Jay Fox - THE WALLS

“…With the search Coprolalia,” somewhat deflated. “My bad.”

“Look, just say, 'Yes, I'm sorry I've been associating with a bunch of street urchins and derelicts as opposed to properly managing my responsibilities. I'm sorry I've been avoiding the real world by searching for an artist who clearly doesn't want to be found. I'm sorry I've been so inconsiderate, Jeff; it will never happen again.'” He smiles with a nauseating tint of smugness. “You need to get your shit together, my friend.”

“Like I said, I'm going to do this for another two weeks. After that, I'm going to start on the job hunt,” I say as I get up to check my email.

He sighs, stands, and then walks to his room. I resent him for a time, but know that his frustration is actually directed at his parents. This was their first time visiting the apartment even though he's lived here for almost a year, and they live about an hour and change away. They stayed for all of twenty minutes.

I open my email account. There are three new messages: one offering me natural male enhancement — a great little euphemism that implies that insecure people will buy just about anything. Another contains a Nabokov reference. The third is actually addressed to me. It is from patrick.y.shaheen@gmail.com, and reads as follows:

I came across your post on Craigslist. While I do not know Coprolalia personally, I may be able to provide you with some information that will lead you to Willis Faxo, a previous friend of his. My contact information is below.

Cheers,

Patrick Shaheen

(The remainder of the transcript has been redacted to assure the privacy of Mr. Shaheen)

Patrick Shaheen stands at five feet six inches. His hair color is a most ordinary brown with timid portions of gray and white. While his facial features are neither minatory nor particularly inviting, there is that potential serial killer allure in his eyes. There is an ease about him that seems disingenuous. His outfit is certainly different — a type of fashion statement that invites ostracism even here in Williamsburg, the Mecca of a hipster movement that has so far heeded a lot of bad music and a lot of fashion statements that future generations will witness with the same horror a man may feel upon waking up with a tequila hangover and seeing a four am call to an ex-girlfriend logged in his phone. Patrick wears a black, mesh tank top and green running shorts, which reveal the majority of his relatively pale thighs. Tomas asks if he is just coming from the gym. He receives a negative response.

Patrick is not mysterious by any means; at least he does not try to be. Open and more than willing to impart any information requested of him (not always with either much detail or the omission of some irrelevant tangent), he embodies whatever the antithesis of social awkwardness is called, though his candor clearly elicits awkwardness from others. His tenor is reserved, but he trollops through conversation topics like an elephant on eggshells. He utilizes the conjunctive “not to go too far off topic here, but…”, which seems to indicate that he has yet to discover the function of the left parenthesis.

Perhaps the most bizarre thing about him is his taste in music. His jukebox choices are ironic — if that adjective applies — and cause for concern among me and Tomas, who presume the bar's inhabitants are ready to take the interruption of Sinatra, hair metal, and rock standards (Hendrix, Cream, the Stones, Zeppelin, BOC, early Aerosmith, AC/DC, the Black Crowes, Metallica, or any grunge band with the possible exception of Collective Soul) personally. He puts on Maria Mulder's “Midnight at the Oasis,” King Harvest's “Dancing in the Moonlight,” Bread's “Guitar Man.” and Captain and Tennille's “Love Will Keep Us Together.” The last song generates a relatively serious amount of disgust from most of the patrons. This arouses a thief's grin from Shaheen.

He informs us that he is three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Lebanese. By the look of him, one would think he is either Greek or Italian, though this assumption would be quickly abandoned upon hearing an impression of his mother's broach. He claims that he has lived in either Ireland or Wales for the majority of his life, but he is without accent. He tells us that he is thirty-one, but, for whatever reason, I don't believe him.

Patrick dodges straight questions with the agility of a pugilist, provoking chronic sighs of exhaustion from both Tomas and I. When we ask about Coprolalia and Willis Faxo, he presents a coy grin. “I have never met the washroom fellow, and I have only met his friend twice. Not to go too far off topic here, but something Mr. Faxo once said to me reminds me of a Graham Greene novel. Do you know the work of Greene?”

“Never heard of him,” Tomas respond.

“Ah, he's one of the best authors of the twentieth century. Not that you'd know that,” as condescending as it appears on the page. “I rarely meet well-read Americans. I met a woman the other day who thought Dickens was the author of Gulliver's Travels ,” he says with a laugh. “And guess what? The Yahoo had never even heard of Swift. Regardless, I'd assume that it's due to the education system here. You do know that it's absolutely horrendous and terribly backward. The No Child Left Behind Act is perhaps one of the most foolish policies the world has ever known. Then again, what do you expect from the same administration that started a war to dethrone a tyrant incapable of threatening his immediate region, Europe, or anyone in this hemisphere? Neither of you voted for the latest paragon of American Pylism, Mr. Bush, I presume?”

“No,” I respond. Was that a The Quiet American reference?

“I voted for Nader,” Tomas says as he begins towards the bar. “You guys need anything?”

“No,” I respond. “Pat, are you okay?”

“Marvelous.” Exeunt Tomas. “As I was saying…”

Two hours pass. Subject matter is addressed and quickly cast by the wayside. Topics include, in chronological order: Locke's treatise on education, Voltaire, Diderot, de Gouges, d'Alembert, Descartes, Bacon, Spinoza, Maimonides, Aquinas, Scotus, Origen, Piso, Colet, St. Jerome, Erasmus, Rabelais, More, Milton, Lord Byron's Cain , the war between Caesar and Pompey, which Patrick calls the first real Roman Civil War, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar , the cobbler in the first act of the aforementioned play, Plato's Meno , the allegory of Jesus and Melchizedek, Lazarus, Faust , the meaning of the term “hero” to the Stoics and the Cynics (someone virtuous enough to survive the death of their body), the fact that most of the Cynic philosophers evidently committed suicide by self-imposed starvation or asphyxiation, the benefits of taking a Vitamin B Complex every day, Dvorák's “New World Symphony,” “Sir Duke,” Sir Duke, Schubert, Mauro Giuliani, Boccherini, Chopin, Debussy, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Zola, Matisse, Mondrian, Satie, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Bartok, Hungary's struggle for freedom in the fifties, Prague in sixty-eight, Kundera, Woody Allen, Coltrane's “Central Park West,” Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, B. F. Skinner, Seymour Skinner, Itchy and Scratchy, Crumb, Ginsburg, Cage, Dine, Ono, Lennon, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche, Wagner, Bakunin, ants, the existence or non-existence of super-organisms, Darwinism, Neural Darwinism, the perplexities of quantum mechanics, “the universe's rate of expansion is increasing; how fucked up is that!” M Theory, Egyptian mythology, Jenna Haze, Lolita , bestiality, Humbolt's Gift, Underworld , the Mets, bestiality again, the Yankees, Gehrig, A-Rod, David Beckham, Ichiro, Ricky Williams, John Muir, Mormonism, Mead, Dickinson, Ibsen, the best book of the nineteenth century (Balzac's Lost Illusions is my pick; Patrick praises Gogol's Dead Souls , but ends up picking Dostoevsky's The Possessed ; Tomas votes for Through the Looking Glass ; the argument ends in stalemate), the Decemberists, the Decemberists, Death Cab for Cutie, favorite album of the aforementioned band (Patrick: “I don't really know them well enough to make an informed decision”; Tomas: Transatlanticism ; Me: Photo Album ), Magical Mystery Tour , worst movie ever (the aforementioned, we all agree), favorite Beatles album (Patrick: Abbey Road ; Tomas: Sgt. Pepper ; Me: Revolver ), Doctor Robert, Leary, Comte, Tocqueville, Cole, the reasons for the Revolutionary War (because a certain group of wealthy and famous Virginians had their rights to vast acres of Ohio Valley property abrogated as a consequence of the Proclamation Line of 1763; Patrick recommends Forced Founders for further information), that the legends of Roland and Thanksgiving are both epics born from historical footnotes, Zinn, Chomsky, Goebbels, St. Helen, Bush, Commodus ( Herculi Romano Augusto ), Nero, Seneca, Booth, Oswald, Kennedy, Castro, Paine, Michael Collins, and what Ireland is like (boring and “verdant”).