Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

I became adept at beguiling and mocking the wealthy, right to the point of their tolerance. I cadged, shamed them into floating me meals and haircuts and cartons of Kools, flattered and appalled them by mentioning what they’d already spent years preparing to spend lifetimes never discussing-their money, the trust funds that kept them in BMWs and designer clothes and brunches and dinners at Le Cheval whenever the dining-hall fare didn’t thrill them, the checks which kept coming though there was nothing, really nothing, to purchase in rural Vermont. Except drugs. And drugs were the other way I earned my stripe.

Camden provided us with free beer and movies and contraception and psychotherapy. These were spoken of, joked about freely. But the school provided other things, not named, which were free as well, like a class called Unorthodox Music, run by a benevolent white-haired professor named Dr. Shakti, and widely known to be a guaranteed pass no matter how rarely you attended, or the books and cassettes which could be boosted hand over fist from the campus store because someone had decreed that nobody’s transcript ought to be blemished with accusations-presumably the administration quietly compensated the vendor’s losses. Of course, our parents would have laughed bitterly to hear these things called “free”: the costs were folded into the absurd and famous tuition, our experience made seamless. Camden was so lush with privileges that it was easy to overlook the fact that a handful of us weren’t rich. We all rode in the first-class compartment, even if some of us also swabbed the deck.

As for drugs, the school didn’t actually supply them, but the blind eye they’d turned was understood as another privilege. Dealers like Runyon and Bee operated with abandon. Joints were smoked openly on Commons lawn, and parties at Pelt House were famous for acid punch concocted in an in-house lab. William S. Burroughs was nominated as commencement speaker, and during screenings of Eraserhead or The Man Who Fell to Earth a cloud of smoke rose through the projector beam in the tiny campus auditorium. Though it was considered polite to shut your door while doing a line of coke or meth few bothered to rehang mirrors afterward, and some kept them propped on crates as permanent coffee tables, much like Barrett Rude Junior.

I was a skunk for coke. It was part of my act. Afternoons when we should have been in class or the library Matthew and I played basketball with Runyon and Bee, out at the largely unused court which was carved deep into the woods at the edge of campus, beyond the unused soccer field- Camden was an unathletic place. Runyon and Bee enjoyed the way I tried to juke and fake, all the moves I’d absorbed and never dared attempt in the gymnasiums of my youth. Matthew and I became Runyon and Bee’s adoptees, their mascots. Like them we wore Wayfarer sunglasses on the court, played slack or nonexistent defense, and, between half-court games, snorted and smoked in the pine-carpeted shade at the perimeter of the asphalt. That I couldn’t pay for my share was irritating or endearing to the dealers, depending on their mood, but hardly important. Evenings I hung around Runyon and Bee’s rooms upstairs, and when another student casually drifted by to cop a quarter gram I’d be included in the obligatory tasting. Once I earned my keep by typing a paper Runyon had written on As I Lay Dying ; it was shockingly riddled with grammatical errors. I rewrote it, as I suspect he’d hoped I would, and we got an A together.

Three or four afternoons that autumn, high on something at an uncommonly early hour, and cut loose from whomever I’d partied with, Moira or Matthew or the dealers upstairs, unable to stem whatever it was that surged in me, I went into the woods and flew. I no longer had the costume, and I wasn’t really Aeroman anymore, just a kid from the city uncorked in the woods and venting crazy energy by soaring between branches. That I wasn’t Aeroman was probably why it was possible, after so long, to fly. I’d never flown in Brooklyn, not apart from one spaldeen catch. I’d been physically cowardly, but also too burdened with what I needed Aeroman to accomplish, with notions of heroism and rescue. Here there was no one to rescue from anything, unless it was all of us from ourselves, and a flying eighteen-year-old couldn’t have attempted that. So instead I wandered into the trees east of the End of the World, below the soccer field and the basketball court, screwed Aaron Doily’s ring on my finger, found a high rock to leap from, and rode air. To rise slightly above the campus, to glimpse the stopped clock on the Commons tower from afar, was to attempt to believe in my luck, in my improbable, intoxicating escape from Dean Street. I tried to make the hills real by confronting them alone and head-on, make the branches mine by grazing them with my fingertips. I don’t know if it worked or not. I’ve never been certain I could taste freedom, not for longer than the fading buzz of a line or the duration of a given song. And a song, when you press repeat , rarely sounds the same. Still, white powder, menthol fume, pine breeze-those flying afternoons my nostrils seemed reversed, so I could smell backward to my own minty-fresh brain.

One of those afternoons, having landed, I was startled in my stroll back up through the trees to Commons lawn by Junie Alteck. Junie was a sylphlike Oswald hippie, a durable partyer who could be found decorating Bee’s room late, after others had folded their tents. We suspected Bee slept with her but he’d never admitted it. Runyon liked to call her “Aspect.” She’d been walking alone in the woods. I understood from her expression that I’d been spotted.

“What were you doing?” she said dazedly.

“Performance-art project,” I said.

“Oh.”

“Pretty good, huh?”

“Uh, yeah!”

Cocaine and black slang and headfakes and flying: everything unsafe all my life was safe here, suddenly, and why not. Camden was designed to feel safe. It was in that state of mind, late one evening in the first days of December, that I took the call at the Oswald pay phone, from Arthur Lomb.

Arthur’s story tumbled out in a hurry. The odd entrepreneurial partnership forged between Lomb, Woolfolk, and Rude in the last months before the shooting had survived Mingus’s conviction for voluntary manslaughter, and his sentencing, in October, to ten years at Elmira, a prison upstate. The result was an even odder partnership: Arthur and Robert. They’d taken the money I’d paid for the comic books and the ring, and the rest they’d scraped together and bought their quarter kilogram. Then successfully dealt it. Barry being a primary customer, I also understood. And Arthur and Robert had kept from consuming the profits, held enough in reserve to cop another quarter kee and begin again. Only now they’d fallen out. Robert had come around Arthur’s place with a pair of cohorts from the Gowanus Houses, demanding money, and Arthur’s mother had freaked out and called the police. Now Robert had promised Arthur he would kill him if he didn’t produce a certain sum by a certain time, only Arthur couldn’t go alone to Gowanus to deal the stash, not with Robert’s friends knowing his white face and the stash he’d be carrying; meanwhile Barry had taken a trip over Thanksgiving, to visit a doctor in Philadelphia, and not returned-

I stopped him, not needing to hear more. In fact, it mattered to me that I seem uninterested in the details of that distant morass.

“No Mingus to protect you,” I said, with satisfaction.

In reply came only Arthur’s breathing on the line, and I detected a little phantom of fake-asthmatic seizure in his genuine panic.

“Buy a Greyhound ticket,” I said. “We’ll unload the stuff in a couple of days, no problem. You’ll come back with his money.”