digitalprimate

So I’m minding my business at work, reading up on CD-bootable Linux distros, avian ‘flu, the Bob Mould concert I’m attending this evening, and generally procrastinating, when I get a phone call from a woman with a fetching London accent.

She informed me that someone was handing out our business cards and shouting, “What’s your’s is mine” to passerbys. Odd enough, but even stranger, this fellow was somewhere in the East 50s, near the park, very far from our funeral home up here in the North Bronx in the Riverdale/Kingsbridge area.

I asked her to describe the fellow, and we quickly agreed upon his identity. This guy comes in to the funeral home once every month or so, asking to use the bathroom or, occasionally, for some other random favor. He’s banned from our business due to his lack of, shall we say?, care when using our facilities. I think our Hungarian maintenance man (who’s nicked named this fellow, “Loose Grips”) would visit some rather traditional Middle European punishments on him were he given the chance.

He’d been in yesterday, asking to use the bathroom again, and again I told him they were “under repair.” Despite this, he then walked into the main vestibule. As I opened my drawer for easy access to my baton and stood, asking, “Can I help you?” - meaning of course the opposite - he took a handful of our business cards and walked straight out, disturbing several pedestrians on his way out of my sightline.

So, I assumed during my conversation with this caller that the incident took place last night, but she told me, no, it was Sunday evening. One of our other funeral directors corroborates this, telling me that this guy had been in on Sunday afternoon and had, presumably, grabbed some business cards then (on Monday we were out of business cards in the same container from which I saw him take them Tuesday; further evidence of this guy’s foresight).

It’s curious that this guy would leave the neighborhood to go to the UES (or, perhaps, he lives there and commutes here?). Shouting out, “What’s your’s is mine” while handing out business cards from a funeral home in whose employ he is not is somewhat strange, although not unheard of in Manhattan.

The fact that he walked into the funeral home as I was speaking on the phone to this random person about this random event, now that’s a little odd.

He asked if we had a copy machine. What on earth could he have to copy? More of our business cards?

I asked the caller to stay on the phone and took the two camera phone photos below. I sent her a link to the Flickr page that hosts them, hoping she writes me back to confirm that is was actually old Loose Grips she saw (how could it not be?)

Good thing I’m not a Christian. I’d certainly assume the Jesus was trying to tell me something.

I’m thinking, a little oil (ok, a lot of oil), some garlic….

Driving to Aikido tonight, a motorcyclist passed me. The weather was fine, and although he was driving reasonably and traffic was light, I had a strong sense that something bad was going to happen to him. So strong in fact that despite knowing the roads on which I was driving intimately, I took not one but two wrong, very wrong turns, for example turning South instead of North on the Bronx River Parkway, a fairly major highway around here and one I take often. The sensation disorientated me, subtly drawing my attention to dangerous sections of highway then projecting those backdrops into dire little films that changed constantly but played continuously in the Cartesian movie hall of my head. I couldn’t shake the feeling until I left the highway and hit the classic anytown USA streets of Scarsdale.

Being thrown around for an hour and a half in Aikido, however, did shake the hoodoo out of me, and by the time I left Scarsdale, I’d forgotten all about it until I pulled the sharp left down the ramp to the Bronx River again and, remembering how I’d spooked so easily earlier, chided myself to remember this most obvious example of confirmation bias next time I chalked up being distracted or hitting the new espresso machine too many times to premonitions.

Five minutes later, LE had traffic stopped both directions on the Bronx River Parkway. I dutifully stopped behind an SUV which itself was stopped behind a police cruiser around and beside which a bunch of guys in shorts and t-shirts looking for something with flashlights. My first thought was, this must be a sobriety check point, but that didn’t’ fit what was going on: plainclothes cops with flashlights not being stuck into drivers’ faces. A uniformed officer went by, I asked what was happening, and he replied, “A motorcycle fatality. They’re looking for his body parts.” It was then I noticed most of his leg was about 10 meters in front of me and to the left (just above that pink light squiggle in the photo, near the guardrail. It was hard not to notice when another cop shouted at a ambulance to stop because it was about to run over it.) After the cops detoured us around the Parkway, at the next exit coming from the South you could see what was left of his bike - not much -crushed against the median guardrail - a good 40 or 50 meters from where the rest of him was.

When I recounted this to my wife she pointed out that at least he must have died instantly. I counted eight small to mid size baggies being taken back to the ambulance and saw more parts that needed bagging, so, yes, one would assume that it was quite immediate. In our morgue, I’ve seen bodies hit by subway trains (jumpers) and by cars, and I’ve seen two motorcycle fatalities. I consider myself a person who, for the most part, abides by the laws of physics, but I can’t think of any way to explain how that poor guy got so torn up. Bodies just don’t rip completely apart like that in these types of accidents. The only thing I can think of - and this would explain why only one car was in front of me while there were two cruisers, one blocking traffic on each side of the Parkway - is that after the initial accident, multiple cars didn’t see him or couldn’t stop in time.

At most, I missed witnessing the accident, or even being involved, by five minutes, perhaps the five minutes after class when an unusual turn of a rather random conversation led me to discuss diving spots in Thailand with a classmate headed there in a couple of months. I wrote about premonitions before, and all my disclaimers about them are there. At the time I declared that I almost certainly wouldn’t avoid boarding a jetliner about which I’d just had a premonition. After tonight, I’m not so certain.

What’s a good empiricist to think?

So there’s a fairly big, Midtown style deli (multiple hot entrees, sandwiches, salad bar, eat in take away - all Mexicans all the time, and yes, we would fucking starve without them) near my office. It has a name, but no one seems to remember it, and we all call it “Tony’s” after it’s gloriously be-maned, loudmouthed owner of indeterminate sexuality.

Anyway, there’s no system to ordering at Tony’s - no take a number device (what the hell are those things called anyway?), no separate line for hot food or sandwiches; you just try to figure out who the last guy in was, and when he’s done ordering, attract attention to yourself as aggressively as possible, preferably without actually injuring anyone around you, unless of course they try to get in an order ahead of you in which case it’s perfectly acceptable to buffet them about the face and shoulders with a hard Italian roll. Or if they’re undercover from the 50 precinct and carrying.

So where was I? Well, here’s what the deli normally looks like:

Usually all we little red stick people line up, more or less at random as you can see from my fine illustration. However, the day in question, people were lined up between two of the aisles of balsamic vinegar and olive oil and potato chips and other deli delights, thusly:

When I first walked in, I found this configuration of fellow primates to be a bit odd, but I figured, what the hell, this is the Bronx. Maybe they’re all together or something. I walked up, said hello to Gilberto who told me he’d be with me in a minute. Then the lady in question (helpfully indicated in the illustration above) said something to the effect of, “Hey, pal, there’s a line here.” To which I responded, “There’s never a line a Tony’s, lady.” She said I should ask the owner, and I replied, I’ll ask Tony when I check out. As she was, in fact, ahead of me, I let her order first, despite the preferential treatment such a valuable, goodchristmastimetipping customer as my self naturally engenders.

The lady in question continued to grumble and give me dirty looks, but I ignored her as she had a wee one with her, probably about three years old, although I did have half a mind to tell her she really shouldn’t be shooting her mouth off around her kid like that.

Now, the dilemma I had was this: The place is a chaos, and often an annoying, conflict producing one, and I’ve told Tony many times he needs a number system, or separate lines - something - but he seems to think the system works fine if only his lazy Mexicans would work harder, which isn’t humanly possible and I’m sure I’ve no idea why one of them hasn’t put a meat cleaver through his sternum yet. I wonder if that line formed spontaneously or if that rather bossy lady manufactured one, preying upon most of my fellow primates’ innate need for order and their willingness to follow the orders of someone who knows what they’re doing. If so, does that invalidate the line solution? Not really, but it as a primate who really, really hates petty tyrants, it really, really pisses me off. I suppose it doesn’t matter as in the end there’s just not enough room to line up an entire lunch crowed between two aisles and there are too many regulars who, as much as it’s possible, know how to work within the current system.

Yet I’m ambiguous about my response to the Bossy Line Lady: she had the right idea, bringing order to the Great Deli Chaos, but she went about it the wrong way with an ultimately untenable solution. Maybe this is why, in a city of nearly unlimited culinary choice and unmatched quality, McDonald’s still thrives: you always know where you stand at a McDonalds. You just might want to watch what you’re standing in.

There’s this one fellow who’s hustled two of my colleagues, one of our drivers, and a rabbi. He’s attempted to hustle some of my company’s clients and a few of the other neighborhood businesses. His method was fairly straight forward: he’d wait until after business hours, then tell folks he worked for us but had locked his car in our garage and left his key to the garage at home. Could they give him a lift to [insert town far enough away to be inconvenient but not so far as to be implausible]? No? How about $20 for the train? Well, OK then.

His ruse went awry when he actually had the balls to walk into our place of business and tried a similar line, claiming to work for the business across the street. Needless to say, we showed him to the door and reminded him that our business is very, very tight with the local police precinct.

We didn’t hear anything about this guy for six months.

So, today I get a call from a local Chevy dealership asking us when we were planning on picking up our ’97 Chevy Whatsitsname. We own no ’97 Chevys of any sort, I informed the man, and I asked him who had dropped off the car for repair. A well dressed well mannered guy? soft but well-spoken? in his early to mid 30s? on the tall side? acts demure, even a bit effete? very short hair? racial features sort of indeterminate? Indeed. Well, let me tell you a little bit about this fella…

So it will be interesting to see how Mr. Hustler with the Balls of Steel reacts when he comes to pick up “our” company car and discovers that several uniformed officers would like to take him for a ride in another type of car altogether. In an odd way, I’m actually kind of rooting for him. Just a little bit.