Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

By six o’clock the first kids have begun to group in 38’s yard, though Flowers won’t show until nightfall. The local crews are here in the meantime, setting up a minor skirmish to whet the appetite. P.S. 38 is the domain of the Flamboyan Crew, since their celebrated DJ Stone operates out of the basement of the Colony South Brooklyn youth center next door. Indeed, it was Flamboyan Crew’s invitation to Flowers which resulted in tonight’s plans. That doesn’t mean nobody disputes Flamboyan’s primacy here, though. Geography dictates the 38 schoolyard’s really a nexus between different forces, the Atlantic Terminals kids crossing down from Fort Greene, the Wyckoff Houses element coming up Nevins. Plus the tough Sarah J. Hale High School kids, drawn to the neighboring block of Pacific from all over.

So, up from Red Hook are the Disco Enforcers-they’ve heard about Flowers’s visit and demanded a turn in the proceedings. Flamboyan’s found itself backed into a battle of the jams when all they’d intended was to host Flowers with themselves as the warm-up. No sweat, though, Stone’s up to it. He’s so sharp on the crossfader he might be Brooklyn ’s king if not for Flowers. The rival crews work together to set up, to steal juice out of the nearest streetlight base and run it down to the far end of the yard for their turntables and amps. At the same time trying to conceal from one another their crates of twelve-inches, thinking to maintain some edge of surprise. The secrecy’s a bit of a joke, though: they’re all, including Flowers when he gets there, certain to be spinning the same fifteen or twenty cuts.

The Enforcers go first. They’re an all-black crew, Enforcers compensating easily for any faggy associations in the first part of their name. Similarly, their partisans dance on roller skates- uprocking , that’s what they call it-and nobody’s laughing. They balance kneebends and one-heel spins against a series of crotch-grabbing and fist-clenched poses, an in-your-face aspect. One mimes feeding you an endless firehose of dick. The Red Hook DJ leans on “Fatbackin” by the Fatback Band and Babe Ruth’s “The Mexican” but also stumps the crowd with Alvin Cash and the Registers’ “Stone Thing (Part 1),” an unfamiliar jam. On the drum breaks the line of roller-skated dancers freaks for the crowd, a storm of limbs, skates striking sparks on the cement.

If you managed to meet the eyes of the dancers, though, you’d find them flinching, shy. To actually get out there and uprock isn’t easy. Far easier to stand pouting with arms crossed, head perhaps bobbing slightly as you stake out your chosen proximity and consider what unfolds.

The beat’s a sonic clatter resounding down Pacific, down Nevins and Third Avenue, a clarion to any who might have missed word: Something’s happening up at thirty-eights, yo.

Flamboyan takes over next. Those who recalled anything beyond Flowers’s appearance that night would later grant DJ Stone blew the Disco Enforcers out the yard . Stone not only finds the break, he wears it out. Plus, where the Enforcers’ DJs provided their own exhortations to the crowd-a scant few Evveybody git down! ’s-Stone’s got a boy on a vocal mic calling out to the crowd, one who must imagine he’s Flowers’s kid brother. The scrawny boy, who calls himself MC Ruff, just won’t quit with the chants and rhymes.

Flamboyan Crew doesn’t provide its own dancers-Stone’s breaks and Ruff’s shouts merely turn the whole yard into Soul Train . No big surprises, just “Paradise Is Very Nice” and “Love Is the Message” sliced a hundred different ways. Those are the grooves get people off the wall. “Love Is the Message” in particular. It’s by MFSB, house band of the Philly Groove. Their name ostensibly stands for “Mother, Father, Sister, Brother,” though those hip know it really means “Motherfuckin’ Sons of Bitches.” No DJ is without three or four copies of the precious twelve-inch, it’s the staple of any set and nobody complains.

Two hours later they hear “Love Is the Message” again from Flowers. In his hands it sounds just as good, better. Flowers in person casts a spell, he’s some kind of heavy Jamaican or West Indian dude, beyond affiliation or strife, like Kung Fu. Flowers is one of the discoverers- the isolators -of the break, one of those who proved how furiously people could be made to dance to a section of song unencumbered by vocals or melody. And proving it again tonight.

By this time the card tables and crepe paper back on Bergen have long been cleared. Here is the only place you’d want to be. Maybe three hundred kids spilled around the turntables and amps, dancers at the front, hard-asses clustered according to faction: Atlantic Terminals, Wyckoff Gardens, Spanish dudes from Fifth Avenue. Nobody wants to be the fool who starts a ruckus, though pride requires vigilance against anyone gazing too long at you or your lady. Rivals form Apache lines and dance their aggression, throwing moves. Sure, there’s a scuffle or two. But this gathering’s peaceful, hardly calls for the cops to come shutting it down just before midnight, stripping one group of kids of sock-hidden steak knives, one cop snapping a pair of nunchucks over his knees, everyone sent streaming out of the schoolyard still buzzing, barely gotten started.

Nevertheless, Flowers’s set runs long enough to carve the night into legend. The Jam of ’77, just before the blackout. The dark yard lit by the glow of the DJ’s flashlights as they cued up grooves, ran breaks together: it merges in memory with that night of flares and candles a week later. In memory, that is, of all but the white kid, the one white face in the whole yard, brought there by, and hewing close to the side of, his homeboy Dose. No blackout for whiteboy. He’s lost his last chess game, eaten his last of Mrs. Lomb’s turkey sandwiches, tomorrow he’s boarding a Greyhound for Vermont. The Fresh Air kid.

Dylan’s gone unhassled tonight. Who knows why unless it’s evidence of the jam’s benignity. He’s stood all night soaking it up, one in the mob of flickering bodies and animated faces, even shouting out Ho-o! and Ow! when Flowers called for it, though this does garner stern looks from some bruthas standing nearby. Still, he skates through. Maybe this night’s just lucky, maybe he’s passed through some flame and come out the other side. Maybe it’s the ring. Maybe the ring has made him invisible. Maybe the ring has made him black . Who can say?

A black-and-white photograph of Fidel Castro in a baseball uniform, standing on a pitcher’s mound:

if the mets had to trade seaver

for a red

they should have shipped him

to cuba for this guy

better fit for che stadium

so saith commissioner crab

The postcard slipped from between the gallery flyers and Chinese takeout menus stuffed through the mail slot and landed on the hallway carpet, message side up. Abraham Ebdus didn’t raise an eyebrow, only dropped it onto the small pile accumulating on the parlor’s side table. He trusted there was no urgency to the Running Crab postcards by this point, nothing in any way timely. The boy could wait to read them when he returned. Abraham himself never even glanced at the things anymore.

Fish mouthed the pond’s surface, seeming to sip air. Mist clung to the long grass curling from the banks and in the tops of the trees beyond the grass. The short, rotten dock where the boy from the city sat floated inside a gray-green smear, like a corroded photograph of a cloud. Easier to see through the pond’s lens to the baublelike sunfish and the broccoli-bright fronds growing underwater than through air to the opposite bank.