Jay Fox - THE WALLS

Aberdeen reaches for his drink. “All I can figure with any certainty is that Coprolalia looks like a guy,” as the cup comes to his lips. Tomas catches my eye.

The woman returns. “She's on her way.” She drags a chair over, sits in the backwards fashion made popular by A.C. Slater, furtively scans her surroundings, and then leans in close: “I don't want a cut — just so you know. I'm not her pimp or nothing.”

A cliché: Silence can speak volumes.

“What?” she asks before looking up to the television. “All fucking right,” she says as she raises her fist in the direction of the television. She returns her attention to us. “You want to see the show, right?”

“Donkey show,” Tomas whispers with a nudge at my side.

“What show?” Aberdeen asks with eyebrows plagued by bewilderment. “We want to meet an artist.”

“Yeah,” the woman responds slowly, making certain that the word is drawn out long enough to deny any ambiguity in the phonetics. “I mean, I don't consider her an artist or nothing, but some people,” she says absently, an ellipsis lingering in the air like an unclaimed fart. “Look dude, either way she likes to discuss her rates before she begins. It's not an issue of trust; it's just business.”

“What does your friend do exactly?”

2.2

Coprolalia: A condition in which a subject involuntarily utters profanity. The word is derived from a conjunction of the Greek words copros and lalia , meaning, respectively, feces and babble.

Coprophilia: A condition in which a subject is sexually aroused by the smell, sight, or taste of feces.

I met Ilkay Abaz at the beginning of my second year of college. We lived on the same floor of a dorm on 26 thStreet between First Avenue and Second Avenue. It is a rather isolated place for the City, known best for its close proximity to Bellevue Hospital and the fact that the maps you find in yellow cabs claim it to be a sickly taupe and anonymous, perhaps even autonomous, region.

The building in which we lived had at one time been government housing. I cannot say when the university purchased it, nor can I imagine the length of the list that itemized all of the improvements that ought to have been made prior to turning it into a dormitory. There were times that it felt as though just about all of these codes and standards were regarded as suggestions more than requirements.

To be blunt, it was a monolithic structure out of a Khrushchev-era nightmare, brilliant only in its austerity. The linoleum floors were of the same pattern of gray static that one finds in public schools, prisons, substandard hospitals, and on snowy televisions. We became acquainted with the time that our neighbors (and their neighbors, too) woke for the day, as well as their more personal idiosyncrasies, whether linguistic, social or sexual. The halls smelled like ghetto subway stations, as some of the less considerate — or more inebriated — on the floor took to using the garbage shoot to dispose of the type of waste that often gets flushed. But these were the minor nuisances we became accustomed to, chuckled about, and eventually learned to ignore. The more aggravating aspects of the housing situation had less to do with the problems we faced, and more to do with the lack of concern for those of us dwelling within the former honeycomb of poverty. Still, this did not lead us to sulk. We were young, in New York City, and the most pressing responsibility imposed upon us was the maintenance a good G.P.A. (or, for those of us with s scholarship, an excellent G.P.A.).

As most will remember, or perhaps come to find, it is a peculiar time in life. Lost in the dialectics of quixotry and cynicism, everything seems both possible and elusive. We maintained the belief that we were being prepared to reshape the world upon our departure from the university — even if we were clueless as to the means we would eventually employ to accomplish this impossible task — and felt it was not only nihilistic, but fatalistic, to believe our parents when they said that they too once knew the distinction between 'ought' and 'should'. We were a new generation ready to rectify the mistakes of the past fifty years with new and dangerous ideas, the majority of which have been around since that James guy wrote that one letter that appears somewhere between the Gospel of John and Revelation (you know, the irrelevant part that Damasus and Jerome stuck in there as filler).

I met Ilkay at our first floor meeting. It was held the night before the beginning of the fall semester. I can remember the faces sitting around the elevator bank, some better than others. There was a common sentiment among my fellow hall-mates that was discernible more in body language than in discourse, a kind of stubborn irritability conjured up by the uselessness of the meeting, the R.A., the need for any form of authority — that imperious presence that exists wherever trust does not. Some of the students were more indignant about the situation than others, but even the least incorrigible or radical respected the role that she, the R.A., was supposed to play as only slightly less cumbersome than a canker sore. Perhaps only one student was more or less indifferent to the whole process: the math prodigy to whom the material world was irrelevant. Her name was a miasma of silent consonants and accents and things that most English speakers call squiggles, even if there are English words for them. She eventually took on the agnomen “The Silent.”

The floor meeting, which was a double-entendre of sorts, was short and to the point. The R.A., whose name I have forgotten, was to be a ghost so long as we avoided excessive noise and public drunkenness. The floor had only recently been designated as non-smoking, she said. Extra towels were recommended. The phrase “try to keep it by the window” was uttered more than once. The more rebellious were told of a handy contraption that consists of a drier sheet and a paper towel or toilet paper roll. It is called by a variety of names, depending on your region (sploof is popular in Albany, bafunga is popular in Northern Long Island, groove tube is popular on Phish tour). There were stories of her second year, flavored with her thick Boston accent and gratuitous profanity. She smiled constantly, spoke quickly, and proposed no ultimatums.

Her sincerity and respect took just about everyone by surprise. She was to be one of us so long as we didn't give her or get her into shit. She stood above us only when she announced that she was going to her room. It was a wonderful little antimony: By relinquishing the majority of her power, we all instantly revered her. One could almost equate her with Cincinnatus.

Unlike the R.A., or most aspects of my self-restraint for that matter, Ilkay was to be a prominent figure in my life that year. We had seen each other throughout the second semester of our first year, as we had taken an ancient philosophy course together. As it was an introductory course, the setting was far from intimate. Our interactions came via momentary glances and faint looks of recognition on the street or in one of the dining halls. I may have recognized the sound of his voice. What I did remember, however, was that he sat next to the same girl during virtually every class, a girl whom one could not help but notice, a girl whom the professor initially thought was Salman Rushdie’s wife, whatever her name happens to be. She wasn’t, isn’t, probably won’t be. Nor was she related to the very beautiful wife of the very talented author, who, for the sake of referencing two favorite books, I’ll call Neela Swift.

Suffice to say, I had ulterior motives when I initially befriended him. In time, however, I learned that the two of us had far more in common than most of the acquaintances I had made at school. Of course, one of the major obstacles I had to initially overcome was convincing him that I wasn't attempting to seduce him. I had never had a gay friend (revise that; I had never befriended a guy secure enough with himself to tell people that he is gay). He had never had a straight guy go out of his way to call him a friend since his less-than-shocking departure from the closet.