Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Now Dylan’s friend Linus Millberg appears out of the crowd with a cup of beer and shouts, “Dorothy is John Lennon, the Scarecrow is Paul McCartney, the Tin Woodman is George Harrison, the Lion’s Ringo.”

“ Star Trek ,” commands Dylan over the lousy twangy country CB’s is playing between sets.

“Easy,” Linus shouts back. “Kirk’s John, Spock’s Paul, Bones is George, Scotty is Ringo. Or Chekov, after the first season. Doesn’t matter, it’s like a Scotty-Chekov-combination Ringo. Spare parts are always surplus Georges or Ringos.”

“But isn’t Spock-lacks-a-heart and McCoy-lacks-a-brain like Woodman and Scarecrow? So Dorothy’s Kirk?”

“You don’t get it. That’s just a superficial coincidence. The Beatle thing is an archetype , it’s like the basic human formation. Everything naturally forms into a Beatles, people can’t help it.”

“Say the types again.”

“Responsible-parent genius-parent genius-child clown-child.”

“Okay, do Star Wars .”

“Luke Paul , Han Solo John , Chewbacca George , the robots Ringo .”

“ Tonight Show .”

“Uh, Johnny Carson Paul , the guest John , Ed McMahon Ringo , whatisname George .”

“Doc Severinson.”

“Yeah, right. See, everything revolves around John, even Paul . That’s why John’s the guest.”

“And Severinson’s quiet but talented, like a Wookie.”

“You begin to understand.”

Dylan’s the bagman for tonight’s LSD run, holding everyone’s folding money, a hundred and ninety bucks which from habit he clutches tightly, hand within his pocket. Pride resists deeper habit’s call to transfer the roll to his sock. The task of copping acid has fallen to Dylan and Linus Millberg for two reasons: 1. They’re regular customers of the dealer, a gay on Ninth Street who sells Stuyvesant kids nickels from his apartment. 2. They’re not in the band.

Linus Millberg is a freak math prodigy, a sophomore running with juniors, formerly shy.

“If we go now we can catch the Speedies’ set,” says Linus.

“Okay but wait a minute.”

“We should have gone an hour ago.”

“Okay I know but wait a minute. Go get me a beer.”

Linus nods and dips back toward the bar.

Dylan is absently gratified by Linus’s puppy-dog servility, perhaps because in the Stately Wayne Manor crowd it serves to mask his own. There’s plenty that might be considered cool about being to one side instead of in the band itself. Mostly, though, it sucks. That’s the self-loathing root of his dawdling: Stately Wayne Manor has never played CB’s before, and Dylan’s reluctant to surrender the borrowed glamour of their debut.

You could not be on the stage and still be on the stage.

It’s not unrelated to standing beside Henry while he roofed a spaldeen you’d fetched from the street.

There’s drama too: whether Josh, the singer, will show up drunk or if Giuseppe, the guitarist, can play with bandaged hands. Though Manor’s chords are such that you might shape them on a Stratocaster’s neck with an elbow or foot.

“There’s the Gawce , she’s looking great.”

Linus has returned with the beers.

“The Gawcester’s here, Ebdus,” he said again. “You better do something this time.”

Linus has a valid point: another factor in dawdling is Liza Gawcet. Liza’s a new freshman Dylan Ebdus maybe-likes. She had a well-publicized curfew, so she wouldn’t be along afterward tripping or bowling: this was his only chance. Dylan had leaked acknowledgment of the spell cast by her blond, mute, new-developed, fishnet-bound cuteness through a network of go-betweens, amazed and appalled that this system of proxy flirtation worked for him as it did for so many he held in contempt. But the system, oblivious to his superiority, had worked. She maybe-liked Dylan in return-that was the message Liza’s girl squad leaked back.

He’ll talk to her tonight if he can split her from the gaggle, a dicey operation.

The way Liza’s fishnets show through knee- and ass-torn OshKosh B’Gosh’s is killingly childish and hot, like she’s slipped the punky leggings on beneath outfits unchanged since fifth-grade hopscotch spills.

You could be sixteen and still suspect yourself of pederastic lusts.

The whole band’s lately sniggering about Liza, infuriating their junior-year girlfriends, but Dylan’s got an inside track.

Linus says, “You’re good-looking in the face and Josh has a body and Gabe’s in the band and I can start a conversation with anyone-if we were combined in one person we could fuck any girl in the school.”

“Shut up.”

“Yeah, but do something.”

“Go see if she wants to meet a drug dealer.”

The miracle of Linus is he tends to oblige. This isn’t a matter of daring, just Gumby pliancy. For instance, at Gabe’s command he’d grabbed a boxed pizza cooling on the counter of Famous Ray’s and scrambled all the way to Washington Square. Now Dylan watches as Liza Gawcet and her friends listen to Linus’s exuberant proposal. Linus points at the door, then at his hand stamp, explaining how they’ll be readmitted, no problem.

And Liza Gawcet is nodding .

Stately Wayne Manor’s amps are set up and the band’s in the back room, smoking pot, acting like a band, making the crowd wait. Fuck them. Dylan hears the opening chords, the false starts and in-jokey banter, in his head. Gabe will play and not see Dylan at the stage and later ask and Dylan will say, Didn’t see Gawcet either, did you? Let him wonder.

Hey, maybe he’d really luck out. Maybe they’d get high at the dealer’s and Liza would break curfew.

He’s glad, anyway, to shield her from Manor’s moment of glory. No shock finding jealousy of the band roiling in his heart, he’s got every shit feeling catalogued there if he glances.

On the sidewalk they fall to a boy-boy, girl-girl-girl formation, Dylan having yet uttered zip to Liza directly. But he and Linus are leading the freshmen away from CB’s, up across St. Marks Place, holy shit.

Through the city’s night they move in a giddy bubble. Older teens, men with shopping carts, taxicabs, all of it recedes to the margins, invisible.

“Mary John , Lou Paul , Murray George , Ted Baxter Ringo .”

Linus will do this until he’s told to stop, but Dylan doesn’t wish him to, it’s serving a nice purpose of keeping their mouths moving. “Good one.”

“I didn’t make this shit up,” says Linus. “It’s like some essential human grouping pattern.”

“So you’re saying that’s why Stately Wayne Manor’s doomed-bad Beatle dynamics .”

“Oh yeah, it’s painfully obvious.”

“Andrew thinks he’s John, nobody wants to be Paul.”

“They all think they’re John. They’re four wannabe Johns. They’re like four Georges . With no Ringo to lighten things up.”

“Not one real John?”

“Maybe Giuseppe. Doesn’t matter. Without Paul to play peacemaker, John’s just as bad as George.”

“I thought George wasn’t bothering anybody, he just wants to, you know, write one song per album and play his sitar.”

“No, no, George is evil, he wants to usurp John, that’s his nature.”

Chewbacca wants to usurp Han Solo? But never mind. Dylan says: “They have to break up, then.”

“Indubitably.”

“We’ll go back and tell them.”

The girls become attentive. “Stately Wayne Manor’s breaking up?” asks Liza Gawcet.

“Tonight,” jokes Dylan, and the amazing thing is he’s honestly never thought it before. Not for a minute had he doubted the band would be signed, famous, an exclusive quadrangle for life. Now realizing that’s unlikely, his jealousy eases into generosity: Stately Wayne Manor’s going nowhere, so let them play CBGB tonight. Hell, let them last a month more and get that Halloween gig opening for Johnny Thunders’s Heartbreakers at the Roxy.