“You've got something,” he begins before descending into a list of onomatopoeic utterances that are employed, typically one at a time, when one attempts to conjure up a better word or phrase for the one previously used. “You've got a lead!” he finally explodes. “That's it! You've got a fucking lead.”
“Not really,” I lament. “I guess I just lost track of time.”
“Look: you need to get over here, dig? Me and James met a group of New School broads, and they just fucking love Coprolalia. You've been working at this pretty hard. What you need is a good, solid night of fucking to clear your head.” The phone is hijacked by a car alarm. “I'm going back in. You know where we are right? It's a few blocks north of that Hercules thing Coprolalia did that you and Aberdeen are always talking about. See you in a bit.”
He hangs up the phone before I can respond. His words clearly do not have the agility to keep pace with his actions or thoughts, and, knowing him, the most important thing at the moment is the opportunity of more amphetamines. Still, a new Coprolalia means the possibility of a witness or even a list of suspects. Either way, the continuing saga of Midas is intriguing enough to get me in for one more round before I head off to examine Tomas' discovery.
A man turns the corner as I stand staring to the tiny moon beyond the streetlight. We catch eyes, but I discern nothing in his face. “The turkey is too dry,” he says once he has approached within a few feet of me. He has a strong British accent.
“Have you tried basting it?” I ask gingerly.
He stares to me from behind tinted glasses. It's difficult to make out his facial features. He is cold and withdrawn, vaporous like a wraith. “So the elusive Monsieur Lemieux lives to see another day,” he laughs coldly. He nods slowly, looks up and down the street, and then walks back around the corner from whence he came. His footsteps echo quietly as he strolls down the canyon of concrete, a kind of steady clicking like an old clock. I hear a luxury car door open. Shut. An idling engine disengages from park. Transmission gears churn and grind. The car turns onto the street and heads north. It is a black Lincoln of modern make: a car that is supposed to be anonymous, elegant, blunt. The man has a driver, but the car does not belong to a service. Hundreds of questions implore my attention like wide-open receivers running through the end zones of my mind.
I enter to find that the floor of the bar has regained its stability — it is no longer an esoteric series of shirting planks, but, rather, just a bunch of adjacent cuts of wood warped by the elements. I return to my seat after using the bathroom to find Pepper and Debbie still talking about Midas. “Yeah, at piece a shit wouldn't even know what t'ado wit it,” I hear Pepper say. I immediately think about Debbie's vagina, which, of course, sets the ol' noodle to work trying to envisage what lay beneath her sweatshorts and whether or not the varicose veins — which crowd the lower portions of her thighs as if stray pen marks or derelict hairs on Linus' head — flow all the way up her leg, or if some anatomical miracle has prevented the advance of these cosmetic abominations, which some culture on this Earth must revere as symbolic of the accoutrement of phronetic wisdom, not only years. I soon lose interest in the matter, however, as I remember the temperature and the unfortunate fact that the vagina reacts to heat much as the skunk reacts to danger. The male grundle, of course, is no better.
“Yo, Quiet Riot, what's on yer mind?” Debbie asks as I realize that I'm grinning with the same countenance that appeared when I started contemplating Debbie's protean pussy. “You ain't gonna get sick, are ya?”
“No, I was just thinking about the best way to get over to Park Slope.”
“What? We ain't good'nuff all of a sudden? Gotta go to fucking Pahk Slope?” Pepper yells above Smokey Robinson, who is telling everyone about Mickey's Monkey. Pepper's tone is not one of indignation, or, if it is, it's the playful sort. The word “persiflage” pops into my head. I don't know if it applies.
“No,” I begin with my palms showing; “There's a new piece in a bathroom over on Union and Fifth. I want to go over to make sure it's authentic.”
The two look to me without scorn.
“What kinda piece we talkin here? You a pimp?”
“He's fowlinround that shitta artist.”
“What?” she says with a look of disgust in my direction. She turns back to Pepper: “He's tailing some dude who makes sculptures wit his shit?”
“No, usually drawings or poetry.”
She turns back to me, utterly mystified: “How ya make poetry wit dookie?”
The question resonates in my imagination for long enough to draw a smile. “He writes on the walls — usually in pen.”
“'Ere was at ting on'm in DaPost,” Pepper says on the heels of my words. Debbie replies with a dithering head. “Yer staying fer another beer, right?”
I ask for a beer and the check. The beer is on the house; the tab is eighteen dollars. I leave thirty. Pepper and Debbie are now gossiping about the neighborhood denizens as though scholars exchanging lurid details of the dead. Midas, once the star, has by now become just another thread in a tapestry of working-class despair, one in which every man is either a drunk or a fool, every woman a saint or a “fuckin nutcase.” I imagine the whole neighborhood as a long stretch of halfway houses filled with deviant kids and adults with forsaken ambitions, which, although highly offensive, is probably more accurate than most would like to admit.
Debbie and Pepper seem incredibly fond of Maria, a recent addition to the neighborhood. She is considered “too good” for Carlos, her husband — evidently more of a fool than a drunk. As they tell stories about these two, Maria and Carlos, I cease to be a focal point; I become more like a detail in the background of one’s reflection or a fly upon the wall that is kept alive because it doesn't draw too much attention to itself. They want to set Maria up with Raphael, the UPS driver. Les McCann, meanwhile, echoes the generation of Baraka and Brathwaite, a generation that has since muzzled itself with the pages of Revelations.
“Ya hear Midas worked fer UPS fer a month a so, right?”
“Get out!”
“Yeah — got fired fer drinkin on the job. A few weeks afta, I ax him, 'Midas, what can Brown do fa you'?” The two bowl over laughing even though the joke doesn't seem to have a punch line.
8.1
The B71 keeps me waiting only a few minutes. Even during rush hour, Brooklyn buses have a nasty habit of not coming unless they are baited by the sudden recollection of a forgotten item less than a block away or a freshly lit cigarette. Neither is here necessary, which gives me that feeling that something good is eminent — an irrational sentiment, no doubt, but one that seems to arise whenever you beat the odds.
I make it to the bar just before two in the morning. The doorman — a severely androgenic colossus with no sense of humor and that overwhelming need to intimidate because he is on the side of power for perhaps the first time in his life — scans my ID for an extended period of time as a nearby group of smokers talk about how horribly pretentious all of the bars in Park Slope have become since they moved to the neighborhood nine months ago. “You cool,” the bouncer concedes. He still stares me down as I reach for the door. I open it to see yet another golem subsisting on negative energies aroused by rejection, indignation, and animosity. Union membership being what it is, I guess the Pinkertons have been forced to scour the classifieds.
Aberdeen, Tomas, and the New School girls are on a couch near the front door. The girls are clearly underage, but they're just attractive enough to not have to deal with the scrupulous bouncer. I am quickly introduced to them. They are Trixi, Mix, Nixi, and Jane. Jane seems sober. Trixi and Mixi probably subsist on a diet dominated by Sparks, Aderol, Sweet and Low, Ensure, and Marlboro Lights. Nixi, however, appears to be strung out on something far more intense than the mélange of products favored by the other two.