by Bill Hayes
“Like osmium?” O asks, hopeful, delighted.
I chuckle. “Yes, just like osmium—clouds of osmium.”
“Oh, I have to look,” O says and steals a hungry glance at the sky.
We had come to the roof, as is our custom, to have some wine. Normally, we take swigs straight from the bottle. But O, to prevent tilting his head back, has brought a straw. He takes a long sip from the bottle then passes it to me. It’s funny—drinking good cabernet through a straw—and even funnier when I finish my sip and the straw bobs back into the bottle—irretrievably.
I go back downstairs for another straw.
Returning to the roof, I find O hugging the rooftop railing.
“What do you see?”
“Oh, I’ve just been looking at the colors, and shapes, and shadows,” he says.
“Nice—show me.”
“There”—he points down to a pink-colored building. We watch the colors and shadows for a long while without talking. Then, O says what I have been thinking: “This is the perfect thing to do when you’ve had eye surgery and can only look down.”
We watch people walking down sidewalks, across streets, and we anatomize the different ways people walk: “There is striding. And scurrying. And rushing. And loafing. And ambulating …”
That last word sidetracks him, and he goes on: “Ambulating. Ambulate. Ambulation … I wonder if that comes from … ? Let’s go look it up in the OED.”
_____________________
7-10-10:
O, in the car, on a drive back from the Botanical Garden—reclining all the way back in his seat (because of sciatica); two pairs of sunglasses on (because of his eye)—suddenly speaks, startling me (I thought he’d been sleeping):
“I’ve suddenly realized what you mean to me: You create the need which you fill, the hunger you sate. Like Jesus. And Kierkegaard. And smoked trout …”
I: “That’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me—I think.”
O chuckles, then adds: “It’s a kind of teaching, in a strange way …”
Later: I thought he was gazing at me lovingly as I drove, but then realized, no:
“I’m watching the odometer and thinking of the elements,” says O.
_____________________
8-17-10:
I stop by O’s to bring him an ice cream bar. I mention I saw fireflies in Abingdon Square Park—fireflies!
O: “Did you keep your mouth shut?”
I: “What do you mean keep my mouth shut?”
O: “They say three will kill you—luciferase, dangerous stuff.”
I am laughing, but he is not. I really cannot tell if he is serious.
O: “I don’t want you to die of fireflies … a luminous death!”
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12-27-10:
Palace Hotel, San Francisco—Over Christmas:
In bed, lights out:
O: “Oh, oh, oh …!”
I: “What was that for?”
O: “I found your fifth rib.”
In the middle of the night: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could dream together?” O whispers.
_____________________
1-1-11:
To Do:
- Rent check, etc.
- New phone?
- Apartment!
- Call Mom
- Buy/Start journal
_____________________
1-4-11:
On the word list:
I: “What do you list toward, Oliver?”
O: “Other than libidinal listings?”
I: “Those go without saying.”
O: “I want a flow of good thoughts and words as long as I’m alive … and you? What do you list toward?”
Man Waiting to Get Into a Fashion Show
A POEM WRITTEN ON THE STARS
I went out for a walk at about six thirty. Someone said it was supposed to rain but the skies looked clear to me. I headed up Eighth Avenue, crossed over at Twenty-Third Street, and at Tenth Avenue saw a stairwell going up and took it. I was on the High Line. That much I’d expected. What I had not anticipated was how crowded it would be, like being stuck on a moving sidewalk at an airport. But the night was too nice to begrudge anyone anything, particularly a chance to experience beauty.
So I imagined I was a tourist, too, headed for a distant gate to board a plane to a place I’ve never been.
Somewhere along the way, I lost my hat. I didn’t realize this until I had exited the park at Thirtieth Street, by which point I couldn’t imagine going back up to retrace my steps. I chose to take the lowlife route home, in the shadow of the High Line, instead.
It’s a different world down there. I stood at the mouth of a car wash, circa 1970, empty but operating. I came to a gas station where fourteen taxis were lined up for a single pump. I almost hopped in one but kept walking. I saw a pay phone up ahead—a pay phone!—and had to take a look. I flashed on how you had to plug them with quarters when making a long-distance call—the sound of the coins dropping, the magic of voices connecting, the disconsolate feeling when your coins ran out.
One man was using the phone, another leaning against the booth waiting in line. The leaning man was dark-skinned and looked striking in his dark clothes, as if dressed for cold weather. He was holding a bouquet of white roses. He looked as if he lived on the streets.
I smiled at him and tipped my missing hat. “Gorgeous night,” I said, and I felt it was true, though the streets here were deserted and dirty; part of the gorgeousness in that moment was he and the old phone booth. He smiled back.
At the corner, I felt a presence and turned around. The man with roses was walking toward me very fast. The rose heads bobbed up and down against his chest, and I thought of a dozen bareheaded babies.
“I know you,” I heard him saying. “We’ve met.”
I did not rule this out. I had had many memorable encounters with strangers in my years in New York. The man stopped in front of me and stared into my eyes as if trying to read my mind. Then his eyes brightened. “Did I write a poem for you?” he said.
I stared back, searching my memory. A curtain lifted: Winter, 2009. Two in the morning. A snowstorm. I get out of a cab at Seventh and Christopher, and see a homeless-looking man on the corner. I give him the five bucks left from my cab fare. He thanks me but says he never takes something for nothing. All he can give me is a poem in return. He gives me a list of options.
“A love poem, of course,” I request. And so he stands there, in the whirling snow, and recites by heart a poem about love—and, being about love, heartbreak. The words go from his mouth to my ears and are carried off by the wind. Two-and-a-half years later, on a different corner but under the same sky, we met again.
“Billy, I’m going to write another poem for you,” he said. His name, he reminded me, was Wolf Song. He wanted to write it down for me this time. Neither of us had anything to write with. “Will you buy me a pen?” the poet asked.
There was a convenience store behind us. I bought Wolf Song a black ballpoint pen for a dollar. He got a beer from the fridge; I paid for that, too.
We left and started walking. “Come on, I’m taking you to my archive,” Wolf Song said. “You’ll see; it’s covered with poems.” He had the pen behind his ear and his beer in a paper bag.
I got a little nervous. The sun was setting. We were heading down a nearly empty street. From above us on the High Line came the buzz of the crowd; if I were to yell, no one would hear me.
“We need some paper, Billy,” he said.
There was a scrap of newspaper on the sidewalk, torn from the Times. He picked it up. Something caught my eye: “Look, there’s a map of the sky.” I recognized the Sunday “Sky Watch” column—a chart of the constellations.
Wolf Song looked stunned. He said he’d been thinking about a poem about the sky all day long. “It was meant to be, then,” I said. “Will you write it on the stars for me?”
He led me to his archive: a d
oorway, just a little enclosure. There were no poems posted on the walls. But to him there were. This was his retreat for poetry-making. I could almost feel his words encircling us.
Then he walked toward a car parked on the street. He put the roses and his can of beer on the hood—his desk. He put the newspaper down, and then hesitated, pen in hand, as if suddenly self-conscious. “You write it,” he said. “I don’t have good handwriting.”
I assured him that it would be fine.
“OK, Billy, this is only for you,” he said, and slowly, painstakingly, carefully forming each letter, he wrote his poem over the map of constellations. When he finished, he read it aloud, a koan to the heavens.
Sky why
So Much
Pain is
The Rain
Drops eyes
To Your
Story
We both looked at the words of the poem on the scrap of paper on the empty street under the High Line and the darkening sky. Something passed between us. Both of us had tears in our eyes.
We shook hands and thanked each other. He gave me my poem and three roses, leaving nine for himself to give to other New Yorkers he would meet that night under the starry sky.
“We will see each other again,” I told him. “I know it.”
I turned and began walking. It was only then that I read the text accompanying the sky map in the newspaper:
This week the planet Venus will pass in front of the sun, becoming evident as a small black circle slowly moving across the solar disk. Such an occurrence is called a transit of Venus, one of the rarest of astronomical events.
It went on to say that only six times in recorded history have humans witnessed the transit of Venus in front of the sun, a chance meeting of two celestial bodies. After this one coming up on Tuesday, the next transit wouldn’t be for 105 years.
When I got to the corner, I looked back to wave at the poet, but he was gone.
NOTES FROM A JOURNAL
1-8-11:
O: “I don’t regret the things I’ve done but those I haven’t done. In that way, I’m like a criminal …”
_____________________
2-13-11:
O: “Can one enjoy two pleasures at the same time?”
I: “Like what? Give me an example.”
O: “The taste of broccoli and the feeling of your leathered thigh.”
I: “Broccoli? That’s your example?”
O: “It’s co-perception, isn’t it? They get fused in a certain way but don’t get de-identified …”
_____________________
3-17-11:
O tripped on a rug and fell in the office, fractured his hip. In hospital.
Coming out of anesthesia this morning and seeing me, O said, “You look very pretty … If it were under less public conditions, I would kiss you.”
I kissed him anyway.
_____________________
6-7-11:
In Seattle, I call O from the hospital where my mother is clearly near death. He urges me to go out with friends and have some laughs. “When my mother died,” he tells me, “my oldest friend called up straightaway and told me three scandalously obscene jokes in a row. I laughed uproariously, and then the tears came.”
I follow his advice.
_____________________
6-19-11:
One morning O tells me he had dreamt the word nephological (the study of clouds); another day, it was triboluminescence.
I: “Such a lovely word—why triboluminescence?”
O: “I like lightbulbs.”
This didn’t seem to answer my question but I liked it anyway.
He asked me to bring the volume from the OED—and a magnifying glass.
O: “Well, that’s interesting! Tribology … Tribometer … Let’s see …” He keeps searching. “Here we are! ‘Triboluminescence: the quality of emitting light under tremendous friction or violent pressure—1879.’”
_____________________
First Day Out of Jail
Undated Note:
O: “How much can one enter, I wonder, another’s insides—see through their eyes, feel through their feelings? And, does one really want to …?”
THE MOVING MAN
When the lease on my first New York apartment came up for renewal, the landlord raised my rent. I could no longer justify what I would be paying for a small, sixth-floor walk-up, so I decided to move. I found a relatively inexpensive place on the East Side, a few blocks from the First Avenue L station. I took it on impulse—my default mode, I see now. Within days, I knew I had made a terrible mistake. The apartment was a cave. The building was a partying frat house. Pigeons lined every sill, cooing and shitting and grooming themselves, despite my shooing, as if to let me know they had been there long, long before me. What hit me just as hard was how much I hated my new subway lines. I came to dread taking the 4/5 from Union Square to work in the Financial District every morning; it was cacophonous and crowded and, more than most subways in my eyes, irredeemably grimy.
Worse, really, was the L, which I’d take home from Oliver’s on the West Side. Not the train itself, which was fast and frequent, but what it represented. In that direction, the L is packed with people on their way to Brooklyn, whether going home or out partying. They always seemed remarkably hip and gay (in the original sense of the word) and young, whereas I felt like an old man being taken away from where he really wanted to be.
I feel guilty now that I projected my unhappiness onto the subways. The L and the 4/5? They did right by me, getting me home and to work on time and safely, and each brought its share of sights and discoveries. While waiting for a 4/5 one mercilessly humid summer afternoon, I found unexpected refuge from the suffocating heat under a gigantic fan installed in the ceiling at Union Square. I’d never noticed it before. But there I stood, gratefully, as if in the final leg of a car wash, my sweat-drenched clothes getting a jet drying.
It was near that same spot on an equally hot day that I saw a young woman faint just steps from the platform’s edge. She wilted in slow motion, but at the exact opposite speed two people came to her aid. By the time I reached the scene, she was in very capable hands, literally. There was a man cradling her head, who turned out to be a doctor, and at her side, holding her hand, was a preternaturally calm woman who looked like a yoga instructor. When the fainted woman came to, she looked terrified and confused, but the calm woman calmed her and the doctor doctored her, and in due time, the two walked her outside for some fresh air.
Crosstown moments come to mind too: Were it not for the L, I would never have met Pablo, the young Dominican who manned the Mister Softee ice cream truck parked outside the station at First and Fourteenth. Stopping for a cone and a how’s-it-going always made heading home easier. At the other end of the line was Joseph, a disabled artist whose drawings I collected and whose dedication inspired me. If Joseph, wheelchair-bound, could get himself from his SRO hotel off Times Square to the Eighth Avenue station every day to make and sell his work—even in the dead of winter—what excuse did I have for not practicing my art?
I had nearly given up writing at that point in my life, too preoccupied and distracted by my full-time job. Moreover, by January, I had begun to despair about my living situation. I couldn’t face another year in that cave, and Oliver and I had decided that, for us, living together didn’t make sense—it would not suit either him or me, each of us needing his own space. Perhaps the ride is over, I thought; the turnstiles that swung so freely are locked shut: Station Closed. But what to do, where to, next? To be a New Yorker is one thing, but to decide consciously to stay, to live out one’s life here? That’s another. I wasn’t sure I had what it takes. By which I did not mean simply fortitude but something more, something less effable.
That is when luck or fate in the form of a New Yorker named Homer, fittingly enough, intervened. Homer, the doorman in Oliver’s building, told me of a just-vacated apartment on the eleventh floor—three floors above Oliver’s
place. He let me see it. Many things about the place struck me as exactly right but, most of all, the light. The small apartment was window-lined. To the south, I could see a downtown cityscape, and to the west, a sliver of the Hudson River. Everywhere I looked, I saw life.
I have been here for six years now. I have not yet and expect I never will cover the windows with blinds or curtains. I’d rather not say exactly where in New York it is. All one needs to know is that, whether you live here, too, hope to, or are visiting, you and I may meet for a fleeting moment, perhaps today even, on a subway.
Just the other night, I had a nice encounter while heading home. Sitting near me was a man about my age sharing a two-seater with a suitcase, a duffel bag, a backpack, and a stuffed garbage bag. He caught my eye (or did I catch his?); something in his beaten-down expression looked familiar. I turned off my iPod.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
He shook his head dolefully. “Too much for one man to take.”
“Yeah?”
That was all he needed—the conversational equivalent of a starting whistle—and he was off, telling me in a rush of words how he was supposed to move today and a buddy with a truck had promised to help him out. The buddy didn’t show. And now here he was on fucking leg three of a solo relay marathon.
“That sucks, man,” I said, “really sucks. But you know what’s at the end of all this?”
He looked stumped, or just plain exhausted.
“A six-pack.”
The Moving Man cracked a smile.
“Have one for me,” I told him as I got off at my stop.
Couple on Seventh and Greenwich
NOTES FROM A JOURNAL
Undated Note—June 2011:
The difference between us in two words:
“Me, too,” I say.
“I, too,” O corrects.
_____________________
6-28-11:
O and I at Miyagi, on “conversion experiences,” as he calls them, life-changing moments, positive and negative, each listing his own: I tell him about discovering Joni and Joan Didion and Diane Arbus and Edmund White, and about the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. And he tells me about Janáček and the Romantic composers—Schubert, Brahms—and Luria, and the community of the Deaf, and about losing his mother. And we talked about those we have shared.