Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(27)

There seemed to be more crashes. They were getting tired. But they were trying to beat the sun, get as many skates in as they could, outrace their own shadows. Soon, they’d have to park their boards for the winter, snow on the streets of New York.

On the periphery, a few girls watched. I understood why. This was a mating ritual, the boys peacocking for the girls who would take them to their beds, if they desired them.

Some boys were packing up for the day. The crashes were taking their toll. More than one was nursing a sore wrist. A kid with shaggy long hair limped up and fell into a heap on the other side of the fence near where I was standing. He hadn’t noticed me. He had a bleeding cut on his arm. He took a long draw from a bottle of Coke. He took out his iPhone and checked messages. He hiked up one of his pant legs and rubbed his ankle. He lit a cigarette.

Finally, I decided to go home. By coincidence (or was it?), the scrappy kid came out of an exit and began walking with me, his deck wedged under an arm. We talked about how cool it was—the park. “I got a broke toe and a broke arm, but when I’m in there, I forget,” he said.

Now, the pain was setting in, darkness falling. But where he’d been before—behind that fence, where boys live in the air? There’s no pain there, nothing’s broken.

He asked me where I was going, and I said I was going home. I wasn’t sure, but I again thought he might be flirting with me. It wouldn’t be the first time a street kid had tried to hustle me.

There was a pause, in which anything might have been said. And indeed, what he said next was completely unexpected: “A dollar for a slice of pizza?”

It took me a good two seconds before I understood how wrong I’d been. I had to laugh at my middle-aged vanity. I reached for my wallet. “Sure, of course, that’s a reasonable price for the lesson you gave me.”

“Cool, man. I was working up my nerve to ask for that.”

That takes nerve? I thought. What about diving down those concrete walls? “No problem. What’s your name?”

“Cube.”

“Cube? Really?”

He grinned, found out. “Chris.”

I asked Chris how old he was.

“Twenty-two. I am new to everything,” he added; it both did and did not sound like a non sequitur. “New to skateboarding, new to New York, new language.”

I took this in.

“What’s your name, sir?”

“I’m Billy.”

“What is it again?”

I took off my sunglasses for the first time all afternoon. He looked straight into my eyes.

“Now I see you,” he said. “Billy. Thank you, Billy.”





A Small Parade





NOTES FROM A JOURNAL

11-15-12:

I saw a young woman on a Manhattan-bound subway train wearing a knockoff Louis Vuitton head scarf and false eyelashes long enough to make a daddy longlegs envious. Her look—a sort of Sally-Bowles-does-Brooklyn—was complete with a matching knockoff L.V. handbag and umbrella. She was seated next to a young man as dashing in his way as she was adorable, but she took no notice of him at all as she was completely absorbed in a paperback titled something like, Becoming a Practical Thinker.

I had an impulse to tear the book from her hands.

“Don’t do that!” I wanted to say. “Practicality will not get you where you want to go. Believe me—I speak from experience!”

Looking back, every life-altering decision I’ve ever made has seemed, at first blush, misguided, misjudged, or plain foolish—and ultimately turned out to be the opposite: every seemingly wrong person I’ve fallen for, every big trip I’ve splurged on, every great apartment taken that I could not realistically afford. And, really, what is pursuing writing but a case study in an impractical career …?

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12-30-12: On a red-eye to Reykjavik for New Year’s Eve:

Leaving New York, the city looked embroidered in gold thread.

Now, clouds and stars, and what sounds like a hymn: “Craving miracles …” Bj?rk sings.

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1-1-13:

Supper of Skyr, biscuits, and tea in our tiny hotel room. Recovering. Snow falling.

Last night, a New Year’s Eve dinner at Bj?rk’s, was like being safely in the middle of a very happy war; a huge bonfire on the beach across the street from her home encircled by people singing; fireworks going off in every direction, from every home, all night long, and culminating in a chaotically beautifully, or beautifully chaotic fireworks display at midnight in the town square.

As if the sky were full of shooting stars.

As the church bells pealed twelve times.

As the ground was snow-covered, white, the floor of a cloud.

As everyone kissed and hugged one another.

Bottles of champagne and Brennivin, an Icelandic schnapps—clear and strong.

As the New Year began.

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1-13-13: Home a week and still adjusting, wishing in some ways we were still in Iceland. The gentleness of life there suits me … suits us.

People even swim gently there, not kicking and splashing—never—as swimmers do in New York, where all seem to be training for triathlons in their minds.

From Reykjavik, we took a little prop plane up north to Akureyri. It was already dark at three in the afternoon, and we went directly to the community pool. I swam some laps then stood in the shallow end. I saw an almost miraculous sight: in the adjacent lap pool, where a swim team was practicing, the outreaching arms of swimmers doing the backstroke and crawl—there must have been twelve or so—and from my pavement-level view, all I could see were the motions of the arms, so elegant, smooth, rising, arcing, falling, like the hands of a dozen clocks, all set at slightly different times, in slightly different time zones.