Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

“What do you do?”

I was briefly tempted to claim I was writing a movie for Dreamworks. “I’m a journalist,” I said. “Mostly music stuff.”

“Smart boy.”

“And you? You own this place, or just run it?”

“Why own a restaurant when you can wait tables?”

“Ah.”

“I used to get shifts at Balthazar, but a certain person decided I wasn’t charming anymore, and I got canned.”

“So you moved out here?”

“Christ, I haven’t been able to afford Manhattan for years. I can barely hack Boerum Hill.”

Of course. From my lousy vantage I’d seen the wealth at Camden as an edifice, seamless, without variations. But it wasn’t. It was a milieu, a money style, sustained even in cases where money itself was gone. Euclid’s parents’ checks were always late, I remembered now.

“This neighborhood’s gotten pretty swanky,” I said, still playing possum.

“I hate it, it’s too trendy. In just like six months everybody came and spoiled it. Smith Street just got listed in some German tourist book as ‘the new Williamsburg.’ They’re like real estate vampires .”

“You’re part of the old guard around here.”

“I’m old , anyhow. Thanks for noticing.”

“This place looks like it opened yesterday.”

“This place is a fucking fake ,” he stage-whispered. Since I’d ordered nothing the chef had wandered from the back and taken Euclid’s place at the bar, but Euclid wasn’t really concerned about being heard by the chef. “The owner’s the landlord,” he explained. “He owns the whole block. He saw his tenants were all getting two stars from Eric Asimov in the Times and thought he’d make a killing with his low overhead. He’s just some fat local fuck. Everybody in this community despises him.”

By community I understood Euclid meant the true foodies, chefs who’d risked their careers to open doors in this hinterland.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” he asked.

“Meeting an old friend. He’s late.”

Perhaps Euclid saw some expression cross my face, for now he remembered. “You’re from Brooklyn, aren’t you?”

“Right around here.” I did feel weirdly bitter, but it was hardly Euclid’s fault. My possessive feelings were silly. I saw meanings encoded everywhere on these streets, like the DMD and FMD tags still visible where they’d been sprayed twenty years before. I saw the changes here in terms of Rachel’s war on the notion of gentrification, which had been conducted mostly in the battlefield of my skull. I walked an invisible map of incidents, shakedowns, hurled eggs, pizza muggings, my own stations of the cross. But imagining those terms should be relevant to the hipsters who’d colonized this place was like imagining that “Play That Funky Music” heard on a taxicab’s radio was a message of guilt and shame intended for my ears. No, Isabel Vendle was dead and forgotten, and Rachel was gone. Euclid’s Boerum Hill was the real one. The fact that I could see Gowanus glinting under the veneer wasn’t important, wasn’t anything more than interesting.

“How’s Karen Rothenberg?” I asked, shifting to safer ground.

Euclid goggled. “She quit calling when she came back from Minneapolis-rehab. Now she’s got this custom hat shop on Ludlow Street. They look like hemorrhoids, if you ask me. But Dashiell Marks-you remember Dashiell?”

I lied and said I did.

“Dashiell got Karen’s hats listed on the Best Bets page of New York magazine, so everything’s hunky-dory.”

Euclid liked reminiscing. He lit the next cigarette from the butt of the last and told me of other classmates, rehearsing grievances which seemed as fresh as if he’d left Vermont yesterday. In the gush of names I learned that Junie Alteck art-directed Cypress Hill and Redman videos, Bee Prudhomme had been knifed to death by a lover in a ski chalet outside Helsinki, and Moira Hogarth was a performance artist known for being censured by a Midwestern senator.

Then Euclid began stubbing his cigarette and waving off the smoke and standing from the table, all at the same time. Arthur Lomb had come through the door, and now I understood why out of the host of Smith Street eateries Arthur had picked Berlin for our meeting. It was like him to underplay and show off at the same time. Arthur wasn’t so much fat as leadenly fleshy, along the coke-bottle lines of his growth spurt at seventeen. Still, I could see why, without anything to suggest a connection to that distant week of cocaine trafficking in Vermont, Euclid hadn’t recognized my old friend as his loathsome employer.

The ashtray palmed unconvincingly away, Euclid scuttled into the back, and I saw what ten or fifteen years of waiting tables had done to the fragile homosexual prince I’d been so intimidated by, that first year of college. At Camden Euclid hadn’t asked to be liked, but he’d yearned to be pitied. I’d never managed before now.

Chunky, bearded Arthur Lomb scowled at Euclid’s retreating back, then brushed real and imaginary ashes from Euclid’s place at my table, and sat.

“You don’t want to nosh? It’s on me.”

“I heard it’s your place.”

“Right, I’m bleeding cash all over the place. What’s a little more?”

“I’m good, I want to hit the road.” My rental car was sitting on Dean Street. I was anxious on behalf of its disc player.

I’d invited Arthur to drive up to the Watertown prison with me, to visit Mingus. He’d declined. He’d already visited, earlier in the summer. But he wanted to see me, and proposed we drop in on Junior together. That was our mission this morning, and now that I’d put aside the distraction of Euclid I was impatient to have it done.

“Okay, after you,” said Arthur. “Coffee’s on my tab, kids,” he shouted into the back.

I took my package and we stepped together onto Smith, the block Euclid claimed all belonged to Arthur: a smashed barbershop with an old glass pole, a botanica, window full of votive candles and folk art, with ghetto apartments above it, and four or five of the understated, sexy little bistros Berlin was meant to undercut. The aesthetic was awfully precise, cute serifs hand-painted on tiny signs or directly onto the discreetly curtained windows. In acts of kitsch or voodoo they’d appropriated local-historical monikers: Breuklyn, Schermerhorn, Pierrepont. One called itself the Gowanus Tart Works, exhuming the name Isabel Vendle had worked so hard to bury.

“Fuck you talking to my faggot waiter for?”

Arthur wore a Yankees cap. I still hadn’t forgiven him his flip-flop from Mets fandom when we were twelve. That betrayal stood, in my mind, for Arthur’s easy adaptation to black style, his glomming onto Mingus Rude. The same inhibition that stuck me to the losing Mets had barred me from the minstrelry which would have allowed me to follow Mingus where he was going.

It was a form of autism, a failure at social mimicry, that had kept me from the adaptations which made Arthur more Brooklyn than me, in the end. I’d had to hide in books, Manhattanize, depart. So it only followed that Arthur Lomb would still be here, gobbling up Smith Street’s commercial real estate just in time to cash in on the yuppie entrepreneurs, a fat local fuck .

It was too much trouble to blow Arthur’s mind making him recall that the faggot waiter had once fondled his then skinny, narcotized ass in a dorm stairwell in Vermont. Lomb and Barnes could recover their small history, or not, without my help. I had no difficulty keeping secrets from Arthur. I’d done it my whole life, in the case of the ring.

I said, “He told me you own the block.”

“I’ve got five buildings, sure. You believe what they tell you, I’m Smith’s Don Corleone.”