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The room Sweeney led me to, a private office full of filing cabinets behind a pebbled-glass door, also held a large wooden desk with a telephone, and a few framed citations and newspaper photos-it might be the warden’s office, if I believed in such things as wardens. I remembered my surprise, as a Brooklyn kid, discovering that the small towns in Vermont actually harbored sheriffs, when that was for me as corny and fictional an honorific as knight or caveman. A warden was a figure from a Le
This was new for me. I’d never once explored invisibility’s perverse opportunities-never been one for strip clubs or porn, let alone window peeping. I identified with the figure of the subway frotteur about as much as I did with Bernhard Goetz. Now, here to renounce and abandon the ring and my secret powers, and alone in this upstairs office with a woman, a weird last-minute greed came to me, and I practically mounted Sweeney’s substantial thigh as I leaned close to capture a whiff of her hair’s perfume. She hummed Cher’s “Believe” to herself, and farted too, but these couldn’t deter me. I imagined whispering Be still, Sweeney, don’t scream, and let the invisible hands of the invisible man invade your ma
Sweeney rolled out the R-S-T drawer and there it was: Rude, Mingus Wright, 62G7634. And that was all it took to deflate me. I might have been a moment or two from asinine calamity, from letting Sweeney feel my breath or erection against her. Now I backed to a corner and watched her complete the task of filing. Sweeney was blithe, unaware of our close call, still humming atonal disco. When she clicked off the overhead on her way out, I left it off. Enough light leaked in from the yard’s floodlamps for me to find the drawer again, and the file inside the drawer.
I sat at the desk and had a look.
The file was fifteen, maybe twenty sheets thick. The first and by far most substantial document dated to 1978-the year Mingus began at Sarah J. Hale, while I was still behind at I.S. 293-on stationery headed by Frank J. Macchiarola, Chancellor of Schools.
PSYCHOLOGICAL EVALUATION: The overall test results suggest a young man of very superior intellectual capacity whose verbal skills are considerably more effective than his practical problem-solving skills. Some limitations in attention, concentration, and awareness… It may be speculated that these limitations are the result of distracting feelings, tensions, and i
And:
D EVELOPMENTAL: Mingus was a full-term baby. A breech delivery, he was born fighting, and knocked the instrument from the doctor’s hand-
And:
I NTERVIEW: Mingus feels he does not understand what has happened to him. He stated that as far as he can remember his problems started when he was in preschool-
And:
He has problems because of the “gang” elements in and around his school. He has little social life and finds it hard to explain what he does with his time-
And:
TEST RESULTS: Mingus entered the test situation readily. There was noted, however, a tinge of mild a
And:
His thinking tends toward secretive and foreboding themes (i.e., on card V a camouflaged butterfly against a tree, card III two people working over a pot, a witches’ brew, card IV a dragon with wings coming down on you)… suggestive of an apprehensive and at times suspicious view of his experience and surroundings-
And:
Mingus’s typical style and ma
The jargon described a Mingus I barely recognized, sulking under the shrink’s gaze-in those same days he ebulliently commanded my world, out on Dean Street. I flipped to the end of the document, and underneath found Mingus’s “yellow sheet,” his at-a-glance arrest and conviction record. First, five or six graffiti detainments, from our high-school days. Before Ed Koch’s graffiti-specific laws, arresting officers had been reduced to euphemistic charges:
3/2/78: Criminal Mischief, Criminal Trespass
4/14/78: Criminal Mischief, Criminal Trespass
9/27/79: Criminal Mischief, Loitering, Possession of Burglar Tools
And so on. Those burglar’s tools were presumably bolt cutters, for breaking into the train yards. No mention of Mingus’s leaping, costumed, from a tree in the Walt Whitman Houses courtyard-he’d been released to Junior’s recognizance that night. His teenage jeopardy was all graffiti related. To that point Mingus had had the freedom to smoke and snort in his own home, when it was being forced onto the street that led to possession arrests.
Those would come, soon enough. First, the parade of scofflaw-charge dismissals ran over this cliff:
8/16/81: Murder 2, Handgun Possession
And its disposition:
10/23/81: Felony Conviction, Involuntary Manslaughter
The long shadow of Senior’s slaying was a six-year silence on the yellow sheet, before the resumption, in 1987, of Mingus’s arrests. By that time the street had undergone its crack revolution:
11/23/87: Criminal Possession of Controlled Substance (stimulant)
This was successively shrunk by some bored typist with a fondness for capitals:
10/3/88: CPCS (stimulant), Simple Misdem.