Jonathan Lethem by The Fortress Of Solitude

Author:The Fortress Of Solitude [Solitude, The Fortress Of]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-04-02T21:00:00+00:00

chapter 17

Stately 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.

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