Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [70]
“You’ll come to when you lean your face over the nose will fall with it–that is known as death. You’ll come to angular rages and lonely romages among Beast of Day in hot glary circumstances made grit by the hour of the clock —that is known as Civilization. You’ll roll your feet together in the tense befuddles of ten thousand evenings in company in the parlor, in the pad–that is known as, ah, socializing. You’ll grow numb all over from inner paralytic thoughts, and bad chairs,—that is known as Solitude. You’ll inch along the ground on the day of your death and be pursued by the Editorial Cartoon Russian Bear with a knife, and in his bear hug he will poignard you in the reddy blood back to gleam in the pale Siberian sun–that is known as nightmares. You’ll look at a wall of blank flesh and fritter to explain yourself–that is known as Love. The flesh of your head will recede from the bone, leaving the bulldog Determination pointing thru the pique-jaw tremulo jaw bone point–in other words, you’ll slobber over your morning egg cup–that is known as old age, for which they have benefits. Bye and bye you’ll rise to the sun and propel your mean bones hard and sure to huge labors, and great steaming dinners, and spit your pits out, aching cocklove nights in cobweb moons, the mist of tired dust at evening, the corn, the silk, the moon, the rail–that is known as Maturity —but you’ll never be as happy as you are now in your quiltish innocent book-devouring boyhood immortal night.”
Gene went on reading–we looked fondly awhile at the way his prognathic jaw stuck up, his hawk nose came down, almost suffocating his ecstatic mouth with its thin round of breath whistling thru it–Gene sure got high on a good magazine story. “Ain’t nothin I like better, podner, than to wrap mah entrails round a good mess of heapin vittlin Star Western or Pete Coyote westerns or The Shadow when dark he come peramgulatin his long soral laff in the Vault of the Bank shade, yes—”(at times Gene, to imitate prose of pulp magazines, began to sound like W.C. Fields). This is what he had said to me the day he led me down to the brown gloom of his father’s drear house cellar and we found Shadows and Thrilling Detectives and Argosies lying around in cobweb bins. “Edify ye mind, me bye,” says Gene, remembering lines from some Argosy sea-story.
On go the Shadow Sax and I, to blacker things in the night beyond– We skirt the Paquin house, glide swiftly without transparency but vaguely and without sound along the fence across the street, at the Boongo house, go on under immense roars of the huge tree above (still buzzing with its insect selves over the flood excitement), and pause, only for a moment, to look at and give homage to my house … the lights of which, on Saturday night, were now tragically dark, I knew there was something wrong. There is nothing worse than the great weeping face of houses, a family house, in the mid night.
7
“FEAR NOT THE GREEN LOSS—every twig in your cerebular tree is aching to return to you now. No particular loss is there in the use of the loss–by same token no gain by use of gain, habit gain, habit loss–all and every moment is yearning to stay grown to you even as the peerade passes it–you’ll take up your place in the hierarchal racks of vegetabalized heaven with a garland of carrots in your hair and still you won’t know you ever suffered such sweet wishes —in your death you’ll know the death part of your life. And re-gain all that green, and browns.”
Thus did Doctor Sax me give counsel as we furled on into the darkness past my house–Ah! there’s my mother now, she’s been out shopping at Parent’s, late, has bought extra subsidiary pork chops to go with the roast beef, the baked beans (with molasses), the boiled ham, the French bread–the holiday weekend walnut bowl–the Saturday morning sausage and eggs and crepes with Vermont maple syrup–the big boiled stew of Saturday noon lunch–the beans and ham of Saturday night–but now, at this juncture, she realizes Shammy and Pop are going to have a get together in the house and Blanche is