There are several ways to soundtrack a journey back from hell. On a Wednesday afternoon in late November, Jorge Pabón lifts himself out of his wheelchair, props himself up, and scrolls through his iTunes until the right song hits him. “Órale!” he exclaims, as the chugging guitar riffs of “Disposable Heroes,” Metallica’s adrenaline-pumping war epic, fill his own personal purgatory: the unassuming physical therapy gym inside New Franklin Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing in Queens, New York. He clasps his hands on the arm bike and propels bicycle pedals with his hands. An easygoing occupational therapist watches him patiently — amusedly even — to ensure he’s not overexerting himself. He pauses only to sing along: “Soldier boy, made of clay/Now an empty shell.” But when he hears the salvo “Back to the front,” he spins faster. He’s smiling when he catches his breath after an exhausting five and a half minutes. The endurance is a small triumph for Pabón, a 58-year-old hip-hop dancer, “aerosol artist,” MC, and college lecturer better known by his stage name, Popmaster Fabel. He’s wearing a red “Harlem” hat, which frames his trim beard perfectly against his matching Adidas tracksuit, the likes of which haven’t gone out of style since Jam Master Jay krushed his first grooves. His six-foot-two-inch frame has complicated his therapy, since he needs a higher walker than his geriatric neighbors in the facility. He’s lost around 50 pounds since his injury, making him look slim, but he still has more mass to lift when he stands than New Franklin’s usual residents. He’s come a long way in the past few months while recovering from a hit-and-run in the Bronx in August. Fabel blacked out and doesn’t remember the type of vehicle that struck him. But when he regained consciousness in an intensive-care unit, he simply felt grateful to be alive. The impact left him with compound leg fractures, a broken pelvis, cracked ribs, a punctured right lung, and a lacerated liver, among other injuries. The driver has yet to be found, and Fabel has been fighting ever since to rehabilitate himself into a complete human being. Since there’s no hip-hop pension plan to cover his recovery, his family launched a GoFundMe in September. So far, they’ve raised over $61,000 of the $150,000 goal to help offset his medical bills and refurbish his apartment to accommodate his recovery. The list of donors reads like a Hip-Hop 50 red-carpet event: Rapper Kurtis Blow, photographer Henry Chalfant, and Fab 5 Freddy all made generous contributions, and it’s still attracting donations from people concerned for Fabel’s well-being. Editorial picks “He’s a high-quality cat and one of the best to ever do it,” Freddy tells Rolling Stone. “Fabel was a pioneer back in the day for creating some diversity in his technique, his approach, and the quality of his performances,” graffiti artist Futura 2000, who contributed, says. “He was super unique and very important to that genre and element of the hip-hop community.” It’s terrible for a dancer to be shattered,” Chalfant says. “The first thing I thought about was how many bones have been broken in his body and how difficult it must be, and will be, to overcome that. I hope he gets as much back as humanly possible.” The outpouring of support has lifted Fabel’s spirits and motivated him to push himself harder in therapy. Next up in his obstacle course is the finger ladder, a corrugated wooden strip nailed to a wall. The exercise helps him elevate his arm and stretch his shoulder, as his fingers slowly inch their way toward the ceiling. To complement this Olympic test, he cues up the Police. Fabel works slowly, taking a break when his hand reaches belly level. His therapist cheers him on, and eventually Fabel’s knuckles arrive at nose-level. He tries to dance, jerking his body to Stewart Copeland’s rhythm. But then he winces. “This is the perfect song,” he says, as Sting sings, “It’s my destiny to be the King of Pain.” His right arm crawls up a little higher before he drops it to move over to physical therapy for leg movements. “Oh, we’re dancing,” he says. “I’m gonna do my toe hop. It’s my dance.” Fabel can get around slowly using a walker, but he’s more comfortable in a wheelchair. Still, he knows he needs to challenge himself if he wants to walk regularly. So he climbs into the seat of a machine called NuStep that works his body similarly to an elliptical. “My musical tastes are all over the place,” he says, holding his phone and a Bluetooth speaker. “You’re gonna learn more about me now.” He cues up Bauhaus’ “Dark Entries,” as another therapist placidly endures Peter Murphy’s gothy declamations. He finds his focus with the propulsive groove. When he finishes, the therapist helps him walk around the facility. “The day I stood up on my own two feet — of course, with them spotting me — I almost could have cried,” he says. “I hadn’t stood up in two months. I felt like a newborn.” Fabel in treatment at a Queens, NY rehabilitation center. Roy Baizan for Rolling Stone Fabel and his older brother, Pedro, were born four minutes apart and raised with their two older sisters, Aida and Noemi, by a single mother in Spanish Harlem. He credits his “old-school Puerto Rican mom” with keeping him on the right track while he was growing up. He says that with dance, nature and nurture converged on him when his sisters introduced him to salsa music and James Brown. He had to move. Fabel settles himself in a conference room, moving gingerly to an office chair with help from his significant other, a Swiss dancer named Anja Roelli. With the easy volubility of a native New Yorker, the hip-hop expert can orate both his own history and that of the culture in vivid color, a quality that has made him a welcome college lecturer. If it weren’t for the violent street gangs that laid claim to New York in the 1970s, he says, he might never have become a professional dancer. His surreal recollections of pre-gentrified New York exist somewhere between scenes from Rocky and West Side Story: Men sing doo-wop around burning garbage cans in his memories and multi-ethnic street gangs face off in dance. “There was a gang on my block called the Savage Samurais,” he says. “None of them were Japanese. They were all Puerto Rican and Black. They wore patches like bikers, but none of them had motorcycles. These guys were notorious, but were amazing dancers.” (The Samurai were notable enough to feature in a Geraldo Rivera news segment in 1975.) Fabel and Pedro would peer out of the windows of their apartment, near East 123rd Street and Lexington Avenue, as kids and watch gang members battle one another in “rock dances,” choreography Fabel loosely compares to the Afro-Brazilian form of dance-fighting known as capoeira. “You might gesture at me like you’re shooting me, and I might pull up a shield and block it,” he explains, pantomiming in his office chair. “It doesn’t even have to be violent. It could be goofy, like I grabbed you and jumped rope with you. The whole thing was to humiliate your opponent.” Humiliation would occasionally escalate to violence. But by the late-Seventies, the Samurais started B-boying. “When I saw the B-boying happening, I was like, ‘Oh, my God,’” Fabel says. “I fell in love with the culture more.” His sister’s boyfriend introduced him to DJ culture at age 12, and Fabel started making “pause tapes” — making beats by recording the breaks in a song, hitting pause, moving the needle back on the vinyl, and recording it again. He still wears his love of hip-hop on his sleeves — and on his head. He surprises Rolling Stone with a white hat that he’s decorated with “Fabel,” jaggedly scrawled across the front panels in orange, yellow, and blue, and “Rolling Stone” beneath the bill. The calligraphy looks identical to the tag he’d spraypainted on a wall near the intersection of East 135th Street and St. Ann’s Avenue in the Bronx on the day of the hit-and-run. But on the hat, the lettering is vibrant. It’s his identity. “I…
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