Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [33]
SCENE 20 You see me marching up and down where I stand, moving slowly around the room, the races are over, I’m marching out of the grandstand but also shaking my head quizzically from side to side like a disgruntled bettor, tearing up my tickets, a poor child pantomime of what sometimes I’d seen my father do after the races at Narragansett or Suffolk Downs or Rockingham– On my little green desk the papers are all spread, my pencil, my editorial desk running the Turf. On the back of that desk still were chalkmarks Gerard had made when he was alive in the green desk–this desk rattled in my dreams because of Gerard’s ghost in it—(I dream of it now on rainy nights turned almost vegetable by the open window, luridly green, as a tomato, as the rain falls in the block-hollow void outside all dank, adrip and dark . . . hateful walls of the Cave of Eternity suddenly appearing in a brown dream and when you slow the drape, fish the shroud, shape your mouth of mow and maw in this huge glissen tank called Rainy,—you can see the void now). —Pushed against the corner by the Victrola, my little pool table–it was a folding pool table, with velvet green, little holes and leather pockets and little cues with leather tips you could cue-chalk with blue chalk from my father s pool table at the bowling alley– It was a very important table because I played The Shadow at it– The Shadow was the name I gave to a tall, thin, hawknosed fellow called St. Louis who came into the Pawtucketville Social Club and shot pool sometimes with the proprietor my father … the greatest poolshark you ever saw, huge, enormous hands with fingers seemingly ten inches long laid out spread-claw on the green to make his cue-rest, his little finger alone sprouted and shot from his handmountain to a distance of six inches you’d say, clean, neat, he slipped the cue right through a tiny orifice between his thumb and forefinger, and slid on all woodsy shiny to connect with that cue-ball at cue-kiss–he’d smack shots in with no two cents about it, fwap, the ball would cluck in the leather hole basket like a dead thing– So tall, shroudy, he bent long and distant and lean for his shots, momentarily rewarding his audience with a view of his enormous gravity head and great noble and mysterious hawk nose and inscrutable never-saying eyes– The Shadow– We’d see him coming in the club from the street–
SCENE 21 And in fact this is what we see now, The Shadow St. Louis is coming into the Social Club to shoot pool, wearing hat and long coat, somehow shadowy as he comes along the long plywood wall painted gray, light, but’s coming into an ordinary bowling alley four of which you see to the left of The Shadow, with only two alleys going and two pinboys at work (Gene Plouffe and Scotty Boldieu, Scotty wasn’t a regular like Gene but because he was the pitcher on our team my father let him make a few extra pennies spotting at the alleys)— A low ceiling cellar is what the joint is, you see plumbing pipes,— We are watching The Shadow come in and up the plywood walls from our seats at the head of the alleys, Coca Colas, scoresheet boards that you stand at, by the rack, and the duckpin balls in the rack and the duckpins set up down the alley squat and shiny with a red band in their goldwood–rainy Friday 6:30 P.M. in the P.S.C. alleys, we see smoke shroudens even the shroudy Shadow as he moves up, we hear murmurs and hubbubs and echo-roars of the hall, click of pool games, laughter, talk …
SCENE 22 My father’s in the little cage office at the rear near the Gershom street-door, smoking a cigar behind the glass counter, it rises from him in a cloud, he is frowning angrily at a piece of paper in his hand. “Jesus Christ now where did this thing come from?—” (looking at another)—”is that a?—” and he falls into scowling meditation with himself over these two little pieces of paper, the other fellows in the office are talking … there’s Joe Plouffe, Vauriselle, and Sonny Alberge —everything’s jumping– We are only looking in at the door, can