What's In The Box?

So, just to close the circle on this, here is the rest of the story….

In the wake of learning that a UPS package with my name on it had mysteriously shown up at my former address 19 years after I’d moved out, I was understandably intrigued. New occupant Carl mentioned that he’d shoot me an email after he’d left it downstairs for me to pick up. All day, however, from the banal to the bizarre, I was bewildered by what the explanation could be.

My first guess was that it was the next phase of an eBay scam I’d somehow gotten ensnared in. A month or so back, I started receiving strange, small UPS packages that were obviously not actually meant for me. Containing these plastic shoelace-protector things for sneakers, at least nine or ten of these parcels showed up with my name and current address on them, all from different eBay buyers, and all seemingly intended as “goods returned to sender.” I believe it’s technically called a “brushing” scheme, and it’s sort of disturbing. After a while, though, they stopped arriving. I still have them all in a box in my front closet, uncertain what to do with them. But upon first hearing about the mystery package on East 12th Street, I became concerned that the problem might be spreading to my old address. So, yeah, that was my first thought.

Sticking with the eBay theme, though, I also harbored the notion that the package may be some long-errant item I’d won on the auction platform that had been languishing in limbo this whole time, finally reaching its appointed destination. Maybe it was a vintage Stranglers poster or a rare Bad Brains 7”. This, by far, was the option I was hoping for the most.

Thinking even further afield, however, my next concept was that it was something more personal, potentially from someone I’d have fallen out of regular contact with prior to moving in 2002. My mind entertained wild notions of it being a box full of personal effects from a far-flung, estranged relative or a bag of ancient mixtapes from a disgruntled ex-girlfriend or a neatly-packed and meticulously counted bundle of 100-dollar bills in tight plastic bands or, y’know, a severed head. The possibilities on this thread were maddeningly endless.

Carl emailed me again early Monday afternoon to say that the package was with the doorman. I left my office downtown around 5:30pm and went to go solve the mystery.

With my brain now spinning the scenario into a fanciful hybrid of “Paddle to the Sea” and the denouement of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (wherein robotic interstellar probe, Voyager Six, returns from the hollow vacuum of a black hole in deep space to reconvene with its creator), I walked into my old lobby to retrieve my fateful package. I didn’t recognize the doorman on duty, but having not lived there for almost two decades, that was not entirely surprising. “Hi, I’m Alex,” I said, "I’m picking up a package that was left for me by Carl on the third floor?” I pictured the doorman reaching under his desk to reveal a weathered, battle-faded parcel, pockmarked by age and festooned with stickers from various ports of call like the pages of a secret agent's passport. I imagined it being covered in dust with barely-discernible handwriting scrawled across it.

Instead, he handed me a thin, flat UPS mailer that very assuredly did not date back to 2002. Sure enough, my name and former address were on it, with the return address being simply the “mail room” of some fulfillment center in West Virginia. I thanked the doorman and took off.

Reeling from a combination of incredulity, confusion and, frankly, disappointment, I opened the cardboard envelope when I got back out onto East 12th Street to reveal its contents ….

…concert tickets for DEVO’s September show at Radio City Music Hall.

As expected, the explanation is somewhat strenuously anticlimactic. On June 11th, tickets went on sale for this show at the very same venue I first saw DEVO in 1981. I immediately purchased a pair of tickets via the site featured on Facebook — that being Ticketmaster. Evidently, I have not used my Ticketmaster account since 2002, when I lived on East 12th Street, so upon completion of the transaction, Ticketmaster sent my tickets to the only address it has for me. No scams. No rare Bad Brains single. No clandestine box of cryptic ephemera. No wads of cash. No severed head.

I came home and put the UPS mailer with my tickets in it on my bureau and told my wife the ridiculous news.

Later that night, she accidentally threw that UPS mailer out.

My son Oliver intrepidly fished the mailer out of the bowels of the trash in the basement this morning, averting further hysteria.

Move along. Nothing further to see here.