The Fortress of Solitude (20 page)

“Just pass that test. Your life depends on it. You think this is bad, wait until high school. If you don’t get into Stuyvesant or at least Bronx Science you’re dead. That’s how the test works, highest scores get into Stuyvesant, next highest Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech’s a last resort. Sarah J. Hale or John Jay, those places are practically like prison. A teacher got shot at Sarah J. Hale, it was on TV. Algebra, geometry, biology. Get Winegar to give you a practice test, I’m telling you out of kindness. Make him think you like him. Say you want to enter some kind of project in the science fair. You don’t really have to do it. If he knows you want to go to Stuyvesant maybe he’ll call someone. Do whatever it takes.”

On the same shelves as his comics Arthur Lomb kept mass-market paperback editions of Al Jaffe’s
Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions
and Dave Berg’s
The Lighter Side
. The snippy irony of the
Mad Magazine
cartoonists seemed perfectly matched to Arthur’s bitter views, everything funny in a not-funny-at-all kind of way. Sarcasm as something you practiced like karate. Later concealing your mute fury when nobody fed you the opening lines.

Arthur Lomb’s bedroom windows faced the rear entrances and neglected, ailanthus-choked backyards of the stores on Atlantic Avenue, the rear windows of apartments above the stores, the Brooklyn House of Detention above the rooftops, the municipal buildings and courts of downtown Brooklyn behind the jail, the trace of Manhattan’s high teeth visible past downtown Brooklyn. Arthur Lomb gazed out of his bedroom with a pair of binoculars. Fading evenings after their inevitable chess Arthur and Dylan would gaze through the binoculars in turn, spying on nothing in particular, in silence for once, until Arthur snapped on his radio, which was tuned to an AM station permanently playing “Dream Weaver” or “Fly Like an Eagle.”

Mostly, though, they sat on the stoop, studying Pacific Street’s failure to acknowledge its connection to Bond or Hoyt. On certain summer days they might have made up the contents of a diorama in the Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side, creatures shot by Theodore Roosevelt, then stuffed and mounted in a case: Dylan Ebdus, Arthur Lomb, Homo sapiens, Pacific Street, Brooklyn, 1976. Days were falsely still, gelled in slow motion, Dylan not thinking of Mingus Rude or Dean Street at all, just studying the gray cat as it skittered under a car, the hypnotic tumbling cloud of hospital steam, the mailman reading magazines on another stoop halfway down the block, wondering how long weird detachment could cover losing a thousand chess games in a row to Arthur Lomb’s blunt but remorseless rook play.

Arthur Lomb using both hands to knead sensation back into his folded-under leg, brain whirring behind consternated gerbil eyes as he dialed up another digression.

“It makes no sense to be a Mets fan, not when you look at the facts. Few people our age have actually considered the record, but the Yankees are simply the greatest team in the history of baseball based on sheer championships, players in the Hall of Fame, etcetera. The whole Mets things is a very recent development. But so many kids like you have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. I maintain you can’t argue with the Yankee legacy.”

“Hmm.”

“You’ve probably wondered why I always wear shoes. I had a pair of Pro Keds and some kids took them from me, made me walk home in my socks if you can believe it. My mother bought me another pair but I keep them at home. My sources tell me Pumas are actually what’s coming next. If you go in for that sort of thing: wearing what everyone’s wearing just because they’re wearing it. I don’t, really.”

“Hmm.”

“Mel Brooks’s funniest film is
The Producers
, then
Young Frankenstein
or
Blazing Saddles
. Terri Garr is hot. I feel sorry for any kid who hasn’t seen
The Producers
. My dad took me to all the humor movies. The best Panther is probably
Return
. The best Woody is
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex
.”

Positioning, positioning, Arthur Lomb was forever positioning himself, making his views known, aligning on some index no one would ever consult. Here was Dylan’s burden, his cross: the accumulated knowledge of Arthur Lomb’s smug policies on every possible question. The cross was Dylan’s to bear, he knew, because his own brain boiled with pedantry, with too-eager trivia ready to burst loose at any moment. So in enduring Arthur Lomb Dylan had been punished in advance for the possibility of being a bore.

“Develop your pawns or Hulk Will Smash.”

Now and again Dylan saw a shutter wink open, a glimpse into the furnace of anger inside Arthur Lomb. Dylan didn’t mind. He regarded himself as deserving, according to the same principle of similars which had dictated their friendship in the first place. Just as Dylan should absorb the ennui of Arthur’s poseurdom because of that kernel which thrived inside himself, so again with those glimpsed coals of rage.

“I couldn’t help but notice the other day you were talking to that Mingus Rude kid after school. Ahem, keep your eye on the board, you’re going to be shocked again. It’s going to be bad for your health until you learn to start castling. As I was saying, I noticed you talking to Mingus Rude, he’s an eighth grader, how’d you get to know him? Not that he’s in school much, huh. Still, it must be advantageous to be friends with, hurrh, that sort of person.”

Arthur Lomb’s speech bore like a small puckered scar a characteristic hitch of intaken breath in that place where he’d omitted the word
black
from a sentence but not from the thought which had given rise to the sentence. And that hitch of breath, it seemed to Dylan, was Arthur in a nutshell, making such show of a card unplayed that he tipped his whole hand.

“How’d you know Mingus’s name?” Dylan heard himself say. He’d been concentrating on the game for once, waiting for Arthur to castle as he always ostentatiously castled, but ready this time, with something in store. Distracted, he’d blurted a question which confessed his possessiveness of Mingus, his jealousy. Listen to Arthur Lomb for a month of afternoons and your own talk would be stripped of disguises, that was the price you’d pay.

“Oh, various kids talk about him,” said Arthur airily.

Dylan couldn’t imagine which various kids would ever be seen speaking to Arthur Lomb in school, as opposed to browsing his pants pockets for loose change. Dylan himself shunned Arthur inside the school building, only met up with him afterward for their mutual creeping to the safety of Pacific Street. He understood Arthur’s acceptance of the humiliation of Dylan’s silent treatment at school as a clear measure of Arthur’s desperation and loneliness. So, which various kids?

“Yeah, well, I knew him before,” said Dylan, shutting up before it was too late. Let Arthur fish. Dylan advanced his knight in reply to Arthur’s castling. He made the move lackadaisically, but his heart pounded. Arthur was blind to knights, it had only taken the first thousand games to see it.

“Before what?” said Arthur with thin sarcasm. He pushed a pawn absently, scowling past Dylan and the chessboard, toward Hoyt Street, perhaps mentally groping for a suitable Snappy Answer.

“Check,” said Dylan.

Now Arthur frowned at the board, his eyes racing hectically to consider this unanticipated turn.

“Is this pawn
here
or
here
?” he asked.

“What?”

Arthur pointed, Dylan leaned in. Suddenly the board rattled, jarred at the corner. Then the ripple among the chessmen became an explosion, and the board was lost, pieces tipping, rolling, Arthur’s doomed king clattering atonally down the stoop toward the street, revealed as plastic.

“Look what you made me do,” said Arthur Lomb.

“You knocked it over.”

Arthur opened his palms: sue me.

“I was going to beat you.”

“Now we’ll never know.”

“You win every time and you couldn’t stand letting me beat you once!”

Arthur Lomb stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Actually, I do think we were headed for a stalemate. You shouldn’t get overexcited, Dylan, it may be a while before you beat me. But your game is improving. I congratulate you. You’ve definitely picked up a few things. Speaking of which, har har, would you pick up that king? My leg seems to have fallen asleep.”

Two men, two fathers. Two fathers expelled from their lairs, headed to Manhattan for a change, dressed for a day threatening rain, having shaved their chins to make some nominal impression at their target destinations, tightened scarves with momentary vain glances at hallway mirrors before flushing themselves out of hiding, onto the street. Two fathers each sighing as they plunge down stairwells to underground trains, to endure the shoulder-jostling crowds which mill on platforms and pass through the jerky opening doors, then hang wearily from straps or clutch poles in the blinking, grinding trains. One carrying evidence, a black pebbled-cardboard portfolio with lace ties, the other empty-handed, his instrument his throat and lungs, carried in the valise of his chest. Two fathers ride a while on two separate trains, then, stations attained, Times Square for one, West Fourth for the other, two fathers again put shoe leather to pavement, out on the big island now, two fathers negotiating Abe Beame’s crumbling, deranged infrastructure in the year of the Tall Ships. Two fathers blinking in confusion, each startled how reclusive they’ve become, drifted into their Dean Street solitudes, Brooklyn a mind-state peeling further from Manhattan each day, like continental drift. Two fathers briefly and involuntarily recalling other less morbid and sensitized selves as they move dazed through strobing faces in the late-October streets, two fathers each realizing he alone is distracted by a slide-show sequence of false recognitions—
You! Didn’t you go to City College? Ain’t you Charles What’sisname?
—among dulled millions trudging Manhattan daily, millions jaded out of such free-associated overstimulation. Two fathers shake it off, forcibly raise the thresholds of their own naïveté, get back to their twin metropolitan missions in the chill-now-beginning-to-rain. Two fathers bearing down, recalling their work-selves, their places in the world. Two fathers here after all for a reason, to do some business, no fooling around.

One father stops abruptly, ducks beneath an umbrella to trade fifty cents for a hot dog from a street vendor, another lost ritual unavailable in his part of Brooklyn, his circumscribed rounds. He juggles the portfolio full of painted boards to one arm, then frees both hands, crumples wax paper back and consumes the mustardy dog in four chunks more swallowed than chewed. The snack glowing nicely in stomach’s pit but, breath possibly fouled, conscious again of the impression he’ll make, the hot-dog-gobbling father halts again at a newsstand for mint chewing gum. Forty-one blocks south, the other father’s got similar pangs and is tempted to stop by the siren odors, suspended in misty cold, of a similar cart with hot dogs in boiling water and greasy knishes on the grill, in fact pats his stomach at the smell but pushes on, relying in anticipation on the spread he’s been promised waits at the recording studio, corn bread and barbecued brisket and red beans and rice trucked down from
Sylvia’s
, that’s the word.

Two fathers come to their respective thresholds, pause. Rain’s falling sideways now, borne on wind, hastening them to curtail reflection. Two fathers exhale deeply. One steps inside the elevator in the lobby of the Forty-ninth Street office tower and pushes the button for the eighteenth floor. The other squints through a porthole window, then rings the buzzer at the door of the squat recording studio on West Eighth Street, the place known as Electric Lady.

To be in this place is to admit you exist.

To be in this place is to admit you want something.

Or maybe tell yourself you’re doing it for the kid.

One father paces at the reception desk, stands rather than sits waiting for the art director of the second-largest publisher of science fiction in mass-market paperback in the city, no fly-by-night Belmont Books offices now, Belmont Books with its three-months-late checks and Fashion District office of six guys in Chinese-food-stained shirts, no, this is publishing proper, dour receptionist with butterscotch sucking candy in a jar and a phone with three blinking lines. Other father, downtown, is welcomed off the street of leather outlets and white teenage vagabonds into the odd brick fortress of a building by the soundboard man, apologetic, telling him the others are late, no sweat though, come in. Guy knows your name and is
a big fan of your work
, actually says it, rare for one of these guys not to disguise any awe, hoarding their technician’s seen-it-all cool. Fine, fine. Downtown father nods coolly, taking it out on the guy, feeling like an ass for being early, for being first.

So, two fathers each given more time for stewing than they’d banked on. Then the art director emerges to pump the hand of the one father uptown, guy in a sweater-vest and chewing an unlit pipe, well-fed corporate hipster head-to-toe, while downtown at that same moment the doors to Electric Lady burst open and piling in from a white limo parked at the curb is the whole gang in their Elton John glasses and pimp hats and boas, the bassist in his spaceman outfit of puffy satin shoulder pads and belt, dressed this way just because that’s the way they’re dressed, not for stage or a photo session but because they’re a bunch of freaks who think they’re Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone and Marvin the Martian rolled into one—and the father reminds himself he knows these guys, they like him and that’s why he’s here, they come from the same place. Shit, they all—every one of these jokers and himself—were signed to Motown back in the day.

Taking his elbow and steering him inside, saying,
Really good to meet you, Ebdus. I have the feeling we’re both going to be glad you called
.

Slapping his hands high and low, insisting on the whole circuit of bullshit, saying,
Hey, man, we just couldn’t get out of bed this morning! But we’re here now! You’re gonna luuuv this motherfuckin’ track, man.