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New York also has big-league bums. I remember the first two bums who ever approached me in New York. It was down at Broadway and 18th St. one night. The first one, a stocky lout who didn't look more than thirty-eight, came up and mumbled something, and I shook my head no, the usual, but he wouldn't let up. He kept on coming and said, "I ain't asking you for eighteen hundred dollars, for chrissake. I ain't going to Acapulco for the winter."

I started outwalking him, mulling over the way he had thrown in these specific details, the eighteen hundred dollars and Acapulco, after the manner of Wordsworth, who would be off in the middle of some lyric passage about the woods and the glades, God, Freedom and Immortality, when his glorious delicatessen owner's love of minute inventory would overwhelm him and he could not help recording that the little girl who appeared on the bridge over the brook, a vision of love's own nostalgia, was exactly seven and a half years old, or like Dickens, who-when this train of thought was broken by the second bum, and the old scrime with a flaky face, who came up and asked me for something or other.

This time I tried something that had always worked in Washington, D.C., when the winos climbed Meridian Hill, I threw my hands up and started talking in a gibberish approximation of French, like Danny Kaye in the old git-gat-gittle days, the idea being that I didn't speak English and therefore didn't know what I was saying. So the guy just stares at me for a moment and says, "O.K., since you're a ________ foreigner who don't speak English, then why don't you go ---------hat, you ----------."

Well, he had me there. What could I do? Announce that I only understood the swear words? A real big-league bum who had to let me know this town has the kind of bums you don't put anything over on.

-excerpted from "The Big League Complex," of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby