Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

106. YOUR DISTANT CRUD WOULD STUPIFY ME STILL (nyc, 1967):

The guy had only one hand - I may have mentioned that once before - but the hand that he had was more adept at doing things than the two hands of most other people and he could purse-snatch or pickpocket quicker than flame and with that strange handicap he moved swiftly and the swiftness was aided by the distraction he caused by just HAVING the one hand because people naturally gravitated towards staring or concentrating on what that other arm was doing or lacking or whatever and that certainly drew attention from his actual activity - his name was Len Levy and he'd come through the very bowels of New York City having first grown up in the old Hell's Kitchen when it really meant something and then - after eventually losing the hand in a brutal knife fight - spending lots of time in both jail and recuperative hospitals all provided to him free of charge by the wonderful City of New York but he never spent a day with his eyes closed and could recite back most every detail of things he'd seen and stuff he'd learned in all this travail for he had a mind like a trap - the proverbial cop mind noticing everything forgetting nothing - and like a detective he could tell you instantly when something was amiss : a bad license plate on a car or a fake sticker or a bogus story or a fake excuse and there wasn't ever an agenda that got by him if it wasn't absolutely one hundred percent exact and on the up and up and because of all these reasons he moved forward with an absolute 'no-stick' quality to him and he seemed to just land in money all the time - I'd met him the very first time outside an old lousy bar on the west end of 37th Street where the horses were kept for some of the horse-drawn carts and things that paraded through midtown and it was on a really old-looking sawdust covered wooden ramp where I met up with him after that to ask some things of him - like what he wanted with me and how he had gotten mixed in with the service-industry crowd around there (he said that for a guy with his one hand it was the second most pleasant thing he could do with the other hand) and he took to that little ramp and horse-garage area pretty well taking care of the feedings and keeping things in order - as he put it - a little bit at a time 'never too much work to get me worn but never to little to bore me' and since he wasn't in it for the money he'd figured he might as well do something he enjoyed and I'd occasionally go there to visit with him (he'd sometmes sit and be playing cards with one or another Hispanic guy there) just to pass time and watch what went on - carriage guys coming and going bushels of feed and oats and stuff being carried in or out and of course the offal-wagons which would always need tending and the whole place was - though pretty compact - ample enough too to take care of everything needed and there was a blacksmith area with a great-looking workbench and tools and strips of leather and harnesses and things - all the sort of items which fascinated me both in their real presence and also in the strange fact of their just BEING there like that in the middle of some God-awful strange city situation - once again I was taken in by the total incongruity of so much of what I saw - a tack shop and saddlery right there in the grimy middle of westside Manhattan running and functioning just as quietly and steadily as any other outrageous surprise in the middle of a city like this and I found out he had a two-room apartment on 41st Street and often also just stayed right there and slept in the back of the horse-room redolent as it was with the warmth and odor of straw hay horse and manure - actually a quite wonderful and very inviting aroma all told - and he kept some belongings in two trunks there (into which he pointed out to me once also went any of the items he got from his small steady stream of theft : jewelry money glasses wallets gloves keys cards - anything he could get away with) and he had people who'd buy from him whatever he wished to sell later on so that ALL TOGETHER whatever rank and foul deeds he did - obscure as they were - they managed to come back to his own benefit over time and the amazing thing I learned and a fact that's always stayed with me was that on the 'surface' of Manhattan what is presented to the 'public' and the outsiders who visit and travel through and turn all the cash registers of the city is ONE thing but the gritty reality of it all BENEATH that is quite another thing - layers upon layers of corrupt dealing theft and danger over which is slid some sort of criminal grease by which it all slides together and over - one piece after the next - and even with all the hands out for parts and percentages it provides enough lucrative heaps of endeavor so as to satisfy an entire underculture of graft corruption and thievery - the very sort of stuff which is NEVER really mentioned or if mentionied is never delved into by anyone INCLUDING authority and law most of which is just as much involved in all of it as anyone else - and the shiney veneer of what is New York City as we know it is only one very small part of the much greater reality - which probably feeds thousands and prospers as many too.