After finishing his second dirty martini (from what I saw, anyhow; the couple may have represented three and four, four and five, etc.), he called me a hippie, told me to do several things (among them, to get a job, to get out of the ivory tower, to stop pushing my liberal agenda on real Americans — who, apparently, don't have enough conviction to maintain an opinion of their own — to stop destroying America, and to go fuck myself), and then stormed out of the bar in triumph. Some of the contractors stared to the door. One of the men at the bar repositioned his Iron Workers, Local 580, hat. The Ides of March played their signature song. The grad-student bartender looked up from his book of Robert Bly and shook his head: “And Jefferson….”
A lot of these pubs are comprised of locals. Consequently, you, an outsider, immediately feel out of place. Even on the more gentrified streets of the City, places where there has come to exist a rift between present and past, there are those watering holes where nights progress on an axis all their own. Most of the habitués are animated and jovial early on, but by two or three in the morning the remaining drinkers have been reduced to stammering unintelligibly about lost opportunities and women who fade into the realm of impossibility before they even pass by the window. This is the vantage from the bottom rung of the social ladder (though, it must be said, they are at least on the social ladder).
I don't normally start conversations with the people in these places, as most see me as something of an anomaly to be gazed at with suspicion, if not quiet hostility, during my first drink. This is especially the case once one leaves Manhattan. Even in the more crowded places, I rarely stay for more than a beer, and leave an apparition's impression. In the bars where I stay longer, someone eventually approaches me to appease their curiosity.
Most think that I am still in college, which, from their perspective, is certainly a rational thing to assume. When I tell them my reason for coming into their bar — it's always their bar—they have a good laugh at my expense. Sometimes the transformation of their neighborhood comes up, though it's always addressed casually: “A couple years back we would have never seen a kid like you in these parts”; “You just move into that new building down the block?”; “I just want to know where all of these white kids keep coming from.” Areas such as Astoria and Harlem seem to be used to it (gentrification) by now. As I walked through parts of Long Island City and Bed-Stuy, however, even the women thought it necessary to stare me down. And then there was the quick sally to the South Bronx, where the diabetrices waddle through intersections like cattle upon the range. They received me with looks of pity or shock more often than scorn.
A surprising number of people know of Coprolalia in these areas populated by the Remi nepotes. “'At muthafucka been doin' 'at shit in the da' hood for a goddamn decade,” a man with a syncopated voice said at one bar somewhere in downtown Brooklyn. The interior was very red and very black.
“Some say even longer,” I responded.
“Shit, man, why you even interested in him?”
“There's a reward, Claude,” the bartender laughed deeply — not a deep laugh, but a deep voice, a voice for jazz radio.
“He draw anything in here, Marlon?” another bar dweller with a Cubs hat asked.
“Nah, that professa' from En Why You came through here and told me it's fake. I tell you though, I only thought to ask him 'cause I thought it might be valuable to somebody. Personally, I could-a cared less.”
“So you got rid of it?” I asked.
“Yeah, the whole bathroom downstairs was starting to look like shit, so I had my asshole brother-in-law come by and do some renovations.” He looked to Claude with a smile. “That lazy muthafucka',” slowly, “Took two fucking months to do the job. I tell ya', he's fuckin' worthless. Fuck-ing worth-less.”
I've found that a large amount of Brooklyn and Staten Island residents are contractors. The Irish and the Italians in particular. They enter the bars after their shifts smelling of sawdust and B.O. because they are required to wear thick clothing in order to avoid scrapes and shallow lacerations even in the heat. They complain about the Yankees and the Mets — the former being a team that is always supposed to win, the latter being a team that is always supposed to lose. They remember “broads” or “bitches” or “slits” that had walked by the worksite as Rolling Stones albums from the early seventies run their course. They call each other “fat fuck” and “wop-diego” and “fucking mic,” but avoid calling their black or brown comrades by any title that could be considered offensive. They have conversations that, from the outside, would seem to be incendiary, but you get the impression that they've been arguing about the same kind of shit for the past decade without incident.
“Whadda mean Jesus was black?”
“He had woolly hair, no job, and went around callin' everybody brotha'. Sounds like a muthafuckin' knee-grow to me.”
It's incredibly awkward to visit the gay bars at night. This is rather obvious, but in my less-than-sober mind I believed that I came off as straight enough to avoid any unwanted advances. As a consequence of my error in judgment, I was the source of chagrin for a man who couldn't believe that I was looking for something in the bathroom that didn't happen to be his penis, which had been displayed through one of those holes to which people will attach the word glory, or, in Coprolalia's case, Pyramus. The incident was rather embarrassing for both parties. He was nice about the misunderstanding, though I am fairly certain that he ordered a phalanx of body builders in white briefs to deny my exit until I stayed for a drink. The whites were fluorescent in the black light, a neon sexuality that turned out to be more intimidating than menacing.
I ended up talking to Greg(g), the presumed general of the briefs brigade, for a little less than half an hour. He worked at the Met and tried to convince me that he had never heard of Coprolalia. (I think I pulled a similar stunt with Connie when she asked me if I was familiar with Basquiat. I managed to rope her into that first conversation, which eventually ended in the bedroom — that night of cautious austerity on both of our parts because everyone knows that the first night needs to be filled with anticipation for the second if there is to be any real future, tiny vessels popped or no. We fell asleep in a tangled heap upon the bed, exhausted and serenaded by Billie Holiday and the murmur of the radiator. She did not exhibit that curious modesty familiar in many women — she was not reluctant to reveal her body in the light of the early morning, but instead spread herself upon the sheets like paint upon canvas as the deep purple of the night sky faded to the dusty wan of morning. The sight was neither surreal nor pornographic; it was rather a personification of comfort and tranquility, a Laodamian idyll with which I knew I was to gain a greater familiarity. But it was a spurious display if one thinks in deeper metaphors. Once she awoke, she was hesitant to agree to so much as a date upon which we could see one another again; and until that later date I could not help but feel guilty, as though I had violated her in some way, that I had taken advantage of her even if the love that we made that night was not intrusive, phallic, or vaginal; it was exploratory, epidermic — our hands intrepidly passing over one another's bodies like astronauts surveying the surface of the moon.) Greg(g), upon realizing that I was not intrigued — in fact annoyed — by his coyness, became willing to impart what he knew of Coprolalia. He told me to track down Sean, that I should focus my attention on Brooklyn, and then spent the remainder of the time telling me about his sister's wedding, which sounded as though it was going to be a lovely service at a rustic site somewhere in Maine. He was not jealous at all. When I left, his friend had just come back from the bathroom and couldn't believe the nerve of some smokers.