THE WALLS

by Jay Fox

  “Irregardless isn't a word, Charlie,” meek Midas interjects.

  “Who the fuck asked this guy, huh?” he says with a coy smile directed at me. “Irregardless,” he begins, making certain to emphasize each syllable, “Place looked like it'd been hit by a fuckin' hurricane. 'Sides the piss puddles and da' refer smell in the can, the whole ambiance was way outta' whack—was like a fuckin'…ya' know…uh, like a fuckin' frat house. Not as bad as fuckin' Paulmil, mind you, but fuckin' bad.” He shrugs again. “Look: I ain't saying 'at type a' shit's gonna happen in my bar. I know most da' people who come in and outta this place, and I ain't gotta worry much. But I ain't gonna stand by and let graffiti…ya’ know…uh, accumulate, until my bar looks like an old train car, you get me, kid?”

  “I understand,” solemnly. “I guess the only question now is if you have any pictures from the bathroom before you painted over it. Maybe your wife took like a before and an after?”

  “Hate to break it to ya', but I ain't the type a' guy who takes pictures a' people on the can. I leave that type a' shit to B.B. Fucking King,” before letting out a boisterous laugh. The guys hanging around the jukebox turn to him. “Yo', youse hear 'bout that?”

  “Was in Saint Louis, right?” one of them asks.

  “Nah, I heard it was the one in Times Square.”

  “I thought it was in Kansas City,” Midas says hesitantly. “Probably just a rumor anyway.” He pauses. “You’re probably thinking about Chuck Berry, Charlie. He definitely did that shit.”

  Charlie nods. “For once in your life, you’re fucking right, Midas. B.B. King’s a fucking saint. Still, dat’s some funny shit dough, huh?” Charlie asks/says. Regardless of the verb he utilizes, its usage manages to elicit a tepid response from the people in the bar, even the young couple playing pool, whom Charlie doesn't seem to know. “Tell ya' what kid, I got a box full of pictures somewhere in back. I can go an'get'm if you don't mind hangin' around a little.”

  “I don't have anywhere to be,” I respond. “It's just that what I'm looking for appeared about a week ago,” I add.

  He doesn't hear me. “Yo', youse don't need nothing, right?” he calls out to no one in particular. A few moments of silence produces no response, so he begins towards the door that reads employe's only.

  “What's the story with the shoe?” I ask Midas as I take my first sip of beer for the day.

  His features become pensive, furrowed into something that may have been a scowl for others, but has since become his default. He glares to the television without attention, the images having ceased to captivate so long ago that it seems the tube's only purpose now is to drown out the thought that too many years have been spent drinking in this dive straddling the lines of Red Hook and limbo. “Long story, kid,” he responds gruffly. I ask him if he knows anything about Coprolalia, and receive a derisive response. And yet in his eyes there is a faint glimmer, an attempt at recourse to something that the steady influx of beer probably makes him forget from time to time.

  His friends call him Midas because everything he's ever touched has gone to shit. At least that's what I assume. It's an example of the sardonic humor that one is bound to encounter in these neighborhoods—a mild causticity that makes the incisive bite of a working a job that never pays all the bills, of living in a home that never keeps out all of the cold, of remembering a past that never fails to center upon the elusive “one big shot,” diffuse into a string of inconveniences and accidents and twists of fate that remove the central figure from any fault or blame—a comedy of errors that never ceases to provoke that poor-bastard shake of the head or, failing that, an encouraging remark about the sun rising the following morning. Luck, the most sacred shibboleth of the working class, never fails to make a cameo every couple of days to break a window, tamper with an alarm clock, or cajole a shoe loose while its owner tries to chase down a B61 driven by “a sadistic son of a bitch,” whose thoughts on empathy can best be summarized by his lead foot (practicing misanthropy, after all, is not just common behavior for MTA and city employees; it's one of their requisite duties). Luck forces the individual to make a split-second decision of “losing my job for looking like a fucking derelict or losing my job because I came in late two times last week” for reasons that are also subject to the whim of the malign poecilonym that keeps the gears of misfortune spinning.

  “What would you do?” he asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you lost your shoe running after the bus,” he responds quickly. “If you show up to work late, you're fired; if you show up wearing one shoe, you're fired—either way you're fucked. The boss will tell you that you should have left earlier. That way, you don't have to run to the bus. Hell, that way, you can even lose your shoe, walk back, pick it up, put it on, and still get to work on time by catching the next one. Problem solved, right?” he says with a snort and a cackle. The bottle almost reaches his mouth before he places it back down on the bar. He turns to me. “But what happens when you're kept up by your cunt of a wife? What happens when your kid won't stop crying all night? What happens when there ain't enough fucking hours in the night to deal escape from all the shit you have to deal with during the day?” He looks back to the bottle of beer in front of him and seems to become almost remorseful. “Fuck, guy, I don't mean to throw all of this on you. You're just looking for some prick who writes some stupid shit on the wall. I don't mean nothing by what I'm saying.” He looks to the beer in his hand with a tepid smile. “You're all right, you know that?”

  We drink our beers in relative silence and stare to the televisions that broadcast sports that no one cares about. Midas offers sound bites of bar wisdom: “All a man really wants is five things. He's gotta have food and shelter; and he's gotta have a reason to wake up every morning and a reason to come home every night. Besides these, he's gotta believe that those four things are secure—philosophy ain't nothing more than a man attempting to legitimize that last one.” “This country was founded by hard work, and hard work's the only thing that's gonna save it.” “We were all born thanks to a woman, and we're all gonna die thanks to a woman.”

  “I wanted to be a musician,” he says after a desultory harangue against unions, Republicans, Democrats; anyone, really—whether they are trying to impugn his liberty with regulations or whether they are getting rich due to the dearth of regulations. To him, it was pretty much all the same: the workingman gets screwed. “I was in a band for a long time called the Red Hook Sound Machine.” I ask what he played. “I was the drummer. I was on kit; we had another guy on percussion. Back in the day I was really something. People used to compare me to Harvey Mason, if you know who that is.” I begin to nod with diffidence. “You know Herbie's Headhunters album?” I smile. “That's him. One of the tightest, most innovative drummers of all time.” The jukebox, after a short hiatus, begins to spew out Big Joe Turner. In the purlieus of the bar, the Motown-Atlantic debate begins anew.

  “Yeah, but I was never in it for the money. I mean, I wanted to make it—don't get me wrong—but I was also realistic. To me, just gigging with the guys every once in a while was enough. Extra money in my pocket was nice, but it's not like that was the only reason I was in it. We were good, too; and a lot of people really dug our sound. It's not like we were putting out gold records, but we had a pretty serious following around Brooklyn, and we were pulling in two hundred or so whenever we played.

  “And then it got to be the nineties, and everything we did sounded outdated. Guys started quitting the band. Two of them got married: one to a woman, another to the JDL. Once we split up, I did some session work here and there, but that kinda fizzled out when Mikey, my connection with the studio, passed about a decade ago.” I don't ask; he just tells me: “AIDS.” He picks up his beer. “But I'm sure you don't wanna hear all this. As a poet once said, the wise don't worship dusty deeds.”

  I mention the opening lines of a Coprolalia poem found in a nautical bar on Atlantic a few years ago. He bobs his head with su
spect enthusiasm. “It's a somewhat odd rhyme pattern called terza rima,” I begin. “This, of course, is pretty weird to begin with—in English anyhow. Furthermore, each line contains eleven syllables.” Midas looks to the mirror behind the bar, perhaps to make sure he is expressing perplexity as accurately as possible. “It's like playing a song in a weird time signature, something like a five-four or a seven-eight.”

  “Okay,” he responds with a nod. “Now you're speaking my language.”

  “But here's what's really interesting: The most famous example of an eleven-syllable terza rima is found in Dante's Divine Comedy. The work has to be a reference to that poem. I mean, if one only takes the words into consideration, Faust seems to be a better candidate; but that ignores the context of the words. And then there's other stuff that he's done. There's a really good one called Herculi Romano Augusto, but no seems to really know what it means. I mean, it's a reference to Commodus, but that's all anyone really knows.” I take a sip from my beer.

  “Who's Commodus?”

  “Roman emperor. I think Joaquin Phoenix's character in Gladiator is supposed to be based on him.”

  “Good movie.”

  I nod.

  “I’d never catch any of that shit. I haven't read anything like it since high school. I think I understand why you like this guy so much, though,” Midas adds as he reaches for his beer. He laughs to himself and shakes his head before taking down the remainder of the bottle. “I used to go through that same shit when I was trying to find the meanings behind the lyrics of Dark Side and Blonde on Blonde. I fucking love Dylan, man.”

  I begin to lose what Midas calls my “college” tone as the dusk begins to creep upon the city. Charlie listens intently to our exchanges and interjects every so often with a non sequiteur involving one of the regulars. He interrupts the music every once in a while to make announcements. Midas keeps repeating the phrase, “When Caesar speaks, the music ceases.” Midas is told to shut the fuck up. A lot. Charlie lets me know that he has a box of photos of the bar before the paint job somewhere, but he doesn't know where. He thinks the box is in his attic, but he's unwilling to commit. “I'll check up there when I get home,” he says in fifteen minute intervals—right after he asks when I'll be back to the bar, and right before he launches into some story about Tony or Debbie or Pepper (a/k/a Handles, but never to her face) or Pabs (a/k/a Broccoli Head) or Shapiro or Marty (pronounced Mardy).

  As the daylight fades into that amethyst tone that signifies an acceptable departure from sobriety, the crowd thickens with regulars, who each take their pop shots at Midas after finding out from Charlie about the most recent event to warrant the forest of empties in front of him. Schadenfreude takes on many faces. Some wear it openly; some camouflage it with tepid pity. “Tough break, dough,” they each say. This is typically followed by: “But, you know what—sun's gonna come up tomorrah.”

  Lifted from the pages of an inane tragedy, Midas' life has been a series of ups and downs; the problem, of course, is that the ups started disappearing fairly early on, and the downs have dug trenches in which they have decided to camp out. One could relate it to the Great War, but, in this case, there is a clear winner.

  There is no one culmination to his misfortunes, he seems to imply, only a steady stream of ill fate. Without a good place to take out his rage, he feels it must be escorted to the bar—this dingy place with the wood veneer redolent with the scent of decay, which, Charlie says incidentally, never dissipates until the passing of the autumn rains that last all day and always make the night seem to come on prematurely.

  The Mets lose, the Yankees win. And while the victory over Boston in something even some of the Mets fan celebrate, it offers such a inane conciliation that Midas, now drunk enough to dispense with any detail of life, however lurid or pathetic, only becomes more flush with that form of consternation that people often confuse with a faulty defecation reflex. He doesn't attempt to conceal the dread of having to return home to Margie, his wife of “too many” years, without the shoe or job with which he left this morning. He just tries to maintain a genial tone and that sense of humor that every village punching bag is required to assume: humble, self-deprecatory, and filled with a cornucopia of obscenities. He even provides a foreign proverb at one point on the virtues of ugly wives, which arouses laughter from some of the men surrounding the two of us once Midas translates it. The end of the Yankees game is one of many signals for him to go home—the first being the point when the yellows and oranges of the sky turn to scarlets and violets, the last being none other than “lights on,” a signal to remind the truly intractable that “last call” took place about an hour beforehand. Instincts of self-preservation alone should have sent him home right after the sun disappeared, but Midas is blind to the hazards of walking into a fight armed only with beer-breath and empty pockets. He's not afraid of his wife, or at least he doesn't call it fear by name; instead, it's “Fuck her; she don't own me” and “I can do whatever I want,” which even he even accepts as a poorly contrived illusion. So, instead of coming in with the proverbial tail between his legs, Midas instead accelerates through the stages of drunkenness at a steady pace until he is left in that morass of inebriated oblivion and eventually forced back home by friends who don’t want to see him fully pickled and poisoned; yes, back they will carry him home to confront all of the problems, now metastasized into potentially fatal maladies, that he had hoped to avoid.

  Charlie finally cuts off his service once it's been dark long enough for no one to know what time it actually is. His eyes hold a limp grudge, but Debbie, one of the more sober regulars, offers to walk him back to his place before hostilities are nurtured in the womb of self-pity. Midas is a profusion of gratitude. He raises the last of his beer to her, saying:

  Wine comes in at the mouth

  And love comes in at the eye;

  That's all we shall know for truth

  Before we grow old and die.

  I lift my glass to my mouth,

  I look to you, and I sigh.

  Midas then stands, falters, and then clutches onto Debbie's shoulder. He tells me to take care of his bar, and then begins for the exit. All eyes are on Midas—some sympathetic, some contemptuous. I think about his name. I was so quick to assume that it was born out of sarcasm, a caustic reminder of his problems; but what if it had been laurelled upon him prior to a vicissitude of fate, what an ancient would have concluded was the result of some great offense to a god?

  As soon as the door closes behind them, a woman named Pepper takes up the unoccupied seat. She's probably the same age as Midas, but her face looks significantly older, even with her hair in pigtails. Her features have been gullied by years, a short stint with meth, and a bigamous marriage to neat whiskey and the brand of full-flavored cigarettes that peer out of the opening of her purse. Her words traverse gravely roads. “Whatcha tawkin wit dat loser four?” she asks with something like flirtation behind the wheel. One would need a specially made piano to hit the octave in which she speaks—shrill fails to capture the tenor of this squawking peacock.

  “I don't know,” I respond. “I'm supposed to be looking for an artist,” I say as my eyes inevitably make their way towards her bounty of cleavage.

  “Ya looking fa an artist in dis ear dump?” Charlie looks over to her. I look to Charlie. “No fence Charl, but I tink dis kid's got da jerkoffs at hang round ear confused wit DUMBO.” Her inept humor is endearing even to those she insults; it's never mordant enough to provoke much more than a thin shawl of derision or one of those grins that expands when doused in alcohol. “Seriously, dough, ya came ear lookin fa an artist?”

  “A true-devoted pilgrim is not weary to measure kingdoms with his feeble steps,” I respond.

  “Yo, Charlie, how many beers ya feed Hamlet ear?” It's no use; Charlie's attention is being courted by the pulsing of the crowd, its gregarious cacophony managing to even drown out the well-known Edwin Starr track rumbling out of the jukebox. A man in a red beret is
dancing a derivation of the Charleston not known in most parts while various onlookers encourage him by clapping along with the rhythm of another song. Pepper looks to Charlie for a long time like an orphan gazing upon a suburban Christmas Morning, but Charlie's still captivated by the commotion overtaking the back of the bar. She finally concedes to futility as he starts mixing what looks to be a Manhattan for a man with a mustache stained hangover-piss brown. “Ah, faget you,” she says as she turns back to me. “So. Ya lookin fa dat Tourette's guy, I take it?”

  “Tourette's?”

  “Yeah,” she says with that you-think-I'm-stupid-or-something grin that, once again, may be flirtatious. “Hate to burst yer bubble, bud, but some a us round ear ain't as dumb as we look.” I look to her apologetically. “I'm just bustin yer chops, kid. 'F I weren't a nurse I wouldn't know coprolalia from aphasia,” she says with the same coy grin that guides her from one bar stool to the next.

  “So you've heard of Coprolalia?” I ask with wide eyes. “That's so (caesura) great.”

  “Yeah,” she explodes. “I heard a'im, but I don't know'm a'nuttin. What gotcha' tawking wit Midas.”

  “I don't know.” I look down to the dregs of beer in my bottle before placing it back on the bar. “Exchanging life stories, I guess—his bad luck versus my waning expectations.”

  “You're what? Twenty-six?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Twenty-two? Wow.” She pats me on the shoulder. “Buck up fella; you gotta few years left four you can bitch like dat.”

  “I guess so.” I take down the rest of my beer. “Guess I'm better off than Midas, anyhow.”

  “Psh,” she responds as she reaches for her glass of whiskey, “He'd blame da hangover he wakes up wit every mornin on his crummy luck 'f he thawt someone'd listen.” Her face contorts into a pincushion wince. “None a what I'm saying ear's any different den what I've said ta'm a thousand times over. He's a loser, kid. I known Margie since we's in junior high. Guess 'at makes me a friend a'is by proxy, huh?