by Jay Fox
Keen Buddy stands at the corner of Manhattan and Huron. I am immediately struck by his negative appearance. It's not that his features are particularly minatory, though I do believe that his eyes would best be described as beady (not because they are reminiscent of beads or marbles or anything that might be taken as aesthetically pleasing; there is nothing captivating or insightful or even meaningful there—no, it is as though they were once in the possession of a passionless mortician, a person who spends the majority of any given day hungover and listening to the bereaved as they describe the style and personality of the dead with as much precision as can be conjured up during that initial time of mourning—those days when we unconsciously manufacture infallibility, perhaps hagiographies, more often than accuracy because every life seems damn near perfect right after it's been lived—, a person who would then clothe the inanimate with no small cataract to detail, a person who would then reach into a drawer of cheap mementos, a bounty of tawdry miscellany just like the beads, and then set to work affixing these contextless and [therefore] meaningless items onto the lifeless body with a haste passionate only in its drive for consummation, the end of the day, the drive home, the bottle that waits on the sideboard next to the phonograph player that both fills the studio apartment with song and helps to alleviate the man’s head of the words that he didn't, doesn't, will not say—to a woman, to God, father, mother, brother, sister: some dead, some dead only to him). Keen Buddy's chin is also more pronounced than what could be considered the average chin, though the idea of an average shape to any body part is rather absurd. So maybe it isn't more noticeable than an average chin because I guess there's no such thing as an average chin. It is just noticeable. You notice his chin. His chin, and those beady eyes.
Still, it is his orientation to the world that strikes me more than anything else once first impressions become conversational as opposed to visual. It is an orientation marked by hostility and preemptive defense, what others like him call realistic or cautious or well-adjusted to the cesspool of hypocrisy and brutality that goes by no name more profound than society. He probably applauds himself for having the perspicuity to know that all people are inherently selfish, the insight to know that all systems of ethics and law are adjunctive to fear, the prescience to foresee betrayal, and, consequently, the good sense to never get too close to anyone. And in his willingness to trespass upon the event horizon of fatalism, he must have also accepted that such a orientation would bar him from ever being able to truly engage anyone, that he would exist only within the sordid world of self and other, of criticism; and that civility in this banal theater would inevitably be too much to handle, as he is already too drunk because he's always already too drunk. He proposes no solutions; he simply continues his nihilistic and almost aggressive march upon the injustices of the world under the white flag of apathy and bitterness. When I consider him and his kind, I cannot help but feel far more pity than contempt.
We take down some cheap and greasy Chinese food on Manhattan Avenue before setting out for the bar where I went with Tomas and Aberdeen the first day we met. The space seems less cavernous due to the abundance of kids regaling the end of the start of the workweek, and for this reason Keen Buddy's sourness fails to anchor our table's mood in the misanthropic quagmire he calls home. He is still complaining about the staleness of his broccoli as we sit with our beers. Soon he begins talking about women with choleric disgust because, “Women just want control: over your life, your pride, your dreams, your money. But no bit of ass will ever get her fucking claws deep enough into me to tell me what to do. I got too much integrity for that shite [this is not a type-o].” He then takes in his surroundings, sitting high up in his chair like a pharaoh turned pariah. “Fucking hipsters are everywhere tonight, eh?” It comes down like a hammer, a kinetics of hatred both puissant and unrelenting. “Don't these fucking cunts have jobs?”
“Calm down, Buddy,” Aberdeen says. It's not an admonishment because it lacks either a condemning or even severe tone. It's more of a plea for civility, an imperative phrased in such a way as to not arouse further contempt. “They're out here to have a good time just like us.” It is odd to see Aberdeen take on a demeanor marked more by attempts at pacification than what one might call demureness—even though the latter word itself is something of an eye- (perhaps tongue-, too) sore. Tomas is more quiet than usual. He becomes ostensibly incensed when his jukebox choice is met with haughty disdain (a pleonasm, perhaps, as some dictionaries define disdain as “haughty contempt,” just as some dictionaries define a salamander as a being that dwells within the realm of fire, or, better yet, a being that is the embodiment of fire, destruction, perdition).
When asked what he considers to be suitable music, the salamander merely shrugs. “You wouldn't know them; and, even if you did know them, you wouldn't understand them.”
Tomas and I soon stand to go to the bar. “He's such a fucking dick,” Tomas says in a voice that is low enough so that I will not follow up with anything more than a concurring nod of the head and a grin. “Honestly,” once we approach the bar, “I don't know why James likes him so much. I mean, I know I complain a lot, don't get me wrong; it's just with fuckstain Buddy over there—well, it's like he refuses to get over himself, dig. He's like half a step above a fucking blogger, and he acts like he's the senior editor of Rolling fucking Stone.”
The bartender is preoccupied by a young woman desperately trying to mask her beauty behind large clumps of raven hair. It does not strike one as an expensive haircut, nor does it seem as though it was cut by a clumsy hand; still, it speaks of an irreverence for the seraphic face that is her birthright—a birthright that no doubt entitles her to tragedy and irony as much as it entitles her to the attention or heart or mind or soul of each person suddenly arrested by her possession of an intangible quality that evokes something far more substantive than the prurient—or puerile—sensation of conquest. She cannot escape it; she can only hide, make pretend that she does not know what power she holds, even if this ignorance is sometimes transparent, as she sometimes wishes she could be. Men—women, too—will impose upon her specious graces, powers taken from a liturgy of love penned by the obsessed and the deranged. They will gladly line up one by one, even if they know they will eventually be jettisoned from the heights of anticipation and cast with hideous combustion down to bottomless perdition—where not even Elpis will venture unless escorted by Hypnos.
The only portions of her face that I see clearly are her lips and her jawline. The former are full and supple like the pulp of a citrus fruit; the latter is well-defined without being angular or severe. She hides her body, as well; it is shielded by loose clothing that would seem most suitable on an expecting mother. Yet for all her hiding, for all her reluctance to display the fullness of her beauty for which so many men—women, too—will sacrifice so much, there is a lack of pretense to her body language, an ease in the movements of her lips as they draw the outlines of letters, forming words that each individual proceeds to color in with his or her own meaning. The bartender's captivation is therefore understandable, somehow necessary; it is not taken as disparaging to those of us waiting for service. We are complacent; we are well aware of the rules of the game.
“You know her?” Tomas asks.
“What?”
“The girl you're fucking staring at, man,” he says as he swipes at my shoulder. “You go to school with her or something?”
“No,” I respond plainly. My eyes look to Buddy talking in choleric pantomime.
“She's cuting füch, man.”
“What?”
“Fucking cute.” He laughs. “You should go talk to her.”
“She's probably here with someone.”
“Probably,” he snorts. “You haven’t been with many chicks, have you?”
“I've had my share,” defensively.
He chuckles with a smugness that's not disguised. “Well, it sure as shit isn't my place to call you out on it,” he adds as the bartender
finally approaches. “Two pints of Guinness and two shots of Jäger.” He smiles and waves off the twelve dollars I produce. “Bennington Special. Dig it!”
We take down the anise component of our Bennington Specials. With nothing more than a glare, he stops me from heading back to our table, so we linger around the bar. His eyes inevitably fall upon the girl from before, who, by now, has returned to the three men that comprise the rest of her party.
“They all want to nail her,” he says.
“No shit. I'm sure one of them is dating her, though.”
“No, they're all just friends. Look at how fucking confident she is, man. She knows that all three of them want to rail the shit out of her.” He pauses. “Hell, everyone in the bar wants to fuck her.”
“I know.”
“But look at the three guys with her. See how disparate…disparate?”
“Dissident?”
“See how dissident they are. There's no one guy shielding her. The three are on equal ground. I'll venture to guess that she has a boyfriend she's starting to tire of, you know, and that guy's probably close with at least one of the three over there. She's fucking within the group of friends because they're all young and clearly new to the city. They probably graduated a year ago. Maybe they finished up at En Why You or Columbia or Pace, and they're just new to the area.” He takes a sip from his pint. “But she'll never touch any one of them. You know, she's just using them to make the fucking absentee boyfriend jealous. Standard procedure, really, but only the most vindictive lovers go any higher than the ante when playing with the friends.”
“West L.A. Fadeaway” begins to play. I hear Keen Buddy vehemently condemning the Dead to…well, death. Two seats become available at the bar. Tomas looks to them. He then motions to me.
“The boyfriend's probably pretty goofy looking.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Fucking think about it, man,” he exclaims. “The whole world is ready to bow to her, dig—to place her upon a pedestal. But she doesn't want that. She hates that shit.”
He means to say that she can't be approached by that silly impulse to buy her time in the form of a drink. She is not interested in formalities. Because she knows that any form of superficiality on her part will be reciprocated to no small degree by her partner. And she doesn't want superficiality. She knows this. She has experienced it in those particularly superficial years that come between adolescence and death; and she has come to discover that the afflatus that so many people have imputed to her tends to bring out the worst in them—men, women, perhaps even animals. The introverted and humble bury themselves; the proud, meanwhile, know that a woman like that has to be treated like filth. 'You have to put that bitch in her place': Famous words of a lonely man with two testicles more familiar to the feel of a foot than a shoe-salesman. So it's more of an effluvium that surrounds her. It is an alienating curse from which she wants nothing more than escape. And yet she can't stand the idea of being alone, probably because she has never had the opportunity to be alone.
“It's not hard to read people from a distance,” he begins. “You know, when you divorce yourself from the situation, you see things with a lot more clarity, you dig me? When you're in closer proximity, however…well, that's when things get complicated.” I look to him with squinted eyes. “Not just you—everyone. I do it, too.” His attention is arrested by the open door. “Holy shit, man. Check it out—B.T.A.”
“What?”
“A B.T.A. just walked through the door.”
“What the hell is a B.T.A.?”
“Big-Titted Asian,” with wide eyes past me. I turn to see her. She has entered with her boyfriend. They favor that rockabilly aesthetic that is more of a niche than a fad. It engenders a nostalgia for a parallel universe in which James Dean and Vincent Vega and Jack Kerouac are still getting loaded on PBR and Schlitz in the flatbed of Carl Perkins' Ford—William S. Boroughs is behind the wheel because Perkins is boozing in the back with the others; Marilyn Monroe is sitting bitch between the driver and Dick Dale, who strums out a few chords along with the radio—as this corybantic gang tears ass down some derelict highway populated by moonlit cornfields and ominously dark towns that recede from sight and from memory like stones in deep waters; and they talk about the American Dream with tones that range from derision to antipathy, about conformity and rebellion, about how the line that distinguishes the two is only relevant to those for whom appearing one way or the other is more important than actually being one way or the other, about the fact that they never would have all imagined themselves (the men at least) as being part of the same campy fantasy, a fantasy that has not simply been concocted by someone born after Khrushchev left office, perhaps even after he died (perhaps even after Brezhnev died), but one that has come to be almost universally acknowledged by now as an accurate depiction of their era (even if it is a series of eras), one that has even come to be revered by the square community of today for whom the threat of Beat poetry seems about as menacing as a rerun of Leave it to Beaver. The B.T.A. sports a skimpy, black cocktail dress that is at least one size too small (from which a leopard-print bra peaks out), torn fishnets, a beehive coiffure, and a possibly fake beauty mark on her right cheek. The boyfriend wears tight black jeans, a red and white checkered shirt that has been left open to reveal a white shirt (as well as his lack of either muscle or fat), and Buddy Holly glasses. He has a well-pomaded head of hair, what bullies from bygone days would have called a pencil-neck (they probably would have used this insult as his slightly official cognomen, too), and a face so fresh—perhaps even glabrous—that one would think he has never found use for a razor. “Come on, man,” Tomas begins softly, “If there's anything better in this world than a cute Asian chick with big beautiful titties, I haven't fucking found it.” I turn to him. He looks to me. “Dig it, man—the absurd man's diligence is focused in the moment.”
How does one respond to that?
“As I was saying,” he resumes, “I was dating this girl a while back. Everyone told me that she was crazy, that she was going to hurt me, that she had an eating disorder. But I refused to believe them. You know, she was such a great fucking person. She was smart, she was witty, she was cultured. And let's not forget that she was fucking gorgeous, too.” He looks from side to side. “And, between you and I, this broad knew how to fuck, dig? I mean she was fucking dirty as shit when it really came down to it. She'd slap me around, I'd pull her hair and shit; she'd scream, and I'd just go to fucking town on that shit. Man,” he exhausts, “probably the best lay of my fucking life.”
“That's…that's…wow.”
“Fucking tell me about it, man. But, you know, it didn't make sense—the whole bulimia thing. How could someone like that (caesura) succumb to such a thing as an eating disorder—which, if you ask me is more of a symptom of a personality disorder than a fucking disease in and of itself, but, hey, what the fuck do I know. This goes for alcoholics, too.” He takes another drink. “Either fucking way, it wasn't until I had to take her to the hospital one night that it all came out.” He pauses as though awaiting a rim-shot. “Okay—bad choice of words; but you know what I'm getting at, right?
“When you're close to someone, you look past their flaws; you create an image, a mental image, of that person. It's like a mirage, dig; it doesn't really exist—it only exists for you. It's how James is with fucking D-Bag Buddy over there,” his head motioning in the direction of their table. “James went over to Scotland for a year during high school—you know, as like an…an….”
“Exchange student?”
“Yeah, as an exchange student. And he fell in love with the fucking country and his (caesura) surrogate—if that's the right word—family. He became incredibly close with Buddy, who was something like the older brother he never had. I humor him, of course, but I only do it because we rarely see that rancid asshole. He's in fucking denial—like some fifteen-year-old (fingers in quotations) virgin complaining about the warts on her snatch, who
…”
“What?”
“…Has managed to block out the memory of that one time mom's new boyfriend stumbled into her room all drunk with his pants around his ankles.”
“…”
“Look, the point is: If the guy actually lived in New York, I'd have to tell James how I felt. But, you know, because I only have to see him once or twice a year I keep my mouth shut.”
“Where does he live?”
“Fucking Boston,” as he brings his pint to his mouth. “Fucking Boston,” as it comes away. “If you want to talk about cities with inferiority complexes…”
“Yeah, I'm not particularly fond of that city, either.”
“You have a way better reason for hating it than I do,” he says. I don't know what he's referring to. “I mean my real problems with that shithole are, I guess, somewhat superficial: the guys are these unhappy trolls, the women are as pudgy and as fucking busted as British chicks, the trains shut down too early, the bars shut down too early, there's nowhere to eat after ten unless you want bar food, it's cold, it's dreary, it's too white unless you're by Harvard; the coffee sucks, the pizza sucks, the Red Sox…”
“Fuck the Sox,” the man next to us exclaims.
“Right on, brother!” Tomas yells.
“Where was I?”
“About Boston?”
He shakes his head. “No. Oh yeah, going back to what I was saying—things get complicated when you're too close. It's so problematic that just about every system of ethics refuses to deal with it.”
I have no idea what he's referring to, but I nod obediently. “What happened to the girl?” I ask.
Tomas becomes slightly morose. “I really tried to work it out with her, dig? Honestly, I-I did. And I felt like complete shit when I had to call it quits. I mean, I really felt guilty. A-and I knew that it would only make things worse for her, but, you know, I didn't sign up for that shit. I was in it to be her boyfriend—in the end, it felt like I was her fucking therapist.”