The Fortress of Solitude (59 page)

Then she was gone, leaving us shocked into silence under the buzz-saw music.

Karen dropped the rolled dollar she’d held and covered her mouth in theatrical astonishment.

Euclid spoke first: “
What. Was. That.
”

“Ho, snap,” said Arthur. “That’s fucked up.”

“I totally forgot she was there,” I whispered to no one in particular, my mind reeling at the insane mistake.

“Did she see?” said Karen, her black-ringed eyes wide like a bird’s.

“Of
course
she saw,” said Moira. “What do you
think
?”

We knew what we thought, but none of us knew what it meant. A famous Camden story—I was certain Moira at least also knew it—concerned a student dealer at Fish House, a few years earlier, who’d been discreetly warned by the school of an imminent bust by the Vermont Police. A sympathetic faculty member had suggested the dealer lock his door and take a long weekend off campus. The point being: Camden had a monumental stake in protecting us from tangles with the law. Talented and eccentric children shouldn’t be judged by society’s harsh adult standards. Let them be eased through their difficult years—this was the deal implicit in the huge tuition, and in the school’s quarantine deep in the woods.

So what did it mean if one of the
little people
knew I dealt coke from Oswald Apartment? Maybe nothing. She might not tell. She might not have caught the full implication, anyhow, might not have seen money change hands. It was easy to imagine nothing crucial had occurred, only something freakish and funny. I could hear Runyon’s voice in my head, urging me to understand it that way. I tried not to race through recollection of the words we’d said aloud, the words she might have overheard.

“Well, I consider it appalling,” said Euclid, breaking the long silence. “The notion of keeping a cleaning woman locked in your bathroom as some kind of sexual pawn. I can’t imagine how you thought you’d get away with it.”

“Ew, she was definitely
not
my sexual pawn,” I said.

“Of course she was,” said Euclid. “You and Arthur both, you’re animals. It’s lucky we created a diversion so she could escape. Were you even intending to give her any food? Were you even intending to give her any
drugs
?”

“Hey, man,” said Arthur, getting with the joke now. “Everybody pays.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” said Euclid.

“Well, I’m glad she’s gone,” said Karen. “Because I have to pee.”

“That would have been a shock,” said Moira.

“Go see if she built a fire,” directed Euclid. “She probably tried to send smoke signals, to others of her kind.”

“Maybe she ate the soap,” suggested Arthur.

The scandal passed, and we resumed our evening’s plot. When Matthew appeared, we recounted the story, competing to exaggerate the details: the woman’s demented scurry, Karen’s nearly wetting her pants, Arthur certain it was narcs and ready to swallow his stash. The five of us were still laughing about it over ten o’clock cassoulet at Le Cheval, courtesy of Karen Rothenberg’s mother’s Mastercard. The next day I described the incident to Runyon, who, as I’d expected, waved it off. And so it was forgotten.

Two weeks later Arthur’s visit was a distant memory for us all, folded behind a dozen other dramas. Moira and I had had our third fling and imploded in misunderstanding, each hurt in a way we could never have articulated, each consoled by newer friends. And as the campus, wreathed in cold and dark, prepared to shut down for the long winter break, the whole term just past dwindled into twee irrelevance. Where were you spending January, that was the question now. Mustique? Steamboat? Well, I was going to Dean Street, but never mind. The future hurtled toward us—who would be our new lovers, in February, when we returned? We had our eyes on a few alluring prospects, ones we’d somehow overlooked the first time. The past term was already mute, and our glories and mistakes there were mute as well.

That was how it felt the afternoon of my conference with my faculty advisor, Tom Sweden, the last day of classes. Sweden was also my sculpture teacher, and he was a typical Camden sculptor, a gruff, inarticulate chain-smoker in a permanent proletarian costume of work boots and plaster-clogged jeans, a bit of a Marlboro Man. We didn’t like one another—I had as much use for his romance of faux poverty and mock illiteracy as he did for mine of faux privilege and mock sophistication. Yet somehow I’d imagined my wit and vigor put Sweden on my side of a line dividing the hipster students and teachers from the square administration. I don’t really know why I thought this, except that I was drunk on college.

Sweden was seated in his wreck of an office in the basement of the arts complex, ringed in a chaos of scrap dowels, overrun ashtrays, and unsorted paperwork. When I arrived, ten minutes late, he was already scowling at a sheaf of pink forms, final evaluations from each of my four classes that term. So he knew, as I did, that I’d failed sociology outright and taken an incomplete from my English professor.

“This ain’t so great,” he said, wrinkling the papers.

“I’ll take care of the incomplete,” I said, approaching the meeting like a negotiation. “I’ve got the paper half-written.” I didn’t have it begun.

Sweden rubbed his bristly chin with stained fingers. Like Brando, he was superior to the part he was playing, and it pained him. He couldn’t fit his deep thoughts to the banal language at hand, so he only frowned.

“I was just more
excited
about sculpture this term,” I said, trying flattery.

“Yeah, but . . .” He trailed off, leaving us both guessing.

“And I passed Unorthodox Music,” I pointed out.

Sweden raised an eyebrow. “Dr. Shakti?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, but that ain’t really a class, is it?”

If Sweden didn’t know he was the only one on campus. I kept silent.

“Was there anything . . .” Sweden kept glancing at the door. “Was there anything, ah,
bothering
you this term, Dylan?”

“No, I just think it was a period of adjustment and I’ll probably focus better when I come back. On classes and stuff. But nothing’s wrong.”

He scratched his chin again. Perhaps my little speech was enough to get us both out of the conference—he seemed to be weighing this. Then there came a knock on his door.

“Yeah, come in.” Sweden sounded disgruntled, but not surprised.

It was Richard Brodeur, president.

“I thought I’d just run these over myself,” he said, showing Sweden a clutch of folders. Sweden grunted, gestured at his desk. Brodeur dropped the folders into the mess there.

“Richard, uh, Dylan Ebdus,” mumbled Sweden, painfully reluctant with his lines. “We’re just, uh, having ourselves a conference here.”

Brodeur reached for my hand and, as he gripped it, looked deep into my eyes. “Yes,” he said gently. “We’ve met.”

“Sure, hi,” I said.

“Gave you a lift on 9A, didn’t I? In the snow.”

“Yes,” I said.

“How’s your friend?”

“Fine, I think. Fine.”

“Well, look, I shouldn’t interrupt,” said Brodeur abruptly to Sweden. “Those papers aren’t urgent. Get to them whenever.”

“Right,” grimaced Sweden.

There was nothing to interrupt. With Brodeur gone Sweden had little to say. He managed to wish me a happy holiday, and good luck with the paper. He had to light a cigarette before he succeeded in telling me to
take care, man
. That was apparently all he’d wanted to get across.

The letter arrived less than a week later, in Brooklyn. It was addressed to my father. We were at the breakfast table when Abraham turned it over to me, replaced in its torn envelope, with no more than a dry, “This is for you, I believe.” But the letter had come the day before—Abraham had taken it upstairs and contemplated it for an afternoon and evening before deciding to say nothing.

The letter was on Camden’s embossed cream stationery and bore Richard Brodeur’s signature. It explained regretfully that for my violations of the school’s policies on overnight guests and narcotics possession, I was subject to a mandatory one-term leave of absence, followed by a student council hearing. More to the point, really, my scholarship had been suspended because of my failure to sustain a minimum threshold of academic excellence. After a specified period I would be invited to
reapply
for the scholarship.

The legend of the dealer at Fish House who’d been warned to close up shop wasn’t misleading, not really. Yes, Camden College could, and would, protect itself from the Vermont narcotics squad. It could also protect itself from me and Arthur Lomb. I stuffed the letter into my jeans, eyes cast low to dodge Abraham’s. My father went on clinking saucers and scraping toast, then in a flurry of excitement, read me an obituary of Louis Aragon, French Poet, eighty-five. With that I could have been off, up Nevins to the 4 train, my knapsack loaded with undone homework and photocopied flyers for Stuyvesant bands. Dean Street was intact as I’d left it, the letter in my pocket the only evidence I’d been anywhere else.

chapter  
8

T
he University of California at Berkeley would still have me. That was far enough to suit my mood, a distance from which Vermont receded into that gnarled mass of old states no one on the bright coast could ever be bothered to tell apart. My Camden credits were useless in the transfer, so I began again as a freshman with a clean slate, so-called. More like a clean chip of slate on my shoulder. The school was Camden’s reverse—an Asian, Mexican, black, and white sea of students, a bayside city in place of Camden’s evergreen art-school hothouse. At Camden, classes had been ten or twelve around a long oak table, all bantering and debating, all preening and being acknowledged. Here a professor muttered into a microphone on a far-off platform while a stadium of freshmen jotted notes, arms synchronized like assembly-line robots. For the first time in my life I learned to study.

The best thing for miles around was the campus radio station, KALX. The gang of DJs there had been freed by the station’s open format to obsess in any direction they liked, and the results were splendidly motley. Many DJs had been allowed to keep their slots for years past graduation—it was this exception to the usual rule which gave KALX its special depth, the depth of an anarchic family, the members all with nicknames to distinguish their shows: Marshall Stax, Gale Warning, Commander Chris, and Sex For Teens were a few of my favorites. Their charismatic, caustic, and homely voices punctuated the seasonless Berkeley days and nights. In my dorm room, on the twelfth floor of an ugly high-rise, above the sightline of the palm trees which dotted a path to the bay, their voices were my only regular company.

The source was a tiny building on Bowditch Street, white cinder block with the station’s call letters painted in a blue stripe. KALX was iceberglike, mostly submerged—the booths and record collection were in the basement, upstairs just a spare office, desks with rotary telephones, and a waiting room full of thrift-store couches leaking foam through cigarette burns. I visited at the first chance, volunteering to man phones during a fund-raising marathon. My shift was in the earliest hours of the morning, and the DJ looked at me like I was a loser for taking it. He explained the drill: for pledging more than twenty-five dollars a caller could visit the station and claim a T-shirt; for more than fifty I could gift them with one of the lousy records clogging the station’s in box. Through the shift I took fifteen or twenty calls. I listened to the DJ’s voice piped from below as he grudgingly fit the fund drive into his format, but I wasn’t admitted into that basement chapel.

Afterward I asked about becoming a DJ and was given little encouragement. It took a hundred hours of dull volunteer work to get on the list for training. Then the waiting list, for even the meagerest twilight slot on the roster, was usually a year. I’d be trained by other DJs, who’d prefer if I didn’t waste their time—I should be serious, or not bother. KALX was, true to Berkeley’s ideals, a real volunteer collective, but managed without any Berkeley sanctimony or mysticism, instead with a stoical punk exhaustion. This was March of 1983. By the end of that year I’d claimed a show, from two to six Thursday mornings. I kept the slot for three years. That was a trifle by KALX’s standards, but it was as large a commitment as I’d managed in my new grown-up life.

I called myself Running Crab. If I’d had a vague suspicion that in transferring to Berkeley I’d mimicked Rachel in her long-ago westward dash, now I bitterly joked with myself that she’d be within hearing range of my broadcasts. She could wonder who he was, her phantom double. I played Ian Dury’s “Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3,” a Monty Pythonesque white rap, at the start of every show, and declared it my anthem. But my bitterness, like my playlist, was soon hung out to dry. My show was bad. However many favorite songs I’d thought I had, they looked threadbare after a few repetitions. I was trying to make an impression, to stake a personality, as Matthew Schrafft and I had by wearing Devo on our sleeves.

It was impossible to hide from the fact: those lonely hours before dawn were either void or mirror. I was talking to nobody, or myself. So I began again, in a mode of fumbling and discovery. Before each show I excavated forgotten albums from the station’s musty library, and on-air I stirred my own curiosity, played cuts I’d never heard and always wondered about. What I cared for, when I permitted myself to know it, was doo-wop, rhythm and blues, and soul. Stax and Motown, but also Hi and Excello and King and Kent, the further reaches. Otis Redding and Gladys Knight but also Maxine Brown and Syl Johnson. And groups—I loved harmony groups. I loved the Subtle Distinctions.

I turned myself into a vinyl hawk, scouring record shops for out-of-print LPs, studying them with Talmudic intensity. The music I loved would all be dug out of studio archives and put onto CD within a few years, but then it was still scratchy and moldy and entirely my own. I read Peter Guralnick and Charlie Gillett and Greg Shaw and forgot which opinions were received and which were mine, and then I made them all mine by playing the records, by playing the records, by playing the records—I learned to shut up and play the records. I’d intersperse the music not with my own comments but with readings from the vintage liner notes on the LP jackets, like Richard Robinson’s for Howard Tate’s
Get It While You Can
: