by Jay Fox
“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 we
ar 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 c
ello. 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.