Jay Fox - THE WALLS

“Yeah, but (largo) he's a pussy and she's a bawl-breaker. Reminds me of her parents' situation.” She takes down whatever is left in her glass and slams it back down on the bar with enough force to grab Charlie's attention. She then resumes, allegro: “Gen! I ain't sayin this cause I like sayin shit bout my friends, understand. I just want to inform you at Midas ain't some guy, oo's just down on his luck; he's a fuckin doormat and no'uns gonna give him a break 'f he don't wizen up and (staccato) take some-fuck-ing initiative. Ya know, Margie does ride him a lot — granted; but she's only doin it to get'm off his ass.” She reaches for the pack of cigarettes in her purse. “D'jew smoke?”

“When I drink.”

“Well, ya drinkin right now, huh; how's'about you accompany me out,” she says as a bit of saliva (perhaps a pebble) flies off her tongue and slaps me on the cheek.

“I don't see a problem with that.” I try to find my sea legs as I stumble into the man next to me. He smiles awkwardly.

It strikes me that Pepper's gestures aren't flirtatious; rather, she embodies the gaze of a guardian angel hired to make certain that the demons I've been ingesting don't get too out of hand, no matter how tenaciously they may fight for control. The Atlantic-Motown argument can be heard above Esther Phillips' “Release Me,” which seems to be serving as quite the soporific for the patrons still riled up from the previous song.

Many eyes (perhaps an odd number) follow us as we make our way from the bar to the front door on shifting floorboards that the regulars learned to navigate long ago. From behind, I would have guessed Pepper to be in her mid-twenties. Short, denim skirt; black, sleeveless V-neck blouse; pigtails of over-dyed hair — these are features that would have produced a shortage of blood in the head had it not been for the steady hours of drinking. She wears three-inch heels on her open-toed shoes, which reveal freshly applied fuchsia polish, as well as freakishly elongated toes. Her belt circumnavigates no less than two feet of waist, and her hips and ass still appear to be awaiting puberty. On her right bicep is a tattoo of something that holds far too esoteric a significance to go into, she tells me as we stand outside in the sultry night, her cigarettes tasting of bargain and sawdust. She takes down two before I can finish the first.

Pepper breaks down Midas' life into seven phases, and explains that he has the tendency to regress into denial when drunk. “Problem, course, is he's always fuckin drunk,” she adds as Debbie comes back and asks for a cigarette.

“Youse talking bout Midas?” she asks.

“Who else?”

“Jesus, he's a real shit show tonight. What'd ya do to'm, kind?”

“He just kept drinking. I wasn't encouraging him. We just started talking and Charlie just kept giving us beer and now it's ten.”

“Dahling,” Pepper says as her hand makes for my shoulder, “'s almost one.”

“Really?” I ask with a smile. She nods sedately and quickly removes her hand to check her watch. It's actually one-fifteen. “Well,” I respond, “He was upset because he lost his shoe and his job.”

“'At sounds like a load,” Pepper scoffs. “Shit, whateva dat guy don't have'n confidence he sure as shit makes up in nerve.” She turns to Debbie. “What'd Margie say when ya brought his drunk ass home?”

“No idea; s'not like I was gonna wait around and see. Fer'all I know he's passed out in the stairwell.”

My phone rings. The two look to me, shrug, and then go back to talking about Midas. It's Tomas. By the urgency in his voice, it's implied that there are a few coke peddlers at whatever bar he's set up shop, but the actual words themselves are indecipherable until he kicks open the door and escapes outside. The sound of traffic compromises a few syllables here and there, but the blanks are filled in without recourse to repetition. After a few platitudes and what seems to be a desire to hold out information, he finally reveals the purpose of the call.

“It's a fucking haiku, man!” ecstatic. I can almost picture his stout body swooning like a question mark as he begins to contemplate the possibility of a Zen influence in the new piece — certainly an anomaly, if not a reason for skepticism. “I'm sure it's a Coprolalia, man,” he reassures me. “You need to fucking come and see it, dig? I've been calling you for, like, two hours. Where the fuck are you?”

“I'm still in Red Hook…I think.” The two women walk inside. The street is suddenly devoid of all life. The steady flow of B.Q.E. traffic resonates through the air like the sound of choppy surf. “Carroll Gardens or Red Hook.”

“You've got something,” he begins before descending into a list of onomatopoeic utterances that are employed, typically one at a time, when one attempts to conjure up a better word or phrase for the one previously used. “You've got a lead!” he finally explodes. “That's it! You've got a fucking lead.”

“Not really,” I lament. “I guess I just lost track of time.”

“Look: you need to get over here, dig? Me and James met a group of New School broads, and they just fucking love Coprolalia. You've been working at this pretty hard. What you need is a good, solid night of fucking to clear your head.” The phone is hijacked by a car alarm. “I'm going back in. You know where we are right? It's a few blocks north of that Hercules thing Coprolalia did that you and Aberdeen are always talking about. See you in a bit.”

He hangs up the phone before I can respond. His words clearly do not have the agility to keep pace with his actions or thoughts, and, knowing him, the most important thing at the moment is the opportunity of more amphetamines. Still, a new Coprolalia means the possibility of a witness or even a list of suspects. Either way, the continuing saga of Midas is intriguing enough to get me in for one more round before I head off to examine Tomas' discovery.

A man turns the corner as I stand staring to the tiny moon beyond the streetlight. We catch eyes, but I discern nothing in his face. “The turkey is too dry,” he says once he has approached within a few feet of me. He has a strong British accent.

“Have you tried basting it?” I ask gingerly.

He stares to me from behind tinted glasses. It's difficult to make out his facial features. He is cold and withdrawn, vaporous like a wraith. “So the elusive Monsieur Lemieux lives to see another day,” he laughs coldly. He nods slowly, looks up and down the street, and then walks back around the corner from whence he came. His footsteps echo quietly as he strolls down the canyon of concrete, a kind of steady clicking like an old clock. I hear a luxury car door open. Shut. An idling engine disengages from park. Transmission gears churn and grind. The car turns onto the street and heads north. It is a black Lincoln of modern make: a car that is supposed to be anonymous, elegant, blunt. The man has a driver, but the car does not belong to a service. Hundreds of questions implore my attention like wide-open receivers running through the end zones of my mind.

I enter to find that the floor of the bar has regained its stability — it is no longer an esoteric series of shirting planks, but, rather, just a bunch of adjacent cuts of wood warped by the elements. I return to my seat after using the bathroom to find Pepper and Debbie still talking about Midas. “Yeah, at piece a shit wouldn't even know what t'ado wit it,” I hear Pepper say. I immediately think about Debbie's vagina, which, of course, sets the ol' noodle to work trying to envisage what lay beneath her sweatshorts and whether or not the varicose veins — which crowd the lower portions of her thighs as if stray pen marks or derelict hairs on Linus' head — flow all the way up her leg, or if some anatomical miracle has prevented the advance of these cosmetic abominations, which some culture on this Earth must revere as symbolic of the accoutrement of phronetic wisdom, not only years. I soon lose interest in the matter, however, as I remember the temperature and the unfortunate fact that the vagina reacts to heat much as the skunk reacts to danger. The male grundle, of course, is no better.