He waved his gun at the window. Just enough so that the window washer would start to pick at the hangnail on his right thumb and the tweeting young men and women of the Flatiron building would write only about him. Although he was in his 80s with puckered dark circles under his eyes and a grey fuzzy head of hair, he was not the Italian cashmere wearing Upper-East-Side Jewish grandfather. He was the other old New Yorker. The one who wore t-shirts with ripped sleeves and didn’t leave his bedroom unless for more Q-tips to clean his ears after showering. His shirt advertised Tim Allen’s For Richer or Poorer and almost completely hid his cutoff shorts. Every gossiping tweeter who realized he had not in fact held up a teashop or anything at all, laughed and re-tweeted his baggy appearance from gawker.com. What they didn’t realize though was that he didn’t have their bleeping shiny smart phones that binged frequently and reminded them they were needed. What they didn’t realize was that he wasn’t crazy at all. He was just another forgotten New Yorker, sitting by himself in a pale yellow, low-ceilinged bedroom with a large poster of Tim Allen dressed as Santa Claus, surrounded by a million other noticed New Yorkers. While they called him insane, they never realized that he was happy they were laughing at him. They had tweeted and texted only about him for a whole forty-five minutes before he quietly let go of his moment of attention and turned himself in to go back to a room of invisibility.
Spotted on gawker.com