thousands of pieces. I’ve got him on the brink, but it’s taking some real hand-holding.”
“No problem,” I said. “I can wait.” I wondered if Erlan Hagopian’s Rachel-paintings would find their way here someday. Maybe they already had.
“I was thinking if you’re free you’d come out to the farm for dinner,” he said. “So we can talk.”
“Number 1, Rural Route 8?” I asked.
Croft’s eyes widened. “We call it Watermelon Sugar Farm, but yeah. Bring your car out front at five and I’ll lead you. Place can be difficult to find-kind of a backroads, no-map-to-the-territory deal.”
“Okay.”
“Cool,” he said. “I’d better get back to this call. If you’re just killing the afternoon I could get Susie, she’s our intern, to give you the full Kinsey tour.”
“That’s okay.”
I’d noted the Hoagy option on the way through Morrison’s lobby, and suspected that better fit my mood. So Croft went to his phone call, I to “March of the Hooligans.”
“Just one thing I want to show you,” said Croft. “Then we ought to go for a walk around the property, before the light’s gone. It’s a rare night.”
Croft, piloting a decrepit Peugot, had led me along a serpentine country road, through hamlets and farmland and well into the woods, before we’d turned onto a well-maintained dirt road with W. SUGAR marked on the mailbox. There we’d rumbled past a few rotting Volkswagen Beetle exoskeletons, field grass swum up through their engines, to stop in front of a hand-hewn cabin, with an ancient paint job mostly blistered off its plank exterior. I thought it leaned dangerously, but we headed for the half-open door. Beside it, an upright manual lawnmower was rusted to sculpture beside a primitive stone well, each having surrendered, like the Beetles, to the field grass.
“You live here?” I asked. I withheld the question that went with it: Was Croft the only one left on the property? The scene was Walden-pretty, but a little desolate, regarded on civilization’s terms.
“God, no, the homes are down the hill, in the woods. We’ve got a hundred and sixty acres. This place was the old communal cookhouse, back when we all ate together. Plus a winter sleeping bunk for the folks in tepees. This was some time ago, though. Nobody uses this for anything anymore, except the bees.”
I suppose there was never a reason for tearing down a cabin or scrapping a stopped automobile, if you had all those acres. Particularly if your models of exterior decoration were author photos of Richard Brautigan, at the door of a Kaczynksian Montana shack.
Inside was an abandoned kitchen: an old range, its enamel webbed like the glaze of a Renaissance painting, a long, stained butcher-block which could have been salvaged for installation in a loft in Emeryville or Gowanus, and a double-basined sink with an old plastic bucket below, in place of plumbing. What Croft had called a sleeping bunk sagged so low over the stove it threatened to kiss it. I picked out wood rot and insect eggs, a hollow-log scent. Croft clambered over some barrel staves and steel drums, into the corner beneath the loft, and from a shelf full of water-swollen hardcover books plucked up a mechanical something and curled it under his arm. When he crawled back through the wreckage, he presented it to me: a manual typewriter. The double ribbon, black-over-red, which had produced the reverb of crimson in Running Crab’s postcard font, was still strung between the spools, though the spools themselves were thick with corrosion, going nowhere in a hurry.
Any stray tendril of fantasy that Croft was about to produce Rachel in the flesh, that she dwelled incognito like a Weatherman or Symbionese soccer mom in one of those homes in the woods, evaporated now, even before he spoke.
“We kept it in the Bug, when we drove out to the coast. We’d write you a postcard each time we stopped for gas, or to get stoned.”
“You wrote them, or she did?”
“I had to kind of push her, but she helped. I think she was ashamed, you know? Later it was just me. After she was gone.” I held the melted typewriter in my two hands, like a beggar with his hat. Croft brushed at the sodden chunks of rust it had deposited on the sleeve of his corduroy jacket.
“You want it?” he asked.
“No.” I wanted my cleaning deposit back when I returned the rental, that’s what I wanted.
“Let’s go for a walk.”
The dirt road curved out of the open field at the property’s entrance, down the hill and to the woods. We left the cars, strolled into the glade, the cool forest, too steep and irregular to ever have been farmed. The sun gone from sight below the hill’s line, the birch trunks and pale ferns seemed bioluminescent, charged with the day’s light. Our footfalls whispered unreplied on the private road’s fresh layer of sharp, gray gravel. The woods were an engine of silence, pumping it to the sky.
Around each turn lay a house. Wooden two-story buildings, seven or eight total, each with their thoughtful trace of Buckminster Fuller or Christopher Alexander-circular rooms with skylight domes, greenhouse windows, breezeways attaching a low annex or small studio. Each house with a car or two in the drive, a few with smoke unfolding from a chimney. Here and there bicycles, chain saws, snowshoes, mulching piles, splintery blast marks of log splitting, ax wedged in a stump. The Watermelon Sugars were home, their kitchens lit. From the distance of the road, though, we granted their privacy as we passed. I was humbled, as I ought to have been, to see what varieties of life could hide between the arrogant, oblivious coasts.
“Rachel and Jeremy were probably the biggest challenge this community ever faced,” said Croft in his squeaky alto. “Confronting them helped us grow up, so I guess we owe them a lot. I’ll never forget that night, we held hands in a circle around them and told them they had to go. I just about shit my pants. Jeremy had already punched me a couple of times, but I was too embarrassed to admit it to anyone. Turned out he’d punched a lot of people.”
“I don’t know who Jeremy is,” I said.
“Somebody told me he died a couple of years ago. He was basically just this really charismatic, really violent guy from Kentucky who used us as his playground for a few months. His favorite game was to scare guys by getting them really high, then talk about how he’d once killed a man outside a bar with a single blow to the throat. He had a lot of those biker horror stories. Right after the throat story he’d move in on the guy’s girlfriend. Everyone was sort of passive, you know, like ‘If she wants to be with Jeremy, that’s cool, maybe she’ll bring him some peace.’ Rach was actually the only person who really stood up to him.”
“He took her away from you?” I asked. It was growing darker, and I’d been momentarily transfixed by the scene in a bright-lit kitchen window-a middle-aged woman, her hair as gray as Croft’s, sliced tomatoes at a counter, while behind her, two blond daughters, bright and shiny as Solver girls, played a dual-remote video game, some dungeon or deep-seascape glowing unearthly blue on a screen. But they couldn’t see me, and I felt like Frankenstein’s monster, peeping at the humans. So I turned away.
“Oh, we weren’t spending much time together at that point. Rachel was her own problem, a lot of people weren’t completely thrilled about my bringing her out here. She had that New York sarcastic thing that burst a lot of people’s balloons.” He laughed. “I mean, she sort of ran rings around people, truth be told. She ran rings around me. Plus she wasn’t happy here. She’s wasn’t all that happy, period, or she would never have gone with Jeremy. I think she regretted leaving New York.”
“Did she talk about-Abraham?”
“Well, she was pretty ashamed,” Croft said. It was the same word he’d used to explain why he’d had to force her to write the postcards. I supposed it was true, the right word. I decided to quit fishing for more.
Croft went on. “Mostly I just remember this one day, I tried to get her to come looking for mushrooms with me. She hated that kind of thing, she thought it was stupid. This was after Jeremy showed up too. I was just trying to reach out, you know, make some connection, because she seemed so balled up. So she had this routine, every time I tried to get her to do anything outdoors she’d say, ‘I wonder what’s playing at the Thalia.’ Like I should know what she was missing, from her life before. She’d say, ‘Maybe it’s The Thirty-nine Steps, or A Thousand Clowns,’ or whatever. So this particular day she said yes, I don’t know why. It had just rained for three days, and we went hunting for fresh morels.” Croft gestured at the forest floor, and I understood he meant here. More or less right around here. “Not that she picked mushrooms. She was chain-smoking-she couldn’t drive, either, she constantly forced me to run her into town for cigarettes. Anyway, she walked with me, smoking like a fiend, and when she started in about the Thalia she said, ‘Maybe they’re showing Beat the Devil,’ and I said, ‘What’s so great about Beat the Devil?’ and she told me the plot of that fucking movie for an hour. I mean, doing Peter Lorre’s voice and everything, all the lines-she had the whole thing memorized.”
I didn’t reach for music until I was out of Indiana. First Croft and I reclaimed our cars, and he showed me his house, another beauty nestled at the end of the drive, where the Watermelon Sugar property nearly ran out. A fire lane cut across another twelve acres, then opened onto the interstate, up from Louisville, Kentucky. If the wind blew right you could hear the trucks. It was then that Croft mentioned, just an afterthought, that the farm was in the fight of its life, against a creature less chimerical than Rachel and Jeremy. The legislature meant to extend the highway across the property, a four-billion-dollar contract for local construction-one which, Croft said, would cut only ten minutes off the trip to Chicago. We considered this together, tipping our ears to catch the distant whine of tractor trailers. Then he showed me inside, and we lit his kitchen, and he made me a plate of spaghetti. He offered a guest-room bed, but I wanted to drive. He told me I could use his phone and I nearly did, then decided I’d call Abby from somewhere west of here, somewhere nearer to home, when I’d sorted out more of all I’d have to explain.
At the door Croft hugged me, awkwardly, and I hugged him back, awkwardly. There was nothing to accept or refuse in the embrace. Isabel Vendle’s nephew wasn’t the mother I never had, any more than a rotting typewriter was. He wasn’t the father I never had, either. Abraham was the father I never had, and Rachel was the mother I never had, and Gowanus or Boerum Hill was the home I never had, everything was only itself however many names it carried, and so I hugged Croft and I went out to pilot my car through the woods, back to the serpentine road. I was lost a few times on the way to Bloomington, but I never stopped and asked for directions. There was no one to ask. And I wasn’t in a hurry.
It was after midnight when I skirted Gary, Indiana, birthplace of the Jackson Five. In Illinois I stopped for gas and noticed the wallet of discs on the backseat. Once on the road I groped one into the mouth of the car’s player, the first to fall into my hand-Brian Eno’s Another Green World. Prog rock-troll music, Euclid Barnes would have called it. I’d listened to this record my whole life since discovering it in the cut-out bin on the eighth floor of Abraham and Straus, at the dying record store there, behind the stamp and coin collecting department. Using Brooklyn skills, I’d boosted another copy, a commercial cassette, from the Main Street record shop of Camden Town, then played it endlessly one night as I made love to Moira Hogarth. I adored the record’s harmless spookiness: Eno’s keyboard washes, John Cale’s sawing cello, Robert Fripp’s teardrop fretwork. And I always associated it with driving, with miles rushing beneath headlights and my eyes. I associated it with one drive in particular.
This was the winter of my expulsion from Camden College. After Richard Brodeur’s letter, I’d been forced to return to the campus once more, to collect my belongings-books, bedclothes, stereo-all crated in the attic of Oswald House. So Abraham had, in his typical, infuriating, silent way, driven me north, in a borrowed car. The school was closed then, for the long, fuel-conserving winter break. Still, at my insistence, Abraham had waited in the car, while I found a security guard who could unlock the dorm’s attic. I didn’t want my father to set foot on the grounds.
Returning, we’d driven through a Massachusetts blizzard, wind swirling flakes in a tunnel of white around the mole-eye of our windshield. Our silence was total. My shame at Abraham’s presumed disappointment could only be stemmed by stony, preemptive fury of my own. When the storm was at its height, our car inching through the polar cyclone, navigating by the taillights of a wavering truck whose treads ground a path through the slurry, I’d reached into the backseat, into a carton of books and cassettes and, as tonight, pulled out the Eno, and put it into the car’s player. The music made an ideal soundtrack to the blizzard’s unreality. I suppose Abraham was actually struggling with a vivid amount of danger, but Another Green World ’s supernatural placidity seemed to acknowledge his effort and to calm us at the same time. Eno sang I can’t see the lines I used to think I could read between -
Earlier, the first years of high school, when the Clash and Ramones were first thrilling me and Gabriel Stern and Timothy Vandertooth, I’d bring a record home and play it for Abraham and ask him, “Do you hear it? How great it is? There’s never been music like this!”
“Sure,” he’d say. “It’s wonderful.”
“But do you really hear what I’m hearing? Can you hear the same song I do?”
“Of course,” he’d say, leaving me perfectly unsatisfied, leaving the mystery unplumbed: Could my father hear my music? By my college years, though, I’d never have asked, even if we weren’t on that dour voyage home. Those lines of inquiry were shut down, so I barely troubled to speculate what Another Green World might mean to Abraham, whether he felt it shaping our pummel through the snow. Eno sang, You’d be surprised at my degree of uncertainty -
I considered now that what I once loved in this record, and certain others- Remain in Light, “O Superman,” Horses -was the middle space they conjured and dwelled in, a bohemian demimonde, a hippie dream. And that same space, that unlikely proposition, was what I’d eventually come to hate and be embarrassed by, what I’d had to refuse in favor of soul, in favor of Barrett Rude Junior and his defiant, unsubtle pain. I’d needed music that would tell it like it is, like I’d learned it to be, in the inner city. Another Green World was like Abraham’s film: too fragile, too yokeable-I wanted a tougher song than that. I knew stuff B. Eno and A. Ebdus didn’t, and I couldn’t afford to carry them or their naïveté, any more than Mingus could afford to carry me or mine.
The collapsing middle was what Running Crab had fled out of. It was the same space the communists and gays and painters of celluloid imagined they’d found in Gowanus, only to be unwitting wedges for realtors, a racial wrecking ball. A gentrification was the scar left by a dream, Utopia the show which always closed on opening night. And it wasn’t so different from the space Abraham raged not to find opening to welcome his film, a space the width of a dwindled summer, a place where Mingus Rude always grooved fat spaldeen pitches, born home runs.
We all pined for those middle spaces, those summer hours when Josephine Baker lay waste to Paris, when “Bothered Blue” peaked on the charts, when a teenaged Elvis, still dreaming of his own first session, sat in the Sun Studios watching the Prisonaires, when a top-to-bottom burner blazed through a subway station, renovating the world for an instant, when schoolyard turntables were powered by a cord run from a streetlamp, when juice just flowed. I’d come to Indiana not to see a typewriter, or meet Croft, but to walk that back road in dusk and see the middle space the Watermelon Sugars had wrested from the world, before the makers of highways wrested it back, just as I’d gone to Katha’s house to see the pallet she kept for her sister, to hear M-Dog’s rhymes. A middle space opened and closed like a glance, you’d miss it if you blinked. Maybe Camden had been one once too, before it was poisoned with cash. It bore the traces. In the same spirit, on Rachel’s principles, I’d been pushed out like a blind finger, to probe a nonexistent space, a whiteboy integrating public schools which were just then being abandoned, which were becoming only rehearsals for prison. Her mistake was so beautiful, so stupid, so American. It terrified my small mind, it always had. Abraham had the better idea, to try to carve the middle space on a daily basis, alone in his room. If the green triangle never fell to earth before he died and left the film unfinished, it would never have fallen-wasn’t that so? Wasn’t it?
Brian Eno sang How can moments go so slowly? as we drove through the storm. Abraham and I let ourselves be swept through the blurred tunnel, beyond rescue but calm for an instant, settled in our task, a father driving a son home to Dean Street. There was no Mingus Rude or Barrett Rude Junior with us there, no Running Crab postcard or letter from Camden College pushed through the slot. We were in a middle space then, in a cone of white, father and son moving forward at a certain speed. Side by side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream.