The Pee Wee Herman Abstinence Ring.

Can’t say N will be too keen on it, but hell.

St. Augustine is the capital of Weirdsville. Aside from the fact that an 88-year-old man was robbed, which is not at all funny*, everything else about this story is absolutely amazing. If you were studying creative writing with Harry Crews and you wrote this story and turned it in, he’d be like, “Man, this is just too far-fetched.”

Man Dressed as Pirate Robs Clerk at Knife Point:

Tom’s Fruits and Gifts at 1812 A1A South was the scene of an armed robbery late Wednesday afternoon according to a report received by the St. Augustine local news desk at Historic City News.

88 year-old Thomas Grohowski and 56 year-old William Grohowski were at work just after 3:30 p.m. Wednesday when they reported that a white male, about 5′8″, in his early 60’s, with a ponytail and facial hair, wearing a pirate hat, a long sleeve shirt and tan pants entered their store.

The unknown man browsed while waiting for other customers to leave.

When they were alone, the man approached William Grohowski at the cash register and brandished a large stainless steel folding knife. The robber demanded that Grohowski give him all of the money in the till.

Grohowski told police that the suspect fled south toward the Pizza Garden; riding a bicycle that was towing a trailer, displaying a Florida Gator flag.

We have driven by Tom’s a million times. It’s the archetypal Florida Souvenir Purveyor–the one-stop-shopping emporium for all your shellac’d gator head, polished conch shell, soft-shell pecan, and Dixie flag needs.

The kicker is that I swear to God N and I have seen the bicycle pirate. Minus the pirate hat, there’s a guy who rides around our “new” neighborhood, towing a wagon with a dog wearing a Gators t-shirt. Kinda hard to miss. (Which is why it’s even more…confounding…that the police weren’t able to find him.)

Related PS: A reader helpfully pointed out that a possible reason behind tourists’ Bad Subway Behavior is due to the fact that the majority of America is without reliable, convenient public transportation. This is a very good point. Though it must be said that this doesn’t address the fact that many parts of America do have reliable and convenient crazy people.

Unrelated PS: Hello, breakfast!

*I’m having a hard time understanding why this guy didn’t have a gun. Everyone in Florida has a gun. Except the bike-riding pirates.

Photo from Historic City.

LC invited me to a reading at Bluestockings on Friday night, which was awesome and not just because I got a last-minute reprieve from working the Winter Antiques Show, longing for the release of a bloodbath or at least for the redistribution of wealth with an auto-da-fe on alternate Thursdays.

I’m glad I went. It was an entertaining reading. A big group of readers, too–several members of the Broad Set Writing Collective, who are very talented and also young. (Fuckers.)

In addition, their professor Mickey Hess, who is totally hilarious and also young(er than I am), read. (Fucker.) He signed a book for me: “Keep on rockin’ it!” Why have I never thought of that inscription?

He read from his book, Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory,* as well as a chapbook called Shittin’ on a Jet:

If you ask me, the greatest hip hop success story has to be that of Brian “Birdman” Williams, founder of Cash Money Records. In his song “Poppin Bottles,” Birdman takes the typical American Dream story to a new level. Generally, American success stories take us from rags to riches or from the poorhouse to the penthouse, but Birdman tells us that he “went from shittin’ in a cell, to shittin’ on a jet.” In that one line, Birdman re-envisions success as going from shitting in one place to shitting in another.

….Then I realized Brian had pictured Birdman squeezing through the aisle, sliding closed the OCCUPIED lever in a cramped Southwest Airlines bathroom, looking at himself in the tiny mirror above the sink and thinking I made it.

Shitting in an airplane bathroom is maybe three steps above shitting in a cell. In between you have gas station, hospital waiting room, and Burger King.

But Birdman doesn’t say airplane. He says jet. Jet implies private jet. I bet Birdman’s is made of diamonds.

And then the evening got better when, rather than going out and spending money we don’t have, LC and I went back to her abode, had pizza** and wine delivered, and looked at old photos. A perfect wintry Friday night.

*I really like Garrett County Press. Many years ago, during the #1HS era, they sent me a copy of Mykel Board’s Even a Daughter Is Better Than Nothing and set me up with an interview.
**The pizza we had delivered was DiGiorno, which makes the whole scenario like a Zen koan: It’s not delivery…it’s DiGiorno…except when it’s delivery.

Tourists. Seriously. I know it’s a played-to-death subject, but can anyone tell me why so few of them understand Appropriate Subway Behavior? They’re always the ones moseying into the car so leisurely, talking too loud, standing in blockade formation around the pole and doorways, forgoing holding ON to the pole in favor of spectacular pratfalls when the train lurches out of the station…

…and messing with crazy people.

Witness: This morning I board the downtown express at 42nd and–because I am eerily observant and perceptive, which is why Maud and I will eventually start a PI firm–notice a Legitimately Insane Person sitting on the bench by the door. I stay away from him. He has an enormous backpack and a stack of books next to him on the seat and is rather furiously writing on a diner placemat. Enter a family from some small town in Iowa or the Dutch equivalent of some small town in Iowa.

They ask him to move his stuff so that they can sit down. He throws down his pen, shoves EVERYTHING on the floor, jumps up, stomps his feet, shouts, then picks everything up and sits back down. They look alarmed for a moment, then sit down next to him, probably thinking, “Oh, that’s NYC, it’s just so quirky.”

Hey, you know what? THAT IS NOT NORMAL SUBWAY RIDERSHIP. Do they not have crazy people where you people come from? They might call it “touched in the head” there.

If New Yorkers have learned anything in recent months, other than the fact that the Jets suck, it’s that asking someone to move their shit on the subway is a surefire way to get yourself killed.

So, I ask visitors to NYC: If you see a man who looks like Harvey Korman (if Harvey Korman were wearing three coats and socks over his shoes) on the subway, just leave him the hell alone. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to sit on the Circle Line tour of the Statue of Liberty.