Jay Fox - THE WALLS

As the daylight fades into that amethyst tone that signifies an acceptable departure from sobriety, the crowd thickens with regulars, who each take their pop shots at Midas after finding out from Charlie about the most recent event to warrant the forest of empties in front of him. Schadenfreude takes on many faces. Some wear it openly; some camouflage it with tepid pity. “Tough break, dough,” they each say. This is typically followed by: “But, you know what — sun's gonna come up tomorrah.”

Lifted from the pages of an inane tragedy, Midas' life has been a series of ups and downs; the problem, of course, is that the ups started disappearing fairly early on, and the downs have dug trenches in which they have decided to camp out. One could relate it to the Great War, but, in this case, there is a clear winner.

There is no one culmination to his misfortunes, he seems to imply, only a steady stream of ill fate. Without a good place to take out his rage, he feels it must be escorted to the bar — this dingy place with the wood veneer redolent with the scent of decay, which, Charlie says incidentally, never dissipates until the passing of the autumn rains that last all day and always make the night seem to come on prematurely.

The Mets lose, the Yankees win. And while the victory over Boston in something even some of the Mets fan celebrate, it offers such a inane conciliation that Midas, now drunk enough to dispense with any detail of life, however lurid or pathetic, only becomes more flush with that form of consternation that people often confuse with a faulty defecation reflex. He doesn't attempt to conceal the dread of having to return home to Margie, his wife of “too many” years, without the shoe or job with which he left this morning. He just tries to maintain a genial tone and that sense of humor that every village punching bag is required to assume: humble, self-deprecatory, and filled with a cornucopia of obscenities. He even provides a foreign proverb at one point on the virtues of ugly wives, which arouses laughter from some of the men surrounding the two of us once Midas translates it. The end of the Yankees game is one of many signals for him to go home — the first being the point when the yellows and oranges of the sky turn to scarlets and violets, the last being none other than “lights on,” a signal to remind the truly intractable that “last call” took place about an hour beforehand. Instincts of self-preservation alone should have sent him home right after the sun disappeared, but Midas is blind to the hazards of walking into a fight armed only with beer-breath and empty pockets. He's not afraid of his wife, or at least he doesn't call it fear by name; instead, it's “Fuck her; she don't own me” and “I can do whatever I want,” which even he even accepts as a poorly contrived illusion. So, instead of coming in with the proverbial tail between his legs, Midas instead accelerates through the stages of drunkenness at a steady pace until he is left in that morass of inebriated oblivion and eventually forced back home by friends who don’t want to see him fully pickled and poisoned; yes, back they will carry him home to confront all of the problems, now metastasized into potentially fatal maladies, that he had hoped to avoid.

Charlie finally cuts off his service once it's been dark long enough for no one to know what time it actually is. His eyes hold a limp grudge, but Debbie, one of the more sober regulars, offers to walk him back to his place before hostilities are nurtured in the womb of self-pity. Midas is a profusion of gratitude. He raises the last of his beer to her, saying:

Wine comes in at the mouth

And love comes in at the eye;

That's all we shall know for truth

Before we grow old and die.

I lift my glass to my mouth,

I look to you, and I sigh.

Midas then stands, falters, and then clutches onto Debbie's shoulder. He tells me to take care of his bar, and then begins for the exit. All eyes are on Midas — some sympathetic, some contemptuous. I think about his name. I was so quick to assume that it was born out of sarcasm, a caustic reminder of his problems; but what if it had been laurelled upon him prior to a vicissitude of fate, what an ancient would have concluded was the result of some great offense to a god?

As soon as the door closes behind them, a woman named Pepper takes up the unoccupied seat. She's probably the same age as Midas, but her face looks significantly older, even with her hair in pigtails. Her features have been gullied by years, a short stint with meth, and a bigamous marriage to neat whiskey and the brand of full-flavored cigarettes that peer out of the opening of her purse. Her words traverse gravely roads. “Whatcha tawkin wit dat loser four?” she asks with something like flirtation behind the wheel. One would need a specially made piano to hit the octave in which she speaks — shrill fails to capture the tenor of this squawking peacock.

“I don't know,” I respond. “I'm supposed to be looking for an artist,” I say as my eyes inevitably make their way towards her bounty of cleavage.

“Ya looking fa an artist in dis ear dump?” Charlie looks over to her. I look to Charlie. “No fence Charl, but I tink dis kid's got da jerkoffs at hang round ear confused wit DUMBO.” Her inept humor is endearing even to those she insults; it's never mordant enough to provoke much more than a thin shawl of derision or one of those grins that expands when doused in alcohol. “Seriously, dough, ya came ear lookin fa an artist?”

“A true-devoted pilgrim is not weary to measure kingdoms with his feeble steps,” I respond.

“Yo, Charlie, how many beers ya feed Hamlet ear?” It's no use; Charlie's attention is being courted by the pulsing of the crowd, its gregarious cacophony managing to even drown out the well-known Edwin Starr track rumbling out of the jukebox. A man in a red beret is dancing a derivation of the Charleston not known in most parts while various onlookers encourage him by clapping along with the rhythm of another song. Pepper looks to Charlie for a long time like an orphan gazing upon a suburban Christmas Morning, but Charlie's still captivated by the commotion overtaking the back of the bar. She finally concedes to futility as he starts mixing what looks to be a Manhattan for a man with a mustache stained hangover-piss brown. “Ah, faget you,” she says as she turns back to me. “So. Ya lookin fa dat Tourette's guy, I take it?”

“Tourette's?”

“Yeah,” she says with that you-think-I'm-stupid-or-something grin that, once again, may be flirtatious. “Hate to burst yer bubble, bud, but some a us round ear ain't as dumb as we look.” I look to her apologetically. “I'm just bustin yer chops, kid. 'F I weren't a nurse I wouldn't know coprolalia from aphasia,” she says with the same coy grin that guides her from one bar stool to the next.

“So you've heard of Coprolalia?” I ask with wide eyes. “That's so ( caesura ) great.”

“Yeah,” she explodes. “I heard a'im, but I don't know'm a'nuttin. What gotcha' tawking wit Midas.”

“I don't know.” I look down to the dregs of beer in my bottle before placing it back on the bar. “Exchanging life stories, I guess — his bad luck versus my waning expectations.”

“You're what? Twenty-six?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Twenty-two? Wow.” She pats me on the shoulder. “Buck up fella; you gotta few years left four you can bitch like dat.”

“I guess so.” I take down the rest of my beer. “Guess I'm better off than Midas, anyhow.”

“Psh,” she responds as she reaches for her glass of whiskey, “He'd blame da hangover he wakes up wit every mornin on his crummy luck 'f he thawt someone'd listen.” Her face contorts into a pincushion wince. “None a what I'm saying ear's any different den what I've said ta'm a thousand times over. He's a loser, kid. I known Margie since we's in junior high. Guess 'at makes me a friend a'is by proxy, huh?