by Jay Fox
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.
&nbs
p; “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 recommend
ation 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.”