“Hrrph.”

Barrett Rude Senior turned and pouted, squinting into the sun. He checked his cuffs, picked a nonexistent thread off the breast of his jacket and examined it briefly before tossing it toward the curb, elaborate dandyish mime.

Inevitably, Pauletta Gib had begun to remind Senior and Junior of their deceased wife and mother.

Like the woman they both remembered, she disfavored the father for the son.

Now two of Pauletta Gib’s flock who’d hovered at the edge of the talk came forward with an envelope and a ballpoint pen and pressed them into the hands of Barrett Rude Junior. A girl in a print dress, bare dusky arms with a trace of talcum powder, her young brother a twig in a pale peach suit. The boy stood shy at his sister’s hip, so the girl had to make the request. They wanted nothing much, though it was a thing the singer hadn’t given in nearly two years: just an autograph.

“Yo.”

“Yo, man.”

“What up?”

“Nothin’, man. What you doin’?”

“What you think, man? Same as you-gettin’ some ink.”

“Cool, cool.”

Samuel J. Underberg’s, Inc. Food Store Outfitters is a boxy, pale-green five-story building on the other side of Flatbush, beyond the newsstand on the traffic island, in the region of flattened lots and stilled warehouses in the shadow of the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower. The area is a big zero in most senses, a region of lack. Past the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Long Island Rail Road terminal, there’s nothing doing, nobody home. In fact, though no one seems to know it, this is the site once slated for Ebbets Field’s relocation, before the Dodgers defected. They got as far as knocking down a lot of old brick and putting nothing up in its place. Nobody smells beer and peanut ghosts here because the ballpark never arrived. The flattened region is a sort of brick-dotted outline tracing a phantom limb. As far as a wandering crowd of kids would care, housing projects-wise, it’s beyond the safety zone of Wyckoff Gardens, well into the turf of Atlantic Terminals.

Strange groups on the bare sidewalk give uneasy props all around, heads bobbing and nodding, eyes averted.

All gaze is deferred to the warehouse wall, the splendid explosion of graffiti there.

At the center of this dead land Samuel J. Underberg’s is a site of mysterious life, one to which the family-owned business is oblivious. It’s nothing to do with their real profitability, which is mainly in supplying new shopping carts, replacements for those stolen by the homeless or wrecked in parking lot collisions. Every day Underberg’s trucks dozens of carts out of their warehouse to supermarkets all over Brooklyn. From the warehouse they also shift big-ticket items like registers and rubber matting and display carousels. Call it a niche. At least it keeps a number of men employed, cousins, many of them.

None of this remotely explains the special magnetism of Underberg’s for the kids who congregate there. The secret’s inside the dinky showroom, practically an afterthought, which features the trimmings a supermarket needs to dress itself as a stage set for the play of shopping: fake parsley-sprig barriers to lay between different cuts of meat inside coolers, fake plastic salamis and gourds of cheese to bulk up displays of real goods, vinyl and laminate signage cut in shapes of fish and pigs to stick in the fronts of delicatessen trays, hot-pink and orange fluorescent signs blaring SPECIAL!

“Yo, man, check it out, that’s Strike, man.”

“Strike? Really?” This a whisper of disbelief that the King of the Broadway Line would materialize in human form.

“Check it out man, he’s tagging up.”

“Ho, snap, man. Strike.”

“I’m gonna get him to sign my book.”

The Underberg’s showroom is the sole place in Brooklyn where a walk-in customer can buy, no questions asked, an eight-ounce bottle of Garvey Formula XT-70 Violet, an industrial ink comprised of ethanol, butyl ether, and polyamid resin, formulated specifically for stamping prices on frozen cellophane and plastic-wrapped packages of slimy meat. Garvey Violet’s unique grabability extends also to grime-covered windowpanes-the panes in question being those of subway cars. For use in the homemade markers of graffiti artists Garvey Violet is an irreplaceable elixir, and that, in turn, makes lowly, oblivious Underberg’s a destination. It also ensures that the sides of the building form a constantly updated museum of tags from every corner of the borough, a showcase for rival tribes in temporary collaboration.

The skull-capped men at the showroom counter have sussed out this much: Garvey Violet is stacked well behind the counter, so it can only be purchased, never shoplifted. And the counter it hides behind is a glass case filled with cutlery, boning knifes, fat cleavers. At $5.99 a bottle Garvey Violet’s enough of a bargain the writers pony up-the only other option, anyway, would be to storm the place with shotguns. Their acting out inside the showroom is more covert: stealing fake fruit and scribbling tiny tags here and there on the cardboard displays.

But apart from this the writers tend to shift in and out glumly, one at a time plunking cash on the counter and mumbling the request, their braggadocio damped until back on the street.

“Yo, man, you hear that? He said Jew want a bag for that?”

“Ah, shut up, man.”

“I swear man, he said it. I’m not making it up.”

These wary groups pass around drawing books bound in pebbly black board, full of their own and others’ tags, as well as full-color felt-tip blueprints for top-to-bottom burners they hope someday to dare to reproduce on a train. Underberg’s is a place for displaying books, for gathering autographs from all over, though the risk is always abasement or mockery if a group of older, stronger writers decides to bully some younger faction.

From up Flatbush Avenue, off the D train, from up Fourth Avenue off the N and the R at Pacific Street, wandering up from the projects, small groups arrive in waves and mingle jostling on the sidewalk there, blocking the Underberg’s men from loading their truck. They come and go noisily, the groups themselves like a form of human scribbling.

This day two white kids stand hoping to be inconspicuous in the gabble of activity that’s suddenly all around them, a simple run to Underberg’s not so simple after all. One’s frozen in the act of tagging up.

“Check out the white boys, man, think they bad.”

“What you write, white boy?”

The white kid with the marker is silent, shoulders bunched against his harassers, but with a certain plodding integrity he finishes marking his tag on Underberg’s wall, in the small space he’s found between larger, spray-painted throw-ups.

“Whazzat say? Art? A-R-T?”

“Dude’s tag is Art, man. That’s wack.”

“Your name Arturo, dude? You don’t look Puerto Rican to me.”

“Shut up, man, leave the guy alone.”

“He’s a toy.”

“Leave him alone, man.”

“I’m not messin’ with the dude, yo, I just want to see what he’s writin’. You with a crew, Art?”

Question’s rhetorical: What white kid could be with a crew? For that matter, what self-respecting crew could contain a white dude, let alone a small, ferrety white dude like this one, let alone two white dudes? Not to mention two like these, beginning to cower instinctively against Underberg’s wall in the manner in which negotiating the halls and schoolyard and adjacent streets of Intermediate School 293 has tutored them.

Ritualized cringes buried millimeter-deep in the psyches of the two white kids, mock-asthmatic seizures and other forms of beseeching, are ready to surface when the nearest thing to a crew these guys could ever hope for pops back out of the showroom with a fresh-purchased bottle of Garvey Violet: Mingus Rude.