Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

209. A DOG'S (new) LIFE (sahib, 1968):
Having only one intention and that was to save myself I walked wildly on past the assorted mishmash of storefronts and idle doorways worn to their own deaths by the endless use of people - people who over all these years had flocked and worked and stayed and savaged any of the places they'd inhabited - around here that of course meant every tenement factory walk-up back-lot brownstone rubble-faced heap that would still keep people and a faucet - which seemed to be getting fewer and fewer - and all that old-time magic of the wild crazy streets was surely diminishing and ending its limited engagement run through the power-stations of the mass-mind which had formed it : tired old men with gaunt eyes and nickles to cheer slumbered or hunched over barrels or carts just letting time THE time the ONLY time they'd get pass them by in a nasty half-slumber of what amounted to nothing more than inattention and some vague mysterious inkling of something having gone wrong (if this was a space-shot already the module would have blown up) and that old man there just fallen over probably whacked out or dead by now - booze fire coffee liquor tobacco and death were his family members to whom I'd been introduced long before - he had a dog name Sahib which I now took in and let sleep under my plank-board bed and he was quiet and sad and savage and fun all together that Sahib was but I wondered how much of anything he remembered - as a dog that is - of any of what transpired of any place of which he'd already been : waterfront ship-shape warehouse loading pile of salt over-riding world of dirt and crap that this is and within which his dog-memory may have played its usual dog-romp.