The Fortress of Solitude (61 page)

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
.