Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Junior’s rooms upstairs smelled of something else, something wicked, heated foil, singed crystal grains. Senior melted candles and chain-smoked Pall Malls, frequently igniting the next with the stub of the last, Mingus and Dylan, sealed into the sanctum with the towel at the door, puffed pot, while upstairs in the parlor which nobody entered Junior burned freebase cocaine in a glass pipe.

Barrett Rude Junior and the Famous Flames.

“Don’t think I forgot you was telling me about Heather, man.”

“You wish.”

“How old is she?”

“Thirteen.”

“Older woman-always said that’s the way to go.”

“I gave her a back rub.”

“Oh yeah. There you go. I know you didn’t stop at no back rub.”

“We kissed, in the attic.” Saying the words Dylan smelled the place, recalled groaning wooden stairs, blond light. “All she had on was her swimsuit.”

“Get serious now. She a old thirteen or a young thirteen?” Mingus’s open hands described fullness in the air.

Dylan thought oranges , said, “Grapefruits.”

“ Damn !” Mingus’s pleasure was so great he scowled. “Hold on a minute.” He pushed himself up and put Sly’s Fresh on the stereo, cranked the volume. Then he slumped back on his bed, fingers spread wide on thighs. Between thighs and spread fingers, tenting his corduroys, a boner.

“You were saying.”

Something moving in the brain of a doer sang Sly in a lubricious, dozy drawl.

“I’ll show you,” said Dylan. “Turn over.”

Mingus nodded, and obeyed.

Dylan was the storyteller here, he understood now that Mingus had no way to contradict him, was only waiting for the story to continue.

Mingus waiting facedown on his bed as though it had only been a matter of time until Dylan understood how to make him quiet.

Dylan’s palms on Mingus’s shoulders through his green jacket.

“So, you’re the girl, right?”

“Uh huh.”

“They’re bulging out on the sides and I’m going crazy.”

“Uh huh.”

“But I go slow.”

“Then I’m grabbing around the sides.”

“Shit.”

“She doesn’t say anything or try to stop me.”

“Uh.”

“Then I try to get inside her pants.”

The world was unnamed, you wore disguises, were Inhumans. Mingus’s room was another Negative Zone, under water, under the house, detached from Dean Street and whirling away to another place. It had been from the day Mingus stood in his Scout uniform and ran his fingers over merit badges, passport stamps from distant realms.

You built fires, marked bridges and trains, jerked into tissues and socks.

A hand molding Mingus’s ass through his pants didn’t need explaining, it wasn’t a faggot thing, just a story you were telling: the pile of Playboy s under the bed, the massing thunderhead of tits everywhere, of wanting women’s bodies in your life, the horizon breaking into shared view.

Anyway, if you caressed Mingus after all this time you’d only want to take a pick to his nappy-ass ’Fro , you’ve always yearned to know what it would feel like to cradle his head and pluck at it with that mysterious fork.

But tuck weird tenderness away, this is boy time.

“Just touching her ass I was hard like a rock.”

“No shit.”

“She didn’t let me get inside, though.”

“You must of been dying!”

“Uh huh.”

“I’d a said: Yo ! Wait a minute!”

“Well, that’s what I did,” said Dylan, inventing with abandon, unmoored. “I told her look at the condition I was in, what was she going to do about it?”

“Don’t say what I think you about to say.”

They were side by side now, as Dylan and Heather had been side by side in the sun-smashed attic then, stretched on the bedspread, draining lemonade from sweaty glasses, icing their forearms. Only Dylan and Mingus lay stoned, sprawled head-propped on Mingus’s drooly pillows, each grappling through pockets and pretending not to notice. Their breath lengthened, Mingus’s sigh rattling like a small snore.

Mingus reached to the stereo and turned the music up another notch so they were swarmed in funk, stupefied deeper.

“Tell me.”

“We didn’t have a rubber so she had to give me a blow job.”

“Damn!”

They were silent a while. When Mingus spoke his voice was quiet and intent:

“You shoot white or clear?”

“White. It use to come out clear.”

“Yeah.”

Then, after further silence:

“How’s it feel in a girl’s mouth, man?”

“Best feeling in the world,” Dylan lied with certainty.

“I heard that .”

“I wish I had a girl sucking on me right now.”

Another pause, then Dylan said: “You can take it out if you want.”

Mingus’s penis was hued dun-to-rose, like his palms. He trembled in his own hand.

“Close your eyes,” said Dylan.

“No shit?”

“Hands behind your head.”

Dylan let himself get in whispering range before chickening out, close enough to smell the air of Mingus’s legs, the pubic tangle in his jockey fly.

“Do it with your hand,” said Mingus.

When the door flew open Dylan and Mingus were caught Vaseline-fisted, their pants irretrievably down, bunched like mufflers over their Pumas. There wasn’t remotely time to do anything but stare back at Mingus’s father as he stood in the doorway barefoot in his blue satin bell-bottoms and a white designer T cut wide on his shoulders like a girl’s blouse. Barrett Rude Junior dressed more and more like a man who never left the house, his whole parlor floor a sort of self-harem, a region of pajamas. Mingus and Dylan might have been termites or mole-men who’d burrowed underneath the Playboy mansion and now were caught, a spade breaking into their burrow, filling it with daylight. Pants down, they were still more dressed than Junior, Mingus in his jacket, Dylan in his sweater, both in their street shoes. They’d only have to jerk the pants back over their bared thighs and be out on the street again, in motion, rats scurrying, street beings. They pulled them up. Dylan looked at the floor.

“Turn that music down, Gus, man.”

Mingus rolled the dial until it was tinny, faint like Junior’s own music now heard arguing through the ceiling.

Mingus’s father regarded them with narrow, sleepy eyes, smacked lips in slow motion, scratched goatee with one blunt finger’s untrimmed nail. His nostrils flared, perhaps sniffing the medicinal goo on their hands and dicks. He lingered, seeming to wait for the right beat to come in on, not from the stereo but instead following his own inner music. When he spoke again it was low, tossed-off, melodic.

“I don’t really care what you motherfuckers get up to down here, but you got to keep it down, man.”

His weary delivery implied encompassing knowledge of anything they might bother to think they’d invented for themselves, along with a smidgen of affectionate distaste for their clumsy disarray, their poorly upholstered love nest. Maybe Dylan and Mingus ought to have lit incense and worn purple dressing gowns-whatever, it was none of his business. He took the door handle.

“You best know you one lucky soul, Gus, it was me not someone else walked in here. Get a lock for this goddamn door, man.”

Then he was gone.

His few sentences might have been the kindest words Dylan had heard spoken in his life.

“Shit,” said Mingus softly to the closed door, mildly disgusted with his father’s presumption once he could afford to be.

Dylan only watched Mingus and waited. Perhaps he bugged his eyes a little.

“Don’t worry, Junior won’t say anything to your pops. I walked in on him doing way more wack shit than this and he knows it.”