The Healthy Bums of Bleeker Street

On that first day of sausage cart work, the day of the informal tasting, I had an amusing exchange with a few bums there. Bleeker Playground is a park with a playground, yes…but there’s also a mess of benches off to the side, outside of the playground’s wrought-iron fence. Lots of benches mean lots of bums, but they seem pretty docile. You never can tell with bums, but as long as you approach them with caution, they can be pretty cool. Depends on the bum, I guess. They may look, smell, and act inhuman at times, but bums are people too, and their lives are often mired in stories much more interesting than the average person who has a home.

To prep for the tasting, we cut some tasty baguettes in half crosswise—you get two sausage rolls from one baguette. But the baguettes are a few inches too long for the sausages (you want a little sausage poking out—it’s what folks pay for, the sausage, and it’s sort of phallic, too), and we needed to trim off and dispose of a two-inch segment of the baguette.

This left us with a bag full of perfectly wonderful baguette rounds. Normally I’m the kind of person who would bring them home and make bread pudding or croutons, but it was in the mid-90s that day—way too hot, for some reason, to haul a bag of bread bits around. So I took them over to the bum benches and offered them to a pair of bums.

“Would you guys like these?” I asked. “They’re from fresh baguettes.”

The bums smiled, cigarettes dangling from blistered, stained lips. “Thanks, sweetheart,” one bum said, “but white bread is the worst thing for you. That and white sugar.”

I smiled at them and returned to the cart, pitching the baguette bits in the trash can on the way. I love it when strangers call me sweetheart. Maybe someday I will buy them wheatgrass shots, and they can mix their vodka in them.