Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(16)

“Here? What do you mean, ‘here’?” It’s as if he had just arrived in America, I point out, as if he were just visiting from England for a few days.

“In fact, I’ve been here for fifty-two years, since the summer before you were born!”

Here before I was born: This still surprises me. Sometimes I feel older than O.

_____________________

3-17-12: O: “I don’t know if a passion for symmetry is an intolerance of asymmetry. Do you?”

I: “I think one can be passionate about both. I think one can embody both.”

O: “Good. Very good.”

_____________________

4-7-12:

A not untypical dinner:

O snipped the ends off the string beans with his cuticle scissors, “coiffing” them for the steam. I trimmed the broccoli. We shared a gigantic carrot, passing it back and forth between us, while having some of O’s specially mixed tea—a blend of smoky Lapsang Souchong and brisk Darjeeling.

We left the salmon to marinate. I read the paper, O went into the bedroom and did fifty-five of his signature crunches—exhaling on the first, then holding it five seconds on the second. O likes things to be in fives. I grilled the salmon atop the stove, five minutes each side, and made some toast from leftover challah bread.

I opened a bottle of wine.

I was feeling blue, I didn’t know why.

To divert me, cheer me, O told a story of a Tourette’s patient who was a surgeon and would smoke while exercising every morning. This made me laugh; I hadn’t heard it before. After eating, O got up and found the story in An Anthropologist on Mars—his large-print edition. As I lay on the couch, he sat at the table and read the entire story, from start to finish, in the most animated voice, lavishly drawing out the more unusual words. I peeked over the couch a few times to watch him reading, the book just a couple inches from his face. It’s amazing he can read at all—he’s so nearly completely blind. I clapped when he came to the end.

We returned to the kitchen. His wine was “too sour,” so he added a packet of artificial sweetener to it—“Much better”—and drank it down. We talked about this and that, and then I said I needed to go to bed. He absentmindedly reached for the bottle of port, uncorked it, and took a swig. “Nothing like port,” he murmured.

Next morning, O reported that he had had a dream in which he was at a “charming little café in the shadows of two giant oversized mushrooms.” On the menu? “Two kinds of fern salad and a carrot salad with 7,217 different carrots.” He’d drawn the number (and a picture of the mushrooms) on the kitchen whiteboard when he woke in the middle of the night.

_____________________

4-8-12:

O: “Are you conscious of your thoughts before language embodies them?”





THE THANK-YOU MAN


One evening, I headed out to see Hailey’s band at a bar in Brooklyn, not the kind of thing I’d normally do with work the next day, but how often does one have a friend who has a band playing at a bar on a summer Thursday? Just outside my front door, I crossed paths with a tall black man wearing a black suit and tie and riding a silver bicycle—a picture of elegance, an angel on Eighth Avenue—and sensed I’d made the right decision.

The subway car was as packed as at rush hour. Face-to-face with a kid with his nose in a Kindle, it struck me that sometimes what one gets—and gets to keep—on public transportation is not an experience but an unforgettable expression. When the subway came to a stop, snapping the kid out of whatever world he was in, he looked at once startled, confused (what stop is this?), anxious, irritated, and finally, relieved. His face went blank, he returned to his reading, and I was left to marvel: This kid had no idea he was born a century too late to be a silent-film star.

I got out at Bedford and began following the directions I’d jotted down earlier. A main street had been blocked off for some reason, so now the directions no longer made sense, and I didn’t have a map app or GPS on my phone. I took my bearings. Something in the air smelled like summer from my childhood—mown grass, gasoline, the dirt of a baseball field. I heard the crack of a bat hitting a ball, and I followed the sound.

I took a left, then a right. At the end of the street, I spotted a guy sitting on a couch positioned on the dock of a warehouse. I approached. His feet were up; two beer bottles were at his side. This looked like the reward at the end of a long day.

“Nice night,” I commented.

“Yeah, just taking it all in.”

I looked over his shoulder at the jumble of boxes and machines, trying to make out what this place was. He told me it was a bunch of things—a foundry, a forklift repair shop, artist studios, storage. I asked if I could take a look. He didn’t answer right away; he was considering the request. I thought he’d say no. Finally: “Sure, just … be careful.”

Now I was really curious. I hopped up. The farther in I went, the more interesting it got—a junkyard of seemingly useless stuff, it spoke of broken machines and dreams and failed inventions and road trips that ended with shot carburetors. The scent in the air was of dirt and engine oil and sweat.

I didn’t linger, not wanting to outstay my welcome. “Really cool,” I said as I hopped back down.

“Thank you,” he replied. He took a swig.