Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

175. HARP-EYED THE FERRY MATTER - and 'the end' (nyc, 1969):

Then there were TWO soldiers and in hats were they and wearing stockings green and blue and they stood straight and they wandered not and kept a face forward fort-wise weary but born to no manor they kept no allegiance and before too long the swords were drawn the tuner was payed twice and over again once to tune and once to just listen HARP-EYED THE FERRY MATTER flowed gently sweet and scattered and rabbits wizened and squirrels forlorn and geese and swans and bears and hens in fact EVERYTHING of the King’s estate came forth to greet the newer date for we’d forgotten already to go and had stayed too long by the old window looking out at the piercing eights and other cars streaming by the gates and doors and no steamer trunk for anywhere else had been unpacked except the twelve APOSTLES they were who couldn’t stay YET I heard them say : "what is up with us ? what self-image is this ? and what do men see when they look at us thus" and the stranger responded by saying : "if it ain’t the Real McCoy it ain’t nothing plus if you’re not gonna’ stay no one’s coming your way and not a soul of you twelve would we miss" and then Red the big one known as Judas to some turned and spoke to the crowd and said : "some there are who claim to know and others there are who seem and still others who know enough to claim to seem but my own idea is it’s all this dream where I twist and turn and some silver I earn by turning in good friend Jeez the one who eats cheese to the nails on the tree and he withers and fades and declaims at the last ‘this ain’t a good game I feel forsaken and shamed but suffer the somethings to come to me’ and by that balderdash it seems a great church was gleaned AND WE’VE STILL GOT THE MONEY we’ve keened" and then I saw he bowed down to the road and the next thing I knew he was hanging there DEAD and ‘sorrowful justification’ the newspapers read but it was all enough to do in the sheriff with the price on his head.
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Now whatever all that was I had to keep myself as steady as I could just to concentrate on what was there : I looked up in the little room and Hans Hoffman's scrawl itself was sequestered on the wall - all brightly painted with reds and blues and all - and the really nice girl the lady at the reception desk said 'come right in we've expected you all morning' and this was (finally) to be the place the gallery the up-and-coming location of painterly hangings and I was to be included - me Mindy Walter Eddie R. and Balton too - and we were the five who'd been selected for the hangings of some thirty pieces yet to be selected and I'd been told a hundred times that 'this could be it' I could be famous this could be the big break but I laughed back at all this (in fact we all did) because we each knew we were too young and had garnered nothing - no 'hard knocks' no experience to live by no reason to make our paintings any more stand-outish than any rat-ass high-school kid's art-class trash - all in all between us we had maybe three year's experience amidst NYC art and even if this did sometimes feel like twenty so any big-break this turned out to be would probably be the big-break that 'broke' us and as it turned out to be that was pretty much it - we hung there for about 6 weeks with some twenty paintings and some little labels about us and the work in each case and there was even a little reception thing with the usual - 'meet-the-artists' crap all around it but nothing much happened a few little things sold and it all came down and we walked away wiser and wizened by the experience but I knew all the time it wasn't for me - all this wrangling and spitting back within the 'art-world' fabrications of fit and style and publicists and agents and all that and every art gallery curator worth his salt wanted nothing much to do wit 'studential' work as one stupid French guy had put it and I pretty much agreed with that anyway saying back 'yeah well at this point of my work I really don't want much to do with curatorial or gallerelial work either' and everybody laughed like it was some big joke even though we were all hurting and there we stood in our bibs and paint-clothing while around us all these jerky hacks came in in studio-black and fancy clothes and the girls all dazzled up with stockings and short skirts and come-hither looks and fetching protuberances and all the rest but it all went for nothing and I was glad anyway to get out of there with my life and went right back down to my basement hole and put on some loud music and crawled up to sleep in the back until the very next day somebody came by and woke me up and handed me a hundred and fifty five dollars for work sold which was like a fortune back then and to me in those days and I took the money but said I wanted all the rest of my stuff back and they said come get it and this payment had gotten someone 3 little pieces I'd done but I wasn't even really sure of that and even now don't know where they went and one had really been my favorite and was an astounding and coincidental piece of work that had dazzled even me - I'd done a blue and white sky all along the top half of the picture and made it slapdash and crazy and wild - all dark blues and light blues and whites and colors befitting the scene and then after I was done I stepped back from it and somehow SOMEHOW from about three or four feet back the combination of light/dark contrast between what were 'clouds' and deep blue sky had somehow spelled out in that sky the very clear but very simple words which read 'the end' and I was amazed and flabbergasted by the accident of what I'd done - and now it was gone and among the three which had sold and I never did see it again but the picture memory of that has stayed with me forever.