Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

The letter was on Camden ’s embossed cream stationery and bore Richard Brodeur’s signature. It explained regretfully that for my violations of the school’s policies on overnight guests and narcotics possession, I was subject to a mandatory one-term leave of absence, followed by a student council hearing. More to the point, really, my scholarship had been suspended because of my failure to sustain a minimum threshold of academic excellence. After a specified period I would be invited to reapply for the scholarship.

The legend of the dealer at Fish House who’d been warned to close up shop wasn’t misleading, not really. Yes, Camden College could, and would, protect itself from the Vermont narcotics squad. It could also protect itself from me and Arthur Lomb. I stuffed the letter into my jeans, eyes cast low to dodge Abraham’s. My father went on clinking saucers and scraping toast, then in a flurry of excitement, read me an obituary of Louis Aragon, French Poet, eighty-five. With that I could have been off, up Nevins to the 4 train, my knapsack loaded with undone homework and photocopied flyers for Stuyvesant bands. Dean Street was intact as I’d left it, the letter in my pocket the only evidence I’d been anywhere else.

The University of California at Berkeley would still have me. That was far enough to suit my mood, a distance from which Vermont receded into that gnarled mass of old states no one on the bright coast could ever be bothered to tell apart. My Camden credits were useless in the transfer, so I began again as a freshman with a clean slate, so-called. More like a clean chip of slate on my shoulder. The school was Camden ’s reverse-an Asian, Mexican, black, and white sea of students, a bayside city in place of Camden ’s evergreen art-school hothouse. At Camden, classes had been ten or twelve around a long oak table, all bantering and debating, all preening and being acknowledged. Here a professor muttered into a microphone on a far-off platform while a stadium of freshmen jotted notes, arms synchronized like assembly-line robots. For the first time in my life I learned to study.

The best thing for miles around was the campus radio station, KALX. The gang of DJs there had been freed by the station’s open format to obsess in any direction they liked, and the results were splendidly motley. Many DJs had been allowed to keep their slots for years past graduation-it was this exception to the usual rule which gave KALX its special depth, the depth of an anarchic family, the members all with nicknames to distinguish their shows: Marshall Stax, Gale Warning, Commander Chris, and Sex For Teens were a few of my favorites. Their charismatic, caustic, and homely voices punctuated the seasonless Berkeley days and nights. In my dorm room, on the twelfth floor of an ugly high-rise, above the sightline of the palm trees which dotted a path to the bay, their voices were my only regular company.

The source was a tiny building on Bowditch Street, white cinder block with the station’s call letters painted in a blue stripe. KALX was iceberglike, mostly submerged-the booths and record collection were in the basement, upstairs just a spare office, desks with rotary telephones, and a waiting room full of thrift-store couches leaking foam through cigarette burns. I visited at the first chance, volunteering to man phones during a fund-raising marathon. My shift was in the earliest hours of the morning, and the DJ looked at me like I was a loser for taking it. He explained the drill: for pledging more than twenty-five dollars a caller could visit the station and claim a T-shirt; for more than fifty I could gift them with one of the lousy records clogging the station’s in box. Through the shift I took fifteen or twenty calls. I listened to the DJ’s voice piped from below as he grudgingly fit the fund drive into his format, but I wasn’t admitted into that basement chapel.

Afterward I asked about becoming a DJ and was given little encouragement. It took a hundred hours of dull volunteer work to get on the list for training. Then the waiting list, for even the meagerest twilight slot on the roster, was usually a year. I’d be trained by other DJs, who’d prefer if I didn’t waste their time-I should be serious, or not bother. KALX was, true to Berkeley ’s ideals, a real volunteer collective, but managed without any Berkeley sanctimony or mysticism, instead with a stoical punk exhaustion. This was March of 1983. By the end of that year I’d claimed a show, from two to six Thursday mornings. I kept the slot for three years. That was a trifle by KALX’s standards, but it was as large a commitment as I’d managed in my new grown-up life.

I called myself Running Crab. If I’d had a vague suspicion that in transferring to Berkeley I’d mimicked Rachel in her long-ago westward dash, now I bitterly joked with myself that she’d be within hearing range of my broadcasts. She could wonder who he was, her phantom double. I played Ian Dury’s “Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3,” a Monty Pythonesque white rap, at the start of every show, and declared it my anthem. But my bitterness, like my playlist, was soon hung out to dry. My show was bad. However many favorite songs I’d thought I had, they looked threadbare after a few repetitions. I was trying to make an impression, to stake a personality, as Matthew Schrafft and I had by wearing Devo on our sleeves.

It was impossible to hide from the fact: those lonely hours before dawn were either void or mirror. I was talking to nobody, or myself. So I began again, in a mode of fumbling and discovery. Before each show I excavated forgotten albums from the station’s musty library, and on-air I stirred my own curiosity, played cuts I’d never heard and always wondered about. What I cared for, when I permitted myself to know it, was doo-wop, rhythm and blues, and soul. Stax and Motown, but also Hi and Excello and King and Kent, the further reaches. Otis Redding and Gladys Knight but also Maxine Brown and Syl Johnson. And groups-I loved harmony groups. I loved the Subtle Distinctions.

I turned myself into a vinyl hawk, scouring record shops for out-of-print LPs, studying them with Talmudic intensity. The music I loved would all be dug out of studio archives and put onto CD within a few years, but then it was still scratchy and moldy and entirely my own. I read Peter Guralnick and Charlie Gillett and Greg Shaw and forgot which opinions were received and which were mine, and then I made them all mine by playing the records, by playing the records, by playing the records-I learned to shut up and play the records. I’d intersperse the music not with my own comments but with readings from the vintage liner notes on the LP jackets, like Richard Robinson’s for Howard Tate’s Get It While You Can :

Yes, Howard is black underground, white folks only admitted by insight. He’s got the true emotion of soul which is only out of sight because you’re not listening with your heart. That’s what Howard and his music are all about: the indifferent earth and the long crawl between breaking day and darkening night.

Who could top that, who would want to try? I’d read a liner note, then play a side at a time. For in KALX’s basement I discovered I had all the time in the world. There I learned that to find one’s art is to kill time dead with a single shot. I felt akin to Abraham. I built a path of two- and three-minute cuts through the night like my father in his cold studio daubing paint on a ladder of film.

The station wasn’t a social place. Staff meetings were gruffly efficient, and the DJs made a hermetic community at best. You might bond with those whose shows bookended your own, literally in passing. But I befriended a group of current and former DJs who played softball together. They called themselves the People’s League. We gathered every Sunday at a place called the Deaf School Field for a ramshackle co-ed game with no balls and strikes, no score kept, and plenty of beer and grilled food. Ten years of lunging at spaldeens with a broomstick had made me a pretty good hitter, though one exclusively capable of line drives up the middle. The other DJs mocked me for my predictability: everything looped over the second baseman’s head.