NYC's latest menace: the serial chatter
Posted: 2003-09-10 04:54pm
I found this absolutly hilarious.
Brooklyn News Wire, September 8, 2003
Police are responding to a number of complaints from Brooklyn residents about a man who is being referred to as "The Cobble Hill Chatter." Beginning in late July, there have been a rash of incidents where innocent people have been accosted and spoken to by this man, despite his being a complete stranger to them. Several of the victims agreed to talk with our reporter about their ordeals.
Tony D'Angela was at the Prospect Park Zoo one day, with his young son, when he realized the man next to him was addressing him. As Tony puts it:
"We was just watching dem seals, my boy and me, and dis goombah starts talking about how fast da seals swim, da way dey use deir flippers, how inneresting it is how dey streamline deir bodies. 'Streamline dis,' I'm thinking to myself. I sizes him up and figger he's gonna try and sell me something or he's like one of dem Mormon guys. But no! It's on and on about da friggin' seals. What does he, think I'm some marine friggin' biologist or something? I'm saying to myself I gotta get out of here, or soon it'll be on to da friggin' walruses and dolphins. I already got a friggin' headache cause I had a few too many at da card game at da club da night before, and da last thing I need to hear is dis guy telling me how da dolphins do it.
"So on da sly I take hold of da kid's arm and starts backing away. 'Daddy,' he says to me, 'I wanna watch da seals!' 'Vinnie,' I says to him, 'you can see da seals some other day. Your pop, he's got a little agita.'
"Now, here comes da piece of resistance: 'Take care,' da mook says to me, 'have a nice day.' Like I'm his old buddy or something. Den he turns around and starts talking to somebody else! Ain't dere a law against being a public nuisance?"
Yasoor Dinnglbari, a waiter at The Hungry Camel Café on Atlantic Avenue, tells of his hair-raising encounter with this man:
"It is this image which you must have in your mind: Our Yemeni restaurant is in the basement of our building. Everybody inside, customers, waiters, cooks, is an Arab. The cockroaches, they are Arab cockroaches. The TV news is on in Arabic. This guy, with milky white skin and a reddish beard, clearly not an Arab, wanders in. He sits down like it is he who comes here every day. I let him sit for a while, thinking soon the clear picture will come to him and he will go away.
"Finally, I say to myself, 'He is not leaving; I must go serve him.' I go over to his table and – Allah save me! – he begins chatting with me.
"Here I am, a scary looking Arab who scowls at all the infidels, and this person is asking me where I'm from, how do I like the neighborhood, how long have I been in Brooklyn. I tried deepening my scowl, but it was not in the least that it deterred him. When he was done eating, he told me he liked the food. You know, he was not so bad of a tipper – perhaps I could learn to tolerate his incessant babble."
Latrina McFarlane, a resident of Brooklyn Heights who commutes to Manhattan, describes the encounter she had with "the chatter" while she was riding the subway: "There I was, hanging onto one of the poles in the train and staring fixedly at the floor, you know, like you're supposed to on the subway. This guy next to me suddenly starts speaking. I glanced up to see who he was with… but he's alone. Like, he was talking to me. And not just me, but anyone around him who would listen. The train was moving pretty slowly, and he's saying stuff like, 'They must be pulling this thing with horses, huh?'" Latrina shrugs her shoulders. "I mean, he didn't look homeless or anything, but I guess he must be."
Although police refused to make an official comment on the progress of their investigation, an unnamed source told the Brooklyn News Wire that their attention was focused on an under-employed writer who had recently moved to the area from "Connecticut or Delaware – one a dem little New England states."