Another minute in that room without Xanax and I'd have hung myself from a fixture, I decided a few moments later, across 50th Street, sitting by St. Bart's church. There are some powers even Giuliani will not challenge, because every night, right across from the Waldorf, a small community of homeless people sleeps in boxes on the church steps. I sat down by a Dell computer box. The person inside was wheezing badly, but there was no place else to sit, especially after two businessmen walked by, nodded at the box, and said, "Dell went up two today."

"You, you out there," came a woman's voice, crabbed and phlegmy. "Can you get me a pack of cigarettes?" A withered hand snaked from the box holding three crumpled dollars. I went back into the hotel, bought a pack of Winstons from the newsstand, knocked on the box, put the butts and the three dollars back in the woman's hand. Immediately the money came back out. "No money," the woman said.

"Keep it, really," I replied, pushing the bills back toward the box.

The woman must have changed her mind, because she stuck her hand out of the box to take the money. Unfortunately, right then one of the bills blew away, down the church steps and onto Park Avenue beyond. Now I had only two dollars. I couldn't give her two after she'd given me three. I dug into my pants, but all I had was a twenty. That about cleaned me out, but what was I supposed to do, ask for change?

"Hey, thanks a lot," she said a moment later, a lot more sprightly.

I started walking again, through the night. It was getting late, but the city never sleeps. Taxis whizzed up and down the avenues. Twenty-seven years ago, should you have hailed a cab in this town, there was a chance I might have pulled over. Back then, driving cabs was apprenticeship for the sort of city boy I aspired to be. I did it for years. But they just don't have guys like me these days, I thought, trudging past the Virgin Megastore. No wonder I'd been able to disappear. I was dead, R.I.P., a ghost in my own museum.

The image made me think of my old friend Harold Conrad, who really is dead. Once a gossip columnist for the New York Mirror, a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle, tight with Runyon and the rest, Duke Ellington and Ali, too, Harold wasn't the most famous of his boulevardier crew, but he liked to walk around the city, all night long, just looking. Sometimes we walked together, two generations of New York dudes. I remember our last stroll. Dinkins was in then, and the trains were not yet running on time, lickety-split, the way they do today. Around Times Square, Harold stopped, looked at the crud.

"So this is what they call New York now," he said, shaking his head in mild disgust, as if he'd been out of town for a few decades. He was entitled. After all, Harold had walked down Broadway when people really walked down Broadway, he'd drunk at better bars, eaten a better cheesecake, and gone to better fights at a better Madison Square Garden.

Then Harold smiled. "Well, that's okay," he said genuinely. "Because it's yours."

I appreciated that, how generous Harold was toward my New York, so clearly inferior to his New York. He liked me well enough to figure I was getting as much out of the shopworn town as could be gotten. He even took my word for it that these new people, Ecuadorans, Hasidim, and the rest, would keep the place interesting. What you had to do was keep walking, Harold said. Because walking around, you'd see everything strange, because if it wasn't strange, it wouldn't be New York.