you meet some characters on the bowery, let me tell you.
i got a million stories just like that one, where that one came from.
just like the president of the united states, who is no better than a jar of olives if you ask me.
i was in bob’s bowery bar the other night and i was talking to sammy the schmuck and tony the twister and seamas macseamas the poet and tony says, hey, remember sid the stopper?
sid the stopper! now there was a character for you.
why was he called sid the stopper, you ask?
because he used to stop people in the street and ask them questions. perfect strangers, men and women, people who looked rich or respectable, ordinary hardworking people, bums like him and you and me, sometimes even teenagers or little kids, he didn’t care.
now, i do not consider myself the most unfriendly guy in the world, but that is not something i would think of doing, would you?
and as you might expect, the people he stopped did not always respond in the politest manner, to put it mildly.
sid carried a big notebook around with him and sometimes he would open the notebook up when he asked his questions, if people would stop and give him a hearing, but i don’t think anybody ever saw him write in it. maybe he had the questions written down in it.
he said he was writing a book about what people told him, the first book in the world that would tell what people really thought, and the book would make him as famous as shakespeare or abraham lincoln,.
sid was tall and had kind of a dignified look about him like a lord or a butler in a movie and said he went to harvard or wherever - like half the guys on the bowery - and grew up in a big house on a hill with chauffeurs and pastry cooks and head gardeners - but at the end of the day he looked like what he was - just another bum.
what kind of questions did sid ask the people that he stopped? that’s a good question. he never asked us other bums questions because he said, there are too many books written about you guys already. it’s a something industry. college industry? something like that.
anyway, one day me and sammy the schmuck asked him, come on, sid, even if you don’t want to write down our answers, just tell us some of the questions you ask.
here are some i can remember.
should people all wear the same clothes?
should everybody in the world have to move to a different neighborhood every year?
is red better than blue?
should the government guarantee everybody a husband or a wife when they got to be twenty-one years old?
should elections be decided by gladiatorial combat?
should all boys be taught to fight with swords, and all girls have to wear their hair long so they can decide things by hairpulling contests?
should everybody in the world get to star in at least one movie?
who would you trust with your life, jack benny, charlie chan, stalin, or the pope?
and so forth. some of the questions were even stupider, but maybe you get the idea.
officer riley used to warn him, you know, sid, you might be safer sticking close to the bowery, and not go wandering into neighborhoods where they might not care so much for strangers, especially if you insist on talking to the womenfolk.
and sid would say, alexander the great didn’t stick close to his neighborhood, and neither did columbus or stanley and livingstone.
then one day sid just stopped coming around. the old story. if you don’t come around for one day, or two days, nobody notices. if you don’t come around for a month, they say who? who ?
the book sid said he was writing? brother, you know as much about it as i do.
they come and they go.
just like the president of the united states.
who is no better than a jar of olives, if you want my opinion.
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