Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [40]
Beyond, the back railroad tracks of the Warehouse, some switch tracks to the cotton mills, the Canal, the Post Office to the right across it–rampy lots, box crate heats of afternoon, the dark dank rich redbrick Georgian alley street like a great street in self-interior Chinatown between wholesale offices and printing plants–my father swung his groaning old Plymouth of the Kraw Time around the little corner, tooting–coming to the inky darkness of the warehouse of his plant, where on a Saturday night in a dream-tragic holdups or moldups are taking place and my father’s busy with one of his interminable aides at some huge hassel of the crock, there’s no telling what it is I really see in that dream–into the future really. Dreams are where participants in a drama recognize one another’s death–there is no illusion of lif e in this Dream–
Long long ago before tot-linoleums of Lupine Road and even Burnaby Street there was, and will be, inconceivable rich red softnesses in the consistency of the air on going-to-the-show nights. (One of those nameless little bugs, so small you don’t know what they are, so tiny, flew by my face.)
Some kind of brown tragedy it was, in the plant,—the spectral canal flows by in its own night, brown gloom of midnight cities presses the windows in, dull lamps as of poker games illuminate the loneliness of my father-just as in Centralville he’s completely unavailable in the Lakeview Avenue night of old–O the silence of this–he had a gymnasium there, with boxers, real life fact– When W.C. Fields has boarded the destiny train, for sooty miles to Cincinnati, my father hurries in the B.F. Keith alley opens the door, goes in on lost endeavors wined from the Canal of sperms and oil that flows between the mills, under the bridge– The mystery of the Lowell night extends to the heart of downtown, it lurks in the shadows of the redbrick walls– Something in old musty records in the City Hall–an old, old book in the library files, with prints of Indians–a nameless laugh by the purities of the wave mist on the river bank, at dead of March or April night–and empty winds of winter night under the Moody Bridge, around the corner of Riverside and Moody, sand grit blowing, here comes old Gene Plouffe in the dawn grim cold headed for work in the mills, he’s been sleeping in his shroud and brown night in the old house of Gershom, the moon’s whipped to one side, cold stars gleam, shine down on empty Vinny Bergerac tenement court where now the washlines creak, The Shadow creeps,—the ghosts of W.C. Fields and my father emerge together from the redbrick alley, straw be-hatted, headed for the ht-up blackwalls of the night of the cross eyed cat, as Sax grins…
BOOK FOUR
The Night the Man with the Watermelon Died
1
AND NOW THAT TRAGIC HALO, half gilt, half hidden–the night the Man with the watermelon died–should I tell— (Oh Ya Ya Yoi Yoi)-how he died, and O’Curlicued on the planks of the bridge, pissing death, staring at the dead waves, everybody’s already dead, what a horror to know —the sin of life, of death, he pissed in his pants his last act.
It was a baneful black night anyway, full of shrouds. My mother and I walked Blanche home to Aunt Clementine’s house. This was a dreadful drear brown house in which Uncle Mike was dying these past five, ten, fifteen years, worse— next door to a garage for hearses leased by one of the undertakers around the corner on funereal Pawtucket Street and had a storage room for–coffins-
Gad, I had dreams rickety and strange about that bam garage–hated to go to Mike’s for that reason, it was Godawful the scene of marijuana-sheeshkabob cigarettes he smoked for his asthma, Cu Babs– The thing that got Proust so all-hung-out–on his frame of greatness– Right Reference Marcel–old Abyssinian Bushy Beard-Uncle Mike bliazasting legal medical tea in his afternoons of gloom-special meditation