“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical, don’t edit your soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” – Franz Kafka.

I met my first anti-vaxxer yesterday. I know intellectually that my country is crazy now and that millions of citizens have sipped some poison and have gone mad. But I was never  this close to one before

The man sitting next to me waiting for his turn was now screaming at a receptionist sitting behind the glass in my cardiologists’ office at the top of his lungs. She had dared to ask him if he were vaccinated against the Covid-19 virus.

He had been sitting alongside me looking angry (sitting on one of the social distancing stickers that sat on every other seat and just daring me to say something).

Technically, he was sitting too close to me. I could have moved, asked him to move, or just gone on reading my Nathanial Philbrick about George Washington. I chose the latter option. I don’t want to get beat up in front of my cardiologist; that would postpone my surgery. Plus, I would get my ass kicked.

At times in my life, I have been brave and even reckless.

But I am shy at heart and a coward about fighting people bigger than me, and my grandmother taught me never to make a scene, which was worse than almost anything, she said.

I asked her once why that was so important, and she said (in Yiddish, so I only got it on the third round) that if you make a scene and you are Jewish, the Christians will come and find you and kill you.

I couldn’t argue with that, not at age nine, and before I was old enough to question this reasoning, it was embedded in my psyche that you don’t make scenes if you are Jewish, or you will pay for it with your life.

My seatmate had no such reservations. I could almost feel him stealing away from his non socially distanced chair. He was hoping I might be an audience, I think, or perhaps even a vaccination advocate. He felt like a man who had to pee very badly but was embarrassed to admit it. He just looked uneasy in his skin.

When his name was called – Daniel something – I was locked in on him with my anger radar. I am very good at sensing angry people, and my old reporter’s head was always eager to eavesdrop on somebody else’s loud scene. Maybe, I thought, they’ll have to call security and drag him out shouting. I set my camera on video and wanted to be ready.

Oh-oh, I thought, when the first thing the receptionist asked him was if he had been vaccinated against the Covid-19. She knew what was coming because before he could reply – his mouth was open, and his fingers gripped the counter in front of the plex-glass: “I’m not telling you what to do,” she said, “I am just required to ask.” But it was too little too late.

“You have no right to ask me that, ” he was yelling. “I have the right to my freedom, and people like you and Joe Biden and his doctors are not going to take that away from me. I’m not vaccinated and won’t get vaccinate and get somebody’s computer chip stuck in my bloodstream.”

He went on for a couple of minutes, but the receptionist quickly rose to the moment.

For a second, I hoped he didn’t go crazy and force me to step in and try to be a hero. I’m 74 now, and with my wrong foot and patched-up heart,  this guy could probably blow me off my feet. Perhaps yelling that I was a heart patient might help. We were in a cardiologist’s office.

He went off like a missile at Cape Kennedy. I’d say he was in his late 30’s; he was big and strong, he had a Yankee baseball cap on, a wedding ring. And a chip on his shoulder that could break toes if it fell off. He was very eager to be a victim of something.

He was ready for this. So was I.

I hit the red video button.

Just maybe, I thought I could catch one of those off-the-wall videos CNN loves to run of angry people shouting and screaming about masks on airplanes or at Wal-Mart stores. I always like the ending of those, when two or three burly cops with enormous bellies come down the aisles jingling all that equipment. They are well trained to work fast in small spaces; they usually reach in and grab the screamer by both arms and drag them off of the plane while the passengers cheer.

They don’t want to hear it.

I admit there is something disturbingly satisfying about watching that.

But there was nobody else in the waiting room but me. My reception area mate was going on about the truth he had heard and read and how the receptionist and the doctors were all complicit in the lies about vaccines. The receptionist, bless her, was tough as nails and had seen just about everything I thought.

“Listen, sir,” she said with great poise, “I could care less if you are getting vaccinated; I just had to ask. You can go and sit down now and wait for the nurse to come and get you, or you can get thrown out and go home and wait for your next appointment, which would be in January. Up to you. Next!” she roared, calling out to me.

The anti-vaxxer seemed caught off guard. He wanted to fight. And he seemed to need the appointment; he appeared to be the perfect candidate for a heart attack.

The receptionist wasn’t cowering. He wanted to whine; nobody wanted to hear it. He came and sat down right next to me as I scrambled to turn off my Iphone and delete the video. She wasn’t interested in giving him the gift of challenging him, and she wasn’t being bullied either. Nothing drives a bully crazier than being ignored.

I got up, went to the receptionist’s window, answered all her questions, and sat down in my chair. At this point, there was no social distancing between me and the anti-vaxxer, and I realized there is no vaccine against being an asshole, and I might very well be one by morning. Should I warn Maria?” (Or does she already know?)

But now I was trapped, sitting right next to someone whose righteous indignation had not been heard and was still bottled up inside of him. I felt I was sitting next to a volcano that wanted to erupt (and he still hadn’t gone to pee.)

I wasn’t in the mood for this; I was there to get the cardiologist’s approval for my surgery in two weeks. It was no big deal, no cops were called, nobody was hurt; the nurses assured me it happens once a day, often more.

But it was still an awkward spot. And I saw first hand just now crazy things have become.

And then I remember what my friend Sgt. Bill TenBrink of the Atlantic City Police Department told me about his way of dealing with loud and instance people (Bill was shot and killed during a traffic stop soon after.) “You don’t want to lose your cool or get into a fight,” she said.”You have to be smarter than that. You have to out-crazy them.”

The world is crazy, and you have to accept it, he said. If you fight it, you’re more likely to get killed. When someone acted crazy around him, he just tried to act crazier than they were. It works all the time, he said. He would say something odd, jump up and down, shout at the moon.

I had to think quickly.

The man, still steaming, tried to make some conversation. “Did you hear that?” he asked. He needed an audience to enable his outrage or be a target. The receptionist was too tough for him.  His next question had to be if I was vaccinated.

When I got to see a nurse, I told her what happened, and she said it happened almost every day to her. People were calling her names, calling her a liar, screaming at them for asking if they had been vaccinated, calling her a Nazi, or worse, for wanting to know.

She said they needed to ban Facebook and Twitter; she said there is something in those algorithms that was her conspiracy theory, she said.

“Sometimes I go home and call my daughters on the phone, they are out of the house, and I cry for a while. We are just trying to do our jobs.” The people who shout the loudest, she said, are all happy to take medicines and get shots for the pain they are in.

I decided to channel Franz Kafka, my spiritual advisor, on the craziness and perhaps the best writer ever on the subject. He was proud of being crazy but tried to be thoughtful about it.

I turned and looked at this man right in the eye and was silent for a few minutes. I think he figured I was a most likely wussy vaccinated person, a tool of the demented Joe Biden, who was propped up on hidden wires and strings so he could stand up alone in front of cameras (I found that story on Fox News as well as Facebook, where it had 14,000 likes.) My friend Bill, the cop, didn’t live long enough to see what crazy is.

After about 10 or 20 seconds, I turned to this anti-vaxxer and said in the softest voice I could muster. “You know, my friend, sometimes I feel like I am a cage in search of a bird.” It was one of the best Kafka quotes, I thought. I feel like that every time I look at the news.

“What?” the anti-vaxxer asked, but I just turned away and picked up my book on George Washington. That unnerved him. “I bet he was never vaccinated,” I added. “They wouldn’t dare.”

My friend moved two chairs away, right where the stickers said he should be. He muttered something under his breath, but I couldn’t hear it. Thanks, Bill.