Jay Fox - THE WALLS

When engaged in political discussion she becomes cynical with alacrity. Her resignation from the banalities of the left that one encounters either on college campuses or in burnt-herb dens seems rational, but it's clear that such a disparaging, if not almost fatalistic, outlook weighs heavily upon her conscience. We agree that the economists in charge of the IMF should be tried for crimes against humanity.

She's beautiful in the sense that I miss some of the things that she says because of prurient fantasies. While the word adorable comes to mind, I am reluctant to use it even to myself because the adjective makes me think of stuffed animals and other puerile fixations. Still, there is no better way to describe her. When she smiles, it's like the introduction of a horn section.

Last call finds us still at the bar, four drinks having passed from glass to gut in the previous two hours. Nixi is long gone; Trixi, Mixi, Aberdeen, and Tomas are, too. She tells me that she is going home. I nod, try to get her number, learn that she has a boyfriend. We part once we walk out the door.

My roommate bursts through the door with his parents and several bags of over-sized provisions from either Costco or K-mart or Wal-mart or perhaps some regional — mart that I've never heard of. To reiterate, he had returned to his parents' estate in Connecticut for the ambiguous period of “a few weeks” after the spring term let out. I guess now seems as good a time as any to return and wake me up.

He laughs boisterously as he expounds upon the virtues of the neighborhood and the joys of living without amenities such as clean streets, peace, or eight hours of consecutive sleep — the most common interruptions being, in no particular order: Reggaeton, car alarms, domestic violence, and an array of sirens emitted from sources such as ambulances and buildings with roof alarms that could be considered hidden, provided one is incapable of discerning the large, red bar across every door to every roof, which reads:

Do Not Exit

Alarm Will Sound

or, like ours:

Not

A Sound

Gunshots are rare. Even so, his parents clearly don't share his enthusiasm.

“What are you doing on the couch?” he asks as I open my eyes to examine the three. There is a large can of beer in the foreground. The television is still on. Tom slams into a wall and becomes an accordion. Jerry lets out with a high-pitched and jubilant cachinnation.

“I must have dozed off,” I respond with the taste of Pepper's cigarette still in my desiccated mouth. “I was watching this documentary a—”

“On the Cartoon channel?” Mrs. Schneider asks.

“It was about cartoons,” gingerly.

“You've been drinking a lot I see,” Mr. Schneider supposes with a mortician's smile. “You know, it's a damn shame that there aren't any jobs out there for an En Why You graduate.”

I try to think of a witty retort, but the only thing that comes to mind is nausea. I'm trying my best to suppress it, but the spinning room, the heat, and that tenement building scent of protracted decay make this a fairly difficult test in endurance. I reach for the glass of water sitting on the coffee table.

“It's eleven thirty,” Mrs. Schneider adds with less-than-passive aggression. “Don't you have anywhere to be?”

“It's Saturday, mom.”

“Still….” she begins as Jeff escorts the two in the direction of his bedroom. I don't hear the rest of the conversation, but I can imagine the gist of it.

I close my eyes again.

9.1

“James Aberdeen and Tomas fucking Bennington?” he asks incredulously. “And you're seriously pursuing Coprolalia?” It's an odd state of envy that includes a countervailing disdain. That's Jeff, though. He worships his pedagogue of a father, regards himself as a licensed therapist, and never fails to play the part of the dissenter in any situation that requires he step beyond the narrow views on life he has established after so many years in Greenwich — not Village, of course. Some would call him aristocratic or patronizing. He would call himself cultured.

While inquisitive by nature, he is also very complacent with routine and never one to seek out anything new unless it has been tried and tested by either his father or one of his friends. Most of the latter live by Columbia. A few of them live in either western Bushwick or (East) Williamsburg. Eddie, his best friend, somehow managed to drag him all the way out here, into the deepest regions of the neighborhood; I don't really know how.

Jeff held what amounted to auditions for a new roommate after Eddie got engaged and decided to move out. This was at the end of January. Around the same time, the university had decided to throw me out of housing due to what I have come to call The Marijuana-Related Event. They were not about to expel me, nor did they see any reason to cut my scholarship. They just didn't want me corrupting the coke dealer down the hall in the single; or the three compulsive gamblers next door to her; or their roommate, who peddled ten milligram Aderols for five bucks a pop; or the idiot next door to them, who was adamantly anti-condom, not celibate, and proud of it; or his roommate, who was just a total dick; or the guy next door to them, who smuggled cigarettes into the City from Virginia and sold them out of his room; or his roommate, who was into some type of bizarre pornography that saw the actresses chloroformed, groped, and…well, actually that was it; or the other roommate in the suite, who was in business school; or the girl across the hall from those three, who cut herself because she believed it to be the only way for her to feel anything besides the imperious torpor of whatever her shrink pumped her full of; or her condign roommate, Denise, who could drink anyone in the dorm under the table even though she weighed no more than a buck-fifteen, and typically passed out in the hallway whenever she forgot her keys, which happened often. Ah, yes, Denise, who will probably have “Quit being such a fucking pussy” as her epitaph, as this was the phrase she frequently employed in order to goad men into doing things that were stupid, illegal, or potentially fatal (and, silly us, it always worked).

My parents were obviously upset by the incident, especially since the only portion of my education that was not funded by scholarships was my room and board. They footed half of the bill; the other half was paid for by student loans. They didn't especially care about the fact that their son had fallen under the spell of Lady Mary Jane. Their grievances had nothing to do with shame; they were pissed that I'd been stupid enough to be caught, and even more upset about the fact that Big Purple had a strict policy of not refunding checks.

My father and I came to an agreement filled with loose conditions and ‘I'll tan your ass if’s. In the end, it was decided that he would give me six hundred and fifty dollars a month for housing, which was not so much a display of mercy as much as a desire to not let the neighbors see that their son had come back home disgraced.

I was given a week to clear the premises.

It only took me two days to find Jeff's ad for a roommate. The rent for the room was seven hundred bucks a month. Luckily, I had a job at the time, so I was able to cover the extra fifty bucks, plus the additional costs of cable, gas, and electricity without much of a problem. We didn't exactly hit it off, but, as he has told me several times, most of the people who came to see the place were either “hipster assholes” or deadbeats. Chances are, he would have waited for a better fit that me, but the female and male components of the situation needed to come together with haste. In that sense, we clicked.