An Unexpected God

Oh, Man: Excepts (Part 4)

Good morning, people,

In 2019 I had a remarkable encounter in Brooklyn, very Walking to Listen. I knew I’d have to write about it, but I dreaded making an attempt, because how could I possibly communicate the whole thing in words? It took me two or three years before I began my approach to this mountain, and it’s been a three-year trek to get to the summit here with you now.

It’s a part of my Oh, Man-uscript, a personal, story-based exploration of masculinity that I’m sharing with my paying subscribers here on Substack.

For your reference:

Here’s an intro to the series.

Part 1: Strange Embrace (another remarkable encounter, this one in Ireland).

Part 2: The Secret Language (on sexuality)

Part 3: How did I become a man? (on rites of passage)

I’m making this one available to all my readers. Thanks so much being here.

Best,

Andrew

Healing, I believe, is a mystery. Like God. Like a monarch from the goo, or a human from the primordial soup. Like love. How does it happen? We don’t want to admit it, or at least I don’t, but the inconvenient truth is that healing is wild. Undomesticated. No one controls it. We can learn about it, sure. We can encourage it. Support it. But we can never guarantee it or take credit for it. Who can take credit for healing when so many variables are always at play, so many specific conditions required? So many mysteries. None of us can make a butterfly. Butterflies happen. Humans happen. Healing happens.

Sometimes it’s quick. Sometimes it goes on and on and on. And sometimes, it just doesn’t.

That breakup, for me, it was taking a while. Almost a year had gone by and I was still tender. Nothing was growing yet in the empty space. It was, and I was, just empty.

At first, during the breakup, there was the thrill of destruction, the shock and awe of a life burning to the ground, the wonder of it, like lightning before thunder. And then, the thunder, the grief, an avalanche I was helpless to stop, roaring down the mountainside of my heart, unloosing old scree fields of ungrieved grief, tearing open old chasms of enshadowed loneliness and disappointment and fear, all of it laid bare now to be felt as if for the first time, all those feelings I hadn’t felt all the way through, buried in vain. That college breakup? I was feeling that all over again. My parents’ divorce, fifteen long years in the rearview mirror? More boulders crashing down the mountain of me, hurting like new.

I had tried to make a home of my own with her. A family. We’d wanted, really wanted, to make it work. I’d let my longing off-leash to run wild, unchecked, let myself really believe it could be her. But it wasn’t. Now, during the month it took for me to move out of our little homestead, there was nothing to do but feel that, all the way through. Feel what I had wanted, but wasn’t.

And then, silence.

And that trip to Ireland with Luke.

And my desperate hope that perhaps I might just be able to stay there, in Ireland, might meet the love of my life in some pub, might not have to go back to that silence, that stillness, the uncompromising emptiness back home. What was home, now? Where?

When I got back to western Mass, an auntie-friend in the neighborhood offered me a room for the winter. I licked my wounds till spring, and when the buds started to pop into summer I knew I had to go, but to where, I had no idea. I just knew I couldn’t stay in that neighborhood, so close to the graveyard of the life I’d wanted to live with the woman I’d loved, yes, but wasn’t the love of my life after all.

So, I took to the road.

---

Right before the Fourth of July I reached out to my sister, Caitlin, to see if I could stay with her in Brooklyn for a few weeks. I was telling myself, and had told Caitlin, that I was going to her place in Bushwick to write. It was easier to simply say, “I’m working on my next book,” than it was to say something closer to the truth, such as, “I’m still recovering from the breakup. I think I’m depressed, but not so depressed I can’t pretend everything’s fine. And as I imagine you’ve heard from Mom, I am living out of my car. So I’m wondering, can I come down to stay at your place for a while, just to stew in all of that with you? I might write. But then again, I might not.”

Caitlin was my first best friend. The second child, three years younger than I. She learned to walk at ten months, to keep up with me, as Mom has it. There’s a picture of us as toddlers. I’m six. She’s three. I’m standing in the shallow end of our grandmother’s backyard pool, beaming at the camera, while Caitlin clings to my neck like she’s about to die, her face, pure terror.

We take turns clinging now. That summer, it was my turn.

It just so happened she had to be away during the weeks I wanted to visit. Well, all the better to get into my manuscript, I thought. However, it took approximately 45 minutes alone in her apartment to understand that the real reason I’d come to New York was to be with her.

I tried to write. I really did. But I just couldn’t do it. I needed something to cling to that wasn’t inside my own head, wasn’t a string of words in Word doc, a thread of Instagram pics on a screen. But Caitlin wasn’t around, and Luke was still abroad, and I didn’t want to see any of my New York friends. I’d have to tell them I was living out of my car. They would see that I had no idea what I was doing with my life. They knew what they were doing. My city friends taught yoga to sexy hipsters, and directed operations at TED, and fought to save the lives of inmates on death row, and had recently released their new folk album. I just didn’t have it in me to see them, or be seen by them. But I needed something, someone, so I started taking walks, long walks crisscrossing the boroughs of Brooklyn, the grid of Manhattan. Just walking it out, day and night.

I clung to every person I passed. They never knew it, the many hundreds of humans on the many dozens of streets. They had no idea I wasn’t walking to get somewhere, or for any other reason than to just see them for a second, be seen by them, be with them and among them instead of alone with my thoughts.

---

On the Fourth of July at dusk, I slung my mandolin across my back and walked a few miles to Brooklyn Bridge Park to watch the fireworks over the East River. Mostly, though, I watched the people. They couldn’t see me from my spot under a tree off to the side, away from the lamplight. It was a huge park with tons of people, and all their eyes were on the night sky or on their lovers or on their children, on their thoughts, but not on me, so I could watch them for minutes on end, pick out certain individuals and just track them as they meandered through the park in the crowd while I plucked on the mandolin. There was something extremely intimate about watching someone without interruption for several minutes.

After about twenty seconds of watching someone without their knowing it, I’d start to feel chastened a bit, challenged, a silent voice demanding that I look away, take off my shoes and get on my knees like God made Moses do before the burning bush. To keep watching them, without feeling like a creep, I’d have to intentionally turn up the dial of my reverence, had to be sure I was watching them as I’d watch a sleeping child or a dying elder or a sunrise, but even still there was always a point at which it really did begin to feel inappropriate. Maybe there’s a limit to how much we’re allowed to see each other, a certain depth beyond which we are not supposed to see or be seen. Maybe we’re like the sun. You can’t stare for too long.

It was around midnight by the time I started the long walk back to Bushwick. I was still a mile or so away from my sister’s apartment when I came upon them at the corner of Union and Broadway: a man screaming at a woman, who was screaming at him. There was another guy standing between them, facing the man, shielding the woman. This guy in the middle had his head turned slightly to the side, apparently hoping to avoid whatever might happen if he made the mistake of making eye contact with the screaming man.

Walking into the blast radius of this anger, I suddenly became aware of my vulnerability, the way you suddenly become aware of the cold when you step outside in the winter. It was midnight in a neighborhood that wasn’t my own. I was alone. The possibility of getting punched in the face felt very real. But I wonder now if it was actually their vulnerability I was feeling. I’d screamed like that on our front porch when I was fifteen, the morning my dad told us he was in love with another woman. I didn’t care what the neighbors might think, not even a little. Pain overrides politeness when it reaches a certain pitch. At that pitch, it needs to scream.

“What living and buried speech is always vibrating here,” Walt Whitman wrote in Brooklyn almost two centuries ago, “what howls restrain’d by decorum?”

---

I stopped walking about half a block away from them. I couldn’t bring myself to walk past them, pretend their pain was just another New York nuisance like the trash on the street. But I couldn’t move closer either, didn’t want to offend or escalate or insert myself into a situation that wasn’t my business.

Compounding my uncertainty was the fact that they were Black, and that I am white, and that we were in America and it was the Fourth of July and what is the best, most honest thing a white man in America can do to celebrate and respect the freedom and independence of a Black man and a Black woman who are moving through some kind of pain together there on the sidewalk? Pretend it’s not happening? That didn’t feel quite right. Call the police? Definitely not. Intervene myself? God no.

Instead, I just stopped walking. Stood there about half a block away. Put both hands on my heart. Averted my gaze like the man in the middle was doing. Waited, for what, I didn’t know.

A car pulled over beside me, up the street a few dozen yards from the man and the woman. The woman started walking up the block toward the car, toward me. The man followed her, and the guy in the middle started walking the other way now that it was all soon to be over.

The woman turned off the sidewalk just in front of me, got into the car, and slammed the door shut before the man could stop her. The car drove away and the man was left standing in the street alone. In sudden silence now, he turned and started walking back to the sidewalk where I still had a hand on my heart.

I watched a thought crab its way into my consciousness as he approached me: “I wish it was the woman I could talk to. Not the man. I am scared of this man.” But then he was upon me, and in a matter of seconds he would pass me by, and before any more crustaceans could scuttle into view I coughed out the words, “Hey, man, are you okay?”

The man looked up at me and our eyes met for a second before he looked back to where the woman’s getaway car had been. He was a little shorter than I, and seemed to be about twenty years older, maybe forty-five or fifty years old. He was wearing a black do-rag and a white sleeveless T-shirt with crisp jean shorts down to his knees. His face was a stone mask of calm.

“Yeah, she’s a bitch,” he said. “You know how it goes.”

His tone was flat, sounded like he was talking about a fickle WiFi connection or a barbecue that just got rained out. I was thrown off, at first, by the dexterity of his avoidance of my question. I nearly mirrored him, said, “Oh, okay. Cool. Yeah, I know how it goes.” He was facing me, continuing to walk away, backwards down the sidewalk.

“No, no,” I said, finding my way back to the question. “I mean, like, are you okay? Like, how are you doing? I’m just imagining if that was me, I’d be kind of rattled, you know? How are you doing after that?”

He stopped walking away from me.

“She’s a fucking bitch,” he said again. “She’s been hanging out with these bad people. I keep telling her not to, but she keeps doing it. These are bad people. Like Bloods and Crips type of shit. Bad people. And it’s going to kill her. She’s going to die.”

“Who is she? How do you know her?”

I could feel that we were beginning to connect, somehow. The invisible tendrils of our respective vulnerabilities were reaching out to each other, making contact: sensitive, tentative, testing to see if the other was safe enough and sound enough to continue the conversation.

“She and I used to be together. We’re not together anymore. Now she just calls me when she needs help, and sends me hundreds of texts, and then she keeps doing this shit. She’s going to get herself killed. We lived together for three years. She gets seizures all the time, big seizures, but when we lived together she never had a single seizure. Never. Not a single one. Because I was strong for her. I’m strong for her. Her family doesn’t respect her. Her friends don’t give a shit. But I’m strong for her, and then she goes and does something like this.”

He slammed the word “strong” like a hammer on the anvil of my listening. The anvil didn’t break, and he kept hammering, almost like he’d been waiting for a solid anvil to come around for a while now.

“I had to be strong for her. We met when we were teenagers. She lost her virginity to me. She was the only woman I was ever faithful to. I’ve been with hundreds of women, and she was the only woman I’ve ever been faithful to.”

“So you love her?”

“She’s a fucking bitch,” he said, ignoring the word I’d just dropped. “She calls me, sends me all these texts, and I’m there for her, and I help her out, but then she goes off with these people. She’s going to get hurt. She’s going to get killed.”

I took a risk, pushed back a little bit.

“So you care about this woman, and she’s hanging out with people who aren’t respecting her, and you’re pissed off about that because you love her.”

He didn’t concede, but he also didn’t correct me.

The boundaries between us began to soften as he went on. When he would share a particularly difficult piece of information, I would feel it, almost physically, and I’d let him know as much. He’d share more. And then, I don’t remember who took the risk first, physical touch entered our lexicon: a light slap on the shoulder, a fist bump, a high five when the pulse of our conversation demanded some kind of exclamation point.

“Both her sons are in jail,” he said at one point. “For murder. They shot and killed people.” He pointed to the police precinct across the street. “Her son walked into that precinct with his body full of bullets and what did they do? They arrested him. He was bleeding to death and they put him in a cell.”

“Oh, God,” I said. “I can’t believe that.”

“Yeah. Y’all have no clue. This shit goes deep. Now you understand why I’m so angry.”

---

I didn’t dare check the time. I feared such an act would take us out of this eternity. I didn’t want it to end. Several times in our conversation he turned to leave, started walking away, but I stayed rooted there, and he would circle back, and we would go deeper.

He told me the story about how, years ago, the woman had conceived a child with another man. Eight months into her pregnancy, this man ghosted her. Just left. She saw him walking down the street with another woman on his arm just a few weeks before giving birth to his child. I let myself feel the shock of that, the betrayal. I let out a groan.

“Damn, dude, I can feel that in my back, like I’m getting stabbed in the back or something.”

“Yeah, it’s like Chuckie,” he said, “stabbing you in the back.”

“So it’s like she got stabbed. No wonder she’s so hurt.”

“Yeah, but then she goes off with these bad people,” he said.

“I know,” I said, having heard this refrain many times by now. “It sounds so hard, man.”

“I just have to let it go,” he said. “I want peace.”

---

We hung there in silence together for a long moment, and I could feel the end of our conversation approaching. I realized I didn’t know his name, though I felt I knew him now in a way that made our names irrelevant.

“What’s your name, man?” I asked anyway.

“God,” he said without missing a beat, leveling the cannon of his gaze directly at my eyes.

“Carl?” I said, unable to believe what I had just heard.

“God,” he said again, enunciating the D, and then spelling it out for me. “G, O, D.”

Speechless, I reached out to him and our hands met and locked together in a tight grasp. We were both, at that point, quite unselfconscious about making eye contact. There was softness in his touch, and in mine. Openness. Imagining the challenges that lay ahead for him, I wanted to give him a pulse of strength, so I lightly contracted my palm around his, attempting to transmit a dose of my power into him.

Feeling my little squeeze alerted him, I think, to the fact that he had allowed himself to become so open with me. This shook him out of the reverie. Immediately, he covered my hand with his other hand and squeezed back much harder than I had. For one long minute (or was it a few seconds, or a year?) he poured the full voltage of himself into me through his hands and his eyes, and I took it like a lightning rod in silence. I saw and felt a man who had survived many battles, battles I would never have to fight, a man who knew full well the war was far from over. Maybe he knew I had my own battles, too. Maybe he knew I was clinging to him.  

He released me. I did what I could to maintain some semblance of normalcy, but we were well beyond normal at that point. How to conclude such an encounter? There wasn’t a formula for this, but basic courtesy required that I give him something. This couldn’t end with him just giving me more. He had already given me so much.

“Can I play a song for you?” I asked. At that point, we were so deep into uncharted territory that my proposition didn’t sound strange at all. And I had my mandolin anyway.

“Sure,” he said, and so I brought the mandolin to my chest, closed my eyes. We disappeared together. It felt to me like the people walking by us couldn’t see us now, had no idea we were right there among them. I took a breath and began to strum, and then to hum, making up the tune as I went, no words. Just as I was settling into the spontaneous pattern of the melody, God joined me, his voice an untrained but confident presence intertwining with my own, raspy and unashamed and true. And so we sang in harmony a song neither of us had ever sung before and would never sing again, a song we had been preparing to sing for our entire lives, perhaps, and now, at last, it’s time had come.

When it was done, I opened my eyes, and we both nodded, as if we’d been working on a painting together and agreed it was complete, or working on a car engine and it was running smoothly now. I started down Broadway while he got on his bike and took off down Union. I looked back. He was riding off the seat, standing, pumping the pedals hard and flying straight down the center of the empty street, his tires spinning circles of LED light in the dark Brooklyn night.