Farrah Fawcett-Majors was gone too, the red one-piece and erect nipple and blond tilted grin which had been pinned at telling eye level to Mingus’s single bed. Instead, a clutch of Barrett Rude Junior’s hand-me-down Playboy and Penthouse magazines were inadequately hidden beneath the bed, tattered centerfolds torn from their staples and flapped out like the tongues of exhausted dogs. A white bloom of balled Kleenex failed to conceal a jar of Vaseline.

“You never told me about the girl in Vermont, man.”

“What girl?” Dylan was turning the pages of Defenders #48, ogling Valkyrie in her blue sleeveless armor, her chain-mail brassiere. Mingus’s comics were in tatters, he’d tagged their slick covers with black El Marko.

“King Arthur said you were bragging about it, man, so don’t even try to lie.”

“I didn’t tell Arthur anything. He’s full of it.”

“Look at my boy, trying to cover up! Arthur said you done got over. You can’t hide from me, D-Man, you know you’ll be telling me in a minute.”

Dylan thought for less than a minute and said, “Her name’s Heather.”

“There you go.”

“We went swimming.”

“I heard more than swimming.”

Despite cutting class for two years, Mingus had graduated to Sarah J. Hale. Like a sundial shadow he’d crept into the next time zone, the next phase. His room had changed, his body had changed, he’d grown gruffer and larger, when he loped down Dean Street he chanted rhymes under his breath, disc jockey patter. He had his own stereo. He scored his own pot, nickel bags through a slot in the door of a tenement on Bergen, no longer raiding Barrett Rude Junior’s freezer stash. His room was a sanctum. Though Barrett Rude Senior had moved into the front of the basement apartment Mingus’s room seemed remote from any authority beyond his own. The rooms of the duplex had become fortresses, the three generations of Rudes barricaded into their dominions in an unspoken war. Mingus called his grandfather Senior and never stepped into his front room, which when it was seen through a half-open door looked barren, as though Senior had forgotten how a large room might be filled. Senior sat by the radiator and stared through the bars of the basement windows onto Dean Street as through the bars of a cell. Sometimes he burned candles. Mingus called him Senior, and he called his own father Junior. Mingus’s room smelled of Vaseline and something else. The jacket of the Ohio Player’s Fire, which depicted a girl’s impossibly hot torso with a firehose snaking obscenely between her legs, was sticky with something, resin maybe, and seeds and stems from rolling joints on the jacket were stuck in the something. It was a bit disgusting, but also fascinating, like a leaf stuck in hair or a smear of food on chin you didn’t want to point out.

Junior’s rooms upstairs smelled of something else, something wicked, heated foil, singed crystal grains. Senior melted candles and chain-smoked Pall Malls, frequently igniting the next with the stub of the last, Mingus and Dylan, sealed into the sanctum with the towel at the door, puffed pot, while upstairs in the parlor which nobody entered Junior burned freebase cocaine in a glass pipe.

Barrett Rude Junior and the Famous Flames.

“Don’t think I forgot you was telling me about Heather, man.”

“You wish.”

“How old is she?”

“Thirteen.”

“Older woman-always said that’s the way to go.”

“I gave her a back rub.”

“Oh yeah. There you go. I know you didn’t stop at no back rub.”

“We kissed, in the attic.” Saying the words Dylan smelled the place, recalled groaning wooden stairs, blond light. “All she had on was her swimsuit.”

“Get serious now. She a old thirteen or a young thirteen?” Mingus’s open hands described fullness in the air.

Dylan thought oranges, said, “Grapefruits.”

“Damn!” Mingus’s pleasure was so great he scowled. “Hold on a minute.” He pushed himself up and put Sly’s Fresh on the stereo, cranked the volume. Then he slumped back on his bed, fingers spread wide on thighs. Between thighs and spread fingers, tenting his corduroys, a boner.

“You were saying.”

Something moving in the brain of a doer sang Sly in a lubricious, dozy drawl.

“I’ll show you,” said Dylan. “Turn over.”

Mingus nodded, and obeyed.

Dylan was the storyteller here, he understood now that Mingus had no way to contradict him, was only waiting for the story to continue.

Mingus waiting facedown on his bed as though it had only been a matter of time until Dylan understood how to make him quiet.

Dylan’s palms on Mingus’s shoulders through his green jacket.

“So, you’re the girl, right?”

“Uh huh.”

“They’re bulging out on the sides and I’m going crazy.”

“Uh huh.”

“But I go slow.”

“Then I’m grabbing around the sides.”

“Shit.”

“She doesn’t say anything or try to stop me.”

“Uh.”

“Then I try to get inside her pants.”

The world was unnamed, you wore disguises, were Inhumans. Mingus’s room was another Negative Zone, under water, under the house, detached from Dean Street and whirling away to another place. It had been from the day Mingus stood in his Scout uniform and ran his fingers over merit badges, passport stamps from distant realms.

You built fires, marked bridges and trains, jerked into tissues and socks.

A hand molding Mingus’s ass through his pants didn’t need explaining, it wasn’t a faggot thing, just a story you were telling: the pile of Playboy s under the bed, the massing thunderhead of tits everywhere, of wanting women’s bodies in your life, the horizon breaking into shared view.

Anyway, if you caressed Mingus after all this time you’d only want to take a pick to his nappy-ass ’Fro, you’ve always yearned to know what it would feel like to cradle his head and pluck at it with that mysterious fork.

But tuck weird tenderness away, this is boy time.

“Just touching her ass I was hard like a rock.”

“No shit.”

“She didn’t let me get inside, though.”

“You must of been dying!”

“Uh huh.”

“I’d a said: Yo! Wait a minute!”

“Well, that’s what I did,” said Dylan, inventing with abandon, unmoored. “I told her look at the condition I was in, what was she going to do about it?”

“Don’t say what I think you about to say.”

They were side by side now, as Dylan and Heather had been side by side in the sun-smashed attic then, stretched on the bedspread, draining lemonade from sweaty glasses, icing their forearms. Only Dylan and Mingus lay stoned, sprawled head-propped on Mingus’s drooly pillows, each grappling through pockets and pretending not to notice. Their breath lengthened, Mingus’s sigh rattling like a small snore.

Mingus reached to the stereo and turned the music up another notch so they were swarmed in funk, stupefied deeper.

“Tell me.”

“We didn’t have a rubber so she had to give me a blow job.”

“Damn!”

They were silent a while. When Mingus spoke his voice was quiet and intent:

“You shoot white or clear?”

“White. It use to come out clear.”

“Yeah.”

Then, after further silence:

“How’s it feel in a girl’s mouth, man?”

“Best feeling in the world,” Dylan lied with certainty.

“I heard that.”

“I wish I had a girl sucking on me right now.”

Another pause, then Dylan said: “You can take it out if you want.”

Mingus’s penis was hued dun-to-rose, like his palms. He trembled in his own hand.

“Close your eyes,” said Dylan.

“No shit?”

“Hands behind your head.”

Dylan let himself get in whispering range before chickening out, close enough to smell the air of Mingus’s legs, the pubic tangle in his jockey fly.

“Do it with your hand,” said Mingus.