The Fortress of Solitude (17 page)

Mingus came upstairs in a T-shirt and his Jockey shorts, looking sleepy-eyed at one in the afternoon. He cocked his head at the drift of cocaine on the sun-mottled mirror, the smeary ghosts of inhaled lines that trailed out of it.

Kid stared at the blow like he’d never seen it before.

“What?” said Barrett Rude Junior. “You want to get high?” He waved his hand at the mirror from his big chair where he sat, felt the weight of his arm, a banner of flesh moving in the damp air.

Nihhh-gahhh, nihh-gahh, got you-self an itchy tri-ggahhh fin-gahhh
. Could be a theme song for some movie about a pimp. Maybe he ought to fish that four-track recorder upstairs, shock their minds with a new track, number-one hit single on the R&B charts, first time the word
nigger
’s ever been on the radio.
Go fuck yourself, Omlet!

It seemed to take a thousand years for Mingus to quit staring and shake his head.

Barrett Rude Junior just laughed. “Don’t tell me you ain’t hittin’ it when I’m not around. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Lay off.”

“I know what’s wrong with you. You’re saying, Barry best get this cleaned up before Senior comes up here. Read your eyes, man.”

“I didn’t say nothing.”

“Whatever. I got these tickets for you if you want them. Brother Ray Charles, up at Ray-
dee
-oh City.
Drinkin’ wine spo-de-o-dee, drinkin’ wine
.”

“You don’t want to go?”

“Nah, not tonight. Why don’t you call up a friend, hop up there on the F train.”

Mingus took the tickets. Barrett Rude Junior rubbed his nose and upper lip with his knuckle, waiting. Him and Mingus both fine-beaded in the day’s wet heat.

“Ray Charles is the man, Gus. Big part of your cultural heritage right there, my man. You’ll be telling your kids you were there,
Ne-ver fo-get the time I saw Bruth-a Ray
.” He couldn’t say why he wanted the boy to go. “Plus they got some fine air-conditioning up there in that balcony, man. Go cool out with a friend, get out the heat. Take Dylan. Or that raisin-looking ghetto child you been bringing around, what’s his name? Robert. Radio City likely blow that boy’s mind.”

The talk came out of him in one breath and was strangely taxing. He closed his eyes and when he opened them Mingus stood there still looking at the tickets as though Barrett hadn’t spoken.

“You gonna go, or what?”

“You got other plans?” asked Mingus.

“What’s that got to do with it?” In truth, Barry had his eye on a double feature at the Duffield Theater up on Fulton Street,
The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings
and
Car Wash
. Leverage his own ass out of the day’s heat, into some dark windowless auditorium with best-be-working air-conditioning. Just not to contemplate Ray Charles in a tuxedo. “You want the tickets?”

Mingus shrugged. Scratching himself in his underwear, eyeballing his father, trying to figure the angle.

“Take them, think it over, give Dylan a call.”

“You don’t care if I sell them?”

Barrett Rude Junior eyeballed his son in return. “Nah, man, I don’t care.” His disappointment was irrational, huge. “But once you’re all the way up there, why not check it out? It’s bread you want, I’ll
give
you bread, Gus.”

His pushing only stoked Mingus’s own resistance, he saw now. If your old man doesn’t want to go see Ray Charles why should you want to go? Too much effort all around, this day especially. Brooklyn was a tropical place, faint marimba notes suspended in the yellow air, now a Mister Softee truck’s incessant, circular tune, rising and falling like an ambulance whine as it positioned itself on Bergen, Bond, Dean, Pacific, drawing sluggish kids like ants to a soda spill. Manhattan seemed a thousand miles away, another city.

Barrett Rude Junior could have done with a soft-dipped cone himself come to think of it.

Getting one was another whole story altogether.

Didn’t see himself standing at no ice-cream truck.

Under the marimba and the Mister Softee jingle he breath-chanted
nihhh-gahhhh, nihhh-gahhh
, the tune, let’s admit it now, going nowhere, unfolding into nothing but itself.
Nigger
would be a song unsung, more dust blown away. Besides, the four-track recorder was impossibly distant, a rumor as farfetched and unlikely as the ice-cream cone, as Manhattan.

You don’t
fetch
what’s too
far
. Hence the phrase.

Now, how was it that blow always make him want to close his eyes? Made no sense at all.

And why couldn’t Mingus answer one simple goddamn question?

When Barrett Rude Junior opened his eyes again hours had passed. He’d been wallowing there all afternoon and into the dusk hour, Mingus long gone
wherever
with the tickets. He awoke entombed in the dark, heat-glazed to the leather chair, the folds of his chin and neck chafed with sweat. The curtain flapped lightly in a useless breeze which had quietly worn the knoll of cocaine and chased grains to the edges of the mirror. Probably on the carpet as well.

He’d already spilled it on the water bed the night before, a new layer of sheen between his body and the sheets. Let it cover the whole house in a layer—it would be there when he’d need it, he’d run his fingers over the walls, snort the carpet. He’d bring a woman home and use her like a sponge to pick it up and get high cleaning it off her body.

True enough, he’d need to get this part of his life stashed away before Barrett Rude Senior got sprung and came up north.

Now haul your ass up splash water on your neck get out the damn house already, it’s nighttime.

The Duffield was a grand ruin of an Art Deco movie palace, an experiment in what happened if you never cleaned a place for fifty years, just sold tickets and stale candy to stick to the floor and flat cola to erode the hinges of the sprung upholstered chairs when it spilled. One chair in four was upright enough to sit in. Others looked like they might have been attacked, stabbed by angry gangs. The walls were panels of torn crimson felt between gold-painted cherubs and rosettes, now blackened and nose-chipped into dingy gargoyles. The place was unnaturally dark. Red exit signs hovered in the murk, cigarette haze floated up through the projector beam to nest in the massive wrecked chandelier, below the peeling vault of the ceiling, the misaligned film played over the edges of the heavy rotting curtain at both sides of the screen. The screen itself showed bullet holes and was prominently tagged by Strike and Bel II.

Barrett Rude Junior paid for his ticket and went inside, found a seat under the balcony.
Bingo Long
was started already, maybe half over. The air was cold and rank. The place was two-thirds full, heads clustered in groups to the distant reaches of the giant room, all smoking and laughing and talking back to the movie. Squeals and moans in the darkest corners. A woman could be giving birth to twins in the balcony, nobody’d know. Barrett Rude leaned back, tested his springs, settled in. He’d had the foresight to ferry in a brown sack with a forty-ounce Colt, not troubling to hide it from the indifferent ticket ripper. Now he eased the cap off. It voiced a quick
shuffff
of freed carbonation, answered by an envious murmur from those in the Duffield near enough to have heard:
Wish I’d thought of that, damn
.

Bingo Long
was no good. It stunk, in fact, full of cloying Dixieland jazz and Billy Dee Williams in a three-piece suit like he thought he was Redford in
The Black Sting
. Plus too little Richard Pryor, too much James Earl Jones making like Paul Robeson, that tired nobility jive. Didn’t matter. It was half over and soon
Car Wash
would start and the crowd was good and the air was cold and the liquor was cold. He only had to stretch it out, not drink it up before the second feature. Everyone was here to see
Car Wash
in the first place. Not that they’d be any quieter then.

It was at the break when the lights rose that he saw them, the nappy dark head and the straight and nearly blond-haired head beside it, the two of them slumped twenty rows closer, at the front where the screen surely loomed like a sky they couldn’t see to the edges of, their identical blue Pro Keds thrown up across the seats in front of them. Mingus had rounded up Dylan, sure—probably dragged him uptown to Radio City to scalp the tickets too. Unloaded them on some white folks in evening dress, no doubt. Then hauled ass back to Brooklyn, like he’d read Barrett Rude Junior’s mind, for the double feature. Shit, it didn’t take a mind reader. Anyone in their right mind for a mile around was at the Duffield tonight, and if you’d delivered free Ray Charles tickets to their mailboxes that morning it wouldn’t be any different. Who wouldn’t want to be here jeering through
Bingo Long
in the dark, anticipation just making things better, waiting for
Car Wash
, all that Norman Whitfield–Rose Royce pizzazz on the soundtrack? Only proved the boy had sense.

It was entirely possible that one song could destroy your life. Yes, musical doom could fall on a lone human form and crush it like a bug. The song,
that song
, was sent from somewhere else to find you, to pick the scab of your whole existence. The song was your personal shitty fate, manifest as a throb of pop floating out of radios everywhere.

At the very least the song was the soundtrack to your destruction, the
theme
. Your days reduced to a montage cut to its cowbell beat, inexorable doubled bass line and raunch vocal, a sort of chanted sneer, surrounded by groans of pleasure. The stutter and blurt of what—a
tuba
? French horn? Rhythm guitar and trumpet, pitched to mockery. The singer might as well have held a gun to your head. How it could have been allowed to happen, how it could have been allowed on the
radio
? That song ought to be illegal. It wasn’t racist—you’ll never sort that one out, don’t even start—so much as anti-
you
.

Yes they were dancing, and singing, and movin’ to the groovin’, and just when it hit me, somebody turned around and shouted
—

Every time your sneakers met the street, the end of that summer, somebody was hurling it at your head,
that song
.

Forget what happens when you start haunting the green-tiled halls of Intermediate School 293.

September 7, 1976, the week Dylan Ebdus began seventh grade in the main building on Court Street and Butler, Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music” was the top song on the rhythm and blues charts. Fourteen days later it topped
Billboard
’s pop charts. Your misery’s anthem, number-one song in the nation.

Sing it through gritted teeth:
WHITE BOY!

Lay down the boogie and play that funky music ’til you die.

When Dylan Ebdus first spotted Arthur Lomb the other boy was feigning pain in the far corner of the schoolyard. At some distance Dylan heard the cries and turned from the entrance of the school to look. Catching sight of Arthur Lomb was like noticing the flight and fall of a bird across a distance of leaf-blurred sky, that flicker at the corner of vision, the abrupt plummeting. Like the flying man too, something Dylan did and didn’t wish to have noticed. It occurred at that moment of slippage after the bell had rung and the gym teachers who patrolled the yard had returned inside, ahead of the flood of students, so the yard became a lawless zone, that terrible sudden reframing of space which could happen anywhere, even inside the corridors of the school. Nevertheless it was a clumsy mistake for the boy now cringing on the ground to be caught so far from the yard’s entrance, a mistake Dylan felt he couldn’t forgive. He wouldn’t have forgiven it in himself.

Arthur Lomb fell to his knees and clutched his chest and keened. His words were briefly audible across the depopulating yard.

“
I can’t breathe!
”

Then, each syllable riding a sharp insuck of air, “
I!
” Pause. “
Can’t!
” Pause. “
Breathe!
”

Arthur Lomb was pretending asthma or some other weakness. It was an identifiable method: preemptive suffering. Nobody could do much with a kid who was already crying. He’d become useless, untillable soil. He had no spirit to crush and it was faintly disgusting, in poor taste. Anyway, this weirdly gasping kid might not know the rules and talk, tattle to some distant cloddish figure of authority what he imagined had been done to him. He might even be truly sick, fucked up, in pain, who knew? Your only option was to say
Dang, white boy, what’s your problem? I didn’t even touch you.
And move on.

Dylan admired the strategy, feeling at once a cool quiver of recognition and a hot bolt of shame. He felt that he was seeing his double, his stand-in. It was at least true that any punishment Arthur Lomb endured was likely otherwise Dylan’s, or anyway that a gang of black kids couldn’t knock Dylan to the pavement or put him in a yoke at the exact moment they were busy doing it to Arthur Lomb.

From that point on Arthur Lomb’s reddish hair and hunched shoulders were easy to spot, though he and Dylan had different homerooms, and schedules which kept them from overlapping anywhere except the schoolyard at lunch hour. Arthur Lomb dressed in conspicuous striped polo shirts and wore soft brown shoes. His pants were often highwaters. Dylan once heard a couple of black girls serenading Arthur Lomb with a couplet he hadn’t himself elicited since fourth grade, snapping their fingers and harmonizing high and low like a doo-wop group:
The flood is over, the land is dry, so why do you wear your pants so high
?

Arthur Lomb carried an enormous and bright blue backpack, an additional blight. All his schoolbooks must be inside, or maybe a couple of stone tablets. The bag itself would have tugged Arthur Lomb to the ground if he’d stood up straight. As it was the bag glowed as a target, begged to be jerked downward to crumple Arthur Lomb to the corridor floor to enact his shortness-of-breath routine. Dylan had seen it done five times already before he and Arthur Lomb ever spoke. Dylan had even heard kids chanting
the song
at Arthur Lomb as they slapped at his reddened neck or the top of his head while he squirmed on the floor. Play that
fucking
music, white boy! Stretching the last two words to a groaning, derisive, Bugs-Bunnyesque
whyyyyyyyboy!