Free The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem Page A

even know it was she who’d gathered them here.
     
    They walked together to Pintchik on Flatbush Avenue at Bergen, a complex of interconnected shops selling paint and furnishings and hardware and plumbing, a business likely once a single storefront, now infiltrated through a block of fronts, and lodged below row houses painted schoolbus yellow with PINTCHIK emblazoned in red, brownstones turned into a street-long billboard, brownstones wearing clown makeup. Something in Pintchik’s unmistakable age and specificity, its indifference, made Dylan ache. Apparently Brooklyn needn’t always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan, as on Dean Street, on Bergen, on Pacific. Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self. Pintchik pointed only into Pintchik for provenance. It was a lair, a warren, and the hairy men selling dust-layered shower-curtain rings and glass doorknobs, the tangible stuff of renovation instead of the idea of renovation, from behind cash registers thick with newspaper clippings, they were rabbits like Bugs Bunny or the March Hare, smug into their hole and only amused or impatient that you might tumble in. Pintchik was a white Brooklyn unimagined by Isabel Vendle.
    On the walk to Pintchik Rachel had taught him the word gentrification . This was a Nixon word, uncool. “If someone asks you say you live in Gowanus ,” she said. “Don’t be ashamed. Boerum Hill is pretentious bullshit.” Today Rachel was talking and Dylan was listening, listening. She sprayed language as the hydrant opened by the Puerto Rican kids around the corner on Nevins on the hottest days that year sprayed water, unstoppered, gushing. You might scrape the bottom of a tin can until it was open at both ends, then use the can to direct the water momentarily through the window of a passing car, but the force of the spray would win in the end. When Dylan had tried it the pillar of water captured the can from his hands and sent it spinning across the street to clatter under a parked car. His mother’s flow he wouldn’t dare try to direct. “Never let me hear you say the word nigger ,” she said, whispering it heavily, lusciously. “That’s the only word you can’t ever say, not even to yourself. In Brooklyn Heights they call them animals , they call the projects a zoo . Those uptight reactionaries deserve the break-ins. They ought to lose their quadraphonic stereos. We’re here to live. Gowanus Canal, Gowanus Houses, Gowanus people. The Creature from the Gowanus Lagoon!” She inflated her cheeks and curled her fingers and attacked him at the entrance to Pintchik.
    What would Dylan find if he walked across Flatbush, past its shops selling dashikis, and T-shirts which read I ’ M PROUD OF MY AFRICAN HERITAGE , past Triangle Sports, past Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips, past Pintchik itself? Who knew. His world found its limit there, under the narrowed shoulders of the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower. Dylan knew Manhattan, knew David Copperfields’s London, knew even Narnia better than he’d ever know Brooklyn north of Flatbush Avenue.
    “We don’t live in a box, we don’t live in a little square box, I don’t care what anyone says we don’t live in a sixteen-millimeter frame!” She flew like the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass through Pintchik, whispering madly to him. “He can’t put us inside, we’ll break out, we’ll bust out of the frame. He can’t paint us in a little celluloid box. We’ll run out in the streets! We’ll paper him into his studio!”
    Inside, Rachel led him to a room full of wallpaper rolls. He was meant to choose a replacement for the jungle animals hiding in palm leaves, that children’s-book design, too young for him now. The samples in the room were furred with velvet, decorated with orange Day-Glo peace symbols and Peter Max sunsets and silver-foil-stripes and lime