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The early Mott Street morning was misty, but that would bum off later; it was
going to be a hot day in New York. The double doors of the boarded-up shop
swung inward with a grating noise, and a black-and-white tomcat bolted out of
an overflowing garbage can next door and slid beneath a parked car.
It was safe there: The car had been left in. distress two days ago, and since
then the neighbourhood kids had removed three tyres and the engine.
After that, nothing moved for a while. At last, a preternaturally clean old
man, neatly dressed in very clean rags, came out of the dark, chill interior
of the shop with a kettle heaped with freshly fired charcoal, which he set on
the sidewalk. Straightening, he took a good long look at the day, exposing his
cleanliness, the sign of his reclamation from the
Bowery two blocks away, to the unkind air. Then he scuffled back into the cave
with a bubbly sigh; he would next see the day tomorrow morning at the same
time, if it didn't rain. Behind him, the bucket of charcoal sent up petals of
yellow flame, in the midst of which the briquettes nestled like dragon's eggs,
still unhatched.
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None so Blind
Now emerged the hot-dog wagons, three of them, one by one, their
blue-and-orange-striped parasols bobbing stiffly, pushed by men in stiff caps.
The men helped themselves to charcoal from the bucket, to heat the franks (all
meat) and the sauerkraut (all cabbage) and the rolls (all sawdust). Behind
them came the fruit pushcarts, and then two carts heaped with the vegetables
of the district: minute artichokes for three cents each, Italian tomatoes,
eggplants in all sizes, zucchini, peppers, purple onions.
When the pushcarts were all gone the street was quiet again, but the cat
stayed underneath the late-model wreck at the curb. It was waiting for the
dogs, who after a while emerged with their men: scrubby, yellowing animals
with long foxy noses- and plumy tails carried low, hitched to the men with
imaginative networks of old imitation-alligator belts and baby-carriage
straps. There was also one authentic German shepherd who wore an authentic
rigid Seeing-Eye harness; the man he was pulling was a powerfully built
Negro who was already wearing his sign:
PRAY IN YOUR OWN WAY
EVERY DAY
TAKE A PRAYER CARD
THEY'RE FREE
I AM BLIND
THANK YOU
The others still carried their signs under their arms, though all were wearing
their dark glasses. They paused to sniff at the day.
"Pretty good," said the man with the German shepherd. "Let's go. And don't any
of you bastards be late back."
The others mumbled, and then they too filed off towards Houston Street, where
the bums were already in motion towards the Volunteers of America shop, hoping
to pick up a little heavy lifting to buy cigarettes with. The bums 123
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None so Blind avoided the dogs very scrupulously. The dogs pulled the men west
and down the sixty steps of the BroadwayLafayette IND station to the F train,
which begins there, and they all sat together in the rear car. There was
almost no talking, but one of the men already had his transistor radio going,
filling the car with a hysterical mixture of traffic reports and
rock-and-roll.
The cat stayed under the late-model wreck; it was now time for the children to
burst out of the church and charge towards the parochial school across the
street, screaming and pummelling each other with their prayer books.
Another clean old man took in the empty charcoal bucket, and the doors closed.
The dogs pulled the men out of the F train at the Fortyseventh-Fiftieth
Street station on Sixth Avenue, which is the Rockefeller Centre stop; they
emerged, however, at the Forty-seventh Street end, which is almost squarely in
the middle of Manhattan's diamond mart. Here they got out their cups, each of
which contained a quarter to shake, and hung on their signs; then they moved
singly, at five-minute intervals, one block north, and then slowly east.
The signs were all metal, hung at belt level, front and back, and all were
black with greenish-yellow lettering. The calligraphy was also all the same:
curlicue capitals, like the ,upper case Pf that type font known as
Hobo.
The messages, however, were varied, though they had obvious similarities in
style. The one following the man with the German shepherd and the prayer
cards, for instance, said:
GOD BLESS YOU
YOU CAN SEE
AND I CAN'T
THANK YOU
Slowly they deployed along Forty-eighth Street towards
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