The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  Mingus only turned away briefly to punch Arthur Lomb on the arm. Arthur shouted “Mother fucker! ” and stroked the punched spot, but didn’t shift from where he lay sprawled, a cackling, smoke-numbed dwarf on the bedspread.

  Aeroman was dead or at least on hiatus, a serious layoff. He’d likely never appear in the same form again. Dylan was certain the costume was lost or destroyed. The costume was irrelevant anyway. With its bedsheet stripes and wobbly Spirograph emblem it had been too personal, too tender for the street, Dylan understood that now. Aaron X. Doily was right to renounce his cape, Dylan had missed the hint. Now Doily’s ring was hidden and it should be. The ring was an enigma to contemplate, a subject for further review. The costume was likely just as stoopid as Arthur Lomb made it sound but the ring wasn’t a part of Arthur’s story, or for that matter the cops’, or The New York Times ’s.

  They got stoneder and stoneder and quit talking.

  The three together might have been a normal occasion if you didn’t think about it too hard. From one perspective it was odd it hadn’t happened before.

  But Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude still had secrets, even if those were on ice, hidden somewhere unspecified behind Mingus’s thousand-yard stare.

  Dylan Ebdus told stories and drew pictures, Arthur Lomb carped and needled, but Mingus Rude possessed a greater force, moods which prevailed, moods like laws. He cold-shouldered whole unwished regions of existence, his scowl chopping down fathers, grandfathers, schools. It wasn’t an argument. For now, Aeroman was vanished, painted out.

  Three white high schoolers cavort along West Fourth Street, returning from J&R’s Music World to an apartment on Hudson where a certain divorced mom’s not home, where they’ve got keys and the regular afternoon run of the place. All three are armored against late-fall weather in black motorcycle jackets, the Brando-Elvis-Ramones variety, leather skins studded with chrome stars and skulls, buckles dangling loose and fronts unzipped against the chill. The three grab-ass, swing incompetently from lampposts, talk in private tongues, nerd-punk argot.

  November 1979: “Rapper’s Delight” has just cracked the top forty. It’s also cracked the attention spans of the white kids at Stuyvesant, including this bunch. The song is on the radio and on the street, leaking from stores and passing shoulder-hoisted boom boxes, a different sound, and impossible to miss.

  But to really hear it for yourself someone’s got to lay down cash and bring the thing home.

  The Sugar Hill Records twelve-inch in its generic sleeve is bagged with their other purchases, Eno, Tom Robinson, Voidoids, Quadrophenia soundtrack. “Rapper’s Delight”’s place on the pop charts is as a novelty single, late entry in the lineage of “The Streak,” “Convoy,” and “Kung Fu Fighting,” and it’s in this spirit these white boys have made their purchase: the record strikes them as inconceivably stupid and killingly funny, two concepts lately the opposite of mutually exclusive, Gabba Gabba Hey.

  Self-loathing worn inside out as a punk’s moron pride.

  If one of these three knows more, he’s not telling.

  But put it this way: if one of those shops on St. Marks Place retailing punk fashion sold T-shirts reading PLEASE YOKE ME you’d buy one in a minute.

  Then zip your jacket wearing it home from Manhattan.

  Now, in the safety of the apartment, the other records are put aside while the twelve-inch is plopped on mom’s turntable for instant-gratification hilarity. The needle is stopped and shifted backward a dozen times for incredulous confirmation of some sequence of chanted rhymes, I don’t care what these people think, I’m just sittin’ here makin’ myself nauseous with this ugly food that stinks. The three white boys bust up, barely able to breathe for laughing.

  “The—chicken—tastes—like—wood! ” one gasps.

  Jackets are shed. Divorced mom’s boyfriend left a six of Heinekens in the fridge, the fool, and these are swiftly drained. A box of Nilla Wafers is demolished, down to the crumbs at the bottom of the wax liner, which are shaken out and inhaled. “Rapper’s Delight” is played again, the punks doing an antic dance, pogoing on the couch, playing at break dancing, striking poses.

  The record includes among others a passage mocking Superman, the rapper calling himself Big Hank mock-wooing Lois Lane with boasting couplets. He may be able to fly all through the night, but can he rock a party ’til the early light? An excellent question for Superman or any other flying personage, really.

  That’s if flying wasn’t the last thing on your mind.

  Now the three begin quoting favorite lines, trying to mimic the rappers’ inflection while keeping straight faces. “I understand about the food,” says one, nearly weeping with pleasure. “hey, but bubba, we’re still friends! ”

  Two of these harmless, pink-cheeked punks are Manhattan-born, were privately schooled until the year they switched to Stuyvesant to spare their parents the expense. For all they know this record might have been cut specifically for their private anthropological enjoyment, and they hear it with detachment suitable for an artifact fallen from the moon. They’ve never heard anyone rap before, anymore than they’ve met Fat Albert or Sanford & Son walking down the street. Consensus might be that what makes “Rapper’s Delight” and black people in general so criminally funny is their supreme lack of irony. Hey, it’s not racist to find blacks earnest as hippies, broad and embarrassing as a comic book. These boys is punks, and punks sneer. That’s what they do, deal with it.

  Lack of irony’s scarcely a problem for the third in the room, the punk from Gowanus.

  Tied in splendid baroque knots, that’s him. Ready to pass any and all litmus tests for self-partitioning. But hey, if standing in your Converse All Star high-tops on the couch cushions rotating hips in awkward parody you recall Marilla’s curbside hula-hoop instruction a million years ago, recall too your disappointment Marilla wasn’t a blond Solver, your guilt at this disappointment, your shame at your body’s inexpressiveness, its unfunky failings— so what ? 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 inapplicable here.

  You’ve just about finished leaving Dean Street, and Aeroman, behind.

  If this means avoiding the one who protected your ass all through junior high, the one you once ached to emulate, the one whose orbit you were happy just to swing in—if it means leaving the million-dollar kid’s regular phone messages in Abraham’s precise handwriting unreturned—that’s a small price to pay for growing up, isn’t it?

  This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no foolin’ around.

  It’s the end, the end of the seventies.

  chapter 16

  Though Barrett Rude Junior had it in mind all along, grist for his own heart’s musing, the evening’s theme was kept a mystery to those in attendance. That hadn’t slowed them delving into the spread, the sliced meats and cheese and olives and egg bread and rye and cherry cheesecake he’d dialed in from Junior’s, the Seagram’s, the dope. This posse of freaks, Horatio, Crowell Desmond, the three girls, they never needed an excuse to party. When finally he made the announcement he got only a faint echo back, most of the crowd already too wasted by then to do more than nod sweetly and spacily, raise a glass with ice if they held one. Barry’s hyped about something, Whose birthday? Whatever, that’s cool. But the one girl, whose name he’d forgotten, said:

  “How old?”

  She’d given him a shy smile when she came in, one of three numbers on Horatio’s arm, all jingling earrings and Egyptian eyelashes, tan skintight slip-sheer dress to her pumps, nearly fifty buttons on one side, ankle to armpit, bottom dozen undone. Prime Horatio specimen, but new and unfamiliar. Picture her answering the phone, Horatio saying, Wanna meet Barrett Rude? Singer from the Distinctions? Wear something nice, baby. Standing at a mirror counting how many buttons up from the floor to undo, nothing’s accidental.

  It talks without talking.

  Brother
, it sings if you listen.

  Right through the door she’d started fussing, dimming the overheads digging in his drawers looking for candles, until he told her there weren’t any. Then she’d thrown her shawl on his lamp, made a web of shadow that stretched across the ceiling like a groaning mouth with tassel teeth.

  “You down with some Fleetwood Mac gypsy type of thing there, girl?”

  Again she’d smiled without speaking, then gone and sucked up a line Horatio had laid out on the kitchen counter.

  All elegance, one nail-painted finger pressed aside a nostril.

  Pinky high like she was sipping Earl Grey.

  He ignored her, slipped something mellow on the turntable, Little Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. Then got to sampling Horatio’s product himself, did a line while waiting for the base to get cooked for the pipe. One of the other girls asked him about the gold records on the mantel and he told her there ought to be four more up there, if the truth be known. He didn’t even get angry, it was just a story now. While he told it he kept half an eye on the quiet girl, as she watched and pretended not to, the usual game. No hurry, the quiet ones always came around. Like a timer going off. Now she showed some curiosity about his having a son, the procreational instinct.

  Fine, girl, we can work with that. That’d be a direction we could definitely explore. He said: “Seventeen, you believe that shit? I’m an old man, damn.”

  Barrett Rude Junior sat in his butterfly chair, arms flung behind his head, spread open to the air the way he preferred, not caring if the girls on the rug were seeing up his gym shorts. Exhibit A, help yourselves. Y’all came here to see me, make sure I’m real.

  “Well, if it’s his birthday, where is he?” Her voice was girlish, purring, porny.

  He lifted his eyes to the door to the basement apartment. “Why don’t you call him up here? Name’s Mingus.”

  Outside a thunderstorm had eased the June night, a tide of cool coming through the parlor windows, flapping the curtains.

  Night the kid was born it was raining too, 1963.

  The girl glanced at the door, surprised, like he was keeping some damn prisoner. “Whole downstairs to himself,” he said in defense. “I called him before but he was out doing his own thing. Motherfucker lives for the street. Storm likely blew him home, though. Or it will.” He shut his eyes and sang in falsetto, tonguing his palate for an Al Green lisp, “I can’t stand the rain—against my window—bringing back sweet memories—hey windowpane— ”

  Taking the dare, she went to the basement door and called the name, tentative, like she didn’t believe it. A minute later the birthday boy arrived, was suddenly in their midst like a dog on the carpet in his stained fatigues and napped hair, his proto-dreadlock nubbins. The girls all looked him over as if on cue, went mm mm, vamping for the sake of the grown men.

  “What?” said Mingus.

  “Hey, Gustopher, man, how you doin’ ?” said Crowell Desmond, leaning over the counter and sticking out his palm for a slap Mingus gave half-willingly. “How come I never see you, man?”

  “Gus only come upstairs steal my records and the dope out my freezer,” said Barry. “He don’t deign to hang with us no more.”

  “You father said it’s your birthday,” said the gypsy-looking girl, still skeptical.

  Mingus nodded.

  “You looked stoned, boy. You asleep? Intro duce yourself to the woman.”

  She held his hand. “Yolanda.”

  “Yo. Mingus.”

  “Yolanda, Yomingus,” said Barry. “Y’all a couple of twins.”

  Desmond Crowell, standing over by the sink where Horatio was cooking up some base in a glass tube, laughed like a horse.

  “Yeah, that’s funny, Barrett,” said Mingus softly.

  “Don’t go calling me Barrett, boy. Look at you, all in your hippie Vietnam shit. You ought to be stealing my clothes.”

  Yolanda returned to the couch where the girls were arrayed and Mingus was stranded on the long fringe of the rug. The album side was finished, needle crackling to the label, hollow clunk of the tone arm’s return, silence. Now all in the room grew attentive, the birthday concept perhaps penetrating dim brains at last. Or else they’d sensed a crackle in the air, summer lightning. Barry felt rebuked and scorned, though he’d hardly alerted Mingus to his plans. But such feelings lay beyond sense.

  You commune with a boy in genetic vibrations and no one but you knows the full history, not even the boy himself who wasn’t born when vibes originated.

  The mother half of vibes being an uncontrolled factor.

  Under his grubby clothes Mingus was a hunch-shouldered man. Lean, coiled, his eyes slanting to the street where he’d likely rather be. When had Barry last looked him over? Couldn’t say. Not looking was a reciprocal deal, struck who-knew-when. He didn’t want to picture himself in his son’s eyes—or for that matter in the eyes of the girl Yolanda—him with his fingernails grown horny, pudding thighs, thickened neck veiled in muttonchop whiskers. Only cocaine kept him from bloating up entirely, turning into some fleshy Isaac Hayes cartoon.

  He should be dancing around the room, instead he felt weighed to the chair, a thousand pounds of ballast.

  It was that world-feeling coming over him again. That was the only way he’d ever been able to describe it.

  “Only fooling on you, Gus, lighten up. Take a seat. We’re here to toast a man’s birthday, people. Desmond, put on a damn record.”

  Mingus twisted on his sneaker soles in the middle of the rug.

  “You got one of your friends hiding downstairs? Don’t be all furtive now, bring ’em up.”

  “Nope, just—”

  “See, Yolanda, Mingus digs white boys.”

  He just said it, no big thing, let it mean what it wanted to mean. Silence, though, had crept over everything, bugging him. The room was full of ions, thunderstorm stuff, and Barrett Rude Junior felt himself to be a massive leaden presence. He ought to dance but there was no music, and as his world-feeling increased his forearms and thighs seemed to grow mountainous. If the girl Yolanda came to him she’d be like a mewling kitten, crawling on the landscape of him. On a television nature show a kangaroo’s pink larva had squirmed from birth to pouch, the parent a planetary form. That was his proportion now. The longer he didn’t get off his ass the bigger he grew.

  Mingus just stood, playing at being eerie like the kid in The Shining, mooning at his father.

  Meantime something good was happening over at the sink, a sizzled stink, a smell with promise. It buoyed him immediately, made him want to sing.

  “Don’t immolate yourself in some Richard Pryor deal, now, Horatio. Get that pipe loaded up and bring it here. And pick some music, Desmond, you good-for-nothing flunky. Gonna write you a theme song, Good-fo-nuthin’ flunky man, he can’t book me a gig I bet somebody else can —”

  Perhaps motivated to stop Barrett’s improvisation Desmond at last picked a new record. Prince’s For You, nothing too grating.

  If Barry wasn’t looming in size like a bloated planet, Horatio and Desmond and Mingus and the girls all tiny and floating in orbit around him, everything would be fine.

  “Desmond, I ever tell you about how this feeling comes on me, like I’m getting bigger while everyone else is getting small?”

  “Nah, man.” Desmond sounded baffled.

  “We all gonna be gettin’ small,” said Horatio. “Nothin’ wrong with that.”

  “My former wife the mother of this boy here used to tell me I was getting grandiose, but there’s nothin’ grand about it. Just at times I feel like my fingertips is a thousand miles away.”

  “Crazy, man,” said Desmond, afraid of saying anything specific or controversial.

  “Yeah, crazy,” said Barrett Rude Junior, seeing the futility in trying to explain. “It’s some crazy shit all right. Yo, give the kid his present, ’Ratio.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t play like you don’t remember.” His voice crep
t from within the tomb of his chest and made its way into space, where the curvature of his own ears retrieved and confirmed it. He trusted that he’d actually spoken.

  Eyes widened, Horatio came from behind the kitchen counter and reached in his inner vest pocket for the slip of folded foil, the gift he might have been unsure Barrett Rude Junior wasn’t joking about. He’d prepared it anyway: never could have too much product on you, partying with Barry.

  “They you go. A gram of your own. You don’t have to go jumping out no trees now.”

  Mingus only stared.

  “That’s for you, take it. You want a line now Horatio cut you up some of his.”

  Mingus slipped the packet into his baggy thigh pocket and shook his head.

  “Happy Birthday. You a man now.”

  Then Barrett Rude Junior, swimming back inside himself, his voice and mind more and more a speck within the sea of his body, saw the gift was incomplete. Sure Mingus was ungrateful, he should be. The gram wasn’t enough. His father had to give him the girl, Yolanda. Barry had no use for her himself, not tonight with these brick-heavy limbs. The girl would be crushed if he somehow mounted her. And if she offered him head she’d be undetectable, miles off, beneath the horizon of the real. Tonight was the boy’s turn.

  “Horatio, you done already? Bring me the pipe because I swear like Old King Cole I’m too damn lazy get out this chair. Hey, Yolanda?”

  “Yes?” she said, surprised to be named by him now, a bit prim.

  “How’d you like to go downstairs and check out Gus’s crib?”

  He’d spoken easily, like she’d know his thinking, one thing flowing from the next. But nobody else saw the essential grace of the handoff, father to son. They all got on him at once.

  Yolanda said, “What’s that supposed to mean?” She didn’t leave the couch, but crossed her legs, guarding the prize, and angled her body resentfully to the door.

  “That’s fucked up, Barrett,” said Mingus in a low and pitying tone.

  “Barry, be cool,” added Horatio, like he had any say in this house.