One guy came to class in Tim Curry pancake whiteface and black-varnished nails every day, the focus of scoffing laughter and secret awe.

Each morning you passed Max’s Kansas City on your way from the Fourteenth Street subway to school, talismanic site of what exactly you weren’t sure.

The band Devo might have to do with the new something in the air, lyrics about mongoloids and swelling itching brains offering some ironic back door into animal nature, a way to evade the appalling, head-on Jim Morrison route.

The main problem any kid faced if he could have found the word was how to find himself in any way sexy. Forget girls themselves for the time being, the problem was between you and the mirror.

Manhattan thankfully didn’t give a shit about you.

What about Mingus and Aeroman, though?

Dylan crept as he reapproached Dean Street in the perishing light of afternoons spent with Gabe and Tim bouncing in and out of Crazy Eddie’s and Ray’s Famous and Blimpies and J &R Music World and Washington Square Park, crept in his mind, furtive like an escapee returning nightly for meals in his old cell. The block was dead as far as he could tell. He’d killed it by graduating from I.S. 293 and leaving for Stuyvesant. It wasn’t only Mingus. Henry, Alberto, Lonnie, Earl, Marilla, and La-La had all fled the scene or been so transformed they might not be recognizable. Some days you passed in silence some kid you’d known, they had a mustache or tits and they were black and you were white and you didn’t say a word.

There was no new crop of kids unless you counted the scruffy batch, mostly Puerto Rican, who didn’t even know you were meant to gather in Henry’s yard or at the abandoned house, they didn’t even know Henry’s name, they squatted like bugs on the sidewalk and were as little able to carry forward the block’s work as bugs would have been. One day Dylan saw one scratching some primitive botched skully board, not on a slate but on a pebbly square of poured concrete, hopeless, like a fallout survivor dim with radiation sickness sketching a blueprint for reinvention of the wheel. One day Dylan passed the buglike kids and one called out “Honky” in a voice so tentative Dylan died laughing at the sweetness of it. The abandoned house wasn’t even abandoned anymore. It wore a sign reading CINDERELLA #3, A PROJECT OF BROOKLYN UNION GAS, and one day they punched through the cement blocks and replaced them with dull aluminum-frame windows, dumb eyes. The site of mystery was destroyed. For a few months bums resolutely drank and passed out on the stoop anyway, then moved on.

Maybe every other week, though, Dylan would find Mingus seated on his own stoop, like a bum, with a forty-ounce in a bag. Mingus ruled his own yard again, now that Barrett Rude Senior had shifted into the welfare hotel on Atlantic Avenue, several blocks away. He’d greet Dylan in the old manner, as though they’d been interrupted a minute before.

“That Parlet record I was telling you about? I just scored it.”

“Oh yeah?”

“That shit is serious, I’m telling you, Dillinger, you need to check it out now.”

Dylan and Mingus met according to no plan or reason, might have been darts hitting a calendar, a roulette of days. He and Mingus would go into the basement apartment and get high and Tim and Gabe, Dylan’s whole Stuyvesant world, would evaporate, Manhattan unlikely as Neptune or Vulcan, restored to its status as an unexplored planet, the future.

Hallway and bathroom were tagged now, the whole basement a subway tunnel. Senior’s room was still off-limits, though, an abandoned shrine which stank of dust-rotting candles.

Mingus chugged beer now, Colt and Cobra, a regular thing.

Dylan didn’t, only got high.

Dylan knew Mingus still hooked up with Arthur Lomb too, saw Arthur’s practice tags in ballpoint on scattered pages around Mingus’s room, sometimes saw Arthur himself. Arthur Lomb had the curse of puniness: he still looked eleven or twelve, no number of what-ups and yos, no degree of street slaunch in his walk, no green suede Pumas could compensate. After flunking the Stuyvesant test Arthur’s mother had falsified their residence to get him transferred to Edward R. Murrow, a white high school deep in the Irish Italian heart of the borough. It was too late, though, he might as well have been at Sarah J. Hale from the look of things. Arthur had become yucky, his sleeves always crusted with Krylon, his red hair slack and ratty, jeans black. Arthur was a pothead now, often looked red-eyed, glazed with an afternoon’s doping. His street credibility was all he had and it was direly thin.

Arthur’s being seen with Mingus was a gift Dylan wouldn’t begrudge him now: it was a thing Arthur needed much worse than Dylan ever had. Let Arthur imagine a parity. In fact, Dylan knew, their two friendships with Mingus, his and Arthur’s, were vastly different. Dylan and Mingus lived in a motherless realm, full of secrets. Aeroman, for one thing. Certain other things, for another. Dylan doubted Arthur even had pubic hair yet. Plus Dylan and Mingus knew each other’s dads, and Mingus went into Dylan’s house. Dylan was certain Arthur wouldn’t ever want Mingus to see inside his own mommified sanctuary of Hi-C juice and Hydrox cookies.

When Mingus was a dollar short of a nickel bag he and Dylan might scrape for loose change in Dylan’s kitchen or even climb the stairs to Abraham’s studio. There Mingus waited at the door, dim transistor jazz seeping through, while Dylan cadged folding money. Abraham, always sensing the lurker in the corridor, would ask:

“Is that Mingus?”

“Yeah.”

“He doesn’t need to hide. Tell him to come say hello.”

In Abraham’s presence Mingus Rude grew courtly, called Abraham Mr. Ebdus, asked about the progress of his film. Abraham would sigh and produce some opaque riddle.

“As well ask Sisyphus, my dear Mingus.”

“Cookypuss?” Mingus would be quick with a free-associated reply. He and Abraham had hatched some running joke of mishearing one another. They couldn’t get enough of it.

“Ah, Cookypuss. Maybe Cookypuss for one is showing some progress. I’d like to think so.”

On the other hand, the two no longer went upstairs to Barrett Rude Junior. The stairway between basement and parlor floors might as well have been sealed now. Dylan saw evidence Mingus avoided the upstairs kitchen, cans of Chef Boyardee heated on Senior’s hot plate, Slim Jim wrappers in the bathroom garbage pail. When they cranked Mingus’s stereo, though, Dylan felt himself expecting, even yearning for Junior at the door singing Fuck you doin’ Gus?, his sweet disapproval a fragment of melody you pined to hear whole.

But no amount of volume drew Junior to the door, in Mingus’s apartment they were mole-men now for sure, on their own deep exploration.

Foxy’s “Get Off” they played fifteen times in a row, louder each time, trying to destroy the distance between that rubbery, fleshlike bass line and themselves, as if the song was a photograph, a Playboy centerfold they enlarged by degrees until they could enter the frame, walk into the picture.

They also stared at certain photographs until they might have left sheddings from their blistered eyeballs strewn on the pages, then exchanged relieving hand jobs without making a particularly big deal of it.

Mingus kept the ring and the costume, Aeroman was officially him. Both were stashed on a shelf high above the door, with a hockey trophy and Mingus’s old football helmet, ring out of sight above eye level, costume balled behind the helmet, nothing any random visitor to the room, Arthur Lomb, say, would bother remarking on. Whether Mingus ever donned them out of Dylan’s company went undiscussed. Afternoons passed when Aeroman wasn’t mentioned, the ring wasn’t handled or even seen, Dylan sat on Mingus’s bed and glanced at the shelf between joint tokes but nothing happened, they’d hit the street or catch a Kung Fu flick or Dylan would only go home stoned to whatever supper Abraham had prepared. Then Aeroman might as well have been the lead in a quickly canceled Marvel title like Omega or Warlock, or a murdered sidekick, quickly avenged then forgotten, or a name from the Golden Age, perhaps, like Doll Man or the Human Bomb: in other words, no superhero at all, not really, not one anyone remembered.