Hours on the subway — especially the M, my Rocinante — were passed with crossword puzzles and other amusements. This human yo-yo ended up at far too many apocheirs, from 95th Street to 242nd Street, from Far (and I do mean Far) Rockaway to Jamaica, as it's difficult to stay awake when drunk and left with nothing to do besides focus on advertisements (“Thank you Dr. Zizmor!”) and Shortz puns in order to avoid eye contact with the others on the train, the majority of them appearing either horribly despondent, enraged, deranged, or just plain fucked. During this time I realized that the subway system is based upon the future. The time in the subway itself is essentially a precursor to wherever it is you are going. People are conscious of the wait, but they seldom notice the cracked tiles that look like snake-skin, the cement-hued paint that runs throughout the system, the stalactites that are made of mysterious mineral compounds, or the way in which the express trains rattle the tracks in six-eight time as they race past the local stations. Everybody notices the piss smell that saturates either end of the platform, as well as the rats that run in and out of those small drainage holes that appear every five yards or so; they see the garbage on the tracks, and even the advertisements that have been operated upon with exacto-knives and not-so-exacto-knives; and yet, for these commuters, the station is a low-altitude purgatory, something that is accepted, but not acknowledged. I guess this became noticeable to me once I started riding the train for more than the typical two hours and change a day.
A lot of this time was spent questioning this project. Going in and out of bars all day is fun, of course, but I wasn’t gaining any serious insight into the identity of Coprolalia. True, I felt like I knew him better than when I began, but these few assumptions were not going to translate into anything more substantial, anything something that was necessarily a fiction because there were simply too many gaps to fill.
By the time I reached Coney Island on Wednesday, I was less than optimistic. My experience there didn’t make me feel any better. Someone named Fo' Sho' (my apostrophes) had appropriated the space that housed the Coprolalia in the beachfront bathroom close by Stillwell. The air was still cool, especially as the night began to fall and the breeze from the ocean picked up. Old Russian men were sitting upon the benches watching the waves roll in; these are the types of men to whom dramatists look for inspiration, for whom composers write nocturnes laden with flatted thirds and sixths, with whom the spirit of Aschenbach stands watching the ocean, not as artist, but as a comrade in moribundity. Most had widower's eyes, glacial and harrowing things that radiated sorrow even (maybe especially) in sleep. They were the men who could challenge Atlas in fortitude, if not determination, but also the types who never would; they would only sit, pockmarked and phlegmatic, staring to the ocean and waiting for the day to end. The company they kept included cheap vodka and cheaper tobacco, harsh stuff that an agoraphobic would refuse even if threatened with being kidnapped, stripped stark naked, and booted out of a speeding van into the cacophony of Times Square — the central hub of Positivist Manhattan's grid.
The beach was beginning to clear out; the families who had spent the late afternoon hours lounging, playing, a few even singing, the more courageous swimming, came up in troves drunk with sun. Most of them were Dominican or Puerto Rican. They ambled slowly, laughed, picked at leftovers stuffed into plastic containers of the translucent, but not transparent variety. Seagulls crowded the vacant spaces left by those on their way to trains or apartments; they would glide down to the earth with ease and kick up small clumps of sand as they moved with erratic determination. They were defensive and quick to discern any avian intruders attempting to stake a claim on the remnants left by the bronzed day-trippers; only then did they accelerate their steps and reveal serpentine tongues pink like bubble gum. With the mere threat of castigation, they managed to repel the dawdling pigeons and the jittery sparrows seeking to pilfer what was — in any case seemed to be — the rightful inheritance of the gulls. The sparrows were easily frightened and quick to retreat; the pigeons, however, were not so easily dissuaded. They grabbed whatever they could and scuttled away as the gulls descended upon the sands with graceful aggression to arrogantly remind — in a language that may just be inherently arrogant — those within earshot that the sands were not there to provide harbor to those from the city.
The beach soon became home to flickering lighters among congregations of sunset silhouettes: Ferlinghetti windmills and roosters. By this time the boardwalk was nearly empty, populated only by memories without volition (walking without direction or drive, shades of varying opacity as if breathing idylls: women in scarlet, the shade of vitality, or rose, the shade of passion; beside them strolled men made docile from gratitude). As one turned away from the ocean and its barren horizon, however, the spirit of abandonment and decay that has characterized the fairground for so long became salient once again — the skeletal remains of more innocent times, back when the distinction between work and leisure was respected. Even before the sunset it had begun to resonate in my mind like a tin drum, an incorrigible cachinnation that neither pulsed nor undulated; it simply echoed within itself without waning in volume or tenacity. The only real beacon came from a bar, out front of which was a small group of smokers at a picnic table. They were busy discussing the Yankees' chances of a World Series victory over a round of beers.
Conversation at the bar revolved around the plans for the boardwalk's redevelopment, even with Boston in town. The patrons spoke in an uncharacteristically timid and ambivalent tone: defiant of gentrification and the process's Sherman-esque contempt for past and present, but sympathetic to rejuvenation as a means of “community improvement” or any of those similar euphemisms that avoid eye contact with the impenetrable face of reality. Even the most sympathetic to the latter were still hesitant to endorse anything proposed by “That motherfucker buying up Coney Island. You know what he did to Albee Square?”
The speaker posed this rhetorical to anyone within earshot, though his eyes did fall on the bartender. He did not respond. No one else did, either. The Fifth Beatle paraphrased Parmenides. After a moment, the man who posed the question concerning Albee Square lifted a bottle to his small, angular mouth. He placed the bottle down on the bar gently, wiped a free hand across the stubble crowding his face like a weak, pontillistic shadow, and then pushed his hair — thinning, wavy, black, long; the kind of capricious fluff that is so often attached to someone with an incessant need to argue like a perpetual student in a state of perpetual truancy — back behind his ears.