THE WALLS

by Jay Fox

  “Come to think of it, Mordy's mother was religious. His dad wasn't. No, man, his dad…man, his dad was a fucking trip. He's one of those old school New York intellectuals. Kind of like my granddad in a way, though he, my granddad, was more of an academic than an intellectual.”

  “How old is Mordy's dad?”

  “Old. His name is Isaac. Mordy's mother was his second wife. She would be in her mid- to late-fifties now. Mr. Adelstein would probably be closer to seventy.”

  “Adelstein?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was he like?”

  “I don't know. You know Saul Bellow?”

  “I've certainly heard of him. He's kind of a family favorite.”

  “Do you know the book Humboldt's Gift?”

  “I haven't read it, but I've heard a good deal about it.”

  “Well, there's this one character in it, Humboldt, who reminds me a lot of Mr. Adelstein. To a degree, mind you. What I mean to say is that the man has read everything, can argue about anything, and will mention everything from Gilgamesh to the most recent Bond film in a five minute time-span.”

  “I know the type,” I say dryly.

  “I'm sorry if I digress. It's the whole lack-of-sleep thing. It makes you crazy.” He smiles. “So, about Mordy. Now, as I've said, Mordy only lived with me for a month or so because we were kicked out of our apartment. It was some bullshit, man. One day the landlord's son came by to tell us that the cops had come into the building to stop a domestic situation down the hall—something that was certainly not out of the ordinary back in those days—and that they had seen syringes in the stairwell. Now, by this point, Tommy has been out of the apartment for well over a month. I've never used. Mordy, so far as I know, never used. On top of that, when I looked for these alleged needles, all I saw was fucking rat turds and broken glass,” he laughs. “So, my conclusion was that either the cops had the landlord clean them up, which is the most likely scenario in hindsight, or they never were there in the first place, which is what I believed at the time, largely due to my situation as a young black man in America.

  “Now, legally speaking, we weren't evicted. We made a deal with the landlord's son, Joe, who said he would allow us to break our lease—yeah, yeah, 'allow'—but that, should we stay, he would have no problem allowing the po-lease to search our apartment at random. 'I don't want no fucking junkies in my fucking building, alright,'” Faxo says in a thick Italian accent. “The ultimatum, in other words, was we either move out or live under constant surveillance. Now, a more conservative person would hardly see this the way I do. He would probably think, If you have nothing to hide, then you shouldn't have a problem with such an invasive policy—although this individual would probably use the euphemism 'a more transparent, secure policy', a positive, to describe the situation—, but what is there to stop someone from planting a bag in the apartment. The situation being what it was, we decided it was best to move.

  “Joe promised to give us back our deposit. And he did, too. He even put in a good word with my next landlord. The fucked up thing, though, was that on the day we moved out, we saw about half of the other tenants doing the same fucking thing. After another month, all of the tenants had been cleared out. And then the contractors started appearing. The whole building was completely renovated. By the end of the year, my apartment was being rented out for way more than what I had paid. It wasn't double or anything like that, but it was a pretty serious increase. It was some bullshit, man.

  “Joe's father, it turns out, had died right around the time Mordy moved in, and Joe had inherited the property. Within a couple of days, some reps from a real estate firm by the name of Abram and Keens came to him. They offered Joe twice the market value on the building on the condition that he find a way to get rid of all the tenants within ninety days.”

  “How the hell did you hear about this?”

  “I only moved half a block east, so I was right there to watch all of this shit go down. Plus, my new landlord, Rosa, was the neighborhood gossip. You'd be surprised just how much information these people pick up. She should have been a journalist.”

  “And Mordecai moved out to Greenpoint, right?”

  “Yeah, moved into this Polish dowager's house. Weird lady.”

  “How long was he there?”

  “I'm not really sure. I'm sure he's moved now, but I couldn't tell you where to. As I've said, I could never get in touch with him—he's never owned a phone.” He shrugs. “Yeah, but that's like him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He's a private guy,” he chuckles. “You should know that much by now.”

  “I can understand being private, but he doesn't seem to have any connections to anyone. You're the first person I've met who knows him personally. Or knew, rather.”

  “I didn't even know him all that well. He never talked about his art until I caught him in the act one night. I just happened to walk in on him when we were out at the bar. I think we were at the Paulmil Café—perhaps the seediest place in all of Manhattan. Come to think of it, we had just talked with Joe, and were trying to decide whether it was best to stay or to go.” He shakes his head. “But that's beside the point. When I came back to the table after I was finished taking a piss, I told him that I thought his drawing was really clever. It had something to do with the bad press the Clintons were receiving on account of Whitewater, but I don't really remember the specifics of the piece.”

  “So this was, what, ninety-six.”

  “Try ninety-four, man.”

  “So you lived together then—obviously.”

  “Yeah, he moved in on the first day of…let me think…March. Yeah, because winter was ending, and I finished out the semester in the new place. So I lived with him for the March and the April of ninety-four.” He laughs. “It seems as though the interview has officially begun, huh?”

  I laugh, too. Daphne and Sean had made him out to be some kind of misanthropic intellectual, but, in reality, he doesn't strike me as any different than most of the people I've met in the past weeks. True, his accent is not as thick as most of the other New Yorkers I've come across. Also, he's one of the few black people that I have met as I've scoured the dives of the city.

  It seems as though black people don't go to the bar to fraternize as often as white people do—unless, of course, they are out with their white friends. I have seen a lot of black people at places that like to call themselves lounges. The disparities between a lounge and a bar are few, but, from what I can gather, the main distinctions are the price of the drinks, the comfort of the furniture, and the age and volume of the music.

  “So what else would you like to know?” he asks.

  “Anything you can tell me, really. Do you know if there's a way to find his parent's house? Do they still live in the same place?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “And you say that they lived on Avenue M?”

  “I'm not sure. Mordy always said he lived off the Avenue M stop on the Q. He could have lived on any street around there. If you haven't noticed by now, Brooklyn people, especially those who have spent their whole lives here, have a fucked up conception of walking distance.” I furrow my brow. “Well, they tend to think that everything is a lot closer than it actually is—especially when it comes to trains. I dated this one girl who always said that she lived 'right by the train'. Turns out she lived nine blocks away from it. I measured it out—it was just under a fucking mile,” he exclaims. “A fucking mile,” he adds to Scooter, who gives back an expression of a deer caught not only in the headlights of a semi, but its grill.

  “Fucking stoner,” with facetious contempt.

  “What about the last time you saw him? Did he mention anything that…I guess I could use to find him?”

  “Let's see…I saw him in February. Like I've said, I have no way of getting into contact with him or anything—we just randomly ran into each other at some bar just south of Columbia. I don't remember the name. He wouldn't shut up
about this lawsuit against his dad's store. Apparently, it was a slip and fall accident. The plaintiff and her husband were demanding something absurd—like three million dollars or some shit.” I nod. “Anyway, he was there with his cousin.”

  “What's his cousin's name.”

  “I was kind of drunk at the time,” he shrugs with a grin. “I think she was working on a Ph.D.,” he begins. “No!” he jumps. “She was in med-school. She was specializing in neurology.”

  “Do you know if she has the same last name as him?”

  “I really have no idea. She had a really Jewish first name. Yeah, and the two of them were debating whether or not he should attend an I.S.M.—”

  “What's the I.S.M.?”

  “The International Solidarity Movement. It's a pro-Palestinian organization.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, yeah, that was kind of the joke. Mordecai didn't really want to go; he's not particularly supportive of Israel's expansionist policies, but he didn't think he'd be welcome on account of his being Jewish and all. She said half of the people there were going to be Jewish. She was a bit more militant in her views, too, accusing the Israeli government of everything short of Holocaust. She was especially pissed because some guy was trying to get an injunction to keep the P.M.I. from holding their conference at Columbia.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “Typical right-wing shit. Supporting the oppressed is supporting terrorism. Same type of language the Apartheid government used whenever they spoke of the A.N.C.”

  “I see.”

  “I don't know what happened with the injunction. I'm guessing the judge threw it out.”

  “Did Mordecai end up going to the event?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “He spends a pretty good amount of time up around there, you know.”

  “That's not all that surprising. He was close with that cousin of his.”

  “He recently did a piece that Sean has entitled Glass Onion.”

  “Sean?”

  “Winchester.”

  A roll of the eyes.

  “What?”

  He shakes his head. “Nothing.”

  “So he was close with her, then?”

  “Maybe.” He laughs, this time with what almost seems like hostility. “Look, I know you want someone who can lead you to Mordy, but, really, I barely know the guy. I've never met any of his friends. For all I know he doesn't have any. I've only met his cousin, his uncle, and his father. His uncle and his dad helped moved him in and out of the apartment, and his dad came by another time to take us out for dinner.” He gives a bit of a wince. “Really, I wish I could help you out a bit more.”

  “Anything you could tell me about him. I mean, did he, did he ever admit to being Coprolalia?”

  “Yes and no. I did hear him refer to himself by that name a few years before that idiot professor started using it to describe every piece of latrine art he thought witty enough to be evaluated or criticized.” He shakes his head. “But what is art? Oscar Wilde aphorisms aside, art does have a purpose; it just isn't a purpose like food or shelter or water or even sex. If it were useless, it would not be ubiquitous. Yet art is found in every culture. Even troglodytes took time off from fucking and killing to paint on the wall, know what I mean?”

  “Troglodytes!” Scooter yelps. “That song is the shit.”

  “Every society has it, but, apparently, no one needs it. It seems as though the majority of art in our society, however, is created solely to bewilder or shock people. High art, I mean. It's either provocative for the sake of being provocative, or it needs to be dissected and interpreted because it lacks that…what's the word I'm looking for…that visceral…ness. Is that a word? Visceralness?”

  “For right now, sure.”

  “What I'm saying is that it is either the most base form of visceral provocation—like shit on a pedestal—or it's produced with extreme pretense.” The song Troglodytes comes on. I feel as though I am once again worshiping Risus. “Not to say that I want to revert back to the bathos of Romanticism. And, look, it's not I hate everything being produced right now, either. I couldn't begin to give a list of all the great people out there who continue to astound me with their abilities and their insights. But, for the most part, I see way too much esoteric shit.

  “When artists returned to the portrayal of Matter as opposed to Form, Subject instead of Substance, during the Renaissance, there was still a sense of propriety, you know, because there was the desire to emulate Nature. But that wasn't enough. It never should have been enough. But obstacles, institutions, started evaporating too quickly after the Impressionists. It wasn't enough to have art be about an individual's style, the artist's observation seen through his own subjective perspective; it had to go further. And soon the communal framework, the pragmatic and inferential elements of society, gave way to utter chaos; it was like jumping from capitalism to anarchy over the course of a few years. I'll admit that, when the revolution was beginning, when art was standing on the edge, that was one of the most fecund eras of modern art; but now the avant-garde has rejected all shared experience. When what Habermas would call the lifeworld is thought to be a part of the hegemony and monolith of capitalism, and one believes it is the all-too Romantic mission of the artist to fight against it, you end up with a lack of coherence, an inability to convey anything because the very symbols within the various superstructures of the society are given meanings that have no context outside of the artist’s mind. Such symbols are, consequently, perceived as meaningless by just about everyone in the community—just like in the case of DuChamps' fucking Fountain, which is only clever in the sense that no one, so far as I know, had made such a purely Structuralist work. Either way, this is the worst aspect of Modernism, if you think about it. Not only will it always be haunted by the specter of Romanticism and, worse, Objectivism, which is—and a lot of people will disagree here—perhaps the closest thing to a Modernist philosophy, it will also never cease to be esoteric by definition. If you think about it this way, it makes it seem to be the marriage of narcissism and Positivism. You feel as though you, the artist, can save the world through your work. But, to add to the narcissism and arcane nature of so much of the work, the audience has no idea whether or not the internal experience that is being represented on the canvas or in the piece of wood or marble or whatever is genuine. It ceases to have an affect on you as a witness or spectator beyond the fact that it is making a Structuralist statement about the object d’art while, at the same time, attempting to singlehandedly alter the community’s traditional understanding of a given symbol. It’s kind of how corporations are generating alien meanings for the symbols of our community, or, in some cases, creating entirely new words in order to manipulate not only the meaning we give to things, but the very form and structure that allows for such meanings to develop.

  “When artists first started breaking rules, the goal was to portray an idea, one that was not wholly reliant upon material predications. It was an antithesis that found its genesis in the movement away from the objective or eternal, an antithesis that can be traced back to the moment when man stopped attempting to either showcase the perspective of God or follow the rules of tradition. And it progressed. It progressed as mankind became increasingly alienated from his traditional institutions. Take, for example, the artwork that appeared in the wake of the First World War. They knew they couldn't convey their experiences with recourse to convention; convention was no longer viable. So artists had to abstract in order to share their vision. And it is understandable why they had to do this. But now convention is rejected for the sake of rejecting convention. One thinks it artsy to speak in tongues about the weather. It's not artsy; it's pretentious, the type of shit someone contrives because they don't have anything important to say. I used to argue that this was the necessary progression of art, but, if we have learned anything from this century, it's that Dewey was right to say that critical theory is an inductive method, and that hist
ory may have a progression, but that the progression is only discernible once it has become historical.

  “Back to the point about art, though. We've come to the end game in terms of the progression of abstraction. There is no progression in existential anomie, especially when it morphs into the irrationality and anti-logic and, let's be honest here, nihilism of Dadaism. It's static, and because it's static…” He stops himself. “I'm sorry I just went on that tirade,” he says quietly, for he had begun to raise his voice. “I haven't been able to sleep very well since I came back from Japan.”

  “Why were you there?”

  “Some company based in Osaka wants me to make some shit for them,” he says as he reaches for a pouch of tobacco and a book of papers. “I won't deny that I feel like kind of a sellout, but, at the same time, I'm the type of person who believes that a check is a check so long as I have the freedom to do what I want. If the person providing the check is not asking me to compromise any of my values, then I don't see a problem with taking the money, even if the money comes from a corporation. You know, if they were telling me what to build, then I wouldn't do it. But, in this case, the only parameters I received concerned the dimensions of the room in which the table will be installed. I don't see that as a compromise.” He pauses to lick the paper. “Anyway, to go back to what I was saying.” He pauses again. “What was I saying?” He shakes his head. “I was probably just rambling.” He pauses again. “You have any more questions about Mordy?”

  “Do you think all of the pieces attributed to Coprolalia have been done by him?”

  “No,” he says as he looks for a lighter. “But, then again, I'm not entirely sure. If it is all the work of one man, he certainly has cornered off a wonderful piece of a market that cannot be exploited or profited from. Think about it. What's the only truly public place that is at the same time private enough to allow an artist the chance to exhibit his or her work without fear of it being stolen or removed? Yo', Scoot, can you toss me a light?”