The Fortress of Solitude Page 9

  “This your friend, huh?”

  Mingus ignored the question, sat on the couch.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Dylan.”

  “Dylan? I met that cat, man. Who you like in the game, Little Dylan?”

  “Huh?”

  “Who you like in the game?”

  “He likes the Vikings,” said Mingus, distantly, fallen into some trancelike state induced by his father and the immense, pulsing screen.

  “Vikings lose,” said Barrett Rude Junior, so flatly that Dylan was momentarily confused—weren’t they all here to find out who won? The game wasn’t a rerun.

  “You know the Dolphins?” said Barrett Rude.

  Dylan lied yes.

  “I worked out with them, summer of ’71. Get the picture, Gus.”

  Mingus rose from the couch and slid into his father’s carpeted bedroom, returned with a framed color photograph, worm’s-eye, showing Barrett Rude Junior in a football uniform, ball curled to his chest, dreaming eyes fixed worlds beyond the lens.

  “Mercury Morris said I’d make the cut as a second-string wideout, never got the chance, though. Damm record company put the kibosh, thought I couldn’t protect myself. Cost me a Super Bowl ring, man.”

  Barrett Rude Junior wound down, his voice purring to nobody in particular. The game itself, when it began, turned out to be a long green flattening: of huffing, robotic men, and of Dylan’s interest. Football was an arrangement of failures, a proving how unlikely most things were. Mingus kept his betting stake private, just rooted maniacally for anyone to put it in the air. Dylan chanted silently along with the commercials, I’d like to buy the world a Coke. Indi-gestion. Barrett Rude Junior twitched his fingers, beating some tune on the Barcalounger’s arm.

  “Gus, get me a Colt from the fridge, man.”

  The yellow forty-ounce bottle sweated beads in the radiator-dry apartment. Barrett Rude wiped his fingers on his blue silk knee after each sip, dark wipes which evaporated but left puckered signatures, trails.

  “Halftime y’all take ten dollars, get us some sandwich makings. Go round to Buggy’s, get me some of that Swedish cheese I like. I hate that Puerto Rican cheese they got at Ramirez, man.” Barrett Rude Junior said Buggy’s like the rest of the block, it didn’t matter that he never went out. Names were known indoors. The block was one thing, whole, it was proven again. The brownstones had ears, minds ticking away.

  Y’all was a couple of yos walking together.

  Dylan and Mingus wrapped themselves in their coats and jammed their hats to their eyes. Wind ripped around the corner of Bond Street, flaying their bony legs, whistling in the vents of their Keds. Fists balled in pockets, palms sweaty, knuckles frozen. Prying Buggy’s door against the wind. She and her German shepherd loomed as apparitions, creatures from Mars peering through glass. A black kid and a white kid buying cheese and mustard. Buggy might not know it was the Super Bowl, might even think the word was toilet-related, a blue dusty item lining her top shelf, which nobody bought.

  Mingus and Dylan assembled sandwiches and the three of them ate, Barrett Rude Junior raving about the taste of the hot mustard, licking his fingers, muttering, punishing a second bottle of malt liquor. The third quarter was a floodlit desert, men piled in disarray, time desolately stretched. Somewhere ice-laden planes might be crashing, Manhattan might have snapped in two and drifted out to sea. Brooklyn was the winter island. Outside it was black as night. You’d never have guessed the Super Bowl was so grim and insistent. A shot from a drifting blimp alleviated nothing. Mingus kept his vigil, closed into himself, father-struck, father-stilled. Dylan scooted on his knees and picked through Barrett Rude Junior’s record collection, which filled the far corner beneath the mantel. Dylan flipped them forward and back, the Main Ingredient’s Afrodisiac, Esther Phillips’s Black-Eyed Blues, Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s The Inflated Tear, the Young Holt Trio’s Wack Wack, the names and cover art windows to some distant world as embedded with irretrievable meaning as any single issue of Marvel Comics.

  “You don’t need to be looking at that stuff now,” said Barrett Rude Junior, distantly annoyed. “Sit up and watch the game.” He squinted, seemed to consider Dylan’s entirety for the first time.

  The whiteness of the boy in the black man’s house.

  “Your mother know you’re here?” Barrett Rude Junior asked.

  “Dylan’s mother’s gone,” volunteered Mingus from the couch.

  “Your mother’s gone?”

  Dylan nodded.

  Barrett Rude Junior weighed it. Dylan’s presence in his room was explained, that might have been his first conclusion. Then, in slow motion, something else dawned. Dylan sensed in Barrett Rude’s heavy-lidded gaze a flare of tenderness, felt it like a headlight’s beam turning to enclose him.

  “Mother’s gone, but the boy is keeping it together.” Barrett Rude Junior spoke the sentence twice. In the first rendition the words emerged thick, deliberate, tongue-mashed. The second was a lilting echo of the first, the line now a song of admonition, a beguilement. “Mu-tha’s gone, but the boy is keeping it together.”

  Dylan nodded again, dumb.

  Mingus Rude’s father still gripped the blunt yellow bottle at its base. He waved it in a circle, toasting an invisible table. “That’s cool. You’re cool. Now, check out the long-players another time, Little Dylan. Sit and watch the game.”

  Did Barrett Rude Junior remind him of Rachel? Or was this only the longest the word mother had been strung in the air since Rachel’s vanishing? Dylan felt that she’d drifted into the room, a mist or cloud, a formation. Mingus Rude squirmed on the couch, wouldn’t meet Dylan’s eye—seemingly he felt her too, Rachel Ebdus or some other mother, pressing on him like a force from above, like weather. Then she drifted out of sight, the camera angle switched to the struggle of inches, runners writhing on shredded ground, a helmet hugged like a baby on the sidelines, the long wait for a measuring chain to come upfield.

  When at the end Mingus Rude put a fist in the air and said, “I won,” his father said, “What you win?”

  “Me and Dylan had a bet.”

  “How much?”

  “Five dollars.”

  “Don’t play your friend like that. Any fool knows the Vikings can’t win no Super Bowl. Come here. Come here.” When Mingus stood near enough Barrett Rude reached out with his wide hand, robe spilling forward, exposing a nipple weirdly soft and large, and cuffed his son on the cheek with his palm. It might have been affectionate if Barrett Rude’s voice, the theatrical summoning, hadn’t marked it as something else. Dylan watched Mingus rock delicately on his sneaker heels in expectation of another, stronger blow. But Barrett Rude grew absent, examined his own hand front and back, as though for something written there. Then he said, “Want money, don’t steal from your friend.” He extended an arm to the mantel and peeled off a twenty from the roll which lay there, shoved it at Mingus. “Put your hat back on and walk Little Dylan home now. And when you get back take a pick to your nappy-ass head, don’t make me keep telling you.”

  Winter days were static glimpsed between channel flips. Rotting snow like black diseased gums in the street. The projects were sealed up, the kids didn’t come out. Henry could be seen slinging a football into the sky, basket-catching it himself. Alberto had abandoned him, shifted into new, more Puerto Rican friendships. It was shocking how Henry was diminished, how much his stature had depended on Alberto after all. Mingus appeared on the block before nightfall or was elusive for weeks. Comics got weird, were thrown down in disgust. Warlock was canceled, they’d never know how his battle with Thanatos turned out. Jack “King” Kirby’s return to Marvel, from his exile at DC, was still building steam. Dylan pictured Kirby in a laboratory leaching the Superman toxins from his body, recovering from kryptonite poisoning.

  A guy jumped from the fifth floor of the halfway house on Nevins and impaled himself on the spiked iron gate, which had to be cut out in a section and moved with him to the Brooklyn Hospital
surgery room. Kids took trips to see the fence, until the telltale spikes were capped by a new steel bar running along their tops. You hadn’t known it was a halfway house until someone jumped out, then it turned out everybody knew. As with the Brooklyn House of Detention on Atlantic, you’d avoided that block on communal instinct, knowledge you couldn’t have guessed you already had.

  Dylan and Abraham stayed up late to see Saturday Night Live but after ten minutes Abraham declared he didn’t get it, and rummaged angrily for a misplaced Lenny Bruce record. Time was running backward, said Abraham. Things used to matter and be funny. Dylan took it on faith. One day Dylan found Earl slamming a spaldeen high off the face of the abandoned house, his teeth gritted as he said, over and over, “I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not! ” Earl was furious, disconsolate, nobody’s friend at the moment. For anybody, ballplaying was now explicitly nostalgic. If a few kids formed a game they were like the Puerto Ricans at the corner on milk crates, recounting the past, grumbling in ritual. Ball games broke like false fevers, passed like moods. Marilla and La-La sang, nearly screaming, Got my sunroof down, got my diamond in the back, put on your shaggy wig woman, if you don’t I ain’t comin’ back, oh, shame, shame, shame, sha-ay-ame, shame on you! If you can’t dance too!

  One thawing Saturday in March Dylan met Mingus at noon to walk up Court Street, through the scrap-strewn park that stretched beyond Borough Hall, on a solemn mission Dylan didn’t understand. In the park they bought hot dogs and knishes in greasy wax paper from a steaming cart, Mingus producing a balled-up five from his coat pocket. Mingus rewrapped half his knish and put it where the money had been, stash for the unknown destination. Just past the war monument the park tilted toward Brooklyn’s edge, the crumpled waterfront: parking lots, garbage scows, city scrap yards. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was a vibrating shadow, beneath it the streets still showed cobblestone in places, elsewhere old trolley tracks lay half buried in the new tar.

  Mingus showed the way. They circled under the on-ramp to find stone stairs up into the sunlight of the bridge’s walkway, then started across, over the river, traffic howling in cages at their feet, the gray clotted sky clinging to the bridge’s veins, Manhattan’s dinosaur spine rotating into view as they mounted the great curve above the river. The walkway’s slats were uneven, some rotten. Just an armature of bolted wire lay between Mingus’s and Dylan’s sneaker tips and the pulsing, glittering water. The bridge was an argument or plea with space.

  They halted two-thirds across. On the vast tower planted at Manhattan’s mouth were two lavish word-paintings, red and white and green and yellow sprayed fantastically high on the rough stone, edges bled in geological texture. The first read MONO , the second LEE , syllables drained of meaning, like Mingus’s DOSE .

  Dylan understood what Mingus wanted him to see. The painted names had conquered the bridge, pinned it to the secret street, claimed it for Brooklyn. The distance between Mono’s and Lee’s blaring, blurry, timeless ten-foot letters and the binder-scribble and wall-scribble, the gnomic marks everywhere, might be traceable, step by step. Tags and their invisible authors were the next skully or Marvel superheroes, the hidden lore. Mingus Rude pulled out his half-eaten knish and nibbled it and the two of them stood in awe, apes at a monolith, glimpsing if not understanding their future. The cars rushing below knew nothing. People in cars weren’t New Yorkers anyway, they’d suffered some basic misunderstanding. The two boys on the walkway, apparently standing still: they were moving faster than the cars.

  Nineteen seventy-five.

  Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude in the spring of 1975, walking home along Dean Street studying marker tags in black and purple ink, on mailboxes and lampposts, DMD and FMD, DINE II andSCAR 56 , trying to break the code, mouthing syllables to themselves. Dylan and Mingus together and alone, in windows of time, punctuation. One crossing Nevins to dodge a clump of kids from the projects, keeping his white face hidden in a jacket hood; one hanging in loose gangs of black kids after school, then walking alone to Dean Street. The two of them, a fifth and a sixth grader, stranded in zones, in selves. White kid, black kid, Captain America and Falcon, Iron Fist and Luke Cage. In windows of time, returning from different schools to the same block, two brownstones, two fathers, Abraham Ebdus and Barrett Rude Junior each wrinkling back foil edges on TV dinners to discover peas and carrots that had invaded the mashed potatoes and Salisbury steak, setting them on the table in dour silence. Dinner in silence or to the sound of the television drowned by the baying of sirens, Nevins Street a fire lane, a path of destruction, the projects flaring up again, an apartment on the eighteenth floor with a smoldering mattress pushed halfway out the window, stuck. The grid of zones, the huddled brownstone streets between prison and projects, Wyckoff Gardens, Gowanus Houses. The whores on Nevins and Pacific. The high-school kids pouring out of Sarah J. Hale all afternoon, black girls already bigger than yo mama, Third Avenue another no-man’s-land, the empty lot where they raped that girl. The halfway house. It was all halfway, you walked out of your halfway school and tried to chart a course through your halfway neighborhood to make it back to your own halfway house, your half-empty house. Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude like figures stepping through mists of silence every few weeks to read a comic book or fool around with tags in ballpoint, dry runs, rehearsals for something else.

  His old teacher’s office was unchanged, so it might all be a dream, a mistake. He might be cutting out on a City College lecture at 135th Street to visit the Art Students League on 57th Street in 1961, might be again the Columbus Avenue kid gawking like he wasn’t even a New Yorker, like he was some hick loosed in hipsters’ paradise, positive he saw de Kooning around every corner, airing his fresh goatee and praying nobody would call him on the bluff, banish him back uptown. Back then Brooklyn had been unknown to him, apart from Coney Island, that distant faded Wonderland where, at seventeen and high on Coca-Cola, under the squeaking boardwalk, in bands of sun and shadow, he’d unclasped his first brassiere, Sasha Koster’s, and, balls aching, jetted spontaneously into his binding underwear. He should have known that by spilling seed there, in the cold littered sand of Brooklyn, he’d doomed himself. That though MacDougal and Bleecker Streets seemed his future he would instead marry a life-drawing model from Williamsburg, a Hunter dropout, a chain-smoker and pot-smoker, a hippie before there were hippies, and end up raising their child alone in a row house five blocks from the Gowanus Canal. By venting Sasha Koster’s breasts to the salt air he’d sworn himself to the borough.

  His office was unchanged and Perry Kandel was unchanged, still genially shabby in an elbow-patched sweater, teeth and skin still gray as an erased charcoal sketch, hair wild like a New Yorker cartoon of a shrink. Kandel tipped his stolid middle over his desk to shake hands and wave at a chair, then sat back and spoke as if resuming pursuit of a conversational point to which he’d been building for half his life but wouldn’t reach if he lived twice.

  “Thinkers aren’t thinking, Abraham, teachers aren’t teaching. The writers don’t write, they stand onstage and play with themselves instead, emulating Mailer and Ginsberg. We’ve lost a generation. Young men walk into my office and declare their intention to live in a geodesic dome and tend bees, or compose choral music in Esperanto. To do happenings. Tradition’s kaput. Nothing’s good enough, not since Warhol, that schmuck with earlaps. It isn’t interesting enough to be merely a man or a woman, even. I went to see a so-called film at the Quad and in three hours learned only that David Bowie is without a penis. Him, he can’t even play with himself. Me, I have a smaller ambition, to keep painters painting, a few, anyway. You, Abe, you’re a grave disappointment.”

  “You said a job, Perry. Don’t torture me.”

  “I regard it as an act of despair. You weren’t selling when you sold to Hagopian, you were burying the evidence like a guilty animal. You’re ashamed of paint, it embarrasses you. What, you’re surprised? You think word doesn’t reach me?”

  “Has word of my wrecked marriage reached you?�
�� Abraham Ebdus spoke the words he hadn’t to this point, and looked his old teacher in the eye, wanting to shock and silence him. In fact, he’d shocked only himself. Perry Kandel didn’t even pause for breath.

  “There’s a problem nobody’s solved. A painter leaves a trail of wrecked marriages should he be so lucky to get laid in the first place, but, but, but—essentially he persists in covering canvas with rabbit-skin glue and pigment. That’s how he earns the right to go on wrecking them.”

  Abraham wasn’t going to descend to mentioning son, or mortgage. “If what you told me on the telephone was just to get me here for a lecture—”

  “Listen, it’s a job. Whether it’s for you, you’ll decide. It would involve the application of paint with a brush, but only for purely tasteless and reprehensible ends, so relax. Your renunciation of your talent should remain uncompromised.”

  “I appreciate the concern.”

  “It’s nothing. An editor acquaintance, a clever man to whom I frequently lose sums at the poker table, he asked if I knew any young painters with both a figurative and an abstract bent, and with a sense of color. I said sure, a couple. He presides over a line of science-fiction paperbacks, which he wants to market with an eye on adults for a change, the college crowd, god knows what he imagines that is. For this he wants someone outside the usual hack commercial painters. He used the word upscale. Personally, I hear that word, I tremble. I wouldn’t want it applied to myself.”