It’s bound to happen eventually and my turn comes near Rockefeller Center. I remember the day because it is the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe. I am doing an errand when I come across a woman with short, curly hair who is stretching her arms out at all and sundry who pass by. At the end of her extended arms, her hands hold a white page with some clearly self-printed information on it.
“I’m writing a book! It’s going to blow the lid off everything! I’ve been attacked and harassed by these people and some of them are in that big building right across the street! Go to my website! Look for my book!”
As I pass by, I stop and turn to walk back. Hell, I’m always curious about this sort of thing, one of my persistent vices, it seems.
“Can I have one?” I ask.
Her upper lip does an Elvis thing, except that it’s not intended to be charming, sexy or friendly–and it isn’t.
“Why do you want one? I don’t want what YOU have.”
I blink twice because I’m not sure how to interpret this. I forge ahead.
“I’m curious, ” I say, “I want to know what’s going on.”
She shoves her photocopies into her messenger bag and takes three steps toward the corner.
“And even now one of them is here on this street! As soon as you start talking about them, they send someone to let you know they’re watching!”
Wait. Me? If I was in the movie They Live, this is about when I’d take out those Hoffman glasses and look at myself in the mirror just to be sure.
It must have been worse for Robert Anton Wilson back when ol’ Fool Saint Kerry Thornley was convinced that Wilson had been replaced by a double from the CIA. Or a cyborg. Luckily, this woman is a stranger.
I think to myself. Seems like if you dive into the murky waters of conspiracy theory, eventually you will be called One of Them or you’ll end up accusing some other undeserving person of being one of THEM.
The thought thread breaks off. Wait. The woman looks familiar.
Several lives ago I worked at a market research dungeon. I monitored the interviewer’s phone calls and evaluated their performance. Big Brother’s little corporate nephew, eavesdropping for peanuts. One summer, we hired a short, vaguely butch, curly-haired woman. After a couple of days doing the household studies at night, she got to move to the daytime. She had made a great impression right away because she was eloquent, seemed very dilligent, friendly, and, most importantly, she always completed a lot of surveys. She even got to sit in with a few of the other “elite” (but still woefully underpaid) interviewers when one of the partners had a big client up in the conference room prior to a survey hitting the phones. Like those sunglasses in They Live, I believe her last name was Hoffman.
Cut to her second week on dayshift: I’m monitoring another interviewer’s phone call when my immediate boss walks up to me.
“C–. Can you listen to this?” He motions me over to his desk. He whispers to me to pick up his phone. He’s tapping the line of our newest star interviewer.
I hear her asking the questions, all in the right order. I hear her smiling and giving the ocasional friendly chuckle between sections of the survey. I hear the sound of her keyboard tapping in the answers as the computer moves from one question screen to the next. What I don’t hear is anyone responding on the other line.
“Maybe it’s just my line. Tap in on yours,” my boss says. So I go over and tap into her line from my computer.
I listen to her as she conducts an entire business survey with no one.
“I’m shocked by the size of her balls,” my boss says. Eventually, he goes over to the Field Director’s office and the Field Director taps into the line, hears the same thing we have. Even the scheduler patches into a line to hear the phantom interview.
She’s allowed to finish the interview and when she hangs up the phone, saying “Thank you so much and enjoy the rest of your day, okay?” the Field Director motions her into his office.
Five minutes later, she’s back out in the field, shamedly collecting her bookbag and leaving the premises.
Was this lady out on the street calling me one of THEM (whoever THEY are), the same woman from the market research job?
I blink twice, and as I’m trying to decide if I have or haven’t met this woman in another life, she shouts:
“And Bloomberg is one of the biggest slavemasters of them all!” she yells. “Him and the rest of the rich Jews!”
“Oh, ” I whisper to myself.
Not only does she think I’m one of THEM, but to her, THEY are the same group Hitler thought THEY were. I shake my head. Just another person who took the entrance to Paranoia Town in search of a peak behind the curtain, and ended up with her mind in a hateful, phantasmagorical hell, further from the truth than when she entered? Or just a lady in search of someone to blame when, for no apparent reason, her mind snapped? If this lady is the same woman from the market research firm, that just makes the anti-semitic state of her headspace that much more tragic. (It should go without saying that, if Mayor Bloomberg is one of the dark overlords, it has fuck all to do with his ethnicity or his religion.)
I am heading for the subway when my mom calls. I tell her all about this brief encounter with paranoid awareness gone totally wrong.
“That’s sad,” my mom replies. “But you’re going to see a lot more people like that with what’s going on right now with the economy and all the lay offs.”
Maybe.
But maybe I’ll see more people like the woman I see just six hours later up in Harlem, a totally different kind of random New Yorker. That’s when, instead of being called one of THEM, Latifah tells me I’m a child who is loved…
[To be continued...]