He never wanted to be King of the A, the CC, or King of any of the IRT lines, never wanted to be King of any line at all. It wasn’t like that for Dose: counting tags, bragging, marking turf. No, you might strike deals with the crews who fought dumb wars for dominance-Dose finally joined FMD as a matter of least resistance-but this was only to free you to practice your art. The days of Mono and Lee and Super Strut-the legends who’d operated in a wide-open Gotham that needed to be taught what a tag or throw-up or top-to-bottom was, what graffiti was in the first place apart from primordial bathroom-wall gags and faggot phone numbers-were over. Gone. A million kids tagged and nobody knew the stories. The kids might figure it was always this way: eat and breathe, watch TV, join crews, do tags.
You needed a feel for the lonely art. It was the line and the language of a fuzzy-gushy flow of pigment settling into vibrant evidence against stone or steel that Dose hungered for. The line and the language, the startlement a perfect tag carved into the city’s face. Let alone a blazing top-to-bottom car rocketing through a station: holy shit! This world might be a dungeon these days, but a few voices called out to a few others. Graffiti never was a popular movement, despite a fog of pretenders. Like Jackie Wilson to Sam Cooke to Otis Redding to Barrett Rude Junior, the real stuff formed a most rarified continuum, a constellation.
Barry might not understand, but Dose knew his own art brought them, father and son, closer.
Cocaine might do the same thing-Barry seemed to think so, by the way he welcomed Dose to it.
A drug was a long study, nothing to take lightly. You might die before grasping what it had to tell you.
His father Barry and his friend Dylan-they couldn’t know how alike Dose saw them, in the end. He felt the weight of their high expectations, of Dose, and of the world. Pops and Dillinger were dreamers, it made them shy. Weak. He wished to protect them from knowledge that would crush them, even if at times it seemed that might be any knowledge at all. Stuff Mingus knew just because his eyes were open. When he abandoned Dylan to his fate at I.S. 293, it wasn’t in ignorance. The opposite: he couldn’t bear knowing the grievance Dylan was destined to absorb, couldn’t face his own inability to stem it. Certain days he wanted to ring the doorbell and roar at Abraham: Send the whiteboy to Brooklyn Friends School already! Get him clear of there!
And flying? He’d mainly just tried not to disappoint.
Black Panther, Luke Cage, Arrowman, sure. Like what Gowanus needed was a black superhero.
Dose read between the comic-book panels, where Dylan failed to, and knew they were only extras in this urban scene. A soon-to-be-canceled title.
Half the yoke artists they clocked were chumps Dose knew from around the projects anyway.
Barry and Dylan, both lingered in a romance of Dean Street. Dose saw the block for the fragile island it was, at sea in the larger neighborhood-knew it as a flying man might, aerial view. He saw Nevins and Hoyt and where they led. Nobody, apart from maybe Marilla, knew how Dose protected the block from thirsty brothers from Wyckoff Gardens and Gowanus Houses, from Robert Woolfolk’s young uncles and their like. Nobody knew how he sheltered the Dean kids, even Alberto and Lonnie, even chest-puffing Henry, from being beaten, from having skateboards and bikes ripped off countless times. Defended the brownstones from the gang on Bergen and Third, who pried basement-window bars with car jacks and slipped inside. Selling them herb, he’d overheard and petitioned against their plotting on the renovators: Ain’t nothing to steal, man! You think those white folks got cash? They a lot of hippies , man! Had a choice you think they’d settle here ?
A fair question, actually. Did the renovators think this was Park Slope? Or what?
Why should Dose have to carry them?
Abraham and Dylan was one thing, but some of those brownstoners, David Upfield, Isabel Vendle, the Roths, wouldn’t look him or Junior in the eye, seemed to begrudge their place on the street. Upfield, out there each day in his Red Sox cap and handlebar mustache, picking litter from his yard. Glaring at PRs on crates in front of Ramirez’s store, like they were ever going to quit tossing bottle caps and empty packets of plantain chips in his forsythia.
Possibly it was shifting from Philly that made him alert to the lines of force. Shedding Boy Scout uniform, football jersey, he’d had to tear down and start over. The whole middle-class assumption that was untenable here.
Junior could stay indoors and buff gold records. You, you were going to have to be able to move along the sidewalk.
There were mornings he just took off down Montague Street, strolled though the crowds of Heights kids rushing to make the bell at Packer and Saint Ann’s, to steal away and get high at the Bridge’s pilings. No teachers or school guards, no Dylan, no Arthur, no Robert. He’d be deaf to the call. No Flamboyan Crew, not today. No Savage Homicides, who wanted him to run Red Hook way, no Tomahawks, who wanted him to run Atlantic Terminals. Gone, all gone, like smoke to the Bridge’s span, while he sat in the city scrap yard among the crumpled cop-car fenders and smashed parking meters and the heap of Board of Ed typewriter carcasses, keys gnarled in a knot at the platen, as if trying to blurt some unsayable word. Gone. Junior gone, Senior gone, Mingus gone.
Senior, he was more like Dose, in a way. Though rabid like a mongoose, he had eyes.
A few times Dose trailed Senior up Nevins for his parole dates, then afterward, to the Avery Bookstore on Livingston Street, where, in the aisle between the astrology magazines and civil-service test books, Senior spent an hour pawing through a bin of mildewed sixties Playboy s, until the old Jew told him he had to buy something or get out.
One day Senior pinched his arm in the hallway of their basement apartment, said, I feel you in my footsteps, son, hope you’re learning something.
What he recalls of the Sunday of the shooting, though, is abysmal shame, wanting to hide the white boy’s eyes.
Remorse in him wasn’t what they’d said it ought to be. If he mentally rewound, it was only to bag Senior by night, entrap him with the whores on Pacific, put a silver one through that vampire heart.
Really, though, his grandfather wasn’t worth the bullet. If Dose could have somehow wielded a scalpel instead of the.45, he’d have bisected Senior from Junior. He’d meant to save his father. That would have been worth the bid he’d drawn.
Spofford.
Barry missed Dose’s arraignment and bail hearing. He’d fled the scene, it turned out, returned with Senior’s body to North Carolina, and left Dean Street behind, the apartment with its stained floor, coke dust melting into the cushions. Nobody arranges for Dose’s release, nobody’s got the money-what’s Arthur Lomb going to do, deal to put up a bond? Take up a collection on Nevins? Ask his horrified mom?
Nobody knew Dose had turned eighteen. So he was first thrown into a dormitory at Spofford Juvenile, up in the Bronx, alongside thirteen-year-old heroin runners, fourteen-year-old transvestites, child child-molesters. He met a couple of slayers, neither even pubescent. They’d killed other kids. Dose already shaved, and he’d shot an old man. Spofford’s boys treated him like an elder statesman. Ten days later somebody in Philly pulled up his birth certificate and the mistake was repaired. He was shifted to Riker’s.
Nevertheless, if he flashes to August ’81, it’s Spofford he recalls: a twelve-year-old bunkmate from Bed-Stuy who heard voices he described as “Bugs Bunny in my head,” who’d kidnapped a third-grade white girl from the yard at P.S. 38 and in the brick-strewn lots behind BAM and the LIRR terminal pulled off both their clothes and forced her to eat his feces, and who now spent nights keening for his mommy. Nobody mocked Bugs-his night song might have been on all their behalfs.