Sellling My Stories for $1 a Pop

In Madrid there is an old man who sits on the sidewalk selling poems for 100 pesetas. He is very rude and his poems are bad but there is something romantic about selling poems on the street.

I can't write poetry, so I sold stories instead. I bought a pegboard and painted it pink; I made a big sign saying "$1 Stories" and I set up shop outside the Metropolitan Museum.

No one was remotely interested. A middle-aged woman with a miniature dog stopped in front of my pegboard on her way to the park.

"What is this?"

"I'm selling stories."

"Yeah, I'll bet."

Standing next to me was a man selling watercolor cityscapes (the same pictures one sees all over Manhattan; they are garish with a dark blue matting and they come from a distributorship in Queens). He stepped over to chat.

"Stories. That's interesting. Sell many?"

"It's my first day."

"I figured. Let me tell you?one dollar, that's a joke. I sell my pictures for $25. If I sell five pictures I have a good day. You, you sell a story for a dollar, you need to sell 100 stories. How you gonna do that? My advice is go home and fix your sign. It should say $5 for a story. You can go broke out here."

At 10 o'clock the woman with the miniature dog returned from the park.

"Okay, okay! I'll buy a story. What are they about? In one sentence."

"This one is about a man obsessed with sex. This one is about a fortune teller. This one is about a woman who hates her husband?"

"I'll take the last one."

After the ice broke, I did fairly well, selling 23 stories before 2 o'clock. The buyers were mostly tourists and rich housewives from the Upper East Side. The story about the woman who hates her husband was my biggest success.

After a week outside the Met, I went down to Wall Street for the afternoon rush hour. (This was, obviously, before 9/11.) I placed myself in front of a subway entrance on Broadway and the first story I sold was to a young Caribbean boy passing out strip-joint fliers on the corner. He called me "Story Man" and bought a story about a man obsessed with sex.

My first repeat customer was a man named David, who worked in a typing pool at the Bank of New York. He wore a white, short-sleeved shirt and a plain red tie stained with ink.

"I'll buy a story."

"Which one?"

"Whichever one you like best, I'm not fussy... Do you ever use the public toilets?"

"Not really."

"Well you shouldn't. They're awful! So dirty and such nasty people. They're a disgrace to the city. Are you sure you never use the public toilets?"

I said I was from out of town.

"You're a nice boy. I'll see you tomorrow."

David bought a different story every day that week and he never mentioned the toilets again.

Whereas at the Met I was surrounded by people selling paintings and photographs, on Wall Street the merchants sold fruit, neckties and children's books. There was also a man named Yusef who sold newspapers. Yusef bought two stories from me. He was from Nepal and whenever there was a lull in street traffic he liked to talk about his homeland.

My last day on Wall Street, Yusef asked me to do him a small favor. He needed to get to the bank before it closed and he wanted me to watch his newspapers. It wasn't a big deal. Yusef left a pile of coins out, and most of the commuters knew to make their own change. There was, however, one bulldogish man in a three-piece suit who refused to serve himself and he stood in front of the stack of newspapers impatiently waving a dollar bill in the air. I stepped over to help him.

"Give me the New York Post."

He gave me his money and I gave him the Post, but I didn't know how much change I owed him. I don't read the Post so I didn't know how much it cost. I snatched the paper back from him and searched the front page for the price.

"You don't know how much the paper costs?" The man was incredulous. "A paper boy who doesn't know how much the paper costs. This city is going to hell."