Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [28]
Little booble-face laughs, plays in the street, knows no different– Yet my father warned me for years, it’s a dirty snaky deal with a fancy name–called L-I-F-E–more likely H-Y-P-E… How rotten the walls of life do get–how collapsed the tendon beam…
BOOK TWO
A Gloomy Bookmovie
SCENE 1 TWO O’CLOCK–strange–thunder and the yellow walls of my mother’s kitchen with the green electric clock, the round table in the middle, the stove, the great twenties castiron stove now only used to put things on next to the modem thirties green gas stove upon which so many succulent meals and flaky huge gentle apple pies have been hot, whee– (Sarah Avenue house).
SCENE 2 I’m at the window in the parlor facing Sarah Avenue and its white sands dripping in the shower, from thick hot itchy stuffed furniture huge and bearlike for a reason they liked then but now call ‘overstuffed’–looking at Sarah Avenue through the lace curtains and beaded windows, in the dank gloom by the vast blackness of the squareback piano and dark easy chairs and maw sofa and the brown painting on wall depicting angels playing around a brown Virgin Mary and Child in a Brown Eternity of the Brown Saints–
SCENE 3 With the cherubs (look closeup) all gloomy in their little sad disports among clouds and vague butterflies of themselves and somehow quite inhuman and cherub-like (“I have a cherub tells me,” says Hamlet to the Rosencranz and Guildenstern track team hotfooting back to Engla-terre)–(I’m rushing around with a wild pail in the winters in that now-raining street, I have a scheme to build bridges in the snow and let the gutter hollow canyons under … in the backyard of springtime baseball mud, I in the winter dig great steep Wall Streets in the snow and cut along giving them Alaskan names and avenues which is a game I’d still like to play–and when Ma’s wash is icy stiff on the line I march it down piecemeal on a side dredge into the drifts of the porch and shovel Mexican gloriettas around the washline merrygoround pole).
SCENE 4 The brown picture on the wall was done by some old Italian who has long since faded from my parochial school textbooks with his brown un-Goudt inks and inkydinky lambs about to be slaughtered by stem Jewish businesslike Mose with his lateral nose, won’t listen to his own little son’s wails, would rather–the picture is still around, many like it– But see close, my face now in the window of the Sarah Avenue house, six little houses in the entire dirt street, one big tree, my face looking out through dew-drops of the rain from within, the gloomy special brown Technicolor interior of my house where also lurks a pisspot gloom of family closets in the Graw North–I’m wearing corduroy pants, brown ones, smooth and easy, and some sneakers, and a black sweater over a brown shirt open at collar (I wore no Dick Tracy badges ever, I was a proud professional of the Shades with my Shadow & Sax)– I’m a little kid with blue eyes, 13, I’m munching on a fresh cold mackintosh apple my father bought last Sunday on the Sundaydriving road in Groton or in Chelmsford, the juice just pops and flies out of my teeth when I cool these apples. And I munch, and chaw, and look out the window at the rain.
SCENE 5 Look up, the huge tree of Sarah Avenue, belonged to Mrs. Flooflap whose name I forget but sprung God-like Emer Hammerthong from the blue earth of her gigantic grassy yard (it ran clear to long white concrete garage) and mushroomed into the sky with limb-spreads that o’ertopped many roofs in the neighborhood and did so without particularly touching any of em, now huge and grooking vegetable peotl Nature in the gray slash rain of New England mid-April– the tree drips down huge drops, it rears up and away in an eternity of trees, in its own flambastic sky–
SCENE 6 This tree fell down in the Hurricane finally, in 1938, but now it only