Jay Fox - THE WALLS

The Nixon Shock essentially did this. I was not familiar with this term. Leo didn't have the opportunity to explain it to me, as a bookie named Scraps soon arrived, and he evidently had some very important things he and Leo had to go over. Leo told me he'd return once everything was straightened out, but five minutes turned to ten, and ten to twenty, and twenty to half an hour. I scanned the streets as I walked to the train, but, unfortunately, Leo was nowhere to be found.

Saturday was spent almost exclusively in Queens. Tomas had managed to convince his friend Randy to drive us around. Most of the time in the car was passed without dialog, as the liturgy of their friendship was drowned out by Randy's “fucking awesome” sound system. He would ask if we knew of a band before we made it through two songs of an album; we would respond in the negative; he would then put on the next album. His taste proved to be so eclectic that it almost seems inappropriate to attribute him with any taste at all. Of all the music that we heard during our time in Queens, the only two bands I can remember enjoying are the Amity Front and Exit Clov.

The bars were not crowded, nor was parking much of a problem. Still, Randy insisted on staying in the car — double-parked and hazards on — as Tomas and I ran into each place to check out the facilities. As always, the bartenders were compliant when we told them what we were up to, and some even directed us to the pieces or apologized for recent renovations. As I had come to expect, most could not provide much more than the month in which any particular piece appeared. We ran into Greg(g), whom I had met earlier in the week at the gay bar in Manhattan. He welcomed us to “the queerest place on Roosevelt Avenue,” which struck both me and Tomas as odd, as one does not typically associate “Queens” with “gay”…revise that: one does not typically associate “Elmhurst” with “gay.” Tomas and I agreed that the place did not seem all that queer. The bartender was a woman in her thirties. She was wearing an orange sundress. Two women sat near the front door. Amy Winehouse crooned “Tears Dry on Their Own,” courtesy of an iPod.

Greg(g) had taken a seat in the middle of the bar, where he was casually sipping on a bloody mary while proofreading something that he didn't want discuss. After introducing him to Tomas, he asked about the search, and once again followed me into one of the bathrooms. The walls were pristine. The only markings were on the deodorant advertisements, which had been modified to better address Greg(g)'s desires. “After talking with you about Coprolalia, I realized that the washroom of my neighborhood watering-hole needed a little touching up.” Once he realized who Tomas was, they started talking about an artist whom I didn't know by name with a great deal of derision. Tomas and Greg(g) continued to talk over one the Sea and Cake's newer songs as I examined the second bathroom. There were several numbers for great head, far more than one finds at most bars. The names were predominately masculine; most of the numbers were the same: 867-5309.

We stopped for a burger and a few beers somewhere in Kew Gardens. Randy put five bucks in the jukebox. The place in which we found ourselves constituted the last of the Queens bars on Sean's list, so we opted to stay and watch the final innings of an anticlimactic Yankee game, which ended with a dumbfounded Bobby Abreu watching strike three sail past the middle of the plate. A guy at the bar laurelled K-Rod as the new Mariano Rivera (“Fucking automatic, son”).

A few plans for the remainder of the day were pitched as we aimlessly drove around listening to “Teen Age Riot.” We eventually decided to go back to Randy's parents' mansion in Great Neck after driving all the way into Red Hook to pick up some barbecue essentials at Fairway. We would have gone elsewhere to pick up groceries, but Tomas insisted on Fairway because neither Randy nor I had ever been there. The store is like no place else — as advertised. It seemed to be a Mecca for culinary masters, vegans without trust funds (something of a rarity), and black intellectuals partial to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad (perhaps all three in some cases). The Food Network had some cameramen floating around the produce section, but we didn't see anyone we recognized.

The drive back up the B.Q.E. was smooth with the exception of a sudden and seemingly meaningless traffic jam in Greenpoint. The L.I.E. gave us no problems. Randy had put of a mix of random 90's songs, which was actually labeled “Random 90's Songs.” It featured, among others I had heard before but cannot name, Spacehog, Tripping Daisy, the Caulfields, Lucas, Supergrass, Harvey Danger, Mazzy Star, Skeelo, Candlebox, the Primative Radio Gods and Joe Public.

Randy's home certainly qualified as a mansion, perhaps even a manor. The house was exceptionally modern — cubist, juxtaposed as opposed to symmetrical, gray, cold. Both mom and dad were out of town, which, from what I could infer, was far from atypical. From the backyard you could see City Island and the Throgs Neck and Whitestone Bridges. Airplanes came and went at a leisurely pace over the gray-blue monotony of the Sound.

We split two bottles of champagne (“What else are you supposed to drink in a fucking mansion?” Tomas asked), and spent most of the afternoon swimming, cooking, and eating. Food-coma set in rather quickly after the last round of brats, and I found myself watching a predictable thriller on one of the premium channels in one of those massage chairs that they sell at the Sharper Image. I had never met anyone who owned one. I awoke to find Randy passed out on the adjacent couch. Tomas was in the kitchen with Randy's live-in maid, Katya, who was twenty, Russian, and flush. Tomas was, too. They were laughing comfortably about something that wasn't all that funny.

We arrived back at Tomas' loft under a Krakatoa sky. Barazov and his friends were preparing for a night on the town. They were archetypes of a sort in that they were desperately trying to embody that type of spontaneity Nietzsche was so fond of. With them, however, it was fairly obvious that they had to be conscious of being spontaneous. So it wasn't really spontaneity at all, but rather a contrived and temporary denial of the inescapable bourgeoisie mentality for which the avant-garde is supposed to have so much contempt. They conformed to the nonconformist manner of wearing black and appearing sullen. They probably had copious amounts of meaningless sex (and it was meaningless, too, as the idea of free-love to them was merely the rejection of monogamy, as opposed to the espousal of a personal tenet, be it spiritual, emotional, ethical, or human), read a lot of Wikipedia entries, and dabbled in the various drugs available to them. Their lifestyle was profoundly childish and narcissistic — which, in-itself, is a profoundly childish orientation to the world.

To further confine them to a stereotype, three out of the four there were members in a rock band — the Sheeps. Their music probably wasn't independent in spirit, but you could tell that it fell into the genre of Indie, a term, like Alternative, that at one point precluded a distinct sound, though by now it has become yet another vacuous label that the Them (those to whom people attribute unfathomable power) employ in order to push useless consumables upon the anxious, the insecure, and the heavily medicated. All in all, the Sheeps, and the people like the Sheeps, engender the profligate lifestyle for which many residents of Williamsburg and Greenpoint have become so infamous and reviled. They are the paragons of white kids as defined by those who have a strong distaste for white people. They are rich. They are arrogant. They are selfish, rude and oblivious. Most importantly, they have neither the will nor the intellect to create in earnest, as they are too lazy and self-conscious to attempt to actualize the talents (whether real or imagined) from which their narcissism derives.