I first heard about "friendship bracelets" (those colorful, hand-woven cloth thingies popular with teenagers and pseudo-hippies a few years ago) from an American vagabond-type I'd met in Mexico. He told me you could buy them for pennies apiece in a town called San Cristobal de las Casas. I'd been traveling intermittently for years to out-of-the-way places and had made small-time entrepeneurial forays into buying, importing, then selling minor amounts of just such locally produced handicrafts, so I filed this information away for future reference.

Two years later, after being offered a small sum to drive a van from Long Island to Mexico, I found myself in San Cristobal de las Casas on market day, haggling over bracelet prices. I hadn't bothered to work out a detailed distribution plan. I simply knew that God smiled brightly upon those who buy low and sell high, and I felt confident I was in an excellent position to do both. So I bought 6000 of the bracelets for a nickel each, shipped them back to New York (paying nary a cent for import duty) and began hunting about for a hippie store that would buy them. When I discovered that no one would give me more than a dime apiece for my hard-smuggled wares, I decided to embark upon a career as an unlicensed retailer--a street vendor.

Why not? I was an independent person. I took pride in my ability to keep ahead of the daily grind, the taxpaying, nine-to-fiver office life that had claimed and seemingly emasculated most of my friends from high school and college. I'd never worked very long for anyone else, managing to be un- or self-employed for most of my life. And, I reasoned, since I'd just moved to New York, and had few, if any, connections to anyone fancy, any jobs available to me were bound to be entry-level, low-paying and boring. If I could pull this street vendor thing off, it'd be exciting, easy money. I'd learn something. Most importantly, I'd remain free.

So without having a clue as to what I was doing, I built a display rack with slitted foamcore board like those I'd seen used by other street vendors with similar merchandise, and, planting myself on Astor Place between Second and Third, right in the heart of the East Village, I began to sell my bracelets for fifty cents apiece.

I felt naked, wild, and slightly ashamed (a nice, middle-class boy like me standing there with my crummy little wares for all to see and judge), but I was also thrilled because it was an act entirely of my own doing. It was brave. It was cool.