4/3/79

viewed from space radioactive

nostrils want a kleenex

if sneezy they might blow

brooklyn to merrie england

however bad molten core might itch

don’t pick down there too deep

or you’ll toast your shell

infrared like mine

meltdown crab

chapter 15

Two sons might think two fathers never budged from their hiding places apart from runs to Ramirez’s or Buggy’s for bare necessities-toilet paper, Tropicana, cold cuts at gouging prices, whatever.

Two sons might think fathers utterly unschooled in the craft of stoop-sitting-might suppose them ignorant equally of their neighbors and of the delirious nature of sunshine spilled into the chasm of brownstones.

Two sons might be wrong all over. Abraham Ebdus and Barrett Rude Junior had their own Dean Street, the eleven A. M. weekday edition.

Abraham Ebdus was up for hours by then, having packed off to school a mute and bleary Dylan, half-eaten toast in his fist, then ferried a thermos of coffee upstairs for a session painting celluloid frames under natural light. Abraham made film early mornings and late nights, his best hours, reserving lunch-dulled afternoons for painting outer spacescapes and electrical gremlins from the fourth dimension, whatever the latest art director required. Book jackets took care of themselves; he could be half asleep. Drowsiness dulled rage and good taste, unnecessary functions. The film required his sleep-purified, caffeine-honed eyes and mind. From eight-thirty he might accomplish five or six seconds of footage and by eleven be ready to unkink his limbs, rinse the thermos, wander briefly from the house. Dean Street at that hour was pensive, transitive, those with jobs and school all scurried away, idlers just rousing. The first of Ramirez’s corner-men would have found a milk carton, or not. Half a block away a landlord might be brooming his portion of slate. And Barrett Rude Junior would have woken, tucked feet in slippers, moved to his stoop for a gander at the day, a first gulp of air and light.

Junior, on waking, often staggered first to the stereo whose red lights still glowed, to re-drop needle on whichever long-player had lullabyed him the night before, so when in robe or pajamas he took possession of his stoop it was with strains of Donny Hathaway’s Extension of a Man or Shuggie Otis’s Inspiration Information at his back. If the volume was sufficient and the Dean Street bus nowhere near, Abraham Ebdus, five doors away, could hear the music, faintly. Junior came sound-tracked, wore a halo of music like a wafting smell, literal funk. No actual bodily odors reached Abraham at that distance, but it wasn’t much of a leap to suppose they clung to those frayed silks in concentrated form.

Seeing Mingus Rude’s father at eleven cheered Abraham. He couldn’t have said why. It happened every few mornings: no pattern but an accumulation, or a long polyrhythm. They lorded from the height of respective stoops, the block’s true kings. On warmer mornings they’d each sit, in cold or rain they might be outdoors less than a minute. Either way, Abraham made an effort to keep the appointment and imagined Barrett Rude Junior doing the same. No way to know, since they only nodded, chins tipping upward, sometimes waved.

Abraham never saw the old man anymore and wondered slightly.

Bus purring through leaf-blotched shadow.

Run-on sentence of cracked slate.

Cornices a horizon, lintels slag in a canyon or quarry wall.

Dean Street of course infiltrated the work, it couldn’t not. Abraham painted row-house façades, then blacked them over, presences drowned in abstraction. The film was among other things a record of methods disguised, a graveyard of strategies. He startled himself one day brushing in a figure, a stoop-wanderer, an armless pylon limned in gray rays. The anomalous form, Barrett Rude Junior taking the morning air, jiggled and danced in place through two weeks’ work, a minute of film, before censure. Abraham didn’t blot the figure retroactively, though. He let it stand. The sprite simply inhabited space for a minute, then turned and went inside. Gone like that.

The film devoured days and years and Abraham let them be devoured. He’d optical-printed earlier sections and now and then ran them in his hand-cranked splicer, not editing so much as dwelling in his own work in progress. At sea. He could no longer relate the motifs in earlier sequences to raw dates, facts in his life. Watergate, Erlan Hagopian, Rachel’s leaving. The film floated above his routine, coffee cups, newspapers, the kid growing. The rest was trivia, moods, implementation. A body moving through days, serving higher purposes.

Abraham Ebdus was reasonably certain he was demolishing the concept of time.

For that reason, and not because of any fetish for death, he savored obituaries. They might be the only news that mattered, quiet closings on forgotten accounts, revealing lives lived decades past their ostensible peaks, their nodes of fame. He turned to them over breakfast and quoted with exaggerated relish, a touch of hammy gusto. “Lived in Mexico as one of Trotsky’s bodyguards and later edited Popular Mechanics -isn’t that amazing, Dylan? These lives, so full and crazy, so contradictory, and you never learn this stuff until they happen to die. You might not even know they’d existed!” The more Dylan met these ravings with silence the more his father hectored: “Jean Renoir, his father was the painter Renoir, you know,” or “Listen: Al Hodge, he played the Green Hornet and Captain Video-incredible.” Charles Seeger, Jean Stafford, Sid Vicious, the names stacked up, a breakfast litany. If nothing else it was a way to chase the boy from the house and onto the IRT. Dylan owed a sterling attendance record to the obituary page, probably. “The best-written part of the newspaper, these guys are geniuses, listen-”

So it was dumb luck the kid was still at the breakfast table that particular morning: nobody good died. The page was a rare bore. Abraham survived this slight disappointment and turned to the Metro section, and there it was, a photograph of Mingus Rude in a weird shirt, surplus cloth bunched around the collar.

“Huh, huh. Wow. Dylan, you’ll want to see this.”

The kid ignored him, mouth-breathing through a cud of Cheerios, par for the course.

Abraham quarter-folded the section and handed the article to Dylan so he couldn’t miss it. The item was smart-alecky, sloppily reported, and full of holes and questions begged, no obituary by a long shot, but it contained its own amazements.

DRUG STING NETS CAPED CRUSADER

BY HUMBOLT ROOS

B ROOKLYN,M AY 16. An undercover operation at the Walt Whitman Houses in Fort Greene was tripped up by the efforts of a teenage vigilante dressed as a superhero late Monday night, according to police at the 78th Precinct.

The costumed do-gooder, later identified as Mingus Rude, 16, was apparently concealed in a tree on housing complex grounds when he assaulted an undercover detective conducting a drug transaction with known dealers, presumably mistaking the officer for a criminal. The attempted citizen’s arrest resulted in a literal headache for plainclothesman Morris, who was treated for minor injuries on the scene, and a paperwork headache for officers filing reports. The surveillance operation, a complex sting in preparation for several weeks, was unsuccessful, and no arrests were made.

All narcotics detectives got for their trouble was the consolation prize of Mr. Rude, later released into his parents’ custody with a warning, but no charges. Dressed in a hand-decorated mask and cape, and giving his name as “Aeroman,” Mr. Rude initially refused to answer questions without the presence of an attorney. Detectives confirmed that several local incidents had been reported recently involving the would-be hero-