Jay Fox - THE WALLS

But I have come to understand his work better with each passing day (the city, too, has become more realistic; it's existence is no longer a pastiche of film and song and prose, but a breathing, living thing). I even believe that I'm beginning to understand him as a person. I may not be an expert in character sketching, but I do believe I can say this of the artist: he is terrified of commitment (romantic or otherwise), he mourns for the future, and he is not French, as the only misspelled words I have found are either derived from or of that language. He is probably of average height because most of his work is at my eye-level or below (and I am just above the average height). I don't think he works in a gallery or anything like that. I would place him in a far more pedestrian occupation, one that denies him the ability to use his talents. This conclusion comes from noting the environments he favors. These bars are not particularly receptive to the artistic types or the hip college students who spent their high school years in solitude listening to the Swans and cutting themselves; the bars are blue-collar dives, places where the foul stench of an inflated ego would inevitably lead to confrontation — and, consequently, recognition.

I have not been targeted, even if it is very clear that I am a recent college graduate. Well…with one exception: I was accosted by a Birchist lawyer who enjoyed using inflated language and Latin terms that didn’t quite sound right. It was at a place nearby the criminal and civil courts of New York County. Though the bar did not look like the type of place visited by a man in three-piece suit, who just happened to think himself to be kindred spirits with John Galt, the bartender knew him by both name and drink. (Proximity to the courts must have been the primary appeal. True, there may be other bars if one goes east, past Columbus Park and into that little region of Chinatown where the sidewalks are painted with grease and animal blood, where the mephitic stench of shit and sun-soaked gore and decay and hoisen sauce and some pungent herb that's probably high in thiamine creates an imperious cloud that not only irritates, but may actually destroy, the olfactory system. Presumably, this is what keeps rent in the area so low, but, then again, it may be the profusion of vermin known to take to the streets under the cloak of Erebus like those retinues of thugs that terrorize the citizenry of Gotham and Metropolis. It's a sight that would haunt even the Orkin Man. Then again, one could go west, toward TriBeCa. Due north leads you into the less soiled regions of Chinatown; northwest places you in SoHo; northeast takes you into a bizarre little region that some people are now calling LoHo as opposed to the Lower East Side, probably because someone felt that every neighborhood south of Houston Street needs to be abbreviated by employing only its northern latitudinal boundary.) The lawyer was not especially combative; he was just of that genre of conservative who finds nothing more aggravating than a college-educated person with a penchant for sympathizing with the victims — both foreign and domestic — of colonialism, imperialism, and the industrial arm of the corporate oligarchy, which provides low-paying, menial, and incredibly hazardous jobs to people who have been displaced by either the political arm (the IMF and U.S. Treasury) or the agricultural arm of said oligarchy. He went further, claiming every leftist to be an elitist and a Stalinist, a person who a) has no real ties to the working class and, consequently, does not understand them, and b) wishes to exploit this same class to promote an agenda that is nefarious, detrimental “to those who actually work,” and rarely, if ever, defined.

After finishing his second dirty martini (from what I saw, anyhow; the couple may have represented three and four, four and five, etc.), he called me a hippie, told me to do several things (among them, to get a job, to get out of the ivory tower, to stop pushing my liberal agenda on real Americans — who, apparently, don't have enough conviction to maintain an opinion of their own — to stop destroying America, and to go fuck myself), and then stormed out of the bar in triumph. Some of the contractors stared to the door. One of the men at the bar repositioned his Iron Workers, Local 580, hat. The Ides of March played their signature song. The grad-student bartender looked up from his book of Robert Bly and shook his head: “And Jefferson….”

A lot of these pubs are comprised of locals. Consequently, you, an outsider, immediately feel out of place. Even on the more gentrified streets of the City, places where there has come to exist a rift between present and past, there are those watering holes where nights progress on an axis all their own. Most of the habitués are animated and jovial early on, but by two or three in the morning the remaining drinkers have been reduced to stammering unintelligibly about lost opportunities and women who fade into the realm of impossibility before they even pass by the window. This is the vantage from the bottom rung of the social ladder (though, it must be said, they are at least on the social ladder).

I don't normally start conversations with the people in these places, as most see me as something of an anomaly to be gazed at with suspicion, if not quiet hostility, during my first drink. This is especially the case once one leaves Manhattan. Even in the more crowded places, I rarely stay for more than a beer, and leave an apparition's impression. In the bars where I stay longer, someone eventually approaches me to appease their curiosity.

Most think that I am still in college, which, from their perspective, is certainly a rational thing to assume. When I tell them my reason for coming into their bar — it's always their bar —they have a good laugh at my expense. Sometimes the transformation of their neighborhood comes up, though it's always addressed casually: “A couple years back we would have never seen a kid like you in these parts”; “You just move into that new building down the block?”; “I just want to know where all of these white kids keep coming from.” Areas such as Astoria and Harlem seem to be used to it (gentrification) by now. As I walked through parts of Long Island City and Bed-Stuy, however, even the women thought it necessary to stare me down. And then there was the quick sally to the South Bronx, where the diabetrices waddle through intersections like cattle upon the range. They received me with looks of pity or shock more often than scorn.

A surprising number of people know of Coprolalia in these areas populated by the Remi nepotes . “'At muthafucka been doin' 'at shit in the da' hood for a goddamn decade,” a man with a syncopated voice said at one bar somewhere in downtown Brooklyn. The interior was very red and very black.

“Some say even longer,” I responded.

“Shit, man, why you even interested in him?”

“There's a reward, Claude,” the bartender laughed deeply — not a deep laugh, but a deep voice, a voice for jazz radio.

“He draw anything in here, Marlon?” another bar dweller with a Cubs hat asked.

“Nah, that professa' from En Why You came through here and told me it's fake. I tell you though, I only thought to ask him 'cause I thought it might be valuable to somebody. Personally, I could-a cared less.”

“So you got rid of it?” I asked.

“Yeah, the whole bathroom downstairs was starting to look like shit, so I had my asshole brother-in-law come by and do some renovations.” He looked to Claude with a smile. “That lazy muthafucka',” slowly, “Took two fucking months to do the job. I tell ya', he's fuckin' worthless. Fuck-ing worth-less.”

I've found that a large amount of Brooklyn and Staten Island residents are contractors. The Irish and the Italians in particular. They enter the bars after their shifts smelling of sawdust and B.O. because they are required to wear thick clothing in order to avoid scrapes and shallow lacerations even in the heat. They complain about the Yankees and the Mets — the former being a team that is always supposed to win, the latter being a team that is always supposed to lose. They remember “broads” or “bitches” or “slits” that had walked by the worksite as Rolling Stones albums from the early seventies run their course. They call each other “fat fuck” and “wop-diego” and “fucking mic,” but avoid calling their black or brown comrades by any title that could be considered offensive. They have conversations that, from the outside, would seem to be incendiary, but you get the impression that they've been arguing about the same kind of shit for the past decade without incident.