by Jay Fox
I can't deny that I'm nervous when I finally get out of the rain and into Faxo's lobby. Pale light stumbles through a thick slab of glass reinforced by hundreds of St. Andrews crosses made of chicken wire. There are four units in the building: one on the ground floor, one on the second floor, and two on the top floor. Faxo's unit is on the second.
When Faxo opens his door, I am surprised to discover that his apartment is actually a wood shop, and that the majority of the space is something of a showroom as opposed to what one might call living quarters. He does not own a television, and, with the exception of the kitchen appliances and stereo, the only piece of furniture in the apartment not made by Faxo goes by the name of Scooter, a dopehead with the attention span of a toddler. A bong sits in front of him, as does a huge bag of what appears to be primo weed. Faxo quickly apologizes for the noise from the workshop downstairs, which, he informs me, specializes in refurbishing limousine engines. The two units upstairs, he adds, have become lofts. “I think there's five kids in each.” He looks to his friend. “Yo', Scoot, have you seen any of them yet?”
“No,” he mumbles. “Hey, dude, blow more doja.” It's pronounced dō'zha.
“What?”
“Fucking Detroitisms,” Faxo says with a smile. Scooter looks confused. “These are the same assholes who 'smoke down'.”
Scooter responds with a gurgling sound that does not come from his throat.
“So you're interested in finding Mordy?” Faxo resumes as he takes a seat in a rocking chair.
“Yes,” I respond. My eyes wander in search of a seat and land on a stool. “He is Coprolalia, right?” as I sit.
“I really don't know,” casually. “I only lived with the guy for a month or two.” He pauses. “You want anything to drink? Water, tea, a cocktail maybe?” He stands.
“No, I'm fine,” I respond as Scooter coughs out a wall of smoke.
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I'm fine.”
“I have some wine.” Before I can decline, he lets out a brief, shallow laugh. “I just realized it's barely noon,” as he makes his way back towards the rocking chair with a 1.5 liter bottle of water retrieved from the nearby counter.
“Actually, it's ten-thirty.”
“Either way, it feels like it's the middle of the night to me,” as he takes his seat once again. “It always takes me three or four days to get used to the time difference. I'm left pretty much wandering around in a fugue-state until then. That being said, I apologize if I'm a bit spacey or…what's the word I'm looking for?”
“Loopy?” Scooter asks.
Willis looks to me with a grin as he unscrews the cap. “Does 'loopy' sound good to you?”
“I would go with faded.”
“Faded? California boy?”
“No,” I respond, “Just a word that came up yesterday.”
He nods. “You know what I just thought about?” Silence. “I haven't thought about this in years: California was supposed to fall into the ocean.”
“I remember hearing that.”
“And yet it didn't.” He takes a sip from the bottle, and quickly screws the cap back on. “Was it a joke, or was it based on scientific study? I don't mean to mock global warming by means of a poor analogy, mind you; I just think it's odd that we don't hear about the death of California as often as we used to—especially now that it's such a drain not only upon our culture, but upon our economy as well. Proposition Thirteen, man,” he shakes his head.
“What's that?”
“Proposition Thirteen. It pretty much allowed the people to vote on the budget. Their choices reflect just how myopic Americans are when it comes to government. They voted to have lower taxes and more social services. It's like wanting…you know, I can't even think of a good simile. It just shows you are fucking stupid people are.” He takes the cap off the bottle. “You know what, I’ll just shut up—you're here to find out about Mordy.” He takes another sip. “I just want to emphasize the fact that I don't know him very well. Our story is pretty brief.”
“It doesn't matter. Any information will help.”
“Well,” recapping, “In the fall of ninety-three I moved into a two bedroom apartment on First Avenue and Seventh. The place wasn't all that nice, but the location was all that mattered to me. You know, back then the Village was really thriving artistically. Today it seems to be nothing more than a bunch of yuppies living out an ironic elegy. Anyway, back then I lived with this guy, Tommy. We were roommates for about a year and a half or so. He was a nice kid out of the Poconos, who tended bar at some place that's not around anymore; it was one of those East Village dives that used to attract a lot of punker kids and deadbeats…something like the International Bar, if you've ever been there.”
“Once or twice,” I respond. “They've closed, you know.”
“Figures,” spitefully. “Regardless, you know the type of place I'm talking about—kids and regulars, dudes down on their luck, dudes that ain't never had any luck to begin with. Tommy used to brag and say that he knew ninety percent of the people who came through the door, maybe not by name, but by face or by drink. And he got on with just about anyone—he was a real chill cat. He would get me and my buddies loaded whenever we went in. I'd cook him dinner the next night. We had a good thing going.
“But, you know, sometimes good people turn into bad people just because of one stupid decision. And Tommy was no exception to this aphorism, trite as it may seem. That being said, there was this one group of kids who came in a lot. A bunch of fucking punks. Everyone hated them. Everyone except this one girl, Hannah, who used to hang out with them quite a bit—not just at the bar, either.
“Now Hannah was a good girl. And she was a fucking piece, too. She had these eyes—Tommy and I used to call them the 'fuck me eyes'. It's not like she tried to do it. She couldn't help it. She just looked like she wanted to attack every dick she saw.
“So, by no real fault of her own, she ended up getting a lot of attention. And, due to her surroundings, it wasn't the kind of attention that a girl necessarily wants. But she handled it well. She was one of those free spirits—not free in the sense that she was flighty or blind to the harsh realities of the real world like most of those liberal arts white girls you meet in Park Slope these days. No, it was more that she was comfortable. With herself. With her surroundings. She was always smiling. She was always laughing. If you called her a chick or a bitch, though,” he laughs and shakes his head; “Man…heads would fucking roll.
“I never could figure out why she spent so much time with the Burnouts, which was the epithet the rest of the regulars attached to the group of losers she hung around. Drugs would be a rational assumption, but she didn't fuck around with that shit. She was a mild drinker; vegan; had hair the color of cotton candy—not too different from some of the types you see running around Williamsburg these days. Only she was for real, know what I mean. And that's what attracted Tommy to her. He wasn't really into the scene at the time, but he certainly liked the music. She knew a lot of the bands floating around the City back then—and not 'know' in either the heard-of or Biblical sense; she knew them personally because she was the beautiful girl with pink hair who everyone wanted to fuck or, failing that, talk to.
“Tommy would give her a few free rounds every time she came in, and they would talk about punk rock and revolution and all of the other stuff you talk about when you're in your early-twenties and you live in New York City and you consider yourself a rebel, even if you sometimes don't fully understand what it is you're rebelling against, let alone why you're rebelling against it. Because you're too young then. Hell, I'm still too young to understand all of it.” He smiles. “But that's neither here nor there. We're all destined to die, and we're all angered by that fact. Forlorn, anguish, despair—fancy Sartrean terminology for the simple fact that we're conscious not only of the fecundity of life, but the ultimate futility and transience of it. It fucking sucks. Moreover, growing old sucks. We don't want eternal life; we want
eternal youth.”
“You're only as old as you act,” Scooter says.
“And yet the autistic die like the rest of us.”
“You're such a fucking buzz-kill today, man,” Scooter says as he holds the flame of the lighter a few centimeters away from the slide.
“Anyway, they—Tommy and Hannah—started fucking. And that, I guess (caesura) initiated—if that's the word—Tommy into the Burnouts.
“Now, a lot of people have the impression that junkies just sit around all day getting all types of fucked up. The truth of the matter, however, is that a lot of them have jobs and can manage to socialize and seem to kind of have their shit together. Either way, the people in the bar knew what these kids were up to, and they definitely noticed when Tommy started getting into that shit. People kept wanting to have talks with me so that I would have a talk with Tommy. They didn't want Hannah to know. I was reluctant to initiate a dialog with Tommy, but eventually I did. And it was a waste. I knew it was going to be a waste. People like that aren't going to listen to what you have to say.”
“They never do,” I nod.
“Yeah, and things turned sour real quick. Some people can use for years without getting desperate. Tommy, however, didn’t fall into this category. It really changed him. I knew he was in real trouble when things around the apartment started disappearing. This is after maybe two months. I remember that Hannah split shortly thereafter. It was a bad scene, but I guess I was naïve about him, about will power in the face of that shit. I was young, you know, and I had—I have—stayed away from it my whole life. I didn't understand what it could do to a person.
“So, because I was young and stupid, I thought he'd snap out of it. And, you know, he was a pretty bright guy; it wasn't that he was oblivious to the fact that he was fucking up his life—he just didn't care. But, blazing revelations aside, nothing was going to change him. People don't fucking change on their own.” He takes another sip from his bottle of water. “Suffice to say, help had to come from elsewhere.
“One day he came home to find his parents sitting on the couch. They had come out from Pennsylvania with—I shit you not—their fucking priest. Turns out Hannah had called them up to let them know that their son was a heroin addict and that he had given her the Hiv (pronounced that way, not spelled out as H-I-V), which was a lie, but she figured it would expedite the process of getting his parents involved with the mess that had become his life. Instead of being passive-aggressive like most of the white parents I've seen, they reacted with a fucking blitzkrieg. They told his boss that he was quitting, told the landlord that he was moving, and came to the city with a van. He didn't know any of this shit was going on. They actually sat outside our apartment until they saw him leave, and then they came in and fucking cleared the place out.”
“What?”
“Yeah. I helped orchestrate it in a sense. I mean, I told them the time to come. I wanted Tommy to get better, but I also wanted to make sure I was there when they came in so they didn't take any of my shit—you know, by accident.
“When I talked to Hannah about it the next night, she told me that, for starters, she didn't have the virus. So maybe this was a little bit more than a few weeks after they broke up,” he says to himself. “Either way, she just figured it was a matter of time before he picked it up—if he hadn't already.” He takes another sip from the bottle. “She probably wasn't too far off the mark, you know—about the Hiv thing. People were dropping like fucking flies in this city when I was growing up.”
“You grew up here?” I ask.
“Naw, not in Brooklyn. I grew up in Harlem, about a block away from Trinity Cemetery, if you know the area,” he says with a curious eye.
“I haven't been up there that much.”
“How long have you been here?”
“About four years.”
“Yeah, it's funny,” as he pulls the bottle to his mouth. “I've met people who think Manhattan ends at Em El Kay. That, or else they think it's like the fucking south Bronx up there. But it's really nice, especially where I grew up. Now, at least. It hasn't always been all that nice. But there's a lot of brownstones, a lot of stuff to do, a lot of students. I should know,” he laughs; “I lived up there until I moved into that apartment in the Village. Our house has been in my family for over sixty years. My granddad bought it when he came back from Japan after the war. He refused to let it go even when the area went to shit in the seventies and eighties. I guess it makes sense, though; I mean, he's spent most of his life there. He taught at City College until ten years ago.”
“What did he teach?”
“Physics. He supposedly taught one of the…what's the word…I guess pioneers of string theory, but I don't know how accurate that is. He's fucking old now—ninety-six. It's not that he's senile or anything; he just doesn't always feel like telling you the truth.” He shakes his head. “It's fucked up watching someone you love so much grow old, but that's the way it goes.” He takes on a morose expression for a moment, but it quickly passes. He looks to the water in his hand, but doesn't raise it to his mouth. “Where are my manners—I'm supposed to be telling you about Mordy.
“So I needed to find a roommate on account of Tommy's being abducted by his parents and subsequently sent to rehab. His dad dropped a month's rent to help me out, which I was certainly grateful for, but I had no idea how I was supposed to go about finding a roommate without getting stuck with some type of lunatic. These were the days before the Internet and Craigslist and all that; the only way to go about things was either word of mouth or classifieds. I asked around for a few days, but no one needed a place—that, or they needed a place but couldn't pay the rent. So I took out an ad in the Voice, and I ended up meeting with five or six people. There were a lot of personality clashes, though. Mordy was the only guy I got on with. There was an immediate rapport between the two of us. I told him he could move in the next day.”
“Where was he living prior to this?”
“He was living either on or nearby Avenue M. I know he lived close to the train stop over there—with his parents.”
“Why did he want to move out?”
“It's not that there was any type of animosity between him and his parents; he just thought it sad for a man of twenty-three to be living with his folks. Also, he had always wanted to move into Manhattan—you know, just to experience it.”
“What did he do?”
“What do you mean?”
“What did he do for a living?”
“Worked at the family store. They owned a deli somewhere by Prospect Park. Still owns it, so far as I know.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“About what?”
“Where it is.”
“I know it's somewhere in either Park Slope or that one place to the south.”
“Windsor Terrace?”
“Yeah. That one.”
“Does he still work there?”
Faxo is pensive. He clutches the water bottle tightly. It crinkles, cracks; a pop resonates throughout the room. Scooter looks to Faxo's with stupefied awe. “Are you guys talking about your old roommate with the uncle who sounded like Larry David?”
“Yeah. Mordecai,” Willis responds.
“Mordecai,” Scooter nods. “Dude, that guy puffed tough.”
“He puffed what?”
“Detroitism…”
“So do you know if he still works there?”
“I really couldn't tell you. I do know that he was working there the last time I saw him, but that was about four years ago.”
“Daphne mentioned that the two of you had a falling out.”
“No, we just kind of lost touch. A falling out seems to imply that a specific event caused a gradual decay of relations. That never happened. The simple truth of the matter is that it's difficult to keep up with a man who refuses to own a phone.” He pauses. “And it doesn't have anything to do with him being Orthodox or anything like that—even though, so far as I know, there is
no telephone prohibition in the Torah. In fact, the Hasids down in Boro Park are on their cell phones about as often as Manhattan businessmen, fourteen-year-old girls, and lazy entrepreneurs from Harlem and the Bronx, who don't do anything all day besides mooch off their chickenhead girlfriends while telling everyone within earshot that they're 'entrepreneurs', or, worse, 'producers'.”
“So what is he?”
“What do you mean?”
“In terms of being Jewish.”
“He was Jewish,” slowly.
“Was he reform, was he—”
“Oh…that. Yeah, he probably fell in that group. He wasn’t even kosher.”
“Was he an atheist?”
“I don't think he would have ever called himself by that title. He certainly never practiced when I lived with him. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard him talk about the subject. He probably celebrates the high holidays with the family, and he may fast whenever it's required, but religion isn't a big part of his life—at least it wasn't when I knew him. With how many born-agains there are these days, though, I guess you never can tell. He always described himself as a…what'd he call it?” He pauses. “A curious theist: Feeling is all; the name is sound and smoke, beclouding Heaven's glow.”
“That sounds familiar.”
“It should. It was one of Mordy's favorite lines. He was a big fan of Faust, though he claimed that no English translation ever did the work justice.”
The work downstairs comes to a sudden stop. The apartment is silent. Scooter spouts out something unintelligible and chuckles to himself. When neither Faxo nor I respond with anything more than knitted brows, he rises and reaches for the iPod that is plugged into the stereo. As he plops back down on the couch, he mentions that the name of the band that we're suddenly hearing goes by the name the Gryphon Shepherds. The two of us shrug and compliment his choice, though I am less concerned with the exposure to a new band, and more interested in the connection between Coprolalia and the man sitting across from me. This is rather obvious even to Scooter.