The Fortress of Solitude (21 page)

You outgrew Belmont before you started working for them, Ebdus. Don’t think everyone didn’t notice your work the minute it appeared. This isn’t a big industry, not once you’re in it. It’s like high school, everybody knows who the cool kids are. I frankly don’t understand why you didn’t come to us in the first place.

Forget the legal bullshit, man. We’ll put some other name on the sleeve, call you, huh, Pee-Brain Rooster. You like that? Anyone with ears is gonna know it’s you the minute you open your mouth, man. Minute you let out that motherfucker of a voice. We’ll sort out the legal shit some other time, can’t let that trouble us.

What one father doesn’t say is that being here means admitting that what he’s engaged in is some sort of
career
. The arrangement with Belmont, he’d always told himself, with admittedly perverse logic, was a sort of favor to Perry Kandel: permitting his old teacher to imagine he’d welcomed him back into the world. It was a lark. Plus the notion of the New Belmont Specials suggested a sort of limited engagement, a run to some conclusion. But to make this call and keep this appointment was to grant that he’s a paperback painter now, a commercial artist. And being welcomed so eagerly here meant despite the contempt dripping from his brush he’d done acceptable work. The seduction of craft had led here, to the seduction of praise. In the elevator he’d sworn he’d heard Perry’s bitter wheezing laughter.

What the other father doesn’t say is that though he envies these men dressed as cartoon pimps and superheroes their freedom, that though a part of him thinks
Shit, why didn’t I haul out the overt freak shit myself, why did I always stay so buttoned down in the goddamn Philly system
, another part just doesn’t think the singing and playing on the backing track is any good. Funk is soul on acid, for better and for worse; today worse. This track sprawls to no purpose, slack, in its way, as disco. Pornographic disco, that’s really what it is. He’s expected to doodle over a harmonizing backdrop but the harmonizing isn’t any good, and for the first time since leaving the Subtle Distinctions he misses their sweet uptight voices, the way they provided him such a smooth clean cushion of sound from which to launch his rhapsodies, his flights.

You want a cup of coffee? It’s not too bad, actually.

Hey man, food’s gonna get here. Need a little blow?

Something the matter?

Just say what you need, man.

Fathers, fathers, why so grim? Today you emerged from your houses, your hiding, and were warmly welcomed. Smile, fathers. Relax. Today this world wants you in it.

chapter  
9

A
t the end of another winter, lion giving way to lamb, he comes to lie there one day in the long sun and shadows and stays for good, curled into a ball at the corner of Atlantic and Nevins, at a spot on the pavement just short of the street, in front of the never-closed liquor store and the never-open locksmith. Fouled in himself, baked in vomit and urine and sweat, his pants black with it, he lies still as a bog man or mummy preserved in a glass case, eyes shut and mouth rigid, arms wrapped around his middle, fighting the chill of one week before, when he first took the position. He’s huddled as if against time itself, enduring the winter that’s already past, his pose a record of pain, a full-body grimace frozen in sunlight. Over his shoulders and tucked under his ass is a child’s thin synthetic sleeping bag, feeble cover though if he’s alive it must have gotten him through. The sleeping bag’s two corners are peeled away in torn strips, exposing cottonoid filler stained gray with street filth, and the two strips meet in a knot under his white-grizzled chin, so the thing weirdly resembles a superhero’s cape.

The flying man, grounded for the foreseeable future.

Guy looks dead if you ask me.

How? Why’s it allowed? Isabel Vendle’s Boerum Hill was declared “The City’s Best-Kept Secret,”
New York Magazine
, September 12, 1971. Gentrification—say the word, nothing to be ashamed of, only what’s this alcoholic coma victim doing here in plain sight? How likely no one expresses concern or touches his shoulder to see if he still moves, still lives, how likely no one even calls the cops?

Is it because he’s black?

Maybe Atlantic Avenue between Nevins and Third isn’t quite Boerum Hill. Maybe it’s Gowanus or some other thing without a name. Anyway this gentrification is strange and slow and not at all as coherent as Isabel Vendle might have hoped. There’s a cluster of antique shops now on Atlantic between Hoyt and Bond, new families on Pacific and Dean, Bergen too. Not Wyckoff, Wyckoff’s too close to the projects, no point hoping. Then there’s the communes. Assuming no one stashes Patti Hearst in a Dean Street basement they’re harmless enough, an acceptable placeholder. Some eager beaver’s opened a French restaurant on Bergen and Hoyt, jumping the gun perhaps but worth a shot. Even State Street, so close to Schermerhorn and the House of Detention and the eye-agonizing blight of downtown Brooklyn, even State’s got a tender little boomlet of brownstone renovation.

Yet it exists under a spell, a pall. The white families appear continuously these days, now too many to count, but collectively they’re still a dream, a projection conjured up by Isabel’s will. The renovators—that’s a politer word for them—they’re a set of ghosts from the future haunting this ghetto present. They’re a proposition, a sketch. Blink and they might be gone.

Ghetto? Is that the name for it? Depends which block in this patchwork you have in mind. Rise up, the way the flying man no longer can. Look. Here Fourth Avenue’s a wide trench of light-industrial ruin, oil-stained auto-body shops and forlorn, graffitied warehouses, sidewalks marked with sprays of broken glass which trace the shape of nighttime incidents in front of Chinese take-out places, liquor stores, bodegas, all of them serving their customers through slots or sliding drawers in shields of Plexiglas. At the opposite end, Court Street’s an old Italian preserve, the side streets south of Carroll hushed in the grip of Mafia whispers, old ways enforced with baseball bats and slashed tires, down to where the looming, curling Brooklyn-Queens Expressway forms a steel curtain severing what used to be Red Hook. South, the Gowanus Canal is a wasteland of buried or sunk toxins and smoldering strips of rubber, while Ulano, the solvent factory, is a block-long engine, its windows like slit eyes, pumping out fresh invisible toxins and accompanying legends of nerve damage and brain tumors. The projects, Wyckoff Gardens and Gowanus Houses—well, they’re projects, their own law, like meteors of crime landed in the city’s midst, still unapproachably hot. The jail’s called a House of Detention, a thin euphemism nonetheless worth clinging to. So, the brownstone streets which span these margins—Wyckoff, Bergen, Dean, Pacific—a ghetto?

Call it “The City’s Best-Kept Secret.”

Nevins has unique properties, venting at the top to Flatbush Avenue and running south smack into the Wyckoff Gardens, on the way threading the halfway house, the Department of Motor Vehicles, Schermerhorn Park, and the Nevins Day Care Center, on the steps of which drunks gather to greet welfare moms as they pass in and out of the center, yanking bawling kids’ arms like yo-yo strings. And widely known but rarely spoken of is this: Pacific Street at Nevins is a place where prostitution’s tolerated. Some default in authority has chased it to this corner, where after eleven o’clock a lone streetwalker or sometimes a pair can be spotted in the shadow of Public School 38, heard cooing enticements to lone strollers on a quiet night. Outraged calls to local officials gain promises and nothing more. At that inexplicable level where such civic deals are struck this one’s irrevocable, even as the neighborhood on all sides is gentrifying fast. So the police are revealed as skeptics, insensible to the concerns of realtors. This zone’s on their official map—never displayed to the public—of Hopeless.

So, perhaps it’s by this same principle that the no-longer-flying man has been allowed to rest undisturbed for weeks in his fetal curl on the corner of Nevins and Atlantic. He’s still there the last Saturday of March, when the black kid and the white kid go by. Yes, they’re together again, that uncanny sporadic pair, their solidarity a befuddlement to passersby, a shred perhaps of utopian symbolism, sure, something Norman Rockwell might have chosen as a subject, but not outweighing the fact that the two look furtive, maybe stoned, unmistakably headed for if not already deep into all kinds of black-white-combo trouble. Even those who don’t happen to spot them slipping blunt felt-tipped markers sopped with purple ink in and out of their jackets sense the likelihood that something’s not right. This is Brooklyn, nothing integrates innocently. Who’s fooling who? If the cops were on the ball they’d likely split up this pair just on general principles.

The white kid and the black kid take turns playing lookout while the other tags up. Things are radically simplified: the white kid’s stopped looking for his own moniker, been encouraged by the black kid to throw up his perfect replication of the black kid’s tag instead.
DOSE
,
DOSE
,
DOSE
. It’s a happy solution for both. The black kid gets to see his tag spread farther, in search of bragging points for ubiquity, that bottom-line standard for a graffiti writer’s success. The King of the C Line, for instance, is just a lousy tagger with too much time on his hands who’s thrown up the unimaginative tag
CE
on every window of every car of the trains that run that line. A success of this type is as impossible to dispute as it is mechanical, crude. Graffiti writers compete like viruses, by raw proliferation.

What’s in it for the white kid? Well, he’s been allowed to merge his identity in this way with the black kid’s, to lose his funkymusicwhiteboy geekdom in the illusion that he and his friend Mingus Rude are both Dose, no more and no less. A team, a united front, a brand name, an idea. The white kid’s control of line, honed in a thousand Spirograph spirals, and his gift for mimicry—Can You Draw Tippy?—both have served him well. His rendition of the
DOSE
icon is clarified, perfected, automatic—in fact cleaner and more sure in its lines than the black kid’s. Just a trick of the hand, nothing anyone couldn’t learn if they practiced it a gazillion times waiting for this moment.

The marker’s in the black kid’s hands now. The white kid’s the lookout. The black kid puts
DOSE
on the base of the traffic light at the corner of Atlantic and Nevins, and on the locked-up locksmith’s rolling metal gate. Then he turns and considers the curled figure near the curb. They both consider the figure. The bum—the word they’d find if they bothered to find a word—has been sleeping or dead on this corner for long enough now that they’ve both noticed him at different times. This is the first time together, though, and being together forces them to acknowledge the figure in a way they wouldn’t apart.

The white kid has one set of feelings, the black kid another. The white kid’s seen this particular bum on better days, seen him
in the sky
, idiotic as that sounds. He’s got no idea whether his friend Mingus has this information, and no idea where he’d begin explaining it if he wanted to try. He’s just locked into a permanent state of stupid wonder here, along with a slug of fear.

The black kid’s curling his lip, suffering a ripple of sudden shame: of course it’s a
black
guy who’d be lying here in the street, goes without saying. Not a Latin guy. No matter how many Hispanic drunkards might spill out of Dean Street’s rooming houses, they always wobble home, sleep in beds, change clothes, cash government checks, and begin again. And he’s no white guy, no need to even think about it.

“Watch this,” said the black kid.

“What?” says the white kid.

The black kid dashes forward with splendid daring, taking the white kid’s breath away. He’s got the marker uncapped. The plasticky sleeping bag stretched across the bum’s back has a sheen despite the grime, a slickness to welcome the marker’s slide. The black kid kneels at the stinky form and tags up, managing despite the drag of the felt on the blackened synthetic: in a moment the thing is done and they both spring away, amazed.

The bum’s back reads
DOSE
.

“Run!”

“He’s not moving. Ho, shit! Look at that!”

“Come on!”

That’s it, they’re done tagging for the day, nothing could top this anyway. The two of them scramble down Nevins, gasping with laughter, drunk on the atrocious prank, on the demonstration of their dangerous new ability to reach out and plop a logo on the maybe-dead of this world.

They arrived late and had to take single seats a distance apart. Dylan sat near the front, in the second row. His father had insisted Dylan take the nearer seat, had himself taken one farther back and at the far left side of the lecture hall. Dylan understood he was meant to appreciate this up-close glimpse of the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, whom Abraham regarded soberly as
a great man, a beautiful man
. The topic, generally, was paint on film. Dylan hadn’t known before this moment that painted film existed, apart from Abraham’s. Let alone that the topic could draw a crowd to fill a hall full of uncomfortable metal folding chairs.

In fact, Dylan found Brakhage, when he spoke, enthralling, though he understood zip of what he said. Brakhage was charismatic and orotund and evoked Orson Welles on television. Like Welles he suggested a greatness both distant from itself and fully at rest, in this case scarcely bothering to taste the air of adulation in the room. The problem with the presentation was that Brakhage rarely spoke. He sat sipping water and blinking rapidly, examining the audience, remaining largely silent in favor of a panel of younger men who in laborious turns pronounced on the significance of Brakhage’s films. Their spiky, resentful tones failed at concealing (or were perhaps not designed to conceal) the implication that they alone understood the filmmaker’s work. Dylan was bored, as Rachel would have said,
shitless
.