Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(12)

Then he walked toward a car parked on the street. He put the roses and his can of beer on the hood—his desk. He put the newspaper down, and then hesitated, pen in hand, as if suddenly self-conscious. “You write it,” he said. “I don’t have good handwriting.”

I assured him that it would be fine.

“OK, Billy, this is only for you,” he said, and slowly, painstakingly, carefully forming each letter, he wrote his poem over the map of constellations. When he finished, he read it aloud, a koan to the heavens.



Sky why



So Much



Pain is



The Rain



Drops eyes



To Your



Story



We both looked at the words of the poem on the scrap of paper on the empty street under the High Line and the darkening sky. Something passed between us. Both of us had tears in our eyes.

We shook hands and thanked each other. He gave me my poem and three roses, leaving nine for himself to give to other New Yorkers he would meet that night under the starry sky.

“We will see each other again,” I told him. “I know it.”

I turned and began walking. It was only then that I read the text accompanying the sky map in the newspaper:

This week the planet Venus will pass in front of the sun, becoming evident as a small black circle slowly moving across the solar disk. Such an occurrence is called a transit of Venus, one of the rarest of astronomical events.

It went on to say that only six times in recorded history have humans witnessed the transit of Venus in front of the sun, a chance meeting of two celestial bodies. After this one coming up on Tuesday, the next transit wouldn’t be for 105 years.

When I got to the corner, I looked back to wave at the poet, but he was gone.





NOTES FROM A JOURNAL

1-8-11:

O: “I don’t regret the things I’ve done but those I haven’t done. In that way, I’m like a criminal …”

_____________________

2-13-11:

O: “Can one enjoy two pleasures at the same time?”

I: “Like what? Give me an example.”

O: “The taste of broccoli and the feeling of your leathered thigh.”

I: “Broccoli? That’s your example?”

O: “It’s co-perception, isn’t it? They get fused in a certain way but don’t get de-identified …”

_____________________

3-17-11:

O tripped on a rug and fell in the office, fractured his hip. In hospital.

Coming out of anesthesia this morning and seeing me, O said, “You look very pretty … If it were under less public conditions, I would kiss you.”

I kissed him anyway.

_____________________

6-7-11:

In Seattle, I call O from the hospital where my mother is clearly near death. He urges me to go out with friends and have some laughs. “When my mother died,” he tells me, “my oldest friend called up straightaway and told me three scandalously obscene jokes in a row. I laughed uproariously, and then the tears came.”

I follow his advice.

_____________________

6-19-11:

One morning O tells me he had dreamt the word nephological (the study of clouds); another day, it was triboluminescence.

I: “Such a lovely word—why triboluminescence?”

O: “I like lightbulbs.”

This didn’t seem to answer my question but I liked it anyway.

He asked me to bring the volume from the OED—and a magnifying glass.

O: “Well, that’s interesting! Tribology … Tribometer … Let’s see …” He keeps searching. “Here we are! ‘Triboluminescence: the quality of emitting light under tremendous friction or violent pressure—1879.’”

_____________________



First Day Out of Jail



Undated Note:

O: “How much can one enter, I wonder, another’s insides—see through their eyes, feel through their feelings? And, does one really want to …?”





THE MOVING MAN


When the lease on my first New York apartment came up for renewal, the landlord raised my rent. I could no longer justify what I would be paying for a small, sixth-floor walk-up, so I decided to move. I found a relatively inexpensive place on the East Side, a few blocks from the First Avenue L station. I took it on impulse—my default mode, I see now. Within days, I knew I had made a terrible mistake. The apartment was a cave. The building was a partying frat house. Pigeons lined every sill, cooing and shitting and grooming themselves, despite my shooing, as if to let me know they had been there long, long before me. What hit me just as hard was how much I hated my new subway lines. I came to dread taking the 4/5 from Union Square to work in the Financial District every morning; it was cacophonous and crowded and, more than most subways in my eyes, irredeemably grimy.

Worse, really, was the L, which I’d take home from Oliver’s on the West Side. Not the train itself, which was fast and frequent, but what it represented. In that direction, the L is packed with people on their way to Brooklyn, whether going home or out partying. They always seemed remarkably hip and gay (in the original sense of the word) and young, whereas I felt like an old man being taken away from where he really wanted to be.