What Do You Do When You Run Into a 300-Pound Man With a Wetsuit and a Gun?
Just last night we noted that New Yorkers' tolerance for crazy is entirely too high. A man screaming in the subway in his underwear is no problem, for example. It's only when he gets naked and starts attacking people that we begin to freak out. Today we have more proof: Gary Smith of Wantagh was walking along Jones Beach yesterday when he saw a clearly befuddled, 300-pound man walking down the boardwalk wearing a wetsuit and a garbage bag. What does Gary Smith do? Does he walk by and avoid eye contact with this clearly worrisome scene? No. Because he is a Good Samaritan, he approaches the guy, Pablo Perez of Flushing. "He was sopping wet and covered in sand ... He didn't look quite right," Smith told the Post. "I asked him where he came from, and he said he'd been out on a raft for the last three days. He told me he was fishing and that his raft was tied to another boat and became detached and he drifted out to sea."
Here's what happened next:
Smith told Perez he was going to call 911. "Then he suddenly tells me that he has a gun, and he started to take it out," Smith said. "And I said, 'Whoa, buddy, why don't you just keep it where it is for now.' "
See? Entirely too calm. Of course, having been abandoned in a boat for three days, Perez couldn't really do much — cops had to actually cut the gun loose from his wetsuit, eventually. But still! "Why don't you just keep that where it is for now?"
