I'm walking through Loisada on tiptoe along rat-infested, though relatively garbage-free sidewalks. I just saw a band at Arlene Grocery.  It's late.  The freaks wave at me like I'm a mirage. As I near the bowels of Soho, one of them stands up and wobbles in the street long enough to blow me a kiss.  I return his gesture in kind. Why not? I'm in a great mood. Besides, he's way too out of it to follow me. It's easy to outrun a wino, even in pumps, I tell myself as I slowly stride past him. (Crackheads are another issue...)

"I love you, baby," he says. His hair is so matted and he is so filthy I can't even tell if he's white or what. Raspy and low, his voice sounds like he's been yelling at someone all day. From the look of things, he probably has. I look him in the eyes, smile and then look straight ahead. I hold my breath as I do so. I have to. He smells like he's been wallowing in an open sewer. As I pass him, he steps away and then leans forward slightly, as though he's dropped something that up and left in my direction.

Out of nowhere, he yells, "An' them big-ass legs, too!" And then he laughs, one of those diabolical, Evil Genius laughs from any one of those after-school cartoons I couldn't get enough of when I was a little kid. It's so authentic. I feel a weird rush of excitement, thinking, Wow! He sounds just like Simon Bar Sinister! So I laugh--to myself of course--but unfortunately loud enough for him to hear me. He laughs even harder then. He knows he has me. Somehow, we've connected.

I turn around and look at him. He's pointing right at me, legs apart, his head flung back and his mouth wide open in what I immediately recognize as the classic Evil Genius stance. I think he has five teeth. Two of them sit on the bottom rung like inverted fangs. They make him look like a demented, smelly baby.

Like any real connection, I know this will stay with the both of us. I feel as though I've exposed myself internally in some way. I feel as though I've stuck my tongue in his mouth. It's all so intimate and dangerous and stupid. And he knows it.

"Bring them big ol' legs back over here," he says, before his voice dissolves into a cacophony of coughing and wheezing and gasping and spitting and coughing, and laughing. He never stops laughing, a sound like someone buried underneath something heavy is shaking a bag of rocks. If he keeps coughing like that, he's going to choke and die on his own phlegm, I think as I turn the corner and disappear from his world. God help him.

God help me, too.