Keeping up with the Kardashians in Riverhead: FAIL

Until about three o’clock Saturday afternoon, I’d never heard of the Kardashians. So when a tipster called to say she’d just seen the Kardashians going into Farm Country Kitchen on West Main Street, my reply was: “the … who?”

My pop culture intelligence quotient is in negative numbers. I stopped watching TV with any regularity sometime in the early 80s, I think. I’m pretty sure “Maude” was still on the airwaves. And, yes, come to think of it, they were… actually…air…waves.

I shun TV not because I’m some highbrow intellectual, or for some other noble reason. It simply puts me to sleep. Quite literally. I watch the tube (though I suppose that’s no longer an accurate label for the thing) for 10 or 15 minutes, and I’m snoring.

After my tipster stopped laughing at me for not knowing some of The Most Famous People in America — people who are famous because… they’re famous, she said — I decided to do a stakeout at the restaurant. I could browse the internet, do some research, doodle around on Facebook, and wait for the Kardashians to emerge from FCK, whereupon I would snap their picture and see if they’d talk to me. RL fans would get a kick out of The Most Famous People in America having lunch at the cozy eatery on the Peconic, right?

After an hour of waiting, I started to get fidgety. And I felt guilty. What was I doing? I don’t care about celebrities — most of them, anyway, though I’ve always wanted to meet Shirley MacLaine — much less people whose claim to fame is modeling and having a reality TV show. This just wasn’t me. It was like me…wearing makeup and heels or something. Hell, I’ve never even watched a reality TV show.

Despite my misgivings, I decided to wait it out in George Schmelzer Park, where I figured I’d have a good vantage point if the fashionistas and their entourage ever exited FCK. I took my camera, my dumb-phone and my Macbook, and settled onto the bench of a wooden picnic table at the “park” established solely as an attempt to thwart the county’s placement of homeless sex offenders in a trailer less than a quarter-mile away. (It didn’t work.)

My thoughts wandered to the late Mr. Schmelzer — who thought of government as an idiotic enemy. I’ve always thought he’d be really mad the town slapped his name on sign presiding over a tiny scrap of land on West Main Street and called it a “park”  — especially so because of the town’s motivation.

I can almost hear the diatribe of the man with the unruly mop of snow-white hair, broad face and toothy grin, always clad in green work shirt and matching pants. I spent many an hour listening to Mr. Schmelzer rant during my four-year sentence-I-mean-term on the Riverhead Town Board about 100 years ago. He spoke in run-on sentences peppered with an almost-breathless laughter. He was one of a small coterie of Town Hall gadflies in that era. He hated government. He thought zoning was the work of the devil. Mr. Schmelzer could teach the Tea Party folks a thing or two. Truth be told, he could teach us all a thing or two.

Mr. Schmelzer was brilliant. For sport, he’d buy small properties with hidden title defects, insure their titles with one of the big title insurance companies, then submit title insurance claims and laugh about how he outsmarted those title companies lawyers. In my book, that beats playing video games.

Anyway, there I sat in George Schmelzer Park, waiting on the Kardashians.

And then along comes Gerard.

He was making a show of himself across the road, yelling and cursing at cars, and then yelling and cursing at nothing in particular. My first thought was he was going to fall into the road and get run down, because he seemed very out of it.

He was, instead, quite lucid, as I learned after he settled down next to me on the picnic table bench in George Schmelzer Park. Gerard told me he is homeless, staying in an “emergency shelter” operated by the county in a house on West Main Street. He’s been there “for 31 days.”

Clad in blue jeans and a stained white golf shirt, the hair left on his balding head was unkempt. His eyes were clear and he had a sense of humor.

Gerard: “You got any money?”
Me: “No.” (I wasn’t lying, either, having run out of the house for my ‘stakeout’ without a wallet.)
Gerard (after responding to several questions): “Are you some kind of cop or something?”
Me: “No, I’m a reporter.”
Gerard: “No wonder you don’t have any money.”

Despite my probing, Gerard didn’t offer many details of his life. I did learn he is 53, Italian-American, lived in the CHI house on West Main with 12 other homeless men. He came to New York from Florida.

“How did you end up homeless,” I asked.

“It’s not hard, believe me,” was his answer. True that. He offered no further details.

When he asked what I was doing there, eyeing my camera and my laptop, I told him I was waiting for these famous TV stars to come out of the restaurant down the street.

“Oh, I saw them before, with their stretch limo and cameras,” Gerard said matter-of-factly. “They left.” He paused.

“I chased them away.”

“You chased them away? How did you do that?”

“I told them to get the f— out of here,” Gerard said, with a shrug.

“Do you know who they were,” I asked.

“No,” he said. “And I don’t care.”

Me neither, Gerard.

With that, we bid each other farewell, with me telling him to be careful around all these speeding cars and him telling me not to worry he is careful. He walked toward the shelter and I walked back to my car, wondering if Gerard would be in an upcoming episode of “Keeping up with the Kardashians.”

I probably enjoyed my encounter with Gerard more than if I’d actually been able to keep up with the Kardashians myself. No doubt I have more in common with him. We are, as my friend Dennis O’Connor put it, part of the “wildlife” people like the Kardashians observe as they venture forth into seedy neighborhoods to visit a trendy, chic hideaway. And there, but for the grace of God, go I.