losers, said by the man on the same road — "Lenz whispered to himself ‘Jesus what…"

The scene's whole moral transaction in two lines: the bottom addresses him directly and gently, and he answers by filing everyone in the alley — the Sterno men, the children, the chanting figure — under a word that has to hold for all of them so it need never touch him. The denial that keeps a using man upright is exactly this reflex, the insistence that the road he is on belongs to losers who are somehow not him.