Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Atlantic had ripped him off in his incarnation as the lead voice of the Servile Distinctions, siphoned royalties from his account like draining a pool. Then as final insult brought in Andre Deehorn and some no-name scab singers and built tracks around unfinished vocals, for release as a bogus final album- The Subtle Distinctions Love You More! -after he’d quit. Now they wheedled and cajoled for the chance to resume ripping him off as a solo act. Only heartfelt emotion they’d ever know, like hungry cousins ringing your phone: Come back and spread green on us again, brother! He’d stashed the four-track below, in Mingus’s apartment, its magnetic virginity intact. Now he turned the same way with the tickets, shouted down the stairwell.

“Gus, man, get up here. Got something for you.”

Mingus came upstairs in a T-shirt and his Jockey shorts, looking sleepy-eyed at one in the afternoon. He cocked his head at the drift of cocaine on the sun-mottled mirror, the smeary ghosts of inhaled lines that trailed out of it.

Kid stared at the blow like he’d never seen it before.

“What?” said Barrett Rude Junior. “You want to get high?” He waved his hand at the mirror from his big chair where he sat, felt the weight of his arm, a banner of flesh moving in the damp air.

Nihhh-gahhh, nihh-gahh, got you-self an itchy tri-ggahhh fin-gahhh . Could be a theme song for some movie about a pimp. Maybe he ought to fish that four-track recorder upstairs, shock their minds with a new track, number-one hit single on the R &B charts, first time the word nigger ’s ever been on the radio. Go fuck yourself, Omlet!

It seemed to take a thousand years for Mingus to quit staring and shake his head.

Barrett Rude Junior just laughed. “Don’t tell me you ain’t hittin’ it when I’m not around. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Lay off.”

“I know what’s wrong with you. You’re saying, Barry best get this cleaned up before Senior comes up here. Read your eyes, man.”

“I didn’t say nothing.”

“Whatever. I got these tickets for you if you want them. Brother Ray Charles, up at Ray- dee -oh City. Drinkin’ wine spo-de-o-dee, drinkin’ wine .”

“You don’t want to go?”

“Nah, not tonight. Why don’t you call up a friend, hop up there on the F train.”

Mingus took the tickets. Barrett Rude Junior rubbed his nose and upper lip with his knuckle, waiting. Him and Mingus both fine-beaded in the day’s wet heat.

“Ray Charles is the man, Gus. Big part of your cultural heritage right there, my man. You’ll be telling your kids you were there, Ne-ver fo-get the time I saw Bruth-a Ray .” He couldn’t say why he wanted the boy to go. “Plus they got some fine air-conditioning up there in that balcony, man. Go cool out with a friend, get out the heat. Take Dylan. Or that raisin-looking ghetto child you been bringing around, what’s his name? Robert. Radio City likely blow that boy’s mind.”

The talk came out of him in one breath and was strangely taxing. He closed his eyes and when he opened them Mingus stood there still looking at the tickets as though Barrett hadn’t spoken.

“You gonna go, or what?”

“You got other plans?” asked Mingus.

“What’s that got to do with it?” In truth, Barry had his eye on a double feature at the Duffield Theater up on Fulton Street, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings and Car Wash . Leverage his own ass out of the day’s heat, into some dark windowless auditorium with best-be-working air-conditioning. Just not to contemplate Ray Charles in a tuxedo. “You want the tickets?”

Mingus shrugged. Scratching himself in his underwear, eyeballing his father, trying to figure the angle.

“Take them, think it over, give Dylan a call.”

“You don’t care if I sell them?”

Barrett Rude Junior eyeballed his son in return. “Nah, man, I don’t care.” His disappointment was irrational, huge. “But once you’re all the way up there, why not check it out? It’s bread you want, I’ll give you bread, Gus.”

His pushing only stoked Mingus’s own resistance, he saw now. If your old man doesn’t want to go see Ray Charles why should you want to go? Too much effort all around, this day especially. Brooklyn was a tropical place, faint marimba notes suspended in the yellow air, now a Mister Softee truck’s incessant, circular tune, rising and falling like an ambulance whine as it positioned itself on Bergen, Bond, Dean, Pacific, drawing sluggish kids like ants to a soda spill. Manhattan seemed a thousand miles away, another city.

Barrett Rude Junior could have done with a soft-dipped cone himself come to think of it.

Getting one was another whole story altogether.

Didn’t see himself standing at no ice-cream truck.

Under the marimba and the Mister Softee jingle he breath-chanted nihhh-gahhhh, nihhh-gahhh , the tune, let’s admit it now, going nowhere, unfolding into nothing but itself. Nigger would be a song unsung, more dust blown away. Besides, the four-track recorder was impossibly distant, a rumor as farfetched and unlikely as the ice-cream cone, as Manhattan.

You don’t fetch what’s too far . Hence the phrase.

Now, how was it that blow always make him want to close his eyes? Made no sense at all.

And why couldn’t Mingus answer one simple goddamn question?

When Barrett Rude Junior opened his eyes again hours had passed. He’d been wallowing there all afternoon and into the dusk hour, Mingus long gone wherever with the tickets. He awoke entombed in the dark, heat-glazed to the leather chair, the folds of his chin and neck chafed with sweat. The curtain flapped lightly in a useless breeze which had quietly worn the knoll of cocaine and chased grains to the edges of the mirror. Probably on the carpet as well.

He’d already spilled it on the water bed the night before, a new layer of sheen between his body and the sheets. Let it cover the whole house in a layer-it would be there when he’d need it, he’d run his fingers over the walls, snort the carpet. He’d bring a woman home and use her like a sponge to pick it up and get high cleaning it off her body.

True enough, he’d need to get this part of his life stashed away before Barrett Rude Senior got sprung and came up north.

Now haul your ass up splash water on your neck get out the damn house already, it’s nighttime.

The Duffield was a grand ruin of an Art Deco movie palace, an experiment in what happened if you never cleaned a place for fifty years, just sold tickets and stale candy to stick to the floor and flat cola to erode the hinges of the sprung upholstered chairs when it spilled. One chair in four was upright enough to sit in. Others looked like they might have been attacked, stabbed by angry gangs. The walls were panels of torn crimson felt between gold-painted cherubs and rosettes, now blackened and nose-chipped into dingy gargoyles. The place was unnaturally dark. Red exit signs hovered in the murk, cigarette haze floated up through the projector beam to nest in the massive wrecked chandelier, below the peeling vault of the ceiling, the misaligned film played over the edges of the heavy rotting curtain at both sides of the screen. The screen itself showed bullet holes and was prominently tagged by Strike and Bel II.

Barrett Rude Junior paid for his ticket and went inside, found a seat under the balcony. Bingo Long was started already, maybe half over. The air was cold and rank. The place was two-thirds full, heads clustered in groups to the distant reaches of the giant room, all smoking and laughing and talking back to the movie. Squeals and moans in the darkest corners. A woman could be giving birth to twins in the balcony, nobody’d know. Barrett Rude leaned back, tested his springs, settled in. He’d had the foresight to ferry in a brown sack with a forty-ounce Colt, not troubling to hide it from the indifferent ticket ripper. Now he eased the cap off. It voiced a quick shuffff of freed carbonation, answered by an envious murmur from those in the Duffield near enough to have heard: Wish I’d thought of that, damn .