O: “I don’t regret the things I’ve done but those I haven’t done. In that way, I’m like a criminal …”
_____________________
2-13-11:
O: “Can one enjoy two pleasures at the same time?”
I: “Like what? Give me an example.”
O: “The taste of broccoli and the feeling of your leathered thigh.”
I: “Broccoli? That’s your example?”
O: “It’s co-perception, isn’t it? They get fused in a certain way but don’t get de-identified …”
_____________________
3-17-11:
O tripped on a rug and fell in the office, fractured his hip. In hospital.
Coming out of anesthesia this morning and seeing me, O said, “You look very pretty … If it were under less public conditions, I would kiss you.”
I kissed him anyway.
_____________________
6-7-11:
In Seattle, I call O from the hospital where my mother is clearly near death. He urges me to go out with friends and have some laughs. “When my mother died,” he tells me, “my oldest friend called up straightaway and told me three scandalously obscene jokes in a row. I laughed uproariously, and then the tears came.”
I follow his advice.
_____________________
6-19-11:
One morning O tells me he had dreamt the word nephological (the study of clouds); another day, it was triboluminescence.
I: “Such a lovely word—why triboluminescence?”
O: “I like lightbulbs.”
This didn’t seem to answer my question but I liked it anyway.
He asked me to bring the volume from the OED—and a magnifying glass.
O: “Well, that’s interesting! Tribology … Tribometer … Let’s see …” He keeps searching. “Here we are! ‘Triboluminescence: the quality of emitting light under tremendous friction or violent pressure—1879.’”
_____________________
First Day Out of Jail
Undated Note:
O: “How much can one enter, I wonder, another’s insides—see through their eyes, feel through their feelings? And, does one really want to …?”
THE MOVING MAN
When the lease on my first New York apartment came up for renewal, the landlord raised my rent. I could no longer justify what I would be paying for a small, sixth-floor walk-up, so I decided to move. I found a relatively inexpensive place on the East Side, a few blocks from the First Avenue L station. I took it on impulse—my default mode, I see now. Within days, I knew I had made a terrible mistake. The apartment was a cave. The building was a partying frat house. Pigeons lined every sill, cooing and shitting and grooming themselves, despite my shooing, as if to let me know they had been there long, long before me. What hit me just as hard was how much I hated my new subway lines. I came to dread taking the 4/5 from Union Square to work in the Financial District every morning; it was cacophonous and crowded and, more than most subways in my eyes, irredeemably grimy.
Worse, really, was the L, which I’d take home from Oliver’s on the West Side. Not the train itself, which was fast and frequent, but what it represented. In that direction, the L is packed with people on their way to Brooklyn, whether going home or out partying. They always seemed remarkably hip and gay (in the original sense of the word) and young, whereas I felt like an old man being taken away from where he really wanted to be.
I feel guilty now that I projected my unhappiness onto the subways. The L and the 4/5? They did right by me, getting me home and to work on time and safely, and each brought its share of sights and discoveries. While waiting for a 4/5 one mercilessly humid summer afternoon, I found unexpected refuge from the suffocating heat under a gigantic fan installed in the ceiling at Union Square. I’d never noticed it before. But there I stood, gratefully, as if in the final leg of a car wash, my sweat-drenched clothes getting a jet drying.
It was near that same spot on an equally hot day that I saw a young woman faint just steps from the platform’s edge. She wilted in slow motion, but at the exact opposite speed two people came to her aid. By the time I reached the scene, she was in very capable hands, literally. There was a man cradling her head, who turned out to be a doctor, and at her side, holding her hand, was a preternaturally calm woman who looked like a yoga instructor. When the fainted woman came to, she looked terrified and confused, but the calm woman calmed her and the doctor doctored her, and in due time, the two walked her outside for some fresh air.