Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

207. ALONG WASHINGTON STREET - (NYC, 1969):

It seemed like every factory-level streetface-outlet door and window was facing my way as I walked along the long edge of Washington Street athwart right there with trucks and carriages wagons and wheels – and every so often a few guys would be milling about smoking and talking and a few trucks would slide by picking up or dropping off whatever it was these trucks had to carry : freezer lockers of meat or freezer lockers of furs refrigerated truck-boxes or ancient old railcars with bad paint and peeling rust which made their way back and forth the slowly over the elevated work-tracks right there all weeded and dirty and cluttered with junk and a few guys up above would be looking down and the street-level unloaders in turn were looking up and by this passage progress somehow was made and things exchanged and the slow steady work of a shift’s labor would get done – ‘there’s a fuckin’ city to feed and looks like we gotta’ feed it’ – some guy said that while messing around one day with the lockers and cabinets of the meat-plant he worked at and anyway the entire street was infused with this weird energy of that sort of thinking - men who’d come in from other places and almost begrudgingly do their work and the sawdust and smell and the drains of blood and carnage made it all seem as if the very slabs of beef on the hooks and hangers were somehow still crying out in death for help and solace but it wasn’t really ever that – instead just cold and ice and frozen or near-frozen slabs of meat being carted off and the very same slabs – fresh now – being carved and chunked off right on the sidewalks and hanging from hooks while swift and silent butchers carved their ancient craft – cuts chops ribs and the rest and you’d think it was a paradise for dogs though I never saw one and anyway whatever animal was here was usually here for selling and even though the nearby waterfront did have its wild dogs and mangy curs running free along marsh and dock they never came here and the two pieces of separate business never seemed to meet so that each was in its own way its own cycle of activity : no one could think of it differently the cops and crimelords and criminals beggars and thieves all knew the situation so that everything down here was pretty well circumscribed and if one had any business in this fashion it was done in a manner both sly and efficient – deals made money changed goods exchanged as well as the usual array of beatings slashings and body-dumpings and I’d seen them all over the time I wandered here but as mum as I remained was as silent as I slept and – as I was also once told – ‘around here buddy the less said the better.'