The Fortress of Solitude (39 page)

“Oh.”

“I
shit
cancer. Doesn’t matter, don’t pity me. You know why don’t pity me? One guess.”

“Lay the girls?”

“Give the man a cigar.”

bad december

no joke kid

i haven’t slept a wink

put a rose at the door

of the dakota for me

i am the walrus crab

“Horatio, fuck you been, man?”

Pause.

“Oh, hey, what up, Barry?”

“You got so much action you can’t even respect a nigger’s phone calls?”

“I’m sorry, baby, I was gonna ring you. Ain’t no thing. What’s goin’ on?”

“I need you to set me up with a piece.”

Pause.

“You
talkin
’ ’bout, Barry?”

“You watch television, Horatio?”

“Sure, I watch television, black man, what’s with you?”

“You know what a Beatle is?”

“What? Oh, yeah, yeah.”

“I got to pack some weight. Simple matter, Horatio. Now can you come through for me?
That’s
the question.”

“Man, you crazy? That shit got nothing to do with you.”

“I
seen
that Chapman-ass motherfucker walking around on Dean Street staring at my house just last week. Wasn’t him it was his cousin. White motherfucker had a
list
.”

“You
serious
?”

“You know how many forces want me out the picture, get they hands on some four-track tapes? I don’t even trust
Desmond
, shit. Must be five or ten smash number-one records on them tapes, you think people don’t
know
that? I’ve got enemies, ’Ratio, on the streets, in the executive boardrooms, no shit, even under my
floor
boards. The question is can you help a brother out or do I have to go elsewhere? Whatever you say to me, be for real.”

Pause.

“No sweat, Barry. That what you want I got you covered.”

“Now you’re speaking words I can understand.”

chapter  
17

S
tately Wayne Manor is scheduled to go on between Miller Miller Miller & Sloane and the Speedies, the whole lineup a battle of high-school bands, the members all from Music and Art and Stuyvesant and City-As-School and Bronx Science or Dewey, wherever it is the Speedies go to school or had dropped out of. The Bowery sidewalk is thronged, nobody checks IDs, there are twelve-year-olds, junior high schoolers around. The girls are incredible, sensational, they teem outside CBGB in print dresses and fifties lipstick shades and teased hair, zits sunk in foundation, cupping cigarettes against light wind, bare arms goose-pimpled. They light up the night, birds of paradise to induce trembling in grown men but there are no grown men here apart from a few flophouse dwellers suffering already from delirium tremens. 1981, sixteen-year-olds could rule the Manhattan night, puff joints openly, and inside the hole-in-the-wall club order beer in plastic cups. Twos or threes of boys in leather and jeans mutter around the mobs of girls, faking hand stamps with ballpoint pen and pushing inside toward the stage, or stalling outside, passing bagged bottles of something harder, occasionally shoving one another to the curb in a hail of shouts, bluffed hostility. Somebody arrives and stickered amps and guitars come out of a trunk. Everyone admires the guitarist’s bandaged fingers, he’d punched a car window and broken three knuckles, just raging at something some girl had gotten away saying unanswered. He’s playing tonight anyhow, with mitts for hands, a show-biz hero.

In a nearby lobby a man enters a cage elevator, returning to a single room he’s lived in since 1953.

A black-and-white curbed on Rivington jiggles slightly, a cop getting blown in the cage while his partner on the Bowery’s corner looks out and waits his turn. Likely there’s some code for this operation,
a stroller
, or an
O-five-O
.

Walls here show punk graffiti, another type entirely, the letter A circled for anarchy, jerky uppercase remembrances of bands like the Mice and Steaming Vomit perhaps the one lasting impression they’ll make.

Tonight’s a bigger than usual deal in the Stuyvesant crowd, with somebody’s apartment parent-vacated for the weekend and mass plans to drop acid there. Weekend, it all happens on the weekend, as if school isn’t twenty-four hours away, as if your life has changed one iota. You could fight the structure, on a Tuesday or Wednesday night go to shows or to Bowl-Mor, the all-night alley on University Place which advertised “Rock-’n’-Roll Bowling!”—but down that road lay too much cutting, failing out, the rock-bottom destinations of City-As-School or your local high. Like Tim Vandertooth you might never be seen again.

So dress up and pretend you won’t all see each other in gym outfits Monday morning, hungover and sheepish as shit.

Inside, Miller Miller Miller & Sloane conclude their set. Their famous encore is a comic cameo, drummer emerging from behind traps to sing Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” which can be safely adored inside the ironical brackets of Upper West Side whiteboys playing the most famous punk club in the world.

Admittedly it’s a pretty great song, which everyone will be humming the next day if LSD doesn’t brainwipe all recollection.

Stately Wayne Manor is on in fifteen minutes.

Dylan Ebdus mills in the crowd at the base of the riser, though he’s only heard this band play about a hundred times already, between small gigs and practices at the rehearsal space on Delancey. His friend Gabe Stern plays bass in Stately Wayne Manor—he taught himself onstage, like Sid Vicious. Dylan, he’s like Manor’s fifth member, he knows their tiny set by heart, hand-letters their posters, listens in confidence to their girlfriends’ grievances.

Sometimes makes out with their girlfriends.

Might one day get laid by their girlfriends.

Girlfriends present and future make a sizeable portion of the crowd which packs the bar like the soda counter in an Archie comic. The three bands lack a sole fan over eighteen. Every kid here would surely claim they’d seen Talking Heads on CB’s tiny stage and be lying, since they were twelve or thirteen last time that happened. You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all. Talking Heads nowadays play the tennis stadium in Forest Hills: buy a seat at Ticketron in the basement of Abraham and Straus and take the subway to Queens like any other schmuck.

The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time
isn’t
.

Tripping on acid tonight’s just the nearest example.

Now Dylan’s friend Linus Millberg appears out of the crowd with a cup of beer and shouts, “Dorothy is John Lennon, the Scarecrow is Paul McCartney, the Tin Woodman is George Harrison, the Lion’s Ringo.”

“
Star Trek
,” commands Dylan over the lousy twangy country CB’s is playing between sets.

“Easy,” Linus shouts back. “Kirk’s John, Spock’s Paul, Bones is George, Scotty is Ringo. Or Chekov, after the first season. Doesn’t matter, it’s like a Scotty-Chekov-combination Ringo. Spare parts are always surplus Georges or Ringos.”

“But isn’t Spock-lacks-a-heart and McCoy-lacks-a-brain like Woodman and Scarecrow? So Dorothy’s Kirk?”

“You don’t get it. That’s just a superficial coincidence. The Beatle thing is an
archetype
, it’s like the basic human formation. Everything naturally forms into a Beatles, people can’t help it.”

“Say the types again.”

“Responsible-parent genius-parent genius-child clown-child.”

“Okay, do
Star Wars
.”

“Luke
Paul
, Han Solo
John
, Chewbacca
George
, the robots
Ringo
.”

“
Tonight Show
.”

“Uh, Johnny Carson
Paul
, the guest
John
, Ed McMahon
Ringo
, whatisname
George
.”

“Doc Severinson.”

“Yeah, right. See, everything revolves around John,
even Paul
. That’s why John’s the guest.”

“And Severinson’s quiet but talented, like a Wookie.”

“You begin to understand.”

Dylan’s the bagman for tonight’s LSD run, holding everyone’s folding money, a hundred and ninety bucks which from habit he clutches tightly, hand within his pocket. Pride resists deeper habit’s call to transfer the roll to his sock. The task of copping acid has fallen to Dylan and Linus Millberg for two reasons: 1. They’re regular customers of the dealer, a gay on Ninth Street who sells Stuyvesant kids nickels from his apartment. 2. They’re not in the band.

Linus Millberg is a freak math prodigy, a sophomore running with juniors, formerly shy.

“If we go now we can catch the Speedies’ set,” says Linus.

“Okay but wait a minute.”

“We should have gone an hour ago.”

“Okay I know but wait a minute. Go get me a beer.”

Linus nods and dips back toward the bar.

Dylan is absently gratified by Linus’s puppy-dog servility, perhaps because in the Stately Wayne Manor crowd it serves to mask his own. There’s plenty that might be considered cool about being to one side instead of in the band itself. Mostly, though, it sucks. That’s the self-loathing root of his dawdling: Stately Wayne Manor has never played CB’s before, and Dylan’s reluctant to surrender the borrowed glamour of their debut.

You could not be on the stage and still be on the stage.

It’s not unrelated to standing beside Henry while he roofed a spaldeen you’d fetched from the street.

There’s drama too: whether Josh, the singer, will show up drunk or if Giuseppe, the guitarist, can play with bandaged hands. Though Manor’s chords are such that you might shape them on a Stratocaster’s neck with an elbow or foot.

“There’s the
Gawce
, she’s looking great.”

Linus has returned with the beers.

“The Gawcester’s here, Ebdus,” he said again. “You better do something this time.”

Linus has a valid point: another factor in dawdling is Liza Gawcet. Liza’s a new freshman Dylan Ebdus maybe-likes. She had a well-publicized curfew, so she wouldn’t be along afterward tripping or bowling: this was his only chance. Dylan had leaked acknowledgment of the spell cast by her blond, mute, new-developed, fishnet-bound cuteness through a network of go-betweens, amazed and appalled that this system of proxy flirtation worked for him as it did for so many he held in contempt. But the system, oblivious to his superiority,
had
worked. She maybe-liked Dylan in return—that was the message Liza’s girl squad leaked back.

He’ll talk to her tonight if he can split her from the gaggle, a dicey operation.

The way Liza’s fishnets show through knee- and ass-torn OshKosh B’Gosh’s is killingly childish and hot, like she’s slipped the punky leggings on beneath outfits unchanged since fifth-grade hopscotch spills.

You could be sixteen and still suspect yourself of pederastic lusts.

The whole band’s lately sniggering about Liza, infuriating their junior-year girlfriends, but Dylan’s got an inside track.

Linus says, “You’re good-looking in the face and Josh has a body and Gabe’s in the band and I can start a conversation with anyone—if we were combined in one person we could fuck any girl in the school.”

“Shut up.”

“Yeah, but do something.”

“Go see if she wants to meet a drug dealer.”

The miracle of Linus is he tends to oblige. This isn’t a matter of daring, just Gumby pliancy. For instance, at Gabe’s command he’d grabbed a boxed pizza cooling on the counter of Famous Ray’s and scrambled all the way to Washington Square. Now Dylan watches as Liza Gawcet and her friends listen to Linus’s exuberant proposal. Linus points at the door, then at his hand stamp, explaining how they’ll be readmitted, no problem.

And Liza Gawcet is
nodding
.

Stately Wayne Manor’s amps are set up and the band’s in the back room, smoking pot, acting like a band, making the crowd wait. Fuck them. Dylan hears the opening chords, the false starts and in-jokey banter, in his head. Gabe will play and not see Dylan at the stage and later ask and Dylan will say,
Didn’t see Gawcet either, did you?
Let him wonder.

Hey, maybe he’d really luck out. Maybe they’d get high at the dealer’s and Liza would break curfew.

He’s glad, anyway, to shield her from Manor’s moment of glory. No shock finding jealousy of the band roiling in his heart, he’s got every shit feeling catalogued there if he glances.

On the sidewalk they fall to a boy-boy, girl-girl-girl formation, Dylan having yet uttered zip to Liza directly. But he and Linus are leading the freshmen away from CB’s, up across St. Marks Place, holy shit.

Through the city’s night they move in a giddy bubble. Older teens, men with shopping carts, taxicabs, all of it recedes to the margins, invisible.

“Mary
John
, Lou
Paul
, Murray
George
, Ted Baxter
Ringo
.”

Linus will do this until he’s told to stop, but Dylan doesn’t wish him to, it’s serving a nice purpose of keeping their mouths moving. “Good one.”

“I didn’t make this shit up,” says Linus. “It’s like some essential human grouping pattern.”

“So you’re saying that’s why Stately Wayne Manor’s doomed—bad
Beatle dynamics
.”

“Oh yeah, it’s painfully obvious.”

“Andrew thinks he’s John, nobody wants to be Paul.”

“They
all
think they’re John. They’re four wannabe Johns. They’re like four
Georges
. With no Ringo to lighten things up.”

“Not
one
real John?”

“Maybe Giuseppe. Doesn’t matter. Without Paul to play peacemaker, John’s just as bad as George.”

“I thought George wasn’t bothering anybody, he just wants to, you know, write one song per album and play his sitar.”

“No, no, George is evil, he wants to usurp John, that’s his nature.”