The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Yeah, right. See, everything revolves around John, even Paul. That’s why John’s the guest.”

  “And Severinson’s quiet but talented, like a Wookie.”

  “You begin to understand.”

  Dylan’s the bagman for tonight’s LSD run, holding everyone’s folding money, a hundred and ninety bucks which from habit he clutches tightly, hand within his pocket. Pride resists deeper habit’s call to transfer the roll to his sock. The task of copping acid has fallen to Dylan and Linus Millberg for two reasons: 1. They’re regular customers of the dealer, a gay on Ninth Street who sells Stuyvesant kids nickels from his apartment. 2. They’re not in the band.

  Linus Millberg is a freak math prodigy, a sophomore running with juniors, formerly shy.

  “If we go now we can catch the Speedies’ set,” says Linus.

  “Okay but wait a minute.”

  “We should have gone an hour ago.”

  “Okay I know but wait a minute. Go get me a beer.”

  Linus nods and dips back toward the bar.

  Dylan is absently gratified by Linus’s puppy-dog servility, perhaps because in the Stately Wayne Manor crowd it serves to mask his own. There’s plenty that might be considered cool about being to one side instead of in the band itself. Mostly, though, it sucks. That’s the self-loathing root of his dawdling: Stately Wayne Manor has never played CB’s before, and Dylan’s reluctant to surrender the borrowed glamour of their debut.

  You could not be on the stage and still be on the stage.

  It’s not unrelated to standing beside Henry while he roofed a spaldeen you’d fetched from the street.

  There’s drama too: whether Josh, the singer, will show up drunk or if Giuseppe, the guitarist, can play with bandaged hands. Though Manor’s chords are such that you might shape them on a Stratocaster’s neck with an elbow or foot.

  “There’s the Gawce, she’s looking great.”

  Linus has returned with the beers.

  “The Gawcester’s here, Ebdus,” he said again. “You better do something this time.”

  Linus has a valid point: another factor in dawdling is Liza Gawcet. Liza’s a new freshman Dylan Ebdus maybe-likes. She had a well-publicized curfew, so she wouldn’t be along afterward tripping or bowling: this was his only chance. Dylan had leaked acknowledgment of the spell cast by her blond, mute, new-developed, fishnet-bound cuteness through a network of go-betweens, amazed and appalled that this system of proxy flirtation worked for him as it did for so many he held in contempt. But the system, oblivious to his superiority, had worked. She maybe-liked Dylan in return—that was the message Liza’s girl squad leaked back.

  He’ll talk to her tonight if he can split her from the gaggle, a dicey operation.

  The way Liza’s fishnets show through knee- and ass-torn OshKosh B’Gosh’s is killingly childish and hot, like she’s slipped the punky leggings on beneath outfits unchanged since fifth-grade hopscotch spills.

  You could be sixteen and still suspect yourself of pederastic lusts.

  The whole band’s lately sniggering about Liza, infuriating their junior-year girlfriends, but Dylan’s got an inside track.

  Linus says, “You’re good-looking in the face and Josh has a body and Gabe’s in the band and I can start a conversation with anyone—if we were combined in one person we could fuck any girl in the school.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Yeah, but do something.”

  “Go see if she wants to meet a drug dealer.”

  The miracle of Linus is he tends to oblige. This isn’t a matter of daring, just Gumby pliancy. For instance, at Gabe’s command he’d grabbed a boxed pizza cooling on the counter of Famous Ray’s and scrambled all the way to Washington Square. Now Dylan watches as Liza Gawcet and her friends listen to Linus’s exuberant proposal. Linus points at the door, then at his hand stamp, explaining how they’ll be readmitted, no problem.

  And Liza Gawcet is nodding.

  Stately Wayne Manor’s amps are set up and the band’s in the back room, smoking pot, acting like a band, making the crowd wait. Fuck them. Dylan hears the opening chords, the false starts and in-jokey banter, in his head. Gabe will play and not see Dylan at the stage and later ask and Dylan will say, Didn’t see Gawcet either, did you? Let him wonder.

  Hey, maybe he’d really luck out. Maybe they’d get high at the dealer’s and Liza would break curfew.

  He’s glad, anyway, to shield her from Manor’s moment of glory. No shock finding jealousy of the band roiling in his heart, he’s got every shit feeling catalogued there if he glances.

  On the sidewalk they fall to a boy-boy, girl-girl-girl formation, Dylan having yet uttered zip to Liza directly. But he and Linus are leading the freshmen away from CB’s, up across St. Marks Place, holy shit.

  Through the city’s night they move in a giddy bubble. Older teens, men with shopping carts, taxicabs, all of it recedes to the margins, invisible.

  “Mary John, Lou Paul, Murray George, Ted Baxter Ringo.”

  Linus will do this until he’s told to stop, but Dylan doesn’t wish him to, it’s serving a nice purpose of keeping their mouths moving. “Good one.”

  “I didn’t make this shit up,” says Linus. “It’s like some essential human grouping pattern.”

  “So you’re saying that’s why Stately Wayne Manor’s doomed—bad Beatle dynamics.”

  “Oh yeah, it’s painfully obvious.”

  “Andrew thinks he’s John, nobody wants to be Paul.”

  “They all think they’re John. They’re four wannabe Johns. They’re like four Georges. With no Ringo to lighten things up.”

  “Not one real John?”

  “Maybe Giuseppe. Doesn’t matter. Without Paul to play peacemaker, John’s just as bad as George.”

  “I thought George wasn’t bothering anybody, he just wants to, you know, write one song per album and play his sitar.”

  “No, no, George is evil, he wants to usurp John, that’s his nature.”

  Chewbacca wants to usurp Han Solo? But never mind. Dylan says: “They have to break up, then.”

  “Indubitably.”

  “We’ll go back and tell them.”

  The girls become attentive. “Stately Wayne Manor’s breaking up?” asks Liza Gawcet.

  “Tonight,” jokes Dylan, and the amazing thing is he’s honestly never thought it before. Not for a minute had he doubted the band would be signed, famous, an exclusive quadrangle for life. Now realizing that’s unlikely, his jealousy eases into generosity: Stately Wayne Manor’s going nowhere, so let them play CBGB tonight. Hell, let them last a month more and get that Halloween gig opening for Johnny Thunders’s Heartbreakers at the Roxy.

  Meanwhile Linus attempts to explain Beatle dynamics to the girls, using his ungainliest example yet. “—the reason they’ll never get off the island is Skipper’s such a weak Paul and Gilligan’s a John who’d rather be a Ringo. He’s like, practically fighting Mr. Howell for Ringo status. Plus Professor’s such an overbearing George, they’re completely screwed up—”

  When one of Liza’s friends says, “What about the girls?” Linus impatiently replies “The girls don’t matter ” before he can stop himself.

  Dylan decides to step into this breach. “A rock band requires a certain alchemy,” he says ominously. “You saw Quadrophenia ?”

  “Sure.”

  “Like that, you know—the four faces of the Who.”

  Liza stares blankly, as if she might have regarded Quadrophenia more along the lines of that movie with Sting in it. Dylan feels despair rising. Fishnet tights do not a cultural vocabulary make. To the ironized, reference-peppered palaver which comprises Dylan’s only easy mode of talk former prep-school girls have frequently proved deaf as cats.

  “I think I mostly like bands with one strong personality,” she says. “Like the Doors.”

  Dylan’s triply whiplashed. Liza’s found the gist of Linus’s conceit through the smokescreen of the Gilligan’s Island example, then just
as quickly dismissed it, which is nimble as hell. Alternately, and fully depressing, she’s into the Doors. Worse, though—if he’s grasped the implication—does she think someone in Stately Wayne Manor has a strong personality ?

  But they’re at Ninth Street and Second Avenue now, nearly to the connection’s stoop, and Dylan means to shift focus to his own status as criminal savant. She said she wanted to meet a drug dealer. “I can’t take this many people up, it’s not so cool,” he says. As though it’s an arbitrary selection he adds, “Uh, Liza, you come up with me. Linus can stay downstairs with you other girls.”

  Linus gets it, and, hunching his shoulders and slanting his eyes, adds, “We’ll keep a lookout.”

  “A lookout for what?” says one of Liza’s pals, instantly spooked.

  “Nothing,” says Dylan, with quick exasperation.

  “Why can’t we stay together?” whines the spooked girl.

  “Don’t worry.” Dylan’s always found the notion of streetwisefulness in Manhattan a joke, has trouble not sneering at his West Side– or Chelsea-born friends who cross streets to duck clusters of homies, as though shit ever happens here. The East Village is too full and frenzied to be dangerous, and, truthfully, cops are everywhere. His friends don’t know fear, they’ve got no idea. Though, go figure, now here’s a black kid in a drawn sweatshirt hood sitting legs-wide on the gay’s top step and looking not at all intimidated to be stranded from his usual turf.

  Then a glance down Ninth reveals two in eyebrow-low Kangol caps and baggy pants walking with deliberate slowness across the street and the vibe’s not great but this is getting stupid : Dylan’s spooking himself. And now’s no time for hesitation.

  “We’ll be down in five. You can go around to St. Marks and get a slice but come back.”

  “Uh, Dylan?” says Liza, once they’re buzzed inside. At the second-floor landing they wait for the dealer to unbolt his door.

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t think the door downstairs closed all the way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like someone put their foot in it.”

  “Relax. Linus is just hysterical, it’s catching.”

  Dylan’s screwy secret is he likes visiting Tom’s apartment, despite the pervasive odor of unfresh kitty litter. The gay dealer recalls someone Dylan might have found sitting in Rachel’s breakfast nook on afternoons when he returned from P.S. 38. Like Rachel, Tom smokes not in the hammily clandestine manner of adolescents, that huffing and crouching and voice-squeezing which Dylan privately despises, but grandly, legs crossed, waving a joint and talking uninterruptedly through inhalations, unmindful of conserving the smoke. The satin shorts Tom sports year-round show too much hairy thigh, but Tom’s okay. Two or three times Dylan’s loafed around his place listening to albums and even meeting other buyers, and Tom’s never bartered to suck anyone’s cock, contrary to legend.

  Tonight’s different: all’s appalling here, and Dylan can’t think of why on earth he’s brought Liza upstairs. He sees only the filthy pile carpet and chintzy decor, Coca-Cola glasses, framed Streamers poster. And Tom looks like a boiled lobster, all red for some reason. Dylan only wants to score and leave, but Tom can’t be rushed.

  “You know this record?” Tom asks. And the colored girls go doo, doo-doo, doo, doo-doo-doo, doo, doo-doo, doo, doo-doo-doo, doo, doo-doo is what’s coming out of the stereo and certainly Dylan’s heard it before, but at the moment, distracted partly by strobe visions of Marilla and La-La, he can only imagine that’s the song’s title : “The Colored Girls Go Doo-Doo-Doo,” etc. Which can’t be right. So he gives out a gruff nod which Tom translates easily: I’ve got no idea.

  “Lou Reed, how soon they forget.”

  “Sure,” says Dylan. In Dylan’s mind Lou Reed dwells with Mott the Hoople and the New York Dolls in a hazy Bermuda Triangle between sixties rock, disco, and the punk which has supposedly demolished both. The music’s brazen sophistication irritates category. The simple solution, particularly from the vantage of Tom’s pad, is to call the phantom genre gay. This is gay music. Pretty catchy, though.

  “You and girlfriend aren’t planning to gulp all this blotter by yourselves, I hope.”

  “No.”

  Tom’s gray Maine coon cat has crept into Liza’s overalled lap, and now she’s curled around it, head ducked, cooing. She’s less than present, off communing with things female and feline.

  “Oh gee, I shouldn’t have said girlfriend. I’m always opening my yap. Just a minute, I’ll get the door.”

  Don’t, Dylan wants to say, but fails.

  The door’s chain snaps and Tom stumbles backward into the living room.

  It’s the two in the Kangols and the one in the hooded sweatshirt, and they’re in Tom’s apartment immediately, yelling, “Sit down, motherfucker! Sit the fuck down! ” Tom stumbles to the couch and plops there between Dylan and Liza, his bare thighs touching them both.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Tom moans.

  “Shutup,” says one of the Kangols.

  A few things are simultaneously notable about the man-boy in the hood, the lurker Dylan and Liza passed coming up the stoop:

  He’s holding a pistol. Waving it. The pistol’s small, dark, unshiny, totally persuasive. All three on the couch watch it and the three black teens watch it too, even the one who holds it. Even the cat. The optics of the room seemingly distort toward the dull fistlike object, as though it were sucking light.

  He’s the obvious leader.

  He’s tall and moves with weird angularity.

  He’s not just any random black guy with an Adam’s apple big as an elbow, he’s one in particular.

  “Robert? ” says Dylan incredulously.

  “Ho, shit,” says one of the Kangols softly.

  Robert Woolfolk stares from under the hood, as stunned as Dylan. There’s no plan, that’s apparent. This is some godless universe’s dumb notion of a joke.

  “You know him?” says Tom.

  “Who this whiteboy, nigga?” wonders a Kangol.

  Liza’s hugged around the ball of fur, trembling.

  Robert Woolfolk just shakes his head. He has instantaneously processed the surprise. What’s left is just lip-sucking disappointment, spiked with pure rage. “You one lucky motherfucker,” he says quietly.

  “Get out of my house, all of you.”

  “Shutup, faggit, I ain’t even talkin’ to you. Come over here, Dylan, what you got for me, man?”

  Robert explores Dylan’s jeans with ancient and tender familiarity, seeming to find the wad of twenties, tens, and fives unremarkable, his due. These pockets and Robert’s fingers have journeyed on parallel tracks from Brooklyn for this unlikely rendezvous: Why shouldn’t something extraordinary come of it?

  Then, sparing Dylan any violence or even the mildest of jibes about Rachel, Robert Woolfolk disappears the gun into his waistband, deep-muffled beneath a sweatshirt that’s nearly to his knees, and waves his homeboys to the door and out into the hall. Perhaps Robert’s forgotten the origins of the prohibition against his harming Dylan. Perhaps as in Chariots of the Gods he goes on obeying a deity he can no longer name or even properly recall.

  All that’s heard is a last: “Who the whiteboy, Robert? ” and the reply: “Shutup, nigger.” And they’re gone.

  Dylan stares at Tom in bewildered silence.

  “Get out of my house.”

  “But—”

  “You brought this here, now get out.”

  Dylan touches Liza’s shoulder and she slaps him away, expelling the cat in the same motion. Is it possible for a cat to have peed in fear at the sight of a gun? For the ammoniac stink seems nearer than the bathroom now, and Liza’s got a wet patch on her OshKosh B’Goshes.

  Oh.

  On the stoop comes the fear that Robert Woolfolk’s still around, that the episode’s not over. As the outer door clicks shut behind them Dylan’s vibrant with this possibility, a plucked string. But no, here’s Linus, just walking up nibbling the t
ip of a wax-papered slice and saying, “Hey, what’s the problem?” Dylan wants to turn to Liza and plead don’t tell but she floods past Linus, crying now, hands cupping pants seat where urine pooled, seeking the consolation of her gaggle—she never should have left their side, never should have come on this expedition, probably never should have graduated Dalton’s eighth grade and allowed her parents to talk her into taking the Stuyvesant test, the cheapskates. Dylan’s searching, almost hopeful, but Robert Woolfolk’s gone, there’s no trace, no proof, nothing but the tale he dreads to tell, the implausible, unworkable, unlikely confession.

  Brooklyn’s stranded thirty punks in an apartment unpsychedelicized and they’ll be needing an account of why.

  Brooklyn’s chased you to the ground and nobody’s going to comprehend except that you’re marked, cursed, best avoided.

  Brooklyn’s bepissed your blond destiny.

  You’d strain pee from fishnets with your teeth to make it up to her but fat chance.

  Maybe Liza Gawcet and Linus Millberg can be enlisted in the cause of explaining it to the others in Beatle-dynamic terms: how Dean Street’s George Harrison tonight spared the life of Dean Street’s Paul McCartney. If you’re willing to tell it all—Mingus Rude, Arthur, Robert, Aeroman—it might be enough, one hell of a story, worth two hundred bucks, an acid trip of its own. But that’s an awful lot of telling, and it opens to realms you’ve diligently left gray to yourself. Be real: it ain’t gonna happen.

  The four-track recorder was secure at the pawnshop on Fourth and Atlantic Avenues, not in the window but deep in the back, on the shelves behind the counter. It would wait for him there: Who’s got use for a four-track hereabouts? The tapes themselves were stashed beneath the loose floorboard under the water bed, along with pipe, silk rope and handcuffs, gun, and assorted drug detritus, though nothing left to smoke or snort or he would’ve smoked and snorted it. At times he was unsure whether the tapes weren’t actually blank, whether he’d demoed any of those compositions floating through his mind. Elsetimes he was positive he slept above a McDuck vault of riches, future sonic gold.

  Either way, nobody pillaging the basement closet was gonna find shit, whether pillager came through a window or door or was already there, an inside man, a mole. They’d have to storm his citadel upstairs. If someone were to force him to reach inside his stash hole it wouldn’t be magnetic tapes he’d come up with in his hand, it’d be the forty-five.