Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [47]
Transcendental!
Transcendenta!
We shall dance
A mad cadenza!
Mwee hee hee ha ha, Doctor Sax was ready for them all-
One clear Saturday morning the citizens of Lowell saw the mad Miss St. Claire (a terribly rich woman with a house in Cuba and an apartment house in St. Petersburg, Russia, where her mother had stayed on after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution—) wandering in the marble-statued gardens of the castle grounds, a mad sight to see, pissing off rocks on the heights around the valley little boys could see her, a white dot moving in the distant yard– Bottles of whiskey were found in the yard by little boys who played hookey to explore the Castle Grounds and play blackjack in a shitty bay window. One night long ago, in the thirties, in the height of the Depression a young man who was walking home from the mills at midnight, down by the canal at Aiken near Cheever in Little Canada, headed home to Pawtucketville to a wretched furnished room over the Textile Lunch (name was Amadeus Baroque) saw a curlicueing yellow sheaf of papers sliding in the coldmoon January wind of the French Canuck ruts in frozen mud so like Russia, by creaking saloon signs, grit winds, canal frozen solid– What would anybody do seeing this thing, it was though it talked and begged to be picked up the way it sidled to him like a scorpion–with its dry sheaves crack-a-lak–a rustling clink-dry voice in the winter solitudes of bitter Human North–he picked it up with his fingertips, he stooped to pluck it in his bearish coat, he saw it had writing on it
Doctor Sax, AN ACCOUNT OF HIS ADVENTURE WITH THE HUMAN INHABITANTS OF SNAKE CASTLE-Written & Arrang’d by Adolphus Asher Ghoulens, With a Hint Contain’d of Things Which Have Not Yet Seen Their End
-he briefly had time to read that ghoulish title, and under-tucked the eerie manuscript which he’d plucked from tenemental coldnorth night of desolation like the Lamb is plucked from black hills by the Grace of the Lord, and went home with it.
Arriving there, he unfurled his snaky mysteries–there had already come a hunch to this intelligent young mill-worker that satisfied his taste for ambition. He did not know then that he held in his hands the only existing piece of writing from the pen of Doctor Sax, who confined himself to alchemies and outcries as a rule–this bit of foddle wildwawp had been briefly sketched with quill feather in his underground forge-works and red sleep-hole (under a hermit of ark shack on the Dracut Tigers road, he had a stonewall around, a fence, a garden with vegetables and herbs, a good big dog, and a scraggly single pine)—on a night when drunk–after a visit for a poker game from Old Bull Balloon of Butte and Boaz the caretaker of Snake Hill Castle who’d stayed on long after Miss St. Claire had departed from the Castle forever—(in the manuscript Boaz is the butler, Miss St. Claire’s butler, it shows how Sax met Boaz for the first time). Old Bull Balloon incidentally came once a year for a game with Sax, Bull traveled a lot–the game was always held in Doc Sax’s shack in Dracut Tigers road–that is, in the underground room, where the giant black cat guarded the laboratory secrets of the doctor–
This was the story, on yellowed blotchy papers with rusty staples and stained with winter, garbage, and sand shrouds–Baroque read and laughed (Doctor Sax was no sophisticated writer):—
Emilia St. Claire was a woman of whimsy; in this she was a tyrant, indeed a lovable tyrant. She could afford to be a tyrant for she was rich. Her family had left her millions. She had a chateau in France (at most, she had a dozen chateaux in Europe); she had a mansion in New York City on Riverside Drive; a villa in Italy overlooking Genoa; it was rumored she had a marble retreat on an isle near Crete. (But this is not certain.)
Her whimsy demanded the baroque, the unusual, often