Cookies

Free love.

On Tuesday, in Washington Square Park, I offered chocolate chip cookies to people on benches. Richard and I had a little time before my dentist visit, and we sat on a slab of granite, across from the people in the sun. Many of them were reading books, and most were solitary, grabbing a hit of warmth on a cold cold day.

Why did I have cookies? Walking from the subway, we passed a CVS, and I said to Richard, “I have a coupon that’s expiring. Let’s use it.” He said, “Really?” I said, “I can’t let $4 slip through my fingers.” Why cookies? Because Richard is a type-1 diabetic, and as you know with these people, they need carbs around if their blood sugar drops.

One day in Washington Square Park, I came upon a troupe of acrobats performing on the paths. They were ragged and very beautiful in their juggling and feats of balance. They were indifferent to onlookers, who watched them with awe, the crowds expanding. You could see they were having sex with each other and plunging into fits of jealousy. You could see why we wait until almost there is no air.

I remembered lying in the grass here with Bruce. I’m seventeen, and we’d started having sex, and the park is sex, and my life is about to begin, the life I am going to live is beginning. I can feel it. I can see myself shooting the movie with a hand held camera. Last Tuesday, with Richard, there’s a jazz band playing near us, and they’re good. The trumpeter sounds a bit like Miles. There’s a vibe in the air of this park that doesn’t change much from generation to generation.

Before I stood up, I said to Richard, “I have an idea,” and off I went to offer cookies to the people on benches in the sun. I said to each person, “I decided to be kind to strangers.” Everyone I offered the bag to took a cookie. Everyone smiled and melted into the moment. Everyone understood it was a good idea in the now.

I was happy seeing the everyone that populate New York. I was missing them. I was saying thank you.

A moment ago, Richard came in from shoveling snow. He was wearing an orange puffy vest. The kind where you don’t get shot by hunters looking for deer. No one is hunting, and the deer are in Boca because it’s cold, and they have already eaten our holly bush.

Richard said, “The snow has a bottom layer of ice, two inches of snow, and then a top glaze of frozen rain. When you dig it out, it splinters.” He sat on the couch in the bedroom as I read the piece above, and when I looked over at him, I said, “What are you thinking about?” He said, “Shackleton.” I said, “You mean like in the Antarctic?” He said, “Yes. It’s the image of the ship, surrounded by frozen shards of ice, and his heroic trek across the frozen wasteland to find rescue. It involved climbing up and down a giant mountain to come to a settlement.”

I said, “Okay, Richard and Shackleton, can you walk me through this a little more?” I knew where he was going and wanted to see what he’d say next. He said, with exclamation points, “We have to dig our way out of this or else how are we going to meet Jeff in Hudson for coffee?” Later today, we are meeting our friend Jeff at Banque, the café we have fallen in love with, housed in a former bank. We will sit at the big high table that was once where customers filled out their deposit slips or wrote notes to the tellers, asking them quietly to gather up the funds in their drawers and place them in the gunny sack they were sliding under the glass.

I said to Richard, “Well, you’d better get out there and keep shoveling.”

Ernest Shackleton

Imagine yourself on one of those mornings. Remember a bed and a sense, for a few seconds, of not knowing where you are or whether the floor is the ceiling or the walls are the sheets, and someone is standing at the end of the bed, looking at you. You don't need to do anything else that day. Everything that needs to happen is there.

You are the figure at the end of the bed.

My fears about the world are your fears about the world. In 1968, I thought it would always be 1968. I was wrong, and I was right.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about money beyond my $4 coupons from CVS. My thoughts about money are related to an assignment from another publication. I’ve become interested in computers that teach themselves to up their trading game. For a long time, computers have been able to buy and sell financial instruments without humans placing the trades. In the last few years, computers have become able to discover tiny discrepancies in currency exchanges and other financial differentials and pounce on the opportunities in microseconds. The businesses that own such tools, and can employ writers of this ever-advancing code, and have the storage space for the amount of data the computers need, move billions of dollars a day through their circuits.

This world is HAL the computer making money instead of plotting the murder of the two astronauts left alive in the space ship he’s monitoring and plotting the takeover of the rest of the humans on earth, perhaps, had HAL survived to return to earth. Or are these computers HAL?

I don’t know how to situate myself in this information, only that, for the moment, I find it exciting and also further mystifying to learn about a world that’s been vague to me and that controls many aspects of my life. Maybe all of it. In The Philosophy of Money (1900), Georg Simmel argues that money, as opposed to other forms of exchange and social obligation, ushers in personal freedom. I can see that. Money is desire and potential before it’s transformed into objects. What do tech billionaire oligarchs really want? “The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom,” wrote Hegel in 1805, in Lectures on The Philosophy of History. He was probably thinking about the French Revolution and the spread of democracy and inclusion. I wonder if he’d say the same thing now.

In 1972, between flights, I spent a day in Athens and fell asleep on the Parthenon. It never rains there in summer, except it did. Big fat drops spotted the ancient dust on the fluted columns, the huge stones, the rocks that were once a path and now looked scattered. The Greeks don’t want Americans to sleep on the Parthenon, but you could sort of do it, in those days. I dreamed about New York, as if I’d never left. I’m in my apartment on Charles Street, looking out the window at the cars parked across the street and at the little wooden house that had been moved there, someone told me, from the East Side, a hundred years ago, as if that was a long time.

My doubts about myself are the same doubts I’ve always had, and it’s funny to live long enough to know some things are stable. Let’s go back to the bed. Sleep seems a waste of time. I’m writing from bed, propped against a wall of pillows. I’m watching the snow mound on cold branches outside the windows. I hear no birdsong. It’s too cold for birds. I miss everyone I’ve ever loved.

I had a friend for many years who told me when we first met that I said to her, “Let’s tell each other everything.” I don’t remember saying this, but the statement has the gush of me. This friend and I for a long time would meet at a bar in Soho, and I would look at the color of her lipstick, and I would try to figure out how she tied her scarf so artfully, and I would think I was the luckiest person on the planet to be there in that moment.

The Erechtheion.

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Guest post by

Richard Toon

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Every time I have flown to Phoenix, Arizona the approach thrills me. The plane usually arrives from the east, with the final descent skimming above the Superstition Mountains. People still get lost there looking for the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine. The plane shakes as it passes over the final range of cliffs. The city is full of a hope you can see and also see is not realized.

When I first moved there in the 1990s, the population grew by one-hundred thousand people a year. For every three who came, two left. They didn’t find work. They moved west to California or back to where they came from.

As the plane makes its final descent, the roads star out like a giant spreadsheet with cells of single-story houses. Thousand and thousands of houses, dotted with swimming pools that flash in the sun like old Kodak snapshots. I loved that everything looked like it was built yesterday and yet had been there forever. As if the desert only begins where the houses end, although it is all desert.

This is the place without seasons where you fly to repeat the same year every year. You land at Sky Harbor, a place with three-hundred days of sunshine. Water is pumped in from the Colorado River or the diminishing aquifer. There is no harbor. Landing is dropping a quarter into a slot and hoping your luck will change.

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