The Impossible Fortress

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  This book is for my mom and dad

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  MY MOTHER WAS CONVINCED I’d die young. In the spring of 1987, just a few weeks after my fourteenth birthday, she started working nights at the Food World because the late shift paid an extra dollar an hour. I slept alone in an empty house while my mother rang up groceries and fretted over all the terrible things that might happen: What if I choked on a chicken nugget? What if I slipped in the shower? What if I forgot to turn off the stove and the house exploded in a fiery inferno? At ten o’clock every evening, she’d call to make sure I’d finished my homework and locked the front door, and sometimes she’d make me test the smoke alarms, just in case.

  I felt like the luckiest kid in ninth grade. My friends Alf and Clark came over every night, eager to celebrate my newfound freedom. We watched hours of TV, we blended milk shakes by the gallon, we gorged on Pop-Tarts and pizza bagels until we made ourselves sick. We played marathon games of Risk and Monopoly that dragged on for days and always ended with one angry loser flipping the board off the table. We argued about music and movies; we had passionate debates over who would win in a brawl: Rocky Balboa or Freddy Krueger? Bruce Springsteen or Billy Joel? Magnum P.I. or T. J. Hooker or MacGyver? Every night felt like a slumber party, and I remember thinking the good times would never end.

  But then Playboy published photographs of Wheel of Fortune hostess Vanna White, I fell head over heels in love, and everything started to change.

  Alf found the magazine first, and he sprinted all the way from Zelinsky’s newsstand to tell us about it. Clark and I were sitting on the sofa in my living room, watching the MTV Top 20 Video Countdown, when Alf came crashing through the front door.

  “Her butt’s on the cover,” he gasped.

  “Whose butt?” Clark asked. “What cover?”

  Alf collapsed onto the floor, clutching his sides and out of breath. “Vanna White. The Playboy. I just saw a copy, and her butt’s on the cover!”

  This was extraordinary news. Wheel of Fortune was one of the most popular shows on television, and hostess Vanna White was the pride of our nation, a small-town girl from Myrtle Beach who rocketed to fame and fortune by flipping letters in word puzzles. News of the Playboy photos had already made supermarket tabloid headlines: The SHOCKED AND HUMILIATED VANNA claimed the EXPLICIT IMAGES were taken years earlier and most definitely not for the pages of Playboy. She filed a $5.2 million lawsuit to stop their publication, and now—after months of rumors and speculation—the magazine was finally on newsstands.

  “It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen,” Alf continued. He climbed onto a chair and pantomimed Vanna’s cover pose. “She’s sitting on a windowsill, like this? And she’s leaning outside. Like she’s checking the weather? Only she’s not wearing pants!”

  “That’s impossible,” Clark said.

  The three of us all lived on the same block, and over the years we’d learned that Alf was prone to exaggeration. Like the time he claimed John Lennon had been assassinated by a machine gun. On top of the Empire State Building.

  “I swear on my mother’s life,” Alf said, and he raised his hand to God. “If I’m lying, she can get run over by a tractor trailer.”

  Clark yanked down his arm. “You shouldn’t say stuff like that,” he said. “Your mother’s lucky she’s still alive.”

  “Well, your mother’s like McDonald’s,” Alf snapped. “She satisfies billions and billions of customers.”

  “My mother?” Clark asked. “Why are you dragging my mother into this?”

  Alf just talked over him. “Your mother’s like a hockey goalie. She changes her pads after three periods.” He had an encyclopedic knowledge of Your Mother jokes, and he unleashed them at the slightest provocation. “Your mother’s like a Japanese steakhouse—”

  Clark flung a pillow across the living room, hitting Alf square in the face. Enraged, Alf threw it back twice as hard, missing Clark and toppling my glass of Pepsi. Fizzy foam and soda went sloshing all over the carpet.

  “Shit!” Alf exclaimed, scrambling to clean up the mess. “I’m sorry, Billy.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Just grab some paper towels.”

  There was no point in making a big deal. It’s not like I was going to ditch Alf and Clark for a bunch of new and more considerate friends. Nine months ago, the three of us arrived in high school and watched our classmates dive into sports or clubs or academics. Yet somehow we just orbited around them, not really fitting in anywhere.

  I was the tallest boy in ninth grade, but I was not the good kind of tall; I wobbled around school like a baby giraffe, all skinny legs and gangly arms, waiting for the rest of my body to fill in. Alf was shorter, stouter, sweatier, and cursed with the same name of the most popular alien on television—a three-feet-tall puppet with his own NBC sitcom. Their shared resemblance was uncanny. Both Alfs were built like trolls, with big noses, beady eyes, and messy brown hair. Even our teachers joked they were twins.

  Still, for all of our obvious flaws, Alf and I knew we were better off than Clark. Every morning he rolled out of bed looking like a heartthrob in TigerBeat magazine. He was tall and muscular with wavy blond hair, deep blue eyes, and perfect skin. Girls at the mall would see Clark coming and gape openmouthed like he was River Phoenix or Kiefer Sutherland—until they got close enough to see the Claw, and then they quickly looked away. A freakish birth defect had fused the fingers of Clark’s left hand into a pink, crab-like pincer. It was basically useless—he could make it open and close, but it wasn’t strong enough to lift anything bigger or heavier than a magazine. Clark swore that as soon as he turned eighteen, he was going to find a doctor to saw it off, even if it cost a million bucks. Until then, he went through life with his head down and the Claw tucked into a pocket, avoiding attention. We knew Clark was doomed to a life of celibacy—that he’d never have a real flesh-and-blood girlfriend—so he needed the Vanna White Playboy more than anyone.

  “Is she on the centerfold?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Alf said. “Zelinsky has it on a rack behind the cash register. Next to the cigarettes. I couldn’t get anywhere near it.”

  “You didn’t buy it?” I asked.

  Alf snorted. “Sure, I just walked up to Zelinsky and asked for a Playboy. And a six-pack. And a crack pipe, too, because why not? Are you crazy?”

  We all knew that buying Playboy was out of the question. It was hard enough buying rock music, what with Jerry Falwell warning of satanic influences, and Tipper Gore alerting parents to explicit lyrics. No shopkeeper in America was going to sell Playboy to a fourteen-year-old boy.

  “Howard Stern says the pictures are incredible,” Clark explained. “He said you see both boobs super close-up. Nipples, milk ducks, the works.”

  “Milk ducks?” I asked.

  “Ducts, with a T,” Clark corrected.

  “The red rings around the nipples,” Alf explained.

  Clark shook h
is head. “Those are areolas, dummy. The milk duct is the hollow part of the nipple. Where the milk squirts out.”

  “Nipples aren’t hollow,” Alf said.

  “Sure they are,” Clark said. “That’s why they’re sensitive.”

  Alf yanked up his T-shirt, exposing his flabby chest and belly. “What about mine? Are my nipples hollow?”

  Clark shielded his eyes. “Put them away. Please.”

  “I don’t have hollow nipples,” Alf insisted.

  They were always vying to prove which one knew more about girls. Alf claimed authority because he had three older sisters. Clark got all of his information from the ABZ of Love, the weird Danish sex manual he’d found buried in his father’s underwear drawer. I didn’t try to compete with either one of them. All I knew was that I didn’t know anything.

  Eventually seven thirty rolled around and Wheel of Fortune came on. Alf and Clark were still arguing about milk ducts, so I turned the TV volume all the way up. Since we had the house to ourselves, we could be as loud and noisy as we wanted.

  “Look at this studio, filled with glamorous prizes! Fabulous and exciting merchandise!” Every episode started the same way, with announcer Charlie O’Donnell previewing the night’s biggest treasures. “An around-the-world vacation, a magnificent Swiss watch, and a brand-new Jacuzzi hot tub! Over eighty-five thousand dollars in prizes just waiting to be won on Wheel of Fortune!”

  The camera panned the showroom full of luggage and houseboats and food processors. Showing off the merchandise was the greatest prize of all, Vanna White herself, five foot six, 115 pounds, and draped in a $12,000 chinchilla fur coat. Alf and Clark stopped bickering, and we all leaned closer to the screen. Vanna was, without doubt, the most beautiful woman in America. Sure, you could argue that Michelle Pfeiffer had nicer eyes and Kathleen Turner had better legs and Heather Locklear had the best overall body. But we worshipped at the altar of the Girl Next Door. Vanna White had a purity and innocence that elevated her above the rest.

  Clark shifted closer to me and tapped my knee with the Claw. “I’m going to Zelinsky’s tomorrow,” he said. “I want to see this cover for myself.”

  I said, “I’ll come with you,” but I never took my eyes off the screen.

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  WE LIVED IN WETBRIDGE, five miles west of Staten Island, in a geographic region known to stand-up comics as the Armpit of New Jersey. We had factories and fuel refineries, dirty rivers and traffic snarls, densely packed single-family homes, and plenty of Catholic churches. If you wanted to buy anything, you had to go “downtown,” a two-block stretch of mom-and-pop businesses adjacent to the train station. Downtown had a bike shop, a pet shop, a travel agency, and a half-dozen clothing stores. All of these places had thrived during the fifties and sixties, but by 1987 they were slowly and stubbornly going out of business, squeezed by competition from all the new shopping malls. Most days I was free to race my bike along the sidewalks, because there were never any shoppers blocking my way.

  Zelinsky’s Typewriters and Office Supplies was the only store in town that sold Playboy. It sat opposite the train station on Market Street, a two-story brick building with antique typewriters in the windows. The awning over the door advertised “Manual * Electric * Ribbons * Repair,” but most of Zelinsky’s business came from the newsstand just inside the front door. He sold cigarettes and newspapers and hot coffee to commuters rushing for their morning trains.

  We left our bikes in a heap on the sidewalk, and Clark went inside to confirm Alf’s story. He emerged moments later, face flushed, looking dazed.

  “Did you see it?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

  Clark nodded. “It’s on a rack behind the register. Just like he said.”

  “And her butt’s on the cover,” Alf added.

  “And her butt’s on the cover,” Clark admitted.

  We squeezed onto a bench to discuss strategy. It was three thirty in the afternoon and it felt good to be outside; it was the warmest day of the year so far, and summer was just around the corner.

  “I’ve got it all figured out,” Alf said. He glanced around to make sure the coast was clear. “We’ll hire someone to buy it.”

  “Hire someone?” I asked.

  “The magazine costs four dollars, and we need three copies. So that’s twelve bucks total. But we’ll pay someone twenty bucks to buy them. We get the Playboys, they keep eight dollars in profit. Just for buying magazines!”

  Alf spoke like this was a magnificent revelation, like he’d hatched a plan to steal gold from Fort Knox. But when Clark and I looked around Main Street, all we saw were moms pushing baby strollers and some old people waiting for the bus.

  “None of these people will help us,” I said.

  “None of these people,” Alf corrected, putting the emphasis in its proper place. “We just need to be patient until the right person comes along. Operation Vanna is all about patience.”

  Alf was the mastermind of all our greatest capers, like Operation Big Gulp (in which we shoplifted music cassettes using sixty-four-ounce soda cups from the 7-Eleven) and Operation Royal Dump (in which we destroyed a school toilet using M-80 fireworks). He got a thrill from breaking rules and challenging authority, and when he set his mind on a goal, he would pursue it for weeks with dogged determination. It was only a matter of time, my mother warned, before Alf was imprisoned or dead.

  We sat huddled on the bench, watching the cars drift along Market Street, scrutinizing every pedestrian. We all agreed that we needed a man—but that was the problem, there were no men walking around Wetbridge at three thirty in the afternoon. All the men were busy at work. And every time a guy did come along, we’d invent a reason to disqualify him:

  “He looks too young.”

  “He looks too old.”

  “He looks too mean.”

  “He looks like an undercover priest.”

  This was Alf again—his family was Catholic and he was always warning us about undercover priests, holy men who dressed in plain clothes and patrolled Wetbridge looking for troublemakers. Clark and I told him this was bullshit; there was no mention of “undercover priests” in the dictionary or the encyclopedia or any book in the library. Alf insisted this secrecy was deliberate; he claimed that undercover priests lived in the shadows, completely anonymous, by strict order of the Vatican.

  We sat on the bench for well over an hour, and Clark started getting impatient. “This is hopeless,” he said. “Let’s go to Video City. We can rent Kramer vs. Kramer.”

  “Not again,” Alf said.

  “It beats sitting here all night,” Clark said.

  Video City checked for ID and refused to rent R-rated films to anyone under the age of seventeen. But Clark researched their inventory and discovered a number of PG movies with shocking amounts of female nudity: Barry Lyndon, Barbarella, Swamp Thing. The best of these was Kramer vs. Kramer, the 1979 Oscar winner for Best Picture, starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. The story—something about two grown-ups getting divorced—was insanely boring, and we always fast-forwarded to the forty-four-minute mark, when Dustin Hoffman’s hot one-night stand gets out of bed to use the bathroom. What follows are fifty-three seconds of jaw-dropping full-frontal nudity filmed from multiple angles. We had rented the movie a dozen times, but never watched more than a minute of it.

  “I’m tired of Kramer vs. Kramer,” Alf said.

  “I’m tired of sitting on this bench,” Clark said. “None of these people are going to help us. Operation Vanna isn’t working.”

  “Traffic’s picking up,” I pointed out. “Let’s give it
a little more time.”

  In the late afternoon, the trains started arriving every fifteen minutes, discharging dozens of age-appropriate male passengers, most of them carrying overcoats and briefcases. They filed past Zelinsky’s on their way out of the train station, and a few ducked inside the store for cigarettes or scratch-off tickets. But we watched them march past without saying a word. We couldn’t bring ourselves to ask any of them for help. They looked way too respectable.

  “Maybe we should call it quits,” I suggested.

  “Thank you,” Clark said.

  But Alf was already pointing across the street to the train station. “There,” he said. “That guy.”

  Emerging from a crowd of suits and ties came a young man dressed in denim cutoffs, a red flannel shirt, and Ray-Ban sunglasses. I felt like I’d seen him before, maybe hanging around the parking lot of Wetbridge Liquors. He had hair like Billy Idol, bleached white and spiky, sticking straight up.

  “He looks . . . fishy,” I said.

  “Fishy is good,” Clark said. “We want fishy.”

  “Excuse me, sir!” Alf called.

  The guy didn’t miss a beat. He veered toward us like fourteen-year-old boys flagged him down all the time. The mirrored shades made it impossible to read his expression, but at least he was smiling.

  “What’s up, fellas?”

  Alf held out the twenty bucks. “Can you buy us some Playboys?”

  His smile widened. “Vanna White!” he said knowingly. “I heard about these pictures!”

  “Three copies is twelve dollars,” Alf explained. “You could keep the change.”

  “Shit, man, you don’t have to pay me. I’ll do it for nothing!”

  We stared at him in disbelief.

  “Seriously?” Alf asked.

  “Sure, I grew up around here. My name’s Jack Camaro, like the car.” He shook hands with all of us, like we were old friends. “I’m glad I can help. You guys need anything else? Penthouse? Cigarettes? Maybe some Bartles and Jaymes?”