He looked like a Scottish golfer from the nineteenth century: thick orange moustache, tweed vest, a flat green hat with a pompom on top: a hilarious joke shaped like a rotten pear walking on spiderlike legs.

He carried a hobo stick with a pouch on the end, dangling like a scrotum. I watched with mild amusement as he approached one person after the next. Most ignored him. One woman began yelling at him. I heard her say, “If I could understand you,” and then storm off in the direction of the bookstore. What a louse.

I don’t know what population of New York city is insane. Justifiably insane. As in, if anyone with authority paid enough attention they’d cart them off, straight jacket-wrapped in spirit of Ken Kesey.

I saw him making his way down the line and after a few minutes he was only two people away. I could hear his pitch rather unclearly. He spoke in a mumble, as if his tongue were cut in half, and lashed around itself into a braid, and perhaps his lips had been sealed shut on the right side. He had opened his pouch and held them dangling like a piñata before a woman. It was an odd assortment: gag, novelty gifts, mostly. Gum that turned your mouth black. Plastic pearls. A rubber chicken. Groucho Marx disguises.

The woman waved the man off with her hand and he turned to me. I looked at the contents and the man looked at me. I held my head by the chin as if weighing my thoughts and really contemplating what I should buy.

Then, in perfectly clear English the man said to me, “Would you fucking buy something already?”

“How much for the chicken?” I asked. I paid the man two dollars, and he went along to the woman sitting next to me, who pretended to be staring at an invisible squirrel dancing around on the tree branches above her head.