Bezjian stops talking for a second to pound on the restaurant’s front window. Azad is sitting on the ledge outside.

The artist first met Rlickman at the diner this winter, and the two quickly became friends.

“He’s a clown,” Azad says, laughing. “How could you not be friends with a clown?”

Tears For a Clown

On Father’s Day last year, Perri the Hobo grabbed Wendy Appel’s hand. That was the usual routine.

But then, Appel recalls, “he looked at my hand and said, ‘I can see you’re not married.’”

He asked her to have coffee with him and offered to carry the bundles she was hauling to work. She declined.

Three weeks later they met again. Again he asked and she said no.

More weeks went by before the moment in late July when they truly bonded, the day when Rlickman had sudden health trouble and Appel drove him to the VA Hospital in Jamaica Plain. During the three-and-a-half weeks he spent there last August, he called her from the hospital several times a day.

The telephone relationship developed into a romantic relationship, which lasted for several months, and the two remained friends until his death.

The fluke of being around when he needed to be driven to the hospital made the friendship seem to Appel like something that was meant to be.

“We had a spiritual, karmic connection,” she says. “There’s no question in my mind about it. It was karmic.”

He made “instant connections” with people, she says—not just with a few friends but with many strangers every day. She echoes friends who say he was a master at reading people and their reactions.

“He was very spiritual,” she says. “He would know who he could stop, who he couldn’t stop, who to stand in front of, who to let walk by.”

She recalls fondly that he liked tying balloon swans, because swans mate for life.