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Photographs | Stranger Passing

A week before the operation, Roger called me— he and Brooks were anxious to be photographed with the 8x10. Where had I been all summer? We agreed to meet the day before I was scheduled to go in. I gathered my equipment, which had been idle for three years. My ground glass was broken—there wasn’t another to be found in time. I convinced myself, utterly wrongly, that any old frosted glass would do. I taped in my broken ground glass. A third of the scene would be missing. Two hours before the shoot, I reached for my tripod in the tiny apartment on Perry Street that had once been Thomas Merton’s—or maybe his was on the floor above and I was listening to the echo of his footsteps across the years. I ran to the parking lot on the river where I kept my camper. Number two tripod also broken. The head on number three would work—but in order to level the camera, I would have to use the legs of the tripod. I drove to Wall Street. As I sat nervously at a red light on Broadway, a van smashed into my camper. The driver of the van, which had a hundred dents, got out and offered, “You know how it is, a van in New York…” I agreed. It took me forever to set the frame. My patient subjects went off to get hot dogs. As soon as they got back I made the picture, guessing with the broken shards they were in focus. The operation revealed that I had sarcoidosis, which sounds terrible but usually is not. In the hospital, I played a trick on Byron. An hour or two after the operation, I found I was able to walk. Seeing him coming down the hallway on rounds I ducked behind a pillar. I stayed behind as he walked into my room and stared at the empty bed. —he became my physician for the next 35 years. Eleven years before all this, I learned I had Von Recklinghausen’s—another “you may never know you have it, or it can kill you” condition. Now I had a new boogeyman: sarcoidosis. I decided I’d better get to work.