Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

59. THE BASTARD KING OF 22ND STREET:

'Put markers on all the ovaries boys and sketch chalk lines on your soul for there's too many mornings left to decide which way to go' and it was never any different NO DIFFERENT no matter where I was - Coenties Slip or walking down Grand Street all the way to Corlears Hook (where they used to frame the ships) hundreds of small people sitting broken on benches and it seemed they all were still in shock bemoaning the olden depths of World War II or Auschwitz Treblinka or Bergen Belsen itself - whether seen as shadow cinema glimpse or ghost - the mass discrimination of mean magic and all its men : tired souls looking for gravesites numbered elbows too tired to grumble short fat men in umbrellas and raincoats with busted-up faces salivating at the water's edge and the small dairy restaurants with their all-night lights and the small civic halls of the one-door bookshops and musty old cafes where the revolutionaries sat reading and the philosophers dozed between bouts of paranoia and bagels both spread with a schmear of longing and angst and fear like something the junkman brought on sorry wagons with sagging horses each morning at the sound of the bell and the first light of dawn and you can call it run-on crap whenever you want but I loved it - the book was called 'Who Deciphered Gabriel Gaul?' and in it I read 'you're rotting away from the outside boy' (in translation of course - hopefully accurate) and that was the first time I'd seen what I'd before only heard but when I heard it it was always about someone who was sick or dying and that person was said to have been 'rotting away from the inside out' or something like that but this was different and somehow seemed fiercer and it came from someone who bore all the appearances of at least knowing what he was talking about from his end of the gun-sight : from a far and distant land but still about cities and urban culture and the personal anxiety and the dilemmas of people who have to come to terms with their own selves and destinies on the streets and in the shelter halls and then (as I read) one day he was just found dead - a crude hoodlum with problems of that day and just like Villon or anybody else I heard someone stammer "I'm the bastard king of 22nd Street you should know that already and if there's anybody ever in my way he's going down like the Titanic in a bowl of soup" and then Max Pariah himself - who had just showed up to read the storyline - turned and walked away and left it all behind.