3-2-15:
On the same day that O had his biopsy, I learned that Ali’s shop is closing. Same old New York story: landlord raised the rent on the lease and his boss has to close the store. Fortunately, he also owns the “sister smoke shop” half a block down, and Ali will now work there. But if that shop doesn’t make it, that’s it.
“This is only America, this happens,” Ali railed angrily when he gave me the news a few weeks ago. “My country? Your grandfather own a shop, then your father have it, then you. But here?” He shook his head. “Here, you can have it ten year, twenty year, thirty year, and it’s not yours.”
I listened. I sympathized. I tried to be optimistic. “Maybe you should have a party on the last day,” I said. “Neighbors will come.”
Ali looked aghast. “You don’t have a party when you lose! No one want to come to that. You have a party when you win. We have a party when we start the other store.”
“You mean, when the Mayor of Eighth Avenue takes office at his new headquarters,” I said, teasing him.
“That’s right,” Ali said, “that’s right.”
Now, they are doing the hard, awful, dirty work of cleaning out, emptying, and gutting the shop. I stopped by today. It was a mess. Ali, Bobby, and their boss (a soft-spoken Indian gentleman whose name I can never remember) looked exhausted. I asked how it was going.
“Everything upside down,” Ali said. “Nothing easy.”
And yet, and yet … Ali added, referring to the three of them, “One Muslim, one Hindu, one Sikh: You see, we all here. Everyone work together. Back home, everyone fight.”
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Undated Note:
O, as he goes over final galleys for his book:
He insists on crossing out clauses suggested by a copy editor that define or explain an unusual word or term he has used: “Let them find out!” he says, meaning—make the reader work a little. Go look it up in the dictionary, or go to the library!
_____________________
4-2-15:
O, when I accidentally dropped a carton of cherry tomatoes on the floor: “How pretty! Do it again!”
So I do.
O: “Your friends must be clamoring to see you.”
I: “Maybe, I don’t know. This is where I want to be—with you.”
O: “Mad. But thank you.”
Back Home, March 2015
4-22-15:
O: “The most we can do is to write—intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively—about what it is like living in the world at this time.”
EVERYTHING THAT I DON’T HAVE
Stories like the one I’m about to tell happen to me often enough that they no longer surprise me. Even so, I don’t take them for granted. This time it was a Sunday in April. I’d been up on Twenty-Sixth or Twenty-Seventh taking pictures, then decided to head home down Eleventh Avenue; it was about four o’clock and getting cold. I was wearing shorts. While crossing Twenty-Second, I spotted a young man who’d fitted himself snugly sideways into a street-level recess in a brick building and was talking on a phone. He looked like a corner piece of a jigsaw puzzle. The street was otherwise empty. I approached him, pointed to my camera, and mouthed the words “Can I take your picture?”
He nodded calmly, still talking, with a kind of Mona Lisa smile (and her dark eyes too); it was as if he’d been waiting for me to come; as if this phone call was just killing time till I finally showed up with my camera. Sometimes it’s like this; this is the magical part of photography: how sometimes it seems like a picture I see has just been waiting for me to come take it. Here I was.
I knelt down and took a bunch. He moved into different positions, without my directing him, like a parody of a model, like Zoolander; it was funny. He finished his phone call, but kept acting like he was on the phone—for the sake of my photo. This made me laugh. The moment he’d started doing that, the pictures started looking fake. I stopped. I walked closer.