Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

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.