Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

150. THE STAND AT LARIMOOR:

But I wanted only to sing beneath blue skies and welcome in the Spring and watch the longer days grow to even more and smile with the new blossoms and fresh growth and birds and insects and everything of the land and air around me and the great glow of new light the resounding freshness of everything and the wide-open glory of the sky and air and watch the morning rise of the sun and the dwindling set of the previous night’s moon with the largesse of creation and the new expansion of bud and bloom and welcome people into the light and smile and laugh and stand alone at brook and river and smell the deep odor of all-that-is with no questions no doubts no answers and being alone share with all and being within all stand alone and reciprocate and grow and give back and praise and repay and give out all that I’ve ever taken in and that’s all I wanted as birds darted from the fence to the wires and some little dog ran around me yapping and old statues with still-dry winter fountains awaited heat and warmth and water and the old people sat in the sun and kids sang around the square and no one in anger struggled nor actually understood and really and then and ever that’s all I’d ever wanted and only wanted now.

149. 'AT PARADISE ALLEY' - (nyc, August, 1967)

The Bunko Mob The Gang With Two Brains The Marlo Brothers The Infestors The 12th Street Maniacs The Mongoloids and The Harem Girls you know what they were ? eastside gangs that I came across as I lived like a corpse at 509 11th Street and any of these would rather kill you as lick a stamp and I lived right there right next to Paradise Alley which was legendary famous and an outrageous corner of 11th Street and Ave A or whatever it had an archway over the entry which said just that ‘Paradise Alley’ and somehow it stayed put all those years - motorcycles and motorcycle gangs came and went and by ’68 the Angels were moving in in whichever incarnation they’d blown into town with – Chicago Outlaws Diablos Hell’s Angels I forget the exact name but when they came in it all shifted and soon enough they were a big gang of their own and there’d be bikes parked out there in a row from all over and people coming and going but before that JUST before that in Summer ’67 there were still leftover things from the era before - it was once an actual Beatnik nest and famous for poetry and for who'd hung out there : the girls were the best though and it wasn’t just girls because the Beats prided themselves a lot too on ‘older’ women dark severe and really black in outlook and clothes too black I mean like serious and negative not black so much like Negro – that never mattered – and by older I meant like 35 or so which was ancient by those standards and they’d stand around dressed in black sweaters and small hats and berets and scarves with cigarettes dangling and smoke everywhere and they were all skinny and beat small and emaciated-looking and I never saw a fat Beatnik somehow like that at the end by the end it was over anyway in those years – squashed like yesterday’s toadstool or a bad mushroom and so quickly replaced by the next mess that it never mattered but the very first beat-gropes I ever saw was right there – one of these ‘older’ women had nudged a guy aside out at the back wall of Paradise Alley which was actually right where I could look down from my window and watch and they were going at it hard and strong and then two more guys I saw came out and they all started just fucking her and she never said a word was digging it greatly wanted more and was loud like an animal with pleasure and I saw it all everything and nobody winced nobody minded and those guys were coming like string all over her by the time it was done and they laughed and were all kissing and laughing some more and then they all went back inside and Paradise Alley was like that and I never saw so much of it anywhere else - the best and the greatest it seemed like some Playland from the bounds of Hell and I still now and then read about it along the way - so many wan reminisces and/or people really trying to do it justice or get the feel of it across but they all - it seems to me - fall short : and all of those little local gangs I mentioned eventually just disappeared as the street was subsumed soon on a much larger crash-pad fad of hippie and druggy stuff which took over and really THAT was wherein I lived – the stupid cusp of one age overtaking the other like Summer crowding out Fall or something akin to that anyway - the cold winds blowing took it all away and the next thing that was seen was like puke on the streets or blood in the alley and infestations of people like rats – kids insanity murder bad trips stolen cars runaway people cops Puerto Rican hoodlums and whores dominoes in the street gunfire eruptions of bad food and water with hungry children and goons and morons on the prowl along Tompkins Square Park and it was fun and it was done or ‘if it was fun it was done’ however and there was sometimes glory but more often trouble everywhere : rock and roll’s pathetic attempts at wisdom supplanted dark be-bop jazz in the park – this was remember where Charlie Parker had lived – and kids never even knew and nobody else either knew what had hit them for it all was like some condescending lark a happening of mirth and fantastic celebration but underneath it all ran a dark black strain of ignorance and conceit but no one saw it then never.

148: MOMENTS WITHOUT PROPER NAMES (A Fatty Arbuckle Story):

Leo Tolstoy was just here and he left without charging a dime or saying a word and it was almost as if he'd seen something spooky something which accelerated his departure and all I can think it was was Greta cutting carrots with her teeth but no matter because in her purple bathrobe she'd have scared most anyone anyway and just about at the same time I received a note from Carlyle saying I'd not be welcomed at his dramatic production but if I wanted to watch here's a free pass-for-one enclosed - and I figured that had to be worth at least twelve dollars but I declined the offer and went on my way or stayed my course (since I wasn't really going anywhere anyway) determined more than ever to be singular solitary and alone and united to nothing but me : and there were a few things people were talking about and stuff I overheard at the exact same time (befuddled as I was by trying to read philosophy between the lines and to learn the ways of all mankind) : be sure to put everything away and do not stay up past some pre-determined hour be neat with your possessions and quiet about your losses and gains both use only a sharpened pencil when you write out lists be sure the lightbulb you are using to read by is adequate for proper illumination and don't leave things behind you'd not want others to see - - and by God that was it and nothing more and then I muttered something to myself about how 'nice it is to arrive somewhere with nothing in hand and just walk out later on - again with nothing in hand' a seemingly perfectly innocuous statement but one fraught - as I saw it - with all truth and possibility too but moments of clarity are far too few and often only come to the uninitiated anyway.
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'Prove you are alive - prove it!'
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"That warehouse is not burning it's only painted that way to look as if it's burning because flames are the logo of the motorcycle master-builder hot-rodders who work in there - pretty good trick huh" and I thought to myself 'no not really and I never for a moment thought the place was burning - what sort of shithead would go around thinking a 'good' paintjob would confuse such an issue?' and I let it go figuring that's the exact sort of stupid talk that these neanderthals thrive on and their small coterie of rocket-scientists and race-car builders probably really do think it's cool as all get out - this paint-job - but for me it's a big nothing and there really are so many other things to dwell on : ('blurring the boundaries between food and sex - in 1921 Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle was accused of using a Coke bottle to rape a virgin - named Virginia Rappe - and Fatty Arbuckle's 'manly equipment' it was said would not do his bidding so he searched the 'fridge' for a tool and finally came up with a soda container and whether or not the charges were true the public was more than happy to see him as a perverted overeater so much so that 'Fatso Funster' became 'Blubber-Thighed Anti-Christ' very quickly') but the more I reason this out I find that that story has so many holes in it as to be suspect - the 1920's idea of a 'fridge' is all wrong to me as they'd not really yet become accepted appliances and were actually referred to as iceboxes since actual ICE was put into them in blocks - only much later did the more automated and efficiently electrically-cooled 'refrigerator' become the 'fridge' from 'Frigidaire' a brand name and was this the first use of a 'Coke' bottle as a sexual 'tool'? or was the shape of it so derived from its use already (any bottle with a thin and graduated neck perhaps) and was that particular folk-use part of the reason such a shape was developed for the popular beverage (which wasn't totally popular yet back then) and does any of this actually make sense could it have been true were there public testimonies and the like or perhaps has all this arisen as folk-tales often do as part of mere popular lore at the expense of someone or something - fat people in general or Fatty Arbuckle in particular - who as I recall reading was in those days of evolving talk-pictures and comedy sketches considered as extra-baggage and old talent leftover and necessary to be gotten out of the way - comedy or sex whichever worked better - and perhaps this instance of local entertainment politics was all the more than meets the eye even back in that day BUT such is sleight of hand such is the ribald rhythm of comedy and solace that we'll never really know.
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The writer John Kennedy Toole - who had a propensity for plumpness too (read WAS FAT) turned - in his writing - obesity into a kind of personality disorder and in his sprawling book A Confederacy of Dunces (1980 but written much earlier) hot-dog vendor Ignatius J. Reilly is SO passionate about the tube-steak business that he sees meat-deprivation as a form of physical assault 'the human desire for food and sex is relatively equal' he says 'if there are armed rapes why should there not be armed hot dog thefts?' and deeply suspicious of the female body Ignatius pays his dues to Freud as he wanders around in a constant state of 'weenie' consumption 'the tip of the hot dog...sticking from his mouth like a cigar' and his pen pal Myrna Minkoff proposes sex but he repeatedly refuses noting that he'd rather concentrate on the way it feels when his nostril hairs are 'analyzing cataloguing categorizing and classifying the distinct odors of hot dog mustard and lubricant' and his 'meaningless impotent existence' drives Myrna crazy while his body puts HER in a bad mood 'where will you ever end?' she snaps 'there's something so unbelievably tacky about your obesity' (the perfect shape for sexual anxiety- the hot dog is the obvious food of choice for fat literary heroes perhaps) YET in some ways the very same prolixity for richness is shown in both men - Fatty Arbuckle as the comic-man exemplar the fat rotund one the roly-poly man to make us laugh who eventually gets overwhelmed by his excess - food comedy or Coke bottle in this instance - and the entire real world then did conspire to enfold around him and smother him and the selfsame genius of Ignatius J. Reilly comes to the fore in the matter of fat and sex and fat/sex combined - which is exactly what did Arbuckle in : FATSEX - perhaps an entirely different notion then just plain sex for FATSEX has no less a lineage - and a far greater story - than plain sex too and another writer Daniel Pinkwater wrote 'The Afterlife Diet' in 1995 in which his characters are 'always eating' and their weight problems did not seem to be biological but induced instead by a certain pleasure in eating and his obese characters - as he wrote them - could be 'sexy' and his publishers refused to reprint the book even after it sold out in three weeks with the cover featuring a flying hot dog instead of the skimpy-bikini-clad beautiful fat woman on the cover that Pinkwater initially sought for and the book 'offended' senses of propriety because of its erotic content in the context of fat people : the novel features a flabby sausage-vendor named Milo who makes love to his voluptuous girlfriend Linda by moaning selective words like 'Protein rich! Bull meat and trimmings of sweet brisket! Ah! Sweet brisket! Hardwood! Hickory! Smoked! Spices! Secret spices! Oh! Knockwurst!' and sure enough when Linda has an orgasm she screams 'Milo...the...weiner...is...good!' and all this was touted as the first commercially published fat novel or 'Scmalzroman' and it has within it a heaven designed exclusively for the 'circumferentially challenged' and two of the characters see the same shrink at the same clinic where ingesting massive amounts of meat is the only therapeutic method that works.

147. I WOULD SUPPOSE (Castor and Pollux):

Castor and Pollux themselves could have none better - the lines all led to the monumental and 'every set of twins is a son to the Gods' as was said in Greek mythology Xerxes Zeus and all the rest - Castor and Pollux the great Gemini twins sharing the constellated stars in Heaven split their time between Heaven and Hades (making great use of dualogy there putting their twin-ness to great use and having as it were the BEST of both worlds - but when one was killed the other so wanted to share Death too and monumental duality comes right there to a crashing end) 'share my death and share my immortality too' and just like that somewhere deep in the bowels of the Firestone Library I found myself looking at two-thousand year old Roman coins stretched out before me in rows and Greek coins and great coins of Byzantium as the docent handed out magnifying glasses and we walked along the rows : particular to images of the formulated past like this was I : small heads and the dolphins and rams of mythology and I realized reduced today to the enormous fizzle of sport and enthusiasm how different was it ? ancient forums with chariot races and bloodied charges and that loud echo down time's warped alley : the mobs of the same still bleating and Castor was a boxer while Pollux was a horseman and I WOULD SUPPOSE back then everyone was assumed to know that stuff : but then have we ever really died and aren't we all - as is said too often - twinned brothers in time's cruel race with awesome Gods watching down from above to see what we do and how and with Time's arrow always in flight : I left all that behind me sun shining at the Japanese Peace Bell right where I stood - fronds and grasses flowers and bloom - the ancient old men of this age's glory seemed doddering and bent as they slowed their ways across the field colored in pastels and squinting in sunlight as dogs ran and the apple-cart turned over music blared (the trumpet man the trombone guy the kid with the massive oboe) and wearing derbies and tophats galore the girls of Oswego or Bainbridge and Maine walked loosely the sidewalks of such awkward acclaim : I was trapped I KNEW in some very old past but couldn't escape from it and wasn't sure anyway if I wanted to.