I was astounded. He’d already had the quarter in his hand! He’d known I was a panhandler before I did!
The next couple ignored me. An older couple gave me a dime. A pair of middle-aged ladies hurried past. A fortyish man in a leather jacket grumblingly told me to go fuck myself. The next couple gave me a quarter. The final couple, mid-twenties, full of high good spirits, stopped to chat. “You want to be careful in this neighborhood,” the male said, reaching into his pocket. “The cops can get tough around here.”
What a thought; first time out on my own and get picked up for begging. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll move on.”
The girl, sympathetic but too cheerful in her own life to really give much of a damn, said, “You ought to go to the Salvation Army or somewhere. Ask people to help you."
Advice, Ambrose Bierce said, is the smallest current coin. “I’ll do that," I said. “Thanks a lot."
The man had finally come up with some coins, which he pressed into my hand as though they were a message to be taken through the lines. “Good luck, fella," he said.
I was beginning to hate them. My misfortune was merely capping their perfect day. (“And," I could hear them telling one another later, in bed, after a perfect copulation, “we helped a bum.") “Thanks," I said, for the third time, and after they walked on I opened my hand to look at a dime and two nickels. I’d been given a lot of valuable advice, and twenty cents.
Which meant a total of eighty cents. I was both elated and depressed, as I walked off with the coins jingling in my jacket pocket. Half a minute ago I’d had nothing, and now I had enough to call my mother and have a cup of coffee and have a pastry or something with it. On the other hand, eighty cents was still a far cry from the kind of money the boys back in the gym were expecting to see. (It was also depressing that my bum imitation had been so thoroughly effective.)
As I walked along, it seemed to me the advice I’d been given had probably been worthwhile. Business streets would tend to be more thoroughly patrolled by the police after dark, and loitering strangers in such areas would be more likely to be picked up for questioning. Since I couldn’t think of a single question I could possibly be asked that I would be willing or able to answer, I made a right turn at the next intersection, and moved away into a residential area again.
But this wasn’t doing me any good. I was cold and moneyless, and I wanted to solve both problems, rapidly, without getting into worse trouble than I already had.
Not too many years ago I could have solved both problems by sending a telegram to my mother asking her to wire me some money, and I could have waited in the warm all-night Western Union office for the couple of hours until the money arrived. But that was back in the days when there was such a thing as a telegram. I know there’s still a company around called Western Union, but God knows how they make their money these days-not with telegraphy.
I walked two blocks in semi-darkness, traveling from streetlight to streetlight, looking at the small houses on either side. It was a weeknight, and most of the windows were dark, the good citizens already in bed, resting mind and body for the honest labor of tomorrow. I could have been like them, asleep now in a conjugal bed in Rye, next to a practical and faithful yet extremely attractive wife. With a sense of wistful envy I looked at the lawns, the driveways, the slanted roofs, the curtained windows. On the open porches were toys, chairs, milk boxes, bicycles. I might steal a bicycle; I could travel faster, and the pedalling would warm me. But I wasn’t a thief, I had never stolen anything in my life.
At the second intersection, I saw some sort of open business establishment at some distance down to my left. Walking that way, I finally saw that it was a diner on a corner, with three cars parked out front. I started to enter, then noticed that one of the three was a police prowl car. I hesitated, almost left, and decided the hell with it. I could enter, couldn’t I? I had money, didn’t I?
Two uniformed cops were sitting at the counter, chatting with a heavyset blonde waitress. At the other end of the counter a man in a shabby brown suit was eating a full meal; a salesman, probably, passing through. A young couple in a booth were having an intense, impassioned, embittered, nearly silent argument; whispering and muttering at one another, making constricted hand gestures, eyes blazing as each one tried to hammer a point across.
I took a booth far from the cops and the quarrelers, picked up the menu from between the sugar and the napkin dispenser, and looked to see what my eighty cents would buy me. And abruptly into my mind came the memory of a newspaper report I'd read years ago, a stunt a fellow had pulled that I had approved of completely. It had been very much in the practical joker line, but since it had been done for money I had never tried the same thing myself. Could I make it work? Was it already too late at night?
The waitress came over: huge-busted, dressed in white. She had been chipper and carefree with the cops, but was noncommittal with me. “You ready to order?”
“Oh. Ah . . .” Another quick look at the menu, a typewritten sheet of paper in a clear plastic holder. “Coffee,” I said. “And the clam chowder.”
“Manhattan or New England?”
“Uh . . . New England.”
“Cup or bowl?”
All these decisions. I looked at the menu again, at the comparative prices for a cup or bowl of chowder, and the cost decided me. “Cup,” I said. That would leave me with fifteen cents; I might even have a doughnut for dessert.
She was about to leave. I said, “Would you have a felt- tip pen I could borrow?”
“A what?”
“You know; the kind of pen with the soft tip.”
“Oh, those damn things,” she said. “They don’t go through the carbon paper.”
“That’s right.”
“Yeah, I think there’s one in the cash register.”
“Thanks.”
She went away, came back with my coffee and a black felt-tip pen, and went away again. The table had already been set for two, facing one another, so I reached across to the other setting, pushed the silverware out of the way, and took the paper place mat. I folded it in half with the diner name inside, and carefully lettered my sign on the white back:
CLOSED FOR REPAIRS USE BOX
Below that I drew an arrow pointing straight down. I made the letters as thick and even and official-looking as possible, and drew the arrow blunt and solid, for that no-nonsense effect.
The waitress brought my clam chowder while I was still printing. She pursed her lips when she saw what had been done to the other place mat, and wordlessly gathered up the extra silverware before I did something terrible to that. She marched it away to safety, and when she came back a third time, with a plate of crackers, I gave her the pen and once more tonight said, “Thank you.”
“Any time,” she said, though without much conviction, and went off to be chummy with the cops again.
Hot food. It was delicious. While I ate I thought about this scheme and tried to decide what I would do if it didn’t work, which it probably wouldn’t. I had planned on calling my mother, but what did I have to say to her? I still had no way for her to send me money, and even if I did it wasn’t a solution to the problem of tonight.
The salesman walked slowly by, burping, popping Turns into his mouth. He paid the waitress and I heard him say to the cops, “What’s the weather up north?”
“Cold,” one of them said.
The salesman expressed gratitude for that news, and left.
When I finished eating I carefully reversed the contents of the sugar canister and salt shaker. Then, just as carefully, I rolled my home-made note to keep it from creasing, and put it in my shirt pocket, where it stuck up almost as high as my collar. I kept it in place by zipping up my jacket, took my eighty cents out of my pocket, and left the excess fifteen cents as a tip, mostly because of the place mat. Then I walked down to the group at the other end of the counter, gave the sixty-five cents to the waitress under the incurious glances of the two cops, and left.