THE WALLS

by Jay Fox

  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 certain
ly 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 R
ussian 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.