Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

16. I HAVE SEEN IDIOCY AND ITS NAME IS.....
(A visit to Easton PA)

There had to be something in the hands of the storefront clown that I couldn't see - for it was producing balloons seemingly from nowhere and the passing little kids were both overjoyed and intriqued but to me the clown looked evil as all get-out and a poor substitute and besides, for the end of another morning, the mothers looked bedraggled (even the guy next me, he leaned over and boozily muttered 'look at these women, they all look like whores'). The men all looked too skinny, like farmers just in town for a visit, and the parmesan cheese guy outside the dirty little pizza joint looked downright sinful, dirty and spent. Two blocks away was the Easton Bus Depot, where 'DelVal Transit' kept dropping buses marked with local streets and towns and malls - buses which dropped a few more lost souls into town and just as quickly took five more away. The dark-haired girl, whom I actually did see and watch as she eventually walked over to this clown scene, had gotten off the bus with two small carry-on type bags and she was on her cell phone the whole time - talking in some beautifully inflected Russian-accent - with her 'boss', evidently back in New York City, who had (from what I gathered) sent her out to Easton to meet someone else who was to take her to some party or seasonal-convention or something, where other girls were eventually to meet her also, and they were to 'work' the event. No one had showed up yet to pick her up, nor were there any other girls there to meet her. So, watching the stupid clown and listening at the same time, I decided - for fun, OK - to conclude my scenario with the idea that she was a whore in town for that event, sent there by her pimp or whatever they're called, back in the big city, to work the gents at the event, make as much money as possible, stay a day or two, and return by the end of the weekend (or whatever) with a bundle of cash, of which she'd get, perhaps, 30 percent. I wanted to nudge the guy who'd just commented to me about the women present, but his taste in locals had already precluded from me any idea of his being interested in outsourced sexual-labor - that being, for him, too far advanced a level of economics and business theory. On the other hand, what it said for the big honcho back in NYC went unanswered : were things that bad now in Manhattan that he had to send his finest, imported Russian talent, like some caviar-tray, out to the dry barriers of one derelict and wheezing Easton, Pennsylvania? Was there no 'tradition and individual talent' (to quote T. S. Eliot) in eastern Pennsylvania to overcome the dearth of local opportunity? Could not the beautiful, young beauty serving bagels, eggs muffins and coffee in the right-here-nearby-at-the-corner coffee palace do just as well (believe me, could so). Was there not nearby an entire mountainside habitated by Lafayette College beauties willing to make a few extra dollars by simply walking down the hill and doing some piecework?

The answer to all of those questions would be - 'of course, of course'. But this was another place - this was a distant field of opportunity bisected by morals and homilies about the correct life and the hundred little German churches surrounding the local hillsides for miles around - Moravian cemetaries replete with people so stiff they had to be buried standing up, local mothers still in their curdled bonnets and hats pledging to continue churning whatever it is they churn in the afterlife - rules, procedures, laws, regulations. This was the place where no foul politician or salesman or lawman dare show his face. This was endless row after row of broken storefronts, emptied and derelict buildings, ghosts of old hotels, long-gone divestitures of purpose and meaning leaving behind only the re-used and re-used again skeletons of old buildings with no longer any purpose for their own standing. This was an emptied and saddened town-center ringed by highways with malls and clumps of stores sending errand-bound locals on their crazed and enticing ways towards Hells of their own making.

In this center of the little city, (an Easton Fire Department Captain's car rushes by, followed by two enormous firetrucks of same, sirens blasting, lights blazing; traffic - or what there is of it - somehow manages to spin to a halt), the tiny clumps of people I see are made up of, I realize, only the lonely few who've been left behind - the car-less, the barely shoe'd, those with nowhere to go and little money to take them there. All of that accounts for the deportment they carry with them - a slow, bedraggled, tempestuous, snide, shady yet subdued haze bespeaking nothing more than suspicion and a certain hunger. The clown, I decided, just perfectly represents them. The few children staring back, and myself watching mysterious balloons appear from nowhere, are realizing - in some bedraggled and winsome way - a future that actually very few will EVER experience. A future within a maze. An ending in a story with no way out.

I was, at moment too, overhearing the Spanish spoken by another couple nearby. He spoke swiftly, while she nodded, in words I really couldn't understand but which, at first, I did not realize was Spanish. I really thought he'd just said "I guess tell your horse it's Gina."