"I thought I'd just run these over myself," he said, showing Sweden a clutch of folders. Sweden grunted, gestured at his desk. Brodeur dropped the folders into the mess there.

"Richard, uh, Dylan Ebdus," mumbled Sweden, painfully reluctant with his lines. "We're just, uh, having ourselves a conference here."

Brodeur reached for my hand and, as he gripped it, looked deep into my eyes. "Yes," he said gently. "We've met."

"Sure, hi," I said.

"Gave you a lift on 9A, didn't I? In the snow."

"Yes," I said.

"How's your friend?"

"Fine, I think. Fine."

"Well, look, I shouldn't interrupt," said Brodeur abruptly to Sweden. "Those papers aren't urgent. Get to them whenever."

"Right," grimaced Sweden.

There was nothing to interrupt. With Brodeur gone Sweden had little to say. He managed to wish me a happy holiday, and good luck with the paper. He had to light a cigarette before he succeeded in telling me to take care, man take care, man. That was apparently all he'd wanted to get across.

The letter arrived less than a week later, in Brooklyn. It was addressed to my father. We were at the breakfast table when Abraham turned it over to me, replaced in its torn envelope, with no more than a dry, "This is for you, I believe." But the letter had come the day before-Abraham had taken it upstairs and contemplated it for an afternoon and evening before deciding to say nothing.

The letter was on Camden's embossed cream stationery and bore Richard Brodeur's signature. It explained regretfully that for my violations of the school's policies on overnight guests and narcotics possession, I was subject to a mandatory one-term leave of absence, followed by a student council hearing. More to the point, really, my scholarship had been suspended because of my failure to sustain a minimum threshold of academic excellence. After a specified period I would be invited to reapply reapply for the scholarship. for the scholarship.

The legend of the dealer at Fish House who'd been warned to close up shop wasn't misleading, not really. Yes, Camden College could, and would, protect itself from the Vermont narcotics squad. It could also protect itself from me and Arthur Lomb. I stuffed the letter into my jeans, eyes cast low to dodge Abraham's. My father went on clinking saucers and scraping toast, then in a flurry of excitement, read me an obituary of Louis Aragon, French Poet, eighty-five. With that I could have been off, up Nevins to the 4 train, my knapsack loaded with undone homework and photocopied flyers for Stuyvesant bands. Dean Street was intact as I'd left it, the letter in my pocket the only evidence I'd been anywhere else.

chapter8.

The University of California at Berkeley would still have me. That was far enough to suit my mood, a distance from which Vermont receded into that gnarled mass of old states no one on the bright coast could ever be bothered to tell apart. My Camden credits were useless in the transfer, so I began again as a freshman with a clean slate, so-called. More like a clean chip of slate on my shoulder. The school was Camden's reverse-an Asian, Mexican, black, and white sea of students, a bayside city in place of Camden's evergreen art-school hothouse. At Camden, classes had been ten or twelve around a long oak table, all bantering and debating, all preening and being acknowledged. Here a professor muttered into a microphone on a far-off platform while a stadium of freshmen jotted notes, arms synchronized like assembly-line robots. For the first time in my life I learned to study.

The best thing for miles around was the campus radio station, KALX. The gang of DJs there had been freed by the station's open format to obsess in any direction they liked, and the results were splendidly motley. Many DJs had been allowed to keep their slots for years past graduation-it was this exception to the usual rule which gave KALX its special depth, the depth of an anarchic family, the members all with nicknames to distinguish their shows: Marshall Stax, Gale Warning, Commander Chris, and Sex For Teens were a few of my favorites. Their charismatic, caustic, and homely voices punctuated the seasonless Berkeley days and nights. In my dorm room, on the twelfth floor of an ugly high-rise, above the sightline of the palm trees which dotted a path to the bay, their voices were my only regular company.

The source was a tiny building on Bowditch Street, white cinder block with the station's call letters painted in a blue stripe. KALX was iceberglike, mostly submerged-the booths and record collection were in the basement, upstairs just a spare office, desks with rotary telephones, and a waiting room full of thrift-store couches leaking foam through cigarette burns. I visited at the first chance, volunteering to man phones during a fund-raising marathon. My shift was in the earliest hours of the morning, and the DJ looked at me like I was a loser for taking it. He explained the drill: for pledging more than twenty-five dollars a caller could visit the station and claim a T-shirt; for more than fifty I could gift them with one of the lousy records clogging the station's in box. Through the shift I took fifteen or twenty calls. I listened to the DJ's voice piped from below as he grudgingly fit the fund drive into his format, but I wasn't admitted into that basement chapel.

Afterward I asked about becoming a DJ and was given little encouragement. It took a hundred hours of dull volunteer work to get on the list for training. Then the waiting list, for even the meagerest twilight slot on the roster, was usually a year. I'd be trained by other DJs, who'd prefer if I didn't waste their time-I should be serious, or not bother. KALX was, true to Berkeley's ideals, a real volunteer collective, but managed without any Berkeley sanctimony or mysticism, instead with a stoical punk exhaustion. This was March of 1983. By the end of that year I'd claimed a show, from two to six Thursday mornings. I kept the slot for three years. That was a trifle by KALX's standards, but it was as large a commitment as I'd managed in my new grown-up life.

I called myself Running Crab. If I'd had a vague suspicion that in transferring to Berkeley I'd mimicked Rachel in her long-ago westward dash, now I bitterly joked with myself that she'd be within hearing range of my broadcasts. She could wonder who he was, her phantom double. I played Ian Dury's "Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3," a Monty Pythonesque white rap, at the start of every show, and declared it my anthem. But my bitterness, like my playlist, was soon hung out to dry. My show was bad. However many favorite songs I'd thought I had, they looked threadbare after a few repetitions. I was trying to make an impression, to stake a personality, as Matthew Schrafft and I had by wearing Devo on our sleeves.

It was impossible to hide from the fact: those lonely hours before dawn were either void or mirror. I was talking to nobody, or myself. So I began again, in a mode of fumbling and discovery. Before each show I excavated forgotten albums from the station's musty library, and on-air I stirred my own curiosity, played cuts I'd never heard and always wondered about. What I cared for, when I permitted myself to know it, was doo-wop, rhythm and blues, and soul. Stax and Motown, but also Hi and Excello and King and Kent, the further reaches. Otis Redding and Gladys Knight but also Maxine Brown and Syl Johnson. And groups-I loved harmony groups. I loved the Subtle Distinctions.

I turned myself into a vinyl hawk, scouring record shops for out-of-print LPs, studying them with Talmudic intensity. The music I loved would all be dug out of studio archives and put onto CD within a few years, but then it was still scratchy and moldy and entirely my own. I read Peter Guralnick and Charlie Gillett and Greg Shaw and forgot which opinions were received and which were mine, and then I made them all mine by playing the records, by playing the records, by playing the records-I learned to shut up and play the records. I'd intersperse the music not with my own comments but with readings from the vintage liner notes on the LP jackets, like Richard Robinson's for Howard Tate's Get It While You Can Get It While You Can : :

Yes, Howard is black underground, white folks only admitted by insight. He's got the true emotion of soul which is only out of sight because you're not listening with your heart. That's what Howard and his music are all about: the indifferent earth and the long crawl between breaking day and darkening night.

Who could top that, who would want to try? I'd read a liner note, then play a side at a time. For in KALX's basement I discovered I had all the time in the world. There I learned that to find one's art is to kill time dead with a single shot. I felt akin to Abraham. I built a path of two- and three-minute cuts through the night like my father in his cold studio daubing paint on a ladder of film.

The station wasn't a social place. Staff meetings were gruffly efficient, and the DJs made a hermetic community at best. You might bond with those whose shows bookended your own, literally in passing. But I befriended a group of current and former DJs who played softball together. They called themselves the People's League. We gathered every Sunday at a place called the Deaf School Field for a ramshackle co-ed game with no balls and strikes, no score kept, and plenty of beer and grilled food. Ten years of lunging at spaldeens with a broomstick had made me a pretty good hitter, though one exclusively capable of line drives up the middle. The other DJs mocked me for my predictability: everything looped over the second baseman's head.

It wasn't easy to explain to them the narrow, flattened diamond of Dean Street, with car handles on either side for first and third and a distant manhole for second. To pull a ball in Brooklyn was to smash a parlor window and end the game. The DJs were from California and had never played in a street. As it happened, the Deaf School Field's irregular shape gave it a cavernous left field, while a stand of trees in center made my tic an advantage: the league's sluggers boomed three-hundred-foot fly outs to left, while my drives scooted into the glade and were lost. As the center fielder beat in the carpet of eucalyptus, searching for the ball, I'd dash around the bases for an easy home run. Once, with a girl there I wanted to impress, I hit four tree-assisted home runs in a single afternoon. It might have been the happiest day of my life. Certainly it would have been if Mingus Rude had been there to witness it.

My people's League heroics were accomplished without help from Aaron Doily's ring. The thing was shelved. I'd forgotten my identity as the world's most pathetic superhero, become a Californian instead. I had California girlfriends, a California apartment, and, after I'd dropped out of classes from sheer disinterest, a California newspaper career, as music critic for the Alameda Harbinger Alameda Harbinger, the job an extension of some work I'd done revamping KALX's moribund gazette. It was three years before I reached for the ring, took Aeroman out of mothballs. What happened was I got yoked, on a bus.

I'd taken Lucinda Hoekke to see Jonathan Richman at Floyd's, a tiny stage in downtown Oakland. Lucinda was a transferred sophomore from St. John's in Annapolis, a KALX groupie; this windy night in March was our third date. After the show we boarded a lonely bus on Broadway, pointed back into Berkeley, and sat too near the rear. I may have been trying to show Lucinda Hoekke or myself that I wasn't afraid of the sole other rider, a tall black kid slouched in the corner, down coat puffed from beneath his arms like water wings. So we took a twin seat, our backs to him. Between woolen hat and striped scarf I sported heavy, black-rimmed glasses, a Buddy Holly/Elvis Costello prop signifying rock hipness. That's what they signified to me. To the kid I surely looked like a caricatured victim: Woody Allen had stepped onto his bus. He threw the yoke on general principles, tipped my jaw with his elbow just long enough to show it could be done.

"I'm just messin' with you, yo. This your girl?"

Lucinda blinked. The windows might as well have been painted black. The bus whirred down the avenue, the driver impassive in his cage. My face grew red.

"You got a dollar you could lend me?"

The script was identical coast to coast. Maybe I had it written on my back. I grabbed Lucinda's mittened hand and drew her up to the front. We sat across from the driver, who barely glanced.

"Are you going to tell him?" whispered Lucinda.

I shushed her.

"See, you don't gotta be like that," called the kid in the back. "You can't even talk talk to me, man?" to me, man?"

He pulled the cord, then stepped through the back stairwell, loudly smacking the bus's side panel in farewell. We rode on in silence, the driver and I complicit in shame, Lucinda cowed. I saw incomprehension in her eyes: Had we been mugged mugged ? Why was I enraged-why did I seem angry at ? Why was I enraged-why did I seem angry at her her ? The conundrum was unaltered since I'd met it last, on some pavement in the vicinity of I.S. 293. A yoking was a koan-it could perplex forever and never be solved. What it had to teach couldn't be named. I never called Lucinda Hoekke again. I also never wore those glasses after that night. ? The conundrum was unaltered since I'd met it last, on some pavement in the vicinity of I.S. 293. A yoking was a koan-it could perplex forever and never be solved. What it had to teach couldn't be named. I never called Lucinda Hoekke again. I also never wore those glasses after that night.

Aeroman's costume was long gone, moldering in some police evidence crate, or disposed of. Just as well. This time I favored something less flamboyant, away from the caped Superman or Omega the Unknown model, nearer to those masked, nattily dressed urban avenger types, the Spirit or the Green Hornet. The change represented an incorporation of my recent fondness for forties and fifties film noir, allied with a general sense of embarrassment at the candy-striped Marvel costumes, which in my mind were now bundled in a seventies-style trash heap with Kiss and T. Rex and the uniforms of the Houston Astros. Our capes-Mingus's, Aaron Doily's, mine-had never helped with flying anyway. So I began shopping in Berkeley consignment shops for a really fine vintage two-piece with narrow lapels, something dashing and memorable and worthy of Aeroman's high intentions: brown sharkskin, maybe, or forest green. Then I discovered the search was unnecessary: Aeroman no longer had an appearance, was no longer capable of dressing up, or down. The ring had changed since my soaring in the Camden woods.

I learned it in open air, in twilight, no mirrors nearby. I'd climbed Berkeley's hills, to a bluff where I could gaze on the rooftops of luxury homes braced on stilts against the grade, the green steppes above campus, including the Deaf School Field and the skirt of flatlands that spread to the marina. I'd gone into the woods to bolster courage, remind myself of the only flight I'd experienced worth recalling, not on city streets where the action was but alone among trees and ponds. I thought I'd work my way down the hill, perhaps light on the Deaf School Field to begin with. And I wasn't stalking injustice tonight. I didn't have a costume or plan of attack. This was just practice.

I only had to don the ring to instantly feel the difference. The ring wasn't drawn to the air-that part of it was dead. Now it didn't confer flying, but something else. My hand was invisible. So was the rest of me, that I could see. I stumbled on the rocky path there, tangling invisible feet as I twisted around, trying for a glimpse of myself, anywhere. As long as I wore the ring there wasn't a glimpse to be had. I could scuff earth with my shoe, I could cough or yell and be heard, could feel my own breath against my palm, could lick a fingertip and feel saliva evaporate in the bay wind. I merely couldn't be seen.

I don't know why it changed. I've wondered if it was a California thing, the ring's nature linked to geophysical forces and altered by its transportation there. Or it might be some passage of age-the ring's, not my own, since Aaron Doily had flown, albeit lamely, in his fifties. In the end I accepted it on personal terms. When I was twelve and the ring first came into my hand I believed that flying was the denominator, the bottom line of superheroic being: any superhero flew, even if they had to cheat by vaulting or floating on bubbles of conjured force or riding in hovercraft. So it was a flying ring. By the time I wore it again on that Berkeley hill I knew differently. Invisibility was what every superhero really really had in common. After all, who'd ever seen one? had in common. After all, who'd ever seen one?

In truth, if it was still a flying ring I might never have tangled with Oakland, might only have flown in the hills and retired the ring again. My cowardice was ritual by now. The fury at being yoked on the bus in front of Lucinda Hoekke might have been expiated by a bit of zipping around, a refreshment of my irrelevant secret power. But this change in the ring seemed a message that Aeroman had grown up. Invisibility was sly and urban and might just do the trick. I was made ready for something.

As I stood dazzled by my transparency, a small bird, a sparrow, attempting to land on what must have appeared to be an empty bluff, swept from the sky and punched me in the temple, hard. We both fell. I crumpled to my hands and knees in panic, not sure the surprise attack wouldn't continue until I spotted the stunned bird lying on its side in the dust. I thought it had killed itself against me, then it began whirring feet and wings, swimming a tiny circle before righting, to stand, head cocked. I pulled the ring from my finger and looked at my palms, found them scraped pink. When I touched my temple I found blood in my hair-my own, not the sparrow's.

The bird stared. It didn't seem entirely surprised I'd become visible. I suppose it had proved my existence by other means. It hopped a short distance, examined me again. Then-satisfied? stupefied? pissed off?-it turned, and we each walked, not flew, from the site of the encounter.

chapter9.

The first CDs came in long boxes, to stack in the bins left behind by the vinyl CDs had displaced. The great first wave of box sets were disguised as vinyl too: discs or cassettes, either might lurk in packaging which mimicked a carton of LPs. It might even be LPs-you read the fine print to know. Rick Rubin put guitars in a rap, and MTV put the rap on television. His group, Run DMC, found their best success with a cover of Aerosmith's "Walk This Way," only Aerosmith was brought in for the chorus, as rappers didn't sing. Cocaine bifurcated, and blacks were awarded crack, beneficiary of the best marketing campaign since-LSD? The Ayatollah Khomeini? In Berkeley, deep in the decade of Reagan, students at Malcolm X Elementary took their lunch hour in Ho Chi Minh Park.

My epic project that year, never to be completed, was something called Liner Notes: The Box Set Liner Notes: The Box Set. The container would be one of those LP-square boxes so beloved by collectors like myself. Inside, loose sheets bearing the greatest liner notes of all time, in fine reproductions of the original designs. They'd include chestnuts by Samuel Charters, Nat Hentoff, Ralph Gleason, and Andrew Loog Oldham, as well as notes written by musicians themselves: John Fahey, Donald Fagen, Bill Evans. Landmarks like Paul Nelson on the Velvets Live 69/70 Live 69/70, Greil Marcus on The Basement Tapes The Basement Tapes, Lester Bangs on the Godz. Joe Strummer on Lee Dorsey, Kris Kristofferson on Steve Goodman, Dylan on Eric Von Schmidt. James Baldwin on James Brown, LeRoi Jones on Coltrane, Hubert Humphrey on Tommy James and the Shondells. The Shaggs' father on the Shaggs, Charles Mingus's psychiatrist on The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Above all, the uncanny found poetry of the endorsements I'd been reading aloud over the KALX airwaves, like Deanie Parker's for Albert King:

If you've ever been hurt by your main squeeze, deceived by your best friend, or down to your last dime and ready to call it quits, Albert King has the solution if you have the time to listen. Maybe you're just curious . . . he'll get through to you . . . put Albert on your turntable . . . put your needle in the groove . . . now drown yourself in the . . . blues.

That it might be regarded as a disappointment to find not a single note of actual music inside Liner Notes: The Box Set Liner Notes: The Box Set never dawned on me. I can't say why, exactly, except that a wish to place the writing on a par with the music was the purloined letter of intent at the project's center. People like to be fooled, and they like to fool themselves. I was twenty-three, and believed to my heart that music fandom needed never dawned on me. I can't say why, exactly, except that a wish to place the writing on a par with the music was the purloined letter of intent at the project's center. People like to be fooled, and they like to fool themselves. I was twenty-three, and believed to my heart that music fandom needed Liner Notes: The Box Set Liner Notes: The Box Set. Similarly, I persuaded myself that the crack epidemic, then reaching its local pitch in Oakland and Emeryville, was a job for Aeroman.

I went where scared me the most. That was a bar on Shattuck Avenue near Sixtieth Street, called Bosun's Locker, a place where everyone knew everyone knew it was easy to score and an excellent place not to be it was easy to score and an excellent place not to be caught dead caught dead if you were white. Edgy groups of young black men could be seen milling on the sidewalks there, in a way which reminded me, when I'd glimpsed it from a passing bus, of the corners near the Wyckoff Gardens or Gowanus Houses, back in Brooklyn. Drive-by shootings were now a famous problem in the poorer suburbs of the Bay Area, Richmond, and El Cerrito, but I was a typical New York expatriate, still without a driver's license, and the suburbs surrounding Berkeley on three sides felt impossibly remote. Besides, I found it hard to envision how an invisible man would halt a drive-by shooting. He'd need an invisible car. I went to the place if you were white. Edgy groups of young black men could be seen milling on the sidewalks there, in a way which reminded me, when I'd glimpsed it from a passing bus, of the corners near the Wyckoff Gardens or Gowanus Houses, back in Brooklyn. Drive-by shootings were now a famous problem in the poorer suburbs of the Bay Area, Richmond, and El Cerrito, but I was a typical New York expatriate, still without a driver's license, and the suburbs surrounding Berkeley on three sides felt impossibly remote. Besides, I found it hard to envision how an invisible man would halt a drive-by shooting. He'd need an invisible car. I went to the place I could walk to I could walk to that scared me the most, and that was the big gloomy pool joint on Shattuck. that scared me the most, and that was the big gloomy pool joint on Shattuck.

I walked in visible at seven on a Tuesday night, fingering the ring in my pocket. I was sure I could get myself mugged-by now I was sure of nothing so much as that. And sure that with the ring I could free myself of a mugging as well. But contriving to rescue the same old whiteboy wasn't right. Aeroman's vanity required somebody to protect. Maybe in some recess of my mind it was a Rude, Mingus or Barrett Junior, someone I'd abandoned. But maybe Rachel too. For Mingus had abandoned me as I'd abandoned him, and I think I had the two, abandoning and being abandoned, confused. This was the fog I carried with me into Bosun's Locker, and the reason my invisible adventure was destined to be so foggy. But I wasn't invisible, yet.

Every head turned, though that was only four. The muttonchopped bartender, large enough to be his own bouncer, two fiftyish pool shooters weighing angles on the farthest of three tables, and a boy, or man-he was my age, and I believed I was a man, then-seated at the bar's corner. He wore a tan suede-front cardigan under a wool coat, and a Kangol cap, the costume of a player. I was the only white face. Nobody spoke, or anyway nothing I could make out over the jukebox cut, the Blue Notes, Teddy Pendergrass intoning Bad luck, that's what you got Bad luck, that's what you got - - "Help you?"

"Anchor Steam, please."

"Bud, Miller, Heineken."

"Okay, uh, Heineken."

My bar companion had been staring, so I raised my bottle before I sipped from it. There were five stools between us. He turned his head to the window as if sickened, and nodded to the music, not me.

I went over. "Hey-"

"Yo, don't be steppin' up on me."

"I just wanted to ask-"

"I'm only saying don't be steppin' up, shock a brother like that."

"Can I ask-"

"Nah, man, just get away from me."

I went back to my seat. A minute later he slid over to me. "What you wanna ax me, man?"

"I'm looking to get high," I said.

He wrinkled his nose. "Fuck you on about, man?"

The word crack crack felt too on the nose. felt too on the nose. Newsweek Newsweek and and 60 Minutes 60 Minutes were those days likening crack to the plagues of the Middle Ages. "I want to freebase," I said. "I'm looking to score some rock." were those days likening crack to the plagues of the Middle Ages. "I want to freebase," I said. "I'm looking to score some rock."

"Yo, shut the fuck up. The fuck you think I could help you score some rock score some rock ?" ?"

"Sorry."

"You lookin' for trouble, man?"

Well, I was, wasn't I? This was the essential point. In this moment he'd seen me clearly.

"No," I said.

"You wouldn't come around here if you wasn't looking for trouble." But he grinned. "Listen, man, feebase and rock two diffint things entily." Despite feebase feebase and and diffint diffint and and entily entily, he genuinely wanted me to understand.

"Sorry," I said again.

He looked to see who might be watching, then offered a handclasp. I took it.

"What your name?"

"Dee," I said.

Again he glanced around the room. Nobody was in earshot, bartender giving berth, pool shooters oblivious. "You could just call me OJJJ." Oh-Jay-Jay-Jay Oh-Jay-Jay-Jay. I supposed OJ and OJJ had been spoken for, in OJJJ's neck of the woods.

"You cool?" he asked me. "You my boy?"

"Sure." I wondered if he thought I was a cop, and if so, why he didn't ask that.

"You wanna get high?"

"I've got money."

He winced, leaned in closer. "Dang, man, shut up. You don't need money you want OJJJ get you high. Just ax."

"Okay."

"Aight." We clasped hands again. OJJJ fought the urge to glance over his shoulder at the window every few seconds, lost, won, lost again. Meanwhile, I caught the bartender checking us out, squinting his distrust. My imagination wrote a voice-over: What's OJJJ doing with that white boy? What's OJJJ doing with that white boy? I was certain anyone here was a regular. And that anyone would audition me for cop. In fact, according to what I soon read in the I was certain anyone here was a regular. And that anyone would audition me for cop. In fact, according to what I soon read in the Oakland Tribune Oakland Tribune, the bartender had never seen OJJJ before in his life and never wondered for a moment if I was a cop. That wasn't how I struck anyone, apparently.

OJJJ led me into the bathroom, past the pool table, the shooters who still didn't think us worth a look. The place was utilitarian, with a steel trough urinal, and a floor pitched around a central drain, for easy sluicing. Graffiti hadn't completely blackened the lime walls. The stall doors had been taken off, but we hid in a stall, each with our back to the divider. It stank of ammonia there, nothing worse. Then OJJJ opened his coat to pull out a glass pipe and I did smell something worse: the acridity of his sweat, infusing the layers of his fancy sweater. I wondered how many days it had been since OJJJ had bathed, or even gone home, wherever home was. Later I'd know it was the chemistry of his fear.

Now his acridity mingled with the tang of crack, seared in a glass pipe lined with a tiny copper screen. I watched OJJJ and tried to do as he did. I'd never smoked cocaine, only seen it done by Barrett Junior. I think OJJJ knew he was teaching me, and was glad to be. I think it gave him courage. He showed me what was a rock rock and what was a and what was a pebble pebble and a and a twig twig. He and I smoked a few of these and once or twice I felt I grasped it, felt the cold rush threading me. But the nature of the high was elusive, impossible to savor, only chase. Then OJJJ took the pipe and showed me the big rock big rock he'd been saving. I watched him smoke it and then he asked to see my money. I offered him forty dollars and he told me to hold it, that we'd need it where we were going, if I wanted to come. I saw he wanted me to. I wondered when I was going to become invisible. he'd been saving. I watched him smoke it and then he asked to see my money. I offered him forty dollars and he told me to hold it, that we'd need it where we were going, if I wanted to come. I saw he wanted me to. I wondered when I was going to become invisible.

There were women at the bar when we came out, made up for the night, and as we passed one of them said to OJJJ, "Hey, where you goin', pretty man?"

"Aw, shut up, bitch."

The bartender shook his walrus head, but we were gone, we didn't care what he thought. OJJJ led me around the corner, down the dark residential block. The poorest parts of Oakland looked the same to me as the rich parts, like suburbs, lawns and driveways, nobody on the sidewalks. Only the cars told the tale of what was inside. The cars on Sixtieth Street were twenty years old, Cadillacs with rotted vinyl roofs, Olds and Chryslers calicoed with rust and mismatched fenders.

OJJJ had been charging ahead, egging me to follow. He seemed to want to keep some momentum, sparked by his hit off the big rock. Midway down the block, he halted. Hand in pocket, I tickled the ring. OJJJ nodded at a free-standing garage, with pink siding to twin it with the home on the left. Yellow light and bass beats leaked from beneath the wide door.

"Ready?"