Laughing at “Rapper’s Delight”‘s no revenge, and anyway it wasn’t your idea, and anyway it’s funny. Dean Street’s another story, a realm of knowledge unapplicable here.You’ve just about finished leaving Dean Street, and Aeroman, behind.If...

It wasn’t for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster...

I want what we all want,” said Carl. “To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.

Eighth grade’s a distant rumor, a tabled issue, and Dylan knows from experience that the summer between might change anything, everything. He and Mingus Rude too and even Arthur Lomb for that matter are released...

By trying to export myself into a place that didn’t fully exist I asked works of art to bear my expectation that they could be better than life, that they could redeem life. In fact,...

What age is a black boy when he learns he’s scary?

Apparently Brooklyn needn’t always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan…. Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.

You could harbor a man in your bed or your body, play on his nervous system like Paderewski at the keyboard, and not shift his brain one inch out of the concrete of dogma. (p....

The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to seduction or insurrection or inspection or merely to watching a little less television. The voices of Barrett Rude Jr....

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...

Insomnia is a variant of Tourette’s–the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort...

The dentist swiveled on his heels and disappeared, leaving me there to massage my jaw back into feeling after its brief, masochistic marriage to the top of my wooden desk.

Enough of this. Does every conversation with you have to be the director’s cut? Get out of the car.

You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.

I said I want my eggs scrambled not destroyed.”At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we’d rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil,...

There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.

There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.

For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction’s seriousness by dating it out of the...

If. If Mingus Rude could be kept in this place, kept somehow in Dylan’s pocket, in his stinging, smudgy hands, then summer wouldn’t give way to whatever came after. If. If. Fat chance. Summer on...

As I get older I find that the friendships that are the most certain, ultimately, are the ones where you and the other person have made substantial amounts of money for one another.

(I)t was by Cicero’s attainments that that he’d gained special witness to the liberals’ adjustment to a brush with actual equality.

Did he ever–try?’Mingus shrugged. ‘He was like you.’What’s that mean?’Means he tried.’Of course. The ring was not a neutral tool. It judged its wearer: Aaron Doily flew drunkenly, and Dylan flew like a coward, only...

Fifth grade was fourth grade with something wrong. Nothing changed outright. Instead it teetered. You’d pushed futility at Public School 38 so long by then you expected the building itself would be embarrassed and quit....