The Brainhole

It had been a great evening. Now was the time to walk home and collapse in bed, another Saturday of triumph complete.

I’m passing Shake Shack in Madison Square Park when the most consummate Bro imaginable yells from a cab across the street,

“Yeah fuck you Snack Shack!”

That a grown man was unable to correctly read a highly legible, enormous and well-lit sign atop one of the most popular burger chains in New York City was sorry enough - I felt a strange but genuine pity for the guy - but then came his next thought:

“And fuck you too, hipster!” I turned to see if there was anyone in a teal and purple hoodie behind me, maybe some fatally cool, terminally flanneled Ace Hotel regular who’d gotten lost. There wasn’t - the gentleman’s beer-soaked ire was aimed directly at me.

In retrospect I shouldn’t have been so surprised. He’d proven himself illiterate and fundamentally disengaged from Manhattan in one short sentence, it makes some sense that he’d describe anyone who dressed in anything more ambitious than a Rangers jersey as a “hipster,” which remains, like “moist,” a word I don’t really like to hear or use simply based on the way it sounds coming out of human faces. I don’t even want to bore you with what I was wearing, but in summary it was all black and not the least bit ostentatious. I promise.

Oh, this is the part where I break my train of thought to inform you that this mouth-breathing zero had frosted tips. Not full on Fieri, but 80% on that dial.

Had there been other people around I might have said nothing and spent the next avenue envisioning his head exploding in the back of that cab (as one does) and that would have been that. But in my examination of the street for actual hipsters I’d inadvertently become aware of how alone we actually were, and that if this man had shot me rather than yawped some anemic insults, he might have actually evaded arrest (contingent of course upon his having a relationship of some kind with the taxi driver). And I couldn’t let him get away with that. Considering the advanced hour and the small-but-not-inconsequential volume of alcohol I’d consumed, I’m ashamed to tell you that the best I could come up with was “How ‘bout I fucking kill you, frosted tips?” - which was pretty standard stuff for me to say when I was around 13 years old and very angry about everything.

You should know I’ve never said that to anyone and meant it. If you’ve never met me before and are reading this, a) thanks for being here, don’t know how you found me, but b) more to the point, I look like a goddamn teddy bear. It’s my gift and curse. There’s not a soul alive who’d pick me out of a lineup of a random sample of heterosexual men as the guy who’s going to start some shit. Which is admittedly not the worst problem to have, but it is what it is.

So I yell that gem of a comeback and 4/5 Fieri opens the cab door and starts to step out onto the street just as the light turns green and the cab driver presses the gas for a second before switching immediately to the brake when he realizes what’s going on. In that split second, Mr. Diners Drive-In’s and Dives has taken an uncomfortable looking dive of his own, clumsily used the free-swinging cab door to pull himself back upright, and - in the most incredible denoument I could have hoped for short of his head actually exploding - gotten a rearview mirror shoved up his ass as a car driving in the next lane came screeching to a halt just in time to not have ruined everyone’s night.

I stopped to see if there was anyone in the cab with him. There was not (which added an extra layer of sadness to the whole yelling-at-a-burger-stand vignette), which then left me with the unsavory prospect of maybe having to be the one to help this guy get to a hospital or something. When all of a sudden, he tilts his head back and howls at the sky,

“Fuck!”

He packed himself back into the cab, shut the visibly deformed door behind him, and ordered the cab driver to “take [him] the fuck home.”

It’s been a great evening. Good night.