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Essays

Subway Lifer

Posted on October 15, 2013 by Bill Hayes in Essays, VQR
Illustration by Joseph Griffith

Illustration by Joseph Griffith

(Originally published in the Virginia Quarterly Review)

I know New Yorkers who last took a subway in their twenties, thirty years ago, or who would rather be stuck in traffic any day than on an express train anyplace. Someday I, too, may know the luxury of a town car and driver or what it’s like to always take a taxi home. But until those hypothetical ships come in, all I can know is what I am now: a subway rider.

During my first year in New York, I took the A/C line to work each day. The West Fourth Street station was five minutes from my apartment. My favorite time was early morning. The station wasn’t crowded yet, riders weren’t rushed. People did not talk but read or listened to iPods. The smokers hacked their smokers’ coughs. Water drops—rusty tears in winter, I’d imagine, beads of sweat in summer—leaked from the steel I-beams overhead. The air was soft, as if unfinished dreams still emanated from everyone’s skin.

Waiting, however, can be a delicate business.

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A Year in Trees

Posted on April 6, 2013 by Bill Hayes in Essays

Illustration: Rebecca Mock

Illustration: Rebecca Mock


(Originally published in the NY Times)

SOMEONE asked me the other day how I had gotten over the sudden death of someone I loved. What I wanted to say but found myself unable to explain (for it would have sounded too strange) was that I learned a good deal about moving through grief from some trees I once knew. They were not my trees. I didn’t plant them. I lived in an apartment surrounded by them. The only tending done was to give them my full attention over the course of four seasons.

When I moved in it was April, still cold, and the branches were bare. Facing northeast, my view of Manhattan was unobstructed, seen through a latticework veil. There were five trees, each distinct. They were not beautiful. My next-door neighbor, a landscape designer, told me that the species, Ailanthus altissima, is an urban weed. But I never expected beauty. That they were tall and strong and present was enough. I found that Ailanthus derives from an Indonesian word meaning “tree of heaven.”

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Out With the Old Anxiety

Posted on December 22, 2012 by Bill Hayes in Essays

(Originally published in the NY Times)

Middle age arrives not with a birthday, with 48 candles on an angel food cake, but with a sudden unbidden insight in the middle of a sleepless night. You roll over and eye the clock and see all at once that the phrase “anything is possible” is not true. That is, it is no longer true for you, if it ever was. You are not going to become a doctor, or run a marathon or have a baby or sail around the world on a solo voyage documented by National Geographic. You simply haven’t the time, the feet, the eggs, or possibly even the desire required to mount such elaborate dream sequences.

In a way, this comes as a relief. When possibilities stop being endless, you can narrow the choices. Indeed, you can make hard choices, without resorting to dreams, without relying on maps, without abandoning duty. Is that not what wisdom is? Knowing when to unload what one will not need or use before approaching the next bridge.

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On Being Not Dead

Posted on November 12, 2012 by Bill Hayes in Essays, NY Times
on-not-being-dead

(Originally published in the NY Times)

ONE night last year I called my friend Oliver and told him to meet me on the roof of our apartment building. He lives three flights down from me. I had pulled together a simple dinner — roast chicken, good bread, olives, cherries, wine. We ate at a picnic table. I’d forgotten wineglasses, so we traded swigs out of the bottle. It was summer. The sun was setting on the Hudson. Neighbors were enjoying themselves at nearby tables. The breeze was nice. The surrounding cityscape looked like a stage set for a musical.

What is the opposite of a perfect storm? That is what this was, one of those rare moments when the world seems to shed all shyness and display every possible permutation of beauty. Oliver said it well as we took up our plates and began heading back downstairs: “I’m glad I’m not dead.” This came out rather loudly, as he is a bit deaf. Even so, he looked surprised by his own utterance, as if it were something he was feeling but didn’t really mean to say aloud — a thought turned into an exclamation.

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A Poem Written on the Stars

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Bill Hayes in Essays, NY Times

04venus-cityroom-blog-notbh (Originally published in the NY Times)

I went for a walk the other night. Someone said it was supposed to rain, but the skies looked clear to me. I headed up Eighth Avenue, crossed over at 23rd Street and at 10th Avenue saw a stairwell going up and took it. I was on the High Line. That much I’d expected. What I had not anticipated was how crowded it would be, like being stuck on a moving sidewalk at an airport. But the night was too nice to begrudge anyone anything, particularly a chance to experience beauty.

So I imagined I was a tourist too, headed for a distant gate to board a plane to a place I’ve never been.

Somewhere along the way, I lost my hat. I didn’t realize this until I had exited the park at 30th Street, by which point I couldn’t imagine going back up to retrace my steps. I chose to take the lowlife route home, in the shadow of the High Line, instead.

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Plato’s Body, and Mine

Posted on April 21, 2012 by Bill Hayes in Essays
From De arte gymnastica, 1569

From De arte gymnastica, 1569

IF only I had read Plato.

That’s what I thought when I saw my MRI: 28 images, impossible to deny, of a torn rotator cuff muscle — a consequence of years of weightlifting. And that’s just my shoulder. May I present C4, C5 and C6 (my herniated discs), my plantar fasciitis, my patellar tendinitis — residual damage done to a body, now 51, in the name of exercise, in pursuit of being buff.

Plato could have warned me. In “The Republic,” he advises “temperance” in physical training, likening it to learning music and poetry. Keep it “simple and flexible,” as in all things, don’t overdo. Follow this course, and you will remain “independent of medicine in all but extreme cases.”

Plato was an athlete, particularly skilled as a wrestler. His given name was Aristocles, after his grandfather, but the coach under whom he trained is said to have called him “Plato” — from the Greek for broad, platon, on account of his broad-shouldered frame. It stuck.

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AIDS at 30: A Time Capsule

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Bill Hayes in Essays

Joe is stricken with grief when visiting his partner. He cries into the bed sheet to keep his partner from seeing him. Hospice of Marin County, 1982 (Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos, 1982)

(Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos)

(Originally published in The New York Review of Books)

It is difficult now to call up the particular mood that prevailed in the AIDS epidemic’s early years. I am not talking about the first rumblings, when no one knew enough to be afraid, but further in. In those post-AZT, pre-ARV-drug days, there was very little one could do if infected. Primitive prophylaxes against certain diseases offered one’s best bet but certainly no guarantee that one wouldn’t die of Kaposi’s sarcoma or cytomegalovirus or pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. The idea of life without AIDS, much less of being alive in thirty years, was almost unimaginable. Which is why in the late eighties, coworkers and I at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation came up with an idea to get people—gay men, in particular—thinking about the future. We decided to create a time capsule. But it would not contain kitschy souvenirs—gadgets and record albums and the like. Instead, the AIDS Time Capsule would house answers to a simple question:

What message would you send to people 50 years from now about your experiences during the epidemic?

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Insomniac City

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Bill Hayes in Essays

Insomniac City
(Originally published in the NY Times)

I moved to New York a year ago and felt at once at home. In the haggard buildings and bloodshot skies, in trains that never stopped running, like my racing mind at night, I recognized my insomniac self. If New York were a patient, it would be diagnosed withagrypnia excitata, a rare genetic condition characterized by insomnia, nervous energy, constant twitching, and dream enactment. An apt description of a city that never sleeps, a place where one comes to reinvent himself.

I brought very little with me, in part because I wished to leave behind reminders of the life I’d had, but also for more practical reasons. My new home was a virtual treehouse, a tiny top-floor walk-up apartment at eye-level with the Ailanthus boughs. There was not room for more than a desk, a chair, a mattress. Nor, a need: You see, the place came furnished with spectacular views of Manhattan.

What I didn’t know when I rented the place was that the French restaurant located straight below my apartment had outdoor seating till 2 a.m. Lying awake in bed, I could literally hear glasses clinking, toasts being made, six stories down. This was irritating at first. But it wasn’t long before I discovered a phenomenon heretofore unknown to me: Laughter rises. Hearing happy laughing people is no cure for insomnia but has an ameliorative effect on broken-heartedness.

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Sleep: Loss

Posted on April 27, 2010 by Bill Hayes in Essays
sleep-loss

(Originally published in the NY Times)

I used to think that the only thing worse than having insomnia is having insomnia next to someone who falls fast asleep and stays soundlessly so till morning.

That was my life for 16 years. I lived with a man who slept, yes, like a baby. There were nights, many nights, when I literally wanted to steal his sleep — slip beneath his eyelids and yank it out of him; a kind of middle-of-the-night “Chien Andalou” moment, minus the surrealism. Instead, I spent the equivalent of at least a tenth of our relationship lying awake or reading in bed. In the end, that I happened to be deep asleep when he first went into cardiac arrest next to me now seems beyond irony. If I had not taken half a sleeping pill that night four years ago, might I have been awake and saved him?

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Didion as Diva

Posted on April 7, 1997 by Bill Hayes in Essays

 

“What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.”

What makes Didion a diva? I ask instead.

In lieu, that is, of the classic opening line from Joan Didion’s 1970 novel Play It As It Lays, the kind of tone-setting, attention-getting sentence with which all of her books begin.

I am thinking of early Didion in particular: the Pulp Fiction Didion of Run River and of the screenplay for Panic in Needle Park (as opposed to the woman responsible for Redford and Pfeiffer’s “Up Close and Personal”). The New Journalism Didion who drank “gin-and-hot-water to blunt the pain and took Dexedrine to blunt the gin” to finish Slouching Towards Bethlehem and who included in The White Album a document from her own report as a psychiatric patient, as evidence of a “not inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.” The Lady Didion in the jacket photo for A Book of Common Prayer, with a gardenia in her hair (borrowed from Billie Holiday), or the Undercover Didion photographed for Salvador, hidden behind big, black sunglasses (picked up from Jackie Kennedy Onassis).

But I am also thinking of the Didion who reemerged in 1997 with The Last Thing He Wanted. “Her first novel in 12 years!” the promotional ads proclaimed, suggesting a triumph of Didionesque resolve over Didionesque ennui. The Diva Didion who came back on top (like Judy at Carnegie Hall or Callas at the Met) with a bestseller, due, in no small part, to her loyal gay following.

What makes Didion a diva? Why do gay men worship her? I send my question out upon the Internet and pour myself a gin-and-hot water.

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Celine, Diva Didion, Joan Didion, Joan Didion and gay men, Joan Didion Celine ad
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  • Thank You for Hacking Me

    December 21, 2013
  • The Secrets Inside Us

    December 3, 2013
  • Subway Lifer

    October 15, 2013
  • A Year in Trees

    April 6, 2013
  • Out With the Old Anxiety

    December 22, 2012
  • On Being Not Dead

    November 12, 2012
  • A Poem Written on the Stars

    June 4, 2012
  • Plato’s Body, and Mine

    April 21, 2012
  • AIDS at 30: A Time Capsule

    June 6, 2011
  • Insomniac City

    May 11, 2011
  • Sleep: Loss

    April 27, 2010
  • Didion as Diva

    April 7, 1997

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