My friend Josie and I were standing outside the Museum of Illusions in New York City on a cool April evening, around midnight. The museum is a former bank turned tourist trap full of optical illusions, like checkerboard designs that seem to vibrate before your eyes. At least, that’s what you see from the street. Even with the senior-citizen discount, the entrance fee is $31, and they wouldn’t waive it for my press pass, so I don’t know what else is in there.

Josie was explaining her view that America is a nation founded by criminals—Europeans came here to get something for nothing (including, of course, free slave labor and stolen land): “That’s why we just elected a criminal president!” (This was in late 2024.) Just then an angry-looking man came up to us and asked, “Do you want a Danish?” In his hand was a small paper bag containing a pastry. We both said no, and he placed the bag atop a nearby car and walked away.

My first thought was that the guy had decided we were homeless. I am often mistaken for a homeless person, because I dress like one. Josie is a psychoanalyst who wears stylish black frocks, but maybe my disheveled appearance is contagious. It’s possible that together we appeared homeless enough to merit the man’s unwanted pastry.

A bewildering mix of emotions ran through me: First I was insulted. Then I wondered why I was taking offense. What’s so insulting about being thought homeless?

Then I felt a small admiration for the Man With The Danish, who hoped to give away excess food rather than throw it in the trash. Maybe I should have accepted the Danish, although I didn’t want it. By turning it down resentfully, I might have discouraged him from ever offering food to a stranger again. But there’s no time to think when someone thrusts a sudden dessert in your face.

“The thing is,” Josie admitted, “I would really like a Danish.” But she’s gluten-free, so this was purely an idle wish. And I don’t eat refined sugar. If the man had offered a comic book or a five-dollar bill, I would have gladly accepted.

Twice I was sitting with my daughter when she was young, and a passing pedestrian dropped a five-dollar bill in my lap, assuming we were penniless. The first time this happened, we were at Coney Island, and the second time we were on the stoop of our building. In both cases the philanthropist was halfway down the street before I could react. I kept the first bill but gave the second away to a real homeless person.

That second stranger gave me a great gift: a chance to become a philanthropist myself.

I try to part with money the way people throw breadcrumbs to pigeons. What is money? It’s buying power, and I prefer to relinquish my power: one less engraving of George Washington to burden me. When I gamble, which isn’t often, my goal is to lose money. Winning is for people with inferiority complexes. We Buddhist gamblers enjoy watching our money disappear.

On the other hand, I need some money. You don’t buy two tons of breadcrumbs to sprinkle in the park.

Money is an abstraction, unless you don’t have any, in which case it becomes a concretion.

The dog walkers are out today in New York City, each holding six dogs on six leashes, as if it’s perfectly normal to have a dog harem. Usually I can deal with city life in 2025, but when I see someone talking to their watch—and the watch talks back—I must stay in my room for a few days.

It’s actually only in the city that people think I’m homeless. In the Catskills, where I live, everyone assumes I’m just an old guy who loves the Grateful Dead. Which I am.

Why do I look like a homeless person? In part because I have a long, ragged beard and somewhat disordered hair. (According to facial-recognition software, I am the prophet Hosea.) But mostly it’s the way I dress: in secondhand clothes I find in a “free” box. In the past I would occasionally borrow a clean jacket, pressed pants, and a brown sweater from my father. Suddenly I looked “presentable,” as my mother used to say. I wouldn’t have been mistaken for an insurance salesman, but I could have passed for a prosperous jazz musician.

I actually do play in a band called Truffles. Our music is either terrible or avant-garde; I’m not sure which. But I don’t want to be a success—or even look like a success. Under capitalism, success is just humiliation plus a swimming pool. That’s why I’ve spent my life running from it. This has not been difficult, as success has not exactly pursued me.

In addition to being a homeless-looking musician, I’m a poet who writes poems like this:

In Brooklyn
Sitting on a bench,
I watch
a two-year-old
discover
her shadow.

Thanks to my artistic endeavors, I have had my fifteen minutes of fame, though only seven of them were fun.

If you move to New York City to become famous, you will probably fail. But perhaps, after many years of trying and trying and trying, you’ll become slightly famous, like me. And slight fame is still fame, the way a small ham sandwich is still a ham sandwich.

I never intended to become slightly famous. Or did I? My therapist once told me everything I do unintentionally is actually intentional.

“What about everything I do on purpose?” I asked.

“That’s all completely random.”

“You should be careful about buying clothing at secondhand stores,” my friend Harden once said. “You take on the karma of people whose clothes you inherit.”

I wonder if something similar happens with wigs made of human hair. Do thoughts come into your mind that you’ve never had before, thoughts that were lodged in the hair?

On Route 17 in New Jersey there used to be a psychic salon above a wig shop. The sign next to the building read:

Psychic
Wigs

I always loved that inadvertent phrase, as if a wig could know the future. Suppose you bought a wig, put it on, and suddenly became psychic. What would you do? Would you register with the American Association of Psychics? Would you use your newfound powers to help others—the homeless, maybe?

We’ll never find out. The building is now empty. The psychic and the wig shop relocated to separate edifices. The era of “Psychic Wigs” is over.

People sometimes ask if I make these things up. Why tell lies, I say, when the truth is so much more improbable?

I am half Jewish, but sometimes wish I were a little more Jewish. Maybe 12 percent more. I’ll never be a practicing Jew, though. I prefer Eastern religion, with its emphasis on suppressing the ego. The problem is, the more you attempt to suppress your ego, the larger your ego grows, because the thing that’s trying to suppress your ego is your ego.

My meditation group, the Ananda Marga Yoga Society, has a series of practices called the 16 Points. When I was young, I filled out a 16 Points questionnaire every day. One of the questions was “Did you accept food from mean-minded people?” Apparently Ananda Marga feels that one should be fed only by benevolent souls.

Was the Man With The Danish “mean-minded”? In the moment he thrust an unwanted pastry toward me, I feared that he was.

What is a “mean-minded” person? I imagine someone filled with resentment, obsessed with trivialities, always cursing. He’s miserable (I’m picturing a man rather than a woman) and, more important, committed to spreading misery throughout the world. A saint, on the other hand, dispenses happiness.

I used to take drugs to be happy. Then, when the drugs wore off, I was unhappy. After a while I began to question the value of all this happiness. Is it really so fabulous? Shouldn’t a good life also include some dreariness? So I stopped taking drugs, just to see. But I was still happy. The drugs had taught me to be happy. My unhappiness had been lost, like a pencil I’d left in a classroom in seventh grade.

Although I no longer take drugs, I am grateful to drugs for their wisdom. LSD taught me that everything I thought was infinite is actually finite, and everything that seemed finite is infinite. Time, for example, has a beginning and end, but a paper clip is limitless.

After my experience with the Man With The Danish, I googled “Danishes.” It turns out that when Danish pastry chefs went on strike in 1850, Austrian chefs took their place and brought with them the recipe that would come to be synonymous with Denmark. So the Danish was the result of Austrian pastry chefs crossing picket lines.

When I was a kid, you might go to a movie theater and see a picket line out front, and you had to decide whether to cross it or go home and watch TV. Usually you’d choose TV, because it was completely immoral to cross a picket line—like spitting on a photograph of your grandmother.

All the teachers in New York City went on strike the year I entered tenth grade. I couldn’t start school for a month. One of those teachers was my mother.

A strike is an act of idealism. Strikers are saying: “I want to improve the lot of my fellow workers, not just myself. I don’t want to outrun everyone else in the race; I want to change the rules of the race itself.” But that’s not easy to do. Being ethical under capitalism is like trying to pray the rosary on a pirate ship.

I used to give my spare pennies to the homeless, until one day in the East Village I offered a beggar a handful of pennies and he violently threw them into the gutter. I was so embarrassed, I never gave pennies to an impoverished person again.

Another time I was walking down West 40th Street toward Midtown Comics when a smiling young couple passed me carrying a pizza they’d just bought, and the guy impulsively offered me a slice. I took it, then sat on one of those fire-hydrant-type mechanisms next to an office building and ate it. (I just looked up those devices; apparently they’re called “standpipes.”)

The young couple were in love, and their love overflowed in my direction.

Maybe the Man With The Danish didn’t think we were homeless. After all, homelessness is typically a solitary state. Rarely does one see a vagabond couple. Perhaps he just thought we were quite poor—poor enough to accept a food gift.

I am such a person, actually, but I’m also quite particular about what I’ll accept. Sometimes I’ll be sitting on the subway when a roving social worker will announce, “If you’re hungry, I have sandwiches.” He will say this to everyone but look me right in the eye.

Yes, I’ll think, but do you have whole wheat sourdough with grilled tofu?

We call subways “mass transit,” but they are much more intimate than that. You get on a car and sit with four other people, all surreptitiously looking at each other’s feet, deciding who has the best shoes.

Yesterday I saw a guy on the subway with a cap that had the name of a team I’ve never heard of: the Elephins—like a combination of elephants and dolphins. For twenty minutes I tried to work up the courage to ask him about the hat, but before I did, he stood up and was gone.

Lately I’ve come to the conclusion that Jesus was wrong: Meekness is not a virtue. It merely allows arrogant men (and a few arrogant women) to control the world. The meek clothe themselves in virtue and wash their hands of the evil of the world, the way Pontius Pilate washed his hands while ordering the death of Jesus.

So maybe I was right when I refused the Danish from the guy on the street. He seemed arrogant, commanding, almost like he was throwing away the Danish, and we were a garbage can.

If the Man With The Danish had come up to us and said, “I just had a big meal and realized I wasn’t hungry anymore, so I took the leftover Danish as a gift for someone in need. Would you like it?” we would have been touched by his kindness. But he was rude and abrupt.

Or am I merely trying to justify my reflexive refusal? Maybe he was shy and feared interrupting our conversation. It’s possible that, after we turned down his offer, he realized he’d mistaken us for homeless and, embarrassed by his error, given the Danish to a car instead.

Maybe his faith, or some passing religious feeling, had inspired him to help the less fortunate. We all feel the presence of God from time to time, but some of us just call it “having a nice day.”

When it comes to religion, we are all gamblers. The universe gives us no choice. You decide that Islam will save you. I spend my day chanting Hare Krishna. We have placed our bets at the roulette table. Who will win? You? Me? Neither of us? It’s thrilling and terrifying at once. We have piled all our chips on one square. We’re waiting for the wheel to stop spinning.

Some people know exactly when to leave a party. Then there are people like me, who leave only when the coat rack is empty.

I don’t even know how to end this essay. I’m still uncertain what the correct response is when offered an unexpected pastry. Should you accept it, to encourage kindness in the fragile human race? Or should you be honest and say, “I don’t need a Danish. Thank you.” Is honesty a virtue? Possibly.

In another, better universe Josie and I would have happily received the Danish, split it down the middle, and penned this essay together, as a thank-you to our anonymous benefactor.