The Fortress of Solitude (34 page)

Arthur’s being seen with Mingus was a gift Dylan wouldn’t begrudge him now: it was a thing Arthur needed much worse than Dylan ever had. Let Arthur imagine a parity. In fact, Dylan knew, their two friendships with Mingus, his and Arthur’s, were vastly different. Dylan and Mingus lived in a motherless realm, full of secrets. Aeroman, for one thing. Certain other things, for another. Dylan doubted Arthur even had pubic hair yet. Plus Dylan and Mingus knew each other’s dads, and Mingus went into Dylan’s house. Dylan was certain Arthur wouldn’t ever want Mingus to see inside his own mommified sanctuary of Hi-C juice and Hydrox cookies.

When Mingus was a dollar short of a nickel bag he and Dylan might scrape for loose change in Dylan’s kitchen or even climb the stairs to Abraham’s studio. There Mingus waited at the door, dim transistor jazz seeping through, while Dylan cadged folding money. Abraham, always sensing the lurker in the corridor, would ask:

“Is that Mingus?”

“Yeah.”

“He doesn’t need to hide. Tell him to come say hello.”

In Abraham’s presence Mingus Rude grew courtly, called Abraham
Mr. Ebdus
, asked about the progress of his film. Abraham would sigh and produce some opaque riddle.

“As well ask Sisyphus, my dear Mingus.”

“
Cookypuss
?” Mingus would be quick with a free-associated reply. He and Abraham had hatched some running joke of mishearing one another. They couldn’t get enough of it.

“Ah, Cookypuss. Maybe Cookypuss for one is showing some progress. I’d like to think so.”

On the other hand, the two no longer went upstairs to Barrett Rude Junior. The stairway between basement and parlor floors might as well have been sealed now. Dylan saw evidence Mingus avoided the upstairs kitchen, cans of Chef Boyardee heated on Senior’s hot plate, Slim Jim wrappers in the bathroom garbage pail. When they cranked Mingus’s stereo, though, Dylan felt himself expecting, even yearning for Junior at the door singing
Fuck you doin’ Gus?
, his sweet disapproval a fragment of melody you pined to hear whole.

But no amount of volume drew Junior to the door, in Mingus’s apartment they were mole-men now for sure, on their own deep exploration.

Foxy’s “Get Off” they played fifteen times in a row, louder each time, trying to destroy the distance between that rubbery, fleshlike bass line and themselves, as if the song was a photograph, a
Playboy
centerfold they enlarged by degrees until they could enter the frame, walk into the picture.

They also stared at certain photographs until they might have left sheddings from their blistered eyeballs strewn on the pages, then exchanged relieving hand jobs without making a particularly big deal of it.

Mingus kept the ring and the costume, Aeroman was officially him. Both were stashed on a shelf high above the door, with a hockey trophy and Mingus’s old football helmet, ring out of sight above eye level, costume balled behind the helmet, nothing any random visitor to the room, Arthur Lomb, say, would bother remarking on. Whether Mingus ever donned them out of Dylan’s company went undiscussed. Afternoons passed when Aeroman wasn’t mentioned, the ring wasn’t handled or even seen, Dylan sat on Mingus’s bed and glanced at the shelf between joint tokes but nothing happened, they’d hit the street or catch a Kung Fu flick or Dylan would only go home stoned to whatever supper Abraham had prepared. Then Aeroman might as well have been the lead in a quickly canceled Marvel title like
Omega
or
Warlock
, or a murdered sidekick, quickly avenged then forgotten, or a name from the Golden Age, perhaps, like Doll Man or the Human Bomb: in other words, no superhero at all, not really, not one anyone remembered.

Other days he’d have told Abraham he was having dinner at Mingus’s house, or slipped out after wolfing dinner at Abraham’s table to return to the basement apartment, and then after a certain hour Mingus would glance at the shelf too, and say:

“Fight crime?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“Uh huh.”

Mingus would grin and say, “Look at you, you’re like,
I thought you would never ask
.”

Aeroman flew six or seven times that fall, was perhaps involved in eight or nine incidents, could claim maybe three bona fide rescues, legible crimes authentically flown down on and busted up. On State Street near Hoyt they halted a six-foot Puerto Rican showing a steak knife to a small Chinese guy, who was busy pulling balled wadded dollars from his pockets, magicianlike, in terrified surrender. Mingus-Aeroman swooped from a fire escape and scissored legs around the knife-wielder’s neck, torque twisting them both to the pavement, Dylan scooted from an apartment building’s entrance to pounce on the knife, plucking it from the ground and surrounding it with his body as though it might detonate. Puerto Rican and Chinese both fled in shock. Though Dylan waved the fluffy bills and called after the victim, he didn’t turn. Breathless and amazed at confiscated weapon and money, Dylan and Mingus stuffed Aeroman’s outfit and mask into a paper sack and walked to Steve’s Restaurant on Third Avenue, celebrated with midnight cheeseburgers and chocolate shakes, adrenaline and marijuana buzz given way to a ravenous appetite, adolescent cells howling for lipids. Waiters gave the hairy eyeball all through the meal, suspecting a scarf-and-run, but Dylan and Mingus didn’t care. They had the dough, even left an ostentatious
fuck-you
tip.

On Smith Street, howling an unrehearsed cowboys-and-indians
woo-woo-woo
as he descended, Aeroman spooked drunks boxing at the door of a social club, sole duty at the tail end of a long night’s stalking around, prowling for gigs, killing time tagging on metal doors. On Third Avenue in a cold mid-October rain he foiled a holdup attempt at one of the Plexiglas-barrier Chinese joints, leaving a spilled mound of orange fried rice trampled to pudding at the entrance. At the far end of the Heights Promenade, under cover of darkness, he was cooed at in his costume by men rendezvousing on park benches, men who didn’t need his protection. On Pacific Street near Court, Dylan and Aeroman found roof access to a tenement and lay on their bellies, in costume and street clothes, peering over the cornice, memorizing the life of the unfamiliar block, every girl screaming “
Mira, mira!
” at someone who wouldn’t reply, every boy slapping a spaldeen into the joint of a wall, every grandmother window-perched on Buddha arms, watching just as Mingus and Dylan watched, absorbed, doing nothing.

The bridge crossing after dark was a sure spot, a famous mistake to walk there at night, so they took it to the bridge: Dylan standing as bait by the massive shoring tower still bearing Mono’s and Lee’s fabulously weathered autographs, Mingus in costume flown to a perch on the high, swaying cable. Below, on the streets, it was late summer, but here above the city winter was arriving, swept off the ocean. Dylan was mugged in minutes, it was comically predictable, almost corny when two homeboys lurched out of the gloom beyond the tower and said: “Hey, whiteboy, lemme borrow a dollar off you, man.”

Dylan gladly played at reaching into his pockets for money, his attackers fish in a barrel. Only Mingus didn’t shoot the fish, he didn’t swoop.

“What you checkin’ around for, man?”

Dylan had made them nervous. They smelled setup in his hesitation and followed his gaze to the bridge, the sky-harp of spun lines. So all three saw the caped figure struggling in the gust which had torn it from the cable, saw Mingus cycling in air, trying to reclaim a footing, nearly doing so before being wind-wrested into the breach between the bridge and the water, the wild void. All three watching lost sight of him below the line of the bridge’s roadway. He was just a twinkle, mask, cape, Puma soles maybe, then nothing at all.

He’d been blown from the bridge.

Dylan turned on the walkway’s planks and bolted for the Brooklyn end, abandoned the scene exactly as Rachel had always told him to do—
Just run, kiddo, use those pogo sticks, they can’t catch up with you!
—and which he’d never done once in a thousand yokings. For Mingus he found his legs, he ran. He nearly tumbled dodging a beat cop staked at the foot of the stairs, waved a quick hello-I-must-be-going to the cop’s dull glower, then panted on, limbs wheeling. Cabs curled off the bridge, faceless, cornering through Cadman Plaza to Henry Street, Clinton Street, to placid brownstones with mock gaslight fixtures. There wasn’t anybody to appeal to for help, Dylan was alone, Mingus, Aeroman, ring all drowned, smashed on the water. Dylan veered to the dark paths below the bridge, seeking the edge of the river, the junk-strewn wasteland where the city hid crashed police cars and looted parking meters and other evidence of helplessness.

Mingus sat hunched and dripping at the base of the anchorage, twisting water from the tips of his cape, stain spreading on the concrete embankment like a snow angel. Dylan arrived gasping, hot-faced, couldn’t speak before Mingus said: “Ho,
shit
, man.”

“You’re okay?”

“I was swimming, man. I don’t even know how to swim.” He spoke with quiet amazement, nodding his head at the water.

“What do you mean?”

“Like a fish, D-Man.”

“You’re saying the ring
gave you the power of swimming
?”

“Or flying underwater, don’t ask me. I was up to some serious Aquaman shit, though.”

They slunk to Dean. The staged rescue left unfinished on the walkway and the plummet from the wires, both were put behind them, though Dylan and Mingus and Aeroman skirted the bridge after that. Aeroman, having been laid flat to dry, mellowed on the shelf for weeks, regathering his wits and bravado, perhaps, shaking off effects of the fall. Mingus didn’t reach for the costume and Dylan didn’t push. Dylan instead became briefly obsessed with clandestine powers in the ring. Why imagine Aaron X. Doily had plumbed them all? Possibly Aeroman was named prematurely, had more to offer. Dylan wore the ring and immersed his head in Mingus’s filled tub, hoping to breathe underwater. He snorted a flood into his lungs, came up hacking, nearly puked, bathwater scalding his nostrils.

The ring also conferred no X-ray vision, though they spent one thrilled night persuading themselves, scowling hard at dresses, black hos working Pacific and Nevins, white Saint Ann’s girls massed at the Baskin-Robbins on Montague.

“Wait, wait, I see something.”

“My turn now.”

“Oh—sweet—Jesus. She’s wearing no panties.”

Aeroman’s last venture that first season of high school was in a light, freak-early midnight snowfall two weeks past Thanksgiving, Dylan walking State Street, Mingus hopping the rooftops above, keeping pace. Ever since the Chinese victim who’d dropped his money, State between Hoyt and Bond was their lucky mugging strip, safe distance from anyone they’d know on Dean or Bergen, dark with a smashed streetlamp, close enough to the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway stop that dumb junkies frightened of venturing into the Heights considered it safe prowling for renovators’ wives, trembling whiteboys, geezers. Tonight, though, a snowball was all Dylan drew. A lone, tall Puerto Rican kid leaning on a car scooped a windshield-mass of fresh stuff and flung an unerring bull’s-eye in Dylan’s back. When Dylan whirled he said: “Try it, motherfucker, I dare you throw one.”

At that moment Mingus descended with a cradled armload, shoveled it into the tall kid’s collar.

Then Mingus landed softly beside Dylan and they ran together hooting, Mingus stripping the costume and cape off over his head, momentarily bare-chested in the snowfalling night.

Mingus afternoons, Aeroman nights, they were untellable the next day at Stuyvesant, if he’d even wanted to try, if he’d somehow corralled Tim Vandertooth’s and Gabriel Stern’s ears for the attempt. Dylan had no interest in telling. Mornings after, he felt himself an orbiter on reentry, his hidden knowledge sealed in flame. Mingus and Aeroman were a million miles away, another realm, Brooklyn. Besides, the thing coming for Tim and Gabe had found them.

Once it arrived it was obvious, had a common name already known: punk. Or new wave. They were related strands: Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, Cheap Trick. Discerning their difference, articulating your precise relation, that was part of the point, a continuum of the now it was suddenly clear anyone could be placed on. Even the longhaired stoners in their refusal were anti-punk, defining something.

Tim came to school one day with a point-studded dog collar. He showed them how it worked, a simple snap. Gabe taunted him uneasily for a week, then went out and bought a Ramonesian leather jacket loaded with zippers and buckles, smelling of preservatives and sizing, almost like one of Abraham’s canvases. Gabe slapped the jacket against a rock in the park, trying to age it. They studied the results. The jacket looked new as licorice. Or the problem was themselves, their bangs, hair curled over their ears. The next week Tim and Gabe returned from Roosevelt Island having fucked up their hair with children’s scissors. The jacket looked slightly improved.

Tim smoked cigarettes now.

Gabe etched a tiny swastika on his forearm with a razor blade. “
You know what my parents would do to me if they saw this?
” he whispered darkly, like he’d been kidnapped by Satanists and forced to recite a pledge.

The girls with short black-dyed hair were suddenly visible. Sarcastic, pale, and titless, they were a different flavor, previously overlooked.

A few even
had
tits, which might violate punk aesthetics but you’d consider making an exception.

Dylan shunted knapsack-loads of Rachel’s Blind Faith and Creedence Clearwater Revival records to Bleecker Bob’s record exchange, embarrassed to see them in the house, returned with the Clash’s
Give ’Em Enough Rope
.

Steve Martin was for children.

There wasn’t much terror. Fourteenth Street, First Avenue, they were scungy but populated, jostling with drug traffic but not a lot of yoking. Maybe you’d outgrown victim size, though it was hard to imagine there could be universal consensus on that point, you had to stay alert. A girl your age was pushed from a subway platform on her way to Music and Art, a cellist who lost her arm under the train and had it reattached in a miracle surgery. The incident made a brief noise of panic among white kids on subways and their parents, but that was 135th Street, Harlem. Poor kid but what did she expect? Thank God you hadn’t gone to Music and Art. To escape the outer boroughs only to soar on the subway past Manhattan’s safe zones all the way into Harlem was ironic, one crazy mistake you’d at least avoided.