by Jay Fox
“No. It's pathetic only if you're conceited and unreasonable. But you have to continue on anyway. You don't have a choice.”
“What do you mean?”
“If I am able to address you as a conscious being, then you are alive. Even if you choose to die, such a choice is made by one who is living. To be or not to be, young man. All other questions are adjunctive to it. Is it not right there in the Declaration of Independence? Life. One cannot have anything unless one has life. Liberty.” He pauses. “What is liberty, my friend?”
I am silent for a moment. I see myself trying to look introspective. “No one really asks that, do they?”
“That is exactly how James Baldwin responded when asked the same question!” He takes pause to laugh. “But liberty; liberty is not simply freedom. Freedom is the pylon of liberty. But liberty is the acceptance of responsibility, the refusal to be little more than a ward. True reactionaries, traditionalists perhaps, have argued against this, and they have legitimized their claims in myriad ways. Men like Charles Loyseau and Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet legitimized the rule of the French crown—while Sir Robert Filmer and those like him, though no one else specifically comes to mind at the moment, legitimized the English one—and the surrounding hierarchy by claiming that order is paramount to both the natural world and morality, that the practices of the ancien régime best embody the Will of God, and, therefore, that God desires certain men to lead and others to follow. Romans was quoted often, though I forget the exact passage.
“Regardless, the Revolution against this system, consequently, took on something of an atheistic, or—according to Anatole France—a deistic, tone. If a cruel system is the system of the Catholic God, then those suffering beneath it will certainly have less than kind thoughts about the nature of this God. Just look at Sade,” he laughs. “But this is a tangent, is it not? What I mean to say is that the fight for liberty is the fight for personal responsibility, for dignity, to cast off the chains of fate. Many people do not understand this. They see responsibility as something that is imposed, liberty as a relief from burden. But it is actually the opposite: Liberty is a burden because it lifts restrictions, thereby leaving man before the world with nothing more than his wits.
“Liberty is dangerous. It is dangerous because it is trust and personal responsibility. A society without trust, a society that believes all people are ultimately irresponsible, will not allow liberty. But we have been granted liberty here, in this country. In fact, if one looks to the words of the Bill of Rights, one realizes that trust is pervasive throughout it. This is a far cry from the days of David and Hammurabi. It is grounded on trust, trust in a people responsible enough to own a firearm, to speak without inciting riot, to write without advocating genocide. This trust, this liberty—it is beautiful. It is beautiful because it is messy, it is chaotic, and it has limitless potential. And this, this my boy, is where the pursuit of happiness comes in. How can one pursue happiness without liberty?”
“But this isn't the eighteenth century any more. A guy with a lot of power and money will just get richer and more powerful at the expense of the people. What I mean to say is that allowing one person to pursue their own definition of happiness will often prevent several others from their own pursuits. And this isn't fair. It isn't just.”
“To think how we've regressed,” he winces. “To think that speaking of liberty promotes the agendas of men who would rape their own mothers for a dollar. Yes, of course they want the freedom to exploit. They want to see every social program gutted, privatized, and left to whither and die. They want to see every roadblock set up to make sure we don't return to the days when a man had no choice but to work for subsistence wages removed. These men befoul the name of liberty in their quest for power and wealth. No, I do not speak of them. I speak of men for whom liberty is infinitely more important than the free market. What seems so odd to me, however, is that the people who trust humanity the least tend to resent regulations the most. Why? If the government steals from you, it's called corruption. If a businessman steals from you, it's called profit. I want more regulations to protect my liberty from corporations, which, contrary to what the Supreme Court may say, are not people.”
“Okay.”
“I apologize for that little rant, my boy,” he laughs. “I asked a simple question and gave you an irrelevant answer.” He sips his coffee. “Let's go back, shall we. Why did you decide to look for my son as opposed to, say, the Holy Grail?”
“There are a number of reasons,” as I look to him. “For one, I thought it'd be a good opportunity—”
“Opportunity!” He smiles. “Thought it may not be my place to play the part of the pedant, I do believe it important to impart this one bit of information to you. Do you know the etymology of the word 'opportunity'?” I shake my head. “It comes from the word opportunus. It means, quite simply, the best way to reach port. Think about that.”
This continues for quite some time. He provides odd pieces of wisdom for which I am less grateful than I appear (which is certainly reminiscent of the night Tomas and I spent with Patrick). He also reproaches me for behaving my age. Repeatedly. I am understandably afraid to seriously argue with him. He is Coprolalia's father after all.
It's something of a disappointment that Isaac was never one for photography. The most recent picture he has of his son was taken four years before the accident, on his thirtieth birthday. It does not take him long to find it.
Mordecai does not look the way I had imagined him—his short, brown hair has a reddish tint to it; his face is somewhat long and thin, lacking in any discernible feature except for the absence of defined cheekbones or a beard or anything that could be called distinctive. His ears are not as big as others have let on, but they do protrude from his head a good deal. His skin tone is a pale, Slavic white. On his body, I can say little—he has hidden himself within that sweatshirt that others have mentioned. As I assumed, he appeared to be about my height.
I can't define the man I had thought him to be. Perhaps I had never taken the time to define him physically, so none of this really changes anything. I guess I thought he was going to radiate something—charisma, afflatus, rebellion. And yet there is nothing alluring about him, nothing that invites suspicions or entertains a mystery. He was just some dude. For all I know, I rode the train with him the day before he died.
Mr. Adelstein provided a lot of biographical information, though most of it was either obvious or not particularly relevant to…well, anything. Mordecai never went to college; he read a great deal; he lived at home until he was twenty-three. After living with Willis Faxo in the City, he moved to Greenpoint. He lived there until sometime in the late-nineties, but Mr. Adelstein cannot remember an exact year. The dowager who rented the place to him either died or decided to move to Florida. He then moved to Morningside Heights for a few years, where he roomed with his cousin, Shayna, who was then enrolled at Columbia. In the spring of 2003, he moved into a studio apartment not too far away from where Vinati currently lives. He remained there until the end of his life.
Mr. Adelstein was ambivalent about this area, especially when Mordecai was new to it. When Mordecai had his nose broken by a gang of muggers, his father was less than hesitant to applaud his intuition. The incident occurred in 2005, on Vinati's corner. It involved a brick.
I can imagine Mordecai growing up in this house. I can see Mr. and Mrs. Adelstein bringing home the new baby from the hospital, being welcomed with balloons and adoring relatives ready to peer past the blue blanket to see the wingless putti with his eyes barely open. They clamor for a glimpse, speak, like Mr. Adelstein, in that stereotypically Brooklyn Jewish accent, and argue about the food, or perhaps just food in general (“You think they have the best babka in the city?” “I know a great butcher who used to run place in the Village; best pastrami you ever had” “Bad kugel? Such a thing is an impossibility”). I can see him in the crib, the young mother fawning over the potential of her first child. I can see him at thre
e running from the kitchen into the living room and jumping on the couch, perhaps on one of the beds upstairs. I can see him in the years leading up to puberty, studying the Torah with his father and preparing for his bar mitzvah at the desk by the record player. I can see him at the age of fourteen, watching the television in the den, which is adjacent to the parlor in which I find myself. I can see him as this man's son, and I can begin to understand just who he was.
But it's not really him, is it? It's me. I see myself doing all of these things, and I imagine myself doing these things. I am both performer and audience, protagonist and spectator. And yet it's all false; because I can't be him any more than I can be Chuang Tzu, let alone the butterfly he once dreamed himself being. To be him, to be anyone else, would mean to not be myself; even if I knew all of Tzu's experiences, even if I knew what he knew about himself and the butterfly he believed himself to be, I would still be the one experiencing the dream, thereby making it profoundly different. I would have to sacrifice myself to truly understand someone else. And, even if this were possible, how could I be said to be the one experiencing the life of anyone but myself? I have ceased to exist; therefore, I have ceased to have experiences.
And then it occurs to me: The Bay Ridge Collection was not meant to be seen as a collection of his work. His goal was to attract people, to awaken them so that they would scrutinize the writings on the walls, to see that they were a part of a community. And he did this simply by drawing attention to what was already there. So it wasn't an end; it was a means to a larger end that had nothing to do with himself, let alone fame or notoriety.
“You appear to have stumbled upon some revelation, my boy,” Mr. Adelstein says after what I realize is a long period of introspection on my part. “What have you realized?”
“I finally get it.”
“Get what?”
“That the content of his work is completely irrelevant. It's the context. It's all context. That's what Faxo meant.”
He nods slowly. “You must explain yourself better than that.”
“I can't. It's just that I realize that he said all he needed to say. He could have said it with a single stroke of the pen. The exegeses, the papers by Winchester, the theses by grad students: they're superfluous.”
“You sound like a man I once knew.”
“Dick Keens, right,” sarcastically.
“No,” he says with perplexed eyes. “Lev Reichmann. His father was a rabbi. He planned to be a rabbi, but he couldn't deal with all of the reading and the Rambam this and Saadia that. So he went into business. He owned a hardware store on Flatbush Avenue. Great man, great man. He moved down to Boca just a few years ago.”
“But you knew Dick Keens, right?”
“Of course I knew Dick. He was a very close friend of the family.”
“And the A-R-E?”
“The what?”
“You don't have to play coy with me,” almost coquettishly. “I know all about it. I even went to one of their festivals.”
He stares to me for a good ten seconds. “It sounds like you enjoyed yourself.” He pauses. “What on Earth is the A-R-E?”
19
It took about four days to write the article, from Wednesday night until Sunday. I sent the finished manuscript in an email to both Sean and the magazine just after seven in the evening.
The few fragments of biographical material came from what I had learned from Willis Faxo, Mr. Adelstein, and a few other people I met over the course of the week following my visit to Isaac’s home. As Mordecai did not leave behind a journal or a diary, these people were really all I had to go on. (In fact, the typical wealth of memorabilia that one assumes will be left behind by the average American corpse was completely lacking. There was a box devoting to clothing (which included the ragged, gray sweatshirt that I had expected to find); a box that was comprised of a small number of photographs and personal papers, most of which were financial; a box of art supplies; a chest that contained cooking supplies and eating utensils; a duffel bag with probably five hundred CDs without jewel-cases; and an assortment of miscellany that had been placed in one box prosaically labeled Stuff). I found an iPod that had never been used—or, if it had been used, it had been taken out of its box, turned on, puzzled over, gazed at with chagrin, and finally stowed in a drawer or a place for safe-keeping. According to Mr. Adelstein, Mordecai never owned a computer, did not like computers, and refused to learn how to do such things as navigate the Internet or check his email. He was more of a Minimalist than a Luddite. Still, it did come as a surprise when I learned that he did not own many books (though his father, it should be said, did have quite a collection, which is probably where his son drew a majority of his references). Mr. Adelstein told me that I could take anything that I wanted from the estate of the deceased. With the exception of a Poot Moint album, I declined the offer.
Mr. Adelstein pressed me on the issue of the A-R-E as another storm front moved in. I apologized for being unable to verify what the letters stood for, adding that the name is as ambiguous as the group itself. “The first person to tell me about them said that the initials stand for the Acolytes of Risus, the Enlightener.”
Upon hearing this, Mr. Adelstein searched through his library and finally produced a leather-bound edition of Apuleius' the Golden Ass. He quickly found a chapter describing a festival dedicated to Risus. From what I gathered, the entire community came together to play a joke on the narrator. He, the narrator, ended up being tried for taking arms against three intruders in true Quixote-fashion. It wasn't until fairly late in the trial that the three lacerated wine sacks were produced, much to the amusement of the crowd. The narrator, as one may expect, did not find much humor in the prank. Mr. Adelstein also showed me an earlier passage from the book, one in which a witch “bepissed” a man who later relayed these soggy events to the narrator. According to Mr. Adelstein, this book is akin to a novel in many forms, though, he argued, the modern novel didn't actually appear until the time of Cervantes. “So perhaps the battle against the bladders is really an homage to Apuleius,” he said. “Still, I find it funny that the novel, in its earliest form, is almost always something of a travelogue.”
Isaac was a veritable library, as Faxo had told me. We listened to old jazz records (he was a huge fan of Lee Morgan, particularly the album The Sidewinder) and talked about philosophy, theology, art, and literature. A bottle of eighteen year old scotch was produced once the rain had passed and the sunlight began to paint the walls in pastels and ocellated shadows, as the neighbors came home from work and dinners and dates to resume lives no less quiet and quaint than those lived out in the suburbs of Westchester and Nassau, came home to houses that held disparities to the adjacent houses only if one knew the occupants, the histories of the homes themselves, the things that cannot be revealed by a simple once-over. For whatever reason, I remember thinking of the Golgotha of 17th Street.
Isaac called me an “old soul” on several occasions once the scotch began to offer more than its emberous warmth. He also said that I reminded him of Mordecai in some ways, though these comparisons were never seriously expounded upon. I couldn't tell if he was flattering me or if he simply wanted to feel as though he was once again talking to his son. I guess this is one of those things that one can never really know.
Mordecai was a fixture at the library, something that was both sworn by Mr. Adelstein and confirmed by a number of the people in Brooklyn's main branch. After showing them his picture, virtually everyone laughed, and then proceeded to provide an anecdote or two about him. Jerome, one of the employees there, had even gone to his funeral. One of the other attendees had been one of the cashiers at his local bodega in Williamsburg.
With the exception of Wednesday's trip to the library and the other stops along Broadway, the four days I spent writing were without incident. I only left my room to go to the bathroom, to buy cigarettes (twice), and to eat whatever I could create with what little food was in the apartment (I finished the scrapple
, ate a lot of butter and garlic linguine, and took down at least three cans of tuna without bread or mayo). On Friday night I found myself in a wife-beater, eating a dish comprised of canned corn, canned beans, and hot sauce. I smoked a cigarette by the kitchen window and drank a dram glass of cheap whiskey after the less than sumptuous meal. As I smoked, I reflected upon a woman I had met at a bar on the boarder of Sunset Park and Bay Ridge (out of the rolling ocean, the crowd). They filmed part of The Departed there, the bartender said; she even showed me a photograph of Scorsese with his headphones on. Her hair was the hue of red that one imagines on sports cars, seldom on a head. The tiles in the bathroom were carnation and black, the same colors of the bathroom in the house where I grew up. There were no deodorant advertisements there, just framed posters of Dublin facades that all looked pretty much the same. There was nothing in there by Coprolalia. The past receded as I finished the last of the cigarette and absently watched all of the sunset rhapsodies unfold on the streets.
Tomas was understanding about my withdraw from social life. Aberdeen didn't really notice; he was too busy attempting to navigate the niceties of the deal with the woman who turned out to have very specific parameters for the pieces that she planned to commission—he related their introduction to the first interaction between Monet and Alice Hoschedé. Vinati's phone continued to go to voice mail. I left a message with my number, attempted to look her up on all of the stalker websites (facebook, myspace, friendster, etc.) without success, but stopped short of trying to figure out whether I knew anyone who would both be in town and know her number. I had an article to write, after all.
It was difficult to whittle down all of the experiences of the previous weeks into something that could be read on one crosstown bus ride. I guess it's true that when a man sits down to write a history he knows no more than his heels what lets and confounded hindrances he is to meet with in his way. Entire portions of the city simply went dark, fell from the scope of this one determined narrator, who I didn't even believe myself to really be. There was no room for narrative minutia, let alone aberrations form the impetus of discovery: Patrick's monologues were harlequined with redactions; the A-R-E was simply called “the group”; the location of the party that Tomas and I attended was not provided; the citrus artillery never fired a shot; Mongo (or the Onion Man—an epithet that Patrick never bothered to explain), Moxy, Früvous, and Boots were relegated to a further reading list; Vinati was not pertinent to the essay; Connie faded into a miasma of rancor that existed between the lines; Daphne was just a link to Willis Faxo, who, in turn, was just another link in the chain that ultimately ended at the grave of Mordecai Adelstein, which I did visit the same day I went to the library (though it was without incident because it’s a grave, and graves, like the dead they represent, don’t entertain guests). Figures like Tommy and Midas dissolved into generalizations, lines in a bibliography. I finished it while listening to “Missed the Boat.”