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 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.
chapter 9
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. 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, Greil Marcus on 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. 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 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. 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 it was easy to score and an excellent place not to be 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 I could walk to 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 —
“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 felt too on the nose. Newsweek and 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.”
“Yo, shut the fuck up. The fuck you think I could help you 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 and diffint and 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. 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? 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, 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 and what was a pebble and a 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 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?”
“Sure, yeah.”
Up the drive we found our way to a side door. OJJJ rapped and the door opened on a chain. A face looked us over.
“Yo, it’s me.”
“Who that? OJJJ?” The voice came from somewhere behind the silent face, which only peered at us.
“Shut up—let me in.”
“What’s up with your boy?” said the peering face at the chain.
OJJJ nodded at me. “He cool.”
“Don’t keep my man OJJJ standing,” said the hidden voice. The door shut again long enough to free the chain, and then we pushed inside. A yellow party bulb cast its glow over a loose ring of men on folding chairs, around the grinning coils of a space heater. The four of them were more than OJJJ had expected—one more in particular. OJJJ turned back for the door the instant he saw the man he hadn’t wanted to see, but it was too late, we were in, and the door was blocked.
The man stood and smiled at OJJJ and held out his hand. OJJJ ignored it, didn’t face him directly, but turned to another in the circle and made a wheedling appeal. “Damn, you let Horton come here just to set me up? That ain’t right.”
“Horton said how you took him off, OJJJ.” The same voice had invited us in. “That ain’t seem exactually right to us.”
“Shut up, man. Fuck you even listen a ill thug like Horton?”
Horton let his hand fall. “I ain’t no thug like you, boy.”
“You come round here to take us off, OJJJ? Who your ghost-face friend?”
With that OJJJ had reached the limits of language—that was what his grimace seemed to say as he tugged the pistol from the interior pocket of the coat, from which the glass pipe had come and returned. It was a snub revolver, as dated as the cars on the street. OJJJ might have bought it at the same thrift shop where he’d bought the suede-front, if thrift shops sold pistols. He fired it, or anyway it fired, on its way out of the coat, shattering plasterboard panels on the ceiling. Dust rained, chairs clattered, the report seemed to ruin my eardrums, only they lived to pulse in pain with the music. Between the first shot and the next every man had time to shout fuck, but after the second anything was drowned by Horton’s bellowing. Blood seeped through Horton’s interlaced fingers as they gripped his knee, and as in a child’s game he moaned “You got me, you got me, you got me!”
I put on the ring and became invisible. No one noticed. OJJJ stood inert, enthralled by the work he’d done on Horton’s knee, but the gun went on moving, jerking back and forth, shaking in tensed fingers, not firing for now. Someone chanted shit, shit, shit. I moved to OJJJ and in the great act of physical courage to that point in my life kneed him in the balls and twisted the gun from his hand—he doubled and vomited so quickly it was as though I’d relieved him of the task of withholding the bile, as though vomiting had been his purpose here from the start.
The pistol was gulped into my invisibility for an instant, but it seared my hand, heated from the combustion of firing—it was a primitive thing, barely more than a nugget of steel and dynamite made for flaring fire in a certain direction, for giving out its jolt, and it had done its work and was a coal. It burned me and I dropped it. Only it wasn’t done. It fired once more as it cracked to the floor, then spun there to a stop in OJJJ’s splash of thin green puke. The third bullet found OJJJ’s neck. He gulped and flopped backward and grasped his neck as Hort
on had his knee, and as he gulped his body flopped and spasmed, and his mouth shaped words which likely didn’t exist. Or if they did he couldn’t say them. That bullet shut him up.
Me, I ran, I booked. I was ten or twelve blocks down Shattuck, past whining sirens, when I smashed face-first into the shoulder of a tall black woman who’d lurched into my path and realized that the series of magnificent collisions I’d barely avoided were the fault of my invisibility. She was twisted around by the impact, and I staggered and nearly fell. As I recovered I wriggled the ring into my palm. When the woman spotted me she swung out in instinctive anger the blow and boxed me in the eye with a heavy jeweled ring, which served nicely as brass knuckles. “Watch where you’re going, child!” I couldn’t blame her and couldn’t explain, only rasp bewilderment. I put my hand to my eye and ran again, Doily’s ring in my pocket now. The sparrow on the hilltop had borne a message for me, if only I’d listened: nature, or at least birds and women, abhorred the invisible man.
Orthan Jamaal Jonas Jackson survived. His and Horton Cantrell’s stable condition at Herrick Hospital’s intensive care unit was reported on the city page of the Oakland Tribune the next morning. The item, headed TWO WOUNDED IN NORTH OAKLAND , included a tantalizing note that the police were searching for a white gunman. Both victims were familiar to the police, bore a record of detainments and, in Cantrell’s case, a conviction and suspended sentence for narcotics possession. Neither faced charges in the current investigation. The item was perfunctory, giving no sense of the architecture of the incident, the fact that Cantrell and Jackson had begun as foes before being wounded by the same weapon. It wasn’t, probably, the most compelling of stories. The milieu was familiar, drugs and guns, and had it ended there the eyes of the world might have remained glazed over.
But Thursday the story had grown, and graduated to the front page. MYSTERY SHOOTER DESCRIBED AS URBAN AVENGER , that was the hook. The two victims had given witness now, and, with the brothers Kenneth and Dorey Hammond, owners of the house and garage, all on the scene concurred: the mystery white boy had come in with gun blazing, having trailed their distant cousin and good friend Orthan Jackson from Bosun’s Locker. The bartender weighed in with a description of my scrawny, nervous demeanor, confirmed that I’d been behaving strangely and had approached OJJJ first. OJJJ, who’d been photographed in hospital gown and a bulging white patch from ear to clavicle, explained that he knew I’d been looking for trouble from the start. Though he hadn’t been fooled for a moment, I’d been pretending to be a nark, had inquired about the local dealers. He should have known, he said, that I was another crazy white motherf****r gaming to cap some n****rs. If it was the journalist, Vance Christmas, who in the following paragraph coined the phrase “Oakland’s Bernhard Goetz,” OJJJ had led him there deftly enough. Vance Christmas would have had to be no journalist at all not to coin it. Goetz was still very much in the air those days.
The Fortress of Solitude Page 46