So it was that Raf became Dose’s protector and broker, taking fifty percent out of any payment, and stockpiling a certain vein of big-titted poster work for private dispersal among the Bloods network. In an unseen deal some top-level Blood had a word with some top-level Nieta and the Astacios melted away. The brothers only shot Dose dartlike glances when they were certain no one saw, Ramon salaciously licking his teeth with his scarred tongue, wanting Dose to see the badge he’d awarded and consider its implications.
But Raf was big and strong, and devoted, and so Dose’s safety at Elmira was secured. Dose was one of his several mules; the others dealt “trees”-tight-rolled cheeba sticks, cut with mentholated tobacco to stretch the ingredient-and he would slip Dose a fistful of these once in a while, a small perk. Dose had arrived at a policy of no dope inside, witnessing the rapid spiral of arrears this led to, but getting stoned on the gratis trees was a safe exception. Raf also turned out not to be so faithful to the recipient of his incessant Valentines that he didn’t want his dick sucked a couple of times, and then to suck Dose’s in return once they trusted one another. The Bloods had a broom closet permanently bought for more or less this exact purpose. Dose learned to admire how Raf could want to stretch a suckjob out to defeat time, like relishing a shaggy-dog story. If he even came to crave it a little, in both directions, find himself as entranced by the tensing in Raf’s lifter’s thighs as he was by the avidity of a mouth, that was fine, neither here nor there, not particularly telling. If there was one thing Dose had learned from his father-the Love Man resting on his laurels, lazily taking what came to the house, Horatio’s women or, on occasion, Horatio-it was that it wasn’t a big deal to suck a little dick now and then, so long as nobody girled you out. That had been Dose’s understanding the day Barrett Rude Junior walked in on his son with Dylan Ebdus: there were more things under the sun than what cats might get up to with one another if there were no women on the scene.
Not that Dose spent a lot of time thinking of Dean Street, or of the days before Senior had come to the house, with Barry still in full polymorphous splendor, before things got paranoiac and eerie all over, in the basement and upstairs and out on the street. In those days when it still seemed Barry might resume making music, might fall in with that crowd of funk superheroes.
The four-track the secret machine under the floorboards, not the.45.
In that brief margin between renouncing his Boy Scout uniform and taking up with FMD and Robert Woolfolk, and spurning Dylan Ebdus, or being spurned by him, whichever it was, Dose could still be enticed by the simplest games, stoopball, wallball, skully, boosting skin mags from the newsstand on the triangle at Flatbush and Atlantic, committing each syllable of Sugarhill Gang’s “Eighth Wonder” or Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks” to subvocal memory.
Or lie in a breeze from the backyard window and page through The Inhumans, waiting for their mute leader Black Bolt to open his mouth and bring it all crumbling down, with one shattering doomsday utterance: the bridge, the towers, the schools, all the public concrete Mono and Lee and Dose had tagged with spray paint for future demolition.
When Black Bolt at last sang it would level the city and there’d be only the subway running underneath through its theorem of tunnels, the one true neighborhood.
Dose could lie on his bedspread in the rotten-ailanthus breeze and dream it for hours.
Or, alternately, rush onto the street on the broilingest of days to join in directing, with a tin can open at both ends, a stream from a wrenched hydrant through the window of a passing car. Driver hectically rolling it if he saw what was in store, never fast enough.
But the stories you told yourself-which you pretended to recall as if they’d happened every afternoon of an infinite summer-were really a pocketful of days distorted into legend, another jailhouse exaggeration, like the dimensions of those ballpoint-crosshatched tits or of the purported mountains of blow you once used to enjoy, or how you’d bellowed an avenger’s roar when you squeezed the trigger of a pistol you’d actually brandished in self-pissing terror. How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end.
As for flying, Dose never even glanced at the sky. Flying was a summer within a summer, a whim. So why think of it at all?
chapter 14
In the years between Elmira and Watertown Dose’s life on the street was a shadow, a pale dream between bids.
One release blurred into another, a Twilight Zone recurrence of being dropped by the Riker’s shuttle at Queensboro Plaza. There the bus stopped under the el tracks and the driver doled out subway tokens, one per man, the system’s laconic parting gift. Up on the platform, Dose would wait in the middle of a gaggle of freaked-out felons, each pretending not to be in the company of the others, each with panic in their eyes. The releasees chewed gum frantically, spit, tugged too-tight street clothes over new biceps and pecs, every last one of them as conspicuously ill-armored for this world as lobsters loosed in an open field.
From Queensboro Plaza Dose made his way back. He’d ride the 7 to Grand Central and change for an express to Nevins if he was feeling bold, hoping to see some fresh top-to-bottom work on the trains, hoping to run into someone he knew. On more sheepish days he’d walk the two blocks to Queens Plaza instead, for the G’s slog through Greenpoint, Bed-Stuy, Fort Greene, thirteen subway stops nobody used, an hour in the tunnels to calm your thoughts.
Sing a song of returning: Ya miss me, sucker? Well I’m back!
Back in the New York groove, sure.
On discharge from Elmira Dose aimed, by prearrangement, for Arthur Lomb’s crib on Smith Street. Barry had rented the basement rooms; no question of a homecoming there. His first season of freedom Dose worked for a hippie contractor named Glenray Schurz, replacing window frames in the rotting brownstones, complicit in renovation, making Boerum Hill of Gowanus. Those early days Dose visited Barry at lunchtimes, still covered with plaster dust, his particle mask around his neck. He’d stop in with a bag of sandwiches from Buggy’s, the hot mustard Barry used to adore. Only now Barry never ate a bite. Dose sat on the couch with him, trying to know his father, but they’d hardly talk. Just watch TV, Phil Donahue, Mission Impossible, or Sunday afternoons sit and groan at the Jets blowing another tackle.
Outside the block was dead, no kids at all.
Henry every once in a while saying yo in a suit and tie.
Barry putting the sandwich in the refrigerator and twisting the cap off his malt-liquor lunch while the fridge door was open.
He’d see his father on the street too, on Atlantic, at the Times Plaza Hotel. There Dose would choose not to be seen, just witness, as Barry hung at the entrance waiting for a deal to unfold.
Later, when Dose had returned inside and been released again, his cycling through Riker’s under way, crackhead days birthing crackhead months birthing crackhead years, years spent on a mission, Arthur Lomb grew too uptight to offer his couch. Arthur would spot Dose coming a mile off on the street and pull his wallet out, stuff a five-spot into his palm for their handclasp when they collided, pity money Dose had become too unproud to refuse. Those days, dropped at Queens Plaza, Dose wouldn’t head back to Gowanus, not to Brooklyn at all. He’d shortcut to Manhattan, Washington Square, seeking cats he recognized, or word of a club or a private affair, and by after-hours be crashing with some woman desperate enough to join his desperate ride, foolish enough not to see where it went: a trail of her pawned possessions, like bread crumbs, pointing to the day of his next arrest.