Jay Fox - THE WALLS

I checked out the bathroom in the bar after my first beer. This bar was not on Sean's list, but, by this point in time, I had decided it was best to simply explore without recourse to anything more than my own curiosity. There was nothing to be found except for a lot of those cliché boy name plus girl name proclamations that one sees engraved in anything wood around either a high school or a summer camp. I stayed for another beer, and left after the seventh inning of the game, though I don't remember who was up, just that a pitcher had been ridiculed viciously and thoroughly.

I didn't go directly to the train. Instead, I walked around a bit more, and even popped my head into the facilities in Astroland, which were home only to the redolent stench of piss and some gruesome-looking vomit suffused with the smell of alcohol and fried food. It cost a quarter to get in. A naked toddler asked me my name as I was looking into an empty stall inhabited by pen marks that could have almost passed for cursive. I smiled to him, but didn't have the time to respond because a man of perhaps nineteen — probably the boy's father — told me that I had to get the fuck out should I insist on snooping around like a fucking faggot.

There was little else to search, save the few Porto-Johns in the area, but I couldn't see much due to the lack of light. I took West 10 thon my way back to Surf Avenue. As I was walking, I came across the banjo player again. He was strumming the same song, though his accompaniment at this juncture was not the ocean, but, instead, a virulent din of teenage hostility, which reverberated around the entrance of the Cyclone like waves from a gong. Racial epithets eventually turned into a scuffle, but the police quickly dispersed the violent throng before anyone was seriously hurt.

Thursday was a blur of northern Brooklyn. I was confident that I had examined every bar in Greenpoint, East Williamsburg, and Williamsburg proper with the exception of some of the places west of Bedford Avenue by around nine. Most of the bars that still featured Coprolalia were fairly new. The older watering holes of generations past were typically absent of anything by the artist; they were home only to the typical jake-walkers silent as wraiths. Two eavesdroppers at a real dive off of McGuinness tried to mitigate my growing frustration by explaining that Coprolalia's work was being erased because Bloomberg wanted to make the City sterile for all the rich people and the corporate assholes in Manhattan. The male component was a postman; the female was a waitress at a somewhat famous diner in the City. How their theories applied to dive bars in Brooklyn or Coprolalia I don't really know, but I nodded as they went on nonsensical tirades profuse with non sequiturs and paranoid beliefs about everything from aliens to freemasonry, to how Charlie Manson was an operative for the F.B.I., and that the Tate murders had been committed to justify raids on communes and other passive anarchist communities that the press could easy smear as having the potential to be yet another Manson Family. The postman was particularly fond of using Times Square as an example—“It's the urban fucking Disney World”—for both the Man's power and the Man's idyll. She said that Bloomberg was looking to shut down a luncheonette on the north side of McGolrick Park, which she referred to simply as “B's.” The postman lamented over the closing of a hamburger joint on Manhattan, which shut its doors sometime during the Giuliani administration. The two were incredibly polite, although their tones were somewhat harsh. It was a stark contrast to the majority of the people populating the rickety chairs and tables of Greenpoint's less trendy taverns, people who were predominately Polish, ornery, and less than discreetly hostile to my presence. Like anywhere else, however, most of these customers turned out to be friendly once I opened up a dialog, though it was clear that they resented the fact that said dialog had to be in English.

The walls of a bathroom somewhere in north Williamsburg had been outfitted with a blackboard — literally. Another one had supplied washable finger-paints for its potty users.

I ran into one of my former professors near the Bedford Avenue L as the sun was beginning to set. She invited me to dinner with her husband — Emily and Dennis, respectively. The two of them were genuinely interested in the project, though their thoughts on Coprolalia's work were both ambivalent and contentious, as they were both professors, and it seems something of a professorial requisite to contrive debates for the sole purpose of displaying just how a person of culture is supposed to look or speak.

Emily suggested that I seek out Sean Winchester, and she clearly thought it something of a faux pas on my part to explain that his advice and direction had hitherto been my only source of (somewhat) worthwhile counsel. She nodded gravely as though I had confirmed a terminal diagnosis: keen eyes focused not so much on me as past me — kind of how my father taught me that one must always remember to swing through a target when throwing a punch. Dennis looked on with almost cataleptic curiosity. Had I not known the context of the stare, I would have assumed him to be looking to someone speaking in tongues. The Byrds sang “Eight Miles High” in those lachrymose harmonies for which they are so highly regarded as the conversation drifted into academia.

“Are you anticipating further studies?” Emily, not Professor Carroll, asked.

“Yes, but I feel as though I need to experience the world beyond the university first.”

“You do know that you can't get as far as you used to without some kind of post-graduate degree.”

“Yes, I understand that it is more important than it used to be.”

“Have you thought about a Ph.D.?”

“Yes, but I really don't know what my focus would be.”

Once the appetizers and their first round of drinks were finished, the subject inevitably changed to the Bush administration, a stain on the conscience of many New Yorkers, as well as our national character. During the main course, she addressed the unconstitutionality of the Military Commissions Act of 2006; and she used that word, “unconstitutionality,” as though it was a gavel stolen from the hand of God. She said that Bush and Cheney and “that motherfucker” Rove needed to acknowledge that the national motto, E Pluribus Unum , is not a justification for autocracy. Twenty minutes were spent addressing our collective outrage over the past six and a half years of Republican rule. Dennis and I put in our two cents. Emily did her best to cover the rest of the bill, especially after she finished her second cocktail.

We exchanged email addresses after the meal. As we made our way out, she told me that she would have no problem writing a letter of recommendation for me no matter what subject I decided to pursue. Dennis wished me luck with graduate school.

Most of Friday was spent navigating the streets of the Bronx. I forwent the bus ride to either Throgs Neck or City Island and focused the majority of my time in Kingsbridge, Riverdale, and portions of Fordham. By day's end, I was on the 1 train heading back into the City with a mild buzz and a desire to never step into the borough again unless it was for a ballgame. I got out of the train at 50 thStreet, walked into Hell's Kitchen under a Guillaumin sunset, and went into the first place that caught my attention. The bar was one of those timeless places, a relic with an identity reliant upon the contours of everything that surrounds it. If the facade was enough to keep out the more glamorous people of the City, the appearance of the denizens in the bar were enough to make the former consider moving to Westchester. Each patron stopped what he or she was doing to examine me when I walked in. The moment seemed strange.