Jay Fox - THE WALLS

“So you're the Coprolalia guy, huh?” Barazov asked as I approached him. “I thought you'd be taller.” He then looked to his friends snickering at the display of irreverence.

Randy rolled his eyes. “I'm going to take off, but you guys should definitely give me a call if you make it down to the Slope tonight,” he said as he walked out the door.

Barazov didn't introduce me to his friends. No one took the opportunity to introduce themselves, either. They exchanged cautious glances like hobos sharing a bottle. There was not a clear reason for the attitude or the silence. One could say it is a lifestyle more than a penchant. Tomas eventually asked where Lindsay and Aberdeen were. He received a shrug from Barazov, a slight, frivolous movement no more engaging than a restrained paroxysm or a suppressed yawn. The derelict chorus chuckled. Tomas motioned toward a door down the hall.

“He's such a fucking brat,” he exhausted as he closed the door to his room. “I can't wait until he's done rebelling with his daddy's fucking money, gets his corporate job, and moves the fuck out of my apartment.” From the other room we heard an explosion of laughter.

Tomas' room was filled with nearly empty liquor bottles and books. My eyes landed on Dennett's Consciousness Explained . “Have you read that before?” he asked.

“I browsed through it once.”

“I haven't gotten much of a chance to read it, either. This guy recommended it to me. Met him in line at Polam — one of the delis on Manhattan. He's apparently starting some magazine called the Green Gnome . I don't know how I feel about it. He wants me to contribute to it, but I don't think I'm going to bother.”

“Why not?”

“I don't think he'll ever publish it. Even if he gets one issue out, I doubt it will go anywhere. He didn't seem to have any business sense.

“I do most of my work in Long Island City,” he responded to my wandering eyes. “I got a really good deal on a studio up there…not too far from P.S. 1.” I nodded absently. “Do you like the Zombies?”

“Sure.”

“I just got their greatest hits record, and I've really been digging on it lately.” The first track was very familiar. “So when do you want to do the East Village?”

“What?”

“When do you want to go looking for Coprolalias in the Village? You haven't been there yet, have you?”

“A little. There's still a lot to do.”

“There's gotta be a fucking ton over there.”

“I figure we can do it this coming week. It's probably going to take a few days.”

“That's fucking cool by me, man. I feel like I never go there anymore.” He paused. “Someone threw that out,” he said as noticed that my eyes were focused on a painting.

“Really?”

“Yeah, they lived right around the corner. I don't know if the guy painted it or anything, but it just kinda called out to me.”

“Someone just threw it out?”

“Yeah, I met them as they were moving — well, more like getting kicked —out.”

“They were evicted?”

“No; their landlord just started building two stories on top of them. They lived on the top floor, too. They did the most rational thing they could do — besides move, of course.”

“What's that?”

“They asked for a rent reduction. And guess what happened?”

“I don't know.”

“The fucking landlord told them to either deal with the construction or get the fuck out.”

“That's fucked up, man.”

“I know. I think they got like a free month out of it, but, still….”

“Isn't that type of thing illegal?”

“It's Greenpoint. Do you have any idea how many of these fucking places are illegal?”

I nodded. “Well, whoever painted that must have really loved triangles and the color blue.”

“Yeah,” he responded as he pulled two cans of beer out of a mini-fridge. “You want one?”

“Sure.”

“Come to think of it, it was the same guy who’s doing that gnome magazine. Huh,” ponderously. “Either way, I never could figure out what the dude was trying to say with it,” he said as he tossed a can my way. “I don't think there's one clear message in it. It's probably just what came out.” He cracked his beer, took a long sip, and flashed either a smile or a wince. “You know how that goes.”

“I guess so.”

Nine days have passed since I began this endeavor. By this point it is Sunday, the Lord's day. The neighborhood drowns in bells and families spilling onto the avenues from the churches. With the guilty orison that is Mass being over, the day will be spent barbecuing, drinking, and playing host to relatives. There is an almost tangible sense of tranquility on these mornings. The bodega urchins, drug peddlers, and walking erections, otherwise known as thugs (probably thugz, as “hard” people love showing off the fact that they are functionally illiterate), are still asleep, so defenses are down, smiles are abundant, and baking asphalt is about the only scent that confronts the nose. Bachatas quietly drift from the windows of tenement buildings like cirrus clouds; the streets pulse with laughter and an uncharacteristically timid rapport between feet and accelerator pedals.

I am overwhelmed by the desire to take the day off. I've been steadily drunk, too drunk only twice, for nearly a fortnight. In my pocket is two dollars and eighty-five cents. I've almost become accustomed to going into a bar without anticipating the arrival of a friend, to drinking without participating in banter or discourse, to leaving without a round of goodbyes. I've certainly begun to take my roommate's absence for granted. Solitude has never been anything more than a short-lived option for me. I've lived with grandparents, siblings, cousins, friends, roommates, even a girlfriend. I have never returned to an empty home with such regularity. It's both a relief and a curse, but, on the bright side, it has allowed me to experience another side of the City that has always been foreign to me.

New York is an odd place. This is true for a number of reasons, obviously, but I speak here exclusively of geography and demographics. When I first moved here, I was under the rather cynical impression that all of the neighborhood names were contrived; in my mind, they were arbitrary boundaries created and manipulated by real estate agencies that fabricated “feels” either to push property on foreign investors or to rent or sell spaces to domestic immigrants from places like Topeka and Duluth. True, I accepted the existence of myriad disparities between East New York, as well as the other lands of Persephone, and the Upper West Side; and I knew that the Village will always house the young and ambitious — which is especially true now, since the spirit of the Village extends well into north Brooklyn — but I could not understand how one differentiated between adjacent neighborhoods like Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens (or, for Manhattanites, Murray Hill and Gramercy Park) without taking recourse to street names and numbers on buildings. As Sartre said of the City (right after the war, I believe, and of Midtown, I would assume), the storefronts and people seem interchangeable; the only distinction between locations is the rent. And yet the more I explore the City, the more I engage it, the more I realize that it's not only that every neighborhood is different; every block of this city contains a sin qua non , an atmosphere, that cannot be described very well — it can only be experienced. Some people go to Europe to experience a plethora of cultures. New York City will give you the same experience, but you won’t need a passport; you just need a good pair of sneakers.

I've been to more than half of the bars on Sean's list. I've yet to get to some of the more remote places in Brooklyn, like Red Hook, which is accessible only via the B61—the most capricious bus in Brooklyn, according to the Tomas. I plan on exploring the neighborhoods south of Prospect Park this coming week. I would have completed the exploration of Windsor Terrance and what has come to be known as Greenwood Heights last night, but the stretch of Seventh Avenue that runs through Park Slope slowed our expedition to a crawl. There were just too many women, too many bars, too many drinks. To be honest, I don't remember how I got home last night.