Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Bingo Long was no good. It stunk, in fact, full of cloying Dixieland jazz and Billy Dee Williams in a three-piece suit like he thought he was Redford in The Black Sting . Plus too little Richard Pryor, too much James Earl Jones making like Paul Robeson, that tired nobility jive. Didn’t matter. It was half over and soon Car Wash would start and the crowd was good and the air was cold and the liquor was cold. He only had to stretch it out, not drink it up before the second feature. Everyone was here to see Car Wash in the first place. Not that they’d be any quieter then.

It was at the break when the lights rose that he saw them, the nappy dark head and the straight and nearly blond-haired head beside it, the two of them slumped twenty rows closer, at the front where the screen surely loomed like a sky they couldn’t see to the edges of, their identical blue Pro Keds thrown up across the seats in front of them. Mingus had rounded up Dylan, sure-probably dragged him uptown to Radio City to scalp the tickets too. Unloaded them on some white folks in evening dress, no doubt. Then hauled ass back to Brooklyn, like he’d read Barrett Rude Junior’s mind, for the double feature. Shit, it didn’t take a mind reader. Anyone in their right mind for a mile around was at the Duffield tonight, and if you’d delivered free Ray Charles tickets to their mailboxes that morning it wouldn’t be any different. Who wouldn’t want to be here jeering through Bingo Long in the dark, anticipation just making things better, waiting for Car Wash , all that Norman Whitfield-Rose Royce pizzazz on the soundtrack? Only proved the boy had sense.

It was entirely possible that one song could destroy your life. Yes, musical doom could fall on a lone human form and crush it like a bug. The song, that song , was sent from somewhere else to find you, to pick the scab of your whole existence. The song was your personal shitty fate, manifest as a throb of pop floating out of radios everywhere.

At the very least the song was the soundtrack to your destruction, the theme . Your days reduced to a montage cut to its cowbell beat, inexorable doubled bass line and raunch vocal, a sort of chanted sneer, surrounded by groans of pleasure. The stutter and blurt of what-a tuba ? French horn? Rhythm guitar and trumpet, pitched to mockery. The singer might as well have held a gun to your head. How it could have been allowed to happen, how it could have been allowed on the radio ? That song ought to be illegal. It wasn’t racist-you’ll never sort that one out, don’t even start-so much as anti- you .

Yes they were dancing, and singing, and movin’ to the groovin’, and just when it hit me, somebody turned around and shouted -

Every time your sneakers met the street, the end of that summer, somebody was hurling it at your head, that song .

Forget what happens when you start haunting the green-tiled halls of Intermediate School 293.

September 7, 1976, the week Dylan Ebdus began seventh grade in the main building on Court Street and Butler, Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music” was the top song on the rhythm and blues charts. Fourteen days later it topped Billboard ’s pop charts. Your misery’s anthem, number-one song in the nation.

Sing it through gritted teeth: WHITE BOY!

Lay down the boogie and play that funky music ’til you die.

When Dylan Ebdus first spotted Arthur Lomb the other boy was feigning pain in the far corner of the schoolyard. At some distance Dylan heard the cries and turned from the entrance of the school to look. Catching sight of Arthur Lomb was like noticing the flight and fall of a bird across a distance of leaf-blurred sky, that flicker at the corner of vision, the abrupt plummeting. Like the flying man too, something Dylan did and didn’t wish to have noticed. It occurred at that moment of slippage after the bell had rung and the gym teachers who patrolled the yard had returned inside, ahead of the flood of students, so the yard became a lawless zone, that terrible sudden reframing of space which could happen anywhere, even inside the corridors of the school. Nevertheless it was a clumsy mistake for the boy now cringing on the ground to be caught so far from the yard’s entrance, a mistake Dylan felt he couldn’t forgive. He wouldn’t have forgiven it in himself.

Arthur Lomb fell to his knees and clutched his chest and keened. His words were briefly audible across the depopulating yard.

“ I can’t breathe! ”

Then, each syllable riding a sharp insuck of air, “ I! ” Pause. “ Can’t! ” Pause. “ Breathe! ”

Arthur Lomb was pretending asthma or some other weakness. It was an identifiable method: preemptive suffering. Nobody could do much with a kid who was already crying. He’d become useless, untillable soil. He had no spirit to crush and it was faintly disgusting, in poor taste. Anyway, this weirdly gasping kid might not know the rules and talk, tattle to some distant cloddish figure of authority what he imagined had been done to him. He might even be truly sick, fucked up, in pain, who knew? Your only option was to say Dang, white boy, what’s your problem? I didn’t even touch you. And move on.

Dylan admired the strategy, feeling at once a cool quiver of recognition and a hot bolt of shame. He felt that he was seeing his double, his stand-in. It was at least true that any punishment Arthur Lomb endured was likely otherwise Dylan’s, or anyway that a gang of black kids couldn’t knock Dylan to the pavement or put him in a yoke at the exact moment they were busy doing it to Arthur Lomb.

From that point on Arthur Lomb’s reddish hair and hunched shoulders were easy to spot, though he and Dylan had different homerooms, and schedules which kept them from overlapping anywhere except the schoolyard at lunch hour. Arthur Lomb dressed in conspicuous striped polo shirts and wore soft brown shoes. His pants were often highwaters. Dylan once heard a couple of black girls serenading Arthur Lomb with a couplet he hadn’t himself elicited since fourth grade, snapping their fingers and harmonizing high and low like a doo-wop group: The flood is over, the land is dry, so why do you wear your pants so high ?

Arthur Lomb carried an enormous and bright blue backpack, an additional blight. All his schoolbooks must be inside, or maybe a couple of stone tablets. The bag itself would have tugged Arthur Lomb to the ground if he’d stood up straight. As it was the bag glowed as a target, begged to be jerked downward to crumple Arthur Lomb to the corridor floor to enact his shortness-of-breath routine. Dylan had seen it done five times already before he and Arthur Lomb ever spoke. Dylan had even heard kids chanting the song at Arthur Lomb as they slapped at his reddened neck or the top of his head while he squirmed on the floor. Play that fucking music, white boy! Stretching the last two words to a groaning, derisive, Bugs-Bunnyesque whyyyyyyyboy!

There were just three other white kids in the school, all girls, with their own girl factors to work out. One shared Dylan’s homeroom, an Italian girl, black-haired and sullen and tiny, dwarfed by the girls all around them who exploded with hormonal authority. The black and Puerto Rican girls had risen to some other place where they were rightly furious at anything in view, jostling at one another and at the teachers in a rage of sex. However, their very size offered an approach: it was feasible to pass unseen below. Homeroom was a place for honing silence in a theater of noise and so the Italian girl and Dylan never spoke. As for Arthur Lomb, Dylan supposed he and the other boy had been kept apart intentionally by some unseen pitying intelligence, to avoid making both more conspicuous in their resemblance. This was a policy Dylan endorsed heartily, whether it existed outside of his own brain or not. Even at that remove, Arthur Lomb bore the mingled stink of Dylan’s oppression mixed with his own, so that it was hard to tell where one began and the other left off. Dylan wasn’t in any hurry to get closer. Really, he wanted no part of Arthur Lomb.