The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  Career.

  At Elmira Dose turned himself into a jailhouse artist. Like Riker matzos, the career was a thing he stumbled into. At a table in the dayroom, he’d been curled in an introspective shell around a series of notebook pages, sketching, in blue ballpoint, elaborately rendered designs for train cars of the mind, in blazing colors supplied only by the mind. He’d been working the hardest at a top-to-bottom with a Valentine’s theme: goopy bulging hearts speared by feathered arrows, shot by a Porky Pig cherub in Nike high-tops.

  A stony-eyed brother in net muscle shirt and doo-rag, one Dose had so far assiduously avoided, suddenly lurched at his shoulder, startling him. The brother pushed a forefinger at the Valentine page.

  “Yo, that shit’s nice.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You could do me something like that? For my girl?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “Put me and her name together. From Raf to Junebug.”

  “Sure.”

  “Put it around the edge of a paper, man. So I can write inside.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “How much?”

  Dose shrugged.

  “Four packs,” grunted Raf.

  Raf was one of those who, having likely neglected or even slapped around his girl in his free life, became a romantic inside. What, apart from love talk, flowery letters, promises of marriage, did a man have to offer, if he wished to keep a woman visiting, or from making time with Jody or running away with his kid? Raf had gone through his little vocabulary of woo in a phone call or two, so gestures like the decorated stationery were increasingly urgent. Possibly he felt Junebug turning from him. Possibly her visits had slowed. He commissioned from Dose a series of ornately inscribed love cards, graffiti Hallmark.

  One evening Dose had the wit to say: “This one’s free, man.”

  Raf narrowed his eyes: No arrears was the message flashing in them. Don’t play me, man.

  “Just don’t mail it right away, okay? Show it around to the brothers.” Raf sat at the Bloods’ table at dinner, an unapproachable zone of latent violence. “Say who did it for you.”

  Raf smiled now, getting it. “Aight, Dog. I could do that f’you.”

  Dose hadn’t taken long to see that the hand-drawn posters and logos and primitive porn scotch-taped to so many bunk walls were the work of just a few prisoners, and the rest of the population customers of those few. No reason not to crack this wider market—his cards for Raf were head and shoulders above the usual crap, which mostly resembled tracings from 1950s comic books. Graffiti stylings, those were what elicited the oohs and ahs.

  Sure enough, a little promotional savvy brought the flood. Dose found himself doodling borders for any number of love letters—the sheer flood of woo being pointlessly pitched from behind stone walls and steel bars could make you dizzy if you dwelled on it. Every one of these retrofitted paramours was a former ho-slappin’ mack daddy, now down on one knee. Dose tried not to learn too much about who was really getting mail back, or visitors, or even their phone calls answered.

  But Valentines were only a feature of the market: Dose did hand-over-fist business in cardboard frames for photographs of loved ones, and burner-style name tags on notebook sheets for personalizing bunk spaces—anyone who saw one would say Yo, I gotta get down with that, and get in line during next rec. He manufactured custom porn, homemade Tijuana Bibles featuring, for instance, Crockett and Tubbs nailing Madonna, whatever the customer wanted, the customer was always right. He drew prototypes for tattoos, which ballpoint-pen tattooists transferred to biceps and thighs and chests. Dose would see men he didn’t know in the commissary line, wearing his tags on their bodies. Call him King of Elmira. Sometimes it threw him back to Boy Scout days, as if he could get a merit badge for Tit Art or Tattoo.

  A Puerto Rican kid asked Dose to personalize one of the system’s standard-issue white T-shirts. He wanted a cartoon of himself, palms turned outward in an expression of helplessness, and the slogan TEN TO LIFE?!? Sad but true, the kid wished to wear it, so Dose knocked it out, bestowed the kid big oval Felix the Cat eyes, not bad if he said so himself. The next day an older black CO named Carroll, ordinarily a stand-up dude, appeared at Dose’s cell.

  “Stand out for search,” said Carroll.

  “What up, man?”

  “Put a sock in it and stand out.”

  Carroll emerged from his bunk search with all of Dose’s art supplies, plus ten packs of coffin nails Dose had stockpiled. “I have to seize these materials and write you up,” he said. “Holding more than six packs is an infraction.”

  “Dang, take the butts, but that’s my drawing shit.”

  “Listen, Rude. You make this shirt?” Carroll showed Ten-to-Life’s T, which he’d had balled in his back pocket.

  “What if I did?”

  Carroll shook his jowly head, weary with all he’d seen in his days. “You’re risking seven years for attempted escape for altering a garment.”

  Dose started over, assembling new materials on credit, and leaving all garments unaltered this time around. The second assault on his enterprise came a few weeks after he resumed, at the hands of the Astacio brothers: two older Hispanic jailhouse artists, either real brothers or not, maybe cousins. No one knew, though both were short and chubby, and both wore their hair in a net with an oily knot at the neck. The Astacios worked in a truly pathetic Coney Island–tattoo style, their lettering of any slogans or monikers as crude as a woodcut. Without troubling to notice, Dose had been suffocating their livelihood, so the brothers began stepping up on him, in the food line, in the commissary line, on the yard. They’d growl animalistically, something about quit stealing their customers—as if Dose was expected to screen requests: You don’t happen to be clientele of the esteemed Astacios?, some shit like that. Dose only pretended not to understand, like they were speaking Spanish. Then Ramon Astacio stepped up on him at a urinal, in an abruptly vacated F-gallery shower.

  Ramon hemmed in near to Dose, now seeming not to have the use of language at all, only body English. He opened his smile and showed why: he was twirling a razor blade in his mouth, flipping it with his tongue like a cheerleader knuckling a baton.

  Dose flipped, a year’s accumulated fear brimming in him, the first rage he’d opened himself to feel since expelling the bullet in Senior’s direction. He threw an elbow and hung Ramon on the jaw, causing him to bite on the ritually displayed blade. The move was triumphant and a mistake. As in a yoking, there were rules to follow, an art of encounters. Threat had a rhetoric. Ramon might have a mouthful of his own blood, but Dose had surrendered the rudder of the moment.

  A man didn’t just hit another man unless he could go all the way and kill him, and this was not the place Dose had staked out for himself.

  Now he rushed from the shower, past Noel, the other brother, sentry at the door.

  At dinner that night Ramon was absent and the word buzzing through the hall was he was getting his mouth sewn. Noel sat at the Nietas’ table and he and some of the Nietas were offering heavy glares. Dose knew he would have to move eventually and saw no margin in waiting, so he went right at the unthinkable, and approached the Bloods’ table. Not directly to Raf, but to the place where King Blood sat. It took gulping back his heartbeat to do it.

  “I want to apologize for disturbing your meal,” he told King Blood. “But I’ve got trouble and I have to ask if I could speak to Raf.”

  King Blood didn’t look from his tray, as if they were all working from a script too familiar to bother dramatizing.

  “This a question of mercy, or you looking to do business?”

  “Business,” said Dose.

  “Go ahead,” said King Blood, only after an appreciable pause, time enough for any pair of eyes in the room to see it was Dose who’d come to them and been made to wait trembling for an answer.

  So it was that Raf became Dose’s protector and broker, taking fifty percent out of any payment, and stockpiling a certain vein of big-titted
poster work for private dispersal among the Bloods network. In an unseen deal some top-level Blood had a word with some top-level Nieta and the Astacios melted away. The brothers only shot Dose dartlike glances when they were certain no one saw, Ramon salaciously licking his teeth with his scarred tongue, wanting Dose to see the badge he’d awarded and consider its implications.

  But Raf was big and strong, and devoted, and so Dose’s safety at Elmira was secured. Dose was one of his several mules; the others dealt “trees”—tight-rolled cheeba sticks, cut with mentholated tobacco to stretch the ingredient—and he would slip Dose a fistful of these once in a while, a small perk. Dose had arrived at a policy of no dope inside, witnessing the rapid spiral of arrears this led to, but getting stoned on the gratis trees was a safe exception. Raf also turned out not to be so faithful to the recipient of his incessant Valentines that he didn’t want his dick sucked a couple of times, and then to suck Dose’s in return once they trusted one another. The Bloods had a broom closet permanently bought for more or less this exact purpose. Dose learned to admire how Raf could want to stretch a suckjob out to defeat time, like relishing a shaggy-dog story. If he even came to crave it a little, in both directions, find himself as entranced by the tensing in Raf’s lifter’s thighs as he was by the avidity of a mouth, that was fine, neither here nor there, not particularly telling. If there was one thing Dose had learned from his father—the Love Man resting on his laurels, lazily taking what came to the house, Horatio’s women or, on occasion, Horatio—it was that it wasn’t a big deal to suck a little dick now and then, so long as nobody girled you out. That had been Dose’s understanding the day Barrett Rude Junior walked in on his son with Dylan Ebdus: there were more things under the sun than what cats might get up to with one another if there were no women on the scene.

  Not that Dose spent a lot of time thinking of Dean Street, or of the days before Senior had come to the house, with Barry still in full polymorphous splendor, before things got paranoiac and eerie all over, in the basement and upstairs and out on the street. In those days when it still seemed Barry might resume making music, might fall in with that crowd of funk superheroes.

  The four-track the secret machine under the floorboards, not the .45.

  In that brief margin between renouncing his Boy Scout uniform and taking up with FMD and Robert Woolfolk, and spurning Dylan Ebdus, or being spurned by him, whichever it was, Dose could still be enticed by the simplest games, stoopball, wallball, skully, boosting skin mags from the newsstand on the triangle at Flatbush and Atlantic, committing each syllable of Sugarhill Gang’s “Eighth Wonder” or Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks” to subvocal memory.

  Or lie in a breeze from the backyard window and page through The Inhumans, waiting for their mute leader Black Bolt to open his mouth and bring it all crumbling down, with one shattering doomsday utterance: the bridge, the towers, the schools, all the public concrete Mono and Lee and Dose had tagged with spray paint for future demolition.

  When Black Bolt at last sang it would level the city and there’d be only the subway running underneath through its theorem of tunnels, the one true neighborhood.

  Dose could lie on his bedspread in the rotten-ailanthus breeze and dream it for hours.

  Or, alternately, rush onto the street on the broilingest of days to join in directing, with a tin can open at both ends, a stream from a wrenched hydrant through the window of a passing car. Driver hectically rolling it if he saw what was in store, never fast enough.

  But the stories you told yourself—which you pretended to recall as if they’d happened every afternoon of an infinite summer—were really a pocketful of days distorted into legend, another jailhouse exaggeration, like the dimensions of those ballpoint-crosshatched tits or of the purported mountains of blow you once used to enjoy, or how you’d bellowed an avenger’s roar when you squeezed the trigger of a pistol you’d actually brandished in self-pissing terror. How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end.

  As for flying, Dose never even glanced at the sky. Flying was a summer within a summer, a whim. So why think of it at all?

  chapter 14

  In the years between Elmira and Watertown Dose’s life on the street was a shadow, a pale dream between bids.

  One release blurred into another, a Twilight Zone recurrence of being dropped by the Riker’s shuttle at Queensboro Plaza. There the bus stopped under the el tracks and the driver doled out subway tokens, one per man, the system’s laconic parting gift. Up on the platform, Dose would wait in the middle of a gaggle of freaked-out felons, each pretending not to be in the company of the others, each with panic in their eyes. The releasees chewed gum frantically, spit, tugged too-tight street clothes over new biceps and pecs, every last one of them as conspicuously ill-armored for this world as lobsters loosed in an open field.

  From Queensboro Plaza Dose made his way back. He’d ride the 7 to Grand Central and change for an express to Nevins if he was feeling bold, hoping to see some fresh top-to-bottom work on the trains, hoping to run into someone he knew. On more sheepish days he’d walk the two blocks to Queens Plaza instead, for the G’s slog through Greenpoint, Bed-Stuy, Fort Greene, thirteen subway stops nobody used, an hour in the tunnels to calm your thoughts.

  Sing a song of returning: Ya miss me, sucker? Well I’m back!

  Back in the New York groove, sure.

  On discharge from Elmira Dose aimed, by prearrangement, for Arthur Lomb’s crib on Smith Street. Barry had rented the basement rooms; no question of a homecoming there. His first season of freedom Dose worked for a hippie contractor named Glenray Schurz, replacing window frames in the rotting brownstones, complicit in renovation, making Boerum Hill of Gowanus. Those early days Dose visited Barry at lunchtimes, still covered with plaster dust, his particle mask around his neck. He’d stop in with a bag of sandwiches from Buggy’s, the hot mustard Barry used to adore. Only now Barry never ate a bite. Dose sat on the couch with him, trying to know his father, but they’d hardly talk. Just watch TV, Phil Donahue, Mission Impossible, or Sunday afternoons sit and groan at the Jets blowing another tackle.

  Outside the block was dead, no kids at all.

  Henry every once in a while saying yo in a suit and tie.

  Barry putting the sandwich in the refrigerator and twisting the cap off his malt-liquor lunch while the fridge door was open.

  He’d see his father on the street too, on Atlantic, at the Times Plaza Hotel. There Dose would choose not to be seen, just witness, as Barry hung at the entrance waiting for a deal to unfold.

  Later, when Dose had returned inside and been released again, his cycling through Riker’s under way, crackhead days birthing crackhead months birthing crackhead years, years spent on a mission, Arthur Lomb grew too uptight to offer his couch. Arthur would spot Dose coming a mile off on the street and pull his wallet out, stuff a five-spot into his palm for their handclasp when they collided, pity money Dose had become too unproud to refuse. Those days, dropped at Queens Plaza, Dose wouldn’t head back to Gowanus, not to Brooklyn at all. He’d shortcut to Manhattan, Washington Square, seeking cats he recognized, or word of a club or a private affair, and by after-hours be crashing with some woman desperate enough to join his desperate ride, foolish enough not to see where it went: a trail of her pawned possessions, like bread crumbs, pointing to the day of his next arrest.

  The song of returning blurred into a mumble, all you recalled were a few phrases from the chorus: I ain’t never going in the joint again, damn straight!

  Girl, you like to party?

  Later still, near the finish, before he’d found his way to Lady’s apartment in the Gowanus Houses, Dose would begin his time of freedom as he knew it was fated to end: nights at the disused public swimming pool on Thompson Street. There he’d hide and sleep beneath the pool’s platform, in a crawl space through a curled-aside section of Cyclone fence, one no derelicts had c
laimed, likely because John Gotti’s social club was just up the block.

  Nothing but a crackhead and a booster, then. Just boosting day and night, harder work than anyone knew, racking CDs, racking clothes, racking belts and shoes and small electronics, until there weren’t any stores left open to boost from. Then find an all-night restaurant and try to steal tips off the counter.

  Living dawn to dusk, pawn to pipe.

  There was only one rescue possible in those years, and that was arrest. Dose came to yearn for it like a changing of seasons, his chance to quit starving in plain sight. He’d smoke himself to ninety pounds, then eighty, become a scarecrow man sleeping in gutters, and begin to beg for recapture: God’s sake, throw me in Riker’s before I die!

  Invisible in a throng of invisible men, Dose had to step out to get what he needed. Solicit an undercover, or work a routine, the same spot every day, a marathon in the alley behind Tower Records or the doorway of OK Harris Gallery, until someone finally requested the police buff this broken human signature from the urban façade.

  Wherever you wandered in Dinkins’s boroughs, then Giuliani’s, this archipelago city was always changed after your intervals on Riker’s, the exile island.

  Fuck did the graffiti go?