The Day My Faith Was Restored in Park Slope

Like many readers of this here blog, I find that living in Park Slope requires that I walk a tightrope of sorts. I enjoy the neighborhood's various charms and relative accessibility on the one hand, yet endure the smug shitheaded-ness of my neighbors on the other. Every once in a while, however, I find that either the charms ain't so charming or, as I recently came to consider, maybe those who share the neighborhood with me aren't the self (or child)-absorbed wankers that I've pegged them to be.

As a semi-professional freelancer, a large portion of my monthly income arrives in paper checks via the U.S. postal service. The daily kerplunk of magazines, letters and junk mail (mostly addressed to people who moved out three years ago) is shimmied through the slot on my building's front door. As it scatters across the small main floor it is, for me, like the ka-ching of a cash register.

The nice thing about this arrangement is that, for a few brief moments before depositing the checks I receive, I can hold the tangible fruits of my labor in my hand. The bad is that I’m an absent-minded sonofabitch, and it is my responsibility to hold on to these fruits until they are deposited.

On a recent Monday, one of the envelopes scattered just inside the front door yielded a fairly substantial check (enough to pay my rent for the month and the some). I took it and the rest of my mail up to my apartment. I endorsed the check by signing the back of it, folded it twice and stuck it in the front left pocket of my jeans. Thirty minutes later I walked the three blocks from my apartment toward my bank where, after perusing the selection of tube socks that an older, overweight man was selling out of a plastic grocery bag on 8^th Ave., I reached into my pocket for the check. It wasn't there.

I re-traced my steps. I scanned the sidewalk and picked up every discarded receipt and used napkin found along the way. No dice. The anxiety that I began to feel as I scoured the area was quickly replaced by disgust as I realized that the check was gone; I’d likely dropped it when I took my cell phone out of my pocket. What kind of moron can't hold onto his money for half-a-fucking-hour? More importantly, who is the filthy rat bastard who was obviously following behind me and conveniently happened upon it?

Now, I'm no commercial paper expert, but I understand that once a check is endorsed, the person holding it can cash it; even if he or she isn't the one who endorsed it. While I'm fairly certain that most banks would require an I.D. in order to cash a check for someone who wanders in with it, I'm less confident that the check cashing joint on 4th Ave under the F train overpass conducts its business under the same rigorous standards.

Everyone immediately became a suspect: the three guys with colorfully-splattered sweatshirts and jeans who were painting a brownstone interior south of 7^th Ave.; the hand-holding bull dyke couple perusing a menu outside Chip Shop; even the elderly, semi-mobile gentlemen who sit in folding chairs in front of the 5^th Ave American Legion. If that one sketch of the serial groper -- you know, the one that looks strangely like Dan Rather -- is any indication, anyone is capable of anything. Sure, it had been days since I'd seen either the Latin guy with tattoos on both sides of the bridge of his nose who often escorts an elderly woman around the neighborhood or the pale, older little fella with watery eyes and a tennis ball sized cyst on the side of his neck who drinks his weekdays away at Jackie's. That didn't mean they weren't already out on 5th Ave spending my goddamned money.

Like any reasonable Park Sloper, I kept my rage concealed. I passive-aggressively eyeballed each and every person on the street without daring to actually confront any of them. This included the middle school girls who'd taken up seats on my front stoop, sharing pizza slices and sipping 7-Up through a straw, all coy and calculating. Did one of them have the check in her backpack? Or had they already signed it over for a year supply of microwaved taquitos, the lunch special next door at Postmark Café? They snickered when I pushed around garbage cans looking for signs of my check and I knew immediately that at least one of those broads was up to no good.

After tossing my apartment around like an NYPD officer looking for –- or perhaps planting -- illegal substances, I gave up and called my employer. He said the company would stop payment on the check and issue a new one. Of course, I opted not to tell my boss that I’d already endorsed the check. I went to bed that night wondering what would happen if someone had already cashed it.

By the next morning, I'd essentially forgotten all about the previous day's events. That is until I picked up the mail. There underneath a waterlogged edition of The Economist, lay an envelope addressed to me with my signed check inside. No return address. No note. Just the check wrapped in a blank sheet of paper.

Clearly, these events have brightened my view of the people surrounding me – at least for the time being. They also spawned a heated and still ongoing debate as to which is more mind blowing: that someone found the check and mailed it back to me or that the Van Brunt postal staff -- the same good people who once issued package slips with the wrong pick-up address printed on them for more than two weeks -- delivered it the very next day?

That, my friends, is a question for the ages.

[Chris has contributed for the Village Voice and L Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter HERE.]