Before reprinting my story of dealing with a random lunatic in Starbucks, please allow me to address a question I always get.
“Liam, do these things really happen to you? Did a woman really ban all male temps from working in her office after you worked there for a day?”
She sure did. There’s not much more to the story than that.
“Liam, be honest, you didn’t really cut your face because you decided to shave before a job interview in a stall in the Men’s Room of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, right?”
Of course I did.
“But you didn’t really show up for the interview an hour late, shirt and face both smudged with shaving cream and blood, and then get the job?”
Not only is this a true story, but it is a ridiculously long one. I have to condense it to make it readable as a Substack post. And with that in mind, enjoy this 100% true story, factual as reported:
* * * * *
September 18, 2006
When you’re not, in the strictest sense ”full-time employed” and you spend your days in Starbucks writing, you get to meet all the other people in this city who don’t necessarily have anywhere to go all day.
My once writing partner, C., and I were meeting at my second-favorite Starbucks1 in the city to write in. It has some drawbacks; the staff only seems to like one CD in the official Starbucks catalogue, and it’s The Best of Bob Marley.
I had, in the month leading up to this, heard Three Little Birds more than a priest in a mid-size city has heard pubescent boys confess to pleasuring themselves.
Which is a suspicious amount above the number a human being should want to hear those stories, which is none.
Seriously, I am normally a fan of Marley, but now all I can do is fantasize about shooting the sheriff and his goddamn deputy - in the head just to make sure they don’t ever come back.
And although I am generally in favor of the idea of personal liberty, I swore that if I heard one more plea for people to get up, stand up for their rights, I will personally put them in shackles and buy us both one-way tickets to Guantanamo Bay so that I can be sure that they have 100% given up the fight.2
It’s also near Times Square, which means you get a lot of tourists; I’ve actually had to give a confused British woman this direction: “You can’t miss 42nd Street, it’s the big one with the lights. When you hit it, turn right, you can’t miss the theatre. It has a big yellow sign that reads, ‘The Lion King’.”
It’s also conveniently close to the Port Authority, which means that the city’s transient lunatic population finds their way through. Anyway, being as how I was sitting that day drinking coffee and water for hours on end, I decided that before I left I’d visit the bathroom that scores of the city’s homeless and bike messengers (often one and the same) call “home.”
Up to the bathroom line comes a large man.
He’s probably in his fifties, bald, his face sliding away with whatever remained of his sanity.3 He’s easily 6’10 (I’m 6’, and his height intimidated the shit out of me), and he has a large belly.
But it’s a solid fat, like one of those old-school barmen who one minute is polishing a glass and the next minute is lifting a plug-ugly over his head and sliding him down the bar and through a solid oak door.
And he’s not just big, but he’s clearly nuts. See, at least a big guy, you can handle because generally you make sure you’re smiling, you don’t step on his shoes, and you think carefully before you say something smart.
But crazy people, you’re never quite sure what’s going to make them snap, and you can just hope that when they do you’re about fifteen feet away, enjoying the spectacle.
The Big Guy walks up to the bathroom door and rattles the handle, pounds on the door. Then he turns to me and says, “How long have they been in there?”
I said, “Oh, a minute.”
He paces to what should be his place on line, then walks up to the bathroom door and pounds on it again. A Drama Queen in line in front of me says, “It’s just been a minute.” All I can say is:
“Big Guy, Big Mistake.”
He doesn’t argue, he doesn’t pound on the door again. He doesn’t say a word to the kid in front of me.
Big Guy walks back to his place on line and says in that way that’s to no one in particular and yet at the same time to me and the other guy in line, “I don’t give a shit. I’ll piss right here on the floor. I’m dying of brain cancer, I’ll be dead in two months anyway.”
Then he walks up to the bathroom door and pounds on it again. I’m sure helping the woman inside go that much faster. He goes back to his place on line, and pauses for a second. But it’s that crazy person pause, the kind that’s much louder than a scream because you’re trying to figure out his thought process, because you know something else is coming next, and you’re making sure you don’t have to jump out of the way.
Then Big Guy said again, “I don’t give a shit, I’ll piss right here. You think I won’t?” And he unzips his fly.
Now this is the point in the conversation where there is no appropriate reply, other than keeping your mouth shut. But I couldn’t help myself. Maybe I’m braver than most, or maybe I’m just dumber.
Maybe it’s because one of my personal heroes is Bugs Bunny, and this is exactly the type of situation where he would mouth off to the big scary goon. In any case, there was an awkward silence, and I felt compelled to fill it, the way some men see Mount Everest and feel a primal urge to climb to where no human being has climbed before.4
So I said, “Just piss over there,” pointing in the other direction, “I don’t want you pissing on my shoes.”
And he looks me up and down, making sure to scrutinize my shoes. And then he says, “I’d like to piss on you.”
>beat<
“But I can’t.”
And then he grabbed my hand and shook it, and I shook it back just as hard, and we were in a handshake stalemate for a few seconds before he let go.
There was peace and quiet for exactly one second, which was then broken by an old man with a cane, thick glasses, and a dirty raincoat, running up to the bathroom door. The Big Guy grabbed the Dirty Old Man and said, “Hey, there’s a line.”
The Old Man broke loose from the Giant’s grip and started yelling, “My heart medicine! My heart medicine!”
Big Guy replied, “Your medicine’s not in there.” He put his arm across the frantic Old Man’s chest and dragged him back, as he screamed about his heart medicine. Then Big Guy announced, “He tried that back at Burger King fifteen minutes ago.”
And that’s when I decided that I could wait to use the bathroom at a hotel a couple of blocks away.
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40th Street (?) & Eighth Ave, which has a huge upstairs with lots of seating. Most customers don’t see the stairs, or are tourists with too much to do to notice the stairs going up.
In 2025 this joke would be about Alligator Alcatraz, and also in terrible taste.
In all honesty, nineteen years later I no longer know what this means. But I like the imagery of the line, so I’ll let it stay.
Except for scores of Tibetans and Sherpas who managed to turn Western Europeans and Americans’ desire for self-destruction in to a cottage industry. But Sir Edmund Hilary was of a generation of gentleman explorers who knew how to differentiate between “people” and “servants.”