Insomniac City
Page 5
We were eating outside. All at once, “Oh!” he exclaims, seeing a firefly, Tinker Bell-like at our feet.
“Isn’t it amazing!”
“Yes, but don’t—as I have told you before—eat one.”
“Ah, the dreaded death by firefly …”
O nods his head very seriously.
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7-5-11:
Ideas for O’s birthday present:
- H. G. Wells or Somerset Maugham short stories
- Talking watch—@ Lighthouse for Blind
- Star Trek: The Next Generation DVDs
- Leather gloves
- Copy of the Koran
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7-11-11:
Evening
Horse hooves on the avenue
Bring me to the window
Taxicabs lined up for gas
Pedestrians in a Merce Cunningham dance
And a woman, clearly lost
iPhone aloft
Stops the mounted policeman for directions
She listens as he talks
And points her the right way
The horse nods and trots off
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8-24-11:
A long soak in a very hot bath:
“What’s the temperature?” O asks.
I check his bathtub thermometer—a comically large contraption: “106.”
He approves. “I’ve gone as high as 110,” he says. “112, that’s the limit, and 102 is too cool. It’s interesting, isn’t it, there’s a very slim margin …”
I soak for half an hour, O at the side of the tub stroking my leg. I feel drugged, tranquil. At one point, I feel him watching me quizzically: “Why does one close one’s eyes with pleasure …?” he wonders aloud.
After, I lie on a towel on the bed, naked.
He lies next to me, clothed. Only our hands, fingers, touching. The AC is on. I am glistening and wet with sweat, cooling down, which takes a very long time. We drowse and talk and look at the salmon-colored sky, but mostly don’t talk, just touch.
“I feel like I’m always rushing,” I say at one point.
O lets it sink in. “That you are,” he says, then more quietly, “that you are …”
He runs a hand over my body. “You are so warm. Even a rattlesnake could find you.”
“Yeah?” I look at him. He is staring at the ceiling as he speaks.
“They have infrared sensors in little pockets behind their eyes.”
I smile. “Imagine that …”
“They’re not in the lenses, I don’t believe, but they can sense the warm blood of poor little mammals—no chance against those vipers …”
Now, he’s off on another thought, as if on his psychoanalyst’s couch, free-associating: “In England, there were motorbikes called the Viper and the Venom. Beautiful machines …”
O turns to me, puts a hand on my belly. “Yes,” he purrs, “a beautiful machine.”
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8-26-11:
We are at the Brazilian restaurant when O suddenly asks: “Have you ever felt that a part of your body was not yours?”
I laugh. “This is why I love you.”
He smiles. “Well?”
“A part of my body not mine: Uh, I’m not sure, I don’t think so.”
“If one did, one would know,” he responds drily.
After eating, we rush back to listen to a live broadcast of Mozart’s Requiem on the radio. Or, what we thought would be. It was Schubert instead. Ah, but Schubert—so romantic and grand: Lying on the bed in the dark, listening to his eighth symphony, in our underwear.
The radio announcer says that Schubert died at thirty-one.
O: “Do you think it makes it easier to die young, knowing that you have already created enough masterpieces for a lifetime?”
“No,” I answer, “no I don’t.”
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9-15-11:
7:15 P.M., O on the phone, without even saying hello: “Billy! Shouldn’t one be on the roof? The sun is setting!”
I: “Yes, one should!”
O: “I will meet you there!”
I: “I will bring a bottle!”
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11-20-11:
We got stoned in what I call O’s “opium den”—it’s just his den, but it’s now been christened with weed. We only take a puff or two, nothing crazy. To get stoned with him is to get a glimpse inside that incredible brain. Because of his blindness in one eye and poor vision in the other, his visual cortex—“almost out of boredom,” as he puts it—becomes hyperstimulated by cannabis, and he greatly enjoys this visual fantasia.
I sat in the chair by the window, watching Eighth Avenue; he lay on the couch.
His eyes were closed, and I asked him what he saw behind his lids: “A Chinese baby.” Pause. “A seal balancing something on his nose … A sort of science fiction flying machine above a medieval forest …” Pause. “And you? What do you see?”
I closed my eyes, waiting.
“Nothing of the kind. I see patterns—black and a kind of dim yellow. A negative image of the Empire State and other buildings I’ve been looking at out the window. And then, a kind of kaleidoscope, but not colored.”
“A negative image?” he inquired. “That’s very interesting.”
Several minutes of silence passed.
Suddenly he said: “Can one ever experience pleasure that is not attached to an object? Pure pleasure?”
I thought about this for a moment, marveling mostly that he had suddenly had this thought and voiced it. But I was not sure I understood. “What do you mean by ‘attached to an object?’”
“Well, one can say, a piece of music gave you pleasure, or seeing a handsome face, or smelling something delicious. But can pleasure be independent of any influences?”
I hesitated but thought of a feeling I get sometimes where I am conscious of nothing but a sense of well-being. “Yes, I think so. I am feeling it now. Do you?”
“Yes, I do. And I think cannabis can bring this out.”
I smiled. I am charmed that he always calls pot “cannabis”—I imagine Darwin would do the same. “Oliver, are you experiencing this now?”
His eyes were still closed: O watching his internal movies. “Yes, oh yes …”
“Oliver, is this not happiness? Is this pure pleasure the same as happiness?”
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
“I think not. Pleasure, even if it’s not dependent on an object, involves the senses—is sensuous. Pleasure can bring happiness, but happiness doesn’t necessarily give one pleasure. So which is of the higher order of the two?”
“Happiness. Happiness is more complex.”
“Agreed.”
Jackson Square Park
FOR THE SKATEBOARDERS
I once said to someone that one doesn’t come to New York for beauty.
I said that’s what Paris, or Iceland, is for.
I said one comes to New York to live in New York, with all its noise and trash and rats in the subway and taxicabs stuck in crosstown traffic jams.
I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.
If there could be a chip implanted to track one’s vocabulary, as miles logged are counted with those fitness bands people go around wearing, I’m sure beautiful would be in my top ten most-used words. I am always saying that that’s beautiful or this is beautiful. The thing is, beauty comes in unbeautiful ways here.
One Sunday morning not long after moving here, I was standing on Sixth Avenue at Eighteenth or so waiting for a light to change when I heard what sounded like the low rumble of snow plows. But this wasn’t winter, I thought to myself, the streets are clean, and then the light turned green and no one walked or drove through the intersection. One couldn’t. Sixth Avenue had been taken over by a brigade of boys on skateboards—dozens and dozens, maybe a hundred or two, I’m not sure, there might have bee
n a girl or two as well; it was all a blur. The sound of their wheels on the street was all but drowned out by their whoops and hollers and the barking of dogs made mad by these four-wheeled paw-level intruders. Some boys had their shirts off and waved them in the air like flags—the flags of an invading army, here to spread a message of freedom, fleetness, speed, wind, wit, youth, grace, the anarchy of pure joy, and fuck you.
I was not the only one on the sides left openmouthed and clapping spontaneously. In a flash—far too soon—the skateboarders were gone, no doubt taking over downtown. The light had turned red by then, and we were still stuck standing there on two feet on the sidewalk.
I wondered what it was all about but never investigated. Someone’s always selling something or someone, and if it was for a promotion of some kind—for a brand of skateboard, let’s say—or being filmed for a music video, I didn’t want to hear about it. The only evidence I have that it really happened and was not something I dreamed up is a cryptic message I sent to my friend Jimmy from my phone as I walked home: “Beauty stops traffic,” I texted.
Jimmy’s lived in New York a lot longer than I have; I love how he responded: “I know,” he texted back.
PART II
ON BEING NOT DEAD
Washington Square Park
NOTES FROM A JOURNAL
12-17-11:
O: “I thought being old would be either awful or trivial, and it’s neither.”
I: “What makes it not awful and not trivial?”
O: “Aside from you, thinking and writing.”
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1-1-12:
Just before midnight, I taught O how to open a bottle of champagne, something he had never done before: sweet to see the joy and surprise and fear on his face as—pop!—the cork exploded. He had insisted on wearing his swimming goggles, though, just in case.
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1-22-12:
O and I watch the view of Eighth Avenue from his apartment; it is cold and gray outside. He has his monocular to his eye, and zeroes in on a smokestack.
“The smoke is doing exactly what it must. It looks like a universe being formed; embodying the air currents.” Pause. “Some has dipped down, curiously, to look beneath the roof.”
He could be narrating a film.
“It’s budding off now, like smoke-lets, like a hydra … Dissipates … trails …” He puts down the monocular. “Trail: Nice word.” O turns to me. “Do you feel on a trail?”
“Now I do,” I reply. “For a long time, I felt off it.”
O nods.
“A trail is for one. But one has to make it,” he says.
Minute after minute passes as O and I watch out the window. I feel serene. I don’t have to ask; I know O does as well, his quietness speaking to it.
“‘Old men ought to be explorers,’” he suddenly says. “I like that line.”
“Auden?”
“Eliot.”
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Undated Note:
Getting dressed for a walk, O habitually announces each article of clothing as he puts it on: “Coat. Hat. Gloves. Muffler …” But then he stops himself. “Do you say ‘muffler’ here?”
“Here? What do you mean, ‘here’?” It’s as if he had just arrived in America, I point out, as if he were just visiting from England for a few days.
“In fact, I’ve been here for fifty-two years, since the summer before you were born!”
Here before I was born: This still surprises me. Sometimes I feel older than O.
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3-17-12:
O: “I don’t know if a passion for symmetry is an intolerance of asymmetry. Do you?”
I: “I think one can be passionate about both. I think one can embody both.”
O: “Good. Very good.”
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4-7-12:
A not untypical dinner:
O snipped the ends off the string beans with his cuticle scissors, “coiffing” them for the steam. I trimmed the broccoli. We shared a gigantic carrot, passing it back and forth between us, while having some of O’s specially mixed tea—a blend of smoky Lapsang Souchong and brisk Darjeeling.
We left the salmon to marinate. I read the paper, O went into the bedroom and did fifty-five of his signature crunches—exhaling on the first, then holding it five seconds on the second. O likes things to be in fives. I grilled the salmon atop the stove, five minutes each side, and made some toast from leftover challah bread.
I opened a bottle of wine.
I was feeling blue, I didn’t know why.
To divert me, cheer me, O told a story of a Tourette’s patient who was a surgeon and would smoke while exercising every morning. This made me laugh; I hadn’t heard it before. After eating, O got up and found the story in An Anthropologist on Mars—his large-print edition. As I lay on the couch, he sat at the table and read the entire story, from start to finish, in the most animated voice, lavishly drawing out the more unusual words. I peeked over the couch a few times to watch him reading, the book just a couple inches from his face. It’s amazing he can read at all—he’s so nearly completely blind. I clapped when he came to the end.
We returned to the kitchen. His wine was “too sour,” so he added a packet of artificial sweetener to it—“Much better”—and drank it down. We talked about this and that, and then I said I needed to go to bed. He absentmindedly reached for the bottle of port, uncorked it, and took a swig. “Nothing like port,” he murmured.
Next morning, O reported that he had had a dream in which he was at a “charming little café in the shadows of two giant oversized mushrooms.” On the menu? “Two kinds of fern salad and a carrot salad with 7,217 different carrots.” He’d drawn the number (and a picture of the mushrooms) on the kitchen whiteboard when he woke in the middle of the night.
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4-8-12:
O: “Are you conscious of your thoughts before language embodies them?”
THE THANK-YOU MAN
One evening, I headed out to see Hailey’s band at a bar in Brooklyn, not the kind of thing I’d normally do with work the next day, but how often does one have a friend who has a band playing at a bar on a summer Thursday? Just outside my front door, I crossed paths with a tall black man wearing a black suit and tie and riding a silver bicycle—a picture of elegance, an angel on Eighth Avenue—and sensed I’d made the right decision.
The subway car was as packed as at rush hour. Face-to-face with a kid with his nose in a Kindle, it struck me that sometimes what one gets—and gets to keep—on public transportation is not an experience but an unforgettable expression. When the subway came to a stop, snapping the kid out of whatever world he was in, he looked at once startled, confused (what stop is this?), anxious, irritated, and finally, relieved. His face went blank, he returned to his reading, and I was left to marvel: This kid had no idea he was born a century too late to be a silent-film star.
I got out at Bedford and began following the directions I’d jotted down earlier. A main street had been blocked off for some reason, so now the directions no longer made sense, and I didn’t have a map app or GPS on my phone. I took my bearings. Something in the air smelled like summer from my childhood—mown grass, gasoline, the dirt of a baseball field. I heard the crack of a bat hitting a ball, and I followed the sound.
I took a left, then a right. At the end of the street, I spotted a guy sitting on a couch positioned on the dock of a warehouse. I approached. His feet were up; two beer bottles were at his side. This looked like the reward at the end of a long day.
“Nice night,” I commented.
“Yeah, just taking it all in.”
I looked over his shoulder at the jumble of boxes and machines, trying to make out what this place was. He told me it was a bunch of things—a foundry, a forklift repair shop, artist studios, storage. I asked if I could take a look. He didn’t answer right away; he was considering the request.
I thought he’d say no. Finally: “Sure, just … be careful.”
Now I was really curious. I hopped up. The farther in I went, the more interesting it got—a junkyard of seemingly useless stuff, it spoke of broken machines and dreams and failed inventions and road trips that ended with shot carburetors. The scent in the air was of dirt and engine oil and sweat.
I didn’t linger, not wanting to outstay my welcome. “Really cool,” I said as I hopped back down.
“Thank you,” he replied. He took a swig.
I looked at him. He seemed lost in thought. I wasn’t sure if I should say what I wanted to say next, but, what the hell: “And that’s a good smell.”
“Thank you,” he said.
I loved that he took this for what it was—a compliment on his patch of the world, odors and all. I asked him directions to the club, and he obliged.
I told him to have a good night and went on my way.
At the door of the club, the security guard asked me for my ID. “You think you look too old just to get in?” he teased.
I dug it out of my wallet and he took a look. “Fifty?”
“Fifty-one.”
“Don’t look it.”
“Don’t feel it,” I replied. “What about you?”
“Guess,” he said.
I eyed him. “Thirty-eight.”
“Nope. I’m older than I look.”
By then, a very young-looking girl was at the door, fishing in her purse for her ID, at the guard’s request. She looked underage, frankly. “Can you guess his age?” I said to her.
She looked confused. Wasn’t this about her age?
She got frazzled. She couldn’t decide. She was taking this very seriously. She didn’t want to offend him, but she also really had no idea. She said she could never judge age, she never thought about it.