Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Meanwhile Linus attempts to explain Beatle dynamics to the girls, using his ungainliest example yet. “-the reason they’ll never get off the island is Skipper’s such a weak Paul and Gilligan’s a John who’d rather be a Ringo. He’s like, practically fighting Mr. Howell for Ringo status. Plus Professor’s such an overbearing George, they’re completely screwed up-”

When one of Liza’s friends says, “What about the girls?” Linus impatiently replies “ The girls don’t matter ” before he can stop himself.

Dylan decides to step into this breach. “A rock band requires a certain alchemy,” he says ominously. “You saw Quadrophenia ?”

“Sure.”

“Like that, you know-the four faces of the Who.”

Liza stares blankly, as if she might have regarded Quadrophenia more along the lines of that movie with Sting in it . Dylan feels despair rising. Fishnet tights do not a cultural vocabulary make. To the ironized, reference-peppered palaver which comprises Dylan’s only easy mode of talk former prep-school girls have frequently proved deaf as cats.

“I think I mostly like bands with one strong personality,” she says. “Like the Doors.”

Dylan’s triply whiplashed. Liza’s found the gist of Linus’s conceit through the smokescreen of the Gilligan’s Island example, then just as quickly dismissed it, which is nimble as hell. Alternately, and fully depressing, she’s into the Doors. Worse, though-if he’s grasped the implication-does she think someone in Stately Wayne Manor has a strong personality ?

But they’re at Ninth Street and Second Avenue now, nearly to the connection’s stoop, and Dylan means to shift focus to his own status as criminal savant. She said she wanted to meet a drug dealer . “I can’t take this many people up, it’s not so cool,” he says. As though it’s an arbitrary selection he adds, “Uh, Liza, you come up with me. Linus can stay downstairs with you other girls.”

Linus gets it, and, hunching his shoulders and slanting his eyes, adds, “We’ll keep a lookout .”

“A lookout for what?” says one of Liza’s pals, instantly spooked.

“Nothing,” says Dylan, with quick exasperation.

“Why can’t we stay together?” whines the spooked girl.

“Don’t worry.” Dylan’s always found the notion of streetwisefulness in Manhattan a joke, has trouble not sneering at his West Side- or Chelsea-born friends who cross streets to duck clusters of homies, as though shit ever happens here. The East Village is too full and frenzied to be dangerous, and, truthfully, cops are everywhere. His friends don’t know fear, they’ve got no idea. Though, go figure, now here’s a black kid in a drawn sweatshirt hood sitting legs-wide on the gay’s top step and looking not at all intimidated to be stranded from his usual turf.

Then a glance down Ninth reveals two in eyebrow-low Kangol caps and baggy pants walking with deliberate slowness across the street and the vibe’s not great but this is getting stupid : Dylan’s spooking himself. And now’s no time for hesitation.

“We’ll be down in five. You can go around to St. Marks and get a slice but come back.”

“Uh, Dylan?” says Liza, once they’re buzzed inside. At the second-floor landing they wait for the dealer to unbolt his door.

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think the door downstairs closed all the way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like someone put their foot in it.”

“ Relax . Linus is just hysterical, it’s catching.”

Dylan’s screwy secret is he likes visiting Tom’s apartment, despite the pervasive odor of unfresh kitty litter. The gay dealer recalls someone Dylan might have found sitting in Rachel’s breakfast nook on afternoons when he returned from P.S. 38. Like Rachel, Tom smokes not in the hammily clandestine manner of adolescents, that huffing and crouching and voice-squeezing which Dylan privately despises, but grandly, legs crossed, waving a joint and talking uninterruptedly through inhalations, unmindful of conserving the smoke. The satin shorts Tom sports year-round show too much hairy thigh, but Tom’s okay. Two or three times Dylan’s loafed around his place listening to albums and even meeting other buyers, and Tom’s never bartered to suck anyone’s cock, contrary to legend.

Tonight’s different: all’s appalling here, and Dylan can’t think of why on earth he’s brought Liza upstairs. He sees only the filthy pile carpet and chintzy decor, Coca-Cola glasses, framed Streamers poster. And Tom looks like a boiled lobster, all red for some reason. Dylan only wants to score and leave, but Tom can’t be rushed.

“You know this record?” Tom asks. And the colored girls go doo, doo-doo, doo, doo-doo-doo, doo, doo-doo, doo, doo-doo-doo, doo, doo-doo is what’s coming out of the stereo and certainly Dylan’s heard it before, but at the moment, distracted partly by strobe visions of Marilla and La-La, he can only imagine that’s the song’s title : “The Colored Girls Go Doo-Doo-Doo,” etc. Which can’t be right. So he gives out a gruff nod which Tom translates easily: I’ve got no idea .

“Lou Reed, how soon they forget.”

“Sure,” says Dylan. In Dylan’s mind Lou Reed dwells with Mott the Hoople and the New York Dolls in a hazy Bermuda Triangle between sixties rock, disco, and the punk which has supposedly demolished both. The music’s brazen sophistication irritates category. The simple solution, particularly from the vantage of Tom’s pad, is to call the phantom genre gay . This is gay music. Pretty catchy, though.

“You and girlfriend aren’t planning to gulp all this blotter by yourselves, I hope.”

“No.”

Tom’s gray Maine coon cat has crept into Liza’s overalled lap, and now she’s curled around it, head ducked, cooing. She’s less than present, off communing with things female and feline.

“Oh gee, I shouldn’t have said girlfriend . I’m always opening my yap. Just a minute, I’ll get the door.”

Don’t , Dylan wants to say, but fails.

The door’s chain snaps and Tom stumbles backward into the living room.

It’s the two in the Kangols and the one in the hooded sweatshirt, and they’re in Tom’s apartment immediately, yelling, “Sit down, motherfucker! Sit the fuck down! ” Tom stumbles to the couch and plops there between Dylan and Liza, his bare thighs touching them both.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Tom moans.

“ Shutup ,” says one of the Kangols.

A few things are simultaneously notable about the man-boy in the hood, the lurker Dylan and Liza passed coming up the stoop:

He’s holding a pistol. Waving it. The pistol’s small, dark, unshiny, totally persuasive. All three on the couch watch it and the three black teens watch it too, even the one who holds it. Even the cat. The optics of the room seemingly distort toward the dull fistlike object, as though it were sucking light.

He’s the obvious leader.

He’s tall and moves with weird angularity.

He’s not just any random black guy with an Adam’s apple big as an elbow, he’s one in particular.

“ Robert? ” says Dylan incredulously.

“Ho, shit,” says one of the Kangols softly.

Robert Woolfolk stares from under the hood, as stunned as Dylan. There’s no plan, that’s apparent. This is some godless universe’s dumb notion of a joke.

“You know him?” says Tom.

“Who this whiteboy, nigga?” wonders a Kangol.

Liza’s hugged around the ball of fur, trembling.

Robert Woolfolk just shakes his head. He has instantaneously processed the surprise. What’s left is just lip-sucking disappointment, spiked with pure rage. “You one lucky motherfucker,” he says quietly.