PLUCK YOU.(The Talk of the Town)

A couple of weeks ago--on a real Christmas-miracle kind of day, cold and heartless in every other respect--the city's two most famous homeless guys both caught a break. First, of course, there was Pale Male, the celebrity hawk and victim of the hour, who had been rendered nestless six days earlier, when the co-op board of 927 Fifth Avenue semi-surreptitiously dismantled the rampart of sticks that he and various mates had called home since 1993. Hounded and shamed by the usual coalition of bird-lovers and co-op haters, besieged by hawk chic, the building agreed to take Pale Male back. Crisis, if not revolution, averted.

Then, there was Al Goldstein. Goldstein, as every schoolboy knows, founded the magazine Screw and served as the foulmouthed host of the scruffy public-access pornography program "Midnight Blue." In recent years, he has come down in the world. His company went bankrupt, and he lost everything, including a mansion in Florida and a six-story town house on East Sixty-first Street; he did time at Rikers for harassing a former employee (he published her name and number in Screw, along with some indelicate collages, and urged readers to call her), then got three years' probation for doing the same, more or less, to his third wife. A shoplifting bust, diabetes, depression, a wife (his fifth) afflicted with Crohn's disease, a son who won't talk to him (and vice versa), and, finally, in recent months, full-bore homelessness--three weeks at the Bellevue men's shelter, a few nights in Central Park, then reassignment to a shelter in East Harlem. "This homeless thing is so bad," he said the other day. "It's just dirty and humiliating."

Goldstein's predicament did not inspire angry throngs to take to the streets, as they had for Pale Male. There was perhaps a feeling toward him, as apparently there must be toward all homeless human beings, that he had brought this on himself. Still, some people stood by him. One of them was a lawyer, Charles DeStefano, who, on the same day that the hawk won his reprieve, informed Goldstein that he'd found a place for him--no 927 Fifth, to be sure, ...