Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

141. MY MOUTH WANTED TO ASK BUT MY LIPS STAYED SHUT:

And it never was as if I'd found a medicine man in a ball or something but where she was standing within that small store I knew I could feel and reach a million other things - Perth Amboy was actually one of those typical wasted New Jersey towns wherein everything of any worth or value or any historical remnant had long ago been erased into a strange and vague blankness of empty nothing filled by people with absolutely no brains nor understanding - one of those places where the past has been wiped clean and I mean wiped completely and there was left an absolute emptiness filled with newcomers or lost souls or complete vacuous idiots intent on uncivilizing anything in their way in order to make for themselves what went as a 'better' life in an absolutely evil way and in fact Perth Amboy itself once did have a storied place and history in all that occurred early on : less then a half mile from where her very place was in fact had been once a great waterfront teeming with vessels and piled high with oyster shells and a clamming industry and sheds and clam-shucker and oyster-cleaning industries which brought in a great and worthy trade of vessels and merchants and drayage and waterfront and inland traffic and at the same spot somewhat later on too had been one of the early slave-trade markets one of the busiest - ships and boats bringing fresh-slave-captives from over the ocean and all the marketing and buying and selling of this odd human cargo took place on platforms and sheds at this very spot and it was the capital too of East Jersey the colony of which Benjamin Franklin's loyalist son was Governor and who - once the revolution had succeeded and the royal colony of Ambo Point was turned over - was arrested in the Proprietary House just up the hill (the old Royal Governor's Mansion) by his father Benjamin Franklin himself and the earliest church in the fledgling nation (St. Peter's Episcopal) still stands along with its pock-marked graveyard and gravestones which once had been bombarded from the harbor by troops in boats nearby and in which also the first free Negro voter after emancipation was buried and in the Civil War era also this area had housed and hospitalized troops and prisoners transported here and the old barracks and town hall and all the other early and Civil War era buildings and markets stood just above the harbor in a circular plateau now called Market Street - but like the people and the rest of the place everything was bereft and without any idea of its own past - the people were immigrant sojourners from besotted nations around the globe and blacks and Puerto Ricans and Dominicans and Mexicans and the rest now filled the place up in droves with layers upon layers of their own tactless and tasteless cultural artifacts and habits and mores all of which had subsumed this once-vivid place into a type of nameless mess still called by its old and now erroneous name - no one knew and no one cared - but in this lady's old antique shop and in her presence I could sense and feel the utter deprivation which had overtaken everything and it was all alive here as if yet it was today's world - vivid and steady as ever - I could hear the voices and sounds of afar and as she spoke and looked about I knew she was viewing a different reality - one wherein the harbor still glistened and teemed with people and trade and water-craft and sailboats of cargo and people and livestock and foodstuffs came and went - the small waterfront was filled with activity and the squalid work of thousands - smokes and smells shouts and oaths and affirmations abounded : she knew it all and was still part of it all : and there really once was a time when work was solid and people were not frivolous (though yes they were some of them in chains - oddly paradoxical no?) but many things arose to my mind that I wished to ask here but did not would not and had I heard answers I'd have been astounded anyway : were the same merchants and tradesmen who worked the slave trade the ones who worked the counting houses and law offices along the street - English gentlemen and great merchants of commerce at once together on each side of the Atlantic ? were the great waves of Jewish merchant-dom yet started there if not here ? counting lists and names and pennies and weights ? announcing descriptions of strong young men and women being led off ships for inspection and onto the trading platforms and auction blocks ? young African women sold for sexual service and servitude as slaves being 'inspected' by salacious buyers intent on viewing their naked bodies ? renegade and un-cooperative black bucks sold as slaves and prisoners being beaten and whipped into submission before hundreds ? WHO was behind all this activity and WHY ? where was this money based and where did it go? and I'd wanted to ask of her what basis any of this made for the establishment of this small harbor city she was so much an ancient part of - the original 'Indians' who were once here now gone decimated broken and dead HOW had all that occurred and how were the woods and marshes cleansed ? - my mouth so wanted to ask but my lips they stayed shut.

140. THE SECRET REVELATION OF JOHN:

Any secret revelation of John had always been lost on me and I was salvaged only by a savior in my imaginings – savage at best – so it was felt that ‘at least I knew where I stood’ and marvelous entities like asteroids and comets portents in the sky overhead lanterns of light or doom sparkling sentinels of something to come they each had momentous occasions and then were gone : something coming something here and over as quick : the lighthouse at Alexandria perhaps had one on me but I was not really too sure and any ‘wonders of the world’ were just that – wonders of the world and not of me nor my world – which bore a different language and had a different edge was something of silence and something of dread and I’d walked these many moons with burdens on my back yet soon as destination neared (it seemed) I’d start out again and just keep moving - ‘no rest for the weary no sleep for the dazed’ or whatever that phrase once was : life had changed one million times since I first took air and though I’d never flown I’d certainly more than hovered (this I knew) – Patmos Pharos Phoenicia any one of those places would have been enough but I had all three – I lived in a library deep and one of my very own persuasion where things came out for me and rested steadily before my eyes and hands and I partook of that whatever and I kept clinging as long as I might and as was said of the Alexandria Lighthouse on the Island of Pharos in the harbor of ancient Alexandria ‘Description of it falls short, the eyes fail to comprehend it, and words are inadequate, so vast is the spectacle’ and likely too for me as much.

140. THE GOLDEN AGE - WHEN IDEAS RAN LIKE WATER:

And then I just got sick and tired of everything else - the sports angle the ball players the rappers the geeks the business types who sport new facial hair and a profit the priests in long black cars with nowhere to go the prisoners with flaps on their taxpayer wallets the flim-flam soldiers of fortune being taken for a ride the monastery types riding side-saddle on the hoof the out-of-work waitresses pretending to see and the people who listen to them PRETENDING not to see and see-through shirts and basket skirts and little girls bending over at five PM to pick up a paper for daddy and then writing their stories so everyone reads and the maniac dousing the fires the homeowner losing his keys while cutting some grass that doesn't belong to him and the appraiser who stops by to appraise while he tells stories of rack and ruination the bikers the killers the tavern-owners fighting hard to stay clean the cop on the beat staying mean the hostess the pieman the lawyer and the cheat EVERY last one of them useless and stupid as anything else - I got sick and tired of it all together and decided then and there to retire to bedlam with everything I owned and that took five minutes and I'm back already building bonfires of constricted hay and the padding from the dowager's sofa : 'but lemme' in but lemme' in please please before Sparky comes home' : and if I cared to explain what I'm saying I'd say it but I don't so I'll forget about that one : and then I heard some guy going on 'and they cut the bad flesh from the open wound and that allowed them to sew it up and you know the cleaner the edges when you get stitched up the better the heal and the mend and if it's straight it'll all grow back together again' and I wasn't sure if that was bullshit or the Thomas Gospel truth and I really didn't care either but I wished whoever it was well and good healing too and I'd gotten my first serious stitches at seven and more at eleven and everything had healed up right well so I had NO dog in that race or whatever those political idiots say when they say it and you know the word 'idiot' in ancient Greece used to mean precisely 'one who did not take part in social affairs or community life' and nowadays it seems it's precisely the opposite wouldn't you say and just yesterday this guy said to me (we were talking about the Greeks and all their old ideas - beat that) he said 'Greece! a people who haven't had a new idea in 2000 years' and I suppose that was his way of summing up lost potential or for the least a certainly shut-down idea-generation since the Golden Age when ideas ran like water through the streets of that ancient land and I suppose it did make some sense but who knows (and who cares) now and like those old guys said 'no harm comes to a good man after his death' and yeah I guess all right to that I second that promotion or whatever advertising lingo covers all that today and if another person ever says 'it's Greek to me' I guess I'll just have to murder his ass and you know how today a large penis is all the rage ? well back in the day of Greece it was the opposite and small penises were seen as the ideal and the reason for that was that (I was being told this) 'they were far easier to slip into the ass' and maybe that was a joke but I never knew and by that token what the Hell Jesus was gay too - get this - out in the desert with 12 men all the time with nothing under their robes sleeping and hanging together and one of his favorite sayings (same guy was telling me this) was 'get thee BEHIND me Satan' which certainly proves the point doesn't it (lucky he didn't just say 'Stan' instead of 'Satan') and when you look at it anyway the only Christianity we know now is the Christianity which was taken over and rewritten and filtered through the Greeks anyway and Aramaic be damned (that was the original language of which all this Jesus stuff was really spoken) and the Greeks it was who extrapolated it all and digested it and put it into the form we have today anyway so what the Hell it was probably all toyed with and tinkered around with by a once-great but now PETERED-out culture that back then didn't any longer know what it was doing and had no energy to do it with anyway - SO - be careful with that religion stuff you never know where it's been and if Jesus was a guy than there could have been a sin and it wasn't really original because I'm sure it had been done before - if not by the Greeks than somebody.

139. SURPLUS MANKIND FOR A SEASON - So What Else Did It Matter? (nyc, 1967)

I'd spent time reading hours in fact reading and I was determined to continue that effect as I went along but wherever I turned of course was a distraction and you can't just go on reading anyway - you miss the life you're living - like the person on a travel-trip whose head is endlessly buried in a map finding out where he is while all about him where he 'really' is passes by him while he delves into the map to determine the fabricated 'where' of his real 'where' - it's like that but no matter : I was not to be : no John Henry Abbott was I in the belly of the beast to break out as a free man and wield a knife to kill a waiter and I was sure in no way would I detract from my own glimmer by negative acts as I was looking only ahead somehow through the glaze of doubt and insidious hesitation along with moving through the streets AS IF I'd always lived here anyway - men with golf clubs I'd see plodding through Spring weather as bad as it got and I'd never understand where they were headed with that equipment whether in midtown somewhere or to the far fringes of cityscape where perhaps 'golf courses' really did exist (certainly not here uncommon of sight and sound in cramped quarters and overlapping grids) but that was a luxury of other men settled men stronger and wealthy and secure and steady-fast-solid and I could maybe understand the horseback riders I'd see at a gait or galloping through portions of the park as they came out from the stables along the westernmost edge of the park area - perfectly attired men and women on horseback with regal postures and claims to something glorified as they went along past tree and shrub clopping first on pavement and then grass and path as they gained pace and entered some awesome loping horse-world I'd never before seen and along with them the occasional mounted police in black leather and green doing the same on patrol and the carriage-men leading their carriage horses in another form of splendor through and past the park and all its hills and ridges with people in the rear huddled or happy from wherever taking it all in and lights would slowly come on all around us as daylight waned and cars rolled the streets and that urban strangeness would arise which always came from evening and people mixed and all the things together as if in some worshipful engagement of all time and life and space huddled together beneath the darkening sky while the city-splendor all around it beckoned and I may have been LOST and broken by someone's definition but NEVER was I by my own in those straits despondent ('we are the ones who got away' it was told to me by a streetside bum copping a cigarette from someone one night as I waited there by him - 'we are the ones who got away and luckier for all that we are - none of that old 'scarpment of bad teats and broken lilies for us and THIS is our place and we are FREE ! goddammit' he exclaimed almost joyously right there) - I almost really felt he meant something as he spoke yet I'd known him as mere surplus mankind for a season or more as he did really nothing but this and you can't live a life by distraction or complaint anyway so it was always better to find a compulsion or a reason to go on : Con Ed workers every morning the same thing throwing pails of water down to settle some dirt putting up black and green cones to identify their work-area working two hours and resting one hour it seemed and all the old and regular badinage of women girls sports sex and solace would arise every time they were present and it none-ever changed while they made good money for their trade-off yet always said you 'had'a know somebody these days' to get in and like some old township librarian job from long ago these guys jumped at the chance of fathers and uncles and the rest for union placement and security on the sly whenever they could : electricity or trains or gas or steam and power it all was the same and for cops and firemen and probably ambulance workers and hospital attendants too the city was one huge shape-up for people on the take of jobs and money and lucre and steady work - some downdraft of the old Depression thirty years back still stood hard on people's heads and formed lives and still shadowed opinions that would never be broken until the old ones eventually passed away and left the dreary scene and all their words and memories with it too : there was a boot-black or two I'd known as well by the train station and over time they too became friendly enough and I swore they were the two fastest remnants of original old slavery-black people I'd ever met dead images for cotton-slaving southerners transplanted north after freedom or whatever and I often watched and thought of them as they worked - still almost slave-like in their obsequious homage to the white man before them as they extended a dedicated attention alone to the service of shining shoes for tips and whatever else it cost for the stand and the place : altogether not so different I'd figure from working for anything or anyone else so what did it matter ? nothing at all.

137. FAR AND AWAY THE BEST (nyc and out, 1970):

Frenchy Smoothy Crazy Lips Honey Mad Man Lover Boy Sal - whatever I got to be called was always OK with me because in street-lingo terms anybody in New York was recognized by their face - if you were some form of Dago wise-guy then Sal would work for you if you were good with the ladies then 'Lover Boy' was useful - and all the rest - it never mattered what you were called because it was just a name and every junky had a handle every killer had a moniker every bitch-whore had a curb-name and so it went but out here in the ass-wilds of Columbia Crossroads Pennsylvania ten miles off Route Six north of Springfield Road just east of Route Fourteen at Springfield-East Smithfield Road things were different up above Mount Pisgah - you needed a regular name and presence a 'something' people would know you by and it had better be right and correct and proper too for there wasn't too much tolerance for bullshit either and although I kind of knew I could put out whatever story I wanted to them and they'd not know the difference between truth and fabrication - no not because they were dumb or simple but just because they'd have no other means of comparison or ways to vouchsafe whatever I said - pretty much just as I would have no means of confirming whatever they said about their own personal pasts and families either - I'd have to be very careful about what I concluded about myself as the 'self' to me : good with a hammer or quick with a wrench they'd know the difference easily there if I wasn't or another choice say well-versed in roofing or good doing plumbing same thing there as any of those stories could be easily found out to be true or not and at the same time if they went around thinking I was a stupid washed-up criminal that would work against me too so I had to decide early on what to be - experience-encrusted big-city gadabout veteran at any early age of so many wild experiences I couldn't remember half of them and a guy now taking a hiatus from everything by just hanging out here for a while with some small money to keep me going and that was how it worked - pretty well OK - me in a simple house with another person now and then coming and going and I made a few friends as they needed things and I needed things - one nearby farmer was having his burned-down barn rebuilt and I got involved in that project - thus meeting people on friendly terms as I pitched in and helped with the construction in whichever ways I could - hammer-wielding banging nails cutting boards etc. - it was simple thereby to get along and meet others on the right side of things and another day my car wasn't running right at all barely in fact and coughing and churning and I got it up to a local mechanic guy about a mile away and we both together pitched in and re-tuned and jetted the carburetor and things like that in his yard - again a perfect in for meeting and learning people in a new situation and all that sort of stuff helped ease me into place and build up a sort of lazy trust around everywhere - which I liked and which was always a help : and these people were different in their ways from what I'd known before unschooled and certainly not cultural nor cultured in any way not mass-minded about style or fashion or art or books or any of that they just rather more solidly went about their tasks closer to nature one with their animals and barnyard tasks and there was very little complaining or carping or setting about to change things or reinterpret things and instead everything was merely what it was - the next big storm coming through or the damages from the last one the next crop or the last disaster and death was a constant animals and people got injured or died things didn't work crops failed or were too late or too early people were either old or very old or young or newborn and having children just went with the territory and sex was like animals - just happened and nothing else - kids grew up in sight of bulls fucking and cows dropping calves and all the rest so none of that featured in any story except maybe as a joke when played well and work was work and it was apparent and had to be done and all of that was truly a reality check for me - who'd been cerebral for years and used to so many different things but I wouldn't say this was the better life - could never bring myself to say that - just a different one a more tactile one more grounded in something or in natural terms and I understood all that but actually found myself thinking of it in some ways as definitely secondary in pursuit and value even as I sat there looking out at the morning sky in some other kind of wonderment as geese flew overhead honking and I looked around for what was next - time was the same though it seemed slower things were the same though they tasted different and richer the air and the wind was the same but it was sleeker cooler warmer and thinner somehow and I knew what things to do but I found myself doing them differently and many of things I'd taken for granted were completely exceptional now - water was a finite supply and needed to be pumped from a gravity-fed holding box at the spring behind the house while sewerage was a cesspool and not a 'system' it all had to be treated electricity was expensive and needed to be hooked into and gas was nonexistent the furnace was an old monster - only wood was plentiful if you worked at it and kept fires going - everything that once was easy was now more difficult and went along with storage preservation refrigeration getting and carting and all the rest - it was truly a different life all around me with no errant words no shady dealings no suspicions mechanizations and very very few creative weird or crafty people and the old urban ways were NOT the ways of these folk.