Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [27]
29
AND THERE’S ME—playing my baseball game in the mud of the yard, draw a circle with a rock in the middle, for 3rd, for SS, 2nd base, first, for outfield positions, and pitch ball in with little selfward flick, a heavy ballbearing, bat is a big nail, whap, there’s a grounder between the rock of 3rd and ss, basehit into left because also missed rolling through infield circles–there’s a flyball to left, plops down into left field circle, he’s out, I played this and hit such a long home-run that it was inconceivable, heretofore the diamond I’d drawn in the ground and the game I was playing were synonymous with regular distances and power-values in baseball, but suddenly I hit this incredible homerun with the small of the nail and drove the ball which was my great race champion $1,000,000 repulsion in its bedroom-in-the-winter-life, now it’s spring, blossoms in center field, Dimaggio’s watching my apples grow–it goes sailing across an intervening stadium, or yard, into the veritable suburbs of the mythical city locating the mythical ballfield —into the yard of the Phebe Street house where we used to live–lost in the bushes there–lost my ball, lost Repulsion, the whole league ended (and the Turf was bereft of its King), a sinister end-of-the-world homerun had been hit.
I always thought there was something mysterious and shrouded and foreboding about this event which put an end to childish play–it made my eyes tired— “Wake up now Jack–face the awful world of black without your aeroplane balloons in your hand”—Behind the thudding apples of my ground, and his fence that shivers so, and winter on the pale horizon of autumn all hoary with his own news in a bigmitt cartoon editorial about storing up coal for the winter (Depression Themes, now it’s atom-bomb bins in the cellar communist dope ring)—a huge goof to grow sick in your papers–behind winter my star sings, zings, I’m alright in my father’s house. But doom came like a shot, when it did, like the foreboding said, and like is implied in the laugh of Doctor Sax as he glides among the muds where my ballbearing was lost, by March midnight that overlaps with a glare mad of her bloodened sun-scapes in the set with the iron groo brush at dusk call fogs, across marshy surveys– Sax strides there soundless on the apple leaf in his mysterious dream-diving night–
When at sweet night I round all my kittens up, my cat, round my blanket up, he slips in, does exactly three turns, flops, motor runs, s’ ready to sleep all night till Ma calls for school in the morning–for wild oatmeal and toast by steaming autumn mornings–for the fogs shimmering up from G.J.’s mouth as he meets me in the corner, “Crise it’s cold!— the goddam winter’s got his big ass farting from the North before the ladies of the summer pick their parasols and leave.”
—Doctor Sax, whirl me no Shrouds–open up your heart and talk to me–in those days he was silent, sardonic, laughed in tall darkness.
Now I hear him scream from the bed of the brim–
“The Snake is Rising Inch an Hour to destroy us–yet you sit, you sit, you sit. Aieee, the horrors of the East–make no fancy up-carves to the Ti-bet