Doctor Sax (7 page)

Joe and I explored all the possible haunted houses in
town. Chief of our great houses was when he lived on Bridge Street near 18th, in an old gray rickety manse in a V of leafy streets in autumn–across Bridge Street, over the stone lawn wall, rose the slope side of pines and drearies, exactly like the lawn of the Lakeview Castle–to the Haunted House which was but a shell, a wreck of plasters, beams, broken glass, shit, wet leaves, forlorn legs of old centerpieces, rusted piano wires in a ping (like in an old abandoned freighter used as a buoy you still find Captain’s Mess has scrollwork in the beams, and the sun shines in all joy mom of sea like it did off Malaya or Seattle so long ago)— There were ghosts in that old House Shell–roofs decaying–pissing was a thrill among these decadent beams and bulge crack walls– Something namelessly, shroudily obscene and wild–like drawings of great cocks of the length of snakes, with dumb venom spittles–we tugged at boards, shifted bricks, broke fresh plaster islands, kicked out glass chips and–

At night, summer’s nights, with the family downstairs in the big kitchen (maybe my own mother or father there, others, a young priest just down from Canada who loves to woo de ladies–we are four levels up to the attic, we only hear faint roars of laughter below)—in the Lowell night we lay relaxed in pissy mattresses, with treeswish at the window, telling stories (“Shee-cago! shee-cago!”), playing with our ding dongs, squirming, throwing legs up in air, rushing to the window to look out at commotions–to look out at our Haunted House in the multiform black and white flashing Lowell night… What owls? hoos and voodoos in the midnight? What old maniac in white hair is come to
pluck the rusty piano springs in a maze of midnight? what Doctor Sax crawling along the black, shaded, cowled, pe-loted, zinging speedily at low-height to his mysteries and fear-

Together, by huge afternoon of world clouds, we explored reservoirs in the hill of Lowell so high, or made camps outside sewage pipes in brown tragic matted fields —in the backfields of St. Louis school–in a tree we sit, call it Fresh Air Texicab,- I fly kites in the field-

Joe comes to my house one Sunday morning after church but I’m eating breakfast so in his white knickers while waiting he goes down the cellar and shovels up a pail of coal for my Ma–we pose outside with Henry Troisieux and my cat, in dull Sunday afternoon,-behind us wave the Doctor Sax trees … the record of old nights in the sleeping barns, in the cold attic, in the mystery, in the dream, Joe and me– Old buddies of the lifetime of boyhood– Yet Joe avoided shrouds, knew no mystery, wasn’t scared, didn’t care, strode along, lumberjack boots, in rainy mornings in church, Sunday, he’s spent last week exploring a little river, wants this afternoon to find his cave in the pine woods–go build a tent, fix the car in rainy dim-mists all day with cans and smudge rags and no refreshments-

Joe had turrets and attics in his house but he wasn’t afraid of sailing ghosts … his phantoms were reality, work and earn money, fix your knife, straighten the screw, figure for tomorrow. I played dismal private games in his backyard, some mythic hassel with myself involving how many times around the house and water–while he’s busy fixing something for his use. Come night, shadows creep, Sax
emerges, Joe just rocks on the porch talking of things to do and every now and then leaning over and scratching his leg and going “Hyoo hyoo hyoo! you shore did get sore that time–hoo hoo!”

THE NOISE OF THE BIG FAMILY PARTIES
could only be heard faintly up in Joe’s fourth story attic but o! when it was at my house, the cottage on West Street earlier or later on, wow, the whoops and screams of the ladies as madcap Duquette would get Blanche to put all the lights out and start playing spooky music on the piano, up riseth a face powdered in white flour, framed in an empty picture frame, with flashlight under chin, oogoogoogoo, the bursts of howling laughter would just practically knock me outa my bed one flight above– But at least I had the satisfaction of knowing that no real shades would come to get me in the midst of such strong adult mockery and racket-Gad, that was a gang: they called themselves
La Maudite Gang
until one of the couples died leaving them twelve couples instead of thirteen so it became
The Dirty Dozen-
Poor priest LaPoule DuPuis was involved with them, he was the last unmarried son of a huge Quebec family that according to tradition felt it would be
damnee
if someone in the house didnt belong to the priesthood so madcap sexfiend LaPoule was retired piously behind the cloistral wall, to some extent, a woman wasnt safe in the same room
with him– One Saturday night he got dead drunk after pirouetting with all the ladies at a big roaring party and passed out before midnight (woulda stopped drinking at midnight anyway, as he was saying Mass in the morning)— Come morning Joe’s father hauls LaPoule into the shower, shoves black coffee down his throat, then calls the whole gang to come see the fun at eleven O’clock Mass–

They’re all there, the Duluozes, the Fortiers, the Duquettes, the DuBois, the Lavoisiers, the lot, all in the front pews, and out comes LaPoule in chasuble with the solemn altar boys and weaves and totters to his work– Every time he turns his bloodshot suffering eyes to the front pews, there’s my father or Joe’s, or Ma and the other crazy women giving him surreptitious little mocking waves of the hand (like in some hilarious blasphemous French movie not yet made) and he in turn waves back as if to say “For krissakes keep it low” but they think he’s spoofing back at them and all through the Mass Joe’s father you can hear his spluttrous inheld explosions of dont-laugh– My father makes everything worse by waving his strawhat between his legs, or Blanche crosses her eyes at LaPoule just as he’s raising a host at the communion rail–mad gang–the poor fellow laboring to kneel, altar boys clutching at his arm as he almost falls over, as good a man of gold and God I’d say as the most postrous Bishop ever levied frowns on his flock —LaPoule at our wild parties loved to tell the joke (which was actually a true story) about the parish priest in Canada who wouldnt pardon some guy for a sin and in revenge the guy smeared shite on the rail of the pulpit so here it is Sun
day morning the priest is about to begin: Today, ladies and gentlemen, I want to speak about religion, la
nature
de la religion–Religion,” says he, beginning, putting his hand on the rail,”religion… “he brings his hand up to his nose, puts it down again … “religion is—” once again he brings his hand to his nose, frowning in preplexity,
“la religion–mais c’est d’la marde!”
Which joke was one of those that used to send off Joe’s big happy mother Adelaide into such a scream you could hear it clear down the river rocks and inevitably blasted my cat off my pillow and sent me wondering out of dreams– The mad gang, the time they had a party at the beach and after the near-tragedy of Pa and Mr. Fortier swimming out too far and almost drowning (Salisbury Beach) even then enough gayety in the gang, that, as Mrs. Fortier is frying the porkchops on the camp cottage stove and everybody’s feeling kinda gloomy, Duquette comes up in his bathing suit, plucks pubic hairs from under his trunks and sprinkles them into the sizzling pan saying “They need a little spice”—so that the gang laughter rang by the sea, and talk about your modern day neighbors complaining to the police about noisy parties, these parties were revolutions and cannonades, it’ll never happen again in America (besides all the swishing trees have been cut down, so dreaming boys cant lean their chins on midnight window-sills any more)—O Moon Lowell– And my mother making coffee in our old 15-cup drip grind aluminum pot, and the poker games in the kitchen lasting till doomsday–Joe and I’d sometimes come down and peek from the staircase at all this Riot Loveliness–

WHEN JOE LIVED
on Bunker Hill Street and we were 8,9, we explored first thing the banks of the Merrimac in that part along Lakeview Avenue then-Polish slums where the river swam dirtily, meekly without rock-roar along the huge red walls of Boott Mills–we’d on rainy Sunday afternoons in February run down there to kick at ice floes and rusty empty kerosene cans and tires and crap– One time we fell in to our hips, got wet–Big brother Henry shat against a tree, he actually did, squatted and aimed an explosion on a lateral line, horrible. We found fat lovers disentangling huge dimpled lady legs and hairy manlegs out of an intercourse in a litter of movie magazines, empty cans, rat rags, dirt, grass and straw halfway up the slope in the bushes … a gray afternoon in summer, they were delightfully engaged in a field dump by the river … and at night came back, darker, wilder, sexualler, with flashlights, dirty magazines, jiggling hands, sucks, furtive listens to the Sound of Time in the river, the mills, the bridges and streets of Lowell … wildeyed in heaven they screwed, and went home.

Joe and I ransacked the river down there … the darker and rainier the better the time… We fished out crap from the stream. An unknown and forgotten morning took place in the yard of a rickety two story house corner of Lakeview and Bunker Hill where we threw firewood and balls all up and down the air and mothers yelled at us, new friends,— like the forgetting of the memory of next Monday morning
in school–ugh it’s impossible to forget the horror of school … coming … Monday-

One afternoon–in the ghost yards of St. Louis, the crunchly gravels of recess, banana smells in the lockers, a nun combing my hair with the water of the pissoir drip-pipe, dank dark gloom and sins of corridors and corners where also (on the girl side) my sister Nin dashed in eternities echoing of her own horror–one afternoon as the whole school stood silent in the noon gravel, listening and fidgeting, Joe, who’d done some
pécker
(sin) during the recess, was being whanged with a big ruler with iron rims on the ass in the Sister Superior’s office–shrieking and howling he was, when I asked him about it later he said “It hurt” and didn’t make any excuses for the howling he did. Joe was always a big cowboy. We played in some old Farmer’s (Farmer Kelly’s) field–he had a solemn farmhouse on West Sixth with attendant hugetree and barns, 100-years-old farm, in the middle of middleclass cottages of Centralville, behind his great fields spread, apples, hollows, meadows, some corn close in, fences,—with the St. Louis parish on his flank (rectory and church and school and auditorium and battered sadfield of recess) (St. Louis, where my brother’s funeral darkened in a fitful glimmer before my eyes … in a dim far loneliness far from here and now … forgotten rains have shrouded and re-shrouded the burial grounds) … Farmer Kelly-his old lamplit oil house flimmered in a glub of night trees when we passed going from my house to Joe’s, we always wondered what kind of an old mysterious hermit he must be, I knew far
mers and farm life from Uncle John Giradoux in the Nashua woods where I went in summers … to a cobwebbed Sax of forest trees–

A kid across the street from Joe’s died, we heard wailing; another kid in a street between Joe’s and mine, died–rain, flowers–the smell of flowers–an old Legionnaire died, in blue gold horrors of cloth and velvet and insignias and paper-wreaths and the cadaverous death of satin pillows– Oh yoi yoi I hate that–my whole death and Sax is wound in satin coffins– Count Condu slept in one all day below the Castle-purple lip’t–they buried little boys in them–I saw my brother in a satin coffin, he was nine, he lay with the stillness and the face of my former wife in her sleep, accomplished, regretted–the coffin streaks, spiders join his hand below–he’d lay in the sun of worms looking for the lambs of the sky–he’d gook a ghost no more in those shroudy halls of sand incarnate dirt behung in drapes of grain by level deep doop dung–what a thing to gape at– AND THROUGH ROTTING SATIN.

I gave up the church to ease my horrors–too much candlelight, too much wax–

I prefer rivers in my death, or seas, and other continents, but no satin death in Satin Massachusetts Lowell–with the bishop of St. Jean de Baptiste Stone, who baptized Gerard, with a wreath in the rain, beads on his iron nose, “Mama did he baptize me?”

“No he baptized Gerard,” I wished– I was just a little too young to have been baptized by a Saint of the Hero Church, Gerard had, and so baptized, saint did thus die —rain across the Rouault Gray Baroque Strasbourg Cathe
dral facade Big Minster Face of St. Jean Baptiste church on Merrimac St. at Aiken’s sad end–rising stone heap from the tenements of Moody Street–grooking rivers piled beneath.

Doctor Sax traversed the darknesses between pillars in the church at vespertime.

FINALLY VINNY BERGERAC
moved to Rosemont–from that tenement on Moody to the swampy interiors and lowlands of Rosemont, a rosecovered cottage flat on the dreaming lurps and purls of the Merrimac… Fact is, they had a swimbeach on that shore, Joe and I went swimming, three times a day in the white sand dumped there–where regularly you saw lumps of human shit floating–I have nightmares of swallowing a cud of crap when I get up on my half rock and point hands to dive, by God I learned to dive by myself by half submerging to my waist–but here’s these turds floating in the river of time and I’m ready to sprowf myself one up, flubadegud– the beach was located in reeds down by the easternmost lost fender of the dump where the rats scurried in a dull gloom of vague smokes smoldering since Xmas week–in the summer mornings of freshness and boyhood we sallied forth into the vast dewy day in a clew pale of happy easters, two kids in a wild swale, having times we’d never forget–I be Buck Jones, you be Buck Jones–all boys want to grow up into hardy weathered characters thin and strong who when they do
grow old throw dark seamy faces to the shroud, blot your satin up and roll it away–

Doctor Sax is hiding in the dark room waiting for it to turn from gray afternoon, late, with quiet child singings in the block (on Gershom, Sarah) (as I peek from dark dumb dull drapes of afternoon)— Sax hides in that darkness coming from behind the door, soon it will be night and the shadows will deepen darker and hoo doo you– Gods of the Fellaheen Flagebus level of fly-away dung bottles blue with bags and scrawny cross black striped old Bohemian carpet of the clock-sprale-pot–