Dave is…
Seeing the love.
Well due to an extremely unfortunate combination of circumstances my original plans to spend this long weekend at Winterfest, the low key off season counterpart to Cabinfest had to be cancelled. It wasn’t all bad, not going upstate did mean I was able to go see a reading off Jeff’s new play and then go to the post reading party, but I did mean I was left to my own devices for the most sacred of the fictitious greeting card holidays. Being the hopeless romantic that I am I spent the day at the library then Barnes and Noble before really getting into the spirit of the day with some Chinese takeout on my way home at 10:30p. I know I’m embarrassingly sentimental.
But clearly I wasn’t the only one. As I was walking out of the take out place in Astoria I saw a couple people across the street that appeared to be a little caught up in the emotion of the evening. Across the street a small group of about two guys and a couple girls were yelling back and forth with a dude in a Mohawk standing a few store fronts down. I dunno what the cause of the argument was but the girls in the group seemed to be persuading their gentlemen to turn away and leave the confrontation while the mohawked dude continued to yell.
I had just paused my music so I could listen to this altercation as I walked by when all of the sudden this large dude in a Giants jersey who looked like a Long Island construction worker but who may or may not have been a bouncer suddenly comes running from out of nowhere past the group and towards Mohawk. Now running is a generous expression for his painful looking lumber but it sufficiently scared Mohawk who ran parallel to me to the end of the street and the crossed right in front of me and ran a few yards down the cross street. The bouncer guy gave up and started walking back across the intersection towards wherever he came from. Now at this point I was about to cross the cross street so I was at the epicenter of what followed.
Mohawk, feeling safe now that the bouncer was walking away came back up to the intersection and started sidling up towards him. The bouncer at this point was catty corner from him across the intersection and had his back to him. So Mohawk, clearly hammered, without ever taking his eyes off the bouncer grabbed this large bag of trash out of the trashcan on the corner and hurled it as hard as he could at the oblivious bouncer.
The bag smashed spectacularly into the driver’s side window of the cop car that was rolling through the intersection minding its own business sending trash everywhere. The cops screeched to a halt. It was really only after they stopped that Mohawk finally seemed to realize they were there. He had been so focused on the big guy he was completely oblivious to the cop car coming up right on top of him. But no aware of his tactical error he took off down the cross street as the dozen or so people around the corner of 30th Ave and 35th street died laughing. The cops meanwhile executed easily the slowest and most inept 8 point turn I have ever seen and then tore after him in pursuit. I was hoping that the chase would take them onto my block and in fact I kept my eyes peeled to see if Mohawk had cut over and was running down my street but the rest of my walk home was without incident.
At home I ate too much Chinese food while watching the dunk contest finals with my roommate before passing out on the couch in front of some terrible movie but I still think that Mohawk made this the best Valentine’s Day I have ever had. It was no replacement for Winterfest but it was better than I expected.