I take my seat at the bar on a rickety stool that capriciously sways as though dancing a bolero and order a mug of McSorely's. My ID is requested, which draws a derelict laugh from the old man down the bar. The bartender puts his finger to the date, looks to the picture, looks to me. “McSorely's, right?” as he hands me back the ID. “Don't see many Maryland licenses,” he adds. “You just move here?”
“I've been here about four years now.”
“You like it?”
“Love it.”
Our exchange falters. I take the opportunity to bring up Coprolalia. “We just painted the bathroom,” he says with a shrug. The medium T-shirt he is wearing bunches up a bit, and he quickly tugs it back into position. “I don't know why,” as he rubs his goatee with his free hand; “It's not like it's going to stop people from writing shit on the wall. I'm pretty sure the owners had that one guy from En Why You come to take a picture of whatever Coprolalia did in there before we painted. I guess you're going to have to contact him if you want to see it.” The geography of his past is still fresh in his accent. It's of the northern Midwest variety: clean, polite, and with head nod and smile accompaniment. It is not so exaggerated as to require a change in spelling in order to accurately transpose; it's just something you notice.
“That's four bucks,” he says as he hands me the beer. I hand him a five.
“This may be a bit out of left field, but do you know who Coprolalia is?”
“Me?” His laugh would be fitting for an animated chipmunk. “No, man. I've heard his name a lot, sure; but I don't have a clue who he is. I just moved to the city, like, six months ago. The only people I even know here are my girlfriend, her friends, and Sam over there.” Sam raises his glass, but says nothing — creepy silence is, after all, one of the most sacred of Thanatist virtues. “The guy probably lives in Williamsburg in a sweet loft or something.”
The conversation quickly flows into the Styx as the Buzzcocks begin their signature song. The next two songs are by the Ramones. What follows is a mystery to me, as I have finished my beer, said my goodbye, and made my exit.
This basic progression is followed without variation even after Uranus changes into a Hawaiian shirt. I enter into a bar, talk to a somewhat taciturn bartender, and quickly leave. I probably shouldn't have been ordering a drink at each place, but it's not an issue I dwell upon, as hindsight is a terrible vantage from which to view life.
I find myself on Third Avenue as the night finally encroaches upon the dusk. The brick precipices of red and gray loom overhead, high enough to block out the setting sun. Scaffolding shadows bemaze the sidewalk. Commuters spill out of train stations like blood from a fresh wound.
I have yet to actually see anything created by Coprolalia because it seems that every bathroom in the City has been recently painted. With the exception of the first place I visited, each bartender has stared back to me with a green stupor, as if the very idea of the artist is something of a joke that needs nothing more than a derisive shake of the head to expose. Soliciting information from them is more work than I would have expected, and the frustration mounts with each passing drink. In the Rembrandt-dark of the pubs, the surrounding customers feel it is a priority to make matters worse. These day-shift drinkers speak like Balzac characters plummeting from grace — shamelessness at terminal velocity.
One of the patrons at a pub with a football-related name lurched within a few feet of me after eavesdropping upon my conversation with Joe, the bartender. When Joe excused himself to pour a pint for one of the faithful, the man nudged his friend before he sidled up to me with something of a lupine grin. “Yo', bro', Copra's a friend of mine.”
I gave no reply.
He did not push the subject. He just stared blankly to me for a moment before telling his friend that his three songs were beginning to play over the jukebox: the one top-ten Raspberries single, Sabbath's “War Pigs,” and Sugarloaf's biggest, arguably only, hit. Joe returned with a voice plagued by hurried indifference. After a few moments of Q and A, he finally directed me to the bathroom, which, although coated in denouncements of the Giants, the Jets, the Yankees, the Mets, the Rangers, the Islanders, the Devils, the Nets, and (peculiarly) Jay-Z, precluded any mention of the Knicks. “Giuliani is a Fascist” was written on a part of the mirror that had barely evaded renovation efforts. It is interesting to reflect upon the types who decide to write such things. What creates such an outburst? Is it simply the alcohol? Or do people feel compelled to acquiesce and contribute to chaos at the slightest appeal? If questioned about their actions would they have a legitimate response? Would they have a response at all?
But this is not the time for philosophic musings, is it? It is Friday night after all. And, as it is Friday night, each bar is more crowded than the last, filled with people in hot pursuit of that perfect state of inebriation, which is as transient as the moment it is reached. Rain becomes less likely as the hours grow; troops of people consequently roam the streets as opposed to taking cars from Point A to Point B — the four in the morning Point C, of course, remains on the horizon of possibility. Young women swagger down the street in clusters, many in the process of reading or writing a text message. There are a lot of skirts, few cankles, fewer natural blondes, and only a handful of praetorian boyfriends looking on with menacing eyes towards other men, other women, dogs, insects, and inanimate objects too varied to bother mentioning. One such man is kicking a hydrant. There are also large groups exclusively of men — perhaps phalanxes would be more appropriate — moving through the streets with gaits both determined and concerted. These chachy customers are dressed in metallic-hued button-downs and expensive jeans of low quality. Interspersed among these groups about to partake in the nightlife, one finds the more militant members of the Young Republicans — fierce-looking twenty- and thirty-somethings with white bags of take-out in one hand, black bags of spirits in the other. The men have removed their ties; the women have changed their shoes. The determined face of ambition, however, remains. Even with the fatigue of a sixty or eighty hour week, they march by quickly, their heads slightly focused upon the pavement, their eardrums insulated by a song of their choosing, their lips pressed tight into something not too unlike a grimace even though there has been no willful manipulation of the facial muscles. They silently denounce you and the rest of the people not attempting to scale the intractable face of Mount Purgatory as they pass by. I've had political conversations with these types. It's not fun. On top of the pervasive resentment — or ressentiment, for the Nietzsche fans — that has somehow come to dominate the thinking of this nation's wealthy, these “Objectivists” utilize a lot of tautologies when confronted with Skepticism, and seem to be under the impression that repeating these tautologies at greater and greater volumes suffices for a cogent attack upon Cartesian metaphysics. Eventually things get personal. They express the narcissistic belief that their position came as a result of their abilities and their intelligence. They are autodidacts, who by chance went to the most prestigious private schools in their respective areas from the ages of three to eighteen, who got into Harvard or Yale or Princeton due to their tenacity and genius alone, who got a job at a firm that just so happens to be run by a friend of the family. Just about all of these arguments end with either a few words of profanity, something about someone's mother, or, occasionally, a fist. Luckily most of them are total fucking pussies.