The Fortress of Solitude (40 page)

Chewbacca wants to usurp Han Solo?
But never mind. Dylan says: “They have to break up, then.”

“Indubitably.”

“We’ll go back and tell them.”

The girls become attentive. “Stately Wayne Manor’s breaking up?” asks Liza Gawcet.

“Tonight,” jokes Dylan, and the amazing thing is he’s honestly never thought it before. Not for a minute had he doubted the band would be signed, famous, an exclusive quadrangle for life. Now realizing that’s unlikely, his jealousy eases into generosity: Stately Wayne Manor’s going nowhere, so let them play CBGB tonight. Hell, let them last a month more and get that Halloween gig opening for Johnny Thunders’s Heartbreakers at the Roxy.

Meanwhile Linus attempts to explain Beatle dynamics to the girls, using his ungainliest example yet. “—the reason they’ll never get off the island is Skipper’s such a weak Paul and Gilligan’s a John who’d rather be a Ringo. He’s like, practically fighting Mr. Howell for Ringo status. Plus Professor’s such an overbearing George, they’re completely screwed up—”

When one of Liza’s friends says, “What about the girls?” Linus impatiently replies “
The girls don’t matter
” before he can stop himself.

Dylan decides to step into this breach. “A rock band requires a certain alchemy,” he says ominously. “You saw
Quadrophenia
?”

“Sure.”

“Like that, you know—the four faces of the Who.”

Liza stares blankly, as if she might have regarded
Quadrophenia
more along the lines of
that movie with Sting in it
. Dylan feels despair rising. Fishnet tights do not a cultural vocabulary make. To the ironized, reference-peppered palaver which comprises Dylan’s only easy mode of talk former prep-school girls have frequently proved deaf as cats.

“I think I mostly like bands with one strong personality,” she says. “Like the Doors.”

Dylan’s triply whiplashed. Liza’s found the gist of Linus’s conceit through the smokescreen of the
Gilligan’s Island
example, then just as quickly dismissed it, which is nimble as hell. Alternately, and fully depressing, she’s into the Doors. Worse, though—if he’s grasped the implication—does she think someone in Stately Wayne Manor has
a strong personality
?

But they’re at Ninth Street and Second Avenue now, nearly to the connection’s stoop, and Dylan means to shift focus to his own status as criminal savant.
She said she wanted to meet a drug dealer
. “I can’t take this many people up, it’s not so cool,” he says. As though it’s an arbitrary selection he adds, “Uh, Liza, you come up with me. Linus can stay downstairs with you other girls.”

Linus gets it, and, hunching his shoulders and slanting his eyes, adds, “We’ll keep a
lookout
.”

“A lookout for what?” says one of Liza’s pals, instantly spooked.

“Nothing,” says Dylan, with quick exasperation.

“Why can’t we stay together?” whines the spooked girl.

“Don’t worry.” Dylan’s always found the notion of streetwisefulness in Manhattan a joke, has trouble not sneering at his West Side– or Chelsea-born friends who cross streets to duck clusters of homies, as though shit
ever
happens here. The East Village is too full and frenzied to be dangerous, and, truthfully, cops are everywhere. His friends don’t know fear, they’ve got no idea. Though, go figure, now here’s a black kid in a drawn sweatshirt hood sitting legs-wide on the gay’s top step and looking not at all intimidated to be stranded from his usual turf.

Then a glance down Ninth reveals two in eyebrow-low Kangol caps and baggy pants walking with deliberate slowness across the street and the vibe’s not great but this is getting
stupid
: Dylan’s spooking himself. And now’s no time for hesitation.

“We’ll be down in five. You can go around to St. Marks and get a slice but come back.”

“Uh, Dylan?” says Liza, once they’re buzzed inside. At the second-floor landing they wait for the dealer to unbolt his door.

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think the door downstairs closed all the way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like someone put their foot in it.”

“
Relax
. Linus is just hysterical, it’s catching.”

Dylan’s screwy secret is he likes visiting Tom’s apartment, despite the pervasive odor of unfresh kitty litter. The gay dealer recalls someone Dylan might have found sitting in Rachel’s breakfast nook on afternoons when he returned from P.S. 38. Like Rachel, Tom smokes not in the hammily clandestine manner of adolescents, that huffing and crouching and voice-squeezing which Dylan privately despises, but grandly, legs crossed, waving a joint and talking uninterruptedly through inhalations, unmindful of conserving the smoke. The satin shorts Tom sports year-round show too much hairy thigh, but Tom’s okay. Two or three times Dylan’s loafed around his place listening to albums and even meeting other buyers, and Tom’s never bartered to suck anyone’s cock, contrary to legend.

Tonight’s different: all’s appalling here, and Dylan can’t think of why on earth he’s brought Liza upstairs. He sees only the filthy pile carpet and chintzy decor, Coca-Cola glasses, framed
Streamers
poster. And Tom looks like a boiled lobster, all red for some reason. Dylan only wants to score and leave, but Tom can’t be rushed.

“You know this record?” Tom asks.
And the colored girls go doo, doo-doo, doo, doo-doo-doo, doo, doo-doo, doo, doo-doo-doo, doo, doo-doo
is what’s coming out of the stereo and certainly Dylan’s heard it before, but at the moment, distracted partly by strobe visions of Marilla and La-La, he can only imagine that’s the song’s
title
: “The Colored Girls Go Doo-Doo-Doo,” etc. Which can’t be right. So he gives out a gruff nod which Tom translates easily:
I’ve got no idea
.

“Lou Reed, how soon they forget.”

“Sure,” says Dylan. In Dylan’s mind Lou Reed dwells with Mott the Hoople and the New York Dolls in a hazy Bermuda Triangle between sixties rock, disco, and the punk which has supposedly demolished both. The music’s brazen sophistication irritates category. The simple solution, particularly from the vantage of Tom’s pad, is to call the phantom genre
gay
. This is gay music. Pretty catchy, though.

“You and girlfriend aren’t planning to gulp all this blotter by yourselves, I hope.”

“No.”

Tom’s gray Maine coon cat has crept into Liza’s overalled lap, and now she’s curled around it, head ducked, cooing. She’s less than present, off communing with things female and feline.

“Oh gee, I shouldn’t have said
girlfriend
. I’m always opening my yap. Just a minute, I’ll get the door.”

Don’t
, Dylan wants to say, but fails.

The door’s chain snaps and Tom stumbles backward into the living room.

It’s the two in the Kangols and the one in the hooded sweatshirt, and they’re in Tom’s apartment immediately, yelling, “Sit down, motherfucker!
Sit the fuck down!
” Tom stumbles to the couch and plops there between Dylan and Liza, his bare thighs touching them both.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Tom moans.

“
Shutup
,” says one of the Kangols.

A few things are simultaneously notable about the man-boy in the hood, the lurker Dylan and Liza passed coming up the stoop:

He’s holding a pistol. Waving it. The pistol’s small, dark, unshiny, totally persuasive. All three on the couch watch it and the three black teens watch it too, even the one who holds it. Even the cat. The optics of the room seemingly distort toward the dull fistlike object, as though it were sucking light.

He’s the obvious leader.

He’s tall and moves with weird angularity.

He’s not just any random black guy with an Adam’s apple big as an elbow, he’s one in particular.

“
Robert?
” says Dylan incredulously.

“Ho, shit,” says one of the Kangols softly.

Robert Woolfolk stares from under the hood, as stunned as Dylan. There’s no plan, that’s apparent. This is some godless universe’s dumb notion of a joke.

“You
know
him?” says Tom.

“Who this whiteboy, nigga?” wonders a Kangol.

Liza’s hugged around the ball of fur, trembling.

Robert Woolfolk just shakes his head. He has instantaneously processed the surprise. What’s left is just lip-sucking disappointment, spiked with pure rage. “You one lucky motherfucker,” he says quietly.

“Get out of my house, all of you.”

“
Shutup
, faggit, I ain’t
even
talkin’ to you. Come over here, Dylan, what you got for me, man?”

Robert explores Dylan’s jeans with ancient and tender familiarity, seeming to find the wad of twenties, tens, and fives unremarkable, his due. These pockets and Robert’s fingers have journeyed on parallel tracks from Brooklyn for this unlikely rendezvous: Why shouldn’t something extraordinary come of it?

Then, sparing Dylan any violence or even the mildest of jibes about Rachel, Robert Woolfolk disappears the gun into his waistband, deep-muffled beneath a sweatshirt that’s nearly to his knees, and waves his homeboys to the door and out into the hall. Perhaps Robert’s forgotten the origins of the prohibition against his harming Dylan. Perhaps as in
Chariots of the Gods
he goes on obeying a deity he can no longer name or even properly recall.

All that’s heard is a last: “
Who the whiteboy, Robert?
” and the reply: “
Shutup, nigger
.” And they’re gone.

Dylan stares at Tom in bewildered silence.

“Get out of my house.”

“But—”

“You brought this here, now
get out
.”

Dylan touches Liza’s shoulder and she slaps him away, expelling the cat in the same motion. Is it possible for a cat to have peed in fear at the sight of a gun? For the ammoniac stink seems nearer than the bathroom now, and Liza’s got a wet patch on her OshKosh B’Goshes.

Oh.

On the stoop comes the fear that Robert Woolfolk’s still around, that the episode’s not over. As the outer door clicks shut behind them Dylan’s vibrant with this possibility, a plucked string. But no, here’s Linus, just walking up nibbling the tip of a wax-papered slice and saying, “Hey, what’s the problem?” Dylan wants to turn to Liza and plead
don’t tell
but she floods past Linus, crying now, hands cupping pants seat where urine pooled, seeking the consolation of her gaggle—she never should have left their side, never should have come on this expedition, probably never should have graduated Dalton’s eighth grade and allowed her parents to talk her into taking the Stuyvesant test, the cheapskates. Dylan’s searching, almost hopeful, but Robert Woolfolk’s gone, there’s no trace, no proof, nothing but the tale he dreads to tell, the implausible, unworkable, unlikely confession.

Brooklyn’s stranded thirty punks in an apartment unpsychedelicized and they’ll be needing an account of why.

Brooklyn’s chased you to the ground and nobody’s going to comprehend except that you’re marked, cursed, best avoided.

Brooklyn’s bepissed your blond destiny.

You’d strain pee from fishnets with your teeth to make it up to her but fat chance.

Maybe Liza Gawcet and Linus Millberg can be enlisted in the cause of explaining it to the others in Beatle-dynamic terms: how Dean Street’s George Harrison tonight spared the life of Dean Street’s Paul McCartney. If you’re willing to tell it all—Mingus Rude, Arthur, Robert, Aeroman—it might be enough, one hell of a story, worth two hundred bucks, an acid trip of its own. But that’s an awful lot of telling, and it opens to realms you’ve diligently left gray to yourself. Be real:
it ain’t gonna happen.

The four-track recorder was secure at the pawnshop on Fourth and Atlantic Avenues, not in the window but deep in the back, on the shelves behind the counter. It would wait for him there: Who’s got use for a four-track hereabouts? The tapes themselves were stashed beneath the loose floorboard under the water bed, along with pipe, silk rope and handcuffs, gun, and assorted drug detritus, though nothing left to smoke or snort or he would’ve smoked and snorted it. At times he was unsure whether the tapes weren’t actually blank, whether he’d demoed any of those compositions floating through his mind. Elsetimes he was positive he slept above a McDuck vault of riches, future sonic gold.

Either way, nobody pillaging the basement closet was gonna find shit, whether pillager came through a window or door or was already there, an inside man, a mole. They’d have to storm his citadel upstairs. If someone were to force him to reach inside his stash hole it wouldn’t be magnetic tapes he’d come up with in his hand, it’d be the forty-five.

And he didn’t mean no seven-inch record. Damn straight.

The Times Plaza Hotel was on the way back from the pawnshop and that was where he stopped on his way home, figuring to buy himself a treat out of the fresh money. There was always some deal cooking in the lobby there. He’d only had to stop by twice, looking for Senior, to suss the general atmosphere.

“Hey, honey, I know you.”

“Nah, you’re mistaken. You don’t know me. But we can change that.”

“I know you because I know your daddy and your little boy. I just never seen you around here before, but I
know
you.”

“Baby, I come ’round here all the time, you just missed me.”

“You a
singer
.”

“That’s right.”

“See, I would of seen you if you come around before, because I know your daddy. He a
religious
man. He tole me all
about
you.”

“That so?”

“Mmm hmm. I don’t even want to
tell
you what he said though.”

“Maybe he told me about you too.”

“See, now you just talkin’ shit.”

“Listen, baby, you know these Trinidadian dudes come around here sometimes?”

“Maybe I
do
.”

He made it songlike and seductive, dropped register: “I know you know everybody, that’s the reason I ask.”