I was back in New York City after a meandering jaunt to Europe. Henry Hypnotic and I carried our instruments while discussing personal hygiene. We had spent the day making rounds across Brooklyn, and Henry feared that all this walking had awakened the body odor that lived inside him. He wanted to hit the subway and go back where he was staying to freshen up.
“You smell fine,” I told him, sniffing in his general direction. An hour-long subway ride seemed a frivolous battle in the war against the body’s recurring odors. I was raised on showering in the morning and washing up at night. In between, you did the best you could, and brushed off the manure you picked up along the way.
Henry frowned and sniffed himself and said that unless we did something about his odor, it would only get worse. To avoid the subway trip, I convinced him that we could go to the Family Dollar where he could purchase a stick of deodorant and give his body a good wipe down.
Much of the merchandize in the Bushwick store on Broadway was stacked in boxes with the top box open. In this store there was a stack of such boxes containing Febreze To Go bottles. But they weren’t going anywhere. In front of them a sign read, “Please Don’t Take Febreze Around The Store.” My plans of following Henry around and spraying him with Febreze dashed, I wondered at the implications of such a sign. What had the Febreze done to deserve this? How could anyone purchase Febreze if it could not be carried? Why were the Pullups and Snausages given freedoms denied the Febreze? What tribulations had transpired to lead the management to take these measures?
I wondered in vain and Instagrammed as Henry paid for deodorant and dental hygiene products. On our way out, a guy from the neighborhood saw our instruments and asked us what sort of music we played. While this conversation was in progress, three men made a hurried entrance. Two of them closed and latched the doors from the inside. The third hurried to the register.
When you are inside a store that is about to be robbed, the mind’s first reaction is that you are misreading the signs. Surely no one is about to pull a gun from his leather jacket and rob the place. The mind’s second reaction is that the mind’s first reaction is incredibly naïve and the body better do something quick.
Things happened fast. I grabbed Henry’s shoulder and moved towards the door. The man began to announce, “May I have your attention ladies and gentlemen! . . .”
“Open the doors,” I said to the two men at the door. They complied and unbolted the door to let us out. Just like that, we were back on Broadway Street.
“What was that about?” Henry asked, matching my quickened pace.
“I think that those guys were going to rob the place.”
“Really?”
I considered, and then reconsidered. “Maybe not? But did you see how those guys closed the door? Something went down.”
We went through the evidence of what we had seen and what it meant. Out of the immediacy of danger, my naivety again took the reins. Maybe he was announcing that the store was closing? My second thoughts weighed in, Come on Luke’s mind, how is that the most plausible scenario?
That I should have called the police immediately seems obvious. But call the police I did not. Having spent 5 of the last 6 years in third world countries where the police are often the bad guys, it is easy to get jaded enough to forget that the police in New York are good guys.
The next night it was the police who called me over to them. I was out with friends at Los Hermanos tortilla factory (the one Anthony Bordain likes) and again forgot to think of the bigger picture of life when I walked out into the street with a beer in my hands. As I exited, three NYPD officers walked by. One of them waved me over wearing an oh-no-you-just-didn’t expression. He asked for my ID and as I apologized for my oversight he said, “Look, why don’t you just finish the beer here with us, otherwise you might get a ticket down the road. We’re headed to bust a party, but there’s no rush.”
Were the cops that I had not called the night before really being this cool about this? Drinking a Dos XXs in the streets of New York, in trio of officers from the neighborhood, I asked them if a Family Dollar store on Broadway had been held up the night before.
“Oh yeah,” said the officer who had waved me over, “Robbed the store and everyone inside.”
I finished my beer, thanked the officers for being so cool and threw the empty bottle away. I resolved to never again try to prevent anyone from freshening up the way they wanted to. The price of Family Dollar deodorant that day had nearly been much higher than a few innocuous dollars.
