Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Drunk on a Subway Bench

Around the time our kids made it to high school my wife and I started taking mini-vacations to New York where we would fly into Manhattan for about three days. We would get a room in a hotel near Times Square, get tickets to whatever Broadway play worth seeing was available, and then we would fly home.
There is a ticket booth in Times Square called "TKTS" where we would buy tickets sold on the day of the performance (theaters usually sold unsold seats at discounted rates). Sometimes we got lucky. We saw “Lion King”, “Ragtime”, “Chicago”, and “Miss Saigon” to name a few. However, sometimes the play was not very good... “Aida” comes to mind. It was billed as being on par with The Lion King. It was not. We never saw “Cats” though… those cats kinda creeped me out anyway.
One of the highlights of the trip was eating dinner at new restaurants. We found a restaurant called "Jekyll and Hyde" where wannabe actors and crazy people dressed up like characters from the time periods of Jack the Ripper and Jekyll and Hyde. They roamed the restaurant and made sure everybody had a good time by harassing the patrons and behaving oddly. The bathrooms were hidden behind secret passages and bookshelves and unless it was an obvious emergency (you were jumping up and down doing the pee-pee dance) no one would tell you where they were. You had to find them for yourself.
Then there was the “Motown Café” where performers who were dressed like the Motown greats performed on a revolving stage made to look like a revolving record. When the mood struck them they would leap off the stage and do all kinds of crazy things: like when singing “Dancing in the Street” by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, they decided to do just that. Before long the restaurant had emptied out and we were all literally dancing in the street!
I believe it was on one of these trips, while we were on our way to one of these dinners, that we encountered an extremely intoxicated man sprawled on a bench near the subway station. He was in his mid-thirties, dressed casually in jeans and a light jacket. To top it off he was wearing a lot of expensive jewelry and a hundred dollar bill was hanging out of his pocket. We were near Central Park which at the time was not the safest place to be.
My first instinct is always to help, much to my wife’s dismay. I approached the man and called to him but he seemed to be unconscious. I gave him a shake and asked him if he was okay. He swatted at me and grunted something that I didn't understand.
My wife translated.
“He said he doesn’t need your help... he says to go away and leave him alone.”
I shook him again. He swatted and grunted (again). It was pretty much the same message as before except I was pretty sure he added a few expletives for emphasis.
I couldn’t just leave him there! I’m pretty good at spotting crooks and I had seen a couple of them hanging out nearby. They couldn’t have been more obvious if they were wearing striped shirts and ski masks. They were totally eying this guy. I had no doubt they would rob him as soon as we walked away.
I tried to get him to sit up but he wouldn’t budge. There was a half consumed bottle of Jack Daniel's in his pocket and he reeked of it. I tried to get his phone number; perhaps I could call someone to come get him. The last thing I wanted to do was leave him where he was, the WAY he was, and then read about his demise in the paper the next day. Even if the best I could do was annoy him, at least he would get moving and get himself away from this obviously dangerous place.
So I decided to bother the heck out of him and not let him sleep. I started to give him advice on getting his life together and the dangers of drinking too much. Look at where it had gotten him: he was semi-conscious, spread out on a bench near one of the most dangerous subway stations in town. He grunted and cursed some more . . . my plan was working.
It wasn’t until the bushes started shaking (and laughing) that I realized what was actually going on. This guy was an undercover cop! And there were three MORE undercover cops hiding behind that shaking, laughing bush waiting for someone to take this guy's money so they could jump him!
They couldn’t hold it in any longer - they were cracking themselves up. Even my wife started laughing! The only two people who didn’t think it was funny was me and the fake drunk guy. He just lay there on the bench, sighed an exasperated sigh, and rolled his eyes.
My wife later informed me that they did this kind of thing on “Cops” all the time. How would I know??? I didn’t even WATCH that show!


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