'Firefighter Chases Woman Down Street'

Miya Lee
Today’s essay is “Firefighter Chases Woman Down Street,” published in February 2020, written by Marlena Brown, read by January Lavoy.

January Lavoy
The firefighter and I met on one of the rare days I decided to wear lipstick.

If I had to guess that a reason for him chasing me down the street that day, it was the lipstick. It always does something to my face.

To be honest, I was so close to shutting him down. Here I was, on my way home from work, a block and a half from my Manhattan apartment, already mentally having shed my shoes and bra. And here was this firefighter — a bald, white, middle-aged New York City cliche I had past on the sidewalk with his buddies, rushing to catch up. He stopped me in my tracks and wasted no time. “I think you’re a beautiful woman. When are you going to let me take you out?”

Not if he could, but when.

I’m a sucker, so I fell for it. And to this day, I can’t tell you why I decided to give him my phone number. Somewhere in the middle of being distracted by what I thought was his lack of eyebrows, I realized that I neither wanted to lie to him, nor could I find any real reason to say no. I figured, he’s a civil servant. How crazy can he be?

Of course, not five minutes later, standing alone in my apartment, I convinced myself that this date would be a disaster. We had nothing in common, and he was going to be as dumb as a brick. I’m a snob. I accept this about myself.

But two days later, during our first phone call, he broke out of any box I tried to put him in. An avid music fan, he wanted to visit Macon, Georgia because of the Allman Brothers.

He shocked me by knowing Emory University, my alma mater, saying, “That’s where they shot ‘Into the Wild.’” He was a travel fiend. He hoped to hike down through Gibraltar and work his way into northern Africa doing volunteer work along the way. He was a hell of a lot more interesting than I, in my snobbery, had given him space to be.

When I told him I was looking forward to dinner, I meant it.

On our first date, we discovered that we both came from families of addiction, alcoholism, substance abuse. He hadn’t managed to escape that legacy, telling me he was now eight years sober.

I had noticed this about him before he told me about any legacy. When he asked me how I knew, I said, “You never looked at the drink menu.”

People say addicts can walk into a room and spot other addicts. I wonder if that truth holds for those like me, who teeter on the edge of that slippery slope, trying like hell not to fall, while wondering, isn’t it just easier to give in?

We also learned that spirituality served as an anchor for us both. He came from good Irish Catholic stock, but had been a bit of a prodigal son, and was slowly making his way back through daily prayer, Bible reading and meditation. I am a hopeful agnostic in a wrestling match with the God of my childhood. The Lord may eventually pin me down, but he will need to pop out my hip to do so.

Politics were another story. Surfacing somewhere in hour two of our first date, conservative libertarian (him) versus bleeding heart liberal (me). After dinner, we strolled through the center of Tarrytown, jabbering nonstop. He was an unstoppable force, while I, arms crossed, eyebrow cocked, remained an immovable object.

Back in the car, city-bound with abortion the topic, he said his Catholicism kept him from viewing the act as anything but murder. As a recovering evangelical, I get it. I believed that too for a long time, until I thought I was pregnant after a night of being drunk in my 20s. I realized abortion was a right I would readily claim and could not in good conscience declare myself anti-abortion, if I was so ready to choose it for myself.

Crossing into Manhattan, he let it fly that he didn’t think racism in New York City was as bad as people claimed. My roots are in the South — I am a descendant of slaves — and I’m always looking for somebody to say something stupid about racism so I can lose my mind.

But I didn’t with him, instead pointing out that racism is not only about extreme acts like burning crosses. Racism exists on a spectrum, and those microaggressions I’ve experienced — being asked why I always look so angry, or finding out a man has stopped seeing me because his family doesn’t want him dating a Black woman — may seem masculine to him, but cut me deep after a while, enough small slices to cut off a limb.

He went quiet at that — a sign I would later understand to be him seriously considering what I had said, because yes, happily, there were more dates, and even more debates, each one digging deeper into controversial issues.

“But don’t you think —” he would start, knowing good and well I didn’t think whatever was about to come out of his mouth. I would dive into a debate that should have been contentious and belligerent, but never was. We never had an off-limit topic, including police interactions with people of color. When he let loose about how officers have a hard job and sometimes “unfortunate” things happen, it took all of my hard earned Southern charm to answer diplomatically. Because unlike mental illness, or even abortion, I had living, breathing skin in this particular game.

My father was born in southern Georgia in the 1950s, and like a lot of men of his generation, he struggled with addiction. He is 6 feet 4, dark skinned, hawk-eyed and curmudgeonly. All he wants to do is sit on a porch, drink beer, and watch “The Flash.” But thanks to our country’s legacy of racism, his very being is perceived as a threat.

I worry about him every time he makes the three-hour drive from Atlanta to Albany, Georgia, where I was born. I’m scared that some state patrol officer will see my father’s big hands and long limbs and think he has to “fear” for his own life.

What I needed was context for the firefighter’s point of view, which I got one warm, summer evening when we met in Central Park for a concert. As we approached the Summer Stage entrance, we passed two patrol officers who were eyeing everyone’s comings and goings. And he said, “My dad and uncle used to work out of the precinct a few blocks away.”

And boom. That one sentence, as casually as he let it slip, created a huge shift in my perspective. His defense of police officers made sense because these were no longer abstract issues. This was personal. This was life. He and I carried the weight of our fathers, his a cop, mine a Black man in America.

Every day, we each worried about our own father’s safety.

I never asked him much about growing up with a father who was a cop. I wish I had. Instead, we drifted apart because he, as he put it, was like Jack Nicholson’s character in “As Good as It Gets”: not ready for a long-term commitment and unsure he would ever be ready. I later learned the truth. He was afraid of having a marriage like his parents’ often strained union. That broke my heart.

So imagine my shock when, seven months after we stopped seeing each other, I googled him and found his obituary. He had died suddenly on vacation, circumstances unexplained. The reality of it, discovered in such a casual way, broke my heart a second time.

Even though we hadn’t lasted, the way we had bridged the political and cultural divide was refreshing. It was love. The world seemed darker without him.

After his death, while sitting in my apartment, I asked him if he could hear me. And when I fled outside in search of escape, there were two firetrucks.

I knew he wasn’t on either rig, but their presence at that moment made me think, yeah, he heard me, just as he always did.

Daniel Jones
It’s Marlena.

Marlena Brown
Hi.

Daniel Jones
I’m seeing you for the first time, I think.

Marlena Brown
Oh, yeah?

Daniel Jones
I don’t normally do my editor’s calls, you know, on video. So —

Marlena Brown
I know.

Daniel Jones
Yeah. So I wanted to ask you about the morning the piece went live on The Times website, within hours, we started getting emails from people who recognized this firefighter.

The Firefighter's Sister
Hello. Someone emailed me this article. At first, I glanced at the title and thought, oh, it’s another fireman story. I’m married to a New York City firefighter and my brother was also one. I get firefighter stories all the time. The next day, I opened the article. For what reason, I don’t know. I only had to read the first sentence or two before I knew the firefighter in this story was my brother. He died, as the author says, suddenly last year. I know he touched so many lives and was special. There are so many stories. I wish I had the time and patience to write a book of those stories.

Thanks for bringing back a piece of my brother to me.

Daniel Jones
You know, we didn’t even identify him by name in the piece. That really wasn’t what it was about. And I sent all of those along to you. What was that for you, to receive almost instantly upon already dealing with the piece coming out, with all of these really revealing and emotional emails from people who knew him so well?

Marlena Brown
It was healing.

There’s something about grieving by yourself that’s really hard, because by the time he passed away, we had broken up. And I just — I found it so hard grieving and not having anyone around me understand how huge of a loss it was, because they just didn’t know him. Something I think I had been waiting for for almost a year it was just being able to connect with people who knew him and be able to grieve with them. So when I started getting some of your emails, I was getting a haircut. At the same time, I was just weeping. And my poor hair stylist was like, are you OK?

Daniel Jones
You were reading them on your phone and —

Marlena Brown
Yeah, I was just reading them on my phone, and I just started trying to respond to every single one of them.

Daniel Jones
Oh my God.

Marlena Brown
Just to let them know that I understand how huge of a loss this was. Because he just — he really was one of those types of people that you just don’t meet every day. Like literally, tried to leave every place that he entered a better space than the way that he found it.

The Firefighter's Sister
Interestingly enough, one of my brother’s friends just texted me a link to it without any information, just a link to the article.

Firefighter 1
That morning, my phone literally just started blowing up.

Firefighter 2
Yeah, like four or five texts of it from different people who I used to work with from the fire department.

Firefighter 3
— friend from the firehouse, and I laughed and I opened it, and then I cried after I read it.

The Firefighter's Friend
You know, as I was reading it, I was just like, oh my God, this is Steve Brady.

Firefighter 4
I knew it was him from the first sentence.

Firefighter 5
The fact that he was a firefighter, the fact that he did that, the fact that it was Manhattan —

Firefighter 6
And then, when talked about his lack of eyebrows, that cemented it. In his passing, we found so many aspects of his life that he kind of kept private. Everybody at his wake was kind of coming forward with this different story of how, oh, how do you Stephen? Oh, well, he was a hospice volunteer who stayed with my mother while she was passing. How do you know Stephen? Oh, well he talked me off the ledge when I thought I was at rock bottom with my drinking. And everything was just this, like, shock of you thought you knew the guy, but there were a million different pieces to him.

And then for here we are, a year and change after he passed, to have him pop up in, of all places, the romance column of The New York Times, it was just like one last surprise from him.

Firefighter 1
Steve, he had his own opinions that were very strong, and I think that created some friction between him and a lot of other people with him.

Firefighter 2
Steve and I agreed on a lot of things, and politics was not one of them.

Firefighter 3
Pretty traditionally conservative.

Firefighter 4
But he did his reading, which is why I respected when he had an opinion.

Firefighter 5
That’s what I thought was so beautiful about her story was — their relationship is very interesting, because I’m glad that Marlena was able to give Steve the chance, you know, to open up. You know, I think a lot of people might have been turned off. Unfortunately, we get turned off in those situations.

The Firefighter's Sister
And I think Marlena probably has a lot of strength.

Firefighter
I could tell she must be very special to Steve because she got to know him very well, which wasn’t an easy thing for a lot of people.
Daniel Jones

So this was back in February. So much has happened since then. We’ve had the protests, a lot of violence. There’s so many raw feelings lately. Do you feel like he would be a good person to be talking to now, or would it be a harder conversation now?

Marlena Brown
Oh.

It would be a hard conversation, but it would be a hard conversation worth having, because I think at times like this, it’s so easy. And I think in certain measures, it’s kind of necessary. Like, you want to bond with people who feel the same, you want to make sure that your feelings are being affirmed. I feel a certain sort of way about police relationships with African-American people — particularly Black men here in the U.S. And then that’s real. And having other people who think that is in a way healing, and it’s affirming for me.

But at the same time, too much of that it becomes an echo chamber. And you can get so caught up in, again, thinking that you’re right and thinking that this is the only point of view, that sometimes stepping over and kind of talking to someone from the other side — as long as it’s respectful, as long as you are recognizing that we’re both complex and we’re nuanced and things are complicated — that can be healing as well.

Daniel Jones
I’m curious what — since so many of your conversations with him were about police and about race, I’m wondering what kind of conversations you would be having if you were together?

Marlena Brown
That’s a great question. I think about that a lot. Often, I can see him falling on the side of, you know, police officers. But I always in the back of my head think that he had — he always managed to surprise me on some of his opinions, or things that he was willing to kind of accept and listen to.

And I remember one particular conversation we had about police interactions, and it was something that I had gotten riled up about. It had happened in Georgia. It was about this young boy who was 10 and was watching his father get arrested. And the police officers were white, and the boy was Black. They threw him on the ground and they handcuffed him. That was their immediate response.

I was like, that’s his impression about police. He’s going to take that through the rest of his life. He’s going to think about this moment. When they had a chance to show him something different, I’m like, they chose wrong. And lo and behold, he’s like, yeah. You’re right. And I was like — my brain didn’t even know what to do with that.

Daniel Jones
Yeah. So he didn’t act defensive when you would bring up stories that people would ordinarily be defensive about?

Marlena Brown
No, and he would be like, yeah, you know what? I hear you.
I think at the end of the day, what made it work, or why we were able to have productive conversations, is that we both — when it came to our core values, like the things that we thought were important, we were actually coming from the same place. We both felt really strongly about things being just and things being fair, and leveling the ground for people who need it. And like, we were just coming at it from two different points of view.

Because I remember like, just kind of listening to him talk about his involvement in — like, in his union at work or like in town councils. And it just struck me how much he actually cared about people. That even though I’m like, we’re political opposites, I get that, but I’m like, have you ever considered running for office? Because that is what people actually need. They need someone who goes in there and cares. And I was like, we need politicians like you.

He never took my suggestion, but there’s that.

Daniel Jones
Thank you so much, Marlena. Really appreciate it.

Marlena Brown
And thank you, Dan, for having me.

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—New York Times - Modern Love Podcast