Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(41)

“Oh, a letter opener, I suppose.”

I just nodded, but I thought this was great for two reasons: because he was carving something slim and elegant out of a big hunk of wood (and he wasn’t even close to finishing) but also because it was a letter opener he was making, a tool everyone once had—a necessity at one time; no longer so. O has several. But it goes without saying: You don’t need a letter opener to open a text or e-mail.

I complimented him but the man seemed embarrassed. “It’s just what I do. I’m a carver.”

I told him good luck and said I looked forward to seeing his progress on it. “I’ll be back another night.”

“Okay, if I’m still around,” he said.

_____________________

A copy of Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer caught my eye in the window of Left Bank Books. Instantly, I felt myself to be sixteen again and in B. Dalton bookstore in Spokane and spotting that book in a display—New Releases—next to the cash register. I could still recite its opening page: “I will be her witness …” I had to go in. I love this shop because it stays open late. I love it because the clerks are never friendly. I love it because they sell old books, mostly first editions. I say old; most of them are from the sixties and seventies—my era.

Whenever I go in there, the clerk or owner eyes me, as he eyes everyone, as if it is an intrusion, as if I am interrupting him, as sometimes I have—he might be deep in conversation with someone. He might be reading. And sure enough, when I walked in the clerk glared at me from the back of the store.

“Are you still open?” I asked, even though I knew they had to be open since the door was open.

He nodded yes, but as if he were making an exception.

I tiptoed around and toward the back. He looked preoccupied, shelving books. “That looks like a nice copy of the Didion,” I said.

He agreed.

I asked how much, and he said thirty-five dollars. I wanted to buy it, even though I already have a first edition of that book. I just wanted to have it; it looked so new, newer than mine. But I kept browsing. So many book covers I recognized: the huge Harry Abrams monograph on Edward Hopper (I had that once; what happened to it?), and there, on the poetry shelf, face out, in a protective plastic cover, Ariel.

Ariel: Oh, Ariel. I felt something very deep, sadness, bittersweetness, a recognition, almost like tears were going to come into my eyes. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was exactly the feeling I have when I see Steve in a dream. Loss: but loss of what? Youth? Poetry?

Five or six books suddenly fell on the shelf where the clerk was rearranging things. In that silent bookstore, the sound was loud and instantly recognizable, the sound of books on a shelf losing their balance, falling on their sides, the weight of a book as an object. It was a good sound, a familiar sound, comforting, and I thought, that sound is reason alone to have books. May books never disappear.

I took the copy of Ariel and read a few pages. “Daddy, Daddy …” I smiled. The force of the poetry was unchanged. The sadness melted into something like gratitude as I looked at the poem titles, poems I once knew well. Consciousness that I am thankful, I thought to myself.

_____________________

9-13-14:

I woke at 4 A.M. to screams—not screams, yelling—and horns honking. In the moment, I almost thought I was having a nightmare, triggered by a violent movie I’d watched. But it was too real, outside my window, eleven stories below. I lay in bed and listened: chaos, one could feel and sense it, even without seeing what was going on; it sounded like a crowd. I finally got out of bed and looked out the window. It was at the gas station: a line of cars, five or six at the pumps, and there appeared to be three or four people centrally involved in an argument. One of the gas station attendants, in a uniform, and a young man—the two of them yelling at each other, threatening one another with fists and punches thrown in the air. A young woman circled around, and she was going at the attendant just as viciously, attacking him physically, yelling, cursing. Others would congregate, try to break things up, and then back out. The fight moved back and forth across the grounds of the gas station. It would almost quiet for a moment, as if the fighters were retreating, and then start up again. At some point, the woman got thrown onto the ground; at another point, someone else did.

It was awful to watch. From afar, they looked like animals, could be mistaken for animals, had it not been for their human voices, their cursing—terrible words.

How New York breaks your heart, I thought to myself. This is one way: with violence, with hatred, rage.

Too much to drink, too: alcohol at 4 in the morning.

I turned on my air conditioner to drown out the noise and took half a Xanax to go back to sleep.





Policeman on West Fourth Street





HIS NAME IS RAHEEM


“It’s Arabic,” he told me. Sometime yesterday morning, Raheem had parked his caravan of three separate shopping carts, each piled six feet high with near-bursting bags of collected cans and bottles, on Eighth Avenue, across the street from where Oliver and I live. You couldn’t miss it, really—there was audacity in his taking over the bus lane as if it were his private parking spot—and yet, people streamed by without glancing in his direction. Or maybe he wasn’t really there. In the extreme heat and humidity of the day—temperatures over ninety—one might almost think Raheem was a mirage.