Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

143. INEPTITUDE COULD BE NO WORSE:

As if I was hidden across a grimy Texas I became a nervous wreck inside my own skin I could never get comfortable I felt always as if the police or something like them were closing in on me getting closer and closer much to my own discomfort and it was never anything I'd 'done' just instead a feeling of something like I'd somehow be implicated in - some long jagged Kafka-like meandering puzzle of no solution which would enwrap and coalesce around me ruining both my life and the rest of my days and the days of any of those around me and as such with the urban mutant (which I sometimes felt I was becoming) it was always something vaguely sinister - two sides of the same coin but different sides on every coin too - so you could see where I was headed like the torn twins or some mythology of the good pious catholic school girl on one hand and the neighborhood hooker on the other (I was 'etherized' upon a table) and spread widely between : no understanding and no explanation possible either and that was the most painful part of it all the knowing that IF I was ever taken in or apprehended by whatever was chimerically chasing me down I'd be at a loss for words to explain it all to any others who might ask - whose lives I may have ruined and whose situations and resources I'd have squandered : no words to matter with no stories to tell why or how - it had all started so slowly and then grown and gotten bigger YET remained slow and really NEVER took up any speed or tempo and that was what made it all the more rigorously painful and INEPTITUDE COULD BE NO WORSE -- long lines of silver Buicks in the sun with the piano-player's appointments all ruined because he'd lost the use of his hands and the washerwoman with ten bucks to spare cleaned out the parson's house while he was away - taking all the silverware and breaking into the strongbox and taking the money too ! what a warp and what a story but too disinclined to tell it all no one would speak up - Alan Shepherd John Glenn and Virgil Gus Grissom like 3 sixth-grade saints in my memory stayed current (we listened raptly in that fateful year on a black 8-transistor hand-held portable radio made by Emerson to every snippet of the news it told - bilious savagery Leopoldville and Mumbasa with Dag Hammerskjold's plane going down Cassius Clay and Malcolm X U Thant and Tryge Lie - so many weird names to boot)- I swallowed it all like freebasing acid on the LSD bib of a stage filled with Hamlets : there was no town to name and no name for the town : one piece after the other on a great bridge to nowhere : penicillin nodules in lumps of clay and stool pigeons in old Jersey City dungeons with Murph the Surf and the Star of India writ large.