Jay Fox - THE WALLS

The beach soon became home to flickering lighters among congregations of sunset silhouettes: Ferlinghetti windmills and roosters. By this time the boardwalk was nearly empty, populated only by memories without volition (walking without direction or drive, shades of varying opacity as if breathing idylls: women in scarlet, the shade of vitality, or rose, the shade of passion; beside them strolled men made docile from gratitude). As one turned away from the ocean and its barren horizon, however, the spirit of abandonment and decay that has characterized the fairground for so long became salient once again — the skeletal remains of more innocent times, back when the distinction between work and leisure was respected. Even before the sunset it had begun to resonate in my mind like a tin drum, an incorrigible cachinnation that neither pulsed nor undulated; it simply echoed within itself without waning in volume or tenacity. The only real beacon came from a bar, out front of which was a small group of smokers at a picnic table. They were busy discussing the Yankees' chances of a World Series victory over a round of beers.

Conversation at the bar revolved around the plans for the boardwalk's redevelopment, even with Boston in town. The patrons spoke in an uncharacteristically timid and ambivalent tone: defiant of gentrification and the process's Sherman-esque contempt for past and present, but sympathetic to rejuvenation as a means of “community improvement” or any of those similar euphemisms that avoid eye contact with the impenetrable face of reality. Even the most sympathetic to the latter were still hesitant to endorse anything proposed by “That motherfucker buying up Coney Island. You know what he did to Albee Square?”

The speaker posed this rhetorical to anyone within earshot, though his eyes did fall on the bartender. He did not respond. No one else did, either. The Fifth Beatle paraphrased Parmenides. After a moment, the man who posed the question concerning Albee Square lifted a bottle to his small, angular mouth. He placed the bottle down on the bar gently, wiped a free hand across the stubble crowding his face like a weak, pontillistic shadow, and then pushed his hair — thinning, wavy, black, long; the kind of capricious fluff that is so often attached to someone with an incessant need to argue like a perpetual student in a state of perpetual truancy — back behind his ears.

The people in the bar called him Gonzo. The possibility of a journalistic knack aside, the name probably referred to his eyes, wide like blooming sunflowers, as well as his nose, which at one point brought to the mind of the bartender “that-a one fucking scene in Clockwork Orange .” Gonzo had a habit of tapping the top of the bar with fervent bursts exclusively in four-four. He changed tempos and rhythms with his mood as opposed to the music. Other mannerisms were less obvious unless one sat nearby him (which I did). For one, he would suck on his teeth after each sip from a brown bottle of unlabeled beer (the red and white scraps of discarded paper littered the area directly in front of and below him, a detritus that the bartender or the barback would eventually have to sweep up with that bitter form of frustration that is evoked whenever you have to exert more energy doing a job that, though necessary, does not necessarily require so much work or time). He also produced sound effects for every pitch, not that he seemed all that interested in the game.

He would have had a cynical face if his eyes were not so open — not to the world exactly, but open like the aperture of a camera prepped by an absentminded photographer's apprentice. It seemed like he was forever in search of something better than whatever it was he had. He was not the sad type, not the bitter or furiously pensive, either. He just had a notion that something was wrong with the world, but that there wasn't much he or anyone could really do about it except to complain to a group of people almost sycophantic in their indifference. In a word: dissatisfied.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the bartender nodded after some time. His hair was more charcoal than gray. “He's dewing that 'ole renovation thing there-a, right?”

“That's what that lying son of a bitch said. Said he was gonna turn the mall into some type a' Vegas-style bullshit.” He paused to pick up his beer, but he did not drink. “Have you fucking been there since he bought it?”

“Nah, Gonzo, you know I ain't ever go up that fa’ north 'less I'm goin' to the City.”

“Yo', bet this kid's heard all about it, ain'tcha?”

“I don't even know where Albee Square is,” I responded as I turned my attention away from the game.

“Yeah,” the bartender shouted upon looking to the television. “Get out; get da' fuck out.” Applause. “Fuck you. Fuck you, asshole,” melodically. “You're a fuckin' bum.” He then walked over to a man more interested in the game than either Gonzo or myself. They slapped hands with gusto.

“C'mon kid,” Gonzo resumed. “You seriously ain't never been to the Fulton Mall?”

“I've been to the Fulton Mall, but I have no idea where Albee Square is.”

“Just move here a' something?”

“I've been here about four years.”

He smiled. “Congrats,” as the beer moved toward his mouth. “En Why You or Columbia?”

“Like a bullseye, huh?”

“Nah, it's not like it's a bad thing.” He paused to drink again. “What the fuck you doing all the way down here for, though? You meetin' a chick?”

“Looking for Coprolalia.”

He whistled long and high as if recreating the audio that occurs before a chagrined cartoon character gets flattened by an anvil, safe, piano, rock, etcetera. “There's a name I ain't heard in a long fucking time,” he exhausted.

“You've heard of him?”

“Course I heard a' him,” he laughed. “Never met the guy, but I remember that thing he did down in Bay Ridge.”

“Do you live around there?”

“Me? Na', I grew up on the Island. Valley Stream. Still live there. Yeah, but I was working down on Eighty-Second at the time. When was that? like fifteen years ago? Was back before anyone knew that the guy's name was Coprolalia.”

He reminisced for an inning or two about Bay Ridge in the early- to mid-nineties. He also mentioned that, whereas the rest of Brooklyn is being inundated by college graduates, most of the people moving into Bay Ridge are Lebanese, Indian, and Chinese. The bartender eventually came back over. Gonzo told him that I was looking for Coprolalia. He nodded distantly and claimed that there had been a piece attributed to the artist on a bench a few feet from the bar. “Unfortunately, the City threw 'at piece a’shit out a few years ago, kid. Hate to have ya' come all the way down 'ere just to go home empty handed, but-a…ya' know-a, I don't know what else to tell ya'.” When I turned to look to the phantom bench, I saw only a solo banjo player walking down the boardwalk strumming out “Daddy's Little Girl” in that Ray Alley style that no one seems to hear anymore.

“You should look in Astroland,” a woman interrupted. She said nothing else to us. Soon I could not keep from furtively gazing to her, wondering why she was in this place, wondering if she just happened to work in the area, and, if she did, whether she served dysentery or green ice cream at that one place between the museum and the sign commanding you to “Bump Your Ass Off,” or whether she perhaps served as the standby for Heather Holiday, the most beautiful sword-swallower on the planet — a living, breathing Mary Rogers, with a truly womanly figure (in these days of bulimia and anorexia and androgyny and what's that in your pocket ?), raven tresses, and a dark smile. This woman had an indifferent face. As I continued to look her, it dawned on me that this indifference did not come from her eyes, as is common; no, her eyes were intelligent even if somewhat blunted by drink — that somber glaze conjured by willful oblivion via Lethe — not of the quantity that one imbibes to erase, just to suspend. It was rather her mouth: small, slightly ajar in that fashion that appears when one attempts to interrupt another's diatribe. She was not waiting to impart anything profound or pythic; she was just waiting like those people who stay on the train platform even after the only subway that services the station has departed — gracelessly silent and cast into a waking narcolepsy that allows blinking and breathing and heartbeats both languid and mechanical, but little else. It wasn't that she was unconscious, just unconscious of being conscious for varying stretches of time, and just cognizant enough to be one with the general polyphony of the bar, the smell of the ocean and the stale beer coming from the taps, the feel of the barstool, the surroundings as both personal and communal.