Tuesday

On Tuesday I went to the park to work on my muscle-up. I saw Junior when I got there, and he gave me a big hug. He asked how my weekend had been, and I gave him an honest answer, and he said, in so many words, that his weekend had been similar. Then he said that we should do some dips together. “Down from fifteen,” he told me, and I told him I wasn’t sure I could do fifteen parallel-bar dips. In fact I was pretty sure I could not do what he was suggesting, which was to start with fifteen parallel-bar dips, and then do fourteen, and then thirteen, and so on down to one. But Junior demurred, and said “You got it, Spence,” and though I didn’t believe him I said sure, that sounded great, of course I’d do some dips with him, I should just warm up first. Then twenty minutes later, when I was mostly warmed up but still kind of wanting to work on my muscle-up, Junior called over to me, and waved me towards the parallel bars, and said “Yo let’s do these dips.”

I did the first set okay, but on the second set I crashed, and the rest of my workout was kind of a beautiful disaster. Junior and I talked between sets, partly about parallel-bar dips and partly about life. We did the dips facing each other, him looking towards the street and me looking towards the basketball court. Behind him, hanging on the fence that separates the workout area from the basketball court, I noticed a new, full-color vinyl banner. There are always a couple of banners hanging on this fence, most notably the one adorned with flags of the Americas, which reminds us to “Respect & protect...Elders, Kids & Ourselves!” But this new banner featured a life-sized photo of a young black man palming a basketball at arm’s length. The banner identified him as Kinu Rochford, and over the course of my workout I learned that he was a pro basketball player — and an old fixture at the park — who had been shot and killed over the weekend at a basketball tournament in Harlem. I had been on a sailing trip and had missed the whole thing, which surprised Junior. “Mamdani even said something about it,” he told me. Junior had known Kinu, and so had Karen, who by this point was watching us do parallel-bar dips together. Karen talked about Kinu longingly. She had seen him just the other day, at the park, she said. She was glad, now, that she had given him a hug.

My breathing was a constant problem throughout the workout, and I really think I need to work on that. Junior grew up in a part of Brooklyn called The Nineties — a small neighborhood, sandwiched between East Flatbush and Brownsville, which happens to be where my kids go to elementary school now. “There was a lot of violence,” Junior told me, cocking his head to the left and shrugging his shoulders in a way that seemed almost apologetic. Then he told me about his fondness for his basketball coach, and about how in middle school he had an English teacher who really opened his eyes up to literature. He told me they read Of Mice and Men, and A Streetcar Named Desire, and Rich Dad Poor Dad. I told him about the pain I’d had recently in my right forearm, and he said that I should put aloe vera on the skin there, and eat a little aloe vera at the same time too. He said that he learned as a kid that there was no black and white. “Do you mean like morals, or race,” I said, and he said morals: Nothing is really purely right or wrong, he said. He said he was obese as a kid, and that he’s twenty-six now. He said that a year and a half ago he lost something like sixty pounds, when he started coming to the park to work out rather than just socialize. He said that smoking weed messes up his whole workout, and as he said this he took a lit joint out of his mouth, and waved it around a little for emphasis.

“Then give it back to me,” Chuck told him, and Junior laughed, and gave the joint back to Chuck.

As we were doing parallel-bar dips I realized that my right ring and pinky fingers were tingly, as if they’d fallen asleep. By this time my range of motion had fully collapsed; I was really just bobbing up and down from the top hold position, focusing on my form within that narrow range rather than gutting out ugly reps. Junior commended this approach. I was trying to talk as much as possible between sets, partly out of curiosity for Junior and partly out of fear of the next set. But finally we came to the end, and Junior said actually, on the last set, instead of doing one dip we should do as many as we’re physically capable of. Junior did twenty-six dips in this last set, and I think I did five. Then he grabbed my hand and pulled me in for another big hug, congratulating me on completing the workout.

Junior went to check out something that Cecil was messing with, and I thought, Wow, something feels weird in my hand, and in my chest. It was pretty clear that I had messed something up doing the dips, but I figured maybe I could shake it off. Maybe I could still work on some pull-ups, I thought, or practice a handstand, or stretch out with a resistance band. I kept moving, rolling my shoulders and elbows and wrists around, trying to understand how it all felt. Meanwhile, Junior had put his head into the little hammock-like contraption — a “cervical neck stretcher,” I later learned — that Cecil had hung from the pull-up bar. Karen was there watching, with Cecil standing nearby, telling Junior to twist his body this way and that. Junior, whose mouth was strapped shut by the cervical neck stretcher, writhed a little and waved Cecil’s instructions off. Then he removed the cervical neck stretcher from his head, and turned to me, and said that we — me and Junior and Karen — should do burpees.

My breathing was a real issue during the burpees. The standard for burpees at the park is a set of a hundred, which is usually performed on the track, in full sun. It was about thirty-five degrees Celsius out, which is hot enough for my weather app to suggest that I beware of “heat illness,” and “check on vulnerable friends.” I was feeling pretty vulnerable myself, but I figured that Junior and Karen knew that, and would continue to monitor my overall degree of illness.

I did a couple good burpees at the beginning, then mostly just kicked my legs out into an unstable plank for a second or two. At one point I think I started saying “You guys,” but I didn’t want to let Junior and Karen down, and never completed the thought. I drank some water, but refrained from doing what I wanted to do, which was to spray it all over my face and torso. I took my hat off and tossed it to the ground. When Karen said we had done ninety-six burpees, and Junior said we were only at ninety-three, I deferred to the lower number and finished my last seven reps as strong as I could muster.

I was spent, and afterwards all I could think to do was sit in the shade with Karen, whose body was draped lightly over a folding chair. I clutched the chain-link fence and lowered myself into a teetering squat. As she spoke Karen gazed across the track, which appeared washed out, as if its true colors were too beautiful to behold.

The following day I brought the kids to MoMA. They were deeply grossed out by the Duchamp; I found myself close to tears looking at a Seurat. The sky became smoky while we jockeyed with Japanese tourists in the Water Lilies room, and by the time we left the museum a pale yellow haze foreshortened the view down Sixth. The chicken-over-rice I bought at a halal cart on Fifty-Fourth was devoid of tomatoes, and its iceberg lettuce, which the vendor pulled with bare hands from a disposable plastic shopping bag, was browned on each and every one of its pre-chopped edges. Preoccupied, it wasn’t until later that evening that I remembered the summer’s Cyclospora outbreaks and felt deeply stupid for having insisted that the kids “really try” carefully assembled bites of chicken, rice, white sauce, and lettuce.

The smoke stuck around for four or five days, during which I fed my kids, who are seven and nine, a steady stream of solidly PG-13 movies. Unable to lift my hands above my head without pain, I didn’t go back to the park for a full week. Still it was clear that I was injured, shouldn’t have been doing anything with my upper body except icing it, or maybe finding someone to give it a hug. But I managed to spend almost three hours in the park the following Tuesday, and another two hours on Friday. Every time I arrived, someone I knew — Brian, Denard, Panama — would ask me what I was working on, and I would tell them that actually I was just trying not to hurt myself, and that working out with Junior had really messed me up, and then I chuckled, and they chuckled. Then a week or three later I finally saw Junior himself, and he grabbed my hand and pulled me in.

“Spence, how you doing man,” he said, cocking his head to the left and grinning.

I told him I was doing okay, and that that workout had really messed me up, and that more than anything I’d just been recovering.

Junior gave me a knowing smile. “That’s good,” he said, and I believed him.