At perihelion Dylan felt himself to be a note of music, one delayed, now floating upward. They might all be notes in a song, the Dean Street kids. Mingus was Dose. Though Dylan had been tagging the name it belonged to Mingus wholly. Mingus had his drug thing, his access to Barrett’s stash, and it was okay, it was cool. Robert Woolfolk, his part was to be skulky and scary. Robert was criminal-minded, Dylan couldn’t begrudge it. You allowed for the kid from the projects, steered a berth. Arthur Lomb, he was the white boy, slotted into place. Even Arthur was okay, he just didn’t know it yet.
As for Dylan, he had the ring. Befuddled witnesses were only part wrong, Dean Street possessed superheroes: not musicians in a limousine but Dylan, the flying kid. He’d sew a costume and take to the rooftops, begin bounding down on crime and they’d know then what they couldn’t be allowed to know yet. Today it had to be disguised: the Discovery of Flight, right under their noses. On his maiden bound, though, he already felt love and sympathy for all as he swam in the air, his view rearranged.
Then Marilla completed the line, hands waving for syncopation, the beat only she heard, I done got myself togeth-a, baby-now I’m havin’ a ball! Dylan landed, Keds squeaking softly, a millisecond after Mingus, though they’d jumped in tandem. The ball in Dylan’s cool palm. Elsewhere sweat had broken everywhere on his thrilled body while aloft.
“Kangaroo boy!” barked Mingus. “Been takin’ his vitamins, dang!”
La-La answered Marilla’s falsetto call with a jeering response:
Got to give it up, baby!
Oh, yeah: Got to give it up!
It would be the throwdown of the summer of ’77 though it was still just the start of July: Grandmaster DJ Flowers is coming with his crew from Flatbush to spin discs in the schoolyard of P.S. 38 after the block party on Bergen. Word’s gone out. Hottest day of summer so far only nobody complains, nobody’s tired, the sun plummets on Manhattan and the harbor, making orange light, but the day hadn’t started yet, not if you knew what was about to go down. You couldn’t drink enough beer to cool off or get sleepy. The block party itself is just preliminary, the white renovators grilling chops in their front yards, trying to get to know their neighbors, couple of Spanish guys playing steel drums, nothing special. The little kids run wild, girl and boy, Spanish, black and white mixed the way they did at that age. They spend themselves in the sun, winning and losing shitty prizes, Super Balls, green-haired gremlins, sucking sweet juice through shaved ice in paper cones, getting face-painted by a clown who’s really somebody’s mom roasting in a Day-Glo Afro wig. The young ones shriek and run, are pooped and whining by four o’clock. The older kids are stalling for night. They kill the afternoon stoop-sitting, eyeing that balloon-filler’s huge canister of helium, eating dollar-fifty plates of paella.
By six o’clock the first kids have begun to group in 38’s yard, though Flowers won’t show until nightfall. The local crews are here in the meantime, setting up a minor skirmish to whet the appetite. P.S. 38 is the domain of the Flamboyan Crew, since their celebrated DJ Stone operates out of the basement of the Colony South Brooklyn youth center next door. Indeed, it was Flamboyan Crew’s invitation to Flowers which resulted in tonight’s plans. That doesn’t mean nobody disputes Flamboyan’s primacy here, though. Geography dictates the 38 schoolyard’s really a nexus between different forces, the Atlantic Terminals kids crossing down from Fort Greene, the Wyckoff Houses element coming up Nevins. Plus the tough Sarah J. Hale High School kids, drawn to the neighboring block of Pacific from all over.
So, up from Red Hook are the Disco Enforcers-they’ve heard about Flowers’s visit and demanded a turn in the proceedings. Flamboyan’s found itself backed into a battle of the jams when all they’d intended was to host Flowers with themselves as the warm-up. No sweat, though, Stone’s up to it. He’s so sharp on the crossfader he might be Brooklyn ’s king if not for Flowers. The rival crews work together to set up, to steal juice out of the nearest streetlight base and run it down to the far end of the yard for their turntables and amps. At the same time trying to conceal from one another their crates of twelve-inches, thinking to maintain some edge of surprise. The secrecy’s a bit of a joke, though: they’re all, including Flowers when he gets there, certain to be spinning the same fifteen or twenty cuts.
The Enforcers go first. They’re an all-black crew, Enforcers compensating easily for any faggy associations in the first part of their name. Similarly, their partisans dance on roller skates- uprocking, that’s what they call it-and nobody’s laughing. They balance kneebends and one-heel spins against a series of crotch-grabbing and fist-clenched poses, an in-your-face aspect. One mimes feeding you an endless firehose of dick. The Red Hook DJ leans on “Fatbackin” by the Fatback Band and Babe Ruth’s “The Mexican” but also stumps the crowd with Alvin Cash and the Registers’ “Stone Thing (Part 1),” an unfamiliar jam. On the drum breaks the line of roller-skated dancers freaks for the crowd, a storm of limbs, skates striking sparks on the cement.
If you managed to meet the eyes of the dancers, though, you’d find them flinching, shy. To actually get out there and uprock isn’t easy. Far easier to stand pouting with arms crossed, head perhaps bobbing slightly as you stake out your chosen proximity and consider what unfolds.
The beat’s a sonic clatter resounding down Pacific, down Nevins and Third Avenue, a clarion to any who might have missed word: Something’s happening up at thirty-eights, yo.
Flamboyan takes over next. Those who recalled anything beyond Flowers’s appearance that night would later grant DJ Stone blew the Disco Enforcers out the yard. Stone not only finds the break, he wears it out. Plus, where the Enforcers’ DJs provided their own exhortations to the crowd-a scant few Evveybody git down! ’s-Stone’s got a boy on a vocal mic calling out to the crowd, one who must imagine he’s Flowers’s kid brother. The scrawny boy, who calls himself MC Ruff, just won’t quit with the chants and rhymes.
Flamboyan Crew doesn’t provide its own dancers-Stone’s breaks and Ruff’s shouts merely turn the whole yard into Soul Train. No big surprises, just “Paradise Is Very Nice” and “Love Is the Message” sliced a hundred different ways. Those are the grooves get people off the wall. “Love Is the Message” in particular. It’s by MFSB, house band of the Philly Groove. Their name ostensibly stands for “Mother, Father, Sister, Brother,” though those hip know it really means “Motherfuckin’ Sons of Bitches.” No DJ is without three or four copies of the precious twelve-inch, it’s the staple of any set and nobody complains.
Two hours later they hear “Love Is the Message” again from Flowers. In his hands it sounds just as good, better. Flowers in person casts a spell, he’s some kind of heavy Jamaican or West Indian dude, beyond affiliation or strife, like Kung Fu. Flowers is one of the discoverers- the isolators -of the break, one of those who proved how furiously people could be made to dance to a section of song unencumbered by vocals or melody. And proving it again tonight.
By this time the card tables and crepe paper back on Bergen have long been cleared. Here is the only place you’d want to be. Maybe three hundred kids spilled around the turntables and amps, dancers at the front, hard-asses clustered according to faction: Atlantic Terminals, Wyckoff Gardens, Spanish dudes from Fifth Avenue. Nobody wants to be the fool who starts a ruckus, though pride requires vigilance against anyone gazing too long at you or your lady. Rivals form Apache lines and dance their aggression, throwing moves. Sure, there’s a scuffle or two. But this gathering’s peaceful, hardly calls for the cops to come shutting it down just before midnight, stripping one group of kids of sock-hidden steak knives, one cop snapping a pair of nunchucks over his knees, everyone sent streaming out of the schoolyard still buzzing, barely gotten started.