Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [26]
On Saturday night I was settling down alone in the house with magazines, reading Doc Savage or the Phantom Detective with his masky rainy night– The Shadow Magazine I saved for Friday nights, Saturday morning was always the world of gold and rich sunlight.
28
NOT LONG AFTER WE MOVED TO PHEBE from Centralville, and I had met Zap Plouffe, I was playing at latedusk in the yard with aftersupper buzzes and slamming screendoors everywhere–with Cy Ladeau and Bert Desjardins in their part of their own childhood which is so antique to me that they seem unbelievably monstrous and assumed more normal shapes in the age molds of later years– Bert Desjardins it was impossible to see young, twelve, his long tall weeping brother Al… I saw him cry boohoo in front of a whole gallery of porch sitters composed of gene and joe plouffe and others in the midst of an eclipse of the sun that partly I’m looking at through my darkburnt glass from the dump and partly ignoring to gape at this spectacle of Al Desjardins sobbing in front of the gang (from some Al Roberts kick in the ass, Al’s sittin there giggling, he was a great catcher and longball hitter)—as the darkness fills all the brown windows of the neighborhood for an instant in the fiery summer afternoon– Bert Desjardins no less eccentric —playing–he walked across the Moody Street Bridge with me the first morning I went to St. Joseph brothers school —the rail was on our left, iron, separating us from the 100-foot drop to the roaring foams of the rocks in their grisly eternity (that became white be-maned hysterical horses in the night)—he said “I remember my first day at school, I wasn’t tall enough to look over the thick bar of that rail, you’re going to grow just like I did right over it–in no time!” I couldn’t believe it.
Bert was in the same school. I don’t know what I did —irked a kid, at recess–I was in love with Ernie Malo, it was a real love affair at eleven–I tiptoed on his fence heartbreakingly across the street from school–I hurt him once with my foot on the fence, it was like hurting an angel, at Gerard’s picture I said my prayers and prayed for Ernie’s love. Gerard made no move in the photo. Ernie was very beautiful to my eyes–it was before I began to distinguish between sexes–as noble and beautiful as a young nun–yet he was just a little boy, tremendously grown up (he became a sour Yankee with dreams of small editorships in Vermont)—A kid known as Fish darkly approached me as I was lifting my foot off the last Moody Bridge plank approaching Textile and the walk in fields and dumps to home–came up to me, “Well, there you are,” and punched me in the face, and walked away as I blubbered. I staggered home aghast in weeps–by walls and under orangebrick chimneys of the painful eternity–to my mother–I wanted to ask her why? why should he hit me? I vowed to hit Fish back for a lifetime and never did– finally I met him delivering fish or gathering garbage for the city, in my yard, and didn’t think anything of it–could have hit him in the gray–the gray’s forgotten now–and so the reason’s gone too–but the tragic air is gone–a new clime dew occupies these empty spaces of Nineteen O Two Two we’re always in– All this to explain Bert Desjardins —and playing with Cy Ladeau in the yard.
I threw a piece of slate skimming in the air and accidentally caught Cy at the throat (Count Condu! he came in the night flapping over the sandbank and cut Cy in the neck with his eager blue teeth by sand moons of snore) (the time I slept at Cy’s with Cy and Big Brother Emil when folks drove to Canada in ‘29 Ford–moon was full the night they left)— Cy cried and bled into my mother’s kitchen with that wound, fresh varnish just