He was a December baby; born on the thirteenth, which coincidentally happened to be Friday in the year of his birth.  From the very start, his mother called him her little prince, which very quickly became simply Prince, and everyone called him that.  By July of his fifth year, just before he was to start school, and his mother died, he no longer remembered the name that was appended to his birth certificate, if in fact he ever knew it, for he’d never been addressed by that name.

His father died six months before he was born; knifed to death in a bar fight, so he never knew him, and his mother had no known relatives, so he was shuttled from foster home to foster home for two  years.

A few days after his seventh birthday, the second year in a row when he’d had no celebration to mark the passage of time, he ran away from the elderly black couple who were his ninth or tenth set of foster parents.  He no longer kept track.

For six years, he lived on the streets.  He became the unofficial ward of the homeless; men and women who wandered from street corner to street corner, from alley way to alley way, subsisting off the castoffs of a society to whom they were invisible.

In January of his thirteenth year he had become more than a mere mascot for his ‘family.’  Small of stature, looking much younger than he actually was, he’d become expert at gaining the sympathy of pedestrians rushing to work, who were made to feel virtuous for giving a few coins, or the occasional bill, to the cute little brown-skinned waif who accosted them, looking up at them with liquid brown eyes that could shed tears on cue.  Tourists from out of town were especially easy marks.  To them, he was part of the ‘local color’ of the city, and they often asked him to pose for photographs; which he was more than happy to do, for a fee of five dollars.  When none of this worked, he could still separate them from any loose change in their pockets.  His small hands could dip in and out without even disturbing the wrinkles or folds of the fabric.