I mention the opening lines of a Coprolalia poem found in a nautical bar on Atlantic a few years ago. He bobs his head with suspect enthusiasm. “It's a somewhat odd rhyme pattern called terza rima,” I begin. “This, of course, is pretty weird to begin with — in English anyhow. Furthermore, each line contains eleven syllables.” Midas looks to the mirror behind the bar, perhaps to make sure he is expressing perplexity as accurately as possible. “It's like playing a song in a weird time signature, something like a five-four or a seven-eight.”
“Okay,” he responds with a nod. “Now you're speaking my language.”
“But here's what's really interesting: The most famous example of an eleven-syllable terza rima is found in Dante's Divine Comedy. The work has to be a reference to that poem. I mean, if one only takes the words into consideration, Faust seems to be a better candidate; but that ignores the context of the words. And then there's other stuff that he's done. There's a really good one called Herculi Romano Augusto, but no seems to really know what it means. I mean, it's a reference to Commodus, but that's all anyone really knows.” I take a sip from my beer.
“Who's Commodus?”
“Roman emperor. I think Joaquin Phoenix's character in Gladiator is supposed to be based on him.”
“Good movie.”
I nod.
“I’d never catch any of that shit. I haven't read anything like it since high school. I think I understand why you like this guy so much, though,” Midas adds as he reaches for his beer. He laughs to himself and shakes his head before taking down the remainder of the bottle. “I used to go through that same shit when I was trying to find the meanings behind the lyrics of Dark Side and Blonde on Blonde. I fucking love Dylan, man.”
I begin to lose what Midas calls my “college” tone as the dusk begins to creep upon the city. Charlie listens intently to our exchanges and interjects every so often with a non sequiteur involving one of the regulars. He interrupts the music every once in a while to make announcements. Midas keeps repeating the phrase, “When Caesar speaks, the music ceases.” Midas is told to shut the fuck up. A lot. Charlie lets me know that he has a box of photos of the bar before the paint job somewhere, but he doesn't know where. He thinks the box is in his attic, but he's unwilling to commit. “I'll check up there when I get home,” he says in fifteen minute intervals — right after he asks when I'll be back to the bar, and right before he launches into some story about Tony or Debbie or Pepper (a/k/a Handles, but never to her face) or Pabs (a/k/a Broccoli Head) or Shapiro or Marty (pronounced Mardy).
As the daylight fades into that amethyst tone that signifies an acceptable departure from sobriety, the crowd thickens with regulars, who each take their pop shots at Midas after finding out from Charlie about the most recent event to warrant the forest of empties in front of him. Schadenfreude takes on many faces. Some wear it openly; some camouflage it with tepid pity. “Tough break, dough,” they each say. This is typically followed by: “But, you know what — sun's gonna come up tomorrah.”
Lifted from the pages of an inane tragedy, Midas' life has been a series of ups and downs; the problem, of course, is that the ups started disappearing fairly early on, and the downs have dug trenches in which they have decided to camp out. One could relate it to the Great War, but, in this case, there is a clear winner.
There is no one culmination to his misfortunes, he seems to imply, only a steady stream of ill fate. Without a good place to take out his rage, he feels it must be escorted to the bar — this dingy place with the wood veneer redolent with the scent of decay, which, Charlie says incidentally, never dissipates until the passing of the autumn rains that last all day and always make the night seem to come on prematurely.
The Mets lose, the Yankees win. And while the victory over Boston in something even some of the Mets fan celebrate, it offers such a inane conciliation that Midas, now drunk enough to dispense with any detail of life, however lurid or pathetic, only becomes more flush with that form of consternation that people often confuse with a faulty defecation reflex. He doesn't attempt to conceal the dread of having to return home to Margie, his wife of “too many” years, without the shoe or job with which he left this morning. He just tries to maintain a genial tone and that sense of humor that every village punching bag is required to assume: humble, self-deprecatory, and filled with a cornucopia of obscenities. He even provides a foreign proverb at one point on the virtues of ugly wives, which arouses laughter from some of the men surrounding the two of us once Midas translates it. The end of the Yankees game is one of many signals for him to go home — the first being the point when the yellows and oranges of the sky turn to scarlets and violets, the last being none other than “lights on,” a signal to remind the truly intractable that “last call” took place about an hour beforehand. Instincts of self-preservation alone should have sent him home right after the sun disappeared, but Midas is blind to the hazards of walking into a fight armed only with beer-breath and empty pockets. He's not afraid of his wife, or at least he doesn't call it fear by name; instead, it's “Fuck her; she don't own me” and “I can do whatever I want,” which even he even accepts as a poorly contrived illusion. So, instead of coming in with the proverbial tail between his legs, Midas instead accelerates through the stages of drunkenness at a steady pace until he is left in that morass of inebriated oblivion and eventually forced back home by friends who don’t want to see him fully pickled and poisoned; yes, back they will carry him home to confront all of the problems, now metastasized into potentially fatal maladies, that he had hoped to avoid.
Charlie finally cuts off his service once it's been dark long enough for no one to know what time it actually is. His eyes hold a limp grudge, but Debbie, one of the more sober regulars, offers to walk him back to his place before hostilities are nurtured in the womb of self-pity. Midas is a profusion of gratitude. He raises the last of his beer to her, saying:
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift my glass to my mouth,
I look to you, and I sigh.
Midas then stands, falters, and then clutches onto Debbie's shoulder. He tells me to take care of his bar, and then begins for the exit. All eyes are on Midas — some sympathetic, some contemptuous. I think about his name. I was so quick to assume that it was born out of sarcasm, a caustic reminder of his problems; but what if it had been laurelled upon him prior to a vicissitude of fate, what an ancient would have concluded was the result of some great offense to a god?
As soon as the door closes behind them, a woman named Pepper takes up the unoccupied seat. She's probably the same age as Midas, but her face looks significantly older, even with her hair in pigtails. Her features have been gullied by years, a short stint with meth, and a bigamous marriage to neat whiskey and the brand of full-flavored cigarettes that peer out of the opening of her purse. Her words traverse gravely roads. “Whatcha tawkin wit dat loser four?” she asks with something like flirtation behind the wheel. One would need a specially made piano to hit the octave in which she speaks — shrill fails to capture the tenor of this squawking peacock.