Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(52)

Before I’d even finished my practiced pitch, they were saying, “Sure, man,” and assembling into place. When I told them my “no cell phones in photos” rule, they complied, pocketing them without complaint. “This is crazy, man, we just came from a shoot—down the block,” said one.

“Gucci,” said another.

(This is so not-Gucci, I thought to myself.)

They smelled of weed.

I got the group shot, and then said, with an authority I don’t normally possess, “Okay, now I want to do each of you solo.” The three young models nodded, compliantly. One stepped up. He was wearing a T-shirt with Mona Lisa on it. I asked him to take off his sunglasses, and he did. And then, like auto-focus on a camera, his features instantly froze into an image of boyish handsomeness. (How do they do that?) I took a couple, he stepped aside, and his friend—a blond—took his place.

Finally, the tallest of the bunch (clearly the leader of the pack, the Alpha Model, if you will), stepped in. He was English and dashing. “I can’t be holding this in a picture,” he murmured, referring to the joint pinched between two fingers. “Want a hit?”

“Sure,” I said. It was the very end of the joint, and as I took a hit, finishing it, I flashed on how when I was in high school and would get stoned with friends, we always talked about how you’d get most high at the end of the joint—because supposedly that’s where all the resin accumulated—and how if you held the hit in your lungs as long as you could, you’d get a head rush that would make you see things.

I don’t know if that’s true or not, but when I looked through the camera lens and took picture after picture of the handsome young Englishman, my brain bloomed. All I could see was beauty.

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7-5-15:

I went up to the roof to sit in the sun, no sunscreen, no hat on my bald head, which I know is the dumbest thing you can do, especially when your partner has a terminal form of melanoma. But I didn’t care; it was a long cold winter here, and I felt like I was still thawing out.

I plopped into the hammock and soaked it up.

Paradoxically, the heat made me think of the cold of winter, the bitter, dry cold, January, February, March—lost months, when O got his diagnosis, all the tests, the two surgeries, standing on First Avenue in the freezing wind trying to get a cab—no luck—nights spent sleeping in a recliner at the hospital next to O’s bed.

Not bad memories, exactly, but … But…

I am reminded of a segment of 60 Minutes I saw years ago that focused on a new drug which was found to be effective in people with PTSD. The drug supposedly helped to erase memories of the traumatic event, allowing people to move forward with their lives (at least, that’s how I remember it). And the central question posed by the reporter from 60 Minutes was, If you could take a drug to forget something, would you?

I have thought about this many times in the years since, and my answer remains unchanged: No, I never would.

Yet not wanting to forget something is not the same as wishing to remember it better.

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7-7-15:

I do fifty push-ups twice a day while O sits at his desk and counts them out by naming the corresponding elements: “titanium, vanadium, chromium, manganese, iron, cobalt…”

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O, proudly, playing a new Schubert piece, and with great flair demonstrating how it requires “crossed hands.”

I am quite amazed and impressed, and I clap.

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7-8-15:

The day before O’s eighty-second birthday, and we got bad news with his latest CAT scan—bad—much worse than expected: Not only have the tumors regrown, the cancer has spread: kidneys, lungs, skin. They are no longer talking about doing another embolization … Doctors advise starting Pembro infusions—the immunotherapy still in clinical trials.

Scared.

O wants to go ahead with his birthday party, and doesn’t want people to know. “Auden always said one must celebrate one’s birthday,” he says.

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Undated Note: “Hey, Beautiful,” I say to O, whenever I come into the bedroom.

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7-9-15—O’s birthday:

At his party—

O asks me to go get the bottle of 1948 Calvados—a rare brandy given to him as a gift years ago and sealed in a wooden box. I open it for him.

I: “Do you want a glass?”

O: “No,” he says, and takes a swig, eyes closed. “Lovely,” he pronounces and looks around the room. “Who would like some?”

Later, he tells me he’d forgotten that he had left the Calvados to a friend in his will.





First Date





A PENCIL SHARPENER


“Hello, Sir!” I said.

“Hello, Sir!” said Ali, smiling.

He sure is a handsome devil, I thought to myself—his trim moustache, his slicked-back black hair—a Pakistani Omar Sharif, Funny Girl period.

“How is everything?”

“Everything good,” Ali said, reaching over the counter to shake my hand. He has seemed as happy as ever in his new shop.

Just then, a customer stepped in and asked for a pack of cigarettes—American Spirits. He was in his late twenties and had blond hair. He wore a classic, light-blue striped seersucker jacket, a crisp white shirt, and jeans rolled at the bottom, and carried a Jack Spade canvas briefcase. He looked like someone who designs apps for iPhones. He looked like a million bucks. He looked like he’d be a millionaire one day.