The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [76]
“Where’s your evidence for zat!” Haupt screamed. “Show me evidence Bush eez corrupt!”
I sighed. “You think they knocked down the towers and you want me to prove to you that Bush and his crew are corrupt?”
“Ver eez your evidence, you bastard!” he shouted.
“Well, there was the Jack Abramoff thing—”
“Bullshit!” Haupt screamed. “No proof!”
This was really getting weird. “He was convicted,” I said. “Is that good enough for you?”
“Lies!” he screamed.
“Nico,” Les whispered. “He was convicted.”
“The evidence! Give me the evidence!”
At another point, when I tried to tell him that the issue of my being “paid off” was moot, since I write my online column for free, he just kept screaming, not letting me get a word in edgewise.
“Now it eez my turn to talk! You will listen! Vat about zee war games?” he screamed.
I looked around the table with a pleading expression. “Hey, can you get this guy to shut up?” I asked.
“Nico, please…,” said Les consolingly.
Nico ignored him and just kept screaming.
“You are a traitor to zee Constitution!” he bellowed, sticking a finger less than an inch from my nose. “An enemy of zee state!”
Hearing this German accuse me of being a traitor to the United States moved me immediately from stunned bemusement to genuine anger. “Stop spitting on me,” I said.
Haupt kept screaming. Bits of food matter—from some previous meal, apparently, since he had not eaten here—were showering my sport coat.
“Hey, stop spitting,” I said. “I’m not kidding.”
“I vill spit on you all I like!” he shouted. “Go ahead, stop me! You vant to hit me? Hit me! Go ahead, hit me! Zen I vill have a story! Go ahead, hit me!”
Haupt was about two inches from my face. The whole restaurant was now staring. The manager of the diner, who had threatened to call the police early on in the confrontation, was now reduced to watching out of mere curiosity; there was nothing left for him to do but let this scene play itself out. The shower of spittle continued to rain on me as a torrent of incomprehensible accusations flowed from somewhere in the middle of Haupt’s beard: “Controlled demolitions…war games…commission…traitors!” I couldn’t even make out the individual words. Every cell in my body ached to twist his head off and roll it down Columbus Avenue, but I knew this was a bad solution.
“Okay,” I said finally. “Let’s go outside. You’re not going to play nice, we’ll just have to do this.”
I went outside. Haupt, I could see through the window, stayed in his chair and smiled faintly, looking at the others for approval. For several minutes he refused to come out. I sighed. I was thirty-six years old, with an expensive dentist, and the prospect of getting into a fight with a deranged German conspiracy theorist on the corner of West Fifty-seventh Street suddenly seemed a more than unusually ridiculous way to spend an afternoon. I was actually relieved when Haupt slipped out the door and slithered uptown, away from me.
AFTER HAUPT LEFT, Les and his friends gathered their things and came outside. I walked with them to the subway.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Les said. “He doesn’t represent us.”
Les was a nice guy. So were all his friends, actually. There was something very sad about the whole thing. On the way to the subway, we talked more about 9/11 Truth. I kept trying to explain my point, which was that there was no concrete evidence that the government had committed the attacks, and that if they wanted