FAMILY PRACTICE

A pediatrician’s search for redemption.

- BY JOSHUA ROTHMAN

The Mott Haven Houses, in the Bronx, are orange brick buildings about twenty stories high. The stairwells are dangerous, the elevators slow; Greg Gulbransen, a pediatrician from Long Island, waited in the lobby, bouncing with impatience. Even at dawn, he was pressed for time. It was six-thirty, and he needed to get back to the suburbs to see patients by nine. “Let's hope we can find him on our first try,” Gulbransen said.

He was looking for Red, a former tattoo artist in his early thirties who was addicted to drugs and now drifted between hideouts in and around the Mott Haven projects—an abandoned construction site, a janitor’s closet, a stairwell to the roof. They had met about a year earlier, when Gulbransen was on his way to see Malik, a onetime gang member who'd been shot and left paralyzed below the chest. A photographer as well as a physician, Gulbransen had been documenting Malik and his circle since 2019, for a series about gun violence and its aftermath. When Red approached him on the street, hoping to sell scavenged goods, Gulbransen noticed his inked-Brando look and asked to photograph him.

Gulbransen is sixty-two and slim, with white hair and blue-framed glasses. He runs five miles with a headlamp every morning; now he darted, as if spring-loaded, through the opening elevator doors. He checks on Red nearly every weekend. This Sunday, he planned to buy him breakfast, offer encouragement and medical attention, and deliver a bag of clothes donated by families from his practice—along with some pillows he'd taken, without his wife’s permission, from a room that was being redone. (“Don’t tell Leslie,” he'd said earlier.) Most of Red’s acquaintances are drug-addicted and on the edge of a fatal overdose; Red is essentially alone in his efforts to save himself, except for Gulbransen, who is part doctor, part social worker, part father figure, part friend. Whenever Red texts, Gulbransen answers.