Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

221. ME-OH MY-OH / (at Constantino's):

If I had ever a manner which would be called my own it was in the ‘manner’ of quiet study and the means through which I went about things – those would probably have been my trademarks (‘he was an oddly quiet kid always just outside of things and on about his own way – evidently absorbing all he could but saying very little about any of it and very often too just merging into things or taking so much a natural part in what was around him that you’d think he’d always have been there – odd and curious too’) - I’d often (truthfully) just hang around : like at The Tombs that gaunt odd junk-hulk of a prison down by Mulberry Bend or what had been and all the remnants of the old opium dens and sex joints which once so long ago dotted the area - the old Five Points and the Brewery and Collect Pond and all the rest now gone and tumbled over and paved and built with civic-crap architecture - all the courts of this and that and hearing rooms and halls of record and whatever else INCLUDING the Tombs itself - all of that once had been riotous in anarchy murder and mayhem (in whichever order you select) and most of those places were once probably five deep in dead bodies and sarcastic knife ministry and bloodletting anyway that very winsome ghost of Olde New York still probably sat around there just waiting for something new to happen THAT was The Tombs for me and all the other area there - the silly frolic of what had become ‘Chinatown’ and the park which replaced the old Bend and the modern apartments which went up looking like chockablock cinder-block jails themselves but praised by others for their ‘architectural merit’ - whatever that was supposed to be - I’d just go there sometimes and sit on late dark Fall afternoons and watch the stuff blow around and all the people scurrying about - attorneys for this and that department and lawyers of clients in hot water and the parade of cop cars and victims and culprits and suspects going to and fro or in and out and ambulances and meat wagons too - the city coroner’s office and family courts offices were there too - all sorts of bureaucratic oddments and leftover syndromes and the sorts of things which lawyers play upon and criminals use to seek sympathy and plead remorse about something they did without really caring a whit either way and every evening or day I watched The Tombs was seen as a credibly-running two-ring circus of crime and circumstance or pomp and punishment - intermingling freely - and each story amounted no really no more than some black-and-white re-run of ‘Naked City’ like it was portrayed on old television : mordant and morose quirky and curious filled with moody eccentrics or twisted remorse and each circumstance was found to have some little psychological underpinning by a pinhead little briefcase lawyer out for his share of money being doled : studies of the criminal mind and studies of recidivist intent or natural ability to lie or inflict harm or explanations of abandonment and bad environment - all that déclassé stuff that 1960’s lawyers were just then getting good at with an entire mental orbit of taste and behavior being used to meander around phrases and concepts which really meant little and which skewered any case but yet each day the criminals came and went - bundled out of the rears of cop cars - with handcuffs on their wrists and sometimes chains at their ankles the superior airs of guards and wardens and assisting officers made it clear which game was being played and the occasional screeching and screaming mother or sister or brother of the victim or the culprit – each the same in their way – would seek their own attention as they grimaced and yelled on the street or the curb and it seemed that – eventually – everyone connected with a crime either way would show up here for a show - it was a dark and dismal world of theater and grief.
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And oh well anyway most of the time no one ever believed me what I'd tell them the real and the imagined and the sugar with the bitter-water all that together : stupid fat cops men in blue walking with their belts and holsters and hats and guns while holding a bag of something coffee or sandwich whatever swaggering out to their cars half parked on the street and half on the curb privileged cop-parking all over the place family court welfare the clinics the dispensaries the law courts paperwork broken families runaways wife-beaters killers and murderers too everyone together in sweltering civic heat with no windows and just crap to breath and swan-sized cars faggoty and fighting it out parking meters fetid pools of drain water tiny little Chinese people stepping between things and lawyers with briefcases and fangs detectives hookers whores and miscreants and it somedays seemed like they'll all amble over to me on the nearby bench just to sit and waste away their time talking idly talking gay : 'fuckin mother system got no room for the likes of me the bastards now want another 50 bucks to keep me out of slam another week otherwise I gott'a go back in - God I hate that fucking place rat-sewer basement hell-hole scum' and that was the way they talked most often even I did understand their marble-mouth missing-teeth fiasco of a face and I just sit there like some Dead End Kid and take it all in and play back 'yeah right the cocks gott'a know the trouble they cause y'know cause they can't be that dumb' meaning of course not a thing at all but it would satisfy these low-life dribblers coming my way and there right there on at the corner the little Greek guy's place for donuts and ham and snacks and coffee and drinks usually loaded up with someone - now most places get loaded up when there's like 15 people crowding in but this was a place with the most interesting trait of getting 'loaded up' with 1 or 2 people inside it was that weird - a small cramped juice of a place like squeezing things out of whomever was inside - just like squeezing an orange then and getting juice and charging 35 cents for it and that was how the entire place worked - the guys behind the counter they never cared for nothing they saw all this coming 24 hours a day - every layer of society the doers and the takers the getters and the got they all came in there soon enough for something and all those civic buildings made it that they always had a clientele always had people who bought from them - a certain odd misery-level of the most un-solid citizenry you could think of and the most solid too - cops and those who made and undertook the law right next to the same ones who broke and fled from it but it never mattered and I always half the time expected someone to get killed when the two met but nothing much ever happened 'cept maybe sometimes some words exchanged but what are words anyway ? cheap and cheesy and useless - kind of like one of Constantino's old sandwiches anyway I always thought.