The Bumpening: A Tale of Modern Tyranny

Posted on July 5, 2020 by antidem

As with millions of Americans, I take a few days of vacation every summer to calm the nerves and recharge the faculties. This year, I endeavored to brave the twin storms of pandemic and civil unrest to take advantage of the abnormally-low rates offered by hotels desperate to attract travelers in the midst of these troubles, and so I loaded up the car and hit the road bound for Cape Cod, where I passed a few peaceful days at Hyannisport, gazing out upon the ocean and contemplating eternity. (Thankfully I did not, to the best of my knowledge, run into any members of the disreputable Kennedy clan – a blessing for which my gratitude knows no bounds.) On the way back home to southern Appalachia, I took a detour to the rust belt town of Schenectady, NY, to pay a visit to my old friend Tony Martell, working class author and advocate for everything that’s good in the world.

Schenectady was once a thriving town known as the “Electric City” in honor of being the headquarters of General Electric, which ran an enormous manufacturing plant there. The prosperity that it brought to the place is obvious in the houses, once magnificent but now run-down and neglected, that line its pothole-cratered streets. GE closed down nearly everything at the height of the outsourcing craze in the 1990s, moving essentially all of its manufacturing to China. It’s easy to point the finger of blame at them for doing so, but the astronomical taxes and choking regulations imposed by New York’s leftist state government made it a near-inescapable decision. Schenectady has been slowly decaying ever since. In the 00s, the Democratic mayor decided to try to reverse the decline via a concerted effort to attract as many Third World immigrants as she could into the city, because PBS and the New York Times told her they were industrious and an asset to any economy. The results were, to say the least, not what the Times promised her they would be. Moving away is a favorite topic of conversation among most of the remaining blue-collar white population.

We arranged to meet for dinner at a bar and grill on State Street popular with that very same working class demographic. I arrived first, staked out a table, and was a quarter of the way through a Sam Adams when Tony walked in.

He seemed almost to charge at the table, a grim look on his face. Not pausing to offer a hello, he said: “Have you heard about Bumpy’s? They’re getting canceled. Black Lives Matter is protesting them right this minute!”

This was quite an odd thing to hear.

Bumpy’s Polar Freeze Ice Cream Stand and Snow Plowing Service is a mile or so down State Street from the bar. It is, in many ways, an exemplar of the hard work and ingenuity behind the American Dream. Every year, Bumpy opens his ice cream stand in May, serves up cones and sundaes until Halloween, then closes it down and takes a week’s vacation. When he comes back, he hooks up plows to his trucks, and he and a couple of year-round employees (the ice cream stand is mostly staffed by students doing summer jobs) plow snow in driveways and parking lots until April (in this part of upstate, snowstorms are not uncommon well into spring). Then he takes another week off, comes back at the start of May, and opens the ice cream stand again. This deft balancing of two seasonal businesses has provided him with a prosperous middle-class living. And it adds to the life of his community – many a dinner with Tony over the years has ended with the two of us reconvening at Bumpy’s after our meal, sitting at the picnic tables by the parking lot with a cold treat, talking about politics or philosophy or art until it got pitch dark.

How, I wondered, was it even possible for Bumpy’s, of all places, to have incurred the wrath of the outrage mob?

Tony sat and, after our orders were placed, told me the story.

The trouble began right at the start of the ice cream season. Coronavirus-inspired mandatory mask-wearing and social distancing orders had been issued by the Governor of New York, an arrogant lout with a room-temperature IQ who (like his brother the CNN anchor) only got his job through the name recognition he inherited from his father, a rhetorically-gifted but otherwise-incompetent Governor from the previous generation. These orders are supposed to be enforced by business owners, who the governor seems to believe he can involuntarily deputize in order to impose his unconstitutional, undemocratically-enacted diktats. They are expected to refuse service to, and expel if necessary, any person not abiding by them. But this didn’t sit well with Bumpy, who figured that his customers are grown adults who can decide for themselves whether or not they want to wear a mask and how far they’d like to stand from each other. No one was paying him to be a cop, he had no interest in refusing money from anyone willing to buy ice cream, and anyhow, this was a free country and he could run his business any way he liked.

He was about to get a lesson in the workings of the Current Year.

It began when a woman customer (it is always a woman, in such cases) dropped dime and ratted Bumpy out to the county Health Department. The Health Department, acting in the vindictive spirit so common to petty bureaucrats, showed up at Bumpy’s for a surprise inspection. Much to their disappointment, they found the place clean as a whistle except for one minor violation; a water hose draining where it shouldn’t have been. This is the kind of thing that would normally be handled with a warning and an instruction to fix the problem as soon as possible. But because Bumpy had openly refused to do the Governor’s dirty work for him and police the actions of the grown adults who came there to do business with him, they instead slapped him with a closure order and a $1000 per day fine until the issue was resolved and they could find time to come around and re-inspect it.

This was, of course, an utter outrage, and Bumpy treated it as such. What right did they have to close down his business like that? He was a law-abiding, tax-paying citizen, and this was a bald-faced abuse of government power! And so, with his defiant spirit not yet broken, Bumpy ignored the closure order and opened up again the next day as normal. When the Health Department heard about this, they returned and announced they were enacting a second $1000 per day fine against his business until he obeyed them, closed down, fixed the hose, and then called them back for re-inspection.

Bumpy was now losing $2000 a day in fines, but even at that he stayed unbent and unbroken. He kept his business open, started making arrangements for the hose to be relocated, and continued to refuse to tell his customers what to do with themselves in reaction to the coronavirus.

The powers-that-be took notice of this refusenik. And this is where Bumpy would encounter the newest aspect of tyranny in the 21st century: the Public-Private Partnership between the government, the media, and the outrage mob in shutting down anyone who dares to get on their bad side. A few days after the Health Department visit, for no apparent reason at all, a posting was made on a local Antifa-affiliated Facebook group. It included a picture of Bumpy’s, centered on the “Thin Blue Line” flag that Bumpy proudly hangs from its roof, and the sentiment: “If you flying Blue Lives Matter, we’re coming!”. Here it is worth noting that Thin Blue Line flags are not at all uncommon in the parts of town that remain white and working class. Many local businesses fly them. So why, and how, was Bumpy’s the one targeted? One does not have to be of a deeply conspiratorial mindset to imagine the answer. Elements within the state government are themselves more than capable of dropping dime to non-governmental players and making sure that a certain enemy ends up in their sights.

When Bumpy got wind of this, he was understandably fearful. It was now the first week of June. Violent riots were sweeping the country. Businesses had been burned and looted by the dozens, by the very same people now targeting him. He tried to think of what he could do to de-escalate the situation. Perhaps a bit of placation might work – some show that might convince these radical leftists not to target him? It was worth a try. And so, this being the beginning of Pride Month, the rainbow flag and the pink-white-and-blue transgender flag went up next to the Thin Blue Line at the ice cream stand. Bumpy hoped this might be the end of it.

But of course, it wasn’t. Apologizing or trying to appease the leftist outrage mob never works. Just the opposite – it only makes them sense blood in the water, and they will escalate until their enemy is crushed and surrenders unconditionally. Since Bumpy had not yet done this, it was time for the next phase of action.

As with the Facebook post, a Tweet mysteriously appeared out of nowhere that included what was claimed to be a screenshot of a text message exchange between Bumpy and one of his managers. It centered around what seems to be a pay dispute involving a black employee. It also seems to show Bumpy calling the employee multiple racial slurs (including The Word That Must Never Be Said), followed up by stating unequivocally that he doesn’t hire black people. Despite it having been tweeted out by a random, unverified account with few followers, and despite these things being trivially easy to fake, several local news outlets immediately ran salacious stories of racism at Bumpy’s based on it. One might wonder how they could ever have found an obscure social media posting like this without being tipped off to it by someone. One also might wonder why the story was run without any verification of the claim made whatsoever, or without calling Bumpy for comment, or without a single one of our erudite journalist class wondering how exactly it could be that Bumpy was having a pay dispute with a black employee if he doesn’t hire black people. It didn’t matter – they ran the story anyway.

What came next was, in the current environment, predictable (and needless to say, absolutely intentional). The very afternoon I had arrived in Schenectady, a mob of Black Lives Matter protesters had made their way out of the city center and gathered around Bumpy’s. They stopped traffic on State Street, causing a large traffic jam. They chanted threatening slogans which intimidated away all of Bumpy’s customers, and even caused most of the employees he had working there that day to quit on the spot rather than face what was doubtless coming when the sun went down. Things got tenser as the twilight grew darker.

But here, Bumpy had his first stroke of good fortune. To what is surely the great surprise of anyone who has spent the last month watching the police cower on their knees in front of angry mobs to save their own skins while the cities around them were sacked and looted, the Schenectady Police Department turned out quickly and in force. Perhaps the Thin Blue Line flag had done Bumpy some good after all. The SPD set a perimeter around the gathering, with barricades placed on State Street to ensure both that passing drivers would not run over any of the mob, and also, as anyone who has watched the events of the past weeks understand, that the mob would not be permitted to give them any reason to. The mob stayed and menaced Bumpy and the remaining staff until just after dark, when, with any possibility of getting violent thwarted and a rainstorm beginning to pass through, they packed up and left. By the time Tony and I drove by after dinner, Bumpy’s was closed and all was quiet.

And so Bumpy’s did not burn that night, as surely some person or persons had intended, and as it surely would have had the police not acted as they did. Nevertheless, Bumpy’s troubles did not end there.

The next morning, as I gathered my belongings for the drive home, I turned on the local television news. As I feared but expected, every station was running breathless stories about how peaceful protestors fighting for civil rights had picketed a racist ice cream stand. They did this knowing that it would ruin Bumpy’s business. That’s precisely why they did it. The police might have been able to stop the place from being destroyed physically, but they couldn’t stop this.

Driving down State Street toward the New York State Thruway, I passed Bumpy’s. It was still closed, and remains so as of this writing. The problem now is not only the closure order, but a lack of employees. The ones he used to have are gone, and there’s not much hope of hiring any new ones. What parent in their right mind would allow their high schooler to take on the risk of accepting a summer job there now?

A day and a half later, I was back at my cottage in the mountains of Appalachia – and needless to say, I was greatly relieved to be there. My little country town remains beyond the power of the kind of tyranny that is wrecking the life of an innocent ice cream merchant up in Schenectady, and I will do whatever I must to ensure that it will remain so. I got in a good night’s sleep and, the next morning, picked up my phone to check in with Tony and ask about the latest news in the case. It was not encouraging.

Two days of heavy rainstorms had caused the mob to stay home, but on the 1st of July, they were back in even greater numbers. This time they showed up before noon and, with the place closed and no employees around, there was nobody to summon the police. One of the neighbors must have called Bumpy to warn him about what as going on, because he quickly showed up to try to protect his business. As he drove his pickup truck down State Street toward the mob, they showed the early signs of swarming it. He got out of the truck with what turned out to be a BB gun (almost certainly the only thing resembling a weapon that this peaceful man owns), at which point the mob cried out that they were being assaulted and (one might think ironically for a “protest” touched off by the presence of a “Thin Blue Line” flag), immediately called the police themselves, demanding that Bumpy be arrested. And that is what happened, though here again his pro-police sentiment may have helped him, as they let him go with only an appearance ticket for misdemeanor menacing. They even assigned a couple of officers to stick around and make sure that the ice cream stand wouldn’t burn while he was being processed. Thankfully, at present, it remains intact.

Once again, wild, unfounded smears against him started flying on Twitter, the most colorful of which was that Bumpy is “a registered sex offender covered in swastika tattoos”. Once again, a round of stories in local media warned parents of the Nazi ice cream merchant in their neighborhood, lying in wait to dispense racism-tinged frozen treats to their children. And now the government has re-entered the fray – the county Civil Rights Commission has issued a formal request for the state Attorney General’s office to open a civil rights investigation against Bumpy’s; meanwhile, the Health Department has announced that it’s seeking a court order allowing it to padlock the place, leaving it closed indefinitely. If it ever opens again, it will be only after months of legal proceedings and tens of thousands – perhaps hundreds of thousands – of dollars in fines and legal costs laid at Bumpy’s feet.

At this point, Bumpy had best hope for a really snowy winter, because the ice cream part of his business isn’t going to be generating any revenue to help pay his bills for a long while. In fact, paying his bills at all now hinges on the off chance that the tyranny Partnership doesn’t decide to target his plow business, too (which they almost certainly will).

Or he might just close it all up, take whatever he has left, and leave town, as everyone else has been thinking of doing. If so, it will be two more productive businesses closed, and one more taxpaying entrepreneur run out of the state. But not to worry – I’m sure all of those dirt poor immigrants will pick up the slack any old time now.

That is where things stand for Bumpy’s right now, and as appalling as it is, I wish that were all there is to the story. But it’s not – with Bumpy’s safely crushed beneath their heel, the Partnership has turned its sights on another target that might, to sane people, seem even more innocuous – Grace Baptist Church, across the Hudson River in Troy, NY. Grace Baptist’s transgression was to encourage the right of self-defense amongst their parishioners by raffling off an AR-15 rifle (one of the variety that must be crippled in order to comply with New York’s assault weapons ban). Self-defense against the violent arm of the Partnership must, of course, never be allowed, so the mob was dispatched to the church’s doorstep, to express the opposition to violence that the gun control movement claims as the core of its beliefs by assaulting and beating churchgoers on their way into Sunday worship. That this actually made the case for AR-15 ownership rather than disproving it didn’t matter. No dialectic matters now – no reason, no logic, no facts, no persuasion, and no “truth bombs”. The Partnership is not here to debate anyone. Their message is one of force and power: Obey us, or one or more arms of the Partnership – official or unofficial – will be sent to destroy you. And don’t you even think about trying to defend yourself, because we’ll ensure that will only make it worse for you. Comply, or else.

If you don’t live in Schenectady, you have almost certainly never had ice cream at Bumpy’s, and you likely never will. But its story is not merely a local news item – Bumpy’s and Grace Baptist Church are canaries in the coal mine in this dark time in our history. Experiences like theirs – of innocents attacked by the mob, smeared by the media, put out of business by the government or woke capital, and prosecuted for defending themselves on their own property – have been repeated nationwide. And the Partnership shows no sign of slowing down. Someday they will come for me, and for you. We are all Bumpy.

I have not, however, told you this cautionary tale to make you lose hope. The Partnership can be turned back. There are ways to put yourself beyond its power, so that they can only rage impotently at you. There are even ways to destroy it – and make no mistake, it will be destroyed eventually. But in order to fight it, you must know what it is and how it operates. Allow yourself no illusions, and make yourself ready.

The Squirearchy: Prologue

Posted on August 22, 2017 by antidem

The next time you’re in lower Manhattan, be sure to take some time to visit the Tenement Museum. It’s located in the SoHo neighborhood of the city, so named because it’s South of Houston Street (in one of those wonderful quirks of the English language, the name of this street is pronounced “How-ston”, as opposed to the city in Texas, the name of which is pronounced “Hugh-ston”). The neighborhood has, for perhaps a quarter century now, been throughly gentrified, with the five-story brownstones that line its streets remodeled and turned into fashionable but oh-so-expensive apartments occupied mainly by the rising stars of the trading houses on nearby Wall Street. But in the late nineteenth through mid twentieth centuries, this place was among the most poverty-ridden slums in the nation; these same brownstones were occupied almost exclusively by penniless immigrants fresh off the boat, many of whom had come through Ellis Island with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Here they toiled in backbreaking and often terribly hazardous conditions. Some (including more than one of my own ancestors) dug the subway tunnels under the city with shovels or moved rock with their bare hands, others labored in sweatshops where fourteen to sixteen hour days, six or even seven days a week, were the norm. Many were crippled, maimed, or killed in accidents like the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911, in which 146 workers, mostly women, burned alive or were crushed in a panicked stampede after a fire broke out at a garment factory and those inside found that the owners had locked the exits in an effort to keep them from taking unauthorized breaks. After their long days of work, the immigrant laborers came home to these tenements, which in those days were kept in a horribly dilapidated condition. The very poorest among them were consigned to the basement apartments, where they lived and slept in an inch or two of water that perennially covered the hard stone floors.

Those days are long past, but a bit of them is preserved at 97 Orchard Street, which the Tenement Museum Foundation acquired just as the neighborhood was beginning its turnaround in the 1980s. From 10AM to 6:30PM, seven days a week, it receives visitors who are given guided tours of apartments that have been carefully restored to look as they would have during the great wave of immigration that hit New York City in the 1880s through the 1920s. If you go there on a weekday during the off-season when the summer tourists are gone and things are slow, and if you show up early for your tour and find yourself sitting in the museum’s lobby with the chance to chat a bit with your guide before they start showing you through the exhibits, you may just end up being favored with hearing this story…

* * *

Sometime toward the tail end of the nineteenth century, a young immigrant by the name of Piotr found himself, after being processed through Ellis Island, lost and alone in the confusing bustle of Grand Central Station in New York City. Surrounding him was a madding crowd made up mostly of other immigrants from every conceivable end of Europe, few of whom spoke so much as a single word of English, and many of whom were illiterate even in their native languages. Interspersed among them, trying to bring some semblance of order to the perpetual chaos that the influx of immigrants had brought to Grand Central, were railway employees, whose job it was to make sure that the immigrants got on the right train – the one that would take them to whoever it was that had sponsored them on their journeys across the Atlantic. Sometimes the sponsors would be relatives, but most often they were employers whose desire for cheap labor was so insatiable that they contracted with agents in Europe who recruited directly from among the continent’s poor, providing them with sponsorships and passage to America in exchange for pledges to work a certain number of years for those who had sponsored them. Most of these agents were deeply dishonest and unscrupulous, telling their perspective recruits tales of streets paved with gold in the New World, and carefully avoiding any truths about sweatshops and tenements.

It was one of these agents who had recruited Piotr, a second son of a poor dairy farmer in some backwater of a Poland that, in those days, was still under the domination of the Russian Czar. At the port of Danzig, before his ship set sail for New York, the agency handed him a piece of wood with that had a bit of rope attached to it at both ends and a word he didn’t recognize written on it. This was the agency’s rather ingenious workaround for the problem of their recruits not having the basic English skills necessary to tell the railway men in New York where they were supposed to be going – it was a sign that they were supposed to wear around their necks when they arrived that had the name of their destination painted on it in large lettering. Now, ten days later and an ocean away, Piotr stood in the chaos of Grand Central Station with the sign dutifully hung around his neck.

Eventually, he managed to fight his way through the crush to one of the railway employees, an annoyed, busy man whose patience with the immigrants who had brought unceasing disorder to his station was running noticeably short. The railman, who simply didn’t have the time to spend more than a few seconds with each one of the newcomers swarming around him, took a quick glance at the sign around Piotr’s neck and pointed him toward a departing train. In the confusion, nobody even stopped to check whether he had a ticket before he boarded (sponsors usually paid fares upon the arrival of their new laborers, so there wasn’t much point in looking at their ticket before they got to their destinations anyway). Everyone seemed satisfied by the fact that he was going where his sign said he should, though Piotr himself had never before even heard of the place whose name was painted on it – a place called Houston.

For three long days, the train rumbled along; through the Mid-Atlantic states, through the Tidewater, through the deep south, and on into Texas. Finally, the exhausting ordeal came to an end when the conductor shook Piotr awake and guided him off the train. Having arrived at his new home, he walked inside the Houston & Texas Central Railway depot to wait for his sponsor to come for him.

He waited all day, and then all night, sleeping fitfully on one of the depot’s wooden benches. Then he waited all the next day, and all the next night as well. By the end of Piotr’s third day there (and with no one having come to pay for his train fare), the station master knew that something had gone wrong. Unable to communicate with the young man and unable to find anyone who knew anything about him or how he had gotten there, the station master eventually summoned the sheriff. The sheriff, who was equally unable to make any sense of the situation, took Piotr off to jail, ostensibly on a charge of vagrancy, but more than anything simply because the jail had a bed for him to sleep in and food for him to eat until someone could figure out where he had come from and what to do with him.

For several days, the sheriff made inquiries, but turned up nothing – nobody seemed to be missing an immigrant or to know who might be missing one. Though Houston is now a vast metropolis, it was in those days a small, sleepy country city – a cow town where everyone knew everyone, surrounded by vast cattle ranches. It didn’t take long before anyone who might know anything had been asked, and every possible route of inquiry had come up dry. The sheriff knew that he couldn’t keep Piotr in jail forever, nor did he wish to, as the young man seemed like a decent enough sort of lad. Unable to think of anything else to do with him, the sheriff started asking around to see if any of the local ranchers would take him on as a hired hand. After a bit of good-natured cajoling, one of them – an old friend of the sheriff – agreed to it. The next morning, a wagon arrived to take the still-confused Piotr away to his new life on the ranch.

As soon as he arrived, his eyes lit up with a combination of joy and relief. Finally, there was something in America that he was comfortable with! He might not have known much about his new country or even known a word of its language, but if there was one thing he did know from growing up on a dairy farm, it was cows. Even his lack of English proved not to be as great a problem as the rancher feared, as Piotr needed hardly any instruction in his duties at all. Beyond this, he was responsible and hardworking; unlike the other cowboys, he didn’t spend his nights getting drunk or his days off down at the local whorehouse or gambling den, and so he was neither perpetually hung over nor perpetually broke. As he slowly but surely became fluent in English, he became more and more useful, and the rancher steadily promoted him to higher (and better paid) positions. And if Piotr had successfully caught the boss’s eye, eventually the gentle and industrious young man began to catch the eye of the boss’s eldest daughter, as well; with the rancher’s blessing, a romance blossomed between them.

Years passed, and the newcomer’s fortunes continued to rise. He became a trusted employee, then a friend, and finally part of the family; courtship turned to marriage, and in time, the ranch passed to Piotr and his wife. Under their direction, the ranch became more prosperous than ever. From the humblest of beginnings, the immigrant who had arrived with nothing came to be wealthy, respected, and a pillar of his community – he had found the American Dream in his adoptive home.

Yet contented as he was, there was still one thing that had never stopped bothering him over the years – the mystery behind the chain of events that had brought him to the ranch in the first place. No one in Houston had ever been able to come up with any explanations – as far as the Texans were concerned, he had simply appeared out of nowhere one day. And so, decades after he had passed through it on his way to his new life, Piotr, now wealthy enough to afford the trip and fluent enough to understand whatever documents he might uncover, set out, with his wife and a couple of his older children in tow, for New York City, to see if he could find out what had happened all those many years ago. While his family enjoyed the delights of shopping and dining on Fifth Avenue, Piotr returned to Ellis Island, spending his days digging through file cabinets full of dusty, yellowed old papers. After a few frustrating, long days of searching, he finally found what he was looking for.

His sponsor had been one the the garment sweatshops that operated in lower Manhattan, and the sign that he carried was meant to send him to Houston Street, not to Houston, Texas. In the crush and chaos of Grand Central Station, the overworked railway employee who never bothered to look at his papers had hastily pointed Piotr toward the wrong train. He was never meant to go where he had gone at all, and, if not for a quirk of fate, would have ended up in a life of crushing poverty in the slums of New York, working fourteen-hour days for pennies in horrifying conditions in someplace very much like the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, and living in misery in a tenement very much like what 97 Orchard Street looked like in those days, most probably even sleeping in an inch of water in a dark and moldy basement apartment.

Piotr returned to the big, comfortable house on his ranch in the wide-open plains of Texas very happy indeed for quirks of fate, and determined never to return to New York City, lest an elderly garment factory owner somewhere south of Houston Street find out who he was and attempt to sue him for the cost of a steerage class ticket from Danzig to New York.

And he lived happily ever after, y’all.

* * *

This seems as good a way as any to start a series of essays on the topic of the advantages of us all seeking our fortunes in the country rather than in the big cities. Expect more in this series to be coming soon.

Follow The Lady

Posted on April 28, 2015 by antidem

A recent episode of an alt-right podcast to which I am a subscriber turned to a discussion of high-trust societies versus low-trust societies. The upshot of the discussion seemed to be that high-trust societies are not only the natural state of Western man, but essentially an unalloyed good. It is, so they seemed to say, only lesser peoples from cruder societies who fail to build high social trust; their societies are worse because of it, and their people incompatible with our better, more advanced social structures.

Perhaps. And yet, whether I wanted it or not, I found something nagging at me from deep with my consciousness; something that told me that there were flaws with seeing high trust as an absolute good, to be aspired to by all men of acute sensibility and good intent. Not a philosophical argument; no, a memory. One from long past – cold, as all old memories are, but clear…

* * *

New York City, January 1986

It was a blistering cold day under a crystal clear blue sky as I made my way through Washington Square Park, headed southeast towards Broadway. Cold as it was, my thick winter coat – a full-length one that went all the way to my knees, still my favorite of all the winter coats I’ve ever owned – kept me well-protected as I wound my way past the park’s great central fountain, past the statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi, and out onto West 4th Street. This was the old, rough New York of the pre-Giuliani days – the fountains had been dry for years; the statue’s base was covered in graffiti and Garibaldi himself was caked in birdshit that no one had bothered cleaning off in ages. As I passed Mercer Street, I saw a disheveled black bum, with a crazy look in his eyes and his pants down around his ankles, loudly straining as, in broad daylight on a crowded street, he defecated in the doorway of one of the buildings of New York University. In those days of the old, rough New York, the cops didn’t care, and everybody simply pretended not to notice.

I pretended not to notice, too. What would I have done about it? I was alone, and twelve years old, wandering through the great city. This was something my father not only allowed, but encouraged. We would come into the city, and he would turn me loose for hours upon end, to explore by myself while he did other things. This was before cell phones, so I couldn’t easily contact anyone if I needed to. I was expected to simply be cagey and street smart enough to get by, and so I was; it was supposed to make me independent and self-reliant, and so it did. We had a time and a place to meet, and if that failed an alternate time and place, and if that failed, I knew how to get to my grandmother’s house in Brooklyn on the subway. I had a little money in my pocket, and a little more tucked into my sock. This was “mugger money” – if someone tried to rob me, I could give him what was in my pocket, and the money secreted in my sock would still be enough to get home with. You had to be ready for anything.

Someplace around where Broadway meets East Houston Street (that’s pronounced “How-ston” – if you pronounce it “Hew-ston” everyone will know you’re a tourist) I came upon a small crowd gathered around two sets of buskers. The first, a troupe of breakdancers whirling crazily on a mat made of old cardboard boxes, held no interest for me, and I quickly passed them by. But the second made me stop and look, for it was a genuine sidewalk game of Three-Card Monte.

Three-Card Monte is a simple game of chance in which three cards, one a queen (of any suit, it doesn’t matter which) are placed side by side, face down, on a small table. The dealer then quickly moves the cards around for a few seconds to randomize which one is where. If the player is able to follow the movements of the queen and correctly pick it out after the dealer is done, he wins. If not, he loses. A simple game of luck and skill – if played honestly. Which it never is, especially not on a sidewalk in lower Manhattan.

I gently pushed through the small crowd, close enough to see the table (actually three cardboard boxes stacked on one another), but not close enough to be mistaken for someone who wanted to play. The dealer was a young black man in a Yankees cap; personable, charming, funny, smiling a lot. Behind him were two more such young men, similarly dressed. All wore nice running shoes as well. The player was an older black lady of maybe 70 years, nicely dressed, and doing very well indeed. She had won the first game and lost the second. This next one, she said, was going to be her last for the day.

The dealer turned the cards face-up. He pointed at the queen, to demonstrate to all that she was indeed there. He turned the cards over, and, with lightning quickness, began moving them, chanting as he did:

“Followtheladyfollowtheladyfollowtheladyfollowthelady…”

When he stopped, the old woman extended her arm to point at the center card, but then paused, grimaced intently, looked at the dealer, and pointed to the card on the right. A winner again!

But of course she won – she was a shill. In a typical game, there are five or six shills – apparent onlookers who are in league with the dealer and assigned various jobs to help him out – sprinkled about the crowd. For example, there would be a lookout or two who would alert the dealer if a cop was coming, in which case he would make use of those running shoes, leaving the cop with nothing but a stack of cardboard boxes to inspect. There would be the “winner” – someone as respectable-looking as they could come up with – whose victories would convince the marks in the crowd that the game could be won. And there would be security, here represented by the young men standing behind the dealer, who would intervene in case a mark who lost a game got physical. Such labor was cheap and plentiful in the ghetto, which was where the entire crew lived, though we were a long subway ride away from it. All of them were, of course, on welfare and unemployed, which left their days free for pursuits such as these. Yes, food stamps covered necessities, but a bit of cash was always useful. After all, liquor stores didn’t take food stamps, nor could they be used for cigarettes, lotto tickets, marijuana, prostitutes, or (at least in those days; perhaps it is different now) expensive running shoes.

The old woman had done her job, and receded into invisibility in the crowd.

“Come on now, who’s next?! I can’t go home broke!!” the dealer cheerfully yelled.

Out of the crowd stepped a young white man of perhaps twenty-five years. In an accent that suggested an origin in the less wealthy end of Europe, he said “Alright, I’ll giff it a try”.

The dealer smiled broadly, doubtless already imagining the filled pipe and 40 of malt liquor that he was going to buy that evening with the mark’s hard-earned money.

“Come on up, mah friend, come on up!”

The mark came on up. The procedure was repeated. The queen was presented, the cards placed face-down, and the dealer’s hands began to move.

“Followtheladyfollowtheladyfollowtheladyfollowthelady…”

Almost imperceptibly, one of the security men gave a nod in the direction of the breakdancers. I couldn’t see what move they pulled, but it was enough to get a loud cheer from the crowd that surrounded them. For a split second, everyone looked away – the mark, the crowd around our table, the shills – everyone except the dealer. And me, as I knew what was coming next. As quick as lightning, one of the cards on the table went up the dealer’s loose, long sleeves, and another card, drawn from the sleeve, replaced it. It happened so fast that, even knowing it was coming, I almost didn’t see it happen. The mark, distracted for a split second, didn’t see it at all.

Now it didn’t matter which card he picked. The lady wasn’t anywhere on the table. He chose. He lost.

It was as the dealer magnanimously offered to let the mark win his money back that I finally spotted the remaining members of the crew of shills. A thin young man who had been standing to the side of the crowd came up behind one of the onlookers, a companion of the mark who was playing the game. There was an ever-so-light brushing up of one against the other, and in a flash, the onlooker’s wallet went from the back pocket of his pants into the front pocket of the thin young man’s jacket. This was the final bit of revenue enhancement for the crew, and probably just as lucrative as the game itself. On a good day, they might lift half a dozen wallets, or maybe even more.

But not mine. There was more than one reason I liked that heavy, knee-length coat.

The thin young man casually but quickly made his way towards the old woman who had won the first game I had seen, and who was still in the crowd. The stolen wallet dropped into the large tote bag she was carrying. This part was key – get the wallet off the pickpocket as quickly as possible; that way, if the victim noticed that his wallet was missing and confronted the person who had just bumped into him (or worse, managed to summon a passing cop), the thief wouldn’t have anything incriminating on him.

“Followtheladyfollowtheladyfollowtheladyfollowthelady…”

Two more games were played – both with distractions appearing at the appropriate times, and both lost by the mark. A couple more wallets were lifted. The crew was having a good day.

If my father meant for me to learn from experiences, I can say without doubt that, at least that day, he succeeded. As I observed the Three-Card Monte crew, it occurred to me that everything there was a fraud, a cheat, and a theft, and that everyone there was complicit. Even the marks, with their desire to make a quick something for nothing, were not blameless. And, in my silence as I watched them get cheated and robbed, neither even was I. There was much to be learned from that.

A loud whistle came from somewhere just beyond the crowd. I turned to look, and almost before I could snap my head back towards the game, the dealer and his security men were gone. It was a signal from one of the lookouts; as the crowd quickly broke up I could see two of New York’s Finest slowly lumbering their way north up Broadway. If they had spotted the game, they were in no rush to get to it, but one way or another they would be where we were very soon. The show was over, and, like everyone else, I turned to go.

I hadn’t made it more than twenty or thirty feet before I heard a loud voice behind me, in an accent that suggested an origin in the less wealthy end of Europe, shout: “Vhere de fuck is my vallet?!”

* * *

And what is it, dear reader, that you might believe is all on the up-and-up?

Do you believe that your government represents your interests; that it works tirelessly to address your concerns and solve the problems in your life?