The Fortress of Solitude (60 page)

Yes, Howard is black underground, white folks only admitted by insight. He’s got the true emotion of soul which is only out of sight because you’re not listening with your heart. That’s what Howard and his music are all about: the indifferent earth and the long crawl between breaking day and darkening night.

Who could top that, who would want to try? I’d read a liner note, then play a side at a time. For in KALX’s basement I discovered I had all the time in the world. There I learned that to find one’s art is to kill time dead with a single shot. I felt akin to Abraham. I built a path of two- and three-minute cuts through the night like my father in his cold studio daubing paint on a ladder of film.

The station wasn’t a social place. Staff meetings were gruffly efficient, and the DJs made a hermetic community at best. You might bond with those whose shows bookended your own, literally in passing. But I befriended a group of current and former DJs who played softball together. They called themselves the People’s League. We gathered every Sunday at a place called the Deaf School Field for a ramshackle co-ed game with no balls and strikes, no score kept, and plenty of beer and grilled food. Ten years of lunging at spaldeens with a broomstick had made me a pretty good hitter, though one exclusively capable of line drives up the middle. The other DJs mocked me for my predictability: everything looped over the second baseman’s head.

It wasn’t easy to explain to them the narrow, flattened diamond of Dean Street, with car handles on either side for first and third and a distant manhole for second. To pull a ball in Brooklyn was to smash a parlor window and end the game. The DJs were from California and had never played in a street. As it happened, the Deaf School Field’s irregular shape gave it a cavernous left field, while a stand of trees in center made my tic an advantage: the league’s sluggers boomed three-hundred-foot fly outs to left, while my drives scooted into the glade and were lost. As the center fielder beat in the carpet of eucalyptus, searching for the ball, I’d dash around the bases for an easy home run. Once, with a girl there I wanted to impress, I hit four tree-assisted home runs in a single afternoon. It might have been the happiest day of my life. Certainly it would have been if Mingus Rude had been there to witness it.

My people’s League heroics were accomplished without help from Aaron Doily’s ring. The thing was shelved. I’d forgotten my identity as the world’s most pathetic superhero, become a Californian instead. I had California girlfriends, a California apartment, and, after I’d dropped out of classes from sheer disinterest, a California newspaper career, as music critic for the
Alameda Harbinger
, the job an extension of some work I’d done revamping KALX’s moribund gazette. It was three years before I reached for the ring, took Aeroman out of mothballs. What happened was I got yoked, on a bus.

I’d taken Lucinda Hoekke to see Jonathan Richman at Floyd’s, a tiny stage in downtown Oakland. Lucinda was a transferred sophomore from St. John’s in Annapolis, a KALX groupie; this windy night in March was our third date. After the show we boarded a lonely bus on Broadway, pointed back into Berkeley, and sat too near the rear. I may have been trying to show Lucinda Hoekke or myself that I wasn’t afraid of the sole other rider, a tall black kid slouched in the corner, down coat puffed from beneath his arms like water wings. So we took a twin seat, our backs to him. Between woolen hat and striped scarf I sported heavy, black-rimmed glasses, a Buddy Holly/Elvis Costello prop signifying rock hipness. That’s what they signified to me. To the kid I surely looked like a caricatured victim: Woody Allen had stepped onto his bus. He threw the yoke on general principles, tipped my jaw with his elbow just long enough to show it could be done.

“I’m just messin’ with you, yo. This your girl?”

Lucinda blinked. The windows might as well have been painted black. The bus whirred down the avenue, the driver impassive in his cage. My face grew red.

“You got a dollar you could lend me?”

The script was identical coast to coast. Maybe I had it written on my back. I grabbed Lucinda’s mittened hand and drew her up to the front. We sat across from the driver, who barely glanced.

“Are you going to tell him?” whispered Lucinda.

I shushed her.

“See, you don’t gotta be like that,” called the kid in the back. “You can’t even
talk
to me, man?”

He pulled the cord, then stepped through the back stairwell, loudly smacking the bus’s side panel in farewell. We rode on in silence, the driver and I complicit in shame, Lucinda cowed. I saw incomprehension in her eyes: Had we been
mugged
? Why was I enraged—why did I seem angry at
her
? The conundrum was unaltered since I’d met it last, on some pavement in the vicinity of I.S. 293. A yoking was a koan—it could perplex forever and never be solved. What it had to teach couldn’t be named. I never called Lucinda Hoekke again. I also never wore those glasses after that night.

Aeroman’s costume was long gone, moldering in some police evidence crate, or disposed of. Just as well. This time I favored something less flamboyant, away from the caped Superman or Omega the Unknown model, nearer to those masked, nattily dressed urban avenger types, the Spirit or the Green Hornet. The change represented an incorporation of my recent fondness for forties and fifties film noir, allied with a general sense of embarrassment at the candy-striped Marvel costumes, which in my mind were now bundled in a seventies-style trash heap with Kiss and T. Rex and the uniforms of the Houston Astros. Our capes—Mingus’s, Aaron Doily’s, mine—had never helped with flying anyway. So I began shopping in Berkeley consignment shops for a really fine vintage two-piece with narrow lapels, something dashing and memorable and worthy of Aeroman’s high intentions: brown sharkskin, maybe, or forest green. Then I discovered the search was unnecessary: Aeroman no longer had an appearance, was no longer capable of dressing up, or down. The ring had changed since my soaring in the Camden woods.

I learned it in open air, in twilight, no mirrors nearby. I’d climbed Berkeley’s hills, to a bluff where I could gaze on the rooftops of luxury homes braced on stilts against the grade, the green steppes above campus, including the Deaf School Field and the skirt of flatlands that spread to the marina. I’d gone into the woods to bolster courage, remind myself of the only flight I’d experienced worth recalling, not on city streets where the action was but alone among trees and ponds. I thought I’d work my way down the hill, perhaps light on the Deaf School Field to begin with. And I wasn’t stalking injustice tonight. I didn’t have a costume or plan of attack. This was just practice.

I only had to don the ring to instantly feel the difference. The ring wasn’t drawn to the air—that part of it was dead. Now it didn’t confer flying, but something else. My hand was invisible. So was the rest of me, that I could see. I stumbled on the rocky path there, tangling invisible feet as I twisted around, trying for a glimpse of myself, anywhere. As long as I wore the ring there wasn’t a glimpse to be had. I could scuff earth with my shoe, I could cough or yell and be heard, could feel my own breath against my palm, could lick a fingertip and feel saliva evaporate in the bay wind. I merely couldn’t be seen.

I don’t know why it changed. I’ve wondered if it was a California thing, the ring’s nature linked to geophysical forces and altered by its transportation there. Or it might be some passage of age—the ring’s, not my own, since Aaron Doily had flown, albeit lamely, in his fifties. In the end I accepted it on personal terms. When I was twelve and the ring first came into my hand I believed that flying was the denominator, the bottom line of superheroic being: any superhero flew, even if they had to cheat by vaulting or floating on bubbles of conjured force or riding in hovercraft. So it was a flying ring. By the time I wore it again on that Berkeley hill I knew differently. Invisibility was what every superhero
really
had in common. After all, who’d ever seen one?

In truth, if it was still a flying ring I might never have tangled with Oakland, might only have flown in the hills and retired the ring again. My cowardice was ritual by now. The fury at being yoked on the bus in front of Lucinda Hoekke might have been expiated by a bit of zipping around, a refreshment of my irrelevant secret power. But this change in the ring seemed a message that Aeroman had grown up. Invisibility was sly and urban and might just do the trick. I was made ready for something.

As I stood dazzled by my transparency, a small bird, a sparrow, attempting to land on what must have appeared to be an empty bluff, swept from the sky and punched me in the temple, hard. We both fell. I crumpled to my hands and knees in panic, not sure the surprise attack wouldn’t continue until I spotted the stunned bird lying on its side in the dust. I thought it had killed itself against me, then it began whirring feet and wings, swimming a tiny circle before righting, to stand, head cocked. I pulled the ring from my finger and looked at my palms, found them scraped pink. When I touched my temple I found blood in my hair—my own, not the sparrow’s.

The bird stared. It didn’t seem entirely surprised I’d become visible. I suppose it had proved my existence by other means. It hopped a short distance, examined me again. Then—satisfied? stupefied? pissed off?—it turned, and we each walked, not flew, from the site of the encounter.

chapter  
9

T
he first CDs came in long boxes, to stack in the bins left behind by the vinyl CDs had displaced. The great first wave of box sets were disguised as vinyl too: discs or cassettes, either might lurk in packaging which mimicked a carton of LPs. It might even be LPs—you read the fine print to know. Rick Rubin put guitars in a rap, and MTV put the rap on television. His group, Run DMC, found their best success with a cover of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” only Aerosmith was brought in for the chorus, as rappers didn’t sing. Cocaine bifurcated, and blacks were awarded crack, beneficiary of the best marketing campaign since—LSD? The Ayatollah Khomeini? In Berkeley, deep in the decade of Reagan, students at Malcolm X Elementary took their lunch hour in Ho Chi Minh Park.

My epic project that year, never to be completed, was something called
Liner Notes: The Box Set
. The container would be one of those LP-square boxes so beloved by collectors like myself. Inside, loose sheets bearing the greatest liner notes of all time, in fine reproductions of the original designs. They’d include chestnuts by Samuel Charters, Nat Hentoff, Ralph Gleason, and Andrew Loog Oldham, as well as notes written by musicians themselves: John Fahey, Donald Fagen, Bill Evans. Landmarks like Paul Nelson on the Velvets
Live 69/70
, Greil Marcus on
The Basement Tapes
, Lester Bangs on the Godz. Joe Strummer on Lee Dorsey, Kris Kristofferson on Steve Goodman, Dylan on Eric Von Schmidt. James Baldwin on James Brown, LeRoi Jones on Coltrane, Hubert Humphrey on Tommy James and the Shondells. The Shaggs’ father on the Shaggs, Charles Mingus’s psychiatrist on
The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
. Above all, the uncanny found poetry of the endorsements I’d been reading aloud over the KALX airwaves, like Deanie Parker’s for Albert King:

If you’ve ever been hurt by your main squeeze, deceived by your best friend, or down to your last dime and ready to call it quits, Albert King has the solution if you have the time to listen. Maybe you’re just curious . . . he’ll get through to you . . . put Albert on your turntable . . . put your needle in the groove . . . now drown yourself in the . . . blues.

That it might be regarded as a disappointment to find not a single note of actual music inside
Liner Notes: The Box Set
never dawned on me. I can’t say why, exactly, except that a wish to place the writing on a par with the music was the purloined letter of intent at the project’s center. People like to be fooled, and they like to fool themselves. I was twenty-three, and believed to my heart that music fandom needed
Liner Notes: The Box Set
. Similarly, I persuaded myself that the crack epidemic, then reaching its local pitch in Oakland and Emeryville, was a job for Aeroman.

I went where scared me the most. That was a bar on Shattuck Avenue near Sixtieth Street, called Bosun’s Locker, a place where
everyone knew
it was easy to score and an excellent place not to be
caught dead
if you were white. Edgy groups of young black men could be seen milling on the sidewalks there, in a way which reminded me, when I’d glimpsed it from a passing bus, of the corners near the Wyckoff Gardens or Gowanus Houses, back in Brooklyn. Drive-by shootings were now a famous problem in the poorer suburbs of the Bay Area, Richmond, and El Cerrito, but I was a typical New York expatriate, still without a driver’s license, and the suburbs surrounding Berkeley on three sides felt impossibly remote. Besides, I found it hard to envision how an invisible man would halt a drive-by shooting. He’d need an invisible car. I went to the place
I could walk to
that scared me the most, and that was the big gloomy pool joint on Shattuck.

I walked in visible at seven on a Tuesday night, fingering the ring in my pocket. I was sure I could get myself mugged—by now I was sure of nothing so much as that. And sure that with the ring I could free myself of a mugging as well. But contriving to rescue the same old whiteboy wasn’t right. Aeroman’s vanity required somebody to protect. Maybe in some recess of my mind it was a Rude, Mingus or Barrett Junior, someone I’d abandoned. But maybe Rachel too. For Mingus had abandoned me as I’d abandoned him, and I think I had the two, abandoning and being abandoned, confused. This was the fog I carried with me into Bosun’s Locker, and the reason my invisible adventure was destined to be so foggy. But I wasn’t invisible, yet.

Every head turned, though that was only four. The muttonchopped bartender, large enough to be his own bouncer, two fiftyish pool shooters weighing angles on the farthest of three tables, and a boy, or man—he was my age, and I believed I was a man, then—seated at the bar’s corner. He wore a tan suede-front cardigan under a wool coat, and a Kangol cap, the costume of a player. I was the only white face. Nobody spoke, or anyway nothing I could make out over the jukebox cut, the Blue Notes, Teddy Pendergrass intoning
Bad luck, that’s what you got
—