Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Fuck did the graffiti go?

What was happening when a motherfucker can’t even light up a joint on Eighth Street?

Not to call yourself a zombie. But you did stalk an unreal city.

Windsor Weather Stripping.

It was Arthur who set Dose up with Glenray Schurz, brought Dose around to the hippie commune on Pacific, one of the last left in the neighborhood now. Schurz was bearded, pinwheel-eyed, but in overalls and no shirt showed only gristle and vein, a vegetarian strongman. Schurz had been a furniture builder, Utopian Woodstock style. Then, coming to Brooklyn, a cabinetmaker, taking kitchen jobs in the neighboring brownstones. Only it was too much hassle finally, the ceaseless answering to housewives’ magazine fantasies. Schurz hit on a simpler life: applying Windsor Weather Stripping to the air-leaky sashes of the decaying row-house windows, the double-hung frames which dated to the 1860s and 1880s-work as repetitive as changing tires, but the renovators were at his mercy. The shade of Isabel Vendle could lure them to the neighborhood, beguile them into perilous mortgages, but no Vendleghost nor anybody else would be there to soothe them after the first winter’s Brooklyn Union Gas bills came in: Yikes! Then they’d sheepishly ask around and be told: Windsor Weather Stripping. There’s this carpenter guy on Pacific who’ll lay it in, forty dollars a window plus materials, pays for itself in six months. He’s a bit seedy and a bit creepy but -

So Dose became Schurz’s assistant. Twice a week they’d gather a load at the mom-and-pop factory down Fourth Avenue that manufactured the zinc linings. Quick run next to Brook Lumber for fresh bullnose molding to replace the bad strips they’d surely find on the job. Then in, often under the flitty eyes of a woman alone at the house, her husband having struck the deal-she likely thinking Did he have to bring an ahem? Should I hide my purse? -to set up their little industrial operation. First unhang the window, lay sash weights and pulleys to one side. Then cut zinc to fit the frame. Router grooves in top and bottom sashes. Line zinc into the header and the sill while the sashes were free. Then the tricky part, which if a renovator attempted himself always proved their dependence on Schurz’s expertise: rehanging those ancient sash weights into the air pockets concealed at each side of the frame, so the windows were balanced on their pulleys. Pity the soul who let a weight slip from his fingers to thud to the bottom of the pocket. They’d have to demolish a molding to fish it free again.

Oriented correctly, the two sashes sealed, the zinc airtight at the seam. On a good day they’d get through eight frames. Dose detected Schurz’s secret satisfaction at the job well done, though Schurz did nothing but sneer at the work as corrupt and at those who’d hired him as bourgeois pigs.

Glenray’s communal housemates were ceding their neighborhood to the yuppies as much as the blacks and PRs. In a gentrification some white people-say Glenray, or Abraham Ebdus, or Arthur’s mom-might only bridge to another kind. Some of the latter of whom were not above niggerfying the former.

Sometimes one of their clientele recognized Dose and just noted it with their eyebrows. Life’s eternal lesson: people return in new guises.

You learned it and taught it at the same time.

One day Dose passed Abraham Ebdus on the street and looked away.

On a few occasions, busting through hundred-year-old plaster and lattice Glenray and Dose discovered stashes of browned newspapers left by long-dead laborers, baseball scores and ship sinkings from the century’s start. Once they found a sealed bottle of brandy tucked deep in a wall, its label so dark it was only readable like a photographic negative. On their break they sat on the building’s stoop and swapped the dust-shouldered bottle like it was Night Train. The stuff was sweet and thick and moldy, mustified by time.

Elsewhere they’d find just pencil marks, names and dates left by the workers who preceded them, Jno. Willson 2.16.09 . Then Dose would take Glenray’s carpenter’s pencil and tag Dose 1987, a little enigma to send down history’s line before they sealed the wall.

On other breaks Dose and Glenray climbed fire escapes to rooftops, and smoked the commune’s petty-cash sinsemilla. They’d gaze out past Wyckoff Gardens, past the F-train platform where it camelbacked over the canal, gaze out toward Coney and the alleged ocean. Dose never spoke of knowing the scheme of streets from the air.

Glenray said: “That Ulano factory is giving us all testicle cancer. If someday it burns down in the dead of night you’ll know it was me.”

Glenray said: “I’d like to build a yurt on top of the Brooklyn House of Detention.”

Glenray said: “Your old man opened for the Stones? Your old man’s a fucking god, man.”

Glenray said: “Once I was on mescaline and I whacked off into a liverwurst sandwich, just because I read about it in a book.”

And one day Glenray said: “It’s weird, I’ve got a million connections for brown leafy drugs but none at all for white powdery drugs, which I am totally in the mood for right now. Any chance you could help me with that, Mingus?”

On a mission.

All he ever got out of recovery-Alcoholics Anonymous, group therapy at Riker’s-was a name for what it felt like when he was on the street and pushing toward the next high: Dose was on a mission . The term encompassed the thousand-and-one things he’d find himself doing, his crafty diversity of scuffles and scams, scalping tickets at the Garden, racking art books at St. Marks and shifting them at the Strand, pawning some girl’s hair dryer or clock, or just slumping around Washington Square watching for some dealer he knew enough to persuade to allow him to shift some rock in return for a rock commission. These might seem to be many activities but were all only one thing, Dose on a mission: intent, monomaniacal, autistic in craving.

His weirdest brush with recovery wasn’t either in the city or inside, but in Hudson, a dying industrial river town upstate, at a program called NewGap. One January night he’d taken refuge from subzero in a city shelter where a social-services worker was scouting. Dose began talking with her for the cup of coffee, and found himself inking block letters on a form. Next thing he knew he was whisked on a bus to the crumbling-brick facility, a refitted TB asylum. The NewGap regimen consisted of some unholy blend of Gordon Liddy fascism and Werner Erhard brainwash, its inductees reconfigured at every level of the social self in order to break self-loathing habituation. Dose and the other “freshmen” were denied the use of speech without written permission, through an elaborate system of note-scribbling and hand-raising, a vast twenty-four-seven parlor game with drill sergeants barking fury at the slightest mistake.

Dose played the game for two weeks. The day he went AWOL he found his way to Hudson’s crackhouse within an hour of hitting the streets, radar working fine after building up his strength on NewGap meals. Invariably, those years, any town had its own microcosmic crackidemic: dealers, whores, every element that the rest of the country righteously decried as big-city symptoms were right up their armpit anywhere you troubled to look.

Indeed, it was in Hudson where Dose met with what he’d always consider his all-time-low glimpse of degradation. In the city proper it was not unknown to hear a dealer humiliate a desperate crackhead, one pleading for free rock: Yo, you want a rock you could suck my dick for it . If it was a cracked-out woman, the dealer might or might not be for real; if it was a man, it was for the laugh, to see the flicker of shame in the human skeleton before giving the charity or kicking him out. Nevertheless, however much debasement might be the real language of the encounter, garbing it in sex kept the players in that drama above a certain threshold, in the realm of greed, desire, human things. Dose understood this when he saw what he saw in Hudson: how much lower one human being could wish to take another.