On Smith Street alone, ignored by the Puerto Rican social club members in their floral shirts and straw porkpies, the humpbacked, overdressed, and sweating thirteen-year-old turned onto Dean and strolled home along the shadowed slate, weirdly satisfied.
Aeroman had not flown, had remained tucked into Dylan’s sleeves and waistband, in chrysalid form.
Nevertheless, two happenings, incomplete in themselves, somehow clicked puzzle-ishly together to form a whole, the phantom image of a mugging averted, Gotham’s streets made safer.
The running woman on State Street had been the one afraid tonight, not Dylan. That was something, a crack of daylight in the night. Aeroman would slip through that crack, he just wasn’t ready yet.
Eighth grade, right, you could almost grasp the shape now. A given day was a model of the grade in miniature, something to get through. Just perfect one single day and you’d have a method to apply to the whole.
Abraham did his part scraping toast while Dylan worked math problems at the table, a take-home test due in fifteen minutes, first period.
Barrett Rude Senior might be lighting a breakfast cigarette in the well of his basement entrance, stroking white stubble, patrolling the morning.
Ramirez rolling up his gate, moms tugging first graders to P.S. 38.
Henry was in his second year at Aviation in Queens, he’d grown a foot and a half and was the man you saw sometimes on the block who’d high-five with younger kids. Recalling he’d been in a fistfight with Robert Woolfolk was useless. There was no history of kids on a block, such facts you couldn’t impart in a way to make anyone care.
Whacking off was a new organizing principle, the rare thing completely under your own command. You might get hard on the way home from school, clutch it in your pocket, anticipating an afternoon session.
Aeroman’s new outfit-in-progress was simpler, cape lighter and shorter and secured at the shoulders, sleeves tight at the wrists.
It progressed slowly, stitch by stitch, no hurry this time.
When the weather cooled Dylan and Arthur took the A to Canal Street. They browsed bins full of lucite knobs, drank egg creams at Dave’s Famous, then made their way to the army surplus store. With money for coats they’d cadged off Arthur’s mom and Abraham they purchased green fatigues like Mingus Rude’s, jackets with heavy vented pockets, strange loops for military knives or rounds of ammunition, who knew. Maybe dudes in Nam had died in the jackets, you couldn’t exclude it, though they lacked telling bullet holes.
Returning to the subway they paused to flip through some worn Beatles LPs for sale on the sidewalk, Let It Be, Abbey Road. Dylan found a name he recognized. The name was superimposed on a photograph of four grinning, beardless black men in peach suits and ruffled shirts seated on stools of various heights, backlit in blue and arranged like a bouquet in a photographer’s studio: The Deceptively Simple Sounds of the Subtle Distinctions.
Dylan showed it to Arthur. “That’s Gus’s dad.”
Arthur looked unimpressed. Dylan bought the record and took it home, but it was scratched, unplayable.
For a week Dylan and Arthur wore the jackets to school pristine. Then one day Arthur appeared with his jacket glamorously ruined with gold and silver paint, sleeves laminated in Krylon, burner scars, evidence. Arthur smirked, Dylan said nothing. That night he retired his virginal jacket before Mingus caught him in it.
Mingus himself was a random factor, a shade or rumor now, only glimpsed. He’d vanish for weeks, then you’d meet up, get high in his basement, and go to the Rex on Court Street to take in a Charles Bronson double feature, sit in darkness for hours not speaking a word apart from dang and ho snap.
Mingus was flush erratically, blew cash in a hurry. Later you’d catch him fluffing cushions for change, palming pennies from the dish Abraham kept at the front door, scraping up enough for a nickel bag.
Nobody took fifty cents or a dollar from Dylan that he didn’t see coming a mile off. One day in the basement Dylan applied Abraham’s hacksaw to a couple of quarters, then strolled with fragments jingling, waiting for the inevitable frisk. When with a dumb grin Dylan offered the sawed half-quarters and quarter-quarters the Gowanus kids who’d cornered him walked off shaking heads, pained, as if he’d spoken Chinese or wriggled an antenna.
You knew this game of days like the back of your hand, if the back of your hand was changing like a werewolf’s.
One day Dylan came home to find Abraham with a package on the kitchen table, an upright bundle wrapped in layers of butcher paper and twine. Abraham shredded at it with a steak knife, freeing the hidden object, unpeeling onion layers of newspaper insulation like Humphrey Bogart unpacking the Maltese Falcon. Dylan imagined it might be something from Rachel, perhaps a statuette depicting A Crab, Running. Then Abraham exposed the top of the prize inside: the gleaming golden nose of a 1950s-style rocketship.
“Don’t worry, I won it fair and square,” said Abraham. “ Sidney accepted on my behalf.”
Words on the gilded rocket’s base explained, at least partly. HUGO AWARD, BEST NEW ARTIST, 1976, ABRAHAM EBDUS.
“Recognition creeps up on one,” said Abraham darkly.
Dylan hefted the thing, scowled.
“You want it for a doorstop?”
Dylan considered, nodded.
“Just don’t say I never gave you anything.”
chapter 13
The song could be heard on New York radio for a week or two, mid-February 1978, not yet charting high but picked to click, scored on the R &B chart at number eighty-four with a bullet-it was asserted to be with a bullet each time that discouraging number was mentioned aloud-and slipped into rotation between Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Serpentine Fire” and Con Funk Shun’s “Ffun”: “(Did You Press Your) Bump Suit” by Doofus Funkstrong, a three-minute, forty-second single edited out of the sprawling eighteen-minute jam that covered side two of the band’s Warner Brothers debut, Double-Breasted Rump. DJs solicited phone calls weighing in-bold or cold, smash or trash, funk or junk? A few dozen requests could still tip a song up regional charts and push it toward a national breakout. Anyone trusting their ears knew Doofus Funkstrong was a disguise for the legally hamstrung, hence recording-under-pseudonyms Funk Mob-for those less sure, a look at the psychedelic Pedro Bell jacket art did the trick. Fewer ears would place the name of the vocalist whose melismas decorated just the last thirty-eight seconds of the single edit, credited on the album jacket, as according to plan, as Pee-Brain Rooster: under his own name Barrett Rude Junior was a voice from radio’s middle distance, years out of rotation, not yet an oldie. If a few formed the question Ain’t that the singer from the Distinctions? it was only a passing thought-how likely, anyway, that the tenor voice of the smooth and mellow Distinctions should show up riding the crest of that distorted synth bass line?
Then the song died. No explanation was called for-certainly none was given. Songs die, this one did. Figure it freakish that it charted at all, with refrains like Up jumped the globster, caught her with a mobster! and Goof a wedgie up your rump pocket! There are limits. So it died; call Doofus Funkstrong an album-oriented act, euphemism for Who cares? Performance royalties trickled through a legal maze, never enough to fight over should Pee-Brain Rooster choose to consult a lawyer. For a few weeks you heard the song or you didn’t, while nerd connoisseurs were left to savor it later, to champion or slag it in their endless tinny dialogue. History, basically, wasn’t made. Marilla and La-La would never be heard chanting this song in their front yard, not skipping rope nor braiding hair nor teasing boys with their fresh-grown hips. That test it couldn’t pass: the song, musicianship aside, lacked a hook.