Thinking Out Loud

By Gerard Meister

I don't care where you live in New York - uptown, downtown or any place in the middle - you're going to have some weird neighbors. Heaven knows that during my half century in the Big Apple I had my share: Mrs.Teitelbaum who wouldn't sit on a wooden kitchen chair because it could easily be set on fire; Mrs. Daneloff, who lived in constant fear of a Martian attack, always wore a dishtowel on her head as protection whenever she went out shopping; and my favorite, Marcos, an observant Turkish Jew, who owned the corner candy store. He claimed he once dated Greta Garbo and implored everyone he let in on his secret to, "keep it under your hat."

But one Gothamite, Antoine Yates, is the stuff that legends are made of. Somehow that guy managed to cram a live-in girlfriend, a five-foot Cayman (alligator) named "Al" (so New York), a 400-pound Bengal tiger answering to "Ming" and a kitten, into his apartment in upper Manhattan without anyone knowing.

Although one neighbor, Valerie Thompkins, maintains that she called the Housing Authority Police three times to complain about a tiger urinating out of an upper-floor window (it was a twenty-odd story building). "Every night urine came down on my window sill," she reported to the New York Post, but no one came to investigate. My guess is that the desk officer in charge of complaints about tigers peeing out of upstairs' windows must have felt that the caller herself was on catnip.

The animal lover wasn't discovered until he checked into the Harlem Hospital with bite marks that he alleged came from a pit bull. Apparently New York doctors are on to pit bull scams and notified authorities. Yates, sensing his jig was up fled to Philadelphia where, he must have reckoned, doctors are more easily conned and checked into the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. But the proverbial long arm of the law collared Mr. Yates there, took him into custody and will extradite to New York when he gets out of the hospital.

In an interview with Fox News, Mr.Yates said he was only trying to establish an Eden right here on earth, something he was meant to do. In the meantime the tiger was sent out west to an animal sanctuary in Ohio and the alligator to one in Indiana, proving once and for all that New York City is, indeed, somewhat East of Eden.?