BY CLAUDIA CARLIN & FANG CUI

Feb. 8, 2002

Jim Pine is now also helping Michael Duke, 60, turn his life around by teaching him the tools of the street book trade. Barely recovering from deep depression suffered after an attack in 1988, Duke, once a writer and a college literature major, is a homeless man.

Duke functions as a unpaid "point dog," sniffing out troves of books abandoned by New Yorkers moving out of their apartment. Duke, however, used to be a collector of fine literature. Says Pine: “He has a taste for first editions, especially of Joyce and Beckett, and used to show up every Sunday morning when I started out here in the late eighties.” Then Duke would disappear for long periods and reappear, trailing problems he could not master.

Pine says he feels empathy for the man he has known as a peer twenty years ago. “Mike is smart and extremely knowledgeable. So I’m trying to teach him the tricky part of dealing in books, for example how to move stock, fair pricing, changing his mindset from collector to merchandiser.” Pine also praises Duke’s honesty and loyalty. “He looks out for me. I trust him.”

Today, Duke chooses not to smile. A cracked tooth broke and dislodged his upper bridge, he is in pain and skipped shaving. Suddenly, he opens his mouth wide in a grimace that bares his upper gums and two metal implants. Then, sheepish. “That’s what homelessness looks like.”

Duke says he is willing and able to break out of the cycle of dependency and depression that landed him on New York streets 18 months ago. Last Dec. 12, at four in the morning, he was rescued, “a comatose derelict” from a subway bench at the end of the F line by a team of volunteers from the Transit Authority Outreach Program. They found him a bed in a shelter near Bellevue Hospital, where a case manager arranged for public assistance and treatment for Duke’s chronic depression. In the past month, Duke boasts that he’s added 10 pounds to his 5-feet 9-inch, 130-pound frame.

Meanwhile, he is reconnecting with his lifelong love of books by learning a new trade. With Jim Pine as his ‘tutor’ in the intricacies of selecting and pricing used books, Duke is looking forward to the time when “I can crawl out of homelessness and make it on my own.”

The connection between the two men dates back to the early '80's. Duke remembers: “I must have bought some $10,000 worth of books from Jim. Money was no problem then.” For years, after graduating from Queens College in the early '60's with a major in literature and philosophy, Duke worked as a writer of annual reports and speeches for bank executives in New York. He also penned a series of poems and some essays and was encouraged to publish.

Then in 1988, after an argument with his landlord, he was attacked by thugs who broke his ribs and hit him on the back of the head. In and out of hospitals, Duke could no longer work, withdrew into himself, constantly wore earplugs which he says “to shut out the world.” As he began his slide into depression, savings and friends melted away.

He hopes to be fitted with a new set of teeth after waiting for hours on line at NYU’s free dental clinic. He shakes his head: “And to think that I spent $6,000 on that bridge.”

Speaking a quasi-fluent French, which he picked up during his travels to France and Morocco, Duke says the word that best fits his new line of work is ‘colporteur’ rather than peddler.

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