Jay Fox - THE WALLS

“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?”

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 17 thStreet.

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.