The Fortress of Solitude

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 Lo

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.

Lo

Now comes Dylan, trailing into the basement five minutes later, and doing nothing to acknowledge any co

Today you’re a white boy for a reason.

Leave it to Mingus Rude to recuperate their differences for his own purposes, for Robin Hooditry in art’s cause.

Dylan goes for the exit. The cans of Krylon clunk and ping seductively in his knapsack, treasure for sure. Spreading gratuitous confusion now, the other three chart divergent paths through the aisles, leave separately. Mingus, the broadest performer, is halted and frisked by a couple of guards. Alberto screams into the doorway behind him, “Fuck you! ” No reason, just because he can.

Back on Fulton they regather in the shade of the parking garage, all out of breath before they’ve even begun their run, hearts thrilled. The paint is quickly weighed, shaken to reveal the shuttle’s promising clatter, then parceled out to coat pockets, stuffed in sleeves. Let some superhuman guard chase them, he’ll never catch all four. They scramble down Hoyt Street, pretending to be pursued, laughing and shouting: “Oh, shit! Book, man! Can’t you run? Something wrong with your legs?”

Animals, Abraham? We can give you animals.

They shared a long walk in silence across Flatbush, up St. Felix, to the red brick hospital wedged against one side of Fort Greene Park. A Saturday afternoon in early April, first blush of heat in the air, the rutting birds and sun-stoned children in the dizzying, near-vertical park screaming in unison, bombarding the hospital windows with a shrill hail of sound. The flung-open windows couldn’t decant the detox ward’s deep linoleum-urine rot, an air of body poisons overlaid with disinfectant and sharp wafting farts from the recently destarved. No fear a bird would fly into the hospital. They’d be knocked back by a wall of odor as though butting a glass pane.

Dylan hung in the doorway. A Jamaican nurse stood beside him, one eyebrow cocked. Abraham went to the bed. The man was a draped hulk, wrists buckled into cloth restraints to the aluminum bed frame, hands hanging below, pitiful and large. One scabby foot was flung past the bed’s lip, the other curled inward like a dancer’s, tucked beneath the sheeted bulk of knee. His left cheek and brow were knit in a petrified wink. An intravenous line dripped something green-yellow into his arm, something that had also made a green-yellow stain on the sheet. Spills were his nature, even here. Hard to fathom he’d negotiated the sky.