[Do not dub me shapka broham]

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

[GVnana]

Survival tactics. My son used to ride a public bus through Watts. H said he just acted crazy and everyone left him alone.

[nuconvert]

"The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby"

Lol. A blast from the past! I haven't thought about that book in years. (dare I say decades?)

[Clemenza]

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 ----------."

I tried this same technique in the Times Square Subway, when a Gay homeless guy (!) tried to get change from me. Luckily, I had a copy of La Nacion with me and began speaking Spanish. He just kept talking louder (WHAT?) I left him down in the station.

[niteowl77]

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

That passage makes me want to pick up a copy and read it again. Many years ago, I was listening to some other design majors earnestly discussing how art students were superior to all other forms of life, when one particularly artsy-fartsy jerk went off on a tirade about how wrong this Tom Wolfe guy was; I started reading and began marveling about how RIGHT this Tom Wolfe guy was!

[Cacique]

This print hangs in my living room, to keep reminding me that poverty sucks.

[Victoria Delsoul]

Where do these guys come from? They are so funny.

[fatima]

Thanks for the ping:)