Prospect Park Eclogue

In the meadow of the people’s park on a Sunday I’m lying in the grass with the intellectuals

In the meadow of the people’s park on a Sunday I’m lying in the grass with the intellectuals Felipe and Terence. Just over this little knoll is the scenester cookout I had just left, where two different groupchats got together for a barbecue (the first I’ve seen of any of those characters in the daytime, touching grass), but I had decided that the time with Felipe is more valuable because it’s one of his last days in town. Felipe writes in the literary magazine Strange Matters. Terence is working on a movie he describes as like Uncut Gems and Michael Mann movies, some high-intensity shit about “men with codes” who are “locked in.” I’ve known Terence through weird theory Twitter for several years, since maybe 2016, and he and Felipe have known each other since high school, where they met at one of those summer camps where gifted kids go to DC and have wonks give them tours of the CNN office. (I also know Felipe through Twitter, but much more recently.) Terence is erudite, and when I mention this Felipe says that Terence has always been like that, he’s always been a fully-formed aesthete. Terence’s demeanor sort of reminds me of some of downtown’s “aristocratic” cool kids (as opposed to the middle-class striver transplants like myself), not in some casual elitist indifference to the world, but in how he seems to be unfazed by the antics and pretensions of the club kids, even though he knows many of them personally. He mentions Straub–Huillet movies like they’re the familiar sorts of things we all got into when we were 15.

Felipe says that Terence “gave him” New York, Felipe was a suburban bumpkin from New Jersey and Terence was the first person he could have real conversations with about art and socialist politics and so on, and when Felipe was studying at Princeton he would visit New York on the weekends, where Terence was the point of access to a rich social world. So it’s through Terence that Felipe himself “became a real New Yorker,” and he lived here for several years, though he’s now in temporary Florida exile, like Caroline Calloway. Felipe says that both he and Terence have a somewhat broadly similar class background, which is to say petty bourgeois, but Terence has more “cultural capital” from his New York artist parents than Felipe from his Latin immigrant ones, or myself from my military officer ones. (Usually he’s skeptical of the concept of cultural capital for various theoretical reasons but here it’s useful enough.) Felipe and I are admiring how handsome Terence is, how his hair falls on his face, it’s giving James Dean. Terence is straight and Felipe is gay “in the manner of Gore Vidal and James Baldwin.” Terence is missing one of his front teeth.

Somehow the two of them get into talking about fighting, and Felipe recalls a story from years ago when he had supposedly mentioned to Terence that he had been taking MMA classes or something, and back then Terence had scoffed at the very idea of blood sports.

“I would never say that,” Terence says.

“I know, I found it amusing at the time that you would say that, because you have such a violent streak. You’re one of the most violent people I know.”