Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

32. GOD IS DEAD MOTHERFUCKER:

Nothing ever mattered back then to me more than a five dollar bill so I never stood around to debate the merits of what it was people were doing or not doing and I neither cared nor knew either if what they were doing was legal clean sound moral safe or wise (for none of that was my part) and I soon caught on that the less you say the better off you are and I learned also real quickly what end of a girl was the business end and I learned that from watching and observing everything - action debate deterioration danger death and destitution - and there never was no Prince John to cover my bridge or no Lady Jane to wipe my ass with love and comfort or wallow in the same grief I was wallowing in so EVEN AT MY AGE one just had to go on and quit slobbering and one of the funniest things I remember too is when some one of those black jazz guys came roosting through the stairwell yelling "is Mohammed in the building? is Mohammed in this fucking goddamn building!" and it was funny to me because it was 1968 the dead of Winter cold as Hell itself and probably darker and I'd never before heard of anyone named Mohammed and it made me wonder what was going on all around me because I did often see black guys along the street handing out a newspaper called 'Muhammad speaks' or something like it and it was a sort of special world-of-blacks publication to which white people were never really especially invited to partake so I never quite knew what it was and here this tall cool black jazz dude was screaming along the stairwells about Mohammed and where he was while all I ever wanted to know instead was WHO he was and now looking back that all seems funny to me and another thing I can say with certainty was how baleful TASTE was back then - taste being a sign of class and class being nothing I was ever living amongst and the only old movies anyone was ever watching on the little TV screens I saw was always the same sort of stupid 1940's crappy movie with an Irish priest or two and some poor down-and-out church or parish hall about to go under and some newfangled sad-faced priest comes in and whips up the boy chorus made up of schoolyard Irish nobodies to win the people over and save the church and the little old discredited priest becomes the hero all over again and WHEW FOR SURE! I never understood a'one of those movies and was glad of it and I'd be willing to bet just as well that just as many lives were ruined and sizzled by that sentimental crap as by any of the scrappy realism I was seeing and living and if strength is breeding and character the result then well just as somehow Good can come of Evil so too can a certain type of Salvation come from broken dreams bad hands horrible memories and dignity's loss and no one ever razzle-dazzled me with anything more lethal than a sword and a command and sure as I was to survive everything else I was able o defy the Death of Reason and Logic and - in point of fact - the Death of God his very self (as Time the Magazine had once fatuously postulated some time before).