Jay Fox - THE WALLS

Aberdeen spends the majority of the ride on the phone with a music journalist who goes by the name of Keen Buddy. According to Tomas, he's not keen on much, nor is particularly friendly. Once he is off the phone, Aberdeen describes this Buddy character as a half-mad Scot with an insatiable thirst for whiskey and a temper that can be measured in Planck units. Aberdeen then defines Planck units even though there is no request to do so. Tomas adds that Buddy's probably syphilitic once the cab driver cranks up the music. It's the point in the movement where the strings have taken the lead and the damsel and the protagonist are seen waltzing through a field; the episode is captured by a camera manufactured sometime during the first decade of the previous century. It is a blur of bucolic sepia.

Keen Buddy stands at the corner of Manhattan and Huron. I am immediately struck by his negative appearance. It's not that his features are particularly minatory, though I do believe that his eyes would best be described as beady (not because they are reminiscent of beads or marbles or anything that might be taken as aesthetically pleasing; there is nothing captivating or insightful or even meaningful there — no, it is as though they were once in the possession of a passionless mortician, a person who spends the majority of any given day hungover and listening to the bereaved as they describe the style and personality of the dead with as much precision as can be conjured up during that initial time of mourning — those days when we unconsciously manufacture infallibility, perhaps hagiographies, more often than accuracy because every life seems damn near perfect right after it's been lived—, a person who would then clothe the inanimate with no small cataract to detail, a person who would then reach into a drawer of cheap mementos, a bounty of tawdry miscellany just like the beads, and then set to work affixing these contextless and [therefore] meaningless items onto the lifeless body with a haste passionate only in its drive for consummation, the end of the day, the drive home, the bottle that waits on the sideboard next to the phonograph player that both fills the studio apartment with song and helps to alleviate the man’s head of the words that he didn't, doesn't, will not say — to a woman, to God, father, mother, brother, sister: some dead, some dead only to him). Keen Buddy's chin is also more pronounced than what could be considered the average chin, though the idea of an average shape to any body part is rather absurd. So maybe it isn't more noticeable than an average chin because I guess there's no such thing as an average chin. It is just noticeable. You notice his chin. His chin, and those beady eyes.

Still, it is his orientation to the world that strikes me more than anything else once first impressions become conversational as opposed to visual. It is an orientation marked by hostility and preemptive defense, what others like him call realistic or cautious or well-adjusted to the cesspool of hypocrisy and brutality that goes by no name more profound than society. He probably applauds himself for having the perspicuity to know that all people are inherently selfish, the insight to know that all systems of ethics and law are adjunctive to fear, the prescience to foresee betrayal, and, consequently, the good sense to never get too close to anyone. And in his willingness to trespass upon the event horizon of fatalism, he must have also accepted that such a orientation would bar him from ever being able to truly engage anyone, that he would exist only within the sordid world of self and other, of criticism; and that civility in this banal theater would inevitably be too much to handle, as he is already too drunk because he's always already too drunk. He proposes no solutions; he simply continues his nihilistic and almost aggressive march upon the injustices of the world under the white flag of apathy and bitterness. When I consider him and his kind, I cannot help but feel far more pity than contempt.

We take down some cheap and greasy Chinese food on Manhattan Avenue before setting out for the bar where I went with Tomas and Aberdeen the first day we met. The space seems less cavernous due to the abundance of kids regaling the end of the start of the workweek, and for this reason Keen Buddy's sourness fails to anchor our table's mood in the misanthropic quagmire he calls home. He is still complaining about the staleness of his broccoli as we sit with our beers. Soon he begins talking about women with choleric disgust because, “Women just want control: over your life, your pride, your dreams, your money. But no bit of ass will ever get her fucking claws deep enough into me to tell me what to do. I got too much integrity for that shite [this is not a type-o].” He then takes in his surroundings, sitting high up in his chair like a pharaoh turned pariah. “Fucking hipsters are everywhere tonight, eh?” It comes down like a hammer, a kinetics of hatred both puissant and unrelenting. “Don't these fucking cunts have jobs?”

“Calm down, Buddy,” Aberdeen says. It's not an admonishment because it lacks either a condemning or even severe tone. It's more of a plea for civility, an imperative phrased in such a way as to not arouse further contempt. “They're out here to have a good time just like us.” It is odd to see Aberdeen take on a demeanor marked more by attempts at pacification than what one might call demureness — even though the latter word itself is something of an eye- (perhaps tongue-, too) sore. Tomas is more quiet than usual. He becomes ostensibly incensed when his jukebox choice is met with haughty disdain (a pleonasm, perhaps, as some dictionaries define disdain as “haughty contempt,” just as some dictionaries define a salamander as a being that dwells within the realm of fire, or, better yet, a being that is the embodiment of fire, destruction, perdition).

When asked what he considers to be suitable music, the salamander merely shrugs. “You wouldn't know them; and, even if you did know them, you wouldn't understand them.”

Tomas and I soon stand to go to the bar. “He's such a fucking dick,” Tomas says in a voice that is low enough so that I will not follow up with anything more than a concurring nod of the head and a grin. “Honestly,” once we approach the bar, “I don't know why James likes him so much. I mean, I know I complain a lot, don't get me wrong; it's just with fuckstain Buddy over there — well, it's like he refuses to get over himself, dig. He's like half a step above a fucking blogger, and he acts like he's the senior editor of Rolling fucking Stone .”

The bartender is preoccupied by a young woman desperately trying to mask her beauty behind large clumps of raven hair. It does not strike one as an expensive haircut, nor does it seem as though it was cut by a clumsy hand; still, it speaks of an irreverence for the seraphic face that is her birthright — a birthright that no doubt entitles her to tragedy and irony as much as it entitles her to the attention or heart or mind or soul of each person suddenly arrested by her possession of an intangible quality that evokes something far more substantive than the prurient — or puerile — sensation of conquest. She cannot escape it; she can only hide, make pretend that she does not know what power she holds, even if this ignorance is sometimes transparent, as she sometimes wishes she could be. Men — women, too — will impose upon her specious graces, powers taken from a liturgy of love penned by the obsessed and the deranged. They will gladly line up one by one, even if they know they will eventually be jettisoned from the heights of anticipation and cast with hideous combustion down to bottomless perdition — where not even Elpis will venture unless escorted by Hypnos.

The only portions of her face that I see clearly are her lips and her jawline. The former are full and supple like the pulp of a citrus fruit; the latter is well-defined without being angular or severe. She hides her body, as well; it is shielded by loose clothing that would seem most suitable on an expecting mother. Yet for all her hiding, for all her reluctance to display the fullness of her beauty for which so many men — women, too — will sacrifice so much, there is a lack of pretense to her body language, an ease in the movements of her lips as they draw the outlines of letters, forming words that each individual proceeds to color in with his or her own meaning. The bartender's captivation is therefore understandable, somehow necessary; it is not taken as disparaging to those of us waiting for service. We are complacent; we are well aware of the rules of the game.