by Jay Fox
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 i
s 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.