Jay Fox - THE WALLS

Tomas is all smiles as he returns. “Sorry that took so long. The line for the can was six deep.” He looks to the back of the bar quickly, turns to me, and then leans in close. “Did you get a load of the mutton chops on the guy two tables down? Looks like Chester A. Arthur on meth.”

10.1

Tomas takes his coffee light and sweet. Patrick manages to convince me to take the brackish sludge he's pushed on the two of us without so much as a grain of sugar. I don't know why, but he finds this incredibly funny. Perhaps this indicates a nascent sign of drunkenness, but it's difficult to tell. He has once again become overly genial after his earlier harangue, which marked Tomas as a conceited jerkoff (“A poor man's Vronsky,” as he said during one of Tomas’ trips to the bathroom) and me as a particularly importune pest.

Tomas maintains that Patrick is a rabid bullshitter while the latter is in the toilet. I'm still on the fence. While I share Tomas' suspicions about the party to which we both have agreed to go — cannibals, after all, are not typically known for their candor — I can’t help but feel as though this odd man will eventually lead me to Coprolalia.

As we drink our coffee, conversation begins to flow less erratically. This is yet another one of Patrick's peculiarities. Apparently, the drunker he gets, the less his mind wanders, which would indicate that his previous foolishness is more sophomoric than moronic — like a sagacious mendicant. He is also becoming visibly anxious to get to the party where we are to meet Daphne, who may or may not know Willis Faxo, who may or may not be in regular contact with a man named Mordecai, who may or may not be Coprolalia.

We linger in grays and speak into our respective beverages. The bar, meanwhile, becomes more and more populated with each passing moment, mostly by kids who have spent the previous hours preening themselves in order to tell the world that they don't give a fuck about convention: the typical Hair Product Anarchists and Quadrennial Democrats that make Williamsburg the most salient example of my generation's political statement of vanity and civic paralysis. Their looks in Patrick's direction are more contemptuous than those he had initially received from the blue-collar elements, who, by this point, have become accustomed to him: his ability to straddle the line between pontification and tirade, his lack of what one might call “appropriate attire,” his insatiability, his audacity, his loquacity, his spastic facial movements (and these involve the whole face, too), possibly even his taste in music. Most of them have said at least a few words to him whether at the bar or from their table; they have judged him a harmless anomaly with a benign smile, an animated disposition, and a good sense of humor. They raise their glasses to him every once in a while in order to make certain they don't only know him from a dream, and seem Christmas-morning delighted when he accepts the toast, not without a belch of laughter alongside his random and mirthful proclamations, which continue to captivate the otherwise languid chorus encircling the bar like parishioners around an altar.

Patrick takes down his two double-pints in the time it takes Tomas and me to get through our respective cups of coffee. The bartender sends another two in our direction. These coffees represent the first comped drinks of the night for us. Patrick has been drinking for free for well over an hour and a half.

The jukebox begins to regale the bar with hits from post-adolescent melancholy — depressing stuff with esoteric lyrics and bizarre noises that mask the band's poor musicianship and inability to (as opposed to desire to not) construct a complex melody. The new inhabitants embody a world in which there's nothing to really complain about except for the vicarious poverty experienced via cheap commodities and those horribly depressing commercials about famines taking place in those countries that sit in the nosebleeds of the UN. Heartbreak, consequently, becomes a pretty serious test in endurance. There are other issues these newcomers address. The group directly behind us complains about how pretentious Williamsburg is becoming. The group to our left does the same. The group in front of us chastises the band the Red Thread for becoming too commercialized. All three of these groups look in the directions of one another with contemptuous eyes and askance curls of the lips. Though never stated explicitly, the three of us wonder if we are stuck in a crossfire or if all of this negative attention is directed at us.

“So this party is really going to be something tonight. Have either of you heard of the A-R-E?”

“No,” Tomas responds. “What is it?”

“It's a 'they', actually; a group of sorts. A lot of eccentrics — mostly musicians and artists. Some people like to think that Andy Warhol founded the group, but this is just baseless speculation. Anyone who has ever had any interaction with the A-R-E knows that it was founded by Dick Keens.”

“Dick Keens?”

“Yes, Dick Keens. Very intelligent man, but a bit off his rocker.”

A man cheers from the bar, “Ain't we all, Paddy!”

“Indeed we are, Louie!” he laughs. “A toast! To madness,” he adds, at which point Patrick and everyone at the bar drinks. He continues:

Oh, let us howl some heavy note,

Some deadly dogged howl,

Something, as from the threatening throat

Of beasts and fatal foul!

As ravens, screech-owls, bulls, and bears,

We'll bell and bowl our parts,

Till irksome noise have cloyed your ears,

And corrosived your hears,

At last, when-as our quire wants breath,

Our bodies being blessed,

We'll sing, like swans, to welcome death,

And die in love and rest.

There is a round of applause. He exhibits his gratitude with several bows, and then turns back to the table. “Don't you love the rhyme scheme? It's Elizabethan.” Tomas and I nod uneasily. “Anyway, Keens founded the A-R-E — The Acolytes of Risus, the Enlightener — back in the early-seventies. The goal, obviously, was to promote laughter in the world.”

“How is that obvious?”

“Risus was the ancient god of laughter. Hence the name.” He holds up his glass: “To laughter!” The folks at the bar all drink. The bartender takes down the Jameson shot that he has poured for a girl with glacial blue eyes. She is ostensibly upset. The bartender fills another glass and passes it her way. Her expression does not change. Patrick takes a small sip before continuing: “Anyway, Keens, it is said, was related to Jose Balaguez. You know of him, right?”

“I've heard the name before,” I respond vaguely.

“Me too,” Tomas adds.

“But do you know his story?”

“He was rich.”

“Yeah — wasn't he a robber baron?”

“More or less. Is that all you know of him?” Tomas and I nod slowly. “Well then, allow me to give you a brief history lesson. I will try to simply relay the events that transpired, as a poet-historian is the worst type of historian, on par with the philosopher-historian, but certainly far above the critical-historian — literary, that is — who is really no historian at all. Not to go too far off topic here, but have you read some of the social construction of blank essays that are out there? I swear, they just tell you what a few novelists said about this and about that, add some obscure details featured in the dailies from the era, and suddenly you're to think that they have unlocked the most arcane aspects of a society. It's a racket.”

“So you don't think that anything is socially constructed?” Tomas asks.

“That's not the point. The point is that there are an endless number of subjects and references. One can claim one thing, and someone can contradict them, and someone can contradict them, and so on and so forth ad nauseum . All an author needs to do is introduce a new piece of referential material to alter the thesis of one of his or her colleagues. And this perpetuates the argument — indefinitely. This is the heart of my complaint: it's intellectually lazy because the topics are so fecund and yet so esoteric and ultimately inane that they cease to say anything intellectually stimulating. The only things I find mildly interesting about such papers are the anecdotes of the famous authors and personages. There's always a few.”