Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

If the halfway house and rehab center and DMV weren’t sufficient to explain a certain thuggish vibe on Nevins between Flatbush and State, here’s the secret: a parole office carefully unadvertised on the second floor of a building on the corner of Schermerhorn Street, six offices off a waiting room, kitchen converted to a lab for on-the-spot urinalysis, windows of one back room heavily barred for use as an impromptu holding cell. Barrett Rude Senior had been making his weekly trudge to this place since the morning he first reported, the day after getting off the Greyhound at Port Authority, never less than impeccably decked out. His officer didn’t return the favor, dressing with his shirt untucked, beard stubble unshaved, with redolent sandwich wrappings unfurled on his desk.

“You misunderestimate an old man,” said Barrett Rude Senior. “I was attempting to bring those girls the blessings of Jesus.”

“You and Jesus keep your blessings off Pacific Street at one A. M., that’s my advice. You got a signature for me?”

Barrett Rude Senior was made to produce an autographed sheet, certifying hours of community service under supervision of Pastor Gib at the Myrtle Avenue Parlor of God Ministry. In lieu of employment a parolee needed some clock to punch; this was his, personally selected. He nonetheless felt it as a humiliation. Each week a bolt of rage split his countenance as he fished with skeletal fingers in his breast pocket for the required proof.

“I go out walking,” he said, rigid with damaged pride, not letting the point go. “Spend too much time in that house I got to air out my mind.”

“Take afternoon walks, not midnight. Feed the ducks.”

“Sounds come through the ceiling nobody should hear because nobody should be making.”

“What am I supposed to say, Barry? Wear earmuffs.” The parole officer glanced at the page and handed it back.

“I got to be relocated out of that house because the devil is making trouble in my mind. Knowing that boy’s getting warped up and not doing anything.”

“Terms of your transfer up from Carolina were habitation in your son’s apartment.” He spoke as though reciting some dull recipe: two parts water to one part rice. “We can talk about sending your file back to the Raleigh office and you with it, if that’s what you want. Your being in New York City where miniskirts walk the streets all night depends on maintaining current residence and you know it.”

“I’m going on the record as it’s not good for my rehabilitation to be around hard narcotics and funk music. Write it down.”

“C’mon, Barry. Be straight with me.”

“I regret to say my only son is courting Satan. Put it in your report. He and I will come to blows or worse. I’m asking a relocation for the good of everyone involved and you’re responsible. I’d take the child with me but he’s already half a man himself and will have to fight through it on his own. I pray nightly, when I can hear myself over the bellows and groans and the crackle of the pipe.”

“We’re concerned here with you keeping together what you need to keep together and you’re not talking to me. I’ve heard this stuff before, it’s old tunes. I’m not going to have your son arrested and I’m not a religious man, so far as I can hear you haven’t said a word yet.”

“I want to get a room in the Times Plaza and take the pressure off.”

“Who’s paying?”

“I believe the devil will pay to have me out of his hair.”

“That old fleabag hotel’s no better than a jail. Half the rooms are filled with cons killing time between bids.”

Barrett Rude Senior stiffened again as though he’d been misunderstood. “From the church I know a man there, a fine saintly man. He gazes out his window and he doesn’t see filth all around him.”

“The Birdman of Alcatraz, eh?”

Senior only returned a look of unshrouded disdain. In his glare he summoned for one moment the mummified eloquence of a legacy of chanting men in cotton fields, sweat-bathed parishioners, masked riders, galley ships from Africa, all the parole officer with his Dion and the Belmonts Bronx accent couldn’t pretend to fathom. For one moment it was as if Senior had ridden into this meeting on a mule, as if the baying of beagles as they crashed through swampland had leaked into the room.

Whatever grain of tenderhearted Serpico resided in the parole officer’s cowboy psyche was touched for just that moment. “It’s really shitty between you and your son, huh, Barry? I have to figure you’re not kidding me to want to move into that dive the Times Plaza.”

“I seen women on women and other counternatural things.”

“Enough already, you’re giving me hives. Let me see what I can do.”

“Born in Babylonia, moved to California -”

“We are the knights who say Ni !”

“Get all excited and go to a yawning festival.”

“You-must-bring-us-a-shrubbery!”

“Hey, let’s go get Blimpies, I’m so hungry I could beat a dead horse. Ow, shit, what’s that for?”

“I said I’d punch you the next time you said Blimpie .”

“You bloody bastard!”

In ragged, rasping voice: “It’s the blimp, it’s the blimp, it’s the mothership!”

“C’mon.”

Falsetto, as they crossed the street from school: “ Basketball Jones, I got a basketball Jones -”

Gabriel Stern and Timothy Vandertooth ranted in a vocal graffiti of impersonations: Steve Martin and Marty Feldman and George Carlin, Devo, Python, Zappa, Spock, The Prisoner . Gabe Stern had memorized the songs of Tom Lehrer, Tim Vandertooth could do Liverpool, Wild and Crazy Guy, Peter Sellers-Swami. Induction into the company of Gabe Stern and Tim Vandertooth had begun the second week of school, Monday, just after three o’clock. Gabe and Tim surrounded Dylan before he reached the subway station on Fourteenth Street and bought him a slice of Original Ray’s, extra cheese. Then they went to Crazy Eddie’s showroom and played the demonstration model of Pong, writhing in fake agony at each loss, oblivious to customers or staff.

“You bastard!”

“Revenge, I swear revenge.”

“ I fart in your general direction .”

Gabe, broad-shouldered, dark, and curly-haired, had blistered nuclei of acne on each cheek, as though acid had been dripped there and was eating through. Tim was sandy, angular, walked hippily, seemingly steering his lean, high body like a kite in wind. Beside them Dylan was smaller. He’d grown, had private developments, weird fists of hair, but with Gabe and Tim felt childlike and possibly invisible. Anyway everyone’s body betrayed them in different ways, it was all forgiven and never discussed.

Dylan folded into the unit of Gabe and Tim as a redundant third: arbiter, audience, appendix. One day Gabe and Tim might seem to be playing to Dylan, wooing him, as though he’d be capable of adjudicating a conflict they’d been trying all their lives to resolve: Which of us is funnier, louder, more irresistible? Those days Dylan felt that it was essential he balance the two in their mania, that if he chose or even slightly favored either Tim or Gabe the other would die sizzling on the pavement like the Wicked Witch of the West. Other days their energies were exclusive, circuit complete between themselves, Dylan might as well have been watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon on television, head propped in his hands, antics reflected in his glasses.

Gabe and Tim would abruptly fall to wrestling on the sidewalk in front of school, knapsacks skidding to the curb as if attacked, yoked. This was different, though, from real hostilities, which drew instantaneous crowds. Anyone besides Dylan knew not to pay attention. When either Tim or Gabe got the other subdued, knees on chest, head clamped in elbow, arm wrenched high behind back, he’d demand some idiot password.