One morning as I was walking up First Avenue, a dog ran past me with a dollar bill in its mouth. A few seconds later a fat man came puffing by in hot pursuit.

Among the peddlers on Astor Place, the same set of theworks of Khrushchev (Foreign Languages Press, Moscow) circulated from hand to hand for at least a year. Nobody ever bought it, but every day it would appear in someone else’s stock.

* * *

My friends J and P worked at an agency located in the basement of the Empire Hotel, across from Lincoln Center, that assisted foreign students traveling in America. They often aided travelers who had spent all their money and lacked carfare to the airport. Frequently students would barter small items for bus tickets; one day somebody traded them a car. It was a tiny car, perhaps Japanese, and clearly on its last legs. It was ugly in an unobtrusive way, its body freckled with rust spots. The argument against possessing a car in New York City has mostly to do with parking problems, but we merrily parked it on corners, at crosswalks, in front of churches and fire hydrants, secure in the knowledge that it wouldn’t be towed, let alone stolen. Tow truck operators would take one look and realize that nobody would be paying ransom.

Everybody envied M his job. Once a month he traveled to Kennedy airport, where, at a set time, he would receive a call on a particular pay phone. A voice would read him a list of numbers, which he would note down. Moving on to an adjacent telephone, he would call another number and read the list to the respondent. A few days later a courier would bring him an envelope full of cash.

* * *

Once after leaving the World, a club on 2nd Street, I was riding in a taxi with J and R. Rounding a corner, we saw a mutual acquaintance, using a car hanger, breaking into a parked car. We knew he did things like that, but none of us had ever seen him in action. It was like watching a nature documentary — or better: It was exactly like looking out the window and seeing an egret building its nest.

* * *

When I felt that prices in Manhattan were getting too high, I would cross the river to Hoboken, where you could still find $1shirts and $5 suits. One day I passed the window of a residence in which two or three old paperbacks were displayed along with scrawled sign saying “For Sale Inside.” I knocked and was admitted. In addition to a couple of revolving racks of fantastically gaudy crime novels from the 1940s and ’50s, the room also contained three generations of a family, apparently Southern, from a babe in arms to a grandmother sprawled hacking and gagging on a couch, with a sheet twisted around her middle. Something was cooking on a hot plate. No one spoke. At least five pairs of eyes regarded me hollowly. I browsed in record time, paid, and fled, feeling like a census taker.

* * *

Z had come from Germany to make his way as musician, and after a few years his career was progressing rapidly. He played in three or four bands, all of them admired. He had also, over the years, become a heroin addict. As addicts will, he was driven to ever greater exigencies to raise money to support his habit. He therefore became a burglar. One night he set out to rob the apartment of a former girlfriend. She lived on the top floor of a tenement, her bedroom window about four feet from the fire escape. Grasping the railing of the fire escape, Z swung his legs over to the window ledge. He inserted the tip of his right sneaker beneath the top of the frame of the lower sash and pushed upward. The window, as he hoped, slid gently open. When he had raised it as far as he could, he dangled his feet inside and gave a mighty push, hoping that momentum and gravity would propel him in. He had fatally miscalculated, however, and dropped five stories. A day or two later, the Daily News covered the story in an inch-length column filler, headed “Romeo Falls To Death.” It told the poignant story of a young émigré musician who was such a romantic that he contrived to slip into the bedroom of his beloved as she slept.

* * *

Sooner or later everybody I knew tried to buy something from the deli on Spring Street, and everyone had the same experience. Usually it was a hot day, and the store hove into view just when the need for a can of soda presented itself. So you’d enter, go to the cooler, pick out a cold one, and take it to the counter.

“Five dollars.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”

Some people left meekly; some tried arguing, to no avail. If the owner didn’t know your family, he didn’t want your business, and that was that.

“My dream,” V told me more than once, “is to come upon a parked truck transporting Kodak film. Think about it: Film is small, light, untraceable, easy to dispose of, and proportionately expensive. A find like that could set you up for years to come.” I lost track of V, so I don’t know whether he ever fulfilled his dream.

From “Commerce,” included in “New York Calling,” a collection of essays by various authors, edited by Marshall Berman and Brian Berger, to be published September 15 by Reaktion Press Ltd.