Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(19)

This is New York in the summer.

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Undated Notes—June 2012:

Garbage overflows from trash cans. The streets are filled with garbage and dirty water. The air stinks. But there is a warm pinkish-gold glow on the streets from the setting sun. Gorgeousness. We are closer to the sun in New York, I think.

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A Sunday: seeing a guy scraping off the mess of ugly flyers taped to a streetlight pole—not a maintenance worker, just a guy from the neighborhood. I watched for a while then asked him about it. He said he comes out every other week or so. “Remember, you have the legal right to rip them down,” he explains. “Go to NYC.Gov/sanitation.” He spray paints the pole to its original gray color. “Today I have gray and green. Sometimes I get red, too—for the fire alarm poles.”

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7-29-12:

In bed, O reads to me from Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, one of his favorite books, which I’d found in his library: “This volume contains, in the form of a Journal, a history of our voyage, and a sketch of those observations in Natural History and Geology, which I think will possess some interest for the general reader …”





At Home





THE SAME TAXI TWICE


It’s not like on TV—taking a taxi in New York City. It’s almost never as interesting or colorful as they make it look, except for when it is—and when it is, stuff happens that you could never make up. I once had a cabbie from Sri Lanka who looked so young one might have legitimately wondered if he was old enough to drive. Turned out, he was twenty-five. He told me he’d been in New York for two years and was saving up money to bring his wife and parents to New York. He hadn’t gotten married yet, though. He hadn’t even met his future wife; his parents back home would arrange a marriage at a given time. We discussed some details about how the courtship would go, and then he told me, “She has to be a virgin.”

I hadn’t asked about this, but I agreed. “Definitely, yes, she should definitely be a virgin.” I was coming from drinks with friends, and I was kind of buzzed.

We came to a red light. “And I have to be, too,” he added.

“A virgin?”

“Yes,” he said solemnly.

Hold on, I thought, is that really a good idea? Shouldn’t someone know what they’re doing in this situation?

“So, let me get this straight: you’ve never had sex at all?”

“Never.”

“Not even almost? Never fooled around—maybe here in New York …?”

He shook his head.

I thought about this through a couple streetlights. I could never even guess how many times I’ve had sex in my lifetime, and with how many different people. I can hardly remember what I like about it most. But this much I could tell him: “You are going to love it. You’re going to really like it a lot. It’s amazing.”

The cabbie from Sri Lanka shot me a look. “Really?”

“Really. You have nothing to worry about.”

It is the enforced intimacy of being in a cab, an enclosed space, for a finite period of time, which makes such conversations possible. I’ve sometimes wondered if the screen between driver and passenger, not unlike that in a confessional booth, adds to this impression. You might say things you would never say otherwise, or do things you’d never do, knowing you’ll never see them again.

But this is not always so.

One night a cabbie picked me up on Wall Street, and we had a nice chat on the FDR. As we approached Eighteenth and First, where I lived at the time, he spoke up: “Drop you off on the right, middle of the block?”

“Yeah, how did you know that?”

“I remember you; I’ve given you a ride before—last year.” He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Sunny,” he said.

Sunny. Yes: The name that went with the face, the demeanor.

What are the odds of having the same taxi driver twice?

He told me: There are 13,800 cabs in New York City, he had been driving for eighteen years, dozens of fares a day, and this had never happened to him before.

“How about that …”

We said good night and goodbye without much fuss.

“See you again, Sunny,” I said.

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I love those late-night rides home. I remember once catching a cab way uptown somewhere after I’d spent the better part of the night with a man who had made me dinner—pot roast and apple pie. I still smelled like him.

It was very cold outside, and with a punishing wind; some were saying it was the coldest day in the history of New York City (an endearing hyperbole). I asked the cab driver if the cold was good for business.

“Yes,” he murmured. He had a bit of an accent.

We were flying down Second Avenue, hitting all the lights. I’d been struggling to get my seat belt on—goddamn seat belts in taxis, they only work about half the time—but finally gave up; I trusted him to get me home safely.

“It must be fun,” I said dreamily, “driving like this when the streets are empty …” I was thinking if it were me behind the wheel, I guess.

It took a moment before his reply came: “No, not fun. Stressful. It’s always stressful.”