Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

The parable wasn’t completely lost on me, though I couldn’t keep from recalling the day Robert Woolfolk and his little friend had tried to mug me for my pizza on Smith Street. I wondered if Richard Brodeur knew of any approach to the problem of the one slice. I suspected not.

Afterward Matthew and I drifted back to the Commons lawn, where, beyond the outermost row of dorms, the mowed rim plunged out of sight-the place was known as the End of the World. There a gaggle of our housemates tapped an early keg. We lined up for plastic cups of frothy beer, against a backdrop of green hills dimpled with sunset shadows.

“What did you take away from that?” said Matthew.

“When you think you’re eating the first slice, you might really be eating the second slice?”

“Something like that. Anyway, it made me hungry.”

This would be a running joke: when he and I began sleeping in late in the Apartment and missing classes we called it eating the first slice . My career at Camden, as it turned out, wouldn’t involve a second.

That week we experienced our first of the famous Friday-night parties. Dorms were provided with a booming sound system, and plastic cups and kegs of beer from the food service-the administration had a stake in keeping its tender wards out of Vermont bars on weekend nights. Camden, truthfully, wasn’t an accidental hothouse, but a deliberate one, an experiment like the Biosphere. So by eleven o’clock two or three hundred of us throbbed in one mass to Rick James’s “Super Freak” on the sticky living-room floor of Fish House, another party dorm only slightly less notorious than Oswald. That easy appropriation of dance-floor funk was a first taste, for me, of something I desperately wanted to understand: the suburban obliviousness of these white children to the intricate boundaries of race and music which were my inheritance and obsession. Nobody here cared-it was only a danceable song. The Rick James was followed by David Bowie, the Bowie by Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, and the OMD by Aretha Franklin. I threw myself into the dance, briefly freed.

A couple of hours later Matthew and I brought two girls back to the End of the World. Now the mowed edge plunged into mist-laced darkness, the nickname explained. Aimee Dunst and Moira Hogarth were, like us, freshman roommates, and suitably punkish, with eye shadow and gelled hair. Matthew had met them in a class on Milton and Blake. We four had talked or tried to talk in the spilling craze of the party, the penumbra of retching and squirming bodies, then ferried our plastic cups of grapefruit juice and vodka out into the chirping dark.

Aimee was from Lyme, Connecticut, and Moira was from Palatine, a suburb of Chicago. Hardly anyone, I’d learned, was really from a city. If they said Los Angeles or Chicago or New York they meant Burbank or Palatine or Mount Kisko.

As a trick of flirting I’d been boasting of my inner-city knowledge, turning discomfort inside out.

“Were you ever mugged?” asked Aimee.

Aimee, like anyone who ever asked me this question before or since, was thinking of a stickup in an alleyway, an adult transaction, a transaction of strangers. She was thinking of Death Wish and Kojak . The nearest I’d come was Robert Woolfolk’s holdup of the drug dealer. That event was beyond explanation.

“I was yoked,” I said instead. “Ever been yoked?”

“What’s that?”

“I’d have to show you.”

They giggled, and Matthew stared, not knowing any more than they did.

“I don’t know,” said Aimee, trailing backward, her footfalls stumbling.

“Okay, forget it.”

“Do me,” said Moira, boldly.

“You sure?”

“Uh huh.”

“It doesn’t really hurt. But you should put down your drink.” We nestled plastic cups in dewy grass. Straightening too quickly, I grew dizzy. The Vermont oxygen was like another drink, a chaser.

“ Fuck you lookin’ at?”

All three turned their heads, fooled by my sudden volume and hostility. But we were alone there, at the End of the World. It was the only place I could ever have put on my mummery, my minstrel show.

I kept my eyes locked on Moira. The others were irrelevant. “That’s right, girl. Don’t look around, I’m talkin’ to you. Fuck you think you lookin’ at?”

“Stop,” said Aimee. Moira just stared back, rattled but defiant.

“See, that’s all right. I don’t mean nothing. Come over here for a minute.” I pointed to the ground at my feet. “What, you afraid? I ain’t gonna do nothin’. Just let me talk to you for a minute.” My drunken self was astounded at how well I knew the drill. These words had never come from my mouth.

Moira stepped closer, taking the dare, Bacall to my Bogey. I might have liked to quit already, but the script demanded I play it all the way. There was rage nestled in the script, urgency I’d never tapped.

“See, I’m your friend, right? You know I like you.” I threw an arm around Moira’s shoulders and tugged her close. “You got a dollar you could lend me?”

“Don’t give it to him!” howled Matthew, getting the joke now. Only it was barely a joke.

“No,” said Moira.

Trapping Moira gently as possible in the triangle of fist-elbow-shoulder, I dipped her, as I’d been dipped a hundred times. Not far. To my chest. “You sure? Lemme check your pockets for a minute.” I frisked the front pockets of her corduroys, found bills and plucked them out. Then Moira twisted against me and I took pity and loosed my hold. She sprang back angrily toward the others.

I raised the curled bills. “It’s just a loan, you could trust me. You know we was just foolin’ around, right?”

Moira rushed and tackled me into the grass. I felt the fury in her body at being handled as I’d handled her, a fury I knew precisely, from her side. But she was also drunk and excited and putting our hips back in conjunction. Yoking Moira, I’d also chosen her. A thick shock of sex was in the air-as it had been on the dance floor at Fish House. It was everywhere at Camden, only waiting for anyone to slice off a portion for themselves, and now Moira and I had done so. In all of high school I’d never kissed a girl without long spoken preliminaries, yet here it was simple. When she grabbed the bills in my hand I grabbed her hand and we returned the money to the pocket of her corduroys together, rolling on the wet lawn, kissing wildly, missing one another’s faces, kissing ears and hair. Beyond where we lay, Matthew and Aimee had gone past the End of the World and vanished in the dark.

What I could never have explained to Moira was that the sexual component of a yoking was present before she and I enacted it, was buried in the practice, as I knew it, at its roots.

Moira Hogarth and I spent that night in her and Aimee’s room in Worthell House, while Aimee and Matthew took Oswald Apartment. Moira and I were a couple for two weeks from that night-an eternity at Camden, where rehearsals of adulthood were rendered miniature by a compression of time and space. A whole relationship could be enacted in a weekend, wounds nursed before the next Friday night. In our case, by Halloween Moira and I wouldn’t be speaking. Then again, by Thanksgiving we were confidantes, whispering and laughing our way across Commons and spending nights in bed together so that everyone was certain we were a couple though we were in fact sleeping with others. Then before the end of the term we’d fucked and fallen out again. And so on: there was nothing notable, at that school, in the close recycling of the same few sympathetic souls. There were too few to waste.

My yoking of Moira, out at the End of the World, became the origin of a scheme: I’d throw Brooklyn down like a dare. I needed something. I’d been set up to feel like a square at Camden, where my short haircut and cardigan-and-loafer style, so decisively David Byrneish or Quadrophenia mod at Stuyvesant only looked ordinarily preppy to those who’d actually been to prep school. But nobody could question my street credibility here, where nobody had any street credibility whatsoever. I earned my stripe at Camden by playing a walking artifact of the ghetto. I pretended to be ignorant of what Baja and Aspen were, or why schoolmates named Trudeau or Westinghouse might be particularly well-heeled. I smoked Kools, I wore a Kangol cap, I called my friends “Yo”-and this, long enough before the Beastie Boys made it widely familiar, was funny enough to a couple of Oswald House upperclassmen, a pair of hipsterish coke dealers named Runyon Kent and Bee Prudhomme, that they made a version of it my nickname: I was Yoyo to them. Basically, I turned myself into a cartoon of Mingus. The shtick was a splendid container for my self-loathing, and for my hostility toward my classmates. And it made me popular.