Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

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.

2/12/89: CPCS (stim.) Misdm.

6/3/89: CPCS (stim.) Misdm.

The sequence was interrupted by the now-expanded penal code:

8/8/89: Possession of Graffiti Instruments

And then:

4/5/90: Larceny 1

Time after time in those court-swamped years Mingus had been held beyond the length of his sentence while awaiting trial at Riker’s, and so been sprung on conviction, his time served. In the years between Elmira and his current bid he’d never left the city, never been exiled upstate. Elsewhere, his charges had been dismissed. Perhaps superior verbal skills -what I knew as his famous persuasiveness-had kept him afloat. Anyway, no one could claim he’d not received his warnings:

8/5/92: CPCS (stim.) Misdm.

1/30/94: CPCS (stim.) Misdm., Possession of Paraphernalia

Again it had the quality of a train wreck or cliff plummet, to see where this orderly conga line of misdemeanors was headed:

8/11/94: Felony Possession of a Stimulant with Intent to Sell, Handgun Possession

And the punch line:

Felony Conviction, 4-to-Life.

With that, Mingus’s yellow sheet had run out. It was as though the state had been nibbling him, tasting him, before committing to a mortal bite.

The rest were documents generated by his present incarceration: his initial classification, dooming him to high-security institutions, based on the previous manslaughter conviction-first Auburn, and then, after his own transfer request, here to Watertown. I’d later understand that he’d swum against a tide: inmates from the city usually pushed southward, trying to shrink the distance for their visitors.

Here too were carbons of infraction tickets Mingus had been written by the COs on the galleries-his “small beefs.” I puzzled the handwriting on a few before growing numb:

Inmate refused to come out of cell for inspection

Contrabanned materials, magic marker

Inmate cooking soup with heating element

Drawn on t-shirt

Excessive news paper

Inmate climbs on bunk, states he is Superman

Contraband materials, pipe

So there it was: the inadequate liner note to Mingus Rude’s whole existence. I memorized his block and gallery numbers and replaced the file in the drawer. Then, before resuming my spook’s jaunt through the facility, I sat at the desk and was tempted by the telephone there. Perhaps it was a lingering whiff of my encounter with Sweeney, perhaps another stalling action, but I yearned for Abby.

I’d grown so accustomed to the empty ringing, though, and the blurred click of my machine’s pick up, that it was a shock when she actually answered.

“Abby?” I said, to her hello.

“Yes.”

“You’re home.”

“Well, I’m in your apartment,” she said cautiously.

“Is that an important distinction?”

“I’m just pointing out that you’re not .” She let this sink in briefly, before asking: “Still enjoying Disneyworld?”

“Disneyland. But no. I mean, I’m not there.”

She waited. I slowly grasped that all the time I’d been ringing the apartment in search of Abby, she might have been doing the same in search of me, with the same result.

“I’m not in Anaheim,” I said. “I came back to Brooklyn.”

“Is your father sick?”

At first I was stumped. It took a moment to grasp that this was Abby’s most generous guess to explain my absence. She’d spared me her worse ones.

“No… no,” I said.

“So you’re on some pathetic Iron John quest, huh? In the woods beating on a drum?”

“Not exactly.”

“Searching for the guy with the Afro pick?”

“Maybe sort of.”

“Why are you whispering?”

“I can’t really talk now,” I said. “I actually wasn’t expecting you to pick up.” I wanted to add I’ve been calling a lot , but it was too late for that. I kept an eye on the murky light which penetrated the door’s pebbly glass, fearing patrollers in the corridor. Anyone alerted by my murmurs would have seen the phone’s cord hammocked between the handset on the desk and a receiver glommed into invisibility close at my head.

“You don’t really want to talk to me now, is that what you’re saying, Dylan?”

“I’m sorry.”

I heard her consider my silence. “You’re in a bad place, aren’t you?” Her tone was gentler, barely. “Our big talk really fucked you up.”

“I’m in a bad place,” I said, agreeing with the part that was obvious.

“I believe you.”

“Thank you,” I said quietly.

“I guess you’ll call again when you can really talk.”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then. I suppose I can wait.”

“Thank you,” I said again.

“I’m staying here now,” she said. “Call anytime.” She was babying me, easing us both off the phone.

“Abby-”

“Yes?”

I wanted to say something before we were done, wanted to have something to say. But where would I begin? Instead I defaulted, to a factoid I’d been holding in reserve for her to admire, the sort of talk we’d enjoyed in better days. “You know how I was always wondering about the Four Tops, about why they didn’t ever break up or get new members, after all those decades? When every other vocal group fell apart?”

“Yeah?”

“Here’s the thing, I found out the reason, it’s kind of incredible. I forgot to tell you. The reason the Four Tops never broke up is they all go to the same synagogue. They’re Jewish. Isn’t that kind of moving?”

“That’s what you called to say? The Four Tops are Jewish?”

“Well-”

“Dylan, I thought you always said that the fact that you happened to be Jewish was, like, the least defining thing about you.”

“Well, sure. But, it’s a… a pretty amazing thing to know about the Four Tops.”

“Hmmm. I guess getting enthralled with negritude still beats self-reflection every time, huh? They must surely have a couple of those black Jewish girls hidden away in Crown Heights somewhere. Good luck on your quest, soul brother.”

With that she clicked off the line. It wasn’t the worst finish I could imagine, only a tad one-sided.

And with that, I had nothing left but my purpose here. Or take Abby’s word and call it a quest : go to Mingus.

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.