Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

The bird stared. It didn’t seem entirely surprised I’d become visible. I suppose it had proved my existence by other means. It hopped a short distance, examined me again. Then-satisfied? stupefied? pissed off?-it turned, and we each walked, not flew, from the site of the encounter.

The first CDs came in long boxes, to stack in the bins left behind by the vinyl CDs had displaced. The great first wave of box sets were disguised as vinyl too: discs or cassettes, either might lurk in packaging which mimicked a carton of LPs. It might even be LPs-you read the fine print to know. Rick Rubin put guitars in a rap, and MTV put the rap on television. His group, Run DMC, found their best success with a cover of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” only Aerosmith was brought in for the chorus, as rappers didn’t sing. Cocaine bifurcated, and blacks were awarded crack, beneficiary of the best marketing campaign since-LSD? The Ayatollah Khomeini? In Berkeley, deep in the decade of Reagan, students at Malcolm X Elementary took their lunch hour in Ho Chi Minh Park.

My epic project that year, never to be completed, was something called Liner Notes: The Box Set . The container would be one of those LP-square boxes so beloved by collectors like myself. Inside, loose sheets bearing the greatest liner notes of all time, in fine reproductions of the original designs. They’d include chestnuts by Samuel Charters, Nat Hentoff, Ralph Gleason, and Andrew Loog Oldham, as well as notes written by musicians themselves: John Fahey, Donald Fagen, Bill Evans. Landmarks like Paul Nelson on the Velvets Live 69/70 , Greil Marcus on The Basement Tapes , Lester Bangs on the Godz. Joe Strummer on Lee Dorsey, Kris Kristofferson on Steve Goodman, Dylan on Eric Von Schmidt. James Baldwin on James Brown, LeRoi Jones on Coltrane, Hubert Humphrey on Tommy James and the Shondells. The Shaggs’ father on the Shaggs, Charles Mingus’s psychiatrist on The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady . Above all, the uncanny found poetry of the endorsements I’d been reading aloud over the KALX airwaves, like Deanie Parker’s for Albert King:

If you’ve ever been hurt by your main squeeze, deceived by your best friend, or down to your last dime and ready to call it quits, Albert King has the solution if you have the time to listen. Maybe you’re just curious… he’ll get through to you… put Albert on your turntable… put your needle in the groove… now drown yourself in the… blues.

That it might be regarded as a disappointment to find not a single note of actual music inside Liner Notes: The Box Set never dawned on me. I can’t say why, exactly, except that a wish to place the writing on a par with the music was the purloined letter of intent at the project’s center. People like to be fooled, and they like to fool themselves. I was twenty-three, and believed to my heart that music fandom needed Liner Notes: The Box Set . Similarly, I persuaded myself that the crack epidemic, then reaching its local pitch in Oakland and Emeryville, was a job for Aeroman.

I went where scared me the most. That was a bar on Shattuck Avenue near Sixtieth Street, called Bosun’s Locker, a place where everyone knew it was easy to score and an excellent place not to be caught dead if you were white. Edgy groups of young black men could be seen milling on the sidewalks there, in a way which reminded me, when I’d glimpsed it from a passing bus, of the corners near the Wyckoff Gardens or Gowanus Houses, back in Brooklyn. Drive-by shootings were now a famous problem in the poorer suburbs of the Bay Area, Richmond, and El Cerrito, but I was a typical New York expatriate, still without a driver’s license, and the suburbs surrounding Berkeley on three sides felt impossibly remote. Besides, I found it hard to envision how an invisible man would halt a drive-by shooting. He’d need an invisible car. I went to the place I could walk to that scared me the most, and that was the big gloomy pool joint on Shattuck.

I walked in visible at seven on a Tuesday night, fingering the ring in my pocket. I was sure I could get myself mugged-by now I was sure of nothing so much as that. And sure that with the ring I could free myself of a mugging as well. But contriving to rescue the same old whiteboy wasn’t right. Aeroman’s vanity required somebody to protect. Maybe in some recess of my mind it was a Rude, Mingus or Barrett Junior, someone I’d abandoned. But maybe Rachel too. For Mingus had abandoned me as I’d abandoned him, and I think I had the two, abandoning and being abandoned, confused. This was the fog I carried with me into Bosun’s Locker, and the reason my invisible adventure was destined to be so foggy. But I wasn’t invisible, yet.

Every head turned, though that was only four. The muttonchopped bartender, large enough to be his own bouncer, two fiftyish pool shooters weighing angles on the farthest of three tables, and a boy, or man-he was my age, and I believed I was a man, then-seated at the bar’s corner. He wore a tan suede-front cardigan under a wool coat, and a Kangol cap, the costume of a player. I was the only white face. Nobody spoke, or anyway nothing I could make out over the jukebox cut, the Blue Notes, Teddy Pendergrass intoning Bad luck, that’s what you got -

“Help you?”

“Anchor Steam, please.”

“Bud, Miller, Heineken.”

“Okay, uh, Heineken.”

My bar companion had been staring, so I raised my bottle before I sipped from it. There were five stools between us. He turned his head to the window as if sickened, and nodded to the music, not me.

I went over. “Hey-”

“Yo, don’t be steppin’ up on me.”

“I just wanted to ask-”

“I’m only saying don’t be steppin’ up, shock a brother like that.”

“Can I ask-”

“Nah, man, just get away from me.”

I went back to my seat. A minute later he slid over to me. “What you wanna ax me, man?”

“I’m looking to get high,” I said.

He wrinkled his nose. “Fuck you on about, man?”

The word crack felt too on the nose. Newsweek and 60 Minutes were those days likening crack to the plagues of the Middle Ages. “I want to freebase,” I said. “I’m looking to score some rock.”

“Yo, shut the fuck up. The fuck you think I could help you score some rock ?”

“Sorry.”

“You lookin’ for trouble, man?”

Well, I was, wasn’t I? This was the essential point. In this moment he’d seen me clearly.

“No,” I said.

“You wouldn’t come around here if you wasn’t looking for trouble.” But he grinned. “Listen, man, feebase and rock two diffint things entily.” Despite feebase and diffint and entily , he genuinely wanted me to understand.

“Sorry,” I said again.

He looked to see who might be watching, then offered a handclasp. I took it.

“What your name?”

“ Dee,” I said.

Again he glanced around the room. Nobody was in earshot, bartender giving berth, pool shooters oblivious. “You could just call me OJJJ.” Oh-Jay-Jay-Jay . I supposed OJ and OJJ had been spoken for, in OJJJ’s neck of the woods.

“You cool?” he asked me. “You my boy?”

“Sure.” I wondered if he thought I was a cop, and if so, why he didn’t ask that.

“You wanna get high?”

“I’ve got money.”

He winced, leaned in closer. “Dang, man, shut up. You don’t need money you want OJJJ get you high. Just ax.”

“Okay.”

“Aight.” We clasped hands again. OJJJ fought the urge to glance over his shoulder at the window every few seconds, lost, won, lost again. Meanwhile, I caught the bartender checking us out, squinting his distrust. My imagination wrote a voice-over: What’s OJJJ doing with that white boy? I was certain anyone here was a regular. And that anyone would audition me for cop. In fact, according to what I soon read in the Oakland Tribune , the bartender had never seen OJJJ before in his life and never wondered for a moment if I was a cop. That wasn’t how I struck anyone, apparently.