Brian

I met Brian one week ago today at the Wisteria Pergola in Central Park, close to dusk. Under the trellis, I inhaled the odor of the drooping racemes and tried to put a name on the memory it roused. The exercise veered between light curiosity and impending panic; was it a chance incident in youth, superfluous and easily forgotten, or something more crucial that fate had stirred from obscurity, needed to complete the shifting puzzle? But the harder I try to unearth an insistent memory, over-saturating in the clues, flailing in the muddy water, the more resistent it becomes, annealing, only to step from the shadows much later in the off moment of revelation. As the nebulous past stayed on the periphery, shrouded, Brian emerged in a thin, orange jacket, faded blue jeans, and heavy black boots. His shaggy, almost curly gray hair hung to his shoulders, and a light fuzz of the same color covered his face. "That's wisteria?" "Yeah. I'm trying to figure out what the smell reminds me of." He let gravity take his legs pitter-patter down the slight slope, and pulled up with his hands on his hips, his eyes on the pendulous flowers. Shorter than me, he had yellowish teeth and a shrewd expression. "Pretty," he said. "You don't happen to know what that tree is, do you?" I asked, pointing ten yards to the west where a short, spreading, gnarled tree grew wild on a fenced hill, its muscled branches moving oddly downward as they twisted at random, acute angles. "No idea," he said, squinting his eyes. "Where you from?" "Upstate New York." "Where upstate?" "You ever heard of Lake Placid?" "I've been to Lake Placid." "Yeah? I'm from a town ten minutes away." "Saranac?" "Saranac Lake, yeah." "Calm up there." "Yeah, it's beautiful." "I wouldn't call it beautiful. Just serene." "What were you doing up there?" Brian had been in the north country to paint flag poles. In the 70s, with no money and no prospects, he'd answered a newspaper ad advertising dangerous work. Since then he'd been all over the country, attached by harness to the long, silver projections, freshening them with a new coat, burnishing America's chipped, flaking image. It wasn't great money, he said, but it allowed him to travel. He'd grown up in the city. "You miss it up there?" he asked. "Not too much. It's nice to go back, but boring if you stay." "The city's great," he said. "Didn't used to be safe around here." He pointed to a black bicycle a few feet away, apparently his. "Used to have to carry a snub-nose .32." "Why?" He leaned in close, confidential. "N*****s," he said, nodding once. He said that the poor white population, all the ones who would fight back, had left by the mid-70s, leaving only middle-class people who wouldn't stick up for themselves. They were terrorized by homeless or drugged-up blacks, which is why he needed the pistol. I asked if he'd ever had to use it. "Took it out once or twice, never fired." He went on to tell me the country was screwed if Obama got elected president, because blacks had huge egos. I steered the conversation to his travels. He'd been to every state but Alaska and Hawaii. He asked about my goals in the city, and I told him about writing. He said there was no money in short stories anymore because all but a few of the literary magazines had gone out of business, and that I should take a Wall Street job for the security. "Or even write for all these advertisers," he said, gesturing at the high-rises to the west. "At least you're still in the practice of writing. Neil Simon did that shit for years before he became a playwright." I told him he was probably on the mark, and I'd think about it. "You married?" he asked next. I said no. "Find a virgin," he advised. "These girls, out there... they've had twenty dicks, you think they're going to be satisfied with just yours?" "Virgins are hard to find these days," I said. "No they aren't. Just go steal one from the churches." Brian had a hacking cough, and when we finally introduced ourselves by name, his hand was clammy with sweat or fever. I told him I had to get going, and my right palm burned with the compulsive need to be washed. "Before you take off," he said, "let me give you my poem for New York." He cleared his throat and looked away, watching the foot traffic by the marble fountain. I don't remember most of the poem, but it was fast, descriptive, rhyming verse, enumerating New York's various landmarks and extolling its rough-and-tumble qualities. Near the end, he referenced the city's eight million children, of all colors, from all places, who "all answer to the same name..." Before the reveal, he paused dramatically, coughed again, and trotted out his best New Yorker bark: "Eh!" I didn't believe he wrote the poem himself, but searches since haven't produced anything, so it's possible. At the time, I laughed at the punch line, obligated and somewhat appreciative of the effort, and waited until I'd hit 71st and Central Park West before cleaning up.