Jay Fox

THE WALLS

THE WALLS

1

Over the course of the past fifteen years or so, Coprolalia has come to be known as one of the most daring figures in the artistic community. To call him a revolutionary would not be entirely accurate, but he certainly has proven himself to be one of the most innovative artists in recent memory. This reputation has come about due to his activity in an arena that no other serious artist has thought to utilize. It is not because it is obscure or difficult to seek out — if anything, it is the opposite. The originality of his preferred medium arises because it had always been thought to be home to little more than dirty limericks, slander, and a rather phallic iconography.

I speak, of course, of the public restroom.

Due to the efforts of Coprolalia, the lavatories of a multitude of New York City bars are now regarded as home to some of the most captivating pieces the avant-garde community has produced in years (though it must be said that some scholars place Coprolalia in the arrière-garde, which, in this context, is a kind of avant-avant-garde movement that prides itself as being at the ass-end of that famous image of the snake eating its own tail). Not only is the work respected for its temerity — as Coprolalia's career is, legally speaking, based upon a string of misdemeanors — it is also thought to be incredibly controversial from a critical perspective. The majority of those who study Coprolalia feel that his work represents a new interpretation of the dynamic between public and private space, a commentary on the artist as a political figure, an insightful statement about the ubiquity of art, and a fresh look at the link between an artist's identity and his or her work. Competing schools have developed out of these debates, but the consensus within these groups does not extend past the theoretical level. For when it comes to the meaning behind any particular piece, virtually no one can agree on anything.

And yet a larger question persists. For while there is no want of critics, scholars, or laymen claiming to have unlocked the enigmatic works that grace the walls of so many city washrooms, there is one thing that no one can speak of with real conviction: the identity of the artist.

Coprolalia has never come forward to accept the laurels of the artistic community. Few have seriously ventured to seek him out, though many claim to have met him. A bar owner in the Bronx attests that the artist used to be a regular at his establishment in the late-nineties. According to him, Coprolalia was a rather surly and belligerent customer, who was eventually incarcerated for a number of crimes all involving the prefix ped-. A bartender in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Cobble Hill swears that Coprolalia frequented her bar regularly during the early years of this century. She described this figure as a pensive man who would regularly engage patrons in chess and academic conversation. She also said that he looked like a young Ron Howard.

Both of these claims, and all of the claims like them, have been discredited. So, too, have the claims of those who have declared themselves to be Coprolalia. The former group drowns in hearsay and baseless conjecture; the latter, connivance and delusion. In either case, only one figure has ever seriously caught the attention of Coprolalia scholars — Andy Bates, a former curator of the Earth Room.

Bates' tenure at the institution ended abruptly in the spring of 2002 after he suffered a nervous breakdown. While this is not the place to discuss the nuances of the episode that precipitated Bates' institutionalization, I do feel it necessary to mention the aftermath. After destroying what one can destroy in the Earth Room (which is essentially nothing, as it is quite literally just a room full of earth), he descended to the street, stripped himself of his clothes, and then ran down several blocks (naked) through SoHo and Chinatown shouting some very choice profanities (in a variety of languages, too) until finally coming upon a public bathroom in Columbus Park. There he remained for quite a while — at least several hours, as it was light when he entered the bathroom and dark by the time he was escorted out. It is certainly possible that he would have remained cloistered in the corner stall for longer had he been able to construct a more resilient barricade, but there is really only so much one can do with the materials one finds in a public restroom. Upon Bates' removal, the police were less than surprised to find that the stall had been covered in graffiti. They were shocked, however, when they realized that the substance all over the stall was not paint, that said substance was still fresh, that said substance had been made (or passed) by Bates, and that said substance coated the person of Andy Bates, the man whom the police had prematurely placed in the backseat of one unlucky officer's car. (Had this scene been written out for a bad cop drama, the director would have had the unlucky officer (perhaps Horowitz, as people named Horowitz seem to have a propensity for law-enforcement) look to the wall for long enough for the bulb of recognition to pop on, then the director would have had Horowitz bellow out a prolonged “Oh…” before cutting to an unrelated scene, as the following (and fitting) profanity would be obvious to virtually any viewer.)

Regardless, the incident proved to be the only discernible connection between Bates and Coprolalia, but many felt it was enough evidence to argue that the two were actually the same person. In time, however, the Bates enthusiasts lost support, especially once it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Coprolalia's work continued to appear with Bates in state custody.

With such a variety of speculation — some of it grounded in complete fiction, some of it not — most have accepted that Coprolalia will remain in anonymity until he decides to step out from the shadows. Scholars consider it especially futile to make conjectures about his identity, and, as one can imagine, my decision to set out in search of the artist was welcomed with either derision or feigned confidence. At best it is a quixotic ambition.

Beyond the inability to describe the artist physically, there are further difficulties. For one, no one can discern a pattern that the artist follows as he goes from one bar to the next. In fact, no one has been able to pinpoint an area that would constitute his base of operations. The majority of scholars believe Brooklyn to be the borough that holds the highest concentration of his work, but many detractors argue that, as he does not sign any of his work, it is impossible to know if the entire catalog of the artist has been documented, and that it is therefore disingenuous to speak of preponderances. Some installations go for months before being brought to the attention of experts, who may or may not then confirm the authenticity of the piece. Consequently, they conclude, it is not at all unreasonable to assert that a sizable percentage of Coprolalia's work either has not been discovered yet or has been erased, lost to more intensive renovation efforts, or dismissed as forgery. The latter possibility is perhaps the biggest concern for all Coprolalia scholars.

“It's difficult to pin down any single feature that makes a piece genuine,” Professor Sean Winchester of New York University said reluctantly. “There is no one litmus test.”

Professor Winchester is regarded as the leading expert on the work of Coprolalia. In the theater of academia there are very few peacemakers such as him, especially in a field as subjective as urban art. Yet when arguments concerning the artist's work arise Sean very often has the final say: no one has dedicated more time to the study of Coprolalia's work, and no one has created a more complete series of tests to determine whether a piece is authentic or not. In fact, the Winchester Criteria, as it has come to be known, is currently the standard methodology employed whenever the prospect of a new Coprolalia arises. Furthermore, Sean also holds the largest private collection of Coprolalia photographs in the world, and his forthcoming book, Lavatory Diaries: A Coprolalia Anthology, will contain virtually the entire catalog of the artist's work from the late nineties to the fall of 2006. As luck would have it, he had been a professor of mine in the recent past, and I was able to contact him without much difficulty.

While I was initially hesitant about approaching him on the subject, he seemed to welcome the project with enthusiasm, especially when I told him that I had decided to spend a month exclusively searching out the artist. He did his best to encourage my optimism, and somewhat gingerly admitted that he had given up the search long ago. “This is not to say that I'm not curious, as I am sure quite a number of people are. I guess I just don't feel that one needs to know an artist personally to appreciate his or her work.” I asked Sean over the phone if, at the very least, he felt it would better his understanding of the art. “Yes, I suppose every piece is an extension of an artist's personality, but Coprolalia clearly doesn't want to be found. His acquaintance is not something I anticipate, nor is it something that I feel I need to seek out anymore. To me, it's kind of a poot moint…I mean moot point,” he added with a laugh. “Poot Moint is a great act if you ever get the chance to see them.”

He invited me to his apartment in order to pick up a “rudimentary list” of Coprolalia's known installations, which, he joked, could also pass as a local's guide to the dive bar scene in the city. “Some artists want their work up in the museum; Coprolalia, however, wants to share his genius through a more plebeian medium. The Mars Bar is his Louvre.”

Sean had always been a fairly popular teacher, even if he was prone to prolonged fits of pontification and the occasional stubbornness. Perhaps all professors are guilty of these things from time to time, no matter how conscientious or composed they seem to be. Then again, neither of these attributes ever applied to Sean. There was a certain energy to him that one rarely finds in a university-level teacher. Even in class he was regarded as something of an anomaly when compared to the more strigine of his associates, those who are oblivious to the world around them and hopelessly lost in the labyrinths of an arcane liturgy no more applicable to modern life than a horse is to modern warfare. Instead of that aggressive desire to make people look stupid or simply uninformed, Sean actually listened to his students — he digested every word uttered within his classroom, and responded accordingly. You felt as though he was taking away as much from the discussion as you were, which, consequently, afforded him a level of respect that resonated with even the most combative and wayward students.

I'm not in his apartment more than ten seconds before he begins talking about the artist. His mannerisms become increasingly frenzied, akin to those of a child recounting the plot of a favorite cartoon — giddy, quick, erratic. After an almost ecstatic soliloquy that lasts roughly fifteen minutes, he directs me to the couch. “I don't want to bore you with what I think about him,” he jokes; “I'm sure you want to see his work for yourself.” He begins in the direction of a hallway. “There's nothing quite like seeing one in person, but I do think it's important to show you just what you're in for.” I ask where the pieces are typically featured, which prompts an incredulous laugh from the other room. “Are you kidding?”

“Besides the obvious. Are there any facilities…institutions, rather, that have managed to get their hands on anything more substantial than a photograph?”

“No,” his muffled voice responds. “The places he goes to aren't exactly friendly to the artistic community. They don't even want to keep the pieces up half the time. Just about the entire corpus from the nineties has been erased, especially in the more gentrified regions of the City. I've managed to either photograph or acquire a photograph of a lot of his work that's appeared over the past decade or so, but there's still a pretty big hole in that collection. Not to sound too conceited, but if I don't have at the very least a replica of a photograph, no one does — unless, of course, it's one of the newer pieces.”

“That's got to piss you off some.”

“No, I don't really blame the people who own these places,” he responds as a resonating crash rattles the apartment. This is followed by a series of curses, perhaps the type that one comes to expect just before someone demands an umpire or referee get off his knees. Sean is then silent for several moments. “Sorry. What was I saying?” He pauses. “Oh, yes: I understand where the owners are coming from. If they feel it stifles business because it creates an atmosphere of depravity or because it invites vandalism or whatever, then they have every right to get rid of it. Sure, I don't agree with it, but, as business owners, it's their prerogative.” I am standing in the doorway of his office, which appears to have recently been renovated by a cyclone. Two freshly broken pieces of plywood are still swinging along the wall like pinball flippers; a chagrined Sean is squatting over a heap of papers and Polaroids and binders that he is still in the process of sculpting into a potato mound. He senses my presence and turns to greet me with the glare of a raccoon caught ravaging the garbage. “I just try to document everything that I can.” He rises. I turn my attention away from him, take note that the apartment is a two-bedroom, and begin to examine the walls in the small hallway that separates the office, bedroom, and bathroom from the kitchen, living room, and the table covered with mail, which, if cleaned, could seat two for dinner.

The office is not the only space dominated by the presence of Coprolalia. His entire apartment is littered with photographs of bar bathrooms from throughout the city. It summons the image of a detective poring over the details of a series of related crime scenes, though there are no corpses involved, and rarely any blood (also, that quintessential overhead fan is missing; Sean's place has A/C). Some of the photographs are tacked to the wall; his favorites are in frames. The majority, however, he stores in large albums. Their covers, once home to phrases such as “Loving Memories” or “Priceless Moments,” do not offer these kitschy descriptions any longer; they have been relabeled by duct tape and a black Sharpie. His titles are prosaic—“Brooklyn '00, “Queens '01”—and most of the ink has been pilfered by sweaty hands, spills, and time. Some of the more recent pictures lay on his coffee table next to two ashtrays overflowing with cigarette ends, a few stray coffee cups and dirty plates, and the jewel case to an Iggy Pop album. “The Passenger” quietly pulses on the stereo as he drops seven or eight albums of photographs on the table. He has a look of mild disappointment on his face. “I can't find it,” he says.

“What?”

“I wanted to show you Vis Inertiae, but I must have left it in my office.” He notices a look. “My other office.”

I ask him about the piece, Vis Inertiae. I've heard of it before, and I can remember a Cooper Union student's ecstatic and vague description of it. We were at some bar on Saint Marx, one of those places to which suburban punks still pay their homage, though most of the street urchins and fringe-straddlers who made it (in)famous in decades past were evicted relatively soon after Giuliani marched on Tompkins in what many consider to be sort of a '68 Prague redux. Our interaction did not last long. The young artist lost interest in continuing the conversation once he recognized my ignorance on the subject of Coprolalia. He was neither arrogant nor rude; he simply realized that there wasn't a real need to branch off into a new topic of discourse as each of us had our respective parties to whom we would return without the feeling that there was anything left unsaid between us.

“It's an elephant flexing its muscle,” Sean says of the piece. “The words 'Vis Inertiae'—or, the power of inertia — are inscribed beneath.” He brandishes a brief, coy smile. “Nice little play on words, don't you think?”

While his apartment is well defined by its furniture and memorabilia, Sean does not seem too concerned with the maintenance of personal appearances. He embodies that faction of academia that has abandoned the tweed and the ivy. His face is adorned with about three days of stubble; his complexion is of that sallow tone that one finds in most career academics still trying to familiarize the world with the rather recondite subject of their obsession. His hair faintly remembers what scissors sound like.

As he settles into the chair beside me, his movements become slow and his words calculated, though his facial features never cease to be engaging and somehow mischievous. One could easily mistake him for an overzealous grad-student.

His thin fingers reach for a framed Polaroid sitting on the table. Unlike some of the other artifacts surrounding it, it is not coated in ash. It is labeled “Pariah Blues — J.J. Bubbles, June 1993.”

“This one is really interesting. While there are some discrepancies between it and his later work,” he says as he traces a finger a few millimeters above the tobacco stained walls featured in the picture, “There is no doubt in my mind that this is an authentic Coprolalia. I can see why some have denied this, but, to me, the rudiments of his style are clearly evident.” He turns to me. “And that's what's important. It's an early piece. No one is going to be fully matured as an artist at the onset of their career. I mean, who doesn't evolve?”

He continues to talk shop about Coprolalia, which soon brings “Pariah Blues” into a far more sentimental light. “This was the first piece of his I saw,” he says as reaches for a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket.

“Really?”

He nods as he lights up. “It was sometime in the spring of ninety-four. To be perfectly honest, I didn't think much of it at the time — the piece, that is. It wasn't until a few years later that I understood just what I had come across. I went back sometime in ninety-eight to see it again, and that's when I took this picture.”

The date that Sean has attributed to Pariah Blues, June 1993, is somewhat controversial. The putative belief, or at least the one espoused by Sean, is that Coprolalia's work began appearing in Brooklyn in either 1991 or 1992. Little attention was paid to him, however. Even today the nascent career of the artist is an interest to art historians more than critics. It wasn’t until he began exhibiting his work in Bay Ridge during the late spring of '93 that he amassed a following. And while it is clear that the artist truly matured during his time spent in the Italian neighborhood in the shadow of the Verrazano, the chronology of the Bay Ridge Collection, as it has come to be known, and of which Pariah Blues is a part, is largely based on speculation and less than reliable depositions.

Inertiae, however, predated the Bay Ridge Collection by at least a year. It appeared in a Park Slope dive, and, unlike the vast majority of Coprolalia's work, the artist inscribed a date: November Seventh. Sean has always been skeptical of its veracity, he tells me, but he has never dismissed it as a forgery. “I like to show it to people because — well…provided it's genuine, of course — it's interesting to see how much Coprolalia matured in that short time. It was rare to see him push political banalities then, but he certainly does still have the habit of doing it even today.

“Of course,” he continues as he takes down the last of his cigarette, “The argument could be made that the pieces from the Bay Ridge Collection represent a departure from the general message found not only in Inertiae, but in all of his work prior to ninety-three. In other words, it may have been more politically charged than his later corpus. The problem is that there are fifteen pieces — and fifteen, might I add, is a fairly liberal estimate; I usually put it closer to ten — that predate the Bay Ridge Collection, so, unfortunately, no one can really regard this as a viable argument. Too much has been lost due to renovations and, especially in the City, gentrification.

“But I've gone on long enough,” he concedes. He walks over to the table steeped in mail and other papers, and retrieves a few sheets of paper. They feature the names of over fifty bars, their addresses, and a title for each corresponding installation. “I wrote this up for you last night. These are the places that, as of a year ago, still featured his work. The ones that I'm not entirely sure about are in italics. These ones,” he begins as he points to a list of several names in bold font, “I've seen in the past few months. I am almost certain that they are still available for viewing.” He hands me the list. “It's a good thing that you stopped me,” which I don't recall doing, “I could have prattled on about Coprolalia for the rest of the day, and I have a meeting in about forty-five minutes.”

He escorts me to the door, places a hand on my shoulder, and then lights another cigarette. The door opens. “Godspeed, young scholar, Godspeed.”

I finagle the sheets into my bag as I wait for the elevator to take me to the lobby. For the first time since I made the decision to do this, I seriously reflect upon the necessary steps I will have to take in order to successfully pursue this evasive figure. I had been under the impression that no one had ever found Coprolalia because no one had bothered to actually go to all of the places he frequents. Sean's collection proved that this was a naïve assumption. What he presented to me was not a grab-bag of photographs taken on a whim or by accident; they were not cutouts from either the paper or those high-end art magazines that omit advertisements in order to pass production costs right on to the consumer; they were not taken by those photographers passing through the bowels of the city seeking commission by means of the grief caused by a murder, a fire, a suicide, a rape, an assault, nor their counterparts who assassinate characters with nothing more than a flash. They were taken by Sean and his friends: they were blurry, overexposed, underexposed, off-center. They were of myriad size. Some had cigarette burns in them. Most contained the faded faces of the men, sometimes women, who had discovered the prize — their thumbs up, their tongues out, their smiles neither feigned nor forced. In fact, the collection said more about Sean than it said about Coprolalia.

I think of the number of such places that I will have to visit simply to gain a rudimentary understanding of the artist as I wait for the elevator. This is not a complaint. I like the bar as much as the next person: The women, the music, the offerings of dope and cigarettes and store-bought booze stashed away either in flasks or — for the less illustrious denizens of the city — in the same plastic in which the alcohol was packaged. I have always been attracted to the cacophony, the thronging around the bar, the chaotic atmosphere after two in the morning, the tangential conversations that always somehow come back to a Wilco lyric, a Warhol reference, a Married…With Children episode. It's often a rush of imagery that the brain places into some form of coherent order, even if it cannot always clearly reconstruct a chronology, let alone create anything more than a poor dramatization of the menagerie. We acknowledge that we set out looking for a good time even if we deny the high expectations and the low levels of patience with which we enter the social arena. And yet once the social lubricants begin to reduce the potency of the friction that exists because of more sober defenses, we find ourselves engaged in earnest conversation — not always as a consequence of lust, sometimes it's just interest — that need not lead to any great epiphany or even a subsequent phone call. For most types (unless one is attempting to talk with those severely artistic people, those who shun even their mothers for not just loving Godard), one need only abandon pretense and belligerence to fit in; for the loners, one just need to engage in that drunken form of conversational funambulism, of being both confessor and confessee to a total stranger who has been driven to the barstool by a laundry list of concerns to which no bottle can provide much in terms of sympathy, only a quick reprieve in the form of a blackout and a further laundry list of concerns the subsequent morning — the items of which are often times amusing unless your name is no different than the one on the letterhead. There are other archetypes floating around in the mix — most of which are either pleasant or harmless, though there are those pernicious and predatory few. It's rare to find members of the latter group in dive bars; they tend to stick to places where physical contact is encouraged, where the majority of the patrons seem to be plagued by a myriad of engagements (“Until, like, next week, but I'll call you — honestly”).

Like the places where one mingles with singles, Sean's building is a rather sterile ecosystem, a vacuum where idiosyncrasies come to die. Two artificial plants sit on either side of the stainless-steel elevator doors like sentries; the tymbals of the fluorescent lights hum in unison, overpowering the faint sounds of an early Modest Mouse record trickling into the hallway from a nonspecific locale. The streets below are muted because the windows are closed even if the day is cool for the season. If it were not for the buildings parallel to the window at one end of the hallway, one could easily forget that this is the city.

Unlike some of the buildings further north or the newer ones in the more trendy Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Park Slope, there is no ornamentation of the walls of the hallway, not even those urbanscapes that often serve as surrogates for windows. The walls are painted white, though the can from where the paint came more than likely bore a name along the lines of “eggshell” or “bone” or “wispy cirrus” or “marshmallow impaled on a stick about to be browned over a bonfire in northern Michigan, Memorial Day '05; you remember, it was the same night that your dad walked in on us in media cunnilingus.” The carpet is short, apprehensive-gray; there is a large brown stain by the door in the shape of Hermann Rorschach. Coffee is the likely culprit. The elevator doors open to reveal a car inhabited by only a camera.

The streets are filled with people languidly making their way through the slate gray afternoon. There are the requisite housewives out with their kids, househusbands out with their kids, nannies out with their kids, kids out with their kids. The majority of the pedestrians, however, are either in their late-twenties or early-thirties. They do not dress as though they are either coming from or going to work. Perhaps they are students — university students — who have one early Friday class, maybe even no Friday class. Then again, most of the schools in the city wrapped up their spring semesters last week. It's fairly certain that only a small percentage of the pedestrians are tourists. The only person wearing a fanny-pack has clearly just come out of the Eighth Avenue bound L station with the intention of showing off how ironic his sense of irony is (“Get it? I'm supposed to be a total douche-bag!”).

A bald man sitting behind a counter welcomes me as I walk into a deli on the corner of First Avenue and Seventh Street to get something to drink. He is on the telephone with his wife, sister, or daughter, as is evident from the loud female voice dominating the conversation, as well as the gentle and perfunctory nature of his sparse language: caring, but not earnest enough to make one believe that he is seriously invested in whatever the other is saying. He rolls his eyes in silence, looks to me with an abject smile, and then unsuccessfully attempts a word over the peremptory voice on the other line. A couple of young Mexican guys beg my pardon as they walk by with crates brimming with cabbages and sweet potatoes. They speak in subservient tones. The taller of the two sports a religious tattoo on his right calf; the other wears an earring.

The scent of fancy bodega, circa early summer, is imperious. The air is an amalgam of cilantro, coffee, stale air conditioning, radishes, and nondescript fragrances from the detergent aisle that no one except for the cat ever seems to inhabit. One of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos (BWV 1048) can be heard coming from a small radio behind the counter. An even smaller black and white television sits next to it blinking images from five or six different cameras strategically placed around the store. The man behind the counter smiles as I pay for a small bottle of water. “Cool one today, yes my friend?” he says in a strong Turkish accent as he cups the phone. I nod and make my exit.

Two people inhabit the first bar I enter: the bartender and a septuagenarian in a checkered cap, who has probably been in the arms of Morpheus for close to a decade. The old man is already swaying in his chair even if it's just past three in the afternoon. Rancid's “Journey to the End of the East Bay” blasts from the jukebox; it resonates off of a concrete floor littered with the detritus of so many fuzzy memories. The walls are black with the exception of a several pieces of art for sale, most of which appear to be the work of a single artist who favors vibrant pastels and virulently anti-Bush themes. The chairs have not been taken down from the scarred tables, and the bartender is still in the process of setting up the bar for the happy hour rush, which, from what I assume, will be limited to a handful of career alcoholics and ornery boozehounds.

I eye one of the bathroom doors at the back of the bar and remember that I've been here before. It was during one of those underage rampages through the dives of the area, those places too desperate for business to worry about what the law recommends. My friends and I entered without even the pretense of sobriety, which assured the bartender that we were, if nothing else, not narcs. The rougher fringes of society played pool and presented their contempt for conformity without the need to constantly talk about how little they thought of what their parents thought of them. A few Steve Earle impersonators floated close by the table exchanging rounds of Buck Hunter. I remember that the urinal was out of order that night, and that most of the men were just going in the sink if an occupied toilet denied them the opportunity of instant gratification. The black walls of the bathroom were coated with several layers of white, silver, gray, and, on more than one or two occasions, orange graffiti. These messages had been accumulating since the Carter administration, something that would not have been discernible had it not been for one writer's outrage over the possibility of a Reagan presidency. The ventilation system consisted of a large hole a few feet above the toilet. It was created by either a sledgehammer or a small explosive.

Just about all of the seats around us were occupied by newer residents of the Village, people who still seemed to be tourists because they were (perhaps they still are) always trying to find “The Real New York,” as if the city as it then stood was a perversion of the Form that existed in the Palladium and the Wetlands and the Limelight and Studio 54 and the stream of destitution that used to line New York's Via Dolorosa, the Bowery. They possessed that type of jealous nostalgia that, when voiced, becomes overtly bucolic in theme, though obviously not always in content.

The majority were students — bleary-eyed radicals and quixotic sophisticates eager to complain, discuss, debate, and argue in ways the dropout crowd calls condescending and the grad-students think rudimentary. Others were graphic designers still waiting to be hired by the company for which they had worked for the better part of a year (independent contractors without the independence, just the reduced pay); there were also musicians without label representation, artists without galleries, writers with too many ideas and not enough discipline, poets with plenty of talent but no connections (who maybe did more complaining than creating), sell-outs with just enough integrity to eschew the more fashionable bars of the City but not the high salaries of Wall Street or Midtown, connoisseurs of the Dive, and people who obviated their disgust for labels by embracing the fashion favored by those who detest labels — which is not a form of cynicism so much as a lack of imagination and an attachment to black cotton shirts. Several hours were spent drinking among such archetypes, people who seem more like clay than flesh until you spark up a conversation with them. We left after last-call and stumbled into the grays of the impending dawn, contently drunk and infatuated with sleep.

I take my seat at the bar on a rickety stool that capriciously sways as though dancing a bolero and order a mug of McSorely's. My ID is requested, which draws a derelict laugh from the old man down the bar. The bartender puts his finger to the date, looks to the picture, looks to me. “McSorely's, right?” as he hands me back the ID. “Don't see many Maryland licenses,” he adds. “You just move here?”

“I've been here about four years now.”

“You like it?”

“Love it.”

Our exchange falters. I take the opportunity to bring up Coprolalia. “We just painted the bathroom,” he says with a shrug. The medium T-shirt he is wearing bunches up a bit, and he quickly tugs it back into position. “I don't know why,” as he rubs his goatee with his free hand; “It's not like it's going to stop people from writing shit on the wall. I'm pretty sure the owners had that one guy from En Why You come to take a picture of whatever Coprolalia did in there before we painted. I guess you're going to have to contact him if you want to see it.” The geography of his past is still fresh in his accent. It's of the northern Midwest variety: clean, polite, and with head nod and smile accompaniment. It is not so exaggerated as to require a change in spelling in order to accurately transpose; it's just something you notice.

“That's four bucks,” he says as he hands me the beer. I hand him a five.

“This may be a bit out of left field, but do you know who Coprolalia is?”

“Me?” His laugh would be fitting for an animated chipmunk. “No, man. I've heard his name a lot, sure; but I don't have a clue who he is. I just moved to the city, like, six months ago. The only people I even know here are my girlfriend, her friends, and Sam over there.” Sam raises his glass, but says nothing — creepy silence is, after all, one of the most sacred of Thanatist virtues. “The guy probably lives in Williamsburg in a sweet loft or something.”

The conversation quickly flows into the Styx as the Buzzcocks begin their signature song. The next two songs are by the Ramones. What follows is a mystery to me, as I have finished my beer, said my goodbye, and made my exit.

This basic progression is followed without variation even after Uranus changes into a Hawaiian shirt. I enter into a bar, talk to a somewhat taciturn bartender, and quickly leave. I probably shouldn't have been ordering a drink at each place, but it's not an issue I dwell upon, as hindsight is a terrible vantage from which to view life.

I find myself on Third Avenue as the night finally encroaches upon the dusk. The brick precipices of red and gray loom overhead, high enough to block out the setting sun. Scaffolding shadows bemaze the sidewalk. Commuters spill out of train stations like blood from a fresh wound.

I have yet to actually see anything created by Coprolalia because it seems that every bathroom in the City has been recently painted. With the exception of the first place I visited, each bartender has stared back to me with a green stupor, as if the very idea of the artist is something of a joke that needs nothing more than a derisive shake of the head to expose. Soliciting information from them is more work than I would have expected, and the frustration mounts with each passing drink. In the Rembrandt-dark of the pubs, the surrounding customers feel it is a priority to make matters worse. These day-shift drinkers speak like Balzac characters plummeting from grace — shamelessness at terminal velocity.

One of the patrons at a pub with a football-related name lurched within a few feet of me after eavesdropping upon my conversation with Joe, the bartender. When Joe excused himself to pour a pint for one of the faithful, the man nudged his friend before he sidled up to me with something of a lupine grin. “Yo', bro', Copra's a friend of mine.”

I gave no reply.

He did not push the subject. He just stared blankly to me for a moment before telling his friend that his three songs were beginning to play over the jukebox: the one top-ten Raspberries single, Sabbath's “War Pigs,” and Sugarloaf's biggest, arguably only, hit. Joe returned with a voice plagued by hurried indifference. After a few moments of Q and A, he finally directed me to the bathroom, which, although coated in denouncements of the Giants, the Jets, the Yankees, the Mets, the Rangers, the Islanders, the Devils, the Nets, and (peculiarly) Jay-Z, precluded any mention of the Knicks. “Giuliani is a Fascist” was written on a part of the mirror that had barely evaded renovation efforts. It is interesting to reflect upon the types who decide to write such things. What creates such an outburst? Is it simply the alcohol? Or do people feel compelled to acquiesce and contribute to chaos at the slightest appeal? If questioned about their actions would they have a legitimate response? Would they have a response at all?

But this is not the time for philosophic musings, is it? It is Friday night after all. And, as it is Friday night, each bar is more crowded than the last, filled with people in hot pursuit of that perfect state of inebriation, which is as transient as the moment it is reached. Rain becomes less likely as the hours grow; troops of people consequently roam the streets as opposed to taking cars from Point A to Point B — the four in the morning Point C, of course, remains on the horizon of possibility. Young women swagger down the street in clusters, many in the process of reading or writing a text message. There are a lot of skirts, few cankles, fewer natural blondes, and only a handful of praetorian boyfriends looking on with menacing eyes towards other men, other women, dogs, insects, and inanimate objects too varied to bother mentioning. One such man is kicking a hydrant. There are also large groups exclusively of men — perhaps phalanxes would be more appropriate — moving through the streets with gaits both determined and concerted. These chachy customers are dressed in metallic-hued button-downs and expensive jeans of low quality. Interspersed among these groups about to partake in the nightlife, one finds the more militant members of the Young Republicans — fierce-looking twenty- and thirty-somethings with white bags of take-out in one hand, black bags of spirits in the other. The men have removed their ties; the women have changed their shoes. The determined face of ambition, however, remains. Even with the fatigue of a sixty or eighty hour week, they march by quickly, their heads slightly focused upon the pavement, their eardrums insulated by a song of their choosing, their lips pressed tight into something not too unlike a grimace even though there has been no willful manipulation of the facial muscles. They silently denounce you and the rest of the people not attempting to scale the intractable face of Mount Purgatory as they pass by. I've had political conversations with these types. It's not fun. On top of the pervasive resentment — or ressentiment, for the Nietzsche fans — that has somehow come to dominate the thinking of this nation's wealthy, these “Objectivists” utilize a lot of tautologies when confronted with Skepticism, and seem to be under the impression that repeating these tautologies at greater and greater volumes suffices for a cogent attack upon Cartesian metaphysics. Eventually things get personal. They express the narcissistic belief that their position came as a result of their abilities and their intelligence. They are autodidacts, who by chance went to the most prestigious private schools in their respective areas from the ages of three to eighteen, who got into Harvard or Yale or Princeton due to their tenacity and genius alone, who got a job at a firm that just so happens to be run by a friend of the family. Just about all of these arguments end with either a few words of profanity, something about someone's mother, or, occasionally, a fist. Luckily most of them are total fucking pussies.

While Gramercy Park is clogged with people, the majority of them similar to those outlined above, there are no teenagers unless they are accompanied by their parents. The Village had been filled with them: on stoops, on the street, among the cascading lilacs of Stuyvesant, mulling about the tenement buildings between the boutiques and fusion restaurants, causing types of trouble that are neither malevolent nor entirely innocent; they share cigarettes, bottles of hijacked liquor, and laughs at the expense of others. The Dominican kids wear hoodies unzipped to reveal scrawny torsos and undergarments of the wife-beater variety. Little nihilists dressed in black with skin a ghostly shade of pale haunt the shops of St. Marx Place looking for under-vigilant shopkeepers and sleepy security guards—ex otium delictum fit. Gramercy, it seems, is a playground of a different sort.

I eventually enter a tavern that has both shuffleboard and a pool table. It's just after eleven. I know it is going to be the last place I visit for the night, as I managed to exhaust my tentative budget for the day a few hours previously. Sobriety is a charade I'm struggling to maintain. I know that I only have enough money for another two drinks, a cab back to Brooklyn, and, if I'm lucky, a cup of coffee in the morning. A large pack of men at the front of the bar greet me with looks of subdued hostility. These glares do not last long; soon they have returned to singing along with Bon Jovi. The ogres and their girlfriends don't miss a beat. The former advertise for corporations who feel it's not unethical to use child labor to make (at least) a thousand percent profit on a shirt. The latter sport open-toed shoes with heels that range from four to six inches in length; their clothing reads “Juicy” and “Bitch,” as well as some more inventive messages, such as “Cum Bucket” and “Semen Receptacle” and “Jizz Magnet” and “Insert Here” and “You Must Be This Big To Ride This” and “More Baggage Than A Luggage Car” and “It Doesn’t Matter How Big You Are; Nothing Is Going To Fill The Void Where My Soul Used To Be.”

“What'll you have, hun'?” the bartender asks as I approach. She places her fingers on the bar and stretches in a way that is more lucrative than satisfying. I ask for a Manhattan on the rocks. “I have no idea what that even is, babe.”

Foregoing the Larry David response, I tell her what it's comprised of, and even go into a short history of the cocktail. She is neither impressed nor annoyed; she just nods as she retrieves the components of the cocktail from the shelf behind the bar. There are two marines next to me. One of them nudges me with an elbow and bobs his head to point out the bartender's black thong. He doesn't smile. His friend doesn't, either. They are both engrossed by the thong, the strands of synthetic fibers that speak the language of sex (lustful more than passionate) by straddling the line of what is and what is not seen. Even if they were not wearing their uniforms, you would still be able to tell that the two had recently seen combat. They each stare down an asymptote with listless eyes as if golems or silent extras in a play. They do not look to one another; they drink with mechanical torpidity, and focus, focus. When the bartender turns back around they continue to stare, the subject or object of their attention once again the nightmares of idealists.

I ask the bartender about Coprolalia as I guide her through the proportions of whiskey to vermouth. Her tongue is fluent in general disinterest and persiflage. “Only heard his name, hun'. There was that one thing on him in The Post,” she says while looking for the bitters. “I can't remember the last time I used these fucking things,” she says once she finds the bottle. “What was I saying? Oh yeah, about the toilet guy and that article.” She pauses. “When was that?” she asks the other bartender, who is busy waiting for the first half of a Guinness pint to settle, “Like six months ago?”

“What was six months ago?”

“The article about the shitter guy?”

“What shitter guy?”

“The guy who writes on the stalls around the city.”

“Oh. That.” She pauses. “I don't fucking know.”

“Did you read it?”

“Yeah, I read it, but it's not like I memorized that shit. Who fucking cares anyway?”

“This guy.” The other bartender shrugs. “Did you read it?” she asks me politely.

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Then you know as much as I do.”

I can tell that my tone is less than suppliant due to a solid string of failures, so I only nod. She finishes the drink, feigns a mousy smile, demands nine dollars even though she uses well whiskey, and grabs her tip before it becomes saturated by the pools of spilled liquor and beer. Jimi Hendrix begins to lament for Mary. Air guitar quickly becomes the most popular activity in this area of the bar.

Beyond the horde that lingers around the front of the place, I see that the residents of the tavern are more varied than I had assumed. Besides the two marines, the group of Jersey men playing muted solos over the verse of the song and the derisive women in close proximity, the bar is home to small clusters of people who have assumed less threatening or exhausted roles. There are a few students and recent graduates in threes and fours quietly reminiscing. At one of the bar's two tables a man attempts to bite into a sandwich, but it bursts apart like an exploding cigar from a Bugs Bunny cartoon or a Kennedy-era assassination attempt. He looks down to the entrails of the sandwich — the tomato, chicken, lettuce, and cheese all saturated with mayo — and then to his friends, who try not to laugh at his chagrin. Several couples floating around the pool table have begun the flirtation ritual; beyond these smiling and fawning creatures stand the loafers and the starers, the creeps and the geeks, the chronically misunderstood and the people who misunderstand them, floaters and hangers-on, sycophants and narcissists, and an obviously engaged couple sitting at the other table with a long-haired companion, who complains about a coworker lovingly referred to as “Shitbag.” He then goes into an impression of the reviled character, which sounds like a rendition of Daffy Duck, complete with speech impediment, salivary assault, and implied amphetamine addiction. The pool table becomes unoccupied when the eight ball is sunk prematurely — much to the dismay of the shooter, a guy with that porcupine hairstyle that cautions aggressors and attracts potential mates.

There is no line for the bathroom, though someone does occupy it. It is a very obnoxious setup: there is a toilet and a urinal, but the two are positioned in such a way as to make it impossible to use one without rubbing shoulders with the person using the other (unless, of course, one of them is sitting…and, no, it's not always on the toilet). Consequently, no two people ever use the bathroom at the same time unless they are mutually comfortable with the presence of a potentially visible penis that is not their own. A shuffleboard player with thin, blond hair and a drunken stare informs me of this. His accent is of the West Coast variety: resonate, slow, tired. The man next to him, who stands at an even seven feet, adds that a lot of fights break out in the bar, most of which are due to either the lavatory arrangements or their often-belligerent friend. Needless to say, I wait until the bathroom is completely vacated to enter.

The washroom is cleaner than most I have seen. The walls are painted forest green and the tiled floor is coated in only trace amounts of urine. There are plenty of paper towels, but the soap dispenser is empty. There are three advertisement posters; two near the toilet and one directly above the urinal. All of them are for the same deodorant, which promises frequent and vigorous encounters with super models. (Are beautiful women the only ones responsive to the pheromones that the product attempts to recreate? Are the less aesthetically endowed for some reason incapable of discerning said pheromones?) Most of the writing on the wall is of generic stock: names of people for whom having been “here” represents some type of accomplishment, the W.A.S.T.E. symbol, and the requisite, “Here I sit broken hearted / tried to shit, but only farted.” There is also the unfortunate reversal of this: “Here I sit broken hearted / tried to fart, but I shat!” In modern slang, this messy misfire is known as a shard. The term can also be used as a verb: Billy was relieved to find an extra pair of boxers in his locker after he sharted in gym class.

Below the advertisement and above the urinal are two messages written in black ink: “God Hates Fags,” and, above that, “Shantih Shantih Shantih.” Both of the messages are written by the same hand, that much is clear. But what the hell does it mean? One is the mantra uttered by a contingency of spiritual derelicts; the other is the final line in T.S. Elliott's most famous poem.

It is clearly the Coprolalia to which Sean's list refers. He has called it Aptheos Ampersand Peritheos. I don't understand the title, probably because I am not familiar with two of the three words. I don't stay in the bathroom studying the piece for too long, as someone assaults the door with a series of importune knocks before I can even finish urinating. I open the door to see one of the marines. He gives a quaint salutation in the form of a head nod, but he does not smile or say anything as I step out. Before the door has fully closed, I hear the sound of whatever he had for dinner hitting the water.

2

“How do you know he exists?” I ask Sean over the phone. “I mean, does he ever give anything like an insignia?” I cannot help but smell my breath — a brassy pollution. It's eleven in the morning. I'm in my apartment. When I awoke, the only evidence of a cab ride could be found by the lack of money in my pocket. Then it started to come back to me. Slowly. The driver was of the talkative variety. He was South African. Black. Xhosa, I think. I faintly remembered the Williamsburg Bridge and a disjointed conversation about Antije Krog with a Clementi soundtrack. I could also remember that he thought Coetzee was overrated and that Mda — a mystery to me — was a genius. Then it all came back. Literature was the icebreaker. After that, there was no hesitance to disclose any detail of his life: that he made sixty-two thousand dollars a year, and that, once the lease, gas, taxes and miscellaneous fees were added into the equation, he walked away with something like eighteen grand, plus the three thousand bucks that came via his tax return. I didn't ask about tips. Regardless of his qualms, he was clearly happy to be away from the poverty and crime of “Jo'burg,” and appreciative of the relative comfort afforded by even the ghettos of this country. Still, he was sick of watching the immigrant's dream come too true from behind a thick sheet of Plexiglas, and didn't seem to think I would get offended when he told me that he didn't really care for white people, generally speaking of course.

I have already been to the nearby bodega to pick up a cup of coffee and a bacon, egg, and cheese. I paid for the latter almost entirely with coins found in the couch — two dollars and a quarter that had two pennies attached to it by means of some mysterious adhesive. I applaud myself for the decision, even if I initially thought it somewhat pathetic to be spelunking for treasure lost on a lazy afternoon. I don't feel as terrible as I look, smell, and (probably) taste, though I must admit that coming back into my building is always somewhat depressing, especially when I've spent the previous night zealously punishing my liver. Perhaps it is because the building is depressing by its very nature. The stairs and walls are painted spleen gray; the hallways smell like cat dander, cumin, garlic, and something that is neither pleasant nor offensive (evasive of definition with the exception of a single word—viz. fried). The sound of someone traveling up the stairs echoes throughout the building. You can hear the process even in your most somnolent moments. You come to expect it, to feel it. (The front door inviting the cacophony of the street in, the bomb-shelter slam of the reinforced steel door, the arduous hike upon the decaying wood stairs — each footfall provoking a snap or a crack—, the aggravated respiration resonating throughout the building like a death-rattle with jingling key accompaniment, click, the turn, the opening door's manipulation of space and silence, the door's fall back into position one, peace, the deadbolt penetrating the door-frame like a rapist.) The tenants are reclusive, so the air lingers in the foyers, the hallways, the stairwell, and the small lobby that houses the mailboxes; it is something like a collective sigh from all of those caught in the doldrums of this existence — too poor to get away, too employed to be afforded a helping hand. I often feel that I am one of them, but this is a specious belief that they are quick to recognize and disdain.

These are visions from Bushwick. The neighborhood is not at the end of the line on any of the trains, but it is deep enough into Brooklyn to provoke a double take from longtime residents, who never can shake incredulous glares when I reaffirm cross-streets and subway stops without a sense of shit-impulse trepidation in my voice. Those from the nicer parts of the city consider Woodhull — the somewhat nearby hospital — to be nothing less than a mythical place, a legend lifted from one of the Inferno's later cantos. And yet I am beyond it, deeper. Those who grew up in the area and have since moved out seem convinced of nothing less than suicidal compulsion on my part, even if the word “gentrification” hides in the shadows of implication. Some seem more incensed about it, gentrification, than others. It's not that they are angry with me personally when it really comes down to it; they are angry at the wave, not the particulate. Those who hunt the dawn don't always make this distinction.

The apartment itself was renovated by a coat of paint and some new windows. The latter fail to keep out either the cold or the din from the streets; the former, on humid days, bleed a dirty-amber substance (proof, my roommate attests, of a chain-smoking former tenant). The roaches are certainly here, as are the mice. Only the latter make regular cameos while the lights are on, though they have been less of a problem since the coming of spring.

Our building is narrow, but the apartment is — for someone used to living in Manhattan — rather spacious. The living room is capacious enough to allow seven or eight comfortably; nine, ten, and beyond have to find a spot either on the floor or in one of the bedrooms (though it must be said that a friend of mine, Denise, did fall into the habit of spending the majority of her time in my tub whenever there were more people than a few people over, as she was not only an over-zealous acolyte of Marx and Bakunin and Lenin and Trotsky, but of Diogenes (the Cynic), too; she would sit there in silence as the rest of the party carried on without her until a visitor came to use the toilet, and she would say that the most earnest conversations take place when people are naked, and that, while she did desire earnest conversation more than just about anything, the bathroom was as close as she wanted to get without sending mixed signals, which is why the toilet became known as “The Hot Seat” whenever Denise was around, why it was dreaded by people who didn't know her or didn't know most of the petit comité in the other room or didn't really feel like talking about anything that required sincerity or extensive thought, which is something that Denise was quick to recognize; and when situations such as these arose she would just recount the most famous of the interactions between Diogenes and Alexander the Great, which occurred when the latter interrupted the former, who was quietly sunning himself, and said, “Ask of me any boon you like,” to which Diogenes replied, “Get out of my light”). The bathroom is small, not have-to-rest-your-legs-on-the-tub-to-shit small, but of a size that can dissuade the seriously claustrophobic from frivolous trips. The shower spits out six minutes of hot water on good days. The bedrooms are large, perhaps designed to accommodate two strangers.

“No, he doesn't typically sign his work,” Sean begins, “But in many cases there's really no need for it.”

“How did this name come about?” I ask. “Did someone make it up?”

“No, he told it to me. I told you that I met him one time, right?”

“No. How the hell does something like that just slip your mind?”

“Well, it's not like it's that important. It was just one brief encounter.”

“This is the man to whom you owe your professional ca—”

“I know, but the interaction was quick, and, well, to be honest, I was quite drunk. I don't even mention it in my essays.”

“It was really that unimportant?”

“Look, if it were to happen now it would be, but back then I was barely even familiar with his work. Imagine meeting Lou Reed at the age of twelve. True, you may know some of his songs, but the conversation would be relatively superficial, wouldn't it?”

“I suppose so.”

“Well, as I was saying, I met him in ninety-eight. April eighteenth…I guess nineteenth, to be precise. I know what you're thinking: If it's so unimportant, why do I remember the day? There's a simple answer to that. It was my friend's birthday. You may know him: Derrick Errington.”

“Sorry, that name doesn't ring a bell.”

“You should check out his work. He's a fantastic photographer.” Caesura. “Well, we were in this bar that most people refer to as Ma' Kettle's — a real dive somewhere on Fourteenth Street. I don't think that's the real name of the place, but, as I said, that's the name it typically goes by. So we're in there for maybe two or three minutes before Bruno, the owner of the bar, comes out of the bathroom. He's clearly upset. He says that someone's just written something on the wall in there. Now, he isn't exactly outraged, or even all that upset, but Bruno has a bit of Fyodor Karamazov in him, and he decides to take the spotlight once he realizes he's attracted everyone's attention.

“Most lost interest after a few minutes, but there were these two men sitting next to me who continued to egg him on. Bruno accosted one of the men after some time, but it was only in jest. It was fairly obvious that the two knew each other rather well. They had similar accents.”

“What kind?”

“Brooklyn.”

“I see.”

“So this goes on for some time: Bruno rants and raves while the two continue in hysterics. Soon even Bruno's had enough, and he goes to the other side of the bar to help the bartender — an older woman, who, as I recall, was one of the bar's biggest, if not only, attractions. Intrigued, I turned to the two to ask how they knew Bruno, which got us to talking not only about Bruno, but about a miscellany of subjects — you know, a typical bar conversation.

“After a while, the more talkative one finally looks around, and very quietly tells me that he did it. I asked him what he meant. He furtively pointed to the bathroom, and, again quietly, told me that he did it. I didn't know how to respond. To be honest, I figured it was some puerile message — you know, typical bathroom vandalism. But I decided to check it out, just to assuage my curiosity. What I saw in there was far from typical; it was…well, brilliant. And I realized that I had seen it before, not the exact piece of course, but the same style, the same essential message. I came out as fast as I could, probably pissing myself a little on the way,” he says with a laugh, “and ran back to my seat. 'You did that?' I ask. 'Yeah,' he responds; 'What of it?' He seemed to think that I wanted to pick a fight with him. As you can probably imagine, he was taken a bit off guard when I told him that I loved his work.

“He thought I was being facetious initially; he was even reluctant to take credit…about the pieces in Bay Ridge I had seen, that is. It wasn't until I started mentioning specific bars and specific instillations that he admitted that he was indeed Coprolalia. It was the first time I had heard the name. As I'm sure you know, the only name that had ever been connected to the Bay Ridge Collection was Anonymous or The Bay Ridge Bathroom Artist or something of the like.”

“Did he give you a reason for the name?”

“He said that he created without thinking, as if it were a tic.”

“Really? Was it compulsive? Impulsive? Was he remorseful?”

“No, not at all,” Sean says as I hear his lighter snap. “He found it very amusing that people had made such a big deal out of what he did in Bay Ridge. He was far more appreciative of reactions like Bruno's.”

“What did he look like?”

“That's the thing,” Sean exhausts. “I don't really remember. The bar is kind of dark in the back, and I had been drinking for just about the entire duration of the night. As I said, it was a Derrick's birthday, and he really had almost a fetish for dive bars at the time. In fact, Ma' Kettle's ended up being our last stop. We weren't even going to go in, but we decided to eat there before going home.”

“You were going to eat at a place called Ma' Kettle's?”

“Actually, we were going to eat in the Kennedy Fried Chicken down the block, but it was packed. We had to take it to go. We just happened to stumble — literally stumble — upon the bar. We asked Bruno if we could bring in outside food. He was more than happy to accommodate, so we ended up eating our chicken over a pitcher of beer. My other friends left after that, but I stayed on for one more. Serendipitous, no?”

“Why?”

“What do you mean? If it weren’t for that decision to stay for another beer, I would have never met Coprolalia. I wouldn't have studied his work. My life would be completely different.”

“I see,” slowly. “Where was the bar?”

“I don't know if it's still there, but it was on Fourteenth between A and B.”

“That was kind of a rough neighborhood back then.”

“Yes, it was.”

“Do you think he's from the area?”

“Coprolalia? Well, he may have been living there, in Manhattan, at the time, but he is most certainly from Brooklyn. The accent was a dead give-away.”

“Do you remember anything else about him?”

“He's white; he has big ears; he's probably about my age, maybe a bit older.”

“How old would that be, then?”

“He's probably in his late-thirties now. He may even be forty.” He slurps what I assume to be coffee without repose. “What was funny, though, was how hard he laughed when I brought up the J.J. Bubbles piece — you remember, I showed it to you yesterday. He said it was one of his favorites. You remember that one, right? Pariah Blues—the one of the coffee table.”

“Of course,” I respond. “That was the first one you saw.”

“Well, I like to think of it as the first one I really noticed, but, yes, in a way you are correct. Long story short, it's one of the only two pieces I absolutely know to be authentic.”

“What's the other one?”

“How hungover are you?”

“I've seen better days,” I respond. “But, regardless, you said it was one of the two pieces….”

“Ma' Kettle's,” he responds slowly. “I think you may want to take it easy tonight, buddy. I know you're young and you think you can take on the world, but the last thing you want to do is get so drunk that you don't even remember your interview.”

I groan. “What do you think I should do, then?”

“Last night I had a few drinks with some former students of mine. Your situation came up, and they want to help you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they want to join you on your little adventure. They want to meet Coprolalia, too. Do you have a pen? I'll give you Tomas' number.”

2.1

Tomas Bennington and James Aberdeen are not the most famous artists in New York. They are not not-famous, or even infamous; they are simply too young to have seriously established themselves. Tomas is a video artist, but he is probably best known for his critically acclaimed, Postlexical book, Letters in Tandem. James has also made something of a name for himself within the art community, as he is the founder (and so far only member) of the Potentialist Movement. His Purple Elephant Waltz #42 is currently on display at the Graham Gallery in Chelsea. He will soon be showing a small collection (beginning in August) at the Keens Center for the Arts, which is located in south Williamsburg.

Tomas is a ruddy-faced eccentric with a narrow nose and crooked teeth. His eyes are of Eastern European stock, though his ancestry is predominately English. Some would think him cynical. I would be no exception to this. It is not a necessarily acerbic orientation, just a state of perpetual disappointment — the primary antecedent, in Seneca’s mind, to anger. He is a stout man, comprised of neither excessive muscle nor fat, but simply brawn. He wears a plain white T-shirt and jeans, gator-skin beetle-boots (zippers on the side, aerodynamic in shape), and a Detroit Tigers hat that hasn't seen a wash cycle in what appears to be a decade.

Tomas sounds like he's in a constant state of agitation, complete with erratic hand gestures that are often accompanied by sound effects and a barrage of profanity. He goes through long periods of time in which he doesn't blink. When he does blink, it is usually followed by several more. Blinks. It's as though he is trying to keep his average blinks-per-minute close to the mean of the general population. When you notice this idiosyncrasy, you can't help but store it in memory for later discussion with someone else. It doesn't seem to have a catalyst, either. This element of caprice just makes it that much more noticeable.

James is taller and more reserved. He is pensive and cautious, but eager to exhibit his insight. In Medieval times he would have been called melancholic. He wears a tweed blazer, nods along as others speak, and rolls his own cigarettes — a habit (or vice, depending whom you ask) in which he takes a modest deal of pride. Tomas says that he drinks nearly a gallon of coffee a day; without it, the tempo of his speech would probably degenerate into a soporific largo. When talking, he refuses eye contact; when listening, he focuses his attention on the mouth of the speaker.

There is a curiosity in his eyes that is salient, somewhat intimidating. At a glance, you would assume him to be a graduate student from Dartmouth or Brown — not a perpetual student like those whom you meet in the coffeehouses of the West Village, but a professional student, a cloistered brain busy mulling over a thesis paper that revolves around the significance of some random artifact in a work of fiction from the nineteenth century (like Natalia's kerchief, which appears towards the end of the sixth chapter of Gogol's Taras Bulba) — not only because of the tweed and the ponderous disposition he exhibits, but also as a consequence of his neat beard. My father always said that beards are for mystics and the vain.

Tomas says that Aberdeen (and he calls him that, too) takes himself too seriously. Aberdeen says that Tomas lives in a state of childish rebellion, which is certainly true to a degree. Neither have what most would consider a real occupation, as they have managed to become successful enough to escape what Aberdeen calls “the tedium of the post-industrial day-job,” and what Tomas refers to as “The degradation of the Dionysian spirit by the anti-social elements of capitalist society.” Even though Aberdeen is less self-righteous than Tomas, his laconic phrases complement the ravings of his friend with a counterbalance of intellectual buzzwords and rehearsed incredulity.

I met Tomas and Aberdeen around two in the afternoon under a corner scaffold in northern Greenpoint, an area supposedly rife with the work of Coprolalia. There was a mist oscillating in severity as we exchanged pleasantries and spoke about the neighborhood, which I had never really visited during the daytime. Even though it had become something of a nexus for those fleeing the rent increases in Williamsburg, who were flocking to Williamsburg to escape the rent increases in the Village, it had retained a lot of its former character. Most of the shop windows have signs in Polish, English, and Spanish (in that order, too), though there are establishments that exclusively cater to the neighborhood's newer, more domestic immigrants. There's a high-end produce market, a minimalist Thai restaurant, and a video store that specializes in quality films that you can never find at your local Blockbuster because the VHS copy has been stolen and the studio hasn't bothered to mass-produce a DVD edition yet. Starbucks has converted the old movie theater into…well…a Starbucks. The marquee implores pedestrians to stop in for a dessert beverage that costs only five bucks. The justification for the price probably comes from the Italian neologism that's been slapped onto the substance, which, for all intents and purposes, is nothing more than hypercaffeinated Nesquik. McDonald's has set up shop nearby, too. The windows reveal a sterile environment that is oddly reminiscent of a poorly constructed diorama or a scene from the bottom of an aquarium. The majority of the inhabitants are Dominican or elderly (in some cases both).

But these newer places do not overwhelm those that have been in the area for what seems like generations. A few storefronts north of the McDonald’s there is a Polish meat market that sells organs and glands that most Americans forget how to spell by the time they get home to plug such items into a search engine. Between the two is an old bar illuminated only by the sun as seen though tinted glass and one of those neon beer advertisements that one typically sees after pulling off the highway deep in Bush country. On the other side of the street is a butcher, as well as pharmacy named after Poland's most famous composer. The G train below all of this smells like asparagus-tinged piss, garlic, offal and some type of peppery spice that may or may not be smoked paprika.

The sidewalks are cleaner than most one comes across in Brooklyn, though the people inhabiting them are typical to the borough. You have the short bulbous brown women in spaghetti-strapped tops; they push strollers down the street while gangs of toddlers hang upon them like ornaments on a Christmas Tree — perhaps there is a certain nimbus surrounding these women, too, a kind of sanctuary of patience beclouding what to all of us sans enfants seems a vision of hell. There's also the requisite Chinese woman marching down the street under a massive bag of cans and bottles. They jingle like loose change in the pocket of a giant. Bearded white men in their early- to mid-twenties discuss a myriad of subjects in aggravated tones while their limp fingers draw out the perimeters of ellipses. Cherubic Polish women stroll though the slight mist; they are being courted by thick men with deltoids like mountain ranges and facial topographies no less marred than the South Dakota Badlands.

The mist begins to pick up a bit as we continue making small talk. Tomas proposes an indoor venue after a gust of wind sends an empty soda can rolling down a street that appears to be filled with nothing but low-density industrial buildings and dumpsters. The idea is met with no resistance, and soon we begin in the direction of wherever he has in mind. The two describe the neighborhood in esoteric fashion as we walk: where the best bar is (where we are going), where the best Cuban sandwich is (Franklin and Huron), where the best coffee is (Franklin and Huron), where to score just about any drug under the sun with the exception of psilocybin, opium, and those goofy pharmaceuticals that smarter dealers know to eschew (wouldn't you like to know). Aberdeen tells me that Magic Johnson owns the property around the corner. Tomas complains that the nearby pizza place, “which fucking sucks anyway,” charges twenty dollars for a large Hawaiian even though the same pie with ham and pineapple runs just sixteen. “Fucking bullshit, man,” he adds with an amount of venom that isn't really warranted. “Praeludium” (BWV 1007) can be heard coming from a window above us. It is being played by a cellist with an erratic right hand.

“Introibo ad altare Dei,” Tomas proclaims as he opens the door for Aberdeen and me.

Aberdeen rolls his eyes. “Sean thinks the piece in here is a fake, but we're not so skeptical,” he states. We walk to the back, past the few patrons and bartender, and stop at the threshold of one of the unisex bathrooms. The ski-ball machine to our right begs for quarters with dancing red lights. The nearby jukebox is a gray mass of technology. “It's obviously a Coprolalia,” Aberdeen continues as the bathroom door is pushed open. He reveals the four small, block letters that comprise the piece, as the others in the bar look to us with curiosity. I don't think either Tomas or Aberdeen notice the attention we draw to ourselves as we stand looking just above the paper towel dispenser from the small ante-lavatory — a space that moonlights as a cigarette lounge, something that evident from the faint redolence of smoke and the flattened filters of white and cedar-speckled gamboge that litter the floor. A rather large pillar obstructs the vantage from behind the bar. This explains why the location serves the secondary purpose it does.

The bathroom is anything but prosaic. More than a few eccentric articles implore attention: an ancient scale, an advertisement for the same deodorant from last night, a table full of free magazines that cater to alternative demographics. “Its simplicity speaks volumes,” Aberdeen says as he walks into the lavatory. “To find truth in brevity like that. It's so perfect.” He pauses to take it in. “FUCK.” He turns to us. “That's all he needed.

“It's reminiscent of a work by Friedman,” he concludes.

“I think it's more like one of Joyce's epileptics,” Tomas counters (apparently because he's on something of a Joyce binge). Aberdeen scowls with a tinge of arrogance before turning back around to examine the four letters with greater scrutiny.

I suggest a Salinger reference, but the two quickly dismiss this for reasons that are neither clear nor debatable. To be honest, I didn't believe my conjecture, either. It's not because I believe either one of them are correct; it's because I am not convinced that we are gazing upon a Coprolalia. It's not ironically juvenile; it's unadulteratedly juvenile. Furthermore, it is not on Sean's list. And while this is not something I feel the need to bring up, it is something that I take note of.

We walk back into the main chamber, the argument now transcending the initial topic. None of the tables is occupied, not even the pool table. A young couple plays darts. They talk about Ilsa Bergman and Humphrey Bogart, though they refer to the latter celebrity as either Bogey or The Humpster. Blondie sings of rapture at a volume that discourages all but the most vigilant of eavesdroppers.

“I think I'm just going to get a soda,” I say as the three of us wait to be served.

“What? You fucking sick or something? Tomas asks.

“No,” I begin, “I'm just hungover.”

The bartender approaches. “Three bloody maries,” Tomas announces. He turns to me. “I'm buying,” he adds before launching into a tirade about the hair of the dog and dialectics of self-realization, which arouses a crooked brow out of me and a derisive shake of the head from Aberdeen. “This, alcohol, is a form of fucking catharsis, man; it's the only means we can abolish the super-ego, the self-for-others, and all of the other shackles that bourgeois society has imposed upon us. Dig it! It eradicates the…the…” as he turns to Aberdeen. “What's that fucking Hegelian word that I'm thinking of? Shitsklit?”

“Sittlichkeit?”

“Yeah; that shit. Fuck it! We need not be prisoners of society's puritanical morality, a morality that is as fucking antiquated as it is profane.” As the bartender looks for the celery stalks with which to garnish our drinks, Tomas begins to speak about his fight against the post-9/11 ethos of fear and repression, at one point referring to himself as “A Luddite engaged in a war against the mechanisms of Conservative nihilism,” perhaps to convey a love for words that sound more important than they actually are.

“So how do you guys know Sean?” I ask once we take our seats at a horizontal Gallega arcade game. Tomas has calmed himself by this point. “You were students of his?”

Tomas nods. “We graduated, what, five years ago.” Aberdeen nods. “Since then, we've been trying to make art our career, dig. It's only been the past year or so that we've been able to quit our day-jobs.”

“And you live around here, right?”

“Yes,” Aberdeen responds. “We live in a loft on Green Street. It's right around the corner.”

The question and answer session continues for a while. I discover that the two have been roommates since their third year in college. They have lived in the loft for the past four years. “Been there since we got priced out of the Village. We lived on Avenue fucking C, man, and we still couldn't afford it. Even with both of us working our bullshit day jobs, the place was just too fucking expensive.” The new space is relatively cheap, they tell me; it is also large enough to allow three other roommates.

Over the course of the years these spaces have been occupied by seven different people, two they consider worthy of being mentioned by their birth names. The three currently occupying the space — besides Tomas and Aberdeen, of course — are Barazov (which is not the man's surname), Lindsay, and Itchycoo (yet another cognomen). Barazov is a self-described anarchist with a trust fund that allows him a life of perpetual turpitude. His real name is Spencer Fitzgerald Bloodsworth. Tomas thinks he's a third or a fourth — as in Spencer Fitzgerald Bloodsworth III (or IV). “Real fucking blue blood, dig. He's the type who's got ancestors who came over on the Mayflower or some shit. Type of family with a manor or an estate instead of a house,” he adds. Lindsay is a receptionist in Midtown, who, as suggested from her lack of a mordant handle, is “a nice girl.” They don't seem to care for her boyfriend, Clyde. It's fairly obvious that the enmity Aberdeen feels for him derives from his attraction to the girl; Tomas, on the other hand, thinks little of Clyde because he's a mean drunk. Itchycoo is a hippie currently on vacation. He works two jobs nine months out of the year so he can spend the summer months touring with the Disco Biscuits and other bands that Tomas and Aberdeen don't know by name. They are dismissive of his taste in music, as well as his general orientation to the world, but at least Tomas acknowledges him as well intentioned.

Aberdeen scowls. “He's a slob. And a hick, too; he's from Georgia.”

“Good musician, though,” Tomas chimes in sympathetically. “You know, I don't dig all the music he's into, but you have to possess some degree of talent to play it.” Before I ask, he responds: “Guitarist. He also owns one of those mini guitars, too,” as he races up an imaginary fretboard with his right hand. “You know, the one with the eight strings. What's it called again?”

“Mandolin,” Aberdeen and I respond in unison.

Tomas continues: “He's not that good at it, but you can barely hear it if he closes his door. As I was saying, he's certainly polite so long as he doesn't drink the shit they sell down the street.”

“Whiskey?”

“No, the liquor store down the block sells this one hundred and sixty proof vodka. The owner won't allow anyone besides the Polska to buy it, but Itchycoo has a lot of experience with moonshine. Was it his father?” as he looks to Tomas.

“Grandfather.”

“Yes, his grandfather evidently ran a still. As you can probably guess, he's not from Atlanta — he's from the North Country.”

“But he's not trailer-trash or anything like that,” Tomas interjects. “He's got an okay head on his shoulders.”

“I guess. The music he listens to, though — that's what really irks me. Endless noodling,” with cumbersome grimace. “He has hundreds of these Phish shows on his computer, and he constantly listens to them. What is his favorite song again?”

“The one about quitting heroin.”

“I know that,” Aberdeen says with indignation. “What is it called?”

“There isn't a Phish song about heroin,” I protest.

“I remember,” Tomas exclaims. “It's 'Down with Disease'.” Aberdeen nods. “It's not that bad of a song.”

“Yes, it is. The album version is terrible, and it would be tolerable live if the damn guitarist didn't take a twenty minute solo during the (pause, sigh, eye roll) jam.”

“What about that other song, the one about the specter of white, male privilege?”

“The ghost song?”

“Yeah.”

“That one's not so bad. It certainly touches on a very poignant subject.” Aberdeen pauses. “I still don't like them.”

“What was that one band he really dug for a while? The one that was really out there?”

“Tortoise,” Aberdeen answers. “We went to the show together. That was actually one of the selling points when he moved in. On top of that, he told us that he would be gone for three months out of the year, and that he didn't want to sublet his space.”

“So he's paying for his room even though he's not there?”

“Yes.”

“Like I said,” Tomas begins, “He's a good guy.”

“How long ago was that Tortoise show anyway? Was it last August?”

“I don't know.”

“Regardless, it was a great show,” he says with authority. “I think they're the only modern band the two of us both like besides Air and Radiohead.”

“What about Wilco?”

“Obviously,” he grants. It is as if enjoying the band has become something of a prerequisite as opposed to a taste, especially with the new album that came out this past Tuesday. “Tortoise, however, has a very unique sound,” Aberdeen continues. “They are too sophisticated for a lot of people. We also went to check out this new band that we both really liked right before he left. Yeasayer — ever heard of them?”

“No.”

“Was that the band with the really good xylophone player?”

“No.”

I try to steer the conversation away from the band and on to Coprolalia, but not before Aberdeen goes to the jukebox and returns chagrined by the absence of several bands residing in various realms of obscurity (though it must be said that almost all of these bands resided outside of the realm of obscure-for-obscurity’s-sake, which serves as the most garish theater for the most pompous of audiences for whom the Internet is the backbone of their identity — i.e. so long small bands in my town, hello alt-country groups from Benin). He broods for the duration of the bloody mary, and is the first to make the trek back to the bartender. He returns with what is more than likely a gin and tonic, as there are four slices of lime in his glass. A song accompanies his return; we are informed of its name, as well as the band that it is by, but this information is ignored. I am fairly certain that it comes from the bartender's iPod.

Coprolalia once again becomes the focal point of the discussion, though the argument this time around is not about the four letters in the bathroom. As it turns out, Aberdeen is of the opinion that the real Coprolalia retired a few years ago. He has no evidence of this, of course, but there's no argument good enough to dissuade him. “He's another Willis Faxo,” he says with a roll of the eyes.

“Another who?” I ask

“Willis Faxo,” Tomas enunciates. I shrug. “He was initially big into Agitprop, although some would call his work Postagitprop—”

“—Which Meinenshahldurgheim has argued is really a form of Cryptoromanticism that has become conscious of itself as such. But wouldn't this make it Neoromantic, perhaps Metapostromantic?”

Tomas and I exchange looks. “Regardless,” Tomas resumes, “He's the artist who made the sculpture outside of the Keens Center.” He stops to scratch his head. “What the fuck is it called again?”

“I don't recall. It's really a fantastic piece, though,” Aberdeen says as he turns to me. “Have you seen it?”

“No.”

“I totally dig it, man. You should check it out when you get the chance.” He drinks a good deal of his bloody mary. “Anyway, I'm not convinced that Coprolalia retired. He probably just moved out of the city, to, like, Long Island or something. There’s that one city that used to be all artists. It doesn’t even have stoplights. I totally think he’s there.”

“On what grounds do you make that assumption?”

“On what grounds do you make your assumption?” Caesura. “Dick.”

“Look, he obviously retired back in oh-two or oh-three when his work started receiving so much exposure. Everything since then has been the work of copycat artists.”

“No way, man,” Tomas protests. “He just doesn't live here anymore. How else can you explain the consistency of his work?”

“It's not consistent at all! If it weren't for Sean, I wouldn't even think that it's the work of a single artist.”

“That's total bullshit, man. You know that Coprolalia has a style. Look at Vis Inertiae. That's so obviously a Coprolalia.”

“That's not what Sean says,” I chime in.

“Who gives a fuck what Sean says. It's not like he's the only person who knows for certain what a fucking Coprolalia is or isn't.”

“He knows better than you,” Aberdeen says quietly as he buries his face in his tumbler.

“I don't care. I think he's fucking wrong. Okay: consider the one that's in that bar way out in Jamaica,” he begins. “What's that fucking place called?” he asks the ceiling. “I'm not going to remember. Anyway, it's the place right next to the Sutpen Boulevard F — you know, the one that's like two blocks away from the court.”

“I think you mean Sutphin Boulevard. Sutpen is a Faulkner character.”

“Sutphin, Sutpen, who the fuck cares?” as he rolls his eyes. “It's the one that reads Guardians Of Privilege with an elephant drinking a flute of champagne. It's almost the same joke as Vis Inertiae. And it's from a year ago, man.”

“No, it's from two thousand and four — you know, when the election was taking place.”

“Regardless,” Tomas counters with a particularly spastic motion of the hand, “This only proves my point. His newer pieces keep appearing in the parts of Queens and Brooklyn that you can easily get to from the L.I.E. or the B.Q.E. Dig it, man, he's totally coming in from Long Island.”

“Yes, but here's why you're wrong….”

This continues for the duration of Tomas' bloody mary and Aberdeen's gin and tonic. They demand that I finish what is left of my first cocktail, buy me another round (this time a pint of German beer with a name that I can't pronounce), and then come back in the mood to talk about something else. I feel slightly awkward after their arguments concerning Coprolalia have been exhausted. They seem to be immune to my presence.

I've never been to this particular bar. While it is not the first location in Greenpoint I have visited, it is my first time this far up Manhattan Avenue. I don't think it qualifies as a dive, but some people would disagree. It certainly has that distinctly north Brooklyn feel to it — spacious, dark, unassuming. There are several pieces of art on the wall, more than likely the work of a single artist. It's an odd style, though the medium — oil on canvas — is straightforward enough. The palette is warm, filled with browns and abundant diagonals. The work is too abstract to describe without turning the process into a psychology experiment. (There is one exception to this statement: what appears to be the silhouette of a woman (you can tell by the breasts, the half moons shawled by arms crossed via St. Andrew) turning away from an ajar door. There is perhaps a man there, either opening or closing it. If opening, perhaps she sits clothed at the table quietly becoming enraged by “the fact that revolutionary women are always villianized.” If closing, she has shawled herself in only a robe, a birthday present from better days. If closing, I have said my goodbye. If closing, you twist a more recent gift in your fingers as you glare to the window as if in mourning, my Gabrielle with a rose. And perhaps you watch as I trudge down the stairs and continue along the walkway that bisects the snow, which glimmers like nacre in the sodium streetlights above, your eyes both glassy and gelid enough to disguise the relief that you are feeling, even if that relief only compounds the guilt that will eventually lead you to the liquor store, and then, several hours later, to the telephone.)

Tomas and Aberdeen continue talking as I survey the surroundings. The people who occupy the seats at the bar are clearly regulars with the exception of a couple who each use the word “pretentious” to describe everything from television programs to drink prices at a club somewhere in or on Manhattan. The rest of the patrons attract less attention. A woman sits at the other end of the bar writing in fervent and infrequent bursts on a legal pad. She makes time to talk to the bartender with familiarity. She puts very little on the page as she writes, which suggests that she is a poet. She smiles with regularity, and laughs boisterously. The two young men next to her are discussing the Bush administration — its arrogance, its ignorance, its incompetence and belligerence. It's a laughing matter a lot of the time, not the type of laughter that makes you feel better, just the type that masks that feeling of impotent, of knowing there's nothing you can do but laugh while the Snopeses of the world keep on doing what Snopeses do. Two Polish men down the bar bark with raised voices and amiable tones, their faces dotted with broken capillaries and two-day's worth of stubble.

Though I struggle to find a seat in Tomas and Aberdeen's theater of dialog, it is quickly acknowledged that awkwardness swims poorly among the two. One drink turns to two, and two turns to three, and soon we're ordering shots even though the sun is still striving to escape from behind thick cloud cover. The Mets/Yankees game is on, but no seems too interested except for a woman who prides herself on being one of ten or eleven white people from within the actual city limits of Detroit. Her voice is of the type that invites eavesdropping: loud, hoarse, guttural — what you would attribute to one of those nineteenth century prostitutes whom you see in photographs from the old West (they are never called prostitutes, of course, but it is fairly obvious that any woman hanging around a nineteenth century saloon full of drunk, violent, horny, and unmarried men — in a town where the bank gets robbed once a week, even if no one puts money in it anymore (the clerk just hands over whatever is in his pocket, which is usually enough for a drink or two, and then goes to the saloon where the robber addresses him by first name and buys him a drink or two);—in a town that has one police station, and that one police station has one jail cell, even if the entire town is comprised entirely of criminals;—in a town in which people get shot for not minding their own business quietly enough — is very likely a prostitute). She entered just before the game, and has been less than clandestinely eying Tomas' hat ever since. It is only after the third inning that she inquires about the orange Old English “D” on his head.

“My mom grew up in Hamtramck,” he responds with a delinquent grin. “I was born in Phoenix.”

“What about you?” she asks either Aberdeen or me.

“I was born and raised in Baltimore,” I respond.

“San Francisco,” Aberdeen says.

“No offense, but you guys don't look like the types that normally hang out together. We got the mechanic,” to Tomas, “the professor,” to Aberdeen, “and the…well, I don't know what the hell you are. What are you, dude?”

“I'm a who.”

“And I'm Thing One!”

Caesura.

“We're looking for someone,” Tomas says. “We're, like, detectives, man.”

“Sure.” Caesura. “So who is it you three are looking for?”

“Coprolalia.”

“What kind of a fucking name is that?”

“It's a nom de plume.”

“It's a what? Is that some type of fruit they sell at the Garden?”

“It's a pseudonym.”

“Pseudonym, huh? Is he ducking you three or something? He owe you dudes money?”

“No, we just want to meet him.”

“What for?”

“What do you mean what for?”

“Well, you don't just go around looking for someone without a reason, now do you, Whoseville?”

“Whoseville?”

“We want an interview.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean why do you want to meet this guy? You still haven't answered my question, dude.”

“Look, we want to meet this fucking guy because no one has ever been able to track him down, dig?”

“Is this dude trying to be Lenny fucking Bruce?”

“This is fucking ridiculous.”

“Calm down, Whoseville. I'm just having fun with you guys.”

“…”

“So who is this guy? If he's from Greenpoint, I'll know him. I know everyone up here.”

“You don't know us.”

“I know everybody who's a somebody.”

Tomas broods in silent indignation.

“Coprolalia’s definitely a somebody. Are you sure you don’t know him?” I ask.

“What's the name again?”

“Coprolalia,” in frustrated unison.

“You know what,” she begins as she scrutinizes the ceiling fan, “That name sounds familiar.” She pauses. I take in her image in for the first time. She looks to be Ashkenazi, as she shares all of the attributes that one associates with that group, even the more superficial features such as thick-framed glasses, leftist shirt, and olive leggings that are neither shorts nor pants. She's probably in her early forties, but I'm admittedly terrible at telling the ages of people, especially women.

“Do you know him?” I ask as she stands in silence.

“I think that's my friend's myspace name,” she says gingerly. “I know it begins with copra- or copro- or something like that, but I'm not really sure. You stay put, Whoseville,” she begins as she reaches for the door. “Let me give her a call.”

“Well,” Aberdeen declares, “This may be a lot easier than we imagined it would be, right Whoseville?”

“That bitch is a fucking whack job.”

“She said 'her', didn't she?”

“What?”

“She said she was going outside to call a woman.”

“So?”

“So?” with an erratic gesture. “Coprolalia's a fucking guy.”

“That's just a fucking assumption, man,” Tomas says derisively. “No one knows anything about Coprolalia.”

“Still, what kind of woman goes into the men's bathroom?”

“One with a prosthetic cock,” Aberdeen counters.

The conversation stops. Not for long, though. Tomas and Aberdeen are soon trading memories, talking television, and trying to reach a compromise for dinner above the studio version of “Ring of Fire.” This leads to an argument in which Tomas takes the position of the pinto bean enthusiast; Aberdeen, on the other hand, attests to the black bean's superiority. They obviously don't take this woman seriously. Neither do I, of course, but it's difficult not to think that there is some possibility, however slight, that everything Sean has said is completely false. I am quiet for a long time. Tomas and Aberdeen, meanwhile, continue to bicker in an attempt to achieve victory in a debate a few degrees cooler, though no less futile, than one of those arguments about the existence or non-existence of God.

“What's up, man?” Tomas finally asks. Aberdeen nods sympathetically.

“Do you think there's any possib—”

“No,” Aberdeen interrupts.

“I'm just entertaining the possibility.”

“You do that.”

“Hey man,” Tomas begins as he swipes my arm, “It might actually be worse if she is Coprolalia.” Aberdeen and I look to him. “Dig this, man: if this chick turns out to be Coprolalia, no one's going to fucking believe it. You'll find the truth, and on one will accept it.” He laughs to himself. “I don't think she's Coprolalia, and,” he turns to me, “for your sake, I hope she isn't.”

“A woman couldn't have been sneaking in and out of men's bathrooms for fifteen years without being noticed,” I respond. “It's impossible, right?”

Aberdeen reaches for his drink. “All I can figure with any certainty is that Coprolalia looks like a guy,” as the cup comes to his lips. Tomas catches my eye.

The woman returns. “She's on her way.” She drags a chair over, sits in the backwards fashion made popular by A.C. Slater, furtively scans her surroundings, and then leans in close: “I don't want a cut — just so you know. I'm not her pimp or nothing.”

A cliché: Silence can speak volumes.

“What?” she asks before looking up to the television. “All fucking right,” she says as she raises her fist in the direction of the television. She returns her attention to us. “You want to see the show, right?”

“Donkey show,” Tomas whispers with a nudge at my side.

“What show?” Aberdeen asks with eyebrows plagued by bewilderment. “We want to meet an artist.”

“Yeah,” the woman responds slowly, making certain that the word is drawn out long enough to deny any ambiguity in the phonetics. “I mean, I don't consider her an artist or nothing, but some people,” she says absently, an ellipsis lingering in the air like an unclaimed fart. “Look dude, either way she likes to discuss her rates before she begins. It's not an issue of trust; it's just business.”

“What does your friend do exactly?”

2.2

Coprolalia: A condition in which a subject involuntarily utters profanity. The word is derived from a conjunction of the Greek words copros and lalia, meaning, respectively, feces and babble.

Coprophilia: A condition in which a subject is sexually aroused by the smell, sight, or taste of feces.

3

I met Ilkay Abaz at the beginning of my second year of college. We lived on the same floor of a dorm on 26th Street between First Avenue and Second Avenue. It is a rather isolated place for the City, known best for its close proximity to Bellevue Hospital and the fact that the maps you find in yellow cabs claim it to be a sickly taupe and anonymous, perhaps even autonomous, region.

The building in which we lived had at one time been government housing. I cannot say when the university purchased it, nor can I imagine the length of the list that itemized all of the improvements that ought to have been made prior to turning it into a dormitory. There were times that it felt as though just about all of these codes and standards were regarded as suggestions more than requirements.

To be blunt, it was a monolithic structure out of a Khrushchev-era nightmare, brilliant only in its austerity. The linoleum floors were of the same pattern of gray static that one finds in public schools, prisons, substandard hospitals, and on snowy televisions. We became acquainted with the time that our neighbors (and their neighbors, too) woke for the day, as well as their more personal idiosyncrasies, whether linguistic, social or sexual. The halls smelled like ghetto subway stations, as some of the less considerate — or more inebriated — on the floor took to using the garbage shoot to dispose of the type of waste that often gets flushed. But these were the minor nuisances we became accustomed to, chuckled about, and eventually learned to ignore. The more aggravating aspects of the housing situation had less to do with the problems we faced, and more to do with the lack of concern for those of us dwelling within the former honeycomb of poverty. Still, this did not lead us to sulk. We were young, in New York City, and the most pressing responsibility imposed upon us was the maintenance a good G.P.A. (or, for those of us with s scholarship, an excellent G.P.A.).

As most will remember, or perhaps come to find, it is a peculiar time in life. Lost in the dialectics of quixotry and cynicism, everything seems both possible and elusive. We maintained the belief that we were being prepared to reshape the world upon our departure from the university — even if we were clueless as to the means we would eventually employ to accomplish this impossible task — and felt it was not only nihilistic, but fatalistic, to believe our parents when they said that they too once knew the distinction between 'ought' and 'should'. We were a new generation ready to rectify the mistakes of the past fifty years with new and dangerous ideas, the majority of which have been around since that James guy wrote that one letter that appears somewhere between the Gospel of John and Revelation (you know, the irrelevant part that Damasus and Jerome stuck in there as filler).

I met Ilkay at our first floor meeting. It was held the night before the beginning of the fall semester. I can remember the faces sitting around the elevator bank, some better than others. There was a common sentiment among my fellow hall-mates that was discernible more in body language than in discourse, a kind of stubborn irritability conjured up by the uselessness of the meeting, the R.A., the need for any form of authority — that imperious presence that exists wherever trust does not. Some of the students were more indignant about the situation than others, but even the least incorrigible or radical respected the role that she, the R.A., was supposed to play as only slightly less cumbersome than a canker sore. Perhaps only one student was more or less indifferent to the whole process: the math prodigy to whom the material world was irrelevant. Her name was a miasma of silent consonants and accents and things that most English speakers call squiggles, even if there are English words for them. She eventually took on the agnomen “The Silent.”

The floor meeting, which was a double-entendre of sorts, was short and to the point. The R.A., whose name I have forgotten, was to be a ghost so long as we avoided excessive noise and public drunkenness. The floor had only recently been designated as non-smoking, she said. Extra towels were recommended. The phrase “try to keep it by the window” was uttered more than once. The more rebellious were told of a handy contraption that consists of a drier sheet and a paper towel or toilet paper roll. It is called by a variety of names, depending on your region (sploof is popular in Albany, bafunga is popular in Northern Long Island, groove tube is popular on Phish tour). There were stories of her second year, flavored with her thick Boston accent and gratuitous profanity. She smiled constantly, spoke quickly, and proposed no ultimatums.

Her sincerity and respect took just about everyone by surprise. She was to be one of us so long as we didn't give her or get her into shit. She stood above us only when she announced that she was going to her room. It was a wonderful little antimony: By relinquishing the majority of her power, we all instantly revered her. One could almost equate her with Cincinnatus.

Unlike the R.A., or most aspects of my self-restraint for that matter, Ilkay was to be a prominent figure in my life that year. We had seen each other throughout the second semester of our first year, as we had taken an ancient philosophy course together. As it was an introductory course, the setting was far from intimate. Our interactions came via momentary glances and faint looks of recognition on the street or in one of the dining halls. I may have recognized the sound of his voice. What I did remember, however, was that he sat next to the same girl during virtually every class, a girl whom one could not help but notice, a girl whom the professor initially thought was Salman Rushdie’s wife, whatever her name happens to be. She wasn’t, isn’t, probably won’t be. Nor was she related to the very beautiful wife of the very talented author, who, for the sake of referencing two favorite books, I’ll call Neela Swift.

Suffice to say, I had ulterior motives when I initially befriended him. In time, however, I learned that the two of us had far more in common than most of the acquaintances I had made at school. Of course, one of the major obstacles I had to initially overcome was convincing him that I wasn't attempting to seduce him. I had never had a gay friend (revise that; I had never befriended a guy secure enough with himself to tell people that he is gay). He had never had a straight guy go out of his way to call him a friend since his less-than-shocking departure from the closet.

I learned that the girl who resembled Neela had a name all her own, one that wasn’t provided by the oglers who came up with very inventive sobriquets by which to call her when she was beyond earshot, the most common of which was Coco-butters (a friend was fond of calling any pair of tits larger than a C cup “butters” or “butteries,” and, in this case, the coco- prefix came about for obvious reasons). This name was Vinati. And as beautiful as she was, she proved to be a short-lived infatuation. It's not that she was frigid or snobbish; in fact, she was far more outgoing than I had initially assumed. It was just that I realized very quickly that she could do better than me; furthermore, I was busy doing somebody else by the time we were formally introduced. I guess this means things failed to materialize for reasons beyond presumed futility.

Vinati and I continued to see one another probably once or twice a month. When B.A.C.s ran high we would talk, flirt, and lament over the general disinterest we shared for the other in more sober settings. A repartee was cultivated, but a genuine friendship was never established.

I came to love her presence for more than the obvious reason. Like mass and power, beauty tends to lump together. This simple fact proved to be beneficial whenever we managed to get a spot in her entourage for the night. She got us invited to parties with free booze, free food, and fashionable people by whom we were silently ostracized. If we went out to a bar, Wall Street types would sometimes buy the entire table several rounds to prove not only their wealth or amour propre, but also their strict obedience to propriety. She and her friends exploited them all ruthlessly, not that these men seemed to notice or particularly care. One could think it somewhat unethical or shameful, but the men continued to put the drinks on their tab even after they realized that they were banging their heads against a proverbial brick wall. Some of them ended up being fairly nice. All of them ended up being revelatory drunks, and most of the revelations concerned the fact that everything they do is an act, and that they don't even know who they are anymore. If we listened either in earnest or with the pretense of sincerity, they would exchange numbers not only with Vinati and her friends, but with all of the guys at the table, too.

We never called them. They never called any of us so far as I know. Vinati and I had a similar relationship. We didn't call one another or even embrace during hellos. Goodbyes were sometimes less reserved. I accepted that we sat at opposite ends of the spectrum that was comprised of the various social groups with whom Ilkay associated. Her friends were predominately female, rich, of noble families from the Indian sub-continent, beautiful, dull, and arrogant. Their bodies had few curves and fewer blemishes except for yellowed teeth and, sometimes, bad breath, which was usually covered up by an Altoid or a Parliament. Many came from the West Coast, and they talked like it, too (pronouncing “yeah” as the Scandinavian yä, and littering their narratives with words like “like” and “rad” and “hella-” and “totally” (sometimes even using all of them in a single sentence — i.e. “Yä, it was, like, totally hella-rad”)). My friends, on the other hand, were mostly contentious drunkards on the weekend, academics more or less confined to the catacombs of the library on the weekdays. We were disdained by the serious students and those who thought themselves too intellectually endowed to socialize unless at a poetry reading or a screening of a Lynch film or one of those art shows where everyone walks around with a glass of red wine and a smug grin because they know only they “really get it” (whatever this elusive “it” happens to be); we were considered too brainy for those who were at the university to piss away a fraction of their parents' fortunes on gambling, covers, liquor, and, after only six short years, an overpriced general studies degree. In other words, we were alienated from the majority of the student body because we sat in the middle of a polarized continuum. One could run a parallel to tragic irony, but the situation was not tragic, and ironic only if one misunderstands the word ‘ironic’, which happens more often than people would like to admit.

Ilkay never did understand the relationship I had with Vinati. It was his belief that the two of us had a silent infatuation for the other. He habitually floated sly remarks in our direction without being entirely clandestine or even contextually relevant, especially when drunk. These sharp (what he would call) quips would send him into small sessions of hysterics that appeared somewhat feigned, though, knowing Ilkay, this was far from the case. And while these comments rarely aroused pink or, in her case, mahogany cheeks, they did prove insidious enough to unite the two of us in momentary hatred. Maybe he sought to unite the two of us via shared scorn, though I certainly have my doubts about this — not because he had a penchant for trying to embarrass his friends, or because he happened to be that one friend who thinks the best way to appear on a pedestal is to bury everyone else; he just seemed to enjoy creating awkward tension between to the two of us.

In his less obnoxious moments he came off as contemplative, but never anxious or cerebral. It was difficult to tell if his thoughts were profound or merely esoteric. According to him, he was always thinking of “nothing really,” which we all recognized as bullshit, though it was also collectively understood that expecting a sincere response from him was but a chasing of the wind.

In his more indulgent moments he liked to talk about his early childhood in Istanbul, Zürich, and Paris. He and his family had moved to Boston when he was nine, which was something he lamented, even if it was rather obvious to all of us that he was more American than European. We said nothing, though. It wasn't out of cowardice or even pity; it was a collective recognition that it is far better to ignore what you cannot change. People will always find an anchor or a control in the past to which they can relate the present, and there's no point in trying to expose the fact that this is a useless practice, attractive only to those who overtly refer to themselves as either optimists or pessimists (the former always seeing progress from that past to present; the latter always seeing decay). For Ilkay (a pessimist), his vetus imago was Paris. Rather predictably, his favorite author was Marcel Proust, of whom he said it was sacrilegious to read in English. He said similar things about Orhan Pamuk, though this author’s primary language is Turkish. Then again, Ilkay enjoyed a lot of Latin American writers without even a moderate proficiency in Spanish.

Europe proved to be about the only subject he would discuss in earnest. You couldn't believe much of what he said otherwise. It wasn't that he had a malicious intent in his prevarications; he just seemed to enjoy either confusing or fucking with people. He was certainly difficult to read. It took me the better part of the first semester just to realize this much.

Of the events that took place that year, my reminiscences are at once both many and slightly hazy. I shared a room in a four-person suit with my roommate from the previous year and closest friend throughout college, Dennis Grabowski. Our two other roommates were nice enough, but they had their own agendas and lives with which we did our best not to interfere. Relations were always cordial, but we never spent much time with either of them. One had a girlfriend with an apartment either in Park Slope or Prospect Heights; the other was of that school of anarchism where members are required to stay in a dark room, smoke grass, listen to punk bands from the early eighties, and discuss The Revolution with friends for fourteen hours a day. Marcus and Alex, respectively.

I don't remember if Alex and his cohort made our suite their base of operations before or after Dennis and I took to spending most of our free time down the hall. Not to say we were spiteful about the room dynamic. After all, Ilkay's suite was a welcoming environment. He had been friends with two out of his three roommates for the better part of a decade, so there seldom arose an issue about rights to the main room. The one roommate whom they had not known prior to the year, Min, was never around anyway. He was involved in the Asian fraternity, which essentially meant he was not to associate with anyone with ancestors from another continent. Ilkay fell in with us, as his parents had been born on the wrong side of the Bosporus. And then there was the whole homophobia thing for which Koreans are so infamous.

Besides me and Dennis, as well as Ilkay's suite-mates, there were also four girls from the hall who regularly came by his suite. Other people stopped in intermittently, too, but the suite was typically home to the nine of us, plus respective boyfriends and girlfriends. People from the other dorms rarely came to see us. We rarely went to see them. It was not for want of compromise; compromise entailed places like the Village or Williamsburg or Smith Street. Unfortunately, such locations came to be visited with less frequency as the first semester approached its end. While we certainly wanted to leave, the problem was one of simple economics. On top of the fact that any venture that extended beyond the confines of Gramercy would inevitably demand at least one cab, it was also the case that Ilkay's parents owned a few liquor stores in the Boston area, and, as one can imagine, there was never a want of free, top-shelf booze available to us. As a consequence more of the latter than the former, many nights were spent doing little more than watching the television with open mouths and closed eyes.

One can presume that there was a lot of fucking going on between the four straight men and the four straight women — well, three, I guess, as one of them was, probably still is, somewhat bisexual (though there were accusations that she would prove to be a L.U.G. (Lesbian Until Graduation), though not strictly, as she made no secret of the few men who meandered into, and quickly out of, her sex-life). Sexual mischief aside, no two people ever managed to seriously pair off. Perhaps as a sign of some kind of shared, sophomoric wisdom, it was understood that, while the fruit was pleasing to the eye and desirable for the pleasure it could provide, this knowledge was best left to those to whom the hall was not home.

It was more a love for the company of others as opposed to an era of perpetual debauchery. While we did spend the majority of this time heavily inebriated, our nights rarely materialized into those seriously interesting anecdotes that get retold over and over again until the very lexicon of the group comes to be a string of inside jokes and obscure references. It was simply a year of my life that I come back to every now and again when I need to be reminded of the fact that I have been unbelievably lucky to know so many wonderful people. And while there certainly are numerous stories that could be told, there is no need to make the reader feel like the awkward date at a high school reunion, one who is forced to listen to tales that eventually ferment into an array of nostalgic half-truths.

Still, it is important to note that it was with these memories in mind that I set out for Ilkay's going-away party. He wasn't really going away — at least not permanently; he was simply going on vacation to Europe, and he thought it imperative he have one last night in New York beforehand, as he seemed to understand that he would come back to what would be, for all intents and purposes, a new city filled with friends in the midst of drifting apart due to work or relationships, people who would end up dispersed throughout Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn, thereby making it impossible to ever get “the gang” back under a single roof until a special occasion — a birthday, a wedding, a funeral — demanded it. Graduation, in so many ways, is a form of entropy.

“It's a fucking Twenty-Sixth Street reunion, man,” Ilkay effervesces as I walk into the…well, it's one of those lounge/bar/club places. Stalactites peer down ominously from the ceiling, adding a pleonastic touch to the already cavernous nature of the basement establishment. The walls glow in luminous aquamarine and a shade of magenta more purple than pink, the color one might expect when ordering an exotic piece of sushi. Shadows wave and flutter in the hues of late dusk, but the dance floor is quiet. Most of the tables are open, as it's just turned nine. The ones that are occupied contain vaguely familiar faces that welcome implicitly — no smiles, just glances of recognition and other sign-language equivalents that capture both the salutatory and informal qualities of the “S'up bro'.”

“I feel like I haven't seen you in months,” Ilkay says dramatically.

“It hasn't been that long,” I respond as I let go of his hand. “We were at that thing for Pete less than a month ago.”

“Was that really only a month ago?” He shakes his head. “I was strung out on fucking Addies for, like, two weeks before graduation. I'm amazed I made it.” He shrugs. “But that's all behind us now, right? Am I right?” I laugh and nod. His attention shifts. “Look what the cat dragged in,” he says either to or of Vinati. She's in an olive drab dress, the type of get-up a nurse from the Second World War may have sported (with a few flattering alterations). Her hair is shorter than I remember; it is styled to frame her face. I can't recall how she wore it the last time I saw her. “So are you going to finally throw him a bone tonight…” he begins. “Well, actually he would be the one throwing you the bone….” He pauses again. Vinati's eyes narrow. “And I guess throwing isn't the proper verb, now is it? More like pene—”

“Why do you have to be such a fucking pervert all the time?” Vinati explodes. She's not really angry; this is simply a matter of protocol. The tirade begins; it's the extended version, too — complete with movements of utter chastisement, refrains of “douche” and “fuck” and “asshole.” He laughs to himself as this goes on, doesn't argue, and casually drinks his cocktail through a red stirrer. I leave for the bar as she continues with vicious gesture accompaniment. She is a maestro of flagellation.

The bartender looks like an art student, probably because of the thick glasses that conceal the depth of her eyes. She doesn't try to veil her revulsion for those who solicit alcohol from her. She is probably of that intellectual sect where the world is considered beautiful only when abstracted, a kind of contempt for the existent that only a Christian could really appreciate. These are the Bukowski fans who don't drink, the people who examine the Sex Pistols as a cultural phenomenon, the people who know how to spell and pronounce the world “visceral,” but have no idea what it means.

“Let me guess,” as she reads my eyes, “Heineken?”

“I was hoping for something a bit more exotic.”

“How about a sex on the divan? Or is that too fruity for your taste?”

“Well, if it comes with an umbrella and a cherry or two….”

“Sorry, we're fresh out of umbrellas,” she says with a shake of the head that lacks the flirtatious bitchiness that one finds so frequently in Manhattan. This is just unadulterated contempt, no need for fancy words or nuance. “I can cook you up something.”

“Working on a secret recipe?”

“Called a butt-fucking cowboy.”

“Aren't they all,” I muse. She flashes a look of irritation. “What's in it?”

“Rye whiskey, Chambord, triple sec, and soda. It's served on the rocks.” My eyes cross. “Oh, and there's an orange slice as a garnish, too,” she adds with a shrug and a quick opening of her hand, that same motion that magicians employ when launching balls of flame into the air, or, when the flint's out, lighter fluid.

“Are these the first few things that come to mind, or are you serious?”

“Serious enough.”

“Let's do it, then.”

The drink is less disgusting than one might assume — that, or I'm too stubborn to admit that I've purchased ten dollars of weak emetic. I turn to see Vinati conducting an absentee orchestra through the final movement of Dvorák's “New World Symphony” or some particularly violent Wagner piece, her arms and hair but a series of blurs. It's irrelevant that Ilkay's no longer there. He's now next to me.

We talk for a few moments about his impending trip to Europe, as well as the unique brand of despair that accompanies graduation. We then move to a table and begin to run through anecdotes that have been repeated so many times that they have almost become platitudes. He returns to playing host upon seeing someone else arrive, which leaves me in the presence of several people I don't really know. Vinati and a few of her friends are at another table practicing thrift by enjoying the milk of a desperate cow that clearly isn't going to be purchased tonight.

I would have come with other friends of mine, but the sad truth of the matter is that most of the people with whom I have associated over the past four years have left town, either for Europe or some distant part of this country. Dennis is busy packing. His plane leaves for London tomorrow at dawn. I would have taken him with me last night, but that time had been reserved for his girlfriend, who has so many pejorative cognomens that just about everyone has started calling her by her first name again: Kristina (not Kris, not Tina, and sure as shit not Krissy). The members of the 26th Street contingency to whom Ilkay referred are nowhere to be seen. Not that this is too big of a concern. As a wise Russian monk once said (and I am paraphrasing here), If we stop feeling at the very least curiosity for the mysterious others surrounding us, we become indifferent to life and even grow to hate it. Nietzsche would disagree, but, then again, Nietzsche seems to be less a person, and more a corpus of aphorisms that people take or decline like hors d'oeuvres at a soirée—kind of like the Bible, ironically enough.

“You were in Post-colonial poetry class,” a girl with very discernible highlights says. This comes after a moment of awkwardness that should have been filled with introductions. Still, she's pleasant; there is a hue of sincerity in her tone that portends either gullibility or the acceptance of that suburban propriety with all of its underhanded comments and supercilious punctilios. I lean to the latter, as she seems to already have the mannerisms of a forty-year-old housewife from Central Jersey. There are more observations that could be documented, but I'll spare the reader as to not sound too cynical about the practices of tanning, shopping, and totally thinking oneself to be a Carrie.

“Yeah,” I respond slowly. “Angelica, right?”

“Yeah.” She offers no follow up until… “This is Teddy.”

“So what do you do?”

“Live.”

He laughs boisterously. “No, man, like what do you do?”

“I just graduated. I haven't even had time to seriously look for a job yet. My parents just left on Wednesday.”

“I know how that goes. I just graduated from Northeastern last year,” he says while thumbing his Bosox hat.

“You're from Boston?”

“Yeah. But the money's a lot better down here. I'm in finance,” he says without pausing, blinking, swallowing: as if trapped in a tableau lacking in any ostensible significance.

“That's good,” curiously, slowly. “Do you miss Boston?”

“Of course, man,” he responds, suddenly animate again.

I realize he doesn't have the accent that one typically associates with New England, let alone Boston. He is a veritable paragon of upper-middle-class-East-Coast-suburban-whiteness, that archetype that has come to be regarded as normal in this country, as a sizable portion of television writers share his background. He's outgoing, a little arrogant, bright yet clueless, and essentially harmless. He shaved two times today. He wears a checkered button-down tucked into slacks (yes, slacks); his sleeves have been rolled to the elbows. He sports loafers, has nearly perfect teeth, and probably votes Democrat for reasons that will soon seem irrelevant once he forgets that there's a distinction between the working class and the poor. “When you're in Boston, you feel like you're in a neighborhood. Here, you just get lost in the crowd. Especially where we live.”

“Well, we're glad that you're here in the City,” Angelica swoons. Most of the denizens of the table taste bile. “You should have seen his apartment up there, though,” she says to no one in particular. Her eyes meet mine. “It was absolutely gorgeous.”

“Where did you live?”

“Back Bay,” he responds in a tone that is overly nonchalant. “Do you know the area?”

“A little. Most of my experiences in the area revolve around Davis Square.”

“Why were you up there?”

“I lived there for about a month with my girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend.” The white Victorian had been converted into three units. I arrived and told you that I felt as though I was in Virginia. There was a patrician elegance to the house that you wanted to deride, but you couldn't. So you went the other way; it was your dream house, the only place in which you could see yourself growing old. You wanted to be surrounded by books, by institutions of culture and learning. —Cambridge has always been home to the most important intellectuals in the country. New York has its fair share, and, you're right, there's probably more artists there than here, but just look at what we're surrounded by. And don't go quoting Bulgakov on me. What I'm trying to say is that I'll actually be able to get some work done without being subjected to the insanity of that cesspool you call home. You weren't being argumentative; you were just trying to eliminate the guilt that had hidden itself in one of the boxes in the back of the U-Haul in which you drove up to whatever city Tufts is located in…Is it Medford or Cambridge? We sat on the porch that first night, listening to a newer Mountain Goats album on that little boom-box that you kept saying you were going to “pitch” and drinking bottles of Ipswich that we'd purchased at a convenient store on Mass Ave. and talking about the previous year with gratuitous usage of the phrases “remember the time…” and “I'll never forget when…”, about little things with big implications, about fights that were speciously resolved, about how both Ortega y Gasset and Sartre sneered at the existentialist movement, but are now considered two of the philosophy's most preeminent figures even if it wasn't a philosophy so much as a recognition of the scary side of freedom, a fact which explains why no American has ever been accepted into the movement's pantheon (as Americans, we are always taught that freedom is good in it-self, that [the Hegelian concept of] negative freedom is the only freedom, that the elimination of some freedoms in order to promote greater freedoms is an idea subscribed to by Marx, and not Locke). —Something Ortega said really got to me recently; it was how he addressed the issue of the other. True, it's a common topic for just about anyone writing in the twentieth century, but he sounded a lot like Fromm when he described the break from Eden as the creation of this other. We break from Eden, from nature, and then live in two worlds — the internal and the external. He said we are constantly looking to return, and that the return to a unified world implies the abolition of the other — the distinction between our internal and external lives. But that's terrible, if you think about it. And yet it's kind of the road we're heading on, what with all the advances in digital technology and the Internet and the Bush administration. How fucked up is that? The air was brisk; I put on that over-sized sweatshirt that your parents had purchased when you visited the university in the spring — I still have it (in my closet, my dresser, somewhere) because you are still too bashful (or polite, I still haven't decided) to ask for it back. We even brought out a blanket from your bedroom and cuddled on the bench that sat on the porch right outside your living room window. The streets were dark and populated by occasional headlights and stray drunks. You said it reminded you of Michigan, the lacustrine graveyard to which you believe you will never return. I said it reminded me of the fall.

“You know, it's funny. I was just talking to Angie about this. I loved growing up in Boston, but I just can't imagine going there on vacation. It would be terrible.” He shrugs. “So many people say that New York's the opposite, but, to me, I think both cities are great.”

We begin to explain our connections to Ilkay. Teddy was a friend of his brother. Angelica had not known him during her years at N.Y.U. (“I mean our school was so big; it's no wonder we never met”). Most of the others at the table are also connected to the school. I've met six of the seven of them before, but I think the exchange of words between us may have been in, perhaps, the double digits. The other, who sits next to me, I've never seen before. He introduces himself.

“Name's Che,” he says as he slowly pushes his hair behind his ears.

“Like Guevara?”

He nods uneasily. “I try not to associate myself with the most commercialized icon of communism. My parents fled Cuba for a reason, after all.”

“Were you born there?”

“Yes, but I don't remember it as well as I remember my time here. This country is my home.” An obvious question follows. “I was ten. We lived in Miami for a long time before moving to Tampa.”

“Did you come up here for school?”

“Yes and no. I am a student at S.V.A., but I also came up because my uncle offered me a job.”

“I see.”

“Hey Che,” a new arrival calls out, “Viva la revolution.” The man holds up a fist until Che acknowledges his presence with an exaggerated smile and a wave.

“Yes, it gets old very quickly,” he responds to a girl whose question can be inferred. “So many Americans are obsessed with this idea of revolution, as if there is no bloodshed involved. One day it is tyranny, the next liberation. War does not work that way,” he says peremptorily. “And no revolution has ever occurred without a war.” He rolls his eyes when a man from the group responds. “How can an American youth such as yourself be in favor of violent revolution?” with vehemence. “Have you ever held a firearm?” The defendant shakes his head. “Then how do you anticipate fighting a war with the most powerful military on the face of the planet? Can you imagine what an M-1 tank rolling down Bedford Avenue would do to a hipster militia with little or no weapons training? Are they going to take pop shots at heavily armored vehicles with fucking slingshots?” He scoffs to the six of them. “Another American revolution will never happen because modern capitalism is elastic; it is not rigid. Our political system is founded upon compromise — class war is now conducted on the floor of the Senate. This is a lack of foresight on the part of Marx and all of those ancient theorists.”

He goes on. I want to argue with several of his points, but, as Hitler and Goebbels believed (and exploited), rational thinking will always be silenced by vehemence. I turn back to Angelica and Teddy. “So, Boston, huh?”

I had managed to catch a quick nap after meeting with Tomas and Aberdeen, so only a remnant of the alcohol from earlier in the day continues to float in my head. I maintain a conservative pace on the libations; others rush through the stages of inebriation with asperity, if not abandon. Conversations, meanwhile, sail through the turbulent waves of argumentation, frustration, soliloquy. One grad student among us complains that contemporary capitalist society is founded upon two elements: faith and eternal adolescence (“How Houellebecquian!” another grad student exclaims). Teddy and I exchange pleasantries for a while until Angelica begins to feel neglected. They get into an argument, quietly at first, and then take the matter outside.

The other seven by this time have calmed down some. Coprolalia comes up as a topic, but the discussion switches to favorite Beatles album once it is discovered that the only things on the walls in the place's bathrooms are those ubiquitous deodorant advertisements.

A round of shots accompanies the resurgent Teddy and Angelica. They have swollen lips and rubicund cheeks. Not to be outdone by their display of generosity, one of the unnamed residents, who refers to me as “Alex's roommate,” orders a second. And as alcohol makes superconductors of us all in terms of social friction, dialogs without the more Laputan elements of academia begin to sprout up like prairie flowers after a flash flood. The subjects range from favorite position to fondest memory from college, and just about everyone is genuinely entertained by the stories being told around the table with the exception of Che, who evidently hasn't discovered a means to remove the chip from his shoulder or the stick from his ass. By midnight, he has reverted to a surly pout, which grows in severity each time he is ordered to lighten up.

I end up talking with Brandy, the bartender, for a few minutes when I return to the bar for the third butt-fucking cowboy of the night. I've come to realize that my initial impression of her needs some revision. She is not contemptuous, nor is she particularly contentious; rather, she seems contemplative and somewhat despondent. As she talks, she gently fingers the locket at the end of a silver necklace. She expresses a distant lament about a seafaring transient when I ask her about the cherished piece of jewelry. “I knew what I was getting into when the whole thing started,” she says. “Look, I'm sorry I've been so bitchy tonight,” she adds after a moment of silence. “I have the tendency to take my problems out on other people sometimes. On a normal night, I'm actually a pleasant person to be around,” with a forced smile. “Seriously,” she adds. “It's just that I always get this way whenever he leaves.”

She removes her glasses to rub her eyes. I realize that they are of a variety that is more prevalent in cartoons and poetry and song than reality. “Look, I'm the one who's supposed to be listening to sob stories,” she says with a contrived laugh. “I'm not the one who tells them.” The ox-eyed goddess of libations becomes sighted again. “Let me buy your table a round.”

Che has departed by the time I return. His friends complain about his petulance. An exchange-student shakes his head and recites the following: “He is an idealist without ideals; a vagrant upon the political landscape. He decries humanity both for its greed and its laziness, so he is never surprised by the misery created by the free-market or the corruption and inefficiency of the state.” He sighs. “Such a bathetic contempt for humanity — how European.”

“I don't even understand why he comes out anymore,” someone adds as I take my seat. “He's so fucking negative, so self-righteous.”

“Everything has to be so fucking dramatic.”

“It's so fucking annoying.”

“Where do you think he went?”

“He probably went home.”

“It's not even midnight.”

“He probably went to that chick's place. He's been boinking her pretty regularly.”

“Really? Boinking? Are you fucking Al Bundy?”

“Actually, it's twelve-thirty.”

“Okay — with whom he has been having regular coitus.”

“You're such a tool.”

“Really? Where have I been?”

“He's got a girlfriend?”

“Lady-friend.”

“Fuck-friend.”

“It's fuck-buddy, numb-nuts.”

“Is there really a difference?”

“Fuck-buddy?”

“You don't introduce your lady-friend to your friends.”

“So you're saying he has a mistress?”

“If you really want to call her that.”

“Fuck-buddy.”

“Heard you the first time, Dave.”

“He's not a bad looking guy.”

“Yeah, but he's such a whiny little bitch.”

“Well, if she's not dating him, who the fuck cares?”

“That's not the point.”

“What's she like?”

“What is the point?”

“Who?”

“The lady-friend.”

“You're a fucking douche bag, that's the point.”

“Fuck-buddy.”

“Jesus Dave, you're like a child who wanders into a movie….”

“Hey, who ordered the shots?”

“The bartender picked up the round,” I respond.

“Looks like somebody's getting his dick wet tonight.”

“And it's not going to be you, you misogynistic fuck-stain.”

“Yeah, it's Alex's old roommate.”

“Thanks for spelling that one out, Dave.”

“I'm not a misogynist, you bitch.”

“Fine. You're a fucking twat, then.”

The shots are taken. The mood once again becomes gregarious and far less slanderous. Personal stories and quotes from favorite movies and television shows are traded like baseball cards. Dumb and Dumber has a surprisingly large number of fans. Books eventually get their time in the limelight. One of the nameless cites Cormac McCarthy as his favorite author. He claims the judge in Blood Meridian to be metaphorically tied to Cain, but cannot provide an explanation as to what the bear at the end of the book is supposed to symbolize. “Is the bear the wilderness of North America? I mean, there is that one bear that kills one of the guys in the group in, like, the middle of the book. The bear in the last chapter could represent the…the…you know, the….”

“Subjugation?”

“Yeah…and destruction of the wildness, as well as the breakdown in Western morality — like the sanctity of life and all that. I don't know, though; something tells me it goes deeper than that.” He asks if there is a bear anywhere in the Bible. Someone responds that Sodom was filled with them. Laughter. This is followed by an etymological query: Is there such a thing as a Gomorrite? A debate on sexual perversions—“A socially constructed concept,” as is evidently not obvious from the word's appearance almost exclusively in value statements — blossoms from the fecund question. I hear of felching for the first time. Munging is defined. The conversation ends with an awkward silence among intoxicated and slack-jawed extroverts.

Two people decide to make their way to the dance floor soon after, which initiates a domino effect that nearly empties the table within a few minutes. As the organs begin to grind, minutes dissolve into memories, smiles become abundant, sexual tensions oscillate. Ilkay disappears. The music ceases to have a discernible melody. At one thirty, I get a text message from Tomas that reads: “LIC party like orgy stop get yer ass herf [sic.] now stop.” Tables get rearranged, reconstructed. People find themselves in new contexts, experiencing transculturation on a microcosmic scale — at least that's what one of the grad-students muses at one point. Vinati and I eventually find ourselves sitting next to one another.

“Evan Klein and the Babymakers,” I respond to a question about my high school band.

She laughs. “Evan Klein and the Babymakers.”

“I was one of the Babymakers…obviously.”

“And you played the bass? You played the bass in a band called Evan Klein and the Babymakers?”

“Yeah.”

“Any relation to Naomi Klein?”

“I wouldn't know.”

“Do you know her?”

“No.”

“Oh, she's great. Probably the best journalist out there right now.”

“I'll check her out.”

“You should.”

“Is she a friend of yours? Another girl from Queens?”

“No, she's Canadian. And I was just born in Queens. We moved to a brownstone on Berkley Street, about half a block away from Prospect Park, when I was four”

“What do your parents do?”

“Is that your phone?”

I look: Tomas.

“It's not important.”

Caesura

“You were saying.”

“Well, my dad owns a few restaurants — mostly in Brooklyn.” She names three in Park Slope.

“Never heard of them.”

“Not a fan of Indian food?”

“Not a frequenter of Park Slope.”

“You should go there more often. There's a new bar that opens, like, every week.”

“You're still there, I take it?”

“No, I've moved into a place in Williamsburg last September. It's kind of a shithole, but it's cheap.”

“Sounds familiar.”

“You're there, too?”

“Bushwick.”

“Bushwick or East Williamsburg?”

“Bushwick — a few blocks from the Knickerbocker stop on the M.”

“Shut up,” she exclaims. “Why are you living all the way out there? It's dangerous.”

“I didn't really have any options.” She squints. “It's kind of a long story.”

She nods slowly. “I worry about you.”

“I know how to handle myself.”

She's unconvinced, but doesn't push the subject. “So Ilkay took off, huh?”

I roll my eyes. “He was like a shark out there. I didn't even get a goodbye.”

“Neither did I. You'd figure he'd want to spend some time with his friends because he's going to be gone for, like, a month. He's so fucking inconsiderate sometimes.”

She is quiet for a moment. I can feel my voice growing hoarse because of the volume of the music, and the pause in conversation is tacitly welcomed. We look to the human shapes dancing to a standard two-thirty-in-the-morning jam without much in terms of substance propelling them along. There is the reoccurring theme of sex (or, rather, the anticipation of sex with a desired object) in the lyrics, but the rhythm patterns convey the drudgery of orgasmless fucking. It's very Libertarian, very free-love without the love. Faces and voices are difficult to make out, so one can only read a body language that has a lexicon consisting of consent or rejection. It's usually straightforward enough, though there are a few people probably looking for “innocent” fun, the types who wear their wedding rings in their jeans or purses. Pragmatics rears its ugly head even in binary, evidently.

Vinati seems like the dancing type: tiny, cute, and friends with Ilkay, who habitually frequents places that refuse to grant you admission if you're not wearing the right shoes. These are the types of places guarded by men behind velvet ropes, men who give you the once over as though you are a cut of meat, men who tell you whether or not you're cool enough to pay thirteen dollars for a bottle of Amstel Light after waiting at a bar for over half an hour to get it. The real problems with places such as these, of course, are those you encounter once you pass through the gates of Elysium: guys without necks try to pick fights with you, girls without grace try to convince you to buy them drinks, dipshits run into you, thereby sending about three-dollar's worth of beer down the only shirt you own that has a label reading dry clean only. Wealthy E-Harmony couples and blind dates attempt to be delicate as they explain themselves above the music that throbs like a bad case of priapism. The people around them drink in a communion of decadence that will ultimately lead to intoxication, conquest, crabs. The dance floor is an orgy of egos. Things are going on in the bathroom. Bad things. Speed freaks scan the room with fidgety eyes and try not to jump out of their skin. The people who are rolling hard are accepting resumes for fondling positions. The few people too humble to jump into the whirling madness stick out like anchorites in Caligula's court.

Maybe I misjudge her, though. There are certainly those who simply like to dance without all of the hedonism that usually gets attached to the club scene. She's here with me for whatever reason, gazing to all of the people lost in the sea of light and sound with a less than sober grin and an unusually reticent demeanor. “Do you dance?” I finally ask.

She smiles. “I've been dancing all night.”

“Do you want to dance?”

“My feet are killing me,” she responds. “This douche-bag Mexi-goth wouldn't leave me alone, and he kept crushing my feet with these, like, Doc Martin boots. Who wears fucking Doc Martins out to a club?” I shrug. “To be honest, I was hoping for someone to just talk with.” I watch the people on the dance floor rubbing against each other with increasing carnality, sweat beginning to appear on the bodies that suffocate in air redolent with stale breath, booze, sex, and excessive recirculation. “I thought I knew more of Ilkay's friends,” she eventually says. “Speaking of which, where are all of your friends?”

“Out of town. The only two I've really gotten to know tonight are over there.” I point out Angelica and Teddy, a tangled mess of left feet, stiff joints, and whale-belly skin. There's a substantial ring around them. The black guys are trying their best not to laugh. The Puerto Ricans are mesmerized. “They seem nice.”

“The lush and yuppie?”

“Well, if you want to be cynical about it, yes, the lush and the yuppie.”

She laughs. She laughs a lot.

We talk for a while. Her hands keep finding their way to my shoulder or knee. My eyes keep falling down her dress. She eventually takes a sip from an empty bottle, which prompts the following: “Do you want to do a shot?”

“Sure,” I beam. “Howzabout a butt-fucking cowboy?”

“Won't Ilkay be jealous?”

Being that it's three in the morning, the place has cleared out somewhat. We are the passing shower's concluding drops. Table service has been discontinued, so most of the people for whom dancing is not a joy have either left or gone up to the bar. This is not to say that the area surrounding the bar is packed; most of the patrons are still dancing, thereby leaving both of the bartenders with relatively little to do for first time of the night. The faithful are nursing their drinks by this time; even the contingency of terminally drunk habitués still trying to abandon the last semblance of sobriety have slowed their pace.

Brandy presents the shooters with an almost demonic grin before I can even place an order. There are three of them. “L'chayim,” she toasts. I am familiar with the taste of the drink by now, so I only make a grimace as I take down her concoction. Vinati's face turns a shade of sour that portends trouble. Brandy looks to her own drained glass with something like a wince. She turns to me: “Is it better on the rocks?”

“I have to run to the restroom,” Vinati says as she begins for the undulating crowd, a sea that even Moses would have had difficulty parting. Suffice to say, she doesn't make it to the other side.

“Your girlfriend can't hold her shit,” Brandy proclaims proudly.

“Oh, she's not my girlfriend.”

“Well, in that case, the girl you were going to bone tonight can't hold her shit.”

“I'm pretty sure that wasn't in the cards.” A crowd of women encompasses Vinati. They whisk her off.

“Well, looks like the deck's being put away,” she says as her eyes point towards the exit sign that hangs above a parting velvet curtain. “You should go help her out. It'll prove your good intentions.”

“I don't want to look like I'm trying to take advantage of her.”

“What?” she yells above the music.

“I said I don't want to look like a sexual predator.”

“You?” incredulously.

“Yes, me.”

“No offense dude, but I've seen more than enough sexual predators in my time here; I can tell you're a good guy.”

“Thanks.”

“Look, I just want to tell you that opportunity is walking out the door right now. Sure, you're not going to score tonight….” She scratches her chin absentmindedly. “Do people still say that word? 'Score.' It sounds forced.”

“It's a bit archaic, in terms of slang.”

“Whatever. The point is if you don't stick your neck out, you're never going to get anywhere.”

“Yeah, but I'll be sure to keep my head.”

Caesura

“You have a mind of elf,” she says after taking down a large sip of dark beer.

“What?”

“I said, you remind me of myself.”

“How so?”

“You won't allow yourself to be vulnerable.”

“That's a pretty big assumption to make about someone you barely even know.”

She explains what she means, but the music pilfers her vowels and softer consonants. I ask her to repeat herself. “Look, there's no need to get all defensive about it,” she yells. “For some people it's easier to be alone than to be seriously involved with another person. It's certainly a lot easier than being rejected. You know, a dock is a chain.”

“What?”

“Like that Simon and Garfunkle song? The rock one.”

“Yeah. Rock. Island. Got it.”

Her attention then shifts. “What's up?” she asks as two impatient patrons grumble next to me.

“Yo', some bitch just puked on my shit,” a strong Jersey accent responds.

4

The following week was spent becoming better acquainted with the work of Coprolalia, rediscovering loneliness, and learning that an individual's tolerance for alcohol skyrockets over the course of a nine-day bender. Luckily, I have had the entire apartment to myself for almost three weeks now, as my roommate has been staying at his parents' place in Connecticut. He did not specify when he was to return, nor did he bother to sublet his room. Consequently, I never had to worry about waking anyone on my arrival home, though I did disrupt the sleep of one of the bodega cashiers down the block one morning around three or four when I purchased a twenty-two of some brand of malt liquor I'd never heard of. It was an odd color — like fluorescent apricot puree — that provoked a weird sense of disgust and curiosity, a sentiment that should be familiar to anyone who has flared their nostrils after hearing the ripping croak of a fart. There was a sense of novelty in buying it; drinking it, however, was an act of incorrigibility…or alcoholism, depending on your mood.

I typically awoke each morning before ten, though I never managed to leave my bed or wherever else I ended up sleeping before eleven. While awake, I had a hard time concentrating on anything besides sex, which must be typical if you've managed to have gone…let's see…almost four months without it. While sojourning at the edge of consciousness there was a reoccurring sensation of panic brought on by the belief that I had forgotten something: to take a test, to pick up roses for Connie, to pay for dinner, to call my parents, to wear pants for the entirety of the previous day.

During, and particularly at the end of, each semester of college, I had had the reoccurring dream that I was reading. The words were usually lifted from one of the passages I had finished directly before falling asleep. At times the tentacles of the television would provide some influence, but this was rare. So I would be reading. I would be going along, reading whatever was in front of me, and then I would suddenly notice that I couldn't understand what was printed on the page: the words themselves were known (I could read them, ruminate about them, put them into context), but the sentences of which they were part claimed no allegiance to even a rudimentary syntax. It seemed to be the semantics of madness.

I would refuse to accept that the book was poorly written; rather, it was my inability to understand what was being said. I would step back, embrace denial (no, embrace a lie because no one can embrace denial, as denial is the whitewashing of a truth that is too painful to accept, and by admitting that the white is there, well, that's how one overcomes denial — so it was just denial). Perhaps the text was written in code. Perhaps I was too dim to understand it. Maybe the words were simply homonyms that I had never come across. Was I becoming Déjérine's Monsieur C? Mybae it was one of tshoe tkrcis lkie the one wtih the out of oderr ltetres taht smoe ppoele can raed so lnog as the frsit and lsat lttrees are the smae. Carzy, huh?

There was nothing more terrifying than the possibility that I was losing the ability to absorb what was right in front of my eyes, a myopia less complete than the ambiguation of color or shape, though no less debilitating to me, a supposed scholar, a student, a man who would take the time to read and analyze the mission statement on a bag of potato chips if I happened to be eating them while on the can. So I would go over it again and again and again. I would vocalize the words with the vain hope of bringing the meaning back. But to no avail: the longer I spent processing the passage, the more convoluted it became. A roommate would eventually wake me without having to say a word; all that was required were his eyes — drowsy, irritated, maybe even somewhat amused — looking down upon me for no more than a few seconds. I could feel the presence. I would remember that you couldn’t read with your eyes closed; I would recognize my closed eyes; I would form a conclusion by means of syllogism. —You're talking in your sleep again, once my eyes met the glare. —Did I say anything good? —No, back turned, unsteady legs already in somnolent transit back to the bed to enjoy the last few minutes of peace, before the snooze button began demanding no less attention than a teething child.

I was happy not to be dealing with feelings of alienation from the written word. Whereas the previous dreams of aphasia tended to create a cloud of anxiety that shadowed me for at least the duration of the morning shower, the inability to remember fictitious items or events was something that I shook off rather quickly.

I would typically leave to get my morning coffee before noon. Some days I picked up a paper, too. Most of the places in my neighborhood do not carry the Times (nor do they have dental floss, which is a very difficult item to explain or accurately charade to someone with virtually no knowledge of the English language). Consequently, I found myself reaching for papers that are just that (papers), because applying the prefix “news-” to the rags would be more supercilious than accurate. I never read more than an article or two. On the plus side, I did manage to complete every crossword puzzle with which I was confronted.

The heat was beginning to swallow up what little relief the night sought to provide, and by Thursday I found myself sleeping on the couch to avoid the sunlight that invaded my room as early as seven in the morning. It rained only once that week, during the early hours of Sunday afternoon. The concrete coughed thick clouds as I stayed inside contemplating the best way to go about finding Coprolalia while feigning interest in a bad comedy I had seen many times before.

I had a drink with a girl I had known from class on Monday. I hadn't planned it or anything; we just happened to run into each other on the corner of Greenpoint and 43rd. She was staying at her sister's place, which was right around the corner. “Temporarily,” she assured me with a severe tilt of the head, a quick motion that supported a tone too grave to be awarded complete credence. “I just can't go back to Merrick with all of the interviews that I have lined up.” She expressed an edacious desire to continue her education, and seemed to already look upon her potential employers as Penelope, mother of Telemachus, looked upon the faces of her suitors.

It was clear that she had recently had an interview; her outfit was not the type of thing a twenty-two-year-old girl in Queens just happens to wear as she goes out to get milk or cigarettes or whatever commodity is needed down at the corner store. Her skirt was blunt: black and short. It covered thighs that seemed to be too pudgy to be connected to her narrow hips or her slender torso. She had loosened a few buttons on her white blouse to present a tasteful bounty of cleavage, enough so that you knew that she was not frigid, but not enough to be distracting. It was an outfit that engendered that limbo between the career you have and the one you want — what one wears as they wade through the River Heraclitus — as it was professional and modest, sophisticated and banal.

She was clearly anxious about her future. A certain intensity emulated from her, and dominated the conversation as the latter half of A Ghost is Born accompanied our time in the bar. Her eyes were of that formidable sort: embers as tenacious as anthracite. Furious, too. It was a passion that was both intractable and somehow forlorn: a desire without direction, just a steady imperative that traveled like an echo — a resonant wave that was strong enough so that it stopped mattering exactly where it originated or where it would eventually find its terminus. Besides her eyes, fulgurant and petulant in the most positive sense of the word, there was a drive inherent in her words even if they burst forth from a small mouth framed by thin lips more cedar than pink, more an extension of skin instead of a supple feature to be admired for its own sake. The drive was founded upon either consternation or ambition — and not just naked ambition, but an ambition adjunctive to integrity, and not an integrity in conjunction with vanity or even apposite to pride (because vanity and pride are integral only to the foolish and the resentful), but an integrity anchored in a mire of naivety that eventually dissipates once one has spent enough time in that “real world” to which Gen-Xers and Gen-Meers and former hippies adhere and even defend on account of their complete and total moral incontinence.

So that was the ambition side of it: the desire to refuse to relinquish what, to her, was the only thing that no adult should ever surrender — integrity. One could even say that this ambition was there to help her avoid the greed that is so often identified as ambition.

I understood it — the ambition she held: a vague quixotry that for so many performs its swan song in concert with “Pomp and Circumstance.” Yet at the same time I understood why she was plagued by consternation. Like me, she knew what the world would eventually demand of her: that demand that has served as the most potent catalyst for the crisis of identity to which every sophist armed with a suspect Ph.D. or a pulpit has produced a specious solution; and she knew that she could do nothing but stare with grim recognition to the hand from which she would eventually eat, the same hand that she now realizes long ago subsumed the hand from which she had been taking by birthright, that same hand whose handiwork was inalienable from all but the last enclaves of humanity trapped (or cushioned, depending whom you ask) by the intractable face of pure wilderness, those inhabitants living at the horizon of oblivion.

So it wasn't really ambition at all, at least not the ambition that is often venerated by the Babbitts of the world — those rapacious fools whose greed is stifled by nothing less than their own stupidity. Instead, she venerated the ideals to which she had ascribed and those to which still did ascribe to some degree; but she knew that they were beginning to falter, to stumble. Soon they would be gone. So this was her elegy (perhaps a bit of a premature one) for her integrity (but only in the acrostic sense — for she never did say what it was she wanted to say, and maybe that's why I'm filling in the gaps for her). Because I understood it, and I knew that she understood it; and that's why it was never said. Maybe that was why we exchanged numbers after the beer, both because she hoped that her eventual capitulation would not be out of the ordinary and as though to say —If you can find a way to escape it, please send for me. Because there was a shared despondency there, a shared discernment of how things would progress if either one of us made that first bow, that first sacrifice. One sacrifice would beget two, and two would beget three, and so on and so forth. Money would become more important, and its importance would swell not because of cupidity (because true cupidity only exists in the hearts of one-dimensional antagonists found in jejune fictions and the schemes of the They so often featured in the nightmares (and daymares) of the schizophrenic), but rather out of specious necessity. And it would eventually become apparent that the problem wasn't the lack of anything; instead, it was the profusion of luxury, vacuous luxury, luxury without purpose or even as a way of being ignorant, comfortably — just luxury for luxury's sake, which is perhaps its purest form. And then we would long for the past, the past not as it had been exactly, but in the way we imagined it had been (joyous and resplendent, without the quagmire of depression and self-doubt that characterizes virtually all of the “best years” of our lives); and yet it would be too late by that point. We would be left with what we didn't want even though we were not only used to it by then; no, it would be fare worse: we would be unable to live without it. And the young, the cool, the hip, would be able to tell. We would try to come back to them, no less tainted and eschewed — maybe even feared — than escaped lepers running amok through the streets of Midtown (and the middle of Midtown, too). We would be the old people, the people so often mocked for thinking they can somehow transcend generations. And so, defeated, we would have to return to our suburban colony to live vicariously through what we read in magazines and what we saw on television, disappointed but at the same time respectful — although seething with jealously — of the institutions guarded by Janus or St. Peter or Uriel. So maybe it is best never to abandon the ascetic life — ascetic not in the sense of willed poverty or the abnegation of the material world, but ascetic in relation to what that first sacrifice promises — ascetic in the sense that sometimes it is better not to have.

We left without speaking these words to one another, of course. She went around the corner and upstairs to her sister's apartment; I hopped on an Astoria-bound train. There, in Astoria, I came upon one of my favorite pieces by Coprolalia, which, unfortunately, no member of the staff could date with any certainty. Sean had labeled it Cōlin Jenkins. I have no idea why. It featured a very dejected Colin Powell holding his severed left ear in a mason jar. There must be some reference there, but I'm at a loss to explain what it is. Regardless, it was certainly better than one of the pieces close by Shea Stadium, which featured a quotation of Derrida's twelfth aphorism. The same quote appeared in a place on Smith Street, though, as Sean pointed out, the two were not written by the same hand.

The repetition is not what surprises me; rather, it's the difference between the two areas. In the bar near Shea (or Ashe, depending on your preference), I was the only person who spoke English as a first language. A captious woman at the bar translated my questions for the bartender (the typical questions that I ask whenever I actually find something done by Coprolalia: Do you know who did it? Can you describe the man you think may have done it? Can you provide an accurate date upon which the piece appeared? etc.). She then translated the bartender's responses back to me. This made her something of a gerund. Neither of the women was familiar with Coprolalia, and both expressed a silent disdain as I explained myself.

The bartender eventually cut me off.

The pseudo-gerund then spoke: “She wants to know your job.” She was a plump nubile, perhaps even underage, with thick glasses, intelligent eyes, and a lofty voice. Her face was very sharp, sculpted even, though to imply that her features were the result of anything plastic would be to ignore the relative innocence in her smile. She was guarded, but not cynical; incredulous, but not maliciously so. She just seemed to express a mild reluctance to either affirm or doubt another's honesty — a common feature in individuals still green enough to believe that happy endings are remote only in their relation to the present, not their potential.

“My what?”

“What is your work?” she reiterated. The pseudo-gerund did not capture the harshness or peremptory tone of the bartender, who stood with her hands upon her hips. She was no taller than a cello. Still, there was fierceness in her face that cautioned the use of excessive charm or flirtation. “Your job. What is your job?”

“I don't have one,” I said gingerly.

“She wants to know why.”

“I just graduated.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don't know.”

“You need a job.”

“I know.”

The both laughed. “She says you are like her son.”

“Your son just graduated?” gingerly again.

“No,” she said between chuckles. “He's on Rikers.”

The majority of the patrons of Smith Street were familiar with Coprolalia, though no one could impart much of use on the matter. Most of the bartenders wanted to know where I was conducting my graduate work. I would reply that I had just finished my undergraduate studies. Interest then faded. A couple at one of the bars on that strip was less dismissive. We talked over the course of two or three drinks. I don't remember the girl's name — it was mildly ethnic, perhaps an Eastern European version of a common American name. She was career-oriented and had these perfect eyebrows that I couldn't help but admire, even if I had never really considered a woman's eyebrows to be a point of interest. The guy's name was Rob. He worked as a paralegal and didn't really think of it as anything more than a temporary gig, as he played in an “alt-country” band that was beginning to gain a significant following. I was hesitant to believe him at first, but his collection of guitars backed up the claim. This collection included, but was not limited to, a '68 New Yorker, a '66 Tele, and a newer Ibanez that he swore by. He was trying to find a Casino (“the guitar Lennon played in the 'Revolution' video”), but the search was proving to be far more difficult than he assumed it would be (“A decent one is like two grand, man”). The jukebox featured a Woody Guthrie song that had been reworked by Wilco and Billy Bragg, something that evoked an elated smile from Rob each of the four times it came on. The song brought back rather painful memories for me, but that's a story in and of itself. Most of our conversation revolved around music and his band, the Ribs. He confessed that they were struggling to find a sound, but this did nothing to stifle his confidence in their abilities. Their style was defined as “Pixies meets Ryan Adams, though recently we've been doing a lot of almost Zappa-esque stuff because our new lead guitarist is fucking nasty. He's our Nels Cline.” According to Rob, their fans appreciated the more technical aspects of the newer songs, and they had been gradually getting more and more people to come and see their shows. They were better off financially than they had been the previous year, as a good deal of money had been coming in through iTunes. By means of a somewhat flawed inductive conclusion, he figured he would be able to quit his day job in two years. They just needed to keep reaching new people. Myspace, he said, was a great way to do so. He reminded me of this at least seven times before I left.

I realized fairly on that a lot of the bars on Sean's list no longer feature the work of Coprolalia. Some no longer exist (the bars, that is). Of those that do, it is common for them to have recently renovated or simply painted their facilities. I initially believed this only applied to Manhattan, but, as the week wore on, I found that this statement did not need geographical qualification. Suffice to say, many hours were spent examining canvases home to nothing more than the typical banalities one runs into when scanning over a lavatory wall.

Sometimes these banalities encroached upon Coprolalia's work, which was yet another difficulty. Such is the case when you abandon the process of painting. One bar in particular, some painfully trendy place on Ludlow, was coated in graffiti so thick that I couldn't discern where one thing ended and another began. Everything lost its original meaning, its original purpose, its individuality. This was something of a paradox, perhaps a critique of the information age. Maybe it was even a deliberate effort on the part of Coprolalia, but I doubt even he could dedicate enough time to create something so baroque. After all, he is far more of a laconic artist than most like to admit.

Still, there were some basic themes that I begin to discern as the number of pieces I saw grew. Some of his work is almost maudlin in its cynicism. While it certainly is the case that any wit runs the risk of appearing bitter or fatalistic, Coprolalia does not seem all that concerned about being labeled a misanthrope. Sometimes his work makes him seem conceited or impudent; other times it reveals a man who is modest, perhaps even unsure of himself. His references also run a gamut, though, in this case, it ranges from the weird to the arcane. The less obscures stuff incorporates figures from pagan mythology: Prometheus, Pandora, Orpheus, Icarus, and Phaeton all appearing regularly. He is also a fan of using passages from Shakespeare and the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, which, according to St. Jerome, is where the real wisdom is to be found. In his more esoteric pieces I have caught everything from Chaucer to Ferlinghetti, Milton to Baraka; all of the Karamazovs have popped up, as have most of the Impressionists. And then there are the philosophers, not only the ones with whom nearly every American college student has some affinity (Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, etc.), but the more (post)modern ones that seem fixated on the distinction between inference and reference, identity and difference. It is sometimes frustrating to find one of his pieces only to not understand what the hell he is talking about, though not as frustrating as being told the piece's obvious and superficial meaning by someone at the bar who doesn't understand that my confusion is far deeper than they assume. A lot of times I feel as though I should take a month off to study up so I can be a few planes closer to the one he is on, but I have neither the funds nor the time.

But I have come to understand his work better with each passing day (the city, too, has become more realistic; it's existence is no longer a pastiche of film and song and prose, but a breathing, living thing). I even believe that I'm beginning to understand him as a person. I may not be an expert in character sketching, but I do believe I can say this of the artist: he is terrified of commitment (romantic or otherwise), he mourns for the future, and he is not French, as the only misspelled words I have found are either derived from or of that language. He is probably of average height because most of his work is at my eye-level or below (and I am just above the average height). I don't think he works in a gallery or anything like that. I would place him in a far more pedestrian occupation, one that denies him the ability to use his talents. This conclusion comes from noting the environments he favors. These bars are not particularly receptive to the artistic types or the hip college students who spent their high school years in solitude listening to the Swans and cutting themselves; the bars are blue-collar dives, places where the foul stench of an inflated ego would inevitably lead to confrontation — and, consequently, recognition.

I have not been targeted, even if it is very clear that I am a recent college graduate. Well…with one exception: I was accosted by a Birchist lawyer who enjoyed using inflated language and Latin terms that didn’t quite sound right. It was at a place nearby the criminal and civil courts of New York County. Though the bar did not look like the type of place visited by a man in three-piece suit, who just happened to think himself to be kindred spirits with John Galt, the bartender knew him by both name and drink. (Proximity to the courts must have been the primary appeal. True, there may be other bars if one goes east, past Columbus Park and into that little region of Chinatown where the sidewalks are painted with grease and animal blood, where the mephitic stench of shit and sun-soaked gore and decay and hoisen sauce and some pungent herb that's probably high in thiamine creates an imperious cloud that not only irritates, but may actually destroy, the olfactory system. Presumably, this is what keeps rent in the area so low, but, then again, it may be the profusion of vermin known to take to the streets under the cloak of Erebus like those retinues of thugs that terrorize the citizenry of Gotham and Metropolis. It's a sight that would haunt even the Orkin Man. Then again, one could go west, toward TriBeCa. Due north leads you into the less soiled regions of Chinatown; northwest places you in SoHo; northeast takes you into a bizarre little region that some people are now calling LoHo as opposed to the Lower East Side, probably because someone felt that every neighborhood south of Houston Street needs to be abbreviated by employing only its northern latitudinal boundary.) The lawyer was not especially combative; he was just of that genre of conservative who finds nothing more aggravating than a college-educated person with a penchant for sympathizing with the victims — both foreign and domestic — of colonialism, imperialism, and the industrial arm of the corporate oligarchy, which provides low-paying, menial, and incredibly hazardous jobs to people who have been displaced by either the political arm (the IMF and U.S. Treasury) or the agricultural arm of said oligarchy. He went further, claiming every leftist to be an elitist and a Stalinist, a person who a) has no real ties to the working class and, consequently, does not understand them, and b) wishes to exploit this same class to promote an agenda that is nefarious, detrimental “to those who actually work,” and rarely, if ever, defined.

After finishing his second dirty martini (from what I saw, anyhow; the couple may have represented three and four, four and five, etc.), he called me a hippie, told me to do several things (among them, to get a job, to get out of the ivory tower, to stop pushing my liberal agenda on real Americans — who, apparently, don't have enough conviction to maintain an opinion of their own — to stop destroying America, and to go fuck myself), and then stormed out of the bar in triumph. Some of the contractors stared to the door. One of the men at the bar repositioned his Iron Workers, Local 580, hat. The Ides of March played their signature song. The grad-student bartender looked up from his book of Robert Bly and shook his head: “And Jefferson….”

A lot of these pubs are comprised of locals. Consequently, you, an outsider, immediately feel out of place. Even on the more gentrified streets of the City, places where there has come to exist a rift between present and past, there are those watering holes where nights progress on an axis all their own. Most of the habitués are animated and jovial early on, but by two or three in the morning the remaining drinkers have been reduced to stammering unintelligibly about lost opportunities and women who fade into the realm of impossibility before they even pass by the window. This is the vantage from the bottom rung of the social ladder (though, it must be said, they are at least on the social ladder).

I don't normally start conversations with the people in these places, as most see me as something of an anomaly to be gazed at with suspicion, if not quiet hostility, during my first drink. This is especially the case once one leaves Manhattan. Even in the more crowded places, I rarely stay for more than a beer, and leave an apparition's impression. In the bars where I stay longer, someone eventually approaches me to appease their curiosity.

Most think that I am still in college, which, from their perspective, is certainly a rational thing to assume. When I tell them my reason for coming into their bar — it's always their bar—they have a good laugh at my expense. Sometimes the transformation of their neighborhood comes up, though it's always addressed casually: “A couple years back we would have never seen a kid like you in these parts”; “You just move into that new building down the block?”; “I just want to know where all of these white kids keep coming from.” Areas such as Astoria and Harlem seem to be used to it (gentrification) by now. As I walked through parts of Long Island City and Bed-Stuy, however, even the women thought it necessary to stare me down. And then there was the quick sally to the South Bronx, where the diabetrices waddle through intersections like cattle upon the range. They received me with looks of pity or shock more often than scorn.

A surprising number of people know of Coprolalia in these areas populated by the Remi nepotes. “'At muthafucka been doin' 'at shit in the da' hood for a goddamn decade,” a man with a syncopated voice said at one bar somewhere in downtown Brooklyn. The interior was very red and very black.

“Some say even longer,” I responded.

“Shit, man, why you even interested in him?”

“There's a reward, Claude,” the bartender laughed deeply — not a deep laugh, but a deep voice, a voice for jazz radio.

“He draw anything in here, Marlon?” another bar dweller with a Cubs hat asked.

“Nah, that professa' from En Why You came through here and told me it's fake. I tell you though, I only thought to ask him 'cause I thought it might be valuable to somebody. Personally, I could-a cared less.”

“So you got rid of it?” I asked.

“Yeah, the whole bathroom downstairs was starting to look like shit, so I had my asshole brother-in-law come by and do some renovations.” He looked to Claude with a smile. “That lazy muthafucka',” slowly, “Took two fucking months to do the job. I tell ya', he's fuckin' worthless. Fuck-ing worth-less.”

I've found that a large amount of Brooklyn and Staten Island residents are contractors. The Irish and the Italians in particular. They enter the bars after their shifts smelling of sawdust and B.O. because they are required to wear thick clothing in order to avoid scrapes and shallow lacerations even in the heat. They complain about the Yankees and the Mets — the former being a team that is always supposed to win, the latter being a team that is always supposed to lose. They remember “broads” or “bitches” or “slits” that had walked by the worksite as Rolling Stones albums from the early seventies run their course. They call each other “fat fuck” and “wop-diego” and “fucking mic,” but avoid calling their black or brown comrades by any title that could be considered offensive. They have conversations that, from the outside, would seem to be incendiary, but you get the impression that they've been arguing about the same kind of shit for the past decade without incident.

“Whadda mean Jesus was black?”

“He had woolly hair, no job, and went around callin' everybody brotha'. Sounds like a muthafuckin' knee-grow to me.”

It's incredibly awkward to visit the gay bars at night. This is rather obvious, but in my less-than-sober mind I believed that I came off as straight enough to avoid any unwanted advances. As a consequence of my error in judgment, I was the source of chagrin for a man who couldn't believe that I was looking for something in the bathroom that didn't happen to be his penis, which had been displayed through one of those holes to which people will attach the word glory, or, in Coprolalia's case, Pyramus. The incident was rather embarrassing for both parties. He was nice about the misunderstanding, though I am fairly certain that he ordered a phalanx of body builders in white briefs to deny my exit until I stayed for a drink. The whites were fluorescent in the black light, a neon sexuality that turned out to be more intimidating than menacing.

I ended up talking to Greg(g), the presumed general of the briefs brigade, for a little less than half an hour. He worked at the Met and tried to convince me that he had never heard of Coprolalia. (I think I pulled a similar stunt with Connie when she asked me if I was familiar with Basquiat. I managed to rope her into that first conversation, which eventually ended in the bedroom — that night of cautious austerity on both of our parts because everyone knows that the first night needs to be filled with anticipation for the second if there is to be any real future, tiny vessels popped or no. We fell asleep in a tangled heap upon the bed, exhausted and serenaded by Billie Holiday and the murmur of the radiator. She did not exhibit that curious modesty familiar in many women — she was not reluctant to reveal her body in the light of the early morning, but instead spread herself upon the sheets like paint upon canvas as the deep purple of the night sky faded to the dusty wan of morning. The sight was neither surreal nor pornographic; it was rather a personification of comfort and tranquility, a Laodamian idyll with which I knew I was to gain a greater familiarity. But it was a spurious display if one thinks in deeper metaphors. Once she awoke, she was hesitant to agree to so much as a date upon which we could see one another again; and until that later date I could not help but feel guilty, as though I had violated her in some way, that I had taken advantage of her even if the love that we made that night was not intrusive, phallic, or vaginal; it was exploratory, epidermic — our hands intrepidly passing over one another's bodies like astronauts surveying the surface of the moon.) Greg(g), upon realizing that I was not intrigued — in fact annoyed — by his coyness, became willing to impart what he knew of Coprolalia. He told me to track down Sean, that I should focus my attention on Brooklyn, and then spent the remainder of the time telling me about his sister's wedding, which sounded as though it was going to be a lovely service at a rustic site somewhere in Maine. He was not jealous at all. When I left, his friend had just come back from the bathroom and couldn't believe the nerve of some smokers.

Hours on the subway — especially the M, my Rocinante — were passed with crossword puzzles and other amusements. This human yo-yo ended up at far too many apocheirs, from 95th Street to 242nd Street, from Far (and I do mean Far) Rockaway to Jamaica, as it's difficult to stay awake when drunk and left with nothing to do besides focus on advertisements (“Thank you Dr. Zizmor!”) and Shortz puns in order to avoid eye contact with the others on the train, the majority of them appearing either horribly despondent, enraged, deranged, or just plain fucked. During this time I realized that the subway system is based upon the future. The time in the subway itself is essentially a precursor to wherever it is you are going. People are conscious of the wait, but they seldom notice the cracked tiles that look like snake-skin, the cement-hued paint that runs throughout the system, the stalactites that are made of mysterious mineral compounds, or the way in which the express trains rattle the tracks in six-eight time as they race past the local stations. Everybody notices the piss smell that saturates either end of the platform, as well as the rats that run in and out of those small drainage holes that appear every five yards or so; they see the garbage on the tracks, and even the advertisements that have been operated upon with exacto-knives and not-so-exacto-knives; and yet, for these commuters, the station is a low-altitude purgatory, something that is accepted, but not acknowledged. I guess this became noticeable to me once I started riding the train for more than the typical two hours and change a day.

A lot of this time was spent questioning this project. Going in and out of bars all day is fun, of course, but I wasn’t gaining any serious insight into the identity of Coprolalia. True, I felt like I knew him better than when I began, but these few assumptions were not going to translate into anything more substantial, anything something that was necessarily a fiction because there were simply too many gaps to fill.

By the time I reached Coney Island on Wednesday, I was less than optimistic. My experience there didn’t make me feel any better. Someone named Fo' Sho' (my apostrophes) had appropriated the space that housed the Coprolalia in the beachfront bathroom close by Stillwell. The air was still cool, especially as the night began to fall and the breeze from the ocean picked up. Old Russian men were sitting upon the benches watching the waves roll in; these are the types of men to whom dramatists look for inspiration, for whom composers write nocturnes laden with flatted thirds and sixths, with whom the spirit of Aschenbach stands watching the ocean, not as artist, but as a comrade in moribundity. Most had widower's eyes, glacial and harrowing things that radiated sorrow even (maybe especially) in sleep. They were the men who could challenge Atlas in fortitude, if not determination, but also the types who never would; they would only sit, pockmarked and phlegmatic, staring to the ocean and waiting for the day to end. The company they kept included cheap vodka and cheaper tobacco, harsh stuff that an agoraphobic would refuse even if threatened with being kidnapped, stripped stark naked, and booted out of a speeding van into the cacophony of Times Square — the central hub of Positivist Manhattan's grid.

The beach was beginning to clear out; the families who had spent the late afternoon hours lounging, playing, a few even singing, the more courageous swimming, came up in troves drunk with sun. Most of them were Dominican or Puerto Rican. They ambled slowly, laughed, picked at leftovers stuffed into plastic containers of the translucent, but not transparent variety. Seagulls crowded the vacant spaces left by those on their way to trains or apartments; they would glide down to the earth with ease and kick up small clumps of sand as they moved with erratic determination. They were defensive and quick to discern any avian intruders attempting to stake a claim on the remnants left by the bronzed day-trippers; only then did they accelerate their steps and reveal serpentine tongues pink like bubble gum. With the mere threat of castigation, they managed to repel the dawdling pigeons and the jittery sparrows seeking to pilfer what was — in any case seemed to be — the rightful inheritance of the gulls. The sparrows were easily frightened and quick to retreat; the pigeons, however, were not so easily dissuaded. They grabbed whatever they could and scuttled away as the gulls descended upon the sands with graceful aggression to arrogantly remind — in a language that may just be inherently arrogant — those within earshot that the sands were not there to provide harbor to those from the city.

The beach soon became home to flickering lighters among congregations of sunset silhouettes: Ferlinghetti windmills and roosters. By this time the boardwalk was nearly empty, populated only by memories without volition (walking without direction or drive, shades of varying opacity as if breathing idylls: women in scarlet, the shade of vitality, or rose, the shade of passion; beside them strolled men made docile from gratitude). As one turned away from the ocean and its barren horizon, however, the spirit of abandonment and decay that has characterized the fairground for so long became salient once again — the skeletal remains of more innocent times, back when the distinction between work and leisure was respected. Even before the sunset it had begun to resonate in my mind like a tin drum, an incorrigible cachinnation that neither pulsed nor undulated; it simply echoed within itself without waning in volume or tenacity. The only real beacon came from a bar, out front of which was a small group of smokers at a picnic table. They were busy discussing the Yankees' chances of a World Series victory over a round of beers.

Conversation at the bar revolved around the plans for the boardwalk's redevelopment, even with Boston in town. The patrons spoke in an uncharacteristically timid and ambivalent tone: defiant of gentrification and the process's Sherman-esque contempt for past and present, but sympathetic to rejuvenation as a means of “community improvement” or any of those similar euphemisms that avoid eye contact with the impenetrable face of reality. Even the most sympathetic to the latter were still hesitant to endorse anything proposed by “That motherfucker buying up Coney Island. You know what he did to Albee Square?”

The speaker posed this rhetorical to anyone within earshot, though his eyes did fall on the bartender. He did not respond. No one else did, either. The Fifth Beatle paraphrased Parmenides. After a moment, the man who posed the question concerning Albee Square lifted a bottle to his small, angular mouth. He placed the bottle down on the bar gently, wiped a free hand across the stubble crowding his face like a weak, pontillistic shadow, and then pushed his hair — thinning, wavy, black, long; the kind of capricious fluff that is so often attached to someone with an incessant need to argue like a perpetual student in a state of perpetual truancy — back behind his ears.

The people in the bar called him Gonzo. The possibility of a journalistic knack aside, the name probably referred to his eyes, wide like blooming sunflowers, as well as his nose, which at one point brought to the mind of the bartender “that-a one fucking scene in Clockwork Orange.” Gonzo had a habit of tapping the top of the bar with fervent bursts exclusively in four-four. He changed tempos and rhythms with his mood as opposed to the music. Other mannerisms were less obvious unless one sat nearby him (which I did). For one, he would suck on his teeth after each sip from a brown bottle of unlabeled beer (the red and white scraps of discarded paper littered the area directly in front of and below him, a detritus that the bartender or the barback would eventually have to sweep up with that bitter form of frustration that is evoked whenever you have to exert more energy doing a job that, though necessary, does not necessarily require so much work or time). He also produced sound effects for every pitch, not that he seemed all that interested in the game.

He would have had a cynical face if his eyes were not so open — not to the world exactly, but open like the aperture of a camera prepped by an absentminded photographer's apprentice. It seemed like he was forever in search of something better than whatever it was he had. He was not the sad type, not the bitter or furiously pensive, either. He just had a notion that something was wrong with the world, but that there wasn't much he or anyone could really do about it except to complain to a group of people almost sycophantic in their indifference. In a word: dissatisfied.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the bartender nodded after some time. His hair was more charcoal than gray. “He's dewing that 'ole renovation thing there-a, right?”

“That's what that lying son of a bitch said. Said he was gonna turn the mall into some type a' Vegas-style bullshit.” He paused to pick up his beer, but he did not drink. “Have you fucking been there since he bought it?”

“Nah, Gonzo, you know I ain't ever go up that fa’ north 'less I'm goin' to the City.”

“Yo', bet this kid's heard all about it, ain'tcha?”

“I don't even know where Albee Square is,” I responded as I turned my attention away from the game.

“Yeah,” the bartender shouted upon looking to the television. “Get out; get da' fuck out.” Applause. “Fuck you. Fuck you, asshole,” melodically. “You're a fuckin' bum.” He then walked over to a man more interested in the game than either Gonzo or myself. They slapped hands with gusto.

“C'mon kid,” Gonzo resumed. “You seriously ain't never been to the Fulton Mall?”

“I've been to the Fulton Mall, but I have no idea where Albee Square is.”

“Just move here a' something?”

“I've been here about four years.”

He smiled. “Congrats,” as the beer moved toward his mouth. “En Why You or Columbia?”

“Like a bullseye, huh?”

“Nah, it's not like it's a bad thing.” He paused to drink again. “What the fuck you doing all the way down here for, though? You meetin' a chick?”

“Looking for Coprolalia.”

He whistled long and high as if recreating the audio that occurs before a chagrined cartoon character gets flattened by an anvil, safe, piano, rock, etcetera. “There's a name I ain't heard in a long fucking time,” he exhausted.

“You've heard of him?”

“Course I heard a' him,” he laughed. “Never met the guy, but I remember that thing he did down in Bay Ridge.”

“Do you live around there?”

“Me? Na', I grew up on the Island. Valley Stream. Still live there. Yeah, but I was working down on Eighty-Second at the time. When was that? like fifteen years ago? Was back before anyone knew that the guy's name was Coprolalia.”

He reminisced for an inning or two about Bay Ridge in the early- to mid-nineties. He also mentioned that, whereas the rest of Brooklyn is being inundated by college graduates, most of the people moving into Bay Ridge are Lebanese, Indian, and Chinese. The bartender eventually came back over. Gonzo told him that I was looking for Coprolalia. He nodded distantly and claimed that there had been a piece attributed to the artist on a bench a few feet from the bar. “Unfortunately, the City threw 'at piece a’shit out a few years ago, kid. Hate to have ya' come all the way down 'ere just to go home empty handed, but-a…ya' know-a, I don't know what else to tell ya'.” When I turned to look to the phantom bench, I saw only a solo banjo player walking down the boardwalk strumming out “Daddy's Little Girl” in that Ray Alley style that no one seems to hear anymore.

“You should look in Astroland,” a woman interrupted. She said nothing else to us. Soon I could not keep from furtively gazing to her, wondering why she was in this place, wondering if she just happened to work in the area, and, if she did, whether she served dysentery or green ice cream at that one place between the museum and the sign commanding you to “Bump Your Ass Off,” or whether she perhaps served as the standby for Heather Holiday, the most beautiful sword-swallower on the planet — a living, breathing Mary Rogers, with a truly womanly figure (in these days of bulimia and anorexia and androgyny and what's that in your pocket?), raven tresses, and a dark smile. This woman had an indifferent face. As I continued to look her, it dawned on me that this indifference did not come from her eyes, as is common; no, her eyes were intelligent even if somewhat blunted by drink — that somber glaze conjured by willful oblivion via Lethe — not of the quantity that one imbibes to erase, just to suspend. It was rather her mouth: small, slightly ajar in that fashion that appears when one attempts to interrupt another's diatribe. She was not waiting to impart anything profound or pythic; she was just waiting like those people who stay on the train platform even after the only subway that services the station has departed — gracelessly silent and cast into a waking narcolepsy that allows blinking and breathing and heartbeats both languid and mechanical, but little else. It wasn't that she was unconscious, just unconscious of being conscious for varying stretches of time, and just cognizant enough to be one with the general polyphony of the bar, the smell of the ocean and the stale beer coming from the taps, the feel of the barstool, the surroundings as both personal and communal.

I checked out the bathroom in the bar after my first beer. This bar was not on Sean's list, but, by this point in time, I had decided it was best to simply explore without recourse to anything more than my own curiosity. There was nothing to be found except for a lot of those cliché boy name plus girl name proclamations that one sees engraved in anything wood around either a high school or a summer camp. I stayed for another beer, and left after the seventh inning of the game, though I don't remember who was up, just that a pitcher had been ridiculed viciously and thoroughly.

I didn't go directly to the train. Instead, I walked around a bit more, and even popped my head into the facilities in Astroland, which were home only to the redolent stench of piss and some gruesome-looking vomit suffused with the smell of alcohol and fried food. It cost a quarter to get in. A naked toddler asked me my name as I was looking into an empty stall inhabited by pen marks that could have almost passed for cursive. I smiled to him, but didn't have the time to respond because a man of perhaps nineteen — probably the boy's father — told me that I had to get the fuck out should I insist on snooping around like a fucking faggot.

There was little else to search, save the few Porto-Johns in the area, but I couldn't see much due to the lack of light. I took West 10th on my way back to Surf Avenue. As I was walking, I came across the banjo player again. He was strumming the same song, though his accompaniment at this juncture was not the ocean, but, instead, a virulent din of teenage hostility, which reverberated around the entrance of the Cyclone like waves from a gong. Racial epithets eventually turned into a scuffle, but the police quickly dispersed the violent throng before anyone was seriously hurt.

Thursday was a blur of northern Brooklyn. I was confident that I had examined every bar in Greenpoint, East Williamsburg, and Williamsburg proper with the exception of some of the places west of Bedford Avenue by around nine. Most of the bars that still featured Coprolalia were fairly new. The older watering holes of generations past were typically absent of anything by the artist; they were home only to the typical jake-walkers silent as wraiths. Two eavesdroppers at a real dive off of McGuinness tried to mitigate my growing frustration by explaining that Coprolalia's work was being erased because Bloomberg wanted to make the City sterile for all the rich people and the corporate assholes in Manhattan. The male component was a postman; the female was a waitress at a somewhat famous diner in the City. How their theories applied to dive bars in Brooklyn or Coprolalia I don't really know, but I nodded as they went on nonsensical tirades profuse with non sequiturs and paranoid beliefs about everything from aliens to freemasonry, to how Charlie Manson was an operative for the F.B.I., and that the Tate murders had been committed to justify raids on communes and other passive anarchist communities that the press could easy smear as having the potential to be yet another Manson Family. The postman was particularly fond of using Times Square as an example—“It's the urban fucking Disney World”—for both the Man's power and the Man's idyll. She said that Bloomberg was looking to shut down a luncheonette on the north side of McGolrick Park, which she referred to simply as “B's.” The postman lamented over the closing of a hamburger joint on Manhattan, which shut its doors sometime during the Giuliani administration. The two were incredibly polite, although their tones were somewhat harsh. It was a stark contrast to the majority of the people populating the rickety chairs and tables of Greenpoint's less trendy taverns, people who were predominately Polish, ornery, and less than discreetly hostile to my presence. Like anywhere else, however, most of these customers turned out to be friendly once I opened up a dialog, though it was clear that they resented the fact that said dialog had to be in English.

The walls of a bathroom somewhere in north Williamsburg had been outfitted with a blackboard — literally. Another one had supplied washable finger-paints for its potty users.

I ran into one of my former professors near the Bedford Avenue L as the sun was beginning to set. She invited me to dinner with her husband — Emily and Dennis, respectively. The two of them were genuinely interested in the project, though their thoughts on Coprolalia's work were both ambivalent and contentious, as they were both professors, and it seems something of a professorial requisite to contrive debates for the sole purpose of displaying just how a person of culture is supposed to look or speak.

Emily suggested that I seek out Sean Winchester, and she clearly thought it something of a faux pas on my part to explain that his advice and direction had hitherto been my only source of (somewhat) worthwhile counsel. She nodded gravely as though I had confirmed a terminal diagnosis: keen eyes focused not so much on me as past me — kind of how my father taught me that one must always remember to swing through a target when throwing a punch. Dennis looked on with almost cataleptic curiosity. Had I not known the context of the stare, I would have assumed him to be looking to someone speaking in tongues. The Byrds sang “Eight Miles High” in those lachrymose harmonies for which they are so highly regarded as the conversation drifted into academia.

“Are you anticipating further studies?” Emily, not Professor Carroll, asked.

“Yes, but I feel as though I need to experience the world beyond the university first.”

“You do know that you can't get as far as you used to without some kind of post-graduate degree.”

“Yes, I understand that it is more important than it used to be.”

“Have you thought about a Ph.D.?”

“Yes, but I really don't know what my focus would be.”

Once the appetizers and their first round of drinks were finished, the subject inevitably changed to the Bush administration, a stain on the conscience of many New Yorkers, as well as our national character. During the main course, she addressed the unconstitutionality of the Military Commissions Act of 2006; and she used that word, “unconstitutionality,” as though it was a gavel stolen from the hand of God. She said that Bush and Cheney and “that motherfucker” Rove needed to acknowledge that the national motto, E Pluribus Unum, is not a justification for autocracy. Twenty minutes were spent addressing our collective outrage over the past six and a half years of Republican rule. Dennis and I put in our two cents. Emily did her best to cover the rest of the bill, especially after she finished her second cocktail.

We exchanged email addresses after the meal. As we made our way out, she told me that she would have no problem writing a letter of recommendation for me no matter what subject I decided to pursue. Dennis wished me luck with graduate school.

Most of Friday was spent navigating the streets of the Bronx. I forwent the bus ride to either Throgs Neck or City Island and focused the majority of my time in Kingsbridge, Riverdale, and portions of Fordham. By day's end, I was on the 1 train heading back into the City with a mild buzz and a desire to never step into the borough again unless it was for a ballgame. I got out of the train at 50th Street, walked into Hell's Kitchen under a Guillaumin sunset, and went into the first place that caught my attention. The bar was one of those timeless places, a relic with an identity reliant upon the contours of everything that surrounds it. If the facade was enough to keep out the more glamorous people of the City, the appearance of the denizens in the bar were enough to make the former consider moving to Westchester. Each patron stopped what he or she was doing to examine me when I walked in. The moment seemed strange.

After ordering a beer and checking out the bathroom, which featured nothing more than the consequence of a weak flush, I took a seat at the bar next to what appeared to be a harmless man. He had become something of a pariah due to a problem that he had evidently been vocalizing for some time. This became apparent rather quickly.

“I can't fuck my wife,” he told me after I ordered a beer.

How does one respond to that?

“Hey, Tommy,” the bartender began in an exhausted tone, “Don't bother the kid.”

“It's fine,” I responded in an overtly jovial way. Before I could ask about Coprolalia or the bathroom, she said,

“He's had his head shrunk, darling. Don't listen to a word a' what he says.”

“And it's not that I'm not, you know, not attracted to her, if that's what you're thinking. That would be so much easier,” he added as though the bartender did not exist, had not spoken, was something of an apparition that materialized whenever he needed another round. “Seriously. I'm not gay. It's not that,” earnestly. “It's so much deeper than that. I just can't do it.”

“Why not?” gingerly.

His face became anguished. It wasn't a harsh face. It had been aged by several years of living in the lower altitudes of the corporate ladder, but it didn't reflect anything more crushing than the repression of ambition. This is not to say that he displayed that dour expression of resignation one sees in the chronically unemployed. He was employed — he even had the tie to prove it. Due to his age, his Midwestern accent, and his presence in the neighborhood, one could even assume that he wasn't struggling to make ends meet. He just looked defeated: his body was of corporate stock — flabby from sitting at a desk all day, but not fat — his face had filled out, and his chin was about as pronounced as a French vowel. Whatever athleticism he may have possessed was by now gone, and so too was that sense of conviction that some people manage to carry with them until Time escorts them into senility or the grave.

That being said, I assumed his problem to be the result of high blood pressure or just a general revulsion to the idea of himself performing the act of coitus, sex, fucking — that series of moments to which the rest of life seems either a prologue or an epilogue.

“You know there are pills for that.” It seemed, at the time, the most rational thing to say. He stared to me with a contemptuous grin. If there is a word for both hating and feeling sorry for someone else's stupidity, then that would probably be the best way to describe this disposition. I was oblivious to this, however, and I added to the fire by adding: “You know, for…what are they calling it now? E.D.?”

“You mean B.D.D., honey: Broke Dick Disease?” the bartender called out over a round of laughs from a group of old men down the bar.

“Fuck off, Pam,” Tommy whined. “No, it's not that,” he began slowly as he turned back to me. “Ever since we had our daughter, Stephanie. I don't know. I guess I just…I just see her-her…you know….”

“Pussy?” the resurgent Pam concluded as she brought us our beers, her crooked smile like corn kernels on a Styrofoam plate. “Five bucks, babe.”

I thanked her. Tommy just stared.

“Her vagina,” he continued. “I see her vagina as special. It's beautiful — the source of life. That's where my daughter came from. She came out of there. I came out of one. A-and I feel like I'm…I don't know. I guess I feel like I'm….”

“You're what?”

“Like I'm making it dirty. Like I'm just ramming this foreign thing into her. Ramming, like a…like a…a ramrod. You know? And, and the last time I did it, the last time I did it…I don't know…it felt like I was trying to kill her with it, like I was stabbing her with this, this thing. And I can't do that to her. I love her.” The words “objectified” and “penis” came into my head.

“You love her too much to fuck her?” Pam asked incredulously. “Jesus, Tommy, every time you bitch about this shit you make less and less sense.”

“Pam, my therapist—”

“Your shrink,” she scoffed. “The more he sees that dyke bitch, the more fucked up he gets,” she said to me. “You think that's just a coinkydink? It's a fucking racket, Tom; she keeps you fucked up to stay in business.”

“Pam, she said that all women feel pain the first time, you know, they have, you know….”

“Sex?”

“Yeah. And, and not just like pain…down there,” as he pointed to his crotch, “but here, too,” as his finger approached his temple.

“That's not fucking true.” It was as though she was admonishing a child.

“So the first time was good for you?”

“I'm not going to tell you the minutia (a lot of emphasis on this word) of my first fuck, Tom. I'll just let you know that the only reason it wasn't anything special was because the loser I — for whatever reason — lost my V-card to didn't know what the fuck he was doing.” She walked away, back to the group of the old men mumbling along with the Kingsmen's “Louie, Louie.”

“Sex is violence,” he resumed. “There's nothing fucking tender about it. We invade them, dominate them. We need to dominate women; that's all the labida [sic.] is for us — the need for power, power over another living thing. Think about it: Our beginning, our….”

“Initiation?”

“Our fucking initiation,” with vehemence, “into adulthood, manhood, is through violence. My father said I became a man when I went hunting with him for the first time. That was the first time I killed a deer. My friends said I became a man when I had sex for the first time. My uncle said I became a man after I went to war, to Grenada — Operation fucking Fury. And I killed a man there. I saw him. I saw him with his gun. I saw that he was aiming at me, that there were only two choices at that moment — me or him. I saw him, and I shot him.” He became quiet for a moment. He then began anew with a bit less passion. “That's what makes a man: violence, killing, the domination and destruction of another life. And that's the progression of a serial killer, too. Did you know that? That's the progression that we…that I followed. First I hunted, then I raped, then I murdered. We're all potential serial killers. All of us. We're evil by our very nature. We're made this fucking way.”

What maniac concocted it?

“You raped someone?”

“Yes. Just because she said she wanted to do it doesn't mean anything. It was just society making her think she had that desire. I know now that she didn't want it.”

“So you're reducing all women to the role of victim and catamite?” His eyes cross. “Are you saying that she didn't want to have sex with you, or are you saying that no woman wants to have sex?”

“The second one. Sex is intrusive and violent. It's fine for us; but for them it's painful and degrading and violent.”

“I don't think I follow you,” I said after taking down a small portion of my beer. He nearly drained his. “I don't think sex is necessarily violent. You seem to be assuming no small degree of sadomasochism to be inherent in the act.”

“I'm not assuming. I'm telling you. It's sadomast—, sadomaso—, masochistic.”

“That's absurd.”

“Why is it absurd?”

“By your reasoning, the performance of coitus is rape — if a man engages in coitus, then he commits rape. Do you agree with this?”

“Yes.”

“And you certainly agree that all cases of rape are criminal.”

“Yes.”

“Okay, so you would have no problem with this proposition: either all coitus is criminal or no coitus is criminal. Every action falls into the realm of being either criminal or non-criminal; coitus is certainly an act, right?”

“Of course.”

“Now, can you imagine a case in which the act of coitus is non-criminal? For example, in a country where prostitution is legal, if a woman enters into a contractual agreement with a man — let's call him Doug — to exchange her services for his money, then certainly the interaction is not criminal. She has offered her labor to a pimp, the pimp has taken her on as his employee, as this pimp owns the means of protection, and he has delivered her to Doug, unto whom she will perform whatever illicit acts Doug desires, so long as he is willing to pay for them. Doug then pays the prostitute for her work, she in turn pays the pimp the percentage due to him, and the process gets repeated again and again and again. This is okay to you?”

“No, but, you know, it's legal.”

“That's right. It is legal. No party, Doug included, has committed a crime.”

“None of them have done anything illegal.”

“So let's repeat our second premise: in all cases rape is criminal. Furthermore, if Doug has coitus, then he commits rape; and if he, Doug, commits rape, then he commits a crime. However, you have affirmed that Doug can have coitus without it being a crime. This presents a contradiction, which allows us to place a tilde in front of that second premise that we asserted at the beginning of this derivation, consequently meaning that we can end up with the following conclusion: It is not the case that rape is criminal.”

“Wait, what? I didn't fucking agree to that!”

“It's a perfectly valid argument.”

“You're fucking insane.”

“Okay, how about this: the introduction to a spoon as opposed to a nipple is the first, perhaps most, traumatic experience in a person's post-uterine life. Think about it: a cold, phallic piece of metal is forced into our reluctant mouths. Forced! Into! And to add to the degradation — to make the act all the more despicable and horrifying — the food, baby food, has the same consistency as shit — baby shit, too, the type that's been sat on and squished and molded into a foul paste. The act of eating, consequently, can be seen as an institution founded upon violence and humiliation. Jesus, where's a critical theorist when you need one? I think I have enough material for a book — all I need is a few irrelevant passages from Discipline and Punish and Being and Time.” He stared to me with contempt. “Look, man, sex can be violent, sure. There are entire cities in California dedicated to this freaky faction of the sex industry. But I just can't agree with you: it would make every heterosexual woman a masochist, and every man — unless he is a permanent catcher — Narcissus, asexual, or a sadist. And that, to me, is absolutely absurd. I can't accept it. One of the most fundamental aspects of life cannot be inherently cruel. Life cannot be inherently cruel.” I shook my head. “What you're saying is absurd.”

“Why? It's only absurd because you've never really thought about it,” he said with a fist upon the bar top. “You've been trained, brainwashed, to think the opposite — that it's somehow beautiful or tender or whatever. It's bullshit. We've been duped by the people in power, the patrimony [sic.], who keep us blind to the truth — the hidden truth that men are violent creatures, and women are made to suffer because we're just these…these fucking brutes. Women are these beautiful creatures and we need to dominate them and dress them up and change them for our own sick pleasure. Do you know the John Lennon song, 'Woman is the N'—”

“—I know the song.”

“Don't you get it, though? You seem like a smart guy; why don't you get it? They are goddesses,” with his fist on the bar. “They are perfect,” again with the fist. “They are without violence, without hatred, without any of the disgusting habits of men. And I can't do it anymore,” he said as he raised his hand to catch Pam's attention. “Can I get another, please?”

“If I give you another round,” she began as she approached, “Will you quit bothering the kid?”

“I'm not bothering him,” he responded. “We're just having a conversation.”

“Is he bothering you?” she asked with high brows. Her tone was lighthearted, as though I was stuck in the midst of a joke. At the same time she knew she could not allow Tommy to feel as though I was humoring him without inspiring a more aggressive tirade. In other words, her act was one of civility. She knew that I would respond in the negative, that this show of compliance would be feigned, and that any vocalization of the truth on my part would shatter the dynamics of propriety that had been established long ago, thereby increasing the potential of Tommy acting in an undesirable fashion — because propriety is a lot like a game of Jenga (which is the word one utters during a game of the same name when a tower of bricks collapses, and, ironically enough, the root of the Swahili verb that means 'to build' (an ironic paronym perhaps?), which is essentially means, the tower falls and everyone yells the imperative “Build!”), only the collapse that takes place once all etiquette has been nullified can be anything from a cascade of tears to an inferno that envelops several city blocks. When I responded with the obvious, she asked the follow-up that always comes up in situations such as these: “Are you sure?” Yes, I was sure that I wanted to perpetuate civility.

I left after that one beer. I don't remember my stated reason for leaving. During the time I was stuck with Tommy, the chasm between our opinions was not bridged. He was suffering from castration envy; I was trying to promote the most basic tenets of humanism, arguing that having a child actually constitutes the last step in the process of a male's maturity, that only a man can be a father. I think I got this concept from a public service announcement that was frequently aired in the early- or mid-nineties, and I'm pretty sure Lawrence Fishburne was the one featured in it. Regardless, he, Tommy, was reluctant to award credence to it. He was living proof of my gender's inability to be responsible in terms of children. To him, this was because we lack empathetic instincts: We are biologically predisposed to be hunters; furthermore, a hunter can only have pity for his prey. And even that's rare. I simply saw him as a typical, albeit older, member of Generation X — too self-absorbed to take responsibility for the problems they create — the generation of overgrown and spoiled children (the generation that takes pride in its vanity, the generation that hated Reagan and Bush I so much that they rebelled via self-destruction, the generation that has killed the written word with books about how-I-made-my-money and why-I-became-a-heroin-addict and I-graduated-from-Yale-and-then-decided-to-become-a-stripper and listen-to-me-,-please-! and I-can't-write-real-fiction-so-I'll-just-fictionalize-my-life memoirs, the generation that never grew up, but sold out nonetheless, the generation of souls too intransigent to take on the part of Dante, so they instead play lion, she-wolf, and leopard to my own generation, my own generation for which I still — for whatever reason — have faith).

Tommy was slightly dejected when I stood to leave. While he obviously appreciated my company, he did not implore my continued presence; he just stared to me. I am fairly certain that he forgot all about our conversation, perhaps even my existence, as he was very close to (or already was) blackout drunk. I thought about him later, about his eventual departure from the bar, his arrival home to his sex-deprived wife — a devastated postpartum mess of hormones almost suicidal because she feels her husband has abandoned her. And, to a large degree, she's right. It's a shame that the future adulteress will feel guilty about the inevitable.

The subsequent hours were spent going in and out of the bars along Eighth and Ninth Avenues. They were not clubs, though it would be misleading to call them dives. They attracted yuppies and women almost haunting in their beauty, as well as what's known in the City as the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, which essentially means people from Jersey, Long Island, and Staten Island (but not Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, or the wealthier parts of Westchester). And then there were the places into which I knew Coprolalia would never enter. I could see inside. The women were beautifully packaged bodies hiding gray loquacity. The men were in checkered shirts. Both had really expensive shoes. No one was smoking. I felt like a vegetarian gazing into the window of a Jewish deli.

It was fairly easy to get around initially because the Broadway crowd had not been let out. I managed to examine about a dozen lavatories without having to wait in line. Every night around eleven or so, however, the streets and bars explode with life. The area becomes something like a reef — beautiful and unnavigable and home to an unfathomable multitude of brightly-colored creatures that do not appear to move on their own; they undulate like the patchwork of a quilt drying in the breeze. Suddenly it takes fifteen minutes to walk a block, whereas before it only took thirty seconds. Porcine Midwesterners strangle the sidewalks, walking as though they are concealing unsliced hunks of deli meats under their clothing. Madness — inspiration for Max Beckmann. The bartenders become too preoccupied to concern themselves with anything more than your order — cranberry juice for me, as I realized quickly that beers in this part of the City start at six or seven bucks.

To make matters worse, it became difficult to hear anything besides the music, as the DJs were apparently catering to a contingent of nearly deaf people, who nonetheless demanded a strict diet of top-forties shit that takes different components of hip-hop (the beat), R&B (the hook), and Blues (the exclusive use of tonic, sub-dominant, and dominant chords) to create a soulless and jejune commodity to be marketed to the public by the beautiful face of the “artist” singing the song. One bartender managed to hear me above the din and assured me that Coprolalia resided in Bellevue. “Andy Bates, right?”

“That's a rumor.”

He nodded quickly before disappearing into the maelstrom of bottles and bodies that inhabited the area behind the bar. He did not come back to me.

The last place in the neighborhood on Sean's list may have been home to a Coprolalia. I am not sure; I was unable to get into one of the stalls because it was occupied by a rather famous beer mascot in the form of a beautiful woman. She was not alone. The man cohabiting the stall kept saying that he was engaging in the high life; the woman kept affirming his proclamation — one could call it blues-inspired copulation. Between their exchanges, there was panting and groaning and moaning and grunting, and when that subsided there were pronounced nasal inhalations. As I was leaving, I heard a resonate crack followed by a heavy object hitting water; this was succeeded by a barrage of profanity and laughter. The guy at the front of the line looked to me with either disgust or envy as I made my exit.

“Yo', is he nailing that bitch in there?”

“That, or there's one hell of a clog.”

I ended up down in the Village, its streets filled with various harbingers of wackiness and unexpected plot twists. It was only midnight, so just about every bar in the area was near to or (well) over capacity, the habitués mingling and, from an outside perspective, coalescing. It's like in cartoons, when the animators decide to give different cells their own personalities and volitions, dreams and ambitions — what an Analytic might call projects. One of the few bars still dedicated to the purity of rock n' roll somehow evaded the notice of those clusters of people wandering the streets looking for a bar that was neither too crowded nor too expensive. It was loud, but, then again, Blue Cheer weren't in the business of writing chamber music.

“Pint of Brooklyn, please,” I said when the bartender approached.

“What?”

“Brooklyn!”

“Brooklyn! Fucking awesome place, right!”

“Yeah!”

“So what do you want?”

“A Brooklyn!”

“Cool!”

I ended up talking with one of the bar's regulars, Leo — which was short for Leonidas, which wasn't his real name, just a title he'd been given as a consequence of a stand-off at a sit-in sometime during one of California's endless summers. Our conversation was filled with deep lapses in dialog, an excessive amount of “what?”s and “huh?”s and other linguistic tools that implore the previous interlocutor to repeat her- or, in this case, himself. His position essentially boiled down to this: The reason why everything is so expensive now isn't because of any increase in the inherent cost of commodities; and it isn't just inflation; and it wasn't even the greed of the corporations, either. No, it was far more pernicious than that.

Here's Leo's theory: The last thing the square community wants is a repeat of the Sixties. The Sixties, according to Leo, were about one thing: liberation. In Africa, Asia, France, Prague, California — it didn't matter. It was about liberation from the system. In the Third World it was about liberation from imperial control. In the First World it was about liberation from the “plastic-fantastic American Dream” that amounted to a bunch of useless shit, a deep feeling of malaise, and several forms of medication, either what you got from the doctor's office or whatever you managed to find at the liquor store or at a shady corner (the one that always seems to have a streetlight out — at least in films).

What they had in the Sixties was disposable income. It went towards things like grass, acid, vinyl, munchies, threads, beers, and so forth. Rent was cheap. Gas was cheap. Food was cheap. But the squares were too smart to just start charging more for necessities. No, it had to sneak up on people. So they (Big Government, Big Business, Big Brother, the Illuminati, the New World Order; the people who decided to build the U.N. on the very site where Nathan Hale was executed, or perhaps some group of really sinister motherfuckers no one has been able to identify yet), started keeping wages the same, which of course means that you make less now than you did back in the day. “Cost of living goes up, but the wages stay constant, dig.”

Leo elaborated: In 1968, a person making minimum wage lived at eighty-five percent of the poverty level, provided, of course, this individual was supporting a four-person family. As of 2006, this number had dropped to around fifty-five percent.

“I won't even start with credit cards. They're the contemporary equivalent of the company store.” The last three words are sung. Before I can open my mouth, he's already downed some of his beer, wiped his mouth, and started in again with, “Fucking bummer, right man. But it's worse than that. It's way worse than that. Take away disposable income from the freaks, and you take away that spirit of community. I know that sounds jaded and all, but it's fucking true. I mean, who's into sharing when you don't have enough to eat, when only your straight and narrows can afford to party and pay the rent? So what does your average freak have to do? He has to get what the squares would, like, call a real job. And then it's just sacrifices, man. Sacrifice after sacrifice, until that hippie freak is just another suit who just happens to dig the Dead, who just happens to light up a number every once in a while, who just happens to have a lot of stories about trips and babes and shows and protests even if he can't remember what he'd dropped, the name of the chick he'd boned, the band he'd seen, the president he'd denounced….”

The Nixon Shock essentially did this. I was not familiar with this term. Leo didn't have the opportunity to explain it to me, as a bookie named Scraps soon arrived, and he evidently had some very important things he and Leo had to go over. Leo told me he'd return once everything was straightened out, but five minutes turned to ten, and ten to twenty, and twenty to half an hour. I scanned the streets as I walked to the train, but, unfortunately, Leo was nowhere to be found.

Saturday was spent almost exclusively in Queens. Tomas had managed to convince his friend Randy to drive us around. Most of the time in the car was passed without dialog, as the liturgy of their friendship was drowned out by Randy's “fucking awesome” sound system. He would ask if we knew of a band before we made it through two songs of an album; we would respond in the negative; he would then put on the next album. His taste proved to be so eclectic that it almost seems inappropriate to attribute him with any taste at all. Of all the music that we heard during our time in Queens, the only two bands I can remember enjoying are the Amity Front and Exit Clov.

The bars were not crowded, nor was parking much of a problem. Still, Randy insisted on staying in the car — double-parked and hazards on — as Tomas and I ran into each place to check out the facilities. As always, the bartenders were compliant when we told them what we were up to, and some even directed us to the pieces or apologized for recent renovations. As I had come to expect, most could not provide much more than the month in which any particular piece appeared. We ran into Greg(g), whom I had met earlier in the week at the gay bar in Manhattan. He welcomed us to “the queerest place on Roosevelt Avenue,” which struck both me and Tomas as odd, as one does not typically associate “Queens” with “gay”…revise that: one does not typically associate “Elmhurst” with “gay.” Tomas and I agreed that the place did not seem all that queer. The bartender was a woman in her thirties. She was wearing an orange sundress. Two women sat near the front door. Amy Winehouse crooned “Tears Dry on Their Own,” courtesy of an iPod.

Greg(g) had taken a seat in the middle of the bar, where he was casually sipping on a bloody mary while proofreading something that he didn't want discuss. After introducing him to Tomas, he asked about the search, and once again followed me into one of the bathrooms. The walls were pristine. The only markings were on the deodorant advertisements, which had been modified to better address Greg(g)'s desires. “After talking with you about Coprolalia, I realized that the washroom of my neighborhood watering-hole needed a little touching up.” Once he realized who Tomas was, they started talking about an artist whom I didn't know by name with a great deal of derision. Tomas and Greg(g) continued to talk over one the Sea and Cake's newer songs as I examined the second bathroom. There were several numbers for great head, far more than one finds at most bars. The names were predominately masculine; most of the numbers were the same: 867-5309.

We stopped for a burger and a few beers somewhere in Kew Gardens. Randy put five bucks in the jukebox. The place in which we found ourselves constituted the last of the Queens bars on Sean's list, so we opted to stay and watch the final innings of an anticlimactic Yankee game, which ended with a dumbfounded Bobby Abreu watching strike three sail past the middle of the plate. A guy at the bar laurelled K-Rod as the new Mariano Rivera (“Fucking automatic, son”).

A few plans for the remainder of the day were pitched as we aimlessly drove around listening to “Teen Age Riot.” We eventually decided to go back to Randy's parents' mansion in Great Neck after driving all the way into Red Hook to pick up some barbecue essentials at Fairway. We would have gone elsewhere to pick up groceries, but Tomas insisted on Fairway because neither Randy nor I had ever been there. The store is like no place else — as advertised. It seemed to be a Mecca for culinary masters, vegans without trust funds (something of a rarity), and black intellectuals partial to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad (perhaps all three in some cases). The Food Network had some cameramen floating around the produce section, but we didn't see anyone we recognized.

The drive back up the B.Q.E. was smooth with the exception of a sudden and seemingly meaningless traffic jam in Greenpoint. The L.I.E. gave us no problems. Randy had put of a mix of random 90's songs, which was actually labeled “Random 90's Songs.” It featured, among others I had heard before but cannot name, Spacehog, Tripping Daisy, the Caulfields, Lucas, Supergrass, Harvey Danger, Mazzy Star, Skeelo, Candlebox, the Primative Radio Gods and Joe Public.

Randy's home certainly qualified as a mansion, perhaps even a manor. The house was exceptionally modern — cubist, juxtaposed as opposed to symmetrical, gray, cold. Both mom and dad were out of town, which, from what I could infer, was far from atypical. From the backyard you could see City Island and the Throgs Neck and Whitestone Bridges. Airplanes came and went at a leisurely pace over the gray-blue monotony of the Sound.

We split two bottles of champagne (“What else are you supposed to drink in a fucking mansion?” Tomas asked), and spent most of the afternoon swimming, cooking, and eating. Food-coma set in rather quickly after the last round of brats, and I found myself watching a predictable thriller on one of the premium channels in one of those massage chairs that they sell at the Sharper Image. I had never met anyone who owned one. I awoke to find Randy passed out on the adjacent couch. Tomas was in the kitchen with Randy's live-in maid, Katya, who was twenty, Russian, and flush. Tomas was, too. They were laughing comfortably about something that wasn't all that funny.

We arrived back at Tomas' loft under a Krakatoa sky. Barazov and his friends were preparing for a night on the town. They were archetypes of a sort in that they were desperately trying to embody that type of spontaneity Nietzsche was so fond of. With them, however, it was fairly obvious that they had to be conscious of being spontaneous. So it wasn't really spontaneity at all, but rather a contrived and temporary denial of the inescapable bourgeoisie mentality for which the avant-garde is supposed to have so much contempt. They conformed to the nonconformist manner of wearing black and appearing sullen. They probably had copious amounts of meaningless sex (and it was meaningless, too, as the idea of free-love to them was merely the rejection of monogamy, as opposed to the espousal of a personal tenet, be it spiritual, emotional, ethical, or human), read a lot of Wikipedia entries, and dabbled in the various drugs available to them. Their lifestyle was profoundly childish and narcissistic — which, in-itself, is a profoundly childish orientation to the world.

To further confine them to a stereotype, three out of the four there were members in a rock band — the Sheeps. Their music probably wasn't independent in spirit, but you could tell that it fell into the genre of Indie, a term, like Alternative, that at one point precluded a distinct sound, though by now it has become yet another vacuous label that the Them (those to whom people attribute unfathomable power) employ in order to push useless consumables upon the anxious, the insecure, and the heavily medicated. All in all, the Sheeps, and the people like the Sheeps, engender the profligate lifestyle for which many residents of Williamsburg and Greenpoint have become so infamous and reviled. They are the paragons of white kids as defined by those who have a strong distaste for white people. They are rich. They are arrogant. They are selfish, rude and oblivious. Most importantly, they have neither the will nor the intellect to create in earnest, as they are too lazy and self-conscious to attempt to actualize the talents (whether real or imagined) from which their narcissism derives.

“So you're the Coprolalia guy, huh?” Barazov asked as I approached him. “I thought you'd be taller.” He then looked to his friends snickering at the display of irreverence.

Randy rolled his eyes. “I'm going to take off, but you guys should definitely give me a call if you make it down to the Slope tonight,” he said as he walked out the door.

Barazov didn't introduce me to his friends. No one took the opportunity to introduce themselves, either. They exchanged cautious glances like hobos sharing a bottle. There was not a clear reason for the attitude or the silence. One could say it is a lifestyle more than a penchant. Tomas eventually asked where Lindsay and Aberdeen were. He received a shrug from Barazov, a slight, frivolous movement no more engaging than a restrained paroxysm or a suppressed yawn. The derelict chorus chuckled. Tomas motioned toward a door down the hall.

“He's such a fucking brat,” he exhausted as he closed the door to his room. “I can't wait until he's done rebelling with his daddy's fucking money, gets his corporate job, and moves the fuck out of my apartment.” From the other room we heard an explosion of laughter.

Tomas' room was filled with nearly empty liquor bottles and books. My eyes landed on Dennett's Consciousness Explained. “Have you read that before?” he asked.

“I browsed through it once.”

“I haven't gotten much of a chance to read it, either. This guy recommended it to me. Met him in line at Polam — one of the delis on Manhattan. He's apparently starting some magazine called the Green Gnome. I don't know how I feel about it. He wants me to contribute to it, but I don't think I'm going to bother.”

“Why not?”

“I don't think he'll ever publish it. Even if he gets one issue out, I doubt it will go anywhere. He didn't seem to have any business sense.

“I do most of my work in Long Island City,” he responded to my wandering eyes. “I got a really good deal on a studio up there…not too far from P.S. 1.” I nodded absently. “Do you like the Zombies?”

“Sure.”

“I just got their greatest hits record, and I've really been digging on it lately.” The first track was very familiar. “So when do you want to do the East Village?”

“What?”

“When do you want to go looking for Coprolalias in the Village? You haven't been there yet, have you?”

“A little. There's still a lot to do.”

“There's gotta be a fucking ton over there.”

“I figure we can do it this coming week. It's probably going to take a few days.”

“That's fucking cool by me, man. I feel like I never go there anymore.” He paused. “Someone threw that out,” he said as noticed that my eyes were focused on a painting.

“Really?”

“Yeah, they lived right around the corner. I don't know if the guy painted it or anything, but it just kinda called out to me.”

“Someone just threw it out?”

“Yeah, I met them as they were moving — well, more like getting kicked—out.”

“They were evicted?”

“No; their landlord just started building two stories on top of them. They lived on the top floor, too. They did the most rational thing they could do — besides move, of course.”

“What's that?”

“They asked for a rent reduction. And guess what happened?”

“I don't know.”

“The fucking landlord told them to either deal with the construction or get the fuck out.”

“That's fucked up, man.”

“I know. I think they got like a free month out of it, but, still….”

“Isn't that type of thing illegal?”

“It's Greenpoint. Do you have any idea how many of these fucking places are illegal?”

I nodded. “Well, whoever painted that must have really loved triangles and the color blue.”

“Yeah,” he responded as he pulled two cans of beer out of a mini-fridge. “You want one?”

“Sure.”

“Come to think of it, it was the same guy who’s doing that gnome magazine. Huh,” ponderously. “Either way, I never could figure out what the dude was trying to say with it,” he said as he tossed a can my way. “I don't think there's one clear message in it. It's probably just what came out.” He cracked his beer, took a long sip, and flashed either a smile or a wince. “You know how that goes.”

“I guess so.”

5

Nine days have passed since I began this endeavor. By this point it is Sunday, the Lord's day. The neighborhood drowns in bells and families spilling onto the avenues from the churches. With the guilty orison that is Mass being over, the day will be spent barbecuing, drinking, and playing host to relatives. There is an almost tangible sense of tranquility on these mornings. The bodega urchins, drug peddlers, and walking erections, otherwise known as thugs (probably thugz, as “hard” people love showing off the fact that they are functionally illiterate), are still asleep, so defenses are down, smiles are abundant, and baking asphalt is about the only scent that confronts the nose. Bachatas quietly drift from the windows of tenement buildings like cirrus clouds; the streets pulse with laughter and an uncharacteristically timid rapport between feet and accelerator pedals.

I am overwhelmed by the desire to take the day off. I've been steadily drunk, too drunk only twice, for nearly a fortnight. In my pocket is two dollars and eighty-five cents. I've almost become accustomed to going into a bar without anticipating the arrival of a friend, to drinking without participating in banter or discourse, to leaving without a round of goodbyes. I've certainly begun to take my roommate's absence for granted. Solitude has never been anything more than a short-lived option for me. I've lived with grandparents, siblings, cousins, friends, roommates, even a girlfriend. I have never returned to an empty home with such regularity. It's both a relief and a curse, but, on the bright side, it has allowed me to experience another side of the City that has always been foreign to me.

New York is an odd place. This is true for a number of reasons, obviously, but I speak here exclusively of geography and demographics. When I first moved here, I was under the rather cynical impression that all of the neighborhood names were contrived; in my mind, they were arbitrary boundaries created and manipulated by real estate agencies that fabricated “feels” either to push property on foreign investors or to rent or sell spaces to domestic immigrants from places like Topeka and Duluth. True, I accepted the existence of myriad disparities between East New York, as well as the other lands of Persephone, and the Upper West Side; and I knew that the Village will always house the young and ambitious — which is especially true now, since the spirit of the Village extends well into north Brooklyn — but I could not understand how one differentiated between adjacent neighborhoods like Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens (or, for Manhattanites, Murray Hill and Gramercy Park) without taking recourse to street names and numbers on buildings. As Sartre said of the City (right after the war, I believe, and of Midtown, I would assume), the storefronts and people seem interchangeable; the only distinction between locations is the rent. And yet the more I explore the City, the more I engage it, the more I realize that it's not only that every neighborhood is different; every block of this city contains a sin qua non, an atmosphere, that cannot be described very well — it can only be experienced. Some people go to Europe to experience a plethora of cultures. New York City will give you the same experience, but you won’t need a passport; you just need a good pair of sneakers.

I've been to more than half of the bars on Sean's list. I've yet to get to some of the more remote places in Brooklyn, like Red Hook, which is accessible only via the B61—the most capricious bus in Brooklyn, according to the Tomas. I plan on exploring the neighborhoods south of Prospect Park this coming week. I would have completed the exploration of Windsor Terrance and what has come to be known as Greenwood Heights last night, but the stretch of Seventh Avenue that runs through Park Slope slowed our expedition to a crawl. There were just too many women, too many bars, too many drinks. To be honest, I don't remember how I got home last night.

Without question, Park Slope retains Coprolalia's pieces the longest. This is not surprising by any means if one knows the idiosyncrasies of the area, but it does go against the general trend that I have seen in other areas like the Slope. Neighborhoods that have recently “come up” over the past decade or so are often reluctant to keep a Coprolalia. Some owners wish to prove the area's nascent respectability, and consequently despise the artist to the extent that one is liable to be asked to vacate the premises with a firm grip around the shoulder if the artist's name is even uttered. Others wish to embrace the former edginess of their neighborhood. They clutch tightly to this past, sometimes under the belief that the streets have been largely uncontaminated by condo barons and the more bohemian I-Bankers and trust-funders in possession of enough dough to actually live in the monstrosities created by the former. It's a proactive form of denial. Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, and Boerum Hill are similar in this respect. At one place on Smith Street, the main drag for the three neighborhoods just mentioned, the Coprolalia installation has actually been quarantined off by four pieces of duct-tape that the owner evidently put up herself.

It goes without saying that I still have yet to discover a pattern. Even if he time-stamped all of his work, it would seem impossible to track him down. Still, I have been attempting to recreate his nights. I ask the staff at each location when they first noticed that there was something in their midst that could potentially be a Coprolalia. Most say that they don't pay much attention. I emphasize the point that I'm not looking for exact figures, that I simply need a compass. Sometimes I get a day, sometimes a weekend, sometimes just a month. It seems preposterous that a man would so diligently obfuscate the time or date he visited a bar, but this seems to be yet another one of Coprolalia's hobbies.

Here's a specific example. According to my sources, Coprolalia hit eight locations over the course of a weekend in mid-April: three in Manhattan (East Village, Lower East Side, Morningside Heights), four in Brooklyn (Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, Greenpoint, Clinton Hill), and one in Queens (Astoria). Three of the pieces, the ones in Morningside Heights, Park Slope, and Astoria were discerned relatively quickly; of the other five pieces, no one is willing to commit to a day, let alone a time. The staff at the Park Slope tavern is certain that Coprolalia was in the bar after seven and prior to nine on Friday. As the size of the piece in Astoria makes it virtually impossible to miss, several members of the staff are more than confident that it appeared between the hours of ten and one on Friday night. The window in which the Morningside installation appeared is wider; the bartender with whom I spoke is certain that the artist came in during his shift, which began at eight and ended at four on the same night. If this information is accurate, I can generate a rough time-line of Coprolalia's travels for the night, provided, of course, these were the only three destinations in his itinerary.

Coprolalia enters the Park Slope tavern sometime during happy hour. It is busy enough so that no one notices him, but slow enough so that he runs a relatively low risk of being interrupted or hurried while creating the piece entitled Herculi Romano Augusto. It is one of the rare cases in which Coprolalia has provided a title, though Sean is absolutely confounded by its meaning. He only knows that “Herculi Romano Augusto” was one of the many honorifics the emperor Commodus bestowed upon himself. Coprolalia must leave this establishment after seven, but prior to nine in the evening, but it is difficult to say the direction in which he goes. The itinerary splits into two scenarios, though in both he begins at the Union Street R train, as it is the closest station to the bar. In the first scenario he transfers to the 2 or 3 train at Atlantic, transfers again to the 1 (the local), probably at 96th Street in Manhattan, and then gets out at the 110th Street stop. This trip takes him between forty-five minutes and an hour and fifteen minutes, thereby meaning he arrives at the bar in Morningside Heights sometime between eight or so and ten-fifteen. It is there that he creates what has been dubbed Glass Onion, a title that Sean created because he thinks it to be a reference to the Beatles song of the same name. At the earliest, Coprolalia gets back on the train at eight-thirty. He then travels south via the 1, transfers to either the 2 or the 3 train, transfers again to the N or the W train at Times Square, and then proceeds into Astoria (or he could have taken a different train, the 7, say, to Queens Plaza where he transfers to either the N or the W). Taking into account that it is no longer rush hour, the trip has to take him close to an hour, if not longer. Also, the bar is not particularly close to the train, meaning that he has to spend at least fifteen minutes walking in order to get there. This places him in the final bar in Astoria, at the earliest, sometime around quarter to ten. He then performs his work, which has to take a substantial amount of time because — as has been established — the piece is atypically large. As the staff is certain that the piece appeared after ten, it is possible that he began his work shortly after arriving, and that it took half an hour to produce. It is also possible that Coprolalia took his time, that he left Morningside Heights as late as eleven or eleven-thirty, and that he arrived in Astoria well after midnight. End scenario one.

In scenario two, Coprolalia takes the R train from Union to Atlantic, but transfers to the N as opposed to the 2 or 3. Although a straight shot to Astoria, the ride on the N takes over an hour. Add the fifteen minutes it takes him to walk from the train station to the bar, as well as a minimum of fifteen minutes required to get from the bar in Park Slope to Atlantic, and you arrive at a total travel time of somewhere between an hour and a half and two hours. This means he can leave the bar in Park Slope at seven, arrive at the establishment in Astoria by nine, create Procession/Regression (another title provided by Sean), and then make it into Morningside Heights by eleven or so to produce Glass Onion.

Both patterns are feasible. Either way you cut it, however, neither scenario makes any rational sense. I'll venture to say that, on rare occasions, New Yorkers may visit three neighborhoods in a night. I'll even admit that there have been cases in which people have managed to go to the three neighborhoods I have mentioned above within a few hours. They would only do so, however, if they satisfied one of two conditions: they have three very important events that unfortunately fall on the same day, or they own a car. Because the serpentine path tediously articulated above is the norm rather than the exception for Coprolalia's travels, this leads me to believe that he is not confined to the lines on the Map. He most certainly owns a car.

As I go over my notes, now with a cup of hot coffee that emits no steam in my hand, I begin to create new patterns, patterns that may or may not exist. There's a large map of each borough of the city, save Staten Island, on the wall in the living room. I also have a smaller map that, paradoxically, contains all five boroughs. On the larger maps, each confirmed Coprolalia is represented by a thumbtack. On the smaller map are eight thumbtacks, each one corresponding to one of the bars mentioned above. Something emerges.

The most rational route from Park Slope to Astoria, by car, would be to take the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to the Grand Central Parkway. In fact, the bar in Astoria is only a block or two away from an off ramp. Furthermore, if one were to drive from Park Slope to the B.Q.E., it would be quickest to cut through Gowanus and into Carroll Gardens; and if one were to take the B.Q.E. from Park Slope to Astoria, it would be necessary to drive past Clinton Hill and Greenpoint. This means that the only locations that appear to be random, provided there was a specified plan to go from Park Slope to Astoria, are the ones in Manhattan. But look here. The Grand Central Parkway leads to the Triborough Bridge, which connects Queens to the Bronx and Manhattan. In fact, if one wanted to avoid Manhattan traffic when going from Park Slope to Morningside, the best route would be the B.Q.E. to the Grand Central and over the Triborough. This explains seven out of the nine. Perhaps the other two appeared the following night.

I take the thumbtacks out, flip the pages of my notebook to another weekend, and begin to form new constellations. The second weekend of March of this year; constellation: a distorted Auriga. The pins demarcate bars in eastern Williamsburg, Hunts Point, Washington Heights, the West Village, Carroll Gardens, and Kensington. If he followed that route, or the reverse of it, it would seem that three of the locations were necessary: Williamsburg, Washington Heights, and Kensington. Were the other three just places where he stopped to grab a beer?

I map out another eight or nine weekends and discern a similar pattern. His work always appears in at least one bar in north Brooklyn and one bar in the vicinity of Prospect Park. Morningside is frequented habitually, as is the west side of Manhattan. The east side locations are in close proximity to the various bridges that head into either Brooklyn or Queens with the exception of the Village. Either way, I believe I have found both his origin and terminus, though I don't know which is which.

I'm on the phone with Sean before I consciously realize that I've called him. “I think I know where Coprolalia lives.”

“Really?” incredulously.

“Well…not exactly; but I've come to the conclusion that he lives in Williamsburg and works around Prospect Park or works in Williamsburg and lives around Prospect Park.”

“And how did you come to this conclusion?”

“Well, first I realized that he has a car. It wouldn't make sense for him to take the train given some of the locations he hits. In Astoria alone he's been to four or five spots that are almost a mile away from the closest train station.”

“He could be taking the bus,” he says as he lights up.

“Well,” slightly deflated, “I understand that. But a car just makes so much more sense. In one night he managed to get to three bars that are each, like, ten miles away from one another. No one would go through that much trouble to paint the town, if you'll pardon the pun. A train rider would localize the bars he goes to. Someone with a car, however, would be free to satisfy his most capricious desires.”

“You don't know Coprolalia,” flatly.

“What do you mean?” fully deflated.

“Look, I've been tracking his work for nearly a decade now. You know that. Now, in the past he used to localize his work, as you said. One weekend would be dedicated to Alphabet City, the next to Carroll Gardens, the next to the Financial District and TriBeCa; then, after a few prolific weekends, he would go missing for two months or so. For the past three years, however, he's been specifying his locations, as if each bar is chosen intentionally.”

“So what you're saying is that he bought a car three years ago.”

“I guess that's a possibility,” he chuckles. “But that means that this Prospect Park-Williamsburg connection is no longer entirely sound. If he's so capricious, that means he's not tied to any pattern whatsoever; either he has a car or else he is in some capacity bound to these two locales.”

To me, it's petty nay-saying for Sean to produce such an exclusive disjunction, but, as I've learned with these professorial types, there's no point in arguing.

“So how deep into the list are you?” he asks.

“I have a few more places I need to visit.”

He grunts as to imply satisfaction. “Well, I'm going down to a tavern in Red hook later today. Coprolalia has recently been to some dumpy place by the lot IKEA recently bought for something like thirty million dollars.”

“There's going to be an IKEA in Red Hook?”

“Kinda weird, right?” he laughs.

“Going back to the piece, though — how did you find out about it?”

“Someone sent me an email.”

“This happens frequently?”

“Oh, I'd say I get at least four or five a day. Only a few of them actually lead me to genuine articles.”

“Has he done anything else recently?”

“Let's see,” as he rustles some papers, “There's supposed to be one in the courthouse in Kings.”

“Which one?”

“The one on Adams. Is that the Supreme Court?”

“I don't know.”

“I'm pretty sure it is.”

“Okay.”

“Regardless, someone told me to examine a stall on the first floor. I was going to look into that one tomorrow — the courts are obviously closed today. Besides that, as well as the one in Red Hook, it's been relatively quiet for the past month and a half or so. I suspect it will pick up in a few weeks. As I've said, he usually has a few prolific weeks, especially in the summer, followed by a lull.”

“Is it possible that he's going to neighborhoods that he hasn't been to in the past? You know, maybe that's why we haven't seen as much activity recently. For all we know, he could be working in Staten Island now.”

“It's doubtful. The only Coprolalia piece to have been featured in Staten Island — St. George, to be precise — appeared six or seven years ago.” He pauses. “And don't even suggest Jersey. I've probably seen fifteen spurious pieces in Hoboken this year alone. The only genuine article I've found over there was in the Jersey City PATH station. That was, what, maybe four years ago.”

“What about East New York or some place like that?”

“I've never been asked to authenticate a piece that deep into Brooklyn.” He pauses. “I take that back. I went out to Gerritsen Beach once. That was a nightmare.”

“Why is that?”

“It's not a bad little neighborhood; it's just not the most accessible part of Brooklyn.” He pauses. “Look, it's certainly possible that he's been out to the eastern regions of Brooklyn and Queens with a greater frequency than in the past, but I wouldn't recommend you expand into these types of areas blindly. The city has changed a lot over the years, but there are still places where one just shouldn't go. At least not alone.”

“I understand that, but it seems as though he's running low on locations. Where else does he have to go?”

“He's not a vandal out to mark his territory,” indignantly. “Many establishments have featured three or four of his pieces, sometimes concomitantly.”

“What about subway stations.”

“That's something of a rarity.”

“Well, doesn't that increase the likelihood of his owning a car?”

He sighs. “Not especially. Subway stations typically have cameras, as well as people waiting for the train. And police are occasionally there, too. In other words, he could very easily be caught if he were to take to featuring his work in train stations. This is not to say that he has never made an exception. Still, it's not a milieu with which you should waste your time.” He pauses. “I don't think he's ever done anything on — or in, for that matter — a train car. Then again, I've never looked as diligently as I could have.”

There's a long pause on the line.

“So what do you think? What should I do at this point?”

“Well, for one, I don't think it's all that wise to return to the bars that he's frequented in the past. It's not particularly conducive to finding him. The probability of catching him in the act is so low as to make the effort futile. The only reason I provided you with that list was to allow you the opportunity to familiarize yourself with some of his work.”

“I was retracing his steps with the hope of running into someone who knows him.”

A captious groan floats down the line. It's one of those things you can just feel. “It's likely that even those who know him have no idea who he really is.”

“So now I'm chasing Clark Kent?”

“I'm just saying that he is a very secretive person. He's not going to disclose his identity to just anybody.”

“And yet he was more than willing to impart that information to you,” I respond.

“That's true,” as he lights another cigarette. “You have to remember this was before he became famous.”

“How did he become so famous? Everybody seems to know his name in this city. It's weird. I mean, I met a guy the other day who had never heard of Dali, yet he knew all about Coprolalia.”

“I don't want to sound like a braggart, but I was the first one to ever publish an article on him. In fact, if it weren't for me, no one would have ever put all of the pieces together; it'd be assumed that Coprolalia's corpus represents the work of a myriad of artists and a few talented drunks — besides the Bay Ridge collection, of course.”

The desire to keep up the conversation wastes away for both of us. The call ends in what feels like a stalemate. My phone ends up on the table next to a stack of borrowed and owned books that were featured in the bibliography of a paper I turned in a few weeks ago. The Brothers Karamazov is on top of the pile. My bookmark is the discarded foil from a pack of cigarettes. It rests between pages 780 and 781. On the bottom of page 780 the following passage has been underlined with pen: “If everything in the universe were sensible, nothing would happen.” I don't look at it; I simply remember it. It's one of those brilliant lines that stay with you. I light the remnants of something sitting in the incense catcher. The apartment is overtaken by a pungent, herbal aroma. The couch begins to vibrate slightly; my skin hums a pleasant tune; my eyes go saurian. I feel an oppressive weight on my chest, a presence of anxiety that slowly dissipates over the course of a few minutes.

Sitting here in one of those horse latitudes of existence, I feel a part of me wants to give up, to abandon the search. Is it not conceited to believe that I can find him when so many others have failed? Of course it is. Then again, what else do I have to do? I am strolling down the Via Atē. I am Don Quixote sans Rocinante. Hell, I don't even have a Sancho Panza. I am not only alone, but also without responsibility — without direction, only temptation. I am watching the lazy River Heraclitus from what feels like the wrong bank. I should not be looking back this early in my life to evanescent youth, and yet I am almost paralyzed by the desire to feel the bubbles from a glass of coca-cola I once had when I was nine on my tongue, to dance to Nina Simone's rendition of “I Loves You Porky” with barefoot Connie in that overpriced jazz club in Gramercy, to spend the night sharing a case Natty Bo' with the guys on the shore of Chesapeake Bay just before our respective departures to our respective universities. If nothing is eternal, then nothing really matters.

So this is despair.

6

Monday arrives with a languid and party cloudy dawn. There is talk of rain. At least that's what some of the weathermen on the Internet say. I shower after learning that John Edwards' expensive haircut is more important than the hundreds of people who have been killed in Iraq in the previous twenty-four hours (and don't kid yourself; it's at least in the hundreds). The shower liner needs to be changed soon. I don't remember this being such a persistent problem when I lived with my parents — the mildew that creeps up like the tide. I don't know any women with this problem, either. Then again, how often do I gaze upon the curtains of strange women?

I'm waiting on the train platform by quarter after eight, aboard the train by eight-twenty. This constitutes the earliest time I have ever left my apartment in Bushwick, unless one counts those lucubratory nights that bitterly transcend the dawn and necessitate several cups of coffee, the occasional amphetamine, and, at some point, a horribly agitated and nonsensical and silent tirade on a matter that is neither pressing nor relevant to the catalyst behind the outburst. These are the types of hours that are comparative to the infamous and brutal Alaskan summer nights, nights infested with wall-eyed lunatics engaging in mild levels of mayhem (not in the legal sense, of course — i.e. to maim or disfigure a potential soldier in the King's army) throughout towns that are described as sleepy because they are populated by somnambulists sauntering (in the strictly Thoreauian sense) through memoryless weeks under the ruthless empire of the sun.

My typical commute into the City had taken place no earlier than ten, no later than eleven. True, the riders were far from boisterous then, but they had the tendency to appear less sleep-deprived than those with whom I share the car at this early hour, people best defined by either one or a conjunction of the following four adjectives: ornery, pensive, bored, asleep in a position that is both uncomfortable and conducive to nothing more than making said individual appear gruesomely unattractive and ostensibly homeless. I would paint myself a hue that straddles the line between the first two because I have been forced to stand. I didn't think it possible that one could be required to stay on one's feet so deep in Brooklyn.

There are no babies on the train, a detail that would be an anomaly at virtually any other hour in the day unless we're talking about the lean hours, which cater to drunks two (perhaps three) drinks past sympathy. All of the people here are clearly on their way to work. The older commuters, the awake ones anyhow, have become inured to the routine. The younger ones, however, still have some fight in them; there is an indelible bitterness in their eyes, as they are more than likely chagrined over the inescapable nature of that proverbial rat race, which involves little running and a far greater proportion of sheep to rats. One of them listens to a song about the lyricist's keen intellect. The lyrics stop short of saying anything insightful or particularly interesting because the song is of that genre of hip-hop that speaks to college-educated kids and loners, those who assume their lack of friends and affinity with the feel of a fifi-bag to be portends of brilliance or genius or whatever it is you call the ability to rationalize a low score on an IQ exam and a bedroom rank with the smell of mushrooms, feet, and sour milk. They are the boring protagonists in boring novels, adventurers as curious as furniture, subjects of insult, purveyors of silent retort. They are the antiheroes of bygone days, the heroes Generation X, made of the same special stuff of Felix Krull and would be no less murderous and pathetic than Nero if given the opportunity. Other songs can be heard, including someone's ring tone, which features the chorus of the Pink song “U + Ur Hand” (and it is spelled that way, too, perhaps to intimate that the lyrics were written out in a series of text messages) blasting through one shitty speaker again and again, though the owner of the phone does not seem to be receiving a call — or, from the look of her, too many drink offers. Other people are on the phone, as the M is superterranean throughout north Brooklyn and Queens. The three people in their residency that board at Woodhull are probably the most loquacious of this group. An older woman speaking in Chinese to someone with bad reception or a broken hearing aid is undoubtedly the loudest. Several Orthodox Jewish men speak in low tones and glance about the train like pitchers with pick-off moves that any umpire would call a balk.

As we approach Manhattan, the people boarding the train begin to resemble models from those uncomfortably erotic American Apparel advertisements: pallid faces and lugubrious countenances, emaciated bodies adorned in clothing that caters to a Progeria fetish. Most of these individuals read novels with controversial and profane titles or self-indulgent memoirs about being totally punk before it was cool to be totally punk or treatises by English professors for whom the usage of a German word with a readily available English equivalent brings on a state of tumescence. The few not reading look impatient and unimpressed. I don't know why.

The train has nearly filled to capacity by the time we reach the Marcy Street station. One young man with the skin tone of dishwater gets his guitar caught in the door, which arouses a lot of acerbic commentary that is more racially motivated than most would like to admit. He eventually makes his way in, which sends us on towards Manhattan, its skyline dissolving into a million different stories both concentric and concurrent.

I transfer to the F train at Delancey. Most of the other passengers coming from the M are going the other way — north, towards the white lights emitted from the shitty souvenir shops that plague Midtown and mutate your average pedestrian into a fevered apparition during the colder months of the year. The F train is filled with relatively supervised Chinese children jumping and screaming and howling for reasons that no one, not even the other children, seem to understand. They all get off the train at Grand Street, which grants me a seat for the first time of the day. No one exits or enters at East Broadway. The Gatsby-Warhols and Astor-Dworkins detrain at York. Most of the remaining passengers are black, between the ages of thirty-five and fifty, and in various states of indignation. The Jay Street-Borough Hall stop sees the majority of them leave. By the time the train hits President Street, there are only eight other people in the car. Out of the eight, there’s a couple that keeps looking to the Map directly above my shoulder. They cannot seem to decide whether they are still in Manhattan or not. When I finally inform them that they are indeed in Brooklyn, the man looks to me as though I hold a knife in one hand and his severed penis in the other. They stare out the window as the train ascends into the light. This is serendipitous. “Whadda' know? There's Lady Liberty.”

They get out of the train at Smith and Ninth, which leaves me alone with only two people — one of those large, contractor types from Bay Ridge with slick, brillowy, cement-colored hair, and a prune of a black woman dressed in what may or may not be funeral attire. The man keeps talking to himself, occasionally tossing a rhetorical in the direction of the woman, who denies direct eye-contact with either myself or the guy busy telling anyone within earshot that, “I just love Jesus,” in a tired monotone. “Ya' know, dare's worship, and den dare's how I worship — s'like supersonic worship, ya' know.” I snicker a bit. “People'll laugh when day hear dat, but when da' rapture happens, ya' know, we're gonna be da' ones laughing at 'dem.” She nods. “Yeah we are.” He looks to her. She stares straight ahead. I notice that she is holding a Watchtower pamphlet. “Ya' know what I'm getting' at dough, right?” The woman mumbles something inaudible. “Yeah, 'cause Jesus wantsta' come down and save us. He does. You'n me. 'Cause you'n me — you'n me — we're da' chosen ones. The kikes think day's God' people,” he begins slowly with a shake of his head. “Nah, nah; let me tell you something: you'n me, we're da' chosen ones. We've decided what path we wanna follow. We decided, and we’re gonna be rewarded.” He stops. “I ain’t always been like dis, dough. Believe it or not, I youseda get high on crack.” He nods awkwardly; it's as though he's reciting from a script with which he's not entirely familiar — perhaps a passage from Infinite Jest that got the ax. “Believe it or not, believe it or not: I youseda smoke crack cocaine. But then I hit rock bottom. I mean, slam, bam — rock-freaking bottom. I'd woken up under da boardwalk, on streets I ain't never seen, in hoods that I ain't never been to, in apartments where I didn't know nobody's name, in the bathroom of freaking Paulmil. And den I woke up in Central Booking one day, and had no clue how I got dare. I was lost. Lost! And den someone — and I'm sure he was an angel — he left a Bible in the cell. I picked it up. I read it. Right there in the cell! I read all four gospels. And I realized dat I'd been givin up my life for drugs, and that I should be givin up my life for Jesus. Dats what it took. Dats what made me change my ways. I suddenly knew why I was here. It all made sense. I once was lost, and now I'm found, ya know,” with a laugh. “I was put here to spread da Gospel: da good news: dat dis world's soon to end because Jesus is comin back. 'Cause dare ain't no justice now. And dare ain't gonna be no justice until Jesus returns to us. And den; and den.” He nods enthusiastically. “You'n me; we accept Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior,” he begins slowly. “We accept dat we're only gonna get inda' heaven if we love'n worship Him. 'Cause dat's eternity. Says so in da' scriptures — and I read da' scriptures. I know'm better'n the priests. I know all 'bout eternity. It ain't five minutes; it ain't even a day. Eternity. All'a time. And it's either heaven or hell. For all'a time. And s'our choice, too. See, 'cause God's dat great. He gave us dat choice, ya' know. And it's either heaven or hell.” She turns to him, nods, and smiles. “Hell scares me. Sure it scares you, too. It really gets da' me, dough — keeps me from sleepin' sometimes. Hell: demons and da' Evil One torturing people for all'a time. All'a time!” ebulliently. “Fughetaboutit!” with the same ebullience. “But I know I love Jesus; I know he'll save me from all'a dat. From hell. Dat's how great He is. He'll save me from dat. And I know He's coming back soon. I just know it. Faith ain't got nutting to do with it. Look 'round. We're livin' in the end times. Wars. You know there ain't never been a time when there were more wars goin' on. Goes to show. Goes to show ya' He's comin' soon. And he wants to come back right now. If it were up to Jesus, we'd all be saved right now; all the sinners of da' world — da' atheists (look to me), and da' faggots (another look to me), and da' Allah worshipers (begins to look at me and perhaps realizes that Allah is just the Arabic word that denotes the monotheistic God featured in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) — day'd be sent straight to hell. But He's got da' Fadder, ya' know, and the Fadder's sayin', 'Jesus, now ain't da' time,' ya' know. 'Cause God, da' Fadder, He wants to save more people. And it's His mercy dat keeps us here. 'Cause God — bless His Holy name — could wipe us out. Ya' know,” as he blows on an imaginary dandelion, “and we're gone. Just like dat.” Again with the dandelion. “It's His Mercy dat keeps us here. And people laugh; day wanna tell me not to love Jesus so much, but I ain't botherin' no one. I'm just mindin' my own, lovin' my Jesus.” The F train pulls into the 15th Street station. I stand. The doors open. “Bless you, sir,” the man yells in my direction. I walk out of the train. The doors close. Like most Evangelicals, he probably assumes his denomination to be his own: an odd amalgam that seeks to synthesize the teachings of the Gospels and Revelations with the personality of Abraham. And I imagine the man in the shoes of Abraham. I imagine that catamite of the Lord climbing up Mount Moriah, constructing the altar where He had appeared to him a few days previously, and then employing some mysterious tactics to get the child onto the altar. Unlike Abraham, though, I see this myrmidon heedlessly raising his knife, struggling with putti, consummating the fillicide. The angels are stunned by his audacity. God seriously considers accepting some blame. The man, however, is sanguine, perhaps even a bit arrogant. With the warm blood of his son flowing from the knife onto his hand, he looks to the angels, quotes Luke 14:26, and then adds, “I hated dat fucking kid, and I hate da' fuckin' world. Dat’s what contempt means, right? It’s proof that I love you, Jesus.”

After picking up breakfast, I take a seat on one of the many open benches in Prospect Park. It's about half past nine. There's a surprising amount of joggers at such an early hour on a Monday morning. They race past the elderly and quiescent couples shuffling past as I eat my bagel and drink my coffee.

I am committing the act that is prosaically known as “people watching,” a leisurely activity that is not as active as most activities; in fact it is more of a pass-time, in that it passes time. I know not to look at people directly, so I can't really be said to be watching them. I merely notice them, speculate on their motivations and convictions, and then move on to the next individual or group of individuals to catch my attention.

I sit upon the same bench until I tire of judging people I will never come to know: the young woman in those shorts that are so conducive to camel-toe, the old man concealing a Newton's Cradle in his sweatpants, the tranquil few taking in a landscape that only changes with the seasons, the early-rising tourists, who have probably gotten lost on their way to the Botanical Gardens or the museum, the young mothers with curious-looking children in curious-looking contraptions. I am the unshaven twenty-something that needs to do something with his life. A group of toddlers stream past like a pack of wild dogs as I begin to walk in the direction of the southwest exit. Several women follow like patient and passive shepherds. There is more than likely a playground in the vicinity, but I can't see it from where I am.

Without any real orientation to the week as a seven-day construct, every day feels like Saturday or Sunday, depending on my mood. Today is more of a Sunday than a Saturday; therefore, it is natural to see the bars closed. I don't consider the option of looking for one that caters to only the most forsaken of aquarium drinkers; instead, I take to inquiring in coffee shops and other locations that have public restrooms not exclusively reserved for patrons. These cafés are filled with women with computers, magazines, newspapers, or popular novels in front of them. There's almost always one very intense girl of maybe seventeen reading something very heavy in the corner.

As I have decided to abandon the practice of having a drink or something to eat at every place I wander into, the number of lavatories I manage to see mounts relatively quickly during the early hours of the day. Few employees know Coprolalia by name, and even fewer are interested in the reason I am looking for him. There is only a quick shrug of the shoulder and a finger in the direction of a door. Sometimes it is marked. Sometimes it is not. Either way, the bathrooms each smell of cheap disinfectant and recirculated air. There are nuances in each of these washrooms, typically something from the kitchen. The walls don't have much on them. There are anti-war stickers on top of deodorant advertisements, illegible tags, changing tables. The latter is an amenity that is more pervasive the further north you go, as it is a prerequisite for any establishment that both serves food and claims to be located within the elusive boundaries of Park Slope, which some people will claim encompasses roughly a third of Brooklyn.

After a few hours in this area (Windsor Terrace or Park Slope or South Slope or Greenwood Heights, which features a medical center named after the cemetery), I believe I have identified at least four Coprolalia installations not featured on Sean's list. The workers initially expressed a reluctance to say when these pieces appeared, but many came to exhibit a modest deal of pride as we examined what they had ignored hitherto, and, after a few minutes, a consensus on the probable month Coprolalia paid them a visit is established.

There are relatively few bars once you're south of Windsor Terrace, and even fewer restaurants that serve anything besides sandwiches, Chinese food, and things both fried and nondescript that have been writhing under a heat lamp since before dawn. Further east, fast-food joints that sell fried chicken and beef patties litter the blocks, as do salons, $.99 stores, and purveyors of cheap and possibly illegal porn. There are more liquor stores and bodegas than garbage cans, which provides some explanation as to why there are shards of broken vodka and beer bottles just about everywhere you look (this is the materialist explanation, of course).

I begin to backtrack with the hope of finding a street with more storefronts, and end up heading west until I come to the southern border of Greenwood Cemetery, its sprawling acres verdant and lush and manicured and fragrant with the scent of damp leaves and mowed grass. I soon realize that the street is something of an extension of the cemetery, so I once again change course, and end up on 39th. Initially, it contains nothing more than the jumbled mixture of row homes and those tenement buildings — miasma of twisted metal (foreground); beer-bottle-brown brick (background) — that are so ubiquitous in nearly every part of Brooklyn; soon it becomes a shallow canyon cutting through a low-density industrial zone profuse with loading areas (some gaping open like toothless mouths, some closed behind walls of retractable steel), diesel-spewing trucks, and small tan men on forklifts. I turn down 14th Avenue when the opportunity arises. This leads me into a community in which I am subjected to a silent curiosity too profane to admit steady eye contact. I am less than an enigma here, more like an apparition just tangible enough to warrant chameleon tongues and quickened steps. The women feign interest in their children: tiny creatures — pudgy to the point of amorphous — with faces both frail and innocent like good men in love. They look out upon the world from the strollers — their mouths suckling upon ellipses, their eyes darting with feline agility — as their mothers scold them (in Semitic tongue) for staring. These mothers then twist their mouths in my direction. Is this some type of apology? The men speak on cellular phones and pay little regard to the traffic upon the street; they gracefully avoid the speeding trucks and cars that, like me, are phantoms passing through the community. The younger girls with whom I share the sidewalk giggle, their faces more rebellious than any others you may run across in this land — this land where the present shadows the past, where today begets not tomorrow, but a slight perversion of what the Day ought to be — although there is nothing particularly defiant in their eyes. The little boys ride bicycles and tricycles along the sidewalk, not in tandem or even succession, with their peyos flowing in the breeze. They, too, weave in and out of traffic — onto the sidewalk, off of the sidewalk — in sine waves. The adolescents and young men are absent, plucked from this anachronistic tableau as if ripened berries from the vine.

As I continue down this avenue, the street numbers increasing from low-forties and eventually arriving at low-fifties, I realize that there are no bars in this neighborhood. It is rather obvious, but obvious only when one redacts the surrounding world. There are restaurants, purveyors of clothing styles that would be considered modern only in the milieu of a great-grandmother's attic, and what may or may not be antique shops; one even comes across grocery stores, a few curiously placed bodegas, and a handful of fish markets, which are far less of an olfactory felony than their Chinese counterparts. To deny the hamlet its pleasantness and quaintness would be to divest it of its virtue, but its relevance to my mission, my life, virtually every other life being lived, is negligible.

I turn onto 52nd and begin making my way east. The street itself looks no different than parts of a Detroit suburb I once had the opportunity to visit: Birmingham or Bloomfield — I forget. It was just a stopover, however; the real destination on that trip was a cottage in the northern region of the state (what Michiganders call “Up North” (a pleonasm that may have been coined by Hemingway) as opposed to “Upstate”; moreover, “Up North” is not to be confused with the second peninsula of the state (the one connected to Wisconsin), which is referred to as “The U.P.,” —And it's filled with nothing but rednecks and hippies, you said as we made our way up I-75 in the insufferable humidity of the Michigan summer — where the sky was neither cloudy nor clear, just an expanse of dirty periwinkle (the same color of the building at the end of Aitken Place) hanging above the rows of conifers that comprised the median and the sides of the highway once we passed mile 200;—looking for M-55, which you said would come up without warning even if there were several signs for it, though not as many as for jerky or firearms or trucks or other things that you had to make disparaging comments about for obvious reasons and because of even more obvious complexes;—hoping to abandon the city, not only in terms of space or even time, but in spirit: to regain that halcyon perspective in which beauty and love and virtue intermingle (to sit around the fire, to stare at the stars, to make love to Neutral Milk Hotel in a bed upon on which you had slept every summer since you were seven); and you believed it could be found in the serenity of a lake scene in that mitten-state, that that same serenity would somehow reveal as opposed to blind us from/to the great truths to which two people are bound to come if they are together long enough). The inhabitants are obviously different here, but the oppressive dimensions of the homes upon the tiny lots are not. Sometimes the three-story brick structures have several buzzers; sometimes there is only one intercom next to the front door. There are very few people on the street. The majority of the people you see are women and small children, not on the street, but perched upon balconies. They scan the streets like patrician owls examining the floor of a forest. Perhaps they indulge only in suspicion; perhaps it is a silent hostility.

I feel more at ease — or at least less ostracized — upon coming to a major avenue. Within sight is an ostentatious lounge complete with Christmas lights and tinted windows. Unfortunately, the bathroom is home only to blank walls and the imperious scent of urinal cakes and stale piss. Mona, the bartender, offers me a glass of water when I emerge. She says I look like I could use a drink, which I decline, though I do tip her for the water. Her hands are more callused than wrinkled, her hair is more orange than red. She's the geriatric Raggedy Anne, complete with a voice about as crisp as a 78 from the 1910s and a body that appears to have spent numerous years on some planet with a mass about ten times that of the Earth. It looks like her belt-buckle is moving, but then I realize that there is a second protrusion floating pendulously just above her waistline. I don't stare; I simply notice.

Mona preemptively apologizes for the behavior of the drunken day laborer sitting at the end of the bar. He is an icon of sorts, the final installment in Mexico's peasant progeny: born in some place down south that has what seems to be too many 'q's and 'x's in its name, a former worker at a Juarez maquiladora up here to make enough money to return home one day, only the concept of home changes, and Mexico becomes like the Israel of Medieval rabbis, and identity ceases to be easily defined by a line so easily discernible on paper — even if it stumbles upon land — and suddenly it's ten years later and there's debt and a wife and unanticipated kids to feed and still the desire, though somewhat diminished, to return once enough money has been saved. And yet here he is: drunk at three in the afternoon. He offers no excuses for his state. Chingada is his mantra. Traditional Mexican music blasts from a jukebox painted in those “electric” hues that were so popular back in the late-eighties and early-nineties. It's like a prop out of Saved by the Bell.

I tell Mona about my search for Coprolalia. She nods very politely. “I wonder if he knows the Bay Ridge guy.”

“What Bay Ridge guy?”

“Well, this was fifteen years ago, maybe. I used to work in this place down on Third Avenue. It was a real hole-in-the-wall. Lotta regulars. Lotta fights. But every once in a while we'd get someone new, and I'd always make sure they got the royal treatment. That's how you get regulars, after all. He was this little guy, couldn'ta been older than eighteen. I know what you're thinking. But you gotta understand that things were a lot lenienter back in those days. Long as you had an ID to show me, it didn't really matter. It wasn't until later that I found out he was something of a legend—'specially among the art crowd in Manhattan.”

“Why?”

“Oh, he drew something on the stall like the guy you're looking for. And he was such a nice, little Jewish boy. He was from around here.” She provides no further information besides one thing: big ears.

I leave the bar and begin to make my way down Avenue J. The area is not dominated by the gelid stares of before, perhaps because there is a paucity of balconies from which to scowl. Like Boro Park, the previous neighborhood, this area is predominately Orthodox Jewish, and consequently lacking in establishments that cater to drinkers. The only place on Sean's list in relatively close proximity is a bit south on Coney Island Avenue. I decide to go there, as it seems that I have pissed away the past two hours with nothing to show for it except for a guilty conscience as a consequence of my intact foreskin.

The establishment on Sean's list is a pizza place with a bar. Contractors from Sheepshead Bay are busting the balls of the bartender. Some would call him a hipster; some would call him ostensibly collegiate (perhaps not some — just me). Bob Seger bemoans the trials of the road. A few old timers watch the Yankees game from a booth. Two out of this crew sport Brooklyn Dodgers hats. The waitress is in her early twenties, but she already knows everyone here. She is a paragon of sorts, a necessary feature in any drama that panders to women for whom the theme of suffocation is easily relatable. She seems less than surprised when I ask to see the bathroom.

“You from En Why You, too?” she asks.

“Excuse me?”

“That professa' guy was here a while back. You wit' him?'

“Which professor?”

“Hey, Pauly,” she shouts to the kitchen. A man coated in thick, black hair on every portion of his body except, perhaps, his forehead, cheeks, and pate, sticks his head around the corner. “What was 'at professa's name?”

“What professa'?”

“That guy from En Why You.”

“Shawn something.” He pauses to think. “Guy was a real fuckin' D-bag,” he concludes before receding out of sight.

“You know a professa' Shawn?”

“Yeah,” I respond hesitantly.

She takes on a patronizing countenance. “Does he like to look in shitters around the city?”

“Language!” an older woman calls from a nondescript location. “Language, Chrissy, language.”

“Sorry ma',” reluctantly. “Does he explore bathrooms around the city?”

“She just gaught into Brooklyn Law,” the mother says over the noise of her heels clicking against the tile, a sound not unlike a chicken pecking concrete.

“Ma',” she rues.

The woman is by my side quickly. “Not that you'd ever know,” she says with a contemptuous shrug and a slight raise of one arm into teapot handle position. The other arm soon forms the spout. “She taughks like a fuckin' sailor.”

It's difficult to tell if the accent is of the Brooklyn, Staten Island, or Jersey variety. It's kind of an amalgam of all three, which, I've heard, is the dialect spoken around Gravesend, a community that became famous for opening its arms to New Amsterdam's first prostitute, Griet Reyniers, after she and her not-so-white husband were driven from Manhattan. This is not to say that Gravesend is particularly famous for its diversity or its prostitutes — just the one.

“You here to see my son's murreal?”

“Your son's mural?”

“Yeah,” Chrissy begins, “He painted something downstairs.”

I admit that I am skeptical. I can't see these two being the mother and sister of Coprolalia. Perhaps skeptical is the wrong word. Rather, I lack optimism. I guess this means I'm being pessimistic.

“Yeah, my brotha' Mark did that before he turned into a fuckin' addict.” The mother glares. “What? He's a fuckin' dope fiend, ma'.”

She expounds upon the tragic fall of Mark, an aspiring guitarist influenced by Slayer, Pantera, and other bands with equally menacing names. “Ya' know that sawng Cemetery Gates? Yeah, he used to be able to play it note-for-fuck-ing-note.” Apparently that shooting star landed somewhere in North Jersey, where he now spends his time avoiding debt collectors and the intractable face of reality with a girlfriend whom the family calls “Train Wreck.” Her body type is described as lumpy. She wears a lot of dresses, which evidently brings to mind two badgers fighting in a pillowcase.

Chrissy escorts me down the stairs. She asks about the search, which, I admit, has not been going well. “Who gives a shit about this type of shit anyways?” she asks as I begin to examine the mural, which must be over a decade old. “It's just some stupid murreal.”

“You'd be surprised,” I respond as I continue to examine the street scene that has been painted on the wall of the lobby where one waits for the bathroom. It's clearly not the work of Coprolalia. He does not create landscapes, and, so far as I know, he does not work with paint on this grand of a scale. Her brother certainly has talent, I tell her, but he's definitely not Coprolalia.

“Well shit, I coulda' told ya' that. The Coprolalia's in the can,” she says as she kicks open the door.

6.1

I receive a call from Tomas as the F train swims in the sunlight pouring down upon the Fourth Avenue station. His words are difficult to discern, as a portion of the car has been commandeered by a punk militia heavily armed with loaded egos and trigger-happy tongues, but I eventually make out his location. He is at a bar on the south side of Atlantic. It's close to the B.Q.E. It will not be my first visit to the place, so I know the route I must travel in order to get there. The train drips back below ground before I am off the phone.

The main dinner rush has not yet begun, but there are more than a few couples strolling down Smith Street menu-shopping, their eyes fixated not simply on the menus, but on the atmosphere and the clientèle past the framed document with its list of epithets for dishes and drinks with histories no less arcane and complicated than the histories of nations. Above these restaurants and the myriad boutique clothing stores that line the blocks are bald facades with bricks the colors of peach pits and blood orange flesh. The sky is a monochrome canvas of cobalt, a Rothko of sorts as it is neither blank nor unimposing in its simplicity. The air in the southern distance pulses above the concrete in a steady lento. This phenomenon is a common feature in those films where the protagonist is forced to wander along a desert highway under a fierce sun glaring down at the world like a sadistic anchorite. The symbolism is blatant. The light is imperious. Light is truth. The truth is imperious. The character bears the weight of the truth alone, anguished and awaiting mercy or peripety from the gods.

The street traffic is dominated by young professionals just returning from work or young professionals out walking their dogs in business casual. Teenagers stroll down the block with skateboards and nowhere in particular to go. A group of recent law school graduates speak of the BAR exam with trepidation out front of a bar on Dean. I almost run into someone as I get to Atlantic. We do that kind of juke move to one another, a kind of hesitant stumble, stop, and then laugh. His hand directs me to the left. A French bulldog looks to me once I reach the corner, its carnation tongue madly flapping like a conch upon a wave. Her owner looks to me from behind thick-framed glasses, smiles, and then crosses the street.

Tomas is all the way in the back of the bar with Aberdeen and several people with whom the two probably went to college. There are two chandeliers, which are dreadfully out of place, as the majority of the furniture clearly spent some time on the street before being picked up by the owner. It is a concert of miscellany. The bartender requests my ID. He doesn't examine it all that diligently, as he is busy listing off a series of seemingly random words, which turn out to be the names of bands with whom his partner in dialog is not even remotely familiar. He finishes after saying the words “Etcetera, Etcetera, Etcetera,” though it is not clear whether this is to reference an ellipsis or yet another band.

“Look, man, I just don't have the time to digest that much music.”

This receives a quick scoff and an utterance out of the onomatopoeic lexicon.

“It takes time to absorb an album.”

“But there's so much good shit out there.”

“I'm sure there is, man, but you can't fully appreciate an album by simply running through the tracks one or two times. You have to really concentrate. Look at Transatlanticism—or, better yet, Pet Sounds. I find something new every time I listen to either of those albums. That's what makes them great albums. That's what makes great music. Note that I'm saying music here. The artistic aspect of punk is in its performance, its visceral and emotive elements; the actual music the band produces is ancillary. Punk is the antithesis of a band like Yes.”

Before the bartender gives his response, he hands me back my ID. Then he throws out the one thing musicians love hearing from people who believe a pair of headphones entitles one to be a music critic: “Yes?” Sigh. “I just don’t get them.” Art hangs on the wall: collages of newsprint spattered with oil paint and obscure objects (toothbrush, lighter, pack of chewing gum, unopened condom). A very subtle artist has written the words “Plagiarism is art” on one of the canvases — this, of course, begging the question that will determine whether or not the piece operates on an even more pretentious level: Is this is an unreferenced and, hence, stolen quote? The whole scene wavers in dimmed light, which compliments the soporific quality of the late-afternoon sun lazily floating in. Most tables have buckets filled with ice and beer, and each one of them sweats like the walls of a tropical cave. Conversations generate a swelling and pulsing cacophony that is crowded as opposed to unpleasant, kind of like an orchestra tuning before a concert. A small group of black women explode with laughter. A live rendition of “Cross-Eyed and Painless” provides the rhythm section. The bartender is all disdain and crossed arms.

There are perhaps twenty people in the place. Tomas finds little trouble in getting to the front of the bar before I have the opportunity to receive or pay for the beer. “Good to fucking see you, man.” He smiles. “How did the search go today?”

“This is getting to be ridiculous. Today,” I begin as the bartender returns with a bottle of High Life, “—Thanks — today was spent wandering aimlessly around the nineteenth century.”

“What? Where the fuck were you—”

As he attempts to think of a punch line, I respond with,

“Boro Park.”

His smile fades. “Can I get another PBR?”.

Aberdeen appears at our side. “Can I interest either of you in a cigarette?”

“Not drunk enough,” Tomas replies.

“That sounds fucking lovely.”

We're out front within a few moments. Tomas has taken my beer back to the table. “I thought you rolled your own,” I say as Aberdeen pulls a pack of Luckies from his breast pocket.

“I do normally. I guess I was feeling lazy today.” Caesura. “I take it things aren't going too well for you.”

“You could say that. It's a veritable labyrinth of bullshit and bad leads out there. And, no, I still haven't been to Bellevue yet to question that Bates guy.” He tilts his head. “Look, I just can't accept it.”

He shrugs as he flicks the bottom of the pack, which coughs up two unfiltered cigarettes. “What's the story with him anyway?”

“Who?”

“Bates.”

“Random lunatic. That's what Sean says, anyway. According to him, the guy was found in a stall covered in his own shit — that's where the whole connection comes from.”

“Where?”

“What do you mean, where?”

“Well, like, where was he found?”

“In the City.”

“Where in the city?”

“A bathroom in Columbus Park.”

“That's in Brooklyn Heights, right?”

“No, the one in Manhattan by Worth Street.”

“Worth and what.”

“Mulberry, I think. It used to be part of the Five Points — you know, the neighborhood in Gangs of New York. Now it's a kind of limbo for retired Chinese people. They just aimlessly wander around, sit on the benches, feed the pigeons — you know, retired.”

“I see.” He pauses as he lights his cigarette. He holds up the lighter to me. I nod as the tip catches. “Why did he do it?”

“Bates?” He nods. “I don't know. Sean's account is fairly spartan. Apparently he just bolted out of the Earth Room — which was where he was working—, ran through SoHo like a madman, and ended up naked in a bathroom with shit smeared all over himself.”

“And the wall.”

“Of course. And he just kept saying 'Shit is life' and 'Only the living can shit'. Apparently.”

“Apparently.”

“Shit is life.”

“There's certainly some truth to that.” He takes a long drag. “And it's better than the reverse.”

“Life is shit.”

“Meaningless, but not shitty.”

“Meaninglessness does not entail shittiness.”

“And shittiness does not entail meaninglessness — just look at Job.” He takes another drag. “Where did they find his clothes?”

“In a trash can on Wooster, I think.”

“Wooster and what?”

“Prince or Spring. Whichever one is two blocks south of Houston.”

“Spring.” He pauses. “So he ran through just about all of SoHo stark naked,” laughing. “That's wild.”

“I know. But what bothers me is that this happened almost five years ago. If Bates is really Coprolalia, there hasn't been a genuine article since he was institutionalized.”

“Oh two, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You do know I believe that to be the year Coprolalia retired.”

“It's a coincidence.”

“Calling something a coincidence is just a form of denial.”

“And linking coincidences is a habit of the schizophrenic.”

“Touché.” He takes a long drag. “Did he ever claim to be Coprolalia?”

“From what I can tell, no. A lot of people just assume that there’s a correlation between the two because they both have left their marks on public toilets — in a manner of speaking.”

“And he's still in Bellevue?”

“That's what I've heard from the majority of people, but some say he's upstate somewhere. Regardless, I don't even want to entertain the idea that he's Coprolalia. I mean, he, Bates, had friends; it's not like he was some loner who just happened to snap one fine day.”

“So you've researched him?”

“Not extensively. I know that every deposition on his character paints him as a quiet, abstemious—”

“—Abstemious?”

“Moderate in drinking and eating practices. If you were to make a scale with an ascetic as your one and a glutton as your ten, then an abstemious person would fall between two and three…three and a half tops.”

“Thank you, Mr. Wallace.”

“Shut up, man. Look, all I'm saying is this: he didn't go out to the bars that often, he wasn't a loner, and, what's more, Bates didn't even move to the city until ninety-six. This precludes him from being the creator of, among other things, the Bay Ridge Collection.”

“I guess I wouldn't follow up on that lead, either.”

“I'm not going to. But it's kind of a shame that it's a dead-end. At this point I just want something to go on. I mean, I initially thought something would just kind of call out to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought there would be a…I guess a tell. You know, like in poker. I thought there would be some clue that others have missed.”

“There isn't one. I'll be frank: Coprolalia doesn't want to be found. He has gone to great lengths to not be discovered.” He notices a look. “I know I'm just restating the obvious, but it's not as though you were blind to the difficulties facing you when you started up with all of this.”

“I know. I just don't like being constantly reminded of my shortcomings.”

“Well, it's not like you've failed. At least not yet,” he says with a sardonic smile. I know that he can be an asshole. He's not a malicious asshole. He's not a passive-aggressive one, either. He is simply candid enough to not especially care whether or not he flirts with the possibility of being incendiary. It's an intractable trait, perhaps an atavistic one, too. His father, a rather famous artist in the West Coast circuit, is renown for his…well, let's call it wit. “You shouldn't let it get under your skin,” he says as his finger wags like the tail of a small, hairless dog. “It's only been, what, like a week?”

“Nine days.”

“That's not even a third of the time you've set aside to accomplish this. Don't be so hard on yourself. At least we've seen some great pieces of his. I really liked that one on Fifth Avenue.”

“Where?”

“I don't know. By the little park.”

“The one about the Roman emperor?”

“Yeah. That one. I just wish I knew what it meant.”

The late-afternoon heat has passed its peak by this point. A breeze from the harbor lazily floats down Atlantic with just enough force to move some of the hairs on Aberdeen's head. The smell of baked concrete and car exhaust fills the air. Atlantic is so many shades of gray. A woman in a burka walks in the direction of the river with her groceries and a dreamy-eyed boy in a stroller. Aberdeen and I wince in her direction. Her steps pick up pace.

“It's hard to find the…I don't know…it seems like determination, I guess, to continue with all of this.”

“To be willing is to be able.”

“Thanks.”

“I think you need to be less goal oriented.”

“You sound like Tomas.”

“Seriously, though, you need to appreciate the experience, not only the…well…goal.”

“I'm not exactly in the mood to hear this right now. I've spent the whole day walking around these random fucking parts of Brooklyn where everybody hates me because I'm not one of them. I'm sweaty, I smell, and all of the muscles in my legs feel like they're smoldering. I'm fucking exhausted, man. At this point, I just want to find something, anything, that could at the very least lead me to someone who knows something about Coprolalia.”

“We got a lead the other day, didn't we?”

“A dominatrix, who goes by the name Coprophagous Coprophile, isn't a lead, James.”

“Did you check out her band?”

“Los Paranoias?”

“And then, in parentheses, 'C'mon and Join Us'. You can't forget that — that's what makes the name.”

“Isn't that a Beatles reference?”

“I think so.” He takes a long drag from his cigarette. “What did she say her name meant again?”

“Which one?” I ask.

“The copro- one.”

“Shit-eating shit-lover.” He smiles. “She was certainly amusing,” I concede.

“Especially when she starting telling those stories. I still can't believe the one about that one guy in Oyster Bay who asked her to bring a strap-on and a goat.” He laughs. “The aristocracy has some bizarre fetishes.”

“It was a shame to hear about the goat, though.”

“And you certainly had to feel for the man's wife.”

“I guess the same dangers apply when women come home from work early.”

“It really was a shame to hear about that goat,” he echoes as he flicks his cigarette to the street.

I follow suit, and then walk into the bar behind him. The bartender cards us once again and assures us that he's too laid back to be the type to go on a power trip. We tell him that we've already purchased beers. He doesn't seem convinced, and makes sure to mention the word “precaution” several times as he tells a story that expounds upon his reasons for not taking people at their word. It's not that he doesn't trust us; it's that he doesn't trust us — others, particulates who have not been converted into persons or personages or even personalities.

While there is an absence of cruelty in his eyes, he does exhibit a mild derivative of megalomania, a quiet belligerence most commonly seen in the eyes of animals and small children. It's a recalcitrance without passion or a specific goal in mind, something of the subject rather than a mere part of it. His eyes intimate a brilliant older sibling and a coddled younger one, a home not broken, but seriously stressed and splintering like a brittle tightrope supporting a shaky funambulist bearing the weight of one too many confessions given without either request or recourse to privacy, but rather at the Thanksgiving table with the alcoholic of the family laughing hysterically as the fireworks begin to shroud the dinner in blizzards of rage and wrath and tears and the eventual calls to the girlfriends or boyfriends to collect solace as though it flows freely from a faucet, though this, too, ends in further complications as there's that reluctance to impart anything more than commiseration because we all have to deal with this type of thing, don't we? and it's selfish to think that you're the only one going through something like this. But that's like you, isn't it? That's so fucking like you.

He hands us back the two licenses. Aberdeen and I then exchange them. “So what are you having?”

“I've already ordered.”

“I've already had, like, three drinks.”

“Seriously?” he laughs. It’s a light, deviant chortle meant to convert his obliviousness into some budget-brand derision. “I thought you two were just saying that.”

“Pete, they were in here less than five minutes ago.”

“Well, we were in the middle of a conversation,” he begins indignantly. Aberdeen mutters something under his breath. I don't catch it, but it's fairly certain that the feeling is mutual.

We arrive at the table after a quick trip to examine both bathrooms. A familiar song by Rats with Wings plays a low level. I am introduced to five people — Mike, Nana, Dmitri, “Nikki with two 'k's and an 'i',” and Mike — who are, as I expected, former N.Y.U. students. Mike Number One is less than welcoming, as is Nikki With Two 'K's And An 'I'. They share that lack of interest in most things or people that are new to them unless they are the first of their friends to discover said things or people. It is a fairly common personality disorder here in New York. Dmitri looks European or gay, though he claims to be neither. Mike Number Two and Nana are in love.

“Tomas says you're the Don Quixote of Brooklyn,” Dmitri says after a moment.

“I like to think of myself as a bit more astute,” I respond with a quick look to Tomas. He blushes a bit.

“Dude, you were just looking for art in the shitter.”

“Did you find anything?” Nana asks as she turns away from Mike Number Two.

“No, not really. There's some really melancholy nonsense in the far one.”

“Who's your Dulcinea Del Torboso?” Dmitri asks.

“His what?”

The group focuses upon Dmitri, his eyes searching for something like concord or recognition to reaffirm how cogent his reference is. This effort, however, is in vain.

“You know, his princesse lointaine.” Goose egg. “Has anyone here actually read all of Don Quixote?” Silence. “I guess no one bothers with the classics anymore,” he shrugs.

The evening continues as one might expect. Mike Number Two and Nana leave after a drink. I discover that they are normally very friendly, but that they have recently become an item. The friends are not particularly enthused by the way the two constantly sequester themselves from the group, but they are quick to understand that this is just one of those honeymooner proclivities that passes in time. Even with this degree of empathy, however, they still mock Mike Number Two because he follows Nana around like a child, and not an intrepid child or even a curious one — and certainly not one so wondrous as to make you yourself wonder how it is that humanity managed not to kill itself off within a few generations—, but a silent and obedient one still captivated by the specious infallibility of adults. Dmitri leaves to meet a friend for dinner. Nikki and Mike Number One go to get a slice of pizza and never come back. A group of girls take the vacant seats. Tomas initiates conversation with the only redhead in this group once he realizes that her inhibitions lay at the bottom of an eighty-proof grave.

She tells us that her name is Yvonne and that she recently broke up with her girlfriend as the soundtrack of the night becomes more soulful than one would expect in a bar dominated by white people under the age of thirty (Sly and the Family Stone, Al Green, Betty Wright, Timmy Thomas, Buddy Miles, and even the hyper-sexual Betty Davis). It is her first night out in roughly two weeks. This explains the awkward sense of defiance in her voice, as well as the reason why her friends (perhaps temporary suzerains) are more than willing to allow Tomas' advances without remonstration or concern. Even if she has no interest in him, they may reason, she needs to feel desirable. They do not seem particularly interested in either Aberdeen or me. This is not to say that they don't find us attractive or sexually provocative. No, we are not on their radar even in the most platonic sense; we are like apparitions screaming to the deaf.

Tomas drops his name as though it is a coin; to Yvonne, its value is copper as opposed to gold. He switches tactics like an astute general, begins to listen to her, to nod sympathetically as she reveals not-all-that-implicitly that she is an egoist: a determined and ambitious former-peon ready to sacrifice nearly anything as she maneuvers up the ladder of Corporate America with the agility of a spider. She has severe brows, darting eyes, and a thin celestial nose. She is regular frequenter of the salon, the spa, the gym, and the clothing stores that cater to women who, thirty years ago, would have been wearing those gruesome Yves St. Laurent get-ups with the shoulder-pads and the sharp angles that give the impression of frigidity with a dash of sociopathy. People judge her as a judgmental person, though it is fairly safe to say that she is more critical of herself than anyone else, a perfectionist who has imposed upon herself such a high standard that her daily routine flirts with some realm of masochism that an amateur Freudian would explain away with recourse to two words: Daddy Issues. Regardless of the antecedents, this type of disposition seems to be pervasive among professional women (men, too).

Suffice to say, Yvonne wears her insecurities as a zebra wears its stripes, though her style of clothing is inconsequential. She could be stark naked with the exception of body-paint and moccasins and it wouldn't matter, because her obsession with appearances is not what reveals the ugly truth. It's not even inherent in her words, which are slurred and dominated by hollow self-confidence and pronouns of the first-person variety. No, it's a part of her that is discernible to that sixth sense, a kind of effluvium or imprecation that warns of a gangrenous conscience even if she has too much pride to admit the possibility that there could be something corrupt about her. You can just tell.

She tells Tomas that she has decided to reconsider dating boys (and she calls them that, too: boys, as though she has already acknowledged that those of us unfortunate enough to be born with a penis are incapable of maturing, or, perhaps, that she is too immature for a man) as the praetorian lesbians watching over her roll their eyes with disdain. Aberdeen describes her as a farmer's daughter as we smoke another cigarette. I tell him that no farmer's daughter I've ever known has so quickly allowed the facade of innocence to crumble; moreover, that the facade that's crumbling inside was never meant to be perceived as innocent. I think he just associates red hair with red barns, and, consequently…well, you understand.

We return to discover that Yvonne has tried to flush her gin and tonic, glass and all, down the toilet. There was a bug in it, evidently. This is followed by an extended period of awkwardness as her companions wait for Tomas to make his move. This is not because they want to see their friend get laid (at least not by Tomas). It's a bit more conniving and potentially dangerous than that. A quiet consensus is soon reached among the three of us that it is probably best to get out of the bar before we discover either what it feels like to be savagely mauled or what Yvonne had for dinner. Tomas writes his number on a cocktail napkin while Yvonne is in the bathroom yet again and hands it to Marissa, one of the members of Yvonne's entourage, who brandishes a contemptuous smile. “I'll see that she gets it,” through clinched teeth.

We cross Atlantic and hail a cab that's heading towards the B.Q.E. “This party's going to Greenpoint.” The cab driver is blasting Mahler's sixth symphony — the first movement, which erupts with that triumphant compositional bravura so common to German Romantics — until Aberdeen asks him to turn it down. He picks up his phone. Tomas turns to me and proposes a new approach: “You should totally post something on Craigslist. Dig it, man: a ton of people prowl that shit. At least one of them has to know something about Coprolalia.”

Aberdeen spends the majority of the ride on the phone with a music journalist who goes by the name of Keen Buddy. According to Tomas, he's not keen on much, nor is particularly friendly. Once he is off the phone, Aberdeen describes this Buddy character as a half-mad Scot with an insatiable thirst for whiskey and a temper that can be measured in Planck units. Aberdeen then defines Planck units even though there is no request to do so. Tomas adds that Buddy's probably syphilitic once the cab driver cranks up the music. It's the point in the movement where the strings have taken the lead and the damsel and the protagonist are seen waltzing through a field; the episode is captured by a camera manufactured sometime during the first decade of the previous century. It is a blur of bucolic sepia.

Keen Buddy stands at the corner of Manhattan and Huron. I am immediately struck by his negative appearance. It's not that his features are particularly minatory, though I do believe that his eyes would best be described as beady (not because they are reminiscent of beads or marbles or anything that might be taken as aesthetically pleasing; there is nothing captivating or insightful or even meaningful there — no, it is as though they were once in the possession of a passionless mortician, a person who spends the majority of any given day hungover and listening to the bereaved as they describe the style and personality of the dead with as much precision as can be conjured up during that initial time of mourning — those days when we unconsciously manufacture infallibility, perhaps hagiographies, more often than accuracy because every life seems damn near perfect right after it's been lived—, a person who would then clothe the inanimate with no small cataract to detail, a person who would then reach into a drawer of cheap mementos, a bounty of tawdry miscellany just like the beads, and then set to work affixing these contextless and [therefore] meaningless items onto the lifeless body with a haste passionate only in its drive for consummation, the end of the day, the drive home, the bottle that waits on the sideboard next to the phonograph player that both fills the studio apartment with song and helps to alleviate the man’s head of the words that he didn't, doesn't, will not say — to a woman, to God, father, mother, brother, sister: some dead, some dead only to him). Keen Buddy's chin is also more pronounced than what could be considered the average chin, though the idea of an average shape to any body part is rather absurd. So maybe it isn't more noticeable than an average chin because I guess there's no such thing as an average chin. It is just noticeable. You notice his chin. His chin, and those beady eyes.

Still, it is his orientation to the world that strikes me more than anything else once first impressions become conversational as opposed to visual. It is an orientation marked by hostility and preemptive defense, what others like him call realistic or cautious or well-adjusted to the cesspool of hypocrisy and brutality that goes by no name more profound than society. He probably applauds himself for having the perspicuity to know that all people are inherently selfish, the insight to know that all systems of ethics and law are adjunctive to fear, the prescience to foresee betrayal, and, consequently, the good sense to never get too close to anyone. And in his willingness to trespass upon the event horizon of fatalism, he must have also accepted that such a orientation would bar him from ever being able to truly engage anyone, that he would exist only within the sordid world of self and other, of criticism; and that civility in this banal theater would inevitably be too much to handle, as he is already too drunk because he's always already too drunk. He proposes no solutions; he simply continues his nihilistic and almost aggressive march upon the injustices of the world under the white flag of apathy and bitterness. When I consider him and his kind, I cannot help but feel far more pity than contempt.

We take down some cheap and greasy Chinese food on Manhattan Avenue before setting out for the bar where I went with Tomas and Aberdeen the first day we met. The space seems less cavernous due to the abundance of kids regaling the end of the start of the workweek, and for this reason Keen Buddy's sourness fails to anchor our table's mood in the misanthropic quagmire he calls home. He is still complaining about the staleness of his broccoli as we sit with our beers. Soon he begins talking about women with choleric disgust because, “Women just want control: over your life, your pride, your dreams, your money. But no bit of ass will ever get her fucking claws deep enough into me to tell me what to do. I got too much integrity for that shite [this is not a type-o].” He then takes in his surroundings, sitting high up in his chair like a pharaoh turned pariah. “Fucking hipsters are everywhere tonight, eh?” It comes down like a hammer, a kinetics of hatred both puissant and unrelenting. “Don't these fucking cunts have jobs?”

“Calm down, Buddy,” Aberdeen says. It's not an admonishment because it lacks either a condemning or even severe tone. It's more of a plea for civility, an imperative phrased in such a way as to not arouse further contempt. “They're out here to have a good time just like us.” It is odd to see Aberdeen take on a demeanor marked more by attempts at pacification than what one might call demureness — even though the latter word itself is something of an eye- (perhaps tongue-, too) sore. Tomas is more quiet than usual. He becomes ostensibly incensed when his jukebox choice is met with haughty disdain (a pleonasm, perhaps, as some dictionaries define disdain as “haughty contempt,” just as some dictionaries define a salamander as a being that dwells within the realm of fire, or, better yet, a being that is the embodiment of fire, destruction, perdition).

When asked what he considers to be suitable music, the salamander merely shrugs. “You wouldn't know them; and, even if you did know them, you wouldn't understand them.”

Tomas and I soon stand to go to the bar. “He's such a fucking dick,” Tomas says in a voice that is low enough so that I will not follow up with anything more than a concurring nod of the head and a grin. “Honestly,” once we approach the bar, “I don't know why James likes him so much. I mean, I know I complain a lot, don't get me wrong; it's just with fuckstain Buddy over there — well, it's like he refuses to get over himself, dig. He's like half a step above a fucking blogger, and he acts like he's the senior editor of Rolling fucking Stone.”

The bartender is preoccupied by a young woman desperately trying to mask her beauty behind large clumps of raven hair. It does not strike one as an expensive haircut, nor does it seem as though it was cut by a clumsy hand; still, it speaks of an irreverence for the seraphic face that is her birthright — a birthright that no doubt entitles her to tragedy and irony as much as it entitles her to the attention or heart or mind or soul of each person suddenly arrested by her possession of an intangible quality that evokes something far more substantive than the prurient — or puerile — sensation of conquest. She cannot escape it; she can only hide, make pretend that she does not know what power she holds, even if this ignorance is sometimes transparent, as she sometimes wishes she could be. Men — women, too — will impose upon her specious graces, powers taken from a liturgy of love penned by the obsessed and the deranged. They will gladly line up one by one, even if they know they will eventually be jettisoned from the heights of anticipation and cast with hideous combustion down to bottomless perdition — where not even Elpis will venture unless escorted by Hypnos.

The only portions of her face that I see clearly are her lips and her jawline. The former are full and supple like the pulp of a citrus fruit; the latter is well-defined without being angular or severe. She hides her body, as well; it is shielded by loose clothing that would seem most suitable on an expecting mother. Yet for all her hiding, for all her reluctance to display the fullness of her beauty for which so many men — women, too — will sacrifice so much, there is a lack of pretense to her body language, an ease in the movements of her lips as they draw the outlines of letters, forming words that each individual proceeds to color in with his or her own meaning. The bartender's captivation is therefore understandable, somehow necessary; it is not taken as disparaging to those of us waiting for service. We are complacent; we are well aware of the rules of the game.

“You know her?” Tomas asks.

“What?”

“The girl you're fucking staring at, man,” he says as he swipes at my shoulder. “You go to school with her or something?”

“No,” I respond plainly. My eyes look to Buddy talking in choleric pantomime.

“She's cuting füch, man.”

“What?”

“Fucking cute.” He laughs. “You should go talk to her.”

“She's probably here with someone.”

“Probably,” he snorts. “You haven’t been with many chicks, have you?”

“I've had my share,” defensively.

He chuckles with a smugness that's not disguised. “Well, it sure as shit isn't my place to call you out on it,” he adds as the bartender finally approaches. “Two pints of Guinness and two shots of Jäger.” He smiles and waves off the twelve dollars I produce. “Bennington Special. Dig it!”

We take down the anise component of our Bennington Specials. With nothing more than a glare, he stops me from heading back to our table, so we linger around the bar. His eyes inevitably fall upon the girl from before, who, by now, has returned to the three men that comprise the rest of her party.

“They all want to nail her,” he says.

“No shit. I'm sure one of them is dating her, though.”

“No, they're all just friends. Look at how fucking confident she is, man. She knows that all three of them want to rail the shit out of her.” He pauses. “Hell, everyone in the bar wants to fuck her.”

“I know.”

“But look at the three guys with her. See how disparate…disparate?”

“Dissident?”

“See how dissident they are. There's no one guy shielding her. The three are on equal ground. I'll venture to guess that she has a boyfriend she's starting to tire of, you know, and that guy's probably close with at least one of the three over there. She's fucking within the group of friends because they're all young and clearly new to the city. They probably graduated a year ago. Maybe they finished up at En Why You or Columbia or Pace, and they're just new to the area.” He takes a sip from his pint. “But she'll never touch any one of them. You know, she's just using them to make the fucking absentee boyfriend jealous. Standard procedure, really, but only the most vindictive lovers go any higher than the ante when playing with the friends.”

“West L.A. Fadeaway” begins to play. I hear Keen Buddy vehemently condemning the Dead to…well, death. Two seats become available at the bar. Tomas looks to them. He then motions to me.

“The boyfriend's probably pretty goofy looking.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Fucking think about it, man,” he exclaims. “The whole world is ready to bow to her, dig — to place her upon a pedestal. But she doesn't want that. She hates that shit.”

He means to say that she can't be approached by that silly impulse to buy her time in the form of a drink. She is not interested in formalities. Because she knows that any form of superficiality on her part will be reciprocated to no small degree by her partner. And she doesn't want superficiality. She knows this. She has experienced it in those particularly superficial years that come between adolescence and death; and she has come to discover that the afflatus that so many people have imputed to her tends to bring out the worst in them — men, women, perhaps even animals. The introverted and humble bury themselves; the proud, meanwhile, know that a woman like that has to be treated like filth. 'You have to put that bitch in her place': Famous words of a lonely man with two testicles more familiar to the feel of a foot than a shoe-salesman. So it's more of an effluvium that surrounds her. It is an alienating curse from which she wants nothing more than escape. And yet she can't stand the idea of being alone, probably because she has never had the opportunity to be alone.

“It's not hard to read people from a distance,” he begins. “You know, when you divorce yourself from the situation, you see things with a lot more clarity, you dig me? When you're in closer proximity, however…well, that's when things get complicated.” I look to him with squinted eyes. “Not just you — everyone. I do it, too.” His attention is arrested by the open door. “Holy shit, man. Check it out — B.T.A.”

“What?”

“A B.T.A. just walked through the door.”

“What the hell is a B.T.A.?”

“Big-Titted Asian,” with wide eyes past me. I turn to see her. She has entered with her boyfriend. They favor that rockabilly aesthetic that is more of a niche than a fad. It engenders a nostalgia for a parallel universe in which James Dean and Vincent Vega and Jack Kerouac are still getting loaded on PBR and Schlitz in the flatbed of Carl Perkins' Ford — William S. Boroughs is behind the wheel because Perkins is boozing in the back with the others; Marilyn Monroe is sitting bitch between the driver and Dick Dale, who strums out a few chords along with the radio — as this corybantic gang tears ass down some derelict highway populated by moonlit cornfields and ominously dark towns that recede from sight and from memory like stones in deep waters; and they talk about the American Dream with tones that range from derision to antipathy, about conformity and rebellion, about how the line that distinguishes the two is only relevant to those for whom appearing one way or the other is more important than actually being one way or the other, about the fact that they never would have all imagined themselves (the men at least) as being part of the same campy fantasy, a fantasy that has not simply been concocted by someone born after Khrushchev left office, perhaps even after he died (perhaps even after Brezhnev died), but one that has come to be almost universally acknowledged by now as an accurate depiction of their era (even if it is a series of eras), one that has even come to be revered by the square community of today for whom the threat of Beat poetry seems about as menacing as a rerun of Leave it to Beaver. The B.T.A. sports a skimpy, black cocktail dress that is at least one size too small (from which a leopard-print bra peaks out), torn fishnets, a beehive coiffure, and a possibly fake beauty mark on her right cheek. The boyfriend wears tight black jeans, a red and white checkered shirt that has been left open to reveal a white shirt (as well as his lack of either muscle or fat), and Buddy Holly glasses. He has a well-pomaded head of hair, what bullies from bygone days would have called a pencil-neck (they probably would have used this insult as his slightly official cognomen, too), and a face so fresh — perhaps even glabrous — that one would think he has never found use for a razor. “Come on, man,” Tomas begins softly, “If there's anything better in this world than a cute Asian chick with big beautiful titties, I haven't fucking found it.” I turn to him. He looks to me. “Dig it, man — the absurd man's diligence is focused in the moment.”

How does one respond to that?

“As I was saying,” he resumes, “I was dating this girl a while back. Everyone told me that she was crazy, that she was going to hurt me, that she had an eating disorder. But I refused to believe them. You know, she was such a great fucking person. She was smart, she was witty, she was cultured. And let's not forget that she was fucking gorgeous, too.” He looks from side to side. “And, between you and I, this broad knew how to fuck, dig? I mean she was fucking dirty as shit when it really came down to it. She'd slap me around, I'd pull her hair and shit; she'd scream, and I'd just go to fucking town on that shit. Man,” he exhausts, “probably the best lay of my fucking life.”

“That's…that's…wow.”

“Fucking tell me about it, man. But, you know, it didn't make sense — the whole bulimia thing. How could someone like that (caesura) succumb to such a thing as an eating disorder — which, if you ask me is more of a symptom of a personality disorder than a fucking disease in and of itself, but, hey, what the fuck do I know. This goes for alcoholics, too.” He takes another drink. “Either fucking way, it wasn't until I had to take her to the hospital one night that it all came out.” He pauses as though awaiting a rim-shot. “Okay — bad choice of words; but you know what I'm getting at, right?

“When you're close to someone, you look past their flaws; you create an image, a mental image, of that person. It's like a mirage, dig; it doesn't really exist — it only exists for you. It's how James is with fucking D-Bag Buddy over there,” his head motioning in the direction of their table. “James went over to Scotland for a year during high school — you know, as like an…an….”

“Exchange student?”

“Yeah, as an exchange student. And he fell in love with the fucking country and his (caesura) surrogate — if that's the right word — family. He became incredibly close with Buddy, who was something like the older brother he never had. I humor him, of course, but I only do it because we rarely see that rancid asshole. He's in fucking denial — like some fifteen-year-old (fingers in quotations) virgin complaining about the warts on her snatch, who…”

“What?”

“…Has managed to block out the memory of that one time mom's new boyfriend stumbled into her room all drunk with his pants around his ankles.”

“…”

“Look, the point is: If the guy actually lived in New York, I'd have to tell James how I felt. But, you know, because I only have to see him once or twice a year I keep my mouth shut.”

“Where does he live?”

“Fucking Boston,” as he brings his pint to his mouth. “Fucking Boston,” as it comes away. “If you want to talk about cities with inferiority complexes…”

“Yeah, I'm not particularly fond of that city, either.”

“You have a way better reason for hating it than I do,” he says. I don't know what he's referring to. “I mean my real problems with that shithole are, I guess, somewhat superficial: the guys are these unhappy trolls, the women are as pudgy and as fucking busted as British chicks, the trains shut down too early, the bars shut down too early, there's nowhere to eat after ten unless you want bar food, it's cold, it's dreary, it's too white unless you're by Harvard; the coffee sucks, the pizza sucks, the Red Sox…”

“Fuck the Sox,” the man next to us exclaims.

“Right on, brother!” Tomas yells.

“Where was I?”

“About Boston?”

He shakes his head. “No. Oh yeah, going back to what I was saying — things get complicated when you're too close. It's so problematic that just about every system of ethics refuses to deal with it.”

I have no idea what he's referring to, but I nod obediently. “What happened to the girl?” I ask.

Tomas becomes slightly morose. “I really tried to work it out with her, dig? Honestly, I–I did. And I felt like complete shit when I had to call it quits. I mean, I really felt guilty. A-and I knew that it would only make things worse for her, but, you know, I didn't sign up for that shit. I was in it to be her boyfriend — in the end, it felt like I was her fucking therapist.”

He lifts up his beer. Before he drinks, he says, “And I have no idea what happened to her. We broke up right after college. I think she moved back to Washington with her parents. We haven't spoken since.”

“Dude! Well, if it isn't Mike the Mechanic and Whoseville,” from behind. I turn around to see the woman from the last time I was in this bar. “What are you doing back up here? I thought those stories Vanessa told you guys would keep you out of Greenpoint for at least a few months.”

“I live here.”

“Vanessa?”

“And why is she calling you Whoseville?”

“You know, my friend.”

“Is this 'King of Carrot Flowers'?”

“The dominatrix?”

“Oh my God, I haven't heard this album in years.”

“Oh, you probably know her by her copro- thing…pseudonym.”

“Coprogenic Coprophile.”

“Yeah, that one.”

“I used to listen to this album all the fucking time.”

“Her real name is Vanessa?”

“Yeah,” she says. I don't remember the woman's name. She clearly doesn't remember ours, either (at least our real ones). Still, she's friendly and not passively so. Her gregarious nature is not something that she cooks up for the sake of occupying time while a friend is in the bathroom. She's genuinely pleased to see the two of us. “Where's the third stooge?”

“He's talking with his friend, Buddy.”

We point. She nods.

“I have a question.”

“What's that?”

“After meeting with Vanessa I got to thinking: What kind of dominatrix gets off on shit? Right? I mean, I could understand it if she liked shitting on people, but her name….”

“She's just really into poo.”

“Into poo?”

“Yeah — into poo. We don’t talk about it. It's narsty.” Narsty? “Fucking grosses me out.”

“Does she have a preference — creamy, chunky….”

“She's just into poo, dude. That's all I know. That's all I want to know.”

We're all quiet a moment.

“Well, I've got some good news for you, Whoseville.”

“Really?”

“Yup. I talked to a few friends of mine — you know, people real in-the-know when it comes to the art scene — and they got me some information about that dude you're looking for.”

“Really?”

“See, I knew you'd be happy to see me again. I told my friend, 'Holy shit, this dude's just totally gonna flip when I tell him'.”

“Yeah…wow…I mean, thanks for looking out for me.”

“You're a nice kid, and I could see you needed some help; so I talked to these friends of mine, and they told me that your guy used to live around here…in Greenpoint.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, like a few blocks down from here. My girlfriend, Marta, told me that he used to hang out in Van Gogh's all the time back when it was called…um, whatever it was called.” She looks to the ceiling. “Ah, dude! I'm not going to remember. Anyway,” with a sweeping hand motion, “I don't know if she's one hundred percent sure about all of this, but it's not like she has a reason to bullshit me.”

“But how does she know for certain? Did she catch him or something?”

“Yeah, dick in hand,” Tomas pops in.

She laughs, a coarse series of plosive sounds that catch the attention of a few of the people standing nearby. “No, I guess she talked to him a few times. He was kind of a loner, and he always looked a little down, so she started something of a little…um, you know…that French word—”

“Rapport?”

“—Rappaport [sic.] with him.”

“What did he look like?”

“White guy, about your height. I don't know. She said he looked Jewish and always wore a gray sweatshirt. He probably didn’t in the summer, but…well, unless it was cold, of course. Yeah, so whenever it was cold he wore a gray sweatshirt. Not that that's too big a help for you right now. It's fucking hot as balls.” She pauses. “He had big ears, too. She said you couldn't help but notice the dude's ears. That's about all she could remember. Plus it was always dark in that bar, and it's not like she wanted to maow down on his dick or nothing.” I look to Tomas. He shrugs. “Not to mention that it's been about nine-ten years since she's seen him.”

“But, I mean…” and I trail off. I trail off because there's really no use in trying to push this woman for further information I know she will be unable to provide. We'll just participate in an incredulous repartee that ultimately leads nowhere. It's the same type of questioning that goes on in the immediate aftermath of some tragic event. The vacuum of information and fact is filled by baseless speculation and whys that are repeated over and over again until the question (why?) itself begins to constitute an answer or, at the very least, a mild level of participation in a dialog no one is qualified enough to be having. It's typically one of those three in the morning phone calls that revolve around a bad, but not fatal, car accident — the kind of catastrophe that has not been anticipated, just regarded as possible even if you tell yourself never to think like that because there's that little, superstitious voice in the back of your head that believes acknowledging a potential calamity is no less dangerous than wishing for it to occur. Still, it's there; you don't dwell on it or anything, but just kind of both avoid and ignore it like a fly upon the wall, which you spare because expending the energy to kill it is more of a deterrent than the respect for the sanctity of insectile life.

She continues to look to me, expecting a response and, at the very least, a modest show of gratitude — not because she needs it, just because it's custom. “Thank you,” I say. “Do you know how long ago he moved out?”

“Naw, dude. She couldn't say. She moved out of here back in ninety-eight…nine. I don't know. She went up to Vermont because she thought the city was sucking the life out of her. She came back, like, three years later. I don't remember exactly. Turns out Vermont has just as many fucked up people as the city — per capita, of course.”

“Was he still hanging out in Van Gogh's?”

“No, he was long gone. No one really remembered him, either.”

Again an apparition, a phantom just short of identifiable. It's a peculiar trait among humans — that our vision does not become just more attuned when we focus upon stationary objects; rather, the object changes — its normal dimensions become slightly disfigured; its utility becomes far more difficult to pigeonhole. It's not that the image loses its original meaning; it's that the context becomes more intricate. What begins as a loner at the bar, a piece of furniture almost innocent in his absence of features, ceases to be the only identity available to the man. He becomes defined by his potentiality and his past, which are limitless as they are both unknown.

“She didn't get a name, did she?”

She smiles: “Mordecai.”

“Seriously?” Tomas squints. He motions to the bartender and points to the empty pint of Guinness in front of him.

“Yeah, Mordecai. No last name, but his first name is Mordecai.”

“That's kind of an odd name.”

“Biblical. Old Testament shit.” She pauses. “You Jewish?”

“No,” I respond.

“Well, it's kind of a funny story — Purim, that is. Do you know anything about it?”

“Not especially. I know that people eat those little triangular pastries during it. What are they called?”

“Hamantashen.”

“Gesundheit.”

She laughs again. “Do you know why we eat them?”

“No.”

“Long story short, the King of Persia, who was apparently Xerxes—”

“—Scissor me, Xerxes,” Tomas adds in an impersonated voice.

“—but not the one who launched the war against Greece — it was his father or grandfather or son or something — I forget — he had a right-hand man by the name of Haman, and Haman hated the Jews because one of them, Mordecai, refused to bow before him.”

“The king?”

“No, before Haman.”

“Why would he have to bow to Haman?”

“It's irrelevant, dude. Anyway, so Haman gets the king's signet ring, and he draws up a decree that allows people throughout the empire to kill all of the Jews.”

“What?”

“Yeah, the decree basically says that random people throughout the Persian Empire will be allowed to kill anyone who's Jewish for, like, one day only.”

“What fucking sense does that make?”

“I know, I know. But listen: So Mordecai is in the king's favor because Mordecai saved him, the king, from assassination; but the king doesn't realize that Mordecai is a Jew until after he's given Haman permission to carry out the genocide. Now, Mordecai finds out about the plot one way or another, and he goes to his cousin or niece — I always forget which one — who is the queen. Queen Esther. This is all in the Book of Esther. Anyway, so Mordecai goes to her and lets her know the shit that's about to go down, and she decides to…um…like ask, but not just ask.” She puts her thumb and forefinger upon her chin. “Lobby. She lobbies the king to stop the bloodbath by inviting Haman and Xerxes to a feast—”

“Wait; she's the queen, and she has to invite the king to dinner?”

“Well, he has more than one wife.”

“I see.”

“That shit's allowed in Judyism?”

“Hell, lotsa shit's allowed in my fucked-up religion.” She shrugs. “Dude! Fucking ‘Divine Hammer’? I love this fucking song!”

“I haven’t heard this in years,” Tomas replies.

“Okay, so she has the two of them to dinner, and nothing happens. But then she asks them to dinner a second time, and on the second night she informs the king that she's a Jew—”

“The king doesn't know?”

“No.”

“Are you sure you're telling the story right?”

“Look dude, I know this story, okay.” She pauses. She's not upset, simply frustrated. “Anyway, so Esther tells the king that Haman wants to kill all the Jews, including both her and Mordecai, who the king loves because Mordecai foiled an assassination attempt. The king becomes outraged, I mean just fucking furious that Haman would try to pull shit like this, so the he, the king, has Haman executed. Oh yeah,” she begins with a slap on the forehead, “I almost forgot. Haman had built a…um, what's that thing called that you hang people from?”

“A scaffold?”

“Scaffold? That's the shit they put up at construction sites.”

“Gallows?”

“Yeah, gallows. So Haman built this fucking gallows that was like a hundred feet tall in front of his house, and he was going to hang Mordecai from it the following day, but the king has Haman hung there instead.

“But the problem was that the decree, which allowed Haman and all his buddies to kill the Jews, could not be revoked.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know, dude; I guess the king couldn't go back on his word. He couldn't…what's the fucking word. You know, like go back?'

“Renege?”

“It’s like that…but different.”

“Contradict?”

“Yeah; the king couldn't contradict himself. Anyway, so the king allows Mordecai to write his own decree, which says that the Jews can rise up in self-defense, and kill whoever they want. In the provinces, they were allowed twenty-four hours to slaughter all of their enemies. In Susa, the capital, they were allowed forty-eight.”

“So the Jews kill all of their enemies.”

“Yup. And that's what Purim is all about. Now, the cookies, the hamatashen, are eaten because, apparently, Haman wore a tri-cornered hat.”

“That's a pretty fucked up holiday,” Tomas says as he takes the first sip of his fresh beer.

“I know dude, right!” she says as she slaps Tomas' arm. “But I like it because it's one of the only times in the Bible where God doesn't really do anything. You know, He doesn't need to because the Jews can handle themselves.”

“I guess this was a few years before bulldozers and refugee camps,” Tomas mutters.

Luckily, she ignores or doesn't hear the comment. “So that's where the name Mordecai comes from,” I conclude.

“Yup.”

“So why does your friend think this Mordecai person is Coprolalia?”

“Apparently this Mordecai dude was reading an article on Coprolalia one night. He just kept saying that the guy who wrote it didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. He — Mordecai — kept pointing out things in the artwork that you wouldn't know just by looking at it. He knew way too much. So my friend figured, maybe this dude actually is Coprolalia.”

“Do you know if the article of which he was derisive was written by Sean Westchester?” I ask.

“Of which he was derisive? Couldn't tell you,” she responds with a shrug and a look to Tomas. Tomas chuckles. “Detroit Rock City” is suddenly audible. She pulls her phone out of her pocket, studies it, and then looks back to me. “I have to take this. I'll be right back.”

Her beer is placed next to mine. She disappears.

“So Mordecai, huh?” Tomas laughs. “Should we call her Esther?”

7

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday: Nothing.

8

The bathroom walls have already been painted over in Miami aqua. I am also again reminded that no woman will fuck you if you smell (unless, of course, it's the second or third or (who knows?) fourth time for the night). When I call Sean to break the news that his most recent prospect in Red Hook has been lost he is all profanity and groans; there's no conciliatory prize I can offer him besides a joke about the possibility of there being fuchsia trim in the bathroom's near future. For a moment I believe the line has been disconnected.

“Weren't you supposed to come down here a few days ago?” I ask as I step out of the washroom. Otis Redding sings of the glory of love.

“I got sidetracked,” he laments. “I visited the courts in both Manhattan and Brooklyn yesterday. The day before that I ended up at Shea Stadium—”

“For the shutout?”

Caesura. “Sure.”

“But Bonds didn't do shit. Ain't hit shit since Sunday.”

“Seven forty-six, right?”

“Seven forty-fuckin'-six. And if he hits that magic number…if he does it, he'll defile the dignity of da' fuckin' game. 's a fuckin' travesty.”

“Who's that?” Sean asks.

“The bartender.”

“Name's Charlie.”

“Charlie the bartender.”

“Charlie the bartender.” He sighs. “Anyway, I didn't find anything there. Terrible leads, really. I don't know why I even bothered going all the way out there.”

I order a pint after hanging up with him and quickly start up a conversation with the unoccupied and loquacious Charlie, a pock-marked man of fifty-something, who sports a Yankees cap, a faded blue shirt, and a pair of shorts that are held up by frequent tugs from his calloused hands. It's not quite five, and the sun comes through the front windows in delicate beams of illuminated dust. Besides me and the bartender, there are six other people in the bar: a sullen man at the next stool who is missing a shoe, a young couple playing pool, and three men in front of the jukebox debating which record label had a greater impact on American music, Motown or Atlantic. William DeVaughn begins to urge the few of us in here to be thankful for what we got.

Charlie lets out a reluctant laugh when I ask him about the recent paint job. “My wife picked da' culla out.” The half-shod man makes a whipping noise, which provokes “Shut the fuck up, Midas,” as rebuke.

“No, I mean why did you repaint the bathroom? The most recent Coprolalia may have been in there?”

“'Da fuck is 'at?”

“It's a who, actually. Coprolalia is an artist,” I add. He squints. “The bathroom wall is like his canvas.”

“Some guy used my shitta' as his canvas?”

“No, he uses any bar's bathroom as his canvas.”

“Sounds like a fucking vandal to me, Charlie,” the man with the one shoe says.

“Oh yeah,” Charlie says with that Staten Island accent that turns the monosyllabic yeə into the polysyllabic yē´ä. “I read something about him in the-uh…in the-uh…in Da (uh) Post.” He shrugs. “Well, s'not like 'at was the only thing in there, you understand. Now I ain't the owner a' the Ritz by any means, but I got a solid establishment ear, not to mention a reputation to uphold, ya' get me, kid?” he adds with a less than amiable tone. “Now, look, I ain't got no problem 'f this guy want to come back, ya know…uh, do some type a' mural or some shit, but I tink it a bit fuckin' rude fa' some fuckin' asshole to just waltz on in ear, and draw some stupid shit on my fuckin' wall like it's his motherfuckin'…you know,” slowly, “like it’s his fucking his prerogative. Who da' fuck he tink he is, anyway?” he asks to no one in particular one octave up.

“He's just some dope from the City, Charlie.” Shoeless Midas speaks from the bottle. “Besides, it ain't like this kid scribbled anything on your wall. Lay off of him.”

“Shut the fuck up, Midas,” he says with facetious cruelty. Apparently, this is something of a refrain. “I ain't talking to you,” he adds. Charlie looks back to me with a smile. Midas continues to macerate his liver with cheap beer. “Look: I don't mean to be short or nothing,” slowly, “but I know how this shit goes. I been here since before you was born. And I know this: once some douche-bag writes something on the wall, it's like an open invitation to every other jackass in town. I just try to stop it before it gets outta' hand, ya' get me, kid?” He smiles and turns back to Midas. “Hey, Midas, what's da' name a'dat one place in the City where we went fa' Mardy's fortieth?”

“I don't know, Charlie,” he responds. “You talking about that place on Saint Marx?”

“No, s'on First, remember?”

“But close to Saint Marx, right?”

“You're right. It was like a block away.” Midas doesn't respond. He's not contemplative, nor is he engaged by someone or something else. He has merely resigned from the conversation because he is a breathing shadow, an irrelevant detail in someone else's dream. Charlie eventually shrugs. “Irregardless,” he turns to me, “It was a fuckin' disaster.”

“Irregardless isn't a word, Charlie,” meek Midas interjects.

“Who the fuck asked this guy, huh?” he says with a coy smile directed at me. “Irregardless,” he begins, making certain to emphasize each syllable, “Place looked like it'd been hit by a fuckin' hurricane. 'Sides the piss puddles and da' refer smell in the can, the whole ambiance was way outta' whack — was like a fuckin'…ya' know…uh, like a fuckin' frat house. Not as bad as fuckin' Paulmil, mind you, but fuckin' bad.” He shrugs again. “Look: I ain't saying 'at type a' shit's gonna happen in my bar. I know most da' people who come in and outta this place, and I ain't gotta worry much. But I ain't gonna stand by and let graffiti…ya’ know…uh, accumulate, until my bar looks like an old train car, you get me, kid?”

“I understand,” solemnly. “I guess the only question now is if you have any pictures from the bathroom before you painted over it. Maybe your wife took like a before and an after?”

“Hate to break it to ya', but I ain't the type a' guy who takes pictures a' people on the can. I leave that type a' shit to B.B. Fucking King,” before letting out a boisterous laugh. The guys hanging around the jukebox turn to him. “Yo', youse hear 'bout that?”

“Was in Saint Louis, right?” one of them asks.

“Nah, I heard it was the one in Times Square.”

“I thought it was in Kansas City,” Midas says hesitantly. “Probably just a rumor anyway.” He pauses. “You’re probably thinking about Chuck Berry, Charlie. He definitely did that shit.”

Charlie nods. “For once in your life, you’re fucking right, Midas. B.B. King’s a fucking saint. Still, dat’s some funny shit dough, huh?” Charlie asks/says. Regardless of the verb he utilizes, its usage manages to elicit a tepid response from the people in the bar, even the young couple playing pool, whom Charlie doesn't seem to know. “Tell ya' what kid, I got a box full of pictures somewhere in back. I can go an'get'm if you don't mind hangin' around a little.”

“I don't have anywhere to be,” I respond. “It's just that what I'm looking for appeared about a week ago,” I add.

He doesn't hear me. “Yo', youse don't need nothing, right?” he calls out to no one in particular. A few moments of silence produces no response, so he begins towards the door that reads employe's only.

“What's the story with the shoe?” I ask Midas as I take my first sip of beer for the day.

His features become pensive, furrowed into something that may have been a scowl for others, but has since become his default. He glares to the television without attention, the images having ceased to captivate so long ago that it seems the tube's only purpose now is to drown out the thought that too many years have been spent drinking in this dive straddling the lines of Red Hook and limbo. “Long story, kid,” he responds gruffly. I ask him if he knows anything about Coprolalia, and receive a derisive response. And yet in his eyes there is a faint glimmer, an attempt at recourse to something that the steady influx of beer probably makes him forget from time to time.

His friends call him Midas because everything he's ever touched has gone to shit. At least that's what I assume. It's an example of the sardonic humor that one is bound to encounter in these neighborhoods — a mild causticity that makes the incisive bite of a working a job that never pays all the bills, of living in a home that never keeps out all of the cold, of remembering a past that never fails to center upon the elusive “one big shot,” diffuse into a string of inconveniences and accidents and twists of fate that remove the central figure from any fault or blame — a comedy of errors that never ceases to provoke that poor-bastard shake of the head or, failing that, an encouraging remark about the sun rising the following morning. Luck, the most sacred shibboleth of the working class, never fails to make a cameo every couple of days to break a window, tamper with an alarm clock, or cajole a shoe loose while its owner tries to chase down a B61 driven by “a sadistic son of a bitch,” whose thoughts on empathy can best be summarized by his lead foot (practicing misanthropy, after all, is not just common behavior for MTA and city employees; it's one of their requisite duties). Luck forces the individual to make a split-second decision of “losing my job for looking like a fucking derelict or losing my job because I came in late two times last week” for reasons that are also subject to the whim of the malign poecilonym that keeps the gears of misfortune spinning.

“What would you do?” he asks.

“What do you mean?”

“If you lost your shoe running after the bus,” he responds quickly. “If you show up to work late, you're fired; if you show up wearing one shoe, you're fired — either way you're fucked. The boss will tell you that you should have left earlier. That way, you don't have to run to the bus. Hell, that way, you can even lose your shoe, walk back, pick it up, put it on, and still get to work on time by catching the next one. Problem solved, right?” he says with a snort and a cackle. The bottle almost reaches his mouth before he places it back down on the bar. He turns to me. “But what happens when you're kept up by your cunt of a wife? What happens when your kid won't stop crying all night? What happens when there ain't enough fucking hours in the night to deal escape from all the shit you have to deal with during the day?” He looks back to the bottle of beer in front of him and seems to become almost remorseful. “Fuck, guy, I don't mean to throw all of this on you. You're just looking for some prick who writes some stupid shit on the wall. I don't mean nothing by what I'm saying.” He looks to the beer in his hand with a tepid smile. “You're all right, you know that?”

We drink our beers in relative silence and stare to the televisions that broadcast sports that no one cares about. Midas offers sound bites of bar wisdom: “All a man really wants is five things. He's gotta have food and shelter; and he's gotta have a reason to wake up every morning and a reason to come home every night. Besides these, he's gotta believe that those four things are secure — philosophy ain't nothing more than a man attempting to legitimize that last one.” “This country was founded by hard work, and hard work's the only thing that's gonna save it.” “We were all born thanks to a woman, and we're all gonna die thanks to a woman.”

“I wanted to be a musician,” he says after a desultory harangue against unions, Republicans, Democrats; anyone, really — whether they are trying to impugn his liberty with regulations or whether they are getting rich due to the dearth of regulations. To him, it was pretty much all the same: the workingman gets screwed. “I was in a band for a long time called the Red Hook Sound Machine.” I ask what he played. “I was the drummer. I was on kit; we had another guy on percussion. Back in the day I was really something. People used to compare me to Harvey Mason, if you know who that is.” I begin to nod with diffidence. “You know Herbie's Headhunters album?” I smile. “That's him. One of the tightest, most innovative drummers of all time.” The jukebox, after a short hiatus, begins to spew out Big Joe Turner. In the purlieus of the bar, the Motown-Atlantic debate begins anew.

“Yeah, but I was never in it for the money. I mean, I wanted to make it — don't get me wrong — but I was also realistic. To me, just gigging with the guys every once in a while was enough. Extra money in my pocket was nice, but it's not like that was the only reason I was in it. We were good, too; and a lot of people really dug our sound. It's not like we were putting out gold records, but we had a pretty serious following around Brooklyn, and we were pulling in two hundred or so whenever we played.

“And then it got to be the nineties, and everything we did sounded outdated. Guys started quitting the band. Two of them got married: one to a woman, another to the JDL. Once we split up, I did some session work here and there, but that kinda fizzled out when Mikey, my connection with the studio, passed about a decade ago.” I don't ask; he just tells me: “AIDS.” He picks up his beer. “But I'm sure you don't wanna hear all this. As a poet once said, the wise don't worship dusty deeds.”

I mention the opening lines of a Coprolalia poem found in a nautical bar on Atlantic a few years ago. He bobs his head with suspect enthusiasm. “It's a somewhat odd rhyme pattern called terza rima,” I begin. “This, of course, is pretty weird to begin with — in English anyhow. Furthermore, each line contains eleven syllables.” Midas looks to the mirror behind the bar, perhaps to make sure he is expressing perplexity as accurately as possible. “It's like playing a song in a weird time signature, something like a five-four or a seven-eight.”

“Okay,” he responds with a nod. “Now you're speaking my language.”

“But here's what's really interesting: The most famous example of an eleven-syllable terza rima is found in Dante's Divine Comedy. The work has to be a reference to that poem. I mean, if one only takes the words into consideration, Faust seems to be a better candidate; but that ignores the context of the words. And then there's other stuff that he's done. There's a really good one called Herculi Romano Augusto, but no seems to really know what it means. I mean, it's a reference to Commodus, but that's all anyone really knows.” I take a sip from my beer.

“Who's Commodus?”

“Roman emperor. I think Joaquin Phoenix's character in Gladiator is supposed to be based on him.”

“Good movie.”

I nod.

“I’d never catch any of that shit. I haven't read anything like it since high school. I think I understand why you like this guy so much, though,” Midas adds as he reaches for his beer. He laughs to himself and shakes his head before taking down the remainder of the bottle. “I used to go through that same shit when I was trying to find the meanings behind the lyrics of Dark Side and Blonde on Blonde. I fucking love Dylan, man.”

I begin to lose what Midas calls my “college” tone as the dusk begins to creep upon the city. Charlie listens intently to our exchanges and interjects every so often with a non sequiteur involving one of the regulars. He interrupts the music every once in a while to make announcements. Midas keeps repeating the phrase, “When Caesar speaks, the music ceases.” Midas is told to shut the fuck up. A lot. Charlie lets me know that he has a box of photos of the bar before the paint job somewhere, but he doesn't know where. He thinks the box is in his attic, but he's unwilling to commit. “I'll check up there when I get home,” he says in fifteen minute intervals — right after he asks when I'll be back to the bar, and right before he launches into some story about Tony or Debbie or Pepper (a/k/a Handles, but never to her face) or Pabs (a/k/a Broccoli Head) or Shapiro or Marty (pronounced Mardy).

As the daylight fades into that amethyst tone that signifies an acceptable departure from sobriety, the crowd thickens with regulars, who each take their pop shots at Midas after finding out from Charlie about the most recent event to warrant the forest of empties in front of him. Schadenfreude takes on many faces. Some wear it openly; some camouflage it with tepid pity. “Tough break, dough,” they each say. This is typically followed by: “But, you know what — sun's gonna come up tomorrah.”

Lifted from the pages of an inane tragedy, Midas' life has been a series of ups and downs; the problem, of course, is that the ups started disappearing fairly early on, and the downs have dug trenches in which they have decided to camp out. One could relate it to the Great War, but, in this case, there is a clear winner.

There is no one culmination to his misfortunes, he seems to imply, only a steady stream of ill fate. Without a good place to take out his rage, he feels it must be escorted to the bar — this dingy place with the wood veneer redolent with the scent of decay, which, Charlie says incidentally, never dissipates until the passing of the autumn rains that last all day and always make the night seem to come on prematurely.

The Mets lose, the Yankees win. And while the victory over Boston in something even some of the Mets fan celebrate, it offers such a inane conciliation that Midas, now drunk enough to dispense with any detail of life, however lurid or pathetic, only becomes more flush with that form of consternation that people often confuse with a faulty defecation reflex. He doesn't attempt to conceal the dread of having to return home to Margie, his wife of “too many” years, without the shoe or job with which he left this morning. He just tries to maintain a genial tone and that sense of humor that every village punching bag is required to assume: humble, self-deprecatory, and filled with a cornucopia of obscenities. He even provides a foreign proverb at one point on the virtues of ugly wives, which arouses laughter from some of the men surrounding the two of us once Midas translates it. The end of the Yankees game is one of many signals for him to go home — the first being the point when the yellows and oranges of the sky turn to scarlets and violets, the last being none other than “lights on,” a signal to remind the truly intractable that “last call” took place about an hour beforehand. Instincts of self-preservation alone should have sent him home right after the sun disappeared, but Midas is blind to the hazards of walking into a fight armed only with beer-breath and empty pockets. He's not afraid of his wife, or at least he doesn't call it fear by name; instead, it's “Fuck her; she don't own me” and “I can do whatever I want,” which even he even accepts as a poorly contrived illusion. So, instead of coming in with the proverbial tail between his legs, Midas instead accelerates through the stages of drunkenness at a steady pace until he is left in that morass of inebriated oblivion and eventually forced back home by friends who don’t want to see him fully pickled and poisoned; yes, back they will carry him home to confront all of the problems, now metastasized into potentially fatal maladies, that he had hoped to avoid.

Charlie finally cuts off his service once it's been dark long enough for no one to know what time it actually is. His eyes hold a limp grudge, but Debbie, one of the more sober regulars, offers to walk him back to his place before hostilities are nurtured in the womb of self-pity. Midas is a profusion of gratitude. He raises the last of his beer to her, saying:

Wine comes in at the mouth

And love comes in at the eye;

That's all we shall know for truth

Before we grow old and die.

I lift my glass to my mouth,

I look to you, and I sigh.

Midas then stands, falters, and then clutches onto Debbie's shoulder. He tells me to take care of his bar, and then begins for the exit. All eyes are on Midas — some sympathetic, some contemptuous. I think about his name. I was so quick to assume that it was born out of sarcasm, a caustic reminder of his problems; but what if it had been laurelled upon him prior to a vicissitude of fate, what an ancient would have concluded was the result of some great offense to a god?

As soon as the door closes behind them, a woman named Pepper takes up the unoccupied seat. She's probably the same age as Midas, but her face looks significantly older, even with her hair in pigtails. Her features have been gullied by years, a short stint with meth, and a bigamous marriage to neat whiskey and the brand of full-flavored cigarettes that peer out of the opening of her purse. Her words traverse gravely roads. “Whatcha tawkin wit dat loser four?” she asks with something like flirtation behind the wheel. One would need a specially made piano to hit the octave in which she speaks — shrill fails to capture the tenor of this squawking peacock.

“I don't know,” I respond. “I'm supposed to be looking for an artist,” I say as my eyes inevitably make their way towards her bounty of cleavage.

“Ya looking fa an artist in dis ear dump?” Charlie looks over to her. I look to Charlie. “No fence Charl, but I tink dis kid's got da jerkoffs at hang round ear confused wit DUMBO.” Her inept humor is endearing even to those she insults; it's never mordant enough to provoke much more than a thin shawl of derision or one of those grins that expands when doused in alcohol. “Seriously, dough, ya came ear lookin fa an artist?”

“A true-devoted pilgrim is not weary to measure kingdoms with his feeble steps,” I respond.

“Yo, Charlie, how many beers ya feed Hamlet ear?” It's no use; Charlie's attention is being courted by the pulsing of the crowd, its gregarious cacophony managing to even drown out the well-known Edwin Starr track rumbling out of the jukebox. A man in a red beret is dancing a derivation of the Charleston not known in most parts while various onlookers encourage him by clapping along with the rhythm of another song. Pepper looks to Charlie for a long time like an orphan gazing upon a suburban Christmas Morning, but Charlie's still captivated by the commotion overtaking the back of the bar. She finally concedes to futility as he starts mixing what looks to be a Manhattan for a man with a mustache stained hangover-piss brown. “Ah, faget you,” she says as she turns back to me. “So. Ya lookin fa dat Tourette's guy, I take it?”

“Tourette's?”

“Yeah,” she says with that you-think-I'm-stupid-or-something grin that, once again, may be flirtatious. “Hate to burst yer bubble, bud, but some a us round ear ain't as dumb as we look.” I look to her apologetically. “I'm just bustin yer chops, kid. 'F I weren't a nurse I wouldn't know coprolalia from aphasia,” she says with the same coy grin that guides her from one bar stool to the next.

“So you've heard of Coprolalia?” I ask with wide eyes. “That's so (caesura) great.”

“Yeah,” she explodes. “I heard a'im, but I don't know'm a'nuttin. What gotcha' tawking wit Midas.”

“I don't know.” I look down to the dregs of beer in my bottle before placing it back on the bar. “Exchanging life stories, I guess — his bad luck versus my waning expectations.”

“You're what? Twenty-six?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Twenty-two? Wow.” She pats me on the shoulder. “Buck up fella; you gotta few years left four you can bitch like dat.”

“I guess so.” I take down the rest of my beer. “Guess I'm better off than Midas, anyhow.”

“Psh,” she responds as she reaches for her glass of whiskey, “He'd blame da hangover he wakes up wit every mornin on his crummy luck 'f he thawt someone'd listen.” Her face contorts into a pincushion wince. “None a what I'm saying ear's any different den what I've said ta'm a thousand times over. He's a loser, kid. I known Margie since we's in junior high. Guess 'at makes me a friend a'is by proxy, huh?

“Yeah, but (largo) he's a pussy and she's a bawl-breaker. Reminds me of her parents' situation.” She takes down whatever is left in her glass and slams it back down on the bar with enough force to grab Charlie's attention. She then resumes, allegro: “Gen! I ain't sayin this cause I like sayin shit bout my friends, understand. I just want to inform you at Midas ain't some guy, oo's just down on his luck; he's a fuckin doormat and no'uns gonna give him a break 'f he don't wizen up and (staccato) take some-fuck-ing initiative. Ya know, Margie does ride him a lot — granted; but she's only doin it to get'm off his ass.” She reaches for the pack of cigarettes in her purse. “D'jew smoke?”

“When I drink.”

“Well, ya drinkin right now, huh; how's'about you accompany me out,” she says as a bit of saliva (perhaps a pebble) flies off her tongue and slaps me on the cheek.

“I don't see a problem with that.” I try to find my sea legs as I stumble into the man next to me. He smiles awkwardly.

It strikes me that Pepper's gestures aren't flirtatious; rather, she embodies the gaze of a guardian angel hired to make certain that the demons I've been ingesting don't get too out of hand, no matter how tenaciously they may fight for control. The Atlantic-Motown argument can be heard above Esther Phillips' “Release Me,” which seems to be serving as quite the soporific for the patrons still riled up from the previous song.

Many eyes (perhaps an odd number) follow us as we make our way from the bar to the front door on shifting floorboards that the regulars learned to navigate long ago. From behind, I would have guessed Pepper to be in her mid-twenties. Short, denim skirt; black, sleeveless V-neck blouse; pigtails of over-dyed hair — these are features that would have produced a shortage of blood in the head had it not been for the steady hours of drinking. She wears three-inch heels on her open-toed shoes, which reveal freshly applied fuchsia polish, as well as freakishly elongated toes. Her belt circumnavigates no less than two feet of waist, and her hips and ass still appear to be awaiting puberty. On her right bicep is a tattoo of something that holds far too esoteric a significance to go into, she tells me as we stand outside in the sultry night, her cigarettes tasting of bargain and sawdust. She takes down two before I can finish the first.

Pepper breaks down Midas' life into seven phases, and explains that he has the tendency to regress into denial when drunk. “Problem, course, is he's always fuckin drunk,” she adds as Debbie comes back and asks for a cigarette.

“Youse talking bout Midas?” she asks.

“Who else?”

“Jesus, he's a real shit show tonight. What'd ya do to'm, kind?”

“He just kept drinking. I wasn't encouraging him. We just started talking and Charlie just kept giving us beer and now it's ten.”

“Dahling,” Pepper says as her hand makes for my shoulder, “'s almost one.”

“Really?” I ask with a smile. She nods sedately and quickly removes her hand to check her watch. It's actually one-fifteen. “Well,” I respond, “He was upset because he lost his shoe and his job.”

“'At sounds like a load,” Pepper scoffs. “Shit, whateva dat guy don't have'n confidence he sure as shit makes up in nerve.” She turns to Debbie. “What'd Margie say when ya brought his drunk ass home?”

“No idea; s'not like I was gonna wait around and see. Fer'all I know he's passed out in the stairwell.”

My phone rings. The two look to me, shrug, and then go back to talking about Midas. It's Tomas. By the urgency in his voice, it's implied that there are a few coke peddlers at whatever bar he's set up shop, but the actual words themselves are indecipherable until he kicks open the door and escapes outside. The sound of traffic compromises a few syllables here and there, but the blanks are filled in without recourse to repetition. After a few platitudes and what seems to be a desire to hold out information, he finally reveals the purpose of the call.

“It's a fucking haiku, man!” ecstatic. I can almost picture his stout body swooning like a question mark as he begins to contemplate the possibility of a Zen influence in the new piece — certainly an anomaly, if not a reason for skepticism. “I'm sure it's a Coprolalia, man,” he reassures me. “You need to fucking come and see it, dig? I've been calling you for, like, two hours. Where the fuck are you?”

“I'm still in Red Hook…I think.” The two women walk inside. The street is suddenly devoid of all life. The steady flow of B.Q.E. traffic resonates through the air like the sound of choppy surf. “Carroll Gardens or Red Hook.”

“You've got something,” he begins before descending into a list of onomatopoeic utterances that are employed, typically one at a time, when one attempts to conjure up a better word or phrase for the one previously used. “You've got a lead!” he finally explodes. “That's it! You've got a fucking lead.”

“Not really,” I lament. “I guess I just lost track of time.”

“Look: you need to get over here, dig? Me and James met a group of New School broads, and they just fucking love Coprolalia. You've been working at this pretty hard. What you need is a good, solid night of fucking to clear your head.” The phone is hijacked by a car alarm. “I'm going back in. You know where we are right? It's a few blocks north of that Hercules thing Coprolalia did that you and Aberdeen are always talking about. See you in a bit.”

He hangs up the phone before I can respond. His words clearly do not have the agility to keep pace with his actions or thoughts, and, knowing him, the most important thing at the moment is the opportunity of more amphetamines. Still, a new Coprolalia means the possibility of a witness or even a list of suspects. Either way, the continuing saga of Midas is intriguing enough to get me in for one more round before I head off to examine Tomas' discovery.

A man turns the corner as I stand staring to the tiny moon beyond the streetlight. We catch eyes, but I discern nothing in his face. “The turkey is too dry,” he says once he has approached within a few feet of me. He has a strong British accent.

“Have you tried basting it?” I ask gingerly.

He stares to me from behind tinted glasses. It's difficult to make out his facial features. He is cold and withdrawn, vaporous like a wraith. “So the elusive Monsieur Lemieux lives to see another day,” he laughs coldly. He nods slowly, looks up and down the street, and then walks back around the corner from whence he came. His footsteps echo quietly as he strolls down the canyon of concrete, a kind of steady clicking like an old clock. I hear a luxury car door open. Shut. An idling engine disengages from park. Transmission gears churn and grind. The car turns onto the street and heads north. It is a black Lincoln of modern make: a car that is supposed to be anonymous, elegant, blunt. The man has a driver, but the car does not belong to a service. Hundreds of questions implore my attention like wide-open receivers running through the end zones of my mind.

I enter to find that the floor of the bar has regained its stability — it is no longer an esoteric series of shirting planks, but, rather, just a bunch of adjacent cuts of wood warped by the elements. I return to my seat after using the bathroom to find Pepper and Debbie still talking about Midas. “Yeah, at piece a shit wouldn't even know what t'ado wit it,” I hear Pepper say. I immediately think about Debbie's vagina, which, of course, sets the ol' noodle to work trying to envisage what lay beneath her sweatshorts and whether or not the varicose veins — which crowd the lower portions of her thighs as if stray pen marks or derelict hairs on Linus' head — flow all the way up her leg, or if some anatomical miracle has prevented the advance of these cosmetic abominations, which some culture on this Earth must revere as symbolic of the accoutrement of phronetic wisdom, not only years. I soon lose interest in the matter, however, as I remember the temperature and the unfortunate fact that the vagina reacts to heat much as the skunk reacts to danger. The male grundle, of course, is no better.

“Yo, Quiet Riot, what's on yer mind?” Debbie asks as I realize that I'm grinning with the same countenance that appeared when I started contemplating Debbie's protean pussy. “You ain't gonna get sick, are ya?”

“No, I was just thinking about the best way to get over to Park Slope.”

“What? We ain't good'nuff all of a sudden? Gotta go to fucking Pahk Slope?” Pepper yells above Smokey Robinson, who is telling everyone about Mickey's Monkey. Pepper's tone is not one of indignation, or, if it is, it's the playful sort. The word “persiflage” pops into my head. I don't know if it applies.

“No,” I begin with my palms showing; “There's a new piece in a bathroom over on Union and Fifth. I want to go over to make sure it's authentic.”

The two look to me without scorn.

“What kinda piece we talkin here? You a pimp?”

“He's fowlinround that shitta artist.”

“What?” she says with a look of disgust in my direction. She turns back to Pepper: “He's tailing some dude who makes sculptures wit his shit?”

“No, usually drawings or poetry.”

She turns back to me, utterly mystified: “How ya make poetry wit dookie?”

The question resonates in my imagination for long enough to draw a smile. “He writes on the walls — usually in pen.”

“'Ere was at ting on'm in DaPost,” Pepper says on the heels of my words. Debbie replies with a dithering head. “Yer staying fer another beer, right?”

I ask for a beer and the check. The beer is on the house; the tab is eighteen dollars. I leave thirty. Pepper and Debbie are now gossiping about the neighborhood denizens as though scholars exchanging lurid details of the dead. Midas, once the star, has by now become just another thread in a tapestry of working-class despair, one in which every man is either a drunk or a fool, every woman a saint or a “fuckin nutcase.” I imagine the whole neighborhood as a long stretch of halfway houses filled with deviant kids and adults with forsaken ambitions, which, although highly offensive, is probably more accurate than most would like to admit.

Debbie and Pepper seem incredibly fond of Maria, a recent addition to the neighborhood. She is considered “too good” for Carlos, her husband — evidently more of a fool than a drunk. As they tell stories about these two, Maria and Carlos, I cease to be a focal point; I become more like a detail in the background of one’s reflection or a fly upon the wall that is kept alive because it doesn't draw too much attention to itself. They want to set Maria up with Raphael, the UPS driver. Les McCann, meanwhile, echoes the generation of Baraka and Brathwaite, a generation that has since muzzled itself with the pages of Revelations.

“Ya hear Midas worked fer UPS fer a month a so, right?”

“Get out!”

“Yeah — got fired fer drinkin on the job. A few weeks afta, I ax him, 'Midas, what can Brown do fa you'?” The two bowl over laughing even though the joke doesn't seem to have a punch line.

8.1

The B71 keeps me waiting only a few minutes. Even during rush hour, Brooklyn buses have a nasty habit of not coming unless they are baited by the sudden recollection of a forgotten item less than a block away or a freshly lit cigarette. Neither is here necessary, which gives me that feeling that something good is eminent — an irrational sentiment, no doubt, but one that seems to arise whenever you beat the odds.

I make it to the bar just before two in the morning. The doorman — a severely androgenic colossus with no sense of humor and that overwhelming need to intimidate because he is on the side of power for perhaps the first time in his life — scans my ID for an extended period of time as a nearby group of smokers talk about how horribly pretentious all of the bars in Park Slope have become since they moved to the neighborhood nine months ago. “You cool,” the bouncer concedes. He still stares me down as I reach for the door. I open it to see yet another golem subsisting on negative energies aroused by rejection, indignation, and animosity. Union membership being what it is, I guess the Pinkertons have been forced to scour the classifieds.

Aberdeen, Tomas, and the New School girls are on a couch near the front door. The girls are clearly underage, but they're just attractive enough to not have to deal with the scrupulous bouncer. I am quickly introduced to them. They are Trixi, Mix, Nixi, and Jane. Jane seems sober. Trixi and Mixi probably subsist on a diet dominated by Sparks, Aderol, Sweet and Low, Ensure, and Marlboro Lights. Nixi, however, appears to be strung out on something far more intense than the mélange of products favored by the other two.

“I am hydrogen,” she says as she stares to the empty patch of space to the left of my ear.

My immediate response is to turn to the others for an explanation. They want to see my reaction — as is evident from the eager looks in each eye. I turn back to her. “That's a pretty song.”

“No,” she says with sudden severity. “I am hydrogen.”

“What's that like?”

She replies with a tepid smile, what I assume will serve as the preamble to a series of Pythian verses. Before any utterance gets made, however, she runs off to a makeshift dance-floor directly in front of the doors leading to the bathrooms. As she goes, she manages to spread mayhem and a general sense of alarm throughout the bar; she's ranting in an amalgam of languages, some of which she may have no knowledge, which leads some to stare with curious expressions as they catch words like “ojos” and “danke” and “schlep” and “mboo” and “how zi” and “flambeaux,” but have no reply when they hear salutations in no less than thirty different languages, most of which are dead, besides a look in our direction, which intimates the following query: “Is this chick insanely smart or just plain insane?” As she goes marauding through the relative peace, she kicks over a table of drinks, sending cosmos and various concoctions with the suffix “-ini” into the air, though the bartender, most of the patrons, and the second bouncer fail to notice because a 4/4 song in the key of C is busy condemning conformity and all of the adjuncts of apathy at decibels surpassing rusty-tracked G levels. By the time the drinks start landing on the unassuming dancers and standers and talkers and others just floating around too close to the epicenter of the collision for their own good, Nixi has already taken the second or third step of — what I'm informed is called — the Rampaging Monkey, an exercise/dance ritual established by the same Hindu sect that believes the flu can be cured by sprinting up a Himalayan trail. That, or she appears to have stumbled upon the same stuff that caused the infamous Dancing Plague of 1518, which most scholars claim is ergot, though there is the possibility that a little bit of that southern magic, with which Pynchon was once so enamored, snuck into Europe like a dispossessed Palestinian looking for a construction job.

“I thought they said she could drink on that shit,” Trixi says. She is wearing a powder-blue wig and a pink T-shirt that reads i'm the coolest in letters that appear to be crystallized in cartoon ice. A poet would have spent afternoons devising clever similes for her breasts, which were perky and celestial. A more straightforward person would have simply stated what happened to be the same unit in which Connie lived while in her junior year dorm: 34-C. “That Cenobe is seriously fucking with her head,” she adds.

“Cenobe?” I ask. “What the hell is that?”

The rest of the party, with the exception of Trixi, groans. This is clearly a subject ready for retirement.

According to Trixi, Nixi is taking part in an experiment for a new drug born from the collective mind of a pharmaceutical company with a research facility somewhere in the Brooklyn Navy Yard (“I know, totally sketchy, right?” Trixi adds). Nixi had decided to subject herself to such experimentation upon finding herself still wallowing in the depths of heartache after taking virtually every drug she could get from her shrink to relieve the pain of a particularly difficult breakup — elements including: a best-friend, a broken condom, an abortion, a confession. Vulnerable and alone, Nixi replied to a Craigslist post from a clinic that was recruiting a group of thirty people for a new drug, Cenobe. They promised eight hundred dollars, on top of the elimination of the malaise caused by her horrible experience. And so, without thinking too much about the potential dangers of legal drugs, which the medical community calls side effects, she signed a waiver and began taking the mischievous pill.

The drug, Trixi relays, is unlike most other anti-depressants on the market; the major difference is the way in which it goes about curing what it called “circumstantial depression,” which, if you ask this word-obsessed geek, is actually dejection. Regardless, the drug does not artificially increase the levels of serotonin or prolactin in the body, nor does it inhibit the production of norepinephrine; rather, it augments the amount of dopamine released during exercise, thereby turning a runners' high into a runners'…well, what's an experimental drug if it doesn't demand a change of pants every once in a while? The medication also reduces appetite, something that the scientists who designed the drug felt would be beneficial, as it serves to reduce the likelihood of a subject seeking releases of dopamine by means of eating. Incidentally, the drug provoked a slight jump in oxytocin production. The architects did not anticipate this element, but they considered it to be a good thing: high levels of oxytocin have been known to decrease, if not eliminate, feelings of anxiety and fear. As has been said, however, this was just an added bonus: The idea behind the treatment was simply that depression thrives in lethargic personalities — eliminate lethargy, eliminate depression.

The full strength, 25-milligram Cenobe bars were not meant to be used for longer than two weeks, as their purpose was to establish a healthy lifestyle by means of inducing euphoria from so little as walking from the bed to the toilet. Following this initial period, in which habits conducive to physical fitness were to be established, the patient was to be weaned off of the drug: two weeks of 20 milligram pills, followed by one month of the 10 milligrams, followed by another month of the 5 milligrams. After the treatment, the patient was to emerge healthier and happier without dependence on the drug, only the dopamine released during exercise.

The lab mice upon whom the initial trials were run did not seem to build up a tolerance to the drug, nor did they appear to become addicted to it. Their behavior changed as the scientists predicated it would: the mice exercised more frequently than they had in the past in order to obtain the dopamine high they craved, they did not seek ulterior ways to get their fix, and they even became increasingly gregarious (possibly because of the increased oxytocin levels, though it must be said that neither Trixi nor I know if oxytocin naturally exists in the rodent brain). Some of the mice developed ulcers, but this was the most pernicious side effect the scientists observed. “Somebody told her that one mouse developed a condition called pterolabia, but they didn't explain what that is. They just said that it was reversible.”

“What the hell does that even mean?” Tomas asks.

“Think Pterodactyl,” I respond. He smiles.

Another thing the developers of the drug failed to mention was that the mice were in solitary confinement for the initial stages of the testing; and, like Pavlov's dog, these mice learned that exercise sufficed for more dopamine. Nixi, however, was free to roam wherever she wished. Consequently, she learned that other activities produced far more dopamine than any run on a treadmill ever could. Furthermore, while she was supposed to be just beginning her month on the five milligram pills, it turns out that humans, while not always murine in their physical features, do share at least one behavioral trait with any rodent, mouse or otherwise: that of being able to obtain things others believe they should not have. For these reasons (and probably a whole lot more), Nixi found herself still on the twenty-five milligram pills, dripping with sweat, dry-humping the legs of passing strangers, and massaging various parts of her body in front of the bathroom door.

“Side-effects vary,” Trixi continues, her tone now one with the small print, “but the weirdest one I saw was the…what'd they call it?”

“Palindromes,” Jane replies. “There was also complete retroluction.”

“Retro-what?”

“-Locution.”

“Yeah, she spoke backwards for, like, three days.”

“Like the midget from Twin Peaks?”

“Sure,” Trixi nods cautiously. She's young [as is our narrator, but apparently the infamous Connie had a thing for Lynch during their relationship]. “But, like, she actually spoke backwards. And she didn't know she was doing it, either. She didn't believe me until I recorded a conversation, and then played the tape back.”

“That's pretty weird.”

“She also spoke in palindromes,” Jane reiterates. “She'd say a phrase, and then utter the same phrase in reverse. It was like an echo.”

“Yeah, and she didn't know she was doing that, either.”

“Did she get any ulcers?”

“Or pterolabia?”

“No. For her, I think the biggest concern is the anal leakage. This is the first time Nixi has worn a skirt in a month,” she says as she notices that just about every man in the bar, including the twink brigade by the bar and the bear couple on a nearby couch, cannot help but stare to the wall-less psyche-ward. Likewise, we all glance over to see her busy boogying away in pink sequined glory with little to no regard for rhythm, public opinion, or the second law of thermodynamics. “Anal leakage, guys,” Trixi adds. We all turn away.

“No one wants to hear that,” Aberdeen chimes in as his hand falls on Trixi's thigh. She looks to him with daggers.

Dialog deteriorates. Jane, however, takes it upon herself to strike up a conversation with me. Aberdeen and Tomas, meanwhile, begin spouting out observations about the various people in the bar with derogatory and occasionally clever cynicism. Trixi and Mixi laugh to themselves and look eager to bring up subjects that don't involve the fashion statements made by those who fail to speak with Shakespearean eloquence. “So you're the Coprolalia guy, huh?” she asks glacially.

“That I am.”

“So you're just going to bars in the city looking for him?”

“Yeah.”

“That doesn't seem particularly productive.”

“You'd be surprised. I meet a lot of characters — some helpful, some not.”

“How close are you to finding him?” warmer now. “James and Tomas seem to think that you're on to something you're not telling them.” Wait, nope, that's condescension.

“Not really. I just think that he's not what most people would consider the artistic type.” She looks to me in bewilderment, probably because my response anticipates her next question. “I mean, I'm fairly sure he's just a normal guy who—”

“What do you mean by normal?” she asks as she tries to push her eyebrows together without using her hands.

“I don't mean 'normal', like, you know, there is a sense of normal.” Her brows touch. “I guess I just feel like he's a working-class guy, who probably has a job that he doesn't really like all that much — you know, like a character in a bad existentialist novel. Somebody once called him an artiste manqué, but I feel like this misses the point. People nowadays believe that artists have to be successful in order to qualify as such, but I don't agree. In fact, I believe that Mann articulated this point better than anyone else, especially in Tonio Kröger. And Coprolalia certainly resembles that character, even if he is a member of the working class. He's both, you know. And that's the draw.”

“Do you feel you know what he looks like? Do you feel like you know him?”

“No, but I can guess that he's probably in his late-thirties, maybe even early-forties. He's white, Jewish, with big ears, apparently. I feel like he's the type of guy you pass on the street without noticing. And that's the point I'm trying to get at: He doesn't want to be famous or anything because he's afraid that that will mean he has to live up to something that he's not.”

“He's the absurd creator!” Tomas shouts.

“Sure.”

“What does that mean?”

“Have you ever read Camus' Myth of Sisyphus?”

“No.”

“Well, it, Sisyphus, is analogous to The Stranger. He's referencing something from the former — I think.” Tomas nods enthusiastically, and even pulls the book out of the bag he has with him. I smile in return. “I would recommend you read The Rebel before it — it's way better.” She smiles. “As I was saying, he just has these moments of brilliance that he wants to convey to the world, even though the medium he's chosen makes everything he does completely ephemeral. And, yes, I know ephemeral is a relative term — ephemeral can be measured in minutes, days, months, years, eons: a second in the life of a person is capable of filling up a library and the Earth's history is a molecule of ink that is but a fraction of a letter in a sentence within a footnote in the trillion volume history of the universe. But he seems to really, sincerely not care. He just creates. And that's all he does — create and express something that just dwells inside of him. In a sense, that's all art is: a prolonged epiphany that captures something that's kind of rational and kind of irrational and beyond the typical capacity of language. You know, a-and maybe some of his stuff is convoluted because he tends to have these epiphanies when he's half in the bag; but, I mean, he's not there to expound — or elucidate, rather — on every line that he writes. He just wants to express himself. There's something very pure in that. I mean, people have these silly ideas, and suddenly they end up producing great works around them. DeLillo wrote White Noise because he thought it'd be funny to have a college that offered Hitler Studies. D.H. Lawrence wrote a novella based on the idea of Jesus getting a boner.” She squints. “The whole book leads up to one line: 'Christ has risen.'” She gives a begrudging smile. “I'm rambling, aren't I?”

“Kind of.”

“But isn't that so great — that he's just a normal guy doing all of this?”

“And, by normal, you mean working as a drone and finding escape in alcohol?”

“No, I think normal means not being a celebrity,” I counter with a slightly ornery tone. “He lives the way most of the people in this city live. You know, as students we sometimes forget that New York isn't just populated by Suits and Radicals; there's this huge middle ground of people, who are hard-working, middle-class, and, typically, pretty intelligent.”

“You honestly think that the majority of the people in this city are intelligent? Just who have you been talking to?”

“They're intelligent; they're just not that insightful. You know, they can understand a lot if you give them a chance; they're just not that good at coming up with it on their own.” I pause. “I think it has something to do with the way religion is taught now days, to be honest; then again, this could just be a side-effect of some larger problem plaguing our society.”

“Like religion.”

“Look: People are told that it's wrong to interpret the Bible, that it's the Word of God, and that it should be read as one reads the newspaper. But if you ask any religious scholar — who's not of the Evangelical persuasion, of course — they'll tell you that there are three levels to scripture: the literal, the allegorical, and the spiritual. You can't read it all literally, otherwise you end up with a myriad of contradictions; and, if you have contradictions, as well as the premises that the Bible is the Word of God and that the Word of God is always true, then you have an invalid argument on your hands. So it can't all be read literally — unless you believe that God can contradict Himself, which, of course begs the far more important question: why should one care what the Bible says at all if no one can tell which passage, if any, can be trusted. And that's where the beauty of religious study comes in. Just look at Gersonides — he concluded that Song of Songs isn't just a poem about love; it's a manual that outlines the proper way to approach the study of God's Word, which, oddly enough, parallels what Plato said in his Republic.”

“What are you, a former Hassid?”

“No, I just think it's fascinating to see that people continue to be able to get so much out of a book that's several thousand years old. And so much of it is original and new, too. That's what I'm trying to say, you know: that the truly wise are able to see things to which the dunces of the world are blind. And you don't get that from as many people as you used to. Over-zealous Christians don't bring anything new to the table — they just quote Romans thirteen to explain why the Bush administration is infallible, but ignore things that they don't agree with or practice: like Deuteronomy twenty: thirteen, which says that, in war, every man in a captured town ought to be put to the sword; or, also in Deuteronomy, that a man is exempt from military service for a year after his wedding. Are we to infer from this not only that the government is infallible, but that the commandments of Deuteronomy can be abrogated by the commandments of the state? I hardly think this is the case, especially when a God-fearing administration controls the country. And that's what bothers me. The dunces of the world just shrug and accept the contradiction. And the Jobs of the world may be able to both recognize the severity of this dilemma and maintain a steadfast faith, but personally I find myself in agreement with Kierkegaard: true faith is not common, and the Jobs — though Kierkegaard, at least in the context of which I am thinking, would say the Isaacs — of this world can be counted on one hand.

“Look, all I'm saying is that the Christian community — especially the Evangelicals — have fought against intellectualism for so long that there are no longer many insightful Christians. And that's what worries me. Religion without wisdom is like nonalcoholic beer — it's manufactured for people in AA, teenagers, and rubes. But if you hear someone imbued with real wisdom and even partial faith, they are able to see beyond jejune superstition and nihilism. And they are the ones deeply encumbered by these incongruities, the individuals for whom such problems foment into works of genius. An individual suffering from forlorn as a result of the absence of God's total beneficence will always be able to produce a work that is superior to an adamant atheist, for whom the lack of a God, as well as an a priori ethics, is of no concern. Then again, there are those who dedicate their time to establishing some form a cadence between the ostensible contradictions of their respective religions. And this is where religious study itself becomes a form of art — it engenders the human condition, and ceases to be a simple practice in acquiescence. I mean, I don't think it would be possible for there to be a Renaissance without the philosophical movements of the High Middle Ages. For all the rigidity of someone like Aquinas, there is also a great deal of ingenuity and interpretation in his work, too. And isn't that what so much of art is about?

“A lot of contemporary art, you know, especially the really out-there stuff, relies more on eliciting a response out of people by using unconventional means as opposed to raw talent. They are asking you to use your own interpretive skills to think, sometimes simply to feel. But because of the way people are brought up now, they can't deal with it. They can appreciate a Van Gogh or a Vermeer, but they can't sit there and seriously concentrate on the work of a contemporary artist, poet, or composer. But these people would see it as valuable, they would see so much of the art today as brilliant, if the education in this country were less bulimic — as in, you take in information, regurgitate it onto paper come exam time, and then forget what it was you learned. See what I mean: because of the way they've been brought up, they end up being unable to appreciate complexity. They just see a can of soup or a flower.” She's almost laughing. “I'm sorry. I've been drinking all night, and I know I'm rambling.”

“What do you think Coprolalia's trying to say?”

“There's no one message. He's simply trying to understand the world in which he lives, and to express his perspective.” She looks to me suspiciously. “I also believe his popularity, especially among those outside of the artistic community, derives from his disdain for those unable to see beauty in labor, even creative labor. You know, you meet so many people who want to be writers, but they don't write. You don't know how crazy it makes me when I hear people say they want to be a writer. What's stopping you? Is your arm broken?” She laughs. “And then you meet artists, and sometimes they have great eyes, but their ideas never materialize because they're lazy. You meet poets, but they don't really write poetry; they just write esoteric and laconic observations in stanzas because they haven't really worked on their metric or their style. They want to live as Nietzsche dictated, as artists, but they don't want to be burdened by the process of creating. I once heard the story of a man who said that he refused to paint because the painting he had constructed in his head was so perfect that it couldn't be reconstructed on a canvas. That's bullshit. Obviously. If he attempted to produce it, saw the finished result as imperfect, and began anew, then I would give him a bit more lenience. Perhaps I might even call him a genius if he did it for his entire life without ever getting it right. But he refused to do anything, and this tells me that he's just a fucking lazy dipshit with a mildly artistic compulsion.

“But this is all besides the point. The point is that Coprolalia really seems to see something beautiful in the ordinary. You know, it's like Dubliners. A lot of people see the world that Joyce created as dreadful, depressing; but that was the typical life there — in Dublin — and he made it beautiful because he really captured it in a unique way. Or you could look at Saramago's Gospel According to Jesus Christ. He spends so much time on the realities of first century life that you apprehend just how wretched existence was back then. And it really was, too. For just about everybody in the early Roman Empire, except for the ruling classes, life consisted of that famous Hobbesian quintet: 'Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' Coprolalia's work embodies the typical life here as seen through the eyes of a normal person. People aren't looking for their place in the sun; they just want someone to listen to them, they just want to feel…I don't know, maybe grounded, connected.”

She smiles. Is this a test? “I feel like you really understand him,” she nods. “I thought you were only in it for the money.”

Aberdeen and Tomas have apparently let the secret out. It is not that I am ashamed of the fact that finding Coprolalia will result in a substantial monetary reward; it's more that I feel as though the knowledge of this prospective boon will make people less inclined to take my ambition seriously. With the cat out of the bag, it seems as though it is now my duty to disclose the details of how I came to find an interest in Coprolalia.

In late-1999, a fairly prominent monthly based in New York decided to offer a hundred thousand dollar reward to anyone who could find and interview Coprolalia. Thousands of people responded to the magazine's offer, and the editors soon found themselves drowning in pages claiming to contain interviews with the reclusive artist. The publication reviewed all of the entries, tossed the obvious frauds, and sent the potentially genuine manuscripts on to Sean Winchester, who proceeded to reject everything he received.

Most forgot about the offer after a couple of months, though, according to Sean, the publication still gets about ten or twenty of these manuscripts a year. Sean has said that the majority of the entries are either confessionals or pseudo-confessionals in which the interviewer turns out to be interviewing his alter ego, who is (big surprise) Coprolalia. “It was far more common when the contest…well, it's not really a contest, but you know what I mean. It was really common back when the offer was first made — probably due to the popularity of Fight Club,” he explained. “Of course, now the whole idea has become so overdone that it's too banal even for Hollywood; but people still try to pull it off. Regardless, it's one of those tricks that needs to be put to bed.”

The magazine doesn't publicize the offer any longer, though Sean has assured me that the editor is still accepting submissions. I had never heard anything about it until the early May of 2007. I had just turned in my final paper to Professor Winchester.

“So what do you have planned now,” he asked after I handed him the thirty page paper that already seems too esoteric and silly to even bother describing. “You're graduating with a major in Art History—”

“—And English,” I responded. “And I'm not an Art History major; this class was for my History minor.”

He nodded. “So you intend to go to grad school, I take it?” he asked as he turned to look out onto Washington Square Park.

“It certainly seems to be the route I'm on,” I responded. “Of course, I want to take a year off in order to get some real-world experience.”

“Any jobs lined up?” he asked as he began to sort through some papers on his desk — a disorganized mosaic of, perhaps a testament to, his general disinterest in teaching.

“No. I've been on a few interviews, but so far nothing has worked out.”

“Well,” he turned to me, “You should enjoy the time you have between school and the working world. During that period — I took a year off from school, as well — I did a lot of reflection on the direction in which I wanted my life to go. I ended up back in Seattle, my hometown, and took up a paralegal job. A year later I moved out here for school. I haven't looked back since.”

“Well, I don't think I want to take up a paralegal job. I don't really know what I want to do.”

“Well, you could always take up the search for Coprolalia,” he responded sarcastically.

I had heard the name more than a couple of times, seen a few pieces, and even caught wind of the artist's reclusive nature, but that was about it. When I asked Sean what he meant by the remark, I was amazed to find out about the reward awaiting anyone capable of producing a bona fide interview with the artist. We talked about it for some time. By the end of the conversation, I decided that this pursuit was something that I had to undertake.

It wasn't just the money. One hundred thousand dollars would obviously be enough for me to live on for quite some time, on the condition that I keep with my thrifty lifestyle. However, this was not the real end. If I proved capable of finding and interviewing Coprolalia, this would guarantee a reputation, an ability to publish freelance in virtually any journal of my choosing. Through Coprolalia I could exit the pedestrian world. And yet, at this point, I've lost that grand sense of ambition. What lay ahead seems inconsequential right now — I simply want to know who Coprolalia is. It's this ambition that I have projected to the world for so long that by now it seems like the only thing that keeps me going.

“No,” I tell Jane, “It's not just the money. I mean, I certainly could use it, don't get me wrong; but, to me, it's become so much more.”

“Well, that's good to know,” she smiles.

Fearing a lapse in conversation, I quickly change subjects. “What's the deal with the triplets?”

“They're my roommates. And,” she beings with a roll of the eyes, “Those aren't their real names. They always come up with these stupid pseudonyms whenever they go out together. The whole rhyming thing was Nixi's idea.” Whether a form of ESP or a simple coincidence, we both look over to Nixi, at present occupied by a man wearing clothes that show off his anemic body. He holds what could only be tequila shots in one hand, two lime slices in the other. “Another awkward morning is on the horizon,” she says with a sigh of exhaustion.

“So my professor says,” Trixi explains to Tomas, who listens with cucumber coolness, “The only problem with your story is that it isn't published!” They both laugh with breaths both quick and resonant. Mixi occupies Aberdeen with the story behind the barbed wire tattoo on her arm.

“Do you want to see the Coprolalia?” Jane asks. She blinks quickly as her head darts towards the bathroom, a valuable piece of property considering the fact that it will soon be expropriated by Nixi & Co.

We have to tiptoe past Nixi and her friend for the evening in order to reach the bathroom door. There is no longer a line because of the busy couple and the fact that there's a second bathroom downstairs. Jane knocks on the door with all the force she can muster as a gesture to ward off the malign spirits of awkwardness. She turns to me with a nod of assurance. “I think it's clear,” she yells over the electropop that blasts from the nearby speaker.

We enter a bathroom that is covered in purple faux-velvet from ceiling to floor with the exception of one framed reminder of the scourge of B.O. and the benefits of smelling like chemicals that are scientifically proven to…well, science is for fucking fags, bro. The door is olive drab, perhaps thick enough to withstand a payload from the Enola Gay. There is nothing written on the wall, nor is there even space for one to do so unless one considers the mirror or the ad. The toilet's white porcelain shines like a celebrity smile, illuminated by one bare bulb hanging from a heavily insulated cord. The floors are sea-green linoleum and tattooed by paralyzed shadows or stains that may or may not be of the fecal variety. There is no sink. How the hell do you have a bathroom without a sink? I turn to Jane: “Where is it?” She slams the toilet seat down, not sparing the typical resentment for male inconsideration, and glides her hand in the direction of the plastic donut. The words are written in green ink. Some of the letters have already been smudged from inaccuracies and, dare I venture, petty malevolence. I don't say anything for a long time; I just stare to the words, which appear without punctuation or break.

Fast Food looks better

Coming out of my ass than

Going in my mouth

“This is bullshit,” I do declare.

“What?” she exclaims. “I think it's pretty funny. I mean, I don't want to be gross or anything, but….”

“Not that,” with frustration. I grab a piece of toilet paper and wipe away the final word of the haiku.

“What are you doing? Don't you want to preserve this?”

“When did you find out about it?”

“What?”

“Did Tomas show it to you?”

“Yeah, like five minutes before you showed up.” She looks to it again, incredulously. “You just know it's a fake — just like that.”

“I need a fucking drink.”

“What's the matter?”

“Yes, it's a fake,” I respond as I reach for the door. “It's the work of one of those two dipshits out there.” The door opens to Nixi and her bare tits being kissed by the toothpick with a burgeoning erection that would probably not be visible if not for the make of his jeans. Her nipples are of that incredibly long stock that are rare even in porn. “Come on,” I yell back to Jane, who is still gawking at the toilet with her mouth ajar. Had anyone been able to see her, they may have assumed her to be gazing upon something far less innocent.

Tomas and Trixi and Aberdeen and Mixi have coupled off in the corner. The men look like vultures eying the carrion of reservation. Trixi runs a hand through her hair and scratches the nape of her craned neck. Her ordinarily nacreous smile shines with an amethyst tint: the consequence of a black light that has suddenly been turned on. Tomas, now with an orange face, places a hand on her shoulder. Aberdeen, meanwhile, has taken to talking about his life in the most pedantic way possible, as is discernible even from this distance. Mixi's head doesn't move; it's difficult to tell if he's boring her into a coma or if he's strumming heartstrings with the dexterity of Don Giovanni or Derek Trucks. Regardless, the party has not dawdled in putting up the proverbial velvet rope, so it seems as though there is nothing left to do besides find another locale to carry on the failed experiment that is the night.

“What are you drinking?” I ask Jane as she runs up behind me with her eyes glued on Nixi's bare breasts. “What are you drinking?” I repeat even as her eyes try to direct my attention towards Nixi. “I know,” I respond. “What are you drinking? I'm buying,” I add.

“I can buy my own drinks, thank you,” she contends. Her eyes dart to the side again.

“Yes, I know about them; impressive, huh?” She smiles mischievously. “Look, I know you can buy your own drinks; this isn't a question of abilities. I'm just trying to be nice.”

“It's not nice,” she objects; “It's patronizing.”

“Tell you what, I plan on drinking quite a bit because this night has been an absolute waste, just like the rest of the fucking week, so I'll buy this round if you buy the next.”

“What?” she says with a very coy grin, “Suddenly we're going Dutch?”

“You know, that's a terribly offensive thing to say,” I begin. “I am Dutch.” Her face reddens. “I'm just fucking with you,” I say before she manages to interject. She smiles and suddenly we're at the bar with drinks in our hands, her Borinquen freckles now visible in the soft light snowing down from above. The music is too loud, but not as imposing one would think. The night begins to haze over as reality and memory become diluted by a steady stream of alcohol and New Wave favorites that pulse in a driving rhythm both rigid and determined. I pine about my inability to find Coprolalia, as if his face is the gray exhaust left by the Roadrunner — tangible only in the sense that it makes the coyote's chagrin that much more unnerving. Jane smiles tepidly as my diatribe runs its course; she seems to enjoy the silent side of the rapport, as she lacks that penchant for speaking in memoirs like most college students.

Episodes from her life are linear, plot-driven. She seems edgy, a purveyor of awkward mannerisms. She may be interpreting our interaction in strictly cerebral terms, curious of my intentions, not entirely certain of her own — that odd miasma of anxiety and anticipation, which summons fits of nervous laughter and shifty eyes. Then again, she may have the disjunctive orientation to the world: a bizarre and paranoid form of cognition dominated by 'either…or' propositions that polarize all potential scenarios into camps of best and worst — a kind of cataract that can eventually envelop all but the last vestments of sanity.

I manage to extract only limited details about her life even after the drinks begin to show their affects (on her — they have been showing their affects on me for about four hours). She's from outside of Buffalo, of Polish and Puerto Rican ancestry, in the music program at the New School, cellist, violinist, guitarist, pianist, songwriter (rarely song-singer), part-time barista, full-time feminist, non-smoker, former Catholic, Working Families Party member, vegetarian, marijuana enthusiast. She talks about music with an almost choleric fervency. She thinks that Webern was a bit too chaotic at times (“Not as chaotic as Xenakis, whom I can respect — I just can't listen to him”), that Bartok was one of those geniuses that will one day be universally appreciated, and that Prokofiev was (“without question”) the best composer of the twentieth century. She calls Shostakovich a musical ironist, but doesn't expound upon the subject. Giuliani's “La Melanconia,” she believes, is the most beautiful piece of music ever written for the guitar. On rainy days she likes to get stoned and listen to Brad Mehldau, Billie Holiday, Fiona Apple, Andrew Bird, or Jesse Sykes — depending on her mood. Her favorite living author is Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Her favorite dead author is either Galdos or Proust — it once again depends upon her mood. She thinks organized religion to be the first form of organized crime, and prides herself an agnostic even though she doesn't know, until I inform her, that the term comes from the Greek, gnosis, to know. “Just slap an 'a' onto the word and you negate the meaning; therefore, it means 'to not know'.” Her favorite instrument is the vibraphone.

When engaged in political discussion she becomes cynical with alacrity. Her resignation from the banalities of the left that one encounters either on college campuses or in burnt-herb dens seems rational, but it's clear that such a disparaging, if not almost fatalistic, outlook weighs heavily upon her conscience. We agree that the economists in charge of the IMF should be tried for crimes against humanity.

She's beautiful in the sense that I miss some of the things that she says because of prurient fantasies. While the word adorable comes to mind, I am reluctant to use it even to myself because the adjective makes me think of stuffed animals and other puerile fixations. Still, there is no better way to describe her. When she smiles, it's like the introduction of a horn section.

Last call finds us still at the bar, four drinks having passed from glass to gut in the previous two hours. Nixi is long gone; Trixi, Mixi, Aberdeen, and Tomas are, too. She tells me that she is going home. I nod, try to get her number, learn that she has a boyfriend. We part once we walk out the door.

9

My roommate bursts through the door with his parents and several bags of over-sized provisions from either Costco or K-mart or Wal-mart or perhaps some regional — mart that I've never heard of. To reiterate, he had returned to his parents' estate in Connecticut for the ambiguous period of “a few weeks” after the spring term let out. I guess now seems as good a time as any to return and wake me up.

He laughs boisterously as he expounds upon the virtues of the neighborhood and the joys of living without amenities such as clean streets, peace, or eight hours of consecutive sleep — the most common interruptions being, in no particular order: Reggaeton, car alarms, domestic violence, and an array of sirens emitted from sources such as ambulances and buildings with roof alarms that could be considered hidden, provided one is incapable of discerning the large, red bar across every door to every roof, which reads:

Do Not Exit

Alarm Will Sound

or, like ours:

Not

A Sound

Gunshots are rare. Even so, his parents clearly don't share his enthusiasm.

“What are you doing on the couch?” he asks as I open my eyes to examine the three. There is a large can of beer in the foreground. The television is still on. Tom slams into a wall and becomes an accordion. Jerry lets out with a high-pitched and jubilant cachinnation.

“I must have dozed off,” I respond with the taste of Pepper's cigarette still in my desiccated mouth. “I was watching this documentary a—”

“On the Cartoon channel?” Mrs. Schneider asks.

“It was about cartoons,” gingerly.

“You've been drinking a lot I see,” Mr. Schneider supposes with a mortician's smile. “You know, it's a damn shame that there aren't any jobs out there for an En Why You graduate.”

I try to think of a witty retort, but the only thing that comes to mind is nausea. I'm trying my best to suppress it, but the spinning room, the heat, and that tenement building scent of protracted decay make this a fairly difficult test in endurance. I reach for the glass of water sitting on the coffee table.

“It's eleven thirty,” Mrs. Schneider adds with less-than-passive aggression. “Don't you have anywhere to be?”

“It's Saturday, mom.”

“Still….” she begins as Jeff escorts the two in the direction of his bedroom. I don't hear the rest of the conversation, but I can imagine the gist of it.

I close my eyes again.

9.1

“James Aberdeen and Tomas fucking Bennington?” he asks incredulously. “And you're seriously pursuing Coprolalia?” It's an odd state of envy that includes a countervailing disdain. That's Jeff, though. He worships his pedagogue of a father, regards himself as a licensed therapist, and never fails to play the part of the dissenter in any situation that requires he step beyond the narrow views on life he has established after so many years in Greenwich — not Village, of course. Some would call him aristocratic or patronizing. He would call himself cultured.

While inquisitive by nature, he is also very complacent with routine and never one to seek out anything new unless it has been tried and tested by either his father or one of his friends. Most of the latter live by Columbia. A few of them live in either western Bushwick or (East) Williamsburg. Eddie, his best friend, somehow managed to drag him all the way out here, into the deepest regions of the neighborhood; I don't really know how.

Jeff held what amounted to auditions for a new roommate after Eddie got engaged and decided to move out. This was at the end of January. Around the same time, the university had decided to throw me out of housing due to what I have come to call The Marijuana-Related Event. They were not about to expel me, nor did they see any reason to cut my scholarship. They just didn't want me corrupting the coke dealer down the hall in the single; or the three compulsive gamblers next door to her; or their roommate, who peddled ten milligram Aderols for five bucks a pop; or the idiot next door to them, who was adamantly anti-condom, not celibate, and proud of it; or his roommate, who was just a total dick; or the guy next door to them, who smuggled cigarettes into the City from Virginia and sold them out of his room; or his roommate, who was into some type of bizarre pornography that saw the actresses chloroformed, groped, and…well, actually that was it; or the other roommate in the suite, who was in business school; or the girl across the hall from those three, who cut herself because she believed it to be the only way for her to feel anything besides the imperious torpor of whatever her shrink pumped her full of; or her condign roommate, Denise, who could drink anyone in the dorm under the table even though she weighed no more than a buck-fifteen, and typically passed out in the hallway whenever she forgot her keys, which happened often. Ah, yes, Denise, who will probably have “Quit being such a fucking pussy” as her epitaph, as this was the phrase she frequently employed in order to goad men into doing things that were stupid, illegal, or potentially fatal (and, silly us, it always worked).

My parents were obviously upset by the incident, especially since the only portion of my education that was not funded by scholarships was my room and board. They footed half of the bill; the other half was paid for by student loans. They didn't especially care about the fact that their son had fallen under the spell of Lady Mary Jane. Their grievances had nothing to do with shame; they were pissed that I'd been stupid enough to be caught, and even more upset about the fact that Big Purple had a strict policy of not refunding checks.

My father and I came to an agreement filled with loose conditions and ‘I'll tan your ass if’s. In the end, it was decided that he would give me six hundred and fifty dollars a month for housing, which was not so much a display of mercy as much as a desire to not let the neighbors see that their son had come back home disgraced.

I was given a week to clear the premises.

It only took me two days to find Jeff's ad for a roommate. The rent for the room was seven hundred bucks a month. Luckily, I had a job at the time, so I was able to cover the extra fifty bucks, plus the additional costs of cable, gas, and electricity without much of a problem. We didn't exactly hit it off, but, as he has told me several times, most of the people who came to see the place were either “hipster assholes” or deadbeats. Chances are, he would have waited for a better fit that me, but the female and male components of the situation needed to come together with haste. In that sense, we clicked.

By the time finals came along, I had quit my job and my parents had calmed down some. They told me that they would pay my way until I found another job, which they expected would pay a good deal more than the small sum afforded to me by the good people at Java Express, my employer as of a few weeks ago. Thinking that they would only be supporting me a few months, we struck a deal: they would deposit fifteen hundred dollars into my checking account at the beginning of every month until either I found a job or September came along, though this latter condition was neither taken nor given entirely in earnest. This left me in a pretty good spot, as (at the time of graduation) I had a little over a grand in my checking account thanks to my previous job and several marijuana-related incidents prior to The Marijuana-Related Event. This was information that I did not feel the need to impart.

“Can I bum a cigarette,” I don't really ask because the pack is open; my thumb is already stroking one of the receded filters. “Thanks,” I add before he has time to object or accede. St. Germain can be heard coming from Jeff's room. I don't know the name of the song, but the central instrument is the flute. It's unlike Jeff to listen to such things; it is also unlike him to stare to me with such an admonishing expression unless I have forgotten to take out the garbage.

“You look like utter shit, man,” he says incidentally.

“Thanks,” I respond between plumes of smoke. “I didn't realize you and your parents were going to come back today. I would have slept in my room had I known.”

“It is a shame that we interrupted your convalescence.”

“Look, I know I made a bad impression. I'm sorry.”

“Well, it's a good thing that we woke you when we did,” he replies coolly. “Have you been greeting every day at the ripe old hour of noon?”

“I had a long night.”

“I see. And wherein lay the difficulty?”

“I'm not looking for pity, Jeff. I'm just explaining myself. It's not like I've been regularly getting up at this time every day,” I embellish (lie). I proceed to recount the entire night to him: Midas, Pepper, Aberdeen, Tomas, the triplets, Jane. The twenty-two was a mistake, I concede. Still, there's barely any left in the can. The air is hot now, as are all of the surfaces in the apartment — especially the Pleather couch on which I slept. My hair is pasted to my head and my body extols a viscous substance that smells like gin-breath and slightly putrefied beef. “I don't know how we're going to sleep in this fucking place without air conditioning,” I add.

Jeff ignores the final remark; he has decided to scrutinize the more inferential aspects of my behavior for the past two weeks with his cunning intellect.

I had told him that I wanted to spend some time searching for Coprolalia right after I had the talk with Sean back in May. He didn't take it seriously. To him it was just a statement that was made in order to perpetuate a conversation about things we wanted to accomplish over the summer. His current list includes finding a girlfriend, reading Infinite Jest, and seeing more jazz shows in the Village. If actions do speak louder than words, then the unopened vitamins on his desk that have been there since he made his New Year's resolution are calling him out. I'm obviously more ambitious. I'll spare the details of my life, and simply say that Coprolalia is not the first chimera I've courted.

“So why are you doing this?” he asks.

“Cowards taste of death many times before their deaths; the valiant only tastes of death but once.”

“Shakespeare?” I nod. “Richard the Third?” I shake my head. “It's Caesar, then.” I nod. “Tell me Brutus, can you see your face?”

“No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself.”

He laughs slightly. “Seriously, though; why are you doing this?” in earnest.

“It's fun,” I respond too quickly. He sighs. “Look, man, it's an adventure. I mean, most of the people who looked for the Holy Grail were probably just in it for the adventure.”

“That's a bit of a stretch,” he grins. “How is it going so far?”

“I won't lie: it’s not going well. But I'd rather be doing this as opposed to doing what most of my friends are doing — besides the ones on vacation, of course.”

“And what's that?”

“Either moving back in with their parents or going to interviews for jobs they don't want. Dave is thinking about joining the navy. Connie—”

“—I still can't believe you even speak to her.”

“She was my girlfriend for over two years, Jeff; I'm not about to just throw away a friendship like that. And now that I've separated myself from the situation some, I can see that it wasn't that bad of a breakup. We just both realized that the long distance thing wasn't tenable any longer.”

“And yet she was the only one who concluded this before you two called it quits.”

I bite my lip. “I knew it, too; I just didn't want to admit it.”

“Well, Boston is not all that far away, but I suppose you would know about these things better than I would,” he says in a tone that could be described and interpreted in a number of ways. The two have never met, but Jeff believes that our separation has led me to create an altar for her. Perhaps there is some truth to this, but it's not something I'd ever admit to him.

“Yes, well, she's going to be moving back to the City soon. She's going to be staying in her dad's place in Gramercy because he doesn't want her to move to Brooklyn.”

“Why does her father own an apartment in Manhattan? Doesn't he live in Cleveland?”

“Detroit. He has the place because he comes out here on business pretty frequently.”

“And why doesn't he want her living in Brooklyn?”

“I guess he thinks Brooklyn is a lot like Detroit — and, as I'm sure you know, Detroit isn't exactly the nicest place to live.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, she's been down here on all of these interviews, and they ask her the most ridiculous questions.” He squints. “You know, these questions that require horribly facetious answers. 'Why did you apply here?' 'Because I need a job and you're hiring.' 'What is one of your worst qualities?' 'Being candid enough to let you know that I'm not going to actually tell you any of my worst qualities.' It's a fucking joke.

“Denise, on the other hand, is doing well.”

“She was the Cynic girl, right?”

“Yeah. I talked to her on I.M. a few nights ago.”

“Did she have her laptop in the tub with her?”

“No, she only does that shit when people are around. Anyway, she's preparing for grad school at Fordham. She's also starting an internship with a radical publishing house in a few weeks — once she's back from Cleveland.”

“So she's the one from Cleveland.”

I nod. “Not Cleveland, but a suburb. Something Falls — I forget the exact name. Anyway, the publishing house is paying her, too.” I pause to drag from the cigarette, but it's been cold for some time. I notice that the first track of the new Wilco album is now playing. “What do you think of this record?”

“With the exception of Yankee Foxtrot, I'd say it's their best. And that's only after four listens.”

“Yeah, I've been listening to it pretty regularly.” Caesura. “Anyway, I guess Denise is the exception. Things are really looking up for her.”

“And you're searching for a man who desecrates bathroom walls.”

“Yes,” I respond with a smile. “And I've gotten to be pretty close with Tomas; not so much with James.”

“Aberdeen.”

“Yeah,” I respond. “He can be kind of condescending sometimes. Then again, there's certain nights he's a really fun guy to be around.” I relight the cigarette. “I don't know what his deal is sometimes. It's not like he's a celebrity or anything. Still, he's got this arrogance about him.” I shrug. “I'm surprised you know of him.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” I respond quickly. “I just didn't think that many people knew about him. That's why I don't understand his arrogance.” Jeff is appeased. “But, to be honest, I didn't think you followed contemporary art all that closely. You don't go to museums or anything.”

“Well, I know plenty,” indignantly. “I even have Letters in Tandem on my bookshelf,” smugly. “I think it's utter bullshit myself, but some people seem to think it to be an iconoclastic work. I don't understand why. It's nothing more than gibberish; letters in tandem — that's it.”

“I've never even asked Tomas about it. We rarely talk about his work.”

“What do you talk about, then?”

“Normal things. He's a very down-to-earth guy once he stops trying to be a revolutionary.” Jeff squints. “Sometimes he talks like a cross between, like, a hipster idiot and Lenny Bruce. It comes in spurts.” Jeff is pensive. He says nothing; he just stares to me from behind the thick frames of his glasses. He's that guy you see on the train: the academic-looking white kid who moved into Brooklyn from Anywhere But Here, USA. I guess I'm no different, but it seems odd that he's here; he should be wandering around the campus of some elite, liberal arts school with several brilliant and monomaniacal professors, who eventually elope with a student after fifteen years of marriage to — go figure — a former student.

“What are you thinking about?” I ask after a small lapse in conversation. He's staring to the table blankly.

“I think you're afraid of the real world. Not to be too philosophical here, but the desire to extend the present is really just a form of nihilism.”

“There's some truth to that, but I wouldn't put it so definitively.”

“Think about it.”

“Sure. Do you want to go put on your analrapist stocking now, or—”

“I'm being serious here. I think you're afraid of the real world. While there are an infinite variety of possibilities in regards to your future, it seems as though your maturation has reached something of a plateau. Though this may sound presumptuous, I feel as though you are envious of your own past.” I squint. “This is not say that you are exhibiting reactionary tendencies; you just wish to continue living the same life that you live now: a student without the school. Yet this is truancy, is it not? However, at the same time, you exhibit the American predilection as James — Henry James — would have described it: the rapacious appetite for experience, which would seemingly be denied by a life preoccupied by the mundane career of the quote, unquote, normal person. It's not exceptionalism exactly, just a refusal to come to terms with the fact that you will inevitably have to support yourself with a pedestrian job before you are capable of producing anything of true value.” He pauses. “Not that you are incapable. These limitations are temporal more than meritorious. After all, Jack London washed dishes prior to being published.” He pauses again. “Or do I peg you incorrectly? Is this quixotic attempt at independence and some picayune truth simply a cover for your real motivation: to indulge in the freedom of childhood before you are borne with the responsibilities of adulthood?”

“Neither,” I respond coldly. “And don't talk like a character from fucking House, please.”

“Don't change the subject.” He pauses. “I don't know if I can fully believe what you're saying. There doesn't seem to be a third option here.” He shakes his head. “It just bothers me. You're an intelligent person, but you don't seem to have any occupational interests that fall short of international renown. Isn't there something more realistic that you can see yourself doing?” I roll my eyes. “Do you even have any idea what you want to do for a living?”

“What the hell does that have to do with anything?” I ask with an exaggerated hand motion. “You know I have no idea, Jeff. We've been over this; why are you even asking me?”

I rarely saw him over the initial months that we lived together. Consequently, our interactions have always been cordial and concise. He stayed with his girlfriend virtually every night of the week while they were together. She lived by Columbia — in one of the undergraduate dorms. Sometime in early May, however, some incident led to an acrimonious breakup. Just about all of their friends sided with her, but Jeff quietly maintains that he did nothing wrong. I never really asked him to explain himself; he never really offered.

Being that the break happened at the end of the semester, exams and papers managed to keep the two of us out of one another's hair. I'll be the first to admit that the amount of work demanded of a doctoral student at Columbia is far more than that of an NYU undergrad; still, we both spent many nights either in the library or cloistered in our respective rooms.

The coffee machine begins to hiss, which means it's been done brewing for some time. Neither of us pays much attention to it; instead, we stare to one another or the languid smoke of my cigarette, which hangs in the dead air of the apartment with torpid indifference for the window or the three fans blowing at full capacity. He shakes his head, which incenses me to no small degree. “Look, Jeff, I know what I'm doing. I mean, yes, I can see how this looks bad, obsessive and silly even, but, honestly, I can handle myself. Who cares if I haven't been to an interview in a few weeks? I'll get a job.”

“But I worry about you,” he says without compassion. He's trying though. “What, exactly, do you want to do?” emphasis, peculiarly, on want. “What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? Where do you see yourself in ten years?” He pauses to light a cigarette of his own. “You need to be asking yourself these questions.”

“I can't see what ten years of life will bring. For all I know, I will have knocked up some girl with a trust fund and parents too conservative to permit either an abortion or a birth out of wedlock. We'll live in a condo somewhere in Manhattan, I'll get hooked up with a cake job, and the rest will just kind of work itself out.” I smile. He doesn't. “Look, I'll probably just go back to school after working some entry-level job for a year or two. Like I've told you, I want a little time to figure all of this out.”

“All of what?”

“My life. I don't want to jump into anything prematurely.”

“Well, you're at the age that you need to start making decisions that will—”

“Dictate the rest of my life? Yes, I'm barely responsible enough to get into a bar, yet I'm supposed to be mature enough to make the most important choices of my life.” I laugh. “You've got to be fucking kidding me, Jeff.”

“This is what college is for,” he says didactically. “You don't spend four years just dicking around getting drunk and laid; you spend four years learning a skill that will prepare you for the real world.”

“That is such a fucking load, and you know it. I went to college to learn about all of the things that the real world has dubbed irrelevant. I went to college to learn about history, philosophy, literature, art — things that people used to believe held inherent value.”

“I'm just saying—”

“What? If it doesn't make dollars, it doesn't make sense?”

“That's not what I mean at all.”

“Then what do you mean?”

“Don't turn this around on me. I'm trying to help you recognize where you are in life.”

“Look, Jeff, you were drawn to a major that provided you with a career path — I wasn't. Do I think I fucked up? No, absolutely not.”

“Just tell me what you enjoy doing. What can you see yourself doing?”

“Writing, playing bass, reading, researching, painting….”

“It sounds as though you wish to live in a state of perpetual adolescence.” He stares back to me and my cigarette, which has once again gone out. “You fear the responsibilities of adulthood. Now, forgive me for being blunt, but your actions portend a feeling of indignity towards work. You need to find your calling; otherwise you're going to find yourself stuck working some menial job even with your fancy degree,” he condescends, as his degree is far fancier than mine (University of Chicago, class of '03). “If you want to be a career academic, go to grad school; but if you think you can eke through this life by living like some asshole bohemian, you'd better go get yourself a trust fund — otherwise you're going to learn a lot of very difficult lessons. And these lessons aren't going to be the types of things one picks up from a book, either.”

“I plan on going to grad school. I just told you that. Hell man, I've told you that a thousand times. I just want to take a year or two off from school. I mean, I really have no idea what I want to do. For the time being, I plan on taking up a bullshit job so that I have enough to eat. I'll figure out 'my calling' while I'm doing that.”

“Have you started looking for this bullshit job that you already seem to detest?”

“Jesus, Jeff; I just graduated from college. I want to have a little time to myself.”

“It's been more than three weeks. You didn't just graduate.” Emphasis, correctly, on just.

“Well, it feels that way.”

“What do your parents think about this? I'm sure they're not going to continue to support you as you destroy your liver on their dime.”

“If I don't find Coprolalia in the next two weeks, I'll give all of this up. I'll sit on the computer all day looking for postings. I'll scour the papers. I'll walk the streets of Midtown handing out fucking resumes.”

“That's great and all, but, in the meantime, it wouldn't hurt to apply to a few places here and there. It requires very little effort and even less time; and, who knows, you may even find something you actually want to do.”

“Why are you suddenly so concerned with my life? When you were with Melissa, you didn't give a shit about what I did or didn't do.”

“Don't try to change the subject.”

“Seriously, though, I want to know why you care. What gives you the right to tell me what to do?”

“Will you listen to yourself? You sound like a petulant teenager.” I light the cigarette again, take a drag, and then put it out. “Look, you've become self-destructive. Perhaps it's to avoid feelings of failure, perhaps it's because you equate freedom with hedonism. I don't know. What I do know is that you've taken on an impossible task — finding Coprolalia — because you know there's virtually no likelihood for success. You need to start going on interviews. You'll thank me in the long run.” I attempt to interject, but he raises his hand. “Look, you are not going to find Coprolalia. You knew you weren't going to, and you know you're not going to. Just listen to me. I was afraid when I was in your position, but I got over it. You have to get over it, too, because you can't continue like this.”

“Is the coffee ready yet?” I ask dispassionately.

“Look, I don't want to pick apart your motivations and all of the other shit you've managed to rationalize. I can tell you, however, that this is a textbook defense mechanism. Not only that, it's an unhealthy lifestyle. When was the last time you went a whole day without a drink?”

“That's irrelevant.” I walk to the kitchen and pour myself a cup of coffee. When was the last time I did the dishes? This clearly doesn't help my case. The remnants of a massive scrapple project are everywhere you look: a faint dusting of cornmeal coats much of the counter, two pots are still on the stove, a measuring cup stained by homemade pork stock (made from neck bones) is next to the refrigerator. This looks like a site of desperation, but, in all honestly, I've never been one to spend much money on food. Previous budget meals include: chicken soup, lentil soup, Purple Soup (pork shoulder, beets, and shredded cabbage in a broth not too dissimilar to red borscht), rice and beans, franks and beans, hot dogs, the three sister medley (squash, corn, beans), and condiment sandwiches.

Being that most of my eating habits are without frills and lack intensive labor, I have always been one to keep my kitchen tidy. This apartment has reinforced such a preference. We do not live in a nice building. (This has been established already, but it should be reiterated here.) Though the apartment came with a fresh coat of a paint and new appliances when Jeff moved in, there are signs of decay just about everywhere you look: the soiled tiles in the hallway made to resemble some arabesque mosaic in tawdry teal, pale maroon, and smoker-teeth white. The walls are thick with that type of oil-based paint that looks as though it's almost dripping — the paint that doesn't chip, but peals off like the skin of a potato; the paint that seems to become viscous in the heat, to sweat and sheen like some alopecic Russian baking on the Brighton boardwalk in an article of swim-wear that leaves nothing to the imagination, but does exercises the brain, as you inevitably attempt to come up with the best simile to describe the gelatinous bulge of flesh that's been shrink-wrapped in a pastel package of synthetic fibers; the paint that is gray like watery gravy, like cigarette ash, like an Oregonian day, like the dust that accumulates behind and beneath couches with the hide-a-beds that mercilessly dredge hardwood floors when moved without the aid of a dolly or a forklift. And then there are the pinecone-sized roaches — explosions of appendages, feelers, and, when struck with a shoe or broad object, bile-colored goo. They're truly gruesome customers even if the grue [yes, this word is actually featured in the O.E.D.] that they evoke is difficult to explain. They have neither venom nor fangs nor stingers; in fact, the only real threat they pose concern the allergens contained in their pheromones and their feces. Still, they are terrifying creeping things, especially since they are the only organisms with heads that can continue to move around for more than a few moments when they lose them. Maybe Energizer had it wrong. They may sell fewer batteries, but they would certainly convey a more accurate rendition of life and tenacity if they switched their mascot from a pink bunny to a roach (though, to avoid bankruptcy, it may be wise to have marketing alter the image of the new mascot so as to not have a dried date gone self-ambulatory peddling batteries). Our roaches are not only driven; they're fearless, too. They have been known to raid the kitchen even during the day. Their bravery, however, has sometimes come at a high cost. Perhaps the worst incident concerned Jeff's craving for toast one still-dark morning and an overly zealous connoisseur of crumbs. The lingering smell proved to be one of those indelible memories like the losing of one's virginity. Hence the reason we don't lament the toaster's absence.

The rest of the apartment is not messy. All of the dirty dishes and empties are confined to the kitchen with the exception of the twenty-two on the coffee table. I swept about three days ago. I mopped last Sunday. The trash is not overflowing, but it should be taken out soon. Still, those dishes do not help my case.

“Can you pour me a cup?” he asks from the other room.

“Is this Tripping Daisy?” I ask.

“You know them? Yeah. I’ve never considered them a one-hit wonder. ‘Piranha’ is a great song.”

“Here you go,” I say as I come back to the table. “Look, I'm sorry about the dishes. I was going to do them yesterday, but I got caught up…”

“With an alcoholic named Midas?”

“…With the search Coprolalia,” somewhat deflated. “My bad.”

“Look, just say, 'Yes, I'm sorry I've been associating with a bunch of street urchins and derelicts as opposed to properly managing my responsibilities. I'm sorry I've been avoiding the real world by searching for an artist who clearly doesn't want to be found. I'm sorry I've been so inconsiderate, Jeff; it will never happen again.'” He smiles with a nauseating tint of smugness. “You need to get your shit together, my friend.”

“Like I said, I'm going to do this for another two weeks. After that, I'm going to start on the job hunt,” I say as I get up to check my email.

He sighs, stands, and then walks to his room. I resent him for a time, but know that his frustration is actually directed at his parents. This was their first time visiting the apartment even though he's lived here for almost a year, and they live about an hour and change away. They stayed for all of twenty minutes.

I open my email account. There are three new messages: one offering me natural male enhancement — a great little euphemism that implies that insecure people will buy just about anything. Another contains a Nabokov reference. The third is actually addressed to me. It is from patrick.y.shaheen@gmail.com, and reads as follows:

I came across your post on Craigslist. While I do not know Coprolalia personally, I may be able to provide you with some information that will lead you to Willis Faxo, a previous friend of his. My contact information is below.

Cheers,

Patrick Shaheen

(The remainder of the transcript has been redacted to assure the privacy of Mr. Shaheen)

10

Patrick Shaheen stands at five feet six inches. His hair color is a most ordinary brown with timid portions of gray and white. While his facial features are neither minatory nor particularly inviting, there is that potential serial killer allure in his eyes. There is an ease about him that seems disingenuous. His outfit is certainly different — a type of fashion statement that invites ostracism even here in Williamsburg, the Mecca of a hipster movement that has so far heeded a lot of bad music and a lot of fashion statements that future generations will witness with the same horror a man may feel upon waking up with a tequila hangover and seeing a four am call to an ex-girlfriend logged in his phone. Patrick wears a black, mesh tank top and green running shorts, which reveal the majority of his relatively pale thighs. Tomas asks if he is just coming from the gym. He receives a negative response.

Patrick is not mysterious by any means; at least he does not try to be. Open and more than willing to impart any information requested of him (not always with either much detail or the omission of some irrelevant tangent), he embodies whatever the antithesis of social awkwardness is called, though his candor clearly elicits awkwardness from others. His tenor is reserved, but he trollops through conversation topics like an elephant on eggshells. He utilizes the conjunctive “not to go too far off topic here, but…”, which seems to indicate that he has yet to discover the function of the left parenthesis.

Perhaps the most bizarre thing about him is his taste in music. His jukebox choices are ironic — if that adjective applies — and cause for concern among me and Tomas, who presume the bar's inhabitants are ready to take the interruption of Sinatra, hair metal, and rock standards (Hendrix, Cream, the Stones, Zeppelin, BOC, early Aerosmith, AC/DC, the Black Crowes, Metallica, or any grunge band with the possible exception of Collective Soul) personally. He puts on Maria Mulder's “Midnight at the Oasis,” King Harvest's “Dancing in the Moonlight,” Bread's “Guitar Man.” and Captain and Tennille's “Love Will Keep Us Together.” The last song generates a relatively serious amount of disgust from most of the patrons. This arouses a thief's grin from Shaheen.

He informs us that he is three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Lebanese. By the look of him, one would think he is either Greek or Italian, though this assumption would be quickly abandoned upon hearing an impression of his mother's broach. He claims that he has lived in either Ireland or Wales for the majority of his life, but he is without accent. He tells us that he is thirty-one, but, for whatever reason, I don't believe him.

Patrick dodges straight questions with the agility of a pugilist, provoking chronic sighs of exhaustion from both Tomas and I. When we ask about Coprolalia and Willis Faxo, he presents a coy grin. “I have never met the washroom fellow, and I have only met his friend twice. Not to go too far off topic here, but something Mr. Faxo once said to me reminds me of a Graham Greene novel. Do you know the work of Greene?”

“Never heard of him,” Tomas respond.

“Ah, he's one of the best authors of the twentieth century. Not that you'd know that,” as condescending as it appears on the page. “I rarely meet well-read Americans. I met a woman the other day who thought Dickens was the author of Gulliver's Travels,” he says with a laugh. “And guess what? The Yahoo had never even heard of Swift. Regardless, I'd assume that it's due to the education system here. You do know that it's absolutely horrendous and terribly backward. The No Child Left Behind Act is perhaps one of the most foolish policies the world has ever known. Then again, what do you expect from the same administration that started a war to dethrone a tyrant incapable of threatening his immediate region, Europe, or anyone in this hemisphere? Neither of you voted for the latest paragon of American Pylism, Mr. Bush, I presume?”

“No,” I respond. Was that a The Quiet American reference?

“I voted for Nader,” Tomas says as he begins towards the bar. “You guys need anything?”

“No,” I respond. “Pat, are you okay?”

“Marvelous.” Exeunt Tomas. “As I was saying…”

Two hours pass. Subject matter is addressed and quickly cast by the wayside. Topics include, in chronological order: Locke's treatise on education, Voltaire, Diderot, de Gouges, d'Alembert, Descartes, Bacon, Spinoza, Maimonides, Aquinas, Scotus, Origen, Piso, Colet, St. Jerome, Erasmus, Rabelais, More, Milton, Lord Byron's Cain, the war between Caesar and Pompey, which Patrick calls the first real Roman Civil War, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, the cobbler in the first act of the aforementioned play, Plato's Meno, the allegory of Jesus and Melchizedek, Lazarus, Faust, the meaning of the term “hero” to the Stoics and the Cynics (someone virtuous enough to survive the death of their body), the fact that most of the Cynic philosophers evidently committed suicide by self-imposed starvation or asphyxiation, the benefits of taking a Vitamin B Complex every day, Dvorák's “New World Symphony,” “Sir Duke,” Sir Duke, Schubert, Mauro Giuliani, Boccherini, Chopin, Debussy, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Zola, Matisse, Mondrian, Satie, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Bartok, Hungary's struggle for freedom in the fifties, Prague in sixty-eight, Kundera, Woody Allen, Coltrane's “Central Park West,” Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, B. F. Skinner, Seymour Skinner, Itchy and Scratchy, Crumb, Ginsburg, Cage, Dine, Ono, Lennon, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche, Wagner, Bakunin, ants, the existence or non-existence of super-organisms, Darwinism, Neural Darwinism, the perplexities of quantum mechanics, “the universe's rate of expansion is increasing; how fucked up is that!” M Theory, Egyptian mythology, Jenna Haze, Lolita, bestiality, Humbolt's Gift, Underworld, the Mets, bestiality again, the Yankees, Gehrig, A-Rod, David Beckham, Ichiro, Ricky Williams, John Muir, Mormonism, Mead, Dickinson, Ibsen, the best book of the nineteenth century (Balzac's Lost Illusions is my pick; Patrick praises Gogol's Dead Souls, but ends up picking Dostoevsky's The Possessed; Tomas votes for Through the Looking Glass; the argument ends in stalemate), the Decemberists, the Decemberists, Death Cab for Cutie, favorite album of the aforementioned band (Patrick: “I don't really know them well enough to make an informed decision”; Tomas: Transatlanticism; Me: Photo Album), Magical Mystery Tour, worst movie ever (the aforementioned, we all agree), favorite Beatles album (Patrick: Abbey Road; Tomas: Sgt. Pepper; Me: Revolver), Doctor Robert, Leary, Comte, Tocqueville, Cole, the reasons for the Revolutionary War (because a certain group of wealthy and famous Virginians had their rights to vast acres of Ohio Valley property abrogated as a consequence of the Proclamation Line of 1763; Patrick recommends Forced Founders for further information), that the legends of Roland and Thanksgiving are both epics born from historical footnotes, Zinn, Chomsky, Goebbels, St. Helen, Bush, Commodus (Herculi Romano Augusto), Nero, Seneca, Booth, Oswald, Kennedy, Castro, Paine, Michael Collins, and what Ireland is like (boring and “verdant”).

Patrick throws in his two cents on everything between and beyond, while Tomas and repeatly fail to scrounge up more than a half penny between us. Patrick’s anger is aroused by the unfortunate fact that most people think the title of the song “Brand New Key” is “The Roller-Skate Song.” He's in favor of the death penalty, especially when it comes to people who commit insider trading. (“So you have a system that's based on speculation. Some people speculate on a stock price going up; some speculate on the price going down. I don't know how the latter is still legal, especially now that it is so easy to disseminate false information. People will admit that this is terrible for small companies, true, but the relative ease by which one can deceive the public is considered a topic for conspiracy theorists. Why? All the short-seller has to do is pay off someone who works for a small, web-based financial journal. Even the rather minor ones are reviewed by tens of thousands of investors. It doesn't matter if they have virtually no credibility to begin with — the investors want as much information as possible, and they are persuaded rather easily on account of their being so skittish. It's so simple: the site posts whatever the short-seller wants, the short-seller is called an unnamed source, and suddenly all of those predictions the short-seller made about a stock price going down come true. By the time the lie is exposed, all of the money has already been exchanged. Done deal: The short-seller makes a profit, the writer counts his bribe money, and the website, suddenly known for its ability to obtain unique information, even if it is false, gets more web traffic. Sure it destroys companies who have done no real wrong, but why the hell should the Social Darwinists care about justice, truth, or the lives that they destroy? To them, these are just nebulous obstacles in the way of success, utility, and, most importantly, money.”) There’s something wrong with Third Avenue in sunlight. I don't really understand why. The word gestalt comes up a lot. He calls Tilden the poor man's Kierkegaard; Browning the most underrated poet of the nineteenth century; Abbagnano the greatest philosopher that no one has ever heard of; Averroes the most influential man of the twelfth century; Lucan the seventh-most eloquent man Rome ever produced, even if he wasn't really from Rome. He does not provide the names of the six who top his list, though he does tell us that Suetonius is his second-favorite Latin historian. Marx is frequently cited. Lenin is, too. Castro and Mao are regarded with an almost haughty indifference. He applauds the premises behind Julius Nyerere's Ujamaa movement, but says that the system was never properly implemented. Proudhon, he muses, should be more popular among American liberals. After talking about Ireland, he goes back to politics, and complains that too many American conservatives equate his beliefs with the Stalinist brand of totalitarianism, which, he notes, is different than Fascism for predominately economic reasons. As a footnote, he adds that the term “Islamo-Fascist” only makes sense if one is ignorant of the fact that Fascism is a distinct branch of totalitarianism, and that one could make the argument that Fascism is sufficient for atheism.

Tomas is reticent when in the presence of an extroverted character with whom he is not well acquainted. I realized this when I was introduced to Keen Buddy, but Patrick seems to exacerbate the phenomena. For the majority of the initial hours we spend together, Tomas simply looks to Patrick with quiet derision in the manner a judge may look at a career criminal. It's a stern expression, one that Tomas denies conveying even after his second or third trip to the toilet. He eventually justifies it as a form of simple skepticism as opposed to misanthropy, or, worse, elitism. Even this he admits reluctantly.

By the time the hours turn to double digits, Tomas has become somewhat inured to the rantings and the divergent method of conversation favored by Patrick. They begin to joke with one another, even finding common ground in their mutual respect for James Lovelock and Lynn Margolis. When I admit that I have no idea who these people are, Patrick takes the opportunity to explain the rudiments of Gaia theory to me. Tomas, meanwhile, leaves to order his sixth gin and tonic. I'm still on my fourth thirty-two ounce beer — probably about half way down. Pat appears as sober as when we entered even if he's taken down seven or eight double-pints. He has begun to quote British poetry at random, but I admittedly don't know how accurate he is. There is a harangue against the IMF and the Chicago Boys. He tells me all I need to know is that Milton Friedman is the devil, that the freer a market is, the more volatile it will be, and that the cycle of boom and bust will prove to enrich the super-wealthy at the expense of the working class, who will never see their wages substantially increased “Because of the ever-present specter of recession.” He calls me Maecenas at one point, and asks why I envy the lives of other men. He laughs when I look to him with confusion, and announces that I shall henceforth be known as Maecenas.

Once Patrick leaves to get his eighth or ninth beer, I turn to Tomas: “What the hell is wrong with this guy?”

“I don't know. He just talks. He's like Joe fucking Biden: you ask him a yes or no question about Coprolalia and he rambles on for an hour about ants. I mean, seriously, ants? They're not fucking super-organisms.”

“Okay, let's not get back on that.”

“I'm just saying…” he begins as he looks over to Pat and the barkeep, who are busy trying to talk over a track off Beggar's Banquet. They exchange exaggerated laughs like old friends. “I think this is a waste of time. Then again, this what you get for posting something on Craigslist,” he scolds, not even bothering to mention Patrick's attire — a rare omission for Tomas.

“That was your idea,” I respond with indignation.

“Yes, and it was a stupid idea I came up with when I was drunk. How many of those ideas do you actually listen to?” Silence. “Do you know how many fucking maniacs prowl that shit? Dig this, man: There was actually a guy in Germany who posted a request that went something like this: Virgin cannibal seeks first meal,” he begins.

“Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”

“Better to sleep with a drunken cannibal than a drunken priest.”

“Ha!” actually said.

“Okay, but due I’m in the middle of a story here.”

“A cannibal on Craigslist…”

“Yeah, and what's even more fucked up is that someone replied! Someone wanted to be fucking eaten!”

“What happened?”

“He ate her!”

“Did he get in any trouble?”

“I'm sure he did,” he says with a suspicious look in Patrick's direction. “I don't know, though; I didn't really follow the story. In fact, I'm not sure if the person eaten was a man or a woman.” He shrugs. “But think about it, man: cannibalism.”

“He's not a fucking cannibal,” I assume. “I think he's just lonely. I mean, a normal guy doesn't just go on like this the first time you meet him. He's lonely, man,” with more confidence. “That's all it is.”

“I don't want to take the chance. Plus,” he trumps the right bower already on the table, “He's fucking annoying. It's like someone gave him a fucking emetic; it just keeps coming and coming, and I don't think it's going to fucking stop soon.” He pauses. “Has he said one fucking word about Coprolalia?”

“No, not really.”

“Oh, and have you heard of any of these fucking people? Who the hell was the one guy who ‘may have inadvertently caused the Reformation’?”

“Erasmus?”

“You know him?”

“Yeah. Didn’t you have to read In Praise of Folly in school?”

“That was him?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.”

One of Pat's songs appears at this point. It's fairly obvious when they do. In this case it's another AM hit from the seventies: Three Dog Night's “Shambala.”

“What if he is Coprolalia?”

“Him? Are you fucking serious?”

“Serious enough.”

“No. No fucking way, man. That guy is a fucking whack-job. You've said it yourself: Coprolalia does not stand out. Anonymity is the best camouflage.”

“Did you just come up with that?”

“No, I think I heard it in some detective movie from the forties — you know, real film noir shit.”

“So, what were we talking about?” Patrick asks as he takes his seat with two more double-pints in Styrofoam cups.

“You were just about to tell us about Willis Faxo,” Tomas responds. “Have you seen his piece in front of the Keens Center?”

“Of course. I'm the one who recommended they purchase it. The Keens family and I go way back.”

Tomas says nothing.

“About Mr. Faxo — as I said in the previous correspondence with your friend,” as he turns to me, “I have never met the washroom fellow, and I've only met Willis, a good friend of his, twice.”

“Where?” I ask. “Do you know one of his friends or was this just a random occurrence?”

“Well, I said twice, which precludes a random occurrence, eh?” as audacious as it appears. “He was dating a friend of mine some time ago,” he says with a shrug. “At the time he was living in a rather dismal flat in Astoria. This was roughly five years ago. I would tell you the address — perhaps it is his current flat, perhaps it is now his former — but, unfortunately, I didn't have the mind to make such an observation. What I can tell you, however, is that he lived within walking distance of the rather famous beer garden up there. We — myself, Willis, and my friend, Daphne, whom Willis was dating at the time — spent a good deal of time there, too. It's a fantastic place. You've been there, I presume?”

“I've heard about it, sure, but I haven't gotten up there yet. According to Sean, Coprolalia hasn't taken the time to visit it, either.”

“Ah, Professor Winchester: The St. Peter of Coprolalia—Sapientia ex cathedra.” He smiles. “I don't mean to be too disparaging of his insight into the artist, but, if you see him, could you please tell him that the piece about the emperor who couldn't weave has nothing to do with the design of his cloth.”

“What does it really mean?”

“It's too difficult to get into.”

As Patrick had not censored himself on any subject up to this point, Tomas and I decide not to press him. He is certainly a wealth of information, but, at the same time, he seems so giddy that I've found it difficult to believe much of what he says. It’s an odd variety of tergiversation.

“You were saying,” Tomas says with a roll of the wrist.

“The beer garden. Ah, yes, it is a fantastic place. Probably the best bar in Queens with the exception of the water taxi bar in Long Island City.”

“The water taxi bar?”

“Yeah, right where the Mohawk Building is,” Tomas adds.

“It's a tremendous place: lots of seating, very cheap drinks…girls….”

“…To eat,” Tomas says under his breath.

“But where is the beer garden?”

He shoots me a glance as though I've struck him. “I'm not the bloody yellow pages.” He turns to Tomas. “He's a rather impetuous one, isn't he?”

“It's day number sixteen and you're his only lead, man,” Tomas replies. “I guess it's understandable.”

“Can I ask you boys a question?” he asks (ha!).

“Shoot, boss,” Tomas says as he toasts nothing in particular.

“What do you see when you close your eyes?”

“What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”

“It's an exercise.”

“I guess darkness,” I shrug.

“I see nothing,” Tomas chimes in with his eyes closed. He smiles as he places his hand over his eyes to better emphasize his participation in the experiment — a virtuous acolyte of Galileo blinding himself for the sake of science. There is silence for a moment. It is soon broken by a pleasant, 6-5-4 progression that will reveal the plight of a semi-anonymous Brandy. “Great choice, by the way — I fucking dig this song.”

“I obviously share your fondness for the rare materialization of Looking Glass's brilliance.” He laughs a bit, drinks deeply from his cup, and continues with his thought experiment. “Back to the question at hand. If someone were to ask you to put your hand in front of your face, not just close to your face, but so close that it blocks out any light — and with your eyes open, mind you — (Tomas opens his eyes and removes his hand from his face), would you still say you see nothing or,” as he turns to me, “darkness?”

“Okay, I see what you're getting at,” Tomas begins with a tone of alacrity that seems hardly justified. “In other words, when you close your eyes, you're really just seeing the back of your eyelids. That's great Plato,” he says with a torpid blink. He turns to me. “This sounds like one of those annoying emails my mom sends me.”

“Yes, I am well aware of the rather childish nature of the thought experiment. All it is supposed to do is elicit certain responses out of different people. It's a bit of parlor psychology, I know, but I feel as though the question effectively reveals how a person views his or her relationship to the universe.”

“What did our answers reveal?”

“It's not an accurate test, of course. Someone I met once said that an individual's favorite condiment was the most revealing portal into their soul.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that ketchup says one thing about a person, vinegar another, mustard something else.”

“I see.”

“Mayo is the only bad one.”

“Mayo?”

“Gluttony — the ultimate virtue in a decadent society.” He pauses before expressing himself in verse:

The appetites of the edacious—

intractable, chaotic, audacious—

foment in perverse and Stygian shades,

and lust the demise of the Palatine's glades.

“What the hell was that?”

“I think Petronius. Regardless,” he continues after a brief pause, “Mr. Faxo said that the previous thought experiment I brought up reveals not only an individual's metaphysical leanings, but that individual's degree of…well, I'll be blunt — narcissism. You can infer what you will from that.”

“So Tomas is a radical Berkeleyite?”

“Was that an insult?”

“I wouldn't say no,” Patrick laughs.

“Okay, so how the fuck did you respond?”

“The same as our friend here.”

“This is such a bunch of bullshit, man,” Tomas replies. “Not only do I resent the implication that I'm some fucking self-absorbed dick, it makes the eyelids response out to be the right one, which means the bullshit test puts science and math on a fucking pedestal.” He sighs in disgust and reaches for his gin and tonic.

“It's not that there's a right answer exactly; but the eyelids one certainly does make more sense. It's not like anyone is capable of seeing nothing unless a lot of very difficult conditions are satisfied. Even if it's a common thing that one hears, the sentence only makes sense because it has been granted a colloquial meaning, not because its semantics are valid. Light penetrates your eyelids even when it's dark, right?”

“Yeah,” Tomas replies, defeated and incensed, “But what if there's no fucking light anywhere? What then?”

“Well,” I begin, “It wouldn't really matter if your eyes were closed or not: you're not going to see anything anyway.”

“There is always light, Tomas.”

He scowls.

“But going back to what was said earlier, it depends on how you define the word 'see'. I mean, if 'to see' is defined as the 'the images the eyes relay back to the brain,' then I guess the eyelids response would always be the correct one. However, if it's defined as 'the illuminated image the eyes transmit to the brain for processing', then I guess 'nothing' could be somewhat correct. Then again, darkness is always right because it simply means the lack of light. It's a relative term, like fast or slow; a is x and b is y only because of the relationship between a and b. It's dark because there's less light than when one's eyes are open.”

“Yeah, well, there may be no absolute lightness, but there is an absolute darkness, an absolute fastness, and, though I'm not a fucking Einstein scholar or anything, an absolute slowness.”

“Still, a car going a hundred kilometers an hour down a residential street is considered to be going fast. Like I said, it's a relative term; the word just needs to accurately apply, given the context, in order to be considered correct. '“A” is “A”' is a universally sound proposition if and only if the pragmatic elements of language are ignored. For example, if Curious George were to steal the hat of the Man in the Yellow Hat, it would be false to refer to the Man in the Yellow Hat — a proper noun — as the man in the yellow hat. This is akin to a puzzle devised by either Russell or Frege—”

“Dude, fuck this,” Tomas says as he finishes his drink. “I have to take a fucking piss.”

I turn to Patrick as Tomas stumbles from his seat. Patrick is ostensibly upset. “Don't mind him,” I say. “He's just drunk.” The conversation stalls for a few moments as we both look around in something akin to an awkward silence, perhaps a distant cousin. I become better acquainted with the aesthetics of the bar, which could be one of the last authentic drinking establishments left on the north Bedford strip: the lack of renovation, the surly-looking bartender, the absence of a woman both single and under forty, the wood veneer, the Christmas lights that are on even in the summer, the pictures of the place from back in the seventies, the availability of seats, the drink specials that do not cater to consumers of pink or green concoctions, the paucity of concern, the stools, tables, and patrons standing on shaky ground, the dirty mirrors, dart holes, and ancient beer advertisements that adorn the walls. People here do not wash behind their ears, nor do they inhabit the world of will; they reside in the realms of should and could and would, an unfortunate domain in which the magnanimous contours of fantasy never seem to comply with the path that reality has decided to take. Sometimes they compare these lines and measure the degree of the angle created when the two diverged. Sometimes it seems more bearable to see the tears of our mothers than the harrowing face of reality.

“You do know that progress is measured by the degree a society understands light, correct?”

“Sure.”

Is that a Plato reference? Is it simply a fact about the progression the study of physics has taken? Does it concern digital technology?

Conversation comes to a halt once again. The jukebox continues to grace us with the sounds of the seventies — now John Sebastian's “Welcome Back”—thereby providing a protracted reprieve from the hair metal medley on which some dude in a Def Leppard had spent a small fortune. Most of the songs were less famous than the typical arsenal of albums these types of bars often carry — records by Poison, Ratt, Warrant, Whitesnake (or is it White Snake?), Motley Crue, Skid Row, Quiet Riot, Twisted Sister, Scorpions, or any of those bands that regularly gig in Purgatory — but each track was known and enjoyed by the majority of the patrons. The Journey requisite was taken care of fairly early on; Guns n' Roses, however, lay in wait, perhaps on reserve. I am expecting Patrick to put on Dusty Springfield or Wham! at some point in order to cement his places as the most annoying presence the bar has seen in recent years, but the John Sebastian seems to be enough to put him there.

“So what do you know of Coprolalia?” I ask plainly.

“Nothing really. I've seen a few of his pieces and most of my friends think he is just the bee's knees; but, like I told you earlier, he's a friend of a friend, who, I suppose, is something of a friend of a friend. Do you know anything of Willis Faxo? I figured you would have come across his name in your search for the artist.”

“Not really,” I respond. “I've heard a few things about him — and only then from Tomas or our friend James.”

“He's a very odd bird — Willis, that is. Something of a Pygmalion, I suppose, though he makes furniture — tables and chairs mostly. Everything is fashioned out of wood. I was under the impression that he was still in Astoria, but a less than reliable source recently told me that he's moved into a space somewhere in that limbo region between Williamsburg and Bushwick — the one the real estate brokers are now calling either East Williamsburg or the Williamsburg Industrial Park. Industrial Park.” He lets out a caustic laugh. “There's an oxymoron if I've ever heard one.” He picks up one of his beers. “It's a desolate area, really. I've known quite a number of people who've been mugged there.

“But you have no need for this information,” he says before taking down about a quarter of his beer. “You want to know about the artist. Well, according to my friend Daphne, the same Daphne whom Mr. Faxo knew biblically, the two were roommates in college.”

“Wait. Who was roommates with who?”

“It's whom — but that's irrelevant. Mr. Faxo roomed with the artist. They both went to that art school in the East Village. Cooper State? Cooper University?”

“Cooper Union?”

“Yes, Cooper Union. They went there. Your artist's real name is Mordecai, but I don't know his last name.” I smile. I don't know the adjective that would qualify it. “Also, he grew up somewhere in Brooklyn — either Midwood or Bensonhurst, I believe.”

“Bay Ridge?” I suppose.

“No, certainly not Bay Ridge. It's one of the neighborhoods to the east of Bay Ridge, and west of Sheepshead Bay. It’s north of both of these regions, as well.” He pauses to scratch his head. “You probably want to know some more details about him, but I can't offer you much help. I haven't seen so much as a picture of him.”

“Well, do you know how I can get in touch with this Faxo character?”

He does not respond with a word; he merely pulls out a sheet of paper that contains a name and a number. “I don't know if Daphne still speaks with him,” he says as he points to the name on the paper. “The two were together for a short time, so don't be too upset if she can't help you.”

“Why didn't you just bring her along?”

“You need to relax, mate,” he snaps with a sudden look of severity. He pulls his head back and regains his former, gregarious constitution. “I was going to surprise you, but it seems as though the two of you are well on your way to making perfect asses out of yourselves if we don't get out of here after the next drink.” I look to him with a wince. “I'm to meet with her tonight at a party. You can either come with me or you can go home and call her tomorrow. It's your choice.” There's a lapse of sound as songs change. The new tune evokes an elated grin from Patrick. “Do you like Seals and Croft?”

“I have no idea. Is this them?”

“Of course it is,” he replies with wide eyes. “You do know that they are both Baha'is, right?”

“No,” nor do I know what the hell a Baha'i is.

“See: this is what happens when you talk to strange people at the bar.”

“Why are you only telling me about this now?” I ask.

“What? About the Baha'i faith?”

“No, about Coprolalia and Willis Faxo and Daphne…what’s this say?” as I point to the piece of paper.

“Karev.”

“Why is this coming out only now?”

“Because Americans hate talking to strangers, even at the pub. I figured I'd have a few drinks with some of the younger artistic types until it was time to go the party. God knows I've met enough of your types, but I still believe — perhaps foolishly — that I'm bound to stumble upon your generation's Kolya one day.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Are you not familiar with The Brothers Karamazov?”

“I get the reference. I don’t—”

“So are you curious about the implication that God's knowledge is all-encompassing?” he asks with a facetious grin. “Or are you more curious as to my frequent interactions with artistic types?”

“Either,” I proclaim.

“Well, in terms of God, I feel His — and might I say that this pronoun is obviously a homonym — omniscience arises from logical necessity, provided one believes God to be both eternal and omnivolent. Now, if one accedes to what I have said — that omnivolence and eternal life suffice for omniscience — then it must be acknowledged that the possibility of any individual will outside of God's is negated. This is a simple exercise in logic based on a somewhat Russellian take on definite descriptions. Not to depart from the subject at hand, but, as an aside, don't you think the word “univolent” would be a far better fit than omnivolent?” He scratches his head. “Regardless; it's best not to dwell upon the ambiguous lexicography one is doomed to encounter when prowling the tomes of theology.

“Either way, this whole — volent business presupposes the existence of God, which is an unverifiable position to take — as is the non-existence of God — because, from a purely epistemological vantage, a posteriori knowledge is a consequences of observation. In other words, faith is the only way to have either God or no God because any material proof or disproof of God is completely beyond our perception or cognitive abilities — furthermore, faith, as Bayle observed, is required if we are to even advance beyond the problems associated with Cartesian duality, the brain in the vat problem and so on. Regardless, this is the real reason why any material manifestation of God is a miracle — it contradicts the very nature of God.

“Now, I am not one of the faithful; I am an agnostic. Many people believe, to paraphrase Mr. Colbert, that an agnostic is just a dissident atheist; but it is really the only rational way to go about matters of religion. I mean, it is certainly more rational than the ludicrous beliefs of the Christians, who think a Trinity can be unified. You may assert that my view is simply contingent upon my rejection of Christ as my lord and savior, but I simply can't see how someone believes that God can be both eternal and temporarily encompassed within the body of a man, who lived some two thousand years ago, and who, at present, sits on the right hand of Himself — sounds like Someone is preparing for the holy stranger as opposed to Judgment Day, you get me, mate.” He takes a massive gulp. “And then there's the Holy Spirit, which no one seems to really understand,” he adds before gesturing with a dismissive hand and a slight whistle. “The Holy Trinity: Father, Cloud, and Tongue,” he adds with disdain. “Honestly, I do not understand why Christians refuse to doubt the validity of this doctrine and just accept Adoptionism or Nestorianism or Arianism — and, no, this last one is not related in any way to white supremacy—, but, then again, I don't understand why these same people, in this country, voted an admitted alcoholic into the White House.”

“An alcoholic?”

“Yes; once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic,” he says with conviction even though the comment is completely irrelevant. “Your president is, ipso facto, an alcoholic.”

“I see,” I respond hesitantly even though I share his disgust.

“I don't compare him to Hitler, as some are wont to do. While Hitler's rise to power was a democratic Volkerwanderung—and that includes an umlaut over the o—a democratic Völkerwanderung that came about as a consequence of an election, his policies and positions were violently antidemocratic. That's the real danger of Nazism — not its capacity for violence, but its appeal to the common people. Bush's win was simply a victory for a very conservative portion of your country, although I do find it troubling that he constantly refers to himself as the commander-in-chief, as that seems to suggest that he sees himself as, or his speech writers wish to make him out to be, a kind of imperator—even if he has not won occasion for a triumph, or even an ouatio for that matter — not that he would even know what such things are, as his head is even more vacuous than that of Calvisius Sabinus. Now, not to go too far off topic here, but I do wish to say that I am absolutely fascinated by the people who continue to support him and a foreign policy that echoes what Calgacus said of the Romans: 'Si locuples hostis est, avari, si pauer, ambitiosi, quos non Oriens, non Occidens satiaverit: soli omnium opes atque inopiam pari adfectu concupiscunt. Auferre trucidare rapere flasis nominbus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.' I am—”

“What the hell did all of that mean?”

He pauses for a moment. “To paraphrase: A rich enemy excites their — the Romans — cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power.” He pauses again. “Their rapacity finds satisfaction from neither East nor West. Alone in this world they are covetous of the abject, as well as the rich. To robbery, slaughter, rapine they give the mendacious name empire; they leave…hmm…I guess deserts in their wake, and call it peace. Actually, that last line is a bit hard to translate. Solitudinem, I guess, is pretty much the same as solitude, but there's a certain aspect to it that….” He scratches his head. “Have you ever read Camus' 'Le Renégat'?”

“'The Renegade'?”

“Yes.”

“Is that the one with the guy who's lost his tongue and he's in the middle of the desert with some weird tribe of really hedonistic people? I know there's some metaphor that I'm fucking up, but I can't really remember.” Patrick nods hesitantly. “To be honest, I don't really remember it. I haven't touched any of Camus' fiction in three or four years.”

“Well, that's the one I'm thinking of.” He pauses. “Or you could think of the landscape, perhaps moonscape, featured in McCarthy's Blood Meridian.”

“That just came up the other day.”

“Well, it's an excellent novel.” He takes a small sip from his cup. “So, to reiterate, it's solitude in the sense of harsh solitude.”

“Okay.”

“As I was saying, though, I'm also amazed by the fact that there are thousands of people your age who support his economic policies even though they are nothing more than fodder for late capitalism's process of stratification. Furthermore, I am disgusted by those who support the war even though they do not fight in it. Rupert Brooke was overzealous in his patriotism, too, but at least he had enough personal integrity to reserve a portion of Greece for Britain.

“And yet the left cannot persuade the moderates of the country to reject the administration, which, with the help of some very Bush Senior-oriented CEOs, has looted this country without restraint, all the while making the conservatives more resolute in their belief that a Democratic administration will pillage the nation of its wealth with public programs that were considered necessary only a few years ago — during the Reagan administration. They quote Lucan—Arma tenenti omnia dat, qui iusta negat—as they bow to Caesar.”

“What does that mean?”

“He who abnegates his due from the armed bully grants him — the bully — everything.”

“I see.”

“Where was I? Oh yes: about the answer to your second question. I am interested in what the young artists are doing in this city, and I’ve made it my business to seek out a lot of them and get their thoughts on art. To be blunt, it has been a piss-poor showing of hacks and cultural bulimics who equate Kurt Cobain’s suicide with the assassination of JFK. At best they are spoiled children, who think themselves entitled to the boon of a best seller just because they've picked up a fucking pen with some specious nostalgie de la boue. That's the writers, of course. Those who use other mediums can be even worse in their unwarranted pomposity — their envy, too. As Antisthenes, one of the contemporaries of either Socrates or Plato, said: 'As iron eats at rust, so too are the envious consumed by their passions'. What’s far more deleterious, however, is the level of condescension and the general isolation that I've found in your generation.” He shakes his head with disappointment. “For one, I absolutely hate being spoken down to by such brutally ignorant people who think their BAs in English actually mean something, especially when their feigned ataraxia is really just akrasia in disguise. Secondly, I don’t understand how you guys get laid. It is absolutely beyond me,” he says slowly. His observation is without enmity. “Do you fuck your sisters and cousins, or is that just in the South?” He pauses, but allows no rebuttal. “I know we're supposed to be the ones with the odd sex life — you know, fucking goats and sheep and all — but, honestly, we at least have the common courtesy to initiate a conversation every once in a while without trying to come off like a owl perched on an ivy tower. You guys, on the other hand…”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean? And I thought the Scots were the goat fuckers.”

He ignores the latter remark. “…What I mean to say is that most of you absolutely revile each other here in the States. I don't understand this notion of patriotism espoused by the right; they detest many of the citizens of this country for being leftist and — even though this group comprises roughly half of the population…at least the population that votes — somehow un-American. They also hate their government. What is this America for which they have such deference? Is it the land they wish to defile in the name of laissez-faire capitalism? Is it a nationalistic mythology that was constructed over the course of the nineteenth century? I just don't get it. And then there are the leftists, who are so fucking full of themselves, as though they are the intellectual superiors to just about everyone under the sun. They proclaim themselves to be the most capable of understanding the masses, but never cease to express disdain for these same individuals. How can you empathize with a social group if you believe yourself to be superior to them, to be Gulliver in the land of the Yahoos? I'm troubled by the notion that New York is supposedly better than anywhere else in this country in this regard, though I often think of Mann's sentiment of Venice when I am here: half fairy-tale, half snare. Regardless, the people here are supposed to be open-minded and non-judgmental; I mean, this is supposed to be the Mecca of personal liberation, right? As an aside, I do believe, in your favor, that this city is far better than Washington, as Rome has never been one for philosophers. Still, the vast majority of this city, with all of its pretensions to history and culture, will always present its Brummels before its Balzacs. I feel like the protagonist in this one Wilfred Sheed novel, Square’s Progress,” he adds distantly.

“Who?”

“American novelist. I don't remember what era he was writing; I believe it was during the heyday of Vonnegut, perhaps Miller. Not so bad if I recall correctly.” He becomes pensive for a moment, then quickly returns to his frantic mode of locution, which by this point has become something of a soliloquy. “Still, everywhere I go I run into the same types: drunk on their own sense of self-importance. Do you know how many times I've come into places on Bedford or on Smith Street or in Manhattan somewhere, and the only thing that people talk about is how silly those around them look or act? Everything seems odd when you're an outsider.” He pauses. “You people move to the city because you reject suburbia and all of the hang-ups there, but you never let those same hang-ups go. But maybe it’s not just that. Maybe it’s because most people are just moving here to get by. Maybe the white migration back to some of the urban centers of this country is a direct consequence of the end of the industrial era and the lack of unionization among the workers participating in what many are now calling the post-industrial economy. Have you ever seen the movie They Live?”

“No.”

“There's a fantastic fight scene in it. I think the show South Park borrowed it for the cripple fight episode. More importantly, however, I believe it captures the anxiety that has defined both your generation as well as my own — perhaps even the previous generation. It's a fair movie, though its lack of subtlety makes its evocation more emotional than analytical.

“As I was saying, however, it's not that difficult to talk to someone new, even if you're taught to fear every stranger as scrofulous, covetous, criminal. I know it seems hard. I know your tellies push xenophobia upon most of this country, but you all need to get over yourselves. You need to abandon the Bluebird mentality.” He looks to me with ire in his eye for a moment. It passes. “Though Erasmus said this in the midst of satire, I believe his words were sincere: ‘The fool tries everything, meets his dangers at first-hand, and thereby acquires what I’m sure is genuine prudence.’ We are sitting in one of the entrepôts of history, of revolution, where ideas congregate with brute, historical forces. This is it, my friend; its potential to become an urban Thélème rivaled only by Detroit.” He laughs at my crossed eyes. “And yet there’s friction between so many people here, as so many are afraid of looking foolish. But I bet you've made quite a number of friends looking for this Coprolalia fellow, have you not? True, you probably don't call them on the weekend, you probably don't even think about them all that much; but something tells me that you're learning that most of the people in this city are not crazy or stupid or dangerous. They're just like you; they just have different preferences.”

“Well, thank you for your input, but—”

“But nothing.” He smiles as he places his fist on his chin. “I love this song.”

“Seriously? The fucking Partridge Family? Would a little Foghat every now and again kill you?”

“But this is so innocent,” with a dreamy smile.

“Your know what your pal Greene said of innocence, don’t you?”

He chuckles. “The more pertinent issue here is that you agree with everything that I have said. It's time this recognition begins influencing your actions. Prove Aristotle wrong.” My eyes narrow. “Prove that a man can be continent prior to the age of thirty.” I nod hesitantly. “Look, the world is a wonderful place for those capable of appreciating the company of others,” he points a finger up, which brushes against his lips. He notices that Tomas has just exited the bathroom. Tomas looks somewhat lost. “He needs to sober up a bit before we get to this party,” he begins somewhat quietly. “You are coming, correct?” I respond in the affirmative. “Well, I'm not about to bring someone assured to make a perfect ass of himself because he can't handle his liquor,” he says as if to drive the point home. “Anyway, I asked the barkeep to brew up a pot of coffee. It should be ready by now.” He looks to the bartender, and then back to me. “It wouldn't kill you to liven up a bit, too. You don't talk all that much, Maecenas, do you?”

Tomas is all smiles as he returns. “Sorry that took so long. The line for the can was six deep.” He looks to the back of the bar quickly, turns to me, and then leans in close. “Did you get a load of the mutton chops on the guy two tables down? Looks like Chester A. Arthur on meth.”

10.1

Tomas takes his coffee light and sweet. Patrick manages to convince me to take the brackish sludge he's pushed on the two of us without so much as a grain of sugar. I don't know why, but he finds this incredibly funny. Perhaps this indicates a nascent sign of drunkenness, but it's difficult to tell. He has once again become overly genial after his earlier harangue, which marked Tomas as a conceited jerkoff (“A poor man's Vronsky,” as he said during one of Tomas’ trips to the bathroom) and me as a particularly importune pest.

Tomas maintains that Patrick is a rabid bullshitter while the latter is in the toilet. I'm still on the fence. While I share Tomas' suspicions about the party to which we both have agreed to go — cannibals, after all, are not typically known for their candor — I can’t help but feel as though this odd man will eventually lead me to Coprolalia.

As we drink our coffee, conversation begins to flow less erratically. This is yet another one of Patrick's peculiarities. Apparently, the drunker he gets, the less his mind wanders, which would indicate that his previous foolishness is more sophomoric than moronic — like a sagacious mendicant. He is also becoming visibly anxious to get to the party where we are to meet Daphne, who may or may not know Willis Faxo, who may or may not be in regular contact with a man named Mordecai, who may or may not be Coprolalia.

We linger in grays and speak into our respective beverages. The bar, meanwhile, becomes more and more populated with each passing moment, mostly by kids who have spent the previous hours preening themselves in order to tell the world that they don't give a fuck about convention: the typical Hair Product Anarchists and Quadrennial Democrats that make Williamsburg the most salient example of my generation's political statement of vanity and civic paralysis. Their looks in Patrick's direction are more contemptuous than those he had initially received from the blue-collar elements, who, by this point, have become accustomed to him: his ability to straddle the line between pontification and tirade, his lack of what one might call “appropriate attire,” his insatiability, his audacity, his loquacity, his spastic facial movements (and these involve the whole face, too), possibly even his taste in music. Most of them have said at least a few words to him whether at the bar or from their table; they have judged him a harmless anomaly with a benign smile, an animated disposition, and a good sense of humor. They raise their glasses to him every once in a while in order to make certain they don't only know him from a dream, and seem Christmas-morning delighted when he accepts the toast, not without a belch of laughter alongside his random and mirthful proclamations, which continue to captivate the otherwise languid chorus encircling the bar like parishioners around an altar.

Patrick takes down his two double-pints in the time it takes Tomas and me to get through our respective cups of coffee. The bartender sends another two in our direction. These coffees represent the first comped drinks of the night for us. Patrick has been drinking for free for well over an hour and a half.

The jukebox begins to regale the bar with hits from post-adolescent melancholy — depressing stuff with esoteric lyrics and bizarre noises that mask the band's poor musicianship and inability to (as opposed to desire to not) construct a complex melody. The new inhabitants embody a world in which there's nothing to really complain about except for the vicarious poverty experienced via cheap commodities and those horribly depressing commercials about famines taking place in those countries that sit in the nosebleeds of the UN. Heartbreak, consequently, becomes a pretty serious test in endurance. There are other issues these newcomers address. The group directly behind us complains about how pretentious Williamsburg is becoming. The group to our left does the same. The group in front of us chastises the band the Red Thread for becoming too commercialized. All three of these groups look in the directions of one another with contemptuous eyes and askance curls of the lips. Though never stated explicitly, the three of us wonder if we are stuck in a crossfire or if all of this negative attention is directed at us.

“So this party is really going to be something tonight. Have either of you heard of the A-R-E?”

“No,” Tomas responds. “What is it?”

“It's a 'they', actually; a group of sorts. A lot of eccentrics — mostly musicians and artists. Some people like to think that Andy Warhol founded the group, but this is just baseless speculation. Anyone who has ever had any interaction with the A-R-E knows that it was founded by Dick Keens.”

“Dick Keens?”

“Yes, Dick Keens. Very intelligent man, but a bit off his rocker.”

A man cheers from the bar, “Ain't we all, Paddy!”

“Indeed we are, Louie!” he laughs. “A toast! To madness,” he adds, at which point Patrick and everyone at the bar drinks. He continues:

Oh, let us howl some heavy note,

Some deadly dogged howl,

Something, as from the threatening throat

Of beasts and fatal foul!

As ravens, screech-owls, bulls, and bears,

We'll bell and bowl our parts,

Till irksome noise have cloyed your ears,

And corrosived your hears,

At last, when-as our quire wants breath,

Our bodies being blessed,

We'll sing, like swans, to welcome death,

And die in love and rest.

There is a round of applause. He exhibits his gratitude with several bows, and then turns back to the table. “Don't you love the rhyme scheme? It's Elizabethan.” Tomas and I nod uneasily. “Anyway, Keens founded the A-R-E — The Acolytes of Risus, the Enlightener — back in the early-seventies. The goal, obviously, was to promote laughter in the world.”

“How is that obvious?”

“Risus was the ancient god of laughter. Hence the name.” He holds up his glass: “To laughter!” The folks at the bar all drink. The bartender takes down the Jameson shot that he has poured for a girl with glacial blue eyes. She is ostensibly upset. The bartender fills another glass and passes it her way. Her expression does not change. Patrick takes a small sip before continuing: “Anyway, Keens, it is said, was related to Jose Balaguez. You know of him, right?”

“I've heard the name before,” I respond vaguely.

“Me too,” Tomas adds.

“But do you know his story?”

“He was rich.”

“Yeah — wasn't he a robber baron?”

“More or less. Is that all you know of him?” Tomas and I nod slowly. “Well then, allow me to give you a brief history lesson. I will try to simply relay the events that transpired, as a poet-historian is the worst type of historian, on par with the philosopher-historian, but certainly far above the critical-historian — literary, that is — who is really no historian at all. Not to go too far off topic here, but have you read some of the social construction of blank essays that are out there? I swear, they just tell you what a few novelists said about this and about that, add some obscure details featured in the dailies from the era, and suddenly you're to think that they have unlocked the most arcane aspects of a society. It's a racket.”

“So you don't think that anything is socially constructed?” Tomas asks.

“That's not the point. The point is that there are an endless number of subjects and references. One can claim one thing, and someone can contradict them, and someone can contradict them, and so on and so forth ad nauseum. All an author needs to do is introduce a new piece of referential material to alter the thesis of one of his or her colleagues. And this perpetuates the argument — indefinitely. This is the heart of my complaint: it's intellectually lazy because the topics are so fecund and yet so esoteric and ultimately inane that they cease to say anything intellectually stimulating. The only things I find mildly interesting about such papers are the anecdotes of the famous authors and personages. There's always a few.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, back to Balaguez. He was one of the lesser-known robber barons, which has already been established. I believe he was the only one of Spanish heritage. With that exception, he was more or less like Carnegie: he and his parents came over to the States sometime in the eighteen-fifties. He was still a young boy then. The family was poor, as can be imagined, but he caught a few breaks, made some money, and invested it well. He was an incredibly shrewd man, a cautious man. Are either of you familiar with Gay's The Miser and Plutus?”

“No.”

“Ah, well I can picture Balaguez stalking his own shadow, furiously pacing in lieu of sleep, which is the one thing a rich man can never afford. If Wealth and Youth bear Folly, then Avarice and Old Age rear Misery.” Tomas and I look to one another in bewilderment. Patrick notices. “What I mean to say is that he came to be incredibly wealthy — I believe the wealthiest man in Brooklyn before or slightly after eighteen seventy-five — at the expense of what many would consider a worthwhile life.

“In his youth he worked in the newspaper industry, which is where he made a good deal of money, but the railroads made him his fortune. Once he became the wealthiest man in his city, however, he gave up on trains and went back to publishing papers. This wasn't simply a desire to return to the business with which he held the greatest affinity; rather, he wished to once again have an artistic outlet — which was something wholly denied to him in the railroad business, as he was not an engineer or an architect. So he returned to newspapers, initially because he wanted to publish his poetry under the pseudonym Lord K. Ruchmord. I’ve never read any of it myself, but I’ve heard that it was of…well, we’ll say pedestrian quality. But the quality of the poetry is irrelevant,” he continues, “The point of that matter is that Balaguez's primary goal, when he returned to the industry at least, was simply to publish himself.

“He acquired several more papers over the course of the late-seventies and early-eighties, and during that time his control over the content began to grow, too. People enjoyed his poetry even though it was shit, and he eventually started writing editorials fairly regularly. I can't recall any of the various pen names he employed when doing so.” He shrugs. “Not that it's particularly important. Either way, by eighteen eighty-two, Balaguez owned eight papers, all of them based in Brooklyn. Each one has since shut its doors, but, at the time, they were some of the most popular dailies in the city — more like The Post than The Times.

“Although Balaguez was not particularly political, he did attempt to control public opinion to a certain extent, especially once he came to think of himself as being gifted with the pen. It was less ideology and more his ego — he was not evil, nor was he particularly adamant in his beliefs. Perhaps this is a cynical belief. Maybe it was simply business even then, a way to distinguish himself, as well as his product from his competitors. Because he did distinguish himself, very much so, by going against the grain, by stirring things up, by making himself and his commodity a spectacle. He rarely, if even, upheld the opinions of his competitors. In fact, he went out of his way to be contentious and made sure that his editors and writers were equally aggressive. He was fond of slandering other papers and other moguls, and found himself as the defendant in a myriad of libel cases.

“Now, Balaguez did not utilize his power in the manner one might expect. He didn't like to push politicians on people — as he was skeptical of all politicians — and, for the most part, he allowed his writers free-reign on foreign affairs so long as they didn't openly endorse communism, anarchy, or any international labor movement. One could assume that he was pragmatic, but, from what I can infer from his actions, I believe this accredits him a certain degree of political shrewdness that he never truly possessed. It's not that politics eluded him; rather, it bored him. Consequently, his writers were allowed to sympathize with striking workers in the States and in Europe; so, too, were they free, if not encouraged, to criticize other industrialists. They were even allowed to take whichever side they wished on issues such as the gold standard, even if Balaguez had come down on the opposing side. The most important restriction, however, was that no one was to question the 'natural order' of capitalism. It's similar to how papers are run today: lament the most flagrant injustices of the system while ignoring the fact that capitalism necessarily exploits the working class.” A smile appears on Patrick's face when Tomas and I nod gingerly. “But I want to reiterate the main point in all of this: The most important thing the writers had to remember was simply to be distinct from the competition.

“Now, even though Balaguez manipulated the truth to a certain degree, he ended up gaining something of a reputation for selling a fairly honest product. The writing was not the most eloquent, but all of his papers were considered fair-minded and levelheaded. To use an American buzzword from today, the reporting was thought to be objective.”

“Ahhhh, 'ere all bullshidh,” a man from the bar yells in that dialect of inebriation where harsher consonants have the tendency to disappear. “'on't alleve a word a' 'at shidh, Paddy; ya' smarda' 'an 'at.” Let me revise that. He doesn't just sound drunk; he sounds like Jame Gumb.

“I'm talking about the papers from a hundred years ago, Rich,” he responds. “Trust me, I know that information was monopolized by the capitalists long ago. It's a commodity, Rich, no different than corn or sorghum.”

“Capaliss?” he laughs. “Ya' a commie or someding, Paddy?”

“Of course. There's a war going on out there, Rich, and there are only two sides. No one can claim neutrality anymore; any form of complacency is an act of support for the plutocratic interests of the world.” He pauses. “Now, there's only one question you have to ask yourself: Are you upset because your workers are asking for too much, or are you upset because your boss doesn't share the company’s profits with equitable consideration to his employees?”

“Equitihuh…”

“Does your boss pay you what you’re worth, Rich?” somewhat seriously.

“My fuckin' boss,” he says to the chorus around the bar. “My fuckin' boss is a Goddamn cock-sucker.” At high volumes the consonants apparently reappear.

“Well, it would do you some good to join in the fight on the side of those against all bosses,” he responds with his Styrofoam cup in the air. “But first another toast. To drinking.” The proletariat party goes to drink, but Patrick stops them with an open palm. The bartender gingerly nods while pouring a pint of Brooklyn Lager. Patrick then begins:

Drink today, and drown all sorrow,

You shall perhaps not do it tomorrow:

Best, while you have it, use your breath;

There is no drinking after death.

A good half of the bar drinks after this. Even the newer members of the congregation manage to give Patrick his due. “What was I saying?” he asks as he turns his attention back to us. “Oh, yes, Balaguez's papers. They were thought ideal examples of journalistic integrity. Well, I won't go that far, but they were not denounced as rubbish. And it's because of this…let’s call it faith…in the integrity of his papers that he was able to take advantage of a lucrative opportunity, one which came to his attention in the early-eighties. I won't say that he exploited the trust of the people; he simply changed their vague perceptions of a rather obscure region of the world. Some features were ignored; others received more attention than they should have. This locale of which I speak is none other than Siberia.”

“Siberia?” skeptically.

“Yes, Tomas, Siberia. I kind of wish I knew an ode to Siberia, but I doubt there are all that many of them written in English — and I don't speak Russian. Smith mentioned it in his Wealth of Nations, and M. P. Price, another economist writing in the early twentieth century, did too, but that's neither here nor there. Anyway, the paucity of references just proves the point to be taken away from all of this: the less information there is about something, the easier it is to manipulate the perception of it. Siberia proved to be a very easy target.

“Balaguez was first intrigued by the area after meeting with George Kennan — not to be confused with the notorious Mr. X of this century — who had gone to eastern Siberia in the service of a telegraph company based out of either Toledo or Akron — I always forget which one. The company wanted to explore the possibility of an Asiatic line that went from east to west as opposed to one that went from west to east. Kennan wrote a book about it, too. I don't remember its title — something about a tent. It's a fascinating read, I've heard; apparently there's a rather sardonic humor throughout it that one wouldn't expect from a nineteenth century travelogue. It sold well, too, as there was a market for books like that.” Tomas shoots Patrick an incredulous look. “Think of David Livingstone — he was incredibly popular at the time, and there was a great deal of public interest in adventures similar to the ones he…well…let's say endured.

“The point of the matter is that the book gave Kennan his career. During the seventies he lectured throughout America, and by the end of the decade he had established himself as one of the leading American experts on Russia.”

“Did he spend any more time in Russia besides that one trip?”

“I believe he went to Crimean in the seventies. It may have been during the Russo-Turkish War, but I'm not entirely certain. Beyond that, I'm fairly certain that he didn't go again until the eighties.”

“I see.”

“Regardless, Kennan and Balaguez met sometime in either eighty or eighty-one. I'm not entirely certain where this meeting took place; all I know is that the two spoke of Siberia for a long while, particularly about the land's mineral resources and the exile system. Balaguez took a serious interest in the subject — after all, nonexistent labor laws and untapped resources, both human and mineral, in the same locale meant one thing to a capitalist like him: profit. The only thing that the area needed, the two men agreed, was a transportation system — a railroad.

“Now, Kennan was initially in support of the tsarist regime. As a consequence of his trips to the country — again, I know not how many — he established something of a rapport with some of the more notable members of the Russian government. They thought him an important ally in the fight for a better image of a ruling class, which, at the time, was rather brutally attempting to suppress a nihilist insurrection. I don't know how familiar you two are with late-nineteenth century Russia, but it is not an exaggeration to say that public officials were being assassinated at the rate of one every other week — perhaps more. Many of the nihilists were ruthless sociopaths. If you're familiar with Sergei Nachayev, then you know just how deranged the leadership of the insurgency was.”

“Sergei who?”

Patrick shrugs. “I guess it's immaterial.” He takes a long sip from one of his cups. “Now, the Russian government didn't want the international community to think that the country was in crisis. Having a history of inferiority complexes in regards to European opinion, this was something of a given. On the other hand, the leaders were not exactly eager to disclose the niceties of the exile system, as most of these exiles were not political prisoners — which was something Dostoevsky touched upon in his pseudo-memoir, The House of the Dead, though this book was written significantly earlier than the era with which were are currently dealing. No, the majority of the exiles and the prisoners to walk the Sibirskii Trakt were guilty of relatively innocuous offenses — kind of like the majority of American prisoners today. Rather than clean up their act, the Russian government decided to do some PR. Guess who they recruited?”

“George Kennan.”

“Very good! Around eighteen eighty-five or so, they asked Kennan to go to Siberia to examine the prisons firsthand. The hope, presumably, was to have Kennan report that the horrors of the prisons — which were, by then, well-known to most of the educated public…kind of like Darfur today — were just exaggerations contrived by the sensationalist media. Kennan's testimonial, in other words, was meant to counteract all of the negative press. He was even granted access to areas no foreigner had been able to examine in order to easily trump the argument that he had been restricted from witnessing the truly horrendous conditions in which many prisoners were living. Without going into the details, I'll just say that the plan backfired terribly. Mr. Kennan was appalled by what he saw, and he immediately began writing a series of articles condemning not only the exile system, but the barbarity of the Russian government, as well.” He pauses. “I think he was banned from Russia as a result.

“Regardless, newspapers throughout the world jumped on the bandwagon. The New York Times even published selections from the Russian penal code at one point to show just how draconian the regime really was. It's really amazing stuff — you could actually get exiled to Siberia if your house accidentally caught on fire.”

“Holy shit,” exclaims Tomas.

“A few papers, however, rejected Kennan's claims. Among them, as you can probably guess, were those published by Balaguez—mercedibus emptae. It wasn't because Balaguez himself was a monarchist. He was just a man who was never blind to an opportunity.”

“Is this the fucking theme from Taxi?”

“You mean ‘Angela’.” Caesura. “By Bob James.” Tomas and I look to one another. “'Sun Runner', another track on this album, sounds almost like the Grateful Dead of the mid- to late-eighties. Are either of you fans of the Dead?”

“Fuck no,” Tomas grunts.

“I'm not a fan, but I don't mind their music.”

“I see.” He takes a small sip of beer. “Well, as I was saying, the Balaguez papers were skeptical of Kennan's findings. That much is clear. But the reason why…well, there is little evidence to support the why, but here we go. Kennan's investigation of the Siberian penal system at the request of the Russian government coincided with the beginning stages of the planning and construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, the critical piece of infrastructure that was necessary to transport the prodigious natural resources of the land to the world market — shipping was out of the question for much of the year because of the ice in virtually every Siberian port. When Kennan refused to be the apologist for the exile system, Balaguez saw an opportunity that he couldn't pass up. And he made a few things happen.

“First, as I've already said, he started publishing pro-tsarist articles in his paper. This is the very late-eighties now. And although the majority of these people writing editorials for Balaguez have never been to Siberia — had never even been to Russia for that matter — the public began to think of the tsarist regime a little less critically — for even a ham-fisted apologist can draw some support. Not all of these editorials came from hack American journalists, though. Some came directly from Russia, from diplomats and other pro-tsarist camps, in order to appear more authentic, more accurate.

“But these articles were not the most important element to Balaguez’s scheme. To him, it was critical that he not only praise the regime for dealing harshly with the nihilists; he also sought to relegate the status of the nihilists to that of a small group of bandits. It was a brazen lie, no less egregious than calling a wasp a gnat, but the truth was difficult to come by. Russian dissenters were unable to vocalize their opinions, as the practice of samizdat or any form of journalistic freedom was nil. Just like anyone with something to prove, the regime was not about to let the rest of the world know just how chaotic things had become, and Balaguez was happy to accommodate such tripe because of his desire to see the Trans-Siberian built.”

“And that was the lynchpin of this whole endeavor. The Trans-Siberian. His spin on the matter was simple: Oriental Manifest Destiny — though this ignored the fact that the vastness of the American West was often perceived in an optimistic light by colonists, whereas their Russian counterparts viewed the expansive Asian steppes with despair and pessimism, especially since most of the people out there had been sent against their will. Regardless, people knew that the Russians were making a strong effort to populate the rather dismal area. Furthermore, Balaguez made sure to note that there was a vast store of not only arable land, but of gold and other precious metals, too. It was the conquest of yet another hinterland for the sake of its unused resources, and he followed the process, or progress,” derisively, “with a tenacity that a war might not even get in today's press. You may ask why, and this is certainly a good question.

“The Russians were obviously paying for the bulk of the Tran-Siberian's construction, but they were hungry for foreign investment. They needed unthinkable funds not only to advance the project, but also to finish it sometime before the twenties. Furthermore, they needed American engineers to assist them — Americans, after all, had conquered the intractable wilderness of their West.

“Now, though there is no proof of this, it seems as though Balaguez put in a lot of his own money by making a deal with the Russian government, which was very simple: I give you a great deal of capital to build your railroad and encourage other Americans to help you out, you give me a cut of the profits made off of the mines. He certainly did not publicize the fact that he had a vested interest in the railroad, let alone such a lucrative understanding with the Russians — he had established something of an 'in' with the tsar because he had befriended Alexis when the prince came to the States back in seventy-one or so—, but he did let it be known, albeit tacitly, that the Russian were willing to pay special favors to those who helped them out. Yeah, quick history lesson: without American capital, the main line of the Trans-Siberian probably wouldn't have been completed until the Stalin years.

“As an aside, it's even said that Balaguez and the Russians tried to finance a tunnel under the Bering Straight, but every engineer who surveyed the area came back and told them that the endeavor was suicide. Still, he publicized the tunnel as a possibility, and it played to investors, as well as all of the Positivists in New York still captivated by the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Now, you may ask, how did Balaguez clandestinely encourage American capitalists to invest in the project? Very simple. In fact, I've already told you: he emphasized, if not exaggerated, Siberia's vast mineral wealth, in particular its vast store of gold. When these investors came to see him, he explained to them the deal with the Russians: if you invest in the railroad, you can invest in the mines.

“That's all well and good, you may say, but you probably want to know why the American capitalists didn't just invest in the mines and leave the construction of the railway to the Russians. This is very simple: The mines were the property of the tsar, and, until the early twentieth century, the tsar only allowed one the privilege of investing in one of his mines by personal favor. Furthermore, the incentive to invest in the mines was not particularly strong — until the railroads got built, the costs of mining, processing, and transporting the gold, which were all very inefficient processes, were going to outweigh the price the gold went for on the market.

“So there arose something of a standoff. Even with the potential boon of the gold mines, investors didn't want to finance the construction of the railroad — not because they were worried about the system never being completed or being repeatedly sabotaged by nihilists or even being socialized by the communist regime to follow the inevitable revolution, a revolution many did not think all that likely because of the lies being spread in Balaguez's papers; no, their primary concern was the fact that their money would be tied up in a venture that would take several decades to bring about a substantial return. This is where Balaguez's true brilliance came in.

“He anticipated the South African War — or, as it is commonly known, the Second Anglo-Boer War. This is now the middle of the nineties. As you may or may not know, South Africa exported more gold during the late-nineteenth century than any other country, and back then, as you two surely know, every industrialized country was still operating on the gold standard. If the flow of gold dried up, the world economy did, too. Consequently, Balaguez pressured his writers to focus on the instability of South Africa, the ensuing war, and the disastrous effects it would have on the gold market. Imagine his solution to the problem of how to deal with this potentially catastrophic situation while allowing the plutocrats of the country to make even more money.”

“He told people to invest in Siberia.”

“Exactly. Other papers followed suit, too. If you read the articles published in the New York Times between say eighteen eighty and nineteen hundred, you'll see a substantial shift in the manner in which journalists discuss Siberia. First it's a desolate wasteland, then it's a giant penitentiary, and then it's referred to, and I've seen this with my own eyes, 'the next California'.

“By the turn of the century, South Africa is being torn apart by one of the most gruesome civil wars in history…” he begins. He then turns to Tomas. “Not to go too far off topic here, but did you know that the concentration camp was invented by the British during this war?”

“No,” he responds.

“Fucked up, huh? Ah, well, I guess it's true that history is written by the victors — that's why the redacted chapters always make you remember that war is nothing more than, as Sorely said, the blind fighting the blind. Anyway, by the turn of the century, the war is raging in South Africa, the tsar is allowing Americans to buy into his mines, and the Trans-Siberian is operational, but only from the Pacific into the Siberian purlieus. Oh, and yet another windfall comes of this — for whom else but the Americans. Their goods, particularly their farming machinery, come to dominate the markets of Eastern Siberia. Not only were they of higher quality when compared to their Russian counterparts — they were actually cheaper due to the railroad.

“Why do you think that was? Why would an empire build a railroad that connects its hinterlands to a port more than six thousand kilometers away from the capital? Why do you think the Americans took the Philippines and Hawaii right around the same time? Why do you think America invaded Siberia after World War One? They said it was because a few thousand Austrian POWs were running amok, but that's silly, transparent. It was all for control of Siberian, and, to a lesser extent, Manchurian, gold. And none of this would have happened had it not been for Balaguez, who, as you can imagine, made a pretty penny from all of this. Some have said that he got Walter Murray Gibson in on it, too, but I'm rather skeptical on the matter. Still, I will have to concede that there is a possibility, however unlikely, that the Bayonet Constitution was written to attract wealthy Americans to Hawaii, and that this colony was established to be a base of operations to more effectively galvanize and augment their sphere of influence in the Amur region, Manchuria, Korea, China, and the rest of Southeast Asia, but I can't award credence to a theory that is reliant on so many unverifiable conditions.”

“That's some story,” Tomas responds incredulously. “What does it have to do Dick Keens?”

“Well,” he begins as he stands, “I'm going to run to the toilet. I'll continue in a moment.”

“Walter Murray Gibson?” Tomas sighs. “What is this? Are we in eighth grade social studies?”

“Let's see where he goes with it.”

Patrick returns after a few moments. “Where was I again?” he asks.

“The Siberian conspiracy.”

“Okay. You were wondering what all of this had to do with Dick Keens. Well, apparently, one of the Balaguez heirs was Dick Keens' father. As the story goes, Keens' mother, Beatrice, was a union gal, worked mostly with the stevedores up and down the piers in Red Hook and whatever neighborhood that is to the north. Columbia Heights, right?”

“Cobble Hill,” I respond.

“It's Carroll Gardens, man,” Tomas counters.

“It's irrelevant.” He takes a small sip from the double-pint in his right hand. “Supposedly, that's how Balaguez's son and Beatrice met. But I'll get to that in time. The story actually begins with Beatrice's mother, Freda.”

“Freda Keens was the daughter of Irish immigrants. They left the Emerald Isle because of the Potato Famine, which, it seems, was the reason most emigrants of Ireland found their way here back then. Her story is a sad one, not that that's too different from most immigrants' stories you hear today, but we'll avoid politics for now so as to not rob Freda of the limelight.

“Freda was born around eighteen fifty-four, the only child of the family to be born in America. The family lived in the neighborhood of Vinegar Hill, a little tract of land that runs from the Navy Yard to about Gold Street or somewhere around there.”

“That's DUMBO,” Tomas interjects.

“It's to the east of DUMBO,” he counters. “The eastern portion of what is now considered DUMBO used to be part of Vinegar Hill,” he says as though admonishing a child. “Regardless, she grew up there, probably living in a little flat no bigger than the ones you and I have, only there were eight people in the space.” He pauses. “No, ten. There were eight children. Suffice to say, Vinegar Hill was not a particularly nice part of town; it was Irish, it was poor, and the housing was substandard to say the least.

“It was a rather dismal environment for a child, but things were not so bad that she had to go to work to help the family — this being largely due to her status as the youngest and all. Instead, Freda goes to school, and it turns out that she has something of a knack for poetry. In fact, the small girl is so precocious that she draws the attention of a rather famous poet of the time, one with whom Walt Whitman is rather close. You've heard of him, I take it?”

“Whitman? Who hasn't?” one of the men from the bar, who happens to be walking past after using the bathroom, responds. Once he gets back to the bar, he holds up his pint. “To Walt fucking Whitman!”

Patrick smiles to the man, stands upon his chair, which arouses a stern admonishment from the bartender, and then recites the following:

Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,

Cheerful, for freest action formed under the laws of divine,

The Modern Man I sing!

He goes to sit, but he is first asked to take a bow. Applause continues as he takes down a fair quantity of beer, bows again, and then sits back down. “Now,” he begins after wiping his mouth, but the remainder of the statement is truncated by the same man as before, who says,

“Do another!”

“Another Whitman?”

“Another!”

Patrick thinks for a moment. “An epithalamium for past and present, then; for the morose scions of Modernism and their megaloprepous, who has now become eidolon:

I met a seer,

Passing the hues and objects of the world,

The fields of art and learning, pleasure, sense,

To glean eidolons.

Put in thy chants said he,

No more the puzzling hour nor day, nor segments, parts, put in.

Put first before the rest as light for all and entrance-song of all,

That of eidolons.

What I believe to be a protracted caesura turns out to be a rare lapse in Patrick's memory. His face is a disappointed shade of embarrassment. “Does the next line begin 'Ever the mutable' or is it 'The ostent evanescent'?” He shakes his head. “I'm terribly sorry for the lack of a proper encore, my friends. On a more sober occasion I could probably recite at least half of that poem, but now must not be the time.” This is met with facetious hisses and jeers. I'm still wondering what the hell the introduction to the poem meant. I think the mega- word comes from Aristotle. “In due time I will return with a retinue of muses to restore my standing amongst you, the august court for whom this humble Silenus performs,” he begins as the audience calms, “but unfortunately I have a wealth of information to divulge to these two, and unfortunately, again unfortunately, I am a bit low on time.”

“Do a dirty one,” the bartender yells.

“A dirty poem?” Patrick is amused. He ponders a moment. “Well, who here has heard of Gaius Valerius Catullus?”

Silence.

“Allow me, then, to present to you the most…let us say lewd…poet of Rome in the time of the first Triumvirate, a fresh voice influenced not only by epic and tragedy, but by the epithets of love and passion, and his own misfortune at the hand of a woman whom he adored and Cicero denounced — Clodia Metelli.” He clears his throat. “This will be in prose, by the way, as I have opted to follow in the steps of Smithers. While I do believe that Whigham's rendition is quite good, I feel it deviates from the Latin a bit too much in order to maintain the—”

“Just recite the fucking poem already.”

“Fine:

Tavern of lust and you, its tent-mates — at ninth pillar from the Cap-donned Brothers—, do you think that you alone have the right, that it is allowed to you alone, to fuck only virgins, and to think the rest are as goats? Because you curs sit one hundred, maybe two, in line, do you think I have not the daring to force fellatio upon your insipid—

“What the fuck?”

“Yo', Eddie, it was ancient fucking Rome. Those guys fucked everything and anything.”

“Remind me to tell you all about Tiberius' minnows.” Patrick pauses. “Now, to continue…

— Just think of it! With slanderous graffiti upon your tavern's facade I will shame your progeny. For my girl, who has fled my embrace, she whom I love as none will be loved, for whom I have fought valiantly, has seated herself here. All of you, good men and rich — and also, all of you, piddling back-alley cornholers — are making love to her, even you, Egnatius, one of the long-haired race — the son of Celtiberia and its bounty of hares — whose quality is revealed by dense-grown pelt, and teeth scrubbed with Iberian piss.

The man who ordered the Whitman asks Patrick to the bar. “You gotta' take a shot wit' me, Paddy. 'Specially afta' that.”

“A glass of hellebore, courtesy of Mr. John Jameson!”

Patrick returns after a quick moment, beaming with an afflatus of whiskey and an eye for mischief. “What do you think of my rendition?”

“I doubt the Latin's that dirty,” Tomas responds.

“Ha,” Patrick says. “You obviously don't speak much Latin.”

“Or any.”

“I suppose it's time you learn then. Did you know that there is a verb, irrumo, that specifically means to force one to suckle? When a man says it…well, you can guess what that means.”

How does one respond to that?

“Now,” he begins, “Where was I?”

“I don't remember.”

“Let's see…Freda. Freda the poet. Whitman. Ah, yes, Freda is introduced to a man in publishing, who takes her under his wing and manages to get her work into the hands of some very powerful individuals.” He has not missed a beat. “And once she starts making some money from her poetry, she starts trying to push it on her father — the money, that is, not the poetry. Unfortunately, the man's too stubborn to take any of it. Remember the era with which we are dealing. But Freda, intransigent even in her youth, starts planting the majority of her earnings in her father's coat. He doesn't notice at first because she's not really making enough to bother about. And she takes this to be a silent acceptance, a proverbial wink of the eye; she believes the act is permissible so long as the family and the neighbors don't know about it. This turns out to be far from the case.

“When Freda catches a relatively big break, she decides to take things a step further.”

“What? Did she buy them a new house or something?” Tomas asks.

“No. She pays the rent. Now, her father is a very traditional man. His wife doesn't work out of the house, his daughters marry before the age of eighteen, his sons stay under his roof until they find a wife of their own — you know, traditional. Suffice to say, Freda's father does not appreciate the gesture. In fact, he sees it as an act of emasculation. And when a reactionary man feels as though he's been humiliated like that, he does not typically respond with clemency or, in this case, mercy. So, as you both can probably imagine, a violent argument ensues, which results in a rather ferocious beating, and ends with Freda being exiled from the house. The man of tradition was too pious to drink on a Sunday—pro pudor! — , but he was apparently fine with pummeling and disowning his teenage daughter because she simply wanted to help.

“Her situation, luckily, was not as dire as one would presume, though I hardly wish to make light of what transpired. She was of course devastated, but she had established something of a network of friends who were willing to take her in. She also had a reputation as a very capable poet, so she was able to publish her work fairly consistently. Not that you could tell. While her lyricism is exquisite, she never spoke of what transpired between her and her father — and, as far as I know, she never reconciled with her family. I do know that her oldest brother was killed during the conscription riots of eighteen sixty-three, but this, of course, took place before she was banished from the home.

“Anyway, she continued writing and ended up taking a job at some school for women somewhere around Fort Greene Park, though I believe it — the park — went by another name back then. She never became particularly famous, but she was introduced to a number of well-known writers from the day. She led a comfortable and industrious life: she was active in the church, she traveled quite a bit, and most of her poetry continued to find its way into publications.

“Now, if you were to read her poems in chronological order, you would probably not see any severely socialist undertones in her early work. After eighty-five or so, however, it becomes extremely leftist in theme and content. As a consequence of this, the work ceases to appear anywhere besides radical newsletters. But this was fine with her. She even started writing essays for these publications, and eventually founded her own weekly, the Brooklyn Worker, which, as I'm sure you can imagine, was overtly Marxist. As a side note, she was somewhat close with Kennan; she republished some of the essays he had written concerning the exile system to galvanize American support for the Nihilist movement. Yes, my friends, gone were the days of poems about bucolic America and the anticipation of a lover’s caress; Freda Keens was concerned only with revolution. I've even heard that she was a pen pal of Mother Jones, though I've never seen any evidence of this.

“What caused this massive change, you may ask? Well, turns out Freda had gotten herself knocked up by an organizer for…I think the Brooklyn Central Labor Union. I’m not sure, though. Regardless, as you may well know, a union organizer back then had the life expectancy of a housefly. And so, before the baby was born, the father found himself on the wrong side of a pistol. I don't remember if Freda blamed Gould or if she thought Rockefeller had a hand in it, but she never accepted it as a robbery, which was the conclusion the police came to. Not that you could blame her. His flat was broken into, but nothing was stolen. He was just dead, shot execution style. As you can imagine, the majesty of the Brooklyn Bridge and the autumn leaves in the Berkshires failed to be all that interesting.

“She worked with radicalized unions, though the only one I know of by name was the Wobblies — the Industrial Workers of the World, who, ironically enough, now appear to spend most of their time attempting to unionize corporate coffee houses in a few American cities. This was to be her calling for pretty much the rest of her life, though she was active behind the scenes. I mean, she had a daughter to raise, and the last thing she wanted was to be responsible for having that kid locked away in some orphanage while she rotted in jail. Once her daughter came of age, however, she became far more active on the street-side of things, and eventually did go to jail for protesting Wilson's decision to enter into the Great War. She died before that absurd chapter in history closed.” Before either Tomas or I can ask, he responds: “Cholera — one of the few things today's incarcerated don't have to worry about…unless they live in Maricopa County, of course.

“Beatrice, her daughter, grew up to be quite beautiful. She was radical like her mother — as I said before, she worked as an organizer for the stevedores and all of the other workers along the shores of Brooklyn. She wasn't particularly popular in terms of the media — in the sense that she was not well known; she wasn't famous and she certainly wasn't infamous. I think there are a few pictures of her from the Times. She was certainly known within more than a few circles, but the public at large had no idea who she was. Dick said it was because union women were supposed to be old maids, you know, real hags. Think Eleanor Roosevelt.”

“Yikes,” from Tomas.

“Speaking of which, Beatrice later came to know Mrs. Roosevelt quite well — and not 'came to know' as a euphemism for sex — though the two had a falling out in the late-forties. But we'll get to that in a little bit. As I was saying, however, Beatrice was something else. Absolutely gorgeous. Between you and me, she was a real—”

“Just get on with it, Pat,” Tomas says as he begins to regain some semblance of sobriety.

“Well,” Patrick almost pouts, “This is where the other Balaguez comes into the picture — not Jose, of course, but his son Raphael. Raphael was a playboy, really liked to stroll the boulevard to exhibit his foppery. He courted the most illustrious ladies of the day, frequented the poshed clubs — you know, he was a real dandy. Well, I don't know exactly how it all came about, but something about Beatrice really called to the young-ish man. He was really quite taken by her. Maybe it was some romanticism that materialized out of a novel or a film — you know, that he could be her knight in shining armor. But, for all I know, he may have just been a young man drawn to a beautiful woman.

“He probably thought it'd be easy enough to seduce her; whatever plans he had after that…well, that's anyone's guess. Problem was, she didn't think too much of him. I won't go into the details, but, like any aristocratic progeny, he was under the impression that some, if not most, of the nation’s laws didn't apply to him. Rape, unfortunately, fell into this category.”

“Holy shit,” says Tomas.

“Now, I'm cutting this a little short because I want to finish these (holding up one of the beers, shaking it, and then placing it back down), I guess this (as he raises the other beer) drink, and get out of here.” He pauses. “I forgot I picked this song (“Sunshine”). Anyway, the long and the short of it is that the Balaguez family was able to pay off Beatrice without batting an eye before the police or the press discovered what had taken place. This is nineteen eleven or twelve. Dick was born in twelve, though I couldn't tell you the date. Anyway, Beatrice didn't do too much with the money at first. She moved into a place in Brooklyn Heights. She ate better. All in all, however, most of it she just gave to her mother, who kept it in a safe place. I don't know the whole story behind it; I just know that it never went into a bank. Regardless, Beatrice, like her mother before her, continued to raise hell, as they used to say back then, and even managed to stay out of jail in order to avoid losing custody of Dick.

“When the depression hit, she took that money and started buying up properties all along the Brooklyn waterfront. From Greenpoint to Bay Ridge, there wasn't a neighborhood in which she didn't have at least one or two buildings. She kept rents low so as to give working people a break, and she managed to make enough on the properties so that she never lost any money due to repairs or taxes or anything like that. As for profit margins…well, they weren't all that important to her. The point is that she wasn't trying to be a martyr, and she sure as hell wasn't about to be consumed by avarice.

“As for Richard, Dick, he was provided with the best education that money could buy. The Balaguez family made sure of that, even after a lot of the money simply disappeared once the Bolsheviks took power in Russia. He went to a private school in Manhattan, got sent to Columbia, and then went to Harvard Law even with the Depression on. Graduated in thirty-eight, I believe. The family cut him off at that point, but he was armed with enough knowledge to help his mother with the property management business. Not to go too far off topic here, but the Balaguez Empire Jose had constructed had completely collapsed by then. Raphael committed suicide after driving all of the papers into the ground. The eldest daughter married into some political family based in New England — not the Kennedy family, but one like them — and the youngest son went out to California. I don't really know what happened with him, but I'm fairly certain that he got involved in the pictures. As for the three other sisters…well, let's just say that they were as virtuous as the daughters of Charlemagne.”

“What?”

This is ignored. “Some people claim that Beatrice began to sell out before the war started. I don't really buy into that. I will admit that she did begin to make more money off of her properties, but I think it had more to do with getting more buildings to help more people as opposed to simply making more money for the sake of a greater profit. She certainly did begin to get frustrated by the amount of work that was demanded of her company in order to comply with building codes and the well-being of her tenants,” he admits. “So maybe they are right to a certain degree; maybe she did cross over that line, and maybe she stopped seeing life through the eyes of those who are struggling to make it. Maybe she found herself incapable of abandoning the vantage wealth provides. But that's only speculation.

“When the war broke out, Dick told his mother that he was going to enlist in the navy should the country enter the war on the side of the Allies. She was pretty steamed about it, or pissed as you fellows say here, but she changed her tune after Operation Barbarossa — you know, when the Nazis launched their assault on the Soviets. After Pearl Harbor, Dick joined up, set out to war, and came back from the Pacific about three years later without these two fingers,” he says as he grips the middle and index fingers of his right hand. “Sad story really, but at least he didn't lose an arm or anything like that.

“Once he got back stateside, he found that things had changed. Beatrice had apparently gone to the other side, as he used to say, and she was scooping up every property she could get her hands on. In order to pay for these myriad acquisitions, she began increasing rents, kicking out tenants who were behind, and charging exorbitant late-fees. When she married Yaniv Abram in the spring of forty-five — something not unlike a political marriage — things took a further turn for the worse.

“While I'll be the first to tell you that most Jewish people are decent and industrious people, there are those elements in any population that make everyone else look bad. It's like the drunks for the Irish,” he says as he takes down another swig. “Now, where I'm from, Americans, as a rule, tend to be considered the exception: it's not looked down upon to think all of you guys arrogant fucks. Of course, as I've found out from my time here, this is just because we don't see working class people from the States all that often. We see the wealthy and the nouveau riche, who come into our country expecting to be treated like fucking royalty just because their last name begins with an ‘O’.

“But that's immaterial. The point is that Abram was the Anti-Semites paragon of the Jew, a shrewd, horrible little man who looked like the lovechild of Cato and a gargoyle. He had acquired a lot of properties, particularly in the Bedford-Stuyvesant, Williamsburg, and Greenpoint regions, and he was notorious for the most downright exploitative practices in which a landlord can partake. Someone once told me that Amiri Baraka, back when he was LeRoi Jones, actually spit on him, but I don't know how true that is. Anyway, my point is that the man was good at one thing — and that was business. Suffice to say, the couple, once together, became one of the most dominating forces in Brooklyn real estate.

“Two days after the marriage, the newlyweds founded Abram-Keens. I guess that was the honeymoon — a trip to the court to file the certificate of incorporation. The company did well; it expanded and became more profitable than either Yaniv's company or Beatrice's company had been prior to the union. The two eventually relocated from Brooklyn Heights to the Upper East Side, the Clivus Victoriae of Manhattan. They hobnobbed with celebrities, aristocrats, and all of the other scum attracted to scenes where status and popularity are determined by the make of your car.”

“Get to the fucking point, man,” Tomas says.

Patrick looks to Tomas with a bit of ire. Tomas sips his coffee begrudgingly. “So, they died — car accident sometime in fifty-four or fifty-five. For whatever reason, Dick inherited the company. Problem was, he couldn't change the direction that it, the company, had taken. He wanted to cut rents, but, by that point in time, most of the people who rented from Abram-Keens were not the type of people who needed their rents decreased. The couple had sold off most of the properties in working class neighborhoods in order to buy properties in the nicer parts of the city — Manhattan in particular. He fought with the shareholders for a few years, but they ended up winning every time. The feats of Hercules and David are still well known for a reason, after all.

“He recognized that his hands were tied, so he did what seemed to be the most rational thing: he sold his shares in the company and resigned. This was fifty-nine.” He pauses. “You have to love this song,” he says as the Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose serenade the bar. “Anyway, some say he was bought out for fifty million dollars, but I don't think that's quite right. Maybe it would have been something like fifty million dollars by today's standards, but I don't think that's right, either. Regardless, the amount isn't all that important; the point is that he came out of the deal with more money than he knew what do with.

“Dick wasn't the communist type, but he certainly was a liberal man. Whereas his grandmother had been an anarchist, and his mother a socialist-turned-capitalist, Dick was more of a philanthropist, but not in the superficial sense. He was more in line with Godwin's man of virtuous disposition — he didn't see the poor as some vague entity in need of pity or eleemosyna—”

“What was that?”

“Alms,” with something akin to frustration. “I take it you don't know any Greek, either?”

“No,” in unison.

“Well, once you've found Janus, please let him know that Polyphemus did indeed die in vain.”

“What?”

“Anyway,” Patrick begins dismissively, “Dick saw a lot of people who couldn't get ahead in this world because they simply never got the opportunity. You have to remember that even Carnegie wouldn't have amounted to much had it not been for a few lucky rolls of the dice. Also, if a man is defined by his environment, the idea of the autodidact seems a bit misleading, doesn't it? Not to go too far off topic here, but it seems silly to believe that a social creature such as a human can be wholly self-made. To quote Erasmus, ‘It’s absurdities like these that sway the mighty, powerful monster that is the common people.’

“Anyway, Dick gave most of his money away to various charities throughout the city and the world, but kept enough so that he never had to work again. He did a lot of traveling throughout the sixties, mostly in this country. In seventy-one, he came back to the city and bought a place on Fiske — a small street contained within Garfield and President, I think. Maybe it's First.” He pauses to scratch his ear, takes a small sip from this beer, and then continues. “Anyway, one day he's on acid tooling around the area, and he comes across this poet, who says this one line that changes Dick's life forever: No one smiles anymore. Now, whether the subsequent revelation was merely chemically induced or if it could qualify as a genuine spiritual awaking…well, that's one of those things people still debate. Regardless, Dick decides to start smiling again. He abandons the veil [not to be confused with vale] of tears. And this, ladies and germs, is the day of the A-R-E's inception.”

“Was all of that necessary?” I ask. “I mean, you could have just told us that Dick Keens started the group. That would have been entirely sufficient.”

“Once you get to the party, you'll understand. Then again, I'm not even done yet.” Tomas groans. “Okay, so I have to backtrack a little because I jumped over the sixties. I forgot to mention that Dick was suffering from despair — Sartre's sense, that is; he was a very wealthy man who saw the world as a very depressing place, and, without much need to go into details, he was certainly correct. Miserable people were — and are — about as prevalent as omens in Lucan. Suffice to say, Keens did not succumb to the quixotry of the sixties. The direction of the world, he thought, had the potential to go in one of two directions: corporate oligarchy or a system based upon nepotism, elitism and fascism. He was fond of a quote in Ecclesiastes. I'm probably going to screw this up, but it goes something like this: I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun: I saw the tears of the oppressed — they had no comforter; power was on the side of the oppressors. And I declared that the dead are happier than the living. But better than both is he who has not yet been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.” He takes on a plaintive countenance and adds: “'Who knows what is good for a man in life, during the few and meaningless days he passes through like a shadow?' The Bible would respond in fairly obvious fashion: God. Keens, of course, was not one to acquiesce to religious faith. He preferred to look for a more terrestrial purpose.

“That being said, he left the city and went out looking for some of that good old Kerouac-style adventure with true gaité de cœur…”

“Oh my God, Patrick, will you please shut the fuck up,” Tomas finally explodes. “I don't care about Dick Keens, okay. I just don't care.”

“Fine, I'll just finish with this: after several years of travel and his return to the city, as well as his revelation with regards to laughter, he bought a few pieces of property in Brooklyn. We are going to one such place tonight. Think of it as a temple. Now,” he begins, clearly frustrated with Tomas, “If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go run to the toilet, and then introduce myself to the newcomers to this bar.”

When each group refuses to even humor Patrick, he comes back to the table in a mood just shy of resignation. Tensions begin to mount. Patrick has thought Tomas to be impudent all night; now he is becoming impatient and downright ornery. Tomas has thought Patrick to be obnoxious and self-absorbed; at this point he feels himself all the more justified because so many others in the bar advocate this view. Efforts to reconcile the two are further impugned by the amount of alcohol in Tomas' bloodstream. It is obvious that he would have been abrasive and even belligerent had it not been for the coffee Patrick had forced upon him. He defends these vicissitudes, and says that they are supposed to be a form of homage to Pollack or Bukowski, but only the most gullible would think this claim to be sincere.

I try to focus my attention on the coffee, but it is fairly difficult. Between the character assassins taking pop shots at anyone in the bar besides the people at their own table, as well as the civil war that threatens to erupt in closer proximity, it is difficult to concentrate on anything, let alone a brackish cup of coffee that has grown cold. The brand is probably the same one served to prisoners and funeral home attendees. The aftertaste is metallic and it ravages the stomach in a way one would think reserved for battery acid or lye. The bartender and the remnants of the early crowd apparently find this very amusing. They are staring at me. The dregs of the pot go into a mug. Patrick finishes his beer, stands, and walks over to the bar. He presents a toast without a word, and then takes down the contents of the mug. The regulars applaud while the newer residents look on with curiosity and contempt. I hear the words “douche” and “tool” and “poseur” spoken as though a mantra. These distant insults are accompanied by the sound of laughter, which begins at the bar, but soon resonates through my head.

10.2

When we leave, the bartender tells Patrick to come back anytime (which, I realize, I will have to do because I failed to scan the bathroom for anything by Coprolalia; I just noticed one of those fucking deodorant advertisements that won't seem to leave me alone). Several women at the bar look to him with hungry eyes. To the least homely of the bunch he recites the following:

In flight I shall be surely wise,

Escaping from temptation's snare;

I cannot view my Paradise

Without the wish of dwelling there.

The air outside is humid, and the scent of damp grass drifts down from McCarren. Patrick puts on a pair of sunglasses. We can still hear the women inside laughing to themselves, even if they are all married, some to the men a few stools down from them, who are still in awe of “'at guy…'at guy's got some serious persafuckinalidy.”

“Lettin' his fuckin' freak flag fly — high!” is added as we leave the realm of earshot.

“You know what?” Patrick looks back to the two of us. “That stanza is absolutely meaningless unless one knows its context. It's barely even a cogent reference to the moment.” He laughs. “Do you know its context?”

“No,” I respond.

“What's the deal with the glasses, man?” Tomas asks. “It's after midnight.”

“It's the streetlights. They bother my eyes.” He does not follow this up with an explanation, nor does he mention the context of the stanza he just recited. He is suddenly silent, driven. He walks into the first deli we come across, buys a pack of cigarettes, a large candy bar, and two pairs of sunglasses. He offers the pack to each of us after lighting up. I take one; Tomas declines. Patrick then hands each of us a pair of glasses. We accept, but don't say anything besides the obvious gratuity.

The three of us travel south. Patrick moves both swiftly and intrepidly. Tomas and I follow with apprehensive steps. No one says anything until we are walking under the Williamsburg Bridge. “I am a part of all that I have met,” Patrick begins with an odd rhythm, as he is more than likely reciting a poem; “Yet all experience is an arch where through gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move.”

We continue for another few blocks. I finally break the relative silence. “Where are we going?”

“It's on this street,” Patrick replies. “I think it's another four or five blocks south.” He opens the candy bar at this point and breaks off a rather sizable chunk. “Here,” he says to Tomas. “I received an extra twenty percent. It stands to reason that this additional portion of candy must be relinquished.” Tomas receives it with hesitance. I decline his, Tomas', subsequent offer.

As we approach a door leading to what appears a small factory, Patrick looks back to us. “Just smile,” he says. “That's the only thing you need to get in.” The street is silent, eerie, and heavily industrial. “Oh, and put on the sunglasses.” We do so. Patrick rings the buzzer.

The open door unleashes what sounds like a ragtime quartet — piano, bass, drums, clarinet. “Do you have business attending a festival of the A-R-E?” an elfish girl with perfect teeth asks. She wears sunglasses, a blue, conical party hat that reads “Everybody Wang Chung!” in golden script, and a yellow prom dress with large pink and purple flowers of satin that appear to have blossomed out of her left shoulder. She is wearing neither shoes nor socks. Beyond the glasses and the hat, she is without accessory.

“Yes, I am here to embrace the eidolons.”

“Are you an acolyte?”

“Indeed.” There is a sudden shrillness in his voice, a conservation of speech that is abnormal and almost patrician. She squints. “Honi soit qui mal y pense.”

“Whatever you do,” Tomas whispers to me, “Don't drink the Kool-Aid.”

“French?” She shows her teeth again, begins to almost snicker. Avoided the obvious reference to pearls or words containing the prefix 'nacre-', I instead think of baby teeth and the way in which we are all clutching an aspect of youth that resonates too powerfully in some, of how our own recollections of self are projected upon others with vivid colors and glaring distortions, abstractions; sometimes these mutated forms even sidle behind the reflection in the mirror, translucent like ghosts.

“These men are outsiders, but they have come with me in search of Coprolalia,” Patrick responds with poorly contrived gallantly. (Had he been sober, he may have said the following: “Fair wench, we beseech thee but the modest proposal of sojourning for the evening, as we seek a man who hath inherited the blessing of the most august Muses.” The begs the question, of course, which Muse would have visited Mordecai?) She focuses her eyes upon Tomas and me as though studying faint images in the distance. “Shun not these gentlemen; their request to find an elusive artist leads them here only out of necessity.”

Her countenance is suddenly a conjunction of pensiveness and patience. Does she judge us? Of course she does; she is human. After a few moments of being confronted with Patrick's sturdy glare, however, she lets out an echoing laugh and abandons the charade of speaking in bastardized Victorian English. “Come on in,” as she pushes the door open a bit wider. “Daphne, Aaron, Lucas, Sam, and Andreas should be finishing up their set fairly soon. I don’t know the guys they're playing with, but they are really on a roll.” She embraces Patrick. “Why are you so late?”

“I had to meet up with these two,” he says before kissing her on the cheek. The kiss itself is polite, a platitude of physical contact. Tomas is intrigued.

“Hi,” she says as she turns to us. She then sticks out her hand to me. “Name's Boots.”

“Boots,” Tomas says with a matter-of-fact nod. Boots and Patrick walk ahead. “If she's Boots, then my name must be Foot,” Tomas whispers as he nudges me in the side.

The door closes behind us. Even without the sunglasses, I'm fairly sure that I would be blinded by the darkness, but I follow the sound of the music, which is occasionally interrupted by a dull, reverberating thud. It sounds like a tennis pro launching serves at a piece of drywall. We turn a corner; I can see a dim light outlining a door. The song comes to an end, a clamor of applause ensues, and the percussive exclamation point once again rattles the building. The door opens.

The band is comprised not only of upright bass, piano, drum kit, and clarinet, but of guitar, trumpet, and sax, too. A man dressed to look like Vincent Price, greased mustache and all, appears to be the singer. The inaugural notes of “Minnie the Moocher” accompany our entry. No one pays any attention to us, as almost everyone is focused on the band. Patrick and Boots abscond, leaving Thomas and I by the door.

The spacious venue is less a loft, perhaps more of a gutted factory — the main chamber of which is capable of holding well over one hundred people comfortably. This is the room in which we find ourselves, awkwardly hugging the wall and listening to an extended instrumental introduction, which features a terrific solo on muted horn.

The loud thuds heard from the hallway are projectiles — oranges, to be exact — launched from a massive slingshot. The bombardment does not seem to have a reason; it is just a thing the people on the balcony above have decided to do in order to occupy the time. A man wearing a diaper and a Pickelhaube leads them. He gives his command in what I’m fairly certain is German. The projectiles from the citrus artillery — coming from about thirty feet to our right — pass over the people crowding around the stage — which is directly in front of us — and then smash into a wall that stands about forty feet to our left. There is a bullseye painted about twenty-five feet above the floor, its center no bigger than a foot in diameter (the area of the entire design is roughly fifty times that of the center — i.e. seven feet in diameter). The center of this target is about twenty feet ahead of us, just about halfway between the wall against which we stand and the beginning of the stage. Regardless of how close they come to the target, each collision provokes an elated cheer from about a quarter of those on the floor, especially the few nudists trying to catch some of the raining pulp and rind in their mouths. The stairs that lead up to the second floor hug the wall opposite the bullseye. A few observers lean on the balustrade, each with stereotypically Russian appearances: squared facial features, men with beards, women with babushkas, the androgynous customers shopping distant looks more sinister than demure. There are two doors up there, as well as two beneath the balcony. The kitchen is directly to our right, an alcove between the wall against which Tomas and I stand and the wall that begins where the stairs do. The depth of the kitchen is probably fifteen feet or so; it contains an island topped by a pyramid of beer cans (a byramid) and features a lot of really fancy equipment that has never been used — this deduction comes from an abundance of shrink-wrap and a cleanliness that is more sterile than tidy. There are two doors on the wall being sieged by the onslaught of oranges, one that clearly leads to a bathroom as what seems to be a line has formed outside of it. The other door is closed and invites little interest. The only windows capable of ventilating the place are probably behind the stage. It is impossible to tell, however, because an array of calico curtains have been thrown up to keep the interior shielded from prying eyes. The kitchen has one small window, but it is made of thick glass blocks that distort the pale light coming from the street.

As the vocalist tells the audience about the most famous mooch on record in a smoky croon, people begin to depart from the kitchen and the upstairs rooms to sing along. The chorus then comes, the Mustache Man conducting one of the most call and response choruses in musical history. Anyone familiar with old, Warner Bros. cartoons proves capable of following along.

“Doesn't this freak you out, man?” Tomas asks as an Elvis impersonator — complete with fat suit (it's obvious that it's a fat suit because he lacks a turkey-neck that is either real or prosthetic) and white, rhinestone-studded abomination — walks past. “I mean, I am all for partying, especially at a madhouse like this, but, seriously, you know, there's a limit. This is just too fucking bizarre, dig.” He pauses. “Whatever,” he shrugs. “You want to grab a beer?”

“Yeah. Looks like they're over there.”

As we stroll into the kitchen, a shoe whizzes over my shoulder and hits an unassuming bystander eating a bowl of Lucky Charms in the face. He drops the bowl, which shatters on the floor and sends a rainbow of milk, marshmallows, peculiar-shaped oats, and ceramic puzzle pieces flying into the air. While some begin to duck for cover, the bowl's previous owner continues to stand with a look of unadulterated mystification as the admixture soaks into his jeans and shoes. Blood begins to gush out of his nose with the force of a hydrant, which causes the viscous, amethyst pool on the floor to turn the color of eggplant. A few attend to the injured. Others address the assailant with tones that range from admonishment to persiflage. The assailant's name, apparently, is Mongo. As he comes in to explain himself, Mongo snags his unshod — and sockless, too — foot on a crescent-shaped shard, which leads to yelps and screams and a sudden flinging of blood and marshmallow milk throughout the entire kitchen. It doesn't seem to matter much to these culinary jesters, as they are all bowling over with those peals of laughter that ripple through rooms like thunder upon the igneous summer skies of the Midwest. Even the one with the potentially broken nose can't help but join in the revelry. Mongo, meanwhile, quietly makes his exit.

This, of course, is not the end of it; within a few seconds Mongo comes running back into the room with an ironing board above his head. He tosses it down in front of him, jumps on, screams “Cowabunga!” and skids through the pool of Technicolor sludge until the board hits the island, which sends him flying through the air towards the byramid towering above the awestruck spectators in a pose so immaculate that it makes everyone in the room believe him to be a veteran aerialist, if only for the moment. There are no barrel rolls or flips; still, his form is exquisite. As the inertial powers that be propel him along in a horizontal swan dive closer and closer to the aluminum monolith, people begin to seek cover under whatever they can find: empty cases of beer, onionskins of newspaper, slices of bread, ashtrays, hands, arms, feet, various props from the set of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

The collision sounds like a strike, but the tumultuous symphony of crashing aluminum and flesh summons the image of a bowling alley only in the schematic sense. These metallic pins don't so much fall as explode; Mongo, meanwhile, continues upon his trajectory, spans the entirety of the island flawlessly, and falls to the floor amidst successive avalanches of cans and swill and the tremendous boom of laughter and tinny cacophony. The music in the other room stops. Shortly after this yet another orange slams into the wall. It's a bullseye, something which may have been overlooked had it not been for the roar from the balcony of “Bullseye!” which cascades down upon the party, summoning a celebration of Tunguskan magnitude. When the applause dies down, the Mustache Man asks if everything is okay. Upon hearing an affirmative response from the kitchen, he gives a three-count, which leads the band right back into the chorus.

“What the fuck is wrong with these people?” Tomas yells, though no one pays much attention to him. Most in the kitchen are busy trying to help Mongo to his feet. This proves to be far more difficult than initially assumed, as the dregs of beer from the two hundred or so cans is by now mixing with the previous mélange of Lucky Charms and nasal and pedal blood to form a concoction with the constitution of mineral oil, which bleeds over the tile floor like a spilled vile of ink upon a page. As the kitchen inhabitants begin to find their feet traveling on radial patterns of 90 or 270 degrees from the vertical axis, which finds right angles at the floor, but not so much the ceiling, cans of beer and tumblers of far more troubling concoctions start to launch skyward in parabolic peril, thereby leading to even further chaos. As the guitarist beings his solo, Mongo emerges from the morass, a primordial beast arising without the ornery disposition that one typically associates with the Godzillas and Mothras of fame, though he is somehow just as menacing. He smiles to the two of us — perhaps because he recognizes something green in us, perhaps because he just happens to be looking in our direction. Before he says anything, however, he slips, goes horizontal, and finds himself on his back yet again. The sound of the crash coincides with yet another bullseye from the citrus artillery, another effervescent celebration, and the portion of the solo where the guitarist teases a Tony Rice head.

“What's going on in here?” a female voice asks with feigned contempt. Tomas and I both turn around to see Boots and the resurgent Patrick each with grins on their faces. “Did Mongo take out the byramid again?”

“You guys can't tempt me like that,” responds an asylum-friendly voice from below. Mongo has crawled his way to us through the swamp of whatever demons have accumulated on the floor. A green clover is stuck to his forehead. “I'll take that shit down every time,” he says as he pounds the floor with his fist, splashing no small amount of fluid into the air.

“You probably shouldn't be crawling around in broken glass, Mongo,” Patrick says stoically. “You're liable to end up in the hospital…again.”

“I think it only got my foot,” he responds. He examines himself. “Nope, got me in the arm here, too,” he says as he presents a patch of blood near his elbow. “This one's not so bad.” He looks to his other arm. “And here, too.”

Patrick and Boots nod. “Well, Maecenas,” Patrick begins to me, “You probably want to meet Daphne.”

“Obviously,” I respond quickly. “The set's soon to be over?”

“This should be the last song,” Boots confirms with a sideways glance to Tomas.

“What?” he smiles for the first time in a while.

“I'm just curious as to how you're taking all of this in,” she says on the sly.

For once Tomas' response is silence; he merely shrugs his shoulders and begins to edge back into the main room, careful not to slip on the sludge slowly sprawling over the pale, tile floor.

“No, I don’t need to go to the hospital, Pat. I’m fucking fine,” is heard as we walk away. There’s an odd sense of sarcasm in his voice that I can make little sense of.

“What's the name of this act?” I ask Patrick.

“Poot Moint.”

Patrick and Boots begin talking to a little person or dwarf or whatever as we join the crowd. Daphne calls him Harry; Patrick calls him Einhard. I remain next to Tomas. The two of us scan over the party in an attempt to get a better idea of what the inhabitants look like. There is no one style that defines them besides the abundance of sunglasses. There are three people wearing zoot suits, one in mint green, one in baby or Carolina blue, and one in a darker blue of the cobalt variety. The first two each wear hats that match their respective suits; Cobalt's hat has found its way onto a transvestite necromancing with some of the darker elements of the crowd. The majority of this latter group is adorned in Rocky Horror garb or the more prurient fashions that the Goth world has to offer. Their pale, translucent skin gleans as the music and the energy of the crowd continues to crescendo towards heights ethereal, to a realm where self is surrendered to a transcendent and unreflective experience of sight and sound. Some of the men in this group seem to be oblivious to a rather large woman walking among them in nothing more than a girdle. She holds a ruler in one hand and, occasionally, someone's cock in the other.

The fat suit Elvis has found his thinner, black leather counterpart. As they dance together, it becomes evident that they share more than a common love for the king. The women surrounding them are no less eccentric. A few have painted their dresses on. An older woman has done a particularly fantastic job, I must say, but she forgot to coat the underside of her…well, a less polite person would call them dugs. Excessive sweating has given away the secret of another woman like her. Some wear dresses with flower prints that would seem more appropriate on couches from the thirties, the kind that grandmothers ritualistically coat in plastic as if this gesture can counteract the ravaging hands of time. It's a curious perversion — something that seems more fitting in the pages of a Nabokov novel.

Still, the majority of people look no different than anyone you might see on the street. And while most of the men are not clean-shaven, and most of the women wear no makeup, there does not seem to be any form of ill-will for those who do prefer to shave regularly or wear makeup. There is a distinct sense that the exclusive nature of the party is not due to a superficial identity that one is required to take on. If anything, the only prerequisite seems to be an appearance of confidence and the willingness to repel the forces of social friction. That, and sunglasses. No one wears much black, white, or gray, either. This is something of an oddity in New York, certainly in this part of Brooklyn. Everything here is drowned in vivid Technicolor — even the Goths favor deep scarlets and royal purples reminiscent of something out of Poe.

The guitarist finishes up his solo as the kitchen crew stumbles out into the main concourse sopping wet, giggles — for some smoke, too — bouncing clumsily off of the lips, hands groping cans of beer, shoulders, sides, body parts with Latin and Greek names that have no English counterparts. Mongo has a can of Schlitz in one hand, a beer bong (“funnel,” in some dialects of American-English) in the other. He dons a mischievous, if not slightly demented, grin as he snaps the can open, drains it into the contraption, and throws the empty against the wall with an echoing and hollow ding. He places the hose to his mouth, kneels down, and lets the liquid undulate in the tube once or twice before it is drained — a disappearing act that may have intrigued Houdini had he not been busy revealing the Achilles' Heel of a set of modern handcuffs to the captious eyes of Les Poseuses (green socks and all). Mongo looks at his contraption for a while before he throws it at the wall. Because the funnel component hits first, the hose snaps up and horsewhips the wall with a sonorous crack that catches the attention of nearly everyone, even the Elvi, who are in the midst of what could be considered a form of masturbation.

The kitchen contingent, still laughing over the antics of Mongo, readily retrieves the beer bong for him. Two people carry it as though a sacred vessel; another two bring with them a jar of grape jelly. The hand-off elicits an epiphanical grin from Mongo before the obvious occurs. And while Mongo's attempts are certainly valiant, the enterprise fails when the jelly clots right around the halfway point in the hose. Had he the lung-power of an Olympiad, Mongo may have been able to pull of the venture, but, with what seems to be a two pack a day cigarette addiction, the stubborn purple mass remains stationary despite his best efforts. Incensed, Mongo pulls his head way from the contraption and bitterly huffs and puffs in an effort to regain some stamina.

He continues to alternate between reprieves and attempts to suck the jelly out of the hose for a while before this peculiar stunt begins to attract more attention than any of the troupe of culinary pranksters anticipated. When the band finishes, they receive a lengthy applause, as well as a seven shot salute from the citrus artillery. As the last of the applause beings to die down, another sound invites attention: a wet, almost loosely flatulent gurgle that would differ from the firing of the world's sloppiest spitball only to those types who can blindly tell the value of any coin you might drop on the table.

All eyes follow the massive, purple globule as it begins its ascent. Its steady rise signifies something to these people, something almost sacred. When it not only hits the ceiling, but actually sticks, a cry of applause erupts.

The band launches into “When You're Smiling”, which only augments the enthusiasm of the crowd. The clarinetist isn't playing because he's broken a reed. He is dressed like the Domesticon model that comes with the thick glasses and eyebrows. Boots look to Tomas and me with a rabid grin: “This is the third time they've played this tonight.”

10.3

“Oh yeah, he's great,” she says when I bring up Coprolalia. She leads Patrick and me into one of the deserted rooms accessible only from the balcony. Patrick hands her the pack of cigarettes he purchased earlier. She lights up.

The room had apparently been used for storage in the past, but it now holds a few pieces of furniture, a phonograph within a large chest (I believe this is called a console), and a lot of books that give the impression that the room has become something of a makeshift study. Several volumes from the Chums of Chance series, perhaps first editions, take up an entire shelf. One of George Kennan's books instantly attracts Patrick's attention. “Tent Life In Siberia! I knew the title had the word 'tent' in it.” Most of the books are older than the combined age of me, Daphne and Patrick. They are the legacy of Dick Keens, apparently. The shelves that hold the volumes are made of plywood and span the entire length of two door- and windowless walls yellowed by a conjunction of poor ventilation and cigarette smoke. These shelves are not overloaded; still, the smell of mildew and leather and stale breath permeates the air as Daphne's cigarette pops and crinkles above the murmuring cacophony coming from the next room. The ceiling appears to have been sprayed by a round of buckshot. Patrick looks beyond the door, maybe to see if anyone has followed, maybe to check on Tomas and Boots, who have begun a conversation on the balcony that concerns his book, Postlexiconism, and the likelihood of his penis finding its way into one of her orifices.

Parallel to the door through which we entered are three windows that have been recently installed, as is obvious from their cleanliness and their make. I remain standing as Daphne walks over to the phonograph player and the attached unit, which houses several hundred albums. “Any requests?” as she examines the player and the disc already on the turntable. “Dick had such a great collection,” is added as a gratuity. She glides her hand across the oak veneer and smiles back to me as I hear the speakers begin to hiss and pop and crackle.

“Do you think he's got Something/Anything??” Pat asks as he pulls out a large volume. This is followed by a roll of Daphne's eyes and a small tick from the record player, which occurs with shifting intervals. It is a nuisance, no doubt; but soon the first track on the album begins to encroach upon the static. Daphne stares to the rotating vinyl in silence. Patrick looks to me with a smile while holding up the book. “Mommsen!” I nod before turning back to Daphne with dithering eyes and a general orientation of confusion that seems more and more like a necessity today.

Daphne begins to sway along with the music. Patrick stops examining the book in his hands. As she continues to rock to the beat of the song, Patrick's attention is diverted to the distant revving of an engine lacking a catalytic converter. He peers out the window, which grants him a view of several modernized row-homes with dark and barred windows (their facades bathed in strands of amethyst), and then down to a book with two words on it (“Polypnuematics” and “Gunnison”). Mommsen is placed down in the space this book previously occupied.

Daphne continues to sway, her flowing skirt licking the portion of her calves just above her narrow ankles. When she finally turns back around, she looks directly at me. The ability to conjure an adjective to describe the glance gets lost in thoughts that are a bit more prurient than the occasion demands. She begins to stroll over to where I am sitting, and I can feel her eyes growing closer even if they are hidden behind sunglasses, allowed to see by virtue of the soft glow of an accountant's lamp, which sits upon a desk beneath a window.

She takes a seat on a sofa that creaks with age as her weight bears down upon it; Patrick continues to stand as he peruses what may or may not be the book he had found so intriguing. I find a leather chair that burps out a plume of dust as I take my seat. The gray, almost translucent haze lazily floats in the air before commingling with the smoke from Daphne's cigarette. The unified particles languidly make their way for one of the open windows.

“Do you like Bill Evans?” she asks.

“Of course,” I respond.

“Do you know this album?”

“I may have heard it, but I don't recognize this track.”

She nods. “The album is kind of odd. A lot of people overlook or dismiss it. Had it been released in the fifties, however, it would have probably been met with far more acclaim.”

The track continues to play, suddenly with a very fluid bass accompanying Bill's solo. It sounds like Ron Carter or Paul Chambers. Maybe it's Sam Jones or Scott LaFaro. I always forget when the latter died. Daphne removes her shades to reveal eyes of indistinct color. She looks like Evelyn Mulwray.

“Do you know him?” I ask as I remove my glasses, as well.

“Who? Bill Evans? I think he died before I was out of elementary school.”

“No. Coprolalia. Do you know him?”

“Personally? No,” she laughs. “Nobody really knows him — therein lay the heart of the appeal: mystique.” I blink torpidly. “There are people who have dedicated their entire lives to learning about him. It's a shame that they still don't understand him any better than you or I. Even those who have met him barely know anything about him.” She looks to Patrick. “Pat, would you be a dear and get me a beer?”

He puts down the book. “I can't get over how young he was.”

“Who?”

“Sorely. Absolutely brilliant. Killed at twenty.” He begins for the door. “Do you want anything, Maecenas?” he asks as he turns his head in my direction.

“Whatever you get her will suit me just fine,” I respond. The door closes. Daphne lights another cigarette.

Daphne's smile summons up a number of adjectives: mysterious, wry, absent. It's not a pronounced disingenuously; rather, she is merely calm and cautious with her words. It is as though she is creating an acrostic or reciting a tome once uttered by a sober oracle. Her speech habits are certainly a departure from the rantings of Tomas and Patrick, two extroverts capable of making conversation out of everything and nothing, very often at the same time. Daphne just continues to smile at me, perhaps content to know that she need not speak a word. She understands who will be directing the route the conversation takes.

“Everybody loves an enigma, I guess.”

“But you know Willis Faxo?”

“Of course I know Willis. We fucked for a few weeks. Nothing all that serious ever came of it. He can be so immature sometimes, even if he is brilliant. I mean, he’s not eidetic like Patrick, but—”

“Eidetic?”

“Like, having a memory that's better than photographic. I mean, Pat can't remember entire pages of information like Hal Incadenza or anything, but it's still scary to see just how much information he can store. And he likes to let you know about it. Willis, on the other hand, is usually more reserved. He's the type of man who actually wants people to think he's less intelligent than he is. He's afraid of revealing his gift. He thinks it will make people feel alienated.” She looks to me with craned neck. “Why do you care about Willis?”

“Didn't Patrick explain all of this to you?”

“I could ask you the same question,” she says with a laugh.

“I mean…”

“That you want information about Willis because you believe he'll be able to lead you to your artist,” she finishes with a mischievous chuckle. “Well, I hate to play the part of the wet blanket, but the truth of the matter is that Willis didn't even know him all that well — that's one of those myths that Patrick created all by himself. True, the two did live together for a time, but they weren't particularly close. Willis was busy with his work at Cooper Union — before he dropped out, of course.”

“Did Coprolalia—”

“No,” she begins coolly, “He didn't go there. And please stop calling him that. His name is Mordecai.”

“Mordecai,” I repeat. “So Esther and Patrick were right.”

“Who's Esther?”

“Don't worry about it.”

“What did you expect?” she grins. “Were you anticipating some type of entity out of a science fiction movie? Or did you want some huge twist in the plot: a thought-to-be-dead artist, a celebrity, or even — God forbid! — a woman? He's only a man — a little weird, true, but no more so than your typical artist. At least that's what Willis always said.”

“A guy named Mordecai from either Midwood or Bensonhurst.”

“Midwood.” She smiles, distantly. “You already seem to know about as much as I do. He's just a man from Brooklyn who writes on bathroom walls. There's nothing more to it.”

I can't explain why this bothers me. If I had to relate to anything, it is like the abolition of the cherished myth of immortality: the first association with the concept of maturity and the introduction to time as a progression, one as necessary as it is terrifying. Just as easily, it could be thought of as similar to the end of innocence, a bite into that bitter heirloom handed down through the generations; but, really, it is just information that falsifies a naïve assumption. Maybe it's so disappointing because it is too difficult sometimes to step outside of the framework that we create for ourselves, to abandon the belief that something is always looming on the horizon while something else is receding into oblivion. I don't know. This is all new to me. I look to Daphne vacantly for far too long.

“Do you want a cigarette?” she asks finally.

“What?” The thought bubble bursts.

“Do you smoke?” She grins. “You've been staring at mine for a great while.”

I nod, walk over to her, and take one from the pack that she presents to me. Something about her phrase 'great while' seems a bit odd, archaic maybe. The cigarette she gives me is the brand without additives, the same brand that was purchased by a massive tobacco conglomerate back in the early aughts, a particularly busy period of buyouts — in terms of both companies and politicians — for the Oligarchy.

As she lights the cigarette, she looks to me with what could almost be called pity. I notice that her irises are a luminescent shade of hazel speckled with flakes of gold. She blinks slowly as I stare down to her, her eyes: amygdalate, immaculate, serene. These are eyes with which one falls in love while in a lucubratory bistro or a really predictable Indie film. They are almost cliché, but I can't help myself. I've always been of the opinion that a woman is at the apex of her beauty when you stare into her eyes, that moment before the first kiss, the second kiss, the kiss that implores the advance of lips and hands and tongue, etc., etc. True, attention is commonly diverted from the eyes, especially when the first day of spring officially arrives and the number of fender-benders increases exponentially throughout the thawing latitudes; but this is just the work of neurotransmitters, a sort of infatuation that is more chemical than conscious. In reality, there is no nudity more erotic than vulnerability, vulnerability as the shedding of pretense, which can permit a connection with another person without so much as a semblance to anxiety. That's the odd thing about skin: it is both boundary and medium (and maybe when the latter ceases to operate as such, it becomes only the former; and maybe that's when love begins to fade, and sex becomes hollow, but you of course can't let on that you are simply going through motions; and so the skin becomes more calloused, thicker, and you find yourself staring at the ceiling as she pretends to sleep next to you; and you pretend, too, but what you are pretending tickles something in you, and she is left believing that — at the very least — you still find her attractive).

“What are you looking at?” she smiles coyly. “You do know that I'm almost twice your age?”

“Does that really matter?” I ask as I break the stare and chuckle to the floor.

“Flattered, kid, but you're really not my type.”

“What is your type?”

She smiles. “The type that doesn't try to engage in these sorts of things when there's about one hundred people ready to barge in through an unlockable door at any minute.” She turns her head to look and quickly returns her attention to me. “Plus, I'm not one to start anything that I can't finish.”

I nod without that sharp aching sensation that more often than not accompanies rejection, take a drag off the cigarette, and make my way back to the taupe, leather chair, which exudes yet another cloud of dust as I plop back down. There are no ashtrays around, not that this matters. “Another time?” I ask.

“If you play your cards right…” she begins with that same smile that evades qualification with nothing short of guile, “…No.” Ouch. “I'd much rather hear why you care about Mordecai's work so much? Is it the money?”

“You know about that?” deflated.

“You think I didn't want to cash in?” she laughs. “I tried to get him over all the time, but Willis refused to call him. They had a falling out over something — I don't know what. He didn't like to talk about it. He said it was nothing, but a woman can always tell.”

“I see.”

“So where did it come from, then? Why are you so interested in him?”

“I'm not in it for the money,” with asperity — sudden, explosive, and instantly regretted. “I mean,” I backtrack, “That's not my only reason for doing this. Maybe it was initially, but now it’s something more.”

“There are no ends without means,” she replies with that unshakable candor. “So why do it?”

I don't know how to respond. There really is no good reason. A side of me wants to say something about Sisyphus in an effort to sound profound, but that reference has become somewhat banal. The truth is that I haven't thought of the why — the reason, the purpose — all that much; there doesn't seem to be a need for a reason or a purpose, just a direction.

I don't know what it is; I don't have a ready name by which to address the need. I know it does not go by any name so great as truth or wisdom. Even “ambition” is indulgent enough to invite dubious eyebrows. I have not set this goal for myself because I believe the identity of the artist needs to be revealed in order to subsequently solve some great mystery concerning the human condition. It is just something to do, a reason to wake up every morning with the feeling that there is something not only worth accomplishing, but something that tangible, too. Jeff is of the opinion that I seek the unattainable because he considers me a pessimist — and a pessimist with an impossible goal before him will never be ashamed of his failure. Tomas looks at it as something with which to preoccupy his time. He has openly projected this sentiment onto me, though my rebukes have always felt more emotional than logical. Maybe I do share this orientation more than I am ready to admit, but I don't really know. The more plausible explanation seems to be that I have no idea what I am to do because for the first time in my life I am confronted with a myriad of forks in the road that all hold their own pros and cons. Who the hell am I to decide which is the best route for me?

My entire life seems to have been a perpetual attempt to mollify others, to respond to the responsibilities imposed upon me by authority figures draped in cloaks of varying opacity. Some stood before me with clear orders and demands; others continue to hide in the shadows with potentially nefarious aims, their shibboleths including “self” and “status” and “success” and “individualism” and “wealth” and all of the prizes adjunctive to these things, all of the glittering commodities that hide the fact that there is no purpose or serious worth inherent in them, something so anathema to what is considered normal these days that an entire industry has been created simply to sell this meager truth (the face of Tyler Durdin is on the cover of People, after all).

Had it ever mattered what I want to do, not in the sense of the choice of where to eat lunch or what topic I wished to explore for a paper, but in the more universal context? It was a question that was asked so infrequently that I had forgotten to pose it to myself, a question that never seemed relevant to the “real world” in which I was, am, expected to enter. To mature, in the sense of our market-oriented world, means less the cultivation of personality or character or even integrity, and more the honing of a skill that can be used within a framework of exploitation: an ability that will be useful to a corporation, which believes that, by providing one the venue to employ their skill, they are entitled to the majority of the wealth created by that individual's labor. And yet to renounce it? Is that not the ultimate in juvenile idealism? No, one must do the adult thing: Submit and complain until you reach the age when you can spend your days getting drunk and accosting young idealists, telling them to follow their dreams, even if you know that they won't and that your disheveled condition makes you look more like a waif than a sage with the type of phronesis the young unknowingly crave. Still, it's only then, only during the ashen twilight between retirement and death, that you realize how foolish it is to think it foolish to want to skip that middle and patently unnecessary step of life, a step plagued by compromises, which, both in the metaphorical and literal sense (though one could debate the extent to which either is applicable), come to be seen as constituents of a protracted suicide, the fractured evanescence of youth discarded one shard at a time until there is nothing more than a pallid shell participating in a drudgery that only a slave would welcome.

Though it would be a fallacy to cite Truth as my sole motive, I am uncertain of the other forces or ideals stoking my ambition. I only know that this endeavor most certainly lacks in the nobility to which so many heroes are wont to strive. By even my own criteria I thought it quixotic, more than likely doomed to end up in the catacombs of futility. But it was something, a practice that promised no windfall because it was not intended to provide one in the conventional sense.

And I don't know what I'll do when I lose the opportunity to live like that, like this. I don't know what I'll do when I have to wake up and know that my life is to forever be plagued by vanishing seconds and entire days that I won't remember just because they are no different than the ones that went before, the ones that will come after. I don't want to experience life as a conjunction of nostalgia and regret like the old men that hang around the newsstands all day drinking coffee spiked with cheap vodka as they piss away their social security money on lotto tickets while discussing the past with others, who, like them, have abandoned the present. And perhaps there is that element of love that is lacking, too; perhaps that's what we really abandon when we relinquish the present — the possibility of love that is not only tangible, but human. And maybe it's the greater love, too; not the love of self or one other or even a series of others, but the love of humanity and the love of life — the joyful pilgrimage with a completely arbitrary destination, which is perhaps the only thing that real art can ever strive to be.

“Adventure,” I respond with a small lump in my throat.

Daphne nods with a versatile expression on her face. Before having the chance to disambiguate her sentiment, Patrick comes into the room with a baroque stein, a sixer of canned beer with a label that reads beer, and a head full of cocaine (though the latter is only implied by the inflection of his voice).

“Hope you cats are thirsty,” he effervesces as he takes a swig from the stein, which has the word “Castalie” transcribed below a scene from some medieval festival. He then launches into song (¾ up-tempo waltz in E Mixolydian):

The nut-brown ale, the nut-brown ale,

Puts down all drink when it is stale!

The toast, the nutmeg, and the ginger

Will make a sighing man a singer.

Ale gives a buffet in the head,

But ginger under-props the brain;

When ale would strike the strong man dead

Then nutmeg tempers it again.

The nut-brown ale, the nut-brown ale,

Puts down all drink when it is stale!

“There's enough swill downstairs to supply a small army,” he adds as he takes another swig. A can makes its way into my hand, perhaps by means of teleportation. “I think Mongo's polished about half of it off by himself!”

“What is the deal with that guy anyway?” I ask. Daphne stands and starts for the hifi.

“Mongo Blageaux? Oh he's the heir to the Keens fortune and yes-yes that is his real name because he had it legally changed sometime back in the early nineties and-and-um-and I think it means something in some language.”

“That narrows it down,” Daphne mumbles as she looks through the record collection.

“A rather hebephrenic personality, right?”

“Sure.” Caesura. “What the hell does hebephrenic mean?”

“It's another word that means something in another language.” She lights another cigarette.

“And it's not Swahili. Ninasema Kiswahili, lakini sikijui nzuri sana.”

“Okay.”

“Yeah I spent-I spent a few weeks in Tanzania some time back. Actually, no…well…yes. It was Zanzibar to be more precise. Beautiful country. Lovely people.”

“What took you all the way over there?” Daphne asks while examining an Edith Piaf compilation.

“My brother's wife was born there and my whole family went down for the wedding.” He looks to Daphne with wide eyes. She acknowledges the look with a nod before returning to the vinyl. “Her father's kind of a prick, but the rest of-the-her relatives are great.” He turns to me. “So how did the interrogation go?”

Caesura.

“Interview! Interview,” as he slaps his head. “A thousand apologies upon a thousand apologies.”

“Patrick,” Daphne begins as she removes a record for its jacket, “I've told you that I don't really know anything about Mordecai.” She replaces the Bill Evans record with an Edith Piaf compilation. “I've never even seen a picture of him,” she adds as she places the needle on the rotating disc.

“Yes well don't you don't-don't you at least know where he moved after living with Willis?”

“That was more than a decade ago,” she laughs. “I'm sure he doesn't still live in Greenpoint.”

“Greenpoint?” I blurt out.

“Did Esther tell you that, too?” Daphne asks sarcastically.

I nod as the tinny horns on the first track of the album blast through the speakers.

“Well, she's right. He moved…where was it?” She turns to Patrick, who shrugs. “I think he lived on Franklin Avenue.”

“It's Franklin Street up there.”

“Regardless. Willis said he lived nearby Greenpoint Avenue — I remember that much.”

“What about Willis? Do you still have his number?”

“Of course. We still keep in touch even if he can be a misogynistic asshole.”

“A what?”

“Many people like Daphne here believe that he hates feminists. But he-he just hates bourgeois femineminism you know the types who simply want to make men and women economic equals in capitalist competition. He has no problem with some of their claims — the more legalistic stuff that is: reproductive rights and harsher punishments for sex offenders and rapists — especially in cases in which the husband rapes his wife — access to affordable daycare — you know…all that.”

“Or that he doesn't acknowledge the insidiousness of patriarchy.”

“Insidiousness? Isn't that a bit extreme.”

“No. Phallocentricism dominates the very language we speak. At best. In its most insidious form, it assimilates, subsumes…conquers everything that opposes it. You do realize there's not even a word for man-hater, unless one uses that horribly awkward word. Man-hater. It's bullshit. The equivalent is misanthrope. It doesn't mean you hate men; it means you hate humanity. Logically speaking, this means you cannot hate men without hating all of humanity.”

Patrick rolls his eyes. “But about Mr. Faxo. His concern arises because he thinks the very framework of our society is based upon the framework of our economy and that the economy is founded upon the exploitation and oppression of the working class, and that the injustices facing women are adjunctive to this primary inequity, what either he or Mr. Keens or Mr. Fromm — or perhaps all three without knowing that there had been a coinage of the term — called the orientation of domination.” Daphne pulls her phone out of her pocket and glares to Patrick, who seems to be speaking in fast-forward. “I'm not saying I totally agree with him,” he begins with a sympathetic look, “But I do agree that the whole system needs to be changed if we are to avoid alterations that are going to be superficial, thereby leaving the class system, and consequently the system of patriarchal hegemony, in tact. If you make men and women equal without eradi-eradi-eradicating the underlying mechanisms at play it just means that your oppressor can potentially wear a skirt…well in public anyhow. In other words it doesn't strike the heart of the matter. Classism is paramount; everything else is but a tool of division to be used by people in power. He even said in one interview—”

“—That bourgeois feminism has done more to advance the influence of capitalism than both Milton Friedman and Barry Goldwater combined. Yes, I read that, too. Not exactly his least idiotic moment.”

“I'm not agreeing with him. I'm just reiterating what he said.” Another roll of the eyes from Daphne. “Now, as to the ethics of revolution…” he begins. “Well…let's not start a discussion upon Trotskyite ethics as of now — we'll be here all night. I'll just say that Faxo was somewhat ambivalent about the idea of apolitical ethics.”

“Jesus Christ, will you shut up for once. Do you have a pen?” Daphne asks after a frustrated sigh.

“I'll just put it into my phone.”

She gives me the number. “I have a second set to play. Do you think the crowd will get restless if I open up with Debussy?”

“What were you thinking?”

“L'isle joyeuse.”

“No. Absolutely not. You may as well try out something by Ligeti.”

“Ligeti? That’s a bit extreme, don’t you think?”

“Okay, fine, you may as well play Satie.”

Grunt. “What then?”

“What about some of those Monk pieces that you've been working on.”

Her eyes narrow. “The only one I'd be comfortable with is Little Rootie Tootie.”

“Given this crowd, I think that's a hell of a lot better than Debussy — or Satie. Why not open with the whole band?”

“I usually start the last set by myself. What about Self-Portrait in Three Colors?”

“Hum it for me.”

She does.

“No.” He laughs. “Why are so intent on depressing the hell out of everyone here? How about Midnight at the Oasis?”

“Maria Mulder? Are you fucking serious? How about this Handel's Sarabande?”

“Why not just go all the way and play Liebesträume?”

“I know it, too!” she laughs. “Look, I just really want to do a serious piece to start off the set. I’ve been doing it a lot, and…” she trails off. “You're right, though.” She turns to me. “I've been relearning a lot of the classical pieces I used to know because we’ve been doing more upscale gigs.” She turns to Patrick and shrugs. “But you're right Patrick; and when you're right, you're right—Little Rootie Tootie it is.”

There are the eventual platitudes of departure: hands on hands, lips on cheeks, desires unfulfilled. “It was a pleasure meeting you. You have my number, right?” I respond with a slow nod. “Well, we'll be in touch.” We shake hands. It is far more official than it needs to be.

“She's something, isn't she?” Patrick says once she exits the room. “Great pianist. She kind of reminds me of a young Herbie Hancock when she plays with the band — a lot of improvisation, a lot of…let's say…jeu. Her solo work has become very different recently. Some of it is ambient; some of it is written to emulate the composers of the fin de siècle. She would probably get upset if she heard me say either, especially about the ambient composers.”

“Why?”

“She thinks only hacks create ambient music. She feels the same way about the majority of minimalists when it comes to literature. I can't help but agree with her. If you are searching for essence by muting the cacophony of existence, then you're a theoretician, not an artist.”

“I see.”

We are both quiet for a moment.

“Hold on…here we go. I just love these last three lines,” he begins. Cue Patrick in five, four, three, two, one…

He has an anachronistic voice, one that is deep and heavy on the tremolo. It's not something that you'd expect. Given the circumstances, however, everything here seems not only permissible, but possible too. “That was nice,” I say gingerly. He nods. “So what do we do now?”

“Let's get fucking pissed.”

11

The phone call wakes Sean. He denies this with a languid urgency even as the words stumble blindly through an alien world of syntaxes and semantics that only a moment ago must have made some kind of sense to him. The confused stupor doesn't last too long; soon his voice has become hurried, surly, and lacking in the lexical elements typically found in his dialect of intellectualism — one that is far more pedagogical than pedantic. He lights a cigarette.

“You're going to have to backtrack a bit,” he groans. “You were at an A-R-E party?”

“Yes,” I respond quickly. “Somewhere in south Williamsburg.” It's quite possible that I'm still drunk. I can't really tell anymore. And then there's the problem of my short-term memory, which has become a miasma of conflicting realities. I remember leaving for the train at five because Yevgeny, a man of Herculean stature with a chickpea nose, thin lips, and torpid eyes, suspended his conversation on the etymology on the word “Popsicle” to explain that the hour fell within the domain of the hare, and that this, he felt, assured a swift return home. I don't remember the ride all that well; my entrance into the apartment is quite possibly a memory from a few days ago. It's something of a terrain vague, a region suffuse with the detritus of dream and the fading opacity of consciousness.

There's a haze over most of the memories from last night. Some reels are projected through an obsidian lens; some appear to be edited with little regard to continuity or context. I know that Poot Moint's second set lasted until four or so. I remember looking to a clock shortly after they finished and mentioning the time to Daphne. The set included, among many other songs, “I Can't Give You Anything But Love,” “Them There Eyes,” “Magilla,” “Sixteen Tons” (which was sung by a man who looked exactly like Duke Ellington), as well as a David Grisman tune that no one seemed to know by name (Andreas, the drummer, abandoned the kit and played djembe, Daphne took up a cigarette, the bassist played bass, the guitarist played mandolin, the Domesticon performed miracles on violin, and one of the nudists played flute). Cobalt bitterly lamented over his inability to remember the song's title; he thought the world of the composer, and was ready to embark into freaky realms of masochism because he couldn't come up with so much as the name of the album on which the track appeared. Their final set ended with a song about a famous street in Paris. I don't remember its name.

There were a lot of conversations, perhaps the most interesting of which took place during a mid-set intermission. Andreas had broken the last of his sticks and had run out to the car to get a pack of pair ones. The topic of discussion was phrenology, a subject I know very little about beyond the fact that it systematically interprets the topography of the head. A jazz-cat named Louis thought it to be an intriguing pseudo-science, and had taken it upon himself to study its methods with Derrida in mind. He was a rather odd character, one of those ambiverts who likes to confess more and more information you don’t care about the longer they speak to you. If he got too extroverted, however, asking him to repeat himself was a sure-fire reset button — he was terribly self-conscious of his English.

On top of being interested in phrenology, he was a rather brilliant mathematician. Daphne asked him the odds of her and I having the same number of hairs on our heads. He told us that they were about one hundred and fifteen times better than either her or my chances of winning the lottery, though, he added after a moment of pensive introspection, that this was taking into account a hypothetical world, one in which the two subjects under consideration (myself and Daphne, in this case) were potentially either fully endowed with hair or entirely bald. He and his friend, another Parisian, looked like members of the Cab Calloway Orchestra and, even with limited English skills, managed to employ a plethora of depression and war-era slang. The two of them hated cigarettes, which was surprising as they were French, jazz aficionados, and…well, French. He scolded Daphne, the Domesticon, and a man known only as Le Zouave for smoking, saying that each cigarette reduces an individual's life expectancy by seven seconds (or minutes, I don't remember exactly). “I–I plan on being crushed by an air conditioning unit, you know,” the Domesticon said as he pulled out a pack of Old Testaments. “Total accident. So, um, you know,” as he lit his cigarette, which faintly smelled of brimstone, “I don't know if that really applies to me. But, you know, I'm a fair guy, so I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll inform the guy who puts the thing, the uh, the air conditioner, in — you know, one of those guys you see at Yankee games and on the Jersey shore and at home with the, um, the other gorillas in the Bronx Zoo — that I've been a smoker for several years now, and that he should, you know, that he should install the unit incorrectly a few years in advance. You know, that way, that way, we can both be winners in this situation: your theory about smoking will be right and I'll get to prove that I have free will.” Kind of a bomb. “Seriously though, I love smoking. My shrink though, a-a real Freudian, he always tells me that it's an oral fixation — smoking, that is. And I asked him, you know, do people really carry that with them all their lives? Can it be developed? You know, can you…can you imbue that type of behavior in a person? He said that smoking can bring it out in a person, sure, and that it's, you know, one of those traits that can remain dormant or latent for years if there's no habit to, you know, I guess draw it out. Ever since that day, I've doubled the number of packs that I buy.”

Le Zouave shrugged. “You are smoking more?”

“Oh, the second pack's not for me. No. It's for my wife.” Rim-shot. “I see you have the sticks, Andreas.” An affirmation. “Daphne, are you ready?” The guitarist, Lucas, motioned for the two to return to the stage. The Domesticon turned to Le Zouave. “And you wanted to sing Sexy Bones a bit later?”

“It is C'est si bon.”

“I'm terribly sorry,” he replied. “I guess my mind's a bit preoccupied, you know, being around Daphne and all.”

Not too long after there was an event concerning Mongo, several unopened cans of beer, and a katana. The incident ended the only way that seemed logically possible: the utter destruction of a cheap coffee table. The three zoots eventually wrestled the katana out of Mongo's hands, though in the process they almost stabbed one of Les Poseuses, who, by this time, had removed her socks and held them in her hands as if dual pairs of nunchucks. She lambasted Mongo in French with vehemence, and then began to let loose with the nylon weapons, an act which took just about everybody by surprise (it is always overwhelming to see a nude woman of ostensible grace partake in the Martial Arts), especially the zoots, who attempted a retreat into the bathroom — though this proved to be impossible because the bathroom door had been locked by the two Elvi, who had commandeered the space either to take turns grunting vowels and the words “fuck” and “yeah” and “me” in various combinations, or to just fuck one another in the butt — before taking cover behind the remnants of the coffee table that had been butchered by Mongo. The Domesticon abandoned the stage upon seeing the chaos, and eventually got the woman under control by employing the help of the young Le Zouave and a Furry couple (a turtle by the name of Moxy and a snail by the name of Früvous) that he, the Domesticon, had armed with PVC piping retrieved from a nonspecific locale. The solo Les Poseuses put up quite a fight, though one would have to admit that the engagement was actually two-on-one as opposed to four-on-one — the plush suits worn by Moxy and Früvous gave the duo little better than carpal-tunnel dexterity. Perhaps the culmination of the event came just as one of the Elvi reached his climax, which sounded eerily like the half-mumbled/half-sung portion of the chorus sandwiched between the words “I'm all shook up” in the song with that title. The two other Les Poseuses not involved in the battle got to laughing when they heard this, which seemed to calm the rabid member of the trio to the point of submission, but not before giving the Domesticon one last whap across the face with one of her socks. The situation finally under control, the clarinetist returned to the stage and ended up taking arguably his best solo of the night on the Arlen/Koehler tune “Get Happy.” After the ado, I discovered that the clarinetist and the nearly-nude French woman, subsequently with elbow length mittens as opposed to socks, had been something of an item in the past — at least that's what Cobalt said as he was relaying the story behind the puncture wounds in the wall to the Elvi and Minos, the latter being one of the goth creatures who had missed everything while out on a cigarette run.

I have yet to speak with Tomas. I only know that he and Boots took their leave after two and before three. Patrick was conscripted to the citrus artillery shortly thereafter. They were still bombarding the wall with fruit when I left, though by this time they had moved on to launching cantaloupes to the sounds of bizarre psychedelic bands and hits from the seventies known more for their obscurity than their brilliance. (“You're never heard of Dennis Coffey and the Detroit Guitar Band or the Jimmy Castor Bunch?” Moxy asked me when I voiced my ignorance. “But you at least know of Atomic Rooster, right? Can? The Chocolate Watchband? The Tages? The Koobas? The Galliwogs? The Daily Flash? Mouse?” When I responded with a shrug and a diffident shake of the head, she laughed: “Okay, but you have to know the La De Das.” Again, an uneasy shrug. “What rock have you been hiding under?”) I felt like an extra in Nut House Rock, the king's less than successful response to Magical Mystery Tour and Head.

I don't mention all of this to Sean. He can infer from my tenor that I have been through the proverbial looking glass and back. “And you've been told that Coprolalia's real name is Mordecai, that he is probably thirty-two years old, and that he grew up in Midwood?”

“Yes,” I respond. “I've also heard that he lived with a man named Willis Faxo for a while during Faxo's time at Cooper Union.” A groan travels down the line, deep into the low end of things. “I still don't know how they met. According to my source, Mordecai wasn't a student at Cooper Union.”

“Faxo?”

“Yes, Willis Faxo. You've heard of him?”

“I've heard more than enough about him.” He pauses. “But the A-R-E?”

“The Acolytes of some Roman god.”

“Risus. God of laughter, joy. Greek too,” he adds. “Then again, there is Gelos, who is also cited as being the god of laughter.” He pauses. “Well, with regards to Risus, there' relatively little referential information about him. I believe Apuleius' the Golden Ass is the source most frequently cited.”

“You already know all of this?”

“Yes, and I've also heard a lot more about those initials. I would suspect someone's playing a prank on you, but I don't know who would go through that much trouble to dick around someone like yourself.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” defenses up.

“Look,” he begins, “I don't mean to be rude. It's just…it's just that there's a lot to explain, and I have a meeting in about half an hour.”

“It's Sunday.”

“Ah, well, the university never sleeps,” he says dispassionately. “I want to talk to you about all of this, though. Can you meet for coffee down in the Village? Let's say two?”

11.1

The heat is beginning to make life in the city that genre of annoying that requires all conversation address and exhaust complaints about temperature, humidity, precipitation, and Global Warming (or, provided you're too stubborn to use a term favored by environmentalists, Global Climate Change). “Hot one today, huh?” Sean says as I approach the table.

“Yeah,” I respond as several beads of sweat aggregate to form one big tear, which descends down my cheek. “I could barely sleep. My roommate is too cheap to have an air conditioner in the apartment.”

“Well sit down,” he says as he picks up his coffee as though to toast. “You look like you're been to hell and back.”

“This search is killing me, Sean. Seriously, I think I'm taking tonight off. I can't keep drinking like this.”

“You're twenty-two, right?” I nod hesitantly. “It gets far worse, my friend. Just wait until you have to start dealing with the two-day hangover. Just another bead on the con side of age.”

Sean has a bad habit of sounding patronizing even when he means well. A part of me thinks it's the environment in which he resides — that fantasy world of academia, where people lapse into worlds that only exist on paper, lose entire months of their lives to esoteric projects, revile sleep, subsist on strict diets of coffee, cigarettes, and consumables that contain heavy amounts of additives and require only the opening of a bag or a can to eat, and somehow always manage to under-appreciate a far too attractive girlfriend or boyfriend. When they reemerge, terrified of light and most forms of human interaction, they often make comments that seem bizarre, as they have forgotten that they are the only passengers on their train of thought. The significant other, of course, finds this endearing; just about everyone else finds it anywhere from perplexing to creepy.

The tangential form of consciousness and the absence of healthy eating habits are probably the least deleterious aspects of living a life that is defined by hermeneutics (in several ways). The greater concern has to do with amphetamine addiction, insanity, and all of those other adjuncts of solitary confinement that rear their ugly heads around the corner like potential assassins contemplating the best vantage from where to take their shot. The mathematics, economics, biology, and physic students are probably the worst in this aspect — what little time they do have to themselves they reserve for all-night drinking bouts, sleepovers in various psyche wards, or hours spent on the benches in the park where the largest populations of pigeons are known to congregate. The philosophers use their free time to argue via recondite and archaic terminology, which I suppose is nothing more than an extension of their already useless hobby; history students are prone to relegating sleep to a diminutive position, one valued only slightly more than masturbation (they are, after all, the biggest readers in the world of academia — something that law students like to deny, as law students are convinced that studying law is the single most demanding occupation one can have until they begin practicing — guess what becomes the most demanding occupation then?). Women's studies majors get offended by universal statements, generalizations, and any remark that requires it be taken either as a joke or with a grain of salt (the fact that you're getting upset by this comment only proves my point). The literature students tend to work hard enough to sound intelligent at parties where they are required to relive scenes from the Dharma Bums. In their more cloistered moments, they drink coffee and conjure up theories that trivialize and generalize things like sexism and racism, as comparative literature is less of a concentration or major, and more a method of autoerotic foreplay for nerds. Regardless of intellectual focus, the academic world breeds many things, but it must be remembered that, in some cases, it can cultivate introversion, narcissism, and the complete detachment from the world in which most of us reside. That being said, Sean is far more personable than most who have dedicated so much time to the university.

The people in the garden of the café look to me with suspicion. It is not an expression of condemnation that they exhibit; rather, they seem preoccupied in trying to find conversation matter, and I am evidently a more than worthy candidate. Although I am wearing the sunglasses from last night, I suppose there are other features that reveal the magnitude of my hangover.

“What's so important that it couldn't be discussed over the phone?” I ask.

“Nothing. I just wanted to see you in person, that's all. It's been quite some time.”

“I see.”

“How many of those bars have you been to?” I shift my gaze. “You know…the list that I gave you a few weeks ago.”

“Oh,” I laugh. “That list is pretty outdated.”

“I just made it,” defensively. “Are you sure you didn't just miss some of the pieces? They're not labeled or anything.”

“Yes, I know. Most of the bathrooms have been completely painted over — even in that one dive on Fifth Street.” I name the bar. “It was the first place I went.”

“That's right; they called me,” he chuckles. He taps his forehead with his fist. “I completely forgot about that.”

(It is said that Thales, one of the Seven Sages of Greek Antiquity, was so captivated by the heavens that, as he was escorting a woman from her house so they could star-gaze, he fell into a ditch. When he called out for help, she responded: 'Do you think, Thales, that you will learn what is in the heavens when you cannot see what is in front of your feet?')

“What's your favorite piece so far?”

“The more I think about it, the more I like Herculi Romano Augusto.”

“That's a great one. That's on Fifth Avenue, right?”

“Yeah, but it may be gone already.” I pause. “Sean, there's not going to be anything left soon.”

“That's not true,” he responds, but he cannot meet my eyes.

“There are still some pieces up around here, don't get me wrong; but it seems as though Coprolalia is slowly being wiped off the entire island of Manhattan that exists above Fourteenth Street. Even the Brooklyn and Queens corpus is beginning to disappear. The Bronx is different, but it doesn't matter because he never goes up there. Regardless, so much of it has been erased that it seems almost pointless to abide by that list. I mean, you remember the other day,” I begin. “You know, when I called you from that bar in Red Hook?”

“Yes, I know.” He lights a cigarette and blows the exhaust towards a yuppie couple. They examine him with scorn. “Look, I know it seems to be a daunting task and all, but Coprolalia is alive and well. The only thing is that he moves around a lot. There are entire months that I go without finding anything, and then, suddenly, pieces appear in places as far away as Jamaica and City Island. We've been over this.”

“Well, that could lead us to believe that he doesn't live here anymore — at least not all year.”

“You sound like James,” he derides.

“Well, maybe he's on to something.” Sean rolls his eyes. “I'm not saying that he's definitely right, especially since it would mean that this Mordecai guy isn't Coprolalia.”

“Mordecai — I haven't heard that name in a few years. Never did get a last name, either.” He shakes his head. A long caesura ensues. “You don't believe any of it, do you? You couldn't possibly be that gullible.”

“I'm certainly not going to dismiss the possibility without seeing some type of evidence. Furthermore, it validates my belief that Coprolalia has some type of base south of Prospect Park.”

“Okay,” he begins calmly. “First of all, he's far too young. As you have said, he's only thirty-two years old.”

“I don't know that. I just assume that he's the same age as Willis, and Willis will be turning thirty-three in a month or so.” Sean nods. “Regardless, I still think it's something I should follow up on. I have Willis' number. It couldn't hurt to give him a call.”

“Far be it for me to advise you not to follow a dead end.” Sean seems to be circumnavigating around the word temerity.

“Well, these people I met last night seem to be fairly convinced that he's really Coprolalia.”

“Of course they are convinced of it. It makes them feel special. People love bragging about who they know; it makes them feel as though they're part of the scene,” he derides.

“Can I start you off with something to drink,” the waitress, who materializes behind me, asks. “We have a bloody mary special — buy one, get one free.”

“Coffee will be fine,” I respond. “I think my liver needs a rest.”

“You only live once,” she curtsies. Whatever gem lay in her nose winks in the sun.

“I guess one drink couldn't hurt,” I say as I look over to Sean.

“Coffee's fine,” he says with severity.

Her eyes widen and her posture straightens. “Okay,” she says with a protracted 'o'. This implies a variety of unflattering thoughts.

She walks back into the building. Its bricks have been painted over in a faded beige — that hue that recollects a child's drawing of Caribbean sands — that is chipped in several places, thereby revealing calico layers from the past. The sound of a Mingus tune can be heard as the door opens. Nothing is said at the table for a long while. Sean drinks his coffee and smokes his cigarette in torpid pantomime. My shadow grows.

“Here you are sweetie,” the waitress says as she hands my coffee, which is in a bowl the diameter of a softball. “If you need anything else, my name is Zoe,” she adds with as much passion as she can summon.

“So why are you so skeptical about Mordecai and the A-R-E?” I ask as I reach for the milk.

“Because I've met them before — not Mordecai, but the others. They all hang around with this one band — Poot Moint.”

“Yeah, they were playing last night. I had a long conversation with Daphne, the pianist.”

“Oh (caesura) her.” The utterance of “Tenochtitlán” would have probably produced a similar expression on the face of Cortés.

“You know her?”

“Ancient history.”

“Did you ever meet Willis Faxo?”

“No, but I've definitely heard the name. The artist who's too good for the art world. Pretentious ass, if you ask me.”

“What do you mean? I thought he made furniture.”

“Yes, he does. It's a whole bunch of Marxist hoopla, really,” he says. I feel as though we both acknowledge that his word choice is something of an anomaly. “He refuses to produce any artwork that the working class won't understand. This, of course, is incredibly patronizing to the working class, but it is also a barb aimed at men of culture. To paraphrase what he said: the discourse of the art world has become a form of autoeroticism for those with too much time and hair on their hands.

“He's critical of nearly everyone: artists, poets, writers, feminists…anyone who does not think the abolition of the class system is paramount to justice. Feminists really hate him. He's called the majority of them, and I quote, 'The most self-absorbed and elitist members of the leisure-class'.”

“That explains what Daphne said of him,” I respond as I sip my coffee. “Can I bum one of those?”

“I didn't realize you smoke.”

“I don't normally, but I could use one right now.” He slides the pack and a lighter across the table. “From where are you quoting this Faxo guy?” The cigarette coughs out a plume of opaque smoke that's almost mauve in the sunlight. “Did he write a book or something?”

“No, some art magazine interviewed him a few years back. It was when he decided to quit the scene. He was quite a celebrity back then.” He drags from his cigarette for a long while. “I think it was back in ninety-eight or ninety-nine. Regardless, it's an amusing read,” he continues; “It's along the lines of Castro's speech to the UN in sixty or sixty-one.”

I concentrate on the white strands of milk, which swirl like wisps of smoke, before they are consumed by the fallow tone the coffee has taken on. I am absently stirring it. “So where does this leave me?” The question sounds more forlorn than it should be. Sean's gaze is sympathetic. “You're basically telling me that nothing I've done over the past two plus weeks has any merit. I mean, it's hard to even find a bar that has preserved one of his pieces, let alone someone who has the, the — apparently the audacity to claim that they know him.” My hands fall to the table. “I mean, what's the point in asking around if everyone is full of shit? Fuck, Sean, I have been on the move since the last time I saw you. I'd be happy if Tomas and Aberdeen were actually helping, but Tomas — who keeps abandoning me, mind you, because the fucking guy gets laid like every night—”

“Don't be jealous,” he scolds. “Some women are just really attracted to artistic types.”

“I know that Sean,” as calm as the eye of the hurricane. “I know. It's just that I'm beginning to feel like nobody takes me seriously.”

“You're young. People think your interest in high culture is ephemeral, that you'll join the workforce and become a yuppie just like so many others with liberal arts degrees,” which provokes a glacial stare from the woman at the next table. “It's a cynical approach to life, I guess, but it's certainly accurate in most cases.”

I nod. “Well, where do I go from here? If Mordecai isn't Coprolalia, and the members of the A-R-E are bullshit artists, what other leads do I have?”

“Oh yeah, that's what I wanted to mention,” he gasps in a minor Eureka! moment. My eyes narrow. “Well, the A-R-E — as you were told — stands for what seems to be a cult that both worships and strives to promote laughter.” I nod. “There is another belief that there are ulterior motives behind their activities. Some people believe them to be a…well…cult.”

“A cult?”

“Okay, for instance I've heard that the point is to encourage people to embrace their real selves, their…well, I forget the exact words that they use. Anyway, the laughter, they believe, is the first step towards coming to term with the real self…the eidolon — that's it! There's some sophomoric reason for this.”

“Okay.”

“Supposedly, the founder, Dick Keens, spent his years searching for some great truth, a penultimate step that could result in pure enlightenment. He called this The Joke — capitalized 'T' and 'J'.” I squint. “Neo-Platonism,” he responds. “And a lot of drugs.”

“I see,” with an uneasy nod.

“Now, I've certainly heard about the laughter aspect, as I've already said, but I have also heard that the acronym has another meaning.” His tenor cannot be described as facetious or malign; a conjunction of the two, however, would not be unfitting, though they would appear very clumsy together if one were to turn one of the words into a noun as so: facetious malignancy/malign facetiousness.

“They go by a name besides the Acolytes of Risus, the Enlightener?”

“Yes,” he nods with a tenuous grin. “Some believe it actually stands for Astrally-Resurrected Entity — or the plural of that: Astrally-Resurrected Entities.” I look to him with lemons. “The term Astral-Projection essentially means the ability to consciously travel without the use of a body; Astral-Resurrection relates to the ability to bring the dead back to life without the need of a corpse.” Before I can respond, he laughs: “Russian ex-pats and a lot of drugs. To be perfectly honest, I'm surprised you got in. They're typically very exclusive. I guess there's one thing I can't doubt, and that's your tenacity.”

“But they never mentioned anything about resurrections or Russia. It was just a bunch of people having fun.”

“Fun,” he scoffs. “I've seen more refinement in the lot outside a Phish show.” He reaches for his cigarettes. “Still, and I am quite sure of this, the membership includes the most ridiculous members of the Russian avant-garde here in New York. To name a few, there's Dmitri Kondrashov, Antonia Kashcheev, Yuri Podgornov, Feodor Zolotov-Khomutov, Yevgeny Pominov…” I look to him with a very stupid countenance — I can feel it, see myself looking like an utter buffoon. Some of the names are instantly familiar; others summon faint recollections of voices and faces. “You obviously know Daphne — Daphne Karev.”

“She didn't seem Russian to me.”

“She's first generation. I think her mother's French or Italian. I forget.” Caesura. “French.”

“Regardless; you've met all of these people?”

“Yes and no. I've only really talked to Daphne and Keen's grandson, Mongo Blageaux. My guess is that the rest of them aren't all that different. Mongo comes from extreme wealth, as I'm sure you already know. Daphne went to Dartmouth, so I can imagine her background is essentially the same. They're no different than the rest of the idiots running around Williamsburg thinking they're revolutionaries just because they reject the posterity of the Manhattan elite. A bunch of fucking bobos if you ask me.”

“Bobos?”

“Bourgeois bohemians,” almost spitefully. There are lines in his face that I swear I have never seen before. Their design is baroque, a ferocious calligraphy.

It dawns on me that this is the first time I have ever looked to Sean as an equal. The realization does not strike me as a fully conscious thought — at least not initially. Yet this is his face, his face with all its imperfections. I've never looked to it as I would to a friend's face. I've always been too busy concentrating on his eyes — the indifference, fatigue, confidence — to notice the small print.

“I enjoyed their company,” I respond. “I even liked Patrick.”

“You don't mean Patrick Shaheen, do you?”

“Yes,” I respond. “What's the big deal?”

“Nothing. I just heard that he was being deported.” Caesura. “I don't remember the exact reason. France would have probably described him as a 'serene fanatic'.”

“France?”

“Anatole France. Yes, from the Gods Will Have Blood.”

“Is he some type of criminal?”

“Anatole France? No—”

“I know who Anatole France is, Sean.”

“Oh, Patrick. Not really. A lot of governments don't particularly like him. I'm sure there are dossiers on him in a variety of languages.”

“What does he do exactly?”

“He's a ghost writer. And I know you've read something he's written — most people in college have.” Before I begin, he interrupts with, “I don't know. Even if I did, I wouldn't be at liberty to say.”

“So he's a ghost writer for what?”

“Academics. Left-wing demagogues.”

“So he writes anti-establishment literature for famous people? He's like living samizdat?”

“If you want to be horribly pretentious about it. Again, it's not as though there are cross hairs on him or anything. It's more that he has connections. I'm surprised he used his real name during your interaction.” He pauses. “Unless someone else used his name as an alias. An old friend of mine in L.A. likes to tell strangers that he's Thomas Pynchon.”

“Well, that's who he said he was,” slowly. “He's the one who took me and Tomas to the party.”

“And what did he tell you of the group?”

“He told us that it was founded by Dick Keens, that Keens wanted to spread happiness and laughter throughout the world, and, to be honest that's about it — unless, of course, you would like to hear the entire history of the Keens and Balaguez families.”

“He didn't explain the group's goal to you guys?”

“Laughter. And you mentioned something about The Joke.”

“It's a form of atonement,” he says bluntly. My cigarette has gone out. He lights another before sliding his Zippo across the table. “He felt guilty about the source of his money, his life. It haunted him.” He drags from his cigarette slowly. “I'm guessing Patrick didn't mention how Keens died.”

“No; never came up.”

“He shot himself.”

There is a long silence at the table. In this time I notice that the couple next to us, who have been getting the majority of the smoke from Sean's cigarette blown in their face, are conversing about how rude smokers are just loud enough so that Sean and I can hear them. The music from inside the café sounds like late George Benson. The centerpiece of the concrete garden, a massive oak rising from a five by five plot of soil, makes shifting shadow-lattices on the walls that surround us. I remove my sunglasses.

“He what?”

“Shot himself.” It comes out plainly, not stoically or gravely; he recites this information as if telling me the time. “He couldn't live with the guilt, so he shot himself.”

“But why? I mean, the money only paid for his education; it's not like—”

“And what of Abram & Keens? Did his mother promote happiness and laughter with that Leviathan? Don't you think he felt that the money from that company was contaminated, that it contaminated him, too. Didn't you question why he never worked again? He could have given it all away, lived by his labor, and rid himself of the insidious wealth that came from the blood and the toil of untold millions, from a scarred landscape where ore was withdrawn, brutalized bodies deposited.” He ashes his cigarette carefully, slowly. “It became his legacy, too. He did not erase it or rectify it; he only denied it.”

“I thought he gave away most of that money. I thought he only kept enough to tool around the world, and that, with the rest of it, he bought a house down in Park Slope.”

“He gave some of it away. But denial is a poor surrogate for innocence,” he adds in an aphoristic tone. “You see, he formed that cult to run away from the reality of the situation. But it was always there, a great cynosure that infected every thread of his clothing, every brick of that house, every thought in his head: there was not one thing in his life that could not be traced back to the privilege he inherited by means of rape or plunder.” He brandishes what I hope is a wince. “And it was this realization, this inability to escape from the imperious guilt, that led him to suicide. Isn't that all suicide really is — the desire to escape from the ego?”

Maybe it is. He was not only his mother's son; he was a constant reminder of the crime, a byproduct of that insatiable lust and that need for power over a woman, a woman for whom the perpetrator felt no love, no tenderness, no sympathy. Yes, he was the unwanted result of a crime, the crime that stole away his mother's youth. And as much as she may have loved him, as much as she may have cared for him and nurtured him and taught him, there was always that element in him that she could not fully trust, and, therefore, could not fully love. And so maybe there are some crimes that are atavistic, even if the father is disowned by the son, the son by the father. But that was not fully the case with Keens. He may have returned each night to the apartment he and his mother shared, he may have never met the eyes of his father, but the boys with whom he socialized and the environment to which he was subjected were befitting of a Balaguez, a Rockefeller, a Vanderbilt. And maybe he realized it early on, too. Because he must have known. He must have been able to see in it in the mirror. Even if he looked nothing like his father, even if he had his mother's eyes or her nose or her mouth or her cheeks or whatever, it didn't matter. Because the guilt was generational, indelible: He could have renounced everything, he could have given away all of his possessions, thrown them away, immolated them upon a pyre and called the whole ordeal a purification ritual; he could have reduced himself to poverty, assumed the likeness of Job and taken to prostrating himself upon the earth, digging at his blistering skin with the shards of his former life; he could have become a doctor, a holy man, a saint — it would not have erased that legacy he inherited (unwillingly, true; but are not all legacies imposed upon their inheritors, benefactor and victim alike?); he still would have been part Balaguez, part aristocrat, part rapist, capitalist, exploiter, parasite, demon.

“He still had options. We always have options.”

“Options?” he scoffs. “By options, do you mean the pissing away of several million dollars in technology that would enable him to apologize to the dead? That's the real reason behind the A-R-E: He wanted to bring the Russian miners and prisoners to Brooklyn, to have a fucking party with these…these ghosts, as if it could somehow ameliorate the tragedy that was their life — a bandage in the form of bacchanalia.”

He takes a long drag from his cigarette. He seems so calm now that one could mistake his demeanor for smug. “Astrally-Resurrected Entities: The Russians who died in the Balaguez mines over one hundred years ago — the same people who had to die to grant his father the ability to circumvent the law, to allow his mother the ability to become the most feared person in Brooklyn real estate, to allow him his schooling at Columbia and Harvard, not to mention his years of aimless traveling and wanton reprobation. And what do you think came of his funding of Dr. Frankenstein's inventions?” I narrow my eyes. “Do you think that Keens discovered a means by which he could communicate with the dead? Or is it far more plausible that the obvious futility of these continued experiments was just further proof of his inability to cope with the history of his family and the crimes he inherited?” He grunts. “And now his grandson continues the pointless charade by inviting a gang of corybants to engage in the basest performances of hedonism and debauchery one can imagine. Is there anything redeeming in that?”

We gaze to one another in a détente that brings not only silence, but also resignation on my part. I am outmatched. I pull my eyes away from Sean, and begin to examine the rest of the garden: the emaciated cat that has appeared on the wall above, the couples gossiping about friends assumed to be mutual, the waitress — Zoe — forcing laughter and salads with goat cheese onto patrons, Sean staring to the ashtray without any ostensible emotion, the harem of shadows dancing enthusiastically in the breeze, the uneven portions of concrete being forced up by the roots of the oak. I have no reason to hold the beliefs that I am unwilling to abandon; I only have a vague sense of hope that seems sympathetic to the existence of a world beyond visible wavelengths and audible frequencies. How can one prove anything when the conclusion we wish to affirm carries the gravity it does precisely because it exists beyond the realm of measurement and empirical instrumentation? It is not faith, but, then again, what else goes by the epithet of unverifiable trust?

The heart of the matter seems to be that there is no barometer with which to gauge our ignorance, there can only be the recognition of areas where knowledge is absent. Successive to that revelation, there comes the discovery that these knowledge vacuums do not diminish with age or study; instead, they augment. Sean cannot admit that some of these holes will never, can never, be filled. As a result, he denies that many exist. Paradoxically, I am more conservative when measuring the dimensions of human ignorance. All that is left is recourse in the F word, the word that provides the only defense against both agnosticism and solipsism. Without it, it would seem that all is lost but the lucent sparks of the mind.

The waitress walks back towards the door and gives the tables a once over. The tabby, meanwhile, prowls the wall, a half-eaten brunch plate and starvation in its eyes. I believe I am the only one acknowledging the curious feline. We lock eyes for a moment, a mutual recognition of what is perhaps more imminent than necessary. I nod, almost as if giving my consent.

The cat finally descends upon the table next to ours, sending greens and fish and half-eaten pieces of bread into the air. Coffee cups and mimosa flutes plummet to the unforgiving concrete below. A clamor of indomitable laughter and bewildered cursing erupts from the surrounding tables.

Sean looks to me with a kind of vapid disdain; I, meanwhile, have stood to get a better look of the scene. The waitress cannot contain herself, which the unfortunate couple at the epicenter of the disturbance view as inconsiderate and horribly offensive. They stand to leave as the cat continues to eat the remnants of their meal. The waitress turns to the busboy — a suddenly cataleptic youth with confusion tattooed on his face — and demands he do something, though this order is neither importune nor entirely direct.

“Can you believe that fucking cat, man?” I chuckle as I sit back down.

“I think it sad,” he laments as he stubs out his cigarette. His words tumble out with an exhaust of derision and paraquat. He gnaws at a long nail, but doesn't bite. It's more of a cleaning exercise, I guess. “So what are you going to do? You have two weeks to track down Coprolalia, and you've accomplished nothing to speak of. You need to think of something; otherwise…well, there doesn't seem to be an ultimatum for you, now does there?”

“I was thinking about paying Willis Faxo a visit,” I respond. I pick up my coffee mug. The waitress, synthetic embarrassment and restrained laughter, looks to me for empathy or sympathy or really anything human. I smile. She smiles back.

When she comes to our table, I don't know if asking if we need anything else is a pretext or if it is sincere. Sean asks for the check. I ask if the drink special is still going on.

11.2

After leaving a message on Faxo's machine, I decide to call Daphne. She is also unavailable. I hang up after leaving a message, and feel that unique type of remorse one feels after leaving a message on the machine of a minor acquaintance.

I really have no idea where to go. Sean became eager to leave once I ordered a second bloody mary. “It's buy one, get one free. Where's the sense in getting only one?” This logic didn't exactly persuade him. He quickly left for reasons that were apparently unrelated.

It seems as though I've dug myself something of a hole. Just about all of the people with whom I have been associating are beyond reach. I don't even have Aberdeen's number. I'm guessing that Tomas is still sleeping off last night's conquest. Most of the acolytes are probably just getting to bed. Patrick and the rest of the citrus artillery are probably still going at it — unless they’re out of ammunition, of course. The old college crew is either still away or preparing for interviews in the morning. Jeff…well, the gun's not to my head quite yet. I wonder if Connie is in town, but figure that it's unlikely. She always did love the City on Sundays, especially during the autumn months, which are so conducive to those conversations that can be measured in miles even if they contain so little in substance. Sean probably won't return my calls in the future, and it's possible, if he's the spiteful type, that he will reject any interview I submit to the magazine as a pitiful fabrication.

All in all, it seems as though I have the choice of either a desultory ramble around the city or going home. The latter option seems more enticing. While I am well aware of my self-imposed duty to continue looking for new pieces done by Coprolalia, exploring neighborhoods at random hasn't been particularly constructive. I feel as though it's time to finally face the unfortunate fact that I have been avoiding for the past few days: I am not going to reach any type of epiphany, nor am I going to discover anyone with any worthwhile information concerning Coprolalia while downing cheap pints of beer in the soiled taverns adjacent to equally soiled tenement buildings and bodegas. And let's not forget the logistics of the whole endeavor. Coprolalia may have been in the Village last night. It is equally probable that he slept by Columbia after visiting College Point, City Island, Pelham Park, Bowling Green, and Breezy Point. There's no algorithm to calculate; there is no hunch that will provide anything more than disappointment or, at worst, another series of faulty assumptions.

Perhaps my goals have been misguided and tarnished by vanity, not mere quixotry. When I began this search, I prided myself as being more intelligent and more insightful than average. I was confident that I would be able to see what others had overlooked, and, consequently, that I would discover the identity of Coprolalia with relative ease. I couldn't have provided a worthwhile reason as to why it seemed natural for me to be endowed with such a gift; then again, I can still feel that same narcissistic effluvium contaminating my thoughts — even if it has diminished in potency. This isn't a riddle, nor is it a puzzle with pieces that others have not been able to fit together. No one has even been able to accrue enough pieces of the puzzle to be confounded by the way its assembled.

The fact of the matter is that there is a certain degree of luck to this process that I grossly underestimated. True, the ability to ask the right questions was obviously assumed to be a prerequisite for the job, but it seems as though the various trails that have appeared came about as a consequence of chance, not due to any knack for investigative research.

I have never been one to doubt in exception, especially when the exception in question concerns some type of boon for myself. It's the same basic premise upon which the lottery operates, one that very quickly leads to chagrin and resignation. And yet it seems as though there will be no exception here; I have used my time unwisely (wasted it, as the idiom goes, though how can one waste time if all moments are either meant to be or valueless or part of that long stretch of eternity that really has no meaning beyond consequents or (to be less objective about it) posterity?). I don't recall if this feeling is anguish or despair. It's unpleasant — that's for certain. And as I wallow in this rather fatalistic quagmire, my anticipation falters; I see tonight's effort to find Coprolalia as nothing more than a generalized recollection of the past few weeks: I'll meet people who delude already baseless aggressions in pints of overpriced beer, listen to stories about fading ambition, meet the ersatz avatars of Sidney Carton, who drunkenly let their one great opportunity of heroism come and go, and watch the more educated classes condemn the stupidity of people who don't think or vote the way they do. I'll proffer nothing more than head nods to misanthropes as they explain that their loss of faith has proven to be a discovery of wisdom. Evangelicals and hard-core Marxists — two sides of the same coin, really — will proselytize about the advent of a new society at the expense of rational thought (Nazis could fall into this foolishly optimistic trap, too, but most Nazis are too stupid and violent (in the most vulgar sense of the term) to understand that Nazism was initially an optimistic movement, and that its broad appeal was primarily due to its push for an elitist revolution — which is certainly a reactionary thing to propagate, not on par with commit-genocide-in-the-name-of-Germanic-purity reactionary, but reactionary nonetheless). Groups of men with thick accents and thicker necks will bitch about the Yankees and the mourn for the Mets. But then there are the more intense mourners, the mourners of sisters and brothers and fathers and wives and mothers and husbands and friends and those relations that get subsumed by etceteras, though the relation, no matter how seemingly distant or previously meager, always becomes so much more profound now that he or she has gone, has become was in henceforth discourse, has been converted into an idea, perhaps even something akin to a Form. And the grief-stricken repeat themselves over and over until the sentiments they convey seem almost juvenile, perhaps because they are not used to expressing earnest sentimentality unless it is quickly amended to appear facetious. We all do this; so, too, do we all make things out to seem serendipitous or mildly miraculous or even retroactively portentous when reflecting upon our interactions with the suddenly dead. But it's strange how it affects you as an outsider, one who is estranged from the dead, a spectator of no relation. Yet you are related to the mourners because you have been there. And you begin to think of the individuals to whom these panegyrists relate; you take on the attribute of mourner and proceed to imagine or remember a mournee. (But you don't call the dead by first name or even surname; you utilize those cognomens that were created as jokes that they hated but eventually grew to love. You refer to them this way, and everybody else does, too. And suddenly I'm back to the night after the burial, here with the whole group of friends who haven't been together in a number of years (animosity, maturity, entropy, etc.), circling a fire, passing around a handle of Jim Beam, listening to “California Stars” on repeat, not awkward, no longer crying at the very mention of the name of the departed, genuinely happy to see all of the other sleep-deprived faces as well as the well-rested apologists who couldn't catch a plane in time to submit another friend to the indifferent earth. People are getting atrociously drunk, but there are no indecent incidents — partial nudity, no full-frontal. And each person laughs shallowly as they tell those within earshot about “this one time…” and events in which “…you were there, you remember.” There aren't those reprisals of silence — complete with eyes that seem almost viscous, not only because they shimmer, but because they want to leak even if they no longer can — that had been so prevalent the day before. Several days were filled with maudlin laughs, which sound like coughs or exaggerated implosives with a certain Pérotinian dynamic and sense of cadence. You drink a lot. Everyone drinks a lot. No one looks attractive in mourning, but you don't know if this is due to an inability to achieve tumescence on your part or if it's because most people actually look as though a gorilla has slapped them around. You remember these quick, insignificant moments that, for whatever reason, are now being exhumed from some dusty corner in that big, gray organ of yours. And you begin to share them. And those around you share incidents no less mundane. And as they come out, it's high school all over again, replayed now like some highlight reel from a football game that has become a thing of legend for only those who were lucky enough to have been there. You are told of that run from the police after braving the blistering cold to drink stolen liquor in a park, an incident you haven't thought about for years. And as the story unfolds, fear of being arrested ceases to be salient. What the interlocutor wishes to convey is inconsequential because it's now imagery lacking the tenebrous cataract it did only days before — of insectile silhouettes leaping in and out of vast nacreous fields of snow as barren as a moonscape—; of ursine masses lumbering in clumsy pursuit. And these images cascade through your consciousness — one door leading to two more, and those two to four, and so on, and so on — until the memories that are being resurrected from obscurity fill out with greater and greater detail — of walking together under the brutality of the summer sun, idly talking about how insignificant the day itself is, and how you said “In two years we won't remember this exact moment,” even though it's five or six (eight or nine) years later, and yet here you are, almost able to touch her sienna skin, which on that day, was contrasted by that incandescent, not-white-not-yellow-hued shirt that she always wore, and you can still see her thick eyebrows at clement angles, and her smile wide and earnest because it was always wide and earnest (then), so innocent and childlike; and she responds in the affirmative, that the day will be lumped together with others that are similar to it, but, when she speaks, her voice is that of the jaded and weary woman she became, not the little, cherubic girl in the relatively early stages of puberty — even though this is not how you would have referred to her then because the word, puberty, was never uttered — it was summed up in all of the adolescent dramatics that were so important at the time, the dramatics that probably dominated most of the conversation that day, even if they have by now peacefully died so long ago that even the question of when seems absurd to you — you, a nineteen your old kid watching through your own eyes: the past you (fourteen or so, awkward in his skin, gangly and pudgy at the same time) and her paired off within a larger group of friends all feeling the burden of the mid-summer doldrums and walking through a construction zone, kicking at pebbles and chunks of gleaming asphalt that almost melt in the imperious presence of the summer sun, thinking 'The air smells of freshly cut grass and truck exhaust'—; of that one midnight tryst, which begins with a silent and serpentine escape from a bedroom window, the one that ends at some park — on a structure that was called just that (a structure), as if the people who decide the names for these types of things in this case went with the obvious or were too tired or were militant acolytes of Grice's theory of inference — with the full moon coating the dew in a milky luminescence, and her face now a ghostly sepia swimming in the clouds of smoke that burn off the cigarettes she stole from her mother; you smoke the contraband with her, and you feel sick, but you keep smoking anyway because you're telling her about the girl(s) that you like (not just like, but “like-like”), because you don't want to use the word “infatuated,” and you tell yourself it's because you're not entirely sure whether you're supposed to be infatuated with ______ or infatuated by _____, or if the two are actually grammatically distinct (whereas you are either elated by the presence of the person because of some carnal/spiritual/emotional/whatever desire or damn near intoxicated by the very idea of that one special someone, who you are too spineless to approach in earnest, respectively; but yet there you are, not only approaching, but with them, the like-liked, and you can't tell her that you like-like her because it would be an act of temerity, one that might jeopardize whatever it is you have going; so you extol Option B — the girl by whom you are intrigued more than infatuated — and predicate upon her all of the desirable qualities you see in the person in front of you in the hopes that there be some kind of tacit understanding, that there will be some revelation on her part, that she will see that the whole exercise is a charade, a kind of acrostic foreplay). We sit on the structure for more than an hour, and I keep thinking, how do you kiss someone? In the movies, it begins as a shared silence, a consenting smile. But there's none of that. She tells me to just tell the girl that I like her, but it's not that easy. I may only be twelve, but I already know that it isn't that easy. Maybe when you grow up you can do that. Maybe in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles you can walk into a nice bar or a coffee house and order a drink for a girl and then talk to her and then go back to your house and just do it. And as you continue to exchange stories something strange happens. The death — the moment when a person ceases to be past, present, and potentiality, and becomes shared past and inanimate present — cases to be something abstract; it becomes more real. You realize that you cannot grasp mortality or infinity or eternity; all you can understand is loss, which is something of a Kantian way of going about things. And you know that the images and memories have become the person's identity. And yet you wish to fight it. Because she was more. And you fear that some will construct that person, that 'her' whom you love and cherish, out of the eulogy and the obituary and the pale, stiff corpse animated only by half-truths. You fear that her progeny will now define her, and that her progeny will be limited to the memories the community has and will have of her. Not only will you lose her in life, you will lose her in death, too. Because there's so many excisions, so much that is omitted. —We are not here to manufacture a god, I think. The casket is lowered into the Earth. My suit doesn't fit quite right. Looking around, I notice that everyone else my age is wearing ill-fitting suits and what appear to be cocktail dresses that were thrown on simply because of their dolorous color. And yet you said nothing. You just gripped the one memory, warts and all, that much tighter. It was the first thing you thought of when the call came. It seemed as though it was almost there with you, that imposing chimera. You remember the walk to the apartment on Eckford Street before the subsequent day's ride down to Baltimore: The city is silent, but the City is magically illuminated in the distance: illustrious steel and pale concrete. There's a six-pack of beer in each of my hands, and I know they will both end up in the same place before ending up in the place all liquid rentals go. This one striking image of her continues to resonate in my head; it appears each time I blink in a way no less vivid than those phosphines that pulse and dance whenever you rub your eyes too diligently. I can't understand why it's taken primacy over all of the millions of other moments that her and I shared, many of which seem to be so much more significant. It's not even that it best describes her; it's just there, haunting me not quite to the level of apparition-grade shadowing or Chopin-nocturne harrowing, but there. Unavoidable. And because it's there without the conscious desire to put it there, it seems only natural to revere the memory and focus upon it in the hopes of making it that much more vivid, perhaps so vivid that it is granted the ability to converse and explain the reason why the “off a building” was not preceded by “slipped” or the passive “was pushed,” but instead is that single invidious word that everyone seems to avoid, to eschew, to replace with ellipses. Everyone is thinking it, though: me and Dave (one of her ex-boyfriends, whom I had met once or twice before) up here in Brooklyn, those back in Baltimore; it resonates with the Boston contingent, those who have gone to state schools in Pennsylvania and Ohio and Michigan, even the nocturnal and talpidic creatures who seem to have retreated into obscure and cavernous regions unknown to all but the most hermetic. “Jumped” (as in willful, as in preventable, as in why were you not there?). And it's inching close to midnight now, the only sounds being the echoing and flatulent choppers sputtering toward the Pulaski and the sirens in the distance and the dogs that speak in aggressive tones like drunk old men roused from sleep. The phone is finally in disuse, but the twenty or so conversations that have taken place over the course of the previous hours continue to occupy my thoughts. Five or six of the people I phoned I haven't spoken to in years. Some of them have changed; some of them haven't. No one has said anything all that profound as of yet, though plenty have made the attempt. It's not raining, but it would be better if it were. It would be more fitting, more dramatic. But there's no need for enhanced dramatics at this point, for those histrionics that need to be contrived by the truly narcissistic. And then you're back on the street. You are walking to get cigarettes, even if you don't smoke. There is a multitude of Polish men on stoops, jake-walking guys who can remember the feeling of sobriety only slightly better than the feel of a tight vagina or a solid stool, couples walking to recently purchased condos, cyclists on those old Schwinns that are as prevalent as Converse All-Stars up here in these vinyl-sided parts, where people have nostalgia for pasts they haven't actually lived, that may have only existed in spurious elegies. Most of them produce no sound until they are within a few feet. For whatever reason, my Adam's Apple suddenly feels as though it's being inflated. I'm absolutely powerless and I know it. The surrounding world goes mute as I wince, choke, and feel bathwater warmth in my eyes. I don't know where I am, or, perhaps, it doesn't register that I am anywhere specifically until the B61 speeds down Manhattan Avenue two blocks away; and then it all comes back: the distant conversations, the car alarms, the ubiquitous traffic that hisses like the static of a 33 that has nothing more to offer. And you find yourself smoking one of those cigarettes on the threshold of a set of French doors that leads to one of those balconies that doesn't protrude more than a few inches from the building. It's later now, deep into the infomercial hours. You're staring at a moon that bleeds pale tallow nimbus onto an inky sky that's neither gray nor black nor purple. It is almost colorless even though it is opaque. The burning of the cigarette, which produces that brittle snapping of brittle wood sound, somehow manages to overpower the volume of everything else for that moment. And there is only the moon and the cigarette and me. In this moment. But it's an ephemeral, perhaps ersatz serenity. Her face will reappear; that one insignificant moment you shared with her will be replayed. It is doomed to play in syndication, just like all of her life. And at some point — when the sitcom reruns from decades past have been usurped by the morning news—; once the first six-pack has been separated into six empty bottles and the empty cardboard case that carried them—; once the second sixer would be lopsided if you tried to pick it up—; once you're through half the pack of smokes and looking to a now moonless sky without clouds or stars, just an expansive ceiling the color of a wool sock—; once you don't know if it's the beers or the many moments that now separate the first call from the present — you find that the pain has become less potent; it has become simply an absence. And it's not that you've become inured to the tragic elements that operate like some spinning gizmo in the mind of Archimedes; you just know it — the loss, the absence — is going to be there from now on. The negative has been replaced by a positive: the void has taken on an existence all its own. So maybe it's that you've become inured to the idea of your individual loss. And I feel desiccated, hollow, harrowed; the night has been nothing but nostalgia and the recognition that the I of the past is distinct from the I of the present; and I feel as though I'm trapped in a prelude to the life that I want to live, and that there is a good possibility that this prelude will continue until I am too old, and that I will have to sing not of anticipation but of regret. And so it becomes about yourself. It continues to be about yourself and your loss until you realize just how selfish such thoughts are. And then you return to her. I've been over that last time we saw each other so many times that I feel as though the chasm that separates is not static; it yawns like a teething infant. And suddenly you realize — and here's the weirdest thing — that the only person not affected by the death is the deceased. They are either worm food, or circling a throne for all of eternity like some haloed bowel movement that defiantly refuses to vacate the premises of the toilet or being punished for not adhering to a morality that has been passed down by a group of pedophiles and reactionaries and people who don't seem to understand that humans have a proclivity for ingratitude, or no long conscious as an individual with a past, or a ghost, and maybe there next to you, wondering —Why the fuck are you still awake? You realize there is nothing you can do about it anymore besides remember the dead and offer solace to the bereaved who haven't yet come to the point where you are — like Dave, with whom I stayed that night; he finished off more than half a liter of vodka that smelled like bleach by ten-thirty and passed out by eleven, even though it was a Tuesday, and we had both agreed to wake up early for an eleven o'clock class for the sake of sanity-via-routine. I cursed him for his lack of foresight, but the ashen pre-dawn sky quoted my mother: —Every time you point a finger at someone, you point three back at yourself. You go back to the brisant call, the bowel-tightening-holy-shit-this-can't-be-happening sensation that comes in tandem waves like an adrenaline rush; you remember how you sputtered out nonsense while the other line remained almost stoic because there's not much more to say at the moment. And then you begin to speak more, and you both open up; and you ask when, and you ask how, and you then proceed to run through metaphysical arguments and produce whys via armchair psychology. Some people begin to conduct research while on the phone; others begin making databases of emails and phone numbers to make sure that the whole community knows of the tragedy with maximum efficiency — not because there is some desire to spread the Bad News like some Bizarro Paul; there's just an inherent need, within certain personality types, to begin doing inane tasks to avoid the real issue at hand. But this comes to an end, and then it's the party after the wake — everything that can be done has been done, everyone who was meant to come has come — and they finally let go and abandon the facade of comportment; they are cry on your shoulder, sobbing hysterically and uncontrollably, apologize for snotting on your shirt, and then laugh that maudlin laugh because it's the only thing that anyone can do given the circumstances. So you remember it: from the call to the wake; the wake to the service; the service to the burial; the burial to the lunch or brunch or whatever it is where drinks are served — even though no one seems to drink more than that one, perfunctory drink that is indulged in for reasons that no one really understands or bothers to contemplate — and where all of the petty shit that had accumulated for the better part of decade is abandoned — and then the eruption of (still somewhat maudlin) laughter that comes when people begin to remember a person as opposed to a saint; this party to the party later that night, which seems to prove that death is a force far stronger than entropy, circling a fire, passing around a handle of Jim Beam, listening to “California Stars” and “Misunderstood” and conversation on repeat, not awkward, no longer crying at the very mention of the name of the departed, genuinely happy to see all of the other sleep-deprived faces they had seen only a few hours previously, as well as the well-rested apologists who couldn't catch a plane in time to submit another friend to the ever-hungry earth. You even recall the night after this, the solitary hours spent riding your old bike through the silent, suburban roads that reared you, listening to Photo Album and Being There over and over again, asking yourself —Was she Guinevere? even if you are guiltily thinking of what's-her-name back in New York, wondering if you're that type of person who only wants what he can't have, drunk, almost running into parked cars that materialize only a few feet in front of you. You wonder if the parents of friends you haven't spoken to in a while still live where they used to as you traipse the ruins of youth. Maybe they moved out to allow new families to help in the destruction of a past that's already destroyed. And you end up in that park that has so many memories. And you're there, under the structure, taking nips from a pint of cheap whiskey that I purchased with a fake I.D. I am thinking about thinking about the time I thought about the bust of the party that followed junior prom, and how we came here: how Adler drove his Pathfinder all the way to the structure I'm sitting under. The Ozomatli album was/was/was/is playing because Adler couldn't/couldn't/couldn't/can't help the fact that he plays every album he likes until no one can stand it anymore, not even him. The keg in back was/was/was/is…and I'm not there; I can't remember it. I can't remember if I remembered what it was. It was probably MGD because kegs were always MGD unless we were dealing with Hill, the prick who would pick up Natty or Red Dog or Natty Boh, and pocket the remainder. The police never showed up that night to pursue the few boys sitting in rented tuxes that didn't fit or the girls doing cartwheels in getups that were purple and pink and too tight. And I am on the bike again, laughing my shadow, tearing through a softball field with abandon, howling at the sight of the moon light some Ferlinghetti rooster, alone again because everyone is too hungover to once again embrace the bottle in lieu of the departed, dipping again after a three-year hiatus, feeling my legs ache and pulse, watching the celestial furnace fire up one dim star at a time, all-too cognizant of the fact that every street that led to this idyll is rife with arcane memories from my adolescent years; and I am going through the non-fictional account of my boring existence thus far, suddenly struck by a feeling that is neither anguish nor spite: no, it's gratitude, gratitude for having the capacity to feel and remember again. And I'm riding in circles, laughing, out of breath, going faster, reducing the circumference of my path, taking another nip, hearing, feeling, intoxicated (by) the wet grass licking the bike tires, going past the event horizon, spinning, on my back, laughing, sinking into the Earth as the midnight dew soaks into my clothing, laughing, laughing.) The second or third night after the burial everyone is at the bar. It's the same anywhere you go. And so you can identify the mourning party, and you can tell who's having the hardest time with the death even if the faces are unfamiliar. Because you've been there. Yes, you've been there. You know the people closest to the deceased just from the infrastructure that has been established in a predictable but not premeditated way: how the parents and the older members of the family have to walk around with faces that move around as though no longer connected to their skulls, and every song and every person and every drink makes them remember, even if these remembrances are not voiced; but they don't breakdown because they have to continue thanking people for the support and walking in circles as though they're trying to find their prom date even if they just want to surrender to a nothingness not as definitive as death, but similar (hence the pharmaceuticals that are handed out like candy). You see the best friends sitting around a small table breathing heavily as they receive quick condolences from those who approach the moment with either bathos or the senseless conviviality that would be appropriate if it were a reunion; and maybe, you think, it's just an untimely and incomplete reunion. And these table-dwellers stare gravely to pints of beer that become warm over hours of silent meditation and arcane reminiscences and anecdotes that seem mundane to the people who never knew the now future-less; but to those at that table (that table like an altar set up to conjure and remember the idea, the imago, the Form, the eidolon, now dead), they are immutable from the identity of the departed. And you're there, and you're explaining to them — the table-dwellers — that, yes, you've also lost somebody at some point in time; and, yes, it was too soon; and, yes, I just can't help but think of the family; and, yes, indulging in all of these morbid platitudes is normal because real grief can't be vocalized: it is internalized more than perhaps any other emotion, and you only end up having that epiphany of GONE! once you stop consciously mourning and one day pick up the phone to recount some pedestrian occurrence only to realize that no one will ever pick up on the other end again, and then it really sets in — not simply the fact that there is an absence, but that the absence is almost as eternal as the soul is supposed to be — it's corporeal life that's the negligible/ephemeral part. They — the table-dwellers — are quiescent, all nods and torpid blinks. They smile, almost acknowledging that there will be a day when they can appreciate whatever the people at the other, more jovial tables are celebrating: a raise, an engagement, a son's or daughter's engagement, the birth of a child — a change in the pattern that had hitherto been lacking something, though the routine was by no means cumbersome. And let's not forget the birthdays, which always seem to end up producing some type of drama caused by either an unexpected appearance or an unexpected absence.

The only thing that seems to change is the music.

It's a strange world in these bars: on a normal night one is bound to encounter either elation or bitterness from the old generation; the few members of the younger crowd, meanwhile, seem to be doing nothing more than entertaining themselves by conversing with either the group they came in with or their prospective bedmate(s) for the night. The disparities of these two worlds can be alarming sometimes, especially considering how exclusive most of the latter are when it comes to just about anything.

I continue to be perceived as an outsider by young and old alike; and I cannot help but feel as though they think I am studying them, my typically pensive demeanor being mistaken for a type of curiosity that is too cerebral and, therefore, too invasive. I can understand where their apprehension comes from. I know I have referred to myself as something of an anomaly in the majority of the bars that I have visited, and this description never ceases to be appropriate. In the blue-collar bars, I am seen as a snob; in the hipper regions, I lack some ornamentation or something because they all seem to stare to me with vapid contempt. So I straddle the line, the line between the intellectual and the working classes, and I know that I will now have to decide which one of these cities I will subsequently call home. Perhaps this why some who move here remain tourists for years, if not decades.

There is a New York of celebrities and models, artists and critics. Among them one is liable to find an inflated sense of importance and a pretension of culture. But this caricature of New York rings true only when one excludes the vast majority of people who only seek to work, love, and socialize. It is not as though the people of this group are devoid of culture or intelligence; it's just that most don't think themselves destined for any type of greatness as defined by fame or international renown. That familiar sense of entitlement among the intelligentsia and the upper class is acknowledged as nothing more than a vain dream to get you through the drudgery of the day. In the end, it is nothing more than an idle fantasy. As Janiqua Williams, a twenty-four-year-old MTA worker born and raised in Wycoff Gardens (with those gray eyes that can melt just about any kolpophile with a pulse), who will soon have a B.A. from Baruch in Marketing and Finance, told me as we sat at the bar of the Brooklyn Inn: “I just wannabe able to own a house and provide for my baby girl, know what I'm sayin'. Sure, I got dreams — I got lots'a dreams. But, you know, I am a realist. I know what I gotsta' do to get ahead, know what I'm sayin'.” She spoke what used to be called Ebonics, an apocopic language derived from English that perhaps upset some black people because it essentially called itself the black language, which I am sure a lot of Koisan and Bantu speakers found fucking ridiculous.

“So you probably think I'm crazy for doing something like this,” I said as I reached for my beer. Cymande played in the background — it had been preceded by Lee Morgan, Wilco, the Zombies and Tribe. “That I'm just some stupid white kid out pissing away his time.”

“Naw, boy,” she replied with a shake of the head; “'f I was in yo' shoes, I'd be pullin' the same type a' shit. But I had to work for eh'thing I got, know what I'm sayin'. And I know it's tough. I ain't never said shit'd be easy. 'Lotta niggas never make it out—'seasy to fall back into the system.”

“The system?”

“Welfare. Peejays. That shit. It ain't right dat niggas be havin' kids just to get a bigga' welfare check, know what I'm sayin'. But dat shit happens. 's the world we live in. And I don't want my baby girl growin' up 'round all dat. I want her to grow up out the ghetto,” slowly. “I want her to get a good education,” slowly. “I want her to have every option I ain't never had.” She pauses, almost lugubriously. “And if she wants to, you know, pursue somethin' like what you're doin', and she's furreal…shit, I'll support her with eh'thing I got.”

In the few weeks that I have been out of the university, I have come to realize that the working class wishes for nothing besides leisure time, while the leisure class wishes for nothing more than a meaningful task to occupy their abundance of free time (hence the lingering effects of the Buddhism fad in places like the Upper West Side, as well as the continuing popularity of Scientology, a movement that appears to be nothing more than a specious response to the feelings of estrangement, perhaps nausea, that have become so pronounced in contemporary society). Still, it's unsettling that I find myself believing that no one is content except for the proud and those too busy enjoying the moment to seriously consider the future (and not the grand, abysmal future, either — the localized, imminent one). It's as though life isn't good enough for humanity anymore.

Still, this is not to say that I am unhappy with the situation. While it is true that I am finding it increasingly difficult to anticipate an interview with Coprolalia, I am certainly cognizant of the way in which I will look at my present situation in the future — an envy of this state of personal evolution, so to speak. And as I stare to the bloody mary before me, I begin to understand that I am no longer a part of the academic community, that I have never been a member of the intelligentsia, that I cannot be considered a member of the working class, that I will continue to be regarded with nothing more than a pejorative fascination so long as I define myself as confined to this transient state—homo manqué. There is no sympathy for me, only a vague empathy that often gets lost in overtones of jealousy and contempt. With limitless possibilities available to me, I have opted to chase a chimera.

At least I can say that I have enjoyed the time. It's just that an uneasy ambivalence is beginning to shadow me. I can't help but feel that I am neglecting a path that I am supposed to follow.

“Liquid brunch?” a familiar voice asks. The question floats through the air without a discernible focus, yet I somehow understand that it is directed at me. I cannot attach a face to the voice until I look up.

“Vinati,” awkwardly. “How have you been?”

She takes a step in my direction. “Besides working and pouring myself into bed just about every night, I'd say pretty good.” She smiles as she places a hand upon the rim of the table. “You're here by yourself?”

“I was having coffee with Professor Winchester,” I say as I once again remove my sunglasses.

“You were always such a kiss-ass,” she says to the sky. When her eyes return to the garden, she notices the absence of one coffee cup, let alone two. She removes her sunglasses to reveal a coy or alluring glance. “So where'd he go?”

“There was an incident involving a cat that really put him off,” I respond dryly. She tilts her head, which reveals an ear that is pierced in no less than eight locations. “Are you here by yourself, too?”

“I was supposed to meet a friend, but she's not here yet.” Her expression is not suppliant, but she is clearly embarrassed by the girl's absence. “Do you mind?” motioning to the vacant seat across from me.

We begin to catch up. This doesn't last that long. The little antecedent information that we have shared needs only scant revising. A paucity of words is dedicated to the last time we saw one another. An ignorant observer would presume that we shared a dance, and then somehow lost track of one another. Within a few moments we are imagining a multitude of scenarios that involve Ilkay. I guess there is no need to break ice when discussing him.

The daylight continues to rain down upon us, the tree in the garden creating only a weak cloak of shade. As the remaining fantasies in which we can place Ilkay begin to reach an asymptote, conversation becomes less caustic and more inquisitive. Commonalities begin to appear in places previously left unexamined. She is far more intelligent than I assumed. Perhaps that is one of those things we project onto beautiful people — i.e. if you're that good looking, it wouldn't be fair for you not to be a fool. We both note that a pianist in one of the units above the restaurant mimics Vince Guaraldi with brilliant accuracy. “That's 'Treat Street',” she exclaims. She looks mildly embarrassed before adding that her parents were both obsessed with Peanuts.

“Peanuts?”

“Every day my dad would read the comic strip. He really liked the television specials, too. He swears that's how he learned English.”

“Really? Are you a big fan of Guaraldi?” She nods her head enthusiastically, but says nothing as her lips are preoccupied by a straw. “The only songs I know by name are 'Linus and Lucy' and 'Young Man's Fancy',” I add.

The restaurant plays that Plain White T's song that seems too innocent to be popular. I look to see the tabby from before prowling about the yard cautiously. As she puts down her drink, Vinati looks to me, notices my eyes, and then slowly turns her attention to the cat. “Is this the guy who caused all the trouble earlier?” She smiles broadly in his direction. It's as though she has extra teeth.

“Probably,” I say without thinking. I look again. “Yeah, that's him all right.”

Eventually, the anonymous friend sends a text message. It's a cancellation, one that Vinati doesn't seem too dejected over. “She's such a fucking flake,” is added with a roll of the eyes.

The evening comes and goes.

Every teleologist will maintain that things happen for a reason. This is something of a tautology. The more militant members of this group will claim that everything happens for a reason. This is an argument that holds water only if one believes that the universe was created. Now, if one espouses this determinate, idealist view of the universe, it is typically sufficient for the belief in some transcendental sense of justice or karma or whatever you wish to call the incarnation (in the figurative sense) of an Ultimate Being, who forbade the reign of Darkness, and thought it necessary to bring about the Light (and, for the more scientifically-inclined deists, that this Being subsequently allowed for an inflaton field to expand — something like a holy spit bubble that is temporally concomitant to the Word). Perhaps it allows people to sleep a little better if they believe in a causal nexus, a Light both mysterious and conscious of every one of the particulates that dictate the passing of one moment to the next. Unfortunately, for those of us who have a hard time relating to, certainly with, this bodiless embodiment of will, wisdom, and supposed beneficence, which people call by an arbitrary name, we cannot accept such willed transcendence. We are forced to observe and attempt to explain only the adjuncts — the simple incidents without much significance when taken on their own — that serve to comprise the tapestry of experience we call existence. Being left to ponder context, we create what some call meaning.

I woke up in Williamsburg with my hand clutching Vinati's bare shoulder — the passing of a J, M, or Z train rattling the entire apartment as it passed. The dusk was beginning to inhabit the sky, and the brilliance of the sunset was made apparent by the orchid tints overtaking the fleecy cloud cover and the pale yellow light on the few regions of pavement where the neon lights did not fall.

And I was dazed. We had fallen asleep to Aeroplane Over the Sea (best rock album since Dark Side) only an hour previously, but it had lapsed into silence. The only sound in the apartment at that moment was the resonating hum of a box fan on the other side of the room. From the street, one could hear the music coming from the corner bodega — those bachatas with virtually no bass and a lead guitar that sounds almost like a banjo — and the younger men calling out from cars vibrating with synthesized drum tracks to groups of pudgy teenage girls strolling down Broadway. Some of the older generations of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans stood outside drinking beer out of paper bags, while the younger ones down the street preferred cocktails in red Solo cups. They called each other “son” and “nigga,” regardless of age or skin tone, and could be heard, with a striking clarity, even in Vinati's bedroom. House cats peered out onto the scene with indifference from windows without screens. Intractable old women looked with chagrin to nothing in particular, and they all seemed to have carts filled with black plastic bags and brilliantly-colored clothing. White girls and boys rode bicycles toward the Williamsburg Bridge in isolation. A unicyclist was accompanied by an unleashed hyena that tore apart several bags of garbage. A Chinese woman shouldered a black bag filled to capacity with cans and bottles. She looked like an ant hauling a blackberry — not struggling by any means; she moved with something like diligence or persistence, the endeavor appearing effortless. And everywhere was the scent of wet asphalt, cloaking the city in a soporific blanket. After I closed the blinds, but before I fell asleep, I heard a train coming from Manhattan.

11.3

“Where are you going?” she murmurs as she covers herself with a transparent sheet, her purple nipples erect from a sudden breeze. Moonlight cascades in through the slits in her blinds, casting the side of her face in nacreous sienna.

“I'm just going to the bathroom. I don't want to walk out naked. Your roommate…”

“My roommate is back in Pittsburgh for the next week,” she laughs. She closes her eyes. “I told you that last…well—” I look to her, soberly, for the first time in what feels like years. “What time is it?” as she shoots up. There is a clock in plain view; she squints, and then turns back to me. “It's one.” She's goes supine once again. I nod, laugh, and then begin my way down the hall of the railroad apartment and into the kitchen.

Her place has been renovated — white walls, new floors, kitchen appliances that do not contain any remnant of a meal purchased with food stamps. This is not to say that every trace of the former tenants has been removed. (There is always dust, dust that has become embedded in every crack in the floor, entrenched itself so resolutely that it can elude even the most diligent of mops or sponges or brooms or any cleaning implement sent to remove it; and there it will remain until the boards in the floor themselves are wrenched from the framework that keeps them in place, only to be replaced by new boards that will absorb new dust. And the process of accumulation will immediately begin, continue, until someone once again decides to replace the floors, and on this occasion the enterprise will again begin anew, and this cycle will continue on forever, or at least until there is no more dust, no more waste. And yet this begs the far more important question, does it not? If there is no dust, then there is no shedding of skin, no refuse, no waste. If there is no dust, there can be no life.) The window frames have not been replaced, but the glass is a lot cleaner than it should be. Perhaps she lives in the only building in all of Brooklyn where the super (or someone hired by the landlord) cleans the outsides of the windows. The curtain undulates in the breeze like a flame dancing on the wick of a penny candle, a fluid motion so captivating that it's only a few seconds later that I realize that my penis is hanging out of the gate of my boxers, and that anyone living above the first floor of the building across the way has an unobstructed view of it. My apprehension eases as I see there are no forms in the windows, not even silhouettes against drawn blinds or curtains. The neighborhood is asleep except for a group of white kids in a nearby courtyard listening to the nasally and melancholy crooning of Colin Meloy, an odd songwriter who employs the word “sinew” more often than the author of a biology textbook. When the sound of yet another J, M, or Z train sends tremors throughout the building, it overwhelms even the most extroverted among the courtyard crew.

The bathroom holds few mysteries, even with the lights on. In my more suburban days, everything in the bathroom was tucked away in cupboards: the plunger, the toilet brush, medicines in the form of pills, liquids, and gel caps, towels, cologne, perfume, deodorant, antiperspirant, toothpaste, floss, moisturizer, topical ointments, tonics, hair gels, sprays, and mousses, bags of douche, cans of shaving cream or gel, razors, exfoliators, facial refiners, revitalizers, and rejuvinators. If the shower curtain wasn't drawn, one might get the chance to see washcloths, shampoos, conditioners, body scrubs, and an assortment of creams filled with substances that have been designed to perform duties somehow disparate from the act of cleansing. One is lucky to find anything more than soap, toilet paper, hand towels and tissue paper in a suburban bathroom, unless one begins to snoop. City bathrooms, however, are far more willing to divulge even their most embarrassing and repulsive secrets. Vinati's roommate has even left her herpes medication on display with name, address, and phone number readily available. I wonder if Upper St. Clair is nice.

I come back into the bedroom, Vinati bathing in the pacific and milky glow of the moon. I get back into bed. Vinati's fingers softly roll over the few hairs on my chest. We begin kissing again, slowly, without much tongue or need for theatrics. She glides on top of me, her hair pouring over my face. Her lips get lost in the chaos. We exchange positions. When I manage to push the hair away to look into her eyes — bright, clear, ethereal — I feel her long fingers sliding from my chest to my shoulders. Sweat permeates the air. Her lips approach yet again. Another J, M, or Z pulls into the nearby station. We once again embrace, tightly; I feel her thighs fall upon my hips. She grips the back of my head and kisses me with abandon.

12

By six in the morning the sun has already begun its parabolic journey, and the street is once again drenched in pastels. Vinati doesn't stir as I shift my weight; she only murmurs quietly. I am thinking clearly now. There is no hangover to speak of, though I do feel incapable of understanding what transpired the day before: brunch in the Village, the trip back to Williamsburg with that mild, daytime buzz, a few drinks at a bar on Union, a song with a whistling refrain, an overpriced veggie burger at Kellogg's, the complaint of too much money being spent, the trip to the bodega, the half-finished beers still sitting on her cabinet like discarded toys. I've never heard of the brand. From this angle it looks like “Lethe.”

It doesn't seem normal that the events followed in the manner that they did. I've been over this. Still, why did this beautiful woman decided to do all of this with me? Of all people. As straight men we are always seeking permission from women. When we finally receive consent, the reason rarely seems clear. For men, that's always been one of the paradoxes of sex: the more we think about it, the less enjoyable it is — especially for the women whom we are fortunate enough to be fucking. In fact, I even had to revert to an old trick that I had not utilized for a long time — as it had been a very long time since I had found myself in bed with someone. Some people think of baseball. Nerd that I am, I tend to see how many squared numbers I can compute. It's a pathetic practice, to be sure, but it is certainly far less pathetic than having a premature mess on your hands…well, actually the fact that it's not going to end up on your hands is exactly the reason why every second is so valuable.

What struck me as so odd, however, was the countenance worn by Vinati during, and particularly after, the act that is colloquially known as making love. (It is a conceptually spurious outlook on sex, as love has its origins around and within sex, though copulation is by no means explicitly reserved for creating the fog of love in two people: it is responsible only for galvanizing those sentiments, assuming that they are there. Love is not restricted to the bedroom; it can be created and made epic with the most simplistic of acts — I've seen lovers at their most tender sharing a box of fried chicken in Cobble Hill Park, huddled together on a bench awaiting the three am D train, passing a cigarette back and forth in the din of Times Square. This is not to say that sexuality and eroticism obfuscate the purity of love; it's simply that these two are components of love, necessary but not sufficient.) In the light of the moon I watched her surrender to the sensation of tiny death — the deeper breaths, the tightening of her thighs around my hips, the increase in speed with which she forced herself up and then down, the ferocity with which she bucked back and forth, swirling, moaning, speaking in tongues or Hindi or some language with a purely internal lexicon. I watched her, drank in the sight of her surrender, and I noticed that her expression did not appear to be a display of ecstasy or even pleasure. No, it seemed to be a look of terror — terror, perhaps, that I was both capable of producing and witness to the Big Moment.

As I lay watching her sleep, I cannot help but think about this. I try to write it off, to once again lose myself in the presence of her naked body. Cast your fate to the wind — you're in love, Charlie Brown. No, not love. The potential for love. Maybe.

I had watched Connie, my previous girlfriend, sleep (Gabrielle with pillow, with blanket, in twin bed recumbent, alone). It isn't one of those things that I like to admit; it certainly isn't something that I have revealed to her or those who know her. It was a reflex. It is a reflex. Some may stare to the ocean to find that moment of peace; personally, I see it in the tranquility of others, a form of empathy that is somewhat rare because it doesn't concern happiness or misery. I continue staring to Vinati for a long while and anticipate that she is soon to wake up (because they always seem to sense your eyes); yet she remains defiantly asleep, the halcyon moment uninterrupted.

After a few minutes, I lift myself and place my feet upon the cool wood floor. I look upon the heaps of clothing with its myriad shadows succumbing to the gray light of dawn-through-the-blinds; soon I am combing through the articles in this mound hoping to find something with which to cover myself. A towel is the best option available. I make my way to the bathroom.

A condom greets me in the toilet. It's a nice reminder of the previous night's experience, one that I will probably come to revisit frequently. In conventional parlance, it has been placed in the spank bank. Then again, it may come to pass that sex with her becomes the norm for the coming months, years. Will that make it any less special? Is that what happened with Connie? Is that something that all men are doomed to feel? Is that something that all people are doomed to feel?

It's difficult to establish any clear reference point as to how Vinati sees this whole thing. Ilkay has said “She's weird with relationships.” What that means is anyone's guess. He wouldn't elaborate. Was it a need for a quick release or a desire for something of substance? From here will we attempt to create a symbiotic relationship founded on a mutual love for one another? Will we engage in one of those shallow, give-and-take enterprises, complete with poorly contrived histrionics arising out of that tedium that is known so eloquently as settling? Or will we remain two autonomous drifters who just happened to share a bed for a night, who will never share so much as an earnest conversation ever again? Posing successive questions is certainly a nuisance, isn't it?

These are clearly not the only possibly scenarios; they do seem to be the most likely, however. Still, it is probably not the best idea to try to divine the future of the relationship, if any, from the Coney Island whitefish lazily floating around the bowl. So I set it free, down into the nether regions to live with its brethren. They swim there, the whitefish, trading stories and living in the past (it's an existence not at all unlike the image of heaven as painted by the boring and the dim). Not that it's all fun and games down there — at least not since a good portion of the croc population became addicted to crack. It wasn't their fault, though — the crocs, that is. They are instinctively drawn to bright-colored objects; and the balloons that started appearing during the eighties — sometimes due to hasty flushing, sometimes due to an impending bust — were bound to attract some attention. So it was an accident — the crack addiction. The attacks upon the whitefish, on the other hand, are mistakes. They, the crocs, are not known for their brilliant sight, and, to be fair, the difference between a balloon and a condom is fairly insignificant until one considers the uses the two serve. But this has nothing to do with Vinati and the situation on this side of the toilet. A beautiful woman is naked in the next room, and I have no idea how to maintain either of those temporary, perhaps temporal, qualities.

We train ourselves not to question in this manner: avoid anticipation, avoid disappointment. It's one of those banal aphorisms that the cynical pass down to those of us too eager and green to recognize that intuition is just another word for induction. Yet it's impossible to ignore the desire to decipher the silent language uttered by the woman sleeping in the other room. Do they, women, go through this, too? Or is this one of those things that men have to experience, and then lie about when asked if it happens to them? We certainly have a lot of those, don't we? The reflection in the mirror can't keep a straight face. He's clearly still thinking about last night as opposed to the consequences of today, so perhaps it is best not to address any more questions to him until he has had a chance to calm down some. Then again, prosopopoeia may be my only means of interlocution for some time.

What am I supposed to do? Should I be passive and let her decide how this thing pans out? It seems to be the safest option unless she wants someone who's assertive. But all women want that, don't they? Well, yes, unless it impugns their independence. But that's kind of the point of being assertive, isn't it? You make decisions, and people are left with the option of either following suit or getting the fuck out of your way. So, really, if you want someone to be receptive to your assertiveness, you need to either hope that they appreciate the assertive type or anticipate that they are passive enough to go by what you say. Welcome back to square one. Being passive means you're a pussy; being assertive means you're a dick. And, as it is for an asexual, neither organ seems all that appealing. And why did Natasha go back to Hycroft Drive without her Valtrex?

As I walk into the kitchen to get myself a glass of water, I am confronted by the smell of cigarette smoke. Unless Vinati has picked up the habit in the past five minutes, this doesn't make any sense. I notice a wispy trail coming form the unscreened window. I poke my head out. On the fire escape sits a stout woman with wet hair and a flush face. She wears a robe with an emblem of Warner Brothers cartoon character on the left breast. She looks to me with confusion, peers down to my towel, up to my dry hair, and then smiles. “Upstars,” as she point to herself. “Mi husband, he no like…uh…smoke,” she says in a voice that I can only describe as small. She smiles again.

“It's fine.”

“D'jew smoke?” She produces a pack from a small pocket.

“No,” I respond in a similarly small voice. “I just wanted to see where the smell was coming from.” She sticks her neck out. “The smell,” I respond as I point to my nose. She goes to stub out the cigarette, but I stop her. “No,” I laugh. “I just…smelled it,” I point again. “Curioso; no bother.” She smiles a little less enthusiastically. “Hasta luego.” She responds in kind, but is clearly bewildered by the incident.

So now what? If this were a novel, and I the protagonist, I would expect the author to give me something to do, but Vinati doesn't even have cable. Is this what people mean by Kafkaesque? Probably not. It'd be Kafkaesque if I suddenly became Vinati's roommate, or, worse, Vinati — and if you cue Webern's “Entflieht Auf Leichten Kaehnen” with Wurlitzer accompaniment, you may have something out of Lynch (and if you somehow get the crack-addicted crocs to come into the bedroom to discuss the differences between heat death and cold death while Vinati pulled out a bottle of lube, admonished my sheepishness, and redirected my thrusting, you'd have something out of Pynchon [and if you have the crocs join in on the action…well, then you'd have some whole new animal on your hand, perhaps a lost Sade epic]).

The walls of her living room are a good source of entertainment. Most of the decoration in the room consists of framed photographs. There is no real symmetry in the way they are distributed, nor is there a sense of continuity in the style, make, or color of the frames. There is a repeated motif of six — or, rather, a repeated motif of rows, columns, twos, threes. On the windowsill there is a chaotic tangle of metal, a shape that could provide the visualization of 'cacophony'. It is clearly a picture-frame — the evidence of this coming from the piece of glass at the center of the motionless contraption, as well as the detachable piece on the back that connects body to the slanted leg that keeps the thing from tumbling to the floor — but it is empty.

I begin to examine the photographs individually. The content ranges from G to PG-13, which is fairly typical unless one ends up in the home of an exhibitionist, a professional photographer, a professional collector of photography, or someone who just really digs porn and wants everyone to know that they really dig porn. So there's no R ratings, certainly no NC-17s or Xs or XXXs. A meditation on the material that necessitates not only one extra “X”, but two, is not indulged.

Vinati appears infrequently. The girl who I assume to be Natasha, the roommate, is ubiquitous. There are pictures of her with the family in Manhattan, in Rome, in Paris, on an estate in some mountainous region with a profusion of goats in the background: those types of pictures in which all but one of the subjects are ostensibly annoyed or frustrated over the penchant of the one person for taking extended-family photographs in the middle of busy sidewalks, in front of famous landmarks, and without any minor blemishes such as closed eyes, erected middle-fingers, protruding tongues, invasive strangers oblivious to the shot, or obvious conveyances of hatred directed at either the dipshit who cannot figure out how to operate the camera — which features a toggle switch and a rather large button with an icon of a flashing camera in the center — or the one who has decided that it is family picture time. In many instances she is both the photographer and one of the subjects, though only when she is with her friends. She makes the same face in these pieces: lips puckered, left eye looking up and to the right, right eye squinted as though in the midst of a wink. Her right arm extends out, toward the viewer; her left arm is always around someone displaying a similar expression, and sometimes this individual has a left arm around yet another person with an equally jovial, intoxicated, or frenetic countenance. She appears poolside with two friends. Her body type is athletic, maybe even aerodynamic. The two other girls in this picture are equally thin, though one of them apparently hasn't learned her alphabet well enough to know that B does not follow C. The three of them are beautiful, perhaps beautiful in that way that some call exotic. Most of her friends and family share this quality. Even the majority of the men could be described by those three adjectives — tall, dark, handsome — that are used to make women swoon unless they are attributed to a black man (tall = imposing; dark = savage or shadowy; handsome = alluring only in his depravity). There is a close-up shot of an eye. It's difficult to say if this is a representation of the panopticon (if said panopticon is an apparatus under state or corporate control; if the previous assumption actually raises a bigger question concerning the inability on the part of citizens to disambiguate corporate- and state-sponsored surveillance; if this question actually misses the far more disturbing truth about the nature of the information age, which is that citizens have eliminated the distinction between public and private discourse by eliminating self-censorship, transmitting extremely sensitive self-identifiers, and participating in a culture of puerile and unrelenting self-description within a public interface accessible to and often provided by either the state or the corporate powers they should fear; which raises the even more distressing question of whether or not these citizens are, therefore, responsible not merely for the perspicuity or pervasiveness (which entails invasiveness) of said power structures, but the very construction of said panopticon) or if this was the result of there being one remaining shot on a roll of film that needed to be developed, like, now. Perhaps the bookshelf can provide an answer.

I admittedly do not know which books belong to Vinati and which books belong to Natasha. I know that Vinati has read the three Vonnegut novels on the shelf because each one was referenced in conversation yesterday — she favors Cat's Cradle over Breakfast of Champions, my favorite. There are two novels by Kamala Markandaya, as well as two books about the novels of Kamala Markandaya. There is the Marx & Engels Reader, which just about every college student owns because, on top of being a book that one will eventually get around to reading, it makes a great flyswatter. There is a book by Wittgenstein, an often-ignored philosopher who would have enjoyed the previous sentence. There is a large section dedicated to bell hooks; there is some Fromm, two books by Joyce without creases in their spines, a lot of Hannah Arendt, what may be the complete collection of Susan Sontag's works, an illustrated manual entitled A Woman's Guide to the Kama Sutra, and a bunch of Penguin Classics that range from Aristotle to Zamyatin — All men naturally desire knowledge…because Reason must prevail.

It is only after fifteen minutes of examining the shelves of knowledge and the moments in time Natasha felt had to be preserved, enshrined, and shared, that I hear a soft beeping noise that means either I have missed a call or a text message is waiting for me. Vinati is still asleep, though she is now positioning herself into a more comfortable position on the bed. This means she will be awake soon.

I find my pants on top of her desk. They are there because throwing clothing is one of those bedroom idiosyncrasies that I've never been able to abandon. It's a combination of passion and joy, I suppose. Beneath my pants lay Vinati's skirt, which reads “2.” I don't think I've ever been with a woman so small. I gaze over to her sleeping quietly as I reach into my pocket, retrieve my phone, and find that I have missed two calls and that I now have two new voice mails. The first is from my parents, and from sometime last night. The second is from Willis Faxo. I just missed him.

The message from my parents is of generic stock — we miss you, get a job, call us when you get a chance (or job). They have been peripheral figures in my life ever since I left for New York. At least that's how I try to think of them, especially after not only reading about the Oedipal Complex, but having the dream (only once) that I killed my father. It's not that I am afraid that I may kill him or fuck my mother. It's not even that I want to disown them; rather, I want to egress from the past, from them, from every definition that is supposed to define someone with my background. I certainly don't want to go back to Baltimore. It is a city of animated ruins. An imperious boredom haunts the day. The summer is hot and humid, filled with days spent indoors and suffocating in the recirculated air. When it rains, it pours. The winter is plagued by dead trees and ashen skies, various shades of death amidst people in various stages of dying. There is some snow, but rarely enough to properly coat the jaundiced grass for more than a day or two.

My father, a militant Chicagoan, never tried to instill in me any sense of pride based on the history of the city or Maryland, let alone the South. My mother was not from there, either; she was a bookish girl from New England, who happened to capture my father's eye because she was reading Saul Bellows while waiting for a train. They took the train together that day, even if my father was supposed to be going in the other direction.

This is really the only sentimental story they seem to have about their relationship. They are a rather detached lot. She's detached because of books; he's detached because of medicine. Still, he does feel as though he has to constantly remind me where he came from, that he rose out of Chicago to have all of the things that his friends in Bridgeport and Hyde Park can only dream about — as most of them came back after being shipped off to Vietnam to work the same jobs their fathers had worked.

Faxo's message is succinct, polite, and inviting. He informs me that he has just returned from Japan, which means his sleep schedule is essentially backwards. Still, he is willing to meet with me anytime before two.

As I take down his address, I hear Vinati stirring. She is suddenly supine, though her eyes remain closed. “Did he actually call you back?” she asks. “Or is this some other lead you haven't told me about?” She is strangely coherent and lucid for someone just regaining consciousness.

“No, it's actually Faxo,” I respond as I look back to her. “He told me I can stop by anytime before two.” I am clearly too ecstatic for her at such an early hour. She groans. “So how ya' feeling this morning?”

“My muscles are sore,” she laughs as she pulls the sheets over her face. She quickly reappears. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

For the life of me I don't know how to respond to this without sounding corny, so I just smile, walk over to the bed, and bend down to kiss her. She turns her head away and ducks beneath the sheets again. “I can't,” she laughs. “My breath is terrible.” My head hovers above hers until she reemerges. She laughs again. “You aren't going to take no for an answer, are you?”

“Not when I know you can't give it.”

13

The Jefferson stop on the L train is, as of the mid-June of 2007, probably the premier spot to live in the city, provided one is both a recent graduate and desperately trying to mirror the bohemian image of generations past. It is one of the many regions of Brooklyn that will soon be home to an affluent population who will, paradoxically, lament the neighborhood's blunted edge. As of now, however, it is still too dangerous for a lot of people. Rapes happen. Stabbings happen. There is still a belief that white skin is logically antecedent to wealth, that the rapes and the robberies (typically concomitant with the stabbings) are romantic in the sense that they are revolutionary or grounded in the desire to fight against a power structure that is unjust at its very core; but the sad truth of the matter is that these are crimes, that these crimes are performed by sad people, that these crimes affect sad people, that there is no glory in fighting against the powerful by victimizing the powerless who happen to have that one very discernible resemblance to the majority of those in power.

Still, there are the nascent signs of gentrification sprouting up. Some factories have been converted into lofts. The ten-story condo buildings that look like something out of an aquarium, however, have yet to appear. Consequently, it is fairly safe to say that the domestic immigrants here are not the disguised trust-funders one finds on Avenue A or even Bedford; they, like the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans who have been here for at least two generations, work menial jobs, forage through the generic sections of the grocery store aisles, and feel a strong resentment for the participants of the eastern migration — only for them it's kind of like hating the mirror.

While no small percentage of this group comes to Brooklyn with the vain hope of beginning a career in the arts, there are those who, like earlier generations of immigrants, have come not so much to find fame as much as a decent job. True, many are attracted to fairly illustrious career paths, but they gravitate to this particular city because many other places in this country can offer little more than a cubicle job that cannot provide such things as health care, a living wage, or even dignity. Here you end up meeting quiet types from Iowa and Michigan, Montana and Idaho, engaged in a form of wage slavery that is more clement than the form of it they would have endured had they stayed home. They are the people who consider paying off student loans to be more important than going to trendy clubs and restaurants featured in those magazines dedicated to culture and the arts — with the exception of literature and poetry, as people are far too busy trying to be cultured to bother with books.

The problem, of course, is that these new immigrants don't only attract their own kind. They attract their wealthy counterparts. Soon a section of the grocery store becomes devoted entirely to cheese. A record shop that specializes in Tahitian punk rock opens up next door to the coffee shop with an obscure and irrelevant adjective as a name (Erudite, Fulgent, Glaborous). The bodega stops carrying Night Flight and begins purveying six packs of microbrews from Vermont. Their delis start offering sandwiches with avocado and sprouts. A designer opens up a boutique filled with hideous dresses that each cost what the previous lessee paid each month in rent. Cabs appear. Then cops. Then bars. Then bistros.

But by this point most of the first wave of young, white immigrants will have already moved on. Unlike the people who have lived in the neighborhood for more than a few years, they do not have rent-stabilized apartments, nor do they have a serious connection to the area. They will move to another location that appears to be beyond the reach of developers and condo shoppers. But soon the migration of the hip and the wealthy will once again encroach upon their homes, and, once again, they will be forced to move out. And when they come into a new neighborhood they will once again be welcomed with hostility, as they are seen as the precursors to a rapid rise in the cost of living (which, unfortunately, they are); and they will not come to know their neighbors because they will feel intimidated and guilty; and no one on the block will go out of their way to discover the reason for their appearance because they assume it to be out of anything but necessity; and the two will call the process integration and gentrification because they see a difference in their skin tone and their language as opposed to their parallel in wages; and the melting pot will never really exist, perhaps it never can exist, because there will never be an alkahest, just weak solvents created by either corporations or the empty words for which politicians and talking heads feign such reverence; there will continue to be different colored solutes, partially dissolved, who maintain their individuality through commodities, antiquated archetypes, and an intense aversion to anything that infringes upon their autonomy as a demographic to be exploited by people who could give a shit whether you're black, brown, white, red, or yellow — the only thing that matters is the green.

I can't deny that I'm nervous when I finally get out of the rain and into Faxo's lobby. Pale light stumbles through a thick slab of glass reinforced by hundreds of St. Andrews crosses made of chicken wire. There are four units in the building: one on the ground floor, one on the second floor, and two on the top floor. Faxo's unit is on the second.

When Faxo opens his door, I am surprised to discover that his apartment is actually a wood shop, and that the majority of the space is something of a showroom as opposed to what one might call living quarters. He does not own a television, and, with the exception of the kitchen appliances and stereo, the only piece of furniture in the apartment not made by Faxo goes by the name of Scooter, a dopehead with the attention span of a toddler. A bong sits in front of him, as does a huge bag of what appears to be primo weed. Faxo quickly apologizes for the noise from the workshop downstairs, which, he informs me, specializes in refurbishing limousine engines. The two units upstairs, he adds, have become lofts. “I think there's five kids in each.” He looks to his friend. “Yo', Scoot, have you seen any of them yet?”

“No,” he mumbles. “Hey, dude, blow more doja.” It's pronounced dō'zha.

“What?”

“Fucking Detroitisms,” Faxo says with a smile. Scooter looks confused. “These are the same assholes who 'smoke down'.”

Scooter responds with a gurgling sound that does not come from his throat.

“So you're interested in finding Mordy?” Faxo resumes as he takes a seat in a rocking chair.

“Yes,” I respond. My eyes wander in search of a seat and land on a stool. “He is Coprolalia, right?” as I sit.

“I really don't know,” casually. “I only lived with the guy for a month or two.” He pauses. “You want anything to drink? Water, tea, a cocktail maybe?” He stands.

“No, I'm fine,” I respond as Scooter coughs out a wall of smoke.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I'm fine.”

“I have some wine.” Before I can decline, he lets out a brief, shallow laugh. “I just realized it's barely noon,” as he makes his way back towards the rocking chair with a 1.5 liter bottle of water retrieved from the nearby counter.

“Actually, it's ten-thirty.”

“Either way, it feels like it's the middle of the night to me,” as he takes his seat once again. “It always takes me three or four days to get used to the time difference. I'm left pretty much wandering around in a fugue-state until then. That being said, I apologize if I'm a bit spacey or…what's the word I'm looking for?”

“Loopy?” Scooter asks.

Willis looks to me with a grin as he unscrews the cap. “Does 'loopy' sound good to you?”

“I would go with faded.”

“Faded? California boy?”

“No,” I respond, “Just a word that came up yesterday.”

He nods. “You know what I just thought about?” Silence. “I haven't thought about this in years: California was supposed to fall into the ocean.”

“I remember hearing that.”

“And yet it didn't.” He takes a sip from the bottle, and quickly screws the cap back on. “Was it a joke, or was it based on scientific study? I don't mean to mock global warming by means of a poor analogy, mind you; I just think it's odd that we don't hear about the death of California as often as we used to — especially now that it's such a drain not only upon our culture, but upon our economy as well. Proposition Thirteen, man,” he shakes his head.

“What's that?”

“Proposition Thirteen. It pretty much allowed the people to vote on the budget. Their choices reflect just how myopic Americans are when it comes to government. They voted to have lower taxes and more social services. It's like wanting…you know, I can't even think of a good simile. It just shows you are fucking stupid people are.” He takes the cap off the bottle. “You know what, I’ll just shut up — you're here to find out about Mordy.” He takes another sip. “I just want to emphasize the fact that I don't know him very well. Our story is pretty brief.”

“It doesn't matter. Any information will help.”

“Well,” recapping, “In the fall of ninety-three I moved into a two bedroom apartment on First Avenue and Seventh. The place wasn't all that nice, but the location was all that mattered to me. You know, back then the Village was really thriving artistically. Today it seems to be nothing more than a bunch of yuppies living out an ironic elegy. Anyway, back then I lived with this guy, Tommy. We were roommates for about a year and a half or so. He was a nice kid out of the Poconos, who tended bar at some place that's not around anymore; it was one of those East Village dives that used to attract a lot of punker kids and deadbeats…something like the International Bar, if you've ever been there.”

“Once or twice,” I respond. “They've closed, you know.”

“Figures,” spitefully. “Regardless, you know the type of place I'm talking about — kids and regulars, dudes down on their luck, dudes that ain't never had any luck to begin with. Tommy used to brag and say that he knew ninety percent of the people who came through the door, maybe not by name, but by face or by drink. And he got on with just about anyone — he was a real chill cat. He would get me and my buddies loaded whenever we went in. I'd cook him dinner the next night. We had a good thing going.

“But, you know, sometimes good people turn into bad people just because of one stupid decision. And Tommy was no exception to this aphorism, trite as it may seem. That being said, there was this one group of kids who came in a lot. A bunch of fucking punks. Everyone hated them. Everyone except this one girl, Hannah, who used to hang out with them quite a bit — not just at the bar, either.

“Now Hannah was a good girl. And she was a fucking piece, too. She had these eyes — Tommy and I used to call them the 'fuck me eyes'. It's not like she tried to do it. She couldn't help it. She just looked like she wanted to attack every dick she saw.

“So, by no real fault of her own, she ended up getting a lot of attention. And, due to her surroundings, it wasn't the kind of attention that a girl necessarily wants. But she handled it well. She was one of those free spirits — not free in the sense that she was flighty or blind to the harsh realities of the real world like most of those liberal arts white girls you meet in Park Slope these days. No, it was more that she was comfortable. With herself. With her surroundings. She was always smiling. She was always laughing. If you called her a chick or a bitch, though,” he laughs and shakes his head; “Man…heads would fucking roll.

“I never could figure out why she spent so much time with the Burnouts, which was the epithet the rest of the regulars attached to the group of losers she hung around. Drugs would be a rational assumption, but she didn't fuck around with that shit. She was a mild drinker; vegan; had hair the color of cotton candy — not too different from some of the types you see running around Williamsburg these days. Only she was for real, know what I mean. And that's what attracted Tommy to her. He wasn't really into the scene at the time, but he certainly liked the music. She knew a lot of the bands floating around the City back then — and not 'know' in either the heard-of or Biblical sense; she knew them personally because she was the beautiful girl with pink hair who everyone wanted to fuck or, failing that, talk to.

“Tommy would give her a few free rounds every time she came in, and they would talk about punk rock and revolution and all of the other stuff you talk about when you're in your early-twenties and you live in New York City and you consider yourself a rebel, even if you sometimes don't fully understand what it is you're rebelling against, let alone why you're rebelling against it. Because you're too young then. Hell, I'm still too young to understand all of it.” He smiles. “But that's neither here nor there. We're all destined to die, and we're all angered by that fact. Forlorn, anguish, despair — fancy Sartrean terminology for the simple fact that we're conscious not only of the fecundity of life, but the ultimate futility and transience of it. It fucking sucks. Moreover, growing old sucks. We don't want eternal life; we want eternal youth.”

“You're only as old as you act,” Scooter says.

“And yet the autistic die like the rest of us.”

“You're such a fucking buzz-kill today, man,” Scooter says as he holds the flame of the lighter a few centimeters away from the slide.

“Anyway, they — Tommy and Hannah — started fucking. And that, I guess (caesura) initiated — if that's the word — Tommy into the Burnouts.

“Now, a lot of people have the impression that junkies just sit around all day getting all types of fucked up. The truth of the matter, however, is that a lot of them have jobs and can manage to socialize and seem to kind of have their shit together. Either way, the people in the bar knew what these kids were up to, and they definitely noticed when Tommy started getting into that shit. People kept wanting to have talks with me so that I would have a talk with Tommy. They didn't want Hannah to know. I was reluctant to initiate a dialog with Tommy, but eventually I did. And it was a waste. I knew it was going to be a waste. People like that aren't going to listen to what you have to say.”

“They never do,” I nod.

“Yeah, and things turned sour real quick. Some people can use for years without getting desperate. Tommy, however, didn’t fall into this category. It really changed him. I knew he was in real trouble when things around the apartment started disappearing. This is after maybe two months. I remember that Hannah split shortly thereafter. It was a bad scene, but I guess I was naïve about him, about will power in the face of that shit. I was young, you know, and I had — I have — stayed away from it my whole life. I didn't understand what it could do to a person.

“So, because I was young and stupid, I thought he'd snap out of it. And, you know, he was a pretty bright guy; it wasn't that he was oblivious to the fact that he was fucking up his life — he just didn't care. But, blazing revelations aside, nothing was going to change him. People don't fucking change on their own.” He takes another sip from his bottle of water. “Suffice to say, help had to come from elsewhere.

“One day he came home to find his parents sitting on the couch. They had come out from Pennsylvania with — I shit you not — their fucking priest. Turns out Hannah had called them up to let them know that their son was a heroin addict and that he had given her the Hiv (pronounced that way, not spelled out as H-I–V), which was a lie, but she figured it would expedite the process of getting his parents involved with the mess that had become his life. Instead of being passive-aggressive like most of the white parents I've seen, they reacted with a fucking blitzkrieg. They told his boss that he was quitting, told the landlord that he was moving, and came to the city with a van. He didn't know any of this shit was going on. They actually sat outside our apartment until they saw him leave, and then they came in and fucking cleared the place out.”

“What?”

“Yeah. I helped orchestrate it in a sense. I mean, I told them the time to come. I wanted Tommy to get better, but I also wanted to make sure I was there when they came in so they didn't take any of my shit — you know, by accident.

“When I talked to Hannah about it the next night, she told me that, for starters, she didn't have the virus. So maybe this was a little bit more than a few weeks after they broke up,” he says to himself. “Either way, she just figured it was a matter of time before he picked it up — if he hadn't already.” He takes another sip from the bottle. “She probably wasn't too far off the mark, you know — about the Hiv thing. People were dropping like fucking flies in this city when I was growing up.”

“You grew up here?” I ask.

“Naw, not in Brooklyn. I grew up in Harlem, about a block away from Trinity Cemetery, if you know the area,” he says with a curious eye.

“I haven't been up there that much.”

“How long have you been here?”

“About four years.”

“Yeah, it's funny,” as he pulls the bottle to his mouth. “I've met people who think Manhattan ends at Em El Kay. That, or else they think it's like the fucking south Bronx up there. But it's really nice, especially where I grew up. Now, at least. It hasn't always been all that nice. But there's a lot of brownstones, a lot of stuff to do, a lot of students. I should know,” he laughs; “I lived up there until I moved into that apartment in the Village. Our house has been in my family for over sixty years. My granddad bought it when he came back from Japan after the war. He refused to let it go even when the area went to shit in the seventies and eighties. I guess it makes sense, though; I mean, he's spent most of his life there. He taught at City College until ten years ago.”

“What did he teach?”

“Physics. He supposedly taught one of the…what's the word…I guess pioneers of string theory, but I don't know how accurate that is. He's fucking old now — ninety-six. It's not that he's senile or anything; he just doesn't always feel like telling you the truth.” He shakes his head. “It's fucked up watching someone you love so much grow old, but that's the way it goes.” He takes on a morose expression for a moment, but it quickly passes. He looks to the water in his hand, but doesn't raise it to his mouth. “Where are my manners — I'm supposed to be telling you about Mordy.

“So I needed to find a roommate on account of Tommy's being abducted by his parents and subsequently sent to rehab. His dad dropped a month's rent to help me out, which I was certainly grateful for, but I had no idea how I was supposed to go about finding a roommate without getting stuck with some type of lunatic. These were the days before the Internet and Craigslist and all that; the only way to go about things was either word of mouth or classifieds. I asked around for a few days, but no one needed a place — that, or they needed a place but couldn't pay the rent. So I took out an ad in the Voice, and I ended up meeting with five or six people. There were a lot of personality clashes, though. Mordy was the only guy I got on with. There was an immediate rapport between the two of us. I told him he could move in the next day.”

“Where was he living prior to this?”

“He was living either on or nearby Avenue M. I know he lived close to the train stop over there — with his parents.”

“Why did he want to move out?”

“It's not that there was any type of animosity between him and his parents; he just thought it sad for a man of twenty-three to be living with his folks. Also, he had always wanted to move into Manhattan — you know, just to experience it.”

“What did he do?”

“What do you mean?”

“What did he do for a living?”

“Worked at the family store. They owned a deli somewhere by Prospect Park. Still owns it, so far as I know.”

“Could you be more specific?”

“About what?”

“Where it is.”

“I know it's somewhere in either Park Slope or that one place to the south.”

“Windsor Terrace?”

“Yeah. That one.”

“Does he still work there?”

Faxo is pensive. He clutches the water bottle tightly. It crinkles, cracks; a pop resonates throughout the room. Scooter looks to Faxo's with stupefied awe. “Are you guys talking about your old roommate with the uncle who sounded like Larry David?”

“Yeah. Mordecai,” Willis responds.

“Mordecai,” Scooter nods. “Dude, that guy puffed tough.”

“He puffed what?”

“Detroitism…”

“So do you know if he still works there?”

“I really couldn't tell you. I do know that he was working there the last time I saw him, but that was about four years ago.”

“Daphne mentioned that the two of you had a falling out.”

“No, we just kind of lost touch. A falling out seems to imply that a specific event caused a gradual decay of relations. That never happened. The simple truth of the matter is that it's difficult to keep up with a man who refuses to own a phone.” He pauses. “And it doesn't have anything to do with him being Orthodox or anything like that — even though, so far as I know, there is no telephone prohibition in the Torah. In fact, the Hasids down in Boro Park are on their cell phones about as often as Manhattan businessmen, fourteen-year-old girls, and lazy entrepreneurs from Harlem and the Bronx, who don't do anything all day besides mooch off their chickenhead girlfriends while telling everyone within earshot that they're 'entrepreneurs', or, worse, 'producers'.”

“So what is he?”

“What do you mean?”

“In terms of being Jewish.”

“He was Jewish,” slowly.

“Was he reform, was he—”

“Oh…that. Yeah, he probably fell in that group. He wasn’t even kosher.”

“Was he an atheist?”

“I don't think he would have ever called himself by that title. He certainly never practiced when I lived with him. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard him talk about the subject. He probably celebrates the high holidays with the family, and he may fast whenever it's required, but religion isn't a big part of his life — at least it wasn't when I knew him. With how many born-agains there are these days, though, I guess you never can tell. He always described himself as a…what'd he call it?” He pauses. “A curious theist: Feeling is all; the name is sound and smoke, beclouding Heaven's glow.”

“That sounds familiar.”

“It should. It was one of Mordy's favorite lines. He was a big fan of Faust, though he claimed that no English translation ever did the work justice.”

The work downstairs comes to a sudden stop. The apartment is silent. Scooter spouts out something unintelligible and chuckles to himself. When neither Faxo nor I respond with anything more than knitted brows, he rises and reaches for the iPod that is plugged into the stereo. As he plops back down on the couch, he mentions that the name of the band that we're suddenly hearing goes by the name the Gryphon Shepherds. The two of us shrug and compliment his choice, though I am less concerned with the exposure to a new band, and more interested in the connection between Coprolalia and the man sitting across from me. This is rather obvious even to Scooter.

“Come to think of it, Mordy's mother was religious. His dad wasn't. No, man, his dad…man, his dad was a fucking trip. He's one of those old school New York intellectuals. Kind of like my granddad in a way, though he, my granddad, was more of an academic than an intellectual.”

“How old is Mordy's dad?”

“Old. His name is Isaac. Mordy's mother was his second wife. She would be in her mid- to late-fifties now. Mr. Adelstein would probably be closer to seventy.”

“Adelstein?”

“Yeah.”

“What was he like?”

“I don't know. You know Saul Bellow?”

“I've certainly heard of him. He's kind of a family favorite.”

“Do you know the book Humboldt's Gift?”

“I haven't read it, but I've heard a good deal about it.”

“Well, there's this one character in it, Humboldt, who reminds me a lot of Mr. Adelstein. To a degree, mind you. What I mean to say is that the man has read everything, can argue about anything, and will mention everything from Gilgamesh to the most recent Bond film in a five minute time-span.”

“I know the type,” I say dryly.

“I'm sorry if I digress. It's the whole lack-of-sleep thing. It makes you crazy.” He smiles. “So, about Mordy. Now, as I've said, Mordy only lived with me for a month or so because we were kicked out of our apartment. It was some bullshit, man. One day the landlord's son came by to tell us that the cops had come into the building to stop a domestic situation down the hall — something that was certainly not out of the ordinary back in those days — and that they had seen syringes in the stairwell. Now, by this point, Tommy has been out of the apartment for well over a month. I've never used. Mordy, so far as I know, never used. On top of that, when I looked for these alleged needles, all I saw was fucking rat turds and broken glass,” he laughs. “So, my conclusion was that either the cops had the landlord clean them up, which is the most likely scenario in hindsight, or they never were there in the first place, which is what I believed at the time, largely due to my situation as a young black man in America.

“Now, legally speaking, we weren't evicted. We made a deal with the landlord's son, Joe, who said he would allow us to break our lease — yeah, yeah, 'allow'—but that, should we stay, he would have no problem allowing the po-lease to search our apartment at random. 'I don't want no fucking junkies in my fucking building, alright,'” Faxo says in a thick Italian accent. “The ultimatum, in other words, was we either move out or live under constant surveillance. Now, a more conservative person would hardly see this the way I do. He would probably think, If you have nothing to hide, then you shouldn't have a problem with such an invasive policy — although this individual would probably use the euphemism 'a more transparent, secure policy', a positive, to describe the situation—, but what is there to stop someone from planting a bag in the apartment. The situation being what it was, we decided it was best to move.

“Joe promised to give us back our deposit. And he did, too. He even put in a good word with my next landlord. The fucked up thing, though, was that on the day we moved out, we saw about half of the other tenants doing the same fucking thing. After another month, all of the tenants had been cleared out. And then the contractors started appearing. The whole building was completely renovated. By the end of the year, my apartment was being rented out for way more than what I had paid. It wasn't double or anything like that, but it was a pretty serious increase. It was some bullshit, man.

“Joe's father, it turns out, had died right around the time Mordy moved in, and Joe had inherited the property. Within a couple of days, some reps from a real estate firm by the name of Abram and Keens came to him. They offered Joe twice the market value on the building on the condition that he find a way to get rid of all the tenants within ninety days.”

“How the hell did you hear about this?”

“I only moved half a block east, so I was right there to watch all of this shit go down. Plus, my new landlord, Rosa, was the neighborhood gossip. You'd be surprised just how much information these people pick up. She should have been a journalist.”

“And Mordecai moved out to Greenpoint, right?”

“Yeah, moved into this Polish dowager's house. Weird lady.”

“How long was he there?”

“I'm not really sure. I'm sure he's moved now, but I couldn't tell you where to. As I've said, I could never get in touch with him — he's never owned a phone.” He shrugs. “Yeah, but that's like him.”

“What do you mean?”

“He's a private guy,” he chuckles. “You should know that much by now.”

“I can understand being private, but he doesn't seem to have any connections to anyone. You're the first person I've met who knows him personally. Or knew, rather.”

“I didn't even know him all that well. He never talked about his art until I caught him in the act one night. I just happened to walk in on him when we were out at the bar. I think we were at the Paulmil Café—perhaps the seediest place in all of Manhattan. Come to think of it, we had just talked with Joe, and were trying to decide whether it was best to stay or to go.” He shakes his head. “But that's beside the point. When I came back to the table after I was finished taking a piss, I told him that I thought his drawing was really clever. It had something to do with the bad press the Clintons were receiving on account of Whitewater, but I don't really remember the specifics of the piece.”

“So this was, what, ninety-six.”

“Try ninety-four, man.”

“So you lived together then — obviously.”

“Yeah, he moved in on the first day of…let me think…March. Yeah, because winter was ending, and I finished out the semester in the new place. So I lived with him for the March and the April of ninety-four.” He laughs. “It seems as though the interview has officially begun, huh?”

I laugh, too. Daphne and Sean had made him out to be some kind of misanthropic intellectual, but, in reality, he doesn't strike me as any different than most of the people I've met in the past weeks. True, his accent is not as thick as most of the other New Yorkers I've come across. Also, he's one of the few black people that I have met as I've scoured the dives of the city.

It seems as though black people don't go to the bar to fraternize as often as white people do — unless, of course, they are out with their white friends. I have seen a lot of black people at places that like to call themselves lounges. The disparities between a lounge and a bar are few, but, from what I can gather, the main distinctions are the price of the drinks, the comfort of the furniture, and the age and volume of the music.

“So what else would you like to know?” he asks.

“Anything you can tell me, really. Do you know if there's a way to find his parent's house? Do they still live in the same place?”

“As far as I know.”

“And you say that they lived on Avenue M?”

“I'm not sure. Mordy always said he lived off the Avenue M stop on the Q. He could have lived on any street around there. If you haven't noticed by now, Brooklyn people, especially those who have spent their whole lives here, have a fucked up conception of walking distance.” I furrow my brow. “Well, they tend to think that everything is a lot closer than it actually is — especially when it comes to trains. I dated this one girl who always said that she lived 'right by the train'. Turns out she lived nine blocks away from it. I measured it out — it was just under a fucking mile,” he exclaims. “A fucking mile,” he adds to Scooter, who gives back an expression of a deer caught not only in the headlights of a semi, but its grill.

“Fucking stoner,” with facetious contempt.

“What about the last time you saw him? Did he mention anything that…I guess I could use to find him?”

“Let's see…I saw him in February. Like I've said, I have no way of getting into contact with him or anything — we just randomly ran into each other at some bar just south of Columbia. I don't remember the name. He wouldn't shut up about this lawsuit against his dad's store. Apparently, it was a slip and fall accident. The plaintiff and her husband were demanding something absurd — like three million dollars or some shit.” I nod. “Anyway, he was there with his cousin.”

“What's his cousin's name.”

“I was kind of drunk at the time,” he shrugs with a grin. “I think she was working on a Ph.D.,” he begins. “No!” he jumps. “She was in med-school. She was specializing in neurology.”

“Do you know if she has the same last name as him?”

“I really have no idea. She had a really Jewish first name. Yeah, and the two of them were debating whether or not he should attend an I.S.M.—”

“What's the I.S.M.?”

“The International Solidarity Movement. It's a pro-Palestinian organization.”

“Okay.”

“Well, yeah, that was kind of the joke. Mordecai didn't really want to go; he's not particularly supportive of Israel's expansionist policies, but he didn't think he'd be welcome on account of his being Jewish and all. She said half of the people there were going to be Jewish. She was a bit more militant in her views, too, accusing the Israeli government of everything short of Holocaust. She was especially pissed because some guy was trying to get an injunction to keep the P.M.I. from holding their conference at Columbia.”

“On what grounds?”

“Typical right-wing shit. Supporting the oppressed is supporting terrorism. Same type of language the Apartheid government used whenever they spoke of the A.N.C.”

“I see.”

“I don't know what happened with the injunction. I'm guessing the judge threw it out.”

“Did Mordecai end up going to the event?”

“I have no idea.”

“He spends a pretty good amount of time up around there, you know.”

“That's not all that surprising. He was close with that cousin of his.”

“He recently did a piece that Sean has entitled Glass Onion.”

“Sean?”

“Winchester.”

A roll of the eyes.

“What?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing.”

“So he was close with her, then?”

“Maybe.” He laughs, this time with what almost seems like hostility. “Look, I know you want someone who can lead you to Mordy, but, really, I barely know the guy. I've never met any of his friends. For all I know he doesn't have any. I've only met his cousin, his uncle, and his father. His uncle and his dad helped moved him in and out of the apartment, and his dad came by another time to take us out for dinner.” He gives a bit of a wince. “Really, I wish I could help you out a bit more.”

“Anything you could tell me about him. I mean, did he, did he ever admit to being Coprolalia?”

“Yes and no. I did hear him refer to himself by that name a few years before that idiot professor started using it to describe every piece of latrine art he thought witty enough to be evaluated or criticized.” He shakes his head. “But what is art? Oscar Wilde aphorisms aside, art does have a purpose; it just isn't a purpose like food or shelter or water or even sex. If it were useless, it would not be ubiquitous. Yet art is found in every culture. Even troglodytes took time off from fucking and killing to paint on the wall, know what I mean?”

“Troglodytes!” Scooter yelps. “That song is the shit.”

“Every society has it, but, apparently, no one needs it. It seems as though the majority of art in our society, however, is created solely to bewilder or shock people. High art, I mean. It's either provocative for the sake of being provocative, or it needs to be dissected and interpreted because it lacks that…what's the word I'm looking for…that visceral…ness. Is that a word? Visceralness?”

“For right now, sure.”

“What I'm saying is that it is either the most base form of visceral provocation — like shit on a pedestal — or it's produced with extreme pretense.” The song Troglodytes comes on. I feel as though I am once again worshiping Risus. “Not to say that I want to revert back to the bathos of Romanticism. And, look, it's not I hate everything being produced right now, either. I couldn't begin to give a list of all the great people out there who continue to astound me with their abilities and their insights. But, for the most part, I see way too much esoteric shit.

“When artists returned to the portrayal of Matter as opposed to Form, Subject instead of Substance, during the Renaissance, there was still a sense of propriety, you know, because there was the desire to emulate Nature. But that wasn't enough. It never should have been enough. But obstacles, institutions, started evaporating too quickly after the Impressionists. It wasn't enough to have art be about an individual's style, the artist's observation seen through his own subjective perspective; it had to go further. And soon the communal framework, the pragmatic and inferential elements of society, gave way to utter chaos; it was like jumping from capitalism to anarchy over the course of a few years. I'll admit that, when the revolution was beginning, when art was standing on the edge, that was one of the most fecund eras of modern art; but now the avant-garde has rejected all shared experience. When what Habermas would call the lifeworld is thought to be a part of the hegemony and monolith of capitalism, and one believes it is the all-too Romantic mission of the artist to fight against it, you end up with a lack of coherence, an inability to convey anything because the very symbols within the various superstructures of the society are given meanings that have no context outside of the artist’s mind. Such symbols are, consequently, perceived as meaningless by just about everyone in the community — just like in the case of DuChamps' fucking Fountain, which is only clever in the sense that no one, so far as I know, had made such a purely Structuralist work. Either way, this is the worst aspect of Modernism, if you think about it. Not only will it always be haunted by the specter of Romanticism and, worse, Objectivism, which is — and a lot of people will disagree here — perhaps the closest thing to a Modernist philosophy, it will also never cease to be esoteric by definition. If you think about it this way, it makes it seem to be the marriage of narcissism and Positivism. You feel as though you, the artist, can save the world through your work. But, to add to the narcissism and arcane nature of so much of the work, the audience has no idea whether or not the internal experience that is being represented on the canvas or in the piece of wood or marble or whatever is genuine. It ceases to have an affect on you as a witness or spectator beyond the fact that it is making a Structuralist statement about the object d’art while, at the same time, attempting to singlehandedly alter the community’s traditional understanding of a given symbol. It’s kind of how corporations are generating alien meanings for the symbols of our community, or, in some cases, creating entirely new words in order to manipulate not only the meaning we give to things, but the very form and structure that allows for such meanings to develop.

“When artists first started breaking rules, the goal was to portray an idea, one that was not wholly reliant upon material predications. It was an antithesis that found its genesis in the movement away from the objective or eternal, an antithesis that can be traced back to the moment when man stopped attempting to either showcase the perspective of God or follow the rules of tradition. And it progressed. It progressed as mankind became increasingly alienated from his traditional institutions. Take, for example, the artwork that appeared in the wake of the First World War. They knew they couldn't convey their experiences with recourse to convention; convention was no longer viable. So artists had to abstract in order to share their vision. And it is understandable why they had to do this. But now convention is rejected for the sake of rejecting convention. One thinks it artsy to speak in tongues about the weather. It's not artsy; it's pretentious, the type of shit someone contrives because they don't have anything important to say. I used to argue that this was the necessary progression of art, but, if we have learned anything from this century, it's that Dewey was right to say that critical theory is an inductive method, and that history may have a progression, but that the progression is only discernible once it has become historical.

“Back to the point about art, though. We've come to the end game in terms of the progression of abstraction. There is no progression in existential anomie, especially when it morphs into the irrationality and anti-logic and, let's be honest here, nihilism of Dadaism. It's static, and because it's static…” He stops himself. “I'm sorry I just went on that tirade,” he says quietly, for he had begun to raise his voice. “I haven't been able to sleep very well since I came back from Japan.”

“Why were you there?”

“Some company based in Osaka wants me to make some shit for them,” he says as he reaches for a pouch of tobacco and a book of papers. “I won't deny that I feel like kind of a sellout, but, at the same time, I'm the type of person who believes that a check is a check so long as I have the freedom to do what I want. If the person providing the check is not asking me to compromise any of my values, then I don't see a problem with taking the money, even if the money comes from a corporation. You know, if they were telling me what to build, then I wouldn't do it. But, in this case, the only parameters I received concerned the dimensions of the room in which the table will be installed. I don't see that as a compromise.” He pauses to lick the paper. “Anyway, to go back to what I was saying.” He pauses again. “What was I saying?” He shakes his head. “I was probably just rambling.” He pauses again. “You have any more questions about Mordy?”

“Do you think all of the pieces attributed to Coprolalia have been done by him?”

“No,” he says as he looks for a lighter. “But, then again, I'm not entirely sure. If it is all the work of one man, he certainly has cornered off a wonderful piece of a market that cannot be exploited or profited from. Think about it. What's the only truly public place that is at the same time private enough to allow an artist the chance to exhibit his or her work without fear of it being stolen or removed? Yo', Scoot, can you toss me a light?”

“Hold on,” he replies as he lights a cigarette of his own.

“It's perfect. He creates entirely for himself and the community at the same time. It's brilliant.”

“Why doesn't he just do murals on the side of buildings, then?”

“Because — thanks — because you need permission to do a mural. Also, your identity is known. Consequently, it becomes his. It's not simply that he's shy. It's that he believes the only possession that should not belong the community is the will — or ego and perhaps even id, sort of — and the body. And while it's obvious that it is his work, that he is responsible for it, he doesn't want his work or the result of his work to become a commodity. Therefore, the work has to be free, and the result of the work must be available to anyone who wishes to view it without cost. True, children can't see his work, but that's not something that he really cared about. He did try, for a long time, to do work in only unisex bathrooms to allow women to see his exhibits, too, but he eventually realized that no one really pays attentions to which bathroom belongs to whom.” He pauses. “Do you know which bathroom a transgendered person is supposed to use? Like, if a person is born a woman, never gets an operation, but identifies himself as a male, should he go into the men's bathroom or the women's bathroom?”

“I really have no idea.”

“You match bathroom signs with hardware, dude,” Scooter says. “How's a guy with a twat supposed to piss in a urinal?”

Laughter.

“I like that rule, Scoot,” Faxo says.

“Just came up with it, man. I was at this one place on Jefferson (turns to me), downtown Detroit (back to Faxo), and this fucking tranny, who was like six-eight — like, Big Fish shit — was just kicking it in the fucking chicks' room. You know, it's like what the fuck? There's a fucking huge chick with a dick just hanging out, acting like everything's fucking cool, but you could tell everyone in there was totally bugging the fuck out.”

“What happened?”

“Fucked if I know.”

“What if she went in the men's room?”

Scooter giggles. “I don't know, man — same type of shit, I guess.”

Faxo smiles and takes a drag from his cigarette. “So what was I saying?”

“About Mordecai's work being communal.”

“Yeah. I don't know if I really have anything else to say about it. The motivation behind the location of his work is anarchistic. I guess that’s it.”

“Do you like all of it?”

“No; but I rarely like everything that an artist does. I wouldn't call myself a critic. I hate critics. How these people manage to think themselves above anything, considering the fact that they create nothing of value, is beyond me. Then again, it is the nature of the parasite to think itself superior to the host.” He pauses for a moment to take another drag. “Look, all I'm saying is that there's a lot of brilliant people out there, but that they don't always reveal their brilliance in their work. Faulkner put out Pylon; Morrison put out The Bluest Eye…”

“But that was her first book.”

“Still; I'm just saying that an artist's genius doesn't always materialize in everything they create. I mean, DeLillo managed to put out The Body Artist only a few years ago, but I still regard him as one of the best American novelists today. Maybe one of the best novelists, period.”

“You didn't like that book?”

“Did anybody?”

“Well, I didn't think it was terrible.”

“It was such a huge departure from his other work — so much so that it seemed almost disingenuous. If you're going to do something like that, you need to have a stronger show.” He shrugs. “Then again, people tell me that I'm an opinionated prick, so I guess I am sometimes too harsh on things that I don't instantly love.

“Regardless, the pieces that are attributed to Mordy I usually find amusing, even if some of them are horribly banal. I mean, if you're going to denounce conformity and consumerism these days, I'm fairly sure you're not going to say anything unique. If the Gap and Old Navy run commercials that essentially convey the same puerile message, it's time to pick either a new or more specific gripe. It's a lonely world of frightened people: it doesn't get much more succinct than that.”

“Dude, that's totally it,” Scooter says as he grips his forehead. “We need to stop the fear. That's why I'm voting for Obama.” He puts down the bong, which must have a slide piece like a chalice, to tend to his cigarette. “Hey, I'm going to put on that Dave Holland album we were listening to earlier. Is that cool guys?”

Faxo says as he relights his cigarette. “Sure thing, Scoot.”

“How do you two know each other?”

“He’s my cousin.”

“Really?”

“Well, not literally. I mean, we're not related by blood.” A gray-blue fractal grows from his lips.

“Shit, Willis, I've known you longer than anyone besides my fucking mom.”

“How do you know each other?”

“It's a long story. I don't want to go on some long, self-absorbed tangent. I did enough of that in my younger years.”

“Thank you for sparing me. God knows I've heard a lot of those lately.”

“What? Did you meet Pat Shaheen the other night when you were out with Daphne?”

“Yeah,” I laugh. “He’s really something.”

“Tell me about it, man.” He laughs, too. “I met him at the beer garden in Astoria back when I was together with Daphne, and I couldn't believe — well, I couldn't believe how much he drank, for one — but I couldn't believe how much he talked. The guy has to go through a kilo of blow a day.”

There is a pause in conversation. The stereo prevents awkwardness.

“I'm sorry that the jet lag is fucking with my head so much. I'm really having a difficult time remembering Mordy.”

“Well, what does he look like?”

“Dumbo ears,” he laughs. “That's the first thing everyone notices.” He pauses. “I couldn't tell you the color of his eyes. He's got brown hair. The last time I saw him he had it really short. It wasn't that good of a look because he's got a pretty serious widow's peak now, and he's starting to go bald on the crown of his head.” Caesura. “He doesn't wear glasses. He's about your height, maybe your weight. How much do you weigh?”

“One-sixty,” I respond.

“Five-nine?”

“Thereabouts.”

“He doesn't look like you, but, on a superficial level, you two are very similar.”

“So you're saying I got big ears?”

He laughs. “Besides the ears.” He pulls from his cigarette. “That was good, man. But, no,” he begins, “You know, he really doesn't have any features that make him stand out in a crowd. He doesn't have the stereotypical Jewish nose. He just looks like…I don't know. He looks like a white guy, you know?”

“What about his voice?”

“It's deep. He definitely had himself a thick-ass accent, too.”

“What type of clothing did he wear?”

“He had a lot of long-sleeve shirts. Not button-downs. He was a fan of that layered look: short-sleeve on top of long-sleeve. He had a gray hoodie that he used to wear a lot, but I would guess that that thing decomposed a few years ago.” He pauses. “You want to get that?” I pull my phone out of my pocket. Connie. I am in Bushwick, hating the fact that I'm in fucking Bushwick. This terrible place with its stench of grease and garlic and canned-beer backwash, its aesthetic of indifference and decay—; the men screaming in Spanish, the women crying in vowels—; children wailing so hard that their vocal cords tear and shred—; doors slamming. I'll have to deal with Lolita (the epithet for the hipster girl next door, who's into rough sex, but still blushes when she notices my eyes on her bruises that appear every now and again) playing the part of Electra again. She's not in yet, but she will arrive around three or so. Because it's Saturday night, and Saturday night is a waste so long as it is not a precursor to an awkward Sunday morning. I'll hear them talk — murmurings that sound like a squirrel taunting a mastiff. And then I'll hear the foreplay and the verbal salacity, the yelps and the sound of skin smacking skin, the climax and the whimper. I won't get used to this. I won't get used to the humorless faces, the pride so many take in their poverty of hope and spirit. It infests everything around here as if a fine layer of dust. And it is so pervasive, so pervasive that it's accepted as normal. I am the anomaly, the freak who receives askance brows and derisive grins when he reveals his disbelief. At what? At everything about this place. True, Denise would denounce these thoughts as bourgeois, but if it's bourgeois to think it necessary to feel you belong to something, to someone, then I guess I'll always play the part of the parlor socialist as opposed to the militant Trotskyite, eager to sacrifice one's humanity for the sake of…well, humanity. Because I need someone, anyone, who at least shares this one belief, this one belief that it's not normal to think that vapidly consuming luxury items represents the pinnacle of human existence. Is this excommunication or is this exile? I think it's exile. Because everyone lives so far away. And I'm here, here in my full-size bed, which takes up less than a sixth of the room. The twin in the dorm had comprised almost a third. I have been too lazy to install the shelving unit, so books are stacked upon the floor like blocks of skyscrapers, a skyline of academia in silhouette. Cottony snow tumbles down from an amethyst sky; it accumulates upon the windowsill. Some of it falls to floor and instantly turns to water. I need to buy a screen. I should close the window, but it's too hot in here. Always. The radiator hisses like a goddamn viper at random hours of the night. The super is supposed to come up to fix it, but he keeps putting it off for a myriad of bullshit reasons. He tells me to just shut it off myself at the beginning of every conversation, and then feigns revelation when he remembers the fact that the knob is broken, and that I, consequently, cannot turn it off. I can't sleep; I can only stare to the ceiling with its topography of shadows both grainy and distorted. The room is dimly lit by the moonlight radiating off the snow and the clouds. Pearl Jam’s “All or None” plays on repeat because I need a reference point. Jeff and Melissa are bickering in the other room. They don't realize that I can hear them with perfect clarity. She doesn't think he should come in to ask me if I want anything from New Garden, the Chinese place down the block. —He's not hungry, Jeff. She's right. She's right even if I haven't eaten anything since the Boston-bound Fung Wah pulled into a plaza somewhere in northeastern Connecticut a little over twenty-four hours ago.

“No, that's all right,” I respond.

“Regardless, I don't remember anything else about him in terms of fashion. He wasn't out to prove anything with his clothes.”

I have a new voice mail.

“I'm sorry if this seems a bit out of line, but I'm just curious: what happens if you find him?”

“If I interview him?” I ask. “I basically make a name for myself as a journalist. Also, there's a reward.”

He smiles. “An honest one.” He looks over to Scooter, who, by this point, has fallen asleep. Smoke from his cigarette drifts languidly from the ashtray like a weak faucet, reverse-tape. “One of the greats once said that journalism is a business; and, like all business enterprises, it knows neither laws nor good faith.”

“Who was that?”

“Balzac. If I remember the passage correctly, he goes on to say that newspapers don't create opinions — they flatter them.”

“That's a pretty cynical outlook.”

“Well, you always come off as cynical when you're considered an opinionated asshole. It's the reason why the white community, the black community, and the artistic community have all rejected me. The Japanese community…” He laughs. “Well, it's hard to be rejected when you're not even considered for acceptance.”

“What do you mean by that? Why have you been rejected?”

“No one likes to be criticized. The black community was terribly offended when I said that the leaders perpetuate a culture of victimization and self-loathing as opposed to a culture of empowerment. They disowned me when I said ghetto-fabulous is just a polite way of saying nigger rich, that rap culture's decadence represents one of the lowest forms of existence in any civilization thus far — that nigga's gotta get paid isn't much different than the Nuremberg credo of I was only following orders. And then there's the whole subject of rap stars essentially serving as pawns for different corporations because these corporations think black people are fucking stupid — that they'll buy anything so long as it's endorsed by one of their own. And you know what really fucking pisses me off? They're fucking right. The symbols of black power, within the ghetto anyway, all revolve around conspicuous consumption of designer good, which are virtually all owned by the same white people they claim to resent, hate, whatever.

“The feminist community rallied against me when I said they only fight against the most paltry examples of sexism because they have yet to establish a solid ethos, and, consequently, lack not only direction but an authentic community. They evidently didn't understand the irony of their actions when they launched their relatively large campaign against me. But I don't think it's sexist to point out the inadequacies of theory; I don't understand how anyone could, unless their accusation is just a defense mechanism — which it usually is. Seriously, though, if half of the elite within the feminist community think they are doing something intellectually stimulating by pointing out misogyny in nineteenth-century fiction, they really have nothing to offer. It's like showing racism in the same era. You have to be a child not to notice it. Yes, I understand the desire to map out a genealogy and all of that, and there are great books of postmodern and feminist theory — though the former almost necessarily encompasses the latter — that rely on doing similar things, but, at this point, every dipshit with a trust fund is writing a thesis on late-capitalism's hegemony over discourse in regards to x. It's intellectual masturbation.”

“You said you feel rejected by the white community. Why?”

“Well, there isn't really one community for any culture or social group in this country — with few exceptions. The so-called white community is no different — something that a lot of my black brethren refuse to consider. It's not limited to these, but when I think of white people, I think of people who belong to the corporate culture, to the redneck, proud-to-be-a-Bush-voter culture, and to the white, counter-culture crowd — which envelops the artistic community, as well as much of the music and entertainment industry — you know, those people who always say, Race doesn’t matter here,’ because I’m always the only brother floating around. Regardless, one could say that the only reason that the latter two, the hillbilly and the hipster communities, exist is because each community shares their own unique delusion when considering their relation to the former, which is hegemonic, monolithic, etcetera. The corporate culture is considered the dominant culture, but you will rarely find someone who believes that they are a part of it — there are not that many Patrick Batemans out there. The ultimate joke of it all is that every person is a part of it to some degree, even those who feel they don't belong to any particular sect of American culture — they think themselves just Americans. Now, these people, as well as the rednecks, don't really know anything about me. The other group I mentioned, the so-called artistic community, thinks I'm a conceited prick because I refuse to participate in the little enclave they've carved out of the media. I believe the exact wording I used in an interview a few years ago was: The group is not only narcissistic in the sense that it wants to go fuck itself, which I think it should do if it gets the chance, but in the sense that it's in the midst of drowning in its own hubris.

“I guess it's not that I feel rejected by every element of the white community, just some of them. I think it's more that I can never fit in completely because I'm not white. It's racist, but it's not like most white people want things to be that way. I mean, what's racist about it is that they want people like me to assimilate, even if they don't actively seek to change things one way or the other. All in all, they don't really care; they just accept that the status quo is normal, natural, and that others should follow suit. More importantly, the only time they seek to alter society or culture is when it most flagrantly contradicts its own tenets. They recognize and hope to eliminate racism in its most explicit forms, but they neither question nor abhor the more insidious elements, probably because they don't really notice them.

“The average white guy is a man who cannot be woken up. He is kept in a state of Denkverbot.” My curiosity is discernible. “It kind of means a prohibition of critical thought, though it may not have to be that strong of a word, depending on usage. Regardless, he, the average white guy, doesn't even notice that he's getting screwed, too. That's just how the mechanisms that operate in this society have been set up — keep people oblivious, cloaked in Maya's veil. And while he's not getting screwed as badly as women and people who aren't white, he, the average white guy, is beginning to realize that even his cut of the pie is diminishing. Less government does not mean more power to the people; it means more power to the corporations and the wealthy. Just look at the way the gap between the rich and the poor has expanded over the past thirty years. The obstacle, of course, is that no radical group will reach out to this huge demographic of white men who aren't rich and who aren't poor, who aren't smart and who aren't dumb, because, to radicalized people on the left, it's almost like conceding.

“But nothing is going to happen in this country until the people as a whole recognize that they are all suffering under the same system, and that — while the judicial and martial branches of the government are clearly sexist and racist, while misogyny and bigotry will never evaporate because of an atavistic orientation to the world that most white men unconsciously possess — the economic system — the system that determines virtually every aspect of an individual's life — is still primarily classist, and it is necessarily so.”

“So you're an anarchist?”

“Anarchy,” he laughs. “I'm not one to profess that type of radicalism, but I do feel that Horace was partially correct in asserting that Fear bore Law. Oh, and then there’s that one Pat told me — Macrobius, I think: Good laws derive from bad habits.

“Look, the truth of the matter is that a myriad of cultures existed for a long time without law. This leaves you with the conclusion that either no fear existed, or that fear in-itself is not sufficient for the creation of law. I believe the latter to be far more probable. Fear existed, certainly not the type that exists between classes in modern times or even the fear that existed between the plebeians and the patricians of Rome, but fear nonetheless. Still, there was order. Order was kept by a shared ethos that was primitive, true, but entrenched to such a degree that there was no need for law. So, because of this, I will concede that anarchy is possible.

“However, I believe that there is a component in the very dynamic of any culture that demands order, that demands a potentially innocuous, also a potentially pernicious, inequity between those who give the orders, and those who only follow. Anarchy is when this disparity is at its most innocuous, essentially nonexistent; Totalitarianism, either the Fascist or the Stalinist variety, is when the disparity is at its most pernicious. But, to go back for a second, it seems that fear is not entirely sufficient for law; this fear has to be of a certain magnitude, which cannot be reached without the existence of property. Therefore, it's not fear that is sufficient for law; rather, the conjunction of property and fear suffice for law. Then again, once law has been established, I don't think you can return to life without it. Even if you abolish property, law will not necessarily disappear. It may be somewhat superfluous, but law has become a component within our society's sittlichkeit, thereby making it very difficult, if not impossible, to excise from the minds of citizens.

“But I don't think there's any possibility of property being abolished without horrible, horrible consequences. Perhaps if there's a nuclear war or an epidemic, it may be possible to establish small anarchist communities, sure, but until some great cataclysm occurs, there will continue to be a disproportionate balance of power and wealth between individuals and between communities. We can hope for a bloodless revolution to minimize these disproportions, but that's about it. If you ask me, real revolution is seeming less and less likely. Or even desirable, for that matter.”

“Patrick depicted you as a revolutionary.”

“Patrick took what I said to fit his own context. He's a Romantic, plain and simple — a Modernist still of the belief that the system can be vanquished by a some Messianic revolutionary-artist.”

“I see.”

“Look, revolutions don't happen without political leaders, and political leaders will always wrestle for power whenever there is an opportunity to monopolize it. The sad truth is that there will always be leaders, there will always be disparities in power, there will always be a State so long as people are organized into large communities.” He pauses. “And, to clarify, by large I mean in the hundreds of thousands, millions, billions, etcetera. So we have to reassess the role that leaders should play. Any theorist who claims to be a “Post” whatever will probably say that I'm acting as an agent of the hegemonic forces, but, seriously, all of this “Post” shit calls autonomy and integrity bourgeois illusions; all communal institutions, meanwhile, are tyrannical. So what are you left with? Personal autonomy doesn't exist because it's governed and maintained by social institutions; all social institutions are necessarily tyrannical because it is inherent within their nature to impose themselves upon the particulates of the social system through language and the ideology entailed within the language. So where can you go from there? You obviously can't be in support of a truly pluralistic community because it's essentially a contradiction. Without some form of meta-institution, which will be rejected because it will be considered just a hegemonic extension of the most powerful sect within the confederacy, the confederacy will succumb to entropy, the pluralities will break off one by one, and you'll just end up with a bunch of tiny, autonomous communities. Maybe they'll have some type of interaction with one another, via trade or during a war…whatever. But this pluralistic delusion, carried to its most extreme, gives you nothing more than futuristic tribalism. And this is not desirable because some of these tribes will become aggressive due to a lack of natural resources or a desire for just plain more of them — this is just how humanity works.

“Personally, I believe that we should strive to have the interests of the leaders be as close as possible to the interests of the people they represent. I'm not talking about having a president who's as smart as an average American, mind you, nor am I promoting that type of provincialism that plagues the floor of the House and the Senate with parochial programs and projects that these politicians champion for the sake of securing a victory in the coming election.

“The problem with our country, I think, is that the power granted to the nation-state has been more or less usurped by corporations, and these corporations — be they industrial, military-industrial, media-oriented, commercial, or financial, you know, banking and whatnot — have no allegiance to anything besides the growth of their own profit margins. And not just profit margins in a sustained and extended sense, but in a very immediate sense, which is an abominable way to operate. As Horace said, Vis consili expers mole ruit sua.”

“What does that mean?”

“Brute force, without wisdom, will collapse under its own weight. Or perhaps Kis’ view would be more appropriate: Ambition and stupidity are far more dangerous than insanity.”

“I see.”

“Regardless, maybe it's not brute force or stupidity or ambition. Maybe it's just blind greed. Avarice,” he adds quickly. “Because I don't think mankind is evil. In fact, I don't even believe authority and structure to be necessarily evil. When honest people control the power structure, when people of integrity fill the posts of a representational democracy, I believe that the system is almost always good. Call it bourgeois if you will, but that's what I've come to accept in my old age. Still, I'm cynical. I know it's a rather rare, if not unattainable, scenario. Moreover, I know our country does not strive to follow this model. The majority of the policies that are enacted by the State, be they foreign or domestic policies, are not in our interest. We have no control over the genesis of legislation, let alone any control in the argument for or against certain amendments that find their way into the text. We may elect the representatives, but that's about the only power we have as citizens. Lobbyists, however, do have the power not only to influence, but to essentially write legislation. They also have the power to get these pieces of legislation passed. And guess whom most of the lobbyists represent? Corporations or Think Tanks or whatever…they are all consolidations of power.

“It is almost irrelevant who we elect because the pool of representatives from which we may choose has been reduced to essentially two types of people: those who support the corporate world, and those who support the working class, but concede virtually everything besides their hollow rhetoric to the corporate world. There is a filtering process when it comes to our elected officials. Those who are uncorrupted by and openly critical of the corporate elite are the first to go. Their tenets are labeled socialist or communist or detrimental to small businesses. And once these types of words and accusations get thrown out, even if they are untrue, the people come to recognize the individual as a communist, a socialist, or an elitist — it's like the story of good old Silky Silk.”

“I love that book.”

“Me too. But you see what I'm saying, right? The media will convey any attempt to deny the claim as an attempt to cover up the truth because the media is really just the PR department of the corporate oligarchy. Even if the allegations are completely false, they will tarnish the character of the individual. The charges don't even have to dominate public opinion. The fact of the matter is that that individual will never be fully trusted by the majority of Americans because that person will always be on the defensive — and, consequently, this will make him seem to be guilty.”

Nod.

“Look, I used to be of the opinion that libertarians have something useful to offer to discourse, but I quickly realized that their beliefs are…well, stupid. Perhaps naive. For one, they are typically the first to point out that public workers — city employees and such — are incredibly stupid, lazy, and horribly incompetent. They say we should privatize. Are you going to tell me that suddenly these people will become adept and helpful? You've been to Rite-Aid — it's a private company with a privatized workforce. Are the people there more astute, more proactive?” He grunts. “If you want to make the argument that they are, be my guest, but I'll be the first one, and certainly not the last one, to tell you that…I don't really know. I was trying to think of something witty, and my mind just went totally blank.”

“It's okay; I get where you were going.”

“Okay, look, the point here is that it's not public work that makes people complacent with their own laziness and inadequacies. It's inherent within the capitalist system. The reason for this is that the people on the bottom, the have-nots as they are called, are considered outsiders. Furthermore, these outsiders are presumed to have inherently criminal elements in their character — this is why they are so often thought to be guilty until proven innocent. This now gives you two classes: the member class and the criminal class. Now, let me ask you a question: Do you want a smart criminal, or do you want a dumb criminal? Smart criminals are difficult to catch; they can learn the vulnerabilities of the system, and, if they score, they typically score big. Dumb criminals, on the other hand, are easy to catch, they don't bother studying the system, and most of their crimes are committed because they appear easy or convenient, as opposed to difficult or capable of producing a high yield. The matter is simple: You want dumb criminals, and, therefore, you want a dumb criminal class that will fill up that big space at the bottom of the economy as unemployed, since you need unemployed people in order to keep wages low — more people without a job, more people who will take yours if you think you deserve more money. The way to get this is simple: cut funding to inner city schools, watch test scores plummet, and then demand that more funding needs to be cut in order to give to schools that perform better. You end up with a group of uneducated people, who are lazy because they live in horribly squalid surroundings and have been brainwashed by a media that glamorizes criminal activity, easy money, and, at the same time, sticking it to the man while buying all of the shit the man tells you to — on credit!

“But what really bothers me isn't just the fact that there are more and more people in this class of criminal have-nots; it's rather the fact that the super-rich just keep getting bigger and bigger slices of the pie. And the more problems that come as a result of this process, the more adamant the acolytes of the Chicago School get. Reagan deregulates, Bush deregulates, Clinton deregulates, Bush the Second deregulates. What happens? We keep getting bubble economies, which produce huge yields for some; then, when the bubble bursts, we end up with a greater recession than the one we had before. Do they ask for some type of regulation or restraint to keep this type of shit from happening? No. They demand more deregulation. They're like the priests of Cahokia and Tenochtitlán demanding more sacrifices in order to appease the silent harvest goddess. Just look at the numbers. The more the government deregulates or privatizes what used to be public services, the more severe the gap between the rich and poor gets. Furthermore, the number of rich people actually diminishes. What does that tell you? They're conditionally linked. The more the government privatizes or deregulates, the greater the number of people in this country who get screwed. The rich tell the population wonderful lies — of a society of owners or a society with more freedom — but, in the end, the people who prosper from this type of paradigm, with rare exception, are those who are already on top.

“See, what the oligarchy wants is simple: the continued exploitation of the environment and those who are not within their ranks. The reason for this is very simple: they benefit from this system immensely. And though this trend may be more obvious in terms of the world, in terms of imperialism and the disparities of wealth between first- and third-world nations, it is becoming increasingly evident within the domestic realm, too: the middle class is evaporating; the wealthy not only have more wealth, but more power; the poor not only have less wealth, but less power. So we do not live in a democracy or a republic. The accoutrement of power into the hands of a limited minority is an oligarchy. And when wealth determines the chairs of the oligarchy, it is called a plutocracy.

“Lenin believed that the so-called vanguard of the proletariat would serve as the leadership against the powerful minority, but the majority of radicals in today's society exist within the insular culture of the university, a culture which prides itself on being leftist and progressive, but fails to mention the obvious fact that it is elitist, and the less obvious fact that its pacifism is nothing more than apathy in drag.

“So they are not the vanguard; they are their own class with their own class interests. This is the difference between an academic and an intellectual. An intellectual lives outside of the university. And such people have become harder and harder to come by. You can forget this, living in New York, but it's true. According to Rushdie, they all went into marketing and advertising. I’m hoping it’s a joke, what Rushdie said, but I can’t help but notice that, ever since the sixties, it keeps getting worse. So there's fewer independent intellectuals, the academic community has become stagnant, and the student movement contains nothing but students.” He notices a look. “The students used to be a huge political force. During the Russian revolutions — the one in nineteen-oh-five, especially — the students played a primary role in organizing strikes and demonstrations in the factories. The American student movement, however, abandoned the workers in the sixties because they considered, and still do consider, the workers to be socially regressive — we have done nothing to repair the Wallace/McGovern divide that existed thirty-five years ago. And the movement suffered as a consequence. They are no longer taken seriously because they are a demographic so distinct from the one whose interests they claim to be fighting for. It's not that I'm saying that student radicalism is completely impotent; an active, radical underground does still exist. The problem is that it's influence, even on college campuses, has diminished significantly, and its inadequacies were very obvious after the invasion of Iraq, when virtually all of the kids simply threw out their NO BLOOD FOR OIL signs, and went back to class.

“The labor movement, on the other hand, has not only diminished in strength, it has pretty much imploded on itself because it lacks competent, uncorrupted leadership. Just look to Chicago. The place is a fucking cesspool of corruption, and it seriously hinders the credibility of leftists or anyone claiming to be pro-union.

“This divide has devastated the progressive movement. And this decay has allowed a new form of leadership to take the reigns — not just in terms of unions, but in terms of the people, or, if you want to sound like Jack Reed, the masses.

“Don't you think it interesting that the growth of the Evangelical movement, which really took off in the seventies, coincided with the fallout of the sixties, the decline of the labor movement, and the exponential growth of the lumpenproletariat, or, if you want to just call it what it is in English, the criminal and fascist class? A vast ocean of surplus humanity. Fuck, man, Huey P. Long stepped off the soapbox and found himself a motherfucking pulpit.

“Now, I don't have the typical hatred for religion that most think I do. I can understand why people are religious. I can understand why they have faith. However, I have a real fucking problem when people tell me that they’re Christian because they believe Jesus had some good ideas. Seneca had some great ideas, too, but you don't see people worshiping him and referring to him as the Son of God.

“That's what's paramount in Christianity. You are a Christian if and only if you believe that Jesus was not a prophet, but the physical manifestation of God in man.” He pauses. “Well, Patrick may disagree. Apparently, there were some Gnostic sects who didn't think this way, so I guess the premise isn't entirely sound. Still, the point I'm trying to make is that this belief is not hereditary. It requires real faith, and faith is not passed down. This is why Jesus said he came to divide people, brother against brother, sister against sister…or whatever he said, I don’t really remember. Look, the point is that being a good person is not good enough to get into heaven, according to the New Testament. You need more. You need faith. For example, the wafers and the wine — these are not metaphors for Christ's body and blood, provided you’re Catholic, of course. For them…are you Catholic?

“I’m not really anything.”

“Okay, well, for Catholics the wine and the wafer are both the living tissues of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. But you don't often meet people who believe this — even Catholics. They cannot completely abandon themselves to faith — or cannibalism for that matter. It's simply too much; too contrary to the material world they have come to know and accept. Consequently, they're going to be left to suffer with the rest of us heathens after the rapture — that five- or six-generation-old idea.

“Look, everyone looks for an explanation as to why life isn't perfect. Some say that it is perfect, but that we are too self-absorbed to acknowledge it. If we had the perspective of God, then we would understand this. This is not Panglossian; it is more oriental in nature, even if such beliefs do have occidental precedents. To sum it up: the world is a vale of tears. Those who abide by this basic outlook on life are probably the happiest of the bunch; they accept that life necessitates suffering even if this is an implicitly nihilistic stance to take, and, as a result, they don’t become enraged and forlorn when bad things happen to good people.

“Then there are those who play the blame game. Some blame the devil, which, to me, implies that the devil is more powerful than God. Whatever. Then there are those who say that the problem is the church. And then there are those who say it's the System, or the Man, or the Patriarchy. There are those who say it's the Plutes. It's the Gays, or the Poor, or the Feminists, or the Blacks, or the Latinos. It's the Democrats. It's the Republicans.” He pauses. “The truth, though, is simple: it's humans.

“Most humans cannot be satisfied with their lot in life. Isn't that what the story of Eden is all about? Because we are conscious of possibility, we are capable of imagining a better world than the one in which we reside. The fruit is just the final straw, the symbolic divorce between man's acceptance of nature and man's wish to control nature, which, through a long string of consequents, ends with man's desire to remove God and Fate from the mix. Those who truly have faith try to deny this faculty, this faculty that led to the Fall. So, too, do they try to deny the mind the ability to foster spite over the way the world is versus the way they want it to be. They put their life in God's hands, so the speak. But, as I have said, most of us can't do this. We want someone to hate. We actively fucking seek it. And when a true demagogue comes along, he knows that the easiest way to recruit people is by tapping into this vast pool of hatred and focusing it on one group of people or one individual person. Isn't that what Hitler did? He came across a population ready to hate, provided an easy scapegoat in the Jews, manufactured a form of nationalism based upon a bastardized version of Hegelian and Nietzschean philosophies, and then proceeded to establish an economic system that utilized the Keynesian principal of deficit spending in order to both increase the quality of life for Aryans, who consequently acquiesced to the new regime, and to bulk up an army that had been eviscerated by the Treaty of Versailles. And, if you ask me, Fascism, as an economic system, is defined more by the marriage of executive power — Hitler, Franco, Mussolini — with powerful international corporations — particularly the arms industry and the American banking industry. This is why the term Islamo-fascist doesn't make any fucking sense: Virtually no Islamic country has a serious industrial sector in their economy, let alone the capacity to manufacture munitions for a large standing army — they import most of their weapons either from us or from the Russians.

I have no idea where he's going with this.

“We're always looking for something or someone to blame, for someone to hate. That's maybe the only place where black people have it easy. We can always blame white people. We can always blame history. Are we wrong? No. History has dealt us a fucked up hand. And that history follows us. Every fucking day. But you can't understand that. You can only understand that you can't understand. I can empathize, though. I have no idea what it's like to be a woman. And I know sometimes I forget this. So I can see how white people can forget their privileges from time to time because I sometimes forget my privileges as a man. I can empathize. I know that I cannot have a feminist perspective; I can only be a man seeing the world through a feminist lens. In order to fully understand what it is to be a woman, I would have to be a woman. And I'm not. Even if I hooked my brain up to the brain of a woman, I would still only be able to interpret her perception via my own. The only way to get around this would be to eliminate myself, but this just leads to a paradox: If I can only understand another by dissolving myself, then I cannot be said to experience anything.”

He pauses. He almost smiles. “I'm guessing you thought I'd hate white people, huh?”

“Well, I had no idea you were black until I came here.”

“Were you surprised?”

“Kind of.”

“Why?”

[Imbroglio: See Above]

“People typically mention it.”

“But they don't mention skin color when a person's white. It's the default, the normal, right?”

I stutter.

“Look, man, I don't think you're racist,” he laughs glacially. “But you have to understand, your basic orientation to the world is. You just don't realize it. I do. I can't help but not.” He pauses. “This is something that all black people have to live with. It's infuriating when I see that you don't realize it, but I can't completely blame you. Like I said: I'm sometimes oblivious to the privileges of being a man.”

He reaches over to the table to grab Scooter's cigarettes. “You want one?” he asks.

“Will he mind?”

“Are you kidding me? He brought them out here for me.” He pulls two out and tosses one my way. A lighter soon follows. “Do you mind if I change the music? I'm not really feeling this right now.”

I toss the lighter back his way. “No.”

An early Medeski, Martin and Wood album begins to play.

“I love these guys.”

“You know them?”

“Yeah. Chris Wood is kind of a hero of mine. He knows how to keep a steady head in the middle of chaos.” I reflect for a moment. “That's probably one of the only pieces of fatherly wisdom I ever received in my life. When my grandmother died, my dad came up to me and said, 'Son, you know you're a man when you can keep your head when everyone else is losing theirs'.”

He nods. “Sounds about right.”

“So what's the story with him?” I ask after a few moments. “I don't see the two of you being friends — or cousins for that matter.”

“He's here on vacation. From Detroit.”

“And he's your cousin?”

“My mom was real close with his parents. They never knew my father. He — my dad — was born in the City, and he moved to Detroit in the sixties to pursue a music career. He was a singer, and he was under the impression that Motown was just handing out contracts to anyone who could carry a tune.” Caesura. “I shouldn't say that. He wasn't naïve or conceited; he just thought he had a better chance of making it out there than he did back here. Who knows? He may have been right.

“Now, my granddad wasn't happy with my father's decision. He wanted his son to go to college to become a doctor or a scientist. And it's not like my dad didn't have the brains to excel in either field; he was a brilliant guy. It's just that he believed himself to be an entertainer and an artist. But there's one thing that my father was not, and that was stubborn. So, to appease my granddad, he enrolled at Wayne State as a part-time student. And he did well there. He also did fairly well gigging with his group, the Detroit Diamonds. It's not like he made much — I mean he still had to wash dishes in order to pay his rent.

“Things were going well for him for a few years. He was making a name for himself in the music scene, he was doing well in school, and he was even getting a few articles published in the school paper. And then the riots happened.”

“This is what? Sixty-eight?”

“Sixty-seven. It was really bad, man. And it changed my dad. I mean, he was sympathetic to the cause, you know, the movement — Civil Rights and Black Power. He went to the rallies, and he marched; he read a lot of the literature, too, but he wasn't ready to seriously commit himself to anything beyond his own pursuits. He was an artist first, an activist second. But the riots changed him. The riots changed a lot of shit. The racism within the ranks of the police was a lot more pronounced back then. In the most basic sense, there was the simple fact that the police were white and the majority of the people on the street were not. It affects you even when you see pictures of the things that happened. But he was there. And that's one of the primary reasons that he got involved.

“I don't know much after that. He and my granddad stopped talking because he thought my granddad was a Tom; my granddad thought it was best to just kind of let my dad be, let him be an angry young man. My aunt kept in touch with him, but she didn't really know much because she was only twelve at the time. She and my dad wrote letters back and forth, but he never went into details. In fact, all she ever really knew for certain was where he was living. A part of me feels as though he became a Panther. That would explain why he ended up moving out to L.A. and, later, to Oakland.”

“Why don't you know? I mean, what happened to him?”

“Well, a few months after I was born, he was shot. He ran a stoplight, got pulled over, and apparently reached for his wallet too quickly, if you know what I mean. The cop got a slap on the wrist — you know, 'Don't you go shooting any more niggers, Dan, otherwise we may have to give you another week's suspension. This time without pay.' My father, meanwhile, died of complications in the ER.”

“Jesus. I'm sorry.”

He gives no response. “Anyway, long story short, my mother and I moved back to Detroit — she was from there. Do you know the area at all?”

“Just the suburbs.”

He shrugs. “Well, we ended up in Ann Arbor, in Scooter's house. It's not like it was a hippie commune or anything like that. My mom just rented out the top floor of their home. We lived there until I was four.”

“Then what?”

“My mother wasn't a saint. I'll be the first to acknowledge that.” He's quiet for a long time. “She was dating this fucking guy. I still don't know how serious it was. Scooter's parents didn't pry into her life, and my grandparents didn't hear anything about him. I guess they had been seeing each other for a couple of months — you know, long enough for her to know that she'd gotten pregnant and that this guy was definitely the father. But she didn't want a child. So she did what she thought was right. Only, she didn't tell him.” He takes a long, lachrymose drag from his cigarette. “But he found out.”

He winces and lets out a sound that one could mistake for a chortle, though it clearly wasn't something so frivolous. In fact, there is no way to refer to the gravity it represented. “He didn't mean to kill her. That's what he's told me. In letters. But he did.” Faxo looks down to his cigarette. “He never could explain what came over him.”

“I'm so sorry.” There are no words that can ameliorate such a wealth of pain; sometimes one can only provide a presence. “Really,” I add without thinking. It feels contrived no matter how much I don't want it to be.

“Well,” he says as he looks up, “I ended up living with Scooter and his parents for a little while before moving in with my granddad. And I've always kept up with him and his folks. He comes out here every once in a while. I go to Detroit every once in a while. Well…not Detroit. Ann Arbor or Royal Oak, which is the suburb to which Scooter moved a few years ago.”

There's silence for a while. I try to think about what my parents were doing during the sixties and the seventies. My dad was born in 1951. My mother was born a year later. They don't talk about the past much. When they do, they concentrate on their early childhoods or on the fact that they hated the seventies — probably because they were both stuck in med-school and residency during much of the decade, even if my father is the only doctor in the family. I can't imagine them going to rallies or even being politically conscious. My mother saw the Dead in 1973 while she was attending the College of William and Mary. She enjoyed a few of the songs, but was rather turned off by the scene surrounding the band. My dad only listens to jazz records. He wasn't what Mailer would have called a White Negro, nor is he much of a musician. He really wanted to be, but he just never had the time to cultivate much of a talent. I guess that explains why I had a bass in my hands at the age of seven.

My parents are not Episcopalian, but they do exhibit the characteristics that one typically associates with the sect. They don't talk about the three things that most New Yorkers dwell upon: politics, religion, and sex. They are quiet, polite, socially conservative (with the exception of the issues of abortion and euthanasia), and active in the clubs and civic communities that comprise any suburban town: the PTA (maybe they've finally included an 'S' in there by now), the church, the book clubs that read best-sellers that are “cultural” in the sense that the setting of the book is different than suburbia or some nineteenth century British estate. They wear clothing that is shipped to them from Maine, and blush when they hear certain words. One would think them incapable of farting or shitting due to the tightness of their sphincters.

“I'm sorry if I got too heavy there,” he says. I didn't realize people still used that word.

“It's all right, man.”

He drinks from his bottle of water. He looks to it, takes another sip, and then looks back to me. “Sure you don't want that drink?”

“A glass of water will be fine. I think I have to meet someone, and I don't want to show up stinking of booze.”

“That's probably a good idea,” he says. “I think I'm going to pour myself a glass of wine.” He stands and begins for the area that contains an island, a sink, and the majority of the household appliances. As he opens the refrigerator, he turns to me. “Where did you meet Patrick and Daphne anyway?”

“I took out an ad on Craigslist to see if anyone could help me find Coprolalia. Patrick responded.”

“Yeah, that sounds like him.”

“We met at a bar on Bedford before going to this party in south Williamsburg. That's where I met Daphne.” He stops abruptly after uncorking the wine. He turns to me with an incredulous expression. “It was held by the A-R-E, if you've heard of them.”

“Sure,” he laughs. “Did you have a good time?”

“It was a bit strange, but it was certainly a lot of fun.”

“You spent an evening with the Avatars, Reincarnations, and Eidolons, and you thought it only a bit strange?”

“I though they were called the Acolytes of Risus, the Enlightener.”

“Wait…was this Saturday?”

“Yeah.”

“The costume party.” He nods. “Not exactly the thing that Dick would have wanted, but…well…whatever.”

“Wait…but about the other name. What about the Acolytes of Risus, the Enlightener?”

“They've been called that. Some people have even said that the initials actually stand for Astral Resurrection Entities or Astrally-Resurrected Entities. Either way, these people are profoundly mistaken — to the point that it's almost silly. The A-R-E is more about the celebration of life — you know, a carnival, a Dionysian celebration, a Coney Island of the mind, a circus of the soul…a step beyond what the Germans would call Gesamtkunstwerk. It's different than a total artwork — to translate the term without recourse to nuance — because it seeks to integrate the audience into the work of art, as well — it's not just the utilization of several mediums. I know that the concept is a bit outdated — probably because it's been a buzzword for literary critics, sophists, and philologists for well over a century now — but that was, or is, the most straightforward drive behind the group. It is the attempt to create a new community, and I’m defining community in the way that Cohen has. This requires the abolition of everything that alienates individuals, that separates them. Keens was of the opinion that the community in which we as Americans live has become pernicious, and that the full, exclusive participation in this community has made people anxious, spiteful, emotionally bankrupt.” He laughs to himself. “You know, Mordy got a lot of his ideas from Keens.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Keens was particularly annoyed by what he called assumed historical identifiers, things that highlight the disparities between individuals: you know, class, race, gender, or any of those things in which so many people take so much pride. But people were skeptical of his intentions. As I said before, to abandon one’s status as, say, a woman, who faces persecution as a consequence of the myriad power structures that have been in place since well before the advent of capitalism, not to mention the ones that have come along since the modern age, as well as the paternal and phallocentric nature of language or langue…well, this type of second-class status within the social hierarchy understandably makes them suspicious and not unjustifiably hostile to any form of assimilation as it’s, again justifiably, presumed to be male-oriented.

“They’re right to be suspicious. I don’t want to say that they’re not. But Keens’ hope was that, if everyone could abandon all of the elements within bourgeois society that define people, the community with its symbols and the meanings derived from them…well, they would be able to truly associate with the other, the people by whom they are surrounded; they would be able to experience a type of context that would eliminate pretences that are largely based on the imperious nature of the other — the other who dictates what is desired, even if this other does not know it. But he knew it couldn’t be done without some type of pretence of his own. And, to a certain extent, he was right. Even among hard-core Marxists and radicals, there is that need to intellectualize everything in order to gain, at the very least, the respect of the community. If you just talk like a normal person, there's a good chance that you'll be dismissed as, at best, a fool, or, at worst, a reactionary.”

“So Keens was something of spiritualist, a guru?”

“No,” as he closes the door of the fridge. “He was an artist first and foremost. His aim was to turn people into pieces of living art, or living pieces of art — I forget. The idea was that people needed to be granted a context within an environment that was neither repressive nor artificial. He thought that all humans really sought thee things: love, creative work, and knowledge. He wanted a community that provided these things, but he was grounded enough to know that such a paradigm simply is not possible in any zeitgeist or episteme or whatever you want to call it, that promotes competition and discourages candor. He wanted a society without antagonisms, whether based upon class or sex or gender or race, and he wanted to allow it to flourish within the framework of leisure, as the freedom to participate in leisure, among the non-aristocratic or mercantile classes anyway, is one of the most important elements within twentieth century capitalism. He wanted a place in which there was nothing but people, people stripped of status and categorized, social identifiers.”

“A utopia.”

“In a manner of speaking.” He hands me the glass of water before he sits.

“Thanks.”

“But utopia paints a spurious picture. It, a utopia, can never be fully realized because it requires too much energy to maintain. The second law of thermodynamics forbids a sustained utopia — unless, of course, one is speaking of a utopia as envisaged by Orwell or Huxley. Regardless, Keens understood the problem.”

“That a true utopia is unattainable.”

“No, that it can only exist in the moment, perhaps only in the mind if you want to sound like a total jerk-off.”

“I see. So he understood this.”

“Yeah, you know, tenacity and failure are stranger bedfellows than tenacity and success, especially if one is capable of understanding limitations. If one is blind to the limitations of their chosen enterprise, however, perseverance and futility are brothers in arms.”

“I see.”

“As I've said, his aim was just to provide a venue. The parties were meant to be small, infrequent bursts of good will, perhaps guideposts to allow one to absorb the philosophy espoused by the group. It wasn't a palace of the sullen — you know, those types who spend their adult life whining over the fact that they didn't quote unquote fit in (while holding up a hand with two curled fingers) during high school. Those types can be the most self-absorbed assholes one can come across. Anyway, Keens sought to provide a place for spiritual fulfillment, the ability to feel involved in something. He wasn't aiming to be all-inclusive, nor did he want it to be some type of exclusive club like the Stonecutters, either. Moreover, he wanted to keep politics out of it because political organizations have a nasty tendency of creating divisions, especially when the organization has no real power. He succeeded in a way, though one could argue that the group was very political, just not in the sense that Americans think of a quote unquote political group. He wanted to have a place where people in the right frame of mind could participate in something greater than themselves without feeling repressed, that they could experience that sense of gemeinschaft, which, according to the Chicago School and Weber and Durkheim, is a necessary feature of urban, industrialized society.”

“That sounds like the goal of Burning Man — or a rave.”

“Well, I think we both know that rave culture is founded more on drugs that anything else — you'd have to have the intellect of a ten-year-old not to see that. Keens, on the other hand, wanted to pull away from the drug culture. He saw what it did to the summer of love. He had a lot of friends who ended up in jail or dead. And he was certainly familiar with people like the Burnouts, who had no real talent, no new ideas, and no vision of anything; they just thought that drugs, heroin in particular, would provide some kind of artistic catalyst — at least this is the excuse a lot of these people utilize in order to hide the deeper issues as to why they opt to pick up the needle as opposed to the fucking pen. The belief is obviously transparent. Some may say that it makes great players better, which I am more than reluctant to entertain, but heroin isn't more important to the cultivation of a sound than the hours each day that a true artist, someone like Coltrane and Evans or Burrows, must dedicate to practicing and writing. In other words, drug use and talent are not conditionally linked. It may be prevalent among the talented, but that has more to do with the Romantic idea of the artist as an outcast or a tortured soul in need of some means of escape, which, of course, breeds people who follow such an archetype. That's what I always found so funny about Camus' Meursault — he's not an artist, which, to me anyhow, indicates that the character is to be considered kind of an everyman. Everybody feels estranged. And what separates the artist from the common person is that the common person learns to deal with or ignore the feeling of estrangement. The artist, on the other hand, creates in order to vanquish his malaise. 'Why does an artist create?' so many have asked. Simple: He has to. If you don't understand this, then you're not an artist.

“You clearly get it. What do you do?”

“Well, I’m into journalism, obviously; but what I really love is music.”

“Bass, right?”

“Yup.”

“What kind?”

“You name it. I have an upright and two electrics: a vintage Rickenbacker, and this custom that my dad got for me on my eighteenth birthday. I can play the cello, too, but I've never owned one. Either way, I focus mostly on jazz — bop and fusion.”

“Who's your favorite bassist?”

“Well, Chris Wood is definitely up there, but I really love Eddie Gomez and Scott LaFaro. Ron Carter's a favorite, too.”

“Right on, man. You don't meet too many jazz cats anymore.” He pauses. “You don't use, I assume?”

“I used to smoke a lot of grass, but I've given that up. My only poison now is booze.”

“A pure soul. That's good to hear.”

“But about Keens. He wasn't one for drugs?”

“I don't know. It's not that he wanted to forbid drugs; he just didn't think they were necessary to induce the type of experience he wished to provide. If drugs helped some people get into the right state of mind, then he saw no reason to discourage users, but it’s not like he spiked everyone’s drink with acid to melt away the…well, whatever’s supposed to melt away when you take that shit.”

“I see. But I guess I'm still a little unclear as to what you mean by the right state of mind.”

“I don't mean to harp on LSD, but I’m sure you’re familiar with LSD, and that, back in the sixties, it was considered a wonder drug by both the CIA and the emerging counter-culture, especially Timothy O'Leary and his adherents. This is because it dissolves the social structure with which everyone has been indoctrinated, or at least allows the various symbols within the community to lose their meaning for a time. Furthermore, it very often introduced users to a spiritual dimension that had not previously been accessible.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Some people, however, are too stupid or immature to understand just how profound the experience really is. I mean, for every Pink Floyd you have ten thousand Monkees. This could be said of psilocybin, too. Regardless, these types cheapen it in a way — it ceases to be an experience and it becomes a high. Keens did not want people like this involved with the A-R-E. While it is certainly the case that some could have learned from the practices of the group, he thought it more likely that they would simply go through the motions without taking anything away from the experience. In other words, he didn't want dogmatists, and, perhaps more importantly, he didn't want the organization to be overrun with degenerates.

“Now I'm not saying that LSD was a big part of the experience. I'm just comparing the two: The A-R-E was not meant to be a frivolous organization, just as LSD should not be considered a frivolous drug.”

“Okay. But I still don't understand this experience he wanted to provide.”

“No one knows exactly. There's plenty of speculation, no doubt, but no one actually knows what his big goal was.”

“What about the JOKE?”

“Well, that's just what the goal was called. Some people within the A-R-E believe that the JOKE was his suicide — that there is no higher purpose; the JOKE is that people think there is.”

“So no one really knows why he did it?”

“Did what?”

“Why he committed suicide.”

“No. I mean, people claim to know, but there's no universal consensus on the matter. The more nihilistic sorts have their reasons, you know, they think it’s because there’s nothing else. But other fractions have their own conjectures. There are those who think that his death was made to look like a suicide. The supposed culprits behind the conspiracy range from the CIA to the KGB, the Mossad to the Vatican. Trying to even explain some of these theories is something of a cluster-fuck if you ask me. I don't really want to get into them.”

“That's fine.”

“Anyway, most people aren’t so quick to jump to such paranoid conclusions. Some think that it was caused by guilt. Others purport boredom. Still others claim that it is the ultimate expression of freedom, which, in a sense, is true, but it’s irrelevant. I’ve even heard that his death was made to look like a suicide because Keens was under the impression that he was the second coming of Christ. As you must surely know, suicide is a pretty serious sin. You can't resurrect yourself with that type of baggage — in fact, you can't even get out of the swamp around the walls of Dis, according to Dante. That's why some people portray Judas as a saint rather than one of the three doomed to spend eternity examining a Satanic palette — or, if you're Borges, as the real Son of God.”

“Okay, but I want to go back to the A-R-E. I still don't understand what it even is. I mean, Keens wanted to promote laughter and what sounds like some kind of venue out of one of Foucault’s wet dreams — I can understand that. But what does context have to do with anything?”

“Context is very important to people. They seek it because they need to wrap their heads around their place in the world. Think of Lacan's Big Other.”

“I’m not really familiar with Lacan.”

“Okay. Well, here’s a brief explanation. Think of the super-ego. Think of how it tells the ego, the self, what to do. Okay, now remove this individual superego, and place it in the social world as some ultimate authority figure. This is the Big Other. It issues objective imperatives, and it can be an institution, a person, or even a deity. The most important element, though, is its objective status. This means that people heed its ethical, spiritual, artistic, etcetera, commands without question. The heavy duty Marxists put their lives in the context of historical progress. They believe their actions will eventually bring about a future free of the injustices that are perpetuated by class antagonisms. Their Big Other is history; it, to them, is objective. Christians place this life in the context of trial that is meant to sort out the wicked and the virtuous, and that all people will be judged accordingly either in death or when Judgment Day comes. Their Big Other is the Holy Trinity; God is granted objectivity.

“But even the most destitute vagrant has a context, something apposite to an identity. See, an identity is merely the consequent of an individual’s context within a community. Seen in this light, the question 'Why am I here?' is a question of context. Furthermore, it suggests that you should be somewhere. 'Why am I here as opposed to there?' 'Why am I here at all?' These questions are posed because people want to know how they are supposed to fit into their surroundings, not how they are actually supposed to be. 'How am I supposed to be?' is easy — happy. 'How am I supposed to attain a perpetual state of happiness?' is simple, too — feel at home. And how do you feel at home? You find your context, and you love it. Amor fati.”

“And how do you do that one?”

“That’s the hard one. See, people feel that their freedom is a burden. There is a vacuity in freedom because it provides no answers; it actually eliminates a tangible sense of context. This point is very often ignored because the vast majority of people believe freedom to be, necessarily, a good thing. But it isn't always good, especially for people seriously trying to discover themselves. Freedom, in thought anyhow, opens up a lot of possibilities because it is dialectically opposed to the acquiescence to dogma. True freedom seeks to abolish the a priori, thereby making the proper way to behave a deeply personal and subjective question. Truth is subjectivity, as Kierkegaard said. But proclaiming there to be truth only in subjectivity is nothing more than an admission of ignorance, not to mention an open invitation for anomie and extreme and debilitating alienation. In other words, all context is abolished. This is why people often reject true freedom; they turn to dogma and ideology, to archetypes, to mores that provide the comfort and security that such alienation denies.”

“So Keens was a nihilist.”

“No, absolutely not. A person who refers to him or herself as an “-ist” of any sort clearly possesses a series of tenets, or at least one tenet. Buddhists believe in the teachings of Buddha; Marxists believe in the teachings of Marx, in history. Most nihilists, however, are their own confused brand of believers. I mean, the proposition 'I believe in nothing' is grammatically vague. Do you believe in something that you are referring to as 'nothing' or 'nothingness'? Do you deny yourself any attachment, any cathexis, and espouse a dogma of criminality like some type of metaphysical insurgent? Do you believe in the worship of science and progress, like one of Turgenev's characters, thereby making you more of a Positivist than anything else? Semantically, any of these positions can be true for one who asserts the proposition, 'I believe in nothing.'

“I don't know about you, but I have a hard time taking nihilists seriously. If one renounces dogma, and the tenets of any form of morality, that's fine. But to exhibit such a great deal of pride in one's renunciation reveals that the process is one of negation, not of abjuration. And that's what bothers me.

“To negate all beliefs is not to not-have beliefs. This is something the adolescents who posture as freethinkers fail to observe. To be free is to be lost. And to be truly lost, in the existential sense, is to lack contextual relevance, in your mind, anyway, to any community, any archetype, anything at all, and this means that you don't believe in nothing — you are incapable of possessing a belief, incapable of cathexis, incapable of empathy, sympathy, etcetera. This is far more severe, far more terrifying, than relativism. Relativism can become a dogma like anything else, as it proclaims, in absolutist terms, the non-existence of justifiable deference. The sense of estrangement to which I am referring is something far more profound, but it is not sustainable. You just can't mentally do it, no matter who you are. No, man: see the idea is to jump into this abyss, to abolish all beliefs, but only for a short time. From the abyss one assesses their life, their place within society, their ideas, their opinions, in the attempt to generate a belief structure without contradiction. All great philosophers, most recently Žižek, have suggested that this type of existential quest is a necessary stage in the development of an adult, of what, in Freudian language, is called the genital stage. And, yes, I know Freud is often called phallocentric. But, if you think about it, there is patriarchal control over discourse even now, so it only makes sense for him to be phallocentric. Perhaps he even understood this, which does not make him phallocentric; rather, it means that he understood that the discourse of the community would shape preferences and personalities, and, as the discourse was phallocentric, preferences and personalities would consequently share this tenet.

“Regardless, the point is that the most brilliant philosophers of the past few hundred years have felt that it is necessary for one to abolish all beliefs and to build them back up again in order to truly progress as an individual. Heidegger advocated it, as did Kant. Descartes most explicitly did. Spinoza certainly did — perhaps a bit more implicitly than the others—, as did Wittgenstein. I even believe that's what Nietzsche was always referring to whenever he spoke of climbing to great heights. Zarathustra is the name one can attach to a person who has acquired wisdom as a consequence of this procedure — one who is immoral because morals have become irrelevant; he is not antipodal to morality, he has transcended it.

“But Keens was a far way off from all of that for a long time. I remember him telling me about his life prior to the A-R-E. He was lost in the truest sense of the word. The sixties certainly advocated anomie, but for all of its haughty language it failed to replace all of the alienating forces in society that so many French sociologists and anthropologists and linguists condemned. Just the fact that people continue to speak of The System and The Man should articulate this rather clearly.” My brows narrow. “Look, think of it in terms of definite descriptions — Russellian, not Strawsonian. There is an organizational dynamic, x, that is a System. There is no more than one organizational dynamic that can be truthfully called a System. Finally, if x is an organizational dynamic, then it is a System. They cannot think beyond it. It is The System. They cannot conceive of another System, which is why it has been denoted as such. The best they can hope for is nihilism; furthermore, the best thing a nihilist can be—, what one could say the ultimate virtue of nihilism is—, is martyrdom. They both cannot conceive of a world in which they willfully participate in the System, and cannot conceive of a world without the System. There's no dialectic that can be fashioned out of this contradiction. The existence of any system will always be The System.”

What?

“Keens did not want to be a martyr, nor did he want to participate in capitalism, as he felt it was essentially evil. But he did not want to die. Even if he couldn't come up with a workable alternative, a real revolution, he still felt that he could alter his surroundings enough to be happy. Some would argue that this made him more of a Romantic than a Modernist — and certainly not a Postmodernist. This would have essentially placed him fifty years behind the times. But this criticism simplifies his vision. It has more to do with creating a new understanding of how one interacts with others, as well as a new way of interacting within an environment and a community. But this all came later. For most of his life he just knew that he wanted something, it was on the tip of his tongue, and yet nothing would materialize for him.

“I think it was sixty-nine that he finally went into seclusion. He did not feel as though he had the capacity to freely associate with another person unless one speaks in vulgar, market-oriented terms. He became increasingly withdrawn. He found himself internalizing, becoming narcissistic. He was horribly cynical about the direction of the world because he felt that there was no longer a place for individuals unless one wanted to jump on the Rand bandwagon, which is a state of denial as opposed to a philosophical system, one that's little more than a weak, ethical buttress for Smith's rudimentary capitalism, which, of course, didn't even exist at the time she, Rand, was writing. On the other hand, the concept of living in a hive didn’t really appeal to him, either.

“I guess it all really started in his youth. Back then, Keens believed in the Messianic message found in Marx and Engels, as well as in the propaganda of the Bolsheviks — of a future society that finds its generation in one glorious revolution that eliminates all of the injustices of the world, that dismantles the oppressive machinery of the capitalists and reassemble it into an efficient and equitable system managed and run by the workers. Even during the thirties he was hesitant to accept that the Bolshevik revolution had degenerated into a Kafkaesque Inquisition, into a despotism in which the State's ability to perform surveillance on the population was about the only place one could find infrastructural efficiency. He wanted to believe, you see. He wanted to think that there was some potential for a return to Eden, for a return to innocence, for a return to peace. But this had been lost in Russia. He finally turned his back on the Bolsheviks when they formed a non-aggression pact with Hitler. 'How could an alliance with the Nazis be expedient to the global revolution?' he thought. And so he was once again without hope. The War came and went without any great change. If anything, he become more misanthropic, less sympathetic to the idea of there being some kind of integrity that is inherent in each human. By the way, if you've ever read Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, then you'll understand his complaint — a lot of American soldiers could have killed a Nazi with nothing more than a noose. But that's neither here nor there. He had always hated the right. I guess he just never realized how pervasive many of the tenets of Nazism are in America, especially the Midwest and the Plains.

“The point, though, is that he began to feel disgusted by the left, too. He couldn't accept what they were espousing in the wake of the war, at the advent of the Cold War. Even the less political rebels that came later, during the fifties and the sixties, he viewed with skepticism. He thought their counter-culture to be just as contrived as the rigid mores of the squares. True, these people, he felt, were onto something; but he believed that an ethos founded upon hedonism and anarchy and placed under the specious banner of love was doomed to fail. The truth was that the majority of the hippies did not want to actually destroy privatized industry and subsidized murder. As Robespierre said of Danton, they wanted a revolution without the revolution. They didn't want to overturn anything; they just wanted an endless vacation from it. Endless summer — as though these fucking idiots were children between seventh and eighth grade. Soon enough, all the revolutionaries were on CBS.

“And now that's all you see — the summer of love, when everything was fucking groovy. When you read something like Roth's American Pastoral, it seems unreal, overstated — because you rarely hear about the few real radicals during that decade. You don't hear about the bombs. No, it’s just the fucking saccharine: Sonny Bono as opposed to Sam Melville, the Moody Blues instead of MC5. Get what I'm saying? Rock replaced by pop; radicalism replaced by infantile recalcitrance. All of the rebellion of the sixties has been defanged, eviscerated, repackaged. And your generation and my generation eat it up. The Sixties was about the music, say the infomercials. No, it wasn't. The radicals of the Sixties attempted to wrestle civilization from the hands of plutocracy, but the hippies weren’t up to it. And so that generation fucking failed. They gave up, became immured to the atrocities taking place around the world, and fell in line. Yes, they became everything they hated; they became the bourgeois cows grazing out in the suburbs because they grew up. Grew up. Matured.” He sighs. “And now the elite are too strong. They own everything — everything has been subsumed by the monolithic nature of capitalism. As Floyd said it most succinctly, we're all just bricks in the wall.

“So there's no hope now. Hope for a better world is a fucking pipe dream. Any serious critique of the elite and the institutions that they control will eventually be disseminated by the elite and the institutions they control. If it's successful, they benefit — they make money. If it fails, they benefit — their crimes remain unknown. They always benefit. But that's not what bothers me. It's the complacency of the people.

“Do you realize we're about five decades away from having an environment so denigrated and polluted that only a fraction of the people on the Earth will be able to live above poverty, and yet there is no effort to confront any of these problems. Why? Because it will hurt profit margins. Who the fuck cares? The longer we wait, the more sacrifices we will have to make in order to live a life that is worthwhile. You can give up the joy of owning a car now, or in fifteen years you can give up eating anything grown in Kansas because the entire fucking state has become a desert. And what do people decide? They keep their car. Fuck the future. It’s the myopia of capitalism — the type of consequentialism that even Bentham couldn’t endorse. These people are like the fucking Munduruku — a people with a language that lacks any word for a specific number greater than four.”

Okay.

“It's this type of myopia that drives me crazy. Why would someone make such an irrational choice? It's not simple laziness. It's more insidious than that, more virulent, more surreptitious. It's because modern capitalism has turned happiness into a series of commodities; people equate their status, not just their economic status, but also their social status and their sense of integrity, with the things by which they are surrounded. Do you see what this means? The context in which modern man finds himself is one of anonymous consumption. Every facet of his routine — his routine! — reminds him of this, and this profound emptiness that man feels in this society is only nurtured by the manner in which he performs his labor, the manner in which he consumes his food, the manner in which he experiences leisure. He is robbed not only of his spontaneity, but of his will to create, too. And it's only the most incorrigible who will be able to endure in this environment without being dehumanized and subdued. And this incorrigible person is the artist. It is only the artist who will be able to maintain. People will call him eccentric, which is nothing more than a polite way of saying, 'You don't know how to follow protocol.' Dick always found this amusing. Artists are almost always eccentric. Do you see? It's because they still have the will to create — and maybe that's all Nietzsche's will to power really is. It's the capacity to shape…to create oneself, even if almost every component of that creation is determined and imposed. It's that tiny bit of autonomy, of freedom, of play, within a predetermined system that makes an artist an artist, a philosopher a philosopher. And maybe that's all Nietzsche's amor fati really amounts to, too: having the power to appreciate your own impotence.

“And that's what makes the artist stand out, what makes his existence necessarily tragic — his desire to be liberated from a world in which he is necessarily confined. But the majority of people in this country have not proven themselves capable of remaining independent in the face of so relentless an enemy. And the result is a pitiful, vacuous, and passive consumer, what a lot of thinkers, most notably Ortega y Gasset, have called mass-man,” he says, now with less passion. “The emptiness of which I speak results in what Wilhelm Reich called the emotional plague, which is more of a personality type defined by extremely antisocial tendencies than a disease.

“Look, the point is that the will of most people in contemporary society lacks uniqueness. This is not an accident. The volition of mass-man is manufactured and polished by an economic system that seeks efficiency in both consumption and production. It's just the nature of capitalism, especially now in its more mature stage. So maybe the elite are not evil; they just don't realize that the mechanisms that they endorse and get rich from squelch individuality. We have been surrounded by forces that seek to prevent critical or existential thought, that seek to diminish any knowledge of history seen through a universal or unpatriotic lens, that seek to ingrain in us the idea that capitalism is not confined to an historical epoch, but that it is the natural order, the only condition under which man will not end up in the throes of ignorance, superstition, and penury. The education system encourages this. The media encourages this. The pharmaceutical industry encourages this. And these industries not only own the means of production in their respective fields; they own the government as well. They have come to control every element that comprises the context of mass-man's daily life; consequently, they now control the definitions of symbols, the symbols by which man navigates through this world.”

“This sounds like a cult.”

“What?”

“What you're telling me. This sounds like the introduction to a cult. It's good versus evil, us versus them. It's not that simple. It's not like the richest people in the world got together and concocted this plan to control the entire population by removing Thucydides from the curriculum of every high public high school in America.”

“Look, the A-R-E is not a cult. The A-R-E is about more than that. Look, what I'm saying is this: To Keens, the paradigm of the slave and master was outdated, bunk. The master, one with an orientation of domination, will be capable of justifying anything because this person sees everyone else as a slave, a pawn. This is a person without integrity, a person of caprice and malice. The slave, one with an orientation of submission, is equally repulsive. The slave capitulates to irrational power structures, not out of fear, but under the impression that such cowardice is moral, even virtuous. He claims these virtues to be founded upon integrity, but there is no integrity in slavery, just as there is no integrity for the master for whom ethics is a practice in rationalizing whim and fancy.

“The two are obviously dialectically opposed. Moreover, neither is desirable. Keens felt that this could not be internalized; one cannot be either master or slave without accepting an absurd form of dualism. So, to him, the A-R-E was an attempt to find a synthesis between the two that would consequently abolish the two not only on a societal level, but on a personal level: the abandonment of egomania on the one hand, the abandonment of irrational deference on the other. But it was more than that, too. It's difficult to explain, but here's the long and the short of it:

“Every individual is an amalgam of experiences. These experiences create the individual's personality and preferences, the way in which they interpret the world in which they live in, the meaning they predicate upon symbols and signifiers. Now, a lot of people have personalities that are founded upon archetypes within any given community. John Wayne's typical character in his movies, for example, is an archetype, which, mind you, is more significant than a personage. Many American men have come to identify him as an archetype, perhaps even the paragon, of masculinity. They consequently strive to replicate his behavior and mannerisms. But this desire is not entirely genuine. They feel as though society wants them to do this. It is the desire to be the other that the other desires, but it is simply not a possibility. As a result, any individual who follows this road will be forever in a state of becoming, even though there is no possible way to satisfy this desire. On the one hand, it is simply impossible — you can’t be what you are not. Furthermore, no individual fully wishes to be like any one archetype. Each individual wants to emulate several archetypes, and these archetypes are often at odds with one another.

“Eidolonism is the attempt to remove the impulse to become one or several archetypes. Most instantly recognize the contradiction in the argument — if one is an amalgam of experiences, then their experience of wishing to be an archetype is a necessary part of their personality. This is true, Keens would concede, but it misses the greater wisdom of an imperfect, perhaps only nascent, philosophical movement. If the various archetypes that one seeks to emulate are in contradiction, then one cannot ever exist without some form of inner turmoil that leaves the personality in a constant state of agitation. How do you extricate the individual from this dilemma? Simple: strive to remove the archetypes. That's the goal. It's virtually impossible to achieve it, I know, the A-R-E is supposed to be about realizing the beauty of a human in his or her individuality — this includes a person's past, present, and future, as well as everything that is either corporeal or spiritual, but it does not include the numerous archetypes imposed upon those who live in this or that society, nor does it include any meaning cast upon a symbol that the individual feels is dubious or inauthentic.

“But to fully appreciate oneself, one needs to appreciate others. One needs to feel comfortable, to have a context within a community of which they feel unencumbered. Furthermore, one needs to appreciate the greats from the past — not only because they are brilliant, but because that's how one comes to really understand the individual self in a historical manner. Then again, Keens wanted people to abandon their prejudice, which, in a sense, meant that they had to abandon certain elements of their history. Prejudice, after all, is created by history.”

“So one must realize the beauty of history by abandoning it?”

“No…I mean, yes. But not how you put it. One must recognize their place in history, but one cannot dwell upon the history. If one is living in the past, then one is stuck in a state of becoming. The goal is to be. And one can only really be when they see themselves within the context of their surroundings.

“Have you ever heard of Ewen Cameron?”

“No.”

“He was a psychiatrist. He worked up in Montreal during the fifties, and the CIA funded a lot of his research — you know, MKUltra shit. You've heard of that?” Nod. “Okay. Well, he realized that a patient's sense of self could essentially be eliminated by electroshock therapy — which destroys short-term memory — and sentences of total isolation. In other words, a mind that is forced to retreat into itself will inevitably collapse. This seems to buttress what Hegel posited: If one is liberated from all of the structures of society, then that individual ceases to have an identity. Identity is sufficient for a community.

“Keens would say that the greatest artists are those who are humans being. Get it? And that's the spirit of improvisation, and real art is nothing but improvisation. 'If you understand 'Trane,' he once told me, 'not just the notes he's hitting, or the theory behind the changes, but the force, then you will perceive his eidolon. The eidolon reveals itself in art.' Spontaneous creation is an instance of autonomy, perhaps humanity's only means of true autonomy — unless one claims that creation is just another example of an individual existing as an agent of the social forces around him, which is certainly possible, but this entails the complete absence of free will, which is something that no human can accept once they step out of the classroom. Regardless, that's what Keens wanted to do: He wanted to provide the venue for people to embrace that force within themselves, not just when it was directed at a canvas or through an instrument or onto a page, but in life, and he wanted there to be a community that shared this ethos in order to allow for a new understanding of the world in which we currently live.”

“The party just seemed like a bunch of people having fun.”

“Fun is kitsch,” he says stolidly. “So, too, was the spiritual awakening of the majority of the hippies in the sixties.” He pauses. “This is similar, only it is substantive. There are exceptions, of course.”

“Mongo?”

“Onion Man?” He laughs. “No, Onion Man is on his own page.” He lights another cigarette. “You said you know Winchester, right?”

“Yeah. He was the one who—”

“Told you about the Astral Resurrection Entities. You should have realized that the title doesn't make any sense. Onion Man came up with it to fuck with Winchester.”

“Why?”

“He, Mongo, had recently seen some documentary on the Yanomamo. In the film, the ethnologist or anthropologist tries to figure out the genealogy of various members of the tribe. After a few weeks, he finally realizes that the whole village was fucking with him, and that none of the information he'd been given was accurate. Onion Man thought it'd be funny to do the same type of thing to Winchester.”

“Why?”

“Humor.” Caesura. “Look, I don't know why Onion Man does half the shit that he does. I don't know why he's pissed away so much time trying to recreate one of Reich's orgone boxes. I don't know why he cans his own beer as opposed to bottling it. I don't know why he believes Gravity's Rainbow to be a continuation of V. Regardless,” as he drags from his cigarette, “Mongo's the reason why Winchester refuses to believe that Mordecai is Coprolalia.”

“What about him and Daphne?”

“Who?”

“Winchester.”

“Yeah — he wishes. They, Poot Moint, ended up playing a few sets at the party Winchester attended. They exchanged numbers. That's about it.”

“What about the Russians?”

“What?”

“The Russians. Sean said that—”

“Oh, that's because it was down in Brighton.”

“How do you know all of this?”

“I was there. Back then I spent a lot of time with the A-R-E.” He laughs. “We ended up sacrificing a pig on Brighton Beach — another one of Onion Man's brilliant ideas. Winchester ended up hightailing it back to the City after that.” He becomes quiet for a moment. “But you understand what I'm saying, right? About Keens and the A-R-E?”

“It's like a religion.”

“Only in the sense that it seeks to provide a spiritual experience without recourse to God. Have you ever thought about the conditional relationship between man’s soul and God? Does either one suffice for the other?”

“Well, it seems like God needs to exist for man to have a soul. Where else would it come from?”

“Has science proven that God didn’t create the Earth?”

“Well…no, actually.”

“I mean in seven days. Is Genesis accurate?”

“No.”

“So it’s possible that the material world can exist without God. Why not the spirtitual, too?”

Caesura.

“Look, the A-R-E was established to attempt to answer some of the questions that have plagued the human mind since it first became conscious of itself. The spiritual experience that Keens aimed to create was to be generated by the free association of eidolons among other eidolons. You know, because Keens always believed conversation to be the highest form of art. He was not fond of the now famous quote of a Nobel laureate, who claimed that hell is other people. Then again, the same laureate once said that an adventure is an event that is out of the ordinary without being necessarily extraordinary. So I guess he didn't have it all wrong.”

“Who? Sartre?”

“Yes. Look, the point is that hell is not other people; hell is dealing with the pretenses of other people. Heaven is all space, all time, filled with eidolons only.”

“So that was the goal.”

“No, the goal, the JOKE, was something different. As I've told you, no one really knows what it was or what it is supposed to be.”

“Did he ever write anything concerning the JOKE? Did he have a manifesto?”

“No.”

“Did he leave a note upon his death?”

“Yes.”

“What did it say?”

“'The only proof of the present is in syntax.'”

14

She's standing on the east side of Fifth Avenue, in the middle of what would be Seventy-First Street if there were no park, only a further extension of concrete. There continues to be a relentless drizzle, turning the City into a symphony of hues a la Ligeti. She is a haze of red and bronze with a chestnut halo that flutters gently as a slight breeze picks up, rustling the various shades of gray and brown and green that surrounds her. She is animated once again — self-animated rather — and no longer any number of visions torn from the picture book of memory. While the Connie of the past had the tendency to elicit every visceral emotion that seeks to protect or embrace or surrender, the Connie of the present evokes things no less carnal, but they all feel negative. I can't help but feel as though I hate this woman.

She is waving now, summoning a flood of images from the past, images that had not necessarily been repressed, but nonetheless relegated to some place that never gets visited, kind of like a senile grandparent's home. The entire train ride up here I felt inundated by her, by the fact that I would once again be in her presence. It was not the warming anticipation of having the opportunity to resume a relationship that had, perhaps, only been suspended; it was more like a walk to the principal's office. I knew I wanted to see her. The problem is that the veracity of this proposition is time-sensitive. I did want to see her, just under the condition that the act occur six months ago.

As the train barreled uptown, I couldn't help but ask myself why she suddenly wanted to have me back in her life. After she avoided so many phone calls. After she explained that she needed time to herself. After she so callously redacted the history that we had shared so as to make years of mutual cathexis seem like a few weeks of innocent fun. These tactics of denial had been employed directly after the break, of course — those first few weeks when we were both attempting to reacquaint ourselves with the type of solitary life that is lonely, lethargic, and often accompanied by damp pillowcases and empty bottles of liquor, beer, wine — whatever is available. Over the past three months, however, she has become less resilient to the idea of the two of us having been in love at some point in the past, to the two of us being just friends now, to the two of us not being able to stop loving one another even if this means we are no longer in love, just lovers in the sense of being like family or friends or lost in some terra vague that seems to transcend both of these groups. It's acknowledged that something had once been there, and that it no longer is. We talk on the phone, we write each other emails, but we eschew the past unless it involves the sort of banality that one can share with a friend or a sibling: about the time we got pulled over in Roscommon, or the time we met John Scofield, or the time we both got sick after eating at one of those half-price Sushi places in the Village. So now it's an abridged history, a history in which I am ignorant of the birthmark that greets anyone who travels far enough up her right thigh, in which I have never seen or smelled or tasted that O'Keeffe flower in which she takes so much pride. Maybe we fucked — to her, that is. And not the author-with-inadequacy-issues or the author-stuck-with-an-inadequate-man type of fuck, which is ruthlessly passionate for all of the five or six consecutive hours it takes for the character with the cock, which needs to measured in meters, to finally launch his gallons onto Onan's tomb. No. This was just a fuck. Nothing epic or tender about it. Just a fuck. And that was it. Cock in cunt. Repeat as needed. Huff. Puff. Ejaculate. Sleep.

“You never remember to bring your umbrella,” she says when I approach her. She embraces me, tightly and quickly, and then backs away with haste. She never was one for physical platitudes, even when we shared a bed. “You look (caesura) good.” I squint. “No, really, you look…I don't know…happy.” She smiles, slowly, maybe coyly. “What's the secret?”

“A complete lack of exercise and sleep,” I respond. “And a lot of booze.”

“So you haven't changed at all, huh?”

We begin to walk south. “So how are you?” I ask.

“Well, I'm kind of tired because the air conditioner in the condo is broken. But, besides that, I had an interview earlier. I don't think it went well. The guy who I met with was such an asshole. He asked me what relevant experience I had. Relevant experience? Excuse me? I thought you were the one who contacted me because you thought I was qualified enough to fill the position. Yeah, position. It's never a job. It's always a position.” She exhausts. “These people are so fucking stupid.”

“What was the (caesura) position for?”

She flashes her teeth. “Administrative assistant.”

“That's about as vague as you can get.”

“You know, answering phones, responding to emails, assisting some rich asshole with his daily life.”

“So secretary.”

“Sure,” derisively, “if you’re stuck in the fifties.”

“What industry?”

“Publishing. I don't even know what they specialize in.”

“Was it an agency or a publishing house?”

“It was an agency. I don't know anyone they represent. No one good, I assume. I wanted to get a job with the people who handle Tom Robbins, but they aren't based in the City.” Something catches her eye. “Hey, the Frick is coming up, right?” I respond in the affirmative. “Remember the one portrait we liked so much, the one with the drag queen?”

“Ah, yes,” I nod; “Gainsborough's Mrs. Elliot.”

“Oh my God,” she swoons; “I though we were going to get kicked out we were laughing so hard. Have you been in there lately?”

“The Frick?”

“Yeah…to see if Coprolalia has…I guess marked his territory.”

“That's not exactly his style.”

I can't tell if the subsequent silence is awkward. It's not silence, of course, just a suspension of conversation. The cars continue to hiss past, kicking up rainwater and coagulated soot and pebbles that have arrived in this city from God knows where. Others out sauntering in the drizzle are speaking in a multitude of languages, as it is the tourist season. A lot of them are wearing garbage bags as a consequence of the rain. I've always believed Europeans to be more fashion conscious than us, but I guess that generalization only applies when the sun's out. Vendors listen to radios at full volume. One hums along with a Chopin etude; others are listening to that modern stuff from the East, which sound like tracks from a Bollywood film. A pauper asks the man in front of us for change, but requests nothing from either Connie or myself. He checks her out with his whole body as we pass. He does not simply follow her with his eyes; rather, he turns his entire body with that sexual deviant posture that a lot of bassists are known to exhibit. A helicopter can be heard overhead. A French bulldog mounts a Pomeranian, which arouses a series of shrieks and laughs. Connie seems oblivious.

“I also remember,” she begins, “You started calling me Gabrielle after that. You said I reminded you of…who was that? One of someone's models?”

“Renoir.”

“I still don't see the resemblance. It wasn't exactly flattering to compare the two of us, you know. She was kind of…I don't know…big-boned.”

“You two have similar faces.”

“She was his cousin, right?”

“The family nanny.”

She is quiet for a moment.

“So what have you been up to besides chasing this artist around?”

“That's about all I've had time for,” I respond. “As I've said, it's not exactly a part-time gig.”

“Jessica tells me you've been hanging around Tomas Bennington a lot.”

“Yeah.” I want to follow this up with something, but nothing comes to mind.

“What's he like?”

“I don't know. He's a pretty normal guy.” I pause. “Same with Aberdeen.”

“Who?”

“James Aberdeen. He's another artist.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He's best friends with Tomas. Actually, they're roommates.”

“I see.”

“I met Willis Faxo, too, if you know him.”

“Never heard of him, either.” She laughs. “You were always such a snob when it came to art.”

Another pause, suspension. She motions for me to cross the street with her. I follow obediently.

She's pensive; she has something important to tell me. This is not prescience; it is more of a syllogism (though the conditional proposition that validates the argument is here only implied). Prescience would at least kill the suspicion and the anticipation. Of course, prescience (perhaps even clairvoyance) would have allowed me the chance to save what we once had. I would have been able to remedy whatever it was that forced me out the door so many months ago. Because it wasn't distance. It's never distance. It's something that you've done, though they won't tell you the catalyst that ignited all of the doubt in the relationship — no, not the relationship; in you, the recipient of the rejection — the person riddled with a cancer so pervasive and repulsive that it subsumes you, steals your identity, becomes all that she can see when she looks at you.

Maybe the reason is that they recognize your ability to surprise them. It's almost like a breech of contract, that you have trespassed upon an unspoken agreement to continue upon an asymptote towards some personal essence that they impute to you. You can never reach it, of course, but you are supposed to strive to engender this person, even if you aren't conscious of this ambition, even if you don't know who this person is supposed to be. You are flawed because you are not the you that they want you to be. But people change, perhaps not dramatically, but subtly. People do not always live up to expectations; in fact, they sometimes refuse to be defined by expectations (which can lead to a paradox, I suppose: By failing to live up to an expectation, you are doing what is expected). And it begins with one aberration, probably not a noticeable one. It's tiny, minute. And then this insignificant change leads to two more insignificant changes. It's exponential. Eventually, they not only mount, but begin to get more discernible. And these miscellaneous alterations eventually aggregate to such a point that you suddenly look upon your own past as you may look upon the pages of a history book — you acknowledge the veracity of the facts in the text, but aren't entirely sure whether or not you agree with the author's explanation as to why the events transpired in such a way. But she is not privy to this information. She still sees me as the me that I once was. But the truth of the matter is that I am following another asymptote, and that she's too stubborn to accept that this is why the equation she possesses keeps turning out the wrong answer. Then again—

“It's so good to see you again,” she says while squeezing my hand.

“I feel the same way.” I squeeze back. She quickly lets go. “I can't get over how great you look.”

She smiles. “Don't say that. I feel like shit. I think I've gained ten pounds since graduating.”

“So you're drinking a lot, too.”

“Well, I’ve been on a little Nebbiolo kick, but nothing excessive.”

“…”

“It’s a Sicilian wine. Either way, I’ve pretty much just been sitting at the computer all day sending out resumes.”

“I've heard that can be rough.”

“Yeah, it can be.”

“Hopefully I'll never have to find out about that.”

“I know Denny and Marge can't be supporting this. Your parents aren't exactly pro-hedonist.”

“They don't know. As far as they're concerned, I'm in the same boat as you.”

“So you're taking advantage of their kindness.” I squint. “You told me that they're helping you out.”

“Yeah, but I figure there's no real harm in it,” I begin. She spells out skepticism in sign. “Look, I don't want to sit here and rationalize all this.” She squints to me. “I know I can't ever be honest — even partially. But there's no way they would have ever financed this search, and there's no way I could have pulled it off while looking for a full-time job.”

“It takes, like, an hour a day.”

“No, it doesn't. You have to individualize every letter. You have to tweak your resume. You have to constantly be looking on six or seven different websites. You have to look through papers, too. It's a very involved process. I'd deal with it, but I've decided to dedicate every moment that I have to Coprolalia.”

“It doesn't take me that long,” she replies.

—Then again it could be your inability to surprise them, your inability to provide anything beyond that same routine — devoid of passion, devoid of anything besides that feeling of suffocation that imperiously hounds you at every moment, even when they are not around. Because you know they will be there. Yes, they will be there, ready to judge, to interject every time you open your mouth, to pout until they get they their way. It is a trial upon your every nerve, a contest to see just how much of your dignity can be pilfered until you finally snap. And then you are a monster. And you feel like a monster, too. No, you haven't hit her; you've done something far worse: you've injured her pride. And she's crying, but you don't know if these are the same disingenuous tears that she contrives when in a critical professor's office or if her face is glistening in earnest. So you apologize, but she doesn't accept it. No, you have to beg for that forgiveness. And you're a monster if you don't. You're a monster even though you don't believe you've done anything wrong. And then it's suddenly over. It's over because you've convinced her that she's convinced you that she is right and that you are wrong. And that's all a woman really wants. She just wants you to tell her that she is right. That's all there is to it. She doesn't care if this admission is genuine or not. She just wants you to acquiesce because there is nothing more intoxicating to a woman than power, especially when that power is over a man. And she'll hold it over you, too. She'll debase you, mock you — not only while she and her friends discuss how spineless you are, how weak you are; she'll do it to your face, too. And if you complain she mocks your masculinity (—Don't be such a baby or — Oh, big man has to make sure his woman’s in check); and if you don't complain she mocks you all the same (—You're such a pushover; why don't you fucking grow a pair?). And yet she'll mock these concepts of male integrity, of a gender role that society has forced me to ascribe by and forced her to find desirable. Still, she wants me to be either callous or assertive. Sometimes. Sometimes that is how I ought to be. But you can't say anything at that point; you can't do anything. Because you just want to be left alone by then. That's all we — men — want: not to be bothered, harassed, and put in these impossible situations in which every fucking response is the wrong one.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“Yeah, I'm fine. I'm just thinking.”

“About what?”

“You know…Coprolalia.”

“That's not what it looks like,” almost as a taunt.

“What do you mean?”

“You look upset. Are you mad at me?”

“No. Of course not. I'm just…you know…a little preoccupied.”

She smiles. “So I'm going to have to dig for this one, huh?”

“No, seriously,” I laugh. “You look into everything way too deeply.”

We approach a French restaurant on Madison. She silently reveals that this is the place.

“I can't afford this,” as I look to the menu. There are no prices. This means money is not an issue for the restaurant's normal patrons.

“Don't worry,” she begins while patting her purse. “This one's on my dad.”

“I don't want to do that. I don't feel right eating—”

“He told me to have a nice meal to celebrate the interview. It's fine.”

We enter (half-reluctantly). The host stares to me before smiling to Connie. They exchange platitudes in French as Josephine Baker serenades the ten or twelve occupied tables. He has massive teeth. It's not that he's buck-toothed; rather, it appears that he stole a pair of dentures from someone twice his size.

“Monsieur,” he eventually begins, “Your table is right this way.”

14.1

The appetizers cost more than any meal I've eaten since my parents were in town back in January. She orders mussels dressed in a sauce consisting of wite whine, butter, shallots, parsley, and rosemary, as well as pâté, before we have even opened the menus. The bread on the table is still warm and the butter has been softened. The wine is ordered without consulting a list. This provokes an impressed nod from the waiter. He approaches with the Muscat d'Alsace within a few moments to pour her a small glass. She sips, nods, and then looks to me as he pours each of us a glass. “The food here is exquisite,” she says. The waiter smiles with feigned humility.

“Had I known we were coming to such a nice place I would have dressed a little nicer. I thought we were just going to grab a coffee.”

“They have coffee here. Besides, it's not like anyone seriously cares. They let you in, didn't they?”

“That's not the point.”

“Why do you care so much about what other people think? Just enjoy the meal.” She pauses. “Jesus, everything has to be such a production with you.”

“Look, I just think I should have gotten a bit of a head's up—”

“About what? About getting a free meal at an amazing restaurant? You know, when you told me that you've been prowling around the gutters of this city looking for some artist who uses a pseudonym derived from the word 'shit' (which provokes a slow and minatory…no, revise that…a disgusted glance from a man at the next table), I was worried about you. And let's not forgot about where you're living — that dump in Bushwick.”

“…”

“What have you been eating by the way? You never were one to care about your body.”

“I made a few pans of scrapple four days ago.” She knits her brows. “Poor-man's meatloaf.”

“And yet you're above a free meal.”

“Connie, I'm not being ungrateful—”

“You could have fooled me.”

“Look, I'm appreciative; I just feel a little awkward.” She curls her lip. “That's all I'm saying.”

“Fine,” with that airy tone of incorrigibility. “I'll make sure never to surprise you again.” She sips from her glass slowly.

“So what do you recommend?” I ask.

“Excuse me?”

“For an entrée. What do you recommend?”

“Well, the duck is absolutely fantastic, but I don't think they have it on the lunch menu.” She looks to make sure. “Then again,” without looking up, “Duck doesn't really go with the wine.”

“I thought poultry goes with white.”

“It's far more nuanced than that,” with her face still blocked by the menu.

Was she always this way?

So this is the grand chasm of misunderstanding and sheer absurdity that is summed up in those two devilish letters: ex. My ex: a person whose present self will forever be tarnished by the past that we shared. And yet it's more layered than that — it's nuanced, like the wine (evidently). There are eras within this past, eras long before the crucification upon love's Golgotha, like that period of angelic innocence and beauty so far removed from anything corporeal, or that period when the passion was not only tangible but insatiable, temeritous in its regard for boundaries or any facet of human volition that promotes moderation in the face of rapacious carnality and lust. And while a part of me may want to depict her as Lilith, it could only be true if I were painted a shade far less contentious than Adam. Because it wasn't that I had suffocated her or even tried to restrain her; I had simply tried to keep her from abandoning me. So when it ended — the relationship, what had become something not of either one of us, but a thing independent of us, a thing that could be personified like one of those demons that sites its genesis not from a creative hand or even an impulsive volition, but as an eruption out of what already was (like a deity from another deity's head) — it was like a betrayal, but a betrayal only if one thinks a transient guilty of betraying an innkeeper by once again taking to the road. My problem was that I had remained in the shoes of the innkeeper because I was too blind to understand that the analogy simply doesn't work, that it can never work. Because the relationship itself had been the shelter for the two of us. And while she had been brave enough to abandon the crumbling house of cards, I had adamantly remained, become something of a preservationist. And there I stayed, eventually taking on a specious shade of a woman woven from the detritus of that shared past as my partner. And the two of us — me and that apparition whom I might as well call Gabrielle, an image frozen onto canvas with her rose or her red robe slightly open — attempted to reconstruct and once again reside in that past for which I so blindly sacrificed truth in the name of comfort and security. And eventually I became infatuated with the apparition, wh-o/-ich was actually nothing more than part of me, a projection of what I thought was my missing half. I breathed my pneuma into this idyllic fantasy, transcending Pygmalion by pushing life upon a golem that was not only soulless, but bodiless, too: a being of delicate evanescence that was capable of maintaining its presence so long as I refused to embrace or even acknowledge the woman of flesh and bone currently sitting across from me.

And now I can't see her for her; I can only compare her to my own manipulation of her — an invention that supplanted the past with a more palpable one. She has to live up an expectation of which she is entirely ignorant, of which she cannot compare because she does not nor should not need to do so.

She will never be who I want her to be.

“Why are you so spacey today?”

“What's that?” I return.

She smiles. “Your head is really in the clouds.”

“It's just Coprolalia,” I begin. “I've already spent half a month trying to find him.”

“Do you know anything about him yet?”

“I know his name is Mordecai Adelstein. That his father's name is Isaac Adelstein.”

“Why don't you just look him up on the Internet?"

“I have. And I've of course gone through the white pages. There's nothing there.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah. I guess it's a bit troubling. I feel like I wasted a lot of time, but I guess I'm kind of grateful, too. It's weird.”

“Would you have done anything differently?”

It's an innocuous question, but it doesn't strike me that way. For her, the Real has the ability to be superfluous, to be capable of inspiring the Event, of provoking all sorts of capitalized words that a slew of theorists either posit or reject. For me, the stage of reality is more difficult. I think of Tomas and Aberdeen, of Midas and Pepper, of Jane, Trixi, Nixi, and the other one. I think of Willis, of Chrissy, of Keen Buddy, of Patrick, Mongo, and Daphne. I think of Greg(g) and the briefs brigade, the citrus artillery, Leonidas, Brandy walking through the silent five am streets of the Lower East Side, and all of those nameless entities that exist in this city just waiting for someone to take notice of them. I think of all of them, laughing or sullenly gazing into the mouth of a bottle, perhaps under the impression that their entire life has been one string of accidents that has somehow amounted to the present. I think of Vinati. I think of Sean. I think of the City — the Irish pubs of Third Avenue with their Irish staffs and Irish renditions of American songs, the crowded basement bathrooms of the Upper West Side, the smell of grilled meat that lingers in the streets of Hells Kitchen, the lights of Times Square that shine so bright as to blind this world from the reality of New York City, the serenity of Claremont Avenue at dusk, the nameless clubs behind thick unmarked doors in the Village — and of Brooklyn — the scent of pig's blood and garlic that has been infused into the Manhattan Avenue sidewalks, the dilapidated row homes of Williamsburg snuggled between ten- and twelve-story condo buildings, the parades of strollers flowing up and down Seventh Avenue, Sixth Avenue and its denizens who appear to be sauntering amidst a canyon of fudge, the dollar stores along Fifth Avenue that will soon be bought out, remodeled, and reopened as trendy bars and lounges, Fourth Avenue's bounty of bodegas and tiny Mexican women all miraculously named Maria, Third Avenue's abundance of valet parking and, further north, a terre mauvaise of rotting industry and stores that specialize in awkward entrances, the Ginger Bread House on the corner of Narrows and 83rd, the pre-dawn skyline of Coney Island from the window of the Q train, the mansions that hide behind neighborhood names with which the world is unfamiliar, Atlantic Terminal with its military recruiters who are so color blind that they are actually incapable of perceiving white people, the Church of Saint Agnes, on Hoyt Street, with its peerless haloed crucifix that penetrates the sky like a turquoise anchorite, the frustrated writers and actors smoking cigarettes outside of places on Smith Street and talking to invasive black men who have been trying to gather bus or train money for half a decade now (who are also the worst in regards to the practice of the doublebeg, which starts with a solicitation for a cigarette, and then proceeds into a request for change), the millions of bricks that flood Cobble Hill in the hues of dried blood and earth, the Promenade's elegance and its view of Manhattan that will rob any true poet of words, DUMBO and all of its pretensions. I think of this whole experiment, of every bar that seems so superfluous until its facade vanishes behind your back. Its only there that the world begins to make sense, that the components of this human world cease to be interchangeable; true, these are people are gears in the machine and bricks in the wall, but they are also haloed by a dim limelight. All of them, the faceless canaille and the gruesome ethics of the lumpenproletariat and the classless peasants who go by the epithet of “tourists” and the personages for whom no degree of fame can be enough; they are all necessary. I now see a world that cannot be called whole without the solo alto-sax serenading the neon-bathed streets of the East Village with a “Misterioso” so soulful that it could make Philomela laugh, that it could dry Niobe's tears; a world that requires that working-class vagrant despondency over the end of another Saturday spent drunk and immersed in the dusk of ambition, or the conversations that end with references to Prokofiev because said references are suddenly recognized not only as arcane, but irrelevant, too; a world that needs the sweet smell of mediocre grass floating from the stoops in that ambiguous region just off of the Classon G stop, and the West Indian women on Empire Boulevard or Henry Street (the former on their own or with friends, the latter with very obedient white children) who roll their eyes at all things and blink torpidly — consequently appearing as though they have just suffered a most egregious indignity — and pronounce “thing” as “ting” and “about” as “boot,” and the ecstatic madhouse jesters — on leave from duties of which we have no knowledge — out parading their lunacy as if it were just another form of defiance, of the continuous cacophony of the J-M-Z as it rattles the tenement buildings that contain goddesses and casts and bagwomen and unnamable sources of redemption on its way into Manhattan or off to Queens — the particulates themselves irrelevant, as they are composites of the grand, intoxicating quagmire that subsumes the very energy of life and questions our privilege of ignorance, ignorance of the fact that we are only cogs in the mechanism of madness that is this city. We are here only to perpetuate it, eidolons and the shadows of archetypes filling niches and pockets until it's finally time to lapse into the void, be it suburbia or that less agonizing form of death that is, perhaps, more complete. We are not the Fury that disdains the very environment from which it cannot escape. We are not the formulas who get etched in the American conscious by Hollywood or the right wing media empire, which finds its home just east of Times Square. There are so few of us whose vapid stares and brilliant smiles are thought captivating enough to be photographed and placed on the covers of those magazines that greet the slowly decaying in their lines in their Midwestern grocery stores to the sound of sugar-free jazz; and there are so few of us who continue to traverse the labyrinthine streets strung out on Ginsberg and hiding from the prying eyes of a sexless blue authority that has no patience or even tolerance for a white kid without ambition or a black kid without the good sense to surrender — and not to that auric badge of law, but to fear, the fear that there are still lynch mobs out there ready to unleash the brutality of fifty rounds into the dawn as if the bullets could eliminate not only the scourge of self-respect, but the light (Light) that that auric badge is supposed to represent. No, we are not simply the flawless figurines strolling the poshest streets of Manhattan, nor are we the savages traversing the concrete gauntlets of the projects with glocks, knives, and minatory glances towards those who have the temerity to question the degree of respect to which we feel we are entitled. We are everything in between. We are not Midtown, because Midtown is nothing but a skyline; and we are not the Uppers of East and West, or the Villages that are now home to the senile, the soulless, and the violet. We are not Marcy. We are not Co-Op City. We are not Wycoff or any planned ghetto that happens to be on a street dedicated to a black hero. And we comprise a city unlike any other: a city in which Alger's myth is realized once for every ten thousand times it is savagely laid to rest; a city in which there is no place for that reticent propriety, which lost its legitimacy when Ypres and the Somme turned this world into mud and gore; a city in which the filth that coats the streets is more valuable than gold; a city in which there is no moment for respite because we dictate the speed at which this fucking planet turns; a city in which the students and the teachers and the activists and the Mammonites and the derelicts and the evangelicals and the working poor and the working rich and the unworking rich and the non-working poor and the artists and the musicians and the suits and the people who just kind of exist to work and eat and fuck all subsist upon the majesty of this inanimate god that we worship every time we utter those three simple words: New York City.

“No,” I respond.

“I know you always said you wanted to live a life without regrets.”

“I figure that's a pretty common thing to want. It's difficult to realize, but it's common.”

She smiles. The waiter appears before she has a chance to respond. “Do you know what you're going to have?” she asks. A long droning song comes from my mouth. “It's okay. I know what you like.”

She speaks to the waiter in French again — lofty, vowel-ridden, and prone to making anyone look like a pretentious jackass when speaking it, provided it is not a first language. They laugh. It's clearly at my expense. He glances back to me with Alpha male derision before leaving. I cannot hide my indignation.

“What?”

“Did you have to order for me?”

“I know what you like.” Caesura. “Look, everything on the menu is good. Don't get upset.”

“I'm not upset. I just would have liked the opportunity to order for myself.”

“Don't be like that. You're just frustrated with your little Coprolalia business.”

“No, I'm upset because you suddenly have no respect for me.”

“Jesus,” she exhales. “What the hell has gotten into you? Why are you so…why are you jumping down my throat?”

“I'm not; I just don't like being treated like a fucking child.”

“I know the best things on the menu. You're going to like what I got you. Don't be so testy about it.” She sips from her glass. “Besides, I know how indecisive you can be when it comes to food.”

“You'd get way more upset if I ordered for you.”

“That's different.”

“How the fuck is it any different?” A man from the next table eyes me. “It impugns your freedom.”

“Impugns? Really? Impugns? Why do you have to use that word?”

“It's a perfectly common word. You clearly know what it means.”

“That's not the point.”

We continue to stare to one another until the busboy removes the plate of mussel shells and the bowl filled with the admixture in which they had previously been swimming. “Let's just drop it, okay. We are two adults; we are perfectly capable of a civil conversation.”

“Agreed.”

“So how is the search going?” she asks. “I mean, do you think you have any shot of actually finding him?”

“I won't deny that it's not going as well as I had hoped, but I feel as though there's some potential. Real leads are beginning to materialize.”

“What if he doesn't want to give you an interview?”

“I haven't thought of that,” I say after a brief moment of introspection. “I guess I always thought he'd reward the person who finally discovers who he is.” She nods. The belligerence passes, though there is still blood in the water. “So what's up with you? I feel like you only talk about all of the interviews that you've been on. There has to be something else going on in your life.”

She takes a long sip from her wineglass. “Actually,” she begins calmly, slowly, “I did have a reason for asking you out here today. I have something to tell you.”

My stomach dips. Thousands of scenarios are all aiming to depart from the realm of potentiality.

“I met somebody.”

“Oh,” I begin. “Well that's…that's good. I thought you were about to tell me that someone had…” She raises an eyebrow. “Well…died.”

“No,” she laughs. “No. Something like that I could tell you over the phone.” She's quiet for a moment. “You're not upset?” gingerly.

“Of course not. I mean, you're a great girl. I'm actually amazed that you've stayed single for so long. I mean—”

“That's sweet of you to say,” she blushes. “But you're not upset?”

“Well, it will be a little difficult to see you two together, but—”

“So you are upset,” dramatically.

“No,” that gentle, elongated version of the word, “I'm just saying that a-a part of me will always love you, and that it's going to be difficult to see you with another man.”

“Why do you tell me these things?” She almost smiles.

“I just want to be honest.”

“But you're okay with it? For real?”

“Yes. Like I said, it will be difficult, but I knew this would eventually happen.”

“How about you?”

“What?”

“Is there anyone in your life?”

“I don't really know yet.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Well,” that elongated, somewhat smug rendition, “Something happened last night. I don't know if it's going to turn into anything, but—”

“Do I know her?”

“You may have met her once or twice.”

“Who is she?”

“You remember Ilkay's friend Vinati, right?”

“Her?” in sforzando.

“Yeah. Kind of funny, right?”

“That's one way to describe it.”

“…”

“It's just…I didn't think you were interested in girls like that.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“She doesn't exactly seem like your type.”

“Why not?”

“You know, I just thought you looked for substance in a person. She's like a little doll. She weighs, what? like ninety-five pounds.”

“So you think I'm shallow because I like a thin girl.”

“I didn't say that.”

Caesura.

“Do you not like her?”

“She's sweet, but, honestly, I always thought…it's just…well, she's always struck me as kind of a ditz.”

“A ditz?”

“Well, she's just so…”

“What?”

“I don't know.”

“It seems like you don't like her because she's pretty.”

“I'm not that pretty — petty. I just can't picture the two of you together.”

“Well, as I said, I'm not entirely sure what her take on it is. It's not like we're dating exactly.”

“Oh. So that's what this whole Coprolalia thing is about. You're out sewing your wild oats.”

“My what?”

“How many girls have you fucked?” The man next to us turns again. She acknowledges him with an agitated scowl. He turns away very quickly, blows on the creamy substance on his spoon, and swallows.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“How many girls have you fucked? Since we broke up. How many? Let's see how honest you really are.”

“She's the first, Connie.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Why would I lie to you?”

She's quiet for a moment.

“Five.”

“Five what?”

“I've been with five guys since I broke up with you. Now tell me your number.”

“One. Just Vinati.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Why don't you believe me? What can I possibly gain by lying to you?”

“So she's the first?”

“Yes. She's the first.”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“Because I don't know how serious the relationship is going to be. I don't even know if there's going to be one. Not to mention it just happened last night.” I stop. “Regardless, you didn't tell me about your first four.”

“And now you're going to hold that against me.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? I'm not holding anything against you.”

“Yes you are. I can see it in your eyes.”

“Connie, I'm just a little confused. I don't understand why you thought it necessary to make such a grand gesture in telling me about one guy when you failed to mention the four before him. Four. That's some selective honesty you have there.”

“Well I didn't know how serious the relationships were going to be.”

We both stop.

“I just wanted to be honest with you because I cherish our friendship.” The malice is now gone from her voice; it's tumultuous now, the words sailing on choppy seas. “But now you want to make me feel guilty; you want to make me feel as though I've wronged you even though you have no right to tell me what I can and cannot do.”

The oglers in the restaurant are less surreptitious now. She's on the verge of those angry tears. I'm still trying to whisper. “I'm not trying to tell you what to do.” I look to either side as though I am about to cross a street. “I just don't want you to tell me that you're being honest because you just failed to mention portions of the truth.”

There's a long pause at the table. The waiter furtively glances towards the two of us with somber eyes; genderless nonagenarians trade vapid glances like breathing ossuaries; younger families try to ignore to us, even if the parents cannot help but think of the one before they met the One who sits on the other side of the table; the bartender makes a joke, which sends two older gentlemen into hysterics. One of them slams his hands upon the bar top with a resonating clap, and then yells something in French.

“You're such a child sometimes,” she finally says.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“You know exactly what it means.”

“You know what I think? I think you came here looking to pick a fight with me. You've been relentless since we met up. You keep projecting all of these negative sentiments onto me, and, honestly, I don't even feel like we're participating in the same conversation.”

“Fuck this,” she says. She stands, begins for the door, and then looks back to me. “Call me if you ever decide to grow up.”

She shouts this, but stops abruptly before opening the door. She is awaiting rebuttal. Those who have been trying to ignore the two of us now have their excuse to examine us like tableaux in a natural history museum (“Modern Man with Stubborn Grimace” and “Modern Woman Being Total Cunt”), and await my response. They are unable to ignore the embodiment of unremitting fury (maybe even volcanism would be fitting), which casts its influence over the restaurant as though a candle at the entrance of a tomb. Those seated nearby whisper to themselves. Their eyes alternate between the two of us and sometimes to spouses or others who happen to be enjoying the vocalized mélange of love, hate, and spite. Josephine Baker wraps up a song about her two loves, which leaves the restaurant cast in uneasy silence. The waiter would be smoking a cigarette if it weren't for the ordinance against it. The busboys chuckle to themselves and nudge one another in the ribs.

She exits.

She fucked around behind your back. Probably with some milquetoast pseudo-intellectual, like that little pussy who actually said, 'I consider myself a feminist', at the one party we went to up in Cambridge. Is that the type of guy she wants now? The type that plays the part of the doormat in order to stare up a skirt? Perhaps. But that's not what bothers me. What bothers me is that she considered it empowering. And it was, too. It was empowering for her as a self-absorbed hedonist. She rationalized it, of course. Maybe universalized it, rather. It became a means of empowerment for all women. It's a strange syllogism, but that's always been her type of twisted logic: If it's good for me, it must be good for the cause. It's kind of like supply-side feminism, the same fucked up reasoning that will eventually bring make Thatcherism look like socialism. Fuck her. It was enough to know that she had fucked guys before me. It was enough to know that “That was amazing” and “No one's ever fucked me like that” and all of the moans and “Holy shit”s and “Oh my God”s were responses to sex regardless of the person with whom she found herself in bed or in the bathroom at some shitty bar or at some fucking frat party or God knows where else she decided that someone had said something witty or intelligent enough to let them fondle and kiss and bite and penetrate and verb and verb and verb and verb that body with its bounty of curves and her glistening with sweat in the glow of a computer monitor as she dug her nails into flesh and…agh, that fucking whore!

The waiter soon approaches. “Sir,” he begins in a whisper, “I do believe it would be best for you to promptly leave the premises. Would you like your meal to go, or shall we discard it?”

“Can you cancel it?”

“This is not a buffet, sir. You will pay for everything that you have ordered, not simply what you have decided to eat. Now, would you prefer to pay the full check, or would you rather I call the police?”

“The check will be fine.”

I finish the rest of my wine in a single gulp, pour another glass, and take that one down, too. I wonder how much all of this will cost. The waiter soon provides an answer: $200. And then there's the tip. Do you tip a waiter if he throws you out of the restaurant? A meditation on the subject will have to wait. He's standing over me like a buzzard. I pull out my ATM card, place it in the book, close the book, hand it to him. I finish the wine as I await his return.

“There is a problem with the card [, sir].”

“Excuse me?”

“You do not have enough to pay the entirety of the check (, sir(rah)).”

People are staring at me. Maybe they never stopped. It's just more pronounced now. It's not simply an uncomfortable feeling for me; it's more a form of torture. They quietly criticize everything about me, laugh at my expense, feel no sympathy as the argument, by virtue of my gender, should have been resolved by my surrender. Pride, they believe. Pride. For this reason my ego must stand with a blindfold and a cigarette awaiting the inevitable.

“I only have fifty dollars on me,” I respond.

“How did you intend to pay for the meal, may I ask?”

“Well…she was supposed to pay for it.”

“That option is no longer available.”

No fucking way!

“I understand that, but—”

“But what? There is a one hundred and fifty dollar balance; and yet you have no means by which you can provide the necessary funds.”

“I can work it off.”

“You can work it off?”

“Yeah. I'll clean dishes or the bathrooms. I can prep vegetables. I used to work in a kitchen a few years ago.” He does not seem all that moved. “Isn't this what they do in the movies?”

He glares down to me, but no longer with the gelid scorn that I was receiving earlier. He pities me — that much is clear. At the same time, that one hundred and fifty bucks has to come from somewhere, and it certainly isn't going to be from his pocket.

“Let me see if something can be arranged.”

15

The heat on the train platform is oppressive, humid, like the suffocating muff of Anopopei. The denizens have faces adorned with a fine misting of sweat that gleans in the fluorescent lighting. Those who have been waiting the longest have shirts that have become ocellated at the smalls of their backs. A woman waiting for the uptown train is dancing irregularly in order to suppress the need to urinate. A man in Conservative fatigues tries to make a call on his cell phone, fails, and then tries again. He paraphrases Murphy's Law to a cute girl of maybe sixteen. She smiles absently, and moves away. He tries to call again. To my left a woman stands in the grip of panic because she is alone. “Shit,” yells the man on the opposing platform. To my right are a group of boisterous black teenagers. Their voices carry throughout the subway tunnels, and their very presence seems to hold quietude in contempt. It would be kind of amusing if they weren't so proud of their ignorance. They talk about the woman to my left as though she cannot hear them. Of me they say nothing. I am a shade.

A breeze is afforded to us all by an uptown express, which roars and squeals into the station. Even as the brakes scream holocaust, you can make out the nearby black kids — and they are black, too; black to the point of shadows — who all agree that white people smell like lemons or wet dog. I smell myself. The train slowly trudges through the station; it doesn't stop because we are the locals, the people you see with looks of chagrin as you pass by and wonder to yourself, Why the hell is this train slowing down; we don't even stop here.

It's almost ten thirty at this point. I am to meet Tomas and Aberdeen in Williamsburg at a small club at midnight. I do not know the name of the act that we are going to see, nor am I too concerned about the set starting punctually. I know the venue well; I know I can make it into Bushwick, shower, and get back into Williamsburg without missing a single note of the set, as the place is, on a good night, twenty minutes behind schedule. Vinati is working late, and doubts that she will want to come to the show after her shift. The local tunnel becomes illuminated. The headlights will soon appear.

The incidents that followed my initial humiliation were as expected. I was removed into the kitchen, where I was allowed to eat before beginning the seven-and-a-half hours of work demanded of me. The staff was pleasant, but conversation was rather limited. None of them knew more than a few words of English with the exception of the head chef, who was Québécois. Almost all of the other workers were from South or Central America. Diego, the dishwasher whose shift I was to assume with his consent, was the only Puerto Rican on staff. The consensus among his fellow employees was that he was a total hard-ass whose mantra was maricón, which, the staff believed, said more about him than it did about the people with whom he typically interacted. I didn't really get this impression. He was a veritable faucet of gratitude when I spoke to him over the phone. The opportunity to take a catering gig had just come up, and it paid about three times more than the meager wages afforded him as a dishwasher, so he was more than willing to let me fill in for him with my request.

It was established early on that my Spanish was worse than the English of anyone in the kitchen. They would shake their heads when they came to drop off stacks of pans, laugh, and say a few adjectives — in either Spanish or English — to complement the nouns “bitch” or “whore” or “bruja” or a few others that I can't recall. Javier, the twenty-eight year old sous-chef on the cold side of the kitchen, was the nicest of the bunch. He gave me a cigarette about halfway through the shift. As we smoked, he asked where I was from; I asked where he was from. We tripped over words, laughed, and complimented one another's misogyny like soldiers sharing a foxhole. He was beginning a course in English, which he said was way more difficult than Spanish, and planned to eventually enroll at either Hunter or another CUNY school once he had some money saved up. He told me that he wants to own a restaurant in California, which is where most of his family is currently living. He also wants to travel, especially to Europe.

Before all of this, however, I was told to clean the two bathrooms, which gave me ample time to brood. As I was scrubbing the floor around the toilet of the men's room, I thought of a Latin quote that, for whatever reason, has always resonated in my mind. Et in Arcadia Ego. I am even in Arcadia. To me, it wasn't only the voice of Death, as some attest, but the presence of misfortune, ill luck, and perhaps even inevitability. It is the force of corruption manifested into a skeleton adorned in a black rope and holding a scythe as to indicate that we, the living, are as formidable as blades of grass to this imperious force. But that's a fairly banal way of looking at it, accurate as it may be. Personally, I tend to imagine Death as a naked skeleton that simply beats the life out of people with a clock that's been modified to also serve as a mace. The thought brought a morbid smile to my face throughout the day.

Anyone who has washed dishes at a restaurant knows that it is not as bad as it is made out to be in film and television. You rarely have to scrub all that hard because the water pressure of the…well, it's essentially a showerhead, is strong enough to wipe away most of the remnants of food that will not be eliminated by the washing machine. I can't see doing it every day, of course, but at least the time goes by fairly quickly. You are constantly finishing something, which reminds you that progressing toward the end of your shift. There are moments when the amount of dishes seems overwhelming, true, but you know that each dish brings you closer to freedom. I guess most jobs are fairly similar.

I think the one major complaint about the whole enterprise concerns the explosive water pressure of the faucet. Your shirt and shoes inevitably get soaked to the point where you can feel portions of your epidermis begin to detach from the rest of your body. There's also a smell that attaches itself to you, a stench that, however unequivocal, can only be described as conjunction of bleach, sweat, and cooking oil. Mix that with the garlic and the onions permeating from the pores in my hands (I did a little bit of prep work), and you get an explanation as to why the passengers on the downtown train are dispersed so unevenly. Even the guy begging for change refuses to come within a few feet of me. We catch eyes. He nods sympathetically before passing.

There is a klezmer band on the J-M-Z platform at Canal Street. I don't get to hear a complete song because a train actually comes within three of four minutes. The ride into Bushwick is not much different in terms of my being a pariah, but there are far fewer people on the train. My reflection is that of a transient, a nuanced bum, and I know that it’s best to try not to meet anyone's eyes.

Vocalists in various shades of senility sing along with songs that I faintly know. A guy in a once-classy suit with a martini croons along with Dean Martin; a lone mariachi takes on the higher harmony in a song made famous by Trio Los Panchos. The two eventually meet at the same door, as they are both getting off at the Marcy stop. And though there is a discernible amount of contempt between the two, there is also an odd sense of mutual respect. They leave.

The silence is momentary. A West Indian woman greets the train car with a voice that resonates throughout the car. She proceeds to proselytize in a thick accent. It's pretty standard stuff: the world is ending because people don't worship Jesus, Jesus is the embodiment of forgiveness, Jesus will not forgive you come Judgment Day unless you acquiesce to the teachings of a book in which he is quoted about six or seven times. The doors open. A bus comes to a shrieking halt at the corner of Broadway. The multitude of raindrops gives the impression of one continuous hissing sound. She smiles, says a blessing, and then hands me a pamphlet that outlines a series of tenets that even a Medieval peasant would have considered rudimentary and, well, stupid.

The rest of the ride is uneventful. I am forced to endure people's curiosity. It's frustrating, but understandable. As the train comes to my stop, I reach in my pocket to find that I still have the fifty dollars — actually fifty-three dollars — that I had when I entered the restaurant about eight and a half hours previously. I'm not sure if it was pity or if the waiter simply forgot. Either way, it feels almost like payday.

I am in and out of the bathroom in about fifteen minutes, and, contrary to what I initially assumed, the stench of half-eaten food, detergent, and soiled cookware did not prove to be indelible. My shirt, however, will probably have to go through several wash cycles. My hands are also still accursed by the odor of garlic and onion. It's not quite as bad as that stench of yeast that attaches itself to Subway workers, but I know that someone, at some point, will comment on it.

Jeff pops his head out from his room as I step out of the bathroom, and asks the predictable: “Where the hell have you been?”

“I've had two fucking crazy days.”

“Make that three, man. You woke me up Saturday night.” He looks contemplative. “Sunday morning, actually.”

“Sorry.”

I can't tell if he's furious or just curious. “You don't even remember any of this, do you?”

“Well,” I begin with a smile, “I didn't until you mentioned it.”

“So you're an eidetic drunk?”

“Sure.”

“Do you even know what 'eidetic' means?”

“Yeah. Perfect memory. It came up recently.”

“While you were getting loaded at one of your plebeian bars?”

“No, at a party in Williamsburg.”

“What type of party?” he asks as I close the door to my bedroom.

“Where have you been?” It's him again; I just think there is a long enough pause to warrant a new paragraph. I don't respond to either question for a few minutes.

I finally open the door as I am putting on my belt. He is at the table smoking a cigarette. “I don't even know if you're going to believe me.”

He smiles as he looks up from the June issue of Harper's. I think he envies me. “Really?”

“Can I bum a smoke?”

“Sure.”

I take a seat across from him. Yo La Tango is busy covering a William DeVaughn track in Jeff's room. He slides the pack across the table.

I explain everything to him: Patrick, the A-R-E, Daphne (The cigarette is finished. He hands me another one.), the argument with Sean, the day and night spent with Vinati, the conversation with Willis Faxo, the histrionics of Connie, my transformation into Diego for a portion of the day. He nods enthusiastically as I retell all of these events, interjects rarely, and laughs in advance. I finish the second cigarette as I tell him what happened after washing dishes: eating Connie's meal with the hostess, two of the waiters, and the bartender. The bartender gave us copious amounts of wine and, without patrons to mollify, activated an iPod playlist filed with fin de siècle pieces, which included “Claire de Lune”, “Gymnopédies”, and the first movement of Elgar's Cello Concerto in E Minor (which may be considered too late to fall in with the fin de siècle, but, for whatever reason, its always related to Dvorák's “New World Symphony” in my mind). Efren, the bartender, described Elgar's compositions as majestic, as if something out of an excellent fantasy film. Satie, he said, is the most haunting composer of the period, perhaps ever. I modified the adjective to “harrowing” without remonstration on his part. As he popped another cork from a previously opened bottle of red wine that was probably worth forty or fifty dollars retail, he explained that the owner didn't care about conserving wine once the bottle had been paid for. “It's fucked up how often these rich people buy a bottle, have a glass, and then leave the rest.” We talked about Philip Glass for a while. He was ambivalent about much of the composer's corpus, but thought the world of an album of études that was released in 2003. I had never heard it, which he found criminal. Soon I was promising that I buy it whenever I got the chance.

I didn't understand his attachment to the album until he told me that he was a struggling composer, and that most of his compositions were for solo piano. He also wrote for string quartet and quintet on occasion, but preferred to work with just one instrument. Since he only played the piano (and a little guitar), this seemed to be the most rational instrument for which to write. Some of his work has apparently been featured in a few video-game soundtracks. Much to my surprise, this is a pretty big market for contemporary composers. “It sounds like a joke, but, man, even the New York Times will be reviewing video-games in a few years — if not sooner. It's a legitimate artistic medium now.”

“And that's what I've been up to.”

“I told you that Connie was unstable,” Jeff says with a shake of the head.

“I know. But love blinds you, you know.” Caesura. “I guess I should have known that she was going to pull some type of stunt.”

Jeff stares to the table somberly as though he is studying a recondite text that demands no small amount of concentration. “Is this how you're going to remember her?”

“What?”

“Can you even remember her — before all of this?” as he pushes his glasses up.

“I guess I just remember that she was always…”

“Always what?”

“I don't know. My thinking is a bit cloudy. It's been a long day.”

“What did you see in her?”

“I don't know,” with a shrug.

“Seriously, man. What did you see in her?”

“I guess she's really intelligent. She's just prone to these bouts of — I know I've already used this word today, but it seems to be the only one that fits — histrionics. It's as though she has this pathological need to create dramatic situations.” I pause. “And maybe I felt like she was the only person who really fit, you know. There are only a few redeeming qualities that I can think of right now, but, for whatever reason, there just seemed to be something there, something deeper that I've lost. Does that make any sense to you?”

“Not to be rude, but it sounds like you spend two years settling. She may be intelligent, but it sounds like she's emotionally retarded and, to be blunt, a total fucking bitch.”

“Maybe you're right.” I pause for a while. “The thing is that I spent so much time with her that I can't really see myself with anyone else. Not even now.”

“What about this Vinati girl?”

“The whole situation just seems too good to be true. Maybe it's even surreal — I don't know. You haven't seen her, but, man, I've got to tell you, she's just…she's something else.”

He smiles. “Did you know Hegel believed India to be home to the most beautiful women on Earth?”

“I didn't realize Hegel had much experience with women from that part of the world.”

“Maybe it was just common wisdom at the time. To be honest, I don't really know. It's just something that I've always found funny.” He lights a cigarette. “Herodotus said the same thing about Ethiopian women. Neither one stated it as an opinion, either. They both considered their statements to be established facts.”

I nod.

“What else do you see in her?”

“Connie?”

“No, this…what's her name again?”

“Vinati.”

“Vinati. It's a beautiful name.”

“It is. And she's just incredibly beautiful. And she's, you know, fairly intelligent, too. I mean, I never considered her to be a great intellect or anything, but we had a lot of good conversations yesterday.”

“So she's not a dummy.”

“No, she's not. She's bright. She's fairly well read. She has a good sense of humor, which is a hell of a lot more than I can say of Connie.”

“It sounds like all the necessary building blocks are there.”

“Yeah, they are. Definitely. And I feel bad that I can't really tell you about all of her idiosyncrasies yet — that's just because I'm getting to know her.”

“Really? You?”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Look, it's not that I'm accusing you of being judgmental. You just have the tendency to…I guess construct personae and back-stories for people out of nothing more than a glance. I guess all people do it; you just seem to go into a lot depth.”

“So I over-analyze people?”

“Yes. Look, dude, I'm not trying to insult you. It's not like it's a character flaw or anything. I mean, you're just like Zuckerman.”

“Dylan?”

“No, Roth's Zuckerman. I don't remember his first name.”

“Okay.”

He drags from his cigarette in silence. Where did the music go? “I just find it odd that you haven't seriously thought about this girl.”

“Sometimes I just don't. Certain people I just accept at face value.”

“Okay,” he says as he reveals his palms to me. He's quiet for a moment. “But, going back to Connie, it seems as though you were in love with the idea of having a girlfriend. In other words, the particular person wasn't all that important; you just wanted to be in love with someone. Some people may say that you were in love with the idea of her.” He ashes the cigarette, looks to it, and then puts it in his mouth. “I'm sorry if any of this is out of line or overly cerebral.”

“No, not at all. You know, given the circumstances…”

His nods. “Let me ask you a question,” he begins as his expression mimics one often worn by Aberdeen. “When you read a poem about love, do you instantly imagine Connie? I mean, even if the author describes a person bearing no physical resemblance to her?”

“Still?”

“As of yesterday.”

I think. I think for a while. She is that personification of the loved. The self I have constructed for her is an avatar that materializes as Juliet, as Werther's Lotte, as I-330, as pre-veil P.G.O.A.T. She's every heroine, every love-interest. Connie's identity has become almost meaningless over the years.

“I'll take that as a yes,” he says.

“Well, it was because I was in love with her.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“I mean,” I stumble, “We had our squabbles, but, yes, I definitely loved her.”

“I'm sure you did, or at least you believed that you did.”

“Don't pull this type of bullshit with me, Jeff,” with a roll of my eyes.

“Am I wrong? It seems like you enjoyed her company occasionally, the ability to have sex without having to form an intimate connection with a stranger — to begin anew, so to speak.”

“This was not a protracted fuck-buddy situation.”

“That's not what I'm saying,” calmly. “It's more that the two of you are very similar in the sense that…well, how do I put this?” He takes a long drag from his cigarette before stubbing it out. “You don't jump into relationships, and I'm guessing she's the same way. You're both marathon runners, so to speak.”

“So it was a relationship of convenience, in other words?”

“Look, I'm not trying to be an asshole here. I'm just telling you what I see. To be blunt, my hope is that you get this bitch out of your life. She's terrible for you. She makes you miserable, and I'm pretty sure the two of you have hated each other for well over a year now.”

“Hate is a pretty strong word. I'll agree that the relationship did kind of become routine. You know, we were in love. It was a fact, like something you don't really have to think about. It wasn't contingent upon any feeling or emotion; it just was. Milton wrote Paradise Lost; your hair is brown; we live in Bushwick. There's no need to reflect upon any of this. I never had to ask myself if it was true. It just was.”

“It was the status quo.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you ever think the two of you would get married?”

“Not especially. It, the relationship, just became so natural. I don't know how else I can put it. I feel like I didn't even like her the entire second year we were together. I don't really know, though. All of the problems just became so much more pronounced once she moved to Boston. There was just this constant animosity between us. Privately, I actually referred to this period as the Animosity — you know, as if it were its own special era.” He laughs uncomfortably. “It almost seems like we stayed together out of spite — both of us.”

“Love as a form of reciprocal torture,” he laughs.

“Proust?”

He nods. “Honestly, it seems like this may have been helpful. I understand that washing dishes was probably not the best epilogue to the relationship, but maybe now you can finally move on, and maybe even begin a relationship with this Vinati girl.”

“On the subject of women,” I begin, “What happened with you a Melissa?”

“Sometimes people just grow apart, man,” stoically. Thom Yorke mutters the first lines of “Kid A” in Jeff's room. I guess the previous silence was actually just an MP3 of very poor quality.

“But you don't seem to see any of your friends anymore.”

“They're her friends. All of the friends I've met in this city, with the exception of Melissa and her group, are either engaged or married. That's what happens when you get to be my age.” He's twenty-six. “People just grow up.”

“What about your friends from college? Don't any of them live in the city?”

“A few, but I wouldn't call them good friends by any means. Sure, I might meet up for a drink with some of them every once in a while, but, by and large, I don't talk to many of my college friends anymore. I don't really keep up with anyone from high school, either. So whom do I have left?” he asks himself. He then answers: “The people I've met here; and, as I've said, they're all fucking married or engaged. And, just like good intellectuals, they are all with dominating women who keep them on short leashes.” He rubs temples for a few moments. “Have you ever been around married people? Not just your parents and their friends, but people who are close to your own age? It's terrible. Everything is so saccharine. They have dinner parties and drink modest amounts of wine. They talk about bad television, acknowledge that it's bad, that it's utter garbage, and then proceed to talk about it for the next hour. And they always want to set you up with someone, too. And these women to whom you're introduced — my God! It's like these people are running kennels.”

“I didn't think that was happening as much as it used to,” after laughing a bit.

“What, that people push their ugly friends onto you like shitty hors d'oeuvres?”

“No, not that.”

“Oh, that smart men continue to take on horribly bitchy women who make them miserable?” He pauses. “Not to say that smart women don't do the same thing. It's just more prominent with men. I guess a lot of smart people just have masochistic tendencies.”

“I see. Well, I was talking about marriage.”

“Oh. I guess that's just the people I've met. I don't know if it applies across the board.”

“Did you ever think that you and Melissa had a chance?”

“A part of me did, yes; but she had other ideas. She was young. It's not that she was all that young in age. It was more that she was socially bound to an age group of which she was not really a part.” I tilt my head. “I'm not saying that I have arrived at a higher emotional or ethical level than her — we are equals in those regards. Speaking of which, have you ever heard of Kohlberg's hierarchy of moral judgment?”

“No,” I respond.

“You may have come across it if you've read Habermas.”

“I never had the pleasure. I've heard plenty about him, but I haven't had the time to pick up anything he's written.” I point to the pack on the table. “Mind if I grab another one.”

“Sure. Well,” as the lighter makes its way across the table, “I guess it's exactly what it sounds like. Kohlberg breaks basic moral development into six stages. And it's different than Piaget, primarily because some people never make it to the sixth stage.” Okay. “Regardless, these stages, to me, also map emotional development to a certain degree, but that's another can of worms. I'll just say that I believe that Melissa and I fall into the same stage of moral development. Socially, however, we are very different. Our projects and aspirations are very different. She still needs to go out all of the time; she refuses to be content with a sedentary life because she equates stability with adulthood, and adulthood with death. Her parents really cemented this into her head because they both worked twelve and fourteen hours a day for pretty much the entire time she was growing up. In other words, she is a fully mature adult on just about every level, but she is terrified of having a career.” He pauses. “To her, it's not just the end of childhood, but the end of autonomy, and, ultimately, the end of life. I see that fear in you, too.”

“There certainly is some truth to that.”

“One could say it is the fruit born of the Me Generation.”

“You sound like me.”

“What?”

“You're rarely this cynical.”

He shrugs. “Well, anyway, this is why all of the friends still see her — because they're her friends, not mine; they were mine only by proxy. It's not that I did anything wrong; it's just that I'm giving her space, which means I'm also giving them space.”

“So there's no animosity there?”

“No, not especially. There was at first, but each time that I've seen her since we decided to…I guess separate, it's been a little better. It wasn't the typical break up. It's not that I did anything, and it's not like she was guilty of any infidelity. I guess we both just realized that we wanted different things. It was kind of a Woody Allen moment — though, I admit, to a certain extent I blame her for killing the shark.”

“So that was it? You wanted to get married; she didn't?”

“It's not that simple, but I guess that's the gist of it.” He digs at a cigarette that refuses to stop burning in the ashtray. I take a long drag. “What did you think?”

“Honestly?”

“Yeah,” he chuckles. “Honestly.”

“I thought you cheated on her. It explained the reason why you don't see any of those people anymore.”

He laughs. “You want a beer?”

“Sure.” He's quickly back with two unopened bottles of Sol. “What? No lime.”

“Fuck you, man,” he laughs. We both sip. “I'm curious about this A-R-E business. What the hell is an eidolon?”

“It's difficult to explain. I guess it's the ideal form of an individual, something along the lines of the soul. I mean, I initially thought it was just another word for soul or ghost, but Faxo clearly believed there to be some type of nuance there. All he did was make the whole thing more convoluted.”

“So it's not synonymous with the soul?”

“I mean, a thesaurus may tell you differently, but there are a number of distinctions between a soul and an eidolon — not that I really know what any of them are. There's more than just the spiritual connotation. There's another side, but I can't seem to figure that part out. Faxo couldn't explain it all that well. He was kind of a pedantic guy.”

“A pedantic artist?” he laughs. “That's unheard of.”

“Seriously, though, it just doesn't make any sense to me. I understand the drive to be without the restraints of convention, which is what he kept talking about; but he also mentioned some other context in which the word applies without really explaining it. I don't see how the two interact. A part of me was thinking that it had Scholastic implications, but I don't see Faxo as being that type of person. Then again, he did bring up Plato once or twice. And Aristotle.”

“What about thetans?”

“What?”

“It just sounds like a cult to me.”

“That's what I said.”

“My guess is that it doesn't explain anything because it's not supposed to,” he continues. “It's just some bullshit ideology that lumps all of the problems of the world together so that it can then proffer some vague solution. This is how all cults and conspiracy theories operate. The schizophrenics aren't all that different.”

“But Faxo was an intelligent guy…”

“What?”

“What's the name of this song? It's so fucking catchy. I've had it in my head for like a week.”

“I think it's called 'Young Folks'. I don't know who does it. This is one of Melissa's mixes. I'll burn you a copy.”

“Thanks.” I take the last drag from my cigarette. “What was I saying?”

“About Faxo.”

“Yeah. It just doesn't make any sense. It doesn't seem like he'd get caught up in that type of bullshit.”

“You do know that Heidegger embraced Nazism.” My skepticism is discernible. “At least in nineteen thirty-three.” I dig at the cigarette, which, again, has refused to go out. “It just goes to show that even intelligent people will embrace some completely insane elements of a system, provided they agree with some of its underlying tenets. Heidegger felt that democracy was not capable of coexisting with the technological advances of the twentieth century. Furthermore, he wanted a society that promoted the epic, the magnanimous. Democracy, he felt, only promoted mediocrity.”

“I think that analogy is a bit exaggerated.”

“I won't deny that it is; I'm just saying that this Faxo character probably gave you the hagiographer's Keens, not the real Keens.” I tilt my head. “He probably came close to deifying the man.”

“But they, the A-R-E, aren't political. The organization isn't really religious, either. In fact, they didn't even seem to have an agenda or anything. They just wanted to pursue a, an — I don't know — halcyon lifestyle. They wanted to be like this nexus of peace and joy amidst a world that seems to have lost its soul — kind of like an artistic Kibbutz.”

“A what?”

“It's like a Jewish commune. It's not really supposed to be politic—”

“So they don't want to be political? Is it because they see politics as futile?”

“I won't put words into mouths.”

“But it's implied, right? That's what the art world has been doing for years. You've heard of Dadaism.”

“But it's different than anti-art and all of the other garbage that people espouse when they're too lazy and self-absorbed to do anything worthwhile. It's spiritual, too. Dadaism was not only nihilistic; it was atheistic, too, wasn't it?”

“I always considered nihilism inherently atheistic.”

“A lot of people would say no, but that's another conversation. It's not just that the A-R-E reject everything; there's a reverence for life, which is something completely anathema to nihilism. There's this earnest desire to…I guess revel in life, to relish it, to make it…I know this sounds stupid, but human. Modern art seems to be drowning in vulgar materialism and the basest of human emotions, the idea that the Unconscious is a bog of fury and lust. Even high art, when it strives to convey something complex or poignant, seems to be necessarily pessimistic.”

“You do read the newspapers, don't you? It's a veritable shit-storm out there. Besides the energy crisis that's about to erupt in this country, you have terrorism, civil wars on just about every continent, enduring strife in most of Africa, a culture of waste in just about every country that would call itself industrialized, waning civil participation, famine…I could go on. The point is that cloistering yourself from the harsh realities of the world either by denouncing them from the ivory tower or by ignoring them is nothing more than Modernist escapism. And we don't need escapism or its equally useless counterpart: bleak, apocalyptic millennialism. We need to recognize the problems confronting us as a species. We need people who not only see these problems, but artists and politicians who can shift the discourse of this society in order to actually address them realistically. I mean, free-market capitalism is no longer a sustainable system. We need a figure on the left who can drive this point home.”

“So vote Gore in oh-eight,” I laugh.

“You know what I'm saying, though,” he smirks.

“I agree with you; I just also believe that people need to enjoy life to a certain degree — that they shouldn't get so bogged down by the plight of the world that they lose heart, and end up just going with the flow. I think that's one of the primary objectives of the A-R-E — a celebration of humanity for just a night every so often. That's what I got out of Daphne and Patrick more than Willis. They seemed to imply that the A-R-E congregates on a fairly infrequent basis in order to have these parties.”

“What else do they do?”

“What do you mean?”

“When they're not having these raging parties with furries—”

“—I think they're called plushies when they wear full costumes like that.”

“Is that capitalized?”

“I don't fucking know.”

“Whatever. So you have plushies and Elvis impersonators and models from Seurat paintings and men in diapers and pointy, German helmets…what are those things called again?”

“Pickelhaubes.”

He laughs. “What do they do on the other days of the week or month…maybe even year?”

“I never thought to ask. It just seems like a loose federation of artists.”

“And the acronym could really be anything. It could be Argonauts Reclaiming Eden, for all you know.”

“That sounds pretty cool. Did you just come up with that?”

“No, I've been saving that one up for a while now.”

“Well, regardless, I know it could mean anything, but you shouldn't think of it as a group that has the potential to change the world. What I saw was just a party. I mean, every culture has their festivals, their Bacchanalias.”

“I guess. It just seems like a waste to me. If there are all of these famous artists floating around the place, I don't see why they don't put their heads together to come up with something of substance.”

“Maybe they do.”

15.1

Tomas is a drunken mess. His voice mail, which I receive as the nearly empty train speeds past sleepy brown facades, is a desultory harangue that conveys only one important piece of information: The Sheeps are going to be going on about quarter to one. The name sounds familiar, but I can't associate them with any person or place.

I arrive to the venue about half past twelve. From what I can infer from the number of slightly inebriated smokers mulling around the door, the place is fairly crowded for an early Tuesday morning. I don't try to eavesdrop on any particular conversation, but it is difficult not to overhear the various members of the throng. After being subjected to organ-slapping decibels, it takes a great deal of concentration to maintain an inside voice, I suppose. Moreover, the sound guy at this venue is known for making everything too loud. He’s also known to be a total dick.

A mini-van parked a few yards away from the venue is being loaded with a dismantled drum kit. Three guys in the midst of stowing it away are receiving good reviews (I would assume they must be the previous band, Freak Bear and the Yummy Makers). Honest ones, too. They lean against the van without the frustrated expressions of those who have borne too much flattery and bullshit exaltation. The postures of those surrounding them are not sycophantic; they are manifestations of admiration and respect. The consensus seems to be that the difficult portion of “Victim of a Cheese Malevolent” came off without a hitch. Ryan's solo in “I Want Pundit-Free T.V.” was perhaps the highlight of the show. One person compares it to Nels Klein's solo in “Impossibly Germany,” which Ryan gingerly denies, as this is far too generous a compliment. The Blind Melon cover, however, was not up to snuff. Danny evidently just can't hit the high notes. “Hey, I know I'm no Shannon Hoon or nothing,” he says in his defense. “Plus it's fucking tough to belt it out when you're playing the main riff, man.” Silence. “Whatever. It was the first time we played it. Probably the last. Are you coming to the Galapagos show next Thursday?”

Like most places that function as both venue and bar, there is no cover at the initial door. Getting to the stage, however, will probably require five bucks. About twenty people occupy the concourse, which leads to the venue. Most of them are young and somewhat motley in appearance. The place looks like a dive bar gone glam-rock on a budget. One could qualify said budget as conservative, but, given the Bush administration's unique brand of Daddy's-Credit-Card-Republicanism, this may convey an image of soon-to-be-repossessed opulence. It's ostentatious, gaudy to the point of almost cool.

That sour beer smell that reminds one of an old ballpark permeates the place. It is the pnuema of the past. Bottles collide like passing strangers from a nonspecific locale. The torn portions of some of the seats have been covered by duck tape; smaller wounds have been sealed by electrical tape. Stuffing the color of a manila folder overflows from the bandages that have been tampered with, probably as a consequence of several visitors' boredom as opposed to the destructive impulses of one fidgety drunk.

The bartender is comprised of tattoos, sinews, and pieces of metal intermittently applied to various pieces of flesh and cartilage. He is like the anatomy project of a third-grader with far too much imagination. Aesthetically, of course. His hair is the color of weak Kool-Aid (Grape, though, to date, I have never come across a grape that tastes quite like Grape); it is thin and shoulder-length. He knows that dull scissors have a lower register than sharp scissors. From experience. From what I can tell, he has all of his teeth. The incisors, however, have been radially stained. His canines are more gray than black.

After cracking two cans of PBR, he approaches two critics at the bar engaging in conversational Onanism, a type of interaction in which a person may indulge if he or she wishes to let everyone within earshot know that, yes, they are in the presence of the smartest motherfucker in the bar, perhaps in all of the city. What makes it Onanistic, of course, is not the conceited belief of intellectual superiority per se; rather, it is that the apparent need to contradict everything another person says with horribly banal interjections that don't often go beyond pointing out that the opposing interlocutor has constructed a proposition that is mendacious as a consequence of the use of a universal quantifier as opposed to an existential quantifier (or, in normal parlance, that said speaker has made a generalization). Truth be told, they are pointing out a semantic inaccuracy, but they fail to note that the pragmatics of colloquial speech allow such propositions when it is obvious that the inaccurate proposition either has been constructed for the sake of brevity or is meant to be taken as a hyperbole. It's unbearable when one person does it; when in concert, it's almost Yoko-Ono-does-Enya unendurable. The shorter of the two conversationalists uses the word “couple” to describe a small group as opposed to a duo. The taller one points out that “couple” and “few” are not interchangeable in that slightly effete tone utilized by those who would never use the word “effete” because they believe it to be derogatory. The hand of the bartender quickly snaps up the dollars they drop on the bar in one quick, predatory motion — like the mouth of a snake, and without a “thank you” or a “thanks” or even a nod of acknowledgment. A Steve Malkmus tune with which I am unfamiliar plays in the background. I admittedly don't get the euphemisms or references, but still enjoy the song.

On the other side of the bar, a drunkard chorus taunts three apologetic friends who claim it to be too late to stay out for another round. One of the girls by the pool table is sympathetic to the responsible few. After saying a quick goodbye to the trio, she once again focuses her attention on the table, which is occupied by two competitors separated by several decades. The older of the two laughs as he calls the pocket into which he anticipates the eight ball will soon drop. He has a saprogenic complexion that indicates a feeble circulatory system and a prolonged case of nocturnalism — probably in the presence of union workers milking Disability, previously meth-addicted barflies who tell stories that would make Jesus seriously regret abandoning carpentry, and bartenders who should be awarded honorary degrees in psychology and social work. The older man's younger, bespectacled adversary shakes his head bitterly at the sight of the older man's arrogance. This should not be happening, he says. He then solicits the few surrounding people to confirm the validity of his belief — previous victories should have entitled his opponent to nothing more than another ass-whooping. The girl from above nods hesitantly. Inductive reasoning, unfortunately, is not the older man's strong suit (that, or he just knows how to exploit it).

The black ball plummets into the pocket. The chagrined kid is already pulling a handful of twenties from his pocket. The more-than-likely girlfriend can't believe her eyes. The old man winks to her, which causes the hairs on the back of my neck to stand at attention. Her entire limbic system probably goes numb.

The woman collecting money at the door to the stage is beautiful in the way an L.A. sunset is beautiful. It's a beauty that's biting, perhaps even raw. Her expression is an almost meditative despondency — not sad exactly, but gripping in a way that is more communicative than the gray, anti-depressant torpidity or picayune angst for which people under the age of twenty-five are so infamous. It's not just intelligence or cynicism, either. It's more a weary melancholy. Because she is clearly waiting for something, something far more substantive than a better job, a better apartment, or a (better) man — either the variety who arrives on a white stallion or the confidence man all-too-familiar with the shibboleths of game: of love, of passion, of phallic narcissism.

Her condition is familiar. It has been described as a certain discomfort — not the nausea of estrangement, which has been ubiquitous since the heyday of the Greatest Generation, and probably long before that — that envelops a person in an almost viscous languor. It's something different than what the previous generations have felt, not only in its severity, but in its very form. Instead of the rejection of Panglossian faith, and the consequent assumption of romantic forms of rebellion, we feel paralyzed by our fecklessness, our own insignificance, and yet unabashedly absorbed by it. We see an unjust God in the eyes of those tormented by famine, by war, by genocide, by the dynamics of power and violence that keep half of the world in the chains of superstition and poverty, and cannot help but feel nothing. Perhaps nothing is a bit strong. It's more of a hollow pity.

Even with the technological innovations that have made it impossible to take recourse in ignorance when one questions our lack of charity or even generosity, it doesn't have the affect it should. We know that it'd be nice to change the system, but the truth is that we do not want to fight for a revolution because we recognize that there is no longer an Objective. We worship the corpse of Dike. Because everything is corrupt. And if an institution hasn't been corrupted, then it's just a matter of time before it will be. And if this isn't the case, if the institution is somehow a paragon of virtue towering above a world consumed by vice, then it's probably not all that affective anyway — it's just some naïve hippie bullshit.

But this is just what we tell ourselves. The truth is that our apathy is grounded more in laziness and self-absorption than cynicism. The truth is that, even if we had the opportunity to participate in something that was pure, it wouldn't matter. Because we do not want revolution any longer. Our disposition contains within it something far more troubling — an alienation from reality, a certain numbness or sickness that one finds in most post-adolescent Americans who have recently come to maturity in the middle and upper-middle classes. I guess the rich kids far no differently.

In vacuo.

The genesis of our most important precepts does not begin with anything so great as the existential outrage over our eventual deaths, as well as the injustices that we will all have to face prior to that time. It begins with information, with constant information. We establish our concerns; we establish our beliefs. The problem is that we are too proud and too saturated with information to accept ignorance on any level, even if we don't really know anything. It's more than that familiar sense of indestructibility that has corrupted the judgment of ephebi since before Jason assembled the Argonauts; it's the belief that our own opinions and the opinions of those with whom we agree are sacrosanct, impervious. We are the progeny of a perverse philosophy of self-affirmation without self-reflection: Cogito, ergo sum rectus. The Colbert Nation. Homo Certô. But these are the early stages. Moving beyond the opinions we espouse, what could be called our personal tenets, we come upon the daunting intellectual landscape of the information age, a space in which there is no proof of a greater veracity in any one institution. Everything becomes bullshit, a lie propagated by some dietrologic force that has corrupted all media outlets, all sources of authority, and (why not?) even those random, polarizing counter-cultural demagogues, who show up in the news every once in a while for saying something racist, sexist, homophobic, unpatriotic, jingoistic, etc. There is always an available objection challenging what is putatively regarded as fact. There are institutions founded to contradict what other institutions posit and report. And there are institutions founded to contradict the skeptics, those skeptical of the skeptics, and so on, ad nauseum. One may be run out of an Arkansas basement, but the message has the potential to be as potent as a signal being transmitted from the antenna on the top of the Empire State Building. It's democratic, true, but it's democratic in the same way that anomie is democratic.

And we are left wondering: Which one is correct? Are some of them mistaken, or are they purposefully hiding the truth? Are some groups acting in collusion? Are they colluding with just the other voices, or are they colluding with some less innocent institution? Or are most of them merely under a delusion, a pandemic Mayan veil, which has enveloped the sanity of so much of the world? Is there a truth that has been overlooked now that physical phenomena are being replaced with digital phenomena (manipulated light, really)? Has something been lost in the translation, something that is, paradoxically enough, intangible?

And the answer seems to be a resounding yes. We experience a false nostalgia more severe than that pastoral longing that Proust and Ortega y Gasset and Fromm and Kerouac and Pynchon and DeLillo and Wallace vocalized prior to the complete digitalization of this world. And we ask ourselves, Has life become more artificial now — not surreal, but abreal? Is there some grand Truth hidden somewhere in the morass? Is Truth still relevant?

And herein lay the rub: there is no answer. Because the answer must come from an institution, and institutions cannot be trusted, especially after Watergate (at least that's what the Me Generation tells us).

And they may be right. Because it seems the most troubling problem of my generation is not just the profusion of information, but the absence of referential authority, the inability to award credence to anything that does not comply with our limited understanding of the world. We have either moved beyond or retreated away from the problem of the twentieth century, which essentially boiled down to the question of legitimacy. There is either total acquiescence to pre-Enlightenment Christianity or the belief that there is no anchor, no legitimacy, in any form. (And this is not just when it comes to the elusive, abysmal absence that has been meditated upon since the writing of the Eclogues; this is in the realm of the every day, the quotidian. It is the world of facts.)

And with all of the knowledge of the material world both accessible and seemingly contradictory, we begin to turn into ourselves. The zealots have their own problems, but those of us without the ersatz faith of the Evangelicals, we find ourselves confronted with a void, a void in which authority is abundant, but credibility is nil. So authority loses the only quality it needs to retain its status as such. Everything becomes bullshit, subject to interpretation, a potential lie if we find out that the wrong people believe it. We have our beliefs and there is no further use arguing because there is no argument that can dissuade us, nor is there an argument that we can provide to dissuade others. Unless they agree with us to begin with. Because conversation is dead, joined the ranks of meditation, civility and earnest piety. We agree to disagree on matters that only a few years ago would not have been regarded as subject to debate because said subjects consist of facts, of phenomena that cannot be manipulated unless one entertains solipsism, the epistemological version of the lowest common denominator. And we do entertain this, not as idealists in the tradition of Berkeley or even Borges, but as idealists of the red and blue variety; we entertain it by engaging in a form of solipsism that is not only parochial, but moral and ideological, too. (“Oh, you read that in Harper's? Well, then it can't be true.” “I wouldn't trust anything in the National Review. You know what their agenda is, don't you?”) In the end, the physical world is subjected to abridgment, redaction, and embellishment because it does not comply with what we want it to be.

And for so many this all becomes too much. It becomes too much to have to refute the beliefs of others, let alone amend our own beliefs in order to make them stronger or more accurate. We become desiccated, not passive exactly, but unaffected — not only to the news, but to the world at large. We cease to be Generation Y, and become Generation Why Bother? We fall into line with Generation X: disgraced, but without shame. Art becomes not only devoid of meaning, but of any feeling that is more complicated than heartache. The best we can produce is either bathos or satire because no one can muster anything real. The rest is just words on pages, paint on canvases, notes in measures, sex in distans. Existence itself eventually becomes white noise, static, that every once in a while interrupts the narration over the iPod. We lament the fact that we used to see odd bursts of light in the peripheries, but know that there's no point trying to find them again.

And she sits there with that certain lachrymose expression that portends northing short of this peculiar disposition in which our generation is trapped. And I cannot help but think that she, too, understands that this form of resignation is only possible in the information age, this capacity to be able to read nearly anything with the presumption that it's completely false, to be able to see art and already know whether it has been accredited as brilliant or dismissed as pretentious shit, to be able to hear music and contemplate nothing of its depth, only its parallel to some other band that can be referenced when speaking to someone “about music” (which really means “about bands,” as very little is said about the music itself, only its relation to other bands “that sound like a cross between…and…”). We acknowledge that we are missing something, that we are undergoing a process of becoming without serious effort or personal struggle. We even know that we have taken the shortcut to our identities, and that this, paradoxically enough, has become our generational identity. We're hollow: familiar with everything and knowledgeable of nothing. And though we know that there is something missing, we are too lazy and too vain to seek out its dimensions or its definition.

(And it shows in the only new form of art (or perhaps just entertainment) to have come on the scene in the past decade: Reality television. That is our contribution. An attempt at art with the absence of creative intention — the end to the debate of art imitating life or life imitating art; the final synthesis exemplified in people just like you and me.)

And so we take on the archetypes that appeal to us, as Faxo said. We assume the role of the sullen intellectual, the derisive critic, or the tortured artist. We learn to play these parts as masked hypokrites, and then complain to our compatriots about the lack of sincerity in our generation, this generation of fabricated memoirs.

And she reveals all of this without attempting to do so. She just is: the culmination of the last half-century with all of its contradictions, all of its fetishes, all of its idolatries, all of its failures. She is the most recent chapter in the American Dream. And I can't help but think of her as beautiful for this, beautiful because of her frailty, her honesty. Maybe “beautiful” is not the right word. Alluring. There's something alluring in her, something that draws you in, interests you. You are intrigued because she is so much like you even though the two of you have never exchanged a single word.

And she asks for five dollars. I give it to her. The taller member of the Onan cult, meanwhile, explains that a watched pot will inevitably boil, provided sufficient heat is applied to it. The girl stamps my hand, smiles absently, and tells me to enjoy the show in an accent of ambiguous origin. I try to think of something to say in return, a quip or something memorable, but I just nod, return the smile, and push the velvet curtain aside. I enter into a dim corridor.

Rock.

Island.

Whatever.

15.2

I remember just who the Sheeps are as soon as I see Barazov on the stage. He’s tightening up some of his toms with a chrome wrench. It radiates violet light. Every few moments he strikes one of the skins; they emit resonant implosives that sound like doom as opposed to boom or thud, though this particular noun, “thud,” would probably be the most accurate means of referring to the din tumbling around the small venue. It’s a rather shallow resonance, probably because of the sound-proofed walls, which have been adorned with that type of black foam that one sees not only in studios, but in hard cases for expensive equipment like keyboards and weapons of mass destruction as featured in those action movies where the antagonist’s thugs are not only evil, they’re also great shots and more than confidant when dealing with the authorities — they’re just completely incompetent when attempting to engage the rugged protagonist, who is a total bad-ass most of the time, but he’s also got a softer side, which is best illustrated by his passion for his resurgent and somewhat adulterous ex-wife (although he’s also being wooed by this totally hot ethnic chick, who just so happens to have been hired out to kill him by the mastermind behind the world’s most daring caper). The guitarists (one with a vintage SG the color of a maraschino cherry, the other with a semi-hollow Ibanez in black with gold trim) are attempting a sound check. SG is talking, but I cannot discern to whom he is speaking or what is being said as a consequence of the thirty simultaneous conversations that are all bleeding into one maelstrom of cacophony. Ibanez wears the solo/orgasm face even as he tunes. SG turns to Barazov with obvious frustration. Barazov, meanwhile, continues to drill at the drums absently until SG finally yells at him. Barazov looks to him with a sudden catalepsy that has various undertones that range from apologetic to just plain startled. The bassist has the face of a child who finds herself in possession of a new toy. She activates a pedal that makes her tone almost aquatic, slides way up the neck, and laughs when SG reprimands her. She turns down, says something to Barazov, and then starts laughing again. Barazov hits the crash with abandon. SG looks to him with daggers. Ibanez maintains an uneasy grin.

“Where’s your drink?” Tomas asks as I approach him, Aberdeen, and… “Oh yeah; this is Lindsay, our other roommate.”

“Pleasure,” she says with a slight bow and an extended hand. She is cute in that murine way that most straight women fail to comprehend; some men and many lesbians, however, find it irresistible. She’s like a librarian: the type of girl who is both well-read and scatterbrained enough to forget about the pencil in her hair as she explains the meaning of “tensegrity” and the brilliance behind the octet truss; who wears a long skirt and a cardigan over her blouse. Her outfit makes her look like the up-and-down type, but you eventually find yourself catching glimpses of a very different story. She becomes strabismic at the mention of acronyms like N.F.L. and M.L.B., but considers sports to be an acceptable and symbolic psychosocial (and homosocial) activity — the healthiest manifestation of libidinal aggression, provided all of the participants abide by the rules of conduct. She will assign further reading, much of it only recently translated from the original French. She wears very little makeup, smiles without showing teeth, and sports an eyebrow piercing, which says more about her than any one piece of ornamentation probably should.

“The same.” We shake. She smiles nervously (without teeth, as has been established). Aberdeen finishes his can of beer.

“So where’s your drink, man?”

“I’ve got to live a little less prodigiously until this Friday.”

“Prodigiously?”

“What?”

“Fucking prodigiously? Are you serious?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Did you really have to throw that one out there?”

“You do know what it means, right?” Aberdeen asks.

“Of course I know what it fucking means.”

“Then why are you berating him?”

“Whatever,” he sulks.

“We can cover you,” Aberdeen says sympathetically.

“Totally, man. We’ve all been there before.”

“Really? I mean, it’s not like I have to drink tonight.”

“To enjoy this band you do,” Tomas counters between two shallow burps.

“And, well, we do kind of owe you.” Tomas and Lindsay both look to Aberdeen with curiosity. “We never did apologize for that fake Coprolalia from the other night.”

“Oh. That.” Tomas is quiet for a moment. “And I guess I did kind of ditch you the other night. Well…I guess other nights.”

Aberdeen looks to him. “What other—”

“Boots.”

Aberdeen nods uneasily. “But about the other, other night. We just needed you to come out because—”

“Did you guys need, like, a ride or something?” Lindsay asks.

“Wingman,” I respond.

“I think she dug you, man. And she seemed like your type, too.” He pauses. “Fuck man, for all the shit you’ve said about that Connie girl…you know, it really seemed like that Jane chick was right up your alley.”

“I didn’t even know she had a boyfriend until the following morning,” Aberdeen explains. “Neither one of us did.”

“I think she totally dug you, though.”

“You two are incorrigible,” Lindsay proclaims. Tomas rolls his eyes. “I’m going to the washroom.”

“Seriously, though; she was totally fucking into you.”

“She was a little put off by the incident at the end of the night, though.”

“The incident? There wasn’t a fucking incident.”

“You didn’t offer her a ride.” Tomas opens his mouth, but Aberdeen quickly puts a cap on his predictable wit. “A cab ride.”

“I was going the opposite way.”

“It doesn’t fucking matter, man.”

“Plus it seemed intrusive.” I pause. “Maybe presumptuous is a better word.”

“Presumptuous my ass.”

“You can’t abandon a woman.”

“You two are serious? You’re really going to reprimand me for this?”

“You just can't do that, man. I don't care if she has a fucking boyfriend — who's two states away, might I add. I don't care if she's not interested in fucking you. If you're the last person that she knows in a bar or at a party, you are responsible for her.” He parses out each syllable like a postman. “This is not because women are weak, mind you.”

“Are you trying to mollify a feminist somewhere?”

“Mollify!” Tomas howls. “You have to love this fucking guy!”

“He's just letting you know that you have certain obligations. You should listen to him.”

“And feminism has nothing to fucking do with it, dig. Set your spite, your fucking resentment, aside and cognosize where you live.” Cognosize? “This is the real world, man. And in the real world women have a serious chance of being fucking raped if they're out on their own. If there's so much as another chick out with her,” he shrugs, “then the situation isn't as percacious.” Huh? “But if she's alone, you gotta man up, man. Call it a double-standard if you will, but it's the imperativious thing to do, dig.”

“This is the world in which we live. Brooklyn may be safer than it used to be, but there are still some dangerous people floating around.”

“I'm loving this little lesson on chivalry, but—”

“Chivalry!” Tomas scoffs. “This isn't about fucking chivalry, man; this is about preventing some serious shit from going down. Look, if you want to profess some type of Dworkinite bullshit, then be my fucking guest; but don't try to tell me that men and women interact in this world the same fucking way. Sometimes women need to be protected, man. More importantly, sometimes they need to be fucking fucked.” He notices a look from Aberdeen, myself, and at least two innocent bystanders. “Yes, broads want to be fucked, dig. Believe it or not. Believe it or fucking not,” with hands waving in a kind of boogieman impression. “They don't just want to make love; sometimes they want to be fucked: penetrated, groped, fucking ravaged, fucking fucked,” with exuberant pelvic thrust. “They want that shit, man. They want to feel that shit in their diaphragms.”

“Tomas,” I begin.

“Yeah, I know. You're going to throw me some line about the majesty of love and all that other bullshit. But I'm not looking for love, man. I am looking for sex. And I've got it fucking easy, man. I know that I exploit what I have going for me. But to say that I'm doing it because of some type of misogyny is bullshit. I am not defiling chicks by fucking them — because the vagina is not sacred. It's nothing more than the inverse of my cock. And that's it. It holds no mystical value, dig? It holds a mysterious value for men because, guess what, men don't have fucking pussies (several looks). Men wrote the myths because only men were writing. And guess what? They didn't understand the vagina — or women for that matter. It, the vagina, the pussy, the bearded-clam, the darkness at the end of the tunnel, doesn't require reverence. It doesn't even deserve respect because it's just a fucking orifice. Women deserve respect, just as every fucking person deserves respect. And they'll get it from me. Every person in the world has my reverence until they give me a reason to feel differently. But the vagina is just fucking flesh and blood—”

“—Among other things,” Aberdeen adds coolly.

“—And that's fucking it. And this is not to say that I don't love vagina, man. I love vagina more than any man or fucking dyke in here (even more looks). But to ask me to see a woman as anything other than my equal is asking me to support fucking chauvinism. It's not reverse-chauvinism, like some asshole Reaganite might say; it is chauvinism. Look it up in the fucking dictionary: An unjustifiable belief in the superiority of a cause or a viewpoint or a belief. That's your pal Dworkin, dig? No justification. The vagina deserves to be fucking worshiped because it is a vagina, because she has one. Fuck that, man. I don't revere my dick. So fuck all that bullshit. Fuck it just as much as fucking male chauvinism. My dick is a piece of flesh that I love, but I don't ask other people to fucking love it. Well,” he pauses, “That's not entirely true.” It's suddenly as though he's awaiting a laugh track. “But you see my point, right? You see, we're no different than them when it really comes down to it. Yeah, we're different because of brain chemistry and hormones and other physionomical shit, but that's it. That's what separates us. Women are just as good as men, and women are just as evil as men — there just haven't been enough women in power to reveal that cruelty knows no gender. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. That's a universal. It's a fucking fact about human nature.”

“Are we done here?” Aberdeen asks.

Tomas halts, sucks on a molar, looks as though he is going to say something, and then clears his throat. “Yeah, I'm fucking done.”

I feel my ribs jingle along with Barazov's erratic drumming. SG becomes audible: “What the fuck, man?”

Aberdeen yawns. “You shouldn't have provoked him by mentioning Dworkin. He really hates her — especially the arguments she put forth in Intercourse.”

“I didn't even mention her!”

“Maybe it was implied.”

“Implied by what? He just went off the fucking handle, man, about fucking God knows what. And what's this shit about the physionomical? Are you just making this up as you go along?”

“Hey, I'm just a little wound up right now,” with a finger on the nose.

“That's no excuse to just fucking rage out like that. Did I ask for a fucking polemic against someone as…as…fucking marginal as Andrea Dworkin?”

“Polemic,” he giggles.

“…”

“All right. Fine. My bad, man,” Tomas begins as he looks around. “I didn't mean to explode on you there.” He stretches his arms out. “Hugs.” He receives a wry glance. “Hugs, man. Fucking hugs.”

People from as far as ten feet away are staring at us. To assume this to be due to the earlier commotion would be correct, but it misses the more important element here: there's no one within ten feet of us even though the place is fairly crowded. It's a very uncomfortable situation to be in — not that this is odd; it's been something of a reoccurring theme over the course of the past twenty-four hours. I think about this, the past twenty-four hours. Exactly one day ago I was being roused from sleep by a passing train, Vinati in my arms, the scent of her hair manipulating my dreams. And now I'm hugging Tomas in some shitty hipster club in Williamsburg. People are taking pictures. If I am to be defined by my presence on the Internet, the girl a few yards away potentially holds a large degree of my personal essence on her digital camera.

“You want that drink?” Tomas asks once I pull away from him.

“Sure.”

Equanimity has never been his strong suit. Furthermore, he's drunk; and when he's drunk, you never really know the contours his harangue will assume. This is the first time it's been directed at me…well, the late Andrea Dworkin and me. Typically it's just the dead, the powerful, or both: Goldwater, Buckley, Reagan. At times it's the typical whining that one encounters when discussing politics with those on the left — about their rationality and open-mindedness vs. the evil chaos propagated by the right under the auspices of freedom and democracy. Then again, this is better than discussing politics with those who are so far on the right that they honestly believe that their opinions have been marginalized even if said opinions are little more than snippets of populism taken from headlines and the soiled oratory that goes by the name of punditry. I guess it's common for people on both sides to claim their opponents' positions to be ubiquitous in the media, Hollywood or otherwise. What they both fail to recognize, however, is that the media, by its very nature, is a business, and that, as a business, its only goal is to have as many consumers as possible. Consequently, the news is neither liberal nor conservative (or, if it is, it is only so accidentally) — it is sensationalist, knowing only that bloody waters equal profits (unless that blood is seeping from a portion of the conglomerate of which they are a part). This is the sad fact of news: sensation and alarmism both sell a hell of a lot better than conscientious reporting, which has a nasty habit of painting everything in oatmeal gray.

“Again, I'm sorry about that, man,” he says as we stand waiting behind a dense wall of people at the bar. I turn around to see Lindsay by Aberdeen's side. He raises his can of beer and shakes it. I guess this means he needs a refill. “I just have this thing about Dworkin.”

“And you decided to take it out on me.”

“Look man, I'm not blind, okay. I know that you think that James and me use our…I guess fame to, you know, get laid. And you're right, man. You're totally right. But wouldn't you do the same fucking thing, man? I feel like any guy's going to do the same fucking thing.”

“Well…”

“Okay, fine, if you weren't afraid of fucking girls, you'd totally—”

“I'm not fucking afraid of women.”

“Women!” he laughs. “Of course not. But riddle me this: How come you never stick your fucking neck out there, man?” he says as he smacks me on the arm.

“What do you think I've been doing for the past two and a half weeks? So, what, talking with complete strangers every fucking night isn't sticking my neck out there?”

“You have no problem talking with men. And it's not that I think you're into dudes; I just think that you have this idea that…women…need to be respected — which is good, it's beyond fucking necessary — but that, you know, you don't just respect them. It's like you think that respecting them means avoiding them.” I scoff. “Look, I'm just saying this because that's how I fucking used to be, dig? I used to think that women couldn't be approached because it…what's the fucking thing in football? You know, where the defense jumps offsides, but it's different than offsides for some reason.”

“Encroachment.”

“Yeah! Encroachment. You're like a portable dictionary, you know that?” I nod slowly. “Yeah, but you think any advance, you know, encroaches upon them. Upon their independence. I thought that way, too, but I've found that women respect a man capable of approaching them without being creepy about the whole thing, dig?” He notices a derisive look. “Hey, if you think I'm just blowing smoke up your ass, then tell me to shut up. Shit, man, just say that I'm wrong, and I'll just drop it.”

“You're babbling like a fucking fifty year-old lush, and, more importantly, you're wrong.”

“Okay. Then fucking riddle me this: When was the last time you got laid?”

“Twenty-four hours ago.”

“…”

“You were saying something, Tomas?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait? Hold on. You gotta go back. What the fuck happened?”

“I don't know. It just kind of happened.”

“I always love that. It? 'It' just happens when you blow a transmission or break a glass. Getting pussy requires skill, tenacity, fucking genius, man.”

“I didn't do anything special. One thing just led to another.”

“Fine, fine, I believe you.” He slaps me on the back. “So who was the lucky lady? Did you finally bone the notorious…uh, what's her name? The Indian broad?”

“I've never told you about her.”

He shakes his head. “You fucking drunk bastard,” he laughs.

“What?”

“You don't remember telling me all about her. The Indian chick. What's her fucking name, man?”

“Vinati.”

“Vinati. Exotic shit, man.”

“Yeah.”

“So you nailed her. That's fucking great man. Fucking solid.”

“Wait…how the fuck do you even know about her?”

“Remember the other night, like, last week sometime. We were in that shithole in Windsor Terrace — the one with all the TVs and the really fucking fat guy in the Snee jersey. Remember? Snee! Who the fuck has a Snee jersey?”

“…”

“Anyway, you wouldn't fucking shut up about her; you just kept going on and on about how much you dig her: how beautiful she is, how smart she is, how you thought you had your shot some night a few weeks ago. Yeah, you said that you totally could've fucked her had it not been for this shit that the bartender made you. It was called,” as he rubs his temples. “It had something to do with sodomy.”

The girl standing next to Tomas turns. She has a look of dumb perplexity on her face.

“A butt-fucking cowboy,” I say.

“Butt-fucking cowboy,” he repeats with a laugh. The girl shakes her head and turns away. “And then you passed out on the can.” The girl goes to turn around again, but decides against it.

“I didn't pass out on the can, man; she—”

“No, dude, I'm talking about the night in Windsor Terrace. You passed out on the can, the bartender threatened to call the cops, and I had to drag your drunk ass into a cab. Snee helped out.” I'm staring to him blankly. “We were with fucking Randy, man. We slept at his place. Remember? On Seventeenth Street, by that one house with the cross in front of it.” Pause. “You know the house, man,” with what would be italics.

“The Golgotha?”

“Yes! And you totally fucking called it that, too. The Golgotha! It sounds like a metal band — like a Swedish, you know, like intense as fuck, metal band.”

“It's the site where Jesus was crucified. Apparently.”

“How do you know this shit, man? You're like what…fucking twenty-two?” I don't respond. “I can't wait to see the Coprolalia article, man. There's going to be references to, like, fucking Gilgamesh and shit.” He laughs. “You're a fucking madman, you know that?”

“Sure.”

“You don't remember any of this, do you?”

“…”

“Holy shit, man. I fucking knew it. You got into that big fight with Randy over Ayn Rand. You said that his…what was it? Yeah, his concept of…of…uh, bourgeois individualism was juvenile and…and-uh…his misunderstanding of Hegel and Marx was astonishing. And then you called him a fucking idiot or whatever it is you would call someone who you thought to be a fucking idiot, and then you told him that he had to read something less…jejiune…jajun…jejune? Is 'jejune' a word?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. So less jejune than a paperback novel if he ever wanted to seriously engage in a philosophical discussion.”

“That doesn't sound like me.”

“That was you, man. And it was beautiful. He hated you for a while, too, but you two patched your shit up because you're cool like that.” Pause. “And you don't remember any of this, do you?”

Blush. “No.”

“And the two of you promised never to bring up politics or anything like that again.”

“Is that it?”

“No. You also talked to that one chick at the bar. Remember her? What was her fucking name…like Roberta or some shit like that?” He pauses. “Oh yeah, Roseira! Yeah, she was this cute South American chick. I think she was, like, Columbian or Bolivian. She looked kind of like…um, the housekeeper from Bottle Rocket—you know, the one Luke Wilson nails.” Roseira's face appears from the oubliette of drunken oblivion. The image is tenebrous at first, but the shadows eventually fade. And there she is. Hi, Roseira! Her features are so overwhelmingly sensual that you want to possess her in ways that are not physically possible, kind of how you wish to live in your favorite song. She is one of those people who cannot avoid passion; she attracts it wherever she goes. The second greatest tragedy about her is that, while passion doesn't age, relationships and people most certainly do. The real tragedy is that she'll never accept that passion and love need not always coexist. “And you just went on and on about this Vinati chick until she left.”

“And then I passed out in the can.”

“Yeah.” He's as animated as a toddler. “And she was like telling you all the shit chicks tell guys when they're too afraid to approach a girl they like. You know, shit like be yourself, don't come off as nervous, she'll like you for you, women like men who are caring even though, so far as I can tell, you have to be a conceited prick to get noticed by about ninety-five percent of broads…”

A spot at the bar finally opens up. Tomas sneaks into position. “What do you want?”

“I don't know.”

“Bennington Special?”

“Do they have Guinness here?”

“There are more bars in this city with it than without it. I was at this little dump in Fort Greene the other day, and the only beers they had on tap were Guinness and Bud. Kind of funny, right? Maybe you should put that in your article.”

“Sure.”

He orders, shells out twenty-five bucks, and then turns back to me. I add that Aberdeen needs a beer. This is ignored. “Anyway, I won't go over everything you said and did because I know how embarrassing it can be to listen to stories about how drunk you were, dig? The point is that I know all about the Indian broad.

“But you never tell me the real shit: that you pounded your dick to her more often than Connie, that you wanted to motorboat those mangoes, that you imagined her fucking snatch smelling like fucking masala. Did it? Did it smell like—”

“—I'm not going to answer that.”

“Why are so ashamed? Why don't you tell me the good shit?”

“Look, I just don't talk like that. I don't even think like that.”

“Yes you do. I can see it in your eyes whenever some hot little walks by. But you never fucking let loose when it comes to broads. You need to let yourself go. Unleash your inner pervert, man. Because I've fucking seen it, dig? I know it's there. You want to bury the fucking bone just like every other dog.” Where does he get these sayings that are below even cliché? “When you see a serious piece of ass on the street, you're thinking what every other guy is thinking: How can I get inside that? I know it, man. Dig it! I can see the look. You're a fucking predator. You just need to embrace it, man.” The drinks arrive. I notice that people are once again staring. The bartender makes no attempt to conceal her incredulous grin. “So how was it?”

“How was what?”

“What? Are fucking serious? How did that pussy taste?”

“Can you believe that guy?”

“He's fucking disgusting.”

“I know, it's like, seriously, we're not in college anymore.”

“Yeah, he's like fucking gross. He's like some fratty hipster, who…”

“Tomas, look, I'm not—”

“Yeah, yeah, you're not one to kiss and tell. I'm sure. Tell you what, let's you and me get all liquored up, and then we'll see how true you hold to that.” He picks up his shot glass, clinks it against mine, and then flips the liquor into his mouth in one quick motion. He closes his eyes slowly, almost gurgling the viscous booze as it makes its way down his throat. The shot glass is clumsily placed back on the bar, where it falters for a few seconds before becoming stable. “I'm guessing she pulled some Kama Sutra shit, huh? C'mon, you can fucking tell me. Was she a slapper? You know, not in the face so much, but that shit can be fucking hot, right? Did she like getting her hair pulled? They all love that shit, but you gotta' be a little sneaky about it at first. You know, you can't just go in like you're ripping fucking carrots out of the ground or some shit — you gotta go high and tight, you gotta have some fucking finesse, dig?”

“You're serious?”

“Of course I'm serious. You're the one who's being supererogatory.” I am? “All I really want to know, though, is whether or not you're going to blow that shit out again. You're gonna slap them titties around again, right?”

“Tomas, I don't—”

“Are you going to fuck her again?” he yells with his eyes to the ceiling. Yes, hi, I see you. Please stare some more. This isn't fucking embarrassing enough. “Please tell me,” he exhausts, “because I'm fucking dying to know.”

“I don't know,” slowly. “It's too early to tell.”

“Yeah buddy,” he laughs, “You're totally gonna hit that shit again. Just don't go for the anal until a few weeks in. Trust me, they never go for it initially…unless they're down with that shit to begin with.” He nods ponderously. “Down with the brown,” he adds absently.

“You're a fucking pig,” one of the nearby girls finally says. She walks away.

“And to think,” meditatively, “I didn't even get started on the pink sock.”

Maybe it's that I'm more sober than normal, but Tomas seems like that guy at the bar. We all know that guy — there's no need to elaborate. The majority of the people in close proximity are giving him less than furtive glances, tacit in their acceptance of what the drinks in front of them can do to anyone over an extended period of time. A song by the Sea and Cake attempts to overcome the cacophony.

There's a pale-faced man at the bar. Fish-faced, too. He's bloated, discernibly agitated, sporting a leather jacket scarred by a life of payday loans and drug addiction. He looks to Tomas. “You look like you've had enough, champ.” He looks to me. The word “aquiline” pops into my head, but I'm fairly certain that it doesn't apply. “You can take down whatever he's got left, right? You look like you know how to handle the sauce.” He's local, but it's not so pronounced as to make you think him the type who remains in the area because he's incapable of leaving. He's intelligent, but, unfortunately, misguided.

“He's not fucking touching shit, man,” Tomas explodes. “I paid for that shit, and I'm fucking drinking it.” He grabs the pint off the bar, almost falls over, and then takes off towards Aberdeen. James' can of beer remains unordered. My shot glass remains on the table, perhaps thinking whatever it is inanimate objects think about before they remain inanimate.

“You know'm or is he just some drunk asshole talking your ear off?”

“He's a friend.”

“He do this type of shit often?”

“Usually he's not this bad. I guess he's had a bit too much tonight.”

He shrugs. “He seems like a horsefucker to me. Probably from a long line of horsefuckers. Equestrian,” he adds casually.

“I couldn't comment.”

He laughs glacially, takes down the last of his beer, and then retakes his anonymity among the people in the bar. As he disappears from sight, my attention turns to the girl next to me. She is alone and eagerly awaiting the bartender. “Do you want to buy a shot off me?”

“What did you put in it?”

“What? Nothing. I just don't want it.” She squints. “My friend bought it for me.”

“I'll pass.” She turns away.

I'm left to ponder at this altar of Dionysus. It's a familiar situation, which I suppose is kind of pathetic. I am a connoisseur of lonely moments. It has given me ample time to reflect upon and appreciate the distinctions of each bar I've visited. This is the first place I've been to in a while where most of the bottles behind the bar have been placed in front of neon lights, making the liquor inside appear phosphorescent. It's not an antiquated look by any means, but the apex of the trend subsided some time ago. True to any trendy place in Brooklyn, however, the bar has been lined with a number of small, white candles that have been placed in dram glasses. The majority of the wicks stand at cold attention, barren like dead trees. The bartender is clearly too busy to bother relighting them, and the hectic environment seems to bring out an earnest disposition that would still be pretty prominent even if the place was dead. Her candor strikes me as somewhat abnormal for an individual partial to the hipster genre of fashion. She sports a Mod-Rock haircut, a mangled shirt featuring the name of a band from the late-seventies, pink dance pants, and a ragged pair of Converse All-Stars. She has no time for small-talk, she says, even if it is referred to as “chit-chat.” She accentuates the “ch-” to such a degree that it makes her look like a rabbit nibbling on a carrot. When a twenty-something man asks her what she recommends, she lets him know, in a less than implicit manner, that it's incredibly selfish to try to flirt with someone who has several customers to appease in a very limited amount of time. She adds that his act is pathetic, that his spurious androgyny is offensive to people who are actually gay, and that he should spend more time reading books as opposed to websites dedicated to Andy Warhol — who she refers to as “That fucking snake-oil salesmen, who ruined art.” When she brings him a PBR, she tells him it's the “House special.” She adds, “Drink up and shut up.” She does not receive a tip from him, but the next two patronesses dig deep.

I have no idea how old she is, but I would guess that she is either young and from the city or a bit older and from somewhere else. Obvious, I know. There is a certain lack of patience in her voice that is, again, earnest. She is a bartender; bartender is an occupation; an occupation is an activity that one does for money, not for fun; hence, “Shit or get off the pot, bud; I don't have time to dillydally here.” True, customer service requires a certain amount of obsequence — even if it is more often than not feigned, if not hostilely sardonic—, but this is not a venue for punctilios and grace; this is just a place to get drunk. The music begins to fade. The Sheeps are to begin soon.

“Do you want this?” I ask her.

“What?”

“This shot. Do you want it?”

She takes it down without much in terms of restraint, and then relays that the next drink is on the house. I ask for Aberdeen's can of beer. “Oh,” she adds as she cracks the top, “Don't let me see your friend trying to buy anything, otherwise I'm getting security to throw his ass out.”

“There's security here?”

“Why you gotta be such a wise ass, huh?”

I exhaust slowly. “Has he been a problem all night?”

“No, but I don't want to lose business on account of his shit. Just keep an eye on him, 'kay.”

Before I can assent, I learn that Barazov uses a double bass pedal.

It's autumn. The leaves have yet to take on the warm, moribund hues of the season, yet the scent in the air is one of stoic anticipation for the rites of the coming chill. The breeze off the East River is serene, no longer suffuse with the stench of putrefied waste. These are the halcyon moments, the transitional days that carry us from era to era, the threads that keep so many patches of memory from falling into famished disuse. The cement exhales the last of the sun's warmth as the western sky grows velveteen with plush clouds and the fading light of sunset — irrational contours and miasmal layers of color. In the summer, the distinctions seem more vivid, even if the rest of the day seems to bleed together.

“If nothing is true, everything is permissible.” It's a man's voice. His words are addressed to me. It's difficult to place his age, though I am certain that he is significantly older than me. His intonation is strenuous, as though each syllable is given a special gravity before it is articulated. To call it calculated would perhaps be more accurate, as his presence radiates a certain erudition that would hold misplaced pauses and other gratuities of speech in contempt. Then again, I have always had a compulsion to refrain from calling people calculated, as I feel the word implies something nefarious.

I am walking with this person, but I do not know who he is. He clearly knows who I am, knows the pace at which I walk, the manner in which I conduct myself. I would like to compare conversing with him to playing a game of chess with God, but this is certainly impossible, as one cannot play a game against a being with knowledge of all the moves that can be made. Perhaps He does not know what you will do, but He knows all that you can do; and He knows all of the potential consequents of any of those actions, and all of the potential consequents of all of the originally potential consequents, which are now antecedents, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. So maybe we have free will; it's just that He knows all, both truth and falsity, and that these two concepts lack definition until future becomes present, present recedes into the past. But then God ceases to be outside of time, no? How then can He be omnipresent?

I cannot remember from where the two of us departed, nor can I recall just how many steps we have taken. I only know that we have traversed a great deal of space and time, that his steady gait has yet to diminish in its sense of urgency.

“I thought it was: If nothing is true, then everything is possible.”

“Such a proposition is absurd — a self-contradictory statement. Beyond asserting that the non-true can possibly be true, and that the true can possibly be not-true, it allows all things to be possible not only in the future, but in the present, as well. This cannot be the case. Possibility is not a concern of the present. The future is the realm of possibility, potentiality: What will be, what will not be. The past is what was. The present is what is. These are definitions.”

“I understand this.”

“What is cannot both be and not-be. The present is determined by its composites, and its composites are; they do not reside in the realm of memory, potentiality, or negation.”

We continue walking, the sun static in the sky and the fragrance of grass and car exhaust mingling together in the doldrums of the evening.

“If everything is permissible, does nothing fall into this realm, this realm of permissibility?”

“I don't understand you.”

“What do you not understand?”

“How can nothing be something?”

“That is my question to you.”

“Wouldn't that negate the rest of the statement? If nothing is accepted, then everything is negated; and yet nothing is part of everything. You speak in paradoxes.”

“No, I am just introducing a proposition that you must rethink in order to understand.”

“Is this your way of telling me that nothing is permissible?”

“Possibly.”

“…”

“You clearly do not understand the gravity of these statements. You are like a judge unfamiliar with the law. Set aside your gavel. Become but a witness. You will learn far more, thereby making you less ignorant. I believe we will both agree that being less ignorant is a positive thing, correct?”

“Yes.”

“You are not a judge. Recognize your ignorance so that you may come to accept it. Accept it so that you may work to overcome it. Work to overcome it because being less ignorant is a positive thing.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you are ignorant.”

“I understand that.”

“This is a baby step towards a big-boy step.”

We continue walking, upon a sidewalk lined with brittle-leafed trees that rustle like paper, among faceless day-laborers and their kids, unicyclists, new couples proudly taking the walk of shame hand in hand, people I think I recognize but have never met. A park expands in either direction, in all directions. It is a park, too. While I may not be able to see its limits, I know that it is confined, that a fence has been thrown up somewhere, and that this environment is somehow bereft of the variables of urban life. And yet it is not the superficiality of suburbia. Its fecund verdancy has been prepared; it has been planned, but it has not been subjected to anything more imperious than a few green thumbs.

“How does a judge come to be a judge?” he asks.

“I don't know.”

“How does he establish himself to be a capable judge? Does he simply pass a test with a series of essays and, perhaps, a multiple choice section?”

“No.”

“Does he demonstrate his abilities? Is judgment demonstrative?”

“Yes.”

“To whom must man demonstrate his judgment?”

“People.”

“His peers?”

“Yes.”

“And what does his judgment represent?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is not his judgment founded upon something?”

“I guess.”

“What does a judge's judgment reflect? Surely his knowledge must be more arcane than simple phronesis. It must be knowledge of something.”

“The law?”

“Is that all?”

“…”

“What is the law supposed to represent?”

“I don't know.”

“Justice, perhaps?”

“…”

“Would I be correct in asserting that a judge must know the law? Would I present a fallacy if I were to state that a judge can only operate within the framework of law?”

“No.”

“If there is a law, then must there be a judge to affirm or deny that the subjects of this law have acted in accordance with or trespassed against it?”

“It would seem so.”

“So a judge is sufficient for law. Now, a law cannot be said to be a law if it is impossible for one to transcend it. On the other hand, a law cannot be said to be a law if it is universally observed without penalty. These postulates are entailed by the definition of law, correct?”

“Law entails freedom, in other words.”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. But here is the more important question: Is it possible for there to be a judge without law?”

“No.”

“So the two, judge and law, are linked biconditionally: One is sufficient for the other.”

“This seems to be so.”

“But if everything or nothing is permissible, can one say there is a series of laws, let alone one? Isn't it the case that a law is a restriction on the permissibility of an action? Isn't it the case that a system of laws is a series of restrictions on the permissibility of actions?

“If there is a Law, then nothing or everything is no longer permissible.”

“So there is no Law.”

“And there are no judges.”

“There is no Judge.”

“If nothing or everything is permissible.”

“…”

“Do you understand the gravity of this statement?”

“I believe I do.”

We continue walking.

“God's Grace is meant to deliver reason to faith,” he says after a while. “Yet we agree that there can be no Grace if the gavel rests silently upon the bench. And if there can be no Grace, then there certainly cannot be a God of justice. How do we confront this situation? It seems as though we are left only with the options of acquiescing to faith we know to be based upon an incomprehensible and bizarre Justice, or proclaiming all or nothing — either we are not subject to Law because it is impossible to transcend it or there is no Law to transcend. In all of these cases, we are left with an absurd conclusion, but the latter two cases concern me the most. You do know why that is, correct?”

“Because either nothing is permissible or everything is permissible.”

“A parrot is a wonderful pet, but a very poor pupil.” He is silent for a moment. “Do you believe nothing to be permissible or do you believe everything to be permissible?”

“Everything.”

“Does this not leave man alone in the universe?”

“Alone but for his peers.”

“Can this absence of transcendence admit a reason for existence?”

“I don't see how it can.”

“Is there a reason for man's solitude or his life if existence itself has no meaning?”

“No.”

“Do you consider a man to be a rebel if the antagonist against whom he rebels does not exist?”

“No.”

“Is there a point to rebelling if this rebellion is against nothing?”

“No.”

“So a man who has not only cast doubt in, but has rejected the authority of Law on the grounds that it does not exist — what does he have left?”

“Nothing.”

“And yet he remains. What, then, does this man have?”

“He has his life.”

“What is he to do with it? Mankind has always presumed existence to be linked with purpose. And yet this seems to be a fallacy. For what is he to strive?”

“I don't know.”

”Should he maintain his integrity?”

“Why bother if nothing has meaning?”

“So suicide, homicide, genocide…all of these are permissible?”

“Yes.”

“Should they be permissible?”

“If one cannot think of 'ought's, how can one speak of 'should's?”

“By what, then, can man abide?”

“I don't know.”

“Do you recognize the similarity between the words 'suffer' and 'suffrage'?”

“I guess. They don't mean the same thing, though.”

“To a man or a woman, an adult, they very often do.”

“…”

“Is this troubling to you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you understand how this relates to all things being permissible?”

“Yes.”

“You see that you have freedom. You know that you ought to approach the situation, not with timidity or criminality, but with joy and creative will — with integrity. As opposed to abnegating his responsibility, seeing it only as cumbersome, man must establish the conditions for law, for happiness, for both himself and his peers. And it is in his freedom that he creates it; and it is only with his integrity that he can remain subject to it, to justice. If everything is permissible, only man can create and enforce his limitations, which he must do because the only thing in which he can take recourse is his integrity.”

“This sounds like an impossible task.”

“But will you walk with those who have borne this responsibility, not as their subordinate, but as their equal?”

“I will.”

“Then you will walk among the eidolons.”

15.3

“Hey, wake up. We're home. Help me with Tomas.”

16

“Porky.” What the hell does that mean?

Toilets are not particularly well known for their comfort, and the one upon which I find myself is no exception. Tomas is supine in the tub, his eyes shielded from the painfully bright lights of the vanity mirror with a washcloth. The washcloth is cream colored and stained in a number of places with a rust colored substance that is probably dried blood. Hopefully dried blood. He breathes with effort. They are shallow breaths, truncated as if his diaphragm has been punctured.

“The Novel of the Future.” How come I never know the literature references?

The time is four in the morning. Perhaps a little later. I can't tell if it's still drizzling outside because there are no windows in here, which is something of a common feature in loft bathrooms. Still, I can feel the moisture in the air, and the smell of wet cement faintly saturates the whole apartment with a comforting aroma. Aberdeen has gone to sleep. He stayed up for one beer once we returned to their place. He ate an apple with cinnamon. He would sprinkle it on the flesh of the fruit right where he planned to bite. My father used to do the same, only with salt.

Aberdeen candidly spoke of Tomas, as he, Tomas, passed out pretty quickly after being transported from the cab to the tub. Aberdeen seems to think that Tomas' drinking problem has exacerbated since the publication of his book. On the plus side, with the exception of a few hours ago, he hasn't purchased a bag of cocaine in over a week, which is apparently the longest Tomas has gone without doing so in a number of months. He adds that Tomas knows that I look down upon those who use the drug (and I do). “He doesn't want to disappoint you. Kind of funny, right? I don't mean to sound silly, but he really values your opinion.” I asked if there is a history of alcohol abuse in Tomas' family, and received a hesitant and circumlocutionary response that I easily distilled down to a very potent yes. Tomas' grandfather, known only as the Czech, poisoned himself by drinking his less-than-loving wife's perfume. While the act certainly could have been taken as a mad and operatic gesture (if it were, say, a Russian short-story from the fin de siècle), the truth of the matter was that the Czech was only thinking about the fact that perfume is on par with moonshine in terms of alcohol content. So the romantic element was the accidental in the story — the Czech just needed a fix, and it ended up costing him his life. He was forty-two.

Tomas never had the opportunity to meet the Czech; he only observed the man's legacy by witnessing his mother's behavior, which was predictably antipodal to that of her father. She was open with her rancor, as she had seen her mother widowed while still in adolescence. And while she may have been more than willing to express her rage and bitterness over the events that transpired, she evenly distributed the blame. She resented her mother for being a frigid authoritarian, and despised her father for his lack of will power. He was a rather miserable man, too: Chronically unemployed, perhaps even unemployable; stubborn when it didn't matter, passive when it did. Aberdeen could not remember if the Czech had fallen from grace, if he was simply harboring at rock bottom, or if he had always been there, a permanent fixture, a pitiful yardstick by which the rest of the community could measure their good fortune.

So she had to overcompensate for their failures — what came as a consequence of the joyless tyranny of the mother, the gluttonous lassitude of the father. She was an odd amalgam of refined comportment and liberalism, a woman for whom civility was sacrosanct. She granted freedoms, but only did so because she was under the impression that such freedoms would never be utilized or expressed. And Tomas did not disappoint so long as he lived in her home (and it was her home; the man who had knocked her up was removed from history, just like Tiberius Iulius Abdes Pantera). He was never much of a drinker, never much of a party-goer, never much of a lady's man in high school. He was more or less a nonentity, a bulb in a strand of lights upon a grandmother's Christmas tree — one that finds its home in the corner of the basement; one that is covered by an ugly blanket and left idle except for that one day out of the year when it was revealed and illuminated for the whole family as they gather in the unfinished basement that may have been able to fit one generation, but not two, and certainly not three; one that could have featured any number of burned out bulbs, but no one really knew or paid any attention to the tree, just as no one bothers examining the smiles of hockey players while the puck is in play. Even during college he rarely came out of his shell. He had one girlfriend during that time (the bulimic), and she was just about the only entry that he could have put on his sexual resume with the exception of one ephemeral relationship during high school, which never went further than a few sloppy hand-jobs and one or two bare-titted grope sessions, and the girl to whom he had lost his virginity while visiting Brown during his senior year of high school. She had no name, barely a face. Aberdeen is fairly sure that the event took place at a fraternity party (though I can't imagine a place like Brown having fraternities), but can't say with complete certainty because Tomas refuses to speak of the incident in much detail. Tomas evidently still considers himself a college student, which is why, Aberdeen believes, he has taken such a shine to me. “He's typically very confrontational and disdainful of men with whom he is not familiar.” He walked away shortly after saying this, evidently to take a call from Lindsay. A few minutes later he returned to inform me that she had gone to her boyfriend's apartment. He then went to bed.

Forty-eight down is ENSE. That means this here is probably ASONE. How would a Jenny Craig testimonial begin? Losing weight obviously has something to do with it. What about ILOST? Well it fits with the one letter I have. What about this? Blank-E-T-Blank for “Coat Hanger.” Abortion. Why does abortion come to mind? Am I really that perverse? Wait…it's “Court Hangers.” Okay, it has to be plural. Court hanger. Flags hang in courts. Juries sometimes hang. What does that mean anyway? Hung jury. Is there another word for flag that could fit? Banner? Tapestry? What about another court? Tennis. Basketball. Hoops. NETS.

I've been assigned the duty of making sure Tomas doesn't die. True, the fear seems a bit melodramatic, but I guess it's better to be safe in situations such as these. He hasn't been lucid since we got him in the tub about three hours ago. The sight of him is rather pathetic: a boxer-clad and pallid lump of flesh coated in sweat and small fragments of partially digested food. He smells like feet and grain alcohol. The rest of the bathroom is redolent with either vomit or disinfectant, though the potency of either one of these components depends upon your location in the room.

Tomas managed to empty just about all of the contents of his stomach before we even got out of the cab. I didn't notice any of this because I had fallen asleep before we even got to Bedford. Luckily, none of it got in the cab, but the exterior of the door was caked with a pink mixture of stomach contents and compunction. The driver was understandably pissed about it. Aberdeen and I did our best to clean it off with hot water and Murphy's oil soap, both of which were fetched from the duo's loft. I did most of the cleaning. Aberdeen shelled out a pretty substantial tip. Tomas, meanwhile, remained fetal on the sidewalk amidst small, glittering shards of glass and derelict pieces of garbage, much to the amusement of a small crew of Dominican guys, who, Aberdeen later relayed, probably have something to do with the tire-slashing epidemics that occasionally erupt on the block. The biggest of the clan had a certain criminality about him, but the other members of the quintet seemed harmless.

Oxygen's atomic number is eight. How would you abbreviate that to fit in four spaces? ATNO? Thirty-one down is probably HEALS, so that's got to be right. That gives me an N-A-Blank-Blank-Blank for the tennis star. It's a Russian surname…don't they call the surnames something different…patronymic or something like that? Regardless, the other name is Russian, so it's probably NADIA. Yeah, let's go with that. What type of product has a rotating ball? Guinness and a few other English beers have those widgets in them. I doubt that's what the clue is supposed to refer to. Blank-O-L-Blank-Blank-Blank. I'll come back to it.

I have been to the terrestrial hell in which Tomas is trapped, that existence of cold sweats and porcelain worship. The torment encroaches upon the infinite. Every muscle in the body strains as it violently strives to reject the poison, but nothing is exhumed except a cocktail of enzymes that coat the tongue in a residue of bitter-citrus that no amount of brushing or mouthwash can remove. You enter into a fugue state — slightly responsive, borderline schizophrenic. (You apologize to your mother and can't figure out whey she looks like your girlfriend. Former girlfriend. She pats you on the head, arousing nerves that you didn't know existed. Topanga, from the television series Boy Meets World, takes over for her every now and again. Giant tacos engage you in profound conversations based on excerpts from Derek Parfitt's Reasons and Persons. They are erudite, but lack the condescension that one typically associates with the scholarly. It is mentioned in passing that Parfitt claims to not have what is know colloquially as a mind's eye — his memories are constructed out of information and data that he cannot visualize. Joey Ramone interrupts the conversation to let you know that Perry Buick-Pontiac is the best place to buy or lease a new Pontiac G6; the voice of the Micro Machines Guy (though he looks like Rachel Ray in drag) adds “On East Virginia Beach Boulevard, just two blocks west of Newton Road” so quickly that you only understand what has been said a few moments later. Rufio and a few of the Lost Boys are reenacting Sade's wedding scene of Narcisse and Hébé (otherwise known as the Shit-Storm) with the cast of Friends on stage left. Stage right is occupied by the janitor from Scrubs, who is busy mopping up some of the melted props used to recreate The Persistence of Memory. He has a minatory look in his eyes, and he keeps calling everyone with whom he speaks “Buttercup.”) You accept everything that takes place in this delirium, but deny whatever is in front of your face. Conspiracy. Everyone is against you.

There's that G that begins twenty-nine across. “Proceeding.” The G could be for Go or GOES or GOING. I've got an AH. How about GOINGAHEAD? It fits. Okay. HEALS and ATNO are definitely right.

The state of the bathroom surprises me. Its cleanliness would be expected if it was not the case that Lindsay shared the other bathroom with Barazov — then again, after living with Connie for just under a month last summer, I do know that women are not immune to certain proclivities that are as disgusting as those of men (though men at least know how to use a fucking plunger!). I can imagine that Aberdeen's frustration with Ichycoo probably stems from his lack of bathroom etiquette, as it is a well-known fact that hippies always let yellow mellow. Furthermore, I have learned that Ichycoo is a wookie (a term that essentially describes a straight bear (if you don't know this term, please consult the next available gay man) with a love of boomers (psychedelic mushrooms), pharmies (pharmaceuticals), and herb (marijuana); the wookie is also known to have a taste for the more southern-inspired improvisation that the jam band scene has to offer (Allmans, Widespread, Mule, etc.), to wear their hair long, often in dreadlocks, and to inhabit parking lots adjacent to venues in the mountainous regions of the U.S.; migration patterns depend upon tour dates, but they are known to travel in cars and vans comprised of people they have only known for a few hours, even if they are familiar with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people within the scene). The bathroom itself is typical in the context of renovated Brooklyn apartments. The walls are of a calico tile — perhaps some kind of marble — that is predominately coral in color. The floors are an off-white, the type of color one is bound to encounter when reading a book printed in the seventies or early-eighties. It is still too close a relative to white to be like one of those paperbacks from the fifties or sixties, the type that has the binding with that horribly brittle glue — so the cover goes missing within a day, the spine snaps shortly thereafter, and by the time you're done reading you end up with seven small books that are all missing pages. There is no counter space. One has the option of storing things either on the toilet, beneath the sink, or in the medicine cabinet behind the mirror. The bathtub is new and small. Tomas barely fits in it.

That has to be OBOE. There's always an OBOE. That has to be TIDE next to it. Don't write it in, though. Wait on it. What do flight passengers work on? There's definitely an S at the end. Forty-two down is MALAWI, right? Yeah, because flight passengers work on LAPTOPS. So it is TIDE. Fifty-six down is PBS. That makes fifty-six across…PLAUSIBLE. Sixty-one is SOITSEEMS. That makes this PLUM, this SETS, and this APSES. This is BAWLEDOUT. Wow, I just got that entire corner in, like, thirty seconds.

A part of me never wants to drink again. Not seriously anyhow. Tomas has proven that Hegelian dialectics can rear its pompous head anywhere. The action of drinking is social, but also inherently anti-social: when taken to its logical conclusion, alcohol is a poison that can kill you — and there's nothing more anti-social than death, especially suicide. There's certainly more to this, but it's rather recondite (perhaps the only English word, with the notable exception of sesquipedalian, that both is and means the same thing — i.e. obscure). I pop off the cap of a beer with a lighter, light one of the cigarettes that Aberdeen left me, and examine Tomas' chest for signs of life. Bob Dylan sings of his “girl from the north country” courtesy of a shuffling iPod. I try to think of the girl for whom he sings, but no photo is available. Tomas lets out a troubled groan.

Who was the sportsman of the year in 1998? Co-winner. Four letters. Tiger had a good year. Probably. He's had good years for the past decade. I remember he was a really big deal right around the time Biggie died. That was '96. I think. Football. Who won the Super Bowl that year? Was it Tampa? No, it was the Broncos. They won those two years in a row. SHARP doesn't fit. Or is it Sharpe? Not that matters. DAVIS doesn't fit. Who was the quarterback on that team? Elway. Of course. How could I forget about John Elway? What about baseball? That was during the home run craze. It obviously isn't Bonds because he didn't hit seventy-three until later — maybe '01. Yeah, I remember that. It was the only news that didn't concern 9-11, bin Laden, Afghanistan. Jesus, was that really almost six years ago? That doesn't even seem real anymore. Everything that day was so fucking unreal. I still remember the principal's announcement. Well, most of it. (Our class was discussing Hemingway's Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. Michelle Cooper was passionately criticizing the blatant misogyny of Hemingway when the announcement began, so I don't remember just how it started; Michelle, for whom discussion was a matter of waiting for the other person to concede that she was right, finished her point, realized no one was listening, and then finished with a surly, “Whatever.” After a moment, though, she grasped the dire gravity in the tenor of the principal, Mrs. McGullen; she understood it, could acknowledge that this was not some insipid notification, and immediately conveyed her remorse and humility with a set of downcast eyes. Yes, she apprehended it. Immediately. I did not. In hindsight, the principal’s voice now shoots ripples of goosebumps throughout my body; at the time, however, I thought it an operatic performance. Yes, a performance. Because that's how I thought of high school: a series of performances by students and teachers, by an authority figure with a job title that finds its root in the honorific bestowed upon Caesar and Octavian. So nothing was serious; it could not be anything more than a scene in the jejune melodrama of suburbia. And I was wrong. The bell rang shortly after the principal had everyone's attention, and most of the students in the classroom lost interest. She continued, though. At the time I was more concerned with making a Something About Mary reference, as Frankie, one of two friends in the class, had managed to get one of his folders stuck in the zipper of his bag. The two of us were met by Allison, the other person in the class I would have considered a friend at the time. I continued to make light of the situation as the three of us made our way toward the door. “Why does it matter? The World Trade Center's been hit by plane. It's a tragedy, sure, but it was just a fucking accident.” A severe look from the teacher. “Sorry, Mr. Heth.” “Accident? Why do you think it was an accident?” “It happens. I mean, the Empire State Building was hit by plane in the thirties…maybe forties.” “You're such a fucking know-it-all.” “Whatever Allie; I just don't see the point of playing Chicken Little.” “But this has gotta be pretty serious, man: The Gooch isn't going to—” “Frankie, don't call her that.” “Sorry, Allie. McGullen isn't going to interrupt class to tell us about some little accident.” “I just got a message from my mom; she's coming to pick me up.” “Why?” “Because it was a big plane. She said it was a seven-forty-seven. She's…” The four us, Katie Lynch, Allison, Frankie, and I walked into a silent hallway filled with cold, tile floors and purple lockers. The gravelly soprano of the principal echoed from the nearby rooms. The students were standing in subdued chaos, choking down mild epiphanies and revelations, attempting to grasp emotions and thoughts that were without signifiers or symbols. No, they were new, frightening. It was a moment in which nearly everyone appeared as though they were on pause, tableaux of confusion and deep, deep fear — without answers, without guidance — nested beneath speakers surrounded by wood paneling and a cottony shawl both the color and texture of a black dress sock. We would all later say that the experience was like a dream or a movie because we were not used to dealing with tragedies in waking, moving, unscripted life. “I'm going to remember this, aren't I?” “Dude, shut the fuck up.” The four of us took a few more steps into the hallway. Katie vanished. A few televisions became audible before receding into silence (the sound was not truncated, as the teachers, in their haste, did not bother looking for the mute button, just the little arrow pointing down). And then there was a huge gasp that resonated throughout the building, the sound that remains indelible upon my memory more so than anything else (like the smell of the Manhattan air that morning, as many people who experienced the event will attest). A few people could be heard taking the Lord's name in vain. Oh my…Can I please have everyone's attention: A second plane has just crashed into the other tower of the World Trade Center. Frankie turned to me. “Accident, huh?” And the aftermath: Looks of complete bewilderment, girls wailing, guys trying to look as though they are in control, arms around shoulders, heads buried in shoulders, dramatics that weren't feigned, profusions of sympathy and fear everywhere, manifested in several guises and poses. And as the shock waves began to reverberate around the world — those waves that would begin as fear and sorrow, but would eventually turn to vengeance and hatred — the three of us stood in that hallway without a semblance of direction. “We're getting out of here, Allie,” Frankie said. With everything in chaos, I figured there was no way we'd be caught, so I asked if I could come along. They were planning to head back to Allison's house. I knew this. Her mother was out of town for the week conducting business in Vegas, and the two of them had been dating for roughly three months. I knew they were not going there to simply watch television, but I didn't want to come back to play the part of the third wheel so much as I just wanted to get the hell out of school. In exchange for a seat in Frankie's car, I offered to smoke him up with a dime bag of what I thought to be decent grass, even if it was a little less than a gram of shake broken off from a chunk of Mexican brick weed. I can't remember if I bought it off of Stevens or that little wigger (or is it whigger?) kid who worker at the gas station. He called himself B-Rock. His real name was Bernard. He lived in the rich part of town, and was hated by most of the black people in the area, as his understanding of black culture rarely went beyond vulgar stereotypes. The white people didn't really care for him, either, although he always had drugs, which is why most of us were on cordial terms with him. As the three of us began making our way through the corridors of the building, the principal continued to address the school with a great deal of emotion, her words profoundly terrifying in their context. This is not an accident. Dave Wesson and some of the guys from the J.V. football team were cracking jokes about the Gooch's attempt at depth until one of the varsity linebackers, the only one to go on to play at a Division 1 school, picked him up about a foot off the ground, and pressed him against a locker. I don't remember the linebacker's name; I only remember that he was known for being one of those gentle giants. He had some legal trouble later that year because he assaulted some guy who thought G.H.B. was nothing more than the world's most potent aphrodisiac. Some of the rich, underclass girls looked as though they were about to engage in a photo-shoot. Most of the older girls tried their best to look composed, their tears both reluctant and earnest. Most of the young men didn't really have any idea how they were supposed to act, so they reverted to stoicism, rarely with success. It's important we stay calm in times such as these. Gurtz smoked a cigarette in the hallway in plain sight of about eight teachers. Being a sixth-year and all, no one really felt the need to reprimand him. He looked to Frankie with the expression one might expect upon a mechanic confronted with a blown transmission. “Fucked up, huh.” Once we got through the heavy-traffic of the main concourse, we cut through hallways completely devoid of people — labyrinthine paths of Cold War architecture, complete with dusty, maybe even disconnected, speakers that had been installed in order to harbinger in nuclear annihilation. I had never been down those hallways, and I'm fairly certain that I never stepped foot in them again. Teachers stood like beheaded totems vapidly staring at radios in the comfort of their classrooms. In some cases, there were no students there with them. When I peaked through the open door to the A/V room, I saw black smoke rising — plumeless and like the wings of a bat — from that pale-gray monolith. The Brooklyn skyline was rubescently hazed; above it, the skies became amber, and then the color of oxidized copper. My intestines felt as though they were caving into an abyss. I stood motionless until Frankie grabbed me by the arm, but then he, too, was struck by the sight. He shook it off quickly, however, so as to not let Allison know the extent of the damage. And then we were off again: chasing exit signs and the light of day. In those dimly lit corridors our footfalls cascaded above the din of the news programs coming from the classrooms and the Gooch's continued efforts to quell any potential panic. And I could see her in there, in her little office with that bulbous microphone on her desk, which looked like the love child of a sprinkler and an egg. I could see her there with her droopy face and those gullied wrinkles that brought to mind Maori tattoos or, to be less respectful and (moreover) honest, the grim face of Thantos. She wanted so much to maintain both her humanity and her authority, but she knew that it was only a matter of time before one of the two had to abandoned. Frankie led us through the long hall by the computer labs with his hand clutched tightly around Allison's. Allison kept looking to me with what appeared to be guilt. I still can't understand why. The Gooch was beginning to stumble upon her words as we ducked out through the east wing. We took that route because the guard at the door went way back with Frankie's dad. The guy, P.J., as he was known, told Frankie that a lot of kids were already being taken out of school. Indeed they were. The parking lot was a wasp’s nest of crying parents and praetorian older brothers; cars blasted voices broadcasting their ignorance. The reporters were so bewildered that they could only repeat about twenty seconds of information. This was no accident. We were almost hit by several cars as they tried to back out of their spots. Fenders were bended; information was exchanged; some freshman kid named Dudzinski got his foot run over. Frankie refused to listen to the news once we were safely in his Olds. I don't remember what he put on instead. Getting out of the lot took us about fifteen minutes. During that time, I crushed up my entire bag, and rolled it into one relatively large spliff (the tobacco portion coming from about a third of one of Frankie's cigarettes). Allison and Frankie took this time to argue about the radio. “I need to see this shit for myself, Allie. I don't want some numb-nutted liberal in New York telling me what the fuck's going on, okay.” He looked back to me. “No offense or nothing.” We got stoned as we sat in a Savage Park parking lot. No one was there, not even the typical mother-child pairs or the drifters cutting through on their bikes. We came into Allison's house laughing, saturated with oblivion once again, and then turned on the television. There was just a big cloud of smoke where one of the towers had been only a few minutes previously. We stood staring in disbelief for what seemed like a lifetime. No one said anything. Reporters spoke of the Pentagon over footage of tar-black smoke spewing from the Napoleonic building. Terrorist organizations were being listed indiscriminately, but no serious allegations were being made. The Mall in D.C. was on fire; the tower falling; there was something wrong in L.A.; the tower falling; government buildings were being evacuated in obscure cities; the tower falling; the citizens of Chicago were beginning to compose panegyrics for the Sears Tower; the tower falling; the tower falling (From a new angle that we have just received); the previous vantage. And we just stood there, the buzz of the grass vibrating the world, making our skin feel like the sand beneath a millipede, unable to move the few feet to the couch, unable to take our eyes off the blinking images of carnage revealing an event so utterly shocking and real that we thought of it as surreal, as something that we couldn't handle, that we shouldn't have to handle, as something that stood antipodal to our boring existence, one without the great obstacles and tribulations of generations past. Yes, we had been taught that history ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the IMF-ication of Asia and South America, and, consequently, that generational differences would ultimately rely on little more than consumption preferences. Our mouths hanging open, our shoes probably coated in copious amounts of drool, we could do nothing but watch. Fait accompli. And then—Good Lord; there are no words… — the second tower crumbled before our eyes, the smoke spraying upwards like the sea crashing into a bluff, the debris cascading onto the streets below, the Asbestos-laden cumuli drowning all vantages of lower Manhattan in what appeared to be a gray mudslide. That was not a replay. The second tower has fallen. And then it was just a pile of rubble — a work of art more harrowing and painful than any sculpture devoted to exposing institutionalized resentment and nihilism ever could be (because only a nihilist can be a terrorist: and he may be brave in the sense that he is willing to relinquish his future, but his bravery is disingenuous, as he rejects the future on an ideological level. So his abnegation is one without courage; he surrenders nothing of value (a life without integrity) because he rejects real liberty and, consequently, the future. His future. He may not be a coward, but he is far worse: he martyrs himself in the name of a cause that hemorrhages every semblance of virtue because it puts more sanctity in death than in life.) We watched television for hours. “No Rain” played on MTV at one point. As a nation, we were morbidly chagrined by the lack of a Zapruder in Pennsylvania. Allison cried until well after twelve. Luckily, she did not have to fear for her mother, who had safely landed a few days before, and would not be flying back until the weekend. They talked on the phone for an hour. I had called my mother prior to this. I told her that I had left school. She told me that she'd call in to excuse me later. When I told her that I loved her, the potency of those simple words choked both of us up. Frankie said he was going to enlist in the Marines. I thought it almost maudlin, but, then again, I felt a similar sentiment. I didn't take him seriously, probably because I didn't take myself seriously. But a few years later I found myself back in Allison's house, didn't I? Yes, but now a nation did not mourn. We were a nation who had grown tired of mourning, grown tired of etiologies on the hatred of America, grown tired of thinking, Perhaps we did something to piss off a rather sizable portion of the world. America had once again become the city upon the hill, and anyone who questioned either policy or the inherent virtue of the interests of this peerless nation was nothing more than a kook, a marginal figure with whom good, upstanding and rational people could not reason. The America of December 2004 was no longer searching for its soul or questioning its direction; it was now just a matter of simple syllogism: If it is American, then it is good. It is American. Therefore, it is good. And since the war is American, it is good. So the story on page one was not “Another Soldier Dies in Unjustified and Horribly Mismanaged War”; the story on page one had the word “Hero” in it, and the rest was filler. So the nation did not feel our pain; they valued our loss, but the grief was ours alone. It was just us, back in that old familiar house after strolling around the funeral home eschewing the knowledge that Frankie lay in the coffin nearby both stone-faced and pale. Killed in Fallujah. A death. A statistic about how well the mop-up of the city was going. I was taking my last exam for the semester when it happened. Compare and contrast x and y. I remember the call that came later that night. The semester was officially over for everyone by that point, and I was in Ilkay's room in the 26th Street dorm. There were about eight or nine people there. We had just finished off a bottle of Johnny Walker, and people were starting to get their coats on, even if it was rather warm for the season. We were going downtown to meet up with what was something of a super group of friends, as the party was to include several clusters of people, many of them mere acquaintances. But then I got the call. I was going to ignore it, as the number was not stored in my phone, but I saw that it was from my old area code. A premonition washed over me as I ducked out of the dorm room and into the hallway. Even before the voice at the other end of the line began to speak, I felt myself falling into a fugue state, my abdomen a theater of acrobats. It was Allison — hysterical, inconsolable. All she wanted was someone with whom she could feel normal, with whom she could retreat into the past, with whom she could feel safe. And I remember feeling so estranged from her, so alienated that I could not even commiserate or mourn with full sincerity. Maryland was an ancillary life at that time, even if I was set to return in only a few hours. And yet we had been separated by so much more. True, we had shared a past, but I had divorced myself from it, not because I was looking to escape it, but because I had egressed from it — from the circles that went to state schools, the army buddies, those who stayed back in the suburbs to work menial jobs and embrace ersatz versions of Yuppidom, those who would tease me when I went home because they said I didn't understand what it was like to work for a living. They were on their own, living in parts of the city that I had been taught to fear. They were regulars at neighborhood bars, even if they hadn't hit twenty-one. Some of them had wives. Some of them had husbands. Or did. And so it was with Allison, the girl who had lived just down the block from me for the majority of my life. And she was such a large part of my life for so long, even if that life now seems to be a precursor to the life I was, am, will be, living. We were in second grade when we met. You wore a red velour dress over a white, ribbed long-sleeve shirt. There were pink and yellow things on it. I don't recall what they were — bunnies or birds or something so nauseatingly cute that we still talked about it the last time I saw you. Even then they were eyesores, weren't they? Even to someone who thought a Magic Eye constituted the most brilliant marriage of technology and art, I knew they were hideous and kitschy and yet so grossly endearing that it was almost painful. You had come from Connecticut — the move a consequence of a disease of the widowing variety. Your hair was almost translucent it was so blond. Your skin was so fair it was almost transparent. I remember being able to see the veins in your face. And I remember being fascinated by it, even if this fascination now seems to be tinged by a certain type of disgust. But it wasn't disgust, was it? It couldn't have been. No, it was something more. And that something more materialized when we were fourteen. Yes, that was you in the dark as Tigermilk, the album to which your older brother could not stop listening, played. It was then that you introduced me to just how beautiful a moment could be, even if I had been taught to think of all sex as pornography, of love as the type of thing that has to be either eternal or a burden or something that can only be felt after decades of trial and error. But love can exist in the moment, can't it? Didn't it? Didn't it exist that night, not as something as profound as eternity, but as something that required nothing more than a shared experience between two people ready to shed things far more substantial than their clothing? Even in the second grade I think I understood this. Because I loved you, even if I did not understand it as love then, even if I don't think of it as the love one speaks of when discussing wives or fiancées or girlfriends; nor was it the love a father or brother or relative feels for the corresponding relative. No, it was its own state of love, a variation upon the Form, which I suppose every instance of love is, as each contains its own history by which its proclivities and idiosyncracies are fashioned. And at the time I could not help but feel as though it all gravitated around your innocence, one that was never truly lost, but eventually obfuscated by the opaque cynicism that all too often clouds the desire to be earnest, which is perhaps the kernel of love. Yes, the desire to be earnest, sincere. And so maybe your innocence was just how I experienced that kernel of truth that united the two of us. And for all I know maybe you see the same thing in me; maybe you cannot help but perceive my innocence. And now you have a child that was born in your likeness, an extension of your innocence. And now she has a husband who will rear his daughter from the confines of a photograph or a candid moment on a video. His only testimonial will come in the form of a one-page letter that he never thought he'd have to share; and yet she will read it like scripture — Frankie's Epistle. The letter was discovered on his body — badly burned, as he had been murdered by a form of blindness that had manifested itself in an I.E.D. He had been murdered because he wanted to protect us, because he thought enlisting was the noble thing to do. He was going to fight on the side of freedom, the quiet American surrounded by other quiet Americans and led by an ugly American. But it was not a battle of valor; it is not a battle of valor over there. It is just a series of murders — some justified, most not. I know that he probably had to commit murder. I know that collateral damage is not miscalculated self-defense; it is a form of murder. He knew it, too. And it was a cumbersome and agonizing epiphany that he came to recognize rather quickly. And then the guilt sank in. He was suffering over there, the suffering fueled by indignation, as so many were incapable of seeing him as defender; rather, he was the oppressor, the aggressor, another belligerent for whom conquest and imperialism were his sole motives. He was profoundly shocked, outraged by the role he had been asked to fill. I knew that he was. War may change even the most intractable, but it cannot eradicate the virtue of integrity unless that person capitulates to hatred. And this is something that he never did, something that he was not capable of. And while a more pessimistic spectator of humanity may claim to know that the world spins upon axes of avarice and wrath, that civilizations evince their advances by measuring the carnage in their wake, there is a wealth of stubbornness that one must attribute to this spectator, for whom all probity is but a lie, for whom heroism is but vanity's most cunning pretense. Yes, there is a stubbornness that will not admit the grace that seeks not to reveal itself. And Frankie was one who maintained his grace, his desire to simply protect, but not destroy, even if he was ordered to do so. He was there for reasons that were his own. And while he probably regretted the decision from time to time, he knew that he had done what he believed was right. He did not enlist to either perpetuate hatred or fulfill an atavistic duty. (He was not a military kid. His father had served in Vietnam, and his grandfather had served in the Pacific, and his great grandfather had fought in the gruesome trenches that continue to scar the European landscape (though perhaps not physically), but his family did not want to be the American Cornellii Scipiones. Perhaps they were each more akin to the ideals set forth by Cincinnatus). He was there because he believed it was the right thing to do. And he understood it as a corollary following from beliefs that he held, not as something that was categorical. He knew that I was against the war, and that others were against the war. And he understood that we believed it was wrong for reasons that stemmed from primary beliefs he did not share. But he respected them. That is why he was always calm as he argued the necessity of a liberated Iraq. He never regurgitated Bushisms, and he never questioned my patriotism. He felt sick because of the ignorance and arrogance of so many of his fellow soldiers, as well as those who shared many of his political views. They talked about shooting ragheads; one guy said he wanted to “Round up every sona'bitch named Mohammad, put'm in a camp, and drop a fuckin' nuke on'm.” I believe the words, “Git'r done” were then added — though it may have been a bit early for that. On leave in Switzerland, a young G.I. tried to baptize him. Frankie was so ashamed of all of this, so ashamed that he fought to uphold freedom and democracy, whereas others were there to participate in holy war and blind vengeance. They were there to destroy, just like the Thanatists of Flights 11 and 77 and 93 and 175, like the people who celebrate and communicate by firing automatic weapons into the air, apparently ignorant or perhaps dismissive of the Western proverb, “What goes up, must come down.” While on leave prior to his deployment, he seemed more like a man than anyone probably should be at so young an age. He had always been intelligent, disciplined; but he was more so when I saw him last. He was so calm and thoughtful for someone who would soon be asked to sacrifice both his life and the lives of others for an idealism in which so long ago I began to lose faith. And now I have — completely and absolutely. That faith's swan song accompanied the firing of seven armed men who stood within yards of his grave. Quiet outrage flowed through so many of the people there during the service. Many of his friends were twisting their programs, their eyes swollen and concentrated in resentment. Whispered sentiments of “This is fucking bullshit” and “Fuck Bush” erupted at sporadic intervals. There was rage against death, rage against war, rage against Mission Accomplished. I was enraged by the fact that his pallbearers were denied the privilege of laying him to rest; instead they had to surrender even his corpse to four Marines, four children, who stood stoic in the wet snow, who didn't know him, who would later attempt to console us by expressing regret for having never known him, who…. But it's not their fault, is it? How can I be angry with men who have been ordered to do these things? How can I hold a grudge against someone who has been commanded to provide something as benign as consolation?). It's so lucid, as is Frankie's wake, as well as the aftermath, when I told Allison that I would always be there for her. And yet I haven't: Allison, who has endured so much death and difficulty. Allison, I have forgotten about you; I have not always been there. And I could lie to myself, and say that it's distance. But it's not distance. It's never distance. But I can't think of all of this now; I can't let myself get caught up in a past that I abandoned so many years ago.

I can hear Aberdeen snoring in the other room. I never would have thought him to be someone who snores. Then again, I can't picture him going to the bathroom or doing anything more than sitting at a table, fondling his beard, and waiting for an opportunity to say something that he believes is either curtly incisive or insightful. He is clearly the neat freak out of the trio who shares this bathroom. Tomas coughs, makes a sound as though he is hiccupping, and then groans.

It has to be Sammy Sosa. What organization issues IDs? I'm guessing Social Security Something. So it has to be S-S-Blank. What do you call a day when court isn't in session? Fuck it; I'm going with SOSA.

This is not the first time I have been entrusted with someone's life after they have drunk themselves incontinent. True, it is the first time since my third year in college, but the procedurals are no different now than they were back then. The only real goal is to make sure your patient doesn't roll onto his or her back (his now; her then). Equally important, you are not to bring up the incident very often once all is said and done.

A film from 1959? Seriously? What about this here? “Whatever” that has a D and a C in it? It's not one word. It can't be. What could be a second word starting with a C? Maybe it's three words. Maybe DONT for the second, I for the first. What about that C? I DONT C— What do you not do when you—

IDONTCARE fits. Let's go with that.

Vinati has not called. I have not called her in some time. Events transpired rapidly once the Sheeps began their set. The first song, a heavy, fifth-ridden march with the refrain, “All I know of love, I learned from you,” was a vicous attack against the father(s) of the lyricist(s), who was evidently a piece of shit. Standard issue in this day and age, but not quite up to the standard set by Death Cab for Cutie's “Styrofoam Plates.” Most of the other songs were filled with equal parts angst and rancor, an exhibition of how Punk Gründlichkeit knows what it wants to say, and says it without things like melody or something as faggy as a major seventh getting in the way. I cannot say this for all the songs, unfortunately. Tomas left for the bathroom during the fifth song in the set. He evidently ran into one of the barbacks there, who emerged from the encounter with a generous helping of vomit on his pants. Suffice to say, we didn't get the chance to see the Sheeps' sixth song, though we did manage to get Tomas out of the bathroom — which probably featured a Coprolalia, though I cannot confirm this — before the bouncer injured anything besides Tomas' pride.

Eight down has to be ORE. One across has to be a simile. Yeah, that's the only way that S can make any sense. Let's see…AS-A-blank-O-blank. Porky. Pig. Hog. FATASAHOG.

Tomas spent no more than a minute in a headlock after he exorcised some of the more mischievous demons for which his stomach had served as residence. The bouncer begrudgingly released him once Aberdeen and I offered to see him out. As we carried his dead weight through the narrow bar that stood between the Sheeps and the street I ran into someone I had met on Smith Street. He and his girlfriend came outside with us. He said his name was Rob. I vaguely remembered him until I took a good look at his girlfriend, Samantha, who had perfect eyebrows. He told us that he and his band had the next slot (a quick look to the chalkboard out front of the venue told me that his band’s name was the Ribs), but understood that we were not going to be able to stay. Tomas said something perverted to his girlfriend, which luckily resulted in a good laugh. Aberdeen groaned. “Did you get the chance to check out our myspace page?” he asked as a cab pulled up on the curb. I replied in the negative, apologized, and then said I'd try to see their next show. “We're playing her again next Tuesday,” he yelled as the door slammed shut. “Oh,” as the window came down, “And we're looking for a new bass player. You mentioned you played.” I nodded. “Yeah, our guy right now just found out that he's moving to Boston in a few weeks, so we kind of need to find someone kind of soon. I don't know, man. If you dig our stuff, you should send me an email. It’s on our myspace page.”

That's KEISTER, which means that this is FINK. 'Fink' is a bit of a stretch. How the hell did Aberdeen get ACREAGE without any letters? That makes seven down HAIRDO. So habits are picked up at NUNNERIES. Clever, Shortz.

And so this is where I find myself. I am gazing upon one of the rising stars of the art world, who has drunk himself into moribundity. I'm slightly buzzed, smoking even though I could have counted the number of cigarettes I had had in my lifetime on my fingers and toes three weeks ago, and completely wide awake because Aberdeen gave me half an Aderol and fifty bucks to watch Tomas until five in the morning (an arbitrary hour, true, but one upon which Aberdeen insisted). He also gave me his pack of Luckies, a book of La Rochefoucauld maxims, last week's Onion, a book of Brassai photographs, and a nearly blank crossword puzzle from last Saturday to keep me occupied. I am even welcome to take all of the beer I want from the fridge, which has been recently stocked with a twelve-pack of Newcastle, a twelve-pack of Amstel, a bottle of Delirium (a temptress that attempts to seduce me every time I open the refrigerator), and several sixers — Ipswich (which I didn't know was sold outside of Boston) and Radeberger, to name two. At present I am drinking a Newcastle, avoiding the desire to over-analyze the particularly lucid dream from two hours ago, and trying to come up with some new approach to this whole Coprolalia thing — between attempts at the puzzle, of course.

Twenty-one across is clearly SADDEN. What the hell could twenty-two down be? Is it Latin? Rob worked in the courthouse, I remember now. Maybe he'd know. Maybe I should save this puzzle until next Tuesday. It'll be a nice segue after we joke about Tomas.

Jeff may be right about my incentives. I am beginning to feel as though I am simply denying the future by refusing to step out of the past. I went to college without any real idea as to what I wanted to do. I figured something would work itself out. It would just click — I'd realize that there was some small, niche occupation for a person like myself that I had been ignorant of, I'd get the job, and then I'd work there for a time until whatever band I was in took off. That, or maybe I'd just stay in school even if it seems useless to dedicate one's life to writing esoteric treatises on novels or poems, to ignore the rawness of art, to end up contriving theses based on discourse in terms of sexuality or class in an era by which we are divorced by several generations. I never could stomach the idea of writing elegies for culture while ignoring the fact that I, as an academic, should be the one creating and propelling culture. Worse, I can't imagine spending my life putting words into the mouths of dead men. Then again, I haven't had much luck realizing that niche that I presumed would be there waiting for me. Even worse, I never found a band that was capable of writing music deserving of a serious record contract (I, of course, share this blame). In fact, I have learned that I am so much like every other kid who has moved to this city to make it. We're no different than the lottery junkies; we're just more self-righteous because we believe ourselves to be endowed with some type of unique, intellectual gift that will ultimately allow us to egress from the less-than-illustrious world of full-time employment. Some call us lazy, some quixotic, some delusional. Some people blame us for the end of the American Empire. Some say, correctly, that we don't value hard work, that we are so rigidly independent that we refuse to take on careers — we only take on jobs because our real ambitions are going to one day land us on the cover of Rolling Stone or People. Yes, it's all tentative. Corporations don't offer lifetime employment any longer, and we don't want it anymore. The Marxist clichés hide the fact that we could never survive in a socialist state because we pride ourselves as either artists who ought to be financed by the state or intellectuals who should be granted entry into the politburo. No, we are not Marxists because there is no such thing as post-industrial communism. It cannot exist, and we cannot imagine ourselves outside of the post-industrial paradigm. We, the so-called Creative Class, are nothing more than a byproduct of the vanity and self-absorption of the sixties, the petulant cynicism of the seventies, the greed and blind optimism of the eighties, and the corporate individualism of the nineties. We demand not only the right to be heard, but the right to have someone broadcast this message for us.

Okay, I need a break from the puzzle. I've been through the Brassai. I've read every article in the Onion. Twice. Let's see what this La Rochefoucauld fellow has to say. Maxim 391: “Fortune seems never so blind as to those on whom she has nothing to bestow.” Why the hell is Fortune personified as a woman? Honestly. Does it sound better in French? Everything does, doesn't it? It also looks more elegant, but seems contrived when English-speaking authors just kind of throw it out there. There are exceptions. “Coup de grâce” is far superior to “mercy kill,” but I personally like “savage capitalism” better than “capitalisme sauvage.” Latin is even better. Latin gives everything a kind of mystical authority. Regardless, the maxim is fitting, given the circumstances.

It's difficult to maintain the will to continue, especially since I've exhausted all of my money and betrayed my parents for the sake of a vain dream that's rooted in all of those generational attributes for which I have so much contempt. I don't even think about discovering Coprolalia any longer. Not really. I think of the bars that I will visit, that I may see something done by him. I think of the faces that blur into a mélange of colors and shapes that dissolve into moments of weak light — Monet-like — both harrowing and beautiful. These faces, these anonymous fragments of life, glow in the sallow hues of each pub's incandescent flambeaux. I am there with them: another face amidst another crowd of old white men attempting to deny the fourth dimension. I enter into the bathrooms, these rooms dedicated to the removal of waste, and study cryptograms that others regard without serious interest, that others see but don't comprehend or even remember. I feel as though I am beginning to fall in line with them, that I have lost the ability to appreciate what was once so unique and earnest. He, Coprolalia, Mordecai, has become Meal Ticket. He is just a means. Maybe he always was, even if I was at one point so adamant in my denial of this.

I don't think of how I will find him, of what happens if I do. I don't think about writing the manuscript. This is secondary — the words will just materialize on the page. I think of what happens after all of this: of life's clemency after the publication, of the dreadful future awaiting me if this never comes to pass. I can't imagine working at a coffee shop for the rest of my life. I can't imagine working in a kitchen, either. That was far worse than the coffee shop, where I was surrounded by guys who were in their thirties and forties who couldn’t accept their lot in life, yet seemed oddly accustomed to serving lattes to yuppies. The kitchen workers were more malevolent. Their only means of exhausting their resentment lay in farting on the crab bisque of a finicky customer or complaining about how worthless the husband or wife is. They would refer to different kids without names, just adjectives (“the good one” or “the independent one” or “the stupid one” or “the other one”). Most conversations revolved around television shows and the lives of celebrities. They were envious, sometimes bitter and spiteful. Those who were almost criminal in their jealousy would constantly discuss their plans once they struck it rich. And that was the most difficult to endure. That was when I felt as though I was hearing the Swan Song of the American Empire, the chorus a throng of peasant Mammonites. Yes, when they struck it rich — as if they could simply tap the earth with a pickax to unleash a geyser of riches. It is a familiar version of American Dream, the one in which becoming wealthy is accomplished by doing virtually nothing. They wanted to win the lottery. They wanted to become various types of personages (actors, singers, rock stars, rappers). They wanted to have a great idea (“A million-dollar idea”). They wanted to have a great idea! How does one have a great idea? One reads. One studies. One thinks. One does not pontificate to a room full of kitchen workers or fatten the wallet of a charlatan posing as a man of God (who would not only mock the austerity of Christ, but probably order Him crucified for assaulting several moneychangers). And yet these were considered credible paths to success. They did not read. They did not think. They did not invent. They did not write songs or lyrics or even learn to play instruments. Sometimes they didn't even make it to the store to “play their numbers.” It was this form of complacency — not entirely complacency, of course, but simply the lack of urgency, the lack of effort — coupled with their outrage over the fact that nothing good ever happens to them, that made me realize just how disgusting it is to see an adult expect to be catered to by fortune, chance, the entirety of the human race. This was the denial of reality for the sake of a potential world that exists virtually at the asymptote of probability. This was middle-age America living on minimum-wage.

Who would be able to translate the French into English? I guess the English back into French. Patrick translated whoever that one poet was from Latin to English. Maybe he knows whether or not that Commodus thing Coprolalia did is a turn of phrase. The guy knows Swahili for fuck's sake. Wait, he said Kiswahili. Maybe it's a dialect. Maybe it's how the Swahili people refer to themselves or their language…what's that word again? Is it an endonym? Is this “Echoes?” I haven't heard this song in years. The last time was probably in Kevin's basement after we tripped in the park. I can't imagine listening to this while peaking. Jesus, that was almost three years ago. Time flies. What was I just thinking about? Oh yeah: Patrick. He certainly knows French.

But who says that an occupation has to be like that? Just because there are so many unhappy people out there doesn't mean, necessarily, that every hour between nine and five must be tedious and draining. After all, this search has proven to be more draining than I would have assumed, but I have enjoyed just about all of it even if I have nothing to show for it, save a shaky friendship with Aberdeen and Tomas. I may have become an alcoholic in this time, too. In all honesty, the only positive aspect of the situation concerns Vinati, though the relationship between the two of us seems far more ambiguous than it did a few hours ago.

Maxim 571: “When you cannot find your peace in yourself it is useless to look for it elsewhere.” Story of my fucking life. Is he breathing? There we go. Keep it up, Tom. Maxim 572: “We are never as unhappy as we think, nor as happy as we had hope.” Well that's a pretty dour sentiment.

I have met people who are content with their jobs. Maybe even happy. This is not just over the past few weeks, but throughout my life. They find their calling. They find love. And yet so much of this is phony, and I guess I always knew that. So many seem fulfilled on every level until they get to the bar, to the point of inebriation where they become fountains of grievances. Is it because the alcohol causes them to renege on their forfeiture, their forfeiture of that vain belief that they are entitled to something more? Or is it far more superficial than that? Does the alcohol just reveal that they have been feigning all along, and that they have learned only to wait, to endure?

What if Sean was right about Mordecai not being Coprolalia? I guess I have to entertain that possibility. Still, who else could it be? Patrick…. Patrick was a poet. Could he be Coprolalia? No, it wouldn't make any sense. He drew too much attention to himself. I can't imagine him being quiet enough to evade the notice of someone. People remember him. Those women at the bar were ready to jump on him like a fucking trampoline. And I don't think their husbands would have minded all that much, either. He's just too much of an extrovert. Someone, somewhere, would have put the pieces together. And it's not like he had big ears, let alone a Brooklyn accent.

I thought I was satisfied with Connie. I did. Even during the Animosity, I took the incessant fighting to be normal. To a certain degree, I still do. All relationships have their troubles, their fights. It would be incredibly juvenile to assume that monogamy can exist without jealousy, without some amount of frustration, without some display of frailty on the part of both parties. And it's the last part that both creates the problems and allows everything to work. It's what allows the relationship to flourish as opposed to remaining just an insouciant association between two subjects. You make yourself vulnerable. That's why everything becomes so polarized — the highs and the lows. Especially the lows. They know you too well — because you haven't lived without them for so long that losing them can occasionally appear refreshing, but still, even in the bitterest turmoil, impossible. It seems that this type of love can only exist when one abandons all pretenses and all boundaries.

If Patrick is Coprolalia, then I can't believe anything that he told me. It would mean that the A-R-E doesn't exist, that all of those people there that night were participating in a prank. But that would require too much time, too much energy. It would have to involve hundreds of people, months of planning. If it were so, the A-R-E would have to be nothing more than a joke. The JOKE.

This is why people cannot love the world.

It's all on me, isn't it? It's not that intricate of a plot. Someone owns a loft, they throw a party, and they just need to not let on when they talk with me. Patrick, Daphne and Willis were the only ones who really said anything about Coprolalia. And they just led me to one another — Patrick to Daphne, Daphne to Willis. No. There's no way they would simply decide to do something so elaborate just because they noticed a post on Craigslist. Which was Tomas' idea. Could he be involved in it, too? Yes, he could. That random woman from the bar down the block just happened to be there a second time, and we ended up there because of Tomas. She was there because Tomas told her to be there. She even went out of her way to mention Mordecai's derision of an article on Coprolalia. And I was to assume that it had been written by Sean. She knew that would happen. It was meant to appear coincidental. From Tomas to Patrick, from Patrick to Daphne, from Daphne to Willis. Esther was there only to corroborate. They were all there to corroborate, all of the people claiming to be members of the A-R-E. And why were they all involved? Because they are all Coprolalia. That's why no one can verify what he looks like. He is really They. It's one big prank that's been set up to…what would the reason be?

This is why people cannot love their fate.

Sean has to be the mastermind. Think about it. He's the leading expert. He's made a name for himself by writing all of that bullshit on Coprolalia. He's tenured at a top university. He's about to publish the definitive volume on Coprolalia. It will end up in hundreds of thousands of homes. It will make him a fucking millionaire. Every asshole hipster will have to have one. Anyone overcome by nostalgia for the former grittiness of the city will have to have one. All Sean had to do was hire out a few artists, remain patient, and create a buzz. He probably commissioned all of those pieces. That's how he knows about them. This has all been one scheme almost fifteen years in the making. Even worse, I have no real part in it. This is not a plot that required some naïve fool in order to set it into motion. There was no step blessed by Até, no one tragic blunder in which confidence betrays judgment. No, I am an accident — I was never considered. I am nothing. And no one will believe what I have to say because all of my evidence relies on the testimonies of those who have colluded with Sean.

Tomas stirs. His head turns as though he is addressing me, but I cannot tell if his eyes are open, as the washcloth still covers roughly half of his face. “You don't want the eggplant, do you?”

Vulnerability.

“Wake up, Tomas.”

“I've got, like, two eggplants. And this one isn't good. You know, it's…it's bad.” He scratches his head. “I mean, it's not bad…like bad. It's going to go bad. Like, soon.”

“Wake the fuck up.”

The washcloth is removed from his face with a painful and torpid motion. His eyes begin blinking rapidly. I'd forgotten that he does that. He's looking around, trying to place himself. He clearly cannot understand why he is where he is, nor can he entirely remember why he's in the condition in which he finds himself. He's like a newborn still unaccustomed to the world to willingly admit light into his eyes.

“Where am I?” His lips are coated with a thin, white residue reminiscent of Spackle dust.

“You're in your bathroom.”

He licks his incisors and rubs the back of his head. His teeth are probably wearing sweaters. His tongue probably feels swollen. He winces after applying pressure to his occipital bone. I guess that's my fault; I let go too soon while Aberdeen and I were transferring him into the tub — or I dropped him, which I guess would be the more accurate depiction of that event.

“And why the fuck are you here?”

“Because I have nothing better to do.”

“Why am I na—” he looks down, feels his boxer shorts. “Why am I almost naked?”

“Because you puked all over yourself.”

“Did I do anything stupid?”

“You puked all over yourself.”

“Did I do anything worse than that?”

“Not tonight.”

“Good.”

Caesura.

“Wait…what?”

“Why haven't you told me the truth about Coprolalia?”

His eyes are red, exhausted symbols of pain. “What? About that night out with Jane?”

“Who the fuck is Jane?”

“Jane — that chick from the other night. We wanted you to talk with her about the poem, the…” he snaps his fingers at roughly 135 bpm.

“The haiku?”

“Yeah,” drowsily. “The haiku in the bar.”

“No. This is bigger, Tomas.”

“Not bigger than my dick.” He chortles slightly as he turns away.

“Are you fucking twelve? Look at me, you fucking asshole. Look at me, and tell me that you didn't fucking have a hand in all of this shit.”

He has the harrowing, sour grimace of a cancer patient, though it's not because of my words. He's about to vomit again. I almost feel guilty for berating him like this. “What the fuck has gotten into you, man?” meekly.

“I've realized that you're full of shit.”

“Yeah…well…art is all pretension these days.” He spits. “The more pretentious, the better.”

“No. You haven't been honest with me. You haven't told me the truth.”

“Look Mulder, I don—”

“How much did Sean pay you?” Sean has connections. Connections in the art world. The more pretentious the better. Tomas has sold me out in order to get good reviews. Reviews published by Sean's friends. They're all involved. Everyone. The whole university; the university beyond the university. The art world is nothing but fucking nepotism and everyone knows it. Faxo was right. Yeah, he knew. It was his tacit admission of guilt. He felt guilty about the bullshit that he was feeding me. He still has a conscience. That's what makes what he did even more despicable. “Coprolalia doesn't exist.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, man? Will you chill the fuck out.” A classic tmesis, one he uses frequently. Wouldn't his speech patterns be different under duress? Why is he so calm? He's just in pain. If he were feeling better, he'd be acting more defensively. “Will you at least tell me why your fucking panties are all in a bundle?”

“You know damn well why I'm fucking pissed.”

He is wincing. Soon those portentous cringes take hold of him. He vomits up a few millimeters of whatever acids have managed to accumulate in his stomach over the past few hours. He then looks up to me, his face now coated in a fine layer of sweat. “No dude,” sternly, “I fucking don't.”

“You're leading me down the wrong path.”

“No one's forcing the bottle down your throat, Dante,” he responds before letting out a mouthful of viscous spit. Would he be the leopard or the lion? “Look, I'll deal with my problems; you deal with your fucking own.”

“Why aren't you listening to me? I know what you and Sean are up to. I know that everything — Coprolalia, the A-R-E, the girl from the bar…Esther, or whatever her real name is — I know it's all been a ploy. You're playing me. There is no Coprolalia. There is no A-R-E. You've been hired out, just like Patrick, Daphne and Faxo. You've all been hired out by Sean to make it seem like there is a Coprolalia.”

“Why?” incredulously.

“Because it will make him money.”

“Who?”

“Fucking Sean, man. There is no art if it isn't appreciated by Sean and the rest of the collegiate aristocracy. There is no art—”

“Unless you're told it's art. The urinal thing — is that what you're getting at? Who did that?”

“Duchamp.”

“First of all, that’s bullshit, and you know it. Out of you, that's fucking something. Second, this isn't the Maltese Falcon, man. No one's lied to you. No one's guarding some grand secret. We've done nothing but try to help you out.”

“But—”

“But what? What the fuck are you accusing me of? That I'm…I'm…doing a conspiracy….” Caesura. “Not doing. I'm acting…participating in a conspiracy against you? Why? You're my fucking friend, man. You don't try to get anything out of me. You don't try to use my name for anything…not even to fucking get pussy. You're the only friend I've made since I published that stupid book.” His face has become wrinkled, like a deflated balloon. “You're the only friend I have besides James.”

“That's not true.”

“Oh yeah, there's Randy,” acerbically. “Randy, who tries to push his shitty novel on me whenever I see him — yeah, he’s not self-interested at all.”

He vomits again.

There is a lapse in conversation that lasts for some time.

“Tell me the truth,” I begin. “Is there something I need to know about? Have you been dishonest with me?”

“Dishonest,” he laughs. “Jesus, man, it's like I'm talking to the fucking principal.” He clears his throat. “Yes, there's something I was dishonest about. Jane didn't dig you. We just wanted to make you feel guilty.”

“No, about Coprolalia.”

Pink Floyd's “Echoes” continues to play in the next room. It is currently at the point where it sounds like dolphin genocide.

“Why are you so sheltered?”

“What? What does this have to do with anything?”

“Why are you content with your solitary-ness? Is that a word?”

“Sure.”

He's pensive for a long time. It appears as though he wants to say something, but it is difficult for him. He holds down several retches. “Why are you so afraid of getting pussy, man?”

“You've obviously forgotten that I got laid about twenty-four hours ago.”

“What?” He laughs. “The Indian broad?”

“Vinati? Yes, I had sex with her.”

“You had sex with her,” dryly. “That sounds fan-fucking-tastic. It really sounds like you enjoyed it. Are you sure you didn't 'do it' with her?”

“What do you mean?”

“You've detached yourself from life, man. You just kind of float above everything, look down on it. Maybe 'float' is the wrong word. You just…you just think about things way too much. You just…wait…wait…the moment is coming. You have to just experience this. Don't think, man. It's fucking indescribable.”

He trails off. The music has gone from ambient to majestic. Tomas has closed his eyes again. He looks almost at peace.

17

I got back in my apartment around one. After waking up on the floor of the bathroom to the sound of Aberdeen taking one of those choppy and protracted pisses, I somehow found the resolve to get up. This proved futile. Aberdeen, on the other hand, was rather chipper. I could hear his bare feet slapping the concrete floor in time with E.L.O.'s “Mr. Blue Sky.” Once the song ended, the faucet went on. For a long time. The song began again. The faucet went off. Aberdeen appeared. In his hand was a bucket of water. The two of us caught eyes for a solid few seconds. There was something very different about him, something not quite berserk or mad or sanguine, but a combination of the three would probably fit the bill — perhaps the grin that one could imagine Mack the Knife wearing during his gory sprees. The contents of the bucket ended up on Tomas.

“What the hell was that for?”

“Yeah, ya' dick,” came a derelict echo from the tub.

“Payback's a bitch.” Aberdeen popped up one of the cigarettes from the pack on the counter with a quick flick of the wrist. He placed it in his mouth, lit it, and then looked down to me. “Ask him about last week.”

“What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“Fine,” Tomas exclaimed. “You got me back. Are you happy?”

“What time is it?” I asked as I reached for the cigarette. My spine did not appreciate sudden movement.

“Breakfast time,” Aberdeen announced. He then lit my cigarette. “Get up; I'm buying.”

Tomas struggled to find the will to move. My presence seemed troubling to him. I guess I shared his sentiment somewhat. Aderol-induced paranoia proved to be more virulent and accusatory than I would have expected. It's a great drug for writing papers, as you suddenly become conscious of connections that only appear perspicacious at four in the morning. True, most of these theories seem patently absurd in the light of sobriety, but there is no shortage of professors who entertain such fantasies, especially if they're the type to whom the more unpopulated and tenebrous regions of the library provides a second home.

I guess one could say that paranoia is too easy; it's vain, self-absorbed, and need not rely on anything more than logical validity. The problem with reality, however, is that things don't have to make sense — there are too many premises to make sense of this world. True, coincidences happen, but, without modern English's imputation of an almost magical element into the meaning of the word, it's really just two incidental incidents happening at the same time, usually in close proximity to one another. That's the pure coincidence, unadulterated by the filthy teleology of mystics and the confused etiology of historians and lunatics. Our lives are filled with them — events that are connected, but connected in such an innocuous manner that they are inconsequential. It's only later, when we feel the need to revise and enhance our relationship with another person, that we take on the task of conflating histories, maybe even identities. Weddings and funerals tend to be filled with such revisions.

We ended up at a Mexican place up Manhattan Avenue. Tomas' relation to the waking world was characterized by an awkward tension — as a true hangover and the recognition of Absurdity feel essentially the same, though it's usually only the latter that sparks either an epiphany or a nausea of the spirit. Angelina, our waitress, initially tried to resume the flirtatious banter in which she and Tomas had partaken the last time he had appeared in the restaurant, but she quickly apprehended the severity of his condition upon looking at his face. On top of the scent of alcohol, which had not dissipated even after a shower, he had managed to vomit with such force that a blood vessel in his right eye had ruptured. She levied upon him a sardonic pity that he seemed to mildly enjoy.

“Though it's hardly tactful to toast oneself,” Aberdeen finally began after the arrival of the coffee, “I will beg your forgiveness on this one occasion. I would have opted for champagne, but I was quite certain that it would have been more than a bit messy to introduce alcohol after the events of last night.” Tomas lifted his right middle finger before resting his head on the meat of his left forearm. “Come on, Tomas, this is good news.”

“Fuck you.”

“This is important. Will you please just—”

“What? What happened? Did you finally fuck Lindsay last night?”

“No. She ended up at the boyfriend's pace,” he added spitefully. His smile returned quickly. “Anyway—”

“How come you don't have a name for him?”

“What?”

“You guys have a nickname for everyone. What's his?”

“We've been kicking a few things around the office, but nothing seems to stick.”

“I see.”

“—Anyway, I'm here to tell you both some very good news,” he resumed as he picked up his coffee cup. I followed suit. Tomas picked up his head. He blew on his coffee while staring vapidly to Aberdeen. “Will you just pick up the fucking coffee, man. I mean, for Christ's sake…”

“Fine.” He clumsily picked up the mug. A few drops fell onto his hand, which he did not bother to wipe off; he merely winced and muttered a few profanities. His other hand was used to convey impatience with Aberdeen's silence.

“I'm obviously in high spirits today, and there is a very good reason for this.” Pause for suspense. “My piece in the Graham Gallery was purchased last night.”

“Holy shit, man,” I said. “Congratulations. That's great.”

“Well, shit. If it were any other morning, I'd say break out the fucking Moët.”

“Yes, well, here's where it gets better: The buyer is commissioning two more pieces. He or she is going to advance me all of the money, too.” He laughed. “This is rent for the year. In a fucking day!”

“Come here, you. C'mon,” Tomas said as he stood. The two embraced. I continued to sit. “So much for your unlucky streak,” he added.

“What do you mean by that?”

“James here hadn't sold a piece in six months. It's weird, man. He fucking cleaned up last year.”

“And spent much of it prematurely,” Aberdeen added.

“This is great, man. Who's giving you the commission?”

“I don't know yet. I should be finding that out later today — around four or so.”

“I bet it's Forrester. Forrester's been buying a lot of shit lately, man. He apparently sold a Miro and a Mondrain a few months ago. He wants to update,” as he rolled his eyes, “his collection.”

“I really have no idea who it is. David refused to mention who it is.”

Tomas' spirit picked up as we ate. Aberdeen remained on a cloud, though he did begrudgingly agree when Tomas complained that the coffee was not up to snuff. Had he been in a less jovial mood, he would have probably brought it up first. The rest of the meal was neither terrific nor terrible; it lacked all forms of ostentation, as the menu refused to offer anything more exotic than what most American children find upon their breakfast tables any given Saturday morning — pancakes, eggs, potatoes, bacon, etc. Aberdeen left the waitress a large tip and flattered her in broken Spanish; she, in turn, blushed and smiled in a not non-seductive manner.

We stepped out into a faint drizzle and fog that cloaked the view of Manhattan in an opaque gray, a barren panoramic more commonly associated with seasons of melancholy and lament. “It's a shame the sky isn't blue today,” Aberdeen said as he lit a cigarette. Tomas shook his head disparagingly.

We were stopped on the corner of Eagle by a couple claiming to be Moxy and Früvous. They were dressed in loud colors and sharing one of those British umbrellas that can shelter an entire family, including distant relatives. The two of them were a lot older than I had assumed. Moxy was easily forty. She looked a bit like Eleanor Roosevelt, buckteeth and all. Früvous appeared to be around thirty-five. He was swarthy and bearded, and had placid eyes that were more serene than dull or unresponsive.

After we introduced the two to Aberdeen, they immediately started in on the A-R-E festival we had attended the night before last. They assumed we were friends of Daphne, as I had spent such a long time talking with her. When I informed them that Patrick had brought the two of us in order to get information about Willis Faxo, who was supposed to lead us Mordecai Adelstein, with whom Faxo had lived, they became a bit uneasy.

“What do you want with Mordy?”

“You know him?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I think he's Coprolalia.”

Früvous laughed. “You think Mordy's Coprolalia?”

“Yeah. But you know him?” The two nodded. “How?”

“Through the A-R-E, of course. He was particularly close with Dick.” Früvous paused to scratch at his beard. “Didn't someone tell us,” as he turned to Früvous, “that he was in Bellevue. Not Mordy, of course, but…”

“Andy Bates.”

“Andy Bates. That's right.”

“So Andy Bates isn't Coprolalia?”

“No.”

“Wait a second,” Tomas ordered. “Who's Dick?”

“Keens, of course. You three must know him, right?”

“I never met him, but I've certainly heard quite a bit about him over the course of the past few days. I didn't realize he and Mordecai were close.”

“Well, actually Dick was close with Mr. Adelstein.”

“How did they meet?”

“They were both chess players. I'm guessing they met because Mr. Adelstein owned a little deli not too far away from Dick's place.”

“Where?”

“Where?”

“Yeah, where was the deli?”

“On Eighth Avenue. Do you remember where, honey?” Früvous asked.

“For the life of me, I can't recall. We haven't spent much time down there since we moved into the neighborhood. Do you three live here?”

“Yeah, we live down on Green Street.”

“Don't you just love the neighborhood? We're renting a loft up on Box Street, and we couldn't be happier.”

“How's the rent?”

“Look, I don't want to be a dick here, but it would be a really big help if you told me the general vicinity of the store.”

Früvous was unmoved by my petulance. “I know it's south of Ninth Street, north of Greenwood.” He fondled his beard for a moment. “Yeah, it's just a regular deli. You know, a convenient store. There's really nothing distinguishing about it.”

“Would it be in Park Slope or Windsor Terrace?”

“I never could distinguish the two. Do you know, honey?”

“No,” she said with a shake of the head. She then smiled. “I'm still just shocked about all of this. Our little Mordy is Coprolalia. Who could have known? He was always so polite and quiet. Such a genuinely nice person.” She turned to Früvous. “And to think he never mentioned any of this to us. It's so unbelievable.”

“I guess he was always a bit secretive.”

“Well, secretive is such a negative way to put it.”

“I didn't mean for it to be negative. He was just always more of a listener. You never could tell what he was thinking.”

“Why would Dick Keens go that far south?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Didn't he live on Garfield…or at least close by Garfield?”

The two looked to one another. “It's not a particularly long walk,” Moxy finally responded. “Dick made it a point to know everyone in the neighborhood.”

“Do you know if Mordecai still works at the store?”

Shrug. “I have no idea. As I said, we haven't been down there in quite some time. I would be very surprised if he didn't any longer, though. He really enjoyed it.”

“What about his father?”

“His father?”

“Yes, do you think his father still owns the store?”

“Yes. Unless he retired.”

“Or relocated.”

“Or got bought out.”

“Well,” I said to Tomas, “It looks like I have something to do today after all.” He tried to smile.

Moxy asked about Boots as I stood there feeling truly sanguine. Gone was the negativity, the cynicism. I figured there couldn't be more than fifteen delis on that stretch of Eighth Avenue, that it would probably only take two hours to find and call all of them. I would just have to ask the name of the owner at each place. The only difficulty would be getting Mr. Adelstein's address.

“She's a bit odd,” Tomas responded, concerning Boots.

Moxy and Früvous laughed quietly. “Odd?” Früvous began with a grin; “Yes, that is one way of putting it.”

The five of us were now standing in a solid rain. Aberdeen's coat smelled like wet dog. Tomas, on the other hand, looked worse than he smelled. His complexion was a pallid gray. I'm sure I was a delight to neither sense, but I wore an indelible grin regardless. Everything was in the process of working out. I was going to find Coprolalia today. Perhaps tomorrow. In fact, it didn't matter. Even if it took two weeks, it didn't matter. The deadline was arbitrary to begin with. Now it was completely irrational, too. I was close. I knew it. I was going to interview him, perhaps over a round of beers. I could tell him all of the stories I had accumulated over the course of the previous weeks. I could ask him about his involvement with the A-R-E, maybe even advance my understanding of the group. Maybe Vinati would come meet us. And then it would be the three of us. We'd talk late into the evening about everything: art, love, the human condition, baseball…it didn't matter. And then I'd publish the interview. I'd have the money to live without restraints. I could get a great job writing for a great magazine. Maybe Harper's would commission me to write something for them. And then I could afford a place in the City. I could live there, maybe even with Vinati.

“What is so odd about her?” Aberdeen asked.

“She explained the boots to you, correct?”

Tomas nodded sheepishly.

The couple soon took their leave. They were on their way back home after brunch in Williamsburg. I left Aberdeen and Tomas at the corner where I first met them, caught the southbound B43, and then transferred to the train down by Woodhull. On my way back home, I kept going back to the tirade from last night. I can still see Tomas trying to defend himself in the tub, his mouth contorted, his body plagued by tremors and the glean of cold sweat. The image is all the more lucid because of the stinging brightness of the lights surrounding the mirror. Actually, all of my senses were made a bit keener by the environment in that bathroom, much to my chagrin. I don't think I'll be able to eat any tomato-based sauce for a couple of days, as Tomas had had pizza prior to going to see the Sheeps. Perhaps it's the company I keep, but it seems as though most of the barf I have encountered in my life is just like me — half Italian.

Everything I believed last night was just paranoia. I recognize that now. I guess I've always had something of an attraction to conspiracy theories, though I've never been blind to the fact that most believers regard the absence of evidence as a veritable piece of evidence. Perhaps I was just upset about Vinati. That would make sense. I overreacted. Her phone has gone straight to voice-mail since the last time I spoke with her. Maybe she stayed at her parents' place last night after work. Getting from Park Slope to Williamsburg is a serious pain in the ass unless it's during rush hour — when the M is running south of Broad Street. And it's not like she's going to have a charger with her. And her parents probably have different phones than her. And it's not like she just remembers my number off the top of her head. So her phone died; she stayed with her parents because she was tired; she'll call me once she gets back to her apartment to apologize and make new plans. Done deal.

Jeff is at work, so the apartment is once again my own. I look around the walls, the maps of the city filled with pins and tacks. I have been to all of the places that those instruments represent, but it is not until I approach the map that the memories come into focus, that these mental cartes de visite become clear and animated. Some memories are easy to recollect; others are quick, disjointed, and susceptible to error.

It's still raining and the wind has picked up. The open window by which I find myself allows the sounds to wash through the apartment — a calming hiss interrupted by a few, abject questions that all begin with either “Yo'” or “Bapi” and remain unanswered. I look down to cement littered with dried-gum ocelli, to parked cars from either the previous decade or the early years of this one. The air in my room chokes in the thick smoke of several cigarettes, courtesy of a pack I picked up at the nearby bodega.

The first thing I did upon returning home was check my email. It's become something of a habit — and a disappointing one at that. Besides the chain letters from my relatives, the preponderance of the messages are solicitors offering up a myriad of beautification drugs, dick pills, and “barely legal” porn. Just what makes it “barely legal” is something I don't really want to discover. Most of these sites probably aren't operated by a company based within the United States, which leaves only the truly gruesome on the table: acts that are “barely legal,” not because they embrace all of those taboo words that end in — phile, but because most of the acts caught on film flirt with various — cides.

I was hoping for something less impersonal when I turned on my laptop. I was anticipating something from Patrick or someone else who happened to have some information concerning Coprolalia, but my guess is that the Craigslist post is now on the fourth or fifth page of the classifieds. It's as good as forgotten. And yet I don't see the need to repost it. I'll simply end up with more speculations about Andy Bates. (I haven't mentioned those, have I? Apologies. I'm still learning that narrating is a lot like weeding: after congratulating yourself for finishing one region, you turn to find that there are still a few stragglers imploring your attention. Regardless, there have been about thirty Bates apologists, including Pepper and Debbie, who addressed me as “Quiet Riot.”)

The search for Mr. Adelstein's store didn't take long. By following Eighth Avenue from Ninth Street to the cemetery on Google Map, I found nine delis. Within about fifteen minutes, I managed to call five of them. This fifth one was owned by a Mr. Adelstein. Predictably, the employee with whom I spoke, Miguel, could not provide Mr. Adelstein's first name or his home address. This was not a reluctance to disclose information. He was friendly and more than willing to cooperate; he simply didn't know any personal details about his employer. Mordecai, however, was a subject that evoked a series of evasive answers and at least one protracted “uhhhhh….” I hung up well after the interaction had become awkward.

My optimism is fighting for its survival. The rain continues to come down, which casts the apartment in a languid and oppressive gray, an almost sinister and ominous portent to what may ultimately be yet another failure. I know that I am now closer to finding Coprolalia than I was only a few hours ago, yet it feels as though I've removed a speed bump in order to have a clear shot at a wall. I take a drag from the cigarette, watch the wind charm the serpentine smoke rising from its cherry. I'm completely out of ideas.

The best thing to do is the simplest: Just go stand outside of the deli; wait there for either Isaac or Mordecai to come in. Even if they don't, there has to be someone who knows one of them. After all, there are always those few people who chat with the employees for at least six or seven hours a day; one of them would have to know where either Mordecai or Isaac lives.

This is something I can do tomorrow. Look at it out there. It's pouring. I really don't feel like standing in the rain. But how else can I find him? What about public records? What's a public record? What about deeds? Is there a way to look at those over the Internet? What if he rents? Well, he may have a lease for the store, but he probably owns his own home. Wait. What about the guy from the Ribs. Didn't he say he made copies of court cases?

The floodgates suddenly open once I hear the voice of Willis Faxo in my head: He wouldn't shut up about this lawsuit against his dad's store. Apparently, it was a slip and fall accident. The plaintiff and her husband were demanding something absurd…something like three million dollars. Would this suit be public record? Would it be filed in the court? Is there a record room or something? There has to be. That's what Rob does for a living. Maybe Isaac Adelstein's address will be in the file. They have to serve papers to him, right? Yes, they do. His address will be in there. It has to be.

18

The rain has subsided, but the sky is still the gray of cigarette ash. As the train begins its ascent into the landscape, I am welcomed to a neighborhood that is oddly reminiscent of Queens (perhaps it's not all that odd, as the two are parts of a greater whole — i.e. Long Island). Small, brick buildings flash by like frames painted on cellophane, the denizens of these structures hidden behind near-obsidian windows thick with generations of soot and dust. The train becomes saturated in the stunted light, in its shady optimism, and the faces of my fellow travelers begin to transform like Monet models.

I was amazed by the ease with which I retrieved the case file that contained all the information of the action against Mr. Adelstein. A man who sounded like Tone Lōc brought it to me. The case caption was:

Shannon Mason and Jeffrey Mason,

Plaintiffs,

V.

Isaac Adelstein, et al.,

Defendants

There was only a summons, a complaint, two affidavits, and a stipulation of discontinuance. On the summons, as well as one of the affidavits, was the address of Isaac Adelstein.

I look down to the copy of the summons in my hand. At the time of the purchase date, he lived three blocks away from the Avenue M stop on the Q — so much for Willis Faxo's complaint about Brooklyn natives' bizarre conception of space and time.

On the way there all of the various scenarios begin to play in my head. There's the one where Mr. Adelstein castigates me (“Do you know how many people have come here searching for that stupid artist? My son is not Coprolalia! Now get the fuck out of here before I call the police!”), and slams the door in my face. There's the one in which Mordecai's mother answers the door, and then does pretty much the same thing. There are other ones, too — positive ones. Mr. or Mrs. Adelstein could invite me inside to provide some background information on their son. One of them shows me Mordecai's old room, tells me about him, and then gives me his number. There's the one where Mordecai answers the door. There's also the one where someone named Jones or Goldstein or whatever opens the door, and then proceeds to inform me that the Adelsteins moved to Florida some time ago. Possibilities are limitless when one refuses to seek answers in earnest. Perhaps this is why I can conjure up so many.

I begin to walk up to the door, but feel guilty for smelling like smoke. I take another lap around the block (my seventh). I look at the clock upon my return. It's just half past five. Maybe no one's home. Maybe I should wait.

And yet I know this isn't the time for hesitation. This is it. This is either the last place I will have to go, the last place I will have to ask for information, or simply the end of this thread. I'm at the door, the chime of the bell fading as footsteps crescendo. A thin, older man opens the door. He has taupe-gray hair, thick brows, and crystalline eyes that are a glacial shade of blue. Stubble shadows his cheeks and neck. His nose has outgrown his face, but his ears are still relatively proportional to the rest of his head. He looks to me with his head slightly cocked. Debussy's “Clair de Lune” plays quietly in the house.

“Are you Isaac Adelstein?” I ask after a few moments of awkwardness.

“Yes.” He smiles curiously. “May I help you, son?”

“I–I'm here to see your son.”

“My son.”

“Yes, your son.” He is awaiting clarification. “Your son…Mordecai.”

“Mordecai,” he responds plainly. There is a certain patience in his voice, that slow determination that one has come to expect from older European men of the Greatest Generation — at least from those still lucid. “Come in, come in,” he says in a suddenly emphatic tone. The door opens wide.

I enter into his den, a warm space with abundant light. A piece in the style of Pollack catches my attention, as does a bookshelf that comprises an entire wall. The former is above the mantel; the latter is opposite the windows that look onto the street. He directs me to a chair as he walks to a desk that contains a lamp, an open book, and a legal pad. “You were a friend of his?” he asks as he closes the book and turns off the lamp. “You seem a bit young,” he adds.

“No, I've never met him,” I respond. “I would like to. That's what this is all about.”

He nods. I cannot see his expression because he begins looking through a vinyl collection that sits in a hollowed-out credenza adjacent to the bookshelf. “And by whom have you been sent?” he asks.

“No one. I'm here because I believe your son to be a famous artist.”

He laughs quietly as he pulls an album from the collection. “So you have come in search of Coprolalia, I presume.”

I return the quiet laugh. “Well…yes. I take it I'm not the first.”

“You're the first one to come to me.” I want to respond with something, but he begins anew before I have the opportunity with, “Sit down, please….” He turns to me with a raised brow. “My, you are a quiet one. Have you ever considered becoming an assassin? Perhaps a samurai?” He smiles again. He then pulls the needle before the last notes of the piece are played, removes the record from the turntable, places it into its jacket, and then reinserts the album back into the collection. “This is…this is never easy to say,” as he cuts the power of the player. He stares to the turntable as it loses speed: “I've grappled with it for nearly two months now.” He then turns, slowly, and begins in my direction. He sits upon a small sofa opposite me. A coffee table separates us. “Mordecai passed in April,” he says stoically. “He died in a car accident.”

The moment is suspended like a photographed gymnast. She strikes the trampoline, it recoils, and then shoots her into the air. In the photograph she remains meters above the trampoline, above the mats that have been carefully placed in strategic locations should the worst happen. She is the focal point, both of the photographer and the spectators (themselves just blurs and amorphous components of the necessarily amorphous crowd). It is irrelevant whether she is ascending, descending, at the apex of her parabola. It doesn't matter because we all assume that she will once again come back to the Earth.

“I'm so….”

He only raises his hand.

“I–I'm sorry I intruded, sir; I….” as I stand. “Really…I should be…I should be going. I didn't mean — I didn't mean to intrude like this.”

“You're not intruding. I invited you into this house,” he responds patiently. “Please. Sit back down.”

“How did it,” as I fall into the chair with a resounding fufseef.

“He was waiting for a light,” slowly. He is looking to the table with his fist on his chin, his elbow on the arm of the sofa. He has clearly gone over this countless times. “It was late. He was always coming back late. If you're familiar with his artwork and where it appeared, then I assume you know this much.” He pauses. “He was waiting for the light at the corner of Union and Broadway. A drunk driver rear-ended him. The force of the impact pushed his car into the intersection.” He licks the undersides of his lips, bites his lower lip, and then sighs. “He was pronounced D.O.A. at the hospital, so I know he did not suffer. I am grateful for this much.”

“Grateful? How—” I take a deep breath. “Again, I'm sorry to hear about your loss.”

“Would you like anything?” he asks. “I recently put a pot of coffee on.”

“Coffee? You just told me that your son died,” in a sheepish rage. “And now you're offering me coffee?”

He nods patiently and looks to me with what feels like pity. “One can not stay forever in mourning,” as stoic as Seneca. I suddenly understand the metaphors that are conveyed by Superman's powerful eyes. “I have no reservations about expressing my emotions, and I have worked to do so as constructively as I can. But I do not see any purpose in lamenting events that I cannot alter. Am I in pain? Of course. What kind of man would not be devastated?” His tone becomes less aggressive: “But I do not let the pain, the grief, the rage, consume me.” He looks to the floor. He remains in this position for some time. “Am I to seek vengeance due to the fate of my son?”

“…”

“This is not a rhetorical question. Would this serve any purpose?”

“No.”

“Then why should I act like a man plotting his revenge?”

“What do you mean?”

“I speak of brooding. One broods because one feels powerless. He imagines having the power to modify the events that have precipitated his misery. But some things cannot be changed. I am not an idle dreamer, especially when such dreams can only end in fruitless rancor. This is how Nazis are born.” He shakes his head. “Why should I brood over my loss, as though there is some retribution that I will receive? There is no answer. There is no retribution when one is dealing with lives. One cannot be exchanged for another.” He clears his throat. “Now, again, would you like some coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

“How do you take it?”

“Black, no sugar.”

“Ah,” with a smile or a wince, I can’t really tell, “A real coffee drinker.”

He walks away, into the kitchen with its hideous wallpaper and avocado tiling. There are flowers on some of the tiles, but it is impossible to discern the species at this distance. There is no television in the room in which I find myself, nor is there anything that could be called digital. A map of the world hangs opposite the mantel. The original was created in MDCXXV. There are hydras as large as islands threatening commerce and discovery. An old lamp and a framed photograph of the Adelstein family sit upon a small end table. There are three boys and a girl. Mr. Adelstein looks to be in his early-forties — robust, healthy, and mustached. His wife is probably only twenty-five. She is a plain woman, the type of person whom you walk past on the street several times a day without seeing. Two of the boys are in their late-teens. Both are somewhat gangly and clearly at home in silence. Their hair and sweaters fix the photograph's date in the early-eighties. The girl and the other boy, whom I assume to be Mordecai, are no older than seven or eight. She is lightly freckled with flaxen hair. Mordecai's ears protrude from his head as if they are being tugged by invisible hands. His face resembles his father's more than his mother's. Against the wall, behind this portrait, sits a framed Whistler print from the Frick Collection.

He calls from the kitchen, but I cannot hear him.

“Excuse me?”

“Why are you here?” as he comes back into the room. “Why did you want to meet him?”

“I don't know. Money, I guess,” despondently.

“An honest man.” He places the two coffees (in cups and saucers) on the table. “I know all about the money from the magazine. Was there anything else?”

“I don't even know anymore. I've been asking myself that question a lot lately. I guess a lot of people just want to know what he had to say.”

“He said all that he needed to say,” dismissively. He notices a look. “You are a fan of Whistler, yes?”

“Excuse me?”

“You were staring at the print. Was this just passive observation?”

“No, no. I’m something of a fan. I guess he just brings to mind someone I used to know.”

“I see. I've always appreciated his understanding of the similarities, the parallels, between painting and music.” He laughs lightly as he sits. “But you are not here to listen to my thoughts on Whistler, brilliant though they may be. You are here to learn what you can of my son.”

“Do you really believe what you just said, that he…said all that he wanted to say?”

“Wanted? No. Needed? Yes. True, Time is man's greatest nemesis, but Time is not necessarily an antagonist. My son accomplished what he set out to do. He never became redundant or boring. I believe one could compare his work to that of a published novel. More could have been added, some themes could have been refined, but this hardly makes his work incomplete or without merit.” He pauses. “You do not agree with this, do you?”

“Look, I don't want to impose. You've clearly been through a lot, and I really feel like I should go.”

“What? I am an old man. I have been around death all of my life. Half of my family failed to escape the genocide of the Nazis — not my mother and my father, of course, but two of my uncles, my Aunt Shayna, and two grandparents—; I served my country in Korea; I have buried two wives. True, it is perhaps the greatest tragedy to lose a son or daughter, but I have come to grips with death. As Nietzsche so brilliantly put it, 'The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and fragrant drop of levity — and now you strange Apotheker-Seelen have turned it into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive.' Life is something from which one ought not cower, no matter the reason.”

“What does that mean? I mean, I know the word apothecary, but what was the other word?”

“Let me see…Nietzsche's phrasing is always poetic, odd. Apotheker-Seelen. I guess it would mean, literally, pharmacist-souls. Just who are the Apotheker-Seelen? As I've said, Nietzsche's phrasing is often more poetic than one would think, and I'm somewhat at a loss to say definitively just who these individuals are, though I am of the opinion that he is speaking of the weak and fanatically religious types — the women who stand on the corners in the city soliciting Watchtower magazines, provided one can call standing with the magazine held up and looking so solemn and empty-headed soliciting. Regardless, I find myself drawn more to the first aspect of the passage. Death's certainty ought to create a sense respect, a reverence, for life, not only in terms of ethics and the interactions that we have with others, but in terms of our very place in the world. And as hard as it was to lose Mordecai, to lose him to blind chance, one cannot turn away from living; one cannot succumb to resentment. The beauty of the world is in its chaos, its irrationality. The Beautiful is not, as Plato posited, necessarily apposite to the Good or the orderly — the realm of Apollo. It's a certain freedom on which we must not impose limits or moralities — not even values. We have to accept that there is beauty everywhere, even in the tragedy of death.”

I attempt to sip my coffee.

“Patience, young man. You lack patience.”

“Excuse me?”

“That coffee is far too hot. Place it on the table, allow it to cool; sip it when it can be enjoyed. Bah,” he exclaims, though not with enough force to require a mark. “The youth of today: so much energy, so little direction.” He pauses. “And yet such is the perennial folly of youth, I suppose.”

“There seems to be some consensus on the matter.”

He smiles. “Of course you fail to understand that my son said all that he needed to say. You go around collecting experiences as a young boy collects stones at the beach — or, if wandering Coney Island, syringes.” His guffaws are like cluster bombs. “But, joking aside, at the end of the day, nothing is cherished; nothing is enjoyed. You look, but you do not see; you listen, but you do not hear; you touch, but you do not feel.” I nod hesitantly. His posture eases. “This is not the first time someone has made a speech of this nature to you, is it?”

“No, sir. My father still treats me like I'm twelve.”

“Given the way you react to the death of a man whom you have never met, it is no wonder. While I understand that this is difficult, that death is an emotional tempest that one must learn to navigate, I simply don’t see the reason to dwell upon it, or, moreover, to solicit pity on account of my loss. I certainly shed many tears for my son, but it is nothing less than an act of self-destruction and vanity to turn away from the passing of time, of life, because of hardship.”

“It's not that. It's not that I'm…I don't know. I'm just in shock right now. You have to understand that. It's the shock.” He nods sympathetically. “And it's not that I'm…you know…overcome with grief. I'm just not a very talkative person.”

“The shock of one great moment leaves you filled with despair; all else evades your attention.” He smiles. The word mercurial pops into my head. “My, my, my — you are truly young. How old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

He grunts. “I guess this is my mistake.”

“What do you mean?”

“You look a few years older. Perhaps because I associate you with my son. He was thirty-four — just thirty-four — when the accident happened.” He repositions himself on the sofa — stretches his legs, crosses left over right, kneecap to ankle. “Death terrifies the young; it ignites the old; it passes over the lost like the wind. The truly lost embrace it for fear of life.”

“It's not something I dwell on,” I respond.

“Spoken like a true child.” He notices a look. “I don't mean to be condescending when I say this. You speak of death as a true soldier, a hero, speaks of death. The Argonauts were children — so, too, were they heroes. And is it not the children of the world who are the heroes? Is it not the most hopelessly quixotic who arouse populations from their slumber? The heroes of the world are the ones with courage, the type of courage that only youth successfully can cultivate. But the term, hero, that has been corrupted, has it not? Corrupted, just as Wagner was corrupted, both in his soul and in his vision.” He takes a deep breath. “You must excuse the musings of an old man, especially one who has recently rediscovered the works of Nietzsche and, what seems almost a consequent of the great Pole, Wagner.

“I only wish to express my belief that there is great depth in every experience, that a man who has the capacity to savor each moment of life will never be tempted to capitulate to despair.” He shakes his head. “You have probably seen much of my son's catalog, but I doubt you can remember each piece with any sense of uniqueness. The young cannot see past the future — a paradox, no doubt, but one that you ought to take to heart.” I squint to him. “Patience, my boy,” he stresses with levity. “Patience.”

The subsequent silence is probably only awkward for me.

“What's that over there?”

“This is what I'm talking about. We have not even begun a conversation, and yet you are looking for new topics of discussion.” He squints as he looks over to the glass cabinet that implores attention. “They are coins. Yes, a Jewish numismatist — who has heard of such a thing!” Bombs away. “Oh, but it is a fantastic collection if I do say so myself.”

He walks over to the case. “Come here, come here,” with a wave of the hand. “I have spent the better part of my life collecting them. There is something very simple, very beautiful in coins. To minters, coins are considered to be of value when they lack uniqueness; to a numismatist, it is the other way around.” He turns to me. “A numismatist is really nothing more than a collector of rarities and errors.”

I approach the cabinet, look down, and finally see that my efforts have not been in vain. This is not a lost cause. The only problem is that it means Coprolalia is dead.

“You are a fan of Roman history, I take it?”

“What makes you say that?”

“The coin with which you are so infatuated. It's authentic, too. I purchased it for an arm and a leg, but it is the crown jewel of my collection.”

“It's not that.” It's a coin with the same inscription on the wall in the Park Slope bar—Herculi Romano Augusto.

“What does it mean?”

“It's very simple,” he begins as he unlocks the case. “You have a standard portrait of the emperor Commodus.” He then reaches for a pair of tweezers at the far end of the cabinet. He grips the coin with them. “On top of having one of the most volatile tempers among people know for tempers, Romans, Commodus could be regarded as the most contemptible emperor of the second century.”

I nod.

“Anyway, this figure is Commodus. He is wearing the lion skin hat of Hercules in his portrait. On the reverse,” as he turns the coin to reveal the familiar text, “is Hercules’ famous club. The club divides the text, which, read left to right, is 'Herculi Romano Augusto'. This conveys Commodus' having the demeanors of both Augustus and Hercules. If one reads only the right side that has been separated by the club from top to bottom, however, one has 'culi ano usto', which means, essentially, 'To the…to the asshole burned up with the club'. The impression is that Commodus uses his club not to beat anyone, which he did fairly regularly, but as a…let's say a sexual toy. For himself.”

“And I thought Catullus was dirty.”

“You're familiar with Catallus?” in disbelief. “I was under the impression that such men had gone the way of phrenology and the scholastics.”

“I met a man who was in the midst of translating one of his poems.”

He says nothing. He simply nods in a fashion that could be described as captious or dismissive, perhaps even a conjunction of several other things that I can't translate all that well.

The coin is returned to its case. The case is locked. We return to our original positions. I pick up the coffee. I blow on it. I sip on it. I then return it to its saucer. The air conditioning hums a monotone tune in a time signature that may have once been utilized by Ornette Coleman. I can't think of anything to say, except, “So he really was Coprolalia.”

“You clearly had your doubts.”

“Of course. I've encountered no small number of people who claim—”

“The mental patient? Ah, yes; Mordecai always found that one amusing.” He smiles. “But these doubts? Am I to believe they no longer trouble you?”

“Not after seeing that coin.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“It was the inspiration behind a piece he created at a place on Fifth Avenue — right around the corner from that one house where the First Battle of Brooklyn was fought.”

“The Old Stone House. Also known as the Vechte-Cortelyou House.”

“I always forget that first name. What was it again?”

“Vechte.”

“Well, anyway, no one could ever explain the meaning of the piece in the bar. But that coin…”

“Mordecai found it especially funny. He said it was the only coin in the collection that wasn't worthless. That was his sense of humor.”

Another pause ensues. This one is less awkward, as we are both able to sip from our coffee without scalding ourselves.

“So why did he never come forward?”

“He liked the idea that he could talk to people about his work with honesty.”

“What do you mean?”

“People are rarely honest with an artist, especially when it concerns the artist's work.” He notices a look. “Yes, it was that simple; but, at the same time, this is far more complex than it appears. The primary point that you should keep in mind is this: He wanted the art to stand alone to be judged by critics and laymen alike. Perhaps 'laymen' is the wrong term, as it is carries a pejorative connotation. Regardless, he wanted to know if people appreciated his work. Everyone. And an artist cannot approach a man on the street with a canvas and ask for an evaluation. The artist, Mordecai felt, must remove himself from critical discourse. And, for the most part, he was successful in this.”

“And he never wanted anything for what he created? I mean, he could have been a very wealthy man.”

“How? Once something is put on a piece of canvas it becomes both art and a commodity. It can be appreciated, true, but it can also be bought, sold, exchanged. If a person creates something to hang in their home, it still has the potential to be taken and placed upon a different wall. Its environment is (caesura) interchangeable. However, if it becomes a part of the wall, it is given a more definitive context; it is a part of the environment or community. It can be scraped from the wall and it can be painted over, but it cannot be transplanted — unless, of course, one wishes to remove the portion of the wall that contains the illustration. This was something that Mordecai could never get around, but he felt it was an objection that failed to seriously draw away from the larger point he wished to make.”

“So he never wanted to be famous? He never wanted to be known as Coprolalia?”

“He would not have been able to accomplish as much had people known his identity. More importantly, he never would have been able to carry out his work without being constantly bothered. And he never wanted to have his art hung up in a gallery or a museum. His choice in medium was no accident.

“The oldest form of artistic expression, as well as the oldest form of written communication, is to be found on the walls of caves; and they express more than what they let on. While I may run the risk of overextending the importance of such illustrations, I do feel it necessary to point out that the Ten Commandments were not written upon papyrus; they were written on stone. Perhaps the creation of a mural is something similar — an expression of both art and communal values.”

“But Mordecai's work isn't a manifestation of some communal ethos. It's abstract and, to be honest, kind of esoteric. How do you create a sense of community by sharing something that means one thing to you, something completely different, sometimes even nothing, to someone else?”

“If you take out the you, then that leaves only the community.”

“What the hell does that even mean?”

“You are over-anxious.”

“Yes, I am. I have been all over this city trying to find a dead man. And I have absolutely nothing to show for it.”

“Why did you do it?”

My own words resonate within me. “Dead man.” The trampoline is no longer there. The mats are gone, too. The gymnast is left floating. Forever. There's no longer any space, so there's no time; she is neither falling nor rising. She isn't even moving.

“Because I needed something to do.”

“You could have done anything, then. Even nothing is something.” I nod.

“So why do anything? There really isn't much of a reason to even get out of bed in the morning.”

“Of course there isn't if you expand what is meant by 'purpose' or 'meaning' to include the 'why' that existence is, to some, supposed to entail.” What? “Either it's all part of a divine plan, and there's no free will, or it's all meaningless acts of free-will. There's really no middle ground unless you focus. Our actions only have meaning when we remove ourselves from the grand stage of history, when we see ourselves as important to people close to us, to those with whom we share a community.”

“But isn't that a tragedy? Isn't it pathetic that virtually no one from our time will be remembered in a thousand years?”

“No. It's pathetic only if you're conceited and unreasonable. But you have to continue on anyway. You don't have a choice.”

“What do you mean?”

“If I am able to address you as a conscious being, then you are alive. Even if you choose to die, such a choice is made by one who is living. To be or not to be, young man. All other questions are adjunctive to it. Is it not right there in the Declaration of Independence? Life. One cannot have anything unless one has life. Liberty.” He pauses. “What is liberty, my friend?”

I am silent for a moment. I see myself trying to look introspective. “No one really asks that, do they?”

“That is exactly how James Baldwin responded when asked the same question!” He takes pause to laugh. “But liberty; liberty is not simply freedom. Freedom is the pylon of liberty. But liberty is the acceptance of responsibility, the refusal to be little more than a ward. True reactionaries, traditionalists perhaps, have argued against this, and they have legitimized their claims in myriad ways. Men like Charles Loyseau and Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet legitimized the rule of the French crown — while Sir Robert Filmer and those like him, though no one else specifically comes to mind at the moment, legitimized the English one — and the surrounding hierarchy by claiming that order is paramount to both the natural world and morality, that the practices of the ancien régime best embody the Will of God, and, therefore, that God desires certain men to lead and others to follow. Romans was quoted often, though I forget the exact passage.

“Regardless, the Revolution against this system, consequently, took on something of an atheistic, or — according to Anatole France — a deistic, tone. If a cruel system is the system of the Catholic God, then those suffering beneath it will certainly have less than kind thoughts about the nature of this God. Just look at Sade,” he laughs. “But this is a tangent, is it not? What I mean to say is that the fight for liberty is the fight for personal responsibility, for dignity, to cast off the chains of fate. Many people do not understand this. They see responsibility as something that is imposed, liberty as a relief from burden. But it is actually the opposite: Liberty is a burden because it lifts restrictions, thereby leaving man before the world with nothing more than his wits.

“Liberty is dangerous. It is dangerous because it is trust and personal responsibility. A society without trust, a society that believes all people are ultimately irresponsible, will not allow liberty. But we have been granted liberty here, in this country. In fact, if one looks to the words of the Bill of Rights, one realizes that trust is pervasive throughout it. This is a far cry from the days of David and Hammurabi. It is grounded on trust, trust in a people responsible enough to own a firearm, to speak without inciting riot, to write without advocating genocide. This trust, this liberty — it is beautiful. It is beautiful because it is messy, it is chaotic, and it has limitless potential. And this, this my boy, is where the pursuit of happiness comes in. How can one pursue happiness without liberty?”

“But this isn't the eighteenth century any more. A guy with a lot of power and money will just get richer and more powerful at the expense of the people. What I mean to say is that allowing one person to pursue their own definition of happiness will often prevent several others from their own pursuits. And this isn't fair. It isn't just.”

“To think how we've regressed,” he winces. “To think that speaking of liberty promotes the agendas of men who would rape their own mothers for a dollar. Yes, of course they want the freedom to exploit. They want to see every social program gutted, privatized, and left to whither and die. They want to see every roadblock set up to make sure we don't return to the days when a man had no choice but to work for subsistence wages removed. These men befoul the name of liberty in their quest for power and wealth. No, I do not speak of them. I speak of men for whom liberty is infinitely more important than the free market. What seems so odd to me, however, is that the people who trust humanity the least tend to resent regulations the most. Why? If the government steals from you, it's called corruption. If a businessman steals from you, it's called profit. I want more regulations to protect my liberty from corporations, which, contrary to what the Supreme Court may say, are not people.”

“Okay.”

“I apologize for that little rant, my boy,” he laughs. “I asked a simple question and gave you an irrelevant answer.” He sips his coffee. “Let's go back, shall we. Why did you decide to look for my son as opposed to, say, the Holy Grail?”

“There are a number of reasons,” as I look to him. “For one, I thought it'd be a good opportunity—”

“Opportunity!” He smiles. “Thought it may not be my place to play the part of the pedant, I do believe it important to impart this one bit of information to you. Do you know the etymology of the word 'opportunity'?” I shake my head. “It comes from the word opportunus. It means, quite simply, the best way to reach port. Think about that.”

This continues for quite some time. He provides odd pieces of wisdom for which I am less grateful than I appear (which is certainly reminiscent of the night Tomas and I spent with Patrick). He also reproaches me for behaving my age. Repeatedly. I am understandably afraid to seriously argue with him. He is Coprolalia's father after all.

It's something of a disappointment that Isaac was never one for photography. The most recent picture he has of his son was taken four years before the accident, on his thirtieth birthday. It does not take him long to find it.

Mordecai does not look the way I had imagined him — his short, brown hair has a reddish tint to it; his face is somewhat long and thin, lacking in any discernible feature except for the absence of defined cheekbones or a beard or anything that could be called distinctive. His ears are not as big as others have let on, but they do protrude from his head a good deal. His skin tone is a pale, Slavic white. On his body, I can say little — he has hidden himself within that sweatshirt that others have mentioned. As I assumed, he appeared to be about my height.

I can't define the man I had thought him to be. Perhaps I had never taken the time to define him physically, so none of this really changes anything. I guess I thought he was going to radiate something — charisma, afflatus, rebellion. And yet there is nothing alluring about him, nothing that invites suspicions or entertains a mystery. He was just some dude. For all I know, I rode the train with him the day before he died.

Mr. Adelstein provided a lot of biographical information, though most of it was either obvious or not particularly relevant to…well, anything. Mordecai never went to college; he read a great deal; he lived at home until he was twenty-three. After living with Willis Faxo in the City, he moved to Greenpoint. He lived there until sometime in the late-nineties, but Mr. Adelstein cannot remember an exact year. The dowager who rented the place to him either died or decided to move to Florida. He then moved to Morningside Heights for a few years, where he roomed with his cousin, Shayna, who was then enrolled at Columbia. In the spring of 2003, he moved into a studio apartment not too far away from where Vinati currently lives. He remained there until the end of his life.

Mr. Adelstein was ambivalent about this area, especially when Mordecai was new to it. When Mordecai had his nose broken by a gang of muggers, his father was less than hesitant to applaud his intuition. The incident occurred in 2005, on Vinati's corner. It involved a brick.

I can imagine Mordecai growing up in this house. I can see Mr. and Mrs. Adelstein bringing home the new baby from the hospital, being welcomed with balloons and adoring relatives ready to peer past the blue blanket to see the wingless putti with his eyes barely open. They clamor for a glimpse, speak, like Mr. Adelstein, in that stereotypically Brooklyn Jewish accent, and argue about the food, or perhaps just food in general (“You think they have the best babka in the city?” “I know a great butcher who used to run place in the Village; best pastrami you ever had” “Bad kugel? Such a thing is an impossibility”). I can see him in the crib, the young mother fawning over the potential of her first child. I can see him at three running from the kitchen into the living room and jumping on the couch, perhaps on one of the beds upstairs. I can see him in the years leading up to puberty, studying the Torah with his father and preparing for his bar mitzvah at the desk by the record player. I can see him at the age of fourteen, watching the television in the den, which is adjacent to the parlor in which I find myself. I can see him as this man's son, and I can begin to understand just who he was.

But it's not really him, is it? It's me. I see myself doing all of these things, and I imagine myself doing these things. I am both performer and audience, protagonist and spectator. And yet it's all false; because I can't be him any more than I can be Chuang Tzu, let alone the butterfly he once dreamed himself being. To be him, to be anyone else, would mean to not be myself; even if I knew all of Tzu's experiences, even if I knew what he knew about himself and the butterfly he believed himself to be, I would still be the one experiencing the dream, thereby making it profoundly different. I would have to sacrifice myself to truly understand someone else. And, even if this were possible, how could I be said to be the one experiencing the life of anyone but myself? I have ceased to exist; therefore, I have ceased to have experiences.

And then it occurs to me: The Bay Ridge Collection was not meant to be seen as a collection of his work. His goal was to attract people, to awaken them so that they would scrutinize the writings on the walls, to see that they were a part of a community. And he did this simply by drawing attention to what was already there. So it wasn't an end; it was a means to a larger end that had nothing to do with himself, let alone fame or notoriety.

“You appear to have stumbled upon some revelation, my boy,” Mr. Adelstein says after what I realize is a long period of introspection on my part. “What have you realized?”

“I finally get it.”

“Get what?”

“That the content of his work is completely irrelevant. It's the context. It's all context. That's what Faxo meant.”

He nods slowly. “You must explain yourself better than that.”

“I can't. It's just that I realize that he said all he needed to say. He could have said it with a single stroke of the pen. The exegeses, the papers by Winchester, the theses by grad students: they're superfluous.”

“You sound like a man I once knew.”

“Dick Keens, right,” sarcastically.

“No,” he says with perplexed eyes. “Lev Reichmann. His father was a rabbi. He planned to be a rabbi, but he couldn't deal with all of the reading and the Rambam this and Saadia that. So he went into business. He owned a hardware store on Flatbush Avenue. Great man, great man. He moved down to Boca just a few years ago.”

“But you knew Dick Keens, right?”

“Of course I knew Dick. He was a very close friend of the family.”

“And the A-R-E?”

“The what?”

“You don't have to play coy with me,” almost coquettishly. “I know all about it. I even went to one of their festivals.”

He stares to me for a good ten seconds. “It sounds like you enjoyed yourself.” He pauses. “What on Earth is the A-R-E?”

19

It took about four days to write the article, from Wednesday night until Sunday. I sent the finished manuscript in an email to both Sean and the magazine just after seven in the evening.

The few fragments of biographical material came from what I had learned from Willis Faxo, Mr. Adelstein, and a few other people I met over the course of the week following my visit to Isaac’s home. As Mordecai did not leave behind a journal or a diary, these people were really all I had to go on. (In fact, the typical wealth of memorabilia that one assumes will be left behind by the average American corpse was completely lacking. There was a box devoting to clothing (which included the ragged, gray sweatshirt that I had expected to find); a box that was comprised of a small number of photographs and personal papers, most of which were financial; a box of art supplies; a chest that contained cooking supplies and eating utensils; a duffel bag with probably five hundred CDs without jewel-cases; and an assortment of miscellany that had been placed in one box prosaically labeled Stuff). I found an iPod that had never been used — or, if it had been used, it had been taken out of its box, turned on, puzzled over, gazed at with chagrin, and finally stowed in a drawer or a place for safe-keeping. According to Mr. Adelstein, Mordecai never owned a computer, did not like computers, and refused to learn how to do such things as navigate the Internet or check his email. He was more of a Minimalist than a Luddite. Still, it did come as a surprise when I learned that he did not own many books (though his father, it should be said, did have quite a collection, which is probably where his son drew a majority of his references). Mr. Adelstein told me that I could take anything that I wanted from the estate of the deceased. With the exception of a Poot Moint album, I declined the offer.

Mr. Adelstein pressed me on the issue of the A-R-E as another storm front moved in. I apologized for being unable to verify what the letters stood for, adding that the name is as ambiguous as the group itself. “The first person to tell me about them said that the initials stand for the Acolytes of Risus, the Enlightener.”

Upon hearing this, Mr. Adelstein searched through his library and finally produced a leather-bound edition of Apuleius' the Golden Ass. He quickly found a chapter describing a festival dedicated to Risus. From what I gathered, the entire community came together to play a joke on the narrator. He, the narrator, ended up being tried for taking arms against three intruders in true Quixote-fashion. It wasn't until fairly late in the trial that the three lacerated wine sacks were produced, much to the amusement of the crowd. The narrator, as one may expect, did not find much humor in the prank. Mr. Adelstein also showed me an earlier passage from the book, one in which a witch “bepissed” a man who later relayed these soggy events to the narrator. According to Mr. Adelstein, this book is akin to a novel in many forms, though, he argued, the modern novel didn't actually appear until the time of Cervantes. “So perhaps the battle against the bladders is really an homage to Apuleius,” he said. “Still, I find it funny that the novel, in its earliest form, is almost always something of a travelogue.”

Isaac was a veritable library, as Faxo had told me. We listened to old jazz records (he was a huge fan of Lee Morgan, particularly the album The Sidewinder) and talked about philosophy, theology, art, and literature. A bottle of eighteen year old scotch was produced once the rain had passed and the sunlight began to paint the walls in pastels and ocellated shadows, as the neighbors came home from work and dinners and dates to resume lives no less quiet and quaint than those lived out in the suburbs of Westchester and Nassau, came home to houses that held disparities to the adjacent houses only if one knew the occupants, the histories of the homes themselves, the things that cannot be revealed by a simple once-over. For whatever reason, I remember thinking of the Golgotha of 17th Street.

Isaac called me an “old soul” on several occasions once the scotch began to offer more than its emberous warmth. He also said that I reminded him of Mordecai in some ways, though these comparisons were never seriously expounded upon. I couldn't tell if he was flattering me or if he simply wanted to feel as though he was once again talking to his son. I guess this is one of those things that one can never really know.

Mordecai was a fixture at the library, something that was both sworn by Mr. Adelstein and confirmed by a number of the people in Brooklyn's main branch. After showing them his picture, virtually everyone laughed, and then proceeded to provide an anecdote or two about him. Jerome, one of the employees there, had even gone to his funeral. One of the other attendees had been one of the cashiers at his local bodega in Williamsburg.

With the exception of Wednesday's trip to the library and the other stops along Broadway, the four days I spent writing were without incident. I only left my room to go to the bathroom, to buy cigarettes (twice), and to eat whatever I could create with what little food was in the apartment (I finished the scrapple, ate a lot of butter and garlic linguine, and took down at least three cans of tuna without bread or mayo). On Friday night I found myself in a wife-beater, eating a dish comprised of canned corn, canned beans, and hot sauce. I smoked a cigarette by the kitchen window and drank a dram glass of cheap whiskey after the less than sumptuous meal. As I smoked, I reflected upon a woman I had met at a bar on the boarder of Sunset Park and Bay Ridge (out of the rolling ocean, the crowd). They filmed part of The Departed there, the bartender said; she even showed me a photograph of Scorsese with his headphones on. Her hair was the hue of red that one imagines on sports cars, seldom on a head. The tiles in the bathroom were carnation and black, the same colors of the bathroom in the house where I grew up. There were no deodorant advertisements there, just framed posters of Dublin facades that all looked pretty much the same. There was nothing in there by Coprolalia. The past receded as I finished the last of the cigarette and absently watched all of the sunset rhapsodies unfold on the streets.

Tomas was understanding about my withdraw from social life. Aberdeen didn't really notice; he was too busy attempting to navigate the niceties of the deal with the woman who turned out to have very specific parameters for the pieces that she planned to commission — he related their introduction to the first interaction between Monet and Alice Hoschedé. Vinati's phone continued to go to voice mail. I left a message with my number, attempted to look her up on all of the stalker websites (facebook, myspace, friendster, etc.) without success, but stopped short of trying to figure out whether I knew anyone who would both be in town and know her number. I had an article to write, after all.

It was difficult to whittle down all of the experiences of the previous weeks into something that could be read on one crosstown bus ride. I guess it's true that when a man sits down to write a history he knows no more than his heels what lets and confounded hindrances he is to meet with in his way. Entire portions of the city simply went dark, fell from the scope of this one determined narrator, who I didn't even believe myself to really be. There was no room for narrative minutia, let alone aberrations form the impetus of discovery: Patrick's monologues were harlequined with redactions; the A-R-E was simply called “the group”; the location of the party that Tomas and I attended was not provided; the citrus artillery never fired a shot; Mongo (or the Onion Man — an epithet that Patrick never bothered to explain), Moxy, Früvous, and Boots were relegated to a further reading list; Vinati was not pertinent to the essay; Connie faded into a miasma of rancor that existed between the lines; Daphne was just a link to Willis Faxo, who, in turn, was just another link in the chain that ultimately ended at the grave of Mordecai Adelstein, which I did visit the same day I went to the library (though it was without incident because it’s a grave, and graves, like the dead they represent, don’t entertain guests). Figures like Tommy and Midas dissolved into generalizations, lines in a bibliography. I finished it while listening to “Missed the Boat.”

The article ended up being six pages long. It was initially nine. As I have said, or perhaps implied, I kept it as impersonal as I could, but certain incidents were detailed somewhat extensively in the first draft. For one, I spent a good deal of time recounting my interactions with Mr. Adelstein and Willis Faxo.

The first draft was well-received by Jeff, who ended up being the only proof reader. After going over it together on Saturday night, the two of us had a few beers and talked about all of the revisions that he recommended (among them, that I edit some of the passages that made Tomas look like an alcoholic and Aberdeen a pompous ass, abridge the conversation with Willis Faxo, and reduce the amount of time dedicated to my talk with Daphne to three sentences), women, and our youth.

I met up with Tomas and Aberdeen on Sunday night. I covered our meal at Wo Hop, that little basement place with its pictures of celebrities that no one remembers anymore all covered in more recent signatures and graffiti. We then went out to one of Tomas' favorite bars, a small, clandestine place on Canal Street. Nikki happened to be there with her new boyfriend, Doug. Tomas described him as a “fucking twat.” The three of us were initially pleasant, however, even if the guy was, indeed, a “fucking twat.” After asking my name with a flamboyant affectation, he inquired into what I did.

“Dig it, man; this guy does the fucking impossible, that's what he does.” Doug was intrigued. “He fucking found Coprolalia, man.”

“You found Coprolalia?”

“I did.”

“So who is he?”

“Mordecai Adelstein.”

“Mordecai whom?”

Whom? “Mordecai Adelstein. He grew up in Midwood, worked at a deli in Park Slope, and died a few months ago in a car accident.”

Doug shook his head. “I believe you're mistaken.”

Silence overtook our trio. Nikki sipped her cocktail through a red stirrer and possibly considered using a stronger moisturizer on her elbow.

“What makes you say that?”

“Professor Winchester just wrote about a new Coprolalia exhibit on his blog. You do know of him, right? Sean Winchester?”

“Yes.”

“Wait, what the fuck did Sean say?”

“There's a new exhibit. Professor Winchester is, like, really excited about it, too. It's a Latin adage.”

The fucking twat turned to Nikki. “What did it say again?”

“Like, death is everywhere, right?”

He sipped from his glass of wine and nodded thoughtfully. “That was it.” He then looked me in the eye. “I hope you haven’t put too much work into this little manhunt. As you can see, you’re quite mistaken — Coprolalia is alive and well. Perhaps you should consult an authority on the subject before you claim to have (sigh, roll of the eyes) accomplished the impossible.”

“There has to be a fucking mistake, man. This guy met Coprolalia's father, dig? He’s been to the motherfucker’s grave. He's been all over the city looking at this shit. He's spent fucking three weeks doing it. He's not fucking around, man; he knows what he's fucking talking about.”

“Yes, Doug, our friend here has good reason to believe that Coprolalia is dead.”

“Well, I guess three weeks is like way more time than Professor Winchester has dedicated to researching Coprolalia. How long is that again…a decade?”

“Look, Sean was only interested in the pieces; he didn't care about the bigger picture. I know him; I've been in contact with him for the past month. He didn't care about finding Mordecai or even understanding that Mordecai's real goal had more to do with context.”

“Sure. Well, before you begin to tell me about this real goal, why don't you start by telling me how a dead man writes something on the wall?”

“Is that a fucking riddle?”

“Shut up, Tomas.”

“So how did he do it? If he's dead, how did he do it? This is a mystery movie with Lindsay Lohan written all over it,” with a sly look to Nikki. She smiled without teeth and nodded along with a track off the most recent Wilco album. The bartender and a young couple at the end of the bar were convinced that the album was an instant classic.

“That's simple. I did it.”

“What?”

“You did it? I highly doubt that. Do you even know wh—”

“Et In Arcadia Ego. And, yes, I know where it appeared. I also know exactly what it means. I know why I wrote it, too, but I really don't see why I should have to explain it to anyone, especially you.”

“Pardon me,” Doug responded. “I didn't mean to offend you.”

“Nikki, your new boyfriend's a fucking twat.”

“Excuse me?” with shoulders perked.

Tomas knocked his shoulder into the sinewy barrier as he walked past, turned, and then said, “Don't act like didn't hear me. Go back to your fucking thesis, you goddamn cake-eater.” Before Doug could respond, Tomas added, “And don't try to play the part of the tough guy, you fucking candy ass; it doesn't fit you.”

The three of us went into the backyard. The fucking twat and Nikki did not follow.

So it was just the three of us again: Tomas with the hangover of success, Aberdeen intoxicated by it, and I awaiting its effects. The moments staggered on into the future — quick and clumsy — as we laughed and took down copious amounts of beer for the sake of having nothing better to do. Apartment lights came on, went off; sirens whined calamity and faded into the distance; lovers quarreled or cuddled while watching small televisions with uneven rabbit ears and grainy pictures, had sex or didn't, felt guilty for not being completely certain whether or not they were happy or felt total elation, rapture ecstatic and jubilant (escaping anchors and holds), because they had faith not only in love, but in the person there with them, too; pigeons dawdled from place to place; keys unlocked deadbolts, but did not open doors; silent peaceful lonely apartments became occupied or vacant; luxury condos echoed with the sounds of solitary footsteps, bathroom-going footsteps that were soft like misting rain on well-groomed grass or patient fingers on ivory keys. The past was receding from the present, and its indelible mark would remain like the rock-face behind a waterfall. We would always be subject to it — required not to live in that realm, as so many would like to do, but to accept it as a construct of necessities and antecedents and bastards of chance that were once just potentialities. And as we sat there, the three of us among the great rondure, reclined in uncomfortable chairs and safely harbored among vacant seats and the amorphous background of City and sky (an expanse that is a necessary lie, a composite of various pasts that come to form one heaven for us), it dawned on me not only that I was complacent, but that I felt this way without guilt. I could not remember the last time this happened. I could not remember a time without that profound sense of obligation that had birthed not only this project, but so many others — so many that had been entertained without an earnest desire for fruition, not because I wanted to fail, but because I felt I needed something by which I could define myself. Perhaps all young adults identify themselves by what they do as opposed to who they are.

Sometime around twelve, Patrick called me. I had not spoken to him since the first night I met him, and I was rather amazed when he showed up a few minutes later with Poot Moint in tow. Daphne appeared first, almost gingerly, with a bottle of wine in her hand. She was wearing an ensemble that would have been fitting on Annie Hall. Aberdeen quietly noted that she did indeed look like a young Faye Dunaway.

“I'd rather see a good band comprised of men before I go see a group of guys and one chick who can barely play her instrument. It's patronizing,” she says to Patrick, who appeared with a bottle of wine in his hand. He was dressed in an expertly tailored suit with a very thin tie, the type of fashion that brought to mind a late-sixties spy film.

“Such a practice became common in the nineties.”

“And the nineties produced the most bastardized version of feminism — just think of…(roll of the eyes)…girl power.”

“Interesting choice of wording, Ms. Karev. 'Bastardized'?”

“Well, Mr. Shaheen, it was Adam who gave names to everything, wasn't it? Doesn't that make the very language we use patriarchal? And, before you butt in, isn't language the chisel that shapes thought?”

“And yet your argument entails a knowable meta-language.”

“You know I'm right.”

“You know you just hate my conclusion, but can't find fault with the premises.”

The remaining members of the band, all dressed in red, corduroy three-pieces, then appeared. They, too, had bottles in their hands. With the exception of the drummer, who had a kazoo in his mouth, the band sang an a cappella rendition of Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue.

The bartender approached soon after: “What the fuck is wrong with you people?”

“Plenty,” Patrick responded with an exaggerated smile (actually, on anyone else it would have been exaggerated; on him it was standard). She did not have a retort readily available. “We had a slight moment of jubilation, my dear; I promise it won't soon happen again.”

“It better not.”

“It won't.”

Caesura.

“Look, I don't want to be a bitch about all of this,” which was debatable, “But you have to keep it down.”

“My dear, you will not hear a peep out of us.”

“Okay, fine. If you guys aren't too loud, I'll keep the back open until one. That gives you a little more than half an hour.”

“Marvelous. You are as considerate as you are beautiful, a modern day Barnabas.” He paused. “And it is now his day, too,” as he looked to his watch. “We shall crown you Miss Barnabas.”

“Why?”

“Because of her good nature. She is no Sapphira. We all know what happened to her.” Silence. “She was smote for not relinquishing all of her property to the community. Come now,” with a bombastic flailing of the arm, “We all know that the early Christians were communists; it's right there in the New Testament, as well as in Josephus — who said the Jews were 'Communists to perfection', though I will quickly note that his assessment applies to the majority of Gnostics, the early Christians, and the Jews. Not to go too far off topic, but will someone please tell me how the right justifies—”

“Just keep it down, okay.”

“Indeed, Miss Barnabas. We will—”

“Patrick,” Daphne sighed. “Shut the fuck up.” She looked to the bartender. “You won't receive any complaints. I'll keep all of them on a short leash.” She looks to me. “Especially that one.”

The bartender disappears. “Come here, you. Come on,” Patrick begins. His arms are spread out wide; his head nods enthusiastically. “Get up, man!” I rise. He then wraps his arms around my ribcage and lifts me off the ground.

“Who are you?” Aberdeen asks.

“I am his Highness' dog at Kew; Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?”

“Patrick Shaheen?”

“I've been known to go by that name, too.”

The members of the band, with the exception of the drummer, all vaguely remember Tomas and me. Aaron, the man once the robot, shakes a finger at me to express recognition. “You. I remember you. You were at the party, you know, with the uh…the uh…” he snaps his fingers, “…the guys launching the oranges and the melons, and then Mongo with the big sword—”

“Katana.”

“—The katana, which ended up somehow in the toilet. You were talking with the French guy.”

The others nod and smile. Before they sit, however, they state their names and instruments to Aberdeen.

“Andreas Vanderhurst: Drums, percussion, jug, kazoo, vocals.”

“Lucas Filoramo: Bass, trumpet, baritone, tuba, sousaphone, kazoo, vocals.”

“Aaron Hirschfeld (a/k/a The Domesticon): Clarinet, oboe, saxophone, organ, violin, cello, kazoo, vocals.”

“Sam Washington: Guitar, mandolin, banjo, uke, harmonica, kazoo, vocals.”

“Daphne Karev: Piano, organ, vibraphone, xylophone, marimba, accordion, melodica, kazoo, vocals.”

“Patrick Shaheen: Thinker, nonconformist, ethicist, socialist, epic rhapsodist, philologist, sophist, idle theologian, soothsayer, poet.”

“Don't forget bullshitter,” Daphne laughs.

“That's the most important one, too! The fecundity of bullshit is nothing short of amazing, my friends.”

The small enclave is constructed entirely out of cinder-blocks — with the exception of a wood fence that parallels the back entrance to the bar — and dimly lit by small lights and candles and a Nite Brite that has been converted into a Virgin icon. Though I have never been to Paris, this “garden,” and perhaps the bar in its entirety, reminds me of the city (or maybe a Parisian-style café in Mexicali; or perhaps a Mexican-style café in Paris). It's narrow, filled with mesh iron tables and mesh iron chairs. The tables have been configured into an ellipse around which the nonet sits. We have in our possession eleven open bottles of wine and not a single glass (save for the three pint glasses Tomas, Aberdeen, and I had been drinking out of).

“So is this what a night off looks like?” Daphne asks. She lights a cigarette. “Sure as hell beats the graveyard shifts you've been working.”

“It's more of a celebration.”

“What?” She hands me a bottle of wine. I don't examine the label; I simply drink.

“I found Coprolalia.”

“So how does it feel?”

“It's kind of weird. I have to admit that I didn't think I was going to do it.”

“Was Willis helpful?”

“Yes and no. I really enjoyed meeting him, though.”

“He's coming tonight. That tenth seat should be reserved for him.”

“Really? What about Scooter? Is he still in town?”

She exhausts. “I totally forgot about him.” She examines the extraneous furniture. “He's got a seat if he shows.”

“So are the two of you on better terms now?”

“Now?”

“You referred to him as a misogynistic prick the last time I saw you.”

“That doesn't sound like me.”

“He's not a misogynist?”

“No, he's not a prick — at least I wouldn't call him a prick because I don't use the word 'prick' very often, and on the rare occasion that I do refer to someone as a prick I sincerely mean it. In fact, in the past five years I probably haven't used the word 'prick' more than I have just now.”

“Glad that's straightened out.”

“Well, the truth is that he and I weren't on any terms. We just kind of drifted apart. I have a very active lifestyle; he has a very sedentary one.”

The two of us continue to converse in symmetry: question, response, question, response, question, response, etc. Our interaction lacks the almost coquettish tone it had taken on when we last saw one another in Keens' study, with its redolence of old books and the memorabilia from decades now buried in dust, lived in black and white, encrusted with nostalgia and less innocent fabrication. We are now outdoors, the fresh air not fresh, but neither humid nor stagnant. It is cool, perhaps a bit milder than one would expect in the beginnings of mid-June. It's curious that you never feel as though you are outside in New York unless it is winter or the peak of summer. At this point, the night sky is a canopy of muddled purples and occasionally nacreous clouds; the moon is nowhere to be seen; the Evening Star has returned to the horizon. It is not a claustrophobic feeling. You just notice the absence of the heavens when you are here.

“A month ago I was celebrating. You know, I had just graduated. I was at some bar in Williamsburg — The Levee, if you know it,” nod, “planning to discover Coprolalia, worried that I never would, that I'd just end up with some dead-end job until giving up on the working world. I'd apply to grad schools and probably leave the city because of some opportunity. But, even then, even after the additional school, that doesn't guarantee anything. I'd still have to get a job — that, or else I could stay in academia. But, I don't know, it seems like I don't really want anything, but, at the same time, I know I can just kind of fit in anywhere, that I'm not necessary to any exact location. I know this sounds kind of juvenile, but ever since I've graduated I really feel that I can identify with the protagonist in the The Stranger or even Nausea. What's his name?”

“Mersault.”

“I know that. What's the protagonist's name in Nausea?”

“Antoine,” Patrick responds. He then turns back to Andreas. “As I was saying, it's like something out of Salvian…”

“Yeah, so I feel like them. And, again, I know it's kind of juvenile. I mean, everyone relates to Mersault when they read The Stranger in high school. But suddenly it's all become relevant again. I feel like I'm just going through the motions until I realize I'm going through the motions. And, I mean, I always understood the whole Kierkegaard thing, where you go through the motions and laugh at their idiocy because you're beyond them. I always got that. There was never a time in the past five years when I didn't feel that way. But I now feel this burden. It's like I want to return, but at the same time I want something new. It's like I'm both exile and explorer.” I take a sip from the bottle of wine. “I don't know if that makes any sense to you. Maybe I'm just rambling.”

“You're rambling,” she laughs. “I get what you mean, though. You don't know your context — in the world or in relation to either your past or your future. The past is always going to be defined by the present, as opposed to what it really was. The future is…not based, but…”

“Contingent?”

“…Contingent!” with an emphatic finger in my direction. “It is contingent on a present you know you don't understand. The wine-dark sea,” she says absently.

“The what?”

“The present: The wine-dark sea.”

We are both quiet for a while. She lights another cigarette.

“Didn't you say you were a bass player?”

“Yeah, but I don't think you can make a living playing old jazz standards anymore.” Caesura. “There are exceptions, of course. But actually making it as a musician — I mean, that's just so rare. I don't want to be that guy at fifty who still wants to show you his demo.”

“You haven't gone to many open-mics, have you?”

“I have. That's why I have this fear.”

“Okay.”

“Look, it's not that I'm afraid of being a starving artist; it's just that I don't see how anyone can afford to be a starving artist in this city — unless they’re squatting up in the Bronx.” I pause. “Maybe it's the bourgeois mentality that I grew up with, but I don't see any glamour in poverty.”

“You're a quick one.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“As Gandhi said,”

In unison: “Poverty is the worst form of violence.”

She smiles. “You know that one, too?”

“I never miss a Kingsley film, I guess.”

“Look, kiddo, I don't want to act like I'm an authority on poverty here, but I'll let you in on a little secret. While I haven't gone through the poverty of a kid on the streets of Calcutta, I have suffered a lot as a consequence of being poor. The only positive is that there is a sense of having no place to go besides up. So you are constantly optimistic. You can't afford not to be, even if you are constantly cut down. I don't want to bore you with my history, and I certainly don't want to put myself on the cross, but as a musician who has dedicated her life to an instrument, I can tell you that there were times when I had to choose between having gas for the month and having a meal for the night. That's luckily behind me. I may not make a lot of money, but I'm happy and secure enough to know that I'm not a paycheck away from being homeless.” She drags from her cigarette. “So here’s what I want to impart to you: The belief that there is any kind of beauty in suffering, in-itself, is bourgeois bullshit.”

“I always thought it to be Eastern.”

“You're misunderstanding me. What I mean to say is that the beauty of struggle and sacrifice relies on the reason why one struggles.” She takes another drag. “If one undergoes all of this simply to be authentic, then the art will not be authentic. If it is for justice or for integrity…well, that's a different story. To suffer for integrity — this is from where that sense of authenticity derives.”

“You sound like Mordecai's dad.”

“What?”

“No, it's not an insult. It's just…you sound different…different than how I remembered you.”

“But the point is valid, right?”

I nod. “I just don't think I could go through living in complete squalor for the sake of art.”

“Where do you live now?”

“Bushwick.”

She laughs. “You En Why You kids and your Bushwick. Which stop off the L are you?”

“I'm actually off the M train.” I name the stop.

Her brows go up. “So the bushy part of Bushwick.” She takes another drag. “I'm sorry for presuming…”

“It's okay. I mean, I would think the same thing if I were in your shoes.”

“It's not like it's a terrible spot. I used to live there a few years ago.”

“Yeah, it's okay. I don't know how long I plan on staying. The lease is up in September, and I don't think Jeff, my roommate, plans to renew. The good news, of course, is that the Coprolalia article will be published soon. Money shouldn't be a concern after that.” I laugh to myself. “I keep forgetting about that. I still feel like I'm about to be up shit's creek.”

“So you're going into journalism, I take it?”

“That seems to be the plan. I figure I should be able to freelance without too much of a problem. I don't mean to sound too conceited, but I have a feeling that this article's going to open up a lot of doors for me.”

She's quiet for a moment. She then smiles. “We should call you Wanderlust.”

“That's a fitting cognomen.”

“Again with your ten-dollar words,” she laughs.

Besides the references to Faye Dunaway, there is a certain energy that resides within her, the type of afflatus that I had imagined I would see surrounding Mordecai Adelstein, even in photographs. It is there, in her eyes, a silent 'yes' to some force that dwells within her.

“You're an eidolon,” I say to her.

“I am an acolyte, Wanderlust. That's the whole point.”

“What about the JOKE?”

“The JOKE is that we're still human.”

Yes, she speaks in riddles, contrivances perhaps.

“Crisis,” Patrick says with a fist on the table. This exterminates all other conversations. “Yes, I speak of crisis. I speak of yet another crisis, a great Gordian Knot that will prove to be a noose if it is not addressed soon. Now, I do not speak only of economic crisis; I speak, more importantly, of social crisis.”

“What? Are you a fucking LaRouche canvasser?”

“Tomas, that is another conversation for another evening.” The bottle in his hand becomes empty. “No, I speak of something far different. We exist in a state of vita minima, without direction, without knowledge of where we are going or where we've even been — what has been has become relativized, fabricated, fabulated, corrupted. We simply drift in a state of inertia. The absence of terra firma has become terra firma; the abolition of morality has become a morality; the generation who sought to destroy now seeks to uphold. Yes, I speak of crisis. Our generation has produced a liturgy of banalities, which has lead so many of us to the steps of the Cynosarges.

“But this is not my primary concern.”

There is a long pause.

“What is your…primary concern?”

“The reactionaries are winning, people. The Dark Ages are coming. As you fight the Sarmatians to increase your influence and your power, your very lifelines are decaying in front of your eyes. The wealthy are no longer building for the sake of themselves and the nation — they are pilfering the wealth of this country, indulging in the grossest of decadences. Whatever they cannot spend, they move to an offshore account, just like the Russian oligarchs of the nineties. If the American people continue on this route for much longer, they will find that they have surrendered all of their ideals for the sake of the rich, who have squandered the boon of empire in so hedonistic a manner that it would be appalling even to Theodora.”

“Who?”

“Theodora? The wife of Justinian? You have never heard of her?” Shrugs. “She is probably the most lascivious woman in history. She once said that she lamented the fact that she only had three orifices.”

“Wow.”

“It's right there in Procopius.”

“Who?”

“Really? You've never heard of Procopius?” with a deflated sigh. “What about Salvian?” Nothing. “See, Daphne, while you mock my admittedly over-zealous interest in history because you think it doesn't apply to very much in life, you fail to note that the most basic thing one gains from the study of history is the knowledge of what not to do. As Horace said,

…Insuevit pater optimus hoc me,

ut fugerem exemplis vitiorum quaeque notando.

Sic transit gloria mundi—via ignorance, my friends.”

“What the fuck does that all mean?”

“It means that Horace's father taught him how to live via the bad examples set by others.”

“I see.”

“Empires crumble under the weight of their own ignorance, their own arrogance, their own narcissism. Men suffer no different.” He looks to Daphne. “Women, too. We had the opportunity to become history's greatest generation — we, of course, meaning in the industrialized world, not just Americans. Our choice was very simple: continue with our lethargy, our sense that everything will work out because it has always worked out in the past, or realize that Postmodernism is the espousal of a world without proper legitimacy, and that, in the absence of legitimacy, most will consign themselves to the most traditional means of authority. They will latch onto jingoism, to patriarchy, to the most mystical forms of spiritualism. In the end, they will reject the material world; they will perceive world events as prophecy and miracle. This is how the Dark Ages began. Fuck the barbarians, inflation, taxation — the downfall of Rome was due to lethargy, Christian masochism, and the collapse of public institutions. My friends, we are approaching the event horizon here.

“We have abolished all legitimacy: our economy is based on a confidence that can be decimated by the utterance of truth. Our physics is based on theories that can be justified by the addition of theoretical dimensions that are said to exist because they justify said theories. Our metaphysics is based on social constructions that are both subjective and objective, that become objective once the community unconsciously validates them. Our epistemology is digital, subject to neither matter nor spirit. High art is nepotism. Low art is deception, at best nothing more than a satire of itself.

“We can accept it. We, here, can deal with the lack of legitimacy. Most men, most women, cannot. And this lack of legitimacy bothers them. So they look for legitimacy, and they realize that it was not even available in the Modern Era. So even this, they reason, must be fully cast aside. Do you understand me? Do you understand that the reaction we are about to face, the reaction to our world — this world without the concrete and easily discernible constructs and structures of Positivism and its allies — does not embrace the institutions of the eighteenth century; they abandon even this, and they consign themselves to God, and to God alone. So we are not confronted with people who will battle our claims with empiricism. To them, any errancy in our theories confirms the inerrancy of the Bible. Yes, I know, it doesn't make any sense. But it's getting worse. One well-intentioned scientist proves that there's an inaccuracy in a putative belief, and the fanatics say it's proof in the infallibility of the Bible. We tell them that this is not the case; the two components of their proposition are not conditionally linked. What does this lead to? A character assassination campaign. And so we lose. We lose in the eyes of the public. They provide unsound premises to counteract our arguments, and people believe them. Because they sit and believe everything these men, these fat white men, tell them when it comes to the miracles of Jesus. You see. They are operating on faith as opposed to reason, and these pastors exploit it. Reason, critical thought, is suspended in order to accommodate the Gospel, but the pastors are not just giving them the Good News; they are filling them with right-wing ideology, conspiracy theories, schizophrenia, xenophobia. And the language is getting more violent, more reactionary, more Manichean, nationalistic, jingoistic. The Evangelicals are giving Paulist arguments for the sanction of torture and unilateralism. My friends, Rome has ceased to be Babylon: The Sermon on the Mount now comes from atop the Tarpeian Rock.

“This is the problem advanced during our generation, but, more importantly, it will become the primary problem of your generation,” he says as he looks to me. “You do understand that we've failed, right? We did not seek to usurp the generation prior to us, and for reasons I cannot fully understand we now face a backlash that for decades, if not centuries, has been waiting to materialize.

“You do understand that our greatest minds decided to embrace cynicism as opposed to action, and that we have now become the generation of self-pity; of bubble economies because we have neither the foresight nor the hindsight to understand the virtue of moderation; of art that says nothing because we know nothing; of politicians who demand more power but refuse to accept any responsibility. We are the generation that fails so completely so that you may succeed.”

“This is all on our shoulders?” I ask.

“Another generation such as ours will forfeit the world to superstition, demagoguery, chaos.”

“Patrick, you're just drunk,” Andreas says in a light German accent I had not previously noticed.

“Am I?” he asks himself. “Yes, I undoubtedly am. But what did Generation X do? It has sought nothing but personal gratification and petty rebellion. And what's left? What's left of our rebellion? Corpses and fucking Fundamentalists. The former are dead because they did not have the will power to control their addictions; the latter have returned to Christianity because they fear responsibility. They cannot deal with it. They blame society, they blame their parents, they blame everything that they fucking can, and only find what they are looking for, the one thing that they need, in Christ — the innocent lamb they believe themselves to be. They are always victims, underdogs. Rich, white men complaining that they are the victims! It's fucking preposterous. But it points to the deeper problem that I see everywhere in this country. The most sacred virtue of the new America — surrender, forfeiture. That is the great goal of our generation: retirement.”

“What about us?” Tomas asks.

“Maybe the two of you can change. Maybe the two of you are younger at heart than you appear.” He shakes his head. “But it's that one that I place my hope in.”

“Are you now going to ask Mr. Baggins to return the ring of power to the fires of Mordor?”

“Willis Bloody Faxo!” Patrick announces.

“Is this one of his tirades about our generation?” he asks Daphne. She nods. “Is this the beginning or am I catching the tail end of it?”

“You got here a bit late,” Daphne laughs as she pulls the bottle away from her lips. Patrick stands to go to the bathroom.

Faxo looks to me as he sits. “So how goes the search?”

“Well…I found him. That's why I'm celebrating tonight.”

Poot Moint (minus Daphne), Patrick and Faxo gasp.

“Oh my, I'd completely forgotten all of that. We never asked, did we?” Patrick begins. “What's he like? How did the interview go?”

“Is he completely bald yet?” Faxo laughs as he lights a cigarette.

“I wouldn't know,” I respond.

“Why not?”

Faxo takes a languid drag. Andreas notices something in the sky, ignores it, and then looks back to me. Patrick is dancing a bit. Aaron grins absently. Sam fidgets, probably because he, like Patrick, has to urinate. Lucas looks to Tomas. Tomas doesn't notice the look. Aberdeen, like Tomas, fixates his attention on me with an expression that could be called guilty. Daphne places the bottle on the table, one side at a time. I swallow with difficulty.

“He's dead.”

19.1

What began as a celebration became something of a belated funeral party, one filled with dirges, requiems, and threnodies — depending whom you asked. Faxo became quiet and pensive. Just about everyone else, however, simply became less boisterous and more reflective — not plagued by the end of a life, but grateful for the continuation of their own. Miss Barnabas politely ordered us inside shortly after Faxo's arrival.

We quickly came to dominate the bar, as there were only three or four others in there, including the bartender. Daphne eyed the piano for only a few minutes before the bartender told her that, while it looked as though it had been kept around either as decoration or to collect dust, it was actually in tune. She implored Daphne to play, and after only one refusal, Daphne launched the band into a version of “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” arranged for piano, two kazoos, wine bottle percussion, and cigarette break. Once Sam returned from his smoke, the band wrapped up the elegy.

The band was about to call it quits, but the bartender pressed them for another tune. As the five deliberated on the subject, Patrick began lecturing a lesbian couple sitting by the front window on the subject of Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity. Tomas and Aberdeen, meanwhile, chatted with the bartender and her husband. Faxo sat next to me quietly taking down a double Jameson on ice.

After about five minutes, Daphne decided that she had to make a quick announcement before performing the next number. “Okay…so I know that it's really rude to try out new stuff on small, captive audiences, but we're kind of lacking on instrumentation tonight. All we have are kazoos and the piano over there.”

“Don't forget the bottles,” Andreas chimed in.

“And wine bottles. Sorry about that.” Caesura. “I guess I have a melodica, too, but that's neither here nor there. Anyway, we're going to do something that we haven't quite perfected, but we all think it could be the most entertaining composition we've ever worked on.” A meager applause was awarded to the band. “Here we go.”

What followed was a version of Ravel's “Boléro” that consisted only of kazoos.

“So a car accident?” Faxo says once the applause has died down. He raises his glass to his mouth.

“Any requests?” Daphne asks as the rest of the band approaches the bar.

“Popcorn!” Patrick yells from the other side of the bar.

“Popcorn?”

“What do you do?” I overhear one of the women ask Patrick.

“In my leisure time I play with paper.”

Daphne is looking at the piano as if it is a chessboard.

“Yeah. A car accident.”

Faxo stares to the whiskey in front of him. One of the cubes pops. “He was just waiting for a light, just minding his own business, and some drunk asshole just rammed into him.”

“Yeah.”

Daphne begins to tool around with the piano in an attempt to remember Patrick's request. Her frustration is discernible even as a familiar melody begins to form. A counterpoint soon follows. It is slow, methodical, perhaps even cerebral. The rest of the band, meanwhile, has taken another five bottles of wine back to a table next to the piano. They begin to slide them back and forth as if they are air-hockey pucks.

Faxo takes a small sip from the dram glass. He stares to it for a long time. “It could have been anyone.”

“I know.”

“It could have been anybody. The only thing that mattered was being in that place at that time. And that's what's so heavy. It could have been anybody, but it had to be him.”

Someone once said — or, if they haven't said it yet, someone will eventually say — that all eloquence is pain. It's true, but it's conditional. It speaks of pain that's been digested and ruminated upon, even if only for a short time. The initial pain, however, deprives eloquence of its wealth and rotundity. And if this eloquence is to be considered poor, then Faxo is in poverty.

20

“This is not an article about Coprolalia; this is a fucking elegy,” Sean says over the phone.

“What?”

“What you sent me. This is utter nonsense. What were you thinking? What are you thinking?”

The clock reads Sanskrit. “What time is it?”

“Are you drunk?”

“What?”

“You're drunk. It's nine in the morning, and you're drunk.”

“No, you just woke me up. What the hell are you so pissed off about?”

“What am I so pissed off about? What am I so pissed off about? You have to be fucking kidding me.” He takes a long drag. “Your article makes me out to be an elitist and a charlatan. Are you trying to undermine everything that I've said and done for the past fucking decade?”

“It's not that—”

“Then what, huh? What is it?”

“It's that you were looking at each piece. It's not—”

“Oh, yes, it's about the context.” Frustrated sigh. “This is simply too much. And the epitaph, which reads…let me see…ah yes: 'It is not that I would forbid the likenesses which are wrought in marble or in bronze; but as the faces of men, so all similitudes of the face are weak and perishable things, while the fashion of the soul is everlasting, such as may be expressed not in some foreign substance, or by the help of art, but in our own lives'. What type of pretentious shit is this?”

“It's Tacitus.”

“I know it's fucking Tacitus,” with jackhammer enunciation. “But Tacitus? Really? And not just Tacitus; no, it’s some fucking obscure, Victorian translation. You honestly expect me to believe that some random Jew from Midwood has Tacitus written on his tombstone?”

“If you knew his father, you would.”

“Oh, yes, the deli owner: a peddler of porn, cigarettes, and beer just loves his fucking Tacitus. What? Is he a retired philologist?” He lights another cigarette.

“Well, actually he kind of is.”

Another sigh. “This is pathetic.”

“Why is this pathetic?”

“For one, you completely dismissed the fact that at least three new Coprolalia exhibits have appeared in the past week and a half. The first is a reference to Midas in some shithole down in Red Hook. It was the same bar I told you to examine, and yet you managed to miss one of the most obvious examples of Coprolalia's wit that I've ever seen. The second is a portion of a haiku recently discovered in Park Slope. Finally…” He takes a long drag. “You think this is funny?”

“Actually, yeah, it's pretty amusing.”

“And why is that?”

“You were about to tell me about the piece called Et In Arcadia Ego. I already know about that one.”

“So you've been reading my blog?”

“No.”

Caesura.

“Furthermore, the Midas thing in what you call a shithole is actually a reference to one of the regulars there. And finally, the haiku, provided it's the one that appeared on a toilet, is the work of none other than Tomas and James.” I light a cigarette of my own. “And sorry for erasing it. I guess I should have let it dry.”

Caesura.

“Hello? Sean, you still there.”

“You little motherfucker.”

“Excuse me?”

“So you weren't looking to find him at all. You just wanted to learn his style so you could duplicate it. Yes, and you want people to believe he's dead because you want to take credit for everything that both he and you do from now on—”

“Wait a minute, Sean. That doesn't make any sense at all. I was only after the truth.”

“You do realize that what you said could potentially ruin my reputation and my career. If anyone takes this shit seriously, I’m out of a job.”

“I'm fully aware of that.”

“After what I did for you?”

“You didn't really do much of anything, Sean.”

“It won't be published in the magazine.” This is not a guess. “It's my word against yours.”

“It is.”

Caesura.

“So what will you do with this…this abomination?”

“I'll probably shop it around some.”

“You do know that I will deny everything you say?”

“Yes, I figured that. I'm not that worried about it anymore.”

“The Rubicon is not a shallow river.”

“Let the die be cast.”

Epilogue

Union Square is always a problematic meeting place. It is large, filled with landmarks, pedestrians, protesters, canvassers, skateboarders, lunatics — the typical New York melee, though this is perhaps its apotheosis. It is the navel of New York City, or at least Manhattan. Whereas Midtown is the voice, and therefore mouth of corporate America, and Wall Street is the cock by which the rest of the country is repeatedly sodomized, Union Square is where all of the forces meet and coalesce — Apollonian and Dionysian, Capitalist and Socialist, Republican and Democrat.

Like so many other solitaries, I am waiting for someone. This person is Vinati. I am on a bench in front of Carlyle, one of the NYU dorms. I watch as the kaleidescope of characters march past, and I cannot help but think, Am I witnessing the nascent signs of renaissance, or has decadence merely assumed a new posture? She is running late, but I don't really care. I have nowhere to be. Scratch that. I am waiting to be with her.

She finally called after getting my number from Ilkay, who returned to the city just yesterday. “Some prick stole my purse from the restaurant,” she explained before the unfamiliar number identified itself. We quickly set a location, a date, a time, to meet.

This was yesterday, a day that should have been filled with celebration and jubilation. But I received a second call that day, one that was a little less pleasant. It was from the magazine. It did not last long.

After hanging up with the editor, I phoned the only person I considered worthy of a call.

“So it was rejected.”

“Oh. I am sorry to hear that.”

“I really wish I could have…I don't know…provided a kind of eulogy for your son. Perhaps something of an epilogue.”

“That would have been nice. On what grounds did they reject your manuscript, might I ask?”

“The editor simply refused to believe that he's dead. In a way, I'm the evidence against myself. I don't really feel like explaining.”

“This comes as a surprise to you?”

“What?”

“Rejection. You did not expect to find my son. Even once you knew he was the artist you were looking for, you did not want to believe it. My friend, even when you were here you did not want to believe that your manuscript would be published. Rejection, you feel, keeps you motivated; it justifies your continued efforts. Without it, you feel as though you would fall into complacency; and, even with your limited experience with the world, you are wise enough to know that complacency very rarely suffices for virtue. This is why you do not have a job right now, why you have refused to look for one. You look for perfection, and yet refuse to believe that it exists.”

“You sound like my roommate.”

“Is this a bad thing?”

“No. It's just that I've heard it a lot lately. I just don't want to lose the desire to…I don't know…I guess create.”

“I felt the same way when I was a young man. But it is juvenile to believe that creativity is stifled by imposed production. Production is a necessity; it is a fundamental trait of humanity. And while it is not necessarily creative in the artistic sense, it is not necessarily a source of fatigue — if you will — for your more creative side. You will learn to separate the two. All real artists and scholars eventually do.

“As I told you when you were here, your desire to maintain creative integrity keeps you in a state of becoming, an acolyte of Pindar, who so ingeniously implored his readers: 'Learn and become who you are.' You refuse to accept the present; you do not accept a specific future. Acceptance is a state of being, my boy, an acquiescence to a reality that is speciously set in stone. By denying this, you are free in the truest sense of the word.”

“And I wish to remain free.”

“You can. You see, man constructs his own prison so that he may dream of a life beyond it. Each bar is a fiction erected to rationalize his history and to anticipate a future that is contingent upon the suppression of infinity. It is neither pious nor judicious to allow oneself to remain tied to a determinate history, nor is it becoming to presume that the universe will simply conform to one's desires. Luck is not apposite to Justice, and, unfortunately, luck has far more of a hand in the creation of fortunes than either Justice or aptitude. Still, a man must act with real courage if he is to engage his fate.”

“How?”

“How?”

“How do I engage my fate?”

“A man who demands such wisdom will never be able to receive it, my friend. You will have to figure that out for yourself because the question you ask has no complete or absolute answer.” He began to chuckle to himself. “Isn't that the ultimate joke?”

The conversation ended shortly after this. So, too, does this replay into the past, for Vinati is now in front of me. She smiles, all immaculate teeth and haunting beauty. “So I guess I owe you something for kind of disappearing for like a week.”

“I hope it's not an apology.”

“An apology?” she laughs. “No, I was thinking of something a little more tangible.” She pauses. “Let me buy you a drink.”

“How's a fish to live without water?”

“You're such a fucking dork!” she roars. “I love it.”

I stand and approach her. We kiss for long enough to attract the attention of a nearby sax player, who prematurely ends his city serenade to say something perverted enough to make the two of us laugh. We stop kissing, but stare into one another's eyes for a few moments. His next song is dedicated to “The two lovebirds.” We don’t stay to listen, though we do tip him with a small degree of ceremony.

The streets are obscured by her words, my responses — infatuated palindromes. She eventually motions with a hand as we approach a higher-end place in the West Village, and it occurs to me that I have not even bothered to note where we are. In fact, I cannot even cognosize (to borrow from Tomas) the route we took.

“So you're done?” she asks. “You're just going to keep trying to get your article published.”

“More or less. I sent it out to, like, fifteen different magazines yesterday.”

“Any responses?” she asks as we take our seats at the bar.

“Just the automated responses, you know, ‘Thank you for submitting your work to us. We’ll respond if we’re interested.’ I’ll wait a few days before I follow up.”

“What are you going to do in the meantime?”

I look to her. “I can think of a few things.”

She smiles. “Well…when I’m at work.”

“Maybe I’ll finally go to see Andy Bates.”

“The mental patient?”

“Yeah.”

“You two ready?” the bartender asks. Vinati has yet to pull off her sunglasses.

“I think I need a minute,” she responds.

“I know what I want.”

“Is it a butt-fucking cowboy?”

“A what?” The bartender smiles because he thinks he heard something really odd, and, oddly enough, this is exactly what he has heard.

“It's an inside joke.”

“Literally,” the bartender responds with a Jim Halpert grin.

He lingers around as Vinati silently studies the taps. His presence seems unnecessary, but I guess it makes sense. We're the only people seated at the bar.

“Yeah, but I'm still kind of curious about him.”

“Who?” as she continues to squint at the forest of taps.

“Andy Bates. I mean, there's so many people who still think he's the real deal.”

“Sorry to interrupt, dude,” the bartender begins, “but are you talking about Coprolalia?”

Vinati laughs. “It's all he ever talks about.”

“Yeah, I've kind of been consumed by him for the past month.”

“Oh, man, then I'm sure you've heard.”

“Heard what?”

“Dude,” the bartender begins gingerly, “That he's dead.”

Ω

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jay Fox was born in Birmingham, Michigan in 1983. He graduated from Birmingham Seaholm High School in 2001 and from NYU in 2005. He is a frequent columnist for staythirsty.com. THE WALLS is his debut novel.

Content

Jay Fox
THE WALLS

THE WALLS

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Epilogue

ABOUT THE AUTHOR