by Jay Fox
There's a haze over most of the memories from last night. Some reels are projected through an obsidian lens; some appear to be edited with little regard to continuity or context. I know that Poot Moint's second set lasted until four or so. I remember looking to a clock shortly after they finished and mentioning the time to Daphne. The set included, among many other songs, “I Can't Give You Anything But Love,” “Them There Eyes,” “Magilla,” “Sixteen Tons” (which was sung by a man who looked exactly like Duke Ellington), as well as a David Grisman tune that no one seemed to know by name (Andreas, the drummer, abandoned the kit and played djembe, Daphne took up a cigarette, the bassist played bass, the guitarist played mandolin, the Domesticon performed miracles on violin, and one of the nudists played flute). Cobalt bitterly lamented over his inability to remember the song's title; he thought the world of the composer, and was ready to embark into freaky realms of masochism because he couldn't come up with so much as the name of the album on which the track appeared. Their final set ended with a song about a famous street in Paris. I don't remember its name.
There were a lot of conversations, perhaps the most interesting of which took place during a mid-set intermission. Andreas had broken the last of his sticks and had run out to the car to get a pack of pair ones. The topic of discussion was phrenology, a subject I know very little about beyond the fact that it systematically interprets the topography of the head. A jazz-cat named Louis thought it to be an intriguing pseudo-science, and had taken it upon himself to study its methods with Derrida in mind. He was a rather odd character, one of those ambiverts who likes to confess more and more information you don’t care about the longer they speak to you. If he got too extroverted, however, asking him to repeat himself was a sure-fire reset button—he was terribly self-conscious of his English.
On top of being interested in phrenology, he was a rather brilliant mathematician. Daphne asked him the odds of her and I having the same number of hairs on our heads. He told us that they were about one hundred and fifteen times better than either her or my chances of winning the lottery, though, he added after a moment of pensive introspection, that this was taking into account a hypothetical world, one in which the two subjects under consideration (myself and Daphne, in this case) were potentially either fully endowed with hair or entirely bald. He and his friend, another Parisian, looked like members of the Cab Calloway Orchestra and, even with limited English skills, managed to employ a plethora of depression and war-era slang. The two of them hated cigarettes, which was surprising as they were French, jazz aficionados, and…well, French. He scolded Daphne, the Domesticon, and a man known only as Le Zouave for smoking, saying that each cigarette reduces an individual's life expectancy by seven seconds (or minutes, I don't remember exactly). “I-I plan on being crushed by an air conditioning unit, you know,” the Domesticon said as he pulled out a pack of Old Testaments. “Total accident. So, um, you know,” as he lit his cigarette, which faintly smelled of brimstone, “I don't know if that really applies to me. But, you know, I'm a fair guy, so I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll inform the guy who puts the thing, the uh, the air conditioner, in—you know, one of those guys you see at Yankee games and on the Jersey shore and at home with the, um, the other gorillas in the Bronx Zoo—that I've been a smoker for several years now, and that he should, you know, that he should install the unit incorrectly a few years in advance. You know, that way, that way, we can both be winners in this situation: your theory about smoking will be right and I'll get to prove that I have free will.” Kind of a bomb. “Seriously though, I love smoking. My shrink though, a-a real Freudian, he always tells me that it's an oral fixation—smoking, that is. And I asked him, you know, do people really carry that with them all their lives? Can it be developed? You know, can you…can you imbue that type of behavior in a person? He said that smoking can bring it out in a person, sure, and that it's, you know, one of those traits that can remain dormant or latent for years if there's no habit to, you know, I guess draw it out. Ever since that day, I've doubled the number of packs that I buy.”
Le Zouave shrugged. “You are smoking more?”
“Oh, the second pack's not for me. No. It's for my wife.” Rim-shot. “I see you have the sticks, Andreas.” An affirmation. “Daphne, are you ready?” The guitarist, Lucas, motioned for the two to return to the stage. The Domesticon turned to Le Zouave. “And you wanted to sing Sexy Bones a bit later?”
“It is C'est si bon.”
“I'm terribly sorry,” he replied. “I guess my mind's a bit preoccupied, you know, being around Daphne and all.”
Not too long after there was an event concerning Mongo, several unopened cans of beer, and a katana. The incident ended the only way that seemed logically possible: the utter destruction of a cheap coffee table. The three zoots eventually wrestled the katana out of Mongo's hands, though in the process they almost stabbed one of Les Poseuses, who, by this time, had removed her socks and held them in her hands as if dual pairs of nunchucks. She lambasted Mongo in French with vehemence, and then began to let loose with the nylon weapons, an act which took just about everybody by surprise (it is always overwhelming to see a nude woman of ostensible grace partake in the Martial Arts), especially the zoots, who attempted a retreat into the bathroom—though this proved to be impossible because the bathroom door had been locked by the two Elvi, who had commandeered the space either to take turns grunting vowels and the words “fuck” and “yeah” and “me” in various combinations, or to just fuck one another in the butt—before taking cover behind the remnants of the coffee table that had been butchered by Mongo. The Domesticon abandoned the stage upon seeing the chaos, and eventually got the woman under control by employing the help of the young Le Zouave and a Furry couple (a turtle by the name of Moxy and a snail by the name of Früvous) that he, the Domesticon, had armed with PVC piping retrieved from a nonspecific locale. The solo Les Poseuses put up quite a fight, though one would have to admit that the engagement was actually two-on-one as opposed to four-on-one—the plush suits worn by Moxy and Früvous gave the duo little better than carpal-tunnel dexterity. Perhaps the culmination of the event came just as one of the Elvi reached his climax, which sounded eerily like the half-mumbled/half-sung portion of the chorus sandwiched between the words “I'm all shook up” in the song with that title. The two other Les Poseuses not involved in the battle got to laughing when they heard this, which seemed to calm the rabid member of the trio to the point of submission, but not before giving the Domesticon one last whap across the face with one of her socks. The situation finally under control, the clarinetist returned to the stage and ended up taking arguably his best solo of the night on the Arlen/Koehler tune “Get Happy.” After the ado, I discovered that the clarinetist and the nearly-nude French woman, subsequently with elbow length mittens as opposed to socks, had been something of an item in the past—at least that's what Cobalt said as he was relaying the story behind the puncture wounds in the wall to the Elvi and Minos, the latter being one of the goth creatures who had missed everything while out on a cigarette run.
I have yet to speak with Tomas. I only know that he and Boots took their leave after two and before three. Patrick was conscripted to the citrus artillery shortly thereafter. They were still bombarding the wall with fruit when I left, though by this time they had moved on to launching cantaloupes to the sounds of bizarre psychedelic bands and hits from the seventies known more for their obscurity than their brilliance. (“You're never heard of Dennis Coffey and the Detroit Guitar Band or the Jimmy Castor Bunch?” Moxy asked me when I voiced my ignorance. “But you at least know of Atomic Rooster, right? Can? The Chocolate Watchband? The Tages? The Koobas? The Galliwogs? The Daily Flash? Mouse?” When I responded with a shrug and a diffident shake of the head, she laughed: “Okay, but you have to know the La De Das.” Again, an uneasy shrug. “What rock have you been hiding under?”) I felt like an extra in Nut House Rock, the king's less than successful response to Magical Mystery Tour and Head
.
I don't mention all of this to Sean. He can infer from my tenor that I have been through the proverbial looking glass and back. “And you've been told that Coprolalia's real name is Mordecai, that he is probably thirty-two years old, and that he grew up in Midwood?”
“Yes,” I respond. “I've also heard that he lived with a man named Willis Faxo for a while during Faxo's time at Cooper Union.” A groan travels down the line, deep into the low end of things. “I still don't know how they met. According to my source, Mordecai wasn't a student at Cooper Union.”
“Faxo?”
“Yes, Willis Faxo. You've heard of him?”
“I've heard more than enough about him.” He pauses. “But the A-R-E?”
“The Acolytes of some Roman god.”
“Risus. God of laughter, joy. Greek too,” he adds. “Then again, there is Gelos, who is also cited as being the god of laughter.” He pauses. “Well, with regards to Risus, there' relatively little referential information about him. I believe Apuleius' the Golden Ass is the source most frequently cited.”
“You already know all of this?”
“Yes, and I've also heard a lot more about those initials. I would suspect someone's playing a prank on you, but I don't know who would go through that much trouble to dick around someone like yourself.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” defenses up.
“Look,” he begins, “I don't mean to be rude. It's just…it's just that there's a lot to explain, and I have a meeting in about half an hour.”
“It's Sunday.”
“Ah, well, the university never sleeps,” he says dispassionately. “I want to talk to you about all of this, though. Can you meet for coffee down in the Village? Let's say two?”
11.1
The heat is beginning to make life in the city that genre of annoying that requires all conversation address and exhaust complaints about temperature, humidity, precipitation, and Global Warming (or, provided you're too stubborn to use a term favored by environmentalists, Global Climate Change). “Hot one today, huh?” Sean says as I approach the table.
“Yeah,” I respond as several beads of sweat aggregate to form one big tear, which descends down my cheek. “I could barely sleep. My roommate is too cheap to have an air conditioner in the apartment.”
“Well sit down,” he says as he picks up his coffee as though to toast. “You look like you're been to hell and back.”
“This search is killing me, Sean. Seriously, I think I'm taking tonight off. I can't keep drinking like this.”
“You're twenty-two, right?” I nod hesitantly. “It gets far worse, my friend. Just wait until you have to start dealing with the two-day hangover. Just another bead on the con side of age.”
Sean has a bad habit of sounding patronizing even when he means well. A part of me thinks it's the environment in which he resides—that fantasy world of academia, where people lapse into worlds that only exist on paper, lose entire months of their lives to esoteric projects, revile sleep, subsist on strict diets of coffee, cigarettes, and consumables that contain heavy amounts of additives and require only the opening of a bag or a can to eat, and somehow always manage to under-appreciate a far too attractive girlfriend or boyfriend. When they reemerge, terrified of light and most forms of human interaction, they often make comments that seem bizarre, as they have forgotten that they are the only passengers on their train of thought. The significant other, of course, finds this endearing; just about everyone else finds it anywhere from perplexing to creepy.
The tangential form of consciousness and the absence of healthy eating habits are probably the least deleterious aspects of living a life that is defined by hermeneutics (in several ways). The greater concern has to do with amphetamine addiction, insanity, and all of those other adjuncts of solitary confinement that rear their ugly heads around the corner like potential assassins contemplating the best vantage from where to take their shot. The mathematics, economics, biology, and physic students are probably the worst in this aspect—what little time they do have to themselves they reserve for all-night drinking bouts, sleepovers in various psyche wards, or hours spent on the benches in the park where the largest populations of pigeons are known to congregate. The philosophers use their free time to argue via recondite and archaic terminology, which I suppose is nothing more than an extension of their already useless hobby; history students are prone to relegating sleep to a diminutive position, one valued only slightly more than masturbation (they are, after all, the biggest readers in the world of academia—something that law students like to deny, as law students are convinced that studying law is the single most demanding occupation one can have until they begin practicing—guess what becomes the most demanding occupation then?). Women's studies majors get offended by universal statements, generalizations, and any remark that requires it be taken either as a joke or with a grain of salt (the fact that you're getting upset by this comment only proves my point). The literature students tend to work hard enough to sound intelligent at parties where they are required to relive scenes from the Dharma Bums. In their more cloistered moments, they drink coffee and conjure up theories that trivialize and generalize things like sexism and racism, as comparative literature is less of a concentration or major, and more a method of autoerotic foreplay for nerds. Regardless of intellectual focus, the academic world breeds many things, but it must be remembered that, in some cases, it can cultivate introversion, narcissism, and the complete detachment from the world in which most of us reside. That being said, Sean is far more personable than most who have dedicated so much time to the university.
The people in the garden of the café look to me with suspicion. It is not an expression of condemnation that they exhibit; rather, they seem preoccupied in trying to find conversation matter, and I am evidently a more than worthy candidate. Although I am wearing the sunglasses from last night, I suppose there are other features that reveal the magnitude of my hangover.
“What's so important that it couldn't be discussed over the phone?” I ask.
“Nothing. I just wanted to see you in person, that's all. It's been quite some time.”
“I see.”
“How many of those bars have you been to?” I shift my gaze. “You know…the list that I gave you a few weeks ago.”
“Oh,” I laugh. “That list is pretty outdated.”
“I just made it,” defensively. “Are you sure you didn't just miss some of the pieces? They're not labeled or anything.”
“Yes, I know. Most of the bathrooms have been completely painted over—even in that one dive on Fifth Street.” I name the bar. “It was the first place I went.”
“That's right; they called me,” he chuckles. He taps his forehead with his fist. “I completely forgot about that.”
(It is said that Thales, one of the Seven Sages of Greek Antiquity, was so captivated by the heavens that, as he was escorting a woman from her house so they could star-gaze, he fell into a ditch. When he called out for help, she responded: 'Do you think, Thales, that you will learn what is in the heavens when you cannot see what is in front of your feet?')
“What's your favorite piece so far?”
“The more I think about it, the more I like Herculi Romano Augusto.”
“That's a great one. That's on Fifth Avenue, right?”
“Yeah, but it may be gone already.” I pause. “Sean, there's not going to be anything left soon.”
“That's not true,” he responds, but he cannot meet my eyes.
“There are still some pieces up around here, don't get me wrong; but it seems as though Coprolalia is slowly being wiped off the entire island of Manhattan that exists above Fourteenth Street. Even the Brooklyn and Queens corpus is beginning to disappear. The Bronx is different, but it doesn't matter because he never goes up there. Regardless, so much of it has been erased that it seems almost pointless to abide by that list. I mean, you remember the other day,” I begin. “You know, when I called you from tha
t bar in Red Hook?”
“Yes, I know.” He lights a cigarette and blows the exhaust towards a yuppie couple. They examine him with scorn. “Look, I know it seems to be a daunting task and all, but Coprolalia is alive and well. The only thing is that he moves around a lot. There are entire months that I go without finding anything, and then, suddenly, pieces appear in places as far away as Jamaica and City Island. We've been over this.”
“Well, that could lead us to believe that he doesn't live here anymore—at least not all year.”
“You sound like James,” he derides.
“Well, maybe he's on to something.” Sean rolls his eyes. “I'm not saying that he's definitely right, especially since it would mean that this Mordecai guy isn't Coprolalia.”
“Mordecai—I haven't heard that name in a few years. Never did get a last name, either.” He shakes his head. A long caesura ensues. “You don't believe any of it, do you? You couldn't possibly be that gullible.”
“I'm certainly not going to dismiss the possibility without seeing some type of evidence. Furthermore, it validates my belief that Coprolalia has some type of base south of Prospect Park.”
“Okay,” he begins calmly. “First of all, he's far too young. As you have said, he's only thirty-two years old.”
“I don't know that. I just assume that he's the same age as Willis, and Willis will be turning thirty-three in a month or so.” Sean nods. “Regardless, I still think it's something I should follow up on. I have Willis' number. It couldn't hurt to give him a call.”