That day, Splinter did not wait for nightfall. He did not even wait for the 3 train. He simply started the engine, threw the Shellraiser into drive, and roared out of the sewers.
His first stop was a convenience store on a neighborhood corner. It was a simple matter to raid the snack food shelves while the proprietor carded a paying customer and then turned to the rack behind the counter to locate the desired carton of cigarettes. Nor did Splinter have any trouble liberating several cases of alcoholic beverages. A nearby sign informed him in large red letters that he needed to have been born before this date in 1991 to purchase alcohol, but it did not card him. Possibly it thought he looked much older than 21.
Splinter felt a little pang at that thought, but mostly he felt a thrill at successfully shoplifting. This was strange. He had stolen food many, many times in the past fifteen years, and it had brought up many feelings in him - shame at robbing innocent store owners, fear that he might be caught, anger and sadness that he had to resort to crime to take care of his young family, and sometimes a kind of muted satisfaction that at least he was able to burglarize grocery stores and restaurant kitchens undetected, and thus keep starvation that little bit further away from his children. But never before had he felt thrilled.
He pushed the thought away quickly, as he loaded the beer and cheap wine and beef jerky and potato chips and cheesy puffs into the back of the Shellraiser. He needed to focus on what he was going to do next.
Starting up the Shellraiser again, he put some distance between himself and the corner store. The owner surely would not take long to notice the unaccounted-for decrease in his inventory, and it would be better for Splinter to be in another part of the city when that happened.
Some minutes later and several miles from the scene of his crime, Splinter pulled up alongside a pocket park. Through the tinted window of the Shellraiser, he scouted the users of this local greenspace.
He was not interested in the young woman pushing a baby in a stroller and trying to prevent a slightly-older child from getting too far away from her - though she was impressively calm and poised as she corralled the two small children. Also she was impressively curvy. Splinter may have been visibly older than 21, but he was not too old to appreciate an attractive woman.
The woman sitting on the park bench he found too advanced in years for his tastes. He wondered whether she might actually be closer to his own age than the young mother. The thought brought on an unpleasant sense of his own mortality, and Splinter pushed it away. At any rate, the older woman was sitting next to a man, likely her husband. Splinter was not interested in them.
Nor was he interested in the burly man in the orange vest. He was emptying one of the park's trash cans into a larger bin mounted on the back of a motorized cart. Splinter wondered whether that cart would be fun to drive.
"Are you kidding me?" Donatello shrieked in his head. "You would rather drive a groundskeeping cart than my Shellraiser?"
Out of respect for his son, Splinter abandoned that idea.
And then he saw exactly what he was looking for: a tall, youthful-looking man power-walking along the park's looping path. He was alone, and looking straight ahead, but his body seemed to swell with joy at the mere existence of the path, the few trees, the clear sky, the fearless pigeons, and everything else that entered the man's sphere of awareness.
Splinter decided to enter that sphere.
Quickly, he rolled down the Shellraiser's window. "You!" he shouted, as the man walked past him at an energetic pace.
The man turned to look, and his jaw dropped - not so much in shock as in a huge smile. "Whoa!" he said. "What are you?"
"I am the best day of your life," Splinter said. He hit a button on the dashboard, and the Shellraiser's bay door unlatched itself and rolled open, revealing a fever dream of futuristic technology, mood lighting, and nutrition-free snack foods. "Get in."
"I don't need to ask any questions about this," the man said, and with even more enthusiasm than his earlier movements, he jumped into the cabin and hauled the door closed behind him. "I'm Phil."
"I am Yoshi," said Splinter. "Tell me, Phil - what is your favorite coffee shop?"
"Uncommon Grounds," Phil replied, without hesitation. "Straight ahead, right on 118th, and just a couple blocks ahead."
"You may want to put on your seat belt," Splinter advised, as he pulled back out into traffic. "The Shellraiser's cabin does not have air bags."
"Your ride is called the Shellraiser?" Phil said, as he did what Splinter had suggested. "That is the best name ever."
"Thank you," was all Splinter said in reply.
Even with New York traffic, it took them only a few minutes to reach Uncommon Grounds. On the one hand, the Shellraiser needed a lot of space to change lanes. On the other hand, when the Shellraiser indicated it wanted to change lanes, just about every other vehicle on the road slowed down to make room. Driving an enormous armored van did have its advantages.
"Who should we invite to join us?" Splinter asked, when they pulled up in front of the cafe.
While Splinter was driving the few blocks, Phil had quickly learned to use the Shellraiser's computer systems, and now he accessed the camera to see who was standing on the sidewalk. "How about the guy in the hat?" he said. "He looks fun."
A large black man in a Mets baseball cap was standing in front of the coffee shop's main window, a hot drink in one hand and his smartphone in the other. He was looking at the small device, and did not appear to have noticed the Shellraiser.
Again, Splinter rolled down the window. "Hello," he said.
The man looked at Splinter. Then he looked at his drink. Then he looked at the food service establishment behind him. "What the hell do they put in these fancy coffees?" he wondered aloud.
"I have a large quantity of alcohol," Splinter said, and opened the door.
The man looked at Phil sitting inside the Shellraiser, then at his smartphone, then at his life. "What the hell," he said again, and climbed into the van. "I'm Isaac."
Splinter did not ask Isaac to suggest a destination. Instead, he asked the two men whether they would like to hear some music.
"I'm always down for some tunes," Isaac replied, and Phil concurred.
Splinter touched a button. "101.1! WCBS-FM! Newww Yooork!" the radio sang, and then they were all singing to the best of the '60s, '70s, and '80s.
A few songs later, they pulled into a warehouse district, where a line of men were standing on a sidewalk, hoping for day work.
"Need one!" Splinter shouted, opening the window and the door at the same time. "No work! No pay! Free snacks!"
Most of the men just stared at him in shock - either from his appearance or from the bizarreness of his offer, or maybe both - but one shrewd-looking Hispanic recognized an opportunity when he saw one, and jumped into the Shellraiser before anybody else moved.
"Jose!" he said, slamming the door behind him.
"Welcome to the partaaaaayyyy!" Phil shouted, and they were off.
By the time they reached a tiny, little-known beach under the Manhattan-side pillar of the Brooklyn Bridge, the four men had exchanged life stories. Isaac had two small girls who were already determined to go to college, and he felt like he did nothing but work as he tried to save up enough money to provide for their futures. Jose, through little more than sheer force of will, had brought his family from Mexico, only to find that life in New York was not much better for those who spoke broken English and could not afford to live in the safer neighborhoods. And Phil worried that, although he'd squeezed every possible drop of fun and excitement out of his 20s and 30s, he was now facing the second half of his life with few resources and no stable relationship.
"Did I make bad decisions?" Phil asked, as they leaned against the outside of the Shellraiser, eating the snacks, drinking the alcohol, and watching the river. "They seemed so great at the time."
"I hear you," said Isaac. "Go to vocational school, marry a good woman, show up to work on time every day - those are supposed to be great decisions. But am I rolling with the rich dogs? No. I'm fighting with my crook landlord to fix the damn plumbing so we don't have to wash dishes in the bathtub."
"You are rolling with me now," Splinter pointed out.
"Right," said Isaac. He tried to be subtle about checking the alcohol content of his beer. "What's your story, Yoshi?"
"I immigrated from Japan in 1997 after my wife and daughter were murdered, and now I am a single father of four teenage boys," Splinter said.
The men stared at him for a moment. "We're not playing 'who has it worst,'" Phil said finally.
Splinter shrugged, and ate another cheesy puff. "That is my story."
Phil offered him a box of wine.
"No, thank you," Splinter said. He gestured at the Shellraiser. "Technically, this is my son's car. I should not drive it inebriated."
Isaac nodded, understanding. "If you wreck it, he'll kill you?"
"Oh, no," Splinter said. "He will try, but I am an eighth-degree ninja master."
"Okay, not cool," said Phil, pointing at Splinter with his half-eaten stick of jerky. "We aren't playing 'Bullshit' either."
"No," Splinter agreed. "I am not."
"Maybe it's true," Isaac said. "I was a first-chair flautist in high school."
"I'm a ranked ping-pong player," said Phil, and nobody questioned him.
They all looked at Jose, who shrugged. "Walked thousand miles with baby across el desierto to come to this country."
"We're a pretty cool bunch of guys," Phil concluded. "What do we have to be down about?"
"Absolutely nothing," said Splinter. "We are picnicking on the beach with our friends and no one can tell us not to."
"And to think I was just supposed to walk to the drugstore and pick up some pantyhose for my wife," said Isaac. Then he grimaced. "I should probably still do that."
"Why?" Phil challenged. "Why are you getting your wife's pantyhose? Why are you working so hard for your daughters' education? It's 2012! Let these females do something for themselves!"
"Yeah!" Isaac said. "What about my future? I don't want to drop dead when I'm 57 because I'm working 80 hours every week and giving myself a heart attack." He seemed to realize then the likely health effects of the snacks and beverages in his hands, but set his features and stuck to what he had just said.
"Kids think I am at office every day," Jose said. "Work line, beach picnic, what difference to them?"
"That's the spirit!" Phil cheered. They toasted, and Splinter turned on the disco ball in the back of the Shellraiser, and they ate junk food and shot the breeze until the motorists on the bridge above began turning on their headlights.
