By BRIAN DONOHUE
As Xavier Hernandez of Hoboken set out for a ride on his bicycle amid the skaters and ice boaters on the frozen Navesink River one recent day, at least two people in nearby buildings began filming him with their phones.
One of them, apparently a worker at the Red Bank Public Library, posted their video to the library’s Facebook page. They added the perfect song, “Skating” by The Vince Guaraldi Trio, and a comment aptly describing it as “wondrous wintertime fun.”
Somewhere nearby, one of a group of office workers had also hit the red button on their smartphone camera.
But on that video, the workers can be overheard calling Hernandez an “idiot,” speculating that he was a pizza deliveryman, and calling him crazy.
On social media, where algorithms reward insult and outrage over truth and context, it was easy to predict which video would go viral.
And within days, the clearly bogus narrative of New Jersey’s tundra-plying pizza delivery man (any Red Banker knows there’s no pizza place using bike couriers in town) had dug itself deep into internet mythology.
So deep, in fact, that memecoin miners had offered a cryptocurrency bounty of 3 Solana for anyone who could find him to tell his story. (They later upped it to ten.)
They never did, of course. For this was a job only redbankgreen could pull off.
Watch our video above to meet Hernandez and, cruising behind him in a sled attached to the bike a rope, his 85-year-old father Jose Hernandez, of Hazlet. You wont’ be disappointed.
Because, in the end, the library had it right. Wondrous wintertime fun indeed.
redbankgreen editor Brian Donohue may be reached via email at [email protected] or by calling or texting 848-331-8331.
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