Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(3)
Usually it went like this: Someone digs up his corpse and initiates CPR; he revives in an instant, no problem. I see him walking, talking, a latter-day Lazarus with a flattop and a beautiful body and a crooked grin. Back from death but unchanged by death, with one crucial difference: He does not recognize me. It is I, not he, who has been transformed.
For a while, I tried going on dates—dinner, a movie, that kind of thing. I met a few nice guys. But I could not disguise my lack of interest. There was one man I saw for about a month. His name was, you guessed it, Steve. Even though we had been intimate from the start, we didn’t end up spending the night together until the fourth week. I can still picture the moment when he turned over to go to sleep. His back, illuminated by moonlight, reminded me of the disappeared Steve’s.
That was the last time I tried that for a long spell. From then on, I would send them home or, depending on the situation, leave myself. Insomnia was my excuse: I would rather not-sleep in my own bed, I explained. This was not altogether true. I would have liked to stay but could no more imagine falling asleep with someone else than I could imagine falling in love again.
Curiously, though, the reverse sometimes occurred: I would be with a lover, before I made my exit. I’d have him wrapped in my arms as we talked in the aimless, dreamy way that lovers do, like two analysands to an unseen Jung. A pause stretches into a long lull and I hear that unmistakable change in breathing—he has fallen asleep, and improbably, I feel responsible, as though I, of all people, possess the arms of Hypnos. It seems like a small miracle. But here’s the rub: As I draw him closer and nuzzle his neck, I cannot help remembering what the Greeks so wisely knew: The god of sleep has an identical twin, Thanatos, the god of death.
Spring Shadows
BLACK CROW
Five or six months after Steve died, I got involved with a guy named Luke—nothing serious, a casual affair. I met him at the Whole Foods in Pacific Heights, where he worked as a clerk. Luke was two decades younger than me and different from Steve in every conceivable way except one: He looked like him. Tall, built, with a boxer’s nose, a prominent jaw, and hands as large and heavy as catcher’s mitts. I did not see the resemblance until a few months and many tequila shots later. Actually, a friend—concerned by my infatuation with Luke, a hard-drinking, motorcycle-driving, tattooed Texan with a temper fueled by enormous amounts of steroids—pointed it out to me. By then, I had long since learned that Luke not only had a boyfriend but also another job and went by another name. He was a porn star, a phrase I do not use lightly. He really was a star, his made-up name appearing above the title, in dozens of hard-core films. I would not have known because watching porn had never been my thing, but I did not care any more than I cared about the boyfriend. Truth is, I found it fascinating. The very idea of reinventing oneself—giving oneself a new name, new body, a radically different life—held great appeal. I had begun unconsciously doing so myself.
One night around that time, I cruised a good-looking guy at the gym, as did he cruise me. I saw him in the shower, and then he followed me out of the gym and into the parking lot. “My name’s Shane,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand.
“I’m Bill,” I said, then added, “Billy. You can call me Billy.”
It just came out; I didn’t even think about it. The name fit in a way that Bill, what I had been called almost my whole life, no longer did. The name is considered a diminutive; I’m aware of that. I was called Billy as a boy. But in middle age, it did not sound that way to me. On the contrary: Billy sounded bigger than me, tougher, invulnerable.
Along with the name came a shaved head, a beard, more muscles, and a tattoo. I had always loved tattoos and, were it not for Steve, who found them repellent for some reason, I would have had at least a sleeveful by then. But something unexpected—unexpected to me, at least—had come with Steve’s death. What he thought or would have thought, which used to seem more important than how I viewed myself, had changed entirely. I still felt Steve looking on constantly, but with death he had left behind all judgments. He no longer approved or disapproved. He didn’t cast a vote. He wanted for me, I felt, one thing, only one thing: To be happy.
I designed a tattoo that symbolized the end of one life and the beginning of another—Roman numerals for 10/10, the month and day Steve died—and had it inked on a pulse point. It hurt like hell but I loved it. I went over to Luke’s afterward to celebrate, tequila and weed serving as my anesthesia. Upon getting home very late that night, I pulled the blinds in every room of my apartment. I had recently taken everything off the walls, all our old pictures and posters, and gotten rid of a bunch of furniture, including the bed Steve and I had slept in all those years, the bed he’d died in, leaving only a foam-rubber mattress on the floor. It looked like a place where someone was only half-moved in or half-moved out, either scenario being plausible to explain my current state. The hardwood floors gleamed in the moonlight. Cool, foggy air blew through the open windows. I got stoned and put on my iPod. This was a period when I would listen to the same few songs over and over again—Bj?rk’s “Hyperballad,” “Unravel,” and “Undo,” Radiohead’s “There, There,” and Joni Mitchell’s “Black Crow,” an undanceable song to which I would dance for so long I would sweat. Music, I found, was the most effective balm to my grief.