Doored to Tears

Cosmic justice served on Court Street.

Not everyone is an Uncle Karen fan: they don’t like him or his smug, predictable brownstoner views on issues near and far. But if you fucking hate Uncle Karen, and wish for him to suffer the consequences of his wobbly Gen X liberalism on local traffic patterns, e-bikes, and canine excrement, then rejoice, for today is most definitely your day.

On Saturday, cosmic forces conspired to make a fool of Uncle Karen in a way that would make you groan if it happened on a particularly lazy episode of Curbed.

Over the weekend, after a years-long process of obtaining a license, Uncle Karen’s smart, diligent cousin-in-law finally opened a proper cannabis shop on Court Street with his business partner. They named it for Karen’s wife’s Uncle Buzzy, a real (and indelible) character who died two years ago.

Naturally, Uncle Karen wanted to check out the family weed store, so on Saturday he piled everyone into the car and drove to Court and Atlantic, something he wouldn’t normally do, but there was zero traffic and they’d already walked many miles that day, so why not? (In case you’re wondering, yes, Karen’s car is electric. No, it’s not a Tesla. If you haven’t figured it out by now, most of Karen’s consumer choices are made for maximum self-satisfaction.)

Anyway, Karen parked in the brand new, and not universally beloved, parking island on Court Street, turned off the car, and swung open the driver’s side door. Bang! The awful and unmistakable sound of hard things colliding against one another.

On the ground was a beefy e-bike. Its rider was already up and on his feet, hands to his face, which was rapidly filling with blood. The rider had made direct contact with the interior of Karen’s driver’s side door, his face likely smashing against the window. Drops of bright red blood were dripping on the new green of the bike lane. Someone ran to get some napkins. Someone else called 911. Uncle Karen reached out and put a compassionate hand on the rider’s shoulder and asked if he was all right. He just turned away. His bad day was only getting worse.

There’s a type of person in the world who rises to just such occasions. Let’s call them concerned bystander with cell phone. The one on this particular scene called 9-1-1 seconds after it happened. He was an older gentleman, nicely dressed, frittering away his Saturday on errands and the acquisition of baked goods. He spoke like Bernie Sanders. “It’s not your fawlt,” he told me. “The design is horr-i-ble.”

Still, Uncle Karen felt like shit, slightly less so when he opened the car door to gauge the extent of his error and see how far the door had extended into the bike lane. In fact, fully extended it was still a good foot shy of it. And while Karen could have, and should have looked before opening the door, this rider had to be nearly two feet outside of the lane. Was he swerving to avoid something? Was he passing someone?

Who even cared at this point? The rider’s nose was clearly broken. His work day was now completely shot. Uncle Karen’s vacation Spanish is, of course, useless in all but the most rudimentary, leisure time communications (“Otra cerveza? Para mi? Claro!”) but the rider made clear he was reluctant to go to the emergency room in an ambulance, which, of course, showed up in about 90 seconds, blocking traffic.

What would a trip to the E.R. cost him? Was it even remotely possible that the rider—who more than likely worked as an independent contractor to Grub Hub, Uber Eats, or Door Dash—had any health insurance? (By the way, those delivery apps collectively spent millions to kill a bill, now stalled in the city council, that would require the app services to provide safety equipment and training to their delivery workers, according to The City.) Uncle Karen worried about this guy’s sudden financial burden. And worse, what kind of immigration risk?

Standing outside the ambulance Karen felt a familiar uselessness (pretty much Karen’s factory setting in these situations) but since the delivery worker absolved him of wrong-doing to the Spanish-speaking cop, and no one was pressing charges, there wasn’t much for Karen to do than give the EMT a phone number and hope he’d call back to tell him whether the rider would be ok. (He didn’t.) Before he left to join the extended family in the weed shop—where the college-aged cousins carefully modulated their enthusiasm for Kush or Sour Diesel in front of their parents—Karen looked around again at the bike lane. The blood was still there—that would have to wait until the next rain—but was there anything that would have forced the rider to swerve to avoid? There was a manhole cover but so what? Then he saw it: a lumpy plastic bag in British racing green, the universal color of dog shit receptacle.

Careful readers, if Uncle Karen has any of those, will notice a trifecta of righteousness: he has advocated vigorously for the rights of delivery workers on e-bikes, for the proper disposal of canine excrement, and most confidently, for the newly reconfigured Court Street. This perfect storm of comeuppance could only be reserved for a truly irredeemable character, like Larry.

Was Karen irredeemable? No. Is Karen sometimes insufferable? Oh yeah, absolutely.

And so what if Uncle Karen was mildly inconvenienced, and genuinely, if momentarily, mortified that he’d really hurt this guy on the bike. And so what if Uncle Karen had to pay 300 bucks to get the auto body shop to get the door to close properly?

At least he learned the unavoidable, unshakeable truth: Karen doesn’t know shit. But you probably already knew that.