Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [3]
6
THERE WERE BLUE HOLIDAY EVES, Christmas time, be-sparkled all over town almost the length and breadth of which I could see from the back Textile field after a Sunday afternoon show, dinnertime, the roast beef waiting, or ragout d’boullette, the whole sky unforgettable, heightened by the dry ice of weather’s winter glare, air rarefied pure blue, sad, just as it appears at such hours over the redbrick alleys and Lowell Auditorium marble forums, with snowbanks in the red streets for sadness, and flights of lost Lowell Sunday suppertime birds flying to a Polish fence for breadcrumbs–no notion there of the Lowell that came later, the Lowell of mad midnights under gaunt pines by the lickety ticky moon, blowing with a shroud, a lantern, a burying of dirt, a digging up of dirt, gnomes, axles full of grease lying in the river water and the moon glinting in a rat’s eye —the Lowell, the World, you find.
Doctor Sax hides around the corner of my mind.
SCENE: A masked by night shadow flitting over the edge of the sandbank.
SOUND: A dog barking half a mile away; and river.
SMELL: sweet sand dew.
TEMPERATURE: Summer mid night frost.
MONTH: Late August, ballgame’s over, no more home-runs over the center of the arcanum of sand our Circus, our diamond in the sand, where ballgames took place in the reddy dusk,—now it’s going to be the flight of the caw-caw bird of autumn, honking to his skinny grave in the Alabama pines.
SUPPOSITION: Doctor Sax has just disappeared over the sandbank and’s gone home to bed.
7
FROM THE WRINKLY TAR corner Moody begins her suburban rise through the salt white tenements of Pawtucketville to reach a Greek peak at the Dracut border wild woods surrounding Lowell, where Greek veterans of American occupation from Crete rush in the early morn with a pail for the goat in the meadow–Dracut Tigers is the name of the Meadow, it is where in the late summer we conduct vast baseball series in a gray clawmouth rainy dark of Final Games, September, Leo Martin pitching, Gene Plouffe shortstop, Joe Plouffe (in the soft piss of mists) temporarily playing rightfield (later Paul Boldieu, p, Jack Duluoz, c, a great battery all in time when summer gets hot and dusty again)—Moody Street achieves the top of the hill and surveys these Greek farms and intervening 2-story wooden bungalow flats in dreary field-edges of Marchy old November dropping his birch on a silhouette hill in silver dusk-fall, craw. Dracut Tigers sitting there with a stonewall behind, and roads to Pine Brook, wild dark Lowell so swallowed me doom its croign of holobaws,— Moody Street that begins a den of thieves near the City Hall concludes ‘mongst ballplayers of the windy hill (all roar like Denver, Minneapolis, St. Paul with the activities of ten thousand heroes of poolhall, field and porch) (hear the hunters crash their guns in skinny black brakes, making deer covers for their motors)—up goes old Moody Street, past Gershom, Mt. Vernon and furthers, to lose itself at the end of the car line, top of the switchpole in trolley days, now place where busdriver checks yellow wristwatch–lost in birch woods of crow time. There you can turn and survey all of Lowell, on a dry bitterly cold night after a blizzard, in the keen edgeblue night etching her old rosy face City Hall clock to the prunes of heaven those flashing stars; from Billerica the wind came blowing dry sun-winds against moisty blizzard-clouds and ended up the storm and made news; you see all Lowell …
Survivor of the storm, all white and still in a keen.
8
SOME OF MY tragic dreams of Moody Street Pawtucketville on a Spectral Saturday Night–so unreachable and impossible-little children jumping among the iron posts of the wrinkly tar yard, screaming in French–In the windows the mothers are watching with wry comments “Cosse tué pas l cou, ey? (Dont break your neck, ey?) In a few years we moved over the Textile Lunch scene of greasy midnight hamburgs with onion & katchup; the one horrible