I always liked Peter Wolff because, like myself, he was an aging hippie who refused to clean up his act for anyone. No matter what the fashion of the day, Peter could always be seen wandering the streets near his East Village home in a tie-dyed tee-shirt, dilapidated sandals and long stringy gray hair, the homeless Einstein of Ninth Street.

For me, Peter was the living embodiment of Emerson's adage, "Man is a god in ruins." For underneath a sneering iconoclasm and firm inability to suffer fools was a burning pride in the way he had chosen to conduct his life. It was easy to imagine Peter having some secret life too important to share with us. Was he writing the great American novel? Did he possess frightening cabalistic powers? Was he genetically engineering dinosaurs in his basement? I liked to think that the truth would turn out to be far stranger than anything I could imagine.

Like the scowling Professor Challenger in the Lost World, Peter lived for human contact, and I loved to bump into him at odd moments when he looked most distracted and lost in his own thoughts. I think he secretly delighted in the knowledge that there were still a few people left who could see past his unkept and intimidating veneer to the friendly and playful little boy he was inside, and I was never disappointed by these encounters.

On one overcast morning I spied him standing in the middle of the narrowest part of the Ninth Street sidewalk, reading a newspaper and oblivious to the sea of human traffic he was blocking. "Well, is it going to rain or not?" I demanded, as if he were the one person who might know the answer.

"What?" he said, blankly, and went on reading.

"You are the Toltec Rain God, are you not?"

"Ah!" he said, catching on. He rubbed his chin for a minute and looked up at the heavens. Then he pronounced his judgement over one shoulder as he marched off down the street:

"I don't think I've decided yet!"