Jay Fox - THE WALLS

“You know her?” Tomas asks.

“What?”

“The girl you're fucking staring at, man,” he says as he swipes at my shoulder. “You go to school with her or something?”

“No,” I respond plainly. My eyes look to Buddy talking in choleric pantomime.

“She's cuting füch, man.”

“What?”

“Fucking cute.” He laughs. “You should go talk to her.”

“She's probably here with someone.”

“Probably,” he snorts. “You haven’t been with many chicks, have you?”

“I've had my share,” defensively.

He chuckles with a smugness that's not disguised. “Well, it sure as shit isn't my place to call you out on it,” he adds as the bartender finally approaches. “Two pints of Guinness and two shots of Jäger.” He smiles and waves off the twelve dollars I produce. “Bennington Special. Dig it!”

We take down the anise component of our Bennington Specials. With nothing more than a glare, he stops me from heading back to our table, so we linger around the bar. His eyes inevitably fall upon the girl from before, who, by now, has returned to the three men that comprise the rest of her party.

“They all want to nail her,” he says.

“No shit. I'm sure one of them is dating her, though.”

“No, they're all just friends. Look at how fucking confident she is, man. She knows that all three of them want to rail the shit out of her.” He pauses. “Hell, everyone in the bar wants to fuck her.”

“I know.”

“But look at the three guys with her. See how disparate…disparate?”

“Dissident?”

“See how dissident they are. There's no one guy shielding her. The three are on equal ground. I'll venture to guess that she has a boyfriend she's starting to tire of, you know, and that guy's probably close with at least one of the three over there. She's fucking within the group of friends because they're all young and clearly new to the city. They probably graduated a year ago. Maybe they finished up at En Why You or Columbia or Pace, and they're just new to the area.” He takes a sip from his pint. “But she'll never touch any one of them. You know, she's just using them to make the fucking absentee boyfriend jealous. Standard procedure, really, but only the most vindictive lovers go any higher than the ante when playing with the friends.”

“West L.A. Fadeaway” begins to play. I hear Keen Buddy vehemently condemning the Dead to…well, death. Two seats become available at the bar. Tomas looks to them. He then motions to me.

“The boyfriend's probably pretty goofy looking.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Fucking think about it, man,” he exclaims. “The whole world is ready to bow to her, dig — to place her upon a pedestal. But she doesn't want that. She hates that shit.”

He means to say that she can't be approached by that silly impulse to buy her time in the form of a drink. She is not interested in formalities. Because she knows that any form of superficiality on her part will be reciprocated to no small degree by her partner. And she doesn't want superficiality. She knows this. She has experienced it in those particularly superficial years that come between adolescence and death; and she has come to discover that the afflatus that so many people have imputed to her tends to bring out the worst in them — men, women, perhaps even animals. The introverted and humble bury themselves; the proud, meanwhile, know that a woman like that has to be treated like filth. 'You have to put that bitch in her place': Famous words of a lonely man with two testicles more familiar to the feel of a foot than a shoe-salesman. So it's more of an effluvium that surrounds her. It is an alienating curse from which she wants nothing more than escape. And yet she can't stand the idea of being alone, probably because she has never had the opportunity to be alone.

“It's not hard to read people from a distance,” he begins. “You know, when you divorce yourself from the situation, you see things with a lot more clarity, you dig me? When you're in closer proximity, however…well, that's when things get complicated.” I look to him with squinted eyes. “Not just you — everyone. I do it, too.” His attention is arrested by the open door. “Holy shit, man. Check it out — B.T.A.”

“What?”

“A B.T.A. just walked through the door.”

“What the hell is a B.T.A.?”

“Big-Titted Asian,” with wide eyes past me. I turn to see her. She has entered with her boyfriend. They favor that rockabilly aesthetic that is more of a niche than a fad. It engenders a nostalgia for a parallel universe in which James Dean and Vincent Vega and Jack Kerouac are still getting loaded on PBR and Schlitz in the flatbed of Carl Perkins' Ford — William S. Boroughs is behind the wheel because Perkins is boozing in the back with the others; Marilyn Monroe is sitting bitch between the driver and Dick Dale, who strums out a few chords along with the radio — as this corybantic gang tears ass down some derelict highway populated by moonlit cornfields and ominously dark towns that recede from sight and from memory like stones in deep waters; and they talk about the American Dream with tones that range from derision to antipathy, about conformity and rebellion, about how the line that distinguishes the two is only relevant to those for whom appearing one way or the other is more important than actually being one way or the other, about the fact that they never would have all imagined themselves (the men at least) as being part of the same campy fantasy, a fantasy that has not simply been concocted by someone born after Khrushchev left office, perhaps even after he died (perhaps even after Brezhnev died), but one that has come to be almost universally acknowledged by now as an accurate depiction of their era (even if it is a series of eras), one that has even come to be revered by the square community of today for whom the threat of Beat poetry seems about as menacing as a rerun of Leave it to Beaver . The B.T.A. sports a skimpy, black cocktail dress that is at least one size too small (from which a leopard-print bra peaks out), torn fishnets, a beehive coiffure, and a possibly fake beauty mark on her right cheek. The boyfriend wears tight black jeans, a red and white checkered shirt that has been left open to reveal a white shirt (as well as his lack of either muscle or fat), and Buddy Holly glasses. He has a well-pomaded head of hair, what bullies from bygone days would have called a pencil-neck (they probably would have used this insult as his slightly official cognomen, too), and a face so fresh — perhaps even glabrous — that one would think he has never found use for a razor. “Come on, man,” Tomas begins softly, “If there's anything better in this world than a cute Asian chick with big beautiful titties, I haven't fucking found it.” I turn to him. He looks to me. “Dig it, man — the absurd man's diligence is focused in the moment.”

How does one respond to that?

“As I was saying,” he resumes, “I was dating this girl a while back. Everyone told me that she was crazy, that she was going to hurt me, that she had an eating disorder. But I refused to believe them. You know, she was such a great fucking person. She was smart, she was witty, she was cultured. And let's not forget that she was fucking gorgeous, too.” He looks from side to side. “And, between you and I, this broad knew how to fuck, dig? I mean she was fucking dirty as shit when it really came down to it. She'd slap me around, I'd pull her hair and shit; she'd scream, and I'd just go to fucking town on that shit. Man,” he exhausts, “probably the best lay of my fucking life.”

“That's…that's…wow.”

“Fucking tell me about it, man. But, you know, it didn't make sense — the whole bulimia thing. How could someone like that ( caesura ) succumb to such a thing as an eating disorder — which, if you ask me is more of a symptom of a personality disorder than a fucking disease in and of itself, but, hey, what the fuck do I know. This goes for alcoholics, too.” He takes another drink. “Either fucking way, it wasn't until I had to take her to the hospital one night that it all came out.” He pauses as though awaiting a rim-shot. “Okay — bad choice of words; but you know what I'm getting at, right?