Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(25)

I think now about that summer night on the roof, and how many people I have known or loved that I’ve lost since then: my mother, three friends, two neighbors, and my agent, Wendy, who was like a second mother to me. Her many friends and relatives came together for a memorial one afternoon last week. It was beautiful, joy-filled. Irishman that I am, I wept all the way through. Oh, well. I’ve come to believe that a good cry is like a car wash for the soul.

Afterward, I started walking, walked past a subway entrance on Lexington and kept going. It was dark by now, and cold. But the autumn night receded and Lex magically turned into Fifth as I called to mind that warm afternoon spent with Wendy in June. We’d had lunch and decided to walk back to her office rather than take a cab. She was about a head taller than me, so whenever I glanced at her it was against a backdrop of blue sky and high-rises and American flags fluttering on Fifth Avenue. I felt like I was on a dolly-cam, seeing her through the lens of a movie camera. She wore a big smile and a sleeveless dress. We were talking about how much we both loved New York—she as a native, I as a newcomer—and all the while, I was aware that I was glad to be here right now and wanted to remember as much of this as I could. And I do. The short clip of our walk plays on a continuous loop.

When I got home, Oliver called. “Come downstairs,” he said, “everything’s marinating.” We set the table and opened a bottle. He’d grilled salmon and steamed peas. For dessert, we split an apple; a perfect meal. We turned on the radio. It was “Beethoven Awareness Month” on our classical radio station, and it began playing Op. 133, the “Great Fugue” with which he had originally ended one of his late quartets. I am not well versed in classical music; had I not heard the announcer, I would have guessed it was something contemporary—even composed this very day. Oliver told me that in Beethoven’s time the piece was considered almost unintelligible by listeners and so demanding technically as to be nearly unplayable. Conversation came to a stop and we just listened, the music at once chaotic and violent, mysterious and gorgeous.

Behind Oliver, through a large picture window facing north, Eighth Avenue unfurled as far as the eye could see. I have this thing where sometimes I try to catch the moment when all the traffic lights on Eighth align and turn red, their number multiplied countless times by the brake lights from stopped cars and taxicabs. It doesn’t happen often at all, traffic lights seeming to have their own sense of time, and Oliver never quite catches it. So I watch for the two of us. Finally: “There, there it is, see?”

He turns to find a fiery red Milky Way on the streets of Manhattan.

And in a blink, the lights start turning green.





ON A TYPEWRITER


I don’t know what to say Says O

So he lets his fingers say What they must be thinking:

This is the first time I gave typed on ages !!!

The typos being not typos But notes from a dying language Qwertyuiop

l t ud rrr jpe miy gos mp ;ry ud der how it goes mpw

The starts and stops and flights of thought Mimicking his

_____________________

M,u good fremd BILLY has put in a new ribbon He types

2345670asdfghjkl; ]xcvnm,.rqwert67890-=



Should I then return to using te y typewriter ?



I think this is, in a q er tai n way, beautiful

I THINK YJIS IS, ON A V CERTAIN WAY, BEAUTIFUL



THIS IS, IN A CERTAIN WAY, BEAUTIFUL



THIS IS BEAUTIFUL



THIS



IS



—3-1-13





AT THE SKATEBOARD PARK


I walked up to the skateboard park off the West Side Highway at Twenty-Second Street. I didn’t just end up there while walking, as I sometimes do; I went there directly, expressly. I am drawn by the sound, by the sight—the skateboarders diving and floating and flying; the way they avidly watch one another from the rim; their rituals, their unspoken rules—and by the feeling it gives me.

“Cool, isn’t it!” said a scrappy-looking boy who had been watching me watch all of them. Had he read my mind, or was it an expression on my face?

I nodded. “So cool. Mesmerizing.”

We spoke through the high metal fence that surrounds the park. I was standing on the western side, one foot on one of the round pedestals put there for viewers, the other atop the concrete bearing wall. I held onto the fence with both hands. The day was gorgeous, high forties, maybe even fifty degrees, sun. “Wish it would stay like this all winter,” I overheard one of the skaters say. The park would be closed for the winter in a few days.

“Some of these guys—they’re good, man,” the boy said, glancing over his shoulder. “You know, you been watching.”

This kid was small, five foot six or so, and skinny. He’d only skated once or twice so far, and he was not nearly as good as any of them. But in a way, I was glad to see this; it would be easy to take for granted how good most of these boys were. But the canyon on the west side was very challenging, with its sheer, twenty-five-foot drop—dangerous. None of them wore helmets or padding.

It seemed like an especially good group today—somehow of a higher caliber; there was a certain intensity in the air. Each had a different style, depending as much on body type as on level of fearlessness. One kid used his arms to help accelerate, sort of like how you use your feet to pump on a swing. Another, part Asian, had an especially elegant way of moving, sinuous. A shorter stocky black guy was rock-solid. And then there was a kid who looked like an Arab prince. He was extraordinary, the way he would ride the rim, then swoop down into the canyon and then fly up, touch the front of his skateboard, land back on it, dive down again, fly back up, tap the rim—extraordinary. No panther could be more accurate or delicate, elegant, than these creatures—the gentle stepping off, stepping back on. A few times, there was spontaneous applause. I’d never heard that before. These boys were not just skating for the fun of it, the thrill; they were competing for “who’s best.”