Insomniac City

by Bill Hayes

  “Vodka!” I said. “We must toast.”

  Ilona broke into a big smile. “Wonderful!” she said.

  She made her way to the back right corner of the apartment, crouched down, and began rummaging. I gathered that this was the “kitchen area,” though there was no stove, oven, or full-size refrigerator, only a toaster oven. “I’m going to choose a very special vodka,” she said. “Cîroc, do you know it?”

  “No,” I said, “that sounds wonderful.” I could see her pouring from what looked like a vodka bottle from an airplane.

  Ilona brought over two very small blue glasses, about twice the size of a thimble, filled with vodka. We clinked glasses. “To a new friendship,” Ilona said.

  “Yes, to friendship,” and we both took small sips.

  Ilona at My Window

  NOTES FROM A JOURNAL

  9-4-14:

  Today was the hottest day of the summer, hot and punishingly humid, as if the city needed to prove that it still had it in it. The heat makes people tense and cranky, but it also bonds—people talk about it in the elevator, in cabs, on the street—commiserate, reassure each other: It’ll pass; fall will be here soon. But on the other hand, the sunsets on days like this are amazing, thanks to smog and heat, the color of the sky unclassifiable—almost a reminiscence, a recrudescence, of pink.

  I decided to soak it all up, take a walk. I stopped at Ali’s. “Hello, Sir,” I said, imitating the way he says it to me. We shook hands. “How you doing?”

  “Tired.” He told me he hadn’t had a single day off in a month—the boss is away—and he doesn’t get one till next week.

  That sounded brutal. “So, what will you do on your day off? Hang out at home …?”

  Ali nodded. “Have the sleep, the eat …” He shrugged. “But you can’t plan. Something might happen. The day off doesn’t come, then what? Everything bad. You plan the day on the day,” Ali said with real clarity, force. “Not before.”

  I told him that makes good sense: Take each day as it comes, don’t overthink it.

  “Yes, my friend, yes.”

  _____________________

  At the corner of Eighth and Jane, the light was red. I noticed a man on the bench in front of the Tavern on Jane. He held a piece of wood and a jackknife. I couldn’t resist: “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Carving a piece of wood.”

  That was a great answer.

  I rephrased: “What are you making?” I crouched next to him. The man was probably seventy-five or older, and thin and small. He wore a baseball cap.

  “Oh, a letter opener, I suppose.”

  I just nodded, but I thought this was great for two reasons: because he was carving something slim and elegant out of a big hunk of wood (and he wasn’t even close to finishing) but also because it was a letter opener he was making, a tool everyone once had—a necessity at one time; no longer so. O has several. But it goes without saying: You don’t need a letter opener to open a text or e-mail.

  I complimented him but the man seemed embarrassed. “It’s just what I do. I’m a carver.”

  I told him good luck and said I looked forward to seeing his progress on it. “I’ll be back another night.”

  “Okay, if I’m still around,” he said.

  _____________________

  A copy of Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer caught my eye in the window of Left Bank Books. Instantly, I felt myself to be sixteen again and in B. Dalton bookstore in Spokane and spotting that book in a display—New Releases—next to the cash register. I could still recite its opening page: “I will be her witness …” I had to go in. I love this shop because it stays open late. I love it because the clerks are never friendly. I love it because they sell old books, mostly first editions. I say old; most of them are from the sixties and seventies—my era.

  Whenever I go in there, the clerk or owner eyes me, as he eyes everyone, as if it is an intrusion, as if I am interrupting him, as sometimes I have—he might be deep in conversation with someone. He might be reading. And sure enough, when I walked in the clerk glared at me from the back of the store.

  “Are you still open?” I asked, even though I knew they had to be open since the door was open.

  He nodded yes, but as if he were making an exception.

  I tiptoed around and toward the back. He looked preoccupied, shelving books. “That looks like a nice copy of the Didion,” I said.

  He agreed.

  I asked how much, and he said thirty-five dollars. I wanted to buy it, even though I already have a first edition of that book. I just wanted to have it; it looked so new, newer than mine. But I kept browsing. So many book covers I recognized: the huge Harry Abrams monograph on Edward Hopper (I had that once; what happened to it?), and there, on the poetry shelf, face out, in a protective plastic cover, Ariel.

  Ariel: Oh, Ariel. I felt something very deep, sadness, bittersweetness, a recognition, almost like tears were going to come into my eyes. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was exactly the feeling I have when I see Steve in a dream. Loss: but loss of what? Youth? Poetry?

  Five or six books suddenly fell on the shelf where the clerk was rearranging things. In that silent bookstore, the sound was loud and instantly recognizable, the sound of books on a shelf losing their balance, falling on their sides, the weight of a book as an object. It was a good sound, a familiar sound, comforting, and I thought, that sound is reason alone to have books. May books never disappear.

  I took the copy of Ariel and read a few pages. “Daddy, Daddy …” I smiled. The force of the poetry was unchanged. The sadness melted into something like gratitude as I looked at the poem titles, poems I once knew well. Consciousness that I am thankful, I thought to myself.

  _____________________

  9-13-14:

  I woke at 4 A.M. to screams—not screams, yelling—and horns honking. In the moment, I almost thought I was having a nightmare, triggered by a violent movie I’d watched. But it was too real, outside my window, eleven stories below. I lay in bed and listened: chaos, one could feel and sense it, even without seeing what was going on; it sounded like a crowd. I finally got out of bed and looked out the window. It was at the gas station: a line of cars, five or six at the pumps, and there appeared to be three or four people centrally involved in an argument. One of the gas station attendants, in a uniform, and a young man—the two of them yelling at each other, threatening one another with fists and punches thrown in the air. A young woman circled around, and she was going at the attendant just as viciously, attacking him physically, yelling, cursing. Others would congregate, try to break things up, and then back out. The fight moved back and forth across the grounds of the gas station. It would almost quiet for a moment, as if the fighters were retreating, and then start up again. At some point, the woman got thrown onto the ground; at another point, someone else did.

  It was awful to watch. From afar, they looked like animals, could be mistaken for animals, had it not been for their human voices, their cursing—terrible words.

  How New York breaks your heart, I thought to myself. This is one way: with violence, with hatred, rage.

  Too much to drink, too: alcohol at 4 in the morning.

  I turned on my air conditioner to drown out the noise and took half a Xanax to go back to sleep.

  Policeman on West Fourth Street

  HIS NAME IS RAHEEM

  “It’s Arabic,” he told me. Sometime yesterday morning, Raheem had parked his caravan of three separate shopping carts, each piled six feet high with near-bursting bags of collected cans and bottles, on Eighth Avenue, across the street from where Oliver and I live. You couldn’t miss it, really—there was audacity in his taking over the bus lane as if it were his private parking spot—and yet, people streamed by without glancing in his direction. Or maybe he wasn’t really there. In the extreme heat and humidity of the day—temperatures over ninety—one might almost think Raheem was a mirage.

  I was on my way to a doctor’s appoin
tment uptown when I first saw him, asleep on a milk crate, his bags shading him from the sun. I could see the photo in my mind even before I was close enough to take it. I thumbed my camera on and pocketed the lens cap as I raced toward him. I crouched down directly across from him, found his face in the frame, and snapped: 1, 2, 3, 4. I felt like a poacher. I was a poacher: The sleeping man roused, and cried out angrily, “Get the fuck away from me!”

  I felt terrible, ashamed. I never do that—never take pictures of people without asking them. It was wrong, and I apologized to the man, who looked like he was silently laying a curse on me. Nevertheless, when I got on the subway I looked at the pictures I’d taken, and I saw that they were good, that they captured something real. But then, I’m sure poachers say that about the tusks they steal, too. Still, I didn’t delete the pictures.

  Returning home later in the afternoon, I saw him still there from a block away. I bought a bottle of water, approached, and gave it to the man. He had hundreds, maybe thousands of empty water bottles, but did he have a full one?

  “You getting enough water today?” I asked. I don’t know if he remembered or recognized me, but he accepted the water with thanks. Maybe he would just empty it and add it to his collection; I didn’t know.

  I asked him what he was up to. He told me that he was on his way, eventually, to Duane Reade, the drugstore, where he would turn in his bags and get money in return. He told me there isn’t a Recycling Center in Manhattan, as there is in the Bronx, and the drugstores won’t take everything at once, so you have to go to one after the other after the other. Moving this caravan from one drugstore to the next would take hours, days maybe. The shopping carts weren’t linked—he couldn’t tow them all at once; instead, he would have to move one cart a time, while eyeing the other two, to make sure another can collector (the junkie ones, he said) didn’t steal them. But he explained this matter-of-factly, as if, This is just what one has to do. Now, he was taking a rest from the heat.

  “Do you have something to eat? A place to sleep tonight?”

  He nodded, again very matter-of-fact; he wasn’t worried about that. This was when I asked his name and he told me it was Raheem. I later learned that it means “merciful.”

  I said my name is Billy. I told him I’d like to give him something to help him out. He had not asked me for a dime, after all. I didn’t want to offend him again. “Is that cool?”

  Raheem nodded. I gave him $20.

  “Peace and love, and hallelujah,” he said quietly, sincerely, like a prayer, “blessings to you.” When I asked, he said it was okay if I took his picture now, and I took a few more.

  I asked him how long he’d been on the streets and he told me sixteen years. Anyway, finding food and a place to sleep weren’t a problem—that’s the least of it, he implied. The problem is the police, who harass him, tell him to get his junk out of the street, or even worse, he said, “These people here now with $120 million apartments—they say, ‘Get away from my building! Why don’t you just throw all that shit in the garbage? I’m gonna call the cops!’ And they do! Fuckers. And then I have to deal with the cops again.”

  He murmured, “The Village was a lot friendlier when it was entirely gay.”

  This made me chuckle, and I said I’ll bet it was, I wish I’d lived here then.

  “They think I don’t know the law. I know the law. I know my rights. I’m not doing anything illegal. I’m not a junkie. I have every right to do this,” he said. He looked over at the bags and bags of what most of us would call garbage. “This is my work!” he said with real feeling. “My work!”

  In that moment, I suddenly saw every person on the streets of New York who collected bottles and cans from garbage bins and turned-over trash cans differently—all the elderly tiny Asian women, sometimes whole families, Peruvian, African, some with bags balanced on poles carried on their shoulders: They were making work for themselves, performing a job most of us were too lazy or busy or wealthy to even think about.

  But Raheem wasn’t finished speaking. “I say to those guys, the ones who own the buildings, ‘What are YOU doing? I’m saving the Earth! What are you doing for this planet?’”

  NOTES FROM A JOURNAL

  9-14-14:

  O heard from one of the doormen that the smoke shop down the block from Ali’s was robbed last week. Thugs came in late on a Sunday night just when they were closing. This made me worried for Ali, so O and I went in to ask him about it.

  “There’s a sign on the door,” he said, pointing to a “Wanted” poster—a grainy image taken from surveillance video. “They have guns, use a Taser, tie him up, take all the money, cigarettes, lotto tickets—”

  “Is he okay now?”

  Ali shrugged. “He okay.”

  He seemed distracted, expressionless, listless almost. Maybe he was just tired of telling the story. Maybe he’s sick of people like me being surprised—don’t we know what a dangerous position they’re in, working alone in a shop that sells cigarettes, liquor, lottery tickets? How naïve can you be?

  O and I bought a newspaper and one ice cream bar. “Nine dollar,” Ali said, “nine dollar.” He looked at Oliver: “And some matches? Some matches too, Doctor?”

  O nodded.

  Ali threw in two books.

  I noticed they were blank—just white covers. “The matches,” I said, “they don’t have ‘Thank You’ printed on them anymore?”

  Ali still had that frozen expression on his face. “No one says thank you, so the matches are same.”

  “Really …?”

  “Things change,” Ali said with not a hint of regret or emotion. “Things change.”

  _____________________

  9-20-14:

  “Do you sometimes catch yourself thinking?” says O, out of the blue, in the car, on the way to his weekend home in the Hudson Valley. “I sometimes sort of feel like I’m … looking at the neural basis of consciousness…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Those are special occasions,” he went on, “when the mind takes off—and you can watch it. It’s largely autonomous, but autonomous on your behalf—in regard to problems, questions, and so on.” A pause, then returning to his thought: “These are creative flights … Flights: That is a nice word.”

  “Mmm, I love that word … What … triggers such flights for you?”

  “Surprise, astonishment, wonder…”

  “Yes.”

  _____________________

  9-25-14:

  Heading home after taking pictures in Washington Square Park, I took a shortcut through the alley off Waverly where I saw a guy on the other side of the street walking with a jangly rhythm—music in his body. “How many times have I seen you today?” he yelled in a friendly voice. “Twenty-five? Thirty? And now? Again …! Unbelievable.”

  I couldn’t see very well—it was getting dark—had I seen him before? Possible. After all, I had just taken photos of a teenage couple making out on a bench that I’d photographed three weeks earlier in a different park. The city can seem so small.

  I played along: “Thirty? No, not thirty times—seventeen, I think.”

  “At least that, I think you lost count,” said the young man.

  I crossed the street and came to him. He was scrappy, thin, young—maybe twenty-three, twenty-four—wearing a baseball cap low over his face, almost covering but unable to conceal his alert, flashing eyes. He was high or drunk. He had a handsome face. He said his name was Billy. I asked if I could take his picture.

  “What kind of photography do you do?”

  I told him.

  “Show me, show me some.”

  I reached for my phone. He objected—vociferously: “Not your phone! Not your fucking phone!” Then, quieter, whispering almost: “On your camera. Show me on your camera. Show me the last picture you took.”

  “Okay, hold on.” I pressed the review button and found it: the picture of the young lovers on a park bench. He grabbed my hand and pulled the camera closer to his fac
e; he studied the picture carefully—a young man and woman, in love, caught in a carefree moment; and I wondered what went through his head. Did he see himself in them or complete strangers?

  “Show me more,” Billy said. So I did. He nodded, approving.

  He stood in the middle of the street. “How about here? If we’re going to do a picture, it’s gotta be the best.”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  “It’s gotta be better than anything you’ve ever taken.”

  I was just about to click when, suddenly, he dashed across the street and down into a stairwell leading to a basement. I walked over, peered down at him.

  “Billy, do you know what it’s like”—he pulled out a baggie and a lighter—“to smoke?”

  I knew he meant crack. I shook my head.

  “It’s unlike anything else, it’s like heaven, it’s—when I smoke, I want to do anything, I can do anything. I could take off all my clothes and dive into a garbage can and it would feel good.”

  I watched as he took out a joint. I put my camera to my eye and began taking pictures. Billy lit the stump of a joint laced with crack. He held the smoke in and finally released it. He watched the bluish smoke float away.

  He fell back, eyes closed. “I want you to take a picture of that—of the smoke.”

  Billy in the Alley

  I took up my camera again, he relit the joint, and I took more pictures.

  I thought to myself, He’s going to die this way.

  _____________________

  10-24-14—In Amsterdam:

  On a short holiday in Amsterdam, one of O’s favorite places; my first time here.

  Last night, he was having dinner with a colleague and encouraged me to go off on my own, have an adventure. So I did.