by Jay Fox
“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 forme
r 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.