In Manhattan
He called himself "Whimsical Fatman" (though he wasn't at all fat), "Whimsy" to his friends, and they numbered in the dozens. He was fifty-seven years old, penniless, white-haired, and he smiled almost constantly.
At the age of forty-five he left his wife and his two children—a boy and a girl, nice kids—and his job in Raleigh, North Carolina, as a Fuel Systems Design Engineer for a company serving the aerospace industry. He came to Manhattan and almost instantly fell into what he still called "the easy life."
For five years, as long as his personal savings lasted (he had left his wife and kids with the family account, which was substantial) he drifted from one sleazy hotel to another even sleazier, until at last he was forced to find, as he called them, "the meanest accommodations that Mother Fate has to offer"—the streets. Occasionally, if the weather was especially bad, he sought out an abandoned building or a particularly secluded part of the subway, but he liked to avoid these places. They were dangerous and lonely, and they went against the grain of what he felt he was doing (or had told himself twelve years earlier he was doing)—getting to know "the real people," the "naked ones"—the men that society had tossed away and who, therefore, lived "according to their wits and sinew."
He had gotten to know these men, and the occasional woman, as well as anyone. He had become one of them. And he had long since stopped using pretentious little phrases to describe himself and his "ambitions." He admitted quite freely and happily that he had few ambitions beyond scrounging up his next meal and a place to sleep.
His name was William Devine.