GC Snax sells the standard fare that its name implies, as well as Sole Proprietorship Forms, Affidavit and Judgment Confession Forms, and legal document covers. Its walls are hung with pictures of the snacks on offer — breakfast sandwiches, hot pockets, burritos — and handwritten signs announcing prices and specials: “Snyder’s Pretzels, only 40¢ ea,” and “New Altoid: Dark Chocolate Dipped Mint.” The shop itself is like a tiny extension of the lobby, with worn marble floors and ornate wrought iron work around the door. A formica-topped wooden counter runs its length horizontally. When Cardenas first opened GC Snax ten years ago, he moved the cash register from the right side of the counter to the left, the better to see the customers who line up to the register’s right.

On a recent weekday, classical music played softly overhead. When a customer ordered a soft pretzel, Cardenas opened a heated glass case in which a rack of pretzels spun slowly, and the room filled with the smell of a New York City street.

“How much, two hundred dollars?” he asked the customer, who had just handed him a twenty. He likes to joke with his customers by adding a zero to their totals. “That’s twenty thousand there, Mr. Galo,” the customer replied. The cash register announced the numbers on the keypad in a mechanized voice as Cardenas punched them in. “Two. Zero. Point. Zero. Zero.” the register said.

Arriving at GC Snax from the street is a task; after climbing the Supreme Court building’s imposing stone steps, passing under George Washington’s words — “the administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government” — and, appropriately, walking past 14 formidable stone pillars, one then has to go through airport-style security (belt off, watch and wallet in little plastic bin, bag on x-rayed conveyor belt), before doubling back to the left of the main entrance, where the shop is nestled. It’s nearly impossible to know how many New Yorkers pass through the Supreme Court each day. The Court System’s Communications Director, David Bookstaver, puts the number in the “thousands,” although they don’t formally keep track — but Cardenas estimates that some 500 people a day stop by his shop. Of these, he knows about half, and he has a remarkable ability to recognize them — and anticipate their purchase — as soon as they walk in the door. “You want blueberry yogurt, right?” he asked a customer in a trench coat. “Yes, and a spoon and a bag,” the man replied. “No spoon! No bag!” Cardenas answered. “You use your fingers today!”

Cardenas, 60, was a guidance counselor for the Brooklyn Public Schools in East New York before he lost his vision 20 years ago in an accident. Born in Italy but raised in Spain, Israel, and the United States, Cardenas speaks 4 languages, and his accent is accordingly difficult to pin down. “I’m like a gypsy,” he said. His black hair, graying at the temples, is gelled and combed neatly back into a side-part. After several years of recovery and rehabilitation, Cardenas made his way to Lighthouse International, a New York-based nonprofit organization whose occupational therapists teach the blind and visually impaired how to negotiate work in a sighted world.

After learning “how to do coffee, and this and that,” as Cardenas puts it, he connected with the New York State Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired, whose Business Enterprise Program operates shops in Federal and State office buildings statewide. He went through an interview process, where he had to demonstrate a mastery of business principles, like balancing profit and inventory, and then he was allocated the space at 60 Centre Street. He gives 25% of his profits to the Commission, whose business advisor comes to check in on him each month. His wife comes each weekend to clean and make new signs. And Cardenas opens his doors at 7:00 each morning, fires up the coffee pot, and begins cracking good-natured jokes at his customers.

“You got taller!” he said, squinting up at a blue-uniformed security guard. “You used to be a short guy! That’s what working here does to you, I guess.”

Beth Schwartzapfel is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn and an MFA student in creative nonfiction at the New School.</>

Cate and I take a minute to admire a portrait of a young girl, her dark hair cut in a straight line across her chin—her bright brown eyes seem as if she’s looking right at you!—before resuming the walk. Cate and I don’t always agree when it comes to fine art, so many of our dalliances involve a painting that she likes and I don’t, or vice versa, disassembling what elements strike us for liking or not liking. When we stop to agree that neither of us likes a stuffy still life with food, the gallery guides have caught up with us. “We’re still closed,” they say, but in a nice way. Footsteps and voices echo in the atrium.

The one on the right is named Vanessa Rubio, and it’s only her second week on the job. She arrived at the Guggenheim after working for several years at the Americas Society Art Gallery on Park Avenue and 68th Street, a job she described as much less busy, and “on Park Avenue, so you get those kind of people.” Rubio has the skin tone of white frosting dusted with cinnamon, or coffee with lots of cream, and her long, dark, curly hair is pulled back into a neat bun. She wears trendy purple titanium glasses. She is an artist—mostly a painter, but she does some cartooning, too—who chose this new job because it allows her more time to take classes in the evenings at the School of Visual Art. At 23, she recently graduated from NYU, where she majored in art and art history.

When I met Rubio, upstairs, Cate was admiring a crucifixion by Jusepe de Ribera, who lived in the Kingdom of Naples, then part of the Spanish empire, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The painting features a mostly-naked Jesus, nailed to a cross, with rivulets of blood, and a pained expression.

As a rule, I hate crucifixion paintings, and this was no exception. Even in the paintings where Jesus isn’t in the process of dying, he looks like he is, or should be. In my notebook, I noted that the paintings in this room are populated primarily by “draped and moaning people.” In fact, the one painting in this room that moved me is the one that seemed totally unrelated to the others, a tiny whimsical Goya canvas called “The Drunk Mason,” which depicts two men smirking at each other over the head of their friend, presumably the eponymous mason, who is too drunk to walk and who they are carrying between them, his stockings slouched down to his ankles. The sky, bright blue in the top left corner, melts to a white haze above their heads in the early morning.

“Look how sexual it is,” Cate said, indicating the Ribera, and I grunted uninterestedly. It didn’t look sexual to me, only boring. “There are no lines in his torso at all. He obviously loved the male form.” Rubio nodded, agreeing with Cate. “It’s definitely not boring,” she said. She said she has learned a lot from being around the masters here. She paints mostly people, herself, using acrylics to render paintings from photographs of herself and her friends, but her favorite in this room is a giant abstract charcoal drawing. “It’s going in all directions. I feel there’s a thousand stories in there,” she said. She was wearing a black sweater over a black shirt, with long rows of tiny white buttons on the sleeves. All of her paintings, so far, are untitled. “I’ve never named any of them because I don’t feel like they’re official enough to name,” she said. “I mostly just hang them in my house or in my family’s house. I’m not like, ‘this is “the Vase.” ’”

When Cate and I had first arrived, at 7:20, a security guard in a blue shirt and tie with graying hair told us we could not come in, since the ticket window had closed at 7:15. We would simply have to come back another time. However, the ticket seller said that tickets were in fact available until 7:30 and grudgingly allowed us to pay $5 for the both of us. It was “pay what you wish” night, and after all, we only had 15 minutes before closing.

The woman behind us on line asked if she could get in free, and as Cate and I were rushing upstairs we heard the ticket seller ask whether she had any pocket change to contribute. Clearly he’d been told that this is “pay what you wish,” not “pay nothing at all” night, and everyone was expected to pay something. Immediately I wished I had given him a couple of quarters instead of a precious 5 dollar bill. “Oh,” said the blue shirt and tie man, with raised eyebrows, as we thrust our tickets toward him. “You got in.” I couldn’t tell if he was irritated or simply making an observation.

Now he came upstairs to tell Vanessa Rubio that she should start herding the stragglers downstairs. “Oh,” he said, when he saw me. “Nice to see you again.” Rubio had just started telling me how Debbie Harry had come in that very afternoon, dressed all in ski boots and swishy pants like she’d been on her way to the slopes. “I tried not to look too much,” she said. And then I said, “I know you have to go,” which was going to be followed by “but,” and another question, when Rubio looked at me. “So do you,” she said, but in a nice way, and we commenced our forced march down the sloping hall and into the cold night.

“You have a job?” he asks.

“I’m a writer,” I say, waving my notebook, which is green and skinny, and has spiral binding on top.

“You work for the city?” he asks.

“No, for a newspaper,” I answer, waving my notebook again. His English is not great, and I think ‘freelance’ will be too hard to explain.

Every morning, Mohammad spends two dollars to ride the subway to 293 Church Street, a garage-like space tucked between two fancy restaurants in a bustling corner of Tribeca. 293 Church Street is more like a not-place than a place. Mohammad calls it a “gar-iz.” It is run by a bristling man named John who has a grey mustache and a heavy Eastern European accent. For six months, Mohammed came to the gar-iz every morning to pick up a silver cart, which he would wheel here, to the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, and sell hot dogs. On a good day, he made about $60 profit. On a slow day, $40.

Mohammad has a vendor’s license, which he keeps in a dirty plastic sheath in his otherwise empty brown leather wallet, its tarnished beaded ball-chain necklace wrapped around it. The license cost him $60, plus $56 for a required 2-day class which taught him that he must wear plastic gloves to handle food, and offered guidance as to how to dress appropriately. The rent on the cart was approximately six hundred dollars per month. It varied, though. “If I am making good business,” he said, “rent go up.”

A vendor’s license allows you to sell food on the street, but a permit is necessary to own your own cart. One day, he showed up at the garage to find that the cart he was renting was no longer available. Permits expire every 7 months, so Mohammad speculates that the cart owner’s permit ran out, or that someone else laid claim to the cart. In any case, he says, pointing to a blue and yellow Sabrett umbrella on the other side of the approach to the bridge, “Maybe he have permit. I have no permit.” Which is to say, without his own permit, there’s nothing he can do.

So now he arrives at 293 Church Street each morning with two blue coolers and an old silver hand-truck. “Water! Cold things!” he says to a group of tourists walking by. “One dollar!” It comes out sounding like, “Wada! Coldings! Wandallah!”

He spends about $30 to fill up the coolers with water, soda, Gatorade, and ice. He wheels the hand truck down Church Street, weaving in and out of parked cars and traffic. The wheels on the truck squeak as he walks. The two coolers are stacked on top of each other, and the lid on the top cooler doesn’t fit quite right. Handfuls of ice cubes fall onto his feet and hit the pavement. His small frame moves quickly, and, struggling to keep up, I keep an eye on his blue and grey and yellow baseball cap, which is made from parachute material and Velcros in the back. He is like a compact little rectangle, with a tan fleece top and blue polyester pants.

He makes a left onto Chambers Street, passes a fruit vendor and a hot dog cart, passes Ralph’s Discount City, and tells me we’re going to the Blooklyn Biliz.

“The Blooklyn Biliz. You know the Blooklyn Biliz?”

I think he’s saying “Brooklyn Village,” so I shake my head no.

“I show you.” He tells me to walk on the sidewalk.

The sky is looking grey, and despite the temperature, which is only in the mid-50s, the haze and the humidity make the air feel hot and sticky.

“Maybe coming rain today,” he says, “people no buy cold things.” Mohammad looks up at the gathering cloud cover. “It’s hard making people like water.”

Mohammad picks a spot at the approach to the Bridge where there is a brass symbol of a walking person inlaid into the sidewalk, with matching brass arrows inlaid on either side, in each direction. The on-ramp for cars hugs the left side of the walkway, and the off-ramp hugs the right. Clumps of tourists walk by, holding cameras and guide books. Joggers and bikers pass, too, sweaty and fast. The Blooklyn Biliz looks dishwater grey on this cloudy day. Its usual majesty is dwarfed by all the taillights and the buildings, which, from this angle, seem at least as tall, if not taller. Even the buildings on the Brooklyn side of the bridge seem tall enough to jostle for the skyline’s attention.

“I set here,” says Mohammad. “People come across. They tired. They buy water.” He lays the two coolers side-by-side, takes their lids off, reaches into the ice, and pulls the bottles of Gatorade—which, at $2, are his most expensive item—to the top of the chilly pile.

“Wada! Coldings! Wandallah!” he calls to a passing blonde family.

“No thank you,” says one woman.

“OK,” says Mohammad, “have a nice day.”

His voice is slightly nasal, and he speaks quickly and confidently, as though he is not aware of the fact that he is often hard to understand. He has dark brown deep-set eyes and a square-shaped dark brown beard with a few grey hairs. Mohammad came to this country from his native Bangladesh when he was 34 years old. The lawlessness and random violence in his country had been wearing him down. “My country too much crazy people,” he says. “People gun. You have money, they take it.” He had been trying to get a visa through the lottery visa program since 1990. He hit the jackpot in 1998. “This country very nice. I like this country,” he says. “Here you have one thousand dollars in your pocket, nobody takes it.”

Mohammad has been here at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge for an hour. So far today, he has made $4.

“Gatorade, Miss?” he asks a passing woman. It sounds like “Gatorid.” “Want Gatorid? That’s good.”

Mohammad wonders if it’s too cold for people to want soda. “I looking for another job now,” he says. “Outside work, vendor, too headache.” Rain, cold, people’s whims—his living is too uncertain. “People buy water, I have money. People don’t buy water, I don’t have money.” When he wants to go to the bathroom, he must cart his coolers to a nearby bench and ask some people sitting there to watch them while he runs to Starbucks.

He lives in a 2-bedroom basement apartment which costs $800. I ask him if he lives alone.

“No, not a loan,” he says. “Rent. Monthly rent.”

He lives with a friend, another Bangladeshi. His wife is still in Bangladesh. He wants to bring her here, but it’s too expensive. “‘How come you no make America for me?’” he says she asks him. “I say no, maybe later.” When he goes to City Hall to try to get her a visa, they always ask about money, always money. “City say ‘how much you make money?’ If you have money, city give you visa.”

He interrupts himself. “Yes sir, wada?” He continues. “If you have no money, city says, ‘how can your wife eat?’”

The Urban Justice Center recently released a report about street vendors in lower Manhattan. They interviewed 100 vendors in 5 languages, and they found among them a median yearly income of $7,500. I cannot imagine Mohammad making even that much at this rate. “The typical vendor,” wrote the New York Times in an article about the report, “is a married immigrant man who is the sole provider for his family and has no health insurance.” That’s Mohammad. “Only 20 percent of the vendors reported English as their first language; forty percent said they were uncomfortable speaking it,” the Times went on to say.

Mohammad is a Muslim. He belongs to the Alamin Mosque on 36th Avenue in Long Island City. He prays five times a day. He might not get a chance to pray five times today, though. He looks at his watch. He sometimes goes to a mosque near here, if he can get away while he’s working. “You watch?” He gestures at his coolers.

“Sure,” I say. “I’ll watch.”

“Really? No problem?” he asks? “You watch, I go?” I nod. “No problem.”

“You watch, I go.” He’s happy. I watch his little blue and grey and yellow hat bob through the crowd towards the Assata Islamic Center, a mile north, on Allen Street.

A sign above my head reads “AREA UNDER NYPD VIDEO SURVEILLANCE.” I watch the twin yellow lights flash at the off-ramp. Bottomtop. Bottomtop. Bottomtop. I write in my skinny red notebook. I wait. A red double-decker Gray Line bus drives by, people spilling off the roof with their cameras. Bottomtop. Bottomtop. I look at the Bridge. Some 27 people died during its construction, most of them immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, and Germany. One tourist in an orange Red Hot Chili Peppers t-shirt passes, doubles back, asks for a beer. When I tell him it’s only water, soda, and Gatorade, he leaves. While Mohammad is gone, I sell two sodas and one water. It’s been about two hours, and Mohammad’s total is now $7.

He returns in about 20 minutes. He smiles at me when I hand him the crumpled dollar bills. “Oh,” he says. “You sell?”

Mohammad has four children. The oldest is 17, the youngest—he has to count forwards on his hand from 1997—is 9. They live in Queens, too, with their mother, his first wife. She’s Bangladeshi but they met here. She divorced him a few years back when she fell in love with another man. After that, Mohammad went back to Bangladesh “to make another marriage.” It sounds like he says “mat-iz.” He gives his first wife money for their children.

“Wada?” He pauses to ask a passerby. “Cold dlink?”

“No thank you.”

“OK, bye.”

He turns to me. “You matiz?”

I’m wearing a wedding ring. I am, for all intents and purposes, married, although my partnership is not valid in 46 states and, until 1993, was flatly illegal in 14. For simplicity’s sake, I shake my head. No. It’s not a lie, not exactly.

“No?” he asks. “What happen?”

I just shrug silently. He leaves it alone.

Mohammad says he has tried to get a job in a restaurant, but he can’t because of his beard. The weather is getting cold, and he knows he won’t be able to sell cold drinks for much longer. So he has decided to try to get a job with the City. His options are limited because he can’t read or write much English. But he wouldn’t mind working with trash. “I make cleaning job,” he says, “OK. No problem. Garbage OK. I like this.” He looks appraisingly towards City Hall.

“Wada?” he asks the next person, and the next. “Wandallah.”