Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“So.” He smiled, frowned, widened his hands. We studied one another and tried to remain friendly. Jared and I were probably the same age but otherwise had traveled from opposite ends of the universe to this meeting. My black jeans were like a smudge of ash or daub of vomit in this cream-and-peach world.

“I’m a friend of Randolph ’s,” I reminded him. “From the Weekly .”

“Riiight.” He nodded, considering it. “Just… who is Randolph?”

“ Randolph Treadwell? The Weekly ?”

He nodded. “I think I know who you mean.”

“Well, he, uh, set this up.”

“Okay. Okay. So, uh, what are you doing in my office?”

“Sorry?” The question was so bald. I was astonished as if he’d asked Why do I hold this job, as opposed to, say, anyone else? Can you explain that, please?

“Just a minute,” he said, holding up one finger and springing from the love seat. He leaned over his desk and pushed a button. “Mike?”

“Yes.”

“What’s Dylan doing in my office?”

“He’s the music guy.”

“The music guy.”

“You remember. He’s got a movie.”

“Ahhhh.” Now Jared turned and smiled at me. This was all pleasure. A movie! How perfectly unexpected. “Who’s Randy Treadmill or something?” he said to the intercom.

“He’s that guy you met when you were talking about the thing.” Click, buzz. “On the boat.”

“ Ahhhh . Okay. Okay.” He released the intercom. There was a hierarchy of remembering here, I understood. Mike remembered for Jared the sort of things Jared had once remembered for someone else, on his way up through the ranks. Someday Mike would have someone remembering things for him as well, and be free to abandon the skill.

Jared returned to the love seat and again pointed a finger at me, but now it was a happier finger.

“You’ve got a movie ,” he said warmly.

“Yes.”

“I’ve been wanting to hear this.” He didn’t know the first thing about it, I saw now. I could have offered him a comedy about a rookie vibraphonist for the Boston Pops, or a thriller about a spy who kills by ultrasonic whistle, any of the many things a music guy would be likely to concern himself with.

“I’m closing my eyes,” said Jared. “It means I’m listening.”

I was left to consider his tanned lids, immaculate desk, twin rubber tree plants. I was the ant who had to move them, apparently.

“Your movie is about-?” This was a just-because-my-eyes-are-closed-doesn’t-mean-there’s-no-hurry situation.

“A true story,” I said.

“Okay.”

“In Tennessee -”

“ Tennessee ?” Jared opened his eyes.

“Yes.”

“What happened in Tennessee?”

I started again. “In the fifties, in Tennessee, there was this singing group called the Prisonaires. Because they were in prison. But they had a career anyway. They recorded at Sun Records, where Elvis Presley was discovered. That’s the name of the movie- The Prisonaires .”

“Did you know that both my parents came here from Tennessee?” He made it sound like Crimea, or Mars. “Or is that just some kind of coincidence?”

“I didn’t know.”

“Okay. Okay. Wild. What’s it called?”

“ The Prisonaires .”

“Okay, tell me again.”

“Let me set it up,” I’d been advised to “talk in scenes.” “I’d want to start the movie inside the prison. The lead Prisonaire is a guy named Johnny Bragg. He’s the songwriter, the lead singer. He’s been in jail for years, since he was sixteen. On trumped-up charges. So he and another convict are out in the yard, walking, in the rain, literally, and one says to the other. ‘Here we are, walking in the rain, I wonder what the little girls are doing?’ And Johnny Bragg starts singing the line, a mournful little song, ‘Just Walkin’ in the Rain.’ Which became their first hit. Maybe it could be playing over the opening credits.”

“That reminds me of something else.”

“You’re probably thinking of ‘Singing in the Rain.’ ”

“Oh yeah, sure. He wrote that ?”

“Different song.”

“Okay, let me get this: he’s wrongfully imprisoned. What’s the charge?”

“Well, actually it was six convictions for rape. Six ninety-nine-year sentences, with no possibility of parole.”

“Ouch.”

“The cops set him up. He was an arrogant, good-looking kid, and they had it in for him. They pinned a bunch of unsolved rapes on him.”

“Brad Pitt, Matthew McConaughey.”

“I forgot to say black.”

“These are black people ?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” Jared waved his hands, reluctantly brushing Pitt from the room. “Start again with black people. How does he get out of jail?”

“Well, he doesn’t. I mean, he does later, but not right away. He starts a singing group in jail, prison, the Prisonaires. That’s the gimmick-they’re still in prison. They’re let out for recording sessions and live performances.”

“I don’t get it. In or out?”

“That’s the movie. The Prisonaires were so famous in Tennessee that the governor was under pressure from both sides-to free them, to keep them locked up as an example. A few got pardons, but Bragg was still locked inside. It’s a great story, full of dramatic highs and lows.”

“You’re freaking me out.”

“I am?”

“Because we don’t make movies with dramatic highs and lows.”

“Sorry?”

“Just kidding, man.”

It was becoming possible I’d pitch myself across the gap between our love seats and throttle Jared.

“Look, if I could just describe it without any interruptions I think I could make you see.”

“Dylan, that’s not nice.”

“It’s just-I’m dying to tell you this story.”

“I like you, mister.”

I waited until it was clear he had nothing to add, then said, “Thank you.”

“Five minutes.” He spread his fingers to show me five , then stretched back and closed his eyes again.

“The Prisonaires are one of the great unknown stories in pop-culture history,” I said. The language was dead on my tongue, but I blundered on. “Five black guys in prison in the 1950s, some serving hundred-year sentences, some on briefer stretches, all victims of prejudice and economic injustice in the Jim Crow South. Five jailbirds who form a singing group just for the love of the music. But they’re so good they sing themselves into an audition. The warden issues special passes just so they can visit Sun Studios-this is in 1953, the same point when a weird little kid named Elvis Presley is hanging around Sun, trying to get a session. But the star of the movie is Johnny Bragg, the lead singer, the lead Prisonaire. When Bragg was sixteen he got railroaded-a woman with a grudge, maybe jealous because he was playing the field, called the cops on him. She screamed rape. And the white cops pinned six convictions on him, just to clear their books. Six unsolved cases, wham. Johnny Bragg gets six hundred years in prison.” Nearly everything I had was cribbed out of Colin Escott’s liner notes from the Prisonaires CD, or fantasized out of my own musings on a handful of newspaper clippings I’d unearthed myself. But it was enough. I was beginning to inspire myself, to remember what I’d had in mind in the first place, the screenplay I ought to have been researching and writing for the past year. “On the early-morning bus ride to Sun Studios Bragg looks out his window and sees an empty drive-in movie theater, and he says ‘Wow, look at that crazy cemetery.’ He’s twenty-six-been in prison for ten years.”