by Bill Hayes
Outside: a racket of horns blasting on Eighth Avenue; there must be a traffic jam. I can see the river of red lights. Oliver doesn’t notice anything. He has come to the end of what he has written. He is not sure where to go next. A phrase suddenly comes to him: “… a handsome apprehension of heaven …”
I say it sounds like Shakespeare.
“Close—sort of.” It’s Sir Thomas Browne, he tells me. “Help me find it, please,” he says, and I follow him into the small room in the back, where he has novels, plays, and poetry shelved—literature, not neurology or science books. He is at the B’s, studying titles, and immediately becomes agitated. “Now, where is it? Religio Medici, I know I have it.” He gets impatient when he’s excited; I half expect him to stomp his feet.
I am hugging him from behind and scanning the shelves: Borges, Burgess…
“I used to have all of Thomas Browne. All my books …” His voice trails off wistfully. “Oh, what has happened …?”
“Are you sure it’s in here?” I go into the living room and find the B’s. There: four or five volumes of Sir Thomas Browne.
“Excellent!” O exclaims. “Aren’t you clever! What would I do without you?”
“You’d go days without your keys or glasses—or your Thomas Browne.”
He settles back down at his desk. “Let’s have some wine,” he says.
I return with two glasses. He is paging through the fragile book, reading aloud his own annotations and underlined passages from fifty or sixty years ago. At last, he finds what he was looking for—“Not in Religio Medici, but in Christian Morals. I had forgotten. And on the very last page …”
He reads it to himself first, savoring the words, and then aloud to me: “‘Reckon not upon long life: think every day the last, and live always beyond thy account. He that so often surviveth his Expectation lives many Lives, and will scarce complain of the shortness of his days. Time past is gone like a Shadow; make time to come present—’”
“—So gorgeous,” I murmur.
O skips ahead a bit: “‘And if, as we have elsewhere declared, any have been so happy as personally to understand Christian Annihilation, Extasy, Exolution, Transformation, the Kiss of the Spouse, and Ingression into the Divine Shadow, according to Mystical Theology, they have already had—’”
He looks up, beaming.
“—Ah, and here we have it: ‘an handsome Anticipation of Heaven.’”
_____________________
10-30-12:
The day after Hurricane Sandy, and the blackout that hit last night hasn’t lifted. How eerie it is, seeing Eighth Avenue without its daubs of red, green, and yellow lights; the street empty but for one or two people; fire trucks and ambulances and police cars converging at Fourteenth. The rumbling of the wind. Sirens.
O is lying on the couch, I am in the easy chair. We crack the windows; strong puffs of air cool our feet. We have opened the bottle of Veuve Clicquot left over from his birthday; we figure it will get warm otherwise. We listen to the transistor radio; people calling in with reports and sightings, fear in their voices. O recalls the blackouts during the war, during his childhood, and the first major blackout in New York—November of 1965—when he had to walk from Bronx State back to Christopher Street; it took him six or seven hours.
Here we are, how many years later? Oliver is seventy-nine, I am fifty-one. We have no power, no running water, no phone service, no gas, no heat.
We drink champagne. We say a toast. We count our blessings.
Freddy and Hollywood
ON BEING NOT DEAD
One night I called Oliver and told him to meet me on the roof of our apartment building. I had pulled together a simple dinner—roast chicken, good bread, olives, cherries, wine. We ate at a picnic table. I’d forgotten wineglasses, so we traded swigs out of the bottle. It was summer. The sun was setting on the Hudson. Neighbors were enjoying themselves at nearby tables. The breeze was nice. The surrounding cityscape looked like a stage set for a musical.
What is the opposite of a perfect storm? That is what this was, one of those rare moments when the world seems to shed all shyness and display every possible permutation of beauty. Oliver said it well as we took up our plates and began heading back downstairs: “I’m glad I’m not dead.” This came out rather loudly, as he is a bit deaf. Even so, he looked surprised by his own utterance, as if it were something he was feeling but didn’t really mean to say aloud—a thought turned into an exclamation.
“I’m glad you’re not dead, too,” said a neighbor gaily, taking up the refrain. “I’m glad we’re all not dead,” said another. There followed a spontaneous raising of glasses on the rooftop, a toast to the setting sun, a toast to us.
I suppose it’s a cliché to say you’re glad to be alive, that life is short, but to say you’re glad to be not dead requires a specific intimacy with loss that comes only with age or deep experience. One has to know not simply what dying is like, but to know death itself, in all its absoluteness.
After all, there are many ways to die—peacefully, violently, suddenly, slowly, happily, unhappily, too soon. But to be dead—one either is or isn’t.
The same cannot be said of aliveness, of which there are countless degrees. One can be alive but half-asleep or half-noticing as the years fly, no matter how fully oxygenated the blood and brain or how steadily the heart beats. Fortunately, this is a reversible condition. One can learn to be alert to the extraordinary and press pause—to memorize moments of the everyday.
I think now about that summer night on the roof, and how many people I have known or loved that I’ve lost since then: my mother, three friends, two neighbors, and my agent, Wendy, who was like a second mother to me. Her many friends and relatives came together for a memorial one afternoon last week. It was beautiful, joy-filled. Irishman that I am, I wept all the way through. Oh, well. I’ve come to believe that a good cry is like a car wash for the soul.
Afterward, I started walking, walked past a subway entrance on Lexington and kept going. It was dark by now, and cold. But the autumn night receded and Lex magically turned into Fifth as I called to mind that warm afternoon spent with Wendy in June. We’d had lunch and decided to walk back to her office rather than take a cab. She was about a head taller than me, so whenever I glanced at her it was against a backdrop of blue sky and high-rises and American flags fluttering on Fifth Avenue. I felt like I was on a dolly-cam, seeing her through the lens of a movie camera. She wore a big smile and a sleeveless dress. We were talking about how much we both loved New York—she as a native, I as a newcomer—and all the while, I was aware that I was glad to be here right now and wanted to remember as much of this as I could. And I do. The short clip of our walk plays on a continuous loop.
When I got home, Oliver called. “Come downstairs,” he said, “everything’s marinating.” We set the table and opened a bottle. He’d grilled salmon and steamed peas. For dessert, we split an apple; a perfect meal. We turned on the radio. It was “Beethoven Awareness Month” on our classical radio station, and it began playing Op. 133, the “Great Fugue” with which he had originally ended one of his late quartets. I am not well versed in classical music; had I not heard the announcer, I would have guessed it was something contemporary—even composed this very day. Oliver told me that in Beethoven’s time the piece was considered almost unintelligible by listeners and so demanding technically as to be nearly unplayable. Conversation came to a stop and we just listened, the music at once chaotic and violent, mysterious and gorgeous.
Behind Oliver, through a large picture window facing north, Eighth Avenue unfurled as far as the eye could see. I have this thing where sometimes I try to catch the moment when all the traffic lights on Eighth align and turn red, their number multiplied countless times by the brake lights from stopped cars and taxicabs. It doesn’t happen often at all, traffic lights seeming to have their own sense of time, and Oliver never quite catches it. So I watch for the two of us. Finally: “There, there it is, see?”
He turns to find a fiery red Milky Way on the streets of Manhattan.
And in a blink, the lights start turning green.
ON A TYPEWRITER
I don’t know what to say
Says O
So he lets his fingers say
What they must be thinking:
This is the first time I gave typed on ages !!!
The typos being not typos
But notes from a dying language
Qwertyuiop
l t ud rrr jpe miy gos mp
;ry ud der how it goes mpw
The starts and stops and flights of thought
Mimicking his
_____________________
M,u good fremd BILLY has put in a new ribbon
He types
2345670asdfghjkl; ]xcvnm,.rqwert67890-=
Should I then return to using te y typewriter ?
I think this is, in a q er tai n way, beautiful
I THINK YJIS IS, ON A V CERTAIN WAY, BEAUTIFUL
THIS IS, IN A CERTAIN WAY, BEAUTIFUL
THIS IS BEAUTIFUL
THIS
IS
—3-1-13
AT THE SKATEBOARD PARK
I walked up to the skateboard park off the West Side Highway at Twenty-Second Street. I didn’t just end up there while walking, as I sometimes do; I went there directly, expressly. I am drawn by the sound, by the sight—the skateboarders diving and floating and flying; the way they avidly watch one another from the rim; their rituals, their unspoken rules—and by the feeling it gives me.
“Cool, isn’t it!” said a scrappy-looking boy who had been watching me watch all of them. Had he read my mind, or was it an expression on my face?
I nodded. “So cool. Mesmerizing.”
We spoke through the high metal fence that surrounds the park. I was standing on the western side, one foot on one of the round pedestals put there for viewers, the other atop the concrete bearing wall. I held onto the fence with both hands. The day was gorgeous, high forties, maybe even fifty degrees, sun. “Wish it would stay like this all winter,” I overheard one of the skaters say. The park would be closed for the winter in a few days.
“Some of these guys—they’re good, man,” the boy said, glancing over his shoulder. “You know, you been watching.”
This kid was small, five foot six or so, and skinny. He’d only skated once or twice so far, and he was not nearly as good as any of them. But in a way, I was glad to see this; it would be easy to take for granted how good most of these boys were. But the canyon on the west side was very challenging, with its sheer, twenty-five-foot drop—dangerous. None of them wore helmets or padding.
It seemed like an especially good group today—somehow of a higher caliber; there was a certain intensity in the air. Each had a different style, depending as much on body type as on level of fearlessness. One kid used his arms to help accelerate, sort of like how you use your feet to pump on a swing. Another, part Asian, had an especially elegant way of moving, sinuous. A shorter stocky black guy was rock-solid. And then there was a kid who looked like an Arab prince. He was extraordinary, the way he would ride the rim, then swoop down into the canyon and then fly up, touch the front of his skateboard, land back on it, dive down again, fly back up, tap the rim—extraordinary. No panther could be more accurate or delicate, elegant, than these creatures—the gentle stepping off, stepping back on. A few times, there was spontaneous applause. I’d never heard that before. These boys were not just skating for the fun of it, the thrill; they were competing for “who’s best.”
“Who is best?” I asked the boy.
“That one there?” he nodded toward the taller black kid in the checked flannel shirt. “He’s confident. Smooth.”
“Yep,” I confirmed.
“And that little kid?”
I knew who he was talking about, I’d seen him earlier—practically a tyke, with long strawberry-blond hair.
“He’s pretty damn good, he’s got air.”
I was picturing the kid flying off the back canyon wall, disappearing behind a cloud.
“But that guy back there—” he nodded at the slightly older white guy, a dude in his early thirties, with a goatee and a loud mouth—he’d been trash-talking some of the other guys before and after he rode and he was himself really good—amazing loops and air, no crashes; fast. “That guy? He is tough.” He did seem really tough—like he had taken a lot of falls in his life and never stopped riding. I was behind a fence, but even there, I felt a little afraid of him. (Earlier, he’d come by and shown another guy where the fence was broken at the top and could be pulled out. “This is where we come in at night,” he’d said.)
Now this kid, talking to me through the fence, started talking trash, too, suddenly adopting street language, foreign to me, and talking about how he was going to do pops and tricks, grabbing at his crotch as he spoke. I wished I had a translator. But even if I had, it wasn’t what he was saying but how, almost like an MC, rapping; it was plainly for show. I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t flirting with me. I had to chuckle.
I asked him how long he’d been skateboarding.
“Only a year, year and a half. I used to come here at eight in the morning, and just sit right there”—he pointed to the rim on the other side of the canyon. “It was empty, no one here. Then they started coming. And I started to hang out, and learn some tricks.” He paused. “I don’t got a board—”
“So how do you skate?”
“Friend let me use one—sometime.”
He must not have any money, I realized.
“But I just got this deck,” he said, “someone’s old board.” I hadn’t noticed that he had been crouching on it this whole time—a skateboard without any wheels; a tiny stage set. He picked it up, turned it over in his hands. It was messed up. Both ends were splintered, like it had seen a hell of a lot of crashes. “Gonna get myself some trucks. Have myself a car.”
Trucks, I had picked up earlier, are wheels; and the skateboards themselves? Cars: boys’ cars. Now I got it. I asked him what made a good skateboard anyway.
He picked up the board and proceeded to explain its anatomy. “See this here?” He was pointing to a very shallow dip, an inverse bump, about four inches from one end. “That’s where you pop.” His voice had taken on a serious, authoritarian tone. “You know?”
He must have seen that I didn’t know what he was talking about. He got onto the board and shifted his weight and, in an instant, used his feet to pop the deck off the ground. He did it three or four times, studying my face all the while until I clearly got what he was talking about.
He crouched back down, proceeding with his lesson. “That little curve there, that shows you where the tail of your board is.”
“The tail?”
“The end—that’s the end of your board. So this is the front.” He showed me the totally banged up and splintered anterior.
“The head?” I asked.
He thought about this. “Okay, the head.”
I had interrupted his flow. “Now, boards are all different layers sandwiched together,” he continued. “See this, when you look down the length of it?” He presented a cross-section view. “This one is—one, two, three, four … five … six, six layers. See?”
I saw.
“But some of ’em, really good boards, are nine layers. Those are heavy fucking boards, and if you’ve got a guy who’s got some good solid weight, you can really fucking fly. But you see,” he was bringing the narrative back to himself now, “I’m kinda small, I’ve got really small feet.” He put the deck back down on the ground and stood on it. I was now at eye level with his feet and the board. He did have small feet, maybe size six. He couldn’t have weighed more than 125 pounds. “So, for me, this is just about perfect, a six-ply board, about eight and five-eighths wide. And you see this tread here?” He was talking about what looked like sandpaper covering the deck. “This is what keeps you sticking to the board.” He demonstrated this quality
, standing on the deck without wheels on the rim of the canyon where skateboarders better than he could even dream of being were diving and flying. In that moment, he looked smooth, confident.
“All you need is some truck—”
“And I’ll have a car,” he replied. It was like we were harmonizing.
He picked up his banged up deck and looked me in the eye and smiled. “So: Skateboarding 101, sir. That’s right.”
“Thank you very much.”
“S’alright.”
He wandered away. I kept watching. I remembered how once I’d brought Oliver here on a hot August afternoon. It was a long walk for him, but he had been fascinated. “It’s a living geometry, isn’t it?” Oliver whispered, dazzled by the sights. He mused about how the ancients would have admired them—these boys who “describe curves in hyperbolic space” with their lithe bodies. “They may not have read Euclid, but they know it all,” Oliver said.
There seemed to be more crashes. They were getting tired. But they were trying to beat the sun, get as many skates in as they could, outrace their own shadows. Soon, they’d have to park their boards for the winter, snow on the streets of New York.
On the periphery, a few girls watched. I understood why. This was a mating ritual, the boys peacocking for the girls who would take them to their beds, if they desired them.
Some boys were packing up for the day. The crashes were taking their toll. More than one was nursing a sore wrist. A kid with shaggy long hair limped up and fell into a heap on the other side of the fence near where I was standing. He hadn’t noticed me. He had a bleeding cut on his arm. He took a long draw from a bottle of Coke. He took out his iPhone and checked messages. He hiked up one of his pant legs and rubbed his ankle. He lit a cigarette.
Finally, I decided to go home. By coincidence (or was it?), the scrappy kid came out of an exit and began walking with me, his deck wedged under an arm. We talked about how cool it was—the park. “I got a broke toe and a broke arm, but when I’m in there, I forget,” he said.