by Bill Hayes
“Why don’t you use your teeth?” I said to her.
She laughed and smiled that famous gap-toothed smile. “I could. I could have once, but …” she wandered off. The bottle got opened somehow. Eventually she circled back and poured water for everyone. She overheard Oliver talking to Kevin about his new book, Hallucinations, which was coming out in a couple weeks. Lauren leaned across the table and listened intently.
“Hey doc, you ever done Belladonna?” she asked. “Now there’s a drug!”
“Well, as a matter of fact, yes, I have,” and he proceeded to tell her about his hallucinations on Belladonna. They traded stories. Eventually she began to figure out that this wasn’t his first book.
“Are you—are you Oliver Sacks? The Oliver Sacks?”
Oliver looked both pleased and stricken.
“Well, it is very good to meet you sir.” She sounded like a Southern barmaid in a 1950s Western. But it wasn’t an act. “I’ve been reading you since way back. Oliver Sacks—imagine that!”
Oliver, I should note, had absolutely no idea who she was, nor would he understand if I had pulled him aside and told him. Fashion? Vogue magazine? No idea…
The two of them hit it off. She was fast-talking, bawdy, opinionated, a broad—the opposite of Oliver except for having in common that mysterious quality: charm.
Somewhere along the way, she explained the black eye: A few days earlier, she had walked out of a business meeting at which she’d learned that she had been “robbed” of a third of everything she’d ever earned, and in a daze walked smack into a scaffolding pipe at eye level on the sidewalk. She didn’t seem too bothered by it: Shit happens.
I looked up and saw that the room was empty by now but for Kevin and us.
“Well, gentlemen, I’m going downtown. Share a cab?”
“Uh, we have a car,” I said.
“Even better. Much more civilized. I’m downtown.”
How could one refuse? “Let’s go, shall we?” I said.
Lauren Hutton offered Oliver an arm and we walked slowly to the parking garage. I pushed things out of the way in the backseat; she tossed in her handbag, and dove in. She immediately popped her head between our seats—the three of us were practically ear-to-ear. Her incredible face blocked my rearview mirror. When O took out his wallet to give me a credit card for the parking, she spotted the copy of the periodic table he carries in lieu of a driver’s license. This prompted a series of questions about the periodic table, the elements, the composition of the very air we were breathing. A dozen questions led to a dozen more, like a student soaking up knowledge. We talked about travels—Iceland, Africa—and Plato, Socrates, the pygmies, William Burroughs, poets … She was clearly intensely curious, life-loving, adventurous. In passing, she said something about having been a model—“the only reason I did it was so I could make enough dough to travel”—but otherwise didn’t say anything about that part of her life.
I am terrible with directions in New York, and she was not shy about telling me where and how to drive—“left here, right there …” Traffic was thick, so it took quite a while to get downtown. Eventually, we reached her address, or close enough.
“Well, gentlemen, it has been a true pleasure. I cannot thank you enough. This is where I exit. Goodbye—for now.” And she was gone, as suddenly as she’d arrived.
Oliver took a breath as we headed west and home. “I don’t know who that was, but she seems like a very remarkable person.”
NOTES FROM A JOURNAL
3-21-13:
Finding O writing letters and listening to the Bach festival on WQXR—“I can’t tear myself away,” he says. He burrows his head into my abdomen and talks as I scratch his neck. He tells me how he’d slept, of his dreams (all “dull”), and of an article in Science about genetic variation that led to the Ruffled Grouse’s ruffled head.
“I wish I could take a crash course in genetics,” O says.
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Undated Note—March 2013:
A heavyset young black woman is squeezed into a spot at the end of a bench near the door on a Brooklyn-bound 2 train. She is probably going home from work. She has her iPod on and her eyes closed—she’s clearly dozed off to sleep; you can see it in her slack face. She hugs a big chunky, bejeweled leather purse to her chest.
Sitting next to her is a small, rail-thin, young white woman—Eastern European?—who has a little boy in a stroller at her feet. The mother’s eyes are closed. The little boy is about two. He’s fidgety, as if he’s just awakened from a nap and eaten some sugar. He eyes the woman’s purse. He starts sort of swatting the purse, swatting at whatever is dazzling him—the colors, the rhinestones. Maybe he’s deliberately trying to get her attention—anyone’s attention. The woman feels something at her hands, brushes it off, her eyes still closed, as if it’s a fly.
The little boy loves this. He starts slapping back at her hands. The young black woman cracks open one eye to see what the heck is going on. All she sees, I imagine, is this little hand—bothering her. She pushes it away. He pushes back. He’s laughing now. She opens both eyes narrowly, and at first looks pissed but then can’t help smiling. She’s sort of giggling, like, “You little rascal, I’m gonna get you!” but also still half-asleep. She flicks his little hand away. He’s giggling now, too, and wants to play more. But finally, she tires of this pest. She repositions her purse and closes her eyes. The little boy turns and grabs for his mother, who smiles at him lovingly.
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3-26-13:
We made dinner—baked halibut, rice, salad—while listening to Bach playing loudly from radios in every room. O, so happy, eager to help out—chopping vegetables, preparing rice, advising whether I should use lemon or lime in the halibut, spontaneously coming over to hug me and have his back scratched—then sitting in his chair and reading from a fat file of the many forewords he’s written over the years, holding his magnifying glass to his eye, reading aloud to me, stopping now and then just to savor the music.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a planet where the sound of rain falling is like Bach?” he says.
“Yes, Planet Bach,” I respond.
He smiles—“Yes,” he murmurs—picturing it, hearing it.
Later, lying on the couch, his legs over mine, we listen to what seems an endless Bach piece. It goes on and on and on, the pauses between passages “a majestic silence,” as O says. We keep thinking it will end, the announcer interrupting to say what the piece is. Neither of us is sure. But instead, the music continues. One begins to wonder if it will ever end, life on Earth returning. O has his eyes closed.
Finally, at 9 P.M. the piece comes to an end and we learn what it was—“The Musical Offering,” one of Bach’s last works, composed for Frederick II. He asks for the Oxford Companion to Music to look it up, I hand it to him along with reading glasses and a magnifying glass, and then he places a call to his assistant and leaves a message on the machine:
“Hailey, I wonder if you can order a CD of this very marvelous Bach piece that has been playing…”
I watch his face as he speaks. He looks so peaceful and happy … on a planet where the sound of rain falling is like Bach…
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3-30-13:
It is hard to describe how tired I am. Noises hurt a little. I crave the quiet—my kind of quiet: the sound of skateboarders going uptown and taxicabs hitting the metal plate on Eighth. Nothing else. Even the radio is too much.
_____________________
4-30-13:
Random images and thoughts:
O, grumpily doing the dishes in the sink: “I wish the plates would somehow magically spring up and clean themselves…”
How, during a daylong series of panels and performances on O’s work, he would repeatedly open his little tin and offer me a mint before taking one himself.
How, when we first met, he didn’t really know how to (or didn’t think to) share with another pers
on. He’d never shared his life before, after all.
How, when I didn’t feel well recently and took a long bath, he brought in to me a piece of toast with a slice of cheese on it. When I transferred to the bed, he brought me another slice.
How I could hear his feet shuffling on the carpet. And how I like that sound.
LESSONS FROM THE SMOKE SHOP
My thirty-year-long subscription to the New Yorker ran out—pure absentmindedness on my part—and since then I have been buying a copy each week at the smoke shop around the corner from our building.
It makes no sense financially. I could save seventy-three percent off the cover price if I renewed for just a year; even more for two. But I’ve found I enjoy the benefits that come with my $6.99 a week, beginning with Ali, the shop’s manager.
Ali had formerly known me as a customer who occasionally came in late at night for a single vanilla Häagen-Dazs bar and asked for a book of matches.
The asking part is important. He once told me about a customer who reached over the counter and grabbed a book of matches from the box next to the cash register.
“‘No, you don’t do that,’ I tell him,” Ali recounted, still bristling. “‘That is wrong. You don’t go reaching across like that, without permission. You ask, I will give you a book of matches.’” He paused, looked at me. “Not everyone gets one.”
Maybe they look like nothing special, Ali’s matches. They’re a generic white, and have “Thank You” printed on them.
I half-reached for one, just to mess with him. He held up a warning finger and tried to look stern, then selected a book of Thank You matches from the box as deliberately as if he were making a chess move.
“Here! Go, with your matches and your ice cream.”
“Thank you, Ali. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
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Here’s another thing I’ve learned from hanging out in Ali’s shop: There’s no haggling here. This may seem obvious, but apparently it’s not—not to everyone. I went in last Friday night to buy my New Yorker and, while browsing the magazines, saw a tall, imposingly built young man try to haggle with him over the price of a single cigarillo, single cigarillos and cigarettes being for sale here.
He fished in his pockets and spilled pennies on the counter. “C’mon, man!”
You might have thought he’d insulted Ali’s grandmother. Ali sent that young man on his way.
“What, they think I’m going to bargain with them just because I have an accent?” he said to no one in particular, in his best indignant voice. Then he laughed. I did, too.
The store is called a smoke shop but, let’s face it, it’s a head shop: Hundreds of pipes and bongs line the shelves. There are rolling papers, booze, condoms, lube, pseudo-poppers, lotto tickets, junk food, you name it. It’s so full of vices that, paradoxically, it’s a vice-free zone. I hardly ever indulged in potato chips before, but that’s changed since I started buying my New Yorkers there. I threw in a bag of salt-and-vinegar ones this time—what the heck.
“Eight dollars,” he said, “eight dollars, my friend.”
I pulled the bills from my wallet while doing the math in my head. Suddenly it hit me: “It’s always right on the dollar, isn’t it? Eight, not $7.98. Or three dollars, not $2.95 with tax, or whatever?”
Ali smiled. “I round it off. Less change; it’s good.”
Ali kept the shop open during Hurricane Sandy, as unfazed by the storm as he is by the crazies he sometimes contends with on weekends. I went in on the second night of no power, lights, or water with Oliver. The shop counter was lit like an altar with a few well-placed candles; Ali looked like an oracle. In the semidarkness, one would never have known there’s a ton of porn for sale in the back: gay, straight, and everything in between, and at every extreme.
We bought water and a flashlight and chatted for a while. He told us when to come back if we needed more—he had a bottled-water connection of some sort.
It felt nice to emerge from our dark, trapped apartments and connect with the formerly normal. We then stepped into the bar next door and had a warm beer by candlelight and toasted with fellow neighborhood drinkers, “To surviving Sandy and to being New Yorkers.”
Even under normal circumstances, one would never find Ali in there—say, having a drink at the end of a night. In fact, Ali would never partake of almost anything for sale in the shop.
“I don’t touch any of it,” he has told me. “I don’t do any of it. I drink Sprite. I go home to my family in Queens.”
Even so, he doesn’t seem to pass judgment on those who partake, or if he does, he’s got quite a poker face. I think he gets that some of us may need a little something extra to distract us, to take the edge off, to gamble on the remote chance that we might win big in the lottery and get to leave this place.
I’ve lived in New York long enough to understand why some people hate it here: the crowds, the noise, the traffic, the expense, the rents; the messed-up sidewalks and pothole-pocked streets; the weather that brings hurricanes named after girls that break your heart and take away everything.
It requires a certain kind of unconditional love to love living here. But New York repays you in time in memorable encounters, at the very least. Just remember: Ask first, don’t grab, be fair, say please and thank you, always say thank you—even if you don’t get something back right away. You will.
Woman Having a Bad Day
NOTES FROM A JOURNAL
6-2-13:
I visited Ali at the smoke shop this evening. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, two months or so. “My friend,” he immediately greeted me, with a smile.
I said I’d been away for a while and he immediately interjected, “So have I—one, two, three, four”—counting on his fingers—“twelve days, I go: Pakistan: back home. See my family: first time in long time: my wedding, the last time: nineteen years ago, it’s been.”
I told him that was absolutely wonderful. “Took your family? Your kids?”
“No, no, just me. I surprise my brother.” He then went on to tell me in elaborate detail about how he had done it, arriving four days earlier than planned. He told me about each plane ride, how long each layover was, where he stayed, up until the final moment when he stepped out from behind a door and surprised his brother, “who almost fall down.” His three other brothers and his sister were in on it. Ali smiled with great pleasure as he told me this story. As did I. I was touched: that he was talking about his siblings, not his parents, or his own wife and kids—about the special bond between siblings. I get that.
As Ali and I were talking, a tall and very built black man came into the store to buy lotto tickets. He overheard us as he was studying the lotto sheets. “That’s nothing,” he couldn’t help commenting, “I’m one of fifteen kids. Fifteen!” Then he said, sort of under his breath, “My daddy couldn’t help himself, always out prowling, probably had lots more kids that I don’t even know about—Haiti, you know.”
Ali cut in: “That’s the thing about third-world countries: There no TV, no movies, no video games—nothing to do—so people have babies.”
The black man laughed: “That’s right—only thing to do is fuck.”
He got his lotto ticket and said so long. He held the door open for a tiny, bent-over old man, bent like an elbow at the lumbar spine. He leaned his cane against the counter. “You’re back,” he said to Ali, glancing up sideways.
“That’s right,” Ali said, “I came back just so I could take your money.”
The bent man smiled.
Ali turned and reached for a pack of Marlboro reds.
_____________________
Undated Note:
I see a young guy hustling mixtapes on Fourteenth Street—such a common sight; usually I walk right past but for some reason I stop tonight: “I’ll take one.” I pull a five-dollar bill from my wallet.
“I can give you change, sir,” the young man offers, overly polite, “a ten for tha
t twenty you got there.”
I laugh. “You could, could you? How nice. No, five’s what I can do.” I hand him the bill, take the CD, and ask, “Can I take your picture?”
“My picture? All right.”
I take his picture.
He hands me his CD and looks me in the eye. “Do you even want it?”
“No,” I answer, “not really.”
I give it back.
“Thank you, sir.”
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7-4-13:
An enchanted Fourth of July:
A lovely scene and vibe up on the rooftop to watch fireworks: lots of neighbors—old and young—and the cityscape behind us. Gorgeous sunset, the sky turning a mint green, the water, a silvery blue, and boats on the Hudson. A fresh breeze. Happiness in the air—one could feel it, and not just because O and I had gotten stoned in the apartment. Everyone felt it and commented on it—the beauty of the scene.
O held onto the railing and watched and talked as thoughts came into his head, describing in clear, precise detail, as if dictating a case history, the “superfluity” of images within his mind’s eye—the one “gift” given to him in exchange for his impaired vision: how the triangular park appears to jut out from the roof railing; how he sees “flakes” of retinal snow when he looks at the sky; how his vision is cut off suddenly by his blind eye, and this looks like “a trapezius of irregularly shaped cardboard.”
Soon, he was seeing hallucinations:
Letters and fragments of text superimposed on the greenish sky, newspapers with unreadable headlines, and more: “A hexagonal building, with a sort of delicate tracery at the lower edges; a gigantic version of me with an enormous phallus; patterns of colors in terra cotta and purple…”
He paused, soaking in these fantastical images, then declared with gusto: “The primary cortex! The genius of the primary cortex!”
Did neighbors hear? Probably so. I couldn’t stop laughing at his ebullient cry.
And as I listened, happily, while also taking in the great beauty of my surroundings—“an attack of beauty,” as O once said about a sunset—I thought two things: one, how there is so much in that head of his, so much O knows; and two, how different we are, in that what is going through my brain is not so much a stream of thoughts and images but of feelings and emotions. I am tuned into the people around me—the dynamics among the group of boys behind us, and the argument being had by the older couple right next to us, and my own complicated feelings. I may not know nearly as much as O knows, I am not as brilliant, but I feel a lot, so much, and some of this has rubbed off onto him and some of his knowledge has rubbed off onto me. We are like two dogs rubbing our scents onto one another.