Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

“Or the dragons.”

“Or the dragons. So you, what? You screw forms? At least Picasso started real. After he laid them both eyes were on one side. He made them walk funny. You, it’s like looking in a microscope. You’re not lonely, just you and your germs?”

Abraham thought: ladies and germs. Which was pretty much Zingerman’s vintage. So this was what it came to, Ebdus the bridge between Ashcan school schlock and photorealist dragons, a momentary interlude. Just him and his germs.

No, the film would not be discussed here, the film would not be considered, not be thought of.

“I’m lonely,” he said honestly.

“Of course you are, you stink of it.”

“A big career mistake, biomorphism.”

“Now you’re talking. Take a leaf from my book,” said Zingerman. “Live. Lay the girls.”

“I will.”

Here Zingerman lowered his voice, to conclude the lesson, to share what he’d earned, what he really knew. “Look,” he said. “Don’t tell Schrooder.”

“Yes?”

“ Riddled .” He passed his cigar magically over the length of his body.

“Sorry?”

“Started lung, so they cut lung. Doesn’t matter where it started. Gone lymph, gone brain, gone bloodstream.”

“Oh.”

“I shit cancer. Doesn’t matter, don’t pity me. You know why don’t pity me? One guess.”

“Lay the girls?”

“Give the man a cigar.”

bad december

no joke kid

i haven’t slept a wink

put a rose at the door

of the dakota for me

i am the walrus crab

“Horatio, fuck you been, man?”

Pause.

“Oh, hey, what up, Barry?”

“You got so much action you can’t even respect a nigger’s phone calls?”

“I’m sorry, baby, I was gonna ring you. Ain’t no thing. What’s goin’ on?”

“I need you to set me up with a piece.”

Pause.

“You talkin ’ ’bout, Barry?”

“You watch television, Horatio?”

“Sure, I watch television, black man, what’s with you?”

“You know what a Beatle is?”

“What? Oh, yeah, yeah.”

“I got to pack some weight. Simple matter, Horatio. Now can you come through for me? That’s the question.”

“Man, you crazy? That shit got nothing to do with you.”

“I seen that Chapman-ass motherfucker walking around on Dean Street staring at my house just last week. Wasn’t him it was his cousin. White motherfucker had a list .”

“You serious ?”

“You know how many forces want me out the picture, get they hands on some four-track tapes? I don’t even trust Desmond , shit. Must be five or ten smash number-one records on them tapes, you think people don’t know that? I’ve got enemies, ’Ratio, on the streets, in the executive boardrooms, no shit, even under my floor boards. The question is can you help a brother out or do I have to go elsewhere? Whatever you say to me, be for real.”

Pause.

“No sweat, Barry. That what you want I got you covered.”

“Now you’re speaking words I can understand.”

Stately Wayne Manor is scheduled to go on between Miller Miller Miller & Sloane and the Speedies, the whole lineup a battle of high-school bands, the members all from Music and Art and Stuyvesant and City-As-School and Bronx Science or Dewey, wherever it is the Speedies go to school or had dropped out of. The Bowery sidewalk is thronged, nobody checks IDs, there are twelve-year-olds, junior high schoolers around. The girls are incredible, sensational, they teem outside CBGB in print dresses and fifties lipstick shades and teased hair, zits sunk in foundation, cupping cigarettes against light wind, bare arms goose-pimpled. They light up the night, birds of paradise to induce trembling in grown men but there are no grown men here apart from a few flophouse dwellers suffering already from delirium tremens. 1981, sixteen-year-olds could rule the Manhattan night, puff joints openly, and inside the hole-in-the-wall club order beer in plastic cups. Twos or threes of boys in leather and jeans mutter around the mobs of girls, faking hand stamps with ballpoint pen and pushing inside toward the stage, or stalling outside, passing bagged bottles of something harder, occasionally shoving one another to the curb in a hail of shouts, bluffed hostility. Somebody arrives and stickered amps and guitars come out of a trunk. Everyone admires the guitarist’s bandaged fingers, he’d punched a car window and broken three knuckles, just raging at something some girl had gotten away saying unanswered. He’s playing tonight anyhow, with mitts for hands, a show-biz hero.

In a nearby lobby a man enters a cage elevator, returning to a single room he’s lived in since 1953.

A black-and-white curbed on Rivington jiggles slightly, a cop getting blown in the cage while his partner on the Bowery’s corner looks out and waits his turn. Likely there’s some code for this operation, a stroller , or an O-five-O .

Walls here show punk graffiti, another type entirely, the letter A circled for anarchy, jerky uppercase remembrances of bands like the Mice and Steaming Vomit perhaps the one lasting impression they’ll make.

Tonight’s a bigger than usual deal in the Stuyvesant crowd, with somebody’s apartment parent-vacated for the weekend and mass plans to drop acid there. Weekend, it all happens on the weekend, as if school isn’t twenty-four hours away, as if your life has changed one iota. You could fight the structure, on a Tuesday or Wednesday night go to shows or to Bowl-Mor, the all-night alley on University Place which advertised “Rock-’n’-Roll Bowling!”-but down that road lay too much cutting, failing out, the rock-bottom destinations of City-As-School or your local high. Like Tim Vandertooth you might never be seen again.

So dress up and pretend you won’t all see each other in gym outfits Monday morning, hungover and sheepish as shit.

Inside, Miller Miller Miller & Sloane conclude their set. Their famous encore is a comic cameo, drummer emerging from behind traps to sing Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” which can be safely adored inside the ironical brackets of Upper West Side whiteboys playing the most famous punk club in the world.

Admittedly it’s a pretty great song, which everyone will be humming the next day if LSD doesn’t brainwipe all recollection.

Stately Wayne Manor is on in fifteen minutes.

Dylan Ebdus mills in the crowd at the base of the riser, though he’s only heard this band play about a hundred times already, between small gigs and practices at the rehearsal space on Delancey. His friend Gabe Stern plays bass in Stately Wayne Manor-he taught himself onstage, like Sid Vicious. Dylan, he’s like Manor’s fifth member, he knows their tiny set by heart, hand-letters their posters, listens in confidence to their girlfriends’ grievances.

Sometimes makes out with their girlfriends.

Might one day get laid by their girlfriends.

Girlfriends present and future make a sizeable portion of the crowd which packs the bar like the soda counter in an Archie comic. The three bands lack a sole fan over eighteen. Every kid here would surely claim they’d seen Talking Heads on CB’s tiny stage and be lying, since they were twelve or thirteen last time that happened. You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all. Talking Heads nowadays play the tennis stadium in Forest Hills: buy a seat at Ticketron in the basement of Abraham and Straus and take the subway to Queens like any other schmuck.

The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn’t .

Tripping on acid tonight’s just the nearest example.