Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

144. WEST-WORLD - the NYC WESTSIDE ART-SCENE, 1970: 'Almost a Nightmare, Sir':

Nathanael West once said 'your order is meaningless - my chaos is significant' (born Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein) he was born in New York City and as I read him and learned a little about him I became curious too about more - it was nothing really not a deep sidetrack into something dense and dark just more a curious fillip of mind into following a local thread so as to see where it went - (New York was in fact filled historically with many of these little stories of people who'd become something else and reputations built upon or salvaged from nothing but pluck and (perhaps) certain levels of ordinate and engrained talent - which the more I delved the more I saw was often nothing more than a talent for performance) : but that's just the way that stuff went and some people it seemed were just born to it - performance display loudness ostentatious fluff and all the rest and parts of the Village and its environs were loaded I knew already with the theater crowd and the art crowd who just crow'd homosexual and lesbian at every turn and even though you get used to it all quickly it's still a bit weird the aspect of the design and the display that takes primary place among them even the smallest little restaurant or cafe scene anywhere I went was fraught with gay tension - colored paintings on the walls fabrics and decorative jewelry the loud guffaw the rising lilt of a voice telling a tale or recounting something and always always somewhere the fey feminine and most flamboyant boy-man being the most effete fem-man you could imagine : it went everywhere from the cross-dressers to the lousy cranks and the enervating old men - gay all and gay everywhere in a small kingdom of their own - the point of 'Performance' as they saw it I supposed was always theater and much like the theatrics of Nathanael West and the pufferies of Baldwin and Capote too I saw so so many people in so so many ways taking their natural role and playing it to the hilt and never were questions or doubts raised because here where I was living - of anywhere else - was this strange and back-then-still-secret counterculture really alive and well.
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I awoke to the savage mimicry of two broken arms and a welded candelabra afire : I had been up for days at the 'CutRate Hotel' truly a place of thieves and an army of ants with a cutthroat landlord named Zuckendorf a bevy of boys admitting to strangeness and a cabin-room filled with cloak - places where zippers hung out and people hung their coats and it was all life-sized and large enough so that one could walk right into it and close the double doors behind yourself and if you brought a friend a good time could be had : doubled-over older men with boys the size of feral cats and meowling just as loud and it was out on old Weehawken Street way down by the old Hudson piers that I first met the eyes of Razwell Dukan Kent some shuddering bastard-drunk of the night-eaves between porters of puke in the alley of doubt and the grenadine was laid out on the table where fist-fires surged and the ashtrays had messages writ like fortune cookies in a madhouse of rum and fury : I never stepped back and once twice three-times a lady was more than I could bear and the peculiar French girl I'd been watching or thought I was turned out to be Latvian instead named Guna Martindrack or something like that - and her sister the Transylvanian mad-hen who was had with the milkman was better then ever and naked to boot (a wise man never held that hand and there was nothing between those loving thighs but vinegar and sugar and a story to be told) Gandy Brody and Esteban Vicente Charles Cajori Nicholas Carone Milton Reznick Morton Feldman Mercedes Matter Philip Guston David Hare and a few more too were the only names I had in this network of friends - 8 W8th Street to you and yours - I'd become my own mailman and I'd managed my own space and eight o'clock in and eight o'clock out seemed much too regimented for me.