Greg(g) had taken a seat in the middle of the bar, where he was casually sipping on a bloody mary while proofreading something that he didn't want discuss. After introducing him to Tomas, he asked about the search, and once again followed me into one of the bathrooms. The walls were pristine. The only markings were on the deodorant advertisements, which had been modified to better address Greg(g)'s desires. “After talking with you about Coprolalia, I realized that the washroom of my neighborhood watering-hole needed a little touching up.” Once he realized who Tomas was, they started talking about an artist whom I didn't know by name with a great deal of derision. Tomas and Greg(g) continued to talk over one the Sea and Cake's newer songs as I examined the second bathroom. There were several numbers for great head, far more than one finds at most bars. The names were predominately masculine; most of the numbers were the same: 867-5309.
We stopped for a burger and a few beers somewhere in Kew Gardens. Randy put five bucks in the jukebox. The place in which we found ourselves constituted the last of the Queens bars on Sean's list, so we opted to stay and watch the final innings of an anticlimactic Yankee game, which ended with a dumbfounded Bobby Abreu watching strike three sail past the middle of the plate. A guy at the bar laurelled K-Rod as the new Mariano Rivera (“Fucking automatic, son”).
A few plans for the remainder of the day were pitched as we aimlessly drove around listening to “Teen Age Riot.” We eventually decided to go back to Randy's parents' mansion in Great Neck after driving all the way into Red Hook to pick up some barbecue essentials at Fairway. We would have gone elsewhere to pick up groceries, but Tomas insisted on Fairway because neither Randy nor I had ever been there. The store is like no place else — as advertised. It seemed to be a Mecca for culinary masters, vegans without trust funds (something of a rarity), and black intellectuals partial to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad (perhaps all three in some cases). The Food Network had some cameramen floating around the produce section, but we didn't see anyone we recognized.
The drive back up the B.Q.E. was smooth with the exception of a sudden and seemingly meaningless traffic jam in Greenpoint. The L.I.E. gave us no problems. Randy had put of a mix of random 90's songs, which was actually labeled “Random 90's Songs.” It featured, among others I had heard before but cannot name, Spacehog, Tripping Daisy, the Caulfields, Lucas, Supergrass, Harvey Danger, Mazzy Star, Skeelo, Candlebox, the Primative Radio Gods and Joe Public.
Randy's home certainly qualified as a mansion, perhaps even a manor. The house was exceptionally modern — cubist, juxtaposed as opposed to symmetrical, gray, cold. Both mom and dad were out of town, which, from what I could infer, was far from atypical. From the backyard you could see City Island and the Throgs Neck and Whitestone Bridges. Airplanes came and went at a leisurely pace over the gray-blue monotony of the Sound.
We split two bottles of champagne (“What else are you supposed to drink in a fucking mansion?” Tomas asked), and spent most of the afternoon swimming, cooking, and eating. Food-coma set in rather quickly after the last round of brats, and I found myself watching a predictable thriller on one of the premium channels in one of those massage chairs that they sell at the Sharper Image. I had never met anyone who owned one. I awoke to find Randy passed out on the adjacent couch. Tomas was in the kitchen with Randy's live-in maid, Katya, who was twenty, Russian, and flush. Tomas was, too. They were laughing comfortably about something that wasn't all that funny.
We arrived back at Tomas' loft under a Krakatoa sky. Barazov and his friends were preparing for a night on the town. They were archetypes of a sort in that they were desperately trying to embody that type of spontaneity Nietzsche was so fond of. With them, however, it was fairly obvious that they had to be conscious of being spontaneous. So it wasn't really spontaneity at all, but rather a contrived and temporary denial of the inescapable bourgeoisie mentality for which the avant-garde is supposed to have so much contempt. They conformed to the nonconformist manner of wearing black and appearing sullen. They probably had copious amounts of meaningless sex (and it was meaningless, too, as the idea of free-love to them was merely the rejection of monogamy, as opposed to the espousal of a personal tenet, be it spiritual, emotional, ethical, or human), read a lot of Wikipedia entries, and dabbled in the various drugs available to them. Their lifestyle was profoundly childish and narcissistic — which, in-itself, is a profoundly childish orientation to the world.
To further confine them to a stereotype, three out of the four there were members in a rock band — the Sheeps. Their music probably wasn't independent in spirit, but you could tell that it fell into the genre of Indie, a term, like Alternative, that at one point precluded a distinct sound, though by now it has become yet another vacuous label that the Them (those to whom people attribute unfathomable power) employ in order to push useless consumables upon the anxious, the insecure, and the heavily medicated. All in all, the Sheeps, and the people like the Sheeps, engender the profligate lifestyle for which many residents of Williamsburg and Greenpoint have become so infamous and reviled. They are the paragons of white kids as defined by those who have a strong distaste for white people. They are rich. They are arrogant. They are selfish, rude and oblivious. Most importantly, they have neither the will nor the intellect to create in earnest, as they are too lazy and self-conscious to attempt to actualize the talents (whether real or imagined) from which their narcissism derives.
“So you're the Coprolalia guy, huh?” Barazov asked as I approached him. “I thought you'd be taller.” He then looked to his friends snickering at the display of irreverence.
Randy rolled his eyes. “I'm going to take off, but you guys should definitely give me a call if you make it down to the Slope tonight,” he said as he walked out the door.
Barazov didn't introduce me to his friends. No one took the opportunity to introduce themselves, either. They exchanged cautious glances like hobos sharing a bottle. There was not a clear reason for the attitude or the silence. One could say it is a lifestyle more than a penchant. Tomas eventually asked where Lindsay and Aberdeen were. He received a shrug from Barazov, a slight, frivolous movement no more engaging than a restrained paroxysm or a suppressed yawn. The derelict chorus chuckled. Tomas motioned toward a door down the hall.
“He's such a fucking brat,” he exhausted as he closed the door to his room. “I can't wait until he's done rebelling with his daddy's fucking money, gets his corporate job, and moves the fuck out of my apartment.” From the other room we heard an explosion of laughter.
Tomas' room was filled with nearly empty liquor bottles and books. My eyes landed on Dennett's Consciousness Explained. “Have you read that before?” he asked.
“I browsed through it once.”
“I haven't gotten much of a chance to read it, either. This guy recommended it to me. Met him in line at Polam — one of the delis on Manhattan. He's apparently starting some magazine called the Green Gnome. I don't know how I feel about it. He wants me to contribute to it, but I don't think I'm going to bother.”
“Why not?”
“I don't think he'll ever publish it. Even if he gets one issue out, I doubt it will go anywhere. He didn't seem to have any business sense.