by Bill Hayes
Not sure where to begin. I suppose I could start with the taxi drive to the restaurant, or with the meal itself—the lovely food, the lovely waitresses. Or I could start where I ended up, in a dark bar, until 4 A.M. Or perhaps on my walk back to the hotel, with a detour through the red light district. But I will get to all that on another day. For now, I have a short New York story—but one set in Amsterdam.
After eating, I sat by a canal and took tokes from the joint I had gotten at a “green café” yesterday. I got gloriously high, then I headed into the bar across the street from the restaurant, the bar that the waitresses had said is “the best” in Amsterdam. It was packed, uncomfortably packed—but with gorgeously dressed, gorgeous young Dutch people. I managed to find a spot at a table on the side where I fell into conversation with two outstandingly pretty young women. We talked for a while. I showed them a bunch of my pictures on my phone. But honestly, it wasn’t very long into our conversation when one of the two, Pauline, who had long blonde hair piled atop her head, suddenly said to me, apropos of nothing that I recall, “I am going to write you a poem.”
“Really?”
By her expression, it was almost as if I’d offended her by asking if she’d really meant it. “Of course!” she insisted.
I told Pauline that this had happened to me before—actually, twice before, on the street, in New York. She didn’t look impressed—or surprised, for that matter.
She found a pen in her purse and retreated to the corner. The other woman and I talked while Pauline wrote. Sometimes I looked over at her and she would stare back at me with great concentration, almost viciousness, more like an animal hunting than like someone writing something. Finally, perhaps twenty minutes later, she rejoined our little table, and presented to me my poem, written on the back of a flyer, and over the din in the bar, and the round of drinks I had just bought, she read it to me:
the choice
you made,
just to accept
that you don’t
know
though you
read, think, talk
is the best
decision you
ever made
because since
then
you enjoyed
people
life
a drink
kind of
you learned
to love life.
Pauline
_____________________
11-2-14:
Back home: I dropped by Ali’s at about 9:00 on my way to grab something to eat. I almost didn’t go in; he had four or five customers in the store. We said our hellos—“Hello, Sir”—and I told him I’d head back and look at the magazines. As I stood back there, I overheard a young sort of hippie couple ask Ali a few questions about lotto tickets and then, to my surprise (because they didn’t look like they had a lot of money), ask Ali for $100 worth. He made the sale. They left. The store was still crowded when a young man wandered in, looked around a bit, and said to Ali, “What do you sell here?”
“What do you mean what do I sell? What does it look like I sell?”
The young man looked back at him as if waiting for a different answer. Then he turned and quickly ducked out the door. I put down my magazine and walked toward the counter. “That was weird,” I said, “do you get that often?”
“What don’t I get?” Ali said.
The store was cleared out now but for one guy buying lotto tickets. On seeing me standing near him, Ali said right away, “This is the guy—the newspaper story. This is the guy I told you about.”
“You’re the one who wrote the story about Ali for the Times?” the other man said.
“I am. Did you see it?” I put out my hand and we shook.
“Of course I saw it,” he answered, “this guy was so excited about it—” he pointed to Ali, who was beaming, but then he added sarcastically, “You were way too kind.”
I asked what he meant.
“He’s not nearly that nice to everyone—definitely not to me, and I’ve been coming here six or seven years.” He had a smile on his face as he spoke, and I could tell he was poking fun, but he meant what he saying, too. The man was a little older than me, maybe late-fifties, tough-looking. “We’ve had some big arguments, Ali and I,” he said, “believe me, you were way too kind.”
“Arguments about what? What are you talking about?”
He rolled his eyes. “You name it: religion, politics. I’m not going to say any more—it might end up in the Times, right?”
Ali laughed at this. “That’s right—in the next article. Be careful what you say.”
I felt uncomfortable and wanted to change the topic. I asked him about lotto tickets—if he buys them every day, and so on. The man was holding a wad of cash. He looked defensive. “Yeah, every day.” Again he said that thing about not wanting to say more—it might end up in the Times. He and Ali picked up the thread of this topic and talked back and forth. Meanwhile, I pulled my camera out of my pocket; I don’t know what came over me. Suddenly I had this idea that I wanted a picture of Ali. “Ali? Can I …? Can I take your picture?” I said in a pause in the conversation.
“No,” he said sincerely, with a wave of a finger.
“He won’t let you take his picture,” the other man said, “I’ve tried, I’m a photographer.” He looked at me. “It’s a Muslim thing.”
Ali immediately took umbrage. “It’s not a Muslim thing! I tell you that. You don’t listen. I never say ‘It’s a Muslim thing.’ That’s not right.”
“What are you talking about? Just the other day, when I tried to take a picture in here, you said, ‘No, Muslims can’t do that.’”
“No, I don’t say that. I say, ‘It’s against Islam.’ All of Islam: Someone take a picture of you, it’s not right—it’s lifeless—like a sculpture, it’s lifeless.”
Words were coming fast but it was as if I pressed pause on Ali’s words: It’s lifeless; a photo is lifeless. I looked him in the eye, and nodded respectfully. All the while, the other man was yammering on. I cut in at one point and tried to lighten the mood. I told Ali that was fine, I absolutely understood, and that I always ask people first if I can take their picture. I found my Instagram page on my phone and handed my phone to Ali to take a look. He squinted his eyes just a bit, and began scrolling through the pictures. He stopped now and then, nodded. “Good, very good,” he muttered.
The other man began asking me some questions, I don’t remember about what, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed Ali holding the phone up and clicking something. “Here you go,” he handed the phone back to me.
He took a picture of me, I thought, Oh great, the last thing I want. I hit the screen to open the camera on the phone, and a tiny thumbnail photo appeared in the bottom left. It wasn’t me he had taken a photo of; it was himself; he had pushed the button that turns the viewfinder around and taken a picture of himself. I looked up and nodded at Ali. He smiled in return; clearly, it had been intentional. I thought of saying something, thanking him, but instantly knew better. The other guy would make a big deal of it. So I slipped the phone into my pocket, shook Ali’s hand—“Good night, Sir!”—shook the other fellow’s hand, and went on my way.
Much later that night, 11:30 or so, I went back into the store. “Ali, thank you—thank you for the photo.”
He smiled but he was serious. “I never do that. I’ve never done that for anyone but you. It’s what I say, in Islam, no—no photos, except in your own family. Only family photos.”
“I understand. Thank you again, my brother,” I said.
We shook hands, and I went home.
A MONET OF ONE’S OWN
I slipped away from work one Monday to take my two nieces to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We went to the Garry Winogrand photography show. I doubt there’s a better way to play hooky in New York.
I almost wished I’d brought a thesaurus, because it wasn’t long before we found words failing us. An image
of an acrobat caught midleap on a Manhattan street, for instance, struck the three of us as the epitome of “amazing.” So did another photo. Then another. Upon seeing the first few dozen of the more than 175 prints on view we pledged that we would not use that word to describe every single photo. Beautiful, incredible, joyful, strange, very sad—we made it as far as the second room before we were back to the A’s.
“It is just so … amazing,” said Katy, who’s eighteen and an aspiring photographer, as if she’d been rendered helpless by yet another example of the Bronx-born artist’s particular genius for street photography. I nodded in sympathy. In a world plagued by intractable problems—police shootings, Ebola spreading, spiraling civil wars, planes falling from the sky—lacking sufficient synonyms for a work of art seemed a good one to have.
When we reached the last room, I asked Katy which picture was her favorite. She led me back to the one that had stumped her in the synonym department. Her sister, Emily, who’s fourteen and had been off wandering through the Met’s collection of European paintings, then showed me her favorite piece in the museum: a Monet water lily (the first she’d ever seen) from 1919.
This is when I let each girl in on a secret: It can be yours. No different from falling in love with a song, one may fall in love with a work of art and claim it as one’s own. Ownership does not come free. One must spend time with it; visit at different times of the day or evening; and bring to it one’s full attention. The investment will be repaid as one discovers something new with each viewing—say, a detail in the background, a person nearly cropped from the picture frame, or a tiny patch of canvas left unpainted, deliberately so, one may assume, as if to remind you not to take all the painted parts for granted.
This is true not just for New Yorkers but for anyone anywhere with art to be visited—art being a relative term, in my definition. Your Monet may, in fact, be an unpolished gemstone or mineral element. Natural history museums are filled with beauties fairly begging to be adopted. Stay alert. Next time a tattered Egyptian mummy speaks to you across the ages, don’t walk away. Stay awhile. Spend some time with it. Give it a proper name: Yours.
But don’t be hasty. You must be sure you are besotted. When it happens, you will know. A couple of years back, I spent much of Memorial Day at the Museum of Modern Art with Oliver, a self-described philistine when it comes to art. He struggled to see the value in the work of the performance artist Marina Abramović as she sat gazing into the eyes of museum visitors. And the enormous, bright red Barnett Newman painting, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, got him all worked up, railing against the pretensions of abstract expressionism.
This was my cue to lead Oliver to another gallery on another floor and steer him toward an early, rose-tinted Picasso. He smiled a smile that even Edvard Munch might have wanted to paint. And he stayed and stayed and stayed, a self-appointed sentinel to Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse.
“It’s yours,” I said. “Congratulations.”
I have been slowly adding to my own collection since moving to New York. I acquired a Francis Bacon nude that I fell hard for at the artist’s retrospective at the Met several years ago. The piece was on loan from a European museum, and the fact that I might never see it again made it all the more irresistible. My naked Bacon and I are forever embroiled in a long-distance romance.
Usually, I gravitate toward works that are overlooked, tucked back in a far corner, or that are a museum’s “John Doe”—Artist Unknown. I am just as likely to make a medieval suit of armor mine as I am an obscure Diane Arbus. I also push myself to go into galleries that I would not normally think about entering. Often, this is a source of my best finds. I am strongly anti-museum-map and militantly in favor of getting lost. While there’s nothing wrong with navigating straight to the old masters, I believe it’s far nicer to lose your way in a labyrinth of galleries and suddenly find yourself, as I did one Saturday evening, face-to-face with an Odilon Redon bouquet looking so fresh I could have sworn the paint was still wet.
Perhaps the best part about possessing art in this way is that what’s mine can be yours, and vice versa. In fact, I would not be surprised if half of New York City has also put dibs on the Monet that Emily chose. This made it no less hers.
I brought her in closer to her new acquisition: “Emily, meet your Monet. Monet, Emily.”
Words did not fail her: “Hello, beautiful,” she whispered.
Teatime
NOTES FROM A JOURNAL
12-1-14:
After nearly five months in the clock repair shop around the corner, O’s beloved grandfather clock (his mother’s) is finally back home, in one piece, and working again for the first time in seven or eight years. Working pretty well, that is, not perfectly.
At one point last night, the clock chimed, startling us (we’re not used to it). O and I counted the chimes carefully. A big smile broke out on his face. “Oh! That’s very eccentric! Earlier, it did ten chimes at four o’clock, and now, seven at nine.”
We laughed how this is like having an aging parent in the house, one who’s a little “dotty,” gets a little lost, misremembers, from time to time…
_____________________
12-21-14:
Sunday, a very cold, gray Sunday:
O and I got bundled up and walked—walked down Fourth Street to Christopher, walked slowly, carefully, minding the ice and the cracks in the sidewalks and the curbs. O was in a good mood. He has completed the final edits on his book, his memoir; it has been sent to Knopf; and I think he feels a great weight lifted. In this book, he discusses his sexuality and private life, including our relationship, for the first time ever. He’s done it! The proof is sitting on his table: a manuscript at least six inches high—My Own Life, he wants to call it. “It accounts for your whole life,” I said spontaneously.
“It is an accounting of part of my life,” Oliver corrected more carefully, laying stress on the an, “not without some omissions but all in all the truth.”
We were walking down Fourth Street to McNulty’s to get coffee, a stroll we’ve taken many times, in many different kinds of weather, and light…
“Look at that tree!” I said, stopping, and putting a hand to his back to make sure he felt steady as he looked up.
“Oh yes, that’s a marvelous one,” he whispered. The tree was enormous, tall, and gnarly, limbs growing in all different directions—west, east, up, down. Part of the tree was covered in ivy, and the bottom half of the trunk was circled in Christmas lights.
“There are a lot of things growing there,” I said.
“Indeed,” O said.
We kept walking. He talked; I listened. In the apartment, he’d nonchalantly said something arresting: “I find I am more interested in the positive pathologies—”
“The ‘positive pathologies’? What’s that?”
“Things like the zigzagging of migraine auras, tics, spasms, seizures—excesses, hypertrophies of physiology, not losses, absences.”
I understood; it made sense—he who has lived a hypertrophied life. He talked about this more as we walked. I felt this was material for an essay, another for his collection on the “neurophysiology of everyday life” he’s been thinking about. But all of this serious talk did not keep us from enjoying the sights. We saw lots of nice lights and decorations. (“Those are jolly,” said O, seeing greens and lights on an iron rod fence.) A small tree in a yard was decorated with round glass bulbs. Wreaths bedecked doorways.
We felt happy living in the Village.
We remembered memorable walks: “Do you remember that little boy? That little Indian boy,” I said, “the one I took pictures of?”
“Oh yes, he was not only amazingly photogenic, but had a whole repertoire of poses. Do you suppose he was born that way?”
I laughed—O, who knows nothing about Facebook or Instagram. “No, I think that was a definite case of nurture over nature.”
We found a broad, dry sidewalk, empty of people, so much so that O felt comfortable letting
go of my arm and walking on his own. He took my arm again at Bleecker. I steered him to the left.
“Now, now, this looks familiar, but I have no idea where we are,” O said. (How many times have I heard that—O and his topographical agnosia, the geographic equivalent to his prosopagnosia.) It occurred to me that now I probably knew the Village better than he did, which is saying something since I’ve only been here five years. But I’ve walked a lot. I may not know the names of the streets, but I know how to get from here to there. And I recognize everyone.
We took a right onto Christopher. Soon we were pushing open the door to McNulty’s, one of my favorite places in the world. I still remember when he introduced me to McNulty’s. It was wonderfully warm inside, and crowded (the crowd helping to heat the place). As we waited, a tall woman said to Oliver, “I like your cane!”
He thanked her and held it up for her to admire the handle, which was completely “enrobed” (O’s word) in different colored rubber bands.
“How long did it take you to collect all those?” she asked.
“About ten minutes,” he said.
“I did not expect you to say that!” she said, laughing.
“I have a vast collection,” he said with modest pride.
O demonstrated how the rubber bands keep the cane from falling when propped against something: “A physical therapist taught me that!”
We bought three pounds of coffee—as well as a box of tea sacks, two tea bricks, which he’ll give as gifts to Jonathan and to Nick’s family, and some coffee-flavored candies—O is going to his nephew’s in D.C. for Christmas. It came to $125—not a small amount of money to spend in a coffee shop. O is not an extravagant man, by any means, except for on those rare instances when he is.
We said happy holidays and thank you to all the gentlemen at McNulty’s. We walked up Hudson, like other streets empty of people because of the bitter cold. O talked easily and nonstop, making his signature “pronouncements,” as I think of them. For instance: suddenly saying, “I find I am very interested in automatism.”