Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(7)
For some reason, there were no subway trains at Columbus Circle that night. I didn’t have money for a taxi, so I started walking. Eventually I stopped at the Fiftieth Street station. It was empty save for a blind man tap-tap-tapping a jagged line on the platform. I watched him for a while, then, worried that he might fall to the tracks, steered him toward a back wall. We introduced ourselves; his name was Harold. It was past midnight and we were both going home—I to Christopher Street, Harold to 155th.
Now, I still didn’t know a lot about subway lines at the time but felt pretty sure that if Harold wanted 155th, he was headed the wrong way, and I gently told him so. He responded with a seeming non sequitur: “Sometimes, Billy, you have to go down to go up.” Just then a train came and we rode together to Forty-Second Street, where Harold got off and disappeared into a crowd. It was only then that I understood he hadn’t been dispensing sage advice about weathering the ups and downs of life in New York. The uptown station at Fiftieth Street had merely been closed.
I am told by longtime New Yorkers that the subway used to be awful—garbage-strewn, graffiti-covered, suffocating in the summer, dangerous late at night all year round. And of course I know plenty of people who despise taking it today, even though the cars are remarkably safe, clean, and cool. I suggest they ride with me. I cannot take a subway without marveling at the lottery logic that brings together a random sampling of humanity for one minute or two, testing us for kindness and compatibility. Is that not what civility is?
The other day, I was on a local 6 going uptown and seated next to a young woman with a baby in a stroller. At each stop, a man (always a man) would enter the car and end up standing right above us. I had my iPod on and was just watching. Inevitably, each man would make goofy faces and smile at the baby, and the baby would smile and make faces back. At each stop, the standing man would be replaced by a new one, straight out of central casting: First, an older Latin guy. Then he gets off and a young black man appears. Then a white man in a suit. Then a construction worker with a hard hat. Tough guys. New York guys. All devoted to one important task: making a baby smile.
I have other subway stories to tell. And I could list lots more reasons why I like riding the 1, 2, 3, C, F, D, 4, 5, or L. But if pressed, I’d have to say that what I love most about the subways of New York is what they do not do. One may spend a lifetime looking back—whether regretfully or wistfully, with shame or fondness or sorrow—and thinking how, given the chance, you might have done things differently. But when you enter a subway car and the doors close, you have no choice but to give yourself over to where it is headed. The subway only goes one way: forward.
NOTES FROM A JOURNAL
5-9-09:
O says I must keep a journal.
And so I must.
I make notes on scraps of paper, the backs of envelopes, cocktail napkins. Sometimes dated, sometimes not.
_____________________
5-12-09:
I brought over a bottle of wine and we went up to O’s rooftop.
My one-month anniversary in NYC: “Shall I get glasses?” asked O, flustered.
“No, no need.”
We took turns swigging from the bottle.
_____________________
5-31-09:
My friend Miguel visits my place. There’s nowhere to sit except the floor. “This apartment should not be legal,” he says. “There must be some code somewhere that’s being broken.”
_____________________
6-2-09: To remember:
How I wake at 5:30 and watch the trees outside my window—the branches look like they are floating on wind drafts.
How the leaves flutter like giraffe’s lashes.
How I take a shower with the sun, a bird and a squirrel watching me.
How as the sun rose, the Chrysler cast a shadow on the MetLife building.
_____________________
6-17-09:
“Are you seeing anyone?” someone asks.
“Only New York,” I answer.
This is not 100 percent true.
O isn’t comfortable with anyone knowing about us and gets palpably nervous if we are out together and see someone he knows.
At the Bodega
THE SUMMER MICHAEL JACKSON DIED
It was nighttime, June 25, 2009, and I was standing at a streetlight on Seventh and Greenwich Avenue when I heard the news. Someone said it out loud, like a town crier, as he crossed against the light: “MICHAEL’S DEAD! MICHAEL’S DEAD! MICHAEL’S DEAD!” His death struck me as a rebuke to tabloid journalism, tabloid culture. Everything written about him, everything rumored, all the insinuations and allegations that had hounded him, driven him into isolation, his freakishness—none of it meant anything anymore, I felt sure. The only thing that would matter from now on was Michael’s music, which one heard everywhere in New York—blaring from car radios, playing in bars, boom boxes on stoops, and people dancing, literally dancing, on the streets and sidewalks and subway platforms. It sounded so innocent, joyful, romantic almost. At least, that’s how it seemed for a week or so. And then details started to emerge about his death—his OD’ing on anesthesia, the unseemly doctor, the lifetime of insomnia and sleeping pills—and soon Michael Jackson’s death was less Sylvia Plath, more Anna Nicole Smith. Very quickly, his music took on that tawdry quality, too. It all sounded wrong, tarnished or fraudulent somehow. I couldn’t hear “Rock With You” without picturing an insomniac Michael being put under with propofol.