Crazy Old Guy

I swear I can’t go 24 hours without something strange happening to me in The City.

Today I picked up 10,000 CD’s from some Crazy Old Guy in Queens.  Part of the reason I like moving other people’s shit is because it gives me a real perspective into how people live — what motivates them, what keeps them alive, how they solve daily problems.  The days you lift up the couch and see what’s hiding underneath are very raw, and I like the idea of helping out during some of the most stressful portions of people’s lives.  Today was not really one of those days.

I was hired to pack up and deliver 10,000 CD’s that were almost all still in their original packaging.  Crazy Old Guy had been living in his house since 1953 and it looked like he had not updated or repaired anything since then.  Over the years, I have been hired by some world class hoarders (remind me to tell the story of Ely sometime), and I would give this guy 3.7 out of 5 stars on the Hoard-O-Meter.  I could at least walk around all the dusty crap, and it was sort of stacked up even if he had shit from the 50’s stacked to the ceiling.

Crazy Old Guy was in my ear for the next 4 hours (packing 10,000 CD’s takes awhile) mostly about how badly he was getting screwed over on the sale price of the extraordinary collection.  He simply could not understand that a plastic packaged CD of Michael Jackson’s album, Bad (or, insert 10,000 other titles) was not worth more than the original sales price of $14.99.  In other words, he believed that the current retail price should retain some sort of investment grade price because of its authenticity.  I tried to explain that few people gave a shit about CD’s because of digital music, and that he was lucky to get $1 apiece for them.  “Fuck the Internet,” he told me.

Yeah, Fuck the Internet.

As I worked in the 100+ degree shit hole of an attic (ever see, People Under the Stairs?) my shirt soaked through with sweat in about 15 minutes despite the 5 “brand new” air conditioning units from the mid-80’s he held under blankets that he insisted I inspect.

“Impressive…” I lied. “I bet you could get this son-of-a-bitch down to about 30 degrees with those motherfuckers.”  By the way, cursing is considered good manners in this part of Queens, so I wasn’t being disrespectful — just mindful of local culture.

I labored.  He cursed out Jews.

I filled the truck.  He told me about his goddamn pancreas.

I left a trail of sweat down his rotting, molded stairs.  He left a trail of obscenities behind me.

Here’s the thing… if you can’t move forward, you risk losing out big time and wasting a lot of time, money, and emotion on things that don’t matter.  If you’re stuck in an ideal that is doomed, and you’re the only one snapping up the great deals on something you don’t even give a shit about, don’t blame other people when you can no longer sell your bullshit.  Sure, there will always be a market for bullshit, but you may lose $14 for every $15 investment if that’s the real reason you spent the money in the first place.

Crazy Old Guy had no passion for music whatsoever, and didn’t even know what he had.  He just kept buying maybe because somebody told him someday they’d be worth a lot of money.  However, that day is not today.  There was no soul in all that decrepit dust — no life… just plastic wrapped in plastic under a pile of neglect and angst.  The guy I work for — the buyer, however, is absolutely enamored with music, and even though he is a shitty business man, he manages to attract people who also might say, “Fuck the Internet.  We’re buying vinyl or CD’s.”  He provides something that has meaning for other people in a forum that they appreciate.

Rolling through the Midtown Tunnel with somewhere between $10,000 and $150,000 worth of CD’s, I was happy that all that music came out of Queens today.  Somebody is going to get a great deal on Michael Jackson’s album.

At the end of the day, Crazy Old Guy turned out to be not so crazy.  When I was done, he asked me if I wanted to see his garden, and even though I thought I may end up as fertilizer, I agreed.

In his tiny backyard, he had a small farm growing, and I could hardly believe what I was seeing.  He estimated he had about 600 vegetable plants growing, and I believed him — there was enough to feed 2 big families.  He offered me some eggplant, but I declined.  I figured I’d taken enough from him today as I marveled over his achievement.

“You work like a fuckin’ mule, Trucker,” he told me.  (Crazy Old Guy didn’t like my real name, so called me “Trucker.”)

“Yeah, sometimes I get the wild hair when I’m feeling motivated, Crazy Old Guy,” I explained.

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