RFK Jr.’s Bear-Skinner Blues

N ew York City is a town with a million tales to tell — images of meteoric success, sordid criminal affairs, elevator pitches, hard-luck stories, legends of loves won and lost — and sometimes it feels like all these unique, deeply felt personal memories are destined to be lost in time, like tears in rain. But c’mon now, we all still remember when a dead bear cub was randomly found in Central Park ten years ago, don’t we?

Yes, that’s right; some stories break through, and The One about the Dead Bear in the Park back in 2014 was an episode of Big Apple randomness that came unexplained and gently faded away in the same manner, lingering uncomfortably in a few memories as a mysterious occurrence akin to the Dyatlov Pass Incident. How in God’s name did a dead black bear cub — which the subsequent autopsy showed had been hit by a car — find its way to Central Park in downtown Manhattan? Bears can indeed be found throughout upstate New York, but it’s hard to imagine a lone cub crossing not only Westchester County but also the Bronx in order to meet an unlikely end in the leafy center of Manhattan Island. (With permission, an older gay friend of mine from NYC supplies some explanatory context: “It’s the city. I once ran into a bear in the bushes of Central Park myself, but that was a rather different scenario . . .”)

So how on earth did it get there? And why was it framed to look as though the bear cub had been hit by a bike rather than a car? Can you even kill a bear cub by hitting it with a bicycle? One imagines you’re more likely to destroy your bicycle instead — right before mama bear investigates, finds you stranded without functioning wheels, and nature takes its grim and just revenge on you for being a cyclist.

We can all share a sense of relief that one of America’s great unsolved mysteries has now been cracked: It was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., of all people, who put that dead bear there. Ten years ago. Buckle up and settle in for a weird tale, folks —  a true New York story — because we’re going to take our time savoring the wonderful insanity of this one. (And if you don’t want to read it from me then you can always listen to RFK Jr. tell the story himself to Roseanne Barr, in an attempt to get ahead of a New Yorker piece on the matter.)

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We begin, as all stories that end with a bear corpse in midtown Manhattan must, with falconry. Apparently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — son of the slain New York senator and U.S. attorney general, currently running as an independent for president — avidly enjoys falconry and likes to partake of the activity with friends. It’s definitely the sort of upper-class pursuit I never got a merit badge in back during my Webelos days, but I suppose that if you come from Kennedy money, it beats depositing campaign staffers underwater as a hobby.

He was on his way to Goshen, a village about 60 miles northwest of Manhattan, to meet his friends and get a-hawking, when the woman in front of him, driving a van, struck and killed a little bear cub (six months old, 44 lbs.). Some people might have driven on from such a sad scene without stopping. But not our man Bobby, who apparently is not one to ever let good food go to waste. No, Kennedy instead pulled over to take a look at the animal. He determined that this wasn’t just any old run-of-the-mill road-killed bear cub: This was a fine specimen of freshly road-killed bear cub. Kennedy says now that his first thought was to take it, skin it, and eat it, and who can argue with a man who displayed such alarmingly fluent knowledge of New York’s roadkill laws in his little chat with Roseanne? “You can do that in New York State, you can get a bear tag, for a roadkill bear.” (News you can use the next time you happen to be vacationing upstate.)

So there is Kennedy, his backseat literally loaded for bear, but with a day of falconing still ahead. Yes, the sport is so darn enticing that RFK was content to let the bear corpse stew in his car for the next several hours. And he was enjoying himself so much that he just didn’t know how to stop falconing. By his own account, on the way back to the city he wanted to make a detour to his home in Westchester County to store his fresh haul, but “we went late, we were catching a lot of game and the people really loved it, so we stayed late.”

Even so, why didn’t he stop off? Because, as much as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likes his roadkill meat, he’s not going to trade it for dinner plans at Peter Luger in Brooklyn, one of New York City’s most expensive and insufferably overrated steak houses. So into the city he drove, leaving his bear carcass in the car as he went to enjoy meat of more reputable pedigree. And wouldn’t you know it? A man as sociable as RFK also tends to be a busy man as well, so even as he let the delightful dinner with friends run late, he also realized that, whoopsy doodle, he also had a plane to catch that night. (Don’t you just hate it when you let something like that slip your mind until the last second?)

It was at this point when RFK decided that maybe he ought to do something about the rotting bear cub stowed in his vehicle. And his choice lives in legend as the work of either an absinthe-drunk madman or an inspired prankster, or both: He decided to drop the carcass in Central Park, the leafy expanse at the heart of Manhattan, and for added effect to “stage” the scene to look as if little Paddington had been killed by a bicycle — one of which he happened to have on hand in his trunk. Kennedy claims that he ran it by his tablemates at dinner and they all thought the idea was hilarious, which suggests either (1) how many Manhattans they had consumed, (2) how poor their judgment is in general, or (3) how they all drew the wrong conclusions from the giraffe incident in The Hangover Part III. The rest is history. (In a wonderfully ironic final grace note, the story was first reported in the New York Times by none other than Tatiana Schlossberg — the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and thus a cousin of RFK Jr.)

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I am left awestruck by RFK Jr.’s capacity for headline-grabbing madness. Recall that we last saw this man in the news for confessing that a significant portion of his brain had been eaten by a parasitic worm, part of which still remains lodged in his head. It’s really quite difficult to top that, but here we are, and who would have thought? I also have to laugh hysterically at the fact that Kennedy described one aspect of this episode as “a little bit of the redneck in me.” That was, he says, the idea of staging a bike accident involving a baby bear in Central Park — because I guess RFK believes rednecks to be known the world over for that sort of thing, as if it’s been in Jeff Foxworthy’s routine for decades — and not, as one might have thought, the idea of storing road-killed bear to later skin and eat.

I want to believe him. In fact, I want more. I now want to believe he’s been behind countless “weird New York” incidents, both known and unknown, since the Eighties at least. Today it was, “Yes, I dropped that bear carcass in the park, it was merely a skinning operation that fell victim to the clock.” By the end of the week, I hope he’s TikTok’ing himself confessing, “So I did once strangle a hobo underneath the Tappan Zee Bridge and dump him in the river by a support beam, yes, but remember — he was the one who sexually assaulted me.” Let the revelations come forth! It’s RFK Jr., after all, so judging strictly by the brain-wormed, bear-corpsed standards he sets for himself, don’t be surprised to next hear him talking about “the time I was huffing ether with Hunter S. Thompson — I’m 99 percent sure this was before he passed away — and the next thing I know I wake up in a Tijuana flophouse with blood all over my arms and a 45-year-old Laotian wife.” Remember that classic New York Post headline, “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR,” back in the day? In my head-canon now, I imagine that as being the work of Bobby and the boys after a few too many Mickey’s Big Mouths.

I want every single detail of the bear story to be true, because it’s already fantastic enough. But I suspect that not every detail is, quite simply because as much as we enjoy joking about this as if it’s a B-plot to Seinfeld (Kramer would absolutely have done all of this), it’s likely that this is a very strange attempt to massage a story that might be even weirder. The one elision that jumped out the most to me: RFK’s insistence that it was a random woman in front of him, not him, who killed that black bear cub. Though he had company later on during this entire madcap event, by his own account he was alone at the outset when the bear was killed. It was just Bobby Jr. and that lifeless bear, struck “by another driver,” alone by the side of the road, and once he was done lamenting the loss he got to . . . thinking of putting these tender victuals on ice? But not before enjoying a long day of falconry with the sunshine cooking that carcass inside the car? Now, perhaps Bobby Kennedy’s son really is a muleskinner at heart, a good ol’ boy from the backwoods, but perhaps he was motivated by other considerations.

Who can say? I end with one final question I haven’t seen anyone else bother to ask yet, because every other detail of this story is so facially ridiculous you either have to accept all of it or reject almost everything except: “and then I put that dead bear there — was that wrong? Should I not have done that?” An answer would help to at least somewhat bolster Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s alibi . . .

Who on earth eats bear meat?