Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

126. 'UNTIL WE STUMBLED ON ISTANBUL' (nyc, 1974):

It was like an endless Christmas Eve of expectation or something - I broke two into two and over again until I was transformed by Nature into effectively illusionary being haunting wild streets or slinking between avenues filled with dead cars : dowagers low on their springs like some tired old Packard sliding into death with no brakes left and fire on each wheel - at 25 Fifth Avenue was a woman I grew to know only by her words with a wonderfully spacious and grand name 'Elizabeth Villiers-Liberty' but pronounced so oddly right with an accent composed of all Europe itself so that it seemed that just be the hearing of it I was transported to the old walls of ancient kingdoms a'borning and the way she talked to me was straight and stern - tea and crumpets with ideas of travel and old conservative ideas about everything and all I really knew was that she 'didn't like men with beards' said once in passing and I thought that in itself to be a precise statement of stricture which seemed odd to me - who anyway cared? - and beards that were everywhere went where they wanted : Romany Marie's to the Jumble Shop to anywhere at all ('I spied a man coming down the street covered in swag and willing to greet - to most everyone he swung his wave and took on the world with a fearsome gaze...') we'd listened to parkland doggerel for too many days but this guy known to everyone 'took the cake' as they say - he was a Roman he was a priest he was from Scotland he pandered for money he traveled the Alps he squandered his art and he searched Ararat too for old Noah's Ark and those were the sort of people I'd meet - well enough until we stumbled on Istanbul.
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So between Ms. Liberty and this Italian guy I just mentioned (Alberto Ragi) I was pretty much set with people of differing persuasions all about me - he did go to Turkey 'south by the sea' but ended up instead stuck along the Bosporus at Constantinople called Istanbul now ('just like that crazy old song' he said) and I kept getting oddball postcards to my 8th Street address for a while - old steamboats plodding up the Bosporus or pictures of the smokey harbor right there with lines of very old crumbling homes in the background - these buildings were perched right up at the river's edge with the water sometimes even running below them and he said they were 'all the old mansions of the past' now burning and crumbling one-by-one daily and the jagged streets were filled with ancient sights and cars and trucks equally old belching smoke and grime into the filthy air as donkeys and animals too walked the dirt streets where poor people lived : 'but I'm intent on living this artist's life right here even if it kills me and I swear I'm happy trying too - you really should come' - and that was the last I ever heard from Ragi for the very next Spring on an awkward May morning he blew his brains out in some fetid backyard filled as it was too (I later learned) with packs of wild dogs - for which the modern-day Istanbul (back then) was famous and every new new politician came into office each time swearing he'd clean up the dog-crisis problem like it was some foreign-policy situation needing immediate attention : but no one ever did anything really about it and that's where Ragi died.
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There were times when all of this felt like nothing more than just taking messages : notes about time and place filtered through some gauze of experience and a watery film of wonder at the same time : 11th Street was a nightmare by then - sixteen people at a time crashing on the floor and each of them AWOL runaways on their way to Canada fleeing their time-to-be in Vietnam just around the corner for them - they'd just drop everything hitch up with one of the cars we were running up and down from Virginia and DC get to NYC and pile out right in front of 509 e. 11th spend a night or two or a weekend then leave more than half their stuff behind (usually) - shoes and shirts and stuff but always being sure it seemed to take guitars and jackets - and get high-tailed some more to Buffalo and Canada to hide out as deserters and that apartment by that time was filled with everything - contraband stolen USNavy and Army stuff ID badges and dogtags even cars and armaments - the cars were taken by the body shop across the street re-painted changed a little and sold for 2 or 3 hundred dollars real fast - of which we'd get maybe 80 bucks - little white Plymouths and Valiants and such all army issue bullshit staff cars - and even though Ms. Liberty 'didn't like men with beards' there were suddenly plenty of them around and girls too - the horniest little fuckers I'd ever seen - all young and not really jaded just burned already by a too-quick and too-idealistic experience of whatever sort : base nurses and army post dieticians and teachers and clerks and secretaries and stuff - I never really knew what any of that was about except maybe it was just a girl's sense of 'adventure' at play but they'd run away and escape too and they sometimes were wilder than the crazy guys I'd see - hanging around naked and free - sometimes they'd just ditch the whole idea and escape instead into the very bowels of NYC - all their special accents and regional dialects and all that - and on that count too (I told Elizabeth - trying for a crummy sex joke) there were 'plenty of beards around and I didn't mind a'one of them' - I think she really tried to laugh but I could tell it hurt too much.