THE WALLS

by Jay Fox

  “Yeah, but (largo) he's a pussy and she's a bawl-breaker. Reminds me of her parents' situation.” She takes down whatever is left in her glass and slams it back down on the bar with enough force to grab Charlie's attention. She then resumes, allegro: “Gen! I ain't sayin this cause I like sayin shit bout my friends, understand. I just want to inform you at Midas ain't some guy, oo's just down on his luck; he's a fuckin doormat and no'uns gonna give him a break 'f he don't wizen up and (staccato) take some-fuck-ing initiative. Ya know, Margie does ride him a lot—granted; but she's only doin it to get'm off his ass.” She reaches for the pack of cigarettes in her purse. “D'jew smoke?”

  “When I drink.”

  “Well, ya drinkin right now, huh; how's'about you accompany me out,” she says as a bit of saliva (perhaps a pebble) flies off her tongue and slaps me on the cheek.

  “I don't see a problem with that.” I try to find my sea legs as I stumble into the man next to me. He smiles awkwardly.

  It strikes me that Pepper's gestures aren't flirtatious; rather, she embodies the gaze of a guardian angel hired to make certain that the demons I've been ingesting don't get too out of hand, no matter how tenaciously they may fight for control. The Atlantic-Motown argument can be heard above Esther Phillips' “Release Me,” which seems to be serving as quite the soporific for the patrons still riled up from the previous song.

  Many eyes (perhaps an odd number) follow us as we make our way from the bar to the front door on shifting floorboards that the regulars learned to navigate long ago. From behind, I would have guessed Pepper to be in her mid-twenties. Short, denim skirt; black, sleeveless V-neck blouse; pigtails of over-dyed hair—these are features that would have produced a shortage of blood in the head had it not been for the steady hours of drinking. She wears three-inch heels on her open-toed shoes, which reveal freshly applied fuchsia polish, as well as freakishly elongated toes. Her belt circumnavigates no less than two feet of waist, and her hips and ass still appear to be awaiting puberty. On her right bicep is a tattoo of something that holds far too esoteric a significance to go into, she tells me as we stand outside in the sultry night, her cigarettes tasting of bargain and sawdust. She takes down two before I can finish the first.

  Pepper breaks down Midas' life into seven phases, and explains that he has the tendency to regress into denial when drunk. “Problem, course, is he's always fuckin drunk,” she adds as Debbie comes back and asks for a cigarette.

  “Youse talking bout Midas?” she asks.

  “Who else?”

  “Jesus, he's a real shit show tonight. What'd ya do to'm, kind?”

  “He just kept drinking. I wasn't encouraging him. We just started talking and Charlie just kept giving us beer and now it's ten.”

  “Dahling,” Pepper says as her hand makes for my shoulder, “'s almost one.”

  “Really?” I ask with a smile. She nods sedately and quickly removes her hand to check her watch. It's actually one-fifteen. “Well,” I respond, “He was upset because he lost his shoe and his job.”

  “'At sounds like a load,” Pepper scoffs. “Shit, whateva dat guy don't have'n confidence he sure as shit makes up in nerve.” She turns to Debbie. “What'd Margie say when ya brought his drunk ass home?”

  “No idea; s'not like I was gonna wait around and see. Fer'all I know he's passed out in the stairwell.”

  My phone rings. The two look to me, shrug, and then go back to talking about Midas. It's Tomas. By the urgency in his voice, it's implied that there are a few coke peddlers at whatever bar he's set up shop, but the actual words themselves are indecipherable until he kicks open the door and escapes outside. The sound of traffic compromises a few syllables here and there, but the blanks are filled in without recourse to repetition. After a few platitudes and what seems to be a desire to hold out information, he finally reveals the purpose of the call.

  “It's a fucking haiku, man!” ecstatic. I can almost picture his stout body swooning like a question mark as he begins to contemplate the possibility of a Zen influence in the new piece—certainly an anomaly, if not a reason for skepticism. “I'm sure it's a Coprolalia, man,” he reassures me. “You need to fucking come and see it, dig? I've been calling you for, like, two hours. Where the fuck are you?”

  “I'm still in Red Hook…I think.” The two women walk inside. The street is suddenly devoid of all life. The steady flow of B.Q.E. traffic resonates through the air like the sound of choppy surf. “Carroll Gardens or Red Hook.”

  “You've got something,” he begins before descending into a list of onomatopoeic utterances that are employed, typically one at a time, when one attempts to conjure up a better word or phrase for the one previously used. “You've got a lead!” he finally explodes. “That's it! You've got a fucking lead.”

  “Not really,” I lament. “I guess I just lost track of time.”

  “Look: you need to get over here, dig? Me and James met a group of New School broads, and they just fucking love Coprolalia. You've been working at this pretty hard. What you need is a good, solid night of fucking to clear your head.” The phone is hijacked by a car alarm. “I'm going back in. You know where we are right? It's a few blocks north of that Hercules thing Coprolalia did that you and Aberdeen are always talking about. See you in a bit.”

  He hangs up the phone before I can respond. His words clearly do not have the agility to keep pace with his actions or thoughts, and, knowing him, the most important thing at the moment is the opportunity of more amphetamines. Still, a new Coprolalia means the possibility of a witness or even a list of suspects. Either way, the continuing saga of Midas is intriguing enough to get me in for one more round before I head off to examine Tomas' discovery.

  A man turns the corner as I stand staring to the tiny moon beyond the streetlight. We catch eyes, but I discern nothing in his face. “The turkey is too dry,” he says once he has approached within a few feet of me. He has a strong British accent.

  “Have you tried basting it?” I ask gingerly.

  He stares to me from behind tinted glasses. It's difficult to make out his facial features. He is cold and withdrawn, vaporous like a wraith. “So the elusive Monsieur Lemieux lives to see another day,” he laughs coldly. He nods slowly, looks up and down the street, and then walks back around the corner from whence he came. His footsteps echo quietly as he strolls down the canyon of concrete, a kind of steady clicking like an old clock. I hear a luxury car door open. Shut. An idling engine disengages from park. Transmission gears churn and grind. The car turns onto the street and heads north. It is a black Lincoln of modern make: a car that is supposed to be anonymous, elegant, blunt. The man has a driver, but the car does not belong to a service. Hundreds of questions implore my attention like wide-open receivers running through the end zones of my mind.

  I enter to find that the floor of the bar has regained its stability—it is no longer an esoteric series of shirting planks, but, rather, just a bunch of adjacent cuts of wood warped by the elements. I return to my seat after using the bathroom to find Pepper and Debbie still talking about Midas. “Yeah, at piece a shit wouldn't even know what t'ado wit it,” I hear Pepper say. I immediately think about Debbie's vagina, which, of course, sets the ol' noodle to work trying to envisage what lay beneath her sweatshorts and whether or not the varicose veins—which crowd the lower portions of her thighs as if stray pen marks or derelict hairs on Linus' head—flow all the way up her leg, or if some anatomical miracle has prevented the advance of these cosmetic abominations, which some culture on this Earth must revere as symbolic of the accoutrement of phronetic wisdom, not only years. I soon lose interest in the matter, however, as I remember the temperature and the unfortunate fact that the vagina reacts to heat much as the skunk reacts to danger. The male grundle, of course, is no better.

  “Yo, Quiet Riot, what's on yer mind?” Debbie asks as I realize that I'm grinning with the same countenance that appeared when I started contemplating Debbie's protean pussy. “You ain't gonna get sick, are
ya?”

  “No, I was just thinking about the best way to get over to Park Slope.”

  “What? We ain't good'nuff all of a sudden? Gotta go to fucking Pahk Slope?” Pepper yells above Smokey Robinson, who is telling everyone about Mickey's Monkey. Pepper's tone is not one of indignation, or, if it is, it's the playful sort. The word “persiflage” pops into my head. I don't know if it applies.

  “No,” I begin with my palms showing; “There's a new piece in a bathroom over on Union and Fifth. I want to go over to make sure it's authentic.”

  The two look to me without scorn.

  “What kinda piece we talkin here? You a pimp?”

  “He's fowlinround that shitta artist.”

  “What?” she says with a look of disgust in my direction. She turns back to Pepper: “He's tailing some dude who makes sculptures wit his shit?”

  “No, usually drawings or poetry.”

  She turns back to me, utterly mystified: “How ya make poetry wit dookie?”

  The question resonates in my imagination for long enough to draw a smile. “He writes on the walls—usually in pen.”

  “'Ere was at ting on'm in DaPost,” Pepper says on the heels of my words. Debbie replies with a dithering head. “Yer staying fer another beer, right?”

  I ask for a beer and the check. The beer is on the house; the tab is eighteen dollars. I leave thirty. Pepper and Debbie are now gossiping about the neighborhood denizens as though scholars exchanging lurid details of the dead. Midas, once the star, has by now become just another thread in a tapestry of working-class despair, one in which every man is either a drunk or a fool, every woman a saint or a “fuckin nutcase.” I imagine the whole neighborhood as a long stretch of halfway houses filled with deviant kids and adults with forsaken ambitions, which, although highly offensive, is probably more accurate than most would like to admit.

  Debbie and Pepper seem incredibly fond of Maria, a recent addition to the neighborhood. She is considered “too good” for Carlos, her husband—evidently more of a fool than a drunk. As they tell stories about these two, Maria and Carlos, I cease to be a focal point; I become more like a detail in the background of one’s reflection or a fly upon the wall that is kept alive because it doesn't draw too much attention to itself. They want to set Maria up with Raphael, the UPS driver. Les McCann, meanwhile, echoes the generation of Baraka and Brathwaite, a generation that has since muzzled itself with the pages of Revelations.

  “Ya hear Midas worked fer UPS fer a month a so, right?”

  “Get out!”

  “Yeah—got fired fer drinkin on the job. A few weeks afta, I ax him, 'Midas, what can Brown do fa you'?” The two bowl over laughing even though the joke doesn't seem to have a punch line.

  8.1

  The B71 keeps me waiting only a few minutes. Even during rush hour, Brooklyn buses have a nasty habit of not coming unless they are baited by the sudden recollection of a forgotten item less than a block away or a freshly lit cigarette. Neither is here necessary, which gives me that feeling that something good is eminent—an irrational sentiment, no doubt, but one that seems to arise whenever you beat the odds.

  I make it to the bar just before two in the morning. The doorman—a severely androgenic colossus with no sense of humor and that overwhelming need to intimidate because he is on the side of power for perhaps the first time in his life—scans my ID for an extended period of time as a nearby group of smokers talk about how horribly pretentious all of the bars in Park Slope have become since they moved to the neighborhood nine months ago. “You cool,” the bouncer concedes. He still stares me down as I reach for the door. I open it to see yet another golem subsisting on negative energies aroused by rejection, indignation, and animosity. Union membership being what it is, I guess the Pinkertons have been forced to scour the classifieds.

  Aberdeen, Tomas, and the New School girls are on a couch near the front door. The girls are clearly underage, but they're just attractive enough to not have to deal with the scrupulous bouncer. I am quickly introduced to them. They are Trixi, Mix, Nixi, and Jane. Jane seems sober. Trixi and Mixi probably subsist on a diet dominated by Sparks, Aderol, Sweet and Low, Ensure, and Marlboro Lights. Nixi, however, appears to be strung out on something far more intense than the mélange of products favored by the other two.

  “I am hydrogen,” she says as she stares to the empty patch of space to the left of my ear.

  My immediate response is to turn to the others for an explanation. They want to see my reaction—as is evident from the eager looks in each eye. I turn back to her. “That's a pretty song.”

  “No,” she says with sudden severity. “I am hydrogen.”

  “What's that like?”

  She replies with a tepid smile, what I assume will serve as the preamble to a series of Pythian verses. Before any utterance gets made, however, she runs off to a makeshift dance-floor directly in front of the doors leading to the bathrooms. As she goes, she manages to spread mayhem and a general sense of alarm throughout the bar; she's ranting in an amalgam of languages, some of which she may have no knowledge, which leads some to stare with curious expressions as they catch words like “ojos” and “danke” and “schlep” and “mboo” and “how zi” and “flambeaux,” but have no reply when they hear salutations in no less than thirty different languages, most of which are dead, besides a look in our direction, which intimates the following query: “Is this chick insanely smart or just plain insane?” As she goes marauding through the relative peace, she kicks over a table of drinks, sending cosmos and various concoctions with the suffix “-ini” into the air, though the bartender, most of the patrons, and the second bouncer fail to notice because a 4/4 song in the key of C is busy condemning conformity and all of the adjuncts of apathy at decibels surpassing rusty-tracked G levels. By the time the drinks start landing on the unassuming dancers and standers and talkers and others just floating around too close to the epicenter of the collision for their own good, Nixi has already taken the second or third step of—what I'm informed is called—the Rampaging Monkey, an exercise/dance ritual established by the same Hindu sect that believes the flu can be cured by sprinting up a Himalayan trail. That, or she appears to have stumbled upon the same stuff that caused the infamous Dancing Plague of 1518, which most scholars claim is ergot, though there is the possibility that a little bit of that southern magic, with which Pynchon was once so enamored, snuck into Europe like a dispossessed Palestinian looking for a construction job.

  “I thought they said she could drink on that shit,” Trixi says. She is wearing a powder-blue wig and a pink T-shirt that reads i'm the coolest in letters that appear to be crystallized in cartoon ice. A poet would have spent afternoons devising clever similes for her breasts, which were perky and celestial. A more straightforward person would have simply stated what happened to be the same unit in which Connie lived while in her junior year dorm: 34-C. “That Cenobe is seriously fucking with her head,” she adds.

  “Cenobe?” I ask. “What the hell is that?”

  The rest of the party, with the exception of Trixi, groans. This is clearly a subject ready for retirement.

  According to Trixi, Nixi is taking part in an experiment for a new drug born from the collective mind of a pharmaceutical company with a research facility somewhere in the Brooklyn Navy Yard (“I know, totally sketchy, right?” Trixi adds). Nixi had decided to subject herself to such experimentation upon finding herself still wallowing in the depths of heartache after taking virtually every drug she could get from her shrink to relieve the pain of a particularly difficult breakup—elements including: a best-friend, a broken condom, an abortion, a confession. Vulnerable and alone, Nixi replied to a Craigslist post from a clinic that was recruiting a group of thirty people for a new drug, Cenobe. They promised eight hundred dollars, on top of the elimination of the malaise caused by her horrible experience. And so, without thinking too much about the potential dangers of legal drugs, which the medical community calls side effects,
she signed a waiver and began taking the mischievous pill.

  The drug, Trixi relays, is unlike most other anti-depressants on the market; the major difference is the way in which it goes about curing what it called “circumstantial depression,” which, if you ask this word-obsessed geek, is actually dejection. Regardless, the drug does not artificially increase the levels of serotonin or prolactin in the body, nor does it inhibit the production of norepinephrine; rather, it augments the amount of dopamine released during exercise, thereby turning a runners' high into a runners'…well, what's an experimental drug if it doesn't demand a change of pants every once in a while? The medication also reduces appetite, something that the scientists who designed the drug felt would be beneficial, as it serves to reduce the likelihood of a subject seeking releases of dopamine by means of eating. Incidentally, the drug provoked a slight jump in oxytocin production. The architects did not anticipate this element, but they considered it to be a good thing: high levels of oxytocin have been known to decrease, if not eliminate, feelings of anxiety and fear. As has been said, however, this was just an added bonus: The idea behind the treatment was simply that depression thrives in lethargic personalities—eliminate lethargy, eliminate depression.

  The full strength, 25-milligram Cenobe bars were not meant to be used for longer than two weeks, as their purpose was to establish a healthy lifestyle by means of inducing euphoria from so little as walking from the bed to the toilet. Following this initial period, in which habits conducive to physical fitness were to be established, the patient was to be weaned off of the drug: two weeks of 20 milligram pills, followed by one month of the 10 milligrams, followed by another month of the 5 milligrams. After the treatment, the patient was to emerge healthier and happier without dependence on the drug, only the dopamine released during exercise.