by Jay Fox
Once Patrick leaves to get his eighth or ninth beer, I turn to Tomas: “What the hell is wrong with this guy?”
“I don't know. He just talks. He's like Joe fucking Biden: you ask him a yes or no question about Coprolalia and he rambles on for an hour about ants. I mean, seriously, ants? They're not fucking super-organisms.”
“Okay, let's not get back on that.”
“I'm just saying…” he begins as he looks over to Pat and the barkeep, who are busy trying to talk over a track off Beggar's Banquet. They exchange exaggerated laughs like old friends. “I think this is a waste of time. Then again, this what you get for posting something on Craigslist,” he scolds, not even bothering to mention Patrick's attire—a rare omission for Tomas.
“That was your idea,” I respond with indignation.
“Yes, and it was a stupid idea I came up with when I was drunk. How many of those ideas do you actually listen to?” Silence. “Do you know how many fucking maniacs prowl that shit? Dig this, man: There was actually a guy in Germany who posted a request that went something like this: Virgin cannibal seeks first meal,” he begins.
“Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”
“Better to sleep with a drunken cannibal than a drunken priest.”
“Ha!” actually said.
“Okay, but due I’m in the middle of a story here.”
“A cannibal on Craigslist…”
“Yeah, and what's even more fucked up is that someone replied! Someone wanted to be fucking eaten!”
“What happened?”
“He ate her!”
“Did he get in any trouble?”
“I'm sure he did,” he says with a suspicious look in Patrick's direction. “I don't know, though; I didn't really follow the story. In fact, I'm not sure if the person eaten was a man or a woman.” He shrugs. “But think about it, man: cannibalism.”
“He's not a fucking cannibal,” I assume. “I think he's just lonely. I mean, a normal guy doesn't just go on like this the first time you meet him. He's lonely, man,” with more confidence. “That's all it is.”
“I don't want to take the chance. Plus,” he trumps the right bower already on the table, “He's fucking annoying. It's like someone gave him a fucking emetic; it just keeps coming and coming, and I don't think it's going to fucking stop soon.” He pauses. “Has he said one fucking word about Coprolalia?”
“No, not really.”
“Oh, and have you heard of any of these fucking people? Who the hell was the one guy who ‘may have inadvertently caused the Reformation’?”
“Erasmus?”
“You know him?”
“Yeah. Didn’t you have to read In Praise of Folly in school?”
“That was him?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.”
One of Pat's songs appears at this point. It's fairly obvious when they do. In this case it's another AM hit from the seventies: Three Dog Night's “Shambala.”
“What if he is Coprolalia?”
“Him? Are you fucking serious?”
“Serious enough.”
“No. No fucking way, man. That guy is a fucking whack-job. You've said it yourself: Coprolalia does not stand out. Anonymity is the best camouflage.”
“Did you just come up with that?”
“No, I think I heard it in some detective movie from the forties—you know, real film noir shit.”
“So, what were we talking about?” Patrick asks as he takes his seat with two more double-pints in Styrofoam cups.
“You were just about to tell us about Willis Faxo,” Tomas responds. “Have you seen his piece in front of the Keens Center?”
“Of course. I'm the one who recommended they purchase it. The Keens family and I go way back.”
Tomas says nothing.
“About Mr. Faxo—as I said in the previous correspondence with your friend,” as he turns to me, “I have never met the washroom fellow, and I've only met Willis, a good friend of his, twice.”
“Where?” I ask. “Do you know one of his friends or was this just a random occurrence?”
“Well, I said twice, which precludes a random occurrence, eh?” as audacious as it appears. “He was dating a friend of mine some time ago,” he says with a shrug. “At the time he was living in a rather dismal flat in Astoria. This was roughly five years ago. I would tell you the address—perhaps it is his current flat, perhaps it is now his former—but, unfortunately, I didn't have the mind to make such an observation. What I can tell you, however, is that he lived within walking distance of the rather famous beer garden up there. We—myself, Willis, and my friend, Daphne, whom Willis was dating at the time—spent a good deal of time there, too. It's a fantastic place. You've been there, I presume?”
“I've heard about it, sure, but I haven't gotten up there yet. According to Sean, Coprolalia hasn't taken the time to visit it, either.”
“Ah, Professor Winchester: The St. Peter of Coprolalia—Sapientia ex cathedra.” He smiles. “I don't mean to be too disparaging of his insight into the artist, but, if you see him, could you please tell him that the piece about the emperor who couldn't weave has nothing to do with the design of his cloth.”
“What does it really mean?”
“It's too difficult to get into.”
As Patrick had not censored himself on any subject up to this point, Tomas and I decide not to press him. He is certainly a wealth of information, but, at the same time, he seems so giddy that I've found it difficult to believe much of what he says. It’s an odd variety of tergiversation.
“You were saying,” Tomas says with a roll of the wrist.
“The beer garden. Ah, yes, it is a fantastic place. Probably the best bar in Queens with the exception of the water taxi bar in Long Island City.”
“The water taxi bar?”
“Yeah, right where the Mohawk Building is,” Tomas adds.
“It's a tremendous place: lots of seating, very cheap drinks…girls….”
“…To eat,” Tomas says under his breath.
“But where is the beer garden?”
He shoots me a glance as though I've struck him. “I'm not the bloody yellow pages.” He turns to Tomas. “He's a rather impetuous one, isn't he?”
“It's day number sixteen and you're his only lead, man,” Tomas replies. “I guess it's understandable.”
“Can I ask you boys a question?” he asks (ha!).
“Shoot, boss,” Tomas says as he toasts nothing in particular.
“What do you see when you close your eyes?”
“What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”
“It's an exercise.”
“I guess darkness,” I shrug.
“I see nothing,” Tomas chimes in with his eyes closed. He smiles as he places his hand over his eyes to better emphasize his participation in the experiment—a virtuous acolyte of Galileo blinding himself for the sake of science. There is silence for a moment. It is soon broken by a pleasant, 6-5-4 progression that will reveal the plight of a semi-anonymous Brandy. “Great choice, by the way—I fucking dig this song.”
“I obviously share your fondness for the rare materialization of Looking Glass's brilliance.” He laughs a bit, drinks deeply from his cup, and continues with his thought experiment. “Back to the question at hand. If someone were to ask you to put your hand in front of your face, not just close to your face, but so close that it blocks out any light—and with your eyes open, mind you—(Tomas opens his eyes and removes his hand from his face), would you still say you see nothing or,” as he turns to me, “darkness?”
“Okay, I see what you're getting at,” Tomas begins with a tone of alacrity that seems hardly justified. “In other words, when you close your eyes, you're really just seeing the back of your eyelids. That's great Plato,” he says with a torpid blink. He turns to me. “This sounds like one of those annoying emails my mom sends me.”
“Yes, I am well aware of the rather chi
ldish nature of the thought experiment. All it is supposed to do is elicit certain responses out of different people. It's a bit of parlor psychology, I know, but I feel as though the question effectively reveals how a person views his or her relationship to the universe.”
“What did our answers reveal?”
“It's not an accurate test, of course. Someone I met once said that an individual's favorite condiment was the most revealing portal into their soul.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that ketchup says one thing about a person, vinegar another, mustard something else.”
“I see.”
“Mayo is the only bad one.”
“Mayo?”
“Gluttony—the ultimate virtue in a decadent society.” He pauses before expressing himself in verse:
The appetites of the edacious—
intractable, chaotic, audacious—
foment in perverse and Stygian shades,
and lust the demise of the Palatine's glades.
“What the hell was that?”
“I think Petronius. Regardless,” he continues after a brief pause, “Mr. Faxo said that the previous thought experiment I brought up reveals not only an individual's metaphysical leanings, but that individual's degree of…well, I'll be blunt—narcissism. You can infer what you will from that.”
“So Tomas is a radical Berkeleyite?”
“Was that an insult?”
“I wouldn't say no,” Patrick laughs.
“Okay, so how the fuck did you respond?”
“The same as our friend here.”
“This is such a bunch of bullshit, man,” Tomas replies. “Not only do I resent the implication that I'm some fucking self-absorbed dick, it makes the eyelids response out to be the right one, which means the bullshit test puts science and math on a fucking pedestal.” He sighs in disgust and reaches for his gin and tonic.
“It's not that there's a right answer exactly; but the eyelids one certainly does make more sense. It's not like anyone is capable of seeing nothing unless a lot of very difficult conditions are satisfied. Even if it's a common thing that one hears, the sentence only makes sense because it has been granted a colloquial meaning, not because its semantics are valid. Light penetrates your eyelids even when it's dark, right?”
“Yeah,” Tomas replies, defeated and incensed, “But what if there's no fucking light anywhere? What then?”
“Well,” I begin, “It wouldn't really matter if your eyes were closed or not: you're not going to see anything anyway.”
“There is always light, Tomas.”
He scowls.
“But going back to what was said earlier, it depends on how you define the word 'see'. I mean, if 'to see' is defined as the 'the images the eyes relay back to the brain,' then I guess the eyelids response would always be the correct one. However, if it's defined as 'the illuminated image the eyes transmit to the brain for processing', then I guess 'nothing' could be somewhat correct. Then again, darkness is always right because it simply means the lack of light. It's a relative term, like fast or slow; a is x and b is y only because of the relationship between a and b. It's dark because there's less light than when one's eyes are open.”
“Yeah, well, there may be no absolute lightness, but there is an absolute darkness, an absolute fastness, and, though I'm not a fucking Einstein scholar or anything, an absolute slowness.”
“Still, a car going a hundred kilometers an hour down a residential street is considered to be going fast. Like I said, it's a relative term; the word just needs to accurately apply, given the context, in order to be considered correct. '“A” is “A”' is a universally sound proposition if and only if the pragmatic elements of language are ignored. For example, if Curious George were to steal the hat of the Man in the Yellow Hat, it would be false to refer to the Man in the Yellow Hat—a proper noun—as the man in the yellow hat. This is akin to a puzzle devised by either Russell or Frege—”
“Dude, fuck this,” Tomas says as he finishes his drink. “I have to take a fucking piss.”
I turn to Patrick as Tomas stumbles from his seat. Patrick is ostensibly upset. “Don't mind him,” I say. “He's just drunk.” The conversation stalls for a few moments as we both look around in something akin to an awkward silence, perhaps a distant cousin. I become better acquainted with the aesthetics of the bar, which could be one of the last authentic drinking establishments left on the north Bedford strip: the lack of renovation, the surly-looking bartender, the absence of a woman both single and under forty, the wood veneer, the Christmas lights that are on even in the summer, the pictures of the place from back in the seventies, the availability of seats, the drink specials that do not cater to consumers of pink or green concoctions, the paucity of concern, the stools, tables, and patrons standing on shaky ground, the dirty mirrors, dart holes, and ancient beer advertisements that adorn the walls. People here do not wash behind their ears, nor do they inhabit the world of will; they reside in the realms of should and could and would, an unfortunate domain in which the magnanimous contours of fantasy never seem to comply with the path that reality has decided to take. Sometimes they compare these lines and measure the degree of the angle created when the two diverged. Sometimes it seems more bearable to see the tears of our mothers than the harrowing face of reality.
“You do know that progress is measured by the degree a society understands light, correct?”
“Sure.”
Is that a Plato reference? Is it simply a fact about the progression the study of physics has taken? Does it concern digital technology?
Conversation comes to a halt once again. The jukebox continues to grace us with the sounds of the seventies—now John Sebastian's “Welcome Back”—thereby providing a protracted reprieve from the hair metal medley on which some dude in a Def Leppard had spent a small fortune. Most of the songs were less famous than the typical arsenal of albums these types of bars often carry—records by Poison, Ratt, Warrant, Whitesnake (or is it White Snake?), Motley Crue, Skid Row, Quiet Riot, Twisted Sister, Scorpions, or any of those bands that regularly gig in Purgatory—but each track was known and enjoyed by the majority of the patrons. The Journey requisite was taken care of fairly early on; Guns n' Roses, however, lay in wait, perhaps on reserve. I am expecting Patrick to put on Dusty Springfield or Wham! at some point in order to cement his places as the most annoying presence the bar has seen in recent years, but the John Sebastian seems to be enough to put him there.
“So what do you know of Coprolalia?” I ask plainly.
“Nothing really. I've seen a few of his pieces and most of my friends think he is just the bee's knees; but, like I told you earlier, he's a friend of a friend, who, I suppose, is something of a friend of a friend. Do you know anything of Willis Faxo? I figured you would have come across his name in your search for the artist.”
“Not really,” I respond. “I've heard a few things about him—and only then from Tomas or our friend James.”
“He's a very odd bird—Willis, that is. Something of a Pygmalion, I suppose, though he makes furniture—tables and chairs mostly. Everything is fashioned out of wood. I was under the impression that he was still in Astoria, but a less than reliable source recently told me that he's moved into a space somewhere in that limbo region between Williamsburg and Bushwick—the one the real estate brokers are now calling either East Williamsburg or the Williamsburg Industrial Park. Industrial Park.” He lets out a caustic laugh. “There's an oxymoron if I've ever heard one.” He picks up one of his beers. “It's a desolate area, really. I've known quite a number of people who've been mugged there.
“But you have no need for this information,” he says before taking down about a quarter of his beer. “You want to know about the artist. Well, according to my friend Daphne, the same Daphne whom Mr. Faxo knew biblically, the two were roommates in college.”
“Wait. Who was roommates with who?”
“It's whom—but that's irrelevant. Mr. Fax
o roomed with the artist. They both went to that art school in the East Village. Cooper State? Cooper University?”
“Cooper Union?”
“Yes, Cooper Union. They went there. Your artist's real name is Mordecai, but I don't know his last name.” I smile. I don't know the adjective that would qualify it. “Also, he grew up somewhere in Brooklyn—either Midwood or Bensonhurst, I believe.”
“Bay Ridge?” I suppose.
“No, certainly not Bay Ridge. It's one of the neighborhoods to the east of Bay Ridge, and west of Sheepshead Bay. It’s north of both of these regions, as well.” He pauses to scratch his head. “You probably want to know some more details about him, but I can't offer you much help. I haven't seen so much as a picture of him.”
“Well, do you know how I can get in touch with this Faxo character?”
He does not respond with a word; he merely pulls out a sheet of paper that contains a name and a number. “I don't know if Daphne still speaks with him,” he says as he points to the name on the paper. “The two were together for a short time, so don't be too upset if she can't help you.”
“Why didn't you just bring her along?”
“You need to relax, mate,” he snaps with a sudden look of severity. He pulls his head back and regains his former, gregarious constitution. “I was going to surprise you, but it seems as though the two of you are well on your way to making perfect asses out of yourselves if we don't get out of here after the next drink.” I look to him with a wince. “I'm to meet with her tonight at a party. You can either come with me or you can go home and call her tomorrow. It's your choice.” There's a lapse of sound as songs change. The new tune evokes an elated grin from Patrick. “Do you like Seals and Croft?”