Not another one of these, she thought at first.

New York City was filled with them — artists who’ll approach you on the subway to brag about their pedigree, their latest unknown screenplay akin in caliber to anything composed by Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller; a script that you dear stranger must print out and read, not look at on a god awful computer screen; a play that you, dear stranger, should actually STAR in … as Magda, the shrewd Latina, strong and smart enough to know how to fist a man in his a**hole and play him like a sock puppet.

It was June. Almost every passenger on the F train was dressed in costume for the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade. Sequin skirts and scepters, bikini tops studded with clam shells. She had two tutus on — one lilac, one magenta — and a mother of pearl tiara slowly becoming pink from the red dye she sprayed onto her curly brown hair that morning.

It’s the culture that teaches us to rebuke the eccentric, to question the unusual, to avoid personalities that appear aberrant. For protection — yes, even when this hypervigilance creates a slow soul death, a hostile takeover of imagination and innocence.

Yet, on this holiday of sorts, the suits that typically flooded the Flatiron district and SoHo, the Upper East Side AND the Upper West Side AND Tribeca AND Hell’s Kitchen AND so on, became the backdrop to a brand of people far more bold. For one day each June, the sting felt for every East Village dive bought out and sold and turned into a Wells Fargo didn’t seem so pronounced. New York City, the capitol of the creative world, now famous for the killing of its creatives, was taken over by its displaced people: the zanies, the loons, the idealists it drove insane.

The sun had set, and she was back in the LES, back from Coney Island, where mermen and merwomen proclaimed “water is the essence of wetness” and other quotes from Zoolander as they watched Pabst Blue Ribbon floats roll down Surf Avenue.

She heard a camera click from across the street of the White Box Gallery. The shadowy figure in a leather jacket waved to her and then walked over.

“I’m Michael Fischer,” he said.

She looked at the dog tags dangling from this old man’s neck, engraved with the name Mike F. So she assumed that yes, this piece of information was correct. Michael Fischer reached into his black messenger bag filled with camera lenses and flipped open an iPad. He Googled his name using his middle finger, amputated down to the second knuckle.

“You know who I am. I’m like the poet laureate of photography for the United States,” he said. “I’m the only successful haute couture photographer in this city! My work’s been featured in 40 movies! I’ve started over 15 companies! I’m going to start an overground subway system to help people transport their furniture as soon as that bastard gives me back my money.”

He looked behind the dumpster and whispered. “I’ve got secret service men protecting me.”

“I fought in Vietnam.” He grabbed his jaw and pulled his mandible out from underneath his skull and moved it from left to right to left.

“I’ve had my entire face reconstructed. That’s why I look so young. Let me buy you a sandwich.”

She said yes. She wanted to know if this guy was famous. Everyone wanted to be famous in this City, as if it would validate their sense of self worth somehow.

“How old are you?” she asked as they began to walk.

“Sixty-seven.” He began to mumble, “You know who I am…You’ve seen my work…I shot James Dean when I was eight years old…He broke my camera. That’s how I got my start…”

The math — James Dean was born in 1931. He died in 1955 when he was 24 years old. If Michael Fischer is 67, he was born in 1946, which would make him 8 years old when James Dean was 23.

“Do you know how much a picture like that costs?!” he screamed. “Three million dollars, if the AP doesn’t try to prostitute it for a lousy five cents a reprint. Hey you,” he barked at a lithesome blonde chick in a jean jacket turning the corner. “She’s a model.”

It was close to midnight and she was not hungry at all, but decided to stay with Michael Fischer. She listened to him as they walked in tandem down the Bowery, past a noodle shop named Rice to Riches, past empty storefronts protected by palate wood, plastered with edgy advertisements for Diesel jeans.

It’s hard to know who’s for real in this f-ed up world, if a guy with half a finger, nails that look like claws, and a fake face is who he says he is.

She wanted to stretch her comfort zone, to place herself in an experience so awkward and absurd it allows all others to flow more easily. She wished only to be surprised, to have her judgments suspended for a moment in time. For experiences such as those only confirmed the truism that nothing is as it seems.

Not all crazy people will hurt you. And people will hurt you who are not crazy.

And if this name dropper was the person he said, she could see how this Michael Fischer man just might teach her something with all his crude babbling that cursed the dull minded cronies of today’s cracked out popular culture.

Michael spewed historical facts as they walked.

(Do you remember when Vanessa Williams won Miss America? Of course you don’t you dumb f*ck.)

He was testing her worldliness, her class, her intellect, her culture.

She was failing.

“The problem with your generation is you’re all liberals. You all want to be lazy and have everything handed to you. You want to take and take and take and not work. Do you know how you become famous? By working.”

He pulled out a Chinese cigarette and lit it with a Zippo.

“You guys have already missed the boat. You f*cked it up. The next generation under you will pick up where you left off, but you guys, you’re done. The problem with your generation is you sit there in these bars drinking 12 dollar drinks with your friends, and you don’t know that the price should really be 4 dollars, and you’re the ones who made it that way! You think anything that’s successful is crazy. You look at me and you think oh he’s insane, because I actually do stuff. I spent 300,000 dollars on this face!”

Michael knocked on the glass window of a locked boulangerie. The cashier in the white apron behind the counter pointed at the clock on the wall and mouthed to Michael he was late.

“Yes, I know I was supposed to be here at 9:30 p.m.”

The man opened the door handed Michael a giant paper bag filled with a loaf of baguette, batard stuffed with brie, and a tuna sandwich on whole wheat.

“Take this loaf of bread and tear it apart in your hands and eat it with butter.”

Michael handed her the baguette.

“Don’t cut it. Don’t toast it. You’ll waste it. Just tear it apart with your hands. If it gets stale, put a cup of water into the microwave, heat it till it’s boiling and then put the bread inside the microwave. It’ll absorb the moisture. Take this sandwich, too.”

He gave her the batard with brie.

“You know, not a lot of people would do that for you — buy you a sandwich like that.” Michael sat down on a steel black folding chair outside a convenience store. He unwrapped the tuna sandwich and took a bite.

“Does it hurt when you chew?” she asked.

“Yes, of course, it hurts when I chew. Listen, I live on the rooftop of an apartment in Soho. I’m growing beans and peas and tomatoes, because it’s quiet there and I’m not spending 2400 dollars a month to rent out some studio apartment, I’d rather buy the building. Is your last name Jewish?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know the Purple Gang?”

“No.”

“You don’t know the Purple Gang? Jesus Christ. What do you do anyway?”

“I’m a performance artist.”

(That was a good way to describe what she was doing this week.)

“Like Lori Anderson. Do you know who Lori Anderson is?”

“No.”

“You don’t know who Lori Anderson is?”

A family of three with a young daughter wearing ruffled socks, licking a scoop of gelato on a cake cone, stood at the intersection where Michael and she sat.

“Do you know who Michael Fischer is?” he yelled at the child. “I’m a famous photographer!”

Her mother grabbed her hand and pulled her across the intersection, as the girl turned back, staring at Michael’s face, most likely asking herself the same question that began this whole excursion:

Was Michael Fischer famous or a giant crock of sh*t who’d flipped his lid in the mid 90s?

“Can I help you?” Michael said a minute later to an older man with white hair now stopped on the sidewalk waiting for the light to change.

“Duetsch,” the man said.

“Where are you from?” screamed Michael.

“Holland!” he said in a thick accent, gesturing that he couldn’t speak English as he crossed the intersection.

Michael spoke a few sentences in Dutch and replied, “You think I don’t speak Dutch you f*cking idiot?” He took another bite of tuna. “Only a f*cking idiot comes to America and doesn’t speak English!”

After a moment of silence; the first moment of silence yet, she said, “This is great brie.” Perhaps she was hallucinating, but she swore she saw his eyes twinkle for about half a second like somewhere he was thinking — at least this girl knows good cheese.

“Okay, I’m going back to my apartment now.”

“Tear the bread and get the butter!” were Michael’s final words as she ran — tutus bouncing — past the blinking numbers counting down the seconds left for her to cross Spring Street.