Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
NEW YORK CITY — At 11 pm on Thursday, seven men gathered around a manhole near McDonald Avenue in Gravesend, worked the cover loose, and went down one after another. The men wore waders, heavy boots, and thick gloves, each carrying a light, dressed head to toe for somewhere wet, dark, and very tight.
How many men can you fit in one manhole? (littleny/depositphotos)
They went in hard and businesslike. Not one of them came up in a hurry – they did not come back up for three hours. When they finally surfaced, around 2 a.m., they cleaned themselves off beside two parked cars, packed their equipment away, and left without a word.
An hour earlier, eight miles north in Williamsburg, eight more men had gone down a manhole near Bedford Avenue and came back up the same satisfied way, into a car idling at the curb.
The NYPD would very much like to know what fifteen grown men found to occupy themselves with in two separate manholes. Whatever it was drew fifteen men underground in the small hours of the morning; they took nothing out with them and left the city’s plumbing exactly as they found it, only looser and possibly more satisfied.
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The Department of Environmental Protection inspected both sites, declared the infrastructure unharmed, and then begged the public to never, under any circumstances, enter a pipe, drain, catch basin, manhole, or outfall. It is a remarkably long list of holes to ask a grown man to keep out of. Sewers, the agency stressed, are full of hazards: foul gases, unstable footing, the risk of sudden flooding, and confined spaces a man can ease himself into far more easily than he can pull back out of.
Investigators have floated urban explorers, a film crew, and “mole people,” the longstanding theory that a population lives in the tunnels under New York. What they have not floated is the plainest reading of the footage: grown men, in gear, going down together in the dark, in two separate parties, staying for hours, and coming up loose enough to strip off and change on the sidewalk. Do I have to spell it out for you?
The men have not been identified, and the department holds that it cannot say whether the two groups had anything to do with each other. Eight miles apart, same night, same gear, same long slow finish. But “connected” would be speculation, and the NYPD is not prepared to speculate about what fifteen consenting men chose to do down a manhole, twice, until they were spent.
To read Bram Teitelman’s Odd Take on this story, click here.
This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.
