Naked Man in the Circle
Catherine M. Brown
April 2006
April 2006
"Well, at least they know he isn't armed," someone said.
It was true.
The rosy yellow of the sky was deepening into a purplish blue, a hazy violet. The line of the buildings below it was unmoving, like the naked man who silently paid homage to the marble monument in the Circle.
The past few summers, at least three movies had been shot in this neighborhood. The reason wasn't because it was so picturesque, but because it was so real. Like the man in the Circle. You just couldn't make this stuff up. And if you tried, no one would believe you anyway. Especially the people from around here, the working class section of Park Slope. Park Slop, some called it.
The locals were born here, bred her, died here only to be waked M. J. Smith and Sons two blocks down and prayed for at Holy Name of Jesus right across the street. These people weren't Yuppies who moved here simply because it was so quaint or the rent was cheaper than Manhattan. They grew up here, skinning their knees on the hard concrete streets. They sweated here, worked here in the sewers and in the schools, then were buried here, in narrow plots at Greenwood Cemetery high up on the hill, overlooking it all.
Mae West was buried in Green-Wood. So were Abner Doubleday, DeWitt Clinton, Ray Sharkey and hosts of others who'd died of AIDS. Most of the people who stood outside Farrell's and drank Bud in the trickling afternoon sun knew and loved someone who was buried in Greenwood. Most of them would end up there too. Perhaps even the naked man in the Circle. Only not yet.
The police officers were still standing there talking. Then a screaming ambulance from Methodist arrived to seal his fate. They had blankets and a stretcher. They had sirens and lights. But first, the Emergency Service Workers discussed the matter with the police officers.
"Poor fuck," someone said.
"Poor, sick fuck."
"Your tax dollars at work. How many police officers does it take..."
"He's going to spend his Memorial Day Weekend in jail."
"Or in Bellevue."
"I'm going Upstate tomorrow. My brother Richie has a house there."
"How is Richie?"
"Tested positive but he's okay. Working on his house. He's still strong and healthy...for now."
The sky was dark and the painfully straight line of the rooftops was not so evident anymore. It was difficult to distinguish where it ended and the sky began. "All the kids I grew up with are either dead, dying or in jail," the fireman remarked sadly to no one in particular.
His girlfriend, the writer, heard. She heard everything. Even the things he didn't say. "But you've escaped," she told him hopefully.
"No, I haven't," he said. "I'm still here."
"But not because you have to be. Because you want to be."
One block away, in the Circle, the naked man went quietly with the EMS workers. They wrapped a blanket around him like Gunga Din. He lay obediently on the stretcher and allowed himself to be strapped in. The doors closed. The sirens moaned. The lights reflected off the nearby buildings quite dramatically. Then the ambulance drove off. Just like that.
"No one would believe this whole thing."
"Sure they would."
"Bet it won't even make the news."
"No, probably not."
The police officers finally finished discussing the situation and left the Circle themselves. There would be paperwork to file and someone had to go down to Methodist. The Circle seemed lonely without them, their striped vehicles and the naked man whose ebony flesh was nearly as dark as the skin of the monument of itself.
"Want to come down with me to Fifth? I have to do laundry. Five loads, maybe six. Got nothing to wear to work tomorrow. Then we can hang out at that Polish bar on the corner. It's a really cool place. You'll love it."
So the fireman and his girlfriend, the writer, tagged along. He drank Budweiser from a sweaty can while she sipped flat ginger ale because they didn't have Coke or wine coolers. Their friend ran back and forth between the bar and the Laundromat.
The fireman had grown up a block away from there. He had lived in an apartment building whose hallways always smelled of cat piss and ammonia. His parents worked hard to send both him and his sister to private school. He was smart ("But if only he'd apply himself...") and they were the poorest kids at Berkeley, but at least they had a chance. Then his family moved to the safety of a wood frame house on Eighth Avenue when he was fifteen. Perhaps this was his real salvation, moving away from the poverty of Fifth Avenue.
The fireman remembered when Luigi's Pizzeria had first opened. It was 1971 or something. He remembered the social club for ancient Italian men and a lot of other places that weren't there anymore. People who weren't there anymore either. The Polish bar was okay. Run-down, ugly, but friendly. Pool table, grimy booths, waxy wood paneling, a rotary dial phone in the corner. A stuffed toy mouse flying in a crepe-paper balloon which the barmaid reprimanded him for touching when he stretched his hand toward the ceiling.
He felt the need to go outside. The sky was black, but not as black as the monument in the Circle. Luigi's was still open, but he wasn't hungry. On the street, he met someone he used to know. They used to be children together in a place full of imperfect lines and sad buildings. They talked. The man was HIV-positive and his brother, dead. These were boys the fireman had played stick ball with, the boys he had been with on that night the junkie snapped off the head of a pigeon right near the Grand Prospect Hall across from the Expressway, right in front of them, to shock them.
And the Nineteenth Street girls who once were pretty now were hags. If they were still alive, that is. It just didn't make sense anymore.
When his childhood friend left, the fireman stood on Fifth Avenue, just down the street from the place where he once lived. "Everyone I grew up with is either dead, dying or in jail," he repeated out loud. But no one heard.
His other friend's laundry was in the spin cycle across the street. Whiskered drunks did shots of vodka with water chasers inside the Polish bar. And the fireman's girlfriend, the writer, rushed out onto the pavement, looking for him. She found him standing there all alone, crying.
Catherine M. Brown’s works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry have appeared in publications as diverse Seventeen and Screw–and practically everything else in between.
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