Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [16]
Dicky Hampshire introduced me to a possible difference … we started drawing cartoons together, in my house at my desk, in his house in his bedroom with kid brother watching (just like Paddy Sorenson’s kid brother watching me and Paddy drawing 4-year-old cartoons–abstract as hell–as the Irish washingmachine wrangles and the old Irish grandfather puffs on his clay upsidedown pipe, on Beaulieu Street, my first “English” chum)— Dicky Hampshire was my greatest English chum, and he was English. Strangely, his father had an old Chandler car in the yard, year ‘29 or ‘21, probably ‘21, wood spokes, like some wrecks you find in the Dracut woods smelling of shit and all sagged down and full of rotten apples and dead and all ready to sprout out of the earth a new car plant, some kind of Terminus pine plant with sagging oil gums and rubber teeth and an iron source in the center, a Steel tree, an old car like that is often seen but rarely intact, although it wasn’t running. Dicky’s father worked in a printing plant on a canal, just like my father … the old Citizen newspaper that went out —blue with mill rags in the alleys, cotton dust balls and smoke pots, litter, I walk along the long sunny concrete rale of the millyards in the booming roar of the windows where my mother’s working, I am horrified by the cotton dresses of the women rushing out of the mills at five–the women work too much! they’re not home any more! They work more than they ever worked!— Dicky and I covered these millyards and agreed millwork was horrible. “What I’m going to do instead is sit around the green jungles of Guatemala.”
“Watermelon?”
“No, no, Guatemala–my brother s going there—”
We drew cartoons of jungle adventures in Guatemala. Dicky’s cartoons were very good–he drew slower than I did– We invented games. My mother made caramel pudding for both of us. He lived up Phebe across the sandbank. I was the Black Thief, I put notes in his door.
“Beware, Tonight the Black Thief will Strike Again. Signed, the Black Thief!!!”-and off I’d flit (in broad daylight planting notes). At night I came in my cape and slouch hat, cape made of rubber (my sister’s beach cape of the thirties, red and black like Mephistopheles), hat is old slouch hat I have … (later I wore great big felt hats all level to imitate Alan Ladd This Gun for Hire, at 19, so what’s silly)— I glided to Dicky’s house, stole his bathing trunks from the porch, left a note on the rail under a rock, “The Black Thief Has Struck.”- Then I’d run-then I’d in the daytime stand with Dicky and the others.
“I wonder who that Black Thief is?”
“I think he lives on Gershom, that’s what I think.”
“It might be,—it might be,—then again–I dunno.”
I’m standing there speculating. For some odd reason having to do with his personal psychological position (psyche) Dicky became terrified of the Black Thief–he began to believe in the sinister and heinous aspects of the deal —of the–secretive—perfectly silent–action. So sometimes I’d see him and break his will with stories— “On Gershom he’s stealing radios, crystal sets, stuff in barns—”
“What’ll he steal from me next? I lost my hoop, my pole vault, my trunks, and now my brother’s wagon … my wagon.”
All these articles were hidden in my cellar, I was going to return them quite as mysteriously as they disappeared —at least so I told myself. My cellar was particularly evil. One afternoon Joe Fortier had cut off the head of a fish in it, with an ax, just because we caught the fish and couldn’t eat it as it was an old dirty sucker from the river (Merrimac of Mills)—boom–crash—I saw stars–I hid the loot there, and had a secret dusty airforce made of