He tried to decline at first, though. He didn’t want the fucking sandwich. And I even heard him say, “No I was just kidding.” Was he just kidding about his hunger? Or perhaps I had missed something in his conversation with the young woman on her way to class with her piano-playing lover? And if he was just kidding, why didn’t the young woman keep her sandwich? These are strange times we live in. The girl might have had anorexia and not been able to eat. In the end, though, he took the sandwich, and I approached him while he was eating it.

He was slightly more rumpled, I saw when I got close, than he looked from across the street. He ate the sandwich very quickly. There were crumbs in his beard, stuck like little islands in the nappy darkness. I walked up to him and said, “Excuse me, could I buy a paper, please?”

He looked at me.

I held out a dollar. I had thought about the man for a long time before I did this. I felt, and still feel, as though there were some connection between us. Not actually between us, but between me and my idea of him, which is, I guess, a selfish sort of notion. In any case, I had some ideas about this man. I had never given him any change before, even though I passed him almost every day and I frequently give my change to homeless people. There was a reason for this: shortly after I transferred back up here for school, I saw him talking out of character. He was a liar, is what I knew.

When I first saw him, I thought he was sick, or slow, or something. He was stricken with a shaking loss of control. He didn’t seem dangerous, just loud, although looking at him again the day of the sandwich he looked potentially very dangerous. The young woman who gave him the sandwich was petite and very pale. He dwarfed her. Anyway, in the beginning when I saw him I thought he was afflicted in some way, but then one day I saw him around the corner from the café, talking to another man. He wasn’t speaking in his paper selling voice, and he was smoking a cigarette.

Aha, I thought, and thereafter told my friends, as we were walking by him or sometimes simply over a meal, don’t give any money to the guy in front of the café. They would ask why, and I would tell them what I had seen and that the guy was a hustler. I did this as if it were my job, a noble thing, as if I had been commissioned to warn people of this criminal who in fact was never a criminal, who in fact was no more a hustler than I am.