The Story of the Crazy Old Italian Man and the Fire Hydrant

Today I had a nice bunch of errands to do, both for myself and as a favor to my mother. Jeff came with me to help out. We stopped at the NY Grill for brunch (which was, as always, delicious), and then headed over to the supermarket to get groceries. Since they were missing half of the stuff we were supposed to get, we just picked up everything at the corner store and then we were on our merry way.

About halfway down the block, this old, crazy little italian man stops us. He's in a wifebeater he shouldn't be wearing and a pair of shorts that were probably a size too small. He even had the classic 'black dress shoes and sandals' look, and he was balding.

He starts mumbling something to us in italian, but since I'm a failure to my culture, I have no idea what he's saying. I just know he's motioning to the fire hydrant. Finally he gets the idea and starts to pretend to speak English. Instead, I get a jumbled mess of consonants and vowels and noises that I'm supposed to comprehend as words.

"What?" Is all I say.

"I..euhhh, the hydrant, I wash mah car, how ... " he stops, picking a wrench that was laying next to the hydrant up off the sidewalk, shaking in my general direction as he finished, "..I do open to the hydrant? To..the top or the side?"

Now I get it. He wants to wash his car using the water from the fire hydrant. He doesn't know which of the caps to unscrew, the top or the side. Now I should have, by all means, said I couldn't help him and kept on walking. Instead, me and Jeff decided that we would show him by pointing to it on the hydrant. "That one."

"Than you, g'bye!" he says, and me and Jeff walk away, not paying the man another look until we get to our door. For a split second, a feeling of dread overcomes me, but I dismiss it quickly and the day goes on.

A few hours later, my mother comes home from grocery shopping. The first thing she says is 'Have you guys been outside lately?'

I was like "Not since I got errands done, why?"

"There's a river of water outside. Some guy destroyed the fire hydrant down the block and it's gushing water. Go out and get the groceries out of the car and you'll see what I mean."

My eyes widened as I looked to Jeff. We then headed outside and the first thing we saw was a torrent of water running down the street. It was deep enough that it went up to my ankles. The closer we got, the more water there was.



"Oh, no, Jeff. What have we done?"

"Nothing, we didn't do this. We just pointed to the fire hydrant."

I feel like we could have stopped this hilarious but wasteful occurrence from happening.




My brother went back inside and I went back out to take pictures. One of my neighbors was watching out of his window. I asked him what happened.

"Nobody saw it happen," he said. "All I heard was some guy was washing his car and then he couldn't get the water off. The fire department came and they couldn't fix it. Whatever the guy did, he fucking destroyed the whole valve. They're actually amazed he did as much damage as he did."

Wow.

In the end, the DEP (I think that's the name?) came and shut off the water main, so we're without water until they replace the whole valve. I hope that fucking happens soon. Thankfully, we had some warning, and we were able to get showers and stuff done before it happened. Good times. Gooooood times.