Then a blond girl with an intricate mouthful of braces stepped out of her gaggle of look-alikes and called them over. Eyes wild with her own daring, she showed a cigarette.
“Got a light?”
Her friends busted up at the self-conscious comedy of it, but apparently Mingus didn’t care, could live inside the quote, make it real. He dug in his jacket lining and pulled out a bright blue lighter, like a PEZ container that blurted a curl of fire. How she’d known he’d have it Dylan couldn’t fathom. The tone of the scene switched again, the girl leaned in, eyes narrowed ferally now, thrilled and wary, tilted her head, scooped her hair around her ear to protect it from the flame. She turned her back the moment the cigarette was lit and Dylan and Mingus moved on, dismissed.
The Heights kids were rich most of all with each other.
The Heights Promenade was a rim of park cantilevered over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the shipyards, Brooklyn ’s sulky lip. Old men and women pecked forward like pigeons on cobblestone, or sat arrayed, frozen with clutched newspapers on benches in the face of Manhattan ’s tedious spires, the skyline a channel no one watched that played anyway, like an anthem, like famous static. Beyond it spilled the garbagey bay, yellow Jersey smoke clung over inching ferries, over the trinketlike Statue. Dylan and Mingus were detectives, not really here. They followed clues. The trail was legible in gushy, streaked font on lamppost bases and mail deposit boxes, fire-alarm poles, garage doors, finger-traced in dust on the panels of trucks.
ROTO I, BEL I, DEAL, BUSTER NSA, SUPER STRUT, FMD.
“Non-Stop Action,” translated Mingus. He was hushed by the knowledge, his eyes unfocused. “Flow Master Dancers.” Tags were no different from anything else: codes in layers, ready to be peeled away or overwritten.
Roto and Bel and Deal were in DMD Crew, a new outfit, jokers from Atlantic Terminals, a housing project across Flatbush Avenue.
Super Strut was old school, he went way back. The style might look funny now, but you wouldn’t disrespect it.
The syllable TOY was written in mockery over certain tags, disrespect for a writer who was a toy.
Write TOY on a DMD tag, get your ass kicked.
Mingus fished in his lining for his El Marko, a Magic Marker consisting of a puglike glass bottle stoppered with a fat wick of felt. Purple ink sloshed inside the tiny screw-top bottle, staining the glass in curtains of color. Mingus drew out a safety pin and stuck the felt in a dozen places, pinning it out he called it, until the ink bled so freely it stained the light skin at his palm, then the green cuff of his oversize jacket. Dylan felt a quiver of the pleasure he associated with his father’s tiny brushes, with Spirograph cogs and skully caps.
DOSEwent up on a lamppost, Mingus’s hand moving in studied arcs.
A tag was a reply, a call to those who heard, like a dog’s bark understood across fences. A reply in moist purple. The letters dripped and stunk thrillingly. Every time they went up Mingus hustled Dylan away, the El Marko clanking back in his jacket lining against the blue lighter and whatever else. Mingus pushing at Dylan’s elbow, the two boys crossed the street diagonally, ducking pursuers who weren’t necessarily real. Their path was a zigzag sentence consisting of a single word, DOSE, written in blank spots found everywhere.
Under oblivious eyes, the invisible autographed the world.
The long path of the Promenade curled at the end in a small abandoned playground, two swings, a slide. Mingus took a minute to tag DOSE on the heel-dented mercury sheen of the slide, a particularly juicy rendition with a dripping halo.
He offered Dylan the El Marko. The purple-fingerprinted bottle rolled like something ripe in Mingus’s stained palm, a plum.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Tag up. Hurry.”
“How do I know what to write?”
“Don’t you got a tag yet? Make one up.”
Vendlemachine, Will-Fuck, Dose. Marvel Comics had it right, the world was all secret names, you only needed to uncover your own.
White Boy?
Omega the Unknown?
“Dillinger,” Dylan said. He stared, not quite reaching for the El Marko.
“Too long, man. Something like Dill Three, D-Lone.”
A Filipino baby-sitter creaked a stroller into the playground. Mingus slipped the marker into his jacket, tilted his head.
“Let’s go.”
You could flee a woman who was four feet tall and a baby lashed into a stroller, scramble away giddy and hysterical. It was only real threat that froze you where you stood, your feet like bricks, to dig in your pocket and offer up your bills and change. Go figure.
Mingus hoisted onto the fence surrounding the playground, swung a leg, dropped. Dylan, trying to follow, doubled himself on the fence. Mingus braced under Dylan’s arms while Dylan scrabbled with his foot. They fell together like cartoon cats in a sack on the other side.
“Dang, son, get off me!”
Dylan found his glasses where they’d tumbled in the grass. Mingus brushed at his pants, his jacket, like James Brown checking his suit for imaginary lint. He was grinning, lit up. A shard of leaf in the coils of his hair.
“Get up, son, you’re on the ground!” Mingus at his happiest called Dylan son in a booming voice, another quotation, half Redd Foxx, half Foghorn Leghorn.
He offered his hand, yanked Dylan to his feet.
There was something about a physical collision, a moment when fond irritation found an outlet. It wasn’t sexual, more just the routine annoyance of what you were supposed to be doing with your time being answered by the occasional pratfall.
You felt its use. The Italian kids on Court Street knocked each other down at regular intervals.
Dylan wanted to clear the leaf from Mingus’s hair but left it alone.
They trudged down a grade to a hidden patch of land, a tilted triangle of desolate ailanthus and weeds, choked in exhaust at the edge of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, cars whirring indifferently below. The patch was littered with cigarette butts, forty-ounce bottles, shreds of tires. It formed another oasis of neglect, with all the secret authority of the abandoned house. Even the Heights was shored with wreckage, the characteristic crap that underpinned everything.
Again they’d traveled in famous traces, like pilgrims. The stone wall that rose up to the Promenade was covered with six-foot letters, patient graffiti masterpieces to be viewed by the passing drivers. They backed toward the traffic to view the art, Dylan adjusting his glasses on his nose. MONO and LEE: the Dynamic Duo had struck here too.
In Dylan’s mind Mono was black and Lee was white.
Mingus leaned against the painted wall, shaded by a canopy of ailanthus, and thumbed the blue lighter, held it sideways to the tip of a small, faucetlike chrome pipe, another surprise product of the green jacket’s lining. Head tilted, eyes squeezed in concentration, Mingus sipped at smoke, held it in with thin-pressed lips. Fumes leaked from his nose. He nodded his chin at Dylan, finally exhaled.
“You want some weed?”
“Nah.” Dylan tried to keep it breezy, an incidental turndown that could have gone either way.
Below, trucks roared past, a wall in motion. They bore their own graffiti markings from other parts of the city, alien communication spread by an indifferent carrier, like a virus.
“I took it from Barrett. He keeps it in the freezer.”
These days Mingus called his father Barrett. To Dylan it was probably the key to everything, a crucial stance. Alone, he’d rehearse the possibility under his breath: Abraham, Abraham, Abraham.
“Does he know?” Dylan asked.
Mingus shook his head. “He got so much, he won’t even notice.” He flicked the lighter again, the bowl of the pipe flaring orange, crackling faintly. Dylan worked not to tip his fascination.