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By Root 2248 0

the Acropolis. Alexander stood before him and said, Ask any favor you choose of me. Name anything, because I’m Alexander the Great and that basically means whatever it is, I can get it for you. Diogenes looked up at him, squinted, maybe gave his scrotum a lackadaisical scratch, shrugged, and said, Get out of my sun. Can one help but admire that? We are animals who like to constantly congratulate ourselves on all our sweetness and light and triumph of spirit, and nobody is supposed to choose to live like a dog. I’ve always admired this man, his presence at the same place and time as the birth of philosophy, like a voice crying, not in the wilderness, but from the wilderness in the human heart, in the midst of civilization. The solemn golden machineries of politics, learning, thought, goodness and grace and virtue and art—especially art—all we call our society, needs Diogenes in the middle of it, a human proud and content to live like an animal, to remind us not to mistake the frippery of human civilization for anything too distant or distinct from what’s already there in pigs and monkeys and dogs, to remind us that for all the sweetness and light of our great cities and great machines and great art, we are nothing terribly more magnificent than apes with clothes on our bodies, words in our mouths, and heads inflated with willful delusions.

And now I arrive at my point: if ancient Athens were late-twentieth-century New York City, Diogenes the Cynic would be Leon Smoler. Leon the Cynic. Leon lived a perennially criminal existence, yet always managed to evade punishment without really trying. Leon cared so little for the laws of mankind that he saw our civilization as a sort of cosmic joke. His were never crimes of passion, or ignorance, or opportunism, or of any particularly malicious intent. There was certainly nothing at all political in his habitual criminality, either. He did not believe that the victims of his crimes in any way deserved them, and he did not imagine any sort of irreparably corrupt system that deserved to be gamed. Leon’s were crimes of cheerful and utter indifference. If Leon Smoler had not been blessed with an essentially peaceful demeanor (or not cursed with his unwieldy physique), he may in another life have been a dangerous man, for this indifference of his unquestionably bordered on the sociopathic. When he wanted something, he took it, and the way the world seemed incapable of meting out any consequences to him was nothing short of magic.

The mention of magic is apropos, for Leon was a magician as well, in a nonmetaphorical sense. When he wasn’t performing Shakespeare in the subway, he scraped together a supplementary income performing magic shows for children’s birthday parties, for office Christmas parties, etc. On such occasions, Leon dazzled his gaping, clapping, awestruck, oohing and aahing audiences with his magic tricks, with his born performer’s showmanship, with his histrionic, always-in-motion and colossal body crammed (which seemed a magic trick in itself) into a plus-plus-size tuxedo—the decidedly old-fashioned kind, with the wing collar, black bow tie, vest, and cummerbund, the damp velvety burst of a red rose stuck in the buttonhole of his lapel, and a glittering blue lamé cape draped across his shoulders, decorated with moons and stars that Leon had industriously snipped with safety scissors out of white felt and glued on himself. I myself never learned the secrets of most of his better tricks, and thus they remained magic to me. He could do things with a deck of ordinary playing cards that bent the laws of physics. He could do things with a set of linking metal hoops that subverted the space-time continuum. He could do things with coins and wands and torches that defied gravity and electromagnetics. He could do things with silk scarves and hats and gloves and tea sets and tablecloths that momentarily unified the theory of relativity with quantum mechanics. He was also an accomplished juggler.

Later, I would submit myself to the role of assistant during Leon’s magic shows: I clad