Staten Island Chuck: The Untold Story

The following note from Joyce Wadler, a former Times reporter, appeared mysteriously in our mailbox today. Attempts to confirm its truthiness were foiled when City Room’s fact-checking staff went out for crullers and never returned, so we are publishing it as is. Caveat lector.

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times In addition to a love of sweet potatoes and indoor carpeting, Staten Island Chuck harbors a deep passion for the modernist theatrical canon.

I was kind of amused to see people taking the spring predictions of our local groundhog Staten Island Chuck so seriously this weekend, because the truth is I swiped the real Chuck a few years ago.

It happened when I stopped by, as feature writers are fated to do, to cover the carryings-on.

“Forty years of covering colorful and wacky goings-on for one newspaper after another,” I muttered. “A women who shelters two dozen grown tigers in the backyard; a composer who performs a sonata for piano and dog at Carnegie Hall. Will it never end”

That’s when I heard a voice I can only describe as furry pipe up at about the level of my knees.

“Tell me about it,” it said. “I myself long to perform Beckett on the boards. It needn’t be Broadway. A few logs in a clearing and a respectful audience is all I ask. Instead, I am reduced to mutely foretelling spring for these reportorial yahoos. No offense meant.”

I was, of course, amazed.

“You can talk” I said to t! he woodchuck. “How come nobody knew this”

“They didn’t ask,” said Chuck. “And, I admit, a few years in this heated cage, being fed all the sweet potatoes a woodchuck could ever want, I got lazy and stopped caring.”

“But you can really forecast stuff” I said. “That’s wild. What’s the stock market going to do”

“Please,” Chuck said. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be in a cage, I’d be in a penthouse in TriBeCa.”

“Gun regulation in America” I asked. “Will it happen”

“I don’t do politics,” Chuck said. “But from a strictly personal view, I never liked them.”

“O.K., O.K.,” I said. “Let’s make it simple. Am I better off taking the R train or the No. 5 from South Ferry”

“The No. 5,” Chuck replied. “I see a water main break coming on the R.”

I was skeptical, of course, but I took the R just to check it out, and just like Chuck predicted, there’s flooding and I get stuck at Wall Street. And so, a daylater, Chuck and I pull the old switcheroo. Chuck’s fat brother-in-law Stan, who’d hung around the enclosure begging for scraps, stepped in for Chuck. Chuck moved into my place, where he burrowed into a stack of old New Yorkers and read prodigiously, especially enjoying the film reviews of Anthony Lane. Well, don’t we all.

Now and then, between Chuck making the rounds of auditions, we’d have coffee and Chuck would tell the future. His predictions were consistently on the mark.

“This married guy I’ve been seeing, will he ever leave his wife”

“Nope.”

“Those lamb chops from Café Loup I had wrapped to go that have been sitting in the refrigerator for 10 days now. You think they’re O.K.”

“I wouldn’t feed them to a badger.”

“San Francisco 49ers or Baltimore Ravens”

“Ravens. And the guys at the Superdome should check the fuse box.”

More important, however, was the example Chuck set. Decent parts for middle-age groundhogs ! are not e! asy to come by, but the plucky little marmot stuck with his plan. He could have gotten a sweet deal forecasting traffic for WINS, but to Chuck that would have been selling out. For him, it was serious theater or nothing. I remember, in particular, a night when we were sitting around the apartment, listening to Springsteen. We’d both been hitting the Johnnie Walker pretty hard.

“Strictly between us, that line ‘I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk,’ has always spoken to me,” Chuck said, his voice now both slurry and furry. “I mean, it is me. I just got to find my audience, you know what I’m saying I have to take my shot. And if I get eaten by a coyote or a wolf along the way, at least I honored what’s in me.”

“This is Greenwich Village, Chuck,” I said. “We don’t have wolves.”

“Yeah, I know,” Chuck said. “I was speaking metaphorically.”

Then he passed out on a pile of The New York Review of Books.

But guess what After years of wor, he achieved his dream. Saturday, when the fake Chuck was hamming it up for reporters, the Chuck I’m proud to call my friend was co-starring in an Off Broadway production of “Waiting for Godot.” He was magnificent.