Weight

My son is born in the morning in early September as blue-black shadows recede, gently pushed aside by the burgeoning dawn streaming through the windows of our tiny studio apartment on 7th street.

That morning I step into the world a New Man and I ride my racing-red single speed with its carefree drop handles carefully, oh so carefully, down Avenue C, coming to a full stop at every cross-section, swinging out my arm to indicate my right turn down Houston on this first test of fatherhood—fetching bagels and lox from Russ & Daughters at Tiffany’s behest, finally able to taste the mercury-laden bounty of the sea after months of pregnancy-induced abstinence.

I ride in a manner I haven’t ridden since I took my bicycling test, tailing our high-viz vest-clad PE teacher around the neighborhood of my Danish elementary school, proving that I can slalom, ride in a straight line, cycle in a group and brake and signal when appropriate, my tongue pressed to the roof of my mouth in concentration.

My wheels turn on the still-cool tar while my mind loops through stern admonitions born of my brain’s tiresome predilection to anticipate the worst; “Don’t get killed now—you just had a kid. Whatever you do, just don’t get killed now.” Over and over, round and round. And as my mind spools I am transported back to earlier this morning; watching while Tiffany and our midwives worked together to deliver my son, the connection between them like a physical presence, charging the atmosphere with a calm and languid harmony.

In that first light I knelt next to our twin box mattress and held Tiffany’s hand, breathing and counting and listening for murmured instructions and requests for water or comfort or strength.

I watched while Katheryn and Yiska gently positioned Tiffany’s limbs. And I listened while they periodically touched the heart monitor to Tiffany’s belly, the pitter-patter of Solbjørn’s heartbeat like a galloping pony, reassuring and rhythmic and full of promise.

I breathed and Tiffany breathed and we breathed together; steady and flowing and strong. As we breathed, I stared into the soft glow of our nightlight, soft concentric rings of luminescence radiating from its eco-friendly bulb, and slowly my consciousness started to expand away from my body and into the room until I was nowhere and everywhere all at once and I realized I was having some sort of religious experience.

And in the moment this seemed entirely appropriate, being there at the nexus of life and birth and all. But then again how would I know since the only God I’ve met was after a less than advisable dose of psychedelics—and that was a funny kind of God; more closely resembling a Windows screen saver than anything bearded or many-armed or tentacled.

Slowly my vantage point nestled itself into the top-most corner besides our bed and I could see myself and I could see Tiffany but what’s more, I could see the universe. Not in the sense of swirling galaxies or imploding suns, but in the sense of histories past and future and, for a moment, still holding Tiffany’s hand, I let my mind go and I imagined myself at the beginning, basking on the salt flats, my tongue darting from my mouth to taste the scent of life at its genesis, my long scaled body warming under the sun as instinct floods my nervous system with ancient purpose and propulsion.

I understood then that my role here is not to be questioned. That for all the fret and fear of fatherhood, I am just a crack. A crack that the universe has found through which to push its eldritch agenda like water through an estuary and our son will exist as an extension of that. A new capillary through which life will flow and maybe join with another. And together they and we and everyone past and present and future will form the lungs and organs and circulatory system of something unknowable and unwitnessable that will march across time, devouring the stars while conjuring a path of souls before it.

In that moment I did experience God in the languid euphoria of letting go of the insistence on Me and whether or not Tiffany and I had done the right thing in having Sol and I couldn’t help but laugh to which Tiffany angrily tells me to STOP LAUGHING and my attention is pulled back into my body, into my breath and the tears running down my cheeks and the hand that’s holding Tiffany’s. And soon after Tiffany would void her bowels and not long after our son was born into this world, and as the sun landed on his face for the first time, all my worries crash back in, because even though we are all touched by God, we’ve still got to pay rent.

But now I’m on a bike and I remind myself to breathe and that bagels come before rent and that everything will be OK. At least for a while now because I have a job again and we are out of lock-downs and curfews and the police helicopters have stopped pressing down on us from above and even the relentlessly climbing daily death tally seems to have slowed, offering us maybe a glimpse, a moment, of hope and respite in the deluge of tragedy that seeped into every moment as we wrung our hands in sanitizer and scanned our neighbors for symptoms. And yes everything has changed but also stayed the same, I think, as I thread my careful path through the potholes and cop cars parked in the bicycle lane. And I guess there will be a lot to talk about once Sol is old enough to carry all this weight.

The sun climbs and the heat bears down on me, humidity tugging at my sleeves as I think about weight; my own in contrast to Sol’s, featherlight as he lay in the palm of my hand that morning. I think about how my own upbringing— the one that I’ll have to rely on to steer his—was full of anger and fear and shame. I think about how, in order to be truthful to Sol, it will be hard to paint myself as the paternal hero he deserves when I talk about what I did and what I’ve done; the violence I sought status in, the drugs and alcohol I fled to, the queerness I hated in myself for decades and sometimes still do.

I think about how each parental truism will forever be lined with bitter irony—just be yourself, you are perfect just as you are, don’t worry what other people think—and how I violently rejected each one as incomprehensible, packing on the resentment day after day, year after year until it snapped the neck of my sanity, killing that me and giving birth to this me; frailer, prone to spells of darkness and depression, but maybe, hopefully, also kinder to myself and the people around me.

I pull up on Houston and Orchard thirty minutes before Russ & Daughters opens and clank my bike to a no-parking sign before joining the line already taking shape outside because it’s Gotham law that no matter what time you arrive at Russ & Daughters there will always be a gaggle of tourists in front of you and an impatient yenta— heavy with soft disparagement and Chanel N°5—behind you.

I stand there, still wearing my bicycle helmet, reciting my order in my head,  knowing that any hesitation at the counter will be seen as weakness by the famously brusque deli staff, as a marker of non-New Yorkerness by these sentinels of the soul of the city that slice and wrap and schmear. And as I stand there, the realization that I have brought a child into this world, with all my sins laid ready for him to inherit, moves from the periphery of soft musings to the hard center of my universe with terrifying irreversibility.

And slowly my order; half a pound of Gaspe Nova salmon, half a dozen bagels (two everything, two sesame, two salt), a quarter pound of caviar cream cheese, a quarter pound of scallion and a bisl of wasabi roe, starts to segue and meld with the list of accumulated flaws possessed by the male lineage of my family. Infidelity, alcoholism, pride, vanity, violence, cowardice, selfishness. All of them jumbling together with the prophetic colloquialisms that I’ve slowly drunk in since my own father died and my mother and my sisters started revealing the extent of his neglect—and I started seeing the overlap with my own failings in the same way I see the traces of him mirrored in my jaw and nose and eyes. I start to cycle through them; “The sins of the father,” “The apple never falls far from the tree,” and my personal favorite, “The mills of the Gods grind slowly, to children’s children and to those who are born after them,” its glacial inevitability and crushing punishment cruel satisfaction to my own morbid masochism.

And as the line shuffles forward, I yank a number from the old-fashioned ticket dispenser and it comes out 013—an omen, clearly—and the panic and the guilt close in on me, springing from their hiding places behind the dried fruit display and the rows of tinned fish and racks of freshly boiled and baked bagels and I start to dissolve under the weight of the rumination, losing control of my order; a quarter pound of lox, a half-pound of infidelity, a bisl of alcoholism until the couple from Wisconsin ahead of me, inexplicably dipped in head-to-toe hiking gear, fumble through their order and now it’s my turn.

I inch my way to the counter and lock eyes with my deli clerk and right then a wave of relief washes over me as I stare into the eyes of the Patron Saint of Lost Queer boys, none other than John Waters, a halo of halogen backlighting his prim features and pencil mustache, his long and delicate fingers floating sweetly above his chest. In that moment I rally and confess my order flawlessly, toppings and all, and I stand there in awe as he confidently readies this breakfast, this communion, swiftly wrapping everything in the protective shine of heavy wax paper. When he finally hands me my credit card slip and pen, I grasp his hand and I stammer, “My son was born today,” and he looks at me with kind eyes and he smiles and says, simply, “Bless you.”

And of course, I know that he is just a lookalike. One that Tiffany and I have chuckled at a hundred times as we stood in line, bright-eyed and in love with New York and with each other, ordering breakfast before we’d go home and make love—the love that ultimately created Sol, our sun that our lives will come to revolve around, sometimes warmed by his light, other times scorched by his intensity.

But in that moment, all I needed was a blessing. A kindness. The kind of kindness that I had been unable to award myself as I tumbled toward fatherhood, full of trepidation that my family is only able to shape to one mold of masculinity, doomed to stutter the mistakes of the past. But standing there clutching St. John’s hand, I understand that a tree is never its final shape, and that Sol is Sol, and I am me and my father was who and what he was but in the end not every apple is a bad one.

I unlock my bike and ride out on Houston again, one hand on the handlebars, wobbling slightly as my weight is thrown by the bulkiness of the bag of bagels in my other. But even as I wobble, I feel the ghost of Sol’s newborn body like a soft dent in my palms. So, I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth and slalom and ride in a straight line and brake and signal when appropriate. And as the bike pulls me forward, I feel the weight start to shift.

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