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.
I remember O had no idea who Michael Jackson was. “What is Michael Jackson?” he asked me the day after the news—not who but what—which seemed both a very odd and a very apt way of putting it, given how much the brilliant singer had transmuted from a human into an alien being. O often said he had no knowledge of popular culture after 1955, and this was not an exaggeration. He did not know popular music, rarely watched anything on TV but the news, did not enjoy contemporary fiction, and had zero interest in celebrities or fame (including his own). He didn’t possess a computer, had never used e-mail or texted; he wrote with a fountain pen. This wasn’t pretentiousness; he wasn’t proud of it; indeed, this feeling of “not being with it” contributed to his extreme shyness. But there was no denying that his tastes, his habits, his ways—all were irreversibly, fixedly, not of our time.
“Do I seem like I am from another century?” he would sometimes ask me, almost poignantly. “Do I seem like I am from another age?”
“You do, yes, you do.”
For me, this was part of the fascination with, part of my attraction to, him. I was seeing a few other men during my first summer in New York, but dates with O were completely different. We didn’t go to movies or to MoMA or to new restaurants or Broadway shows. We took long walks in the botanical garden in the Bronx, where he could expatiate on every species of fern. We visited the Museum of Natural History—not for the dinosaurs or special exhibitions but to spend time in the often-empty, chapel-like room of gems, minerals, and, especially, the elements—O knew the stories behind the discoveries of every single one. At night, we might walk from the West Village to the East, O talking excitedly nonstop, to have a beer and burger at McSorley’s Old Ale House.
I learned that not only had he never been in a relationship, he had also never come out publicly as a gay man. But in a way, he’d had no reason to do so—he hadn’t had sex in three-and-a-half decades, he told me. At first, I did not believe him; such a monk-like existence—devoted solely to work, reading, writing, thinking—seemed at once awe-inspiring and inconceivable. He was without a doubt the most unusual person I had ever known, and before long I found myself not just falling in love with O; it was something more, something I had never experienced before. I adored him.
Oliver and the Crabapple Trees
NOTES FROM A JOURNAL
7-09-09:
O’s 76th birthday:
After I kiss him for a long time, exploring his mouth and lips with my tongue, he has a look of utter surprise on his face, eyes still closed: “Is that what kissing is, or is that something you’ve invented?”