Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(42)

I was on my way to a doctor’s appointment uptown when I first saw him, asleep on a milk crate, his bags shading him from the sun. I could see the photo in my mind even before I was close enough to take it. I thumbed my camera on and pocketed the lens cap as I raced toward him. I crouched down directly across from him, found his face in the frame, and snapped: 1, 2, 3, 4. I felt like a poacher. I was a poacher: The sleeping man roused, and cried out angrily, “Get the fuck away from me!”

I felt terrible, ashamed. I never do that—never take pictures of people without asking them. It was wrong, and I apologized to the man, who looked like he was silently laying a curse on me. Nevertheless, when I got on the subway I looked at the pictures I’d taken, and I saw that they were good, that they captured something real. But then, I’m sure poachers say that about the tusks they steal, too. Still, I didn’t delete the pictures.

Returning home later in the afternoon, I saw him still there from a block away. I bought a bottle of water, approached, and gave it to the man. He had hundreds, maybe thousands of empty water bottles, but did he have a full one?

“You getting enough water today?” I asked. I don’t know if he remembered or recognized me, but he accepted the water with thanks. Maybe he would just empty it and add it to his collection; I didn’t know.

I asked him what he was up to. He told me that he was on his way, eventually, to Duane Reade, the drugstore, where he would turn in his bags and get money in return. He told me there isn’t a Recycling Center in Manhattan, as there is in the Bronx, and the drugstores won’t take everything at once, so you have to go to one after the other after the other. Moving this caravan from one drugstore to the next would take hours, days maybe. The shopping carts weren’t linked—he couldn’t tow them all at once; instead, he would have to move one cart a time, while eyeing the other two, to make sure another can collector (the junkie ones, he said) didn’t steal them. But he explained this matter-of-factly, as if, This is just what one has to do. Now, he was taking a rest from the heat.

“Do you have something to eat? A place to sleep tonight?”

He nodded, again very matter-of-fact; he wasn’t worried about that. This was when I asked his name and he told me it was Raheem. I later learned that it means “merciful.”

I said my name is Billy. I told him I’d like to give him something to help him out. He had not asked me for a dime, after all. I didn’t want to offend him again. “Is that cool?”

Raheem nodded. I gave him $20.

“Peace and love, and hallelujah,” he said quietly, sincerely, like a prayer, “blessings to you.” When I asked, he said it was okay if I took his picture now, and I took a few more.

I asked him how long he’d been on the streets and he told me sixteen years. Anyway, finding food and a place to sleep weren’t a problem—that’s the least of it, he implied. The problem is the police, who harass him, tell him to get his junk out of the street, or even worse, he said, “These people here now with $120 million apartments—they say, ‘Get away from my building! Why don’t you just throw all that shit in the garbage? I’m gonna call the cops!’ And they do! Fuckers. And then I have to deal with the cops again.”

He murmured, “The Village was a lot friendlier when it was entirely gay.”

This made me chuckle, and I said I’ll bet it was, I wish I’d lived here then.

“They think I don’t know the law. I know the law. I know my rights. I’m not doing anything illegal. I’m not a junkie. I have every right to do this,” he said. He looked over at the bags and bags of what most of us would call garbage. “This is my work!” he said with real feeling. “My work!”

In that moment, I suddenly saw every person on the streets of New York who collected bottles and cans from garbage bins and turned-over trash cans differently—all the elderly tiny Asian women, sometimes whole families, Peruvian, African, some with bags balanced on poles carried on their shoulders: They were making work for themselves, performing a job most of us were too lazy or busy or wealthy to even think about.

But Raheem wasn’t finished speaking. “I say to those guys, the ones who own the buildings, ‘What are YOU doing? I’m saving the Earth! What are you doing for this planet?’”





NOTES FROM A JOURNAL

9-14-14:

O heard from one of the doormen that the smoke shop down the block from Ali’s was robbed last week. Thugs came in late on a Sunday night just when they were closing. This made me worried for Ali, so O and I went in to ask him about it.

“There’s a sign on the door,” he said, pointing to a “Wanted” poster—a grainy image taken from surveillance video. “They have guns, use a Taser, tie him up, take all the money, cigarettes, lotto tickets—”

“Is he okay now?”

Ali shrugged. “He okay.”

He seemed distracted, expressionless, listless almost. Maybe he was just tired of telling the story. Maybe he’s sick of people like me being surprised—don’t we know what a dangerous position they’re in, working alone in a shop that sells cigarettes, liquor, lottery tickets? How na?ve can you be?

O and I bought a newspaper and one ice cream bar. “Nine dollar,” Ali said, “nine dollar.” He looked at Oliver: “And some matches? Some matches too, Doctor?”