by Jay Fox
As I continue down this avenue, the street numbers increasing from low-forties and eventually arriving at low-fifties, I realize that there are no bars in this neighborhood. It is rather obvious, but obvious only when one redacts the surrounding world. There are restaurants, purveyors of clothing styles that would be considered modern only in the milieu of a great-grandmother's attic, and what may or may not be antique shops; one even comes across grocery stores, a few curiously placed bodegas, and a handful of fish markets, which are far less of an olfactory felony than their Chinese counterparts. To deny the hamlet its pleasantness and quaintness would be to divest it of its virtue, but its relevance to my mission, my life, virtually every other life being lived, is negligible.
I turn onto 52nd and begin making my way east. The street itself looks no different than parts of a Detroit suburb I once had the opportunity to visit: Birmingham or Bloomfield—I forget. It was just a stopover, however; the real destination on that trip was a cottage in the northern region of the state (what Michiganders call “Up North” (a pleonasm that may have been coined by Hemingway) as opposed to “Upstate”; moreover, “Up North” is not to be confused with the second peninsula of the state (the one connected to Wisconsin), which is referred to as “The U.P.,” —And it's filled with nothing but rednecks and hippies, you said as we made our way up I-75 in the insufferable humidity of the Michigan summer—where the sky was neither cloudy nor clear, just an expanse of dirty periwinkle (the same color of the building at the end of Aitken Place) hanging above the rows of conifers that comprised the median and the sides of the highway once we passed mile 200;—looking for M-55, which you said would come up without warning even if there were several signs for it, though not as many as for jerky or firearms or trucks or other things that you had to make disparaging comments about for obvious reasons and because of even more obvious complexes;—hoping to abandon the city, not only in terms of space or even time, but in spirit: to regain that halcyon perspective in which beauty and love and virtue intermingle (to sit around the fire, to stare at the stars, to make love to Neutral Milk Hotel in a bed upon on which you had slept every summer since you were seven); and you believed it could be found in the serenity of a lake scene in that mitten-state, that that same serenity would somehow reveal as opposed to blind us from/to the great truths to which two people are bound to come if they are together long enough). The inhabitants are obviously different here, but the oppressive dimensions of the homes upon the tiny lots are not. Sometimes the three-story brick structures have several buzzers; sometimes there is only one intercom next to the front door. There are very few people on the street. The majority of the people you see are women and small children, not on the street, but perched upon balconies. They scan the streets like patrician owls examining the floor of a forest. Perhaps they indulge only in suspicion; perhaps it is a silent hostility.
I feel more at ease—or at least less ostracized—upon coming to a major avenue. Within sight is an ostentatious lounge complete with Christmas lights and tinted windows. Unfortunately, the bathroom is home only to blank walls and the imperious scent of urinal cakes and stale piss. Mona, the bartender, offers me a glass of water when I emerge. She says I look like I could use a drink, which I decline, though I do tip her for the water. Her hands are more callused than wrinkled, her hair is more orange than red. She's the geriatric Raggedy Anne, complete with a voice about as crisp as a 78 from the 1910s and a body that appears to have spent numerous years on some planet with a mass about ten times that of the Earth. It looks like her belt-buckle is moving, but then I realize that there is a second protrusion floating pendulously just above her waistline. I don't stare; I simply notice.
Mona preemptively apologizes for the behavior of the drunken day laborer sitting at the end of the bar. He is an icon of sorts, the final installment in Mexico's peasant progeny: born in some place down south that has what seems to be too many 'q's and 'x's in its name, a former worker at a Juarez maquiladora up here to make enough money to return home one day, only the concept of home changes, and Mexico becomes like the Israel of Medieval rabbis, and identity ceases to be easily defined by a line so easily discernible on paper—even if it stumbles upon land—and suddenly it's ten years later and there's debt and a wife and unanticipated kids to feed and still the desire, though somewhat diminished, to return once enough money has been saved. And yet here he is: drunk at three in the afternoon. He offers no excuses for his state. Chingada is his mantra. Traditional Mexican music blasts from a jukebox painted in those “electric” hues that were so popular back in the late-eighties and early-nineties. It's like a prop out of Saved by the Bell.
I tell Mona about my search for Coprolalia. She nods very politely. “I wonder if he knows the Bay Ridge guy.”
“What Bay Ridge guy?”
“Well, this was fifteen years ago, maybe. I used to work in this place down on Third Avenue. It was a real hole-in-the-wall. Lotta regulars. Lotta fights. But every once in a while we'd get someone new, and I'd always make sure they got the royal treatment. That's how you get regulars, after all. He was this little guy, couldn'ta been older than eighteen. I know what you're thinking. But you gotta understand that things were a lot lenienter back in those days. Long as you had an ID to show me, it didn't really matter. It wasn't until later that I found out he was something of a legend—'specially among the art crowd in Manhattan.”
“Why?”
“Oh, he drew something on the stall like the guy you're looking for. And he was such a nice, little Jewish boy. He was from around here.” She provides no further information besides one thing: big ears.
I leave the bar and begin to make my way down Avenue J. The area is not dominated by the gelid stares of before, perhaps because there is a paucity of balconies from which to scowl. Like Boro Park, the previous neighborhood, this area is predominately Orthodox Jewish, and consequently lacking in establishments that cater to drinkers. The only place on Sean's list in relatively close proximity is a bit south on Coney Island Avenue. I decide to go there, as it seems that I have pissed away the past two hours with nothing to show for it except for a guilty conscience as a consequence of my intact foreskin.
The establishment on Sean's list is a pizza place with a bar. Contractors from Sheepshead Bay are busting the balls of the bartender. Some would call him a hipster; some would call him ostensibly collegiate (perhaps not some—just me). Bob Seger bemoans the trials of the road. A few old timers watch the Yankees game from a booth. Two out of this crew sport Brooklyn Dodgers hats. The waitress is in her early twenties, but she already knows everyone here. She is a paragon of sorts, a necessary feature in any drama that panders to women for whom the theme of suffocation is easily relatable. She seems less than surprised when I ask to see the bathroom.
“You from En Why You, too?” she asks.
“Excuse me?”
“That professa' guy was here a while back. You wit' him?'
“Which professor?”
“Hey, Pauly,” she shouts to the kitchen. A man coated in thick, black hair on every portion of his body except, perhaps, his forehead, cheeks, and pate, sticks his head around the corner. “What was 'at professa's name?”
“What professa'?”
“That guy from En Why You.”
“Shawn something.” He pauses to think. “Guy was a real fuckin' D-bag,” he concludes before receding out of sight.
“You know a professa' Shawn?”
“Yeah,” I respond hesitantly.
She takes on a patronizing countenance. “Does he like to look in shitters around the city?”
“Language!” an older woman calls from a nondescript location. “Language, Chrissy, language.”
“Sorry ma',” reluctantly. “Does he explore bathrooms around the city?”
“She just gaught into Brooklyn Law,” the mother says over the noise of her heels clicking against the tile, a sound not unlike a chicken pecking concrete.
“Ma',” she rues.
<
br /> The woman is by my side quickly. “Not that you'd ever know,” she says with a contemptuous shrug and a slight raise of one arm into teapot handle position. The other arm soon forms the spout. “She taughks like a fuckin' sailor.”
It's difficult to tell if the accent is of the Brooklyn, Staten Island, or Jersey variety. It's kind of an amalgam of all three, which, I've heard, is the dialect spoken around Gravesend, a community that became famous for opening its arms to New Amsterdam's first prostitute, Griet Reyniers, after she and her not-so-white husband were driven from Manhattan. This is not to say that Gravesend is particularly famous for its diversity or its prostitutes—just the one.
“You here to see my son's murreal?”
“Your son's mural?”
“Yeah,” Chrissy begins, “He painted something downstairs.”
I admit that I am skeptical. I can't see these two being the mother and sister of Coprolalia. Perhaps skeptical is the wrong word. Rather, I lack optimism. I guess this means I'm being pessimistic.
“Yeah, my brotha' Mark did that before he turned into a fuckin' addict.” The mother glares. “What? He's a fuckin' dope fiend, ma'.”
She expounds upon the tragic fall of Mark, an aspiring guitarist influenced by Slayer, Pantera, and other bands with equally menacing names. “Ya' know that sawng Cemetery Gates? Yeah, he used to be able to play it note-for-fuck-ing-note.” Apparently that shooting star landed somewhere in North Jersey, where he now spends his time avoiding debt collectors and the intractable face of reality with a girlfriend whom the family calls “Train Wreck.” Her body type is described as lumpy. She wears a lot of dresses, which evidently brings to mind two badgers fighting in a pillowcase.
Chrissy escorts me down the stairs. She asks about the search, which, I admit, has not been going well. “Who gives a shit about this type of shit anyways?” she asks as I begin to examine the mural, which must be over a decade old. “It's just some stupid murreal.”
“You'd be surprised,” I respond as I continue to examine the street scene that has been painted on the wall of the lobby where one waits for the bathroom. It's clearly not the work of Coprolalia. He does not create landscapes, and, so far as I know, he does not work with paint on this grand of a scale. Her brother certainly has talent, I tell her, but he's definitely not Coprolalia.
“Well shit, I coulda' told ya' that. The Coprolalia's in the can,” she says as she kicks open the door.
6.1
I receive a call from Tomas as the F train swims in the sunlight pouring down upon the Fourth Avenue station. His words are difficult to discern, as a portion of the car has been commandeered by a punk militia heavily armed with loaded egos and trigger-happy tongues, but I eventually make out his location. He is at a bar on the south side of Atlantic. It's close to the B.Q.E. It will not be my first visit to the place, so I know the route I must travel in order to get there. The train drips back below ground before I am off the phone.
The main dinner rush has not yet begun, but there are more than a few couples strolling down Smith Street menu-shopping, their eyes fixated not simply on the menus, but on the atmosphere and the clientèle past the framed document with its list of epithets for dishes and drinks with histories no less arcane and complicated than the histories of nations. Above these restaurants and the myriad boutique clothing stores that line the blocks are bald facades with bricks the colors of peach pits and blood orange flesh. The sky is a monochrome canvas of cobalt, a Rothko of sorts as it is neither blank nor unimposing in its simplicity. The air in the southern distance pulses above the concrete in a steady lento. This phenomenon is a common feature in those films where the protagonist is forced to wander along a desert highway under a fierce sun glaring down at the world like a sadistic anchorite. The symbolism is blatant. The light is imperious. Light is truth. The truth is imperious. The character bears the weight of the truth alone, anguished and awaiting mercy or peripety from the gods.
The street traffic is dominated by young professionals just returning from work or young professionals out walking their dogs in business casual. Teenagers stroll down the block with skateboards and nowhere in particular to go. A group of recent law school graduates speak of the BAR exam with trepidation out front of a bar on Dean. I almost run into someone as I get to Atlantic. We do that kind of juke move to one another, a kind of hesitant stumble, stop, and then laugh. His hand directs me to the left. A French bulldog looks to me once I reach the corner, its carnation tongue madly flapping like a conch upon a wave. Her owner looks to me from behind thick-framed glasses, smiles, and then crosses the street.
Tomas is all the way in the back of the bar with Aberdeen and several people with whom the two probably went to college. There are two chandeliers, which are dreadfully out of place, as the majority of the furniture clearly spent some time on the street before being picked up by the owner. It is a concert of miscellany. The bartender requests my ID. He doesn't examine it all that diligently, as he is busy listing off a series of seemingly random words, which turn out to be the names of bands with whom his partner in dialog is not even remotely familiar. He finishes after saying the words “Etcetera, Etcetera, Etcetera,” though it is not clear whether this is to reference an ellipsis or yet another band.
“Look, man, I just don't have the time to digest that much music.”
This receives a quick scoff and an utterance out of the onomatopoeic lexicon.
“It takes time to absorb an album.”
“But there's so much good shit out there.”
“I'm sure there is, man, but you can't fully appreciate an album by simply running through the tracks one or two times. You have to really concentrate. Look at Transatlanticism—or, better yet, Pet Sounds. I find something new every time I listen to either of those albums. That's what makes them great albums. That's what makes great music. Note that I'm saying music here. The artistic aspect of punk is in its performance, its visceral and emotive elements; the actual music the band produces is ancillary. Punk is the antithesis of a band like Yes.”
Before the bartender gives his response, he hands me back my ID. Then he throws out the one thing musicians love hearing from people who believe a pair of headphones entitles one to be a music critic: “Yes?” Sigh. “I just don’t get them.” Art hangs on the wall: collages of newsprint spattered with oil paint and obscure objects (toothbrush, lighter, pack of chewing gum, unopened condom). A very subtle artist has written the words “Plagiarism is art” on one of the canvases—this, of course, begging the question that will determine whether or not the piece operates on an even more pretentious level: Is this is an unreferenced and, hence, stolen quote? The whole scene wavers in dimmed light, which compliments the soporific quality of the late-afternoon sun lazily floating in. Most tables have buckets filled with ice and beer, and each one of them sweats like the walls of a tropical cave. Conversations generate a swelling and pulsing cacophony that is crowded as opposed to unpleasant, kind of like an orchestra tuning before a concert. A small group of black women explode with laughter. A live rendition of “Cross-Eyed and Painless” provides the rhythm section. The bartender is all disdain and crossed arms.
There are perhaps twenty people in the place. Tomas finds little trouble in getting to the front of the bar before I have the opportunity to receive or pay for the beer. “Good to fucking see you, man.” He smiles. “How did the search go today?”
“This is getting to be ridiculous. Today,” I begin as the bartender returns with a bottle of High Life, “—Thanks—today was spent wandering aimlessly around the nineteenth century.”
“What? Where the fuck were you—”
As he attempts to think of a punch line, I respond with,
“Boro Park.”
His smile fades. “Can I get another PBR?”.
Aberdeen appears at our side. “Can I interest either of you in a cigarette?”
“Not drunk enough,” Tomas replies.
“That sounds fucking lovely.”
> We're out front within a few moments. Tomas has taken my beer back to the table. “I thought you rolled your own,” I say as Aberdeen pulls a pack of Luckies from his breast pocket.
“I do normally. I guess I was feeling lazy today.” Caesura. “I take it things aren't going too well for you.”
“You could say that. It's a veritable labyrinth of bullshit and bad leads out there. And, no, I still haven't been to Bellevue yet to question that Bates guy.” He tilts his head. “Look, I just can't accept it.”
He shrugs as he flicks the bottom of the pack, which coughs up two unfiltered cigarettes. “What's the story with him anyway?”