After learning too late your father had been one, you became for a while an expert on who was what; for instance, who was faking. And when you saw over and over again passersby laughing at the wit of the seasonal fakers—“Can you help me buy a BMW?”—and giving them money—so much money that the four of them, one on each corner of that intersection, piled into two taxis at the end of the day and drove off, laughing—and also saw those passersby, one after another after another, ignoring the torment of the unkempt, emaciated stranger muttering to himself in a doorway a few yards away, who was fighting an invisible war against an imagined enemy and was dying slowly in that war in front of all of us—the anger and the frustration were, to be honest, too goddamned much. You knew that, you couldn’t help knowing that, but what you didn’t and couldn’t know was that almost a quarter-century later, nothing would be better, nothing would be different, except your anger and your frustration, which had grown older and, therefore, more tired and weaker.
