The Fortress of Solitude (29 page)

“Check out the white boys, man, think they bad.”

“What you write, white boy?”

The white kid with the marker is silent, shoulders bunched against his harassers, but with a certain plodding integrity he finishes marking his tag on Underberg’s wall, in the small space he’s found between larger, spray-painted throw-ups.

“Whazzat say? Art? A-R-T?”

“Dude’s tag is
Art
, man. That’s wack.”

“Your name
Arturo
, dude? You don’t look Puerto Rican to me.”

“Shut up, man, leave the guy alone.”

“He’s a toy.”

“Leave him alone, man.”

“I’m not messin’ with the dude, yo, I just want to see what he’s writin’. You with a crew,
Art
?”

Question’s rhetorical: What white kid could be with a crew? For that matter, what self-respecting crew could contain a white dude, let alone a small, ferrety white dude like this one, let alone
two
white dudes? Not to mention two like these, beginning to cower instinctively against Underberg’s wall in the manner in which negotiating the halls and schoolyard and adjacent streets of Intermediate School 293 has tutored them.

Ritualized cringes buried millimeter-deep in the psyches of the two white kids, mock-asthmatic seizures and other forms of beseeching, are ready to surface when the nearest thing to
a crew
these guys could ever hope for pops back out of the showroom with a fresh-purchased bottle of Garvey Violet: Mingus Rude.

Mingus’s assessment of the situation is so instantaneous and smooth his remark seems to emerge from his mouth even as he himself emerges from Underberg’s, while at the same time he slips the bottle of ink into the fat thigh pocket of his military-surplus pants. He doesn’t address the four black kids who are tightening the lasso of themselves around Arthur Lomb and Dylan Ebdus, instead speaks as if all but Arthur and Dylan are invisible, his tone one of annoyance.

“Fuck you doin’, Art man? I tole you them other dudes are waiting for us. Ain’t time to be foolin’ around here, man, we got to
go
.”

A reference to
other dudes
is magic. The lasso slackens. Arthur and Dylan nod obediently to Mingus, duck their heads, eyes cast down on the sidewalk as they follow him.

The three escape together, leaving the Underberg’s pavement to other confrontations.

Across Flatbush, Arthur Lomb skips up excitedly beside Mingus, while Dylan lags behind. Arthur’s eager mimicry produces a twee, mechanical version of Mingus’s hunched lope. He really is, in this sense, a
toy
: he’s turning himself into a Mingus-puppet. “Yo, them dudes were talking about Strike, man, they said he was there tagging up, but I didn’t see him. Could be wishful thinking, just like everybody claims they saw Son of Sam. Anyway, Strike’s okay, but I prefer Zephyr, I think he’s really got the most original tag, yo, man, you know what I mean?” Mingus only grunts and stalks on, but that’s encouragement enough for Arthur. “Man, that one guy was trying to act real scary, but I could see his face, he looked like a baby, his lips were all blubbery. Yo, I probly could of taken him if you hadn’t come out just then. Lucky for him I’d say, yo.” Arthur’s careful slurring of certain words, in contrast to his sharply nerdish pronunciation elsewhere, is wincingly obvious to Dylan, who wonders why Mingus doesn’t just smack him upside the head and command him to stop. But Mingus tolerates Arthur’s parroting talk, accepts this transformation Arthur’s accomplished, somehow, in the month Dylan’s been away. Arthur Lomb, it appears, contains multitudes: he’s managed this utter self-reformatting with the same sleazy facility with which he earlier dumped the Mets for the Yankees. “Couple white boys could of taken their paints and shit off them, I bet, that is if they had anything worth taking, which I doubt, yo, judging from the poor condition of their sneakers.”

“Be cool,” says Mingus now, as without glancing sideways he throws out an arm to slow Arthur’s pogo-ing gait. There may be no stopping the flow of Arthur’s talk, not once he’s on this kind of roll. At least, though, he might quit hopping.

Arthur does slow. He allows Mingus to move ahead, giving him some room to glower in his own irritated headspace, often a necessity when Mingus hasn’t smoked a joint in a while. Arthur turns to Dylan instead. “What you think, we could of taken them, yo?”

“Don’t yo me,” said Dylan.

He crouched in darkness at the top of the abandoned house’s stoop, hearing distant sirens. Nearer by, voices at Bond Street, a laugh knifing through the humidity, floated to the sky. Though the night was hot he wore a sweatshirt. Underneath was the costume, the cape crammed up into the back like a soft turtle’s shell, bell-bottom sleeves doubled around his wrists. He sweat furiously, it couldn’t be helped. The ring he kept like a folded dollar, hidden in his sock: the possibility of being yoked while still on the ground was very much with him. Perhaps he should have begun on rooftops, but access to his own was through Abraham’s studio, and Abraham was painting frames of film tonight. Dylan had opened the studio door to find his father planted under a single clip-on floodlamp, fingers crabbed around a tiny brush, transistor radio tuned low to gooselike jazz, the barely audible squonks of Rollins or Dolphy.

“I’m going out.”

“Tonight?”

“Just for an hour.”

“Shouldn’t you sleep?”

“Just an hour.”

It was the evening of the day before eighth grade.

It was somewhat unclear how to begin.

Mingus Rude and Arthur Lomb were off painting a burner on the side panel of an abandoned police truck in the city salvage yard at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. The expedition had been planned for days, a wake for summer’s death, a last fling. Dylan involved himself in preparations, including the harvesting of Krylon from McCrory’s and the assembling of a sheaf of marker sketches in full color, then bowed out of the jaunt itself at the last second. This ensured that tonight he wouldn’t bump into Mingus or Arthur. Anyway, Dylan was exhausted with the whole Mingus-Arthur situation. He’d begun to wonder if he was encouraging it by his own presence. Let them be alone together, let Mingus endure the raw, grasping force of Arthur’s sycophancy without Dylan around as a buffer, and see how he liked it.

Besides, the two would be painting Dylan’s design on the police truck, Dylan’s hand was inherent in the sketches. Mingus might be Dose, but Dylan was Dose’s auteur.

Teenagerdom was a secret identity in the first place.

At thirteen you’d begun to leave traces, occult names and signs proliferating, sheets you fiercely insisted on laundering yourself.

Like a Spirograph cog your wobbling path made messes.

Aeroman was a bolder route, only he was proving hard to bring out of his sweatshirt shell.

Where in Gowanus did a fresh-minted superhero go to find the sort of crime in which he could meaningfully intervene? Dylan huddled on the abandoned stoop, ear cocked to the damp howl of the late-summer wind as it bore voices through the night. The gays walked their dog, otherwise the block was empty. Dean Street wouldn’t cut it. Nevins, that was too much, the prostitutes, the old men on Ramirez’s corner, the chance of Wyckoff kids ranging up from the projects. Smith Street, same problem. He needed an isolated nightscape, an alley, a woman yelling for return of her stolen pocketbook, the classical Spider-Man mugging scenario: exactly what he’d never seen in his life. A superhero spliced criminals from victims. In Gowanus things tended to be more mixed up.

He needed height, perhaps. To rise above.

He roused himself from the stoop and walked to the corner, then up Bond Street, to the subway, the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station, knowing it was a place he’d never go at this time of night if conditions weren’t changed, and they were barely changed. He resembled himself, not Aeroman, until he shed the sweatshirt. And Aeroman didn’t walk, he flew. Until he brought himself to fly down from a rooftop he wasn’t Aeroman, he was a kid in a costume in a sweatshirt, walking. The ring was in his sock—he reached down and confirmed it. A white boy on the corner of Bond and Schermerhorn at eleven at night. The place was desolate enough, barren parking lots and basketball courts, darkened municipal buildings, the street’s wide lanes silent. Too desolate, maybe. Places you feared most were empty, your fear of them theoretical. You wouldn’t be caught dead there, so you didn’t go, so no one went because what was the point?

In truth the action was below, in the long urine-stinking subway tunnel beneath Schermerhorn. The token booth there was buried deep in the block, the path to it a terrifying gauntlet, a home for beggars who slumped against the dimmed windows of subterranean displays, relics from a time before Abraham and Straus figured there was no one worth advertising to in the stations underground, and no way to protect the merchandise displayed there. The tunnel was a famous danger.

He caught himself, though:
What use was a flying man in the subway?
A novice mistake, barely outsmarted. He felt a degree of accomplishment in avoiding it. Aeroman’s first triumph, a prudent hesitation. It was a relief not to enter the tunnel.

Maybe Smith Street was a better bet after all.

Tomorrow eighth grade began.

Aeroman wanted to emerge before it was too late, but he needed crime to call him out.

Beneath his feet the pavement rumbled as the A or GG slowed at the underground platform, then a handful of lonely figures leaked from the station into the night. He stood beneath the lamppost across Schermerhorn, watching. One white woman glanced in his direction, eyes darting, surveying the empty street. She turned down Bond, then onto State Street.

Sweating, hunchbacked, Aeroman followed.

Maybe something would happen. He was magnetized by her fear, a thing he understood. Seeing it reflected in the woman was acutely thrilling. Here was precisely what Aeroman meant to combat, the hectic, accelerating heel steps in darkness, on a block where the canopy of limbs masked the streetlights. He reached down, not breaking stride, and palmed the ring up from his ankle, slipped it onto his left forefinger. The voices of hidden paper-bag drinkers drifted from the recessed stoops, idle jaded watchers who’d never help a woman in danger.

She was underdressed, rape-able, regretting she’d ever heard the word
Brooklyn
, let alone nibbled the bait of the reputed astonishing rents here, the hardwood floors.

Just one catch: the scene sorely lacked a villain. No one followed the girl apart from him.

He was chasing her down the block. It was his footsteps she fled.

It was a mugging like an egg on a roosterless farm, unfertilized, incomplete.

When she began actually running he stood still in the middle of State Street and let her go, made dumb with chagrin. Should he fly ahead, somersault over and intercept her, perhaps, to apologize? But he’d only scare the shit out of her worse than he already had.

Aeroman had met the enemy, and it was Aeroman.

Now he trudged to Smith Street.

He went unnoticed here in his humped shirt, his hands bunched at his waist, right covering left, the finger with the ring. Happy enough for the moment to be scaring no one, to be a part of the crowd. The summer night was alive, Puerto Ricans spilling from social clubs in groups of four at sidewalk domino games, younger men in Yankee shirts tuned to the game. The entrance to the Bergen subway station was clotted with Gowanus Houses kids, teenage boys in stocking caps, angry girls he might or might not recognize from school. School, ready to resume, ready to pin him in place. He felt urgently again the need to find a meaningful crime, something he could handle. He slunk past the crowd of Gowanus kids at the subway, certain there was less than nothing for him there.

He was hungry. Looking both ways, he fished in his other sock for the dollar tucked inside. It was soaked. He transferred the dollar to his pocket and rubbed it against the cloth at his thigh to dry it. At Bergen and Smith was a pizzeria, also thronged with older teenagers, a place he and Arthur Lomb had braved one afternoon on the way from school to Pacific, to Arthur’s stoop, in the early days of their friendship. It seemed possible now his friendship with Arthur Lomb had peaked in the first month of that summer, during the deplorable chess marathon, that he would never taste Arthur’s mom’s red juice or turkey sandwiches again. He couldn’t permit himself to be nostalgic. Arthur was a phony, and Mingus would know soon enough. He imagined Arthur saying,
Yo, Mister Machine sucks, Jack Kirby can’t draw anymore, dang, but a number one’s a number one, yo, seal it in airtight plastic and put it on the shelf, that’s my policy, yo.
He went into the pizzeria and ordered a slice, spread his moist dollar on the counter.

A hand clapped over the two quarters change as they appeared in place of the dollar. Dylan looked up. Robert Woolfolk scooped the coins into his pocket. The men at the pizza counter were uninterested: the event occurred at the teenage stratum, which they filtered at a preconscious level. Dylan or Aeroman was a little uninterested himself. He kinked the slice of pizza at the crust, folding it so it supported the floppy weight of its own tip, fluffed the sheet of translucent paper underneath, then shook garlic salt onto the pizza’s surface, tan grains which saturated instantly in pooled oil. With the slice he stepped into the populated street. Robert Woolfolk followed. Robert had a companion along, a small version of himself, dark and rangy, whom Dylan had never seen before.

“Don’t bite that, man,” said Robert.

“Why not?”

“Take it off him,” Robert told the other boy, who was smaller than Dylan.

“What you talkin’ about?” said the younger boy, disbelieving the obvious.

“Take his slice.”

Among yokings, this was a familiar format to Dylan: the master instructing apprentice, commanding
Take it off him
or
Check his pockets, man
. Call it the Batman-and-Robin.

Never for a slice, though. That was fairly original.

“C’mon, man,” implored the protégé, not looking at Dylan.