“Born in Babylonia, moved to California -”

“We are the knights who say Ni!”

“Get all excited and go to a yawning festival.”

“You-must-bring-us-a-shrubbery!”

“Hey, let’s go get Blimpies, I’m so hungry I could beat a dead horse. Ow, shit, what’s that for?”

“I said I’d punch you the next time you said Blimpie.”

“You bloody bastard!”

In ragged, rasping voice: “It’s the blimp, it’s the blimp, it’s the mothership!”

“C’mon.”

Falsetto, as they crossed the street from school: “Basketball Jones, I got a basketball Jones -”

Gabriel Stern and Timothy Vandertooth ranted in a vocal graffiti of impersonations: Steve Martin and Marty Feldman and George Carlin, Devo, Python, Zappa, Spock, The Prisoner. Gabe Stern had memorized the songs of Tom Lehrer, Tim Vandertooth could do Liverpool, Wild and Crazy Guy, Peter Sellers-Swami. Induction into the company of Gabe Stern and Tim Vandertooth had begun the second week of school, Monday, just after three o’clock. Gabe and Tim surrounded Dylan before he reached the subway station on Fourteenth Street and bought him a slice of Original Ray’s, extra cheese. Then they went to Crazy Eddie’s showroom and played the demonstration model of Pong, writhing in fake agony at each loss, oblivious to customers or staff.

“You bastard!”

“Revenge, I swear revenge.”

“I fart in your general direction.”

Gabe, broad-shouldered, dark, and curly-haired, had blistered nuclei of acne on each cheek, as though acid had been dripped there and was eating through. Tim was sandy, angular, walked hippily, seemingly steering his lean, high body like a kite in wind. Beside them Dylan was smaller. He’d grown, had private developments, weird fists of hair, but with Gabe and Tim felt childlike and possibly invisible. Anyway everyone’s body betrayed them in different ways, it was all forgiven and never discussed.

Dylan folded into the unit of Gabe and Tim as a redundant third: arbiter, audience, appendix. One day Gabe and Tim might seem to be playing to Dylan, wooing him, as though he’d be capable of adjudicating a conflict they’d been trying all their lives to resolve: Which of us is funnier, louder, more irresistible? Those days Dylan felt that it was essential he balance the two in their mania, that if he chose or even slightly favored either Tim or Gabe the other would die sizzling on the pavement like the Wicked Witch of the West. Other days their energies were exclusive, circuit complete between themselves, Dylan might as well have been watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon on television, head propped in his hands, antics reflected in his glasses.

Gabe and Tim would abruptly fall to wrestling on the sidewalk in front of school, knapsacks skidding to the curb as if attacked, yoked. This was different, though, from real hostilities, which drew instantaneous crowds. Anyone besides Dylan knew not to pay attention. When either Tim or Gabe got the other subdued, knees on chest, head clamped in elbow, arm wrenched high behind back, he’d demand some idiot password.

“Say Fanta.”

“No. Ow! Dr. Pepper!”

“ Not Dr. Pepper, Fanta.”

“Tab!”

“Fanta.”

“Mr. Pibb! No. Shit, stop! Bastard, bloody bastard!”

“You know what I want.”

“Okay, ow, okay, okay-Fanta!”

“Now Sprite!”

“No! Never that! Let go!”

Stuyvesant drew high-scorers from all five boroughs, a migration hidden under the skin of rush hour, subway floods of Lacoste-clad Upper West Siders who’d known each other since kindergarten, dazed black math geniuses from the South Bronx who slumped in the hallways wondering if they’d ever recover from the shock, studious Puerto Rican nerds from Stuyvesant Town who’d only crossed the street to attend school and were still in thrall to local bullies from their pre-high-school lives, diligent Chinese achievers from assorted immigrant neighborhoods, Greenpoint, Sunnyside, usually in sequences of siblings, an older sister in an upper grade nearby to grab an ear if a younger began to trickle toward the mass of kids who cut class almost from day one, smoking joints and playing frisbee in Stuyvesant Park down the block. The lemmings gathered from every corner of the city, some unlucky souls coming from Staten Island on the ferry every morning had to set their alarms for five or six or some wilder hour.

Gabriel Stern and Timothy Vandertooth lived on Roosevelt Island, had met three years before when their families moved to the new housing there. Roosevelt Island was an enigma, carless and dogless, haunted by the ruins of a tuberculosis sanitorium on the southern shore. Residence there was like cult membership. The science-fiction tram on pulleys which dangled beside the span of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and which Tim and Gabe rode to school and home together every day stood nicely for their resolute and impenetrable best-frienditude: they were freaks beamed daily to the island of Manhattan from their own subordinate, moonlike isle, no wonder they spoke a private language, nanu-nanu, live long and prosper.

Stuyvesant was Jewish white, wasp white, hippie white, Chinese, black, Puerto Rican, and much else but crucially it was nerd, nerd, nerd, nerd, the great family of those able to ace the entrance test. Pencil chewers, teacher’s pets in glasses, the Arthur Lomb in everyone unbound now, no longer having to cower. It was pathetic to think of Arthur himself, on course for this natural destination all those years at Saint Ann’s, then derailed by Dean Street only six months or so short of his goal. The mystery was how so many who’d toed the line, favored studies over socialization in order to pass the test, then within a few weeks of freshman orientation broke out Jim Morrison- and Led Zeppelin-painted jean jackets and began loafing all day in the park, immaculate scholastic careers ruined overnight.

Timothy Vandertooth and Gabriel Stern didn’t drift into stoner affiliation, not exactly. The sole class they cut was gym, and though they did spend that period and lunch hour and some after-school hours in the park they were inept with frisbees and retained their short haircuts and were uninterested in Hendrix or Morrison or Zeppelin, music too blunt and earnest to be swallowed straight. The languorous, slack-haired park girls paid Tim and Gabe no attention at all, seemed unable to parse jokes in any register.

“I swear she almost looked at you when your voice cracked. You ought to talk like that all the time, get a tank of helium.” Tim and Gabe discussed matters in full voice as if girls were deaf, lame payback for the silent treatment they themselves received.

“I think she was distracted staring at your pants, actually. Check your fly, maybe there’s a spot of chocolate milk or scum or something.”

“It’s because of the zucchini I’m concealing in my underwear, my new method which I highly recommend. I offer it free, you don’t owe any royalties. The cold wears off eventually.”

Tim and Gabe would smoke pot or not. Either way they didn’t fit, were tourists, comic relief to the longhairs in the park who were comic relief to them in turn, never clear who ought to be laughing at who, only that Tim and Gabe were moving at a faster clip, their movements and thoughts hectic, jerky. Those first months of high school Tim and Gabe waited for something else to complete them, or the reverse, something waited to complete them. They were stalled like robots, incanting their encoded frustration.

“Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Open the pod bay doors, Hal.”

“I am not a number. I am a free man! ”

You waited too, feeling it.

Another sensibility agitated in periphery, one located in the conjunction of the midnight movies at the Eighth Street Playhouse and the Waverly, on Sixth Avenue: Clockwork Orange, Pink Flamingos, Rocky Horror, Eraserhead. Within six weeks you’d seen all but Eraserhead, the prospect of which was too terrifying, though you’d never admit it, just fumbled out an excuse about being grounded that night. In fact you’d never been grounded in your life, wondered where you’d even picked up the word.