Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Returning to the subway they paused to flip through some worn Beatles LPs for sale on the sidewalk, Let It Be , Abbey Road . Dylan found a name he recognized. The name was superimposed on a photograph of four grinning, beardless black men in peach suits and ruffled shirts seated on stools of various heights, backlit in blue and arranged like a bouquet in a photographer’s studio: The Deceptively Simple Sounds of the Subtle Distinctions .

Dylan showed it to Arthur. “That’s Gus’s dad.”

Arthur looked unimpressed. Dylan bought the record and took it home, but it was scratched, unplayable.

For a week Dylan and Arthur wore the jackets to school pristine. Then one day Arthur appeared with his jacket glamorously ruined with gold and silver paint, sleeves laminated in Krylon, burner scars, evidence. Arthur smirked, Dylan said nothing. That night he retired his virginal jacket before Mingus caught him in it.

Mingus himself was a random factor, a shade or rumor now, only glimpsed. He’d vanish for weeks, then you’d meet up, get high in his basement, and go to the Rex on Court Street to take in a Charles Bronson double feature, sit in darkness for hours not speaking a word apart from dang and ho snap .

Mingus was flush erratically, blew cash in a hurry. Later you’d catch him fluffing cushions for change, palming pennies from the dish Abraham kept at the front door, scraping up enough for a nickel bag.

Nobody took fifty cents or a dollar from Dylan that he didn’t see coming a mile off. One day in the basement Dylan applied Abraham’s hacksaw to a couple of quarters, then strolled with fragments jingling, waiting for the inevitable frisk. When with a dumb grin Dylan offered the sawed half-quarters and quarter-quarters the Gowanus kids who’d cornered him walked off shaking heads, pained, as if he’d spoken Chinese or wriggled an antenna.

You knew this game of days like the back of your hand, if the back of your hand was changing like a werewolf’s.

One day Dylan came home to find Abraham with a package on the kitchen table, an upright bundle wrapped in layers of butcher paper and twine. Abraham shredded at it with a steak knife, freeing the hidden object, unpeeling onion layers of newspaper insulation like Humphrey Bogart unpacking the Maltese Falcon. Dylan imagined it might be something from Rachel, perhaps a statuette depicting A Crab, Running . Then Abraham exposed the top of the prize inside: the gleaming golden nose of a 1950s-style rocketship.

“Don’t worry, I won it fair and square,” said Abraham. “ Sidney accepted on my behalf.”

Words on the gilded rocket’s base explained, at least partly. HUGO AWARD, BEST NEW ARTIST, 1976, ABRAHAM EBDUS.

“Recognition creeps up on one,” said Abraham darkly.

Dylan hefted the thing, scowled.

“You want it for a doorstop?”

Dylan considered, nodded.

“Just don’t say I never gave you anything.”

The song could be heard on New York radio for a week or two, mid-February 1978, not yet charting high but picked to click , scored on the R &B chart at number eighty-four with a bullet-it was asserted to be with a bullet each time that discouraging number was mentioned aloud-and slipped into rotation between Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Serpentine Fire” and Con Funk Shun’s “Ffun”: “(Did You Press Your) Bump Suit” by Doofus Funkstrong, a three-minute, forty-second single edited out of the sprawling eighteen-minute jam that covered side two of the band’s Warner Brothers debut, Double-Breasted Rump . DJs solicited phone calls weighing in-bold or cold, smash or trash, funk or junk? A few dozen requests could still tip a song up regional charts and push it toward a national breakout. Anyone trusting their ears knew Doofus Funkstrong was a disguise for the legally hamstrung, hence recording-under-pseudonyms Funk Mob-for those less sure, a look at the psychedelic Pedro Bell jacket art did the trick. Fewer ears would place the name of the vocalist whose melismas decorated just the last thirty-eight seconds of the single edit, credited on the album jacket, as according to plan, as Pee-Brain Rooster: under his own name Barrett Rude Junior was a voice from radio’s middle distance, years out of rotation, not yet an oldie. If a few formed the question Ain’t that the singer from the Distinctions? it was only a passing thought-how likely, anyway, that the tenor voice of the smooth and mellow Distinctions should show up riding the crest of that distorted synth bass line?

Then the song died. No explanation was called for-certainly none was given. Songs die, this one did. Figure it freakish that it charted at all, with refrains like Up jumped the globster, caught her with a mobster! and Goof a wedgie up your rump pocket! There are limits. So it died; call Doofus Funkstrong an album-oriented act , euphemism for Who cares? Performance royalties trickled through a legal maze, never enough to fight over should Pee-Brain Rooster choose to consult a lawyer. For a few weeks you heard the song or you didn’t, while nerd connoisseurs were left to savor it later, to champion or slag it in their endless tinny dialogue. History, basically, wasn’t made. Marilla and La-La would never be heard chanting this song in their front yard, not skipping rope nor braiding hair nor teasing boys with their fresh-grown hips. That test it couldn’t pass: the song, musicianship aside, lacked a hook.

When Mr. Winegar asked him to remain after class he sat imagining that he’d somehow become known, that the science teacher had taken it upon himself as gravity’s local spokesman to pronounce on the matter: Young man, human flight is sheerly impossible! Renounce it at once! Instead Mr. Winegar took a letter from his drawer and handed it across his desk, sat twisting the end of his mustache as he watched Dylan Ebdus absorb its contents: test scores permitting entrance to Stuyvesant.

Outside it snowed, jigsaw chunks which piled on the ledge, clotted the grate which covered the window. The school had poured out into the white-muffled afternoon. Staying late Dylan had lost his chance to sneak across Smith in a protective mob of bodies in motion, would instead be snowball target prime for anyone prowling near the school.

“Only kid in the school to make it,” said Winegar. “But then only six even tried the test. I requested the chance to tell you in person, don’t mind saying I’m proud of how you’ve applied yourself.”

Winegar’s mustache-torturing and puzzled gaze contradicted this potted speech: he’d retained the letter in order to glimpse the freak, the reverse-retard who’d surfaced unexpectedly in the ocean of screaming, proto-criminal souls that made up Dylan’s classmates, made up for that matter all five periods of science teaching in his day’s schedule-made up, come to think of it, his entire blighted career. If I’d known you’d pull this I’d have flattered myself by noticing you sooner.

But caretaking Winegar’s astonishment wasn’t one of Dylan’s priorities.

“What about my friend Arthur Lomb?”

Winegar frowned. “I shouldn’t discuss anyone else’s results with you.”

It could only mean one thing. Dylan found himself pained for Arthur, felt an unexpected throb of empathy.

“He must of gotten into Bronx Science, though,” he suggested to the teacher.

Winegar looked hurt. “Certain persons-” he began, and broke off. Dylan understood: not Bronx Science, not even Brooklyn Tech. Arthur Lomb, chess demolitionist, whiz mimic, master strategist of escape, hadn’t honored his own advice and studied for the test. Perhaps he thought a last-minute asthmatic seizure would carry the day, perhaps proudly held a bowel movement through the test period, perhaps thrown a few yos their way. All useless in the teeth of algebra. Houdini had drowned inside his padlocked cabinet.