THE WALLS

by Jay Fox

  “Yeah!”

  “So what do you want?”

  “A Brooklyn!”

  “Cool!”

  I ended up talking with one of the bar's regulars, Leo—which was short for Leonidas, which wasn't his real name, just a title he'd been given as a consequence of a stand-off at a sit-in sometime during one of California's endless summers. Our conversation was filled with deep lapses in dialog, an excessive amount of “what?”s and “huh?”s and other linguistic tools that implore the previous interlocutor to repeat her- or, in this case, himself. His position essentially boiled down to this: The reason why everything is so expensive now isn't because of any increase in the inherent cost of commodities; and it isn't just inflation; and it wasn't even the greed of the corporations, either. No, it was far more pernicious than that.

  Here's Leo's theory: The last thing the square community wants is a repeat of the Sixties. The Sixties, according to Leo, were about one thing: liberation. In Africa, Asia, France, Prague, California—it didn't matter. It was about liberation from the system. In the Third World it was about liberation from imperial control. In the First World it was about liberation from the “plastic-fantastic American Dream” that amounted to a bunch of useless shit, a deep feeling of malaise, and several forms of medication, either what you got from the doctor's office or whatever you managed to find at the liquor store or at a shady corner (the one that always seems to have a streetlight out—at least in films).

  What they had in the Sixties was disposable income. It went towards things like grass, acid, vinyl, munchies, threads, beers, and so forth. Rent was cheap. Gas was cheap. Food was cheap. But the squares were too smart to just start charging more for necessities. No, it had to sneak up on people. So they (Big Government, Big Business, Big Brother, the Illuminati, the New World Order; the people who decided to build the U.N. on the very site where Nathan Hale was executed, or perhaps some group of really sinister motherfuckers no one has been able to identify yet), started keeping wages the same, which of course means that you make less now than you did back in the day. “Cost of living goes up, but the wages stay constant, dig.”

  Leo elaborated: In 1968, a person making minimum wage lived at eighty-five percent of the poverty level, provided, of course, this individual was supporting a four-person family. As of 2006, this number had dropped to around fifty-five percent.

  “I won't even start with credit cards. They're the contemporary equivalent of the company store.” The last three words are sung. Before I can open my mouth, he's already downed some of his beer, wiped his mouth, and started in again with, “Fucking bummer, right man. But it's worse than that. It's way worse than that. Take away disposable income from the freaks, and you take away that spirit of community. I know that sounds jaded and all, but it's fucking true. I mean, who's into sharing when you don't have enough to eat, when only your straight and narrows can afford to party and pay the rent? So what does your average freak have to do? He has to get what the squares would, like, call a real job. And then it's just sacrifices, man. Sacrifice after sacrifice, until that hippie freak is just another suit who just happens to dig the Dead, who just happens to light up a number every once in a while, who just happens to have a lot of stories about trips and babes and shows and protests even if he can't remember what he'd dropped, the name of the chick he'd boned, the band he'd seen, the president he'd denounced….”

  The Nixon Shock essentially did this. I was not familiar with this term. Leo didn't have the opportunity to explain it to me, as a bookie named Scraps soon arrived, and he evidently had some very important things he and Leo had to go over. Leo told me he'd return once everything was straightened out, but five minutes turned to ten, and ten to twenty, and twenty to half an hour. I scanned the streets as I walked to the train, but, unfortunately, Leo was nowhere to be found.

  Saturday was spent almost exclusively in Queens. Tomas had managed to convince his friend Randy to drive us around. Most of the time in the car was passed without dialog, as the liturgy of their friendship was drowned out by Randy's “fucking awesome” sound system. He would ask if we knew of a band before we made it through two songs of an album; we would respond in the negative; he would then put on the next album. His taste proved to be so eclectic that it almost seems inappropriate to attribute him with any taste at all. Of all the music that we heard during our time in Queens, the only two bands I can remember enjoying are the Amity Front and Exit Clov.

  The bars were not crowded, nor was parking much of a problem. Still, Randy insisted on staying in the car—double-parked and hazards on—as Tomas and I ran into each place to check out the facilities. As always, the bartenders were compliant when we told them what we were up to, and some even directed us to the pieces or apologized for recent renovations. As I had come to expect, most could not provide much more than the month in which any particular piece appeared. We ran into Greg(g), whom I had met earlier in the week at the gay bar in Manhattan. He welcomed us to “the queerest place on Roosevelt Avenue,” which struck both me and Tomas as odd, as one does not typically associate “Queens” with “gay”…revise that: one does not typically associate “Elmhurst” with “gay.” Tomas and I agreed that the place did not seem all that queer. The bartender was a woman in her thirties. She was wearing an orange sundress. Two women sat near the front door. Amy Winehouse crooned “Tears Dry on Their Own,” courtesy of an iPod.

  Greg(g) had taken a seat in the middle of the bar, where he was casually sipping on a bloody mary while proofreading something that he didn't want discuss. After introducing him to Tomas, he asked about the search, and once again followed me into one of the bathrooms. The walls were pristine. The only markings were on the deodorant advertisements, which had been modified to better address Greg(g)'s desires. “After talking with you about Coprolalia, I realized that the washroom of my neighborhood watering-hole needed a little touching up.” Once he realized who Tomas was, they started talking about an artist whom I didn't know by name with a great deal of derision. Tomas and Greg(g) continued to talk over one the Sea and Cake's newer songs as I examined the second bathroom. There were several numbers for great head, far more than one finds at most bars. The names were predominately masculine; most of the numbers were the same: 867-5309.

  We stopped for a burger and a few beers somewhere in Kew Gardens. Randy put five bucks in the jukebox. The place in which we found ourselves constituted the last of the Queens bars on Sean's list, so we opted to stay and watch the final innings of an anticlimactic Yankee game, which ended with a dumbfounded Bobby Abreu watching strike three sail past the middle of the plate. A guy at the bar laurelled K-Rod as the new Mariano Rivera (“Fucking automatic, son”).

  A few plans for the remainder of the day were pitched as we aimlessly drove around listening to “Teen Age Riot.” We eventually decided to go back to Randy's parents' mansion in Great Neck after driving all the way into Red Hook to pick up some barbecue essentials at Fairway. We would have gone elsewhere to pick up groceries, but Tomas insisted on Fairway because neither Randy nor I had ever been there. The store is like no place else—as advertised. It seemed to be a Mecca for culinary masters, vegans without trust funds (something of a rarity), and black intellectuals partial to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad (perhaps all three in some cases). The Food Network had some cameramen floating around the produce section, but we didn't see anyone we recognized.

  The drive back up the B.Q.E. was smooth with the exception of a sudden and seemingly meaningless traffic jam in Greenpoint. The L.I.E. gave us no problems. Randy had put of a mix of random 90's songs, which was actually labeled “Random 90's Songs.” It featured, among others I had heard before but cannot name, Spacehog, Tripping Daisy, the Caulfields, Lucas, Supergrass, Harvey Danger, Mazzy Star, Skeelo, Candlebox, the Primative Radio Gods and Joe Public.

  Randy's home certainly qualified as a mansion, perhaps even a manor. The house was exceptionally modern—cubist, juxtaposed as opposed to symmetrical, gray, cold. Bot
h mom and dad were out of town, which, from what I could infer, was far from atypical. From the backyard you could see City Island and the Throgs Neck and Whitestone Bridges. Airplanes came and went at a leisurely pace over the gray-blue monotony of the Sound.

  We split two bottles of champagne (“What else are you supposed to drink in a fucking mansion?” Tomas asked), and spent most of the afternoon swimming, cooking, and eating. Food-coma set in rather quickly after the last round of brats, and I found myself watching a predictable thriller on one of the premium channels in one of those massage chairs that they sell at the Sharper Image. I had never met anyone who owned one. I awoke to find Randy passed out on the adjacent couch. Tomas was in the kitchen with Randy's live-in maid, Katya, who was twenty, Russian, and flush. Tomas was, too. They were laughing comfortably about something that wasn't all that funny.

  We arrived back at Tomas' loft under a Krakatoa sky. Barazov and his friends were preparing for a night on the town. They were archetypes of a sort in that they were desperately trying to embody that type of spontaneity Nietzsche was so fond of. With them, however, it was fairly obvious that they had to be conscious of being spontaneous. So it wasn't really spontaneity at all, but rather a contrived and temporary denial of the inescapable bourgeoisie mentality for which the avant-garde is supposed to have so much contempt. They conformed to the nonconformist manner of wearing black and appearing sullen. They probably had copious amounts of meaningless sex (and it was meaningless, too, as the idea of free-love to them was merely the rejection of monogamy, as opposed to the espousal of a personal tenet, be it spiritual, emotional, ethical, or human), read a lot of Wikipedia entries, and dabbled in the various drugs available to them. Their lifestyle was profoundly childish and narcissistic—which, in-itself, is a profoundly childish orientation to the world.

  To further confine them to a stereotype, three out of the four there were members in a rock band—the Sheeps. Their music probably wasn't independent in spirit, but you could tell that it fell into the genre of Indie, a term, like Alternative, that at one point precluded a distinct sound, though by now it has become yet another vacuous label that the Them (those to whom people attribute unfathomable power) employ in order to push useless consumables upon the anxious, the insecure, and the heavily medicated. All in all, the Sheeps, and the people like the Sheeps, engender the profligate lifestyle for which many residents of Williamsburg and Greenpoint have become so infamous and reviled. They are the paragons of white kids as defined by those who have a strong distaste for white people. They are rich. They are arrogant. They are selfish, rude and oblivious. Most importantly, they have neither the will nor the intellect to create in earnest, as they are too lazy and self-conscious to attempt to actualize the talents (whether real or imagined) from which their narcissism derives.

  “So you're the Coprolalia guy, huh?” Barazov asked as I approached him. “I thought you'd be taller.” He then looked to his friends snickering at the display of irreverence.

  Randy rolled his eyes. “I'm going to take off, but you guys should definitely give me a call if you make it down to the Slope tonight,” he said as he walked out the door.

  Barazov didn't introduce me to his friends. No one took the opportunity to introduce themselves, either. They exchanged cautious glances like hobos sharing a bottle. There was not a clear reason for the attitude or the silence. One could say it is a lifestyle more than a penchant. Tomas eventually asked where Lindsay and Aberdeen were. He received a shrug from Barazov, a slight, frivolous movement no more engaging than a restrained paroxysm or a suppressed yawn. The derelict chorus chuckled. Tomas motioned toward a door down the hall.

  “He's such a fucking brat,” he exhausted as he closed the door to his room. “I can't wait until he's done rebelling with his daddy's fucking money, gets his corporate job, and moves the fuck out of my apartment.” From the other room we heard an explosion of laughter.

  Tomas' room was filled with nearly empty liquor bottles and books. My eyes landed on Dennett's Consciousness Explained. “Have you read that before?” he asked.

  “I browsed through it once.”

  “I haven't gotten much of a chance to read it, either. This guy recommended it to me. Met him in line at Polam—one of the delis on Manhattan. He's apparently starting some magazine called the Green Gnome. I don't know how I feel about it. He wants me to contribute to it, but I don't think I'm going to bother.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don't think he'll ever publish it. Even if he gets one issue out, I doubt it will go anywhere. He didn't seem to have any business sense.

  “I do most of my work in Long Island City,” he responded to my wandering eyes. “I got a really good deal on a studio up there…not too far from P.S. 1.” I nodded absently. “Do you like the Zombies?”

  “Sure.”

  “I just got their greatest hits record, and I've really been digging on it lately.” The first track was very familiar. “So when do you want to do the East Village?”

  “What?”

  “When do you want to go looking for Coprolalias in the Village? You haven't been there yet, have you?”

  “A little. There's still a lot to do.”

  “There's gotta be a fucking ton over there.”

  “I figure we can do it this coming week. It's probably going to take a few days.”

  “That's fucking cool by me, man. I feel like I never go there anymore.” He paused. “Someone threw that out,” he said as noticed that my eyes were focused on a painting.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, they lived right around the corner. I don't know if the guy painted it or anything, but it just kinda called out to me.”

  “Someone just threw it out?”

  “Yeah, I met them as they were moving—well, more like getting kicked—out.”

  “They were evicted?”

  “No; their landlord just started building two stories on top of them. They lived on the top floor, too. They did the most rational thing they could do—besides move, of course.”

  “What's that?”

  “They asked for a rent reduction. And guess what happened?”

  “I don't know.”

  “The fucking landlord told them to either deal with the construction or get the fuck out.”

  “That's fucked up, man.”

  “I know. I think they got like a free month out of it, but, still….”

  “Isn't that type of thing illegal?”

  “It's Greenpoint. Do you have any idea how many of these fucking places are illegal?”

  I nodded. “Well, whoever painted that must have really loved triangles and the color blue.”

  “Yeah,” he responded as he pulled two cans of beer out of a mini-fridge. “You want one?”

  “Sure.”

  “Come to think of it, it was the same guy who’s doing that gnome magazine. Huh,” ponderously. “Either way, I never could figure out what the dude was trying to say with it,” he said as he tossed a can my way. “I don't think there's one clear message in it. It's probably just what came out.” He cracked his beer, took a long sip, and flashed either a smile or a wince. “You know how that goes.”

  “I guess so.”

  5

  Nine days have passed since I began this endeavor. By this point it is Sunday, the Lord's day. The neighborhood drowns in bells and families spilling onto the avenues from the churches. With the guilty orison that is Mass being over, the day will be spent barbecuing, drinking, and playing host to relatives. There is an almost tangible sense of tranquility on these mornings. The bodega urchins, drug peddlers, and walking erections, otherwise known as thugs (probably thugz, as “hard” people love showing off the fact that they are functionally illiterate), are still asleep, so defenses are down, smiles are abundant, and baking asphalt is about the only scent that confronts the nose. Bachatas quietly drift from the windows of tenement buildings like cirrus clouds; the streets pulse with laughter and an uncharacteristically timid rappor
t between feet and accelerator pedals.

  I am overwhelmed by the desire to take the day off. I've been steadily drunk, too drunk only twice, for nearly a fortnight. In my pocket is two dollars and eighty-five cents. I've almost become accustomed to going into a bar without anticipating the arrival of a friend, to drinking without participating in banter or discourse, to leaving without a round of goodbyes. I've certainly begun to take my roommate's absence for granted. Solitude has never been anything more than a short-lived option for me. I've lived with grandparents, siblings, cousins, friends, roommates, even a girlfriend. I have never returned to an empty home with such regularity. It's both a relief and a curse, but, on the bright side, it has allowed me to experience another side of the City that has always been foreign to me.

  New York is an odd place. This is true for a number of reasons, obviously, but I speak here exclusively of geography and demographics. When I first moved here, I was under the rather cynical impression that all of the neighborhood names were contrived; in my mind, they were arbitrary boundaries created and manipulated by real estate agencies that fabricated “feels” either to push property on foreign investors or to rent or sell spaces to domestic immigrants from places like Topeka and Duluth. True, I accepted the existence of myriad disparities between East New York, as well as the other lands of Persephone, and the Upper West Side; and I knew that the Village will always house the young and ambitious—which is especially true now, since the spirit of the Village extends well into north Brooklyn—but I could not understand how one differentiated between adjacent neighborhoods like Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens (or, for Manhattanites, Murray Hill and Gramercy Park) without taking recourse to street names and numbers on buildings. As Sartre said of the City (right after the war, I believe, and of Midtown, I would assume), the storefronts and people seem interchangeable; the only distinction between locations is the rent. And yet the more I explore the City, the more I engage it, the more I realize that it's not only that every neighborhood is different; every block of this city contains a sin qua non, an atmosphere, that cannot be described very well—it can only be experienced. Some people go to Europe to experience a plethora of cultures. New York City will give you the same experience, but you won’t need a passport; you just need a good pair of sneakers.