The Fortress of Solitude (22 page)

“I would rather see my work as an attempt to clear aesthetic areas, to free film from previous arts and ideologies,” said Brakhage when he was permitted. His words rippled through the room, resonating in minds so straining toward their speaker that they practically boiled. Dylan felt it himself. He looked back at his father, who sat straining too, in love and anger toward the stage. “Perhaps to leave it clear to be of use to men and women of various kinds which might help evolve human sensibility.”

The fluorescent-lit, plaster-crumbled lecture hall in the Cooper Union basement was full to capacity now, to standing room only. Dylan twitched, but he wasn’t alone. The man in the seat beside him was tearing a Styrofoam cup into a thousand dandrufflike shreds which floated down to form a drift between his tapping feet. The Styrofoam-tearing man might have been in an agony of suppressing some question he wanted to cry out to the men on the stage. Perhaps he thought he belonged on the stage. Everywhere chairs creaked.

“I believe in song,” said Brakhage. “That’s what I want to do and I do it quite selfishly, out of my own need to come through to a voice that is comparable with song and related to all animal life on earth. I am moved at the whole range of songs that the wolf makes to the moon, or neighborhood dogs make, and I in great humility wish to join this.”

When the tension in the room was at its height and the Styrofoam cup had been wholly processed the shredder beside Dylan jumped up and shouted into the panel’s droning, “What about Oskar Fischinger? None of you are acknowledging Fischinger!”

Having thrown this gauntlet he stood trembling, perhaps expecting to find the crowd at his back, enraged, ready to rush the dais.

“I don’t think anyone’s denying Fischinger,” said one of the men on the panel, in a tone of draining sarcasm. “I don’t think that’s really the point at all.”

“Never mind Fischinger,” came another voice. It was Abraham Ebdus. He spoke from the corner of the room without rising from his chair, and more quietly than the shredder, who still stood. “Maybe at this point someone should mention Walther Ruttman.”

Silence on the podium, marked only by Brakhage’s slight and unsurprised nod, which seemed to say,
Ruttman, yes, Ruttman
. The shredder took his seat, humbled.

Then, from the back of the hall another cry pierced the breath-inheld tension: “Fuck Ruttman! What about
Disney
?”

This brought a roar of relief, since no one actually relished the burden of understanding how little they knew of the careers of Fischinger and Ruttman. The moment was now lost in a calamity of babble and laughter. Then Brakhage smoothed everything, began taking questions from the crowd. Hostility slowly dissipated as the panelists were rendered equal to the audience by Brakhage’s authority. Silent, the younger men could be more-or-less forgiven for being onstage.

Forgiven perhaps by all but Abraham.

Afterward Brakhage was mobbed at the foot of the stage. Abraham found Dylan in the swirling mass of bodies, took his hand, and together they pushed to the exit. Dylan felt his father’s smoldering inarticulate fury, felt enclosed in it as in a cocoon as they descended the subway stairwell at Astor Place and as they waited on the platform, then boarded the 6 train, felt it shut them out against the other night riders, whose heads lolled with the train’s movements on the weary sticks of their bodies, felt it shut them against the whole city everywhere around them.

Dylan breathed his father’s embarrassment. Something had gone wrong in Abraham’s demonstration to his son of Brakhage’s greatness, and of his, Abraham’s, kinship with the great filmmaker, this man who was Abraham’s secret tutor, his North Star. Perhaps the hall had been too full. Perhaps it would have been too full if there had been even one other soul there apart from Brakhage and Abraham Ebdus and his son. The evening was essentially ruined as soon as it was obvious Brakhage wasn’t only not as lonely for recognition as Ebdus but wasn’t lonely for recognition in the least.

Or maybe it was just that asshole shouting
Disney
for an easy laugh.

The mood lasted as they waited at Brooklyn Bridge for the 4 train, that extra indignity of the 6’s refusal to bother entering Brooklyn, lasted as they emerged at Nevins to walk in silence toward Dean Street, toward their beds, oblivion for their demolished evening. It might have gotten them home, Abraham’s bubble of muted rage, if it hadn’t been for the tagged bum still in his self-clench on the corner of Atlantic.

Dylan glanced as they passed. The once-flying man’s mummified pose was unchanged, though he seemed nearer to the gutter now.
DOSE
gleamed on the billboard of his back, spotlit by the streetlamp.

Abraham Ebdus raised his eyes from his dark contemplation of the pavement at his feet and followed Dylan’s gaze to the bum’s back. He halted in his steps.

“What’s that?”

“What?” blurted Dylan.

“
That
.” Abraham pointed, unmistakably, horribly, at the spotlit
DOSE
on the bum’s sleeping bag.

“Nothing.”

“What’s it say?”

“I don’t know,” said Dylan, hopelessly.

“You do,” said Abraham. “You write it on your notebook.” Certainty rose in Abraham’s voice, his fog of anger given shape. “I’ve seen it. That’s the word you and Mingus write on everything. You think I don’t
notice
? You think I’m
stupid
?”

Dylan couldn’t speak.

“Let me see your sneakers.”

Abraham Ebdus took Dylan’s shoulder, his hand clawlike, a startling assertion of force between them. Abraham’s disapproval or affection were usually aspects of a floating arrangement of father-notions, largely sonic: footsteps pacing overhead, a voice descending stairs. Abraham was a collection of sounds bound in human form by gloom.

Now they stood in the cool night on the corner of Atlantic Avenue, connected by Abraham’s grip. The streetlamp’s nimbus on the shape at their feet, a stinky outcropping of the gutter ignored for weeks and improbably come to human attention at last. Abraham turned Dylan by the shoulder and squinted to examine his son’s sneakers like evidence in a murder.

Eyes behind passing windshields could care less.

A block away, a whore paced to the corner of Pacific. She called to some old man walking a dog, no illusions, just out of boredom.

Spring was coming, though, a general thaw, she could feel it.

“What’s that?” Abraham said, his grip fierce. “It’s the same, isn’t it?”

There was no way to hide. The fat white margin at the sole of each of Dylan’s Pro Keds was crammed with miniature tags. The mushy rubber took a blue ballpoint like butter under pressure of a fork’s tine, a discovery which had enraptured Dylan’s attention during a crushingly dull math class. Though technically he was destroying his prize 69ers, Dylan couldn’t stop himself. At least it rendered them not worth stealing.

“Mingus wrote it,” Dylan heard himself say.

Abraham freed Dylan’s shoulder and they sprang apart, a physical renouncing as sharp as the contact itself.

“Look at us!” Abraham said, squeezing his eyes and forehead with one hand. It wasn’t clear that he was speaking to Dylan.

Dylan waited frozen.

“What could this possibly mean?” said Abraham, his voice erupting from him now. “Is this what I raised you for? This disrespect for a human life? What do you and Mingus do out on the streets, Dylan? Just run like feral animals? Who
taught
you this?”

“I didn’t—” But Dylan couldn’t offer Mingus’s name again.

“Maybe this is just a terrible place. Maybe in these streets right and wrong are confused, so you and your friends run insane like animals that would do this to a human person.” Rachel went omitted, unnamed, but both knew that to speak of this place was to speak of her, however little they wished to. Possibly Dylan and Abraham only remained in Gowanus for Rachel, holding down her spot. Now they’d tiptoed together to the brink of an implication that Rachel had outlawed. Some shadow lurked in the word
animals
that shamed Abraham deeply.

“It’s this time in the world,” said Abraham, groping for some epic sentiment to blur the thought that had come over them both. “We’re in hell, that’s the only explanation.” The body on the street with
DOSE
on his back could be ascribed to Gerald Ford or Abe Beame, perhaps the Shah of Iran.

In a city commanded to
drop dead
it wouldn’t be improbable for a few of its citizens to do so literally and in full view. Especially on Nevins Street.

“This neighborhood is killing us, it’s my fault, Dylan, I’m sorry. These choices I’ve made.” At last and almost mechanically, Abraham was turning on himself, with every resource of disappointment and loathing. He might have farmed humiliation from the Cooper Union lecture hall and beyond, from who knew where. From Rachel. It was no relief to Dylan. “Look at us, God,” Abraham moaned. Previously he’d covered his eyes; now he widened them.

Absolution lay in one direction only. At their feet.

“Is this man even
alive
?”

“I don’t know,” said Dylan.

Abraham knelt and embraced the form’s shoulder through the wrapped sleeping bag. Nudged, then rolled the body slightly. Dylan watched, horrified. “Are you—” began Abraham, stupidly. What question was appropriate? Did you ask a corpse if it was okay, comfortable? Abraham resorted to “Hello?”

Incredibly, the man on the ground unkinked, rustled his limbs. Then spoke, in a snorelike groan: “
Fuckin’!
”

The man on the ground twisted his neck, beat at the air with wrists and elbows doubled, resembling a T. rex scrabbling with tiny forelegs. However long his nap, the man woke into resumed conflict, warding something or someone away. The movement stirred his odor, made his size apparent. Abraham jerked his hand back, startled.

They’d thought he was dead, really. Dylan and his father blinked, appalled to see they’d been talking over a live body. The fallen man might even have been listening.

“Hold on, man,” said Abraham, his voice hollow, rushed. To Dylan it sounded as if Abraham thought the man on the pavement had been fine a moment before, had only fainted, as though this spell on the street corner didn’t define a man’s life but was only an interruption, a hiccup. “We’ll get an ambulance.”

The whore, pacing uncommonly far in her boredom, reached the avenue. Atlantic was quiet, no cars at the lights which changed red-to-green with a
chunk-chunk
just audible above the insect hum of the streetlamps. She teetered halfway across the intersection and called out to the three, the small man and the thin tall one and the thick black one on the ground:

“Any y’all need a date?”

The best colors all have the best names: Pastel Aqua, Plum, John Deere Yellow, Popsicle Orange, Federal Safety Purple. A blind guy could steal the right paint just hearing the monikers. These colors are the necessities for
throwing up a burner
, a top-to-bottom masterpiece of flaming 3-D letters studded with rivets or bleeding from gashes, surrounded by clouds of stars, lightning bolts, and a Vaughn Bode wizard or Felix the Cat character standing to one side like a master of ceremonies. A burner comes into life either on the panels of a stilled subway car or on a handball court or schoolyard wall, an unsimple matter of five or six hours in the dead of night, two guys spraying paint, the more talented one handling outlines and fade effects, the lesser doing flat fill-ins, usually two more guys looking out at the end of the block or the entrance to the train yard. Plus ruining a set of clothes, coming home pore-and-tear-duct-clogged with pigment. Plenty more obvious than drugs, to a vigilant parent; the potheads have it easy.

First, though, you’ve got to assemble the paint.

That means
racking at McCrory’s
.

Today it’s the Dean Street Crew: a temporary, maybe one-time agglomeration, led by Mingus Rude. The crew consists of Lonnie, Alberto, Dylan, and Mingus. Mingus the oldest. The four have a scheme, a plan of attack, which, like the expedition itself, is Mingus’s original conception—or if Mingus learned it from another kid he’s not giving credit. The scheme feels brilliantly original to the Dean Street Crew, feels fine. In fact they’re high on it, jangled, dancing.

McCrory’s is the feebler of Fulton Street’s two department stores. The other, a block away, is A&S—Abraham and Straus—an eight-story Art Deco monolith, a gilded time machine into some glorious shopping Utopia. It’s also intimidating and Manhattanesque, with its uniformed elevator operators and old ex-cop guards. On floor six of A&S there’s a gourmet shop with rows of hand-dipped chocolates, on the eighth there’s toys, puzzles, a counter selling collectible coins and stamps. Also an enclosed record store, four walls within four walls, out of which no kid’s yet claimed to succeed in boosting records. Gangs roam clear of A&S, perhaps embarrassed by memories of parent-guided expeditions to sit on Santa’s lap. That place, it’s just a little too dreamy.

McCrory’s is the department store they understand and deserve, McCrory’s is a tad more approachable. It’s a Woolworth’s knockoff, really, with butter-sour popcorn smells and costume jewelry in Plexiglas cases and a photo booth and a desolate sandwich counter where a sharp-eyed kid can order a milk shake and pay for it with tips he’s slid away from other placings on the counter, if he drinks the shake slowly enough. The main floor’s acres of underwear and baby clothes and brandless reject sneakers in bins. Back-to-school specials give way to orange crepe-paper pumpkins that give way to half-dim strings of Christmas lights that give way to Valentines and Easter crap and summer bargains, all flacked by a recorded drone from unseen speakers. Downstairs is the hardware department. That’s their destination today, the Dean Street Crew. They’ve cased the joint the afternoon before. They’re ready.

According to the scheme Dylan Ebdus now stands waiting alone, a still figure in the passing crowds, mostly black ladies with young kids in tow, on Fulton Street. He’s wearing his glasses for once, plus a green-and-white striped Izod shirt—ironically not his but Mingus Rude’s—buttoned up to his neck, to complete the picture of harmless private-school nerd. He’s also wearing a backpack, empty but fluffed out from inside with a bent wire hanger to appear, they all hope, heavy with schoolbooks.