by Jay Fox
“Why not?” gingerly.
His face became anguished. It wasn't a harsh face. It had been aged by several years of living in the lower altitudes of the corporate ladder, but it didn't reflect anything more crushing than the repression of ambition. This is not to say that he displayed that dour expression of resignation one sees in the chronically unemployed. He was employed—he even had the tie to prove it. Due to his age, his Midwestern accent, and his presence in the neighborhood, one could even assume that he wasn't struggling to make ends meet. He just looked defeated: his body was of corporate stock—flabby from sitting at a desk all day, but not fat—his face had filled out, and his chin was about as pronounced as a French vowel. Whatever athleticism he may have possessed was by now gone, and so too was that sense of conviction that some people manage to carry with them until Time escorts them into senility or the grave.
That being said, I assumed his problem to be the result of high blood pressure or just a general revulsion to the idea of himself performing the act of coitus, sex, fucking—that series of moments to which the rest of life seems either a prologue or an epilogue.
“You know there are pills for that.” It seemed, at the time, the most rational thing to say. He stared to me with a contemptuous grin. If there is a word for both hating and feeling sorry for someone else's stupidity, then that would probably be the best way to describe this disposition. I was oblivious to this, however, and I added to the fire by adding: “You know, for…what are they calling it now? E.D.?”
“You mean B.D.D., honey: Broke Dick Disease?” the bartender called out over a round of laughs from a group of old men down the bar.
“Fuck off, Pam,” Tommy whined. “No, it's not that,” he began slowly as he turned back to me. “Ever since we had our daughter, Stephanie. I don't know. I guess I just…I just see her-her…you know….”
“Pussy?” the resurgent Pam concluded as she brought us our beers, her crooked smile like corn kernels on a Styrofoam plate. “Five bucks, babe.”
I thanked her. Tommy just stared.
“Her vagina,” he continued. “I see her vagina as special. It's beautiful—the source of life. That's where my daughter came from. She came out of there. I came out of one. A-and I feel like I'm…I don't know. I guess I feel like I'm….”
“You're what?”
“Like I'm making it dirty. Like I'm just ramming this foreign thing into her. Ramming, like a…like a…a ramrod. You know? And, and the last time I did it, the last time I did it…I don't know…it felt like I was trying to kill her with it, like I was stabbing her with this, this thing. And I can't do that to her. I love her.” The words “objectified” and “penis” came into my head.
“You love her too much to fuck her?” Pam asked incredulously. “Jesus, Tommy, every time you bitch about this shit you make less and less sense.”
“Pam, my therapist—”
“Your shrink,” she scoffed. “The more he sees that dyke bitch, the more fucked up he gets,” she said to me. “You think that's just a coinkydink? It's a fucking racket, Tom; she keeps you fucked up to stay in business.”
“Pam, she said that all women feel pain the first time, you know, they have, you know….”
“Sex?”
“Yeah. And, and not just like pain…down there,” as he pointed to his crotch, “but here, too,” as his finger approached his temple.
“That's not fucking true.” It was as though she was admonishing a child.
“So the first time was good for you?”
“I'm not going to tell you the minutia (a lot of emphasis on this word) of my first fuck, Tom. I'll just let you know that the only reason it wasn't anything special was because the loser I—for whatever reason—lost my V-card to didn't know what the fuck he was doing.” She walked away, back to the group of the old men mumbling along with the Kingsmen's “Louie, Louie.”
“Sex is violence,” he resumed. “There's nothing fucking tender about it. We invade them, dominate them. We need to dominate women; that's all the labida [sic.] is for us—the need for power, power over another living thing. Think about it: Our beginning, our….”
“Initiation?”
“Our fucking initiation,” with vehemence, “into adulthood, manhood, is through violence. My father said I became a man when I went hunting with him for the first time. That was the first time I killed a deer. My friends said I became a man when I had sex for the first time. My uncle said I became a man after I went to war, to Grenada—Operation fucking Fury. And I killed a man there. I saw him. I saw him with his gun. I saw that he was aiming at me, that there were only two choices at that moment—me or him. I saw him, and I shot him.” He became quiet for a moment. He then began anew with a bit less passion. “That's what makes a man: violence, killing, the domination and destruction of another life. And that's the progression of a serial killer, too. Did you know that? That's the progression that we…that I followed. First I hunted, then I raped, then I murdered. We're all potential serial killers. All of us. We're evil by our very nature. We're made this fucking way.”
What maniac concocted it?
“You raped someone?”
“Yes. Just because she said she wanted to do it doesn't mean anything. It was just society making her think she had that desire. I know now that she didn't want it.”
“So you're reducing all women to the role of victim and catamite?” His eyes cross. “Are you saying that she didn't want to have sex with you, or are you saying that no woman wants to have sex?”
“The second one. Sex is intrusive and violent. It's fine for us; but for them it's painful and degrading and violent.”
“I don't think I follow you,” I said after taking down a small portion of my beer. He nearly drained his. “I don't think sex is necessarily violent. You seem to be assuming no small degree of sadomasochism to be inherent in the act.”
“I'm not assuming. I'm telling you. It's sadomast—, sadomaso—, masochistic.”
“That's absurd.”
“Why is it absurd?”
“By your reasoning, the performance of coitus is rape—if a man engages in coitus, then he commits rape. Do you agree with this?”
“Yes.”
“And you certainly agree that all cases of rape are criminal.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, so you would have no problem with this proposition: either all coitus is criminal or no coitus is criminal. Every action falls into the realm of being either criminal or non-criminal; coitus is certainly an act, right?”
“Of course.”
“Now, can you imagine a case in which the act of coitus is non-criminal? For example, in a country where prostitution is legal, if a woman enters into a contractual agreement with a man—let's call him Doug—to exchange her services for his money, then certainly the interaction is not criminal. She has offered her labor to a pimp, the pimp has taken her on as his employee, as this pimp owns the means of protection, and he has delivered her to Doug, unto whom she will perform whatever illicit acts Doug desires, so long as he is willing to pay for them. Doug then pays the prostitute for her work, she in turn pays the pimp the percentage due to him, and the process gets repeated again and again and again. This is okay to you?”
“No, but, you know, it's legal.”
“That's right. It is legal. No party, Doug included, has committed a crime.”
“None of them have done anything illegal.”
“So let's repeat our second premise: in all cases rape is criminal. Furthermore, if Doug has coitus, then he commits rape; and if he, Doug, commits rape, then he commits a crime. However, you have affirmed that Doug can have coitus without it being a crime. This presents a contradiction, which allows us to place a tilde in front of that second premise that we asserted at the beginning of this derivation, consequently meaning that we can end up with the following conclusion: It is not the case that rape is criminal.”
“Wait, what? I didn't fucking agree to that!”
&
nbsp; “It's a perfectly valid argument.”
“You're fucking insane.”
“Okay, how about this: the introduction to a spoon as opposed to a nipple is the first, perhaps most, traumatic experience in a person's post-uterine life. Think about it: a cold, phallic piece of metal is forced into our reluctant mouths. Forced! Into! And to add to the degradation—to make the act all the more despicable and horrifying—the food, baby food, has the same consistency as shit—baby shit, too, the type that's been sat on and squished and molded into a foul paste. The act of eating, consequently, can be seen as an institution founded upon violence and humiliation. Jesus, where's a critical theorist when you need one? I think I have enough material for a book—all I need is a few irrelevant passages from Discipline and Punish and Being and Time.” He stared to me with contempt. “Look, man, sex can be violent, sure. There are entire cities in California dedicated to this freaky faction of the sex industry. But I just can't agree with you: it would make every heterosexual woman a masochist, and every man—unless he is a permanent catcher—Narcissus, asexual, or a sadist. And that, to me, is absolutely absurd. I can't accept it. One of the most fundamental aspects of life cannot be inherently cruel. Life cannot be inherently cruel.” I shook my head. “What you're saying is absurd.”
“Why? It's only absurd because you've never really thought about it,” he said with a fist upon the bar top. “You've been trained, brainwashed, to think the opposite—that it's somehow beautiful or tender or whatever. It's bullshit. We've been duped by the people in power, the patrimony [sic.], who keep us blind to the truth—the hidden truth that men are violent creatures, and women are made to suffer because we're just these…these fucking brutes. Women are these beautiful creatures and we need to dominate them and dress them up and change them for our own sick pleasure. Do you know the John Lennon song, 'Woman is the N'—”
“—I know the song.”
“Don't you get it, though? You seem like a smart guy; why don't you get it? They are goddesses,” with his fist on the bar. “They are perfect,” again with the fist. “They are without violence, without hatred, without any of the disgusting habits of men. And I can't do it anymore,” he said as he raised his hand to catch Pam's attention. “Can I get another, please?”
“If I give you another round,” she began as she approached, “Will you quit bothering the kid?”
“I'm not bothering him,” he responded. “We're just having a conversation.”
“Is he bothering you?” she asked with high brows. Her tone was lighthearted, as though I was stuck in the midst of a joke. At the same time she knew she could not allow Tommy to feel as though I was humoring him without inspiring a more aggressive tirade. In other words, her act was one of civility. She knew that I would respond in the negative, that this show of compliance would be feigned, and that any vocalization of the truth on my part would shatter the dynamics of propriety that had been established long ago, thereby increasing the potential of Tommy acting in an undesirable fashion—because propriety is a lot like a game of Jenga (which is the word one utters during a game of the same name when a tower of bricks collapses, and, ironically enough, the root of the Swahili verb that means 'to build' (an ironic paronym perhaps?), which is essentially means, the tower falls and everyone yells the imperative “Build!”), only the collapse that takes place once all etiquette has been nullified can be anything from a cascade of tears to an inferno that envelops several city blocks. When I responded with the obvious, she asked the follow-up that always comes up in situations such as these: “Are you sure?” Yes, I was sure that I wanted to perpetuate civility.
I left after that one beer. I don't remember my stated reason for leaving. During the time I was stuck with Tommy, the chasm between our opinions was not bridged. He was suffering from castration envy; I was trying to promote the most basic tenets of humanism, arguing that having a child actually constitutes the last step in the process of a male's maturity, that only a man can be a father. I think I got this concept from a public service announcement that was frequently aired in the early- or mid-nineties, and I'm pretty sure Lawrence Fishburne was the one featured in it. Regardless, he, Tommy, was reluctant to award credence to it. He was living proof of my gender's inability to be responsible in terms of children. To him, this was because we lack empathetic instincts: We are biologically predisposed to be hunters; furthermore, a hunter can only have pity for his prey. And even that's rare. I simply saw him as a typical, albeit older, member of Generation X—too self-absorbed to take responsibility for the problems they create—the generation of overgrown and spoiled children (the generation that takes pride in its vanity, the generation that hated Reagan and Bush I so much that they rebelled via self-destruction, the generation that has killed the written word with books about how-I-made-my-money and why-I-became-a-heroin-addict and I-graduated-from-Yale-and-then-decided-to-become-a-stripper and listen-to-me-,-please-! and I-can't-write-real-fiction-so-I'll-just-fictionalize-my-life memoirs, the generation that never grew up, but sold out nonetheless, the generation of souls too intransigent to take on the part of Dante, so they instead play lion, she-wolf, and leopard to my own generation, my own generation for which I still—for whatever reason—have faith).
Tommy was slightly dejected when I stood to leave. While he obviously appreciated my company, he did not implore my continued presence; he just stared to me. I am fairly certain that he forgot all about our conversation, perhaps even my existence, as he was very close to (or already was) blackout drunk. I thought about him later, about his eventual departure from the bar, his arrival home to his sex-deprived wife—a devastated postpartum mess of hormones almost suicidal because she feels her husband has abandoned her. And, to a large degree, she's right. It's a shame that the future adulteress will feel guilty about the inevitable.
The subsequent hours were spent going in and out of the bars along Eighth and Ninth Avenues. They were not clubs, though it would be misleading to call them dives. They attracted yuppies and women almost haunting in their beauty, as well as what's known in the City as the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, which essentially means people from Jersey, Long Island, and Staten Island (but not Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, or the wealthier parts of Westchester). And then there were the places into which I knew Coprolalia would never enter. I could see inside. The women were beautifully packaged bodies hiding gray loquacity. The men were in checkered shirts. Both had really expensive shoes. No one was smoking. I felt like a vegetarian gazing into the window of a Jewish deli.
It was fairly easy to get around initially because the Broadway crowd had not been let out. I managed to examine about a dozen lavatories without having to wait in line. Every night around eleven or so, however, the streets and bars explode with life. The area becomes something like a reef—beautiful and unnavigable and home to an unfathomable multitude of brightly-colored creatures that do not appear to move on their own; they undulate like the patchwork of a quilt drying in the breeze. Suddenly it takes fifteen minutes to walk a block, whereas before it only took thirty seconds. Porcine Midwesterners strangle the sidewalks, walking as though they are concealing unsliced hunks of deli meats under their clothing. Madness—inspiration for Max Beckmann. The bartenders become too preoccupied to concern themselves with anything more than your order—cranberry juice for me, as I realized quickly that beers in this part of the City start at six or seven bucks.
To make matters worse, it became difficult to hear anything besides the music, as the DJs were apparently catering to a contingent of nearly deaf people, who nonetheless demanded a strict diet of top-forties shit that takes different components of hip-hop (the beat), R&B (the hook), and Blues (the exclusive use of tonic, sub-dominant, and dominant chords) to create a soulless and jejune commodity to be marketed to the public by the beautiful face of the “artist” singing the song. One bartender managed to hear me above the din and assured me that Coprolalia resided in Bellevue. “Andy Bates, right?”
“That's a
rumor.”
He nodded quickly before disappearing into the maelstrom of bottles and bodies that inhabited the area behind the bar. He did not come back to me.
The last place in the neighborhood on Sean's list may have been home to a Coprolalia. I am not sure; I was unable to get into one of the stalls because it was occupied by a rather famous beer mascot in the form of a beautiful woman. She was not alone. The man cohabiting the stall kept saying that he was engaging in the high life; the woman kept affirming his proclamation—one could call it blues-inspired copulation. Between their exchanges, there was panting and groaning and moaning and grunting, and when that subsided there were pronounced nasal inhalations. As I was leaving, I heard a resonate crack followed by a heavy object hitting water; this was succeeded by a barrage of profanity and laughter. The guy at the front of the line looked to me with either disgust or envy as I made my exit.
“Yo', is he nailing that bitch in there?”
“That, or there's one hell of a clog.”
I ended up down in the Village, its streets filled with various harbingers of wackiness and unexpected plot twists. It was only midnight, so just about every bar in the area was near to or (well) over capacity, the habitués mingling and, from an outside perspective, coalescing. It's like in cartoons, when the animators decide to give different cells their own personalities and volitions, dreams and ambitions—what an Analytic might call projects. One of the few bars still dedicated to the purity of rock n' roll somehow evaded the notice of those clusters of people wandering the streets looking for a bar that was neither too crowded nor too expensive. It was loud, but, then again, Blue Cheer weren't in the business of writing chamber music.
“Pint of Brooklyn, please,” I said when the bartender approached.
“What?”
“Brooklyn!”
“Brooklyn! Fucking awesome place, right!”