TKOG Who moves you along, ’cause there’s nothing to see here

ITALICS MONSTER! Two things: 1) Cool, so there’ll definitely be some sort of little party in Boston after my NTKOG year is over. Details forthcoming, my parents’ schedules pending. 2) Forgive the recent proliferation of ads (yes, even you RSS readers): I’m just trying everything for a week to see which earns me the most, after which, in the words of Highlander, there can only be one.

NTKOG 221: The kind of sanctimonious busybody who, observing your behavior isn’t up to her purse-lipped par, grabs you by the elbow and tells you how to live.

I am: annoyed by nothing in the world quite so much as old people who, seeing me on the street, descend from the guru-mountain of senescence to lecture me about my clothes, my hair, my body — whatever pops into their minds.

I am not: even always the best judge of my behavior, let alone anyone else’s.

The Scene: The Boston Public Library, a quarter of an hour before closing time. I was browsing the W’s fiction shelf for some nighttime reading, when a shriek ricocheted through the marble foyer.

“Help me! Help! Make her stop!” a teenage girl screamed.

A series of ominous thumps, then a deep women’s voice, cracking with panic, cried out: “Call the police! Call an ambulance! Goddamnit, call somebody!”

Her voice physically dragged me across ten feet of carpeting and into the foyer, where a few patrons stood frozen at the check-out line and half a dozen library employees clustered in an anxious knot.

On the outside of one of the big glass doors, a woman — mid-forties but with an older face — wrestled a skinny teen girl against the glass. The girl twisted herself around, trying to land a vicious elbow into the woman’s face, letting out an animal wail.

Somehow, the women hooked her left ankle into one of the next set of doors and dragged it open enough to scream into the library again: “Call a fucking ambulance! It’s my daughter. She stole my phone. She just got out of the hospital.”

“Don’t fucking touch me!” the girl screeched. “I’ve never seen this woman before in my life!” The rest was lost in sobs.

And maybe it was the scared resignation in the woman’s voice, or the way she was ripping her body in an attempt to restrain the girl while seeking help, but something told me this was indeed a mother, dealing with only the latest episode in a long, sad battle with her daughter’s mental illness. It’s just a guess, mind you. But if you were there, I think you’d agree it’s a good one.

After two or three more minutes of wrestling and wailing, the head security guard stepped outside. “Has someone helped you?” he boomed.

“No. I keep asking. I’ve asked five fucking times for an ambulance! I took her out of the hospital and it was a mistake — she needs to go back right now.”

The guard paced back to the security desk in quick, measured steps, and — finally — called the proper autorities. As he started describing the situation to the dispatcher, I checked out my book and slinked out of the library.

Except, out on the street, I was the only person moving. There must have been three dozen pedestrians gawking at the specacles — eyes wide, whispering to each other out of the corners of their mouths, all but nursing bowls of Jiffy Pop.

And, dude, something inside of me snapped.

“Hey,” I broke into a coven of after-work PR blondes. “They called the cops. You should probably keep walking — all these people can’t be helping the situation.”

One of the blondes made a moue of disgust, but they shifted.

One by one, ran up to the groups of goggling pedestrians. “Dude, there’s nothing to see there. It’s none of your business.”

Some people moved away; some stayed, staring, smiling, speculating on the scene with schadenfreudistic glee. Then, out of the corner of my eye, a glint of iPhone casing.

Twenty feet from the scene, a crew of high-school boys stood, one training his phone on the whole conflict.

“Are you taping this?!” I spat. “What, are you going to put it on YouTube?”

“Come on,” the ringleader grinned. “It’s hilarious.”

And there were many things I wanted to do. I wanted to swipe the phone from his hand and smash it to the ground. I wanted to click through his contacts and call his mother, tell him what her son was out doing. I wanted to smack his smug face until he learned the difference between suffering and entertainment. But of course I couldn’t do any of those things — not with the cops already on their way. So, I did the only thing I could do.

I danced.

Ducked into the path of his iPhone video until I was obscuring the entire frame, then danced my spastic ass off. Where he swiveled, I followed instantly; where he tried to evade, I only took up more space; where he ran, I followed. I blocked out every trace of the two women’s struggle until, finally, he gave up.

“Crazy bitch,” he snarled. Which tells me two things. First, this kid obviously doesn’t appreciate fine dance. And second, that he might have a bigger lesson to learn about what is and what isn’t entertainment.

The Verdict: Not sure how sold I am on this one. On the one hand, it’s the type of thing I feel myself increasingly drawn to do these days, yet lack the commitment (and willingness to look like a total ass) to actually pull off.

On the other, it doesn’t escape me that it might be a trifle hypocritical. After all, who am I to unilaterally declare what is and is not a worthy public spectacle? Besides, to be perfectly honest, I know I would have been staring away if I were that teenager. So what about a year ago? Or six months ago? Or yesterday?

Making other people’s ethical decisions for them: fraught. Guerrilla-dancing in other people’s YouTube-bound videos: hilarious. Let’s go ahead and call this one a draw.

Tagged as: bipolar mania, boston, boston public library, copley, dancing for JUSTICE, do old people not lecture you guys all the time? for some reason old people love to be instant frenemies with me., i like that this post is simultaneously categorized in "bad behavior" and "pretending to be a saint", if you misread "guerrilla-dancing" as "gorilla-dancing" in penultimate sentence it probably did not change your understanding of the sentence, rubbernecking, this feels especially hypocritical 'cause i used to call The Ex from the freeway to breathlessly recap every five-car pile-up i saw, trying to be a less awful person one youtube video at a time