First Person Peculiar Read Online Free PDF Page A

me out all the millions who live on this damned island.
    We don’t do anything but meet and talk, occasionally in delis and coffee shops, now and then in bars, once in a while when the weather’s nice just out on a bench where anyone who’s looking for him can find him (though everyone who needs him seems to have no trouble finding him wherever we are).
    We never go to the Garden for basketball or hockey, we never see a movie or a play, in truth we never get much more than half a block off 34 th Street. He just wants to visit, to talk about almost anything, and he’s always straightforward—or at least I think he is—when we talk about what he calls the Wiz Biz.
    “What do you do if someone won’t pay you after you’ve given them a winner, or told them how to avoid a mad dog gunman, or whatever?” I ask him one day as we’re walking down 34 th Street.
    “I’m the Wiz,” he says. “I know before I help them if they’re deadbeats.”
    “That’s a pretty useful thing to know,” I say. “Man’s a deadbeat, you send him away.”
    “Not always.”
    “Why not?” I ask.
    “Maybe his wife or kid is growing a tumor, and he’s not insured and hasn’t got enough to pay for a doctor. It becomes an ethical question: should they suffer because he’s a loser?”
    “I see,” I say. “It’s not as simple as it seems at first.”
    “Nothing ever is,” he says.
    “Why don’t you quit?” I say. “Just walk away from it all?”
    “Who’d be here to help them?”
    “You’ve seen enough suffering,” I continue. “You’ve done your share. It’s their problem.”
    “Just let them all suffer in pain and poverty when I can prevent it?” he says. “Is that what you’d do?”
    I think about it for a long moment. “No,” I admit. “That’s not what I’d do. It’s just what I’d want to do.”
    “I know,” he says, and I get the feeling he does know.
    “When we first met,” I say, “I kind of envied you. I really did. I thought you had the greatest gift in the world. But the more we talk about it, the more I hate the choices you have to make day in and day out.”
    “You learn to live with it,” he says.
    “I don’t know how,” I say. “There’s so much pain, so much misery in the world. Most people just see a tiny part of it, but you—you see it all.” I shake my head. “What must it be like?”
    He comes to a stop and grabs my shoulder.
    “Say that again!” he says, and there’s a hint of excitement in
    his voice as his fingers dig in.
    I stare curiously at him. “What’s it like to see the future?”
    “And you really want to know?”
    “I asked, didn’t I?”
    “Thank you, my friend,” he says with such an air of relief you’d swear he’s just run a marathon. “I have been waiting seventeen years for someone to ask me that.”
    And suddenly his fingers feel like they’re dissolving on my shoulder. He seems to grow, not thinner exactly, but somehow less substantial, then translucent, and finally transparent, until there’s nothing left of him but a pile of grubby clothes on the ground and the butt of his still-burning cigarette,
    All this happens seven years ago. Sometimes it feels like seven centuries.
    * * *
    I am the Wizard of West 34 th Street. If you’ve got a problem, or a need, or just a question, come by and tell me about it. There is no situation too dire or too hopeless, nothing so complex that it’s beyond my ability to solve. There will be a fee, of course, but you’ll be happy to pay it, and I will never ask for it before you are pleased with the results.
    I’m always around. If you don’t see me on the street, just ask one of the locals, or peek into a restaurant or a bar. There aren’t that many of them, and I’ll be in one. Don’t let my appearance fool you. I’ve got a Master’s degree, I have enough money that I’m not going to con you out of yours, and I guarantee that you won’t catch any diseases from me. How I look just isn’t