I had definitely beaten the system, and I took a special, if self-justifying, pleasure in comparing my lot with the guys who looked like what I would've looked like if I'd taken the entry-level office job: cheap, uptight and silly. I loved sitting out in the sun in my shorts and T-shirt, watching them sweating through their collars, yanking at their ties, earning half of what I was making in three times the time and eight times the humiliation.

At the same time, I began to use the sense of bourgeois propriety that tied me to these people: if a shopkeeper or cop tried to move me along, I shifted into a deliberately upper-middle-class posture and manipulated them into politeness, if not submission. It frequently worked. If I managed to sound like someone they recognized as a boss, they instinctively seemed to respond and forget that I was just a street salesman.

Meanwhile, I felt privileged to absorb firsthand the psychic torrent that characterizes New York street life. Everybody came by: Matt Dillon, timid Asian tourists, porky middle Americans, NYU summer school students, secretaries, B-girls with reluctant B-boys in tow.

I started to get to know other street vendors. There was Joseph, a balding, roly-poly, rosy-cheeked heroin addict who sold homemade jewelry. There was the Argentine guy who sold roasted peanut candy. He was big on catcalling female passersby. When I asked him how and why in the world he thought that was going to get him anywhere, he said, "I'm doing them a favor! How else are they supposed to know they're beautiful?!" And then there was Moustapha. Moustapha was a tall, slender, and extremely dapper college student from Senegal who sold African jewelry and knickknacks and did a hell of a business. (That was the summer of Do The Right Thing, and working-class African Americans were tumbling over themselves to buy anything "African," especially anything with yellow/green/red on black, the pseudo colors of some Pan-African entity that never existed). Moustapha was also a big flirt, although he had a different, slightly more successful line: "Hello. My name is Moustapha. I have been to sixty-five countries. My father is diplomat."

Together, Moustapha and I met Eduardo, a Guatemalan who wholesaled us bracelets like mine, but made with the magic colors: yellow/green/red on black. I bought thousands of them and sold them all. It was so easy.

After a few months, though, I began to be bothered by what had at first felt most exciting. Being on the street with hundreds of dollars of cash and merchandise meant being constantly hyper-aware of thieves, pickpockets and drunks. It meant maintaining a constantly defensive posture--a kind of sustained, animal paranoia. It also meant putting up a barrier between me and the aforementioned psychic torrent of New York City street life, because it became very numbing to have hundreds and thousands of strangers stare and make eye contact day in, day out. I developed a tough shell to protect myself, and I began to care less and less what anyone thought of me. I started getting that thing homeless people must get to enable them to eat, sleep, or piss out in the open in broad daylight--the ability to disconnect your socialization settings at will.

My shell grew harder and harder. One time, on the way home from work, I started rummaging around in a pile of rubble from a newly demolished building. I found a filing cabinet full of old 45's from a juke box, and a homeless guy came up alongside me, saying, "Well, looky looky whut we got here. Music!" Immediately, without thinking about it, I snarled and said, "Hey, fuck you, man. I got here first." He made off in fear for his life. When I replayed the image of myself, clawing through wreckage, hissing at fellow beasts, it gave me a start.