On nights when he worked the closing shift, he just talked and talked. He told stories about Vietnam. He remembered his family and his house back in Louisiana. He talked about how he liked to cook.

Through these conversations, Cross came to realize that Rlickman worried constantly about what people thought of him. When they talked about his antics, he asked his boss whether his whistling was annoying. He asked if he had gone too far in Provincetown.

“He wanted people to care about him. He wanted me to like him, he wanted people around him to like him,” she says. “He wanted to be cared about. I think there was a lot of pain inside of him from other times.”

“Most of the clowns I’ve met are crying,” she adds. “On the outside they’re smiling but on the inside they are sad. That’s how Perri was, you know, a lost soul.”

At Au Bon Pain, many staff members cried the first few days after they learned of his death.

Over at Leo’s, even as they make final preparations for the memorial service on Tuesday, the Bezjian brothers say they cannot believe the clown had died.

“I personally believe the whole thing is a hoax and he’s going to come back,” Raffi Bezjian says.

He pauses. “He did leave us with really good memories.”

At the memorial yesterday, Chris Halliday drops off a page he had written about the friend he ate with every couple of weeks.

“We’re all clowns,” his tribute reads. “We get up in the morning, we put on our game face, pull on our work pants, slip on our shiny shoes, jump in our bank-owned cars and drive off to an office somewhere, or a store.”

The two met sitting at the window counter and talking about the weather. They met again, Rlickman always decked out in his clown get-up, but it wasn’t until their fourth or fifth meeting that Halliday first broached the topic.

Even as they continued sharing meals, Halliday never could figure out what had inspired Perry Rlickman to become Perri the Hobo.

“He liked talking with kids because they didn’t see he was a little bit seedy,” he says. “They just saw a clown.”

Halliday says he will miss the “gentle, good-humored” entertainer.

“He’d only been here for a couple of summers, but he seemed like a fixture,” he says. “I keep expecting I’m going to see him. Especially now the sun is out and there’s lots of people on the street, I expect him to come around the corner with that damn whistle.”

—Staff writer Andrew S. Holbrook can be reached at holbr@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Daniela J. Lamas can be reached at lamas@fas.harvard.edu.