Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Katha had been born in the late seventies but her flippant smile, easy banter, and the pitch of her sturdy hips as she moved with a tray, all were film-noir vintage, whether she knew it or not. Though I gobbled her up with my eyes, she was only an easy, impersonal icon of sexual cheer in my life the first dozen times she waited my table. I took her friendly provocations for nothing more than an aspect of her art, and tipped accordingly.

As has sometimes been the case for me, it was one woman who focused my attention on the reality of another. “You and that girl really get a kick out of each other, don’t you?” Abby said one night in May, as we walked home from a Suzzy Roche show.

“She’s got a Drew Barrymore smile,” I joshed, denying by not denying.

“She’s got Drew Barrymore jugs ,” said Abby, and punched me on the arm. We laughed, chummy, jaded cohorts in my self-deception. And that was the last night Abby and I went together to a show at Shaman’s Brigadoon.

My next visit I learned Katha’s last name, and a few other things. Katha Purly only looked nineteen-she was twenty-one. Despite appearances, she wasn’t up from some beach town, but down, from Walla Walla, Washington. Flying in the teeth of cliché, she was an aspiring singer-songwriter waitressing at a joint where she hoped someday to headline. She lived in a commune in Emeryville, along with two of the other waitresses from Shaman’s who’d come south with Katha at the same time. No, the three weren’t a band, just friends. I couldn’t keep from asking the questions but after I learned the answers I pretended I didn’t know them. My sincerity had almost spoiled our breezy, effortless repartee, but on my next visit we fought our way back. And that was where we’d left it, until this night.

Onstage was a trio of African musicians, an organist, xylophonist, and bongo player, billed as the Kenya Orchestra Vandals. They weren’t creating a lot of excitement, and I wondered if a major portion of the orchestra hadn’t been detained at the Nairobi airport. There were free tables near the riser, but I didn’t sit as close as I could have. Instead I picked the quietest corner of Katha’s section.

“Hiya, buster,” she said, and dropped a menu on my table.

“Katha, Katha, Katha.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing at all. Just saying your name. It sounds like panting, actually.”

“I guess, if you’re a dog. You drinking?”

She brought me scotch and I pretended to admire the band. Whenever she was near enough I made jokes about Walla Walla and tried to make her sit at my table for a cigarette break. Once I succeeded, I said: “So what are you doing later, anyway?”

“Who, me ?” Katha’s tone of delighted surprise was all I wished to inspire in her, or for that matter in any other living human, ever again. When two bodies felt the raw uncanny instinct to be joined, and before any damage had been exchanged, it was so easy for one to make the other smile.

“You. You and your so-called friends. You and what army.”

She squinted. “What about the horse I rode in on?”

“The horse especially.”

“You want to party with me, Dylan?”

“I want to hear you play your guitar.”

I felt her hesitation, avoiding a trap. I will not trap you ever or tonight , I willed.

“I’m not off until one-thirty,” she said.

I shrugged and she began to know that I was serious.

“Some people are showing up later,” she said, precisely vague. “But if you don’t mind coming along we could get some hanging-out time.”

I wasn’t much into the Kenyans, so I took a walk to the marina. Mexicans fished off the pier by night, hunched against the indifferent skyline, the Orwellian Transamerica pyramid. I went as far as the pier’s crumbled tip, where lovers walked, though I couldn’t decide whether to count myself as one.

Then ten blocks back to Shaman’s, to an alley door Katha had told me to use. A rap beat pulsed from a small boom box on a kitchen shelf, playing Digital Underground’s “Foghorn Leghorn,” a song which happened to include a few sampled bars of Doofus Funkstrong’s “Bump Suit.” You could hear Barrett Rude Junior’s tenor moan deep in the sample, if you listened hard. The lights in the kitchen were up, the chairs in the darkened front room already turned on the tables. Katha and one of her friends counted the till, mumbling numbers aloud like a prayer, hurrying through the work. The third girl had drawn lines of cocaine on the counter with a kitchen knife.

“Deirdre,” said the girl with the knife, and handed me a rolled bill. Hair had fallen to cover her face as she concentrated over the drug and now she swept it back behind her ear.

“Dylan. Thanks.”

“You know Katha-?” She left it for me to fill in.

“Just from here.”

“Cool.”

The quick onset of alliances were the stuff of these girls’ days, that was the impression Deirdre gave. She’d make a place for me, mildly weird older guy , if I’d make a place for myself. So it was here, as elsewhere, Gowanus, Hollywood, ForbiddenCon 7, other secret zones of belonging. Entry points between zones are hidden until they aren’t, until they become as obvious as a lit kitchen door in a club’s alley, behind which three young women from Walla Walla pool an evening’s tips. And as so often in my experience, passage between was eased by alcohol or marijuana or cocaine, those boundary medicines. Line, Mr. Mildly Weird Older? Of course I’d like a line, and to cross one too, please. How could I not find myself doing Barrett Rude Junior’s drug before this weekend was behind me? That was precisely what I’d come here to do, without knowing it. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Katha. I wanted her badly, but now I’d sensed that the price for having her would be a reschooling in the provisionality of my being, in the futility of my illusions of control. And I wanted to pay that price as much as I wanted Katha herself.

“You really write for Rolling Stone ?”

“I have.”

“Who’d you meet?”

“Uh?”

“Like, did you ever meet Sheryl Crow?” The questions were flat, unashamed.

“Nope.”

“R.E.M.?”

“I was backstage with R.E.M. once, at the Oakland Coliseum.” How to explain that I’d spent the time talking to the dB’s-the opening act?

“What are they like?”

“Well, Michael Stipe was sucking from an oxygen tank after the show.”

“Wow.”

Katha was at the wheel of her Ford Falcon, Deirdre beside her, up front. I was being interviewed by Jane, third and youngest, in the backseat, as we whistled down San Pablo Avenue into Emeryville. A bag of bottles from Shaman’s sat on the seat between us. Velocity, the company of girls as brash as Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh , and revelatory after-hours views of streets I took for granted in daytime, these were the intoxicants I was high on, as much as the cocaine. Or at least I couldn’t parse my other thrillments from the drug. Katha hadn’t spoken to me directly, back in Shaman’s kitchen, only taken the rolled bill from me with a wry, welcoming smile before doing a line herself. And she ignored me in the car, left me to Jane’s questions. That was another thrillment. The silence seemed consent that we’d taken a step. That this night was already earned. We could rest the banter for now.

We slowed in front of a big, turreted, three-story Victorian, set back from the street and with a low white gate around its weedy yard. Bare bulbs and postered white walls blazed from behind curtains of bedsheet and hippie tapestry, so the commune stood out like a piñata from the two-story cookie-box apartments which slumbered on all sides. The cars parked on the street included two that weren’t going anywhere, and one that looked lived in. As my eyes focused I made out a black man in a white undershirt, seated in a lawn chair under the carport of one of the neighboring apartments, and crumpling a paper bag around a bottle. His gaze followed the sputtering progress of the Falcon into the alley beside the commune, impassively.