HAVE YOU EVER? (the bible salesman Sanford, nyc 1970)

25. HAVE YOU EVER? (the bible salesman Sanford on Allen Street, NYC 1970):

...Dined with the hungry, eaten with the dead, spied falcons off the cliff or suspended the moments of reckoning you've passed over ? no no I would say no of course not the very thought of the marvels which made you can hurt just in thinking and the last day I recalled ever being so mis-shapen and uninformed was the day I awoke from a pallor of doubt and found myself on Allen Street between someone's bags of flour - splayed as I was without meaning on the broken sidewalk front and it was 5am and a hot Summer morning with the heat vaulting rooftops already before day had done its work and a senseless dog was at my side sniffing something anything at all as dogs do : wide-eyed and open every doorway beckoned as the slow creep of hours went by I stood and called my own name quietly just to be sure - at the least - that I was in the right spot and the bible salesman Sanford whom I'd seen a hundred times before passed me and asked if I was alright and I said yes and he said 'walk with me we can have a quick breakfast' so I went dishevelled and broken but no more than he was and we sat at some small pitiful window seat in an un-busy Jewish neighborhood shop with coffee and whatever else he'd brought and he asked me why I lived like this and I said 'I don't know - you sure it's even living?' and I could tell he was trying to get to something other some point of reckoning by which to define his own time and day and he said 'my point is I'm not averse to helping you but I often ask why and then I begin to think it's perhaps time you yourself put some of these pieces together and figured why you're stuck like this - here have another - and you know your life is passing by you you're losing time and it doesn't come back and each day you awaken like this your teeth are rotting from no care - just absolutely sizzling away slowly from the sugars and acids of the junk you must be eating - and the dirt on your skin takes its own toll : you are mortal my son after all - what a discovery that ! no ? and let me put myself in your position five years ago I would have better understood but now as it is I can only see you as vermin or hurt and lost' and I said back 'why not just think of me as a survivor like you a survivor like you and your high-vaunted people who think of themselves all as survivors too? and what's the difference anyway?' and with that he gave me a strange look that I wondered about for a long time after : we got up he paid the little man at the counter and we went our separate ways but only after - last parting shot - he said 'you are less wise than you think and your years they will take a toll and I have half-heartedly in this attempt tried to bring you around but it will be no more I shall pass you by forever each time now that I see you there is no thankfulness in doing something for nothing over and over you are finding your way heedlessly - like all the others - to the scrapheap of time and history wherein you shall dwell then forever go ahead I don't any longer care' and somehow too it did all make sense and then I realized as well that I had dreamed of this sequence a few times and It had almost perfectly recreated itself - except for the strange setting of a grey basement and blue wooden shelves being painted by a small girl in a funny knit hat and I had a dying cat in a box that suddenly started to scamper around after showing only lifelessness throughout the dream and the man across the way - the frame shop - had been trying to get me to sign disclaimers and bills for eight hundred dollars and yet outside of that I knew just knew I had lived all this scene before and I went along my way determined then to find that spot that Allen Street entryway perhaps into that other place and time where I would feel far more comfortable and better with words that any of this grubbing on the street : the bible salesman Sanford is now long gone I would imagine but maybe still peddling his ancient wares from a shelf on high above the Heavens and all the Earths somewhere I'll never know.