Jay Fox - THE WALLS

“Yo, Quiet Riot, what's on yer mind?” Debbie asks as I realize that I'm grinning with the same countenance that appeared when I started contemplating Debbie's protean pussy. “You ain't gonna get sick, are ya?”

“No, I was just thinking about the best way to get over to Park Slope.”

“What? We ain't good'nuff all of a sudden? Gotta go to fucking Pahk Slope?” Pepper yells above Smokey Robinson, who is telling everyone about Mickey's Monkey. Pepper's tone is not one of indignation, or, if it is, it's the playful sort. The word “persiflage” pops into my head. I don't know if it applies.

“No,” I begin with my palms showing; “There's a new piece in a bathroom over on Union and Fifth. I want to go over to make sure it's authentic.”

The two look to me without scorn.

“What kinda piece we talkin here? You a pimp?”

“He's fowlinround that shitta artist.”

“What?” she says with a look of disgust in my direction. She turns back to Pepper: “He's tailing some dude who makes sculptures wit his shit?”

“No, usually drawings or poetry.”

She turns back to me, utterly mystified: “How ya make poetry wit dookie?”

The question resonates in my imagination for long enough to draw a smile. “He writes on the walls — usually in pen.”

“'Ere was at ting on'm in DaPost ,” Pepper says on the heels of my words. Debbie replies with a dithering head. “Yer staying fer another beer, right?”

I ask for a beer and the check. The beer is on the house; the tab is eighteen dollars. I leave thirty. Pepper and Debbie are now gossiping about the neighborhood denizens as though scholars exchanging lurid details of the dead. Midas, once the star, has by now become just another thread in a tapestry of working-class despair, one in which every man is either a drunk or a fool, every woman a saint or a “fuckin nutcase.” I imagine the whole neighborhood as a long stretch of halfway houses filled with deviant kids and adults with forsaken ambitions, which, although highly offensive, is probably more accurate than most would like to admit.

Debbie and Pepper seem incredibly fond of Maria, a recent addition to the neighborhood. She is considered “too good” for Carlos, her husband — evidently more of a fool than a drunk. As they tell stories about these two, Maria and Carlos, I cease to be a focal point; I become more like a detail in the background of one’s reflection or a fly upon the wall that is kept alive because it doesn't draw too much attention to itself. They want to set Maria up with Raphael, the UPS driver. Les McCann, meanwhile, echoes the generation of Baraka and Brathwaite, a generation that has since muzzled itself with the pages of Revelations.

“Ya hear Midas worked fer UPS fer a month a so, right?”

“Get out!”

“Yeah — got fired fer drinkin on the job. A few weeks afta, I ax him, 'Midas, what can Brown do fa you'?” The two bowl over laughing even though the joke doesn't seem to have a punch line.

8.1

The B71 keeps me waiting only a few minutes. Even during rush hour, Brooklyn buses have a nasty habit of not coming unless they are baited by the sudden recollection of a forgotten item less than a block away or a freshly lit cigarette. Neither is here necessary, which gives me that feeling that something good is eminent — an irrational sentiment, no doubt, but one that seems to arise whenever you beat the odds.

I make it to the bar just before two in the morning. The doorman — a severely androgenic colossus with no sense of humor and that overwhelming need to intimidate because he is on the side of power for perhaps the first time in his life — scans my ID for an extended period of time as a nearby group of smokers talk about how horribly pretentious all of the bars in Park Slope have become since they moved to the neighborhood nine months ago. “You cool,” the bouncer concedes. He still stares me down as I reach for the door. I open it to see yet another golem subsisting on negative energies aroused by rejection, indignation, and animosity. Union membership being what it is, I guess the Pinkertons have been forced to scour the classifieds.

Aberdeen, Tomas, and the New School girls are on a couch near the front door. The girls are clearly underage, but they're just attractive enough to not have to deal with the scrupulous bouncer. I am quickly introduced to them. They are Trixi, Mix, Nixi, and Jane. Jane seems sober. Trixi and Mixi probably subsist on a diet dominated by Sparks, Aderol, Sweet and Low, Ensure, and Marlboro Lights. Nixi, however, appears to be strung out on something far more intense than the mélange of products favored by the other two.

“I am hydrogen,” she says as she stares to the empty patch of space to the left of my ear.

My immediate response is to turn to the others for an explanation. They want to see my reaction — as is evident from the eager looks in each eye. I turn back to her. “That's a pretty song.”

“No,” she says with sudden severity. “I am hydrogen.”

“What's that like?”

She replies with a tepid smile, what I assume will serve as the preamble to a series of Pythian verses. Before any utterance gets made, however, she runs off to a makeshift dance-floor directly in front of the doors leading to the bathrooms. As she goes, she manages to spread mayhem and a general sense of alarm throughout the bar; she's ranting in an amalgam of languages, some of which she may have no knowledge, which leads some to stare with curious expressions as they catch words like “ ojos ” and “ danke ” and “ schlep ” and “ mboo ” and “ how zi ” and “ flambeaux ,” but have no reply when they hear salutations in no less than thirty different languages, most of which are dead, besides a look in our direction, which intimates the following query: “Is this chick insanely smart or just plain insane?” As she goes marauding through the relative peace, she kicks over a table of drinks, sending cosmos and various concoctions with the suffix “-ini” into the air, though the bartender, most of the patrons, and the second bouncer fail to notice because a 4/4 song in the key of C is busy condemning conformity and all of the adjuncts of apathy at decibels surpassing rusty-tracked G levels. By the time the drinks start landing on the unassuming dancers and standers and talkers and others just floating around too close to the epicenter of the collision for their own good, Nixi has already taken the second or third step of — what I'm informed is called — the Rampaging Monkey, an exercise/dance ritual established by the same Hindu sect that believes the flu can be cured by sprinting up a Himalayan trail. That, or she appears to have stumbled upon the same stuff that caused the infamous Dancing Plague of 1518, which most scholars claim is ergot, though there is the possibility that a little bit of that southern magic, with which Pynchon was once so enamored, snuck into Europe like a dispossessed Palestinian looking for a construction job.

“I thought they said she could drink on that shit,” Trixi says. She is wearing a powder-blue wig and a pink T-shirt that reads i'm the coolest in letters that appear to be crystallized in cartoon ice. A poet would have spent afternoons devising clever similes for her breasts, which were perky and celestial. A more straightforward person would have simply stated what happened to be the same unit in which Connie lived while in her junior year dorm: 34-C. “That Cenobe is seriously fucking with her head,” she adds.

“Cenobe?” I ask. “What the hell is that?”

The rest of the party, with the exception of Trixi, groans. This is clearly a subject ready for retirement.