Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

151. AND AMIDST OTHER THINGS I'VE DONE:

"I got up and washed the dirt of that place from my shoes like it never even existed and I boarded the next flat car I could find for other points and it was when I jumped on that I realized maybe for the first time that I was a man or becoming one or wanting to anyway and there's not much you can do about it no matter Oklahoma or Wappinger's Falls and me and the others we just sat there in the fine summer air watching the scenery roll by and probably too wondering just where we was going because none of us spoke - the others weren't as young as me but I could see they were just as determined and that's really what does it anyway 'determination' that's the steel that makes the blade because I've found if you let something distract you and take you away it will and once you're gone it's hard to get back to the subject at hand and anyway we rode most all day that afternoon when we stopped somewhere the whole train stopped in some switch yard and we knew it was time to get beat so we all nodded after a few words of this or that and it just seemed everybody got down and walked away and I think that was somewhere almost way east and I somehow then managed to get a car-ride with some kids from a college somewhere and they drove me straight across New Jersey with them for ten bucks and some soda and I found myself a'lighting from their car in some sort of wonderment on June 19 1960 and it really was a wonderful time to be anywhere 'cept that I had to listen to Earth Angel and Barbara Ann the entire way as much as the radio played it - and it just seemed like all the world was still intact that nobody had artificially colored the scenes yet flavored the coffee and stuffed the dummies it was a real world between worlds and I was loving it and first thing or one of the first things I did was to write a New York City postcard back to my mom and I told her I'd made it here I was and everything was OK so I found myself as a twenty-two year old kid across from Romeo's on W42nd Street at some skeetball palace with lights and sounds coming off every wall - the chicken that told fortunes the lady with the hookah and the sash the tall gentleman who made change - it was all like the carnival of Elton Springs had come to a town and set up and never left and it was nothing and it was everything all at the same time and across the street at Romeo's you could get an entire meal for one dollar and twenty-five cents - a plate of spaghetti a meatball some bread and something to drink and often I'd just sit there staring out and watching the people go by - the trumpeters from the loft across from the window the guys with their cameras and the others with musical instruments and muscles and girls - everything went waltzing by that window in a wonderfully horrid still-life of Dantesque proportions and no one spoke to anyone else unless you asked first people remained as strangers to each other as much as they wanted - it was a one-by-one world the kind you don't see anymore and I was a savage in these great new North American woods it seemed" : this was not the recollection of a fool this was a real person retelling his story this was Eremine Phule speaking a name he'd taken only much later his real name was Allen Robinson and he only became a stage-guy later on apparently much later after he'd settled in but this was his little story ad he was telling it to the group assembled to listen at the Mazur Drama Club on a second floor stage on W37th at five bucks a head to hear a 'true stage veteran' tell his story : "one of the first things I did was to go to one of those hair-cutting places they had back then where they were teaching people to be barbers and for 25 cents you could get a haircut - which I did - a twenty-five cent learner's practice cut which wasn't so bad anyway - short and close- and you could that a lot back then as I said the world hadn't yet changed over and I later heard and found out the same thing in Chinatown - real Chinamen cutting hair for twenty cents in Chinamen haircutting schools two bits there would get you some tea and an orange too if you wanted it and that saved nickel would get you a ride back home too and HOME by the way had by then become a shared room on 17th street with some guy named Freddy-Frankie - that was what he called himself - he worked the coat-district pushing carts all day and sometimes at night he was a door guy at Harriman's an old jazz club barroom on 50th Street and there'd be an occasional trampy whore brought home with him and we - part of the rooming agreement - often shared that too it was just like a loaf of bread that we'd promised to cut in half - and way downtown too speaking of haircuts I'd found the most interesting old and original theater district which once abutted the area now of City Hall and some big music store and Pace University and anyway back in the mid 1800's that was the original theater district and there was still right there an old barber shop operating which was the very place Walt Whitman used to go not just for barbering but also to have his head read - the craze then was phrenology a tricky craft which barbers did along with bloodletting and phrenology was when a 'seer' doubling as a barber would tell your fortune and your personality traits by reading the bumps on your skull with his hands ANYWAY right there was still the very place that Walt Whitman went and the last I looked it was actually still there - the building anyway the place and fifty years on now it had two lady haircutters peering out at me and right next door was a hat shop with every sort of hat displayed in the window - not women's foppery I mean men's hats fedoras like of old and Russian fur hats and military caps and police hats and logger's wool hats and all the rest and it's pretty amazing to look at - so many types of different hats and wools and finishes and colors and everything is displayed with a price tag and all the rest - totally fascinating for me to this day - but anyway back then in 1960 I don't recall any hat store or anything but what I was saying was the original barber place was still there as were many traces of the old theater district which long long ago had moved twice uptown (first Union Square Herald Square and then Times Square) and there were still the cranky used book stores like along Fourth Avenue at 12th Street too - all gone now - and I remember the time some crazed old Greek Orthodox priest went absolutely crazy in one of those bookstores - just completely bonkers he lost his mind and started yelling and screaming and throwing things and they had to come and take him away in a straitjacket with which they wrestled him to the ground poor old bearded geezer fellow in service to Christ and God and all Byzantium too and no one ever knew what happened he'd just cracked and the place was abuzz for a week afterwards and it used to have a toilet room in the back against the back wall and the water tank and all that stuff was up at the ceiling and to flush the thing you had to pull this big rope with a wooden hand-hold at the end and gravity I suppose just ran the water down and flushed the thing and whatever it was I'd never seen that before it was just fascinating to me and then that first Winter eventually set in after a brutal hot August and September too and everything was sweltering and I found urban heat what I call New York heat a lot different than country heat because you're like trapped just baked in an oven you can't get away from and every room every crevice had not yet been air-conditioned like now when everyplace is cold even when you don't want it to be back then when it was hot you suffered and I was working the trucks out along the Hudson in the 30's then and I'd get like 8 dollars a day to do a day's work and that seemed enough and at night there'd be clubs and plays and I'd read for this or that occasional role - nobody yet cared much whether or not you'd attended 'acting' school or one of the method schools or whatever a person could still get a part - and a career - on pluck and daring (I once ran into Sal Mineo walking along the streets and I just set in next to him and started talking and he said nothing much just 'keep at it don't listen to nobody you can do it if you sweat' and then he said 'they always told me I was too short' and I remembered that and laughed at it a lot because he finished it with 'you just gotta' make sure you get short parts') and anyway it was funny then even though I wasn't sure what he'd meant - a small part or a part written for a short person - but it never mattered after that and I never saw him again" and I realized I could listen to this stuff all day this guy was beautiful "out along 42nd Street back then too along towards the west side there was still this really beautiful row - a long row - of old walkup brownstones and you'd see one stoop after another one set of stairs and a grand doorway after another in sequence all the way down the street - back then there was still a lot of that to be seen - now it's all gone obliterated covered over or torn down and these particular houses were seedy they'd already been used well for probably a hundred years and the facades were running down things were broken (so that by the late seventies they were gone) but people still lived grandly amidst them - bus station car traffic and all that notwithstanding - and right there all along the street there'd be the usual array of everyone doing everything - out of work actors singing for quarters and dimes streetsweepers wishing they were opera stars singing arias while they emptied cans and policemen in street garb watching the blacks hand out Muhammed Speaks newspapers all the while businesspeople and clerks and secretaries passed by on their way to or from the bus station which was in some way a very weird crossroads of the world on wheels - not trains now they were already outmoded then before a later comeback - but auto truck and bus traffic in and out and everything was turned over to that no matter what else and that became the initial impetus for the real change in New York City that eventual transformation of the urban mind to auto-mobility and the rest be damned but back in 1960 it was still a mix of both worlds and you could yet find solace in walking or forgetting about traffic and whatever pushed me along (I'd have to say) was probably the crowds I'd see thronging the theater row along 42nd Street the Biltmore the Astor the Barrymore all those big theaters which would be thronging with outside visitors and traffic-tourists dying to see a show and I figured 'good enough way as any to make a buck let me get started' and for me that's how it all began I played Wantley in my first role in some Inge play nobody recognized then I semi-starred in a street-production of Albee and then we did a No Exit reading by Sartre - nothing really there just words - but little by little it worked and eventually I got better roles and my union card kept me busy so that one thing after another by 1965 I was pretty much set (my mother never did get another down-and-out postcard - instead I occasionally sent her flowers)."