“I think that's my friend's myspace name,” she says gingerly. “I know it begins with copra- or copro- or something like that, but I'm not really sure. You stay put, Whoseville,” she begins as she reaches for the door. “Let me give her a call.”
“Well,” Aberdeen declares, “This may be a lot easier than we imagined it would be, right Whoseville?”
“That bitch is a fucking whack job.”
“She said 'her', didn't she?”
“What?”
“She said she was going outside to call a woman.”
“So?”
“So?” with an erratic gesture. “Coprolalia's a fucking guy.”
“That's just a fucking assumption, man,” Tomas says derisively. “No one knows anything about Coprolalia.”
“Still, what kind of woman goes into the men's bathroom?”
“One with a prosthetic cock,” Aberdeen counters.
The conversation stops. Not for long, though. Tomas and Aberdeen are soon trading memories, talking television, and trying to reach a compromise for dinner above the studio version of “Ring of Fire.” This leads to an argument in which Tomas takes the position of the pinto bean enthusiast; Aberdeen, on the other hand, attests to the black bean's superiority. They obviously don't take this woman seriously. Neither do I, of course, but it's difficult not to think that there is some possibility, however slight, that everything Sean has said is completely false. I am quiet for a long time. Tomas and Aberdeen, meanwhile, continue to bicker in an attempt to achieve victory in a debate a few degrees cooler, though no less futile, than one of those arguments about the existence or non-existence of God.
“What's up, man?” Tomas finally asks. Aberdeen nods sympathetically.
“Do you think there's any possib—”
“No,” Aberdeen interrupts.
“I'm just entertaining the possibility.”
“You do that.”
“Hey man,” Tomas begins as he swipes my arm, “It might actually be worse if she is Coprolalia.” Aberdeen and I look to him. “Dig this, man: if this chick turns out to be Coprolalia, no one's going to fucking believe it. You'll find the truth, and on one will accept it.” He laughs to himself. “I don't think she's Coprolalia, and,” he turns to me, “for your sake, I hope she isn't.”
“A woman couldn't have been sneaking in and out of men's bathrooms for fifteen years without being noticed,” I respond. “It's impossible, right?”
Aberdeen reaches for his drink. “All I can figure with any certainty is that Coprolalia looks like a guy,” as the cup comes to his lips. Tomas catches my eye.
The woman returns. “She's on her way.” She drags a chair over, sits in the backwards fashion made popular by A.C. Slater, furtively scans her surroundings, and then leans in close: “I don't want a cut — just so you know. I'm not her pimp or nothing.”
A cliché: Silence can speak volumes.
“What?” she asks before looking up to the television. “All fucking right,” she says as she raises her fist in the direction of the television. She returns her attention to us. “You want to see the show, right?”
“Donkey show,” Tomas whispers with a nudge at my side.
“What show?” Aberdeen asks with eyebrows plagued by bewilderment. “We want to meet an artist.”
“Yeah,” the woman responds slowly, making certain that the word is drawn out long enough to deny any ambiguity in the phonetics. “I mean, I don't consider her an artist or nothing, but some people,” she says absently, an ellipsis lingering in the air like an unclaimed fart. “Look dude, either way she likes to discuss her rates before she begins. It's not an issue of trust; it's just business.”
“What does your friend do exactly?”
2.2
Coprolalia: A condition in which a subject involuntarily utters profanity. The word is derived from a conjunction of the Greek words copros and lalia, meaning, respectively, feces and babble.
Coprophilia: A condition in which a subject is sexually aroused by the smell, sight, or taste of feces.
3
I met Ilkay Abaz at the beginning of my second year of college. We lived on the same floor of a dorm on 26th Street between First Avenue and Second Avenue. It is a rather isolated place for the City, known best for its close proximity to Bellevue Hospital and the fact that the maps you find in yellow cabs claim it to be a sickly taupe and anonymous, perhaps even autonomous, region.
The building in which we lived had at one time been government housing. I cannot say when the university purchased it, nor can I imagine the length of the list that itemized all of the improvements that ought to have been made prior to turning it into a dormitory. There were times that it felt as though just about all of these codes and standards were regarded as suggestions more than requirements.
To be blunt, it was a monolithic structure out of a Khrushchev-era nightmare, brilliant only in its austerity. The linoleum floors were of the same pattern of gray static that one finds in public schools, prisons, substandard hospitals, and on snowy televisions. We became acquainted with the time that our neighbors (and their neighbors, too) woke for the day, as well as their more personal idiosyncrasies, whether linguistic, social or sexual. The halls smelled like ghetto subway stations, as some of the less considerate — or more inebriated — on the floor took to using the garbage shoot to dispose of the type of waste that often gets flushed. But these were the minor nuisances we became accustomed to, chuckled about, and eventually learned to ignore. The more aggravating aspects of the housing situation had less to do with the problems we faced, and more to do with the lack of concern for those of us dwelling within the former honeycomb of poverty. Still, this did not lead us to sulk. We were young, in New York City, and the most pressing responsibility imposed upon us was the maintenance a good G.P.A. (or, for those of us with s scholarship, an excellent G.P.A.).
As most will remember, or perhaps come to find, it is a peculiar time in life. Lost in the dialectics of quixotry and cynicism, everything seems both possible and elusive. We maintained the belief that we were being prepared to reshape the world upon our departure from the university — even if we were clueless as to the means we would eventually employ to accomplish this impossible task — and felt it was not only nihilistic, but fatalistic, to believe our parents when they said that they too once knew the distinction between 'ought' and 'should'. We were a new generation ready to rectify the mistakes of the past fifty years with new and dangerous ideas, the majority of which have been around since that James guy wrote that one letter that appears somewhere between the Gospel of John and Revelation (you know, the irrelevant part that Damasus and Jerome stuck in there as filler).
I met Ilkay at our first floor meeting. It was held the night before the beginning of the fall semester. I can remember the faces sitting around the elevator bank, some better than others. There was a common sentiment among my fellow hall-mates that was discernible more in body language than in discourse, a kind of stubborn irritability conjured up by the uselessness of the meeting, the R.A., the need for any form of authority — that imperious presence that exists wherever trust does not. Some of the students were more indignant about the situation than others, but even the least incorrigible or radical respected the role that she, the R.A., was supposed to play as only slightly less cumbersome than a canker sore. Perhaps only one student was more or less indifferent to the whole process: the math prodigy to whom the material world was irrelevant. Her name was a miasma of silent consonants and accents and things that most English speakers call squiggles, even if there are English words for them. She eventually took on the agnomen “The Silent.”