Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

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.