by Bill Hayes
“Just guess,” the guard prodded, “just try. How old am I?”
She studied him carefully. “You’re … comfortable,” she finally said.
This thought floated in the air.
“That is such a good answer,” I said.
“Yeah,” the guard agreed, “very good.”
“That’s how he looks. I don’t know his age, but he looks comfortable.”
The guard checked her ID; it was legit. We all introduced ourselves: Raymond, Billy, and Crystal. Crystal told me to come by the bar, where she’d be working, and she would give me a free Heineken.
“Cool.”
_____________________
Hailey—O’s assistant by day, musician by night—and her band were fantastic. They played as if they were in a stadium, not a two-bedroom-sized bar. I stayed too late and had one more beer than I should have. When I left, I passed by the warehouse. The Thank-You Man was still there, accompanied now by two other people and several more bottles of beer.
“You’re still here,” I said, not knowing what else to say. All three looked at me calmly, openly, as if thinking: Of course we’re here, where else would one want to be?
“Yeah,” he answered, “just making sure everything is operating correctly.”
“I feel safer already.”
“Thank you,” he replied.
I said good night, and the three said good night in return.
As I walked back toward the subway, I looked at the sky and there were great white cumulus clouds visible. Bright clouds at night, backlit by the moon, have always thrilled me. They seem so surreal, and yet make you feel very much like you are part of a planet, part of a universe, not just in a random city. Then I did something I do sometimes when maybe I feel a little lost or need to remind myself of exactly where I am in my life: I sort of clear away the junk and do a quick metaphysical inventory:
“Consciousness that this is a planet,” I whispered to myself, “and of the sky and the clouds.
“Consciousness of my mother, who loved clouds and who died a year ago tomorrow.
“Consciousness that I am lucky to be here.
“Consciousness that I got myself here.
“Consciousness that I am thankful.”
Lovers on the Grass
NOTES FROM A JOURNAL
Undated Note—2012:
O: “I sometimes think things are not enough until they are too much. There is no in between for me.”
_____________________
6-17-12:
I met a go-go boy tonight. He was on a break, downing a Red Bull at the bar where he works. His name was Vinnie, and he was twenty-five.
“I put myself through school doing this, dancing,” he told me. “F.I.T.—I just graduated.”
I congratulated him and shook his hand, still wet with sweat. “And what amazing things can the world expect from you next?”
He smiled. “Photography—fashion photography—the sickest.”
He took out his iPhone and showed me pictures from a recent shoot. I was surprised by how good they were—highly stylized; Art Deco meets the 1980s, somehow suggesting a Madonna influence, I commented.
“Exactly. Madonna saved me. My first album was Ray of Light, and I loved the photography. I knew then, that’s what I wanted to do.”
The go-go boy asked me about myself. I told him what I do, about the piece I have in the Times this weekend, my books.
He said he wanted to read the piece in the Times. “It sounds romantic.”
“It is romantic,” I told him, “deeply so. You’re a romantic, too?”
His helpless expression answered.
Vinnie told me he’d grown up “on the Island”—Long Island, a skinny kid with thick glasses—“I’m practically legally blind, honestly; I can’t see anything when I’m dancing”—and dreamed about one day living in New York. Madonna was part of his dream.
“And you made it.”
“I did.”
“Here you are.”
“Here I am.”
He left to do a set on the go-go box. Later, when he took another break, Vinnie came and found me, and we picked up where we’d left off. First, though, he felt obliged to tell me, “I have a boyfriend.”
“As do I, and he knows I’m here. It’s all good.”
“Actually,” he corrected himself, “two. I have two boyfriends, a couple, and I am their boy. See?” He showed me the dog tag around his neck, engraved with both their names.
I could not imagine such an arrangement working well, but who knows? “That’s fantastic,” I said, “tell me about it.”
And so he did. The go-go boy with the glorious body told me all about his boyfriends and his belief in polyamorous relationships, but there was something troubling him. “We had a fight yesterday—”
“—That happens, bound to happen.”
“No, this was a big fight. And, maybe because tomorrow is Father’s Day, it’s really worrying me. I mean, these two—they’re sort of like my dads; my parents did nothing for me—and they help … give me direction.”
I nodded, thinking about how Steve and I used to have blowouts once or twice a year, usually over something minor—“cleaning out the pipes,” I used to call it—and even O and I squabble occasionally. I pulled Vinnie in close and hugged him: “It’s going to be okay,” I said into his ear, just making myself heard above the disco music, “I promise.” I held him for what seemed like a long time. I had no awareness of people watching us, if they were. Finally, I let him go. I stuffed a twenty-dollar bill into his jockstrap.
“Go,” I said to the go-go boy, “dance.” And I headed home.
Oliver’s Desk
4-22-12:
O, tidying his desk:
“I specialize in a very large number of a very few things—magnifying glasses, spectacle cases, shoehorns, rubber bands …”
_____________________
Undated Note—April 2012:
I found O standing at the piano, where he was taping together pieces of sheet music, enlarged on the copy machine so he can read them. I watched him silently as he narrated while he worked. It was all very, very, very complicated of course. He had fourteen sheets and was “very puzzled” about what had happened to sheet #12 or why sheet #8 was slightly smaller than sheet #9: “Oh, oh, oh,” he said very seriously, “I think we have a problem …” He was thinking it all the way through, and envisioning the worst.
I watched as he tried to snip an uneven edge off one sheet; because of his blindness, he was missing it entirely, scissoring the air very, very gently, and there was something so touching about this—the care with which he was doing it; I know he felt that he must be very delicate with the paper, with the music, must not hurt it. After a bit, I gently moved his hand, so that he cut the paper as he wished. He said thank you.
From there, he, with my help—“Would you mind, please, putting your finger there? No, not there! There.”—began Scotch-taping them together on his long table. One after the other, after the other, each “hinged” with a piece of tape, then taped again from behind. Occasionally, he would get distracted and start talking about something entirely different. He noticed that the blinds were uneven and asked if I would even them out (like cheese or pieces of scrap paper, everything had to be symmetrical in his world).
I reached to do so, but he stopped me with a cry, “Take heed of the ferns!”
“‘Take heed’? Who talks like that?” I teased. “Queen Victoria?”
He laughed hard, as he rushed to protect his “little darlings” from me. They were just barely new, on the sill to get some sun. (Later he would explain exactly how they reproduce—the eggs and the sperm, as if I were in a sex-ed class from the nineteenth century.)
Finally, we were done with the sheet music. He asked me to fold it up—“like an accordion”—and then he began playing. It was one of Schubert’s songs. And he played it all the way through, from left to right—I unfolding it at his comically barked c
ommands: “Now!” “Now!”—and he played it well, and it was lovely.
_____________________
5-17-12:
A balmy night; taking a walk through the playground on Horatio St.; seeing girls playing four-square, and boys shooting hoops, one of whom is particularly striking—tall and lithe and tanned, shirtless. He runs, dribbling, and dunks a basket, then immediately steps onto a skateboard and from there glides across the entire playground in a gentle arc, perfectly balanced, all the while reading texts on his phone.
_____________________
6-4-12:
On the street: A woman dressed—and completely covered—in black. She wears a pair of sunglasses. For some reason, I turn to see her from behind. She has a second pair of sunglasses on the back of her head.
_____________________
From my window: the triangle park, and the oblong traffic divider with two trees. I see a couple standing at the tip of the divider. Not young—maybe forties? She wears a long summer dress and is blonde. He is bald and has one hand on her ass. He pulls her in close and kisses her. They came out there to catch a cab but end up making out in the middle of traffic instead. So sexy. Finally, he flags down a cab. They are going back to his place, I imagine, to fuck.
This is New York in the summer.
_____________________
Undated Notes—June 2012:
Garbage overflows from trash cans. The streets are filled with garbage and dirty water. The air stinks. But there is a warm pinkish-gold glow on the streets from the setting sun. Gorgeousness. We are closer to the sun in New York, I think.
_____________________
A Sunday: seeing a guy scraping off the mess of ugly flyers taped to a streetlight pole—not a maintenance worker, just a guy from the neighborhood. I watched for a while then asked him about it. He said he comes out every other week or so. “Remember, you have the legal right to rip them down,” he explains. “Go to NYC.Gov/sanitation.” He spray paints the pole to its original gray color. “Today I have gray and green. Sometimes I get red, too—for the fire alarm poles.”
_____________________
7-29-12:
In bed, O reads to me from Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, one of his favorite books, which I’d found in his library: “This volume contains, in the form of a Journal, a history of our voyage, and a sketch of those observations in Natural History and Geology, which I think will possess some interest for the general reader …”
At Home
THE SAME TAXI TWICE
It’s not like on TV—taking a taxi in New York City. It’s almost never as interesting or colorful as they make it look, except for when it is—and when it is, stuff happens that you could never make up. I once had a cabbie from Sri Lanka who looked so young one might have legitimately wondered if he was old enough to drive. Turned out, he was twenty-five. He told me he’d been in New York for two years and was saving up money to bring his wife and parents to New York. He hadn’t gotten married yet, though. He hadn’t even met his future wife; his parents back home would arrange a marriage at a given time. We discussed some details about how the courtship would go, and then he told me, “She has to be a virgin.”
I hadn’t asked about this, but I agreed. “Definitely, yes, she should definitely be a virgin.” I was coming from drinks with friends, and I was kind of buzzed.
We came to a red light. “And I have to be, too,” he added.
“A virgin?”
“Yes,” he said solemnly.
Hold on, I thought, is that really a good idea? Shouldn’t someone know what they’re doing in this situation?
“So, let me get this straight: you’ve never had sex at all?”
“Never.”
“Not even almost? Never fooled around—maybe here in New York …?”
He shook his head.
I thought about this through a couple streetlights. I could never even guess how many times I’ve had sex in my lifetime, and with how many different people. I can hardly remember what I like about it most. But this much I could tell him: “You are going to love it. You’re going to really like it a lot. It’s amazing.”
The cabbie from Sri Lanka shot me a look. “Really?”
“Really. You have nothing to worry about.”
It is the enforced intimacy of being in a cab, an enclosed space, for a finite period of time, which makes such conversations possible. I’ve sometimes wondered if the screen between driver and passenger, not unlike that in a confessional booth, adds to this impression. You might say things you would never say otherwise, or do things you’d never do, knowing you’ll never see them again.
But this is not always so.
One night a cabbie picked me up on Wall Street, and we had a nice chat on the FDR. As we approached Eighteenth and First, where I lived at the time, he spoke up: “Drop you off on the right, middle of the block?”
“Yeah, how did you know that?”
“I remember you; I’ve given you a ride before—last year.” He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Sunny,” he said.
Sunny. Yes: The name that went with the face, the demeanor.
What are the odds of having the same taxi driver twice?
He told me: There are 13,800 cabs in New York City, he had been driving for eighteen years, dozens of fares a day, and this had never happened to him before.
“How about that …”
We said good night and goodbye without much fuss.
“See you again, Sunny,” I said.
_____________________
I love those late-night rides home. I remember once catching a cab way uptown somewhere after I’d spent the better part of the night with a man who had made me dinner—pot roast and apple pie. I still smelled like him.
It was very cold outside, and with a punishing wind; some were saying it was the coldest day in the history of New York City (an endearing hyperbole). I asked the cab driver if the cold was good for business.
“Yes,” he murmured. He had a bit of an accent.
We were flying down Second Avenue, hitting all the lights. I’d been struggling to get my seat belt on—goddamn seat belts in taxis, they only work about half the time—but finally gave up; I trusted him to get me home safely.
“It must be fun,” I said dreamily, “driving like this when the streets are empty …” I was thinking if it were me behind the wheel, I guess.
It took a moment before his reply came: “No, not fun. Stressful. It’s always stressful.”
I was surprised at being mildly rebuffed. “Of course—must be, I can’t imagine,” I said, trying to make up for my presumptuousness.
“Traffic’s good here,” he added, “but in Midtown? Crazy right now—a game at the Garden.”
A picture came to mind of men in suits and ties, fat cats and their ladies in diamonds, with front row seats on the floor at the Garden, a place improbably filled with flowers of every kind. “You must get totally different customers depending on where you pick them up,” I said, as if it were something fabulous and interesting, something I’d love to see right now—so much so that I thought about asking him to turn around and head toward Midtown.
The cab driver took this in. “No,” he said, “not really—different people everywhere.”
Two strikes. Oh well. But I liked that he was actually listening to my questions and thinking about them, not just agreeing with me.
I watched Manhattan rolling by—the cold city and the streetlights. I imagined I was on a ship—a cutter ship in the Arctic.
“Cross Thirteenth—is that what you want?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
We stopped at a light, a long line of cars. Even at that hour, crosstown traffic was slow.
“You’re like a psychiatrist in this job,” he offered, suddenly, unprompted, “people tell you all their problems, all kinds of things, stories.” With his face lit by the red brake lights of the car in front, he looked like he was running through a few of them in his head, t
he wilder ones, I supposed.
“Usually, not New Yorkers”—here he made that gesture of sealing your lips—“they don’t say much. But tourists? Tourists talk.”
“So, do you like it when people talk, or no?”
“Oh yes, I do, I like to meet people.”
“You don’t mind that I’m asking you questions?”
“Not at all, boss.”
Boss. That is one thing: I do not feel like a boss. And even if I did—who likes their boss? It doesn’t seem like a compliment. But I get that all the time in cabs.
“I’ve only lived here a few years,” I told the cabbie, “moved here four years ago.”
He looked at me in the rearview. “An infant, like a child, four years old—in city years,” he said with a grin. “I’ve got a daughter your age.”
I laughed. “How about you—how long have you lived here?”
“Twelve.”
“Almost a teenager then!” He turned and gave me a smile. “From where? Where are you from originally?”
“Africa,” he said with a punch of emphasis. “Morocco—Casablanca. Like the film, you know—Humphrey Bogart?”
I watched his face: he was thinking about Casablanca—or maybe Ingrid Bergman.
“So why here? Why New York?”
“Make money, for my family. My wife and kids are back there.”
This was almost impossible for me to imagine—the people you love most living so far away. No one making him dinner. No one waiting up for him at home.
“I think it’s good,” he added, “for them—it’s too hard here. My kids, if they want to come later, when they’re older, that’s okay. For me? I don’t know—I came for the American Dream or whatever.”
He really did say that. People do say things like that—in cabs, at night, at least.
He laughed bitterly.
I felt many things—I felt badly for him; I felt guilty about my prosperity, my good fortune; I felt bad for New York, bad about America. But I also felt lucky that he and I had met.
We approached my street. “You can cross here, I’m up at the corner. Right side.”