“Horatio, you done already? Bring me the pipe because I swear like Old King Cole I’m too damn lazy get out this chair. Hey, Yolanda?”

“Yes?” she said, surprised to be named by him now, a bit prim.

“How’d you like to go downstairs and check out Gus’s crib?”

He’d spoken easily, like she’d know his thinking, one thing flowing from the next. But nobody else saw the essential grace of the handoff, father to son. They all got on him at once.

Yolanda said, “What’s that supposed to mean?” She didn’t leave the couch, but crossed her legs, guarding the prize, and angled her body resentfully to the door.

“That’s fucked up, Barrett,” said Mingus in a low and pitying tone.

“Barry, be cool,” added Horatio, like he had any say in this house.

“I don’t mean anything, relax y’all. Damn. What if I make you a bet, though? How old are you, little Yo- landa? If you’re closer to his age than mine, what about you go downstairs? Do a few lines of birthday blow with my son, it’s only fair.”

“She can’t,” said Mingus flatly.

“Wait up, Gus, let’s hear from the girl. What about it, baby? Year of the Dragon or Rat or what?”

“You’re a sweet-looking man, Mingus,” said Yolanda defiantly, refusing to look at Barrett. Her voice was layered with sex, mothering, other mystical woman shit meant to shame Barry and let him know what he’d missed. For he’d missed it, blown it, she was gone. “Don’t let your father ruin your birthday for you. I’ll come see your room if you want.”

But Mingus ignored her. “She can’t come downstairs,” he said again.

“Why is that?” said Barry.

“Senior’s in the front. I heard him in there.”

“He snuck back in?”

“What you expect? You didn’t take his key.”

Barry was resigned to the world-feeling now. This was how it felt: he’d become a planet and his population swarmed like gnats, flitting in and out of sight. So his old man was back, the skulker! Senior’d done something to get himself in bad with the pimps and dealers running the Times Plaza Hotel, talked some girl into his room and tried to baptize her, or maybe just fulminated too long in the lobby-anyhow, got himself unwelcomed, then crept back here to the basement. Mingus and Senior were two of a kind, creatures ungrateful by nature and grown as remote from him as his own distant hands. Horatio, Desmond, son, father, pussy, gold records, all flew in a cloud, godforsaken and tinny.

What he needed was a hit on the pipe. A line or two lines or a dozen wasn’t going to do it tonight, wasn’t going to shrink his unendurable weight or expand the other inhabitants of the room from irritant size.

Outside, rain misting on the day-baked tar.

Pipe, bowl, and be damn sure the Fiddlers Three don’t weasel themselves a co-writer’s credit.

It was the fact that the venue was the New School, a name he associated with pinkish causes and the hiring of scantily credentialed professors, which had beguiled him to committing this mistake. That and the Dutch collector of original paperback art who’d enthused through his telephone a half-dozen times until Abraham relented. Perhaps also some morbid curiosity to encounter his colleagues: one Howard Zingerman and one Paul Pflug, incredible as the names might seem. Likely his own name Ebdus struck others the same way and it was the oddness of their monikers which had caused them to drift into this enterprise. Perhaps Abraham had accepted out of vanity. Certainly vanity. The term pop culture, thrown around so freely by the Dutchman. He was pop culture now. So let him go and see what that meant and let him meet Zingerman and Pflug. What harm to sit on a panel?

Well, he’d learned what harm, what cost to be baited out of hiding. The New School auditorium was no insurance against humiliation. The small crowd, fewer than fifty, nearly all of them lurching males with complex facial hair, had come expressly to meet Pflug. Pflug was himself perhaps thirty, had a long ponytail like many of his admirers, and appeared to be a weight lifter, though he also wore the wispy beard of an old man, or possibly a wizard.

Pflug worked in the style which had succeeded Abraham’s in time and overwhelmed it in popularity. That was, if Abraham’s style had in fact ever enjoyed any real popularity except with art directors, who had for a few years vied to hire Abraham himself and, when he proved unavailable, commissioned bald imitations of his work. This no longer happened. Though Abraham still worked, the vogue for arty psychedelia was done. Pflug was typical of what replaced it. He painted dragons and strongmen in the fashion of the posters of certain recently popular films, his skies full of billowy Maxfield Parrish clouds, his barbarians and gladiatrixes and even his dragons rendered with a uniform photorealist gloss, down to each feather and scale, down to each blond, blow-dried strand of their anachronistic haircuts.

In fact, it became clear it was Pflug who’d created the poster for one of the recently popular films. This explained the resemblance, and also the existence of his fans. They’d barely concealed their impatience through the brief panel, waiting for the chance to mob Pflug with posters, now reverently uncurled from cardboard tubes, which they hoped he’d autograph. No one here cared about paperback cover art, and why should they? It wasn’t a thing to care about.

The exception was the Dutchman who’d single-handedly organized this event, God help him, coming from Amsterdam to do so. And it was Zingerman he cared about, exclusively. The Dutchman, younger than Pflug even, was clean-cut and shaven. He’d sounded older on the phone, but in person was soft-spoken, dumbstruck with reverence. Zingerman was his hero. He’d been buying Zingerman originals from the warehouses of defunct paperback houses, from thieving art directors, from catalogues which circulated among aficionados like himself. The Dutchman was authoring a monograph, a catalogue raisoné, and sought Zingerman’s blessing. His Atlantic crossing should have been a direct pilgrimage to the feet of his master but he’d been shy, it now seemed, and so had arranged this whole sham panel, Zingerman-Pflug-Ebdus, “The Hidden World of Paperback Art,” as a blind.

Zingerman the painter had a certain integrity, a kind of Ashcan school realism. He was painterly in the mood of the Soyer brothers, or, if you were generous, even the earliest Philip Guston. Zingerman’s milieu was urban gothic, characters caught at heights of expressive torment, men tearing shirts from women and vice versa, but also moments of tenderness or even pensiveness. Small dogs and rusted cans lay in the gloom of Faulknerian porches. The women were only always a tad beautiful, Playboy bunnies in disarray, slumming. Hands, faces, and cleavages were all in clean focus, while much else was lost in chiaroscuro, a signature style which also saved man-hours and was surely far less wearing than Pflug’s autistic micro-detail in the long run.

The examples on hand, books sealed in protective plastic sleeves and two of the paintings themselves, were all from the Dutchman’s collection. The titles spanned four decades, from the forties, Paul Bowles and Hortense Calisher beside outright pornography-Zingerman’s treatment was consistent. He’d conceded to the seventies only his sfumato palette of grays and browns, brightening his tones and adding Laugh-In -style paisley bikinis and unbuttoned print shirts to his girls’ wardrobes, fluffy sideburns to his protagonists’ clenched jaws.

Zingerman the human? He was toxic. Maybe seventy, he stooped from a basketballer’s height, his enormous frame draped in a dust-colored suit and folded awkwardly behind the table they shared. Hair sprouted from his French-cuffed sleeves like he wore an ape suit beneath, but the skin of his hands and face was papery, drained of vitality. Against the auditorium’s posted prohibitions he chain-smoked cigars thick as his clubby fingers. He coughed frequently around the cigars. Hard to picture those fingers with a brush-but then so many things were hard to picture and yet were, like this evening’s occasion.