The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  “I don’t mean anything, relax y’all. Damn. What if I make you a bet, though? How old are you, little Yo- landa ? If you’re closer to his age than mine, what about you go downstairs? Do a few lines of birthday blow with my son, it’s only fair.”

  “She can’t,” said Mingus flatly.

  “Wait up, Gus, let’s hear from the girl. What about it, baby? Year of the Dragon or Rat or what?”

  “You’re a sweet-looking man, Mingus,” said Yolanda defiantly, refusing to look at Barrett. Her voice was layered with sex, mothering, other mystical woman shit meant to shame Barry and let him know what he’d missed. For he’d missed it, blown it, she was gone. “Don’t let your father ruin your birthday for you. I’ll come see your room if you want.”

  But Mingus ignored her. “She can’t come downstairs,” he said again.

  “Why is that?” said Barry.

  “Senior’s in the front. I heard him in there.”

  “He snuck back in?”

  “What you expect? You didn’t take his key.”

  Barry was resigned to the world-feeling now. This was how it felt: he’d become a planet and his population swarmed like gnats, flitting in and out of sight. So his old man was back, the skulker! Senior’d done something to get himself in bad with the pimps and dealers running the Times Plaza Hotel, talked some girl into his room and tried to baptize her, or maybe just fulminated too long in the lobby—anyhow, got himself unwelcomed, then crept back here to the basement. Mingus and Senior were two of a kind, creatures ungrateful by nature and grown as remote from him as his own distant hands. Horatio, Desmond, son, father, pussy, gold records, all flew in a cloud, godforsaken and tinny.

  What he needed was a hit on the pipe. A line or two lines or a dozen wasn’t going to do it tonight, wasn’t going to shrink his unendurable weight or expand the other inhabitants of the room from irritant size.

  Outside, rain misting on the day-baked tar.

  Pipe, bowl, and be damn sure the Fiddlers Three don’t weasel themselves a co-writer’s credit.

  It was the fact that the venue was the New School, a name he associated with pinkish causes and the hiring of scantily credentialed professors, which had beguiled him to committing this mistake. That and the Dutch collector of original paperback art who’d enthused through his telephone a half-dozen times until Abraham relented. Perhaps also some morbid curiosity to encounter his colleagues: one Howard Zingerman and one Paul Pflug, incredible as the names might seem. Likely his own name Ebdus struck others the same way and it was the oddness of their monikers which had caused them to drift into this enterprise. Perhaps Abraham had accepted out of vanity. Certainly vanity. The term pop culture, thrown around so freely by the Dutchman. He was pop culture now. So let him go and see what that meant and let him meet Zingerman and Pflug. What harm to sit on a panel?

  Well, he’d learned what harm, what cost to be baited out of hiding. The New School auditorium was no insurance against humiliation. The small crowd, fewer than fifty, nearly all of them lurching males with complex facial hair, had come expressly to meet Pflug. Pflug was himself perhaps thirty, had a long ponytail like many of his admirers, and appeared to be a weight lifter, though he also wore the wispy beard of an old man, or possibly a wizard.

  Pflug worked in the style which had succeeded Abraham’s in time and overwhelmed it in popularity. That was, if Abraham’s style had in fact ever enjoyed any real popularity except with art directors, who had for a few years vied to hire Abraham himself and, when he proved unavailable, commissioned bald imitations of his work. This no longer happened. Though Abraham still worked, the vogue for arty psychedelia was done. Pflug was typical of what replaced it. He painted dragons and strongmen in the fashion of the posters of certain recently popular films, his skies full of billowy Maxfield Parrish clouds, his barbarians and gladiatrixes and even his dragons rendered with a uniform photorealist gloss, down to each feather and scale, down to each blond, blow-dried strand of their anachronistic haircuts.

  In fact, it became clear it was Pflug who’d created the poster for one of the recently popular films. This explained the resemblance, and also the existence of his fans. They’d barely concealed their impatience through the brief panel, waiting for the chance to mob Pflug with posters, now reverently uncurled from cardboard tubes, which they hoped he’d autograph. No one here cared about paperback cover art, and why should they? It wasn’t a thing to care about.

  The exception was the Dutchman who’d single-handedly organized this event, God help him, coming from Amsterdam to do so. And it was Zingerman he cared about, exclusively. The Dutchman, younger than Pflug even, was clean-cut and shaven. He’d sounded older on the phone, but in person was soft-spoken, dumbstruck with reverence. Zingerman was his hero. He’d been buying Zingerman originals from the warehouses of defunct paperback houses, from thieving art directors, from catalogues which circulated among aficionados like himself. The Dutchman was authoring a monograph, a catalogue raisoné, and sought Zingerman’s blessing. His Atlantic crossing should have been a direct pilgrimage to the feet of his master but he’d been shy, it now seemed, and so had arranged this whole sham panel, Zingerman-Pflug-Ebdus, “The Hidden World of Paperback Art,” as a blind.

  Zingerman the painter had a certain integrity, a kind of Ashcan school realism. He was painterly in the mood of the Soyer brothers, or, if you were generous, even the earliest Philip Guston. Zingerman’s milieu was urban gothic, characters caught at heights of expressive torment, men tearing shirts from women and vice versa, but also moments of tenderness or even pensiveness. Small dogs and rusted cans lay in the gloom of Faulknerian porches. The women were only always a tad beautiful, Playboy bunnies in disarray, slumming. Hands, faces, and cleavages were all in clean focus, while much else was lost in chiaroscuro, a signature style which also saved man-hours and was surely far less wearing than Pflug’s autistic micro-detail in the long run.

  The examples on hand, books sealed in protective plastic sleeves and two of the paintings themselves, were all from the Dutchman’s collection. The titles spanned four decades, from the forties, Paul Bowles and Hortense Calisher beside outright pornography—Zingerman’s treatment was consistent. He’d conceded to the seventies only his sfumato palette of grays and browns, brightening his tones and adding Laugh-In -style paisley bikinis and unbuttoned print shirts to his girls’ wardrobes, fluffy sideburns to his protagonists’ clenched jaws.

  Zingerman the human? He was toxic. Maybe seventy, he stooped from a basketballer’s height, his enormous frame draped in a dust-colored suit and folded awkwardly behind the table they shared. Hair sprouted from his French-cuffed sleeves like he wore an ape suit beneath, but the skin of his hands and face was papery, drained of vitality. Against the auditorium’s posted prohibitions he chain-smoked cigars thick as his clubby fingers. He coughed frequently around the cigars. Hard to picture those fingers with a brush—but then so many things were hard to picture and yet were, like this evening’s occasion.

  Zingerman wanted no part of Pflug, and barely seemed to tolerate the Dutchman, his Boswell. Perhaps they lay beyond some age requisite for Zingerman’s attention. As Pflug autographed posters—another artistic task he handled in excruciating detail, lavishing each with cartoons and inscriptions—Zingerman stretched in his chair, offered Abraham a cigar, and wholesaled his life’s philosophy.

  “Lay the girls.”

  “Sorry?”

  Zingerman’s voice was graveled and abrupt and possibly Abraham had mistaken a baroque cough for speech.

  “Lay the girls, every one of them.” Zingerman gestured at the paperbacks on the table before them, then back at the large originals hung on the curtain. “The models. That was my only consolation for staying in this dirty stinking business, and that’s why I can’t fathom a guy like you goes on painting these whatever-you-calls, geodesic forms. What are you, going to lay a geodesic form? That’s a lonely road.”

  “Your models? You took them to bed?”

&nb
sp; “To the bed, to the couch, right in the middle of the room with a leopard-skin outfit, in a mermaid costume, with fake fangs, with a toy gun in their hands, with paint all over my fingers, lay them, lay them, lay them. Strict policy. Hire the boy, hire the girl, arrange the pose, snap Polaroids, send the boy home, give with an excuse to start touching the outfit, fix the collar, hand on the ass, lay the girl, lay the girl, lay the girl, thirty-five years.”

  “Like Picasso,” was all Abraham could think to say.

  “You bet your ass. I couldn’t bear to paint those pictures any other way, I’d put my head in the stove. I tried telling my friend Schrooder, he thinks I’m joking. I’m not joking. You a married man?”

  “I was.”

  “We all were. These kids have no idea. That one there? You think he lays them? He’s too busy painting hair, painting feathers, painting the shine on bubbles. If I got one of those girls with the swords and the hair in my room I’d know what to do. Him, see those arms? I think he’s looking harder at the boys.”

  “Or the dragons.”

  “Or the dragons. So you, what? You screw forms? At least Picasso started real. After he laid them both eyes were on one side. He made them walk funny. You, it’s like looking in a microscope. You’re not lonely, just you and your germs?”

  Abraham thought: ladies and germs. Which was pretty much Zingerman’s vintage. So this was what it came to, Ebdus the bridge between Ashcan school schlock and photorealist dragons, a momentary interlude. Just him and his germs.

  No, the film would not be discussed here, the film would not be considered, not be thought of.

  “I’m lonely,” he said honestly.

  “Of course you are, you stink of it.”

  “A big career mistake, biomorphism.”

  “Now you’re talking. Take a leaf from my book,” said Zingerman. “Live. Lay the girls.”

  “I will.”

  Here Zingerman lowered his voice, to conclude the lesson, to share what he’d earned, what he really knew. “Look,” he said. “Don’t tell Schrooder.”

  “Yes?”

  “Riddled.” He passed his cigar magically over the length of his body.

  “Sorry?”

  “Started lung, so they cut lung. Doesn’t matter where it started. Gone lymph, gone brain, gone bloodstream.”

  “Oh.”

  “I shit cancer. Doesn’t matter, don’t pity me. You know why don’t pity me? One guess.”

  “Lay the girls?”

  “Give the man a cigar.”

  bad december

  no joke kid

  i haven’t slept a wink

  put a rose at the door

  of the dakota for me

  i am the walrus crab

  “Horatio, fuck you been, man?”

  Pause.

  “Oh, hey, what up, Barry?”

  “You got so much action you can’t even respect a nigger’s phone calls?”

  “I’m sorry, baby, I was gonna ring you. Ain’t no thing. What’s goin’ on?”

  “I need you to set me up with a piece.”

  Pause.

  “You talkin ’ ’bout, Barry?”

  “You watch television, Horatio?”

  “Sure, I watch television, black man, what’s with you?”

  “You know what a Beatle is?”

  “What? Oh, yeah, yeah.”

  “I got to pack some weight. Simple matter, Horatio. Now can you come through for me? That’s the question.”

  “Man, you crazy? That shit got nothing to do with you.”

  “I seen that Chapman-ass motherfucker walking around on Dean Street staring at my house just last week. Wasn’t him it was his cousin. White motherfucker had a list.”

  “You serious ?”

  “You know how many forces want me out the picture, get they hands on some four-track tapes? I don’t even trust Desmond, shit. Must be five or ten smash number-one records on them tapes, you think people don’t know that? I’ve got enemies, ’Ratio, on the streets, in the executive boardrooms, no shit, even under my floor boards. The question is can you help a brother out or do I have to go elsewhere? Whatever you say to me, be for real.”

  Pause.

  “No sweat, Barry. That what you want I got you covered.”

  “Now you’re speaking words I can understand.”

  chapter 17

  Stately Wayne Manor is scheduled to go on between Miller Miller Miller & Sloane and the Speedies, the whole lineup a battle of high-school bands, the members all from Music and Art and Stuyvesant and City-As-School and Bronx Science or Dewey, wherever it is the Speedies go to school or had dropped out of. The Bowery sidewalk is thronged, nobody checks IDs, there are twelve-year-olds, junior high schoolers around. The girls are incredible, sensational, they teem outside CBGB in print dresses and fifties lipstick shades and teased hair, zits sunk in foundation, cupping cigarettes against light wind, bare arms goose-pimpled. They light up the night, birds of paradise to induce trembling in grown men but there are no grown men here apart from a few flophouse dwellers suffering already from delirium tremens. 1981, sixteen-year-olds could rule the Manhattan night, puff joints openly, and inside the hole-in-the-wall club order beer in plastic cups. Twos or threes of boys in leather and jeans mutter around the mobs of girls, faking hand stamps with ballpoint pen and pushing inside toward the stage, or stalling outside, passing bagged bottles of something harder, occasionally shoving one another to the curb in a hail of shouts, bluffed hostility. Somebody arrives and stickered amps and guitars come out of a trunk. Everyone admires the guitarist’s bandaged fingers, he’d punched a car window and broken three knuckles, just raging at something some girl had gotten away saying unanswered. He’s playing tonight anyhow, with mitts for hands, a show-biz hero.

  In a nearby lobby a man enters a cage elevator, returning to a single room he’s lived in since 1953.

  A black-and-white curbed on Rivington jiggles slightly, a cop getting blown in the cage while his partner on the Bowery’s corner looks out and waits his turn. Likely there’s some code for this operation, a stroller, or an O-five-O.

  Walls here show punk graffiti, another type entirely, the letter A circled for anarchy, jerky uppercase remembrances of bands like the Mice and Steaming Vomit perhaps the one lasting impression they’ll make.

  Tonight’s a bigger than usual deal in the Stuyvesant crowd, with somebody’s apartment parent-vacated for the weekend and mass plans to drop acid there. Weekend, it all happens on the weekend, as if school isn’t twenty-four hours away, as if your life has changed one iota. You could fight the structure, on a Tuesday or Wednesday night go to shows or to Bowl-Mor, the all-night alley on University Place which advertised “Rock-’n’-Roll Bowling!”—but down that road lay too much cutting, failing out, the rock-bottom destinations of City-As-School or your local high. Like Tim Vandertooth you might never be seen again.

  So dress up and pretend you won’t all see each other in gym outfits Monday morning, hungover and sheepish as shit.

  Inside, Miller Miller Miller & Sloane conclude their set. Their famous encore is a comic cameo, drummer emerging from behind traps to sing Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” which can be safely adored inside the ironical brackets of Upper West Side whiteboys playing the most famous punk club in the world.

  Admittedly it’s a pretty great song, which everyone will be humming the next day if LSD doesn’t brainwipe all recollection.

  Stately Wayne Manor is on in fifteen minutes.

  Dylan Ebdus mills in the crowd at the base of the riser, though he’s only heard this band play about a hundred times already, between small gigs and practices at the rehearsal space on Delancey. His friend Gabe Stern plays bass in Stately Wayne Manor—he taught himself onstage, like Sid Vicious. Dylan, he’s like Manor’s fifth member, he knows their tiny set by heart, hand-letters their posters, listens in confidence to their girlfriends’ grievances.

  Sometimes makes out with their girlfriends.

  Might one
day get laid by their girlfriends.

  Girlfriends present and future make a sizeable portion of the crowd which packs the bar like the soda counter in an Archie comic. The three bands lack a sole fan over eighteen. Every kid here would surely claim they’d seen Talking Heads on CB’s tiny stage and be lying, since they were twelve or thirteen last time that happened. You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all. Talking Heads nowadays play the tennis stadium in Forest Hills: buy a seat at Ticketron in the basement of Abraham and Straus and take the subway to Queens like any other schmuck.

  The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn’t.

  Tripping on acid tonight’s just the nearest example.

  Now Dylan’s friend Linus Millberg appears out of the crowd with a cup of beer and shouts, “Dorothy is John Lennon, the Scarecrow is Paul McCartney, the Tin Woodman is George Harrison, the Lion’s Ringo.”

  “Star Trek,” commands Dylan over the lousy twangy country CB’s is playing between sets.

  “Easy,” Linus shouts back. “Kirk’s John, Spock’s Paul, Bones is George, Scotty is Ringo. Or Chekov, after the first season. Doesn’t matter, it’s like a Scotty-Chekov-combination Ringo. Spare parts are always surplus Georges or Ringos.”

  “But isn’t Spock-lacks-a-heart and McCoy-lacks-a-brain like Woodman and Scarecrow? So Dorothy’s Kirk?”

  “You don’t get it. That’s just a superficial coincidence. The Beatle thing is an archetype, it’s like the basic human formation. Everything naturally forms into a Beatles, people can’t help it.”

  “Say the types again.”

  “Responsible-parent genius-parent genius-child clown-child.”

  “Okay, do Star Wars.”

  “Luke Paul, Han Solo John, Chewbacca George, the robots Ringo.”

  “Tonight Show.”

  “Uh, Johnny Carson Paul, the guest John, Ed McMahon Ringo, whatisname George.”

  “Doc Severinson.”