Jay Fox - THE WALLS

“Whadda mean Jesus was black?”

“He had woolly hair, no job, and went around callin' everybody brotha'. Sounds like a muthafuckin' knee-grow to me.”

It's incredibly awkward to visit the gay bars at night. This is rather obvious, but in my less-than-sober mind I believed that I came off as straight enough to avoid any unwanted advances. As a consequence of my error in judgment, I was the source of chagrin for a man who couldn't believe that I was looking for something in the bathroom that didn't happen to be his penis, which had been displayed through one of those holes to which people will attach the word glory, or, in Coprolalia's case, Pyramus. The incident was rather embarrassing for both parties. He was nice about the misunderstanding, though I am fairly certain that he ordered a phalanx of body builders in white briefs to deny my exit until I stayed for a drink. The whites were fluorescent in the black light, a neon sexuality that turned out to be more intimidating than menacing.

I ended up talking to Greg(g), the presumed general of the briefs brigade, for a little less than half an hour. He worked at the Met and tried to convince me that he had never heard of Coprolalia. (I think I pulled a similar stunt with Connie when she asked me if I was familiar with Basquiat. I managed to rope her into that first conversation, which eventually ended in the bedroom — that night of cautious austerity on both of our parts because everyone knows that the first night needs to be filled with anticipation for the second if there is to be any real future, tiny vessels popped or no. We fell asleep in a tangled heap upon the bed, exhausted and serenaded by Billie Holiday and the murmur of the radiator. She did not exhibit that curious modesty familiar in many women — she was not reluctant to reveal her body in the light of the early morning, but instead spread herself upon the sheets like paint upon canvas as the deep purple of the night sky faded to the dusty wan of morning. The sight was neither surreal nor pornographic; it was rather a personification of comfort and tranquility, a Laodamian idyll with which I knew I was to gain a greater familiarity. But it was a spurious display if one thinks in deeper metaphors. Once she awoke, she was hesitant to agree to so much as a date upon which we could see one another again; and until that later date I could not help but feel guilty, as though I had violated her in some way, that I had taken advantage of her even if the love that we made that night was not intrusive, phallic, or vaginal; it was exploratory, epidermic — our hands intrepidly passing over one another's bodies like astronauts surveying the surface of the moon.) Greg(g), upon realizing that I was not intrigued — in fact annoyed — by his coyness, became willing to impart what he knew of Coprolalia. He told me to track down Sean, that I should focus my attention on Brooklyn, and then spent the remainder of the time telling me about his sister's wedding, which sounded as though it was going to be a lovely service at a rustic site somewhere in Maine. He was not jealous at all. When I left, his friend had just come back from the bathroom and couldn't believe the nerve of some smokers.

Hours on the subway — especially the M, my Rocinante — were passed with crossword puzzles and other amusements. This human yo-yo ended up at far too many apocheirs , from 95 thStreet to 242 ndStreet, from Far (and I do mean Far) Rockaway to Jamaica, as it's difficult to stay awake when drunk and left with nothing to do besides focus on advertisements (“Thank you Dr. Zizmor!”) and Shortz puns in order to avoid eye contact with the others on the train, the majority of them appearing either horribly despondent, enraged, deranged, or just plain fucked. During this time I realized that the subway system is based upon the future. The time in the subway itself is essentially a precursor to wherever it is you are going. People are conscious of the wait, but they seldom notice the cracked tiles that look like snake-skin, the cement-hued paint that runs throughout the system, the stalactites that are made of mysterious mineral compounds, or the way in which the express trains rattle the tracks in six-eight time as they race past the local stations. Everybody notices the piss smell that saturates either end of the platform, as well as the rats that run in and out of those small drainage holes that appear every five yards or so; they see the garbage on the tracks, and even the advertisements that have been operated upon with exacto-knives and not-so-exacto-knives; and yet, for these commuters, the station is a low-altitude purgatory, something that is accepted, but not acknowledged. I guess this became noticeable to me once I started riding the train for more than the typical two hours and change a day.

A lot of this time was spent questioning this project. Going in and out of bars all day is fun, of course, but I wasn’t gaining any serious insight into the identity of Coprolalia. True, I felt like I knew him better than when I began, but these few assumptions were not going to translate into anything more substantial, anything something that was necessarily a fiction because there were simply too many gaps to fill.

By the time I reached Coney Island on Wednesday, I was less than optimistic. My experience there didn’t make me feel any better. Someone named Fo' Sho' (my apostrophes) had appropriated the space that housed the Coprolalia in the beachfront bathroom close by Stillwell. The air was still cool, especially as the night began to fall and the breeze from the ocean picked up. Old Russian men were sitting upon the benches watching the waves roll in; these are the types of men to whom dramatists look for inspiration, for whom composers write nocturnes laden with flatted thirds and sixths, with whom the spirit of Aschenbach stands watching the ocean, not as artist, but as a comrade in moribundity. Most had widower's eyes, glacial and harrowing things that radiated sorrow even (maybe especially) in sleep. They were the men who could challenge Atlas in fortitude, if not determination, but also the types who never would; they would only sit, pockmarked and phlegmatic, staring to the ocean and waiting for the day to end. The company they kept included cheap vodka and cheaper tobacco, harsh stuff that an agoraphobic would refuse even if threatened with being kidnapped, stripped stark naked, and booted out of a speeding van into the cacophony of Times Square — the central hub of Positivist Manhattan's grid.

The beach was beginning to clear out; the families who had spent the late afternoon hours lounging, playing, a few even singing, the more courageous swimming, came up in troves drunk with sun. Most of them were Dominican or Puerto Rican. They ambled slowly, laughed, picked at leftovers stuffed into plastic containers of the translucent, but not transparent variety. Seagulls crowded the vacant spaces left by those on their way to trains or apartments; they would glide down to the earth with ease and kick up small clumps of sand as they moved with erratic determination. They were defensive and quick to discern any avian intruders attempting to stake a claim on the remnants left by the bronzed day-trippers; only then did they accelerate their steps and reveal serpentine tongues pink like bubble gum. With the mere threat of castigation, they managed to repel the dawdling pigeons and the jittery sparrows seeking to pilfer what was — in any case seemed to be — the rightful inheritance of the gulls. The sparrows were easily frightened and quick to retreat; the pigeons, however, were not so easily dissuaded. They grabbed whatever they could and scuttled away as the gulls descended upon the sands with graceful aggression to arrogantly remind — in a language that may just be inherently arrogant — those within earshot that the sands were not there to provide harbor to those from the city.