Jay Fox - THE WALLS

“But, you know, sometimes good people turn into bad people just because of one stupid decision. And Tommy was no exception to this aphorism, trite as it may seem. That being said, there was this one group of kids who came in a lot. A bunch of fucking punks. Everyone hated them. Everyone except this one girl, Hannah, who used to hang out with them quite a bit — not just at the bar, either.

“Now Hannah was a good girl. And she was a fucking piece, too. She had these eyes — Tommy and I used to call them the 'fuck me eyes'. It's not like she tried to do it. She couldn't help it. She just looked like she wanted to attack every dick she saw.

“So, by no real fault of her own, she ended up getting a lot of attention. And, due to her surroundings, it wasn't the kind of attention that a girl necessarily wants. But she handled it well. She was one of those free spirits — not free in the sense that she was flighty or blind to the harsh realities of the real world like most of those liberal arts white girls you meet in Park Slope these days. No, it was more that she was comfortable. With herself. With her surroundings. She was always smiling. She was always laughing. If you called her a chick or a bitch, though,” he laughs and shakes his head; “Man…heads would fucking roll.

“I never could figure out why she spent so much time with the Burnouts, which was the epithet the rest of the regulars attached to the group of losers she hung around. Drugs would be a rational assumption, but she didn't fuck around with that shit. She was a mild drinker; vegan; had hair the color of cotton candy — not too different from some of the types you see running around Williamsburg these days. Only she was for real, know what I mean. And that's what attracted Tommy to her. He wasn't really into the scene at the time, but he certainly liked the music. She knew a lot of the bands floating around the City back then — and not 'know' in either the heard-of or Biblical sense; she knew them personally because she was the beautiful girl with pink hair who everyone wanted to fuck or, failing that, talk to.

“Tommy would give her a few free rounds every time she came in, and they would talk about punk rock and revolution and all of the other stuff you talk about when you're in your early-twenties and you live in New York City and you consider yourself a rebel, even if you sometimes don't fully understand what it is you're rebelling against, let alone why you're rebelling against it. Because you're too young then. Hell, I'm still too young to understand all of it.” He smiles. “But that's neither here nor there. We're all destined to die, and we're all angered by that fact. Forlorn, anguish, despair — fancy Sartrean terminology for the simple fact that we're conscious not only of the fecundity of life, but the ultimate futility and transience of it. It fucking sucks. Moreover, growing old sucks. We don't want eternal life; we want eternal youth.”

“You're only as old as you act,” Scooter says.

“And yet the autistic die like the rest of us.”

“You're such a fucking buzz-kill today, man,” Scooter says as he holds the flame of the lighter a few centimeters away from the slide.

“Anyway, they — Tommy and Hannah — started fucking. And that, I guess ( caesura ) initiated — if that's the word — Tommy into the Burnouts.

“Now, a lot of people have the impression that junkies just sit around all day getting all types of fucked up. The truth of the matter, however, is that a lot of them have jobs and can manage to socialize and seem to kind of have their shit together. Either way, the people in the bar knew what these kids were up to, and they definitely noticed when Tommy started getting into that shit. People kept wanting to have talks with me so that I would have a talk with Tommy. They didn't want Hannah to know. I was reluctant to initiate a dialog with Tommy, but eventually I did. And it was a waste. I knew it was going to be a waste. People like that aren't going to listen to what you have to say.”

“They never do,” I nod.

“Yeah, and things turned sour real quick. Some people can use for years without getting desperate. Tommy, however, didn’t fall into this category. It really changed him. I knew he was in real trouble when things around the apartment started disappearing. This is after maybe two months. I remember that Hannah split shortly thereafter. It was a bad scene, but I guess I was naïve about him, about will power in the face of that shit. I was young, you know, and I had — I have — stayed away from it my whole life. I didn't understand what it could do to a person.

“So, because I was young and stupid, I thought he'd snap out of it. And, you know, he was a pretty bright guy; it wasn't that he was oblivious to the fact that he was fucking up his life — he just didn't care. But, blazing revelations aside, nothing was going to change him. People don't fucking change on their own.” He takes another sip from his bottle of water. “Suffice to say, help had to come from elsewhere.

“One day he came home to find his parents sitting on the couch. They had come out from Pennsylvania with — I shit you not — their fucking priest. Turns out Hannah had called them up to let them know that their son was a heroin addict and that he had given her the Hiv (pronounced that way, not spelled out as H-I–V), which was a lie, but she figured it would expedite the process of getting his parents involved with the mess that had become his life. Instead of being passive-aggressive like most of the white parents I've seen, they reacted with a fucking blitzkrieg . They told his boss that he was quitting, told the landlord that he was moving, and came to the city with a van. He didn't know any of this shit was going on. They actually sat outside our apartment until they saw him leave, and then they came in and fucking cleared the place out.”

“What?”

“Yeah. I helped orchestrate it in a sense. I mean, I told them the time to come. I wanted Tommy to get better, but I also wanted to make sure I was there when they came in so they didn't take any of my shit — you know, by accident.

“When I talked to Hannah about it the next night, she told me that, for starters, she didn't have the virus. So maybe this was a little bit more than a few weeks after they broke up,” he says to himself. “Either way, she just figured it was a matter of time before he picked it up — if he hadn't already.” He takes another sip from the bottle. “She probably wasn't too far off the mark, you know — about the Hiv thing. People were dropping like fucking flies in this city when I was growing up.”

“You grew up here?” I ask.

“Naw, not in Brooklyn. I grew up in Harlem, about a block away from Trinity Cemetery, if you know the area,” he says with a curious eye.

“I haven't been up there that much.”

“How long have you been here?”

“About four years.”

“Yeah, it's funny,” as he pulls the bottle to his mouth. “I've met people who think Manhattan ends at Em El Kay. That, or else they think it's like the fucking south Bronx up there. But it's really nice, especially where I grew up. Now, at least. It hasn't always been all that nice. But there's a lot of brownstones, a lot of stuff to do, a lot of students. I should know,” he laughs; “I lived up there until I moved into that apartment in the Village. Our house has been in my family for over sixty years. My granddad bought it when he came back from Japan after the war. He refused to let it go even when the area went to shit in the seventies and eighties. I guess it makes sense, though; I mean, he's spent most of his life there. He taught at City College until ten years ago.”

“What did he teach?”

“Physics. He supposedly taught one of the…what's the word…I guess pioneers of string theory, but I don't know how accurate that is. He's fucking old now — ninety-six. It's not that he's senile or anything; he just doesn't always feel like telling you the truth.” He shakes his head. “It's fucked up watching someone you love so much grow old, but that's the way it goes.” He takes on a morose expression for a moment, but it quickly passes. He looks to the water in his hand, but doesn't raise it to his mouth. “Where are my manners — I'm supposed to be telling you about Mordy.