The Fortress of Solitude (35 page)

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

“You wanna fight me?”

“
What?
” Gabe squinted in fierce incredulity.

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

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

“You in a
crew
?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I tole you. Now we gotta fight.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure, sure.”

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

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

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

4/3/79

viewed from space radioactive

nostrils want a kleenex

if sneezy they might blow

brooklyn to merrie england

however bad molten core might itch

don’t pick down there too deep

or you’ll toast your shell

infrared like mine

meltdown crab

chapter  
15

T
wo sons might think two fathers never budged from their hiding places apart from runs to Ramirez’s or Buggy’s for bare necessities—toilet paper, Tropicana, cold cuts at gouging prices, whatever.

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

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

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

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

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

Abraham never saw the old man anymore and wondered slightly.

Bus purring through leaf-blotched shadow.

Run-on sentence of cracked slate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DRUG STING NETS CAPED CRUSADER
BY HUMBOLT ROOS

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

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

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

And so on.

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

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

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

“Bye!” he shouted from the hall.

And was out the door.

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

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

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

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