Anarchtica
This story’s a few weeks old already, but if I hadn’t have told you that, you’d never have known.
This is the kind of honesty and transparency that has made me unfit for society.
Anyway, speaking of society–
I was at a bar on Ninth Street with two of my buddies. We drained a few pints (but only a few) as we watched, with equal parts confusion and fear, a six-legged female jig-storm/dancing-circle form and threaten to swallow us like the tornado of flailing limbs that it was.
So it goes. My friends gave me cash, I threw the bill on my credit card and we left to hit up another bar. One of the guys stayed behind to use the facilities, while the other (my roommate) and I showed ourselves out. I walked out towards the street, just to get a little air, when a cab pulled up a few feet down from the door. Out of the back stepped a tall man with a large nose and a beard. I didn’t have my glasses on — which in this case meant I was glad I wasn’t hit by said cab — but for some reason, I knew exactly who this man was the moment I saw him.
He daddy-long-legged his way past my roommate, into the bar, just before my third friend joined us outside. What our friend saw was the other two of us, jaws agape, very much and very sadly star-struck by a D-list celebrity who we’d seen just days earlier on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
For those who haven’t seen the episode, I’d rather not use this fellow’s name, so as not to spread his celebrity without an official endorsement. But it turns out that this man’s an activist who thought it’d be a good idea to–
–wait for it–
–hand out, i.e. distribute, toy guns in Harlem.
If you don’t know him, I kid you not. If you do, yeah — it was that guy.
The fact that I knew who he was frightened me in several ways: 1) I realized I watch too much television 2) I thought I remembered too much of what I watch on television 3) I knew that his name and face could be replaced, in my mind, with more important information. But they weren’t.
It also registered that he might be a dangerous individual.
So I did the most ludicrous thing that came immediately to mind.
I went in the bar and asked for his autograph.
Me: Excuse me, is your name (***)?
***: Yes it is.
Me: Were you on television recently?
***: Yeah, I did The Daily Show last week.
Me: (beat) Can I have your autograph?
***: Sure.
I asked the bartender for the pen with which I’d earlier paid our check. As my new friend signed me his name under the message, “In Liberty”, one of the two guys he was meeting in there spoke up:
Barfly: Are you an anarchist?
Me: Part-time.
At this point, I wanted to seem in solidarity with them, but also safely distant. I’m aware that a cutesy blog does not qualify one as even a part-time anarchist
But yes, I got the autograph and fled the scene slowly, in triumph and in shame.
A bigger, better man may have walked into the bar and shoved a broken bottle in this tall man’s face.
But I am not a bigger, better man. I’m a man who loves a laugh, forever on the lookout for hard proof of his most surreal, most curious, most inexplicable moments.
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