“I’ve seen you,” says Dylan, nearly whispering, the knowledge appearing with the words.

“Can’t no more,” says the flying man angrily, then licks his lips. “Muthafucking”-here he works to find a word-“air waves always got to be knocking me down.”

“Air waves?”

“Hah. Hah. I can’t stay in the air no more. That’s the problem, man.” The flying man suddenly spots the quarters shining in his cracked palm, like shards of mirror sun-caught in a muddy curb. “That’s all you got, man? That’s all you got for me?”

Dylan nods mutely, then undoes his belt and surrenders the tiny, wadded dollar, not unfolding it but dropping it like a Chiclet into the cup of the flying man’s vast fissured hand.

“Hah. You really seen me flyin’?”

The flying man lifts his chin to point at the distant rooftops above Pacific and Nevins, the roof of P.S. 38 and beyond, to the Wyckoff Houses. Seagulls wheel in the pale sky, strayed from Coney Island or Red Hook.

Dylan Ebdus nods again, then flees the park.

chapter 7

A postcard from Running Crab, postmarked Bloomington, Indiana, August 16, 1976. The front a black-and-white photograph of Henry Miller on the beach at Big Sur, naked apart from a loincloth so big it’s like a baby’s diaper, wrinkled chest sagging below caustic grin and sunburned brow. A statuesque, black-haired woman stands aloof behind him, in a bikini and a filmy wrap, ankles in surf, ignoring the camera.

don’t let hank fool you d

a brooklyn street kid never quits

dreaming of stickball triples

egg creams and the funnies

in his mind he’s dick tracy

she’s brenda starr

not venus on the half shell

love beachcomber crab

He stared at the tickets so long his eyeball vibes might have scoured off the ink bearing that blind coon’s name and replaced it with his own. Some fool up at Artists and Repertory had sent him two tickets to see Ray motherfucking Charles at Radio City Music Hall, as though he was likely to sit pondering a mile of the spangled white pussy known as the Rockettes-from the goddamn balcony!-just to see that haughty jive-ass banging on a grand piano hollering “God Bless America.” Never wished to play Radio City, why would he be found in the balcony?

He’d propped his parlor windows open high. Outside, Dean Street moaned in an ailment of humidity. The heat was granular, undissolved. The sunlight on the strewn mirror blobby, swimmy. Nothing rippled the curtains, the air didn’t move. Just a steady distant Puerto Rican beat from the square in front of Ramirez’s store, might be the same song for the last two hours, the whole afternoon. Cars moved like jellyfish, barely distinguishable from their medium, a ripple where the tar met the air.

Four black kids dancing like startled spiders in the flow of a wrenched-open hydrant on Nevins and Bergen.

He tossed the tickets on the mirror, then carved out a line, taking care to point his toes outward, ten and two on the face of an imaginary clock. He’d recently developed a technique of widening his hips and knees and keeping his back arched as he leaned forward, so that breathing a line became more natural, the blow raining into his open lungs, flushing him through with cool air. Too many cats snorted while balled up, imbibing the drug ragefully, their bodies fistlike.

It was like singing, a matter of what distant quadrants in your belly and chest you could find to offer up.

Commitment on a deeper level.

From the low angle he puzzled the tickets with his eyes, exploring how they lay twinned on the mirror, dark writing inaccessibly sandwiched in shadow between the two pairs, the real and the reflected. Maybe Crowell Desmond, his so-called manager, had engineered this affront. A widely unknown historical fact was that Ray Charles had personally bounced a reel of Subtle Distinctions’ demos when he was running Tangerine, saying, reputedly, Don’t come around here with this Motown-sounding doo-wop horseshit. But could Desmond, who’d crept onto the scene only a year ago, be savvy to that fact? Not likely. Anyway, Crowell Desmond lacked initiative for such a cryptic put-down.

Barrett Rude Junior picked up a rolled dollar bill and drew a line clear into his lower gut, into his balls and dick. Felt the chill there shudder outward everywhere through his clammy, sweat-boiled carcass.

Nigger, he thought. Nig- guh, major falling to minor, an interval of sevenths.

Fugitive melodies lurked in the space between syllables, niggers themselves crouching in the dark.

No, the bestowal of the Ray Charles tickets was A &R working on its own, twitches from a corporate body which had never walked, only groveled. The resemblance to sentient life purely accidental. Someone in the offices had the wholly asinine and improbable notion they’d sweet-talk him up to Montreal to record some discofied bullshit with the German producer of the Silver Convention, wanting to turn him into Johnnie Taylor, maybe, or the Miracles after Smokey split, soul men in mirror-studded spandex bodysuits singing for horny Valley of the Dingbat housewives.

Move it up, move it down, move it in, move it out, Disco Lady! Then take me out behind the house and shoot my lame black ass.

Nihhh- gahhh, like breathing.

Could turn into a Curtis Mayfield falsetto thing, maybe.

In the same cause the sycophantic flacks had one month earlier dragged to his doorstep a slick new four-track tape recorder with a note on cream-colored gold-embossed stationery reading Barry, never forget you wrote Bothered to get me off your back, I’m still on it, Ahmet. As if that white-goateed upper-management hipster had likely even noticed the tune until the Mantovani Strings version had floated into his private fur-lined elevator.

Atlantic had ripped him off in his incarnation as the lead voice of the Servile Distinctions, siphoned royalties from his account like draining a pool. Then as final insult brought in Andre Deehorn and some no-name scab singers and built tracks around unfinished vocals, for release as a bogus final album- The Subtle Distinctions Love You More! -after he’d quit. Now they wheedled and cajoled for the chance to resume ripping him off as a solo act. Only heartfelt emotion they’d ever know, like hungry cousins ringing your phone: Come back and spread green on us again, brother! He’d stashed the four-track below, in Mingus’s apartment, its magnetic virginity intact. Now he turned the same way with the tickets, shouted down the stairwell.

“Gus, man, get up here. Got something for you.”

Mingus came upstairs in a T-shirt and his Jockey shorts, looking sleepy-eyed at one in the afternoon. He cocked his head at the drift of cocaine on the sun-mottled mirror, the smeary ghosts of inhaled lines that trailed out of it.

Kid stared at the blow like he’d never seen it before.

“What?” said Barrett Rude Junior. “You want to get high?” He waved his hand at the mirror from his big chair where he sat, felt the weight of his arm, a banner of flesh moving in the damp air.

Nihhh-gahhh, nihh-gahh, got you-self an itchy tri-ggahhh fin-gahhh. Could be a theme song for some movie about a pimp. Maybe he ought to fish that four-track recorder upstairs, shock their minds with a new track, number-one hit single on the R &B charts, first time the word nigger ’s ever been on the radio. Go fuck yourself, Omlet!

It seemed to take a thousand years for Mingus to quit staring and shake his head.

Barrett Rude Junior just laughed. “Don’t tell me you ain’t hittin’ it when I’m not around. Nothing to be ashamed of.”