Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [31]
SCENE 15 Next scene, I’m crawling along all stridey and careful following my marbles, and I’m calling em fast “Mate by two lengths”—
SCENE 16 POW flash shot of Mate the marble two inches ahead of big limping Don Pablo with his chipholes (regularly I held titanic marble-smashing ceremonies and “trainings” and some of the racers came out chipped and hobbled, great Don Pablo had been a great champion of the Turf, in spite of an original crooked slant in his round–but now chipped beyond repair–an uncommon tender fore hock, crock, wooden fenders of gloomy mainsmiths smashing up the horn in the horse’s hoof on gray afternoons on Salem Street when still a little horseshit perfumed the Ah Afternoons of Lowell-tragic migs frantic in a raw bloom of the floor, of the flowery linoleum carpet just drymopped and curried by the racetrack trucks— “Don Pablo second!” I’m calling in the same low Doctor Sax crouch—’and Flying Ebony coming up fast from a slow start in the rear-Time Supply” (red stripes on white), (no one else will ever name them), blam, no more time, I’m already leaning over with my arm extended to lean falling on the wall over the finish line and hang my face tragically over the pit of the wood homestretch in entryway with wide amazement and speechless–just manage, wide-eyed, to say— “-s-a-a-a-,”-
SCENE 17 The marbles crashing into wall.
SCENE 18 “—Don Pablo rolled over and crashed in–gee, chipped, he’s so heavy! Don Pablo-o!” with hands to my head in the great catastrophe of the “fans” in the grandstand. (One morning in that room there had been such glooms, no school, the first official day of racing, way back in the beginning, the dismal rainy 1934’s when I used to keep history of myself–started that long before Scotty and I kept baseball history of our souls, in red ink, averages, P. Boldieu, p., .382 bat, .986 field–the day Mate became the first great winner of the Turf, capturing a coveted misty prize of lost afternoons (the Graw Futurity) beyond the hills of Mohican Springs racetrack “in Western Massachusetts” in the “Mohawk Trail country”—(it was only years later I turned from this to the stupidities and quiddities of H.G. Wells and Mososaurs–in these parentheses sections, so (-), the air is free, do what you will, I can–why? whoo?—) the gray dismal rains I remember, the tragic damp on my windowpane, the flood of heat pouring up through the transom near the closet, my closet itself, the gloom of it, the doom of it, the hanging balloons of it, the papers, boxes, smatterdurgalia like William Allen White’s closet in Wichita when he was 14—my yearning for peanut butter and Ritz crackers in the late afternoon, the gloom around my room at that hour, I’m eating my Ritz and gulping my milk by the wreckage of the day– The losses, the torn tickets, the chagrined footsteps disappearing out the ramp, the last faint glimmer of the toteboards in the rain, a torn paper rolling dismally in the wet ramps, my face long and anxious surveying this scene of gloomy jonquils in the floor-frat–that first bookkeeping graymorning when Mate won the Stakes and from the maw-mouth of the Victrola the electric yoigle yurgle little thirties crooners wound too fast with a slam-bash Chinese restaurant orchestry we fly into the latest 1931 hit, ukeleles, ro-bo-bos, hey now, smash-ah! hah! atch a tchal but usually it was just, “Dow-dow-dow, tadoodle-lump!”—”Gee I like hot jyazz”—
Snazzz!)
—but in that room all converted into something dark, cold, incredible gloomy, my room