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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.

This tableau also seems familiar.

Also Beggars. And among the beggars New York's status competition is renewed, there in the much-despised subway...The Dixie cup is the conventional container.

There is one young Negro on the Seventh Avenue line who used to get on at 42nd Street and start singing "I Wish That I Were Married," at the top of his lungs and then pull a Dixie cup out from under the windbreaker he always wore and walk up and down the car waiting for contributions.

I never saw him get a cent. Lately, however, life has improved for him because he has begun to understand status competition. Now he gets on and sings "I Wish That I Were Married," only when he opens up his windbreaker, he not only takes out a Dixie cup but reveals a clipboard sign, on which is written: "MY MOTHER HAS MULTIPLE SCHLERROSSIS AND I AM BLIND IN ONE EYE."

His best touch is sclerosis, which he has added every conceivable consonant to, creating a good, intimidating German physiology-textbook solidity. So today he does much better. He seems to make a living. He is no idler, lollygagger or bum. He can look with condescension upon the states to which men fall.