At first, sales were slow--a bracelet or two a day. Then I moved a few blocks west to Sixth Avenue, closer to New York University. This was more like it: there were students everywhere. Within an hour I'd sold a bunch of bracelets and made friends with two nice Hunter College girls selling crystal jewelry next to me. They were new at this too, and we established an easy rhythm of gabbing, selling, displaying, hawking, and gabbing some more.

That's when the two tall white gentlemen came by. How was I to know they were undercover cops? "Wow! Only fifty cents?" they asked. "Yup," I answered, already wondering if I should raise the price to a dollar. "Great, Can we get three?" I said "Sure!" and instantly I was arrested, handcuffed, thrown into an unmarked car, and taken to Manhattan's Sixth Precinct.

New York's Finest were surprisingly friendly, in a possibly racist sort of way. Either because I was white and spoke fluent middle class English, or because I had no prior arrest record and possessed an ID, I was set apart from the other suspects and given kindly treatment. Evidently, none of the other suspects (all black) had ID or clean records, so they were going to have to spend two or three nights in jail. But me, I was in and out of there in half an hour with a citation--later waived. In fact, the sergeant who processed me clearly took an interest in me, and he kept repeating over and over, "See, you can't sell stuff on the street without a license unless it's religious merchandise. Religious merchandise. Religious." It didn't dawn on me until the 500th or so repetition that he was coaching me. He was giving me a tip!

So the next day I made a trip to Chinatown and Kinko's, where I clipped some Chinese and Korean characters from a newspaper headline and a Buddhist temple flyer and made a totally bogus permission slip that transformed my little cloth loops into "Buddhist Harmony Bracelets."

Now, when the cops came and all the other street vendors ran in terror, I'd hold my ground and whip out the permission slip. The cops'd look at it, grunt with pained confusion, hand me back the permission slip and jiggle off somewhere else. At most, they'd tell me to move to a different part of the sidewalk.

That was when I started making the real money. I raised my price to a dollar per bracelet. I learned bit by bit about what streets to work when, how to display the bracelets better, and how to engage in small talk with one customer to keep him/her there forever, luring many more. (Fact: humans are herd animals. Customer interest begets customer interest. If one customer is looking at your wares, more will stop, even if you're selling four-day-old manure.) Before long, I averaged $40-$50 an hour, tax-free. It was the ideal lifestyle, working four hours a day, five days a week. I had twelve hours a day to spend reading, writing, and learning to play the guitar.