The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  Barrett Rude Senior stiffened again as though he’d been misunderstood. “From the church I know a man there, a fine saintly man. He gazes out his window and he doesn’t see filth all around him.”

  “The Birdman of Alcatraz, eh?”

  Senior only returned a look of unshrouded disdain. In his glare he summoned for one moment the mummified eloquence of a legacy of chanting men in cotton fields, sweat-bathed parishioners, masked riders, galley ships from Africa, all the parole officer with his Dion and the Belmonts Bronx accent couldn’t pretend to fathom. For one moment it was as if Senior had ridden into this meeting on a mule, as if the baying of beagles as they crashed through swampland had leaked into the room.

  Whatever grain of tenderhearted Serpico resided in the parole officer’s cowboy psyche was touched for just that moment. “It’s really shitty between you and your son, huh, Barry? I have to figure you’re not kidding me to want to move into that dive the Times Plaza.”

  “I seen women on women and other counternatural things.”

  “Enough already, you’re giving me hives. Let me see what I can do.”

  “Born in Babylonia, moved to California—”

  “We are the knights who say Ni !”

  “Get all excited and go to a yawning festival.”

  “You—must—bring—us—a—shrubbery!”

  “Hey, let’s go get Blimpies, I’m so hungry I could beat a dead horse. Ow, shit, what’s that for?”

  “I said I’d punch you the next time you said Blimpie.”

  “You bloody bastard!”

  In ragged, rasping voice: “It’s the blimp, it’s the blimp, it’s the mothership!”

  “C’mon.”

  Falsetto, as they crossed the street from school: “Basketball Jones, I got a basketball Jones —”

  Gabriel Stern and Timothy Vandertooth ranted in a vocal graffiti of impersonations: Steve Martin and Marty Feldman and George Carlin, Devo, Python, Zappa, Spock, The Prisoner. Gabe Stern had memorized the songs of Tom Lehrer, Tim Vandertooth could do Liverpool, Wild and Crazy Guy, Peter Sellers–Swami. Induction into the company of Gabe Stern and Tim Vandertooth had begun the second week of school, Monday, just after three o’clock. Gabe and Tim surrounded Dylan before he reached the subway station on Fourteenth Street and bought him a slice of Original Ray’s, extra cheese. Then they went to Crazy Eddie’s showroom and played the demonstration model of Pong, writhing in fake agony at each loss, oblivious to customers or staff.

  “You bastard!”

  “Revenge, I swear revenge.”

  “I fart in your general direction.”

  Gabe, broad-shouldered, dark, and curly-haired, had blistered nuclei of acne on each cheek, as though acid had been dripped there and was eating through. Tim was sandy, angular, walked hippily, seemingly steering his lean, high body like a kite in wind. Beside them Dylan was smaller. He’d grown, had private developments, weird fists of hair, but with Gabe and Tim felt childlike and possibly invisible. Anyway everyone’s body betrayed them in different ways, it was all forgiven and never discussed.

  Dylan folded into the unit of Gabe and Tim as a redundant third: arbiter, audience, appendix. One day Gabe and Tim might seem to be playing to Dylan, wooing him, as though he’d be capable of adjudicating a conflict they’d been trying all their lives to resolve: Which of us is funnier, louder, more irresistible? Those days Dylan felt that it was essential he balance the two in their mania, that if he chose or even slightly favored either Tim or Gabe the other would die sizzling on the pavement like the Wicked Witch of the West. Other days their energies were exclusive, circuit complete between themselves, Dylan might as well have been watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon on television, head propped in his hands, antics reflected in his glasses.

  Gabe and Tim would abruptly fall to wrestling on the sidewalk in front of school, knapsacks skidding to the curb as if attacked, yoked. This was different, though, from real hostilities, which drew instantaneous crowds. Anyone besides Dylan knew not to pay attention. When either Tim or Gabe got the other subdued, knees on chest, head clamped in elbow, arm wrenched high behind back, he’d demand some idiot password.

  “Say Fanta.”

  “No. Ow! Dr. Pepper!”

  “Not Dr. Pepper, Fanta.”

  “Tab!”

  “Fanta.”

  “Mr. Pibb! No. Shit, stop! Bastard, bloody bastard!”

  “You know what I want.”

  “Okay, ow, okay, okay—Fanta!”

  “Now Sprite!”

  “No! Never that! Let go!”

  Stuyvesant drew high-scorers from all five boroughs, a migration hidden under the skin of rush hour, subway floods of Lacoste-clad Upper West Siders who’d known each other since kindergarten, dazed black math geniuses from the South Bronx who slumped in the hallways wondering if they’d ever recover from the shock, studious Puerto Rican nerds from Stuyvesant Town who’d only crossed the street to attend school and were still in thrall to local bullies from their pre-high-school lives, diligent Chinese achievers from assorted immigrant neighborhoods, Greenpoint, Sunnyside, usually in sequences of siblings, an older sister in an upper grade nearby to grab an ear if a younger began to trickle toward the mass of kids who cut class almost from day one, smoking joints and playing frisbee in Stuyvesant Park down the block. The lemmings gathered from every corner of the city, some unlucky souls coming from Staten Island on the ferry every morning had to set their alarms for five or six or some wilder hour.

  Gabriel Stern and Timothy Vandertooth lived on Roosevelt Island, had met three years before when their families moved to the new housing there. Roosevelt Island was an enigma, carless and dogless, haunted by the ruins of a tuberculosis sanitorium on the southern shore. Residence there was like cult membership. The science-fiction tram on pulleys which dangled beside the span of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and which Tim and Gabe rode to school and home together every day stood nicely for their resolute and impenetrable best-frienditude: they were freaks beamed daily to the island of Manhattan from their own subordinate, moonlike isle, no wonder they spoke a private language, nanu-nanu, live long and prosper.

  Stuyvesant was Jewish white, wasp white, hippie white, Chinese, black, Puerto Rican, and much else but crucially it was nerd, nerd, nerd, nerd, the great family of those able to ace the entrance test. Pencil chewers, teacher’s pets in glasses, the Arthur Lomb in everyone unbound now, no longer having to cower. It was pathetic to think of Arthur himself, on course for this natural destination all those years at Saint Ann’s, then derailed by Dean Street only six months or so short of his goal. The mystery was how so many who’d toed the line, favored studies over socialization in order to pass the test, then within a few weeks of freshman orientation broke out Jim Morrison– and Led Zeppelin–painted jean jackets and began loafing all day in the park, immaculate scholastic careers ruined overnight.

  Timothy Vandertooth and Gabriel Stern didn’t drift into stoner affiliation, not exactly. The sole class they cut was gym, and though they did spend that period and lunch hour and some after-school hours in the park they were inept with frisbees and retained their short haircuts and were uninterested in Hendrix or Morrison or Zeppelin, music too blunt and earnest to be swallowed straight. The languorous, slack-haired park girls paid Tim and Gabe no attention at all, seemed unable to parse jokes in any register.

  “I swear she almost looked at you when your voice cracked. You ought to talk like that all the time, get a tank of helium.” Tim and Gabe discussed matters in full voice as if girls were deaf, lame payback for the silent treatment they themselves received.

  “I think she was distracted staring at your pants, actually. Check your fly, maybe there’s a spot of chocolate milk or scum or something.”

  “It’s because of the zucchini I’m concealing in my underwear, my new method which I highly recommend. I offer it free, you don’t owe any royalties. The cold wears off eventually.”

  Tim and Gabe would smoke pot or not. Either way the
y didn’t fit, were tourists, comic relief to the longhairs in the park who were comic relief to them in turn, never clear who ought to be laughing at who, only that Tim and Gabe were moving at a faster clip, their movements and thoughts hectic, jerky. Those first months of high school Tim and Gabe waited for something else to complete them, or the reverse, something waited to complete them. They were stalled like robots, incanting their encoded frustration.

  “Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Open the pod bay doors, Hal.”

  “I am not a number. I am a free man! ”

  You waited too, feeling it.

  Another sensibility agitated in periphery, one located in the conjunction of the midnight movies at the Eighth Street Playhouse and the Waverly, on Sixth Avenue: Clockwork Orange, Pink Flamingos, Rocky Horror, Eraserhead. Within six weeks you’d seen all but Eraserhead, the prospect of which was too terrifying, though you’d never admit it, just fumbled out an excuse about being grounded that night. In fact you’d never been grounded in your life, wondered where you’d even picked up the word.

  One guy came to class in Tim Curry pancake whiteface and black-varnished nails every day, the focus of scoffing laughter and secret awe.

  Each morning you passed Max’s Kansas City on your way from the Fourteenth Street subway to school, talismanic site of what exactly you weren’t sure.

  The band Devo might have to do with the new something in the air, lyrics about mongoloids and swelling itching brains offering some ironic back door into animal nature, a way to evade the appalling, head-on Jim Morrison route.

  The main problem any kid faced if he could have found the word was how to find himself in any way sexy. Forget girls themselves for the time being, the problem was between you and the mirror.

  Manhattan thankfully didn’t give a shit about you.

  What about Mingus and Aeroman, though?

  Dylan crept as he reapproached Dean Street in the perishing light of afternoons spent with Gabe and Tim bouncing in and out of Crazy Eddie’s and Ray’s Famous and Blimpies and J&R Music World and Washington Square Park, crept in his mind, furtive like an escapee returning nightly for meals in his old cell. The block was dead as far as he could tell. He’d killed it by graduating from I.S. 293 and leaving for Stuyvesant. It wasn’t only Mingus. Henry, Alberto, Lonnie, Earl, Marilla, and La-La had all fled the scene or been so transformed they might not be recognizable. Some days you passed in silence some kid you’d known, they had a mustache or tits and they were black and you were white and you didn’t say a word.

  There was no new crop of kids unless you counted the scruffy batch, mostly Puerto Rican, who didn’t even know you were meant to gather in Henry’s yard or at the abandoned house, they didn’t even know Henry’s name, they squatted like bugs on the sidewalk and were as little able to carry forward the block’s work as bugs would have been. One day Dylan saw one scratching some primitive botched skully board, not on a slate but on a pebbly square of poured concrete, hopeless, like a fallout survivor dim with radiation sickness sketching a blueprint for reinvention of the wheel. One day Dylan passed the buglike kids and one called out “Honky” in a voice so tentative Dylan died laughing at the sweetness of it. The abandoned house wasn’t even abandoned anymore. It wore a sign reading CINDERELLA #3 , A PROJECT OF BROOKLYN UNION GAS , and one day they punched through the cement blocks and replaced them with dull aluminum-frame windows, dumb eyes. The site of mystery was destroyed. For a few months bums resolutely drank and passed out on the stoop anyway, then moved on.

  Maybe every other week, though, Dylan would find Mingus seated on his own stoop, like a bum, with a forty-ounce in a bag. Mingus ruled his own yard again, now that Barrett Rude Senior had shifted into the welfare hotel on Atlantic Avenue, several blocks away. He’d greet Dylan in the old manner, as though they’d been interrupted a minute before.

  “That Parlet record I was telling you about? I just scored it.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “That shit is serious, I’m telling you, Dillinger, you need to check it out now.”

  Dylan and Mingus met according to no plan or reason, might have been darts hitting a calendar, a roulette of days. He and Mingus would go into the basement apartment and get high and Tim and Gabe, Dylan’s whole Stuyvesant world, would evaporate, Manhattan unlikely as Neptune or Vulcan, restored to its status as an unexplored planet, the future.

  Hallway and bathroom were tagged now, the whole basement a subway tunnel. Senior’s room was still off-limits, though, an abandoned shrine which stank of dust-rotting candles.

  Mingus chugged beer now, Colt and Cobra, a regular thing.

  Dylan didn’t, only got high.

  Dylan knew Mingus still hooked up with Arthur Lomb too, saw Arthur’s practice tags in ballpoint on scattered pages around Mingus’s room, sometimes saw Arthur himself. Arthur Lomb had the curse of puniness: he still looked eleven or twelve, no number of what-ups and yos, no degree of street slaunch in his walk, no green suede Pumas could compensate. After flunking the Stuyvesant test Arthur’s mother had falsified their residence to get him transferred to Edward R. Murrow, a white high school deep in the Irish Italian heart of the borough. It was too late, though, he might as well have been at Sarah J. Hale from the look of things. Arthur had become yucky, his sleeves always crusted with Krylon, his red hair slack and ratty, jeans black. Arthur was a pothead now, often looked red-eyed, glazed with an afternoon’s doping. His street credibility was all he had and it was direly thin.

  Arthur’s being seen with Mingus was a gift Dylan wouldn’t begrudge him now: it was a thing Arthur needed much worse than Dylan ever had. Let Arthur imagine a parity. In fact, Dylan knew, their two friendships with Mingus, his and Arthur’s, were vastly different. Dylan and Mingus lived in a motherless realm, full of secrets. Aeroman, for one thing. Certain other things, for another. Dylan doubted Arthur even had pubic hair yet. Plus Dylan and Mingus knew each other’s dads, and Mingus went into Dylan’s house. Dylan was certain Arthur wouldn’t ever want Mingus to see inside his own mommified sanctuary of Hi-C juice and Hydrox cookies.

  When Mingus was a dollar short of a nickel bag he and Dylan might scrape for loose change in Dylan’s kitchen or even climb the stairs to Abraham’s studio. There Mingus waited at the door, dim transistor jazz seeping through, while Dylan cadged folding money. Abraham, always sensing the lurker in the corridor, would ask:

  “Is that Mingus?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He doesn’t need to hide. Tell him to come say hello.”

  In Abraham’s presence Mingus Rude grew courtly, called Abraham Mr. Ebdus, asked about the progress of his film. Abraham would sigh and produce some opaque riddle.

  “As well ask Sisyphus, my dear Mingus.”

  “Cookypuss ?” Mingus would be quick with a free-associated reply. He and Abraham had hatched some running joke of mishearing one another. They couldn’t get enough of it.

  “Ah, Cookypuss. Maybe Cookypuss for one is showing some progress. I’d like to think so.”

  On the other hand, the two no longer went upstairs to Barrett Rude Junior. The stairway between basement and parlor floors might as well have been sealed now. Dylan saw evidence Mingus avoided the upstairs kitchen, cans of Chef Boyardee heated on Senior’s hot plate, Slim Jim wrappers in the bathroom garbage pail. When they cranked Mingus’s stereo, though, Dylan felt himself expecting, even yearning for Junior at the door singing Fuck you doin’ Gus?, his sweet disapproval a fragment of melody you pined to hear whole.

  But no amount of volume drew Junior to the door, in Mingus’s apartment they were mole-men now for sure, on their own deep exploration.

  Foxy’s “Get Off” they played fifteen times in a row, louder each time, trying to destroy the distance between that rubbery, fleshlike bass line and themselves, as if the song was a photograph, a Playboy centerfold they enlarged by degrees until they could enter the frame, walk into the picture.

  They also sta
red at certain photographs until they might have left sheddings from their blistered eyeballs strewn on the pages, then exchanged relieving hand jobs without making a particularly big deal of it.

  Mingus kept the ring and the costume, Aeroman was officially him. Both were stashed on a shelf high above the door, with a hockey trophy and Mingus’s old football helmet, ring out of sight above eye level, costume balled behind the helmet, nothing any random visitor to the room, Arthur Lomb, say, would bother remarking on. Whether Mingus ever donned them out of Dylan’s company went undiscussed. Afternoons passed when Aeroman wasn’t mentioned, the ring wasn’t handled or even seen, Dylan sat on Mingus’s bed and glanced at the shelf between joint tokes but nothing happened, they’d hit the street or catch a Kung Fu flick or Dylan would only go home stoned to whatever supper Abraham had prepared. Then Aeroman might as well have been the lead in a quickly canceled Marvel title like Omega or Warlock, or a murdered sidekick, quickly avenged then forgotten, or a name from the Golden Age, perhaps, like Doll Man or the Human Bomb: in other words, no superhero at all, not really, not one anyone remembered.

  Other days he’d have told Abraham he was having dinner at Mingus’s house, or slipped out after wolfing dinner at Abraham’s table to return to the basement apartment, and then after a certain hour Mingus would glance at the shelf too, and say:

  “Fight crime?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure?”

  “Uh huh.”

  Mingus would grin and say, “Look at you, you’re like, I thought you would never ask.”

  Aeroman flew six or seven times that fall, was perhaps involved in eight or nine incidents, could claim maybe three bona fide rescues, legible crimes authentically flown down on and busted up. On State Street near Hoyt they halted a six-foot Puerto Rican showing a steak knife to a small Chinese guy, who was busy pulling balled wadded dollars from his pockets, magicianlike, in terrified surrender. Mingus-Aeroman swooped from a fire escape and scissored legs around the knife-wielder’s neck, torque twisting them both to the pavement, Dylan scooted from an apartment building’s entrance to pounce on the knife, plucking it from the ground and surrounding it with his body as though it might detonate. Puerto Rican and Chinese both fled in shock. Though Dylan waved the fluffy bills and called after the victim, he didn’t turn. Breathless and amazed at confiscated weapon and money, Dylan and Mingus stuffed Aeroman’s outfit and mask into a paper sack and walked to Steve’s Restaurant on Third Avenue, celebrated with midnight cheeseburgers and chocolate shakes, adrenaline and marijuana buzz given way to a ravenous appetite, adolescent cells howling for lipids. Waiters gave the hairy eyeball all through the meal, suspecting a scarf-and-run, but Dylan and Mingus didn’t care. They had the dough, even left an ostentatious fuck-you tip.