Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

171. AND ALL THIS TOO (nyc, 1st street, 1968)...

Five days around the clock and a true Mysterion arrives holding in his ciphered hands the rings of Saturn and all that go with it - elopements of frenetic dupes scavengers of toil and tale and the harbingers of yesteryear's return (the scolded saddle-boots the Hoppalong Cassidy shortstop the bullet-ridden target-practice brain of Enid P. Falk) and he opens his valise and fire rises out of it - soot and black smoke scalding reality but leaving his face intact (marked marked I say like the very Devil would be) - and a few minutes later I'm standing by the stove in an unheated apartment wishing I was not alone but with a fireside crowd instead ('we're cold here all the time there's never any real heat the stove costs a fortune but we never pay the bill and no matter they never turn it off') and the girl nearby with a six-month old baby is holding her hand over the baby girl's face and I ask her why and she says 'to keep the warm air closer to her?' and down below on the street a patrol car slides by slowly with a spotlight tracing the upper windows of a nearby building - someone had thrown an incendiary bomb into the shattered window on the fourth floor and a small fire had started and the police are still marauding around looking for clues - but now it's nightfall and no one any longer cares who sees what and they know they don't have to hide (why is it I wonder that cities are taken over at night by each element that hides from it during the day?) - by morning as usual there will be a corpse or two to clean up and a few beatings to investigate along with five or six people hospitalized and one or two just clinging to life but it's always like that and because of that it brings out the Bible salesmen - the thumpers pushing some meaningless Old Testament blues down the throats of every rabid Goy or Hebrew they can find : say it once or a hundred times and it all works out the same : myriad rosebushes growing on graves lame lankies leaning on Lincolns and the entire westside of old Jersey City falling over on itself in a drunken Slovak stupor - the cows and the cats shall rest together assured of one thing : just like the major powers on the international scene = Mutual Assured Destruction or (MAD) for short (and no I kid you not).
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I watched the tall woman as she took off her clothes - it was an incredible sight - and all I had to do was sit on this big old armchair in its spot by the window and watch window to window across the alley from 1st Street to the next and her open uncurtained window was lit well enough for any passing parade to watch - of course not from the street because craning one's neck would break one's back but here - neighbor-to-neighbor as it were - it became a simply nicety a social courtesy a neighborly thing to be sure and the guy whose apartment this was (I sometimes cleaned it) had told me all about it and damned to be sure if he wasn't right ! and what a sight.
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But no matter - this lower east side was much bigger than that and this small scene would only make one gag when seen broadly in the much larger scheme of things all around.