The Truth About Roscoe
LAST YEAR, AFTER appearing on a particularly disastrous radio call-in show, I wrote a column about my love for conspiracies and urban legends. If there was one thing the callers to that show confirmed, it was that conspiracies and urban legends are among the most basic tools we Americans use to transform our drab day-to-day lives into movies. The story I wrote after the show mostly concentrated on the frequency with which urban legends-even old ones-continue to appear on the newswires as fact.
I'd been tempted on a number of occasions in the past to drop a line to Prof. Jan Harold Brunvand, just to bounce a few stories I'd heard off him to see if he'd heard them, too. Something always stopped me, though-usually the fear that I'd just bore him. The professor, after all, is among the world's foremost authorities on urban legends. He's heard everything-and in most cases, he's heard it several times over.
Last week, I finally got around to sending him that long-threatened note. There were a good dozen or so stories that still tugged at me for one reason or another, and I thought I'd try out at least a couple on him. Knowing I shouldn't bother him with a dozen, though, I only sent along three.
The first was fairly simple. Every few years I'd been seeing a story on the local news about a particular Manhattan restaurant. As you might imagine, it's a very special restaurant-very high class, very exclusive and very, very expensive. But the menu at this particular eatery consists almost entirely of insects-ants, beetles, grasshoppers, grubs-which are prepared in a variety of ways and served up to the bejeweled diners on the finest china. Of course, whenever it's reported that the restaurant is open and doing a booming business, the newsreader conveniently neglects to mention what the place is called, or where it's located.
Last time I saw this reported was, I'm pretty sure, in 1997, on the Channel 7 six o'clock news. When I saw it then, I had to laugh. I'd seen it prior to that, and had even asked friends in the local culinary scene what they could tell me about this mysterious restaurant-which was, of course, zilch.
Much of what I see on the local television news passes over me like water, but this stuck. I was so fascinated by this bug restaurant, I think, because it was such an obvious example of an urban legend being reported as fact. I'd first heard about the restaurant in Mondo Cane, the 1962 shockumentary that was, the filmmakers admit, about half fake. I was hoping Brunvand could tell me if it went back further than that, or if I was seeing it on the local news now because it had originally appeared in Mondo Cane.
I also wanted to get his opinion on a weirdie that I heard about a year or so ago, and have never heard since.
I got a call at the office from a fellow who, in the past, had been a fairly reliable source for interesting and off-beat stories. The one he was calling about last year was a bit more offbeat than most, and sounded a bit too good to be true.
He wanted to put me in touch, he said, with a friend of his who was in a methadone treatment program on the Lower East Side. This friend (a young woman) had told him that every day at the same time, the center threw its trash out into a back alley, where it would later be picked up. But recently the guys dragging out the trash noticed that the rats were becoming much more aggressive and much more plentiful. Soon, it appeared as if the rats were actually waiting for them at the same time every day. And as soon as the men showed up with the bags, the previously skittish rats would swarm all over them, tearing the bags open.
The strange thing about that is that the trash consisted almost exclusively of the small plastic cups that had held the methadone. You'd think the rats would be able to find plentiful, more edible food elsewhere. Still, though, the number of rats there every day kept growing, and they really seemed to love those plastic cups.
At first the people at the clinic thought the rats were simply after the residual drops of sweet orange drink left in the used cups-but that wouldn't explain their aggressive behavior. Again, this was the Lower East Side-there's plenty of trash and discarded food around. Soon, though, it became obvious. The rats, after consuming enough of the orange drink, had become addicted to methadone, and were showing up every day to get a fix, just like the human addicts who lined up outside the clinic every morning. What's more, they seemed to be spreading the word.
That's all I heard of the story. My source told me the woman would give me a call, but she never did. That didn't surprise me, and I didn't pursue the story any further. I've learned over the years that junkies aren't the most reliable news sources available.
Not surprisingly, I've not seen any other reports about the Junkie Rats of the Lower East Side, but I still think about them every once in a while.
(If any readers happen to know anything about the above two stories, I'd be curious to hear it.)
I also sent Prof. Brunvand a third story. That was, to me at least, the big one. At heart, my reasons for deciding to finally write the professor were very personal.
In recent weeks, a couple of legends he'd recounted in his books had come together in a way that never struck me before. And putting them together, I recognized something that I didn't necessarily want to recognize.
Growing up, my dad and my uncles were always telling me stories about my Grandpa Roscoe, who died shortly after I was born. My favorite Roscoe story involved his protest against a nickel toll that the county had started collecting on a little covered bridge Roscoe crossed on his way to work every day. Instead of changing his route or speeding past the toll-taker to avoid paying, every morning as he approached the bridge, Roscoe would heat a nickel with a lighter, then drop the glowing coin into the unsuspecting man's hand. After just a couple days, the toll taker waved him on through, free of charge. He never paid a toll on that bridge again.
It was a great story, and one I'd told over and over again (even putting it in a book of my own).
But then recently I recalled a brief reference Brunvand made in his first book to fiends who heated pennies in a skillet before dropping them into the hands of trick-or-treaters. That sounded familiar. And there was an entire section in one of his later books detailing cruel tricks played on toll takers. Put the two together and what do you have? Grandpa Roscoe.
I didn't want to think about it, but I had to. I'd been taken in by good stories before-fairly easily, too-but this was a very formative story in my childhood and early adult years. I desperately wanted it to be true.
It would have been easy, I suppose, to simply ignore it, not ask the professor about it, and continue to believe it as I always did. But even if I tried to ignore this newfound doubt, it would continue to gnaw at me. I knew that. It would be like an ol' earwig in my brain. So I wrote and asked him. I've not heard anything back yet, and must say that's almost a relief.