The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

What was happening when a motherfucker can’t even light up a joint on Eighth Street?

  Not to call yourself a zombie. But you did stalk an unreal city.

  Windsor Weather Stripping.

  It was Arthur who set Dose up with Glenray Schurz, brought Dose around to the hippie commune on Pacific, one of the last left in the neighborhood now. Schurz was bearded, pinwheel-eyed, but in overalls and no shirt showed only gristle and vein, a vegetarian strongman. Schurz had been a furniture builder, Utopian Woodstock style. Then, coming to Brooklyn, a cabinetmaker, taking kitchen jobs in the neighboring brownstones. Only it was too much hassle finally, the ceaseless answering to housewives’ magazine fantasies. Schurz hit on a simpler life: applying Windsor Weather Stripping to the air-leaky sashes of the decaying row-house windows, the double-hung frames which dated to the 1860s and 1880s—work as repetitive as changing tires, but the renovators were at his mercy. The shade of Isabel Vendle could lure them to the neighborhood, beguile them into perilous mortgages, but no Vendleghost nor anybody else would be there to soothe them after the first winter’s Brooklyn Union Gas bills came in: Yikes! Then they’d sheepishly ask around and be told: Windsor Weather Stripping. There’s this carpenter guy on Pacific who’ll lay it in, forty dollars a window plus materials, pays for itself in six months. He’s a bit seedy and a bit creepy but —

  So Dose became Schurz’s assistant. Twice a week they’d gather a load at the mom-and-pop factory down Fourth Avenue that manufactured the zinc linings. Quick run next to Brook Lumber for fresh bullnose molding to replace the bad strips they’d surely find on the job. Then in, often under the flitty eyes of a woman alone at the house, her husband having struck the deal—she likely thinking Did he have to bring an ahem? Should I hide my purse? —to set up their little industrial operation. First unhang the window, lay sash weights and pulleys to one side. Then cut zinc to fit the frame. Router grooves in top and bottom sashes. Line zinc into the header and the sill while the sashes were free. Then the tricky part, which if a renovator attempted himself always proved their dependence on Schurz’s expertise: rehanging those ancient sash weights into the air pockets concealed at each side of the frame, so the windows were balanced on their pulleys. Pity the soul who let a weight slip from his fingers to thud to the bottom of the pocket. They’d have to demolish a molding to fish it free again.

  Oriented correctly, the two sashes sealed, the zinc airtight at the seam. On a good day they’d get through eight frames. Dose detected Schurz’s secret satisfaction at the job well done, though Schurz did nothing but sneer at the work as corrupt and at those who’d hired him as bourgeois pigs.

  Glenray’s communal housemates were ceding their neighborhood to the yuppies as much as the blacks and PRs. In a gentrification some white people—say Glenray, or Abraham Ebdus, or Arthur’s mom—might only bridge to another kind. Some of the latter of whom were not above niggerfying the former.

  Sometimes one of their clientele recognized Dose and just noted it with their eyebrows. Life’s eternal lesson: people return in new guises.

  You learned it and taught it at the same time.

  One day Dose passed Abraham Ebdus on the street and looked away.

  On a few occasions, busting through hundred-year-old plaster and lattice Glenray and Dose discovered stashes of browned newspapers left by long-dead laborers, baseball scores and ship sinkings from the century’s start. Once they found a sealed bottle of brandy tucked deep in a wall, its label so dark it was only readable like a photographic negative. On their break they sat on the building’s stoop and swapped the dust-shouldered bottle like it was Night Train. The stuff was sweet and thick and moldy, mustified by time.

  Elsewhere they’d find just pencil marks, names and dates left by the workers who preceded them, Jno. Willson 2.16.09. Then Dose would take Glenray’s carpenter’s pencil and tag Dose 1987, a little enigma to send down history’s line before they sealed the wall.

  On other breaks Dose and Glenray climbed fire escapes to rooftops, and smoked the commune’s petty-cash sinsemilla. They’d gaze out past Wyckoff Gardens, past the F-train platform where it camelbacked over the canal, gaze out toward Coney and the alleged ocean. Dose never spoke of knowing the scheme of streets from the air.

  Glenray said: “That Ulano factory is giving us all testicle cancer. If someday it burns down in the dead of night you’ll know it was me.”

  Glenray said: “I’d like to build a yurt on top of the Brooklyn House of Detention.”

  Glenray said: “Your old man opened for the Stones? Your old man’s a fucking god, man.”

  Glenray said: “Once I was on mescaline and I whacked off into a liverwurst sandwich, just because I read about it in a book.”

  And one day Glenray said: “It’s weird, I’ve got a million connections for brown leafy drugs but none at all for white powdery drugs, which I am totally in the mood for right now. Any chance you could help me with that, Mingus?”

  On a mission.

  All he ever got out of recovery—Alcoholics Anonymous, group therapy at Riker’s—was a name for what it felt like when he was on the street and pushing toward the next high: Dose was on a mission. The term encompassed the thousand-and-one things he’d find himself doing, his crafty diversity of scuffles and scams, scalping tickets at the Garden, racking art books at St. Marks and shifting them at the Strand, pawning some girl’s hair dryer or clock, or just slumping around Washington Square watching for some dealer he knew enough to persuade to allow him to shift some rock in return for a rock commission. These might seem to be many activities but were all only one thing, Dose on a mission: intent, monomaniacal, autistic in craving.

  His weirdest brush with recovery wasn’t either in the city or inside, but in Hudson, a dying industrial river town upstate, at a program called NewGap. One January night he’d taken refuge from subzero in a city shelter where a social-services worker was scouting. Dose began talking with her for the cup of coffee, and found himself inking block letters on a form. Next thing he knew he was whisked on a bus to the crumbling-brick facility, a refitted TB asylum. The NewGap regimen consisted of some unholy blend of Gordon Liddy fascism and Werner Erhard brainwash, its inductees reconfigured at every level of the social self in order to break self-loathing habituation. Dose and the other “freshmen” were denied the use of speech without written permission, through an elaborate system of note-scribbling and hand-raising, a vast twenty-four-seven parlor game with drill sergeants barking fury at the slightest mistake.

  Dose played the game for two weeks. The day he went AWOL he found his way to Hudson’s crackhouse within an hour of hitting the streets, radar working fine after building up his strength on NewGap meals. Invariably, those years, any town had its own microcosmic crackidemic: dealers, whores, every element that the rest of the country righteously decried as big-city symptoms were right up their armpit anywhere you troubled to look.

  Indeed, it was in Hudson where Dose met with what he’d always consider his all-time-low glimpse of degradation. In the city proper it was not unknown to hear a dealer humiliate a desperate crackhead, one pleading for free rock: Yo, you want a rock you could suck my dick for it. If it was a cracked-out woman, the dealer might or might not be for real; if it was a man, it was for the laugh, to see the flicker of shame in the human skeleton before giving the charity or kicking him out. Nevertheless, however much debasement might be the real language of the encounter, garbing it in sex kept the players in that drama above a certain threshold, in the realm of greed, desire, human things. Dose understood this when he saw what he saw in Hudson: how much lower one human being could wish to take another.

  “You need a rock, man?” the Hudson dealer had told the crackhead in question. “See that roach over there?”

  Dose saw it, bigger than a roach in fact. A doleful waterbug, shining yellow-brown under a shattered sink. Dose saw the begging crackhead see it too.

  “Eat that bug, I give it to you.”

  The skeleton had reached for th
e waterbug, nabbed it, gulped. And been given his hit, to the cackling enjoyment of the dealer and others. Dose only turned his eye, bewildered at what had so suddenly been flayed from all their souls. They were each dead there in that paint-peeling room, and only Dose knew.

  When Hudson cops caught Dose in a sweep they didn’t arrest him, only put him on a Greyhound back to the city. A month or two later, after his next city arrest, Dose sat on a Riker’s bunk and told the Hudson story. Incredibly, one of his listeners offered triangulation. They’d seen the same once, the eat-a-bug shtick, on a jaunt down in Florida.

  All agreed: such grim hick shit would never go over here. New Yorkers had too much self-respect for that.

  Lady’s.

  That night in June in Barry’s front room was the first and only time Dose ever saw Lady out of her own crib. You’d be stretching to call it a party: Dose and his father, plus Horatio, Lady, and some skinny crabby other girl who struggled to keep her head up.

  Dose had full-circled with Barry, to sharing the pipe.

  If crackheads were an extended family, as hateful with one another as true relations, why exclude his father?

  Smoke scribbled in the air between them, like exhausted language, Senior’s unmentioned name etched in fume.

  Once in a blue moon Dose brushed dust off an album jacket and placed the tonearm over a groove Barry hadn’t aired in ten years—Esther Phillips, Donny Hathaway—treasures moldering in disuse. The evening when Dose met her, though, there in the half-light of Barrett Rude Junior’s parlor sarcophagus, Lady had already been at the old vinyl and made a selection— Curtis Live, “Stare and Stare,” “Stone Junkie,” Mayfield laughing in falsetto at his drummer’s stuttering breaks.

  Lady featured the hugest capacity Dose had seen. He never knew anyone could smoke more rock than him, let alone a woman. She partied three, four days in a row, hardly nodded, and never more so than that first time, beginning after Barry kicked them out, four in the morning. Horatio and the floppy girl went up Nevins to the IRT, and Lady led Dose to her crib in the Gowanus Houses, a public housing apartment turned crack den.

  Her true name was Veronica Worrell, though he never heard it from her lips. She offered what everyone called her: Lady. The name encoded her formal airs, a tinge of severity. She was nobody’s girl and nobody’s mother, but everyone’s Lady, well known as such.

  If walking down Dean with her that night Dose might have mistaken what kind of pickup she’d made, what it was Lady had spotted in his eyes, seeing her crib dispelled any uncertainty. Her door opened to the Hoyt Street face of the projects, in sight of traffic, cars rolling by with the booming systems, backbeat rattling windows, the cops cruising too, ominously hushed in their Giuliani Task Force vans. Lady kept a lookout, a crackhead schooled in two hand signals, all they could keep track of: fist for a white man, or an unfamiliar black, a maybe-cop, open hand for a recognized customer or any obvious pipehead, too young or skeletal to be a threat.

  He didn’t know it but Dose had come in for his last mission, homing like a pigeon.

  The place was a factory geared for one purpose, support of Lady’s own habit. The volume of enterprise out of a three-bedroom public unit was staggering, a feat to make Henry Ford or Andy Warhol envious. Any space was rentable, not only bedrooms to girls for turning tricks, kitchen to dealers cutting up their shit, but closets for stashing quantities in transit, corridors and couches for slumping against. You might not sleep anymore—many didn’t. Dose couldn’t recall authentic sleep by the end of two months at Lady’s. But if you didn’t sleep you nodded, if you didn’t nod you rested with your eyes open. At Lady’s, you paid to rest.

  Dose paid the only way he could, by bringing people back to Lady’s crib. If they bought product he was settling his debt. This was Lady’s specialty, her adding-machine brain. Even as she smoked more than he thought a human body could tolerate, Dose never knew her to drop a digit in her calculations. She’d tell him when he was ahead enough to earn a rock. Or more, ahead enough to be allowed to pitch some rock himself. He remade himself as an entrepreneur four or five times in his months under Lady, taking vials of product onto Hoyt or up to Fulton, to the Albee Square Mall, or just into the courtyard in the project’s interior. Then he’d fail, smoke it all, not be able to afford another vial, and when he’d nod he’d be in debt for the extent of wall he took up. It was a tough system, but fair. Nothing could be held against Lady, she was so obviously looking out for her people, the pipeheads. Nobody stole your shoes or your clothes when you closed your eyes at Lady’s.

  This was the true love affair, Dose misunderstood no longer. Lady saw into his soul and found an appetite for rock there, all the way down to the bottom.

  That was his last summer, a long nod against her corridor wall. And smoking until by arrest he was thinner than he’d ever been, maybe seventy pounds light.

  Let’s get small, everybody get small.

  That same June, on Smith Street, one measly block away, Sans Famille, the first of the area’s upscale French restaurants, opened its doors. The bistro drew a star from the Times, the first tick of Smith’s gentrification time bomb, precursor to the cafés and boutiques which would leverage out botanicas and social clubs, precursor to Arthur Lomb’s counterfeit Berlin.

  Sans Famille’s busboys and dishwashers weren’t unwitting of the action on Hoyt. More than a few made their way to Lady’s threshold on their city-regulated ten-minute breaks.

  Once he proved himself untrustworthy for taking vials on the street, Dose accepted his obvious fate, the slot for which Lady might have pegged him the moment they met. He ran her door. Not the lookout window, he’d not plummeted to that ignoramus level. He was a dealer still, just one trusted to go no farther than his hand could reach through the security-chained door. Money in and product out, Dose touched it all as it passed and kept barely anything.

  He unchained the door for the cops when they came. They came just in time. He was going to die if he kept Lady’s pace.

  The gun was nobody’s in particular, hidden in a drawer, but it stuck to him. Dose had to be philosophical. It was in the nature of an arrest situation that a floating gun attached to the individual bearing a manslaughter rap.

  He’d been six months at Riker’s and was up to a hundred and thirty pounds when he pled out and was moved upstate to Auburn, then Watertown.

  Auburn.

  His first tour, Dose had been prodigal, an advance man for a generation destined inside. Now it wasn’t just Riker’s which brimmed with faces from the neighborhood or the yards. It was the big upstate houses like Auburn, too, as though the system was inadvertently reassembling the city and its factions here, 1977 trapped in the amber of incarceration. Writers were reunited with their crews, none having seen each other since back in the day, since they’d spun from teenage affiliations into lives more burdened and serious. Yet those adult lives seemed stripped away by their failure. What remained were thirty-year-old teenagers joshing in prison: Ho, shit, man, it’s you! This my boy Pietro, from DMD! Or: Damn, I used to see your shit on the 6 line, you were with Rolling Thunder Crew, right?

  Lines of enmity dissolved. Any connection was a good one, here in the woods. Dose met a couple of boys from a once-upon-a-time-terrifying Coney Island gang. Some summer ago, Dose and two others from FMD had gotten on the Coney crew’s bad side by making a dumb mistake: they’d tagged inside a bunch of apparently clean D-train cars in a yard’s dim moonlight, using black ink from heavy-flowing fat mops. When the trains ran the next day, Dose and his mates saw with horror what moonlight hadn’t revealed: the D-train interiors had already been covered with the Coney Island crew’s clunky tags in pink ink. Black now overlapped the pink everywhere. How to explain the pink hadn’t even been visible ? Impossible. They thought Dose had deliberately backgrounded them. Dose spent that summer watching over his shoulder for the Coney gang, marked as prey.

  Now it was all hunky-dory, good for a laugh. Dose was one of the famous names, so the Coney c
rew recalled the incident as evidence they’d once been significant writers.

  Dose was ambulatory history, and brothers wished to claim some for themselves.

  “Yo, Dog, you remember me? I wrote Kansur 82, you used to background me all the time.”

  “Sure, sure, I remember you,” Dose would say, if he was in a generous mood.

  Other times he’d withhold the glory of being linked to his name, just to see their frustration: “Why would I trouble to background you, blood? What was you to me?”

  “I was a toy, I know—you was right to go over my tags.”

  Dose would deny it, tormenting their minds: “You claiming you got up somewhere before me?”

  “You used to go over me!” the younger writer would insist.

  “Nah, man. You used to go under me.”

  Surgery.

  Of course it would be Horatio, clownier than ever, who turned up in Auburn’s visitor’s room talking around the subject, not saying what he meant. Barry was illing—well, Dose knew that already. No, truly illing, like in the Long Island College emergency room a couple of times. His father needed Dose now, in some way Horatio wouldn’t explain. Dose agreed without understanding what he’d agreed to.

  A week later he was escorted to Auburn’s infirmary for consultation with a surgeon who acted like Doolittle among the savages, brow furrowed in reproach even as he spoke at moron rpm. Did Dose grasp what he was offering? Yes, sure, though he hadn’t until then. There was no certainty it would work, Doolittle warned. Tests were required, to check the match. His and his father’s candidacy had to be examined. Dose, old hand in passivity by now, submitted to three weeks of fluid donations, spinal, bile, and shit. The results: Dose was a hundredth-percentile shoe-in to rescue his father’s putrefying blood.

  Doolittle, chafing at being instrument of a back-channel exception, prison strings pulled by Andre Deehorn and others in the Philly scene, advised Dose against the procedure. The kidney could fail within five to ten years—that was a successful outcome.