“What?”
“Like that Simon and Garfunkle song? The rock one.”
“Yeah. Rock. Island. Got it.”
Her attention then shifts. “What's up?” she asks as two impatient patrons grumble next to me.
“Yo', some bitch just puked on my shit,” a strong Jersey accent responds.
4
The following week was spent becoming better acquainted with the work of Coprolalia, rediscovering loneliness, and learning that an individual's tolerance for alcohol skyrockets over the course of a nine-day bender. Luckily, I have had the entire apartment to myself for almost three weeks now, as my roommate has been staying at his parents' place in Connecticut. He did not specify when he was to return, nor did he bother to sublet his room. Consequently, I never had to worry about waking anyone on my arrival home, though I did disrupt the sleep of one of the bodega cashiers down the block one morning around three or four when I purchased a twenty-two of some brand of malt liquor I'd never heard of. It was an odd color — like fluorescent apricot puree — that provoked a weird sense of disgust and curiosity, a sentiment that should be familiar to anyone who has flared their nostrils after hearing the ripping croak of a fart. There was a sense of novelty in buying it; drinking it, however, was an act of incorrigibility…or alcoholism, depending on your mood.
I typically awoke each morning before ten, though I never managed to leave my bed or wherever else I ended up sleeping before eleven. While awake, I had a hard time concentrating on anything besides sex, which must be typical if you've managed to have gone…let's see…almost four months without it. While sojourning at the edge of consciousness there was a reoccurring sensation of panic brought on by the belief that I had forgotten something: to take a test, to pick up roses for Connie, to pay for dinner, to call my parents, to wear pants for the entirety of the previous day.
During, and particularly at the end of, each semester of college, I had had the reoccurring dream that I was reading. The words were usually lifted from one of the passages I had finished directly before falling asleep. At times the tentacles of the television would provide some influence, but this was rare. So I would be reading. I would be going along, reading whatever was in front of me, and then I would suddenly notice that I couldn't understand what was printed on the page: the words themselves were known (I could read them, ruminate about them, put them into context), but the sentences of which they were part claimed no allegiance to even a rudimentary syntax. It seemed to be the semantics of madness.
I would refuse to accept that the book was poorly written; rather, it was my inability to understand what was being said. I would step back, embrace denial (no, embrace a lie because no one can embrace denial, as denial is the whitewashing of a truth that is too painful to accept, and by admitting that the white is there, well, that's how one overcomes denial — so it was just denial). Perhaps the text was written in code. Perhaps I was too dim to understand it. Maybe the words were simply homonyms that I had never come across. Was I becoming Déjérine's Monsieur C? Mybae it was one of tshoe tkrcis lkie the one wtih the out of oderr ltetres taht smoe ppoele can raed so lnog as the frsit and lsat lttrees are the smae. Carzy, huh?
There was nothing more terrifying than the possibility that I was losing the ability to absorb what was right in front of my eyes, a myopia less complete than the ambiguation of color or shape, though no less debilitating to me, a supposed scholar, a student, a man who would take the time to read and analyze the mission statement on a bag of potato chips if I happened to be eating them while on the can. So I would go over it again and again and again. I would vocalize the words with the vain hope of bringing the meaning back. But to no avaiclass="underline" the longer I spent processing the passage, the more convoluted it became. A roommate would eventually wake me without having to say a word; all that was required were his eyes — drowsy, irritated, maybe even somewhat amused — looking down upon me for no more than a few seconds. I could feel the presence. I would remember that you couldn’t read with your eyes closed; I would recognize my closed eyes; I would form a conclusion by means of syllogism. —You're talking in your sleep again, once my eyes met the glare. —Did I say anything good? —No, back turned, unsteady legs already in somnolent transit back to the bed to enjoy the last few minutes of peace, before the snooze button began demanding no less attention than a teething child.
I was happy not to be dealing with feelings of alienation from the written word. Whereas the previous dreams of aphasia tended to create a cloud of anxiety that shadowed me for at least the duration of the morning shower, the inability to remember fictitious items or events was something that I shook off rather quickly.
I would typically leave to get my morning coffee before noon. Some days I picked up a paper, too. Most of the places in my neighborhood do not carry the Times (nor do they have dental floss, which is a very difficult item to explain or accurately charade to someone with virtually no knowledge of the English language). Consequently, I found myself reaching for papers that are just that (papers), because applying the prefix “news-” to the rags would be more supercilious than accurate. I never read more than an article or two. On the plus side, I did manage to complete every crossword puzzle with which I was confronted.
The heat was beginning to swallow up what little relief the night sought to provide, and by Thursday I found myself sleeping on the couch to avoid the sunlight that invaded my room as early as seven in the morning. It rained only once that week, during the early hours of Sunday afternoon. The concrete coughed thick clouds as I stayed inside contemplating the best way to go about finding Coprolalia while feigning interest in a bad comedy I had seen many times before.
I had a drink with a girl I had known from class on Monday. I hadn't planned it or anything; we just happened to run into each other on the corner of Greenpoint and 43rd. She was staying at her sister's place, which was right around the corner. “Temporarily,” she assured me with a severe tilt of the head, a quick motion that supported a tone too grave to be awarded complete credence. “I just can't go back to Merrick with all of the interviews that I have lined up.” She expressed an edacious desire to continue her education, and seemed to already look upon her potential employers as Penelope, mother of Telemachus, looked upon the faces of her suitors.
It was clear that she had recently had an interview; her outfit was not the type of thing a twenty-two-year-old girl in Queens just happens to wear as she goes out to get milk or cigarettes or whatever commodity is needed down at the corner store. Her skirt was blunt: black and short. It covered thighs that seemed to be too pudgy to be connected to her narrow hips or her slender torso. She had loosened a few buttons on her white blouse to present a tasteful bounty of cleavage, enough so that you knew that she was not frigid, but not enough to be distracting. It was an outfit that engendered that limbo between the career you have and the one you want — what one wears as they wade through the River Heraclitus — as it was professional and modest, sophisticated and banal.
She was clearly anxious about her future. A certain intensity emulated from her, and dominated the conversation as the latter half of A Ghost is Born accompanied our time in the bar. Her eyes were of that formidable sort: embers as tenacious as anthracite. Furious, too. It was a passion that was both intractable and somehow forlorn: a desire without direction, just a steady imperative that traveled like an echo — a resonant wave that was strong enough so that it stopped mattering exactly where it originated or where it would eventually find its terminus. Besides her eyes, fulgurant and petulant in the most positive sense of the word, there was a drive inherent in her words even if they burst forth from a small mouth framed by thin lips more cedar than pink, more an extension of skin instead of a supple feature to be admired for its own sake. The drive was founded upon either consternation or ambition — and not just naked ambition, but an ambition adjunctive to integrity, and not an integrity in conjunction with vanity or even apposite to pride (because vanity and pride are integral only to the foolish and the resentful), but an integrity anchored in a mire of naivety that eventually dissipates once one has spent enough time in that “real world” to which Gen-Xers and Gen-Meers and former hippies adhere and even defend on account of their complete and total moral incontinence.