Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [43]
“What’s the matter with Shammy, he’s an ideal man.”
“But he’s married.”
“If you love him that ain’t his fault–you gotta take the bad with the worse.” My mother had a great secret love for Shammy–she told him and everybody so–Shammy reciprocated with great kindness and charm– When he wasn’t at the Club bowling or shooting pool, or home sleeps, or driving his bus, he was at our house having big parties with Blanche and my father and mother and sometimes a Textile student Tommy Lockstock and my sister —Shammy had a real affection for Blanche–
“But he’s only a truck driver,” she’d say. “There’s nothing really fine about him.” She probably meant he was just dumb and silent, Shammy was, nothing much troubled him, he was a goodlooking peaceful man. Blanche wanted Rachmaninoff in her teacups.
“Oh the irony of life.”
“Yeah,” my mother’d echo, “the iyony of life, oui”—and bundle along with Blanche’s arm in hers in coats for the latenight mist, and I, Ti Jean, walking beside them sometimes listening but most of the time watching the dark shadows in the night, from Sarah park to the Funerals and Grottos of Pawtucket, looking for The Shadow, for Doctor Sax, listening for the laugh, “mwee hee hee ha ha,” looking for that lawn where G.J. and I and Dicky Hampshire wrestled, the place where Vinny Bergerac and Lousy threw popcorn at each other etc. and also wrapped deep in that dream of childhood which has no bottom and instantly soars to impossible daydreams, I’ve got the whole city of Manhattan paralyzed, I’m going around with a super-buzzing-current in me that knocks everything out of its way and also I’m invisible and taking money out of cash registers and striding along 23rd Street with fire in my head and making the elevated highways ring with my electricity, on steel and stone etc.— Across the street, just before we go in the Grotto, is the store Uncle Mike briefly owned before he got too sick and for a while Edgar ran it and one summer night I heard him say that new word “sex appeal” and all the ladies laughed–
As we’re turning from the sidewalk into the darkness of the Grotto (it’s about eleven o’clock) Blanche is saying “If he only’d made some money somehow, if he’d been rich like some men do with store,—instead the squalor of those years and that house, really Angy I was born for something much grander, don’t you feel it in my music?”
“Blanche I always did say you was a very great painist —there!—a great artist, Blanche, I understand you, when you make a mistakes on the piano I always know, it’s always been so–ain’t it?”
“You do have a good ear, Ange,” conceded the Princess.
“You damn tootin right–ask anybody if I ain’t got a good ear, Ti Jean, I tell you,” (turning to me) “a toutes les fois que Blanche fait seulement quainque un ti mistake sur son piano, pis je’ll sais tu-stiite, … Hah?”(Repeating what she said.)
And I jump up athletically to catch a branch of the overhead tree in answer and to prove my world is more action —so engrossed have we been in our conversation, we’re in the Grotto!—deep, too,—halfway to the first Station of the Ghost. The first of the stations faced the side of a funeral home, so you kneeled there, at night, looking at faint representations of the Virgin, hood over head, her sad eyes, the action, the tortured wood and thorns of the Passion, and your reflections on the subject become mirrored from the funeral home where a dull light fixed in the ceiling of an overpass rain garage for hearses shines dully in the gravelly gloom, with bordering dewy grassplots and shrubs to give it the well-tended look, and the drapes in the windows