Харлан Эллисон: More Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction

He had just scavenged some two-day-old doughnuts from a pile of boxes behind a doughnut store on Broad Street, and bought a paper container of coffee from a Greek delicatessen where the counterman (another aging hippie, faded flower tattoos still visible under the bristly black hair on his arms) usually knocked a nickel or two off the price for old time’s sake. Now he was sitting on the white marble steps of an old brownstone row house, eating his breakfast. His breath steamed in the chill morning air. Even sitting still, he was in constant motion—his fingers drumming, his feet shuffling, his eyes flicking nervously back and forth as one thing or another—a car, some wind-blown trash, pigeons taking to the air—arrested and briefly held his attention; at such times his shoulders would momentarily hunch, as if he expected something to leap out at him.

Across the street, a work crew was renovating another old brownstone, swarming over the building’s partially stripped skeleton like carrion beetles; sometimes a cloud of plaster-powder and brick dust would puff from the building’s broken doorway, like foul air from a dying mouth. Winos and pimps and whores congregated on the corner, outside a flophouse hotel, their voices coming to Nicky thin and shrill over the rumbling and farting of traffic. Occasionally a group of med students would go by, or a girl with a dog, or a couple of Society Hill faggots in bell-bottomed trousers and expensive turtlenecks, and Nicky would call out “Jesus loves you, man,” usually to no more response than a nervous sideways glance. One faggot smirked knowingly at him, and a collegiate-jock type got a laugh out of his buddies by shouting back “You bet your ass he does, honey.” A small, intense-looking woman with short-cropped hair gave him the finger. Another diesel dyke, Nicky thought resignedly. “Jesus loves you , man,” he called after her, but she didn’t look back.

When his butt began to feel as if it had turned to stone, he got up from the cold stoop and started walking again, pausing only long enough to put a flyer for the Lordhouse on a lamp pole, next to a sticker that said EAT THE RICH. He walked on, past a disco, a gay bookstore, a go-go bar, a boarded-up storefront with a sign that read LIVE NUDE MODELS, a pizza stand, slanting south and east now through a trash-littered concrete park full of sleeping derelicts and herds of arrogantly strutting pigeons, stopping now and then to panhandle and pass out leaflets, drifting on again.

He’d been up to Reading Terminal early that morning, hoping to catch the shoppers who came in from the suburbs on commuter trains, but the Hairy Krishnaites had been there already, out in force in front of the station, and he didn’t like to compete with other panhandlers, particularly fucking groups of them with fucking bongos . The Krishnaites made him nervous anyway—with their razor-shaved pates and their air of panting, puppyish eagerness, they always reminded him of ROTC second-lieutenants, fresh out of basic training. Once, in front of the Bellevue-Stratford, he’d seen a fight between a Krishnaite and a Moonie, the two of them arguing louder and louder, toe to toe, until suddenly they were beating each other over the head with thick rackets of devotional literature, the leaflets swirling loose around them like flocks of startled birds. He’d had to grin at that one, but some of the panhandling groups were mean , particularly the political groups, particularly the niggers. They’d kick your ass up between your shoulder blades if they caught you poaching on their turf, they’d have your balls for garters.

No, you scored better if you worked alone. Always alone.

He ended up on South Street, down toward the Two-Street end, taking up a position between the laundromat and the plant store. It was much too early for the trendy people to be out, the “artists,” the night people, but they weren’t such hot prospects anyway. It was Saturday, and that meant that there were tourists out, in spite of the early hour, in spite of the fact that it had been threatening to snow all day—it was cold, yes, but not as cold as it had been the rest of the week, the sun was peeking sporadically out from behind banks of dirty gray clouds, and maybe this would be the only halfway decent day left before winter really set in. No, they were here alright, the tourists, strolling up and down through this hick Greenwich Village, peering into the quaint little stores, the boutiques, the head-shops full of tourist-trap junk, the artsy bookstores, staring at the resident freaks as though they were on display at the zoo, relishing the occasional dangerous whiff of illicit smoke in the air, the loud blare of music that they wouldn’t have tolerated for a moment at home.

Of course, he wasn’t the only one feeding on this rich stream of marks: there was a juggler outside of the steak-sandwich shop in the next block, a small jazz band—a xylophone, a bass, and an electric piano—in front of the communist coffeehouse across the street, and, next to the upholsterer’s, a fat man in a fur-lined parka who was tonelessly chanting “incense sticks check it out one dollar incense sticks check it out one dollar” without break or intonation. Such competition Nicky could deal with—in fact, he was contemptuous of it.

“Do you have your house in order? ” he said in a conversational but carrying voice, starting his own spiel, pushing leaflets at a businessman, who ignored him, at a strolling young married couple, who smiled but shook their heads, at a middle-aged housewife in clogs and a polka-dot kerchief, who took a flyer reflexively and then, a few paces away, stopped to peek at it surreptitiously. “Did you know the Lord is coming, man? The Lord is coming. Spare some change for the Lord’s work?” This last remark shot at the housewife, who looked uneasily around and then suddenly thrust a quarter at him. She hurried away, clutching her Lordhouse flyer to her chest as if it were a baby the gypsies were after.

Panhandling was an art, man, an art —and so, of course, of course , was the more important task of spreading the Lord’s word. That was what really counted. Of course. Nevertheless, he brought more fucking change into the Lordhouse than any of the other converts who were out pounding the pavement every day, fucking-A, you better believe it. He’d always been a good panhandler, even before he’d seen the light, and what did it was making maximum use of your time. Knowing who to ask and who not to waste time on was the secret. College students, professional people, and young white male businessmen made the best marks—later, when the businessmen had aged into senior executives, the chances of their coming across went way down. Touristy types were good, straight suburbanites in the 25–50 age bracket, particularly a man out strolling with his wife. A man walking by himself was much more likely to give you something than a man walking in company with another man—faggots were sometimes an exception here. Conversely, women in pairs—especially prosperous hausfraus, although groups of teenage girls were pretty good too—were much more likely to give you change than were women walking by themselves; the housewife of a moment before had been an exception, but she had all the earmarks of someone who was just religious enough to feel guilty about not being more so. Brisk woman-executive types almost never gave you anything, or even took a leaflet. Servicemen in uniform were easy touches. Old people never gave you diddley-shit, except sometimes a well-heeled little old white lady would, especially a W.H.L.O.W.L. who had religion herself, although they could also be more trouble than their money was worth. There were a lot of punkers in this neighborhood, with their ’50s crewcuts and greasy motorcycle jackets, but Nicky usually left them alone; the punks were more violent and less gullible than the hippies had been back in the late ’60s, the Golden Age of Panhandling. The few remaining hippies—and the college kids who passed for hippies these days—came across often enough that Nicky made a point of hitting on them, although he gritted his teeth each time he did; they were by far the most likely to be wiseasses—once he’d told one “Jesus is coming to our town,” and the kid had replied, “I hope he’s got a reservation, then—the hotels are booked solid .” Wiseasses. Those were also the types who would occasionally quote Scripture to him, coming up with some goddamn verse or other to refute anything he said; that made him uneasy—Nicky had never really actually read the Bible that much, although he’d meant to: he had the knowledge intuitively , because the Spirit was in him. At that, the hippie wiseasses were easier to take than the Puerto Ricans, who would pretend they didn’t understand what he wanted and give him only tight bursts of superfast Spanish. The Vietnamese, now, being seen on the street with increasing frequency these days, the Vietnamese quite often did give something, perhaps because they felt that they were required to. Nicky wasn’t terribly fond of Jews, either, but it was amazing how often they’d come across, even for a pitch about Jesus —all that guilt they imbibed with their mother’s milk, he guessed. On the other hand, he mostly stayed clear of niggers—sometimes you could score off of a middle-aged tom in a business suit or some graying workman, but the young street dudes were impossible, and there was always the chance that some coked-up young stud would turn mean on you and maybe pull a knife. Occasionally you could get money out of a member of that endless, seemingly cloned legion of short, fat, cone-shaped black women, but that had its special dangers too, particularly if they turned out to be devout Baptists, or snakehandlers, or whatever the fuck they were: one woman had screamed at him, “Don’t talk to me about Jesus! Don’t talk to me about Jesus! Don’t talk to me about Jesus! ” Then she’d hit him with her purse.