Insomniac City

by Bill Hayes

  Now, they are doing the hard, awful, dirty work of cleaning out, emptying, and gutting the shop. I stopped by today. It was a mess. Ali, Bobby, and their boss (a soft-spoken Indian gentleman whose name I can never remember) looked exhausted. I asked how it was going.

  “Everything upside down,” Ali said. “Nothing easy.”

  And yet, and yet … Ali added, referring to the three of them, “One Muslim, one Hindu, one Sikh: You see, we all here. Everyone work together. Back home, everyone fight.”

  _____________________

  Undated Note:

  O, as he goes over final galleys for his book:

  He insists on crossing out clauses suggested by a copy editor that define or explain an unusual word or term he has used: “Let them find out!” he says, meaning—make the reader work a little. Go look it up in the dictionary, or go to the library!

  _____________________

  4-2-15:

  O, when I accidentally dropped a carton of cherry tomatoes on the floor:

  “How pretty! Do it again!”

  So I do.

  O: “Your friends must be clamoring to see you.”

  I: “Maybe, I don’t know. This is where I want to be—with you.”

  O: “Mad. But thank you.”

  Back Home, March 2015

  4-22-15:

  O: “The most we can do is to write—intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively—about what it is like living in the world at this time.”

  EVERYTHING THAT I DON’T HAVE

  Stories like the one I’m about to tell happen to me often enough that they no longer surprise me. Even so, I don’t take them for granted. This time it was a Sunday in April. I’d been up on Twenty-Sixth or Twenty-Seventh taking pictures, then decided to head home down Eleventh Avenue; it was about four o’clock and getting cold. I was wearing shorts. While crossing Twenty-Second, I spotted a young man who’d fitted himself snugly sideways into a street-level recess in a brick building and was talking on a phone. He looked like a corner piece of a jigsaw puzzle. The street was otherwise empty. I approached him, pointed to my camera, and mouthed the words “Can I take your picture?”

  He nodded calmly, still talking, with a kind of Mona Lisa smile (and her dark eyes too); it was as if he’d been waiting for me to come; as if this phone call was just killing time till I finally showed up with my camera. Sometimes it’s like this; this is the magical part of photography: how sometimes it seems like a picture I see has just been waiting for me to come take it. Here I was.

  I knelt down and took a bunch. He moved into different positions, without my directing him, like a parody of a model, like Zoolander; it was funny. He finished his phone call, but kept acting like he was on the phone—for the sake of my photo. This made me laugh. The moment he’d started doing that, the pictures started looking fake. I stopped. I walked closer.

  “Who are you?” he asked. I told him. He said his name, it started with a D, and he said he was an artist. He had a foreign accent I couldn’t place. He scooted over on his little shelf, protected from the wind, and I sat down right next to him. It was a tight squeeze, so our thighs touched, and far warmer here than on the street. There was an instantaneous intimacy, as if we’d known one another a long time, even though I hadn’t caught his name and I couldn’t understand everything he was saying.

  He asked me more about my pictures, and I showed him my website on my phone. He looked carefully at many of the pictures, not saying much, murmuring, “Nice, nice, nice…” Then he showed me photos of his paintings—strange, vivid canvases of women with red hair. Not red—“Ginger,” as he said, “ginger.” He said he was obsessed with ginger. He showed me a photo he’d taken of a woman with red hair. He zoomed in on her hair until the image became a pure abstraction—shimmering cylinders of gold and orange and red. “See?” he said, shaking his head in wonder, “it’s impossible to understand the source of that color.”

  I got it; I got what he was talking about. I told him he should do paintings from those enlarged photos—abstracted images of strands of ginger hair.

  “I love you,” he said with a deadpan look, “let’s get married.” He was joking—I’d known the moment I sat next to him that he was straight—but there was something sincere about it, too. I actually could marry him, I thought to myself—let’s say, if he needed a green card: Men can marry one another now, and women, women: This still amazes me. Recently I met an attractive young man, just twenty-two or so, Dominican, who said something about “me and my husband,” and I thought for sure he’d gotten the word wrong—that he’d meant to say “boyfriend.” But no: They had rings and had gotten married at City Hall. I thought to myself: Twenty-two is way too young to be married—male, female, I don’t care.

  The artist and I sat there for a while and showed each other pictures on our phones. It was sort of like—actually, it felt a lot like—two boys trading baseball cards, although I was old enough to be his father. He showed me a photo of himself and friends at a party in Brooklyn—it all looked drunken and wonderful, like the kind of thing you’d still be recovering from at four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon.

  He reached into his backpack and took out two small oranges—clementine oranges—and gave one to me. “I’m like your mother, I take care of you.”

  I laughed, disarmed, and was touched. This was all so strange, but so normal. I said, “It feels like I’m having a déjà vu.”

  He disagreed. “For me, this is a nostalgia.”

  The orange was delicious. He asked me more about myself, about my books and writing, my agent and publisher. “Will you be my agent?” he said.

  “What? You want me to be your agent?”

  “I want everything from you that I don’t have,” he said.

  The line stopped me. It was both very beautiful and very spooky.

  “You don’t want everything I have right now, trust me,” I said.

  I impulsively patted his head. He had the softest hair.

  “I have to go. Let me take one more picture of you,” I said, and I went to one side and took one, his face peeking out from the wall. We exchanged phone numbers then and promised to hang out one day and see some art.

  “We’ll go to the opening of your first exhibit together,” I said.

  He agreed.

  We said goodbye, and as I walked away I immediately sent the young man sitting in the wall a text message: “I want everything from you that I don’t have,” it read.

  NOTES FROM A JOURNAL

  4-14-15:

  I have been taking pictures constantly—every day, hundreds sometimes.

  If I can’t get outside, I bring New York inside my apartment—do portraits of people I meet on the street.

  At the end of each day, I show O my pictures. He reads to me what he’s written. He is working on five or six things at once. As when he was a boy, his fingers are stained with ink.

  _____________________

  Undated Note—May 2015:

  Intensely creative and productive time for both of us—

  Some days, I feel like Sylvia Plath married to Anne Sexton—or is it Anne Sexton married to Sylvia Plath?—but without the depressions or suicides.

  Just poetry.

  _____________________

  5-1-15:

  On a flight to London, where we will stay for a week, seeing O’s friends and relatives, perhaps O’s last time—then to Dorset for three days:

  O reads an article in New Scientist about a study showing that when dogs look into their masters’ eyes (and vice versa), oxytocin (the “love hormone”) is released; this helps explain, in part, the bond dog owners may feel with their animals.

  He puts down the magazine. “We should look into each other’s eyes more,” he says.

  “Let’s do it right now,” I say, and we do.

  _____________________

  5-6-15:

  At lunch, the husband of O’s niece tells me how he first met Oliver, some forty years ago, at the home
of his future father-in-law, O’s older brother David: Nicky looked out the window, where he saw a large, bearded man lying on the grass in the garden. “What were you doing?” Nicky asked once he came indoors.

  “I was wondering what it is like to be a rose,” replied Oliver.

  _____________________

  6-4-15:

  I found a great, papered-over wall on a fairly empty street—an interesting backdrop for photos—and loitered there for a while, waiting for the right person to stroll into the frame. I tried one or two passersby; the chemistry wasn’t right. And then out of the corner of my eye, I saw a trio of tall, exotic-looking creatures approaching; baby giraffes came to mind.

  Before I’d even finished my practiced pitch, they were saying, “Sure, man,” and assembling into place. When I told them my “no cell phones in photos” rule, they complied, pocketing them without complaint. “This is crazy, man, we just came from a shoot—down the block,” said one.

  “Gucci,” said another.

  (This is so not-Gucci, I thought to myself.)

  They smelled of weed.

  I got the group shot, and then said, with an authority I don’t normally possess, “Okay, now I want to do each of you solo.” The three young models nodded, compliantly. One stepped up. He was wearing a T-shirt with Mona Lisa on it. I asked him to take off his sunglasses, and he did. And then, like auto-focus on a camera, his features instantly froze into an image of boyish handsomeness. (How do they do that?) I took a couple, he stepped aside, and his friend—a blond—took his place.

  Finally, the tallest of the bunch (clearly the leader of the pack, the Alpha Model, if you will), stepped in. He was English and dashing. “I can’t be holding this in a picture,” he murmured, referring to the joint pinched between two fingers. “Want a hit?”

  “Sure,” I said. It was the very end of the joint, and as I took a hit, finishing it, I flashed on how when I was in high school and would get stoned with friends, we always talked about how you’d get most high at the end of the joint—because supposedly that’s where all the resin accumulated—and how if you held the hit in your lungs as long as you could, you’d get a head rush that would make you see things.

  I don’t know if that’s true or not, but when I looked through the camera lens and took picture after picture of the handsome young Englishman, my brain bloomed. All I could see was beauty.

  _____________________

  7-5-15:

  I went up to the roof to sit in the sun, no sunscreen, no hat on my bald head, which I know is the dumbest thing you can do, especially when your partner has a terminal form of melanoma. But I didn’t care; it was a long cold winter here, and I felt like I was still thawing out.

  I plopped into the hammock and soaked it up.

  Paradoxically, the heat made me think of the cold of winter, the bitter, dry cold, January, February, March—lost months, when O got his diagnosis, all the tests, the two surgeries, standing on First Avenue in the freezing wind trying to get a cab—no luck—nights spent sleeping in a recliner at the hospital next to O’s bed.

  Not bad memories, exactly, but … But…

  I am reminded of a segment of 60 Minutes I saw years ago that focused on a new drug which was found to be effective in people with PTSD. The drug supposedly helped to erase memories of the traumatic event, allowing people to move forward with their lives (at least, that’s how I remember it). And the central question posed by the reporter from 60 Minutes was, If you could take a drug to forget something, would you?

  I have thought about this many times in the years since, and my answer remains unchanged: No, I never would.

  Yet not wanting to forget something is not the same as wishing to remember it better.

  _____________________

  7-7-15:

  I do fifty push-ups twice a day while O sits at his desk and counts them out by naming the corresponding elements: “titanium, vanadium, chromium, manganese, iron, cobalt…”

  _____________________

  O, proudly, playing a new Schubert piece, and with great flair demonstrating how it requires “crossed hands.”

  I am quite amazed and impressed, and I clap.

  _____________________

  7-8-15:

  The day before O’s eighty-second birthday, and we got bad news with his latest CAT scan—bad—much worse than expected:

  Not only have the tumors regrown, the cancer has spread: kidneys, lungs, skin. They are no longer talking about doing another embolization … Doctors advise starting Pembro infusions—the immunotherapy still in clinical trials.

  Scared.

  O wants to go ahead with his birthday party, and doesn’t want people to know. “Auden always said one must celebrate one’s birthday,” he says.

  _____________________

  Undated Note:

  “Hey, Beautiful,” I say to O, whenever I come into the bedroom.

  _____________________

  7-9-15—O’s birthday:

  At his party—

  O asks me to go get the bottle of 1948 Calvados—a rare brandy given to him as a gift years ago and sealed in a wooden box. I open it for him.

  I: “Do you want a glass?”

  O: “No,” he says, and takes a swig, eyes closed. “Lovely,” he pronounces and looks around the room. “Who would like some?”

  Later, he tells me he’d forgotten that he had left the Calvados to a friend in his will.

  First Date

  A PENCIL SHARPENER

  “Hello, Sir!” I said.

  “Hello, Sir!” said Ali, smiling.

  He sure is a handsome devil, I thought to myself—his trim moustache, his slicked-back black hair—a Pakistani Omar Sharif, Funny Girl period.

  “How is everything?”

  “Everything good,” Ali said, reaching over the counter to shake my hand. He has seemed as happy as ever in his new shop.

  Just then, a customer stepped in and asked for a pack of cigarettes—American Spirits. He was in his late twenties and had blond hair. He wore a classic, light-blue striped seersucker jacket, a crisp white shirt, and jeans rolled at the bottom, and carried a Jack Spade canvas briefcase. He looked like someone who designs apps for iPhones. He looked like a million bucks. He looked like he’d be a millionaire one day.

  As he reached for his wallet, he remembered something—I could see this in his body even before he uttered any words: “Oh! I almost forgot—and one of your pencil sharpeners!”

  This I did not expect—would not ever have expected—him to say. I watched in disbelief as Ali directed him to a back corner of the smoke shop.

  A pencil sharpener? Who buys pencil sharpeners anymore? Who sells them?

  Ali read my mind: “Left from the stationery store,” he said in his deadpan way.

  Ah, yes, the failed stationery store that his boss had for six months before giving up on it—more money in lotto tickets and cigarettes than in paper clips and notepads, I guess.

  Ali and I watched silently as the young man in the seersucker jacket reached up to take something from a high shelf and returned to the counter holding, yes, a pencil sharpener. It was purple. “Last one,” he murmured with a tone of amazement.

  I don’t remember if I asked the young man, or if he simply saw the questioning look on my face, but he turned to me and said, “This is the best pencil sharpener.” But he didn’t stop there. “The best. You can’t find another one this good.”

  I nodded in agreement, convinced.

  “I ran over my old one.” He looked at Ali. “That was the last one you had, too, wasn’t it?—My lucky day.”

  Ali looked completely blasé: “Hundreds more in the basement.”

  This made me laugh.

  I watched the young man pay Ali and noticed just then that the pack of American Spirits was exactly the same light blue as the stripes on his jacket, the same light blue as his lighter, and the same light blue as his dazzling blue eyes. I had no doubt that every detail of his appearance had b
een thought out, refined, tested on previous nights—selfies taken and studied—until he had arrived at this curated version of himself, equal parts Mad Men, Entourage, and This American Life. I could easily envision his apartment, with its retro touches, and his Kate Spade-accessorized girlfriend, and his terrier dog.

  But still, I had a question for this young man: “Why a pencil sharpener? Why a pencil?”

  “Hey, I make mistakes sometimes.”

  “Excellent answer,” I said.

  The young man waved “so long” and was out of there, probably meeting friends at the Art Bar next door.

  I said good night to Ali and headed south on Eighth toward a favorite neighborhood restaurant. On my way, I walked through Abingdon Square Park. To enter was to step back in time—twice: once, to an earlier age in New York, the early twentieth century, with the wrought-iron lampposts and benches, and secondly, to 2009, when I first moved here and discovered this park on walks on insomniac nights. A wave of nostalgia washed over me. I couldn’t just dash through on my way to the restaurant. I had to sit down for a moment and soak it in.

  The light here was so pretty—the yellowy light from the lampposts, light from apartment windows, some stars overhead. At this hour, just before closing, there were only a few people here in the park. None were talking on cell phones or even looking at cell phones. There was a homeless man splayed out on one bench, a couple talking quietly, a guy with a dog, and to the far right, sitting right under a lamppost, a tall, dark-haired, bearded man reading a book and smoking a cigar. He was perhaps in his mid-thirties. His wife and baby daughter were at home nearby, I imagined. He was stealing a little time for himself. The cigar had just an inch or two left—he had been here awhile. He was the very picture of a man, a certain type of very masculine man: a New Yorker, but somehow imbued with the spirit of his European forebears, too.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. It was such a beautiful picture, him sitting there under that light. He was such a beautiful picture. He pulled on the cigar, leaned over, studying his book. I wished, I so wished, I had my camera with me; I would have taken a photo. I tried to dissuade myself from doing so but couldn’t—I had to at least go talk to him.