Worries about becoming somewhat uncivilized, combined with more general anxieties about the direction of my life, were coming to a head when my birthday arrived in late August. It was a depressing day, a Sunday with an overcast, gray-green heavy sky, the kind gives a hungover feeling to the city. For some reason, no one from my family called to wish me a happy birthday, which was unusual, and made me feel horrible. I was still new in New York, and had very few friends to call upon, so I decided to go out and make a little money to cheer myself up.
Now, at the time, I wasn't a huge fan of underwear, and I was wearing some old, worn-in olive khakis whose zipper had the unfortunate tendency to open up whenever I thrust my fists into my pockets. So well into the afternoon--I think I'd made a hundred bucks or so--two plain-looking Midwestern tourist girls came up and began looking over the mechandise. They began to flirt a bit, dawdling over their bracelet choices. I wasn't very into it, but I probably would've flirted with Mr. T that day, I was so lonesome. Then suddenly, the girls left. In kind of a hurry, it seemed. I couldn't figure it out.
I thought about it for a minute. Hmmf. Oh well. Then suddenly, a breeze blew and I felt something strange down south. I realized my wiener was hanging out of my pants. Oh my. I could not stop the thought: here you are, spending your 26th birthday with your cock flapping in the breeze out on Broadway and 8th.
This is you. This is who you are. Right now. The whole fantasy just curled up and died right there.
I wholesaled off the remaining bracelets, gave up the trade, and eventually became a graduate student. As such, I was eligible for enough government loan money to live for years without working. At first, I couldn't help noticing on an animal level how soft, flabby, weak and unaware my fellow students seemed. There were purses and unguarded valuables all over the place. But to my surprise, the street skills I'd acquired fell away within weeks, and I began acquiring new ones--ostensibly less animal and more social. And I'm sure that by now I'm as whitebread and sensually unaware as the next desk jockey. However, I still carry with me a sort of confidence, even arrogance, knowing that if all the trappings, the bourgeoisie shit--the office politics, the manners, the clothes, the routines--were stripped away, and we were all suddenly reduced to howling, snivelling beasts roaming the city, I'd have a head start.

And somehow, this is comforting.

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