Jay Fox - THE WALLS

“That's some story,” Tomas responds incredulously. “What does it have to do Dick Keens?”

“Well,” he begins as he stands, “I'm going to run to the toilet. I'll continue in a moment.”

“Walter Murray Gibson?” Tomas sighs. “What is this? Are we in eighth grade social studies?”

“Let's see where he goes with it.”

Patrick returns after a few moments. “Where was I again?” he asks.

“The Siberian conspiracy.”

“Okay. You were wondering what all of this had to do with Dick Keens. Well, apparently, one of the Balaguez heirs was Dick Keens' father. As the story goes, Keens' mother, Beatrice, was a union gal, worked mostly with the stevedores up and down the piers in Red Hook and whatever neighborhood that is to the north. Columbia Heights, right?”

“Cobble Hill,” I respond.

“It's Carroll Gardens, man,” Tomas counters.

“It's irrelevant.” He takes a small sip from the double-pint in his right hand. “Supposedly, that's how Balaguez's son and Beatrice met. But I'll get to that in time. The story actually begins with Beatrice's mother, Freda.”

“Freda Keens was the daughter of Irish immigrants. They left the Emerald Isle because of the Potato Famine, which, it seems, was the reason most emigrants of Ireland found their way here back then. Her story is a sad one, not that that's too different from most immigrants' stories you hear today, but we'll avoid politics for now so as to not rob Freda of the limelight.

“Freda was born around eighteen fifty-four, the only child of the family to be born in America. The family lived in the neighborhood of Vinegar Hill, a little tract of land that runs from the Navy Yard to about Gold Street or somewhere around there.”

“That's DUMBO,” Tomas interjects.

“It's to the east of DUMBO,” he counters. “The eastern portion of what is now considered DUMBO used to be part of Vinegar Hill,” he says as though admonishing a child. “Regardless, she grew up there, probably living in a little flat no bigger than the ones you and I have, only there were eight people in the space.” He pauses. “No, ten. There were eight children. Suffice to say, Vinegar Hill was not a particularly nice part of town; it was Irish, it was poor, and the housing was substandard to say the least.

“It was a rather dismal environment for a child, but things were not so bad that she had to go to work to help the family — this being largely due to her status as the youngest and all. Instead, Freda goes to school, and it turns out that she has something of a knack for poetry. In fact, the small girl is so precocious that she draws the attention of a rather famous poet of the time, one with whom Walt Whitman is rather close. You've heard of him, I take it?”

“Whitman? Who hasn't?” one of the men from the bar, who happens to be walking past after using the bathroom, responds. Once he gets back to the bar, he holds up his pint. “To Walt fucking Whitman!”

Patrick smiles to the man, stands upon his chair, which arouses a stern admonishment from the bartender, and then recites the following:

Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,

Cheerful, for freest action formed under the laws of divine,

The Modern Man I sing!

He goes to sit, but he is first asked to take a bow. Applause continues as he takes down a fair quantity of beer, bows again, and then sits back down. “Now,” he begins after wiping his mouth, but the remainder of the statement is truncated by the same man as before, who says,

“Do another!”

“Another Whitman?”

“Another!”

Patrick thinks for a moment. “An epithalamium for past and present, then; for the morose scions of Modernism and their megaloprepous , who has now become eidolon :

I met a seer,

Passing the hues and objects of the world,

The fields of art and learning, pleasure, sense,

To glean eidolons.

Put in thy chants said he,

No more the puzzling hour nor day, nor segments, parts, put in.

Put first before the rest as light for all and entrance-song of all,

That of eidolons.

What I believe to be a protracted caesura turns out to be a rare lapse in Patrick's memory. His face is a disappointed shade of embarrassment. “Does the next line begin 'Ever the mutable' or is it 'The ostent evanescent'?” He shakes his head. “I'm terribly sorry for the lack of a proper encore, my friends. On a more sober occasion I could probably recite at least half of that poem, but now must not be the time.” This is met with facetious hisses and jeers. I'm still wondering what the hell the introduction to the poem meant. I think the mega- word comes from Aristotle. “In due time I will return with a retinue of muses to restore my standing amongst you, the august court for whom this humble Silenus performs,” he begins as the audience calms, “but unfortunately I have a wealth of information to divulge to these two, and unfortunately, again unfortunately, I am a bit low on time.”

“Do a dirty one,” the bartender yells.

“A dirty poem?” Patrick is amused. He ponders a moment. “Well, who here has heard of Gaius Valerius Catullus?”

Silence.

“Allow me, then, to present to you the most…let us say lewd…poet of Rome in the time of the first Triumvirate, a fresh voice influenced not only by epic and tragedy, but by the epithets of love and passion, and his own misfortune at the hand of a woman whom he adored and Cicero denounced — Clodia Metelli.” He clears his throat. “This will be in prose, by the way, as I have opted to follow in the steps of Smithers. While I do believe that Whigham's rendition is quite good, I feel it deviates from the Latin a bit too much in order to maintain the—”

“Just recite the fucking poem already.”

“Fine:

Tavern of lust and you, its tent-mates — at ninth pillar from the Cap-donned Brothers—, do you think that you alone have the right, that it is allowed to you alone, to fuck only virgins, and to think the rest are as goats? Because you curs sit one hundred, maybe two, in line, do you think I have not the daring to force fellatio upon your insipid—

“What the fuck?”

“Yo', Eddie, it was ancient fucking Rome. Those guys fucked everything and anything.”

“Remind me to tell you all about Tiberius' minnows.” Patrick pauses. “Now, to continue…

— Just think of it! With slanderous graffiti upon your tavern's facade I will shame your progeny. For my girl, who has fled my embrace, she whom I love as none will be loved, for whom I have fought valiantly, has seated herself here. All of you, good men and rich — and also, all of you, piddling back-alley cornholers — are making love to her, even you, Egnatius, one of the long-haired race — the son of Celtiberia and its bounty of hares — whose quality is revealed by dense-grown pelt, and teeth scrubbed with Iberian piss.

The man who ordered the Whitman asks Patrick to the bar. “You gotta' take a shot wit' me, Paddy. 'Specially afta' that .”

“A glass of hellebore, courtesy of Mr. John Jameson!”

Patrick returns after a quick moment, beaming with an afflatus of whiskey and an eye for mischief. “What do you think of my rendition?”

“I doubt the Latin's that dirty,” Tomas responds.

“Ha,” Patrick says. “You obviously don't speak much Latin.”

“Or any.”

“I suppose it's time you learn then. Did you know that there is a verb, irrumo , that specifically means to force one to suckle? When a man says it…well, you can guess what that means.”

How does one respond to that?