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I’m walking home from work, and I’m freezing cold.

 

Near the produce stand at the intersection of Broadway and Houston stands a gaunt urchin in a Bad Religion T-shirt and an army jacket. “Spare some money so I can get something to eat?” he asks in a tar-coated sneer.

 

I pass.

 

On Crosby Street, barely a block later, a tall woman stands behind the roach-coach selling the hot dogs and kebabs. She fixes her stare on me. Like a hatless Minnie Pearl from Hell, she gawks at me with her fists stuffed into a zippered gray sweatshirt. She also wears a dirty-looking floral print skirt, pantyhose and brown flats.  

 

Not your average beggar, obviously. For one, she’s not a dude. More bag lady of old, only no bag. Her short, curly hair appears to have once been blonde. Her haggard face coexists somehow with her puffy cheeks. The lips? Pursed in the extreme but open just… enough… to reveal a traffic jam of bent teeth.

 

At last she bursts in a Midwestern accent, “You have ihh dollar, so I kin get uh pack uh cig’rehhhhhhttes?”

 

I remember the pack of Natural American Spirit Lights I broke down and bought a couple nights ago prior to a coworker’s going-away party. It’s sitting in my own jacket pocket. I could just give her one. But instead, like the Bad Religion kid, I simply pass without a word. The woman repeats herself: “You have ihh dollar, so I kin get uh pack uh cig’rehhhhhhttes?”

 

I think she’s still talking to me, so I glance over my shoulder at her. She’s actually talking to the man behind me, I discover. In a tan blazer over a black V-neck sweater, the fellow jerks to a halt. He quickly touches his outsize forehead and drags his hand irritatedly through his receding hairline, fingers lacing through the stringy, combed-back gray hair.

 

He jabs a thumb at Bad Religion a block back and shouts, “No! I just gave that kid a quarter!” The woman just pivots her gaze down the long stretch of Houston, waiting her next potential donor.

 

—Tim Coleman covers the street beat for Trainjotting.