Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

28. YOU COULD SAY:

And I remember other nights and days when things were a lot different and when the situation of my own life was very different too I remember the late night walks along Fifth Avenue along the streets of the 70’s the apartment building with its ill-faced modernism for its day wherein Charlie Parker died at 995 Fifth in like 1953 and the Frick Collection right nearby that vast and sordid looking old mansion athwart the street and set back behind its black grill fence and the grand masonry of its military like and low-slung granite walls and across from the street right there the huge strange statue in the park along the park’s rock wall too the tribute statue to WWI regimental local dead the monuments the benches and those flat dead broke and saddened tired sleeping upon the and the ill-gotten gains of the street when secret things were secret things the third floor room all painted hard in red and able to be seen from the street the woman or girl within it straightening things moving pictures around and pottery her figure just visible in the dimming light along the street and myself beleaguered and troubled and without so much wishing too somehow that I was up there acceptable and part of that other world but instead young broke and shattered going from spot to spot yet proclaiming a conqueror a city all my own every spot and step every brick and alley and the people would come up to me with their missionary foils and hand me leaflets and tracts and say ‘my son you are troubled and lost’ and I’d look back defiant and say ‘I am nothing of the sort but it’s for sure you are’ and they’d bless me and go on and did I miss them ? NO YOU COULD SAY I DID NOT!