Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [61]
4
IT’S LENT AND PEOPLE GO ON WITH THEIR NOVENAS—I’m in there at gray dusk Tuesday evening (the afternoon after the raft fiasco with Dicky I spent hours simply on my back in the riverside grass at the cliff precipice under Moody Bridge, surveying the flood with drowsy time’s eye of summer and idly watching an airplane circling the river)—I’m at church, have to finish my Novena with which I can pray for anything I want later, besides they all told me to do my Novena, so I’m in church at dusk– More people than usual, they’re afraid of the Flood. Dimly you can hear it roaring behind the candle silence walls.
5
BAGGYPANTS JOURNEYMEN INVENTORS OF THE WORLD couldn’t have been able to solve the riddle of the flood even if they had a union– Make a study:—along the shore of the presdigitator water-measurer on the canal there was nothing but water, the gimmick was drowned, the alley between redbrick warehouses leading to the grimy door of my father’s front floor hall-chamber with wagon wheels and wrinkly coaldust basement groundfloor for a red carpet to the Boss–it was all one vast and ghastly swimmingpool made of mud, straw, cotton, machine oil, ink, piss and rivers–
6
STAVROGIN HUNGRY MY FILIAL BROTHER was lost in the mud rats–I heard that Joe was off somewhere with a .22 rifle hunting rats, there was a bounty being paid, talk was up about a mass Typhoid inoculation–everybody had to take these shots, G. J. and I were terribly sick and arm-swollen from them that following week–
7
MY FATHER, Ma and Nin, and I, the car parked behind us, are standing on a high parapet street down by White Street surveying below us the brown water rising to the second floor level of houses just like our own on Sarah Avenue and the poor families like us that were out of a house,—well all they gotta do now is go bohemianing in the candlelight like all Mexico,—White Street was the name of Mrs. Wakefield’s street, it was now Brown Street,—down towards the river you can see the arm of water inrushing and how it all happened, all coming from great seas of flood reported up-river–
“Bon, ca sera pas terrible ca avoir l’eau dans ta chambre a couchez aussi haut que les portrats sur T mur” said my father—(Well, wouldn’t that be terrible to have water in your bedroom as high as the pictures on the wall!) I stood close to him for protection, love and loyalty. A fly buzzed.
8
MRS. MOGARRAGA THE IRISH WOMAN who lived in the little white bungalow in Rosemont was heard declaiming as she moved out of her piano parlor in a rowboat, “Bums and kit’s kaboodles they are, the slimes of Arrah, to make trousers of themselves in the general pants bottoms Gomorrah of their filthy hovel house–it’s the Lord brought the Flood to wash the wretches out like cockroach! Bottles in their bedspreads, beans in their bedbugs, batty–I’d as soon sweep them out with me broom”— (referring to her boarders) (clutching her cat to her bosom God bless her huge delight)— A ripple of laughter rises from the floodside crowd.
9
EUGENE PASTERNAK, mad with love of his stride-howl midnights, comes furiyating down the slime path in hod’s man’s boots with a flume of essence in his air—”Geeyaw! The groolemen make my single dole ring soul make out–containt my comp! save my bomp!”—and disappearing in the back shacks (in a shimmy dance like a comedian leaving the stage).
10
IN SEARS ROEBUCK and hardware stores people stomped around by the light of gray afternoon and bought boots, rubbers, fiddled among rakes, cape, gloomrain gear–something like a dirty splotch of ink hung in the sky, the flood was in the air, talk in the streets–views of water at distant street-ends all over town, the great clock of City Hall rounded golden silent in the dumb daylight and said the time about the flood. Puddles splashed in traffic. Unbelievably