Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

183. IN THE SAME HOTHOUSE AIR (nyc, autumn, 1967):

Times like that were tense and funny and I was still a newcomer to that Summer town - August and September 1967 I was still finding things on every streetcorner that astounded me and it felt as if each day was a billion degrees with hot sidewalks melting and streets of black tar sagging in the weight of old pennies screws and washers and gum melted in – if you looked carefully you could see most anything pressed into the soft surfaces of each street and corner - and most everything was brand new to me the witnessing and the watching - the hoist-winch of 71st street piano movers as they manuevered through a double-wide seventh-floor drawing-room balcony out over the street or to see the Julliard students moving along uptown with the huge cellos from taxi to curb outside Lincoln Center - it was a wond’rous excitement just to watch trucks unloading and hear the catcalls and bravado of the drivers and carriers - whistling or shouting out to passing women or yelling about this or that as they moved and scurried about at the sidewalk floor receiving elevators and basement entryways which opened onto the open sidewalk with cars more tracks and taxis honking and screaming in their bids to get past - people walked around or over things as they has to – the girls and women in the shortest pastel-colored skirts imaginable in a stylistic fantasy of bloom which defined that Summer and those few years - no qualms about showing whatever showed and it was as if on that singular level of id eros and sexuality no one cared as everyone cared – a blasé lust was in the air everywhere – men and women too – sex ruled the night airs and married women it seemed suddenly gained a second wind : I didn’t know what to make of much of it and for sure a lot of it all probably passed me by : I literally lived for a time with no sexual fantasies of any nature at all and I walked about as if a kangaroo-character in some odyssey of the Outback a wandering localized continental drift which was apt to take me anywhere – some places had connections in my head to other things – like some mesmerizing Holden Caulfield grip on the Central Park Boathouse or lake or the Natural History Museum and so many other references everywhere about – I scrounged and I waited I littered and I took – and most everything I got I got for free and strange mountains of food and refuse seemed always about as much as the breezes off either river blowing inward to cool off or try to some unfettered blinding lower eastside heat blasting along St. Mark’s or 1st Avenue or A or B it never mattered as everything just seemed adrift in the same hothouse air.