Brian

Note to self: The following events occurred on 2026-08-25, a Tuesday.

Another note: I believe I captured my conversation with Brian accurately, but ultimately all I can offer here is my interpretation of his story. Either way it’s a pretty intimate topic, and I defer to him about what’s appropriate for me to share. The same goes, for different reasons, for the interaction between K and SB: I want to be sensitive to their privacy, and aware of the potential difference between my experience of the afternoon and theirs.

Just now, before sitting down to write this, I took out the paper recycling. Earlier this week I had sifted through an old file cabinet and decided to throw away a bunch of stuff from the late aughts and early teens — those hopeful years, during which I tried to build custom bike frames for a living. I had thrown the old files into the kitchen’s paper recycling pail, and when I went to take it out just now, the files were all right there on the top, looking at me in an accusatory manner. I waved their accusations off: “All this stuff is from like three lives ago,” I thought to myself as I pinched the rim of the black plastic pail and picked it up. The pail was heavy from all the files, but I could handle it. I handled it through the front door, whose strike-side jamb I was halfway through fixing, and I handled it through the heavy front gate, which I need to repaint, and when I got to the big paper recycling bin, the green one with the hinged lid that the city required us to purchase a few years ago, I set the pail down on the ground. “It’s kind of a lot of paper recycling this week,” I thought to myself, noting that neither Ada nor the kids had been in the house for five days. “I guess I threw a lot of stuff out.”

I had to push down on the cardboard that was in the big green recycling bin before I could even attempt to dump the pail into it, and when I did, a few things spilled onto the patio. I stooped over, grabbed two pieces of junk mail off the ground, and tossed them into the bin. They landed on top of a manila folder labeled “SSCX” — designs for a cyclocross bike that I built in 2006. I shook the memories off, swung the bin’s lid closed, and began wheeling it towards the street.

But then I saw one last thing on the ground: a little piece of paper, with the word “ME” written on it in red crayon, a couple of little pink hearts surrounding this singular word. I smiled, partly to see something my kids must have made and partly at the idea that anyone at all might have written a heart-adorned card to themselves. “That’s so thoughtful,” I thought to myself. “And so mature.”

My brow softened, and I leaned over, and picked it up off of the concrete patio. It was about the size of a postcard and written on medium-weight, off-white paper. Some care had been put into the handwriting — but then I noticed that it was actually folded in half, unevenly, like a crude greeting card. Wondering if there was a message inside, I opened it — but found only a looped-up piece of blue masking tape.

“Funny,” I thought, wondering what the tape was there for. Then I flipped the card over to see the back side.

“KICK,” the back side said.

Anyway. This afternoon I went to the park to work out, and to write. Tone was there, and Not Nice, and OG, and Flow, and Brandon and T and Casey, who must be in the Navy, because his shirts always say “NAVY” on them. A bunch of other guys were in the back — Chad and Sour for sure — and I thought I saw Brodi over near the track. I didn’t really have a plan for my workout, and ended up bouncing between kick-up, back-to-the-wall handstands, and walk-up, belly-to-the-wall handstands, and also various movements on the pull-up bar. OG and I chatted about injury recovery, and Brandon saw me working on my handstands and suggested that I do military presses in order to build my shoulder strength up. Then Brandon said I should do swinging pull-ups, but do them on the monkey bars, and do them on the second rung, keeping my arms extended so that my face would fly just a few inches from the first rung. He leapt up and caught the monkey bars, and showed me what he was talking about, and I was terrified to see how close his face was to the first rung. But Brandon is in incredible shape, and he’s so soft-spoken, and his smile is so friendly, and he had never given me advice before. So I took it seriously, and jumped up onto the monkey bars myself, heaving my body back and upward so that my chest pointed into the afternoon sky. My nose barely cleared the first rung. I could also barely see: I was facing into the sun, which was filtering through the park’s little hawthorn tree, and as I swung up and down the sunlight flickered through the tree, dazzling me a bit, and after two or three swings I stopped, and dropped to the ground, and stood there blinking.

As I was blinking I heard Flow calling out from across the park. “Rasta! You ready for da next set?”

“Yeah, ma General,” was OG’s reply.

I looked at my watch; I had been working out for about an hour. Then I repeated Flow’s question in my head, thinking about how on earth I’d transcribe it: “Rasta! You ready fer da next set?”

And then I repeated OG’s reply: “Yah, mah Gen-er-all.”

Then I found a bench, and sat down, and started to write the exchange down.

Brian showed up, and we greeted each other, and he sat down on the bench next to me. I continued what I was writing, which was this:

I had gotten to the park at like four-thirty, feeling slightly dusty from having spent the middle part of the day in the backyard cutting, sanding, and then applying tung oil to a big piece of white oak. Nobody really understands why I’m working on these pieces of white oak. I tried to explain it to the kids, but who can tell what they understand. When Ada came over to pick the kids up she asked about it, and I said “Uh, it’s for a thing,” and then when she asked about it a second time I said it had something to do with handstands, and that the project was kind of weird, but that I thought it would be good for me. Ada seemed to understand this, but I wondered how much of her understanding was actually about the pieces of white oak, and how much was about the way that I’m processing our separation, and how I occupy myself when I’m under a lot of stress.

Luckily, my ability to be und——

Then Brian broke in. “Is that work?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Or, I don’t know, maybe. I mean, I’m writing.”

I no longer know who at the park knows that I’m a writer and who doesn’t. And I don’t know what it means, really, the fact that I’m a writer, the fact that I might write down things that people tell me. I told Brian that I wrote something recently that was partly about the park, and partly about my separation, and partly about all the weed that’s smoked at the park.

Brian rolled his eyes and glanced over towards the back entrance to the workout area, and the crowd of guys smoking joints and drinking Coronas there. “Yeah, there’s a lot of that,” he said. Then he said that he doesn’t drink, and he doesn’t smoke, and he never has.

I said that I thought it was kind of cool, all of the weed at the park, and then I remembered that a day or two earlier I had seen a little seedling, an actual Cannabis plant, in the dirt right behind where Brian and I were sitting. It was surrounded by a bunch of spearmint, and was about a foot tall, its pointy leaves fully developed, with little buds starting to form on its tips. It would never be smokeable, but I had thought it was cute, and I turned towards where it had been, but it was gone. Brian said yeah, someone must have pulled it out, and I wondered who that would have been.

SB showed up and walked around the park, shaking hands and asking how we all were. The sun was getting low over my left shoulder, and Brian was looking almost directly into it as we talked. It was beautiful out, hot but not sweltering, the humidity more or less in check, the clouds turning peachy pink on their western edges and blue-grey to the east. I asked where Brian grew up, and he gestured into the sunset, and said “That building.” I asked him how long he had been working out at the park and he said more or less forever. I asked him how old he was, and he said forty, and felt around in the roots of his long black dreadlocks to show me a grey hair. I said he was pulling it off well. He said his dad worked out at the park when he was young, and that he remembers when it was literally a parking lot, and then a couple guys started leaving equipment there, and eventually the parks department moved their equipment storage container from there to there, and planted the hawthorn tree there, and put in the old, low monkey bars, the ones that are cream-colored now but were blood red at some point in the past. The red paint shows through in spots today, and the steel itself shows through too. There are a few stickers on the monkey bars advertising weed dispensaries, and a few stickers whose meanings are too obscure for me to grasp. Brian said that people didn’t always smoke weed in the workout area; at first they only smoked weed over by the basketball courts. This was during the Bloomberg administration, pre-legalization, “When they used to do stop-and-frisk.” The cops would show up periodically, and anyone who didn’t want to be rounded up would need to get out of the park quickly, and it was hard to get out of the park quickly if you were smoking weed by the basketball courts. So the weed smoking migrated to the workout area, which was easier to escape from.

At first, not everyone loved the weed smoking. This might have been because it was illegal at the time, but I suspect it also had to do with the juxtaposition between working out on the one hand and getting stoned on the other. It is, to most people, quite the contrast, but it turns out that the two activities are not mutually exclusive. I have seen people at the park do seriously impressive shit while concurrently smoking joints: muscle-ups, deep tricep dips, parallel-bar handstands. Back in May I saw a slim, shirtless kid, maybe eighteen years old, swinging back and forth on a pull-up bar in Chelsea, and every time he got to the apex of his swing he let go of the bar completely, and executed a quick half-barrel roll, and caught the bar again, and continued swinging. I believe he may have put his joint down while he was doing this, but he was smoking it before he started and he smoked it again after he was done. I was slack-jawed at the whole thing — and I had not been smoking weed myself.

Brian didn’t seem like he loved the weed smoking at the park, but he clearly respected the physicality of some of the regular weed smokers there. He gestured towards one or two guys in the back and indicated that they had eventually normalized the constant presence of giant, hand-rolled joints there. Today their tan, cone-shaped silhouettes are pinched between sweaty lips at almost all times of day. There are roaches all over the park’s cushioned rubber ground covering, and a few days ago I saw someone find, pick up, and joke about lighting a whole and I believe previously-unlit joint, which was at least three inches long and had been lying on the ground near the monkey bars. I found this hilarious, and I was not alone, and the fact that we all had something to chuckle about together felt downright wholesome.

Flow had apparently finished the set he was doing with OG, and now he walked over to Brian and me. He was holding a quart-sized deli cup full of cold, ripe, multi-colored cherry tomatoes. “Fresh from my garden,” he said, and I believed him, and when he offered us some I took one, and it exploded in my mouth, and it was amazing. Brian took one too, and then I took another, and then Flow walked off to offer them to someone else.

I told Brian that also, I was in a phase where I was thinking very permissively, and putting a lot of myself out there in public, being pretty vulnerable. Like, recently I had begun wondering how much of my dating life I wanted to share with my kids, and actually, I thought it would be kind of cool to talk with them about it, tell them about dates I go on, tell them what makes me feel good on a date, and how I try to make the other person feel seen and appreciated too. I wouldn’t share everything, of course, but I liked the idea of being fairly open about it all. I couldn’t tell what Brian thought about this, but he said something smart about deferring to my kids regarding what we discuss, and I agreed that was a good strategy too. Then I asked if he had kids.

And Brian said “I lost four.”

K had showed up at the park, and almost immediately he and SB were talking heatedly, even shouting at each other at moments. Brian told me about his four kids, three of whom died before birth, the last of whom lived about three weeks. The sun was in his eyes, and now there was water in his eyes too, his whites turning red, and his lids puffing up a bit, and tears welling up and then spilling over his smooth, high cheekbones. I wanted to give him a hug, but I wasn’t sure what kind of support or acknowledgment he was comfortable with. K and SB were fighting on the other side of the monkey bars, and Brian was clearly distracted by that, and then he said that actually it was kind of nice that they were fighting, because it gave him a moment to pull himself together. He told me about the emergency C-section, mom and baby in different parts of the same hospital in Brooklyn, then baby transferred out to Long Island somewhere, Brian bouncing back and forth until mom was discharged. There had been a blood type mismatch, he said, and there had been an umbilical cord around baby’s neck, and baby wasn’t really able to breathe at all without life support. He said that baby’s x-rays were white all around where the lungs were, and that he needed to phone a friend — a nurse who lived out of state — to help explain to him that the tissue around baby’s lungs had died, and wouldn’t ever come back. He said that at the end he was holding his son, and they pulled life support, and that after they pulled life support it was many minutes of beeping alarms, and then alarms being turned off, and then all the sudden Brian’s legs turned off too, his body just stopped functioning, and in some way maybe this had helped him understand the Haitian funerals he had grown up with, where the women wailed and fell down in the aisles and Brian had always thought it was a bit much. This whole time he was in some kind of family room that was attached to the pediatric ICU, and looking back he realized that there were families in this room constantly, and that all these families had had to pull their babies’ life support too. Brian said that when the doctors asked him if he was ready to pull life support, he asked them if they had ever had to make this same decision, and none of them had, and now that’s something he understands better than any of them.

I couldn’t really tell what K and SB were fighting about, but apparently someone had chased some pussy up to Harlem, and someone else didn’t need to gossip about it. I like both K and SB, and I think that in their own ways they like me too. They’re both at the park a lot. Brian attempted, gently, to get them to move their fight elsewhere, but it was clear that nobody really wanted to intervene. Eventually the mood seemed to stabilize.

It was getting towards dinner time, but my dinner date had canceled earlier in the day. When she did I had added “Mourn a little” to my day’s to-do list. After moping about for a few hours, and breaking down to sob about various things at least once, I had crossed “Mourn a little” out. Then I had added “Work out and write at the park,” and a handful of tasks related to the giant pieces of white oak that I’ve been working on. Nobody really seems to understand why I’m working on these pieces of white oak.