TIMES SQUARE I MET BRERBRIAN, Telf and Esteban at Rudy's. BrerBrian ...

SQUARE

I MET BRERBRIAN, Telf and Esteban at Rudy's. BrerBrian often plays guitar and sings Beatles songs for the morning commuters on the street, or on the Times Square Shuttle. An amiable Rudy's barfly told me that his ex-wife got most of his paycheck from the last year and that he gets paid 23¢ for each mile he drives in his truck. He told me all about how much rent he pays and, of course, what happened that time he got kicked out of the bar. Then he switched his attention to two young women getting a pitcher. It was like a complete relationship in a time span of nine thrifty minutes.

We went into the backyard, BrerBrian got his guitar out and Esteban, the drummer, started banging a tin can with change in it. They got through five bars before a manager came running up to put a stop to us.

"All of a sudden she's singing, he's got a can of change—what am I supposed to think? Did you talk to anybody?"

"We had enough money to buy beers here," Telf pointed out, on somewhat of a tangent but still making a valid point.

"She's writing a column for New York Press," Brian added, as if to explain my sudden outbreak of song.

"Do you have a card?" the manager asked me. "Cuz if she's from where she says she's from, I'm thinking she'd have a card!"

Well, I don't, and out we went, with guardedly polite behavior on all sides. Thrilling! I'd started to busk and had already gotten kicked out of the first place!

"The thing about Brian," Esteban and Telf explained, "is that he's crazy."

Outside of the Ranch 1 on 45th St. and 8th Ave., BrerBrian broke out into a quiet falsetto rendition of, what else—"Cuz we are the champions……of the world" by Queen, the best pinball parlor soundtrack ever. Esteban, despite initially wanting to appear uninvolved, broke down and drummed along on top of the plastic Employment Guide and 212-Writers boxes. Telf sang backup, wearing his big hat, proving my theory that big hats make people happy. A diminutive black man walked up and told Telf that he liked the electroclash band Black Dog, which he let everyone listen to on his Walkman.

Brian launched into a moody version of Slayer's "Angel of Death." This, too, made our new friend happy: "You don't find that many blacks who like Slayer, but we're out there!"

We moved to a new spot, outside of a DVD peepshow, and a heckler walked up to Brian, with the aw-shucks grin of the disempowered cruel, and asked, "Don't you know any other chords?" I smiled, an attempt to disarm him.

He turned to a woman with facial sores and a cat on her shoulders, then came back. "Don't sing! The cats are running away."

Brian, a former Guardian Angel, ignored him and kept singing in a soft tone ("Birds singing on the sycamore tree—say nighty night"). He really has his own angle on singing in the street, but then Bill, a videographer, pointed his camera at a guy who had a baby carriage with a black plastic container on it. A verbal scuffle ensued, and the little guy showed his knife and barked, "Make a move! Do it, do it!"

We ducked into the great regulars bar called the Collins Bar, where manager Alan Jestice plays vintage Misfits and has several kinds of microbrews and delicious free popcorn. Telf, who had been pretty quiet up to that point, went over each beer and where it came from—one hailed from Mendocino—then cleverly took a vitamin so he wouldn't get a bad hangover from mixing three gourmet beers together. The guy with a knife kept walking around in front, so Bill called the cops to report the knife and the suspicious package, and about 20 of them came swarming up.

We went to 42nd St., where black teenagers in ultra-long t-shirts rule the night, and the boys played a country-style version of the Cypress Hill song "Insane in the Brane," for which they received a dollar. We stopped off at the optimistically named Times Square Cafe, where Brian used to play before a misunderstanding. It's upstairs in the AMC 25 and, by special arrangement, you can buy veal Milanese for $16.95 and take it into the movie with you. You can also buy a 99¢ Coors draft from five to eight, and spend happy hour at the multiplex.

The large, dingy Easy Internet Café sells sandwiches of a recent vintage, has over 600 computers and costs only a few dollars for an hour, so we settled in. BrerBrian showed me his site, as well as Girlbomb, and Olive Juice, where he conducts all his personal feuds. He talked philosophically: "I know jail will come up soon, and I can't do anything to prevent it. If I do go back I won't be ashamed, because it's just for playing and not having enough money, so I won't feel bad."