Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(13)

I feel guilty now that I projected my unhappiness onto the subways. The L and the 4/5? They did right by me, getting me home and to work on time and safely, and each brought its share of sights and discoveries. While waiting for a 4/5 one mercilessly humid summer afternoon, I found unexpected refuge from the suffocating heat under a gigantic fan installed in the ceiling at Union Square. I’d never noticed it before. But there I stood, gratefully, as if in the final leg of a car wash, my sweat-drenched clothes getting a jet drying.

It was near that same spot on an equally hot day that I saw a young woman faint just steps from the platform’s edge. She wilted in slow motion, but at the exact opposite speed two people came to her aid. By the time I reached the scene, she was in very capable hands, literally. There was a man cradling her head, who turned out to be a doctor, and at her side, holding her hand, was a preternaturally calm woman who looked like a yoga instructor. When the fainted woman came to, she looked terrified and confused, but the calm woman calmed her and the doctor doctored her, and in due time, the two walked her outside for some fresh air.

Crosstown moments come to mind too: Were it not for the L, I would never have met Pablo, the young Dominican who manned the Mister Softee ice cream truck parked outside the station at First and Fourteenth. Stopping for a cone and a how’s-it-going always made heading home easier. At the other end of the line was Joseph, a disabled artist whose drawings I collected and whose dedication inspired me. If Joseph, wheelchair-bound, could get himself from his SRO hotel off Times Square to the Eighth Avenue station every day to make and sell his work—even in the dead of winter—what excuse did I have for not practicing my art?

I had nearly given up writing at that point in my life, too preoccupied and distracted by my full-time job. Moreover, by January, I had begun to despair about my living situation. I couldn’t face another year in that cave, and Oliver and I had decided that, for us, living together didn’t make sense—it would not suit either him or me, each of us needing his own space. Perhaps the ride is over, I thought; the turnstiles that swung so freely are locked shut: Station Closed. But what to do, where to, next? To be a New Yorker is one thing, but to decide consciously to stay, to live out one’s life here? That’s another. I wasn’t sure I had what it takes. By which I did not mean simply fortitude but something more, something less effable.

That is when luck or fate in the form of a New Yorker named Homer, fittingly enough, intervened. Homer, the doorman in Oliver’s building, told me of a just-vacated apartment on the eleventh floor—three floors above Oliver’s place. He let me see it. Many things about the place struck me as exactly right but, most of all, the light. The small apartment was window-lined. To the south, I could see a downtown cityscape, and to the west, a sliver of the Hudson River. Everywhere I looked, I saw life.

I have been here for six years now. I have not yet and expect I never will cover the windows with blinds or curtains. I’d rather not say exactly where in New York it is. All one needs to know is that, whether you live here, too, hope to, or are visiting, you and I may meet for a fleeting moment, perhaps today even, on a subway.

Just the other night, I had a nice encounter while heading home. Sitting near me was a man about my age sharing a two-seater with a suitcase, a duffel bag, a backpack, and a stuffed garbage bag. He caught my eye (or did I catch his?); something in his beaten-down expression looked familiar. I turned off my iPod.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

He shook his head dolefully. “Too much for one man to take.”

“Yeah?”

That was all he needed—the conversational equivalent of a starting whistle—and he was off, telling me in a rush of words how he was supposed to move today and a buddy with a truck had promised to help him out. The buddy didn’t show. And now here he was on fucking leg three of a solo relay marathon.

“That sucks, man,” I said, “really sucks. But you know what’s at the end of all this?”

He looked stumped, or just plain exhausted.

“A six-pack.”

The Moving Man cracked a smile.

“Have one for me,” I told him as I got off at my stop.





Couple on Seventh and Greenwich





NOTES FROM A JOURNAL

Undated Note—June 2011:

The difference between us in two words: “Me, too,” I say.

“I, too,” O corrects.

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6-28-11:

O and I at Miyagi, on “conversion experiences,” as he calls them, life-changing moments, positive and negative, each listing his own: I tell him about discovering Joni and Joan Didion and Diane Arbus and Edmund White, and about the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. And he tells me about Janá?ek and the Romantic composers—Schubert, Brahms—and Luria, and the community of the Deaf, and about losing his mother. And we talked about those we have shared.

We were eating outside. All at once, “Oh!” he exclaims, seeing a firefly, Tinker Bell-like at our feet.

“Isn’t it amazing!”

“Yes, but don’t—as I have told you before—eat one.”

“Ah, the dreaded death by firefly …”

O nods his head very seriously.

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7-5-11: Ideas for O’s birthday present: