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Essays

Thank You for Hacking Me

Posted on December 21, 2013 by Bill Hayes in Essays
Illustration: Cun Shi

(Originally published in the NY Times) Illustration by Cun Shi

I got hacked.

I say “I”; it was my email account, but it felt — feels still — deeply personal. It started on a Tuesday at exactly 7:20 a.m. E.S.T. I know because I received a text message at that time saying that my email password had just been changed. If I had made this change, I need not “take any action.” But if not, “click this link.”

I was bleary, jet-lag weary, having returned the night before from 10 days’ traveling in Europe, but I was quite sure I had changed nothing but my sheets since getting home. Right then, a message from a friend popped up on my Facebook page delivering the news that something was amiss: “Just received a strange email from you asking for money. Change your password.”

It was already too late.

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The Secrets Inside Us

Posted on December 3, 2013 by Bill Hayes in Essays

Illustration: Luca Zamoc

Illustration: Luca Zamoc


(Originally published in the NY Times)

WHEN the news broke recently that a team of Belgian scientists had “discovered” a new body part — a ligament located just outside the knee — the first place my mind went was to Padua.

Padua is the small city in northern Italy where the 16th-century Brussels-born scientist Andreas Vesalius taught anatomy and created his history-making masterpiece, “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” (“On the Fabric of the Human Body”), published in 1543. The old man would have been delighted by the news, I couldn’t help thinking.

Vesalius’s wasn’t the first book on anatomy, but it was the first detailed study based entirely on actual dissection of human cadavers — on scientific fact, not supposition. It systematically dismantled the error-filled doctrine of Galenism, which rested in part on animal rather than human anatomy and had held sway for 14 centuries. But in mapping the inner body, Vesalius didn’t get everything right.

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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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  • 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

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