Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Not that Dose spent a lot of time thinking of Dean Street, or of the days before Senior had come to the house, with Barry still in full polymorphous splendor, before things got paranoiac and eerie all over, in the basement and upstairs and out on the street. In those days when it still seemed Barry might resume making music, might fall in with that crowd of funk superheroes.

The four-track the secret machine under the floorboards, not the.45.

In that brief margin between renouncing his Boy Scout uniform and taking up with FMD and Robert Woolfolk, and spurning Dylan Ebdus, or being spurned by him, whichever it was, Dose could still be enticed by the simplest games, stoopball, wallball, skully, boosting skin mags from the newsstand on the triangle at Flatbush and Atlantic, committing each syllable of Sugarhill Gang’s “Eighth Wonder” or Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks” to subvocal memory.

Or lie in a breeze from the backyard window and page through The Inhumans , waiting for their mute leader Black Bolt to open his mouth and bring it all crumbling down, with one shattering doomsday utterance: the bridge, the towers, the schools, all the public concrete Mono and Lee and Dose had tagged with spray paint for future demolition.

When Black Bolt at last sang it would level the city and there’d be only the subway running underneath through its theorem of tunnels, the one true neighborhood.

Dose could lie on his bedspread in the rotten-ailanthus breeze and dream it for hours.

Or, alternately, rush onto the street on the broilingest of days to join in directing, with a tin can open at both ends, a stream from a wrenched hydrant through the window of a passing car. Driver hectically rolling it if he saw what was in store, never fast enough.

But the stories you told yourself-which you pretended to recall as if they’d happened every afternoon of an infinite summer-were really a pocketful of days distorted into legend, another jailhouse exaggeration, like the dimensions of those ballpoint-crosshatched tits or of the purported mountains of blow you once used to enjoy, or how you’d bellowed an avenger’s roar when you squeezed the trigger of a pistol you’d actually brandished in self-pissing terror. How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end.

As for flying, Dose never even glanced at the sky. Flying was a summer within a summer, a whim. So why think of it at all?

In the years between Elmira and Watertown Dose’s life on the street was a shadow, a pale dream between bids.

One release blurred into another, a Twilight Zone recurrence of being dropped by the Riker’s shuttle at Queensboro Plaza. There the bus stopped under the el tracks and the driver doled out subway tokens, one per man, the system’s laconic parting gift. Up on the platform, Dose would wait in the middle of a gaggle of freaked-out felons, each pretending not to be in the company of the others, each with panic in their eyes. The releasees chewed gum frantically, spit, tugged too-tight street clothes over new biceps and pecs, every last one of them as conspicuously ill-armored for this world as lobsters loosed in an open field.

From Queensboro Plaza Dose made his way back. He’d ride the 7 to Grand Central and change for an express to Nevins if he was feeling bold, hoping to see some fresh top-to-bottom work on the trains, hoping to run into someone he knew. On more sheepish days he’d walk the two blocks to Queens Plaza instead, for the G’s slog through Greenpoint, Bed-Stuy, Fort Greene, thirteen subway stops nobody used, an hour in the tunnels to calm your thoughts.

Sing a song of returning: Ya miss me, sucker? Well I’m back!

Back in the New York groove, sure.

On discharge from Elmira Dose aimed, by prearrangement, for Arthur Lomb’s crib on Smith Street. Barry had rented the basement rooms; no question of a homecoming there. His first season of freedom Dose worked for a hippie contractor named Glenray Schurz, replacing window frames in the rotting brownstones, complicit in renovation, making Boerum Hill of Gowanus. Those early days Dose visited Barry at lunchtimes, still covered with plaster dust, his particle mask around his neck. He’d stop in with a bag of sandwiches from Buggy’s, the hot mustard Barry used to adore. Only now Barry never ate a bite. Dose sat on the couch with him, trying to know his father, but they’d hardly talk. Just watch TV, Phil Donahue , Mission Impossible , or Sunday afternoons sit and groan at the Jets blowing another tackle.

Outside the block was dead, no kids at all.

Henry every once in a while saying yo in a suit and tie.

Barry putting the sandwich in the refrigerator and twisting the cap off his malt-liquor lunch while the fridge door was open.

He’d see his father on the street too, on Atlantic, at the Times Plaza Hotel. There Dose would choose not to be seen, just witness, as Barry hung at the entrance waiting for a deal to unfold.

Later, when Dose had returned inside and been released again, his cycling through Riker’s under way, crackhead days birthing crackhead months birthing crackhead years, years spent on a mission , Arthur Lomb grew too uptight to offer his couch. Arthur would spot Dose coming a mile off on the street and pull his wallet out, stuff a five-spot into his palm for their handclasp when they collided, pity money Dose had become too unproud to refuse. Those days, dropped at Queens Plaza, Dose wouldn’t head back to Gowanus, not to Brooklyn at all. He’d shortcut to Manhattan, Washington Square, seeking cats he recognized, or word of a club or a private affair, and by after-hours be crashing with some woman desperate enough to join his desperate ride, foolish enough not to see where it went: a trail of her pawned possessions, like bread crumbs, pointing to the day of his next arrest.

The song of returning blurred into a mumble, all you recalled were a few phrases from the chorus: I ain’t never going in the joint again, damn straight!

Girl, you like to party?

Later still, near the finish, before he’d found his way to Lady’s apartment in the Gowanus Houses, Dose would begin his time of freedom as he knew it was fated to end: nights at the disused public swimming pool on Thompson Street. There he’d hide and sleep beneath the pool’s platform, in a crawl space through a curled-aside section of Cyclone fence, one no derelicts had claimed, likely because John Gotti’s social club was just up the block.

Nothing but a crackhead and a booster, then. Just boosting day and night, harder work than anyone knew, racking CDs, racking clothes, racking belts and shoes and small electronics, until there weren’t any stores left open to boost from. Then find an all-night restaurant and try to steal tips off the counter.

Living dawn to dusk, pawn to pipe.

There was only one rescue possible in those years, and that was arrest. Dose came to yearn for it like a changing of seasons, his chance to quit starving in plain sight. He’d smoke himself to ninety pounds, then eighty, become a scarecrow man sleeping in gutters, and begin to beg for recapture: God’s sake, throw me in Riker’s before I die!

Invisible in a throng of invisible men, Dose had to step out to get what he needed. Solicit an undercover, or work a routine, the same spot every day, a marathon in the alley behind Tower Records or the doorway of OK Harris Gallery, until someone finally requested the police buff this broken human signature from the urban façade.

Wherever you wandered in Dinkins’s boroughs, then Giuliani’s, this archipelago city was always changed after your intervals on Riker’s, the exile island.