The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  Never Street, Jape Street, Doubtful Place, Murder Avenue. Stifle, between Bums and Hurt.

  Soar into space or use Googlemaps to make sense of this place, read the smashed black orbs of sidewalk gum like an aerial map of disease vectors, urban dismay, or merely the exhausted moment when the wrung-out blob of xylitol spills from your lips. Chew Ennui! Rise higher, now sight the workmen’s gloves scattered in the gutters with their fat smashed canvas fingers resembling popped corn. Were their hands lopped off? Higher, now a distribution of church spires confesses the forgotten plots of acreage and silence, Brooklyn a planet of towns, plow it up and start over. Dime Savings Bank was a fieldstone to begin with, biggest ever. Shifted it out of Manfred Von Bergen’s farm. Metrotech a meteorite, fell in the ’70s, they started scraping out windows. Plane crashed on Schumer’s Horn in ’81, folks were living in it the next day. Yo Mama included!

  Turn left on Tightwad. Place you want is on Living Stoned. Off Smear. Talk to a guy I know. You don’t even have to say my name, he’ll know I know you. No, you’ll know when you see him. All taken care of. You talk he talks all talk no trouble. Cash only! No checks!

  This place don’t look like much but it’s legendary and nearly historical. They kept slaves on Doubtful Place, so I heard. Black ones. I remember when they tore down that theater. They had to close down Grim Ugly Plaza because a tidal wave of rats ran east. Hey, don’t take my word for it. You could look it up or alternately go fuck yourself.

  The Aggravated Antic.

  Pathetic Street.

  Dude snatched a purse and they chased him all the way down Hurt to Why Cough. Dude lived in the Why Cough Garbage.

  Guy crawls blinking out of the Lost Isolation Rail Road terminal with a blue Dodgers cap on his head with the visor ripped off, sort of like a Dodgers beanie or yarmulke. White beard down to his scabby knees, covering his crotch, maybe this guy’s Rip Van Brooklyn! Nothing covering his ass, though. Hey, Rip, get some pants! That’s no Fertile Crescent!

  This Times Plaza? Rip asks the nearest passerby.

  Thefuckkeryu tokkinbout?

  Where is my pawnshop where is my newsstand what’s that weird rectangle building full o’ gizmos this is not my beautiful intersection go fuck yerself where you been sleeping all this time, old freak? Time don’t stand still! Get some pants and cover yer ass!

  You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

  To the Moon, Alice!

  Fuggeddabouddit, Gofuckkalamppost, Musteatapileofshit, Welcome to Brooklyn!

  Rip Van Calamity creeps for cover into the Doray Tavern (“Where Good Friends Meet”), a bar like a black hole, daylight bent and broken at its threshold, full of Mohawk ghosts, guys that fell off in-progress skyscrapers chasing a falling half a ham sandwich and ending up embedded to their sternums in Manhattan concrete sidewalks. Here at the Doray they paint the whiskey black. Not the bottles, the whiskey. The ghosts pour shots and chaser down their neck holes and welcome Rip with a hearty hoist of a glass. His kind of people, and he theirs.

  Used to work in the then I worked in the that was when I lived in the before all the then after I worked in the then I used to sleep in the before they filled in the hole in the I used to be able to hide in the catch a few zzz’s in there sometimes before they filled it all in.

  Fuggeddabouddit, Fuggedda, Fugget.

  I already Fuggot.

  Problem with people these days money. Problem with money these days people. People with money these days problem. People with problem these money days.

  The higher you go there you are.

  To the moon and all I got was this goddamn parking lot.

  Beautiful shadows everywhere.

  You like it so much, you live there!

  —Brooklyn Was Mine, 2008

  Crunch Rolls

  Cap’n Crunch rolls into the station at seven-thirty on a Tuesday, causing a little ripple of excitement and recognition among the morning commuters, the wet-haired Wall Street guys and the bleary homeless folks just waking up and dragging their bedrolls and the secretaries with their fingers marking a page in a mass-market paperback and the domestics, mostly island ladies, headed in the other direction to take care of the young babies and, most of all, the high-school kids, headed uptown to LaGuardia or Bronx Science or out to Aviation in Long Island City, jostling each other in their knapsacks and then jaws dropping as Cap makes his brash debut. A lot of these kids might have communed with Cap once already today (a few of the Wall Street guys did this, too), scraping their gums on his oaty squares, flooding their milk and their bloodstreams with his sugar—but here the dude is in the flesh! Cap’s looking a little crazy, a little freaky around the edges, like maybe he’s been up all night in some club, but it’s him all right. A subway platform is an involuntary oasis of community, everyone studiously ignoring everyone else, but this explosion of paint and vibrancy and meaning where they were expecting only a grimy machine goes like ecstatic lightning through the population here—we who smile are smiling partly at one another and partly at the fact that the others don’t smile, don’t bow to a contemporary deity like Cap’n Crunch the way we do—what’s the matter with them, don’t they have a television in their house?

  The photographs in this book unveil graffiti’s origins in tribalism, cave painting, and cargo cult. Figures morphing in and out of font describe the alphabet’s own provenance in hieroglyph and pictogram (never more obvious than in the case of the ultimate common denominator of this convergence, The Saint logo), and simultaneously points the way to the alphabet’s inevitable future as insignia, decal, emblem: These twenty-six letters we use so routinely were never going to sit still, not when they were loaded up with so much mythological garbage and magic, how could we have ever expected them to? No, they were destined to leap into the sky, onto our walls and our transport, screaming with occult notions and inscrutable claims of identity. These words and names we brandish so unthinkingly were pictures all along—and like most pictures, they were pictures of people. Not just ordinary people, but gods and ghosts and heroes, mocking nightmare clowns, idols of cool, figures of sex, superstition, and commerce. And the easy quotations of comic books and cartoons and advertising are indigenous evidence of the universal practice of sampling and mashup, the unquestioning privilege the artist claims over all the languages, verbal and visual, that float through his or her mindscape, indifferent to the claims of the proprietors of intellectual property. What’s delivered so often by the creators here, with the immediacy typical of the pop impulse, is the slick and chaotic vocabulary of commercial culture decanted brilliantly into folk idiom, on the spot, in the dark, on the fly. The figures roll into your mind like a train into a station, with a squeal and a groan of metal on metal. And then the doors open.

  —Introduction to Mascots & Mugs: The Characters and Cartoons of Subway Graffiti, 2007

  Children with Hangovers

  The children with hangovers are taking out the garbage. I watch from above as they lurch out of the basement apartment. Their garbage is in brown paper sacks, the kind you have to request to be given anymore at the grocery checkout, and the paper sacks are rotten and soggy, splitting like tomatoes. The children with hangovers stagger out cradling the sacks, hoping to keep them from bursting before reaching the curb. They slump them in a heap in the street, coming away with fingers stained with salad dressing and coffee grounds. Then they turn back to the apartment, squinting groggily in the morning sun. It is early for the children with hangovers.

  The man next door stands out on the curb, beside his neatly knotted green plastic garbage bags, scowling at the children with hangovers. I am sure he can hear the bass thrum of their music through his walls, as I can hear it up here on the top floor of the house, pulsing clear through the apartment between. I am sure that, like me, the man next door does not understand how the children with hangovers can keep it up.

  The man next door has five flagpoles. He displays three at all times, an ordinary flag, a rattlesnake coiled above the words DON�
�T TREAD ON ME, and a POW/MIA flag, with crossed sabers on a black field—prisoner of war, missing in action. On the fourth pole he shows a flag for every season, an Easter flag, with pink stripes and bunnies for stars, a scary black-and-orange Halloween flag, a Valentine’s flag, a Thanksgiving flag, and so forth. The fifth pole is always bare, ready for some crisis or affiliation not yet born.

  The recycling trucks come before the garbage trucks but no one has left anything for the recycling men, not the man next door or the children with hangovers or the man in the apartment between, or me.

  The postwoman comes next, and as always she comes up the stoop and pushes a single fat bundle of mail, bound with a rubber band, through my slot. Then, as she has done lately, she goes down the stoop and rings the bell for the basement apartment. Though she’s left all the mail for the house upstairs she rings the bell of the children with hangovers and when they come to the door the postwoman goes inside.

  Often when I go down to sort out the mail I run into the man who lives in the apartment between, just as he is coming in from his night shift driving a taxi in the city. He drives all night and early morning and returns to sleep through the late mornings and afternoons and early evenings, and then he awakens again near nightfall. I hear his alarm clock buzz at eight or nine. Then he begins drinking and cursing and readying himself for his shift, which begins after midnight. He continues to drink in the taxicab as well and by the time he returns in the mornings he is usually looking as bad as the children with hangovers, or worse. When I run into him in the hall I offer him his mail, and then his hands are too full, with his bottle and his pistol which he keeps under his seat while he drives his cab. He asks me to hold his pistol while he looks at the mail I’ve handed him, then finds his keys and unlocks his apartment door. Once his door is opened he reclaims his pistol and goes inside. The mail for the children with hangovers I bring upstairs into my apartment.

  I live in fear of hailing a cab one night in the city and finding that my driver is the man from the apartment between.

  I never see the postwoman leave the basement apartment but she must at some point go and resume her rounds. I just never see her go.

  This evening the children with hangovers build a bonfire in the backyard. Perhaps this is why their bags of garbage are so exclusively oily and damp. They have been hoarding their paper and cardboard for the bonfire. The bonfire is many feet around and grows to a quite impressive height. I can see magazines burning, centerfolds, glossy paper the color of flesh wrinkling in the blaze. Soon I see they have begun stacking broken chairs and shelving and other items, plastic and ceramic vessels from their kitchen, onto the fire. The children with hangovers dance laughing in a circle around the fire, with bottles in their hands. They light cigars and smoke them as they dance and sing around the fire. The postwoman is there with them in the yard, dancing, too. I don’t know whether she’s been in their apartment all day or whether she came back.

  I hope she has not burned the mail.

  The alarm clock of the man in the apartment between buzzes while I am looking out the back window at the tower of flame, which rises well above the heads of the children with hangovers now.

  The mail for the children with hangovers is all collection notices and credit card offers and I sort through it, making two piles: collection notices, credit card offers. I have two large piles. The only mail the children with hangovers will accept are the free gifts which sometimes arrive, videotapes or CDs or CD-ROMs which I bring downstairs and leave at their door.

  The children with hangovers have never invited me inside.

  I think the children with hangovers are fucking the postwoman.

  The garbage has not been picked up from the front curb. Today may be an obscure garbage holiday, a patriotic or religious civic occasion nobody can keep track of, not even the man next door.

  The smoke from the bonfire curls through my back windows, so I shut them.

  The children with hangovers have begun giving out my phone number when bill collectors call. I handle these calls for them, explaining just as well as I can, trying to spare any misunderstanding.

  The collectors rant and fume on the line. I am patient with them, hearing them out, soothing them exactly as one would an infant. This sometimes takes hours, but I’ve decided it’s the least I can do.

  —Lit, 2003

  L. J. Davis

  This can only be entirely personal for me, I have no way around it. Not least because in considering the matter of “the Brownstoners”—those straggling individuals and families, nearly all of them white, who, by laying claim in the ’60s to a few of the aging and tattered row houses in the neighborhoods on the periphery of downtown Brooklyn, set the groundwork for the disaster and triumph of Brooklyn’s slow-motion gentrification, so full of social implications and ethical paradoxes, and trailing any number of morbid and comic life situations not unlike those depicted in L. J. Davis’s three novels of Brooklyn—I am considering the matters of my own life. My parents were Brownstoners, and the complexly uncomfortable facts in the case, discernible behind Davis’s Brooklyn novels and also behind Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters and Thomas Glynn’s The Building, are the facts of my childhood. These were the facts I eventually excavated in a long novel called The Fortress of Solitude, but yet which no matter how deeply I dig, I will never completely demystify.

  Not least, but not only. Writing about Davis’s A Meaningful Life is personal for me because L. J. Davis was my first writer, and by that I mean not in the sense of Lewis Carroll or L. Frank Baum, who were among the first writers I read, but that he was my first captive specimen. L.J. and his family lived on the next block (he still lives in the neighborhood, and so do I), and I was best friends with his son Jeremy. When I first conceived the wish to be a writer, the thought was pretty easily completed by the phrase: like Jeremy’s dad. I liked what I saw. L.J. sat at the back end of an open, high-ceilinged parlor floor devoted to bookshelves. (That I alphabetize my books now is probably attributable to the fact that his were alphabetized.) His desk was massive—I think it had to be, to support the weight of his manual typewriter, which I recall as a piece of epic ironwork wreckage, something you’d seen driven around on the back of a flatbed truck in search of a vacant lot where it might be safely abandoned. In that office, when Jeremy and I weren’t shooed away, I was introduced to the existence of the books of Thomas Berger, Charles Webb, Leonard Michaels, and Kingsley Amis (“I was happy to be called Brooklyn’s Kingsley Amis,” L.J. once told me, “until I had the misfortune of being introduced to Kingsley Amis”), and to Leonard Cohen’s New Skin for the Old Ceremony LP. These are all tastes I’ve retained, and the flavor of which seem relevant now to the pleasure I take in L.J.’s novels—rightly relevant, it seems to me, though I could never defy the associative force of childhood memory.

  So A Meaningful Life, along with the true literary thrill it offers on rereading, provides for me a shudder of recognition, or a whole series of shudders. In three of L.J. Davis’s four novels, young men who can only be described as sick, chronically ill with self-knowledge of their prejudices and reservations, find their ambivalent fates manifest in scenes of brownstone renovation in downtown Brooklyn, where the joists and pillars of the grand and tempting old houses are too often rotten to the core. More even than Fox’s great novel, close to the bone though it cuts, this reproduces the world I dawned into when my parents moved to Dean Street. The dystopian reality of late ’60s and early ’70s outer-borough New York City can be difficult to grant at this distance; these streets, though rich with human lives, were collectively damned by the city as subhuman, crossed off the list. Firehouses and police stations refused to answer calls, whether out of fear, indifference, or both. As L.J. told me once, most simply: “Anyone who chose to move to the neighborhood was in some way crazy. I know I was.” The precariousness of this existence—morally, sociologically, financially—was never exactly permissible, outside of L.J.’s books, to name, or at least not with s
uch nihilistic glee.

  L.J., refusing to blur the paradoxes of racial and class misunderstanding in idealist sentiment, was “un-PC” before there was such a thing. By being so, he turned some of his neighbors against him, exemplifying a loneliness he, from the evidence of his books, already felt as an innate life condition. That he also chose with his wife to adopt two black daughters to raise in his brownstone alongside their two white sons is a fact that still stirs me in its strangeness and beauty. I remember thinking even as a teenager that L.J. had made his home a kind of allegory of the neighborhood, perhaps partly in order that he might refuse to stand above or apart from it. Then again, with characteristic dryness (unforgivable in the eyes of some local parents), L.J. once awarded a friend of mine and Jeremy’s the Dickensian nickname “Muggable Tim,” and recommended we avoid walking the streets with him. When after thirty-odd years of personal shame at such stuff I finally managed to open my mouth in The Fortress of Solitude, I had L.J. to thank.

  L.J., with Berger and Webb and Bruce Jay Friedman and a few others, found himself cast, by contemporary critics, as a black humorist, though most writers associated with that label disavowed it. Many, like L.J., were critical darlings who bumped to the lower rungs of the midlist; if a concocted literary “movement” doesn’t sell books, what good is it? In any event, these writers could be called sons of Nathanael West, but, unlike West, unburdened of the formal pressure of modernist aesthetics. In L.J.’s case, he appears to have tempered his West with a jigger of P. G. Wodehouse. “I like slapstick,” L.J. recently told me, as if guiltlessly confessing a murder.

  L.J.’s family home also gave evidence of a fanatical interest in world history, which had been Davis’s major at Stanford. He and Jeremy shared a fondness for antique lead toy soldiers, for John Huston’s adaptation of Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, for scrupulously realistic board-game re-creations of European wars, and for the Flashman novels of George MacDonald Fraser. Born in Seattle but raised in Idaho, L.J. explained in a typically caustic autobiographical statement (written for the jacket of his first novel, Whence All But He Had Fled):