Jay Fox - THE WALLS

I am committing the act that is prosaically known as “people watching,” a leisurely activity that is not as active as most activities; in fact it is more of a pass-time, in that it passes time. I know not to look at people directly, so I can't really be said to be watching them. I merely notice them, speculate on their motivations and convictions, and then move on to the next individual or group of individuals to catch my attention.

I sit upon the same bench until I tire of judging people I will never come to know: the young woman in those shorts that are so conducive to camel-toe, the old man concealing a Newton's Cradle in his sweatpants, the tranquil few taking in a landscape that only changes with the seasons, the early-rising tourists, who have probably gotten lost on their way to the Botanical Gardens or the museum, the young mothers with curious-looking children in curious-looking contraptions. I am the unshaven twenty-something that needs to do something with his life. A group of toddlers stream past like a pack of wild dogs as I begin to walk in the direction of the southwest exit. Several women follow like patient and passive shepherds. There is more than likely a playground in the vicinity, but I can't see it from where I am.

Without any real orientation to the week as a seven-day construct, every day feels like Saturday or Sunday, depending on my mood. Today is more of a Sunday than a Saturday; therefore, it is natural to see the bars closed. I don't consider the option of looking for one that caters to only the most forsaken of aquarium drinkers; instead, I take to inquiring in coffee shops and other locations that have public restrooms not exclusively reserved for patrons. These cafés are filled with women with computers, magazines, newspapers, or popular novels in front of them. There's almost always one very intense girl of maybe seventeen reading something very heavy in the corner.

As I have decided to abandon the practice of having a drink or something to eat at every place I wander into, the number of lavatories I manage to see mounts relatively quickly during the early hours of the day. Few employees know Coprolalia by name, and even fewer are interested in the reason I am looking for him. There is only a quick shrug of the shoulder and a finger in the direction of a door. Sometimes it is marked. Sometimes it is not. Either way, the bathrooms each smell of cheap disinfectant and recirculated air. There are nuances in each of these washrooms, typically something from the kitchen. The walls don't have much on them. There are anti-war stickers on top of deodorant advertisements, illegible tags, changing tables. The latter is an amenity that is more pervasive the further north you go, as it is a prerequisite for any establishment that both serves food and claims to be located within the elusive boundaries of Park Slope, which some people will claim encompasses roughly a third of Brooklyn.

After a few hours in this area (Windsor Terrace or Park Slope or South Slope or Greenwood Heights, which features a medical center named after the cemetery), I believe I have identified at least four Coprolalia installations not featured on Sean's list. The workers initially expressed a reluctance to say when these pieces appeared, but many came to exhibit a modest deal of pride as we examined what they had ignored hitherto, and, after a few minutes, a consensus on the probable month Coprolalia paid them a visit is established.

There are relatively few bars once you're south of Windsor Terrace, and even fewer restaurants that serve anything besides sandwiches, Chinese food, and things both fried and nondescript that have been writhing under a heat lamp since before dawn. Further east, fast-food joints that sell fried chicken and beef patties litter the blocks, as do salons, $.99 stores, and purveyors of cheap and possibly illegal porn. There are more liquor stores and bodegas than garbage cans, which provides some explanation as to why there are shards of broken vodka and beer bottles just about everywhere you look (this is the materialist explanation, of course).

I begin to backtrack with the hope of finding a street with more storefronts, and end up heading west until I come to the southern border of Greenwood Cemetery, its sprawling acres verdant and lush and manicured and fragrant with the scent of damp leaves and mowed grass. I soon realize that the street is something of an extension of the cemetery, so I once again change course, and end up on 39 th. Initially, it contains nothing more than the jumbled mixture of row homes and those tenement buildings — miasma of twisted metal (foreground); beer-bottle-brown brick (background) — that are so ubiquitous in nearly every part of Brooklyn; soon it becomes a shallow canyon cutting through a low-density industrial zone profuse with loading areas (some gaping open like toothless mouths, some closed behind walls of retractable steel), diesel-spewing trucks, and small tan men on forklifts. I turn down 14 thAvenue when the opportunity arises. This leads me into a community in which I am subjected to a silent curiosity too profane to admit steady eye contact. I am less than an enigma here, more like an apparition just tangible enough to warrant chameleon tongues and quickened steps. The women feign interest in their children: tiny creatures — pudgy to the point of amorphous — with faces both frail and innocent like good men in love. They look out upon the world from the strollers — their mouths suckling upon ellipses, their eyes darting with feline agility — as their mothers scold them (in Semitic tongue) for staring. These mothers then twist their mouths in my direction. Is this some type of apology ? The men speak on cellular phones and pay little regard to the traffic upon the street; they gracefully avoid the speeding trucks and cars that, like me, are phantoms passing through the community. The younger girls with whom I share the sidewalk giggle, their faces more rebellious than any others you may run across in this land — this land where the present shadows the past, where today begets not tomorrow, but a slight perversion of what the Day ought to be — although there is nothing particularly defiant in their eyes. The little boys ride bicycles and tricycles along the sidewalk, not in tandem or even succession, with their peyos flowing in the breeze. They, too, weave in and out of traffic — onto the sidewalk, off of the sidewalk — in sine waves. The adolescents and young men are absent, plucked from this anachronistic tableau as if ripened berries from the vine.

As I continue down this avenue, the street numbers increasing from low-forties and eventually arriving at low-fifties, I realize that there are no bars in this neighborhood. It is rather obvious, but obvious only when one redacts the surrounding world. There are restaurants, purveyors of clothing styles that would be considered modern only in the milieu of a great-grandmother's attic, and what may or may not be antique shops; one even comes across grocery stores, a few curiously placed bodegas, and a handful of fish markets, which are far less of an olfactory felony than their Chinese counterparts. To deny the hamlet its pleasantness and quaintness would be to divest it of its virtue, but its relevance to my mission, my life, virtually every other life being lived, is negligible.

I turn onto 52 ndand begin making my way east. The street itself looks no different than parts of a Detroit suburb I once had the opportunity to visit: Birmingham or Bloomfield — I forget. It was just a stopover, however; the real destination on that trip was a cottage in the northern region of the state (what Michiganders call “Up North” (a pleonasm that may have been coined by Hemingway) as opposed to “Upstate”; moreover, “Up North” is not to be confused with the second peninsula of the state (the one connected to Wisconsin), which is referred to as “The U.P.,” —A nd it's filled with nothing but rednecks and hippies, you said as we made our way up I-75 in the insufferable humidity of the Michigan summer — where the sky was neither cloudy nor clear, just an expanse of dirty periwinkle (the same color of the building at the end of Aitken Place) hanging above the rows of conifers that comprised the median and the sides of the highway once we passed mile 200;—looking for M-55, which you said would come up without warning even if there were several signs for it, though not as many as for jerky or firearms or trucks or other things that you had to make disparaging comments about for obvious reasons and because of even more obvious complexes;—hoping to abandon the city, not only in terms of space or even time, but in spirit: to regain that halcyon perspective in which beauty and love and virtue intermingle (to sit around the fire, to stare at the stars, to make love to Neutral Milk Hotel in a bed upon on which you had slept every summer since you were seven); and you believed it could be found in the serenity of a lake scene in that mitten-state, that that same serenity would somehow reveal as opposed to blind us from/to the great truths to which two people are bound to come if they are together long enough ). The inhabitants are obviously different here, but the oppressive dimensions of the homes upon the tiny lots are not. Sometimes the three-story brick structures have several buzzers; sometimes there is only one intercom next to the front door. There are very few people on the street. The majority of the people you see are women and small children, not on the street, but perched upon balconies. They scan the streets like patrician owls examining the floor of a forest. Perhaps they indulge only in suspicion; perhaps it is a silent hostility.