Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

“I hid it away.”

“Did the police see you fly?”

“The cops, man? They think I sprung out a tree .”

“What-”

Mingus put up his hand to say Enough, not now . “You wanna come in? I got King Arthur here.”

The shelf was empty, no costume, no ring, just the football helmet, Manayunk Mohawks, its bowling-ball curve now tagged in soppy marker by Art and Dose. “Get Off” was on the stereo, the needle hadn’t actually plowed the music off the vinyl yet though it sounded like it was getting close. Arthur Lomb lay on his side on the bed, his cruddy Pumas on the bedspread, sifting seeds from a nickel bag in the gatefold crotch of the Spinners’ Pick of the Litter . Crumpled rolling paper lay balled in a loose circle around him, failed tries, like some ring of dubious enchantment. He grinned at seeing Dylan: Welcome to my chamber, bluh-hah-hah!

Arthur Lomb had become a foul gnome. He seemed smaller. That was likely an optical illusion, a matter of losing himself inside titanic hooded sweatshirts and droopy military pants which could have held dozens of his pipe-cleaner legs. Arthur’s clothes were growing though he wasn’t. He completed a joint at last, repulsively swooping it through his mouth to cauterize the paper with saliva. He only spoke after it was lit, in order to demonstrate expertise in speaking through gagged breath, his voice helium-dwindled with effort:

“You heard Gus got arrested?”

“ Shut up , Arthur.”

Arthur handed the joint to Dylan, his own held toke exploding in a gust from his lips. “He went to the Myrtle Avenue projects at midnight and jumped out of a tree in his underwear. I suppose if you’re tripping on LSD or heroin it might strike you as a good idea. I saw something like that on The FBI once. A girl ate the bark off a tree in a vacant lot. She was pretty hot, too.”

“I’m right about to kick your ass.”

“Do it, superhero.”

“When I do you’ll be weeping.”

“I’ll look forward to that day, it’ll be worth seeing you dress up in your homo suit, Arrow Man. ”

Arthur needled like he moved rooks, unashamed of the obvious. He was monotonous and punishing, easy to tune out. Mingus had seemingly acquired the skill.

“What’s your power going to be, Dylan? Because we all need powers now, we’re Superfriends. I was thinking maybe I’d be able to undress people with my mind, I mean like their clothes would really actually vanish , criminals would be humiliated and surrender on the spot. I’ll call myself Fig Leaf Man. ”

Mingus didn’t meet Dylan’s eyes when they handed off the joint. Questions remained simpler to leave unanswered, Mingus flying solo, Aeroman’s agenda at the Walt Whitman Houses. If he’d wanted to bust up a drug deal he only had to go as far as Bergen, or Atlantic, the foyer of the prostitute hotel. Or upstairs, for that matter, to Junior’s apartment, where deals occurred on a daily if not an hourly basis.

But maybe that was the dilemma which had spun Aeroman off his usual orbit-the risk of meeting someone familiar in a local deal. Up to and including Barrett Rude Junior or Senior.

“Yo, D-Man, you got to hear this record ‘King Tim Personality Jock’ by Fatback-” Mingus began. He moved to the stereo, marking the conclusion of his two-night’s-ago adventure as a topic, announcing the resumption of the real story: they lived in a famous era where heroic advances in musical styles, the discovery of a new break previously unheard, could happen at any moment. “Shit is seriously dope , check it out.”

Mingus only turned away briefly to punch Arthur Lomb on the arm. Arthur shouted “Mother fucker! ” and stroked the punched spot, but didn’t shift from where he lay sprawled, a cackling, smoke-numbed dwarf on the bedspread.

Aeroman was dead or at least on hiatus, a serious layoff. He’d likely never appear in the same form again. Dylan was certain the costume was lost or destroyed. The costume was irrelevant anyway. With its bedsheet stripes and wobbly Spirograph emblem it had been too personal, too tender for the street, Dylan understood that now. Aaron X. Doily was right to renounce his cape, Dylan had missed the hint. Now Doily’s ring was hidden and it should be. The ring was an enigma to contemplate, a subject for further review. The costume was likely just as stoopid as Arthur Lomb made it sound but the ring wasn’t a part of Arthur’s story, or for that matter the cops’, or The New York Times ’s.

They got stoneder and stoneder and quit talking.

The three together might have been a normal occasion if you didn’t think about it too hard. From one perspective it was odd it hadn’t happened before.

But Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude still had secrets, even if those were on ice, hidden somewhere unspecified behind Mingus’s thousand-yard stare.

Dylan Ebdus told stories and drew pictures, Arthur Lomb carped and needled, but Mingus Rude possessed a greater force, moods which prevailed, moods like laws. He cold-shouldered whole unwished regions of existence, his scowl chopping down fathers, grandfathers, schools. It wasn’t an argument. For now, Aeroman was vanished, painted out.

Three white high schoolers cavort along West Fourth Street, returning from J &R’s Music World to an apartment on Hudson where a certain divorced mom’s not home, where they’ve got keys and the regular afternoon run of the place. All three are armored against late-fall weather in black motorcycle jackets, the Brando-Elvis-Ramones variety, leather skins studded with chrome stars and skulls, buckles dangling loose and fronts unzipped against the chill. The three grab-ass, swing incompetently from lampposts, talk in private tongues, nerd-punk argot.

November 1979: “Rapper’s Delight” has just cracked the top forty. It’s also cracked the attention spans of the white kids at Stuyvesant, including this bunch. The song is on the radio and on the street, leaking from stores and passing shoulder-hoisted boom boxes, a different sound, and impossible to miss.

But to really hear it for yourself someone’s got to lay down cash and bring the thing home.

The Sugar Hill Records twelve-inch in its generic sleeve is bagged with their other purchases, Eno, Tom Robinson, Voidoids, Quadrophenia soundtrack. “Rapper’s Delight”’s place on the pop charts is as a novelty single, late entry in the lineage of “The Streak,” “Convoy,” and “Kung Fu Fighting,” and it’s in this spirit these white boys have made their purchase: the record strikes them as inconceivably stupid and killingly funny, two concepts lately the opposite of mutually exclusive, Gabba Gabba Hey.

Self-loathing worn inside out as a punk’s moron pride.

If one of these three knows more, he’s not telling.

But put it this way: if one of those shops on St. Marks Place retailing punk fashion sold T-shirts reading PLEASE YOKE ME you’d buy one in a minute.

Then zip your jacket wearing it home from Manhattan.

Now, in the safety of the apartment, the other records are put aside while the twelve-inch is plopped on mom’s turntable for instant-gratification hilarity. The needle is stopped and shifted backward a dozen times for incredulous confirmation of some sequence of chanted rhymes, I don’t care what these people think, I’m just sittin’ here makin’ myself nauseous with this ugly food that stinks . The three white boys bust up, barely able to breathe for laughing.

“ The-chicken-tastes-like-wood! ” one gasps.

Jackets are shed. Divorced mom’s boyfriend left a six of Heinekens in the fridge, the fool, and these are swiftly drained. A box of Nilla Wafers is demolished, down to the crumbs at the bottom of the wax liner, which are shaken out and inhaled. “Rapper’s Delight” is played again, the punks doing an antic dance, pogoing on the couch, playing at break dancing, striking poses.