Doctor Sax (8 page)

We heard the Henry Armstrong fights through roots of broken leaves, we lay on the sofa upside down in dark summer evenings with the window open and only the radio dial for a light, deep brown gloom red glow, Vinny, G.J., Lousy, Scotty, me, Rita (Vinny’s kidsister) and Lou (his kidbrother) and Normie (next oldest brother, blond, nervous)—Mother Charlie and Father Lucky out, she at graveyard shift of mill, he as bouncer in a French Canadian nightclub (full of cowbells)— We in the summer evening indulged ourselves in various listens to the radio (Gang-busters, The Shadow–which is on Sunday afternoon and always dismally short of the mark)—(Orson Welles great-programs of Saturday night, 11
P.M.
Witches’ Tales on faint stations—) We all talked of screwing Rita and Charlie, the women in the world were only made to bang– There was an orchard in back, with trees, apples, we kicked among them–

One night we had a juvenile homosexual ball without realizing what it was and Vinny leaped around with a sheet
over his head and yelled “Oook!” (the effeminate shrieking ghost as compared to the regular “Aouoool” of the regular virile dumbghosts) (eek, Dizzy); also I remember vaguely G.J.’s and my disgust with the whole thing. It was that madcap Vinny, that’s who it was. A horrible moron by name of Zaza hung around Vinny, he was almost 20, Zaza indeed–that was his real name, it was a regular Arabian country epic–along the dump he’d drooled since childhood, spermatazoing in all directions, jacking off dogs and worst of all sucking off dogs–they’d seen him try it under a porch. Doctor Sax the White-haired Hawk knew these things–The Shadow always knows–um hee hee he ha— (echo hollow chamber hello ripple anybody there-y-ere-y-ere-ere- Like? hike? hike?)—(as the tank recedes)—that’s The Shadow’s laugh–Doctor Sax lurked under porches watching these operations, from the cellar, made notes, sketched, mixed herbs, come up with a solution to kill the Snake of Evil–which he used on the last climactic day–the Day the Snake was Real–and stove up–and hurled a honk of angers at the wailing world–but later–

Ah Zaza indeed–a moronic French Canadian sexfiend, he is now in a madhouse–I saw him masturbate in the livingroom one rainy afternoon, he did it in public to amuse Vinny who watched at his leisure like a Pasha and sometimes gave instructions, and munched on candy–no pariah the schoolboy be–but a Persian super Luminary of the Glittering Courts— “Come on Zaza madman, faster—”

“I go fast I can.”

“Go, Zaza, go-”

The whole gang: “Come on Zaza, corne!”

“Here he comes!’

We all laugh and watch the horrible sight of an idiot youth pumping up his white juices with his jerking fist in a dazzle of frenzies and exhaustion of the spirit… nothing else to resort to. We applaud! “Hooray for Zaza!”

“Thirteen times last Monday–he came each time exactly, no lie–Zaza has an endless supply of come.”

“That’s Zaza the crazy one.”

“He’d rather jerk off than die.”

“Zaza the sex fiend–look! he’s startin again–Gol dang son of a bootch–Zaza’s at it again—”

“Oh his record’s longer than this—”

(To myself:
“Quel—
what a damn fool.”)

I believe eight-year-old Lou must have seen–no, as Vinny always made sure his kidbrothers weren’t involved in any dirty play … he protected them with sanctimony and gravity.—His sister much less–as primitive people do-

It was later when Vinny moved to Moody Street again, farther downtown, in the humbuzzing around St. Jean de Baptiste that we began to have less childlike pursuits haunted by darkness and goofs– Later we simply forgot dark Saxes and hung ourselves on the kick of sex and adolescent lacerated love … where everafter the fellows disappear. .. There was a great big whore called Sue, 200 pounds, friend of Charlie’s, came calling at Vinny’s, to sit in rockingchair and yak but would sometimes throw her dress up to show us herself when we made cracks from a safe distance. The existence of this huge woman of the world reminded me that I had a father (who visited her purple doorways) and a real world to face in the future
—whoo! It snowed on shroudy New Year’s one two three as we laughed about that!

SATURDAY NIGHT WAS
the time of the balloon in the sky when I’d listen to wayne King, or some of those great Andre Baruch orchestras of the thirties (our first radio had a great shit-colored false-paper-disc speaker round and strange)—sit back, imagine–stoned beyond eternity as I listened to the for-the-first-time-to-me individual pieces of music and instruments,—all of it by the literal flower-vase of the Golden Davenport Thirties when portly Rudy Vallee was a dalliance dawn cuteboy of rosy moon saws by a lake, coo owl–lost in Saturday night reveries, earlier of course it’s always the Hit Parade, fanfare number one song hit, boom, crash, the title?
Film Your Eyebrows in my Song, Tear—
with an upswing of the band and crash of events as I turn over my page of Saturday night funnies fresh from the wagons of the boys in the exciting Sat night streets in which also I cut along considerably, one night with Bruno Gringas arm in arm wrestling all the way up the bright market of Moody from City Hall to Parent’s meat store (where Ma bought everything)—the butcher himself looked good enough to eat, the store was so rich– Pursy times, when I’d a 20¢ cake splurge, and they were the biggest cakes then–black night shadows of Sat night wound with fiery lights of stores and traffic make a huge arrangement of lacelike blackery to splarse and intersplash the
views and heels of spiny real people in clothes interwiling with the wild blue dark, disappear–the mystery of the night, which is a dew of grain-

Great White Sheets of the house being ironed by my mother on the big round table in the middle of the kitchen-She drinks tea while working,— I’m in the solemn furniture of the livingroom, my mother’s brown chairs, with leather, and wood, big and thick, inconceivably solid, the table is a massive plank on a log, round–reading
Tim Tyler’s Flying Luck—
My mother’s past furnitures have almost been forgotten, certainly lost, O lost–

On Saturday night I was settling down alone in the house with magazines, reading
Doc Savage
or the
Phantom Detective
with
his
masky rainy night–
The Shadow Magazine
I saved for Friday nights, Saturday morning was always the world of gold and rich sunlight.

NOT LONG AFTER WE MOVED TO PHEBE
from Centralville, and I had met Zap Plouffe, I was playing at latedusk in the yard with aftersupper buzzes and slamming screendoors everywhere–with Cy Ladeau and Bert Desjardins in their part of their own childhood which is so antique to me that they seem unbelievably monstrous and assumed more normal shapes in the age molds of later years– Bert Desjardins it was impossible to see young, twelve, his long tall weeping brother Al… I saw him cry boohoo in front of a whole gallery of porch sitters composed of gene and joe plouffe
and others in the midst of an eclipse of the sun that partly I’m looking at through my darkburnt glass from the dump and partly ignoring to gape at this spectacle of Al Desjardins sobbing in front of the gang (from some Al Roberts kick in the ass, Al’s sittin there giggling, he was a great catcher and longball hitter)—as the darkness fills all the brown windows of the neighborhood for an instant in the fiery summer afternoon– Bert Desjardins no less eccentric —playing–he walked across the Moody Street Bridge with me the first morning I went to St. Joseph brothers school —the rail was on our left, iron, separating us from the 100-foot drop to the roaring foams of the rocks in their grisly eternity (that became white be-maned hysterical horses in the night)—he said “I remember my first day at school, I wasn’t tall enough to look over the thick bar of that rail, you’re going to grow just like I did right over it–in no time!” I couldn’t believe it.

Bert was in the same school. I don’t know what I did —irked a kid, at recess–I was in love with Ernie Malo, it was a real love affair at eleven–I tiptoed on his fence heartbreakingly across the street from school–I hurt him once with my foot on the fence, it was like hurting an angel, at Gerard’s picture I said my prayers and prayed for Ernie’s love. Gerard made no move in the photo. Ernie was very beautiful to my eyes–it was before I began to distinguish between sexes–as noble and beautiful as a young nun–yet he was just a little boy, tremendously grown up (he became a sour Yankee with dreams of small editorships in Vermont)—A kid known as Fish darkly approached me as I was lifting my foot off the last Moody
Bridge plank approaching Textile and the walk in fields and dumps to home–came up to me, “Well, there you are,” and punched me in the face, and walked away as I blubbered. I staggered home aghast in weeps–by walls and under orangebrick chimneys of the painful eternity–to my mother–I wanted to ask her why? why should he hit me? I vowed to hit Fish back for a lifetime and never did– finally I met him delivering fish or gathering garbage for the city, in my yard, and didn’t think anything of it–could have hit him in the gray–the gray’s forgotten now–and so the reason’s gone too–but the tragic air is gone–a new clime dew occupies these empty spaces of Nineteen O Two Two we’re always in– All this to explain Bert Desjardins —and playing with Cy Ladeau in the yard.

I threw a piece of slate skimming in the air and accidentally caught Cy at the throat (Count Condu! he came in the night flapping over the sandbank and cut Cy in the neck with his eager blue teeth by sand moons of snore) (the time I slept at Cy’s with Cy and Big Brother Emil when folks drove to Canada in ‘29 Ford–moon was full the night they left)— Cy cried and bled into my mother’s kitchen with that wound, fresh varnish just moved in he spills blood on, my mother coaxes him to stop crying, bandages him, slate so neat and deadly everybody’s mad at me–they say the Castle Hill’s called Snake Hill because it’s got so many little garter snakes hangin around–snaky slate– Bert Desjardins said “You should not do that.”— Nobody could understand it was an accident, it was so sinister–like the paper I used to Black Thief Dicky, sinister —that gray’s forgotten too, as I say Cy and Bert were dread
fully young in a long-ago of moving Time that is so remote it for the first time assumes that rigid post or posture deathlike denoting the cessation of its operation in my memory and therefore the world’s–a time about to become extinct —except that now it can never be, because it happened, it– which led to further levels–as time unveiled her ugly old cold mouth of death to the worst hopes–fears—Bert Desjardins and Cy Ladeau like any prescience of a dream are unerasable.

AND THERE’S ME
—playing my baseball game in the mud of the yard, draw a circle with a rock in the middle, for 3rd, for SS, 2nd base, first, for outfield positions, and pitch ball in with little selfward flick, a heavy ballbearing, bat is a big nail, whap, there’s a grounder between the rock of 3rd and ss, basehit into left because also missed rolling through infield circles–there’s a flyball to left, plops down into left field circle, he’s out, I played this and hit such a long home-run that it was inconceivable, heretofore the diamond I’d drawn in the ground and the game I was playing were synonymous with regular distances and power-values in baseball, but suddenly I hit this incredible homerun with the small of the nail and drove the ball which was my great race champion $1,000,000 repulsion in its bedroom-in-the-winter-life, now it’s spring, blossoms in center field, Dimaggio’s watching my apples grow–it goes sailing across an intervening stadium, or yard, into the veritable
suburbs of the mythical city locating the mythical ballfield —into the yard of the Phebe Street house where we used to live–lost in the bushes there–lost my ball, lost Repulsion, the whole league ended (and the Turf was bereft of its King), a sinister end-of-the-world homerun had been hit.

I always thought there was something mysterious and shrouded and foreboding about this event which put an end to childish play–it made my eyes tired— “Wake up now Jack–face the awful world of black without your aeroplane balloons in your hand”—Behind the thudding apples of my ground, and his fence that shivers so, and winter on the pale horizon of autumn all hoary with his own news in a bigmitt cartoon editorial about storing up coal for the winter (Depression Themes, now it’s atom-bomb bins in the cellar communist dope ring)—a huge goof to grow sick in your papers–behind winter my star sings, zings, I’m alright in my father’s house. But doom came like a shot, when it did, like the foreboding said, and like is implied in the laugh of Doctor Sax as he glides among the muds where my ballbearing was lost, by March midnight that overlaps with a glare mad of her bloodened sun-scapes in the set with the iron groo brush at dusk call fogs, across marshy surveys– Sax strides there soundless on the apple leaf in his mysterious dream-diving night–

When at sweet night I round all my kittens up, my cat, round my blanket up, he slips in, does exactly three turns, flops, motor runs, s’ ready to sleep all night till Ma calls for school in the morning–for wild oatmeal and toast by steaming autumn mornings–for the fogs shimmering up
from G.J.’s mouth as he meets me in the corner, “Crise it’s
cold!—
the goddam winter’s got his big ass farting from the North before the ladies of the summer pick their parasols and leave.”

—Doctor Sax, whirl me no Shrouds–open up your heart and talk to me–in those days he was silent, sardonic, laughed in tall darkness.

Now I hear him scream from the bed of the brim–

“The Snake is Rising Inch an Hour to destroy us–yet you sit, you sit, you sit. Aieee, the horrors of the East–make no fancy up-carves to the Ti-bet wall than a Kangaroo’s mule eared cousin– Frezels! Grawms! Wake to the test in your frails– Snake’s a Dirty Killer–Snake’s a Knife in the Safe– Snake’s a Horror–only birds are good–murderous birds are good–murderous snakes, no good.”

Little booble-face laughs, plays in the street, knows no different– Yet my father warned me for years, it’s a dirty snaky deal with a fancy name–called L-I-F-E–more likely H-Y-P-E… How rotten the walls of life do get–how collapsed the tendon beam…