Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(33)

I told him that was absolutely wonderful. “Took your family? Your kids?”

“No, no, just me. I surprise my brother.” He then went on to tell me in elaborate detail about how he had done it, arriving four days earlier than planned. He told me about each plane ride, how long each layover was, where he stayed, up until the final moment when he stepped out from behind a door and surprised his brother, “who almost fall down.” His three other brothers and his sister were in on it. Ali smiled with great pleasure as he told me this story. As did I. I was touched: that he was talking about his siblings, not his parents, or his own wife and kids—about the special bond between siblings. I get that.

As Ali and I were talking, a tall and very built black man came into the store to buy lotto tickets. He overheard us as he was studying the lotto sheets. “That’s nothing,” he couldn’t help commenting, “I’m one of fifteen kids. Fifteen!” Then he said, sort of under his breath, “My daddy couldn’t help himself, always out prowling, probably had lots more kids that I don’t even know about—Haiti, you know.”

Ali cut in: “That’s the thing about third-world countries: There no TV, no movies, no video games—nothing to do—so people have babies.”

The black man laughed: “That’s right—only thing to do is fuck.”

He got his lotto ticket and said so long. He held the door open for a tiny, bent-over old man, bent like an elbow at the lumbar spine. He leaned his cane against the counter. “You’re back,” he said to Ali, glancing up sideways.

“That’s right,” Ali said, “I came back just so I could take your money.”

The bent man smiled.

Ali turned and reached for a pack of Marlboro reds.

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Undated Note:

I see a young guy hustling mixtapes on Fourteenth Street—such a common sight; usually I walk right past but for some reason I stop tonight: “I’ll take one.” I pull a five-dollar bill from my wallet.

“I can give you change, sir,” the young man offers, overly polite, “a ten for that twenty you got there.”

I laugh. “You could, could you? How nice. No, five’s what I can do.” I hand him the bill, take the CD, and ask, “Can I take your picture?”

“My picture? All right.”

I take his picture.

He hands me his CD and looks me in the eye. “Do you even want it?”

“No,” I answer, “not really.”

I give it back.

“Thank you, sir.”

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7-4-13:

An enchanted Fourth of July:

A lovely scene and vibe up on the rooftop to watch fireworks: lots of neighbors—old and young—and the cityscape behind us. Gorgeous sunset, the sky turning a mint green, the water, a silvery blue, and boats on the Hudson. A fresh breeze. Happiness in the air—one could feel it, and not just because O and I had gotten stoned in the apartment. Everyone felt it and commented on it—the beauty of the scene.

O held onto the railing and watched and talked as thoughts came into his head, describing in clear, precise detail, as if dictating a case history, the “superfluity” of images within his mind’s eye—the one “gift” given to him in exchange for his impaired vision: how the triangular park appears to jut out from the roof railing; how he sees “flakes” of retinal snow when he looks at the sky; how his vision is cut off suddenly by his blind eye, and this looks like “a trapezius of irregularly shaped cardboard.”

Soon, he was seeing hallucinations: Letters and fragments of text superimposed on the greenish sky, newspapers with unreadable headlines, and more: “A hexagonal building, with a sort of delicate tracery at the lower edges; a gigantic version of me with an enormous phallus; patterns of colors in terra cotta and purple…”

He paused, soaking in these fantastical images, then declared with gusto: “The primary cortex! The genius of the primary cortex!”

Did neighbors hear? Probably so. I couldn’t stop laughing at his ebullient cry.

And as I listened, happily, while also taking in the great beauty of my surroundings—“an attack of beauty,” as O once said about a sunset—I thought two things: one, how there is so much in that head of his, so much O knows; and two, how different we are, in that what is going through my brain is not so much a stream of thoughts and images but of feelings and emotions. I am tuned into the people around me—the dynamics among the group of boys behind us, and the argument being had by the older couple right next to us, and my own complicated feelings. I may not know nearly as much as O knows, I am not as brilliant, but I feel a lot, so much, and some of this has rubbed off onto him and some of his knowledge has rubbed off onto me. We are like two dogs rubbing our scents onto one another.

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7-25-13—In Rhinebeck: O: “I’m going to write a little piece about the book I never wrote, and then let’s take a swim.”

He sits at his desk with a yellow pad, takes up his fountain pen, and sets to work. I go into the main house.

Four hours later:

Pouring rain, no other sound but the hard rain, and then I hear the porch screened door slam, and footsteps: It is O, who walked from the cottage in his swimsuit, cane in one hand, umbrella in the other, a big smile on his face: “I finished my piece!”