Dr. Sax

by Jack Kerouac

  DOCTOR SAX

  OTHER WORKS BY JACK KEROUAC

  PUBLISHED BY GROVE PRESS

  Lonesome Traveler

  Mexico City Blues

  Satori in Paris and Pic

  The Subterraneans

  DOCTOR SAX

  Faust Part Three

  BY JACK KEROUAC

  Copyright © 1959 by Jack Kerouac

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kerouac, Jack, 1922-1969.

  Doctor Sax: Faust part three.

  I. Title. II. Title: Dr. Sax

  PS3521.E735D63 1987 813′.54 87-25915

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9572-2

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  BOOK ONE

  Ghosts of the Pawtucketville Night

  1

  THE OTHER NIGHT I had a dream that I was sitting on the sidewalk on Moody Street, Pawtucketville, Lowell, Mass., with a pencil and paper in my hand saying to myself “Describe the wrinkly tar of this sidewalk, also the iron pickets of Textile Institute, or the doorway where Lousy and you and G.J.’s always sittin and dont stop to think of words when you do stop, just stop to think of the picture better –and let your mind off yourself in this work.”

  Just before that I was coming down the hill between Gershom Avenue and that spectral street where Billy Artaud used to live, towards Blezan’s corner store, where on Sundays the fellows stand in bestsuits after church smoking, spitting, Leo Martin saying to Sonny Alberge or Joe Plouffe, “Eh, batêge, ya faite un grand sarman s’foi icite”—(“Holy Batchism, he made a long sermon this time”) and Joe Plouffe, prognathic, short, glidingly powerful, spits into the large pebblestones of Gershom paved and walks on home for breakfast with no comment (he lived with his sisters and brothers and mother because the old man had thrown em all out–”Let my bones melt in this rain!”–to live a hermit existence in the darkness of his night–rheumy red-eyed old sickmonster scrooge of the block)–

  Doctor Sax I first saw in his earlier lineaments in the early Catholic childhood of Centralville–deaths, funerals, the shroud of that, the dark figure in the corner when you look at the dead man coffin in the dolorous parlor of the open house with a horrible purple wreath on the door. Figures of coffinbearers emerging from a house on a rainy night bearing a box with dead old Mr. Yipe inside. The statue of Ste. Thérèse turning her head in an antique Catholic twenties film with Ste. Therese dashing across town in a car with W.C. Fieldsian close shaves by the young religious hero while the doll (not Ste. Therese herself but the lady hero symbolic thereof) heads for her saintliness with wide eyes of disbelief. We had a statue of Ste. Therese in my house–on West Street I saw it turn its head at me–in the dark. Earlier, too, horrors of the Jesus Christ of passion plays in his shrouds and vestments of saddest doom mankind in the Cross Weep for Thieves and Poverty–he was at the foot of my bed pushing it one dark Saturday night (on Hildreth & Lilley secondfloor flat full of Eternity outside)–either He or the Virgin Mary stooped with phosphorescent profile and horror pushing my bed. That same night an elfin, more cheery ghost of some Santa Claus kind rushed up and slammed my door; there was no wind; my sister was taking a bath in the rosy bathroom of Saturday night home, and my mother scrubbing her back or tuning Wayne King on the old mahogany radio or glancing at the top Maggie and Jiggs funnies just come in from wagon boys outside (same who rushed among the downtown redbricks of my Chinese mystery) so I called out “Who slammed my door (Qui a farmez ma parte?)” and they said nobody (“Parsonne voyons donc”)—and I knew I was haunted but said nothing; not long after that I dreamed the horrible dream of the rattling red livingroom, newly painted a strange 1929 varnish red and I saw it in the dream all dancing and rattling like skeletons because my brother Gerard haunted them and dreamed I woke up screaming by the phonograph machine in the adjoining room with its Masters Voice curves in the brown wood– Memory and dream are intermixed in this mad universe.

  2

  IN THE DREAM of the wrinkly tar corner I saw it, hauntingly, Riverside Street as it ran across Moody and into the fabulously rich darknesses of Sarah Avenue and Rosemont the Mysterious … Rosemont:—community built in the floodable river flats and also on gentle slopes uprising that to the foot of the sandbank, the cemetery meadows and haunted ghostfields of Luxy Smith hermits and Mill Pond so mad–in the dream I only fancied the first steps from that “Wrinkly tar,” right around the corner, views of Moody Street Lowell–arrowing to the City Hall Clock (with time) and downtown red antennas and Chinese restaurant Kearney Square neons in the Massachusetts Night; then a glance to the right at Riverside Street running off to hide itself in the rich respectaburban wildhouses of Fraternity presidents of textile (O!—) and oldlady Whitehairs landladies, the street suddenly emerging from this Americana of lawns and screens and Emily Dickinson hidden schoolteachers behind lace blinds into the raw drama of the river where the land, the New England rockyland of high-bluffs dipped to kiss the lip of Merrimac in his rushing roars over tumult and rock to the sea, fantastic and mysterious from the snow North, goodbye;—walked to the left, passed the holy doorway where G.J. and Lousy and I hung sitting in the mystery which I now see hugens, huger, into something beyond my Grook, beyond my art & Pale, into the secret of what God has done with my time;—tenement standing on the wrinkly tar corner, four stories high, with a court, washlines, clothespins, flies drumming in the sun (I dreamed I lived in that tenement, cheap rent, good view, rich furniture, my mother glad, my father “off playing cards” or maybe just dumbly sitting in a chair agreeing with us, the dream)— And the last time I was in Massachusetts I stood in the cold winter night watching the Social Club and actually seeing Leo Martin breathing winter fogs cut in for aftersupper game of pool like when I was small, and also noticing the corner tenement because the poor Canucks my people of my God-gave-me-life were burning dull electric lights in a brown doom gloom of kitchen with Catholic calendar in the toilet door (Ah Me), a sight full of sorrow and labor–the scenes of my childhood– In the doorway G.J., Gus J. Rigopoulos, and I, Jackie Duluoz, local sandlot sensation and big punk; and Lousy, Albert Lauzon, the Human Cave-In (he had a Cave-In chest), the Kid Lousy, World’s Champion Silent Spitter and also sometimes Paul Boldieu our pitcher and grim driver of later jaloppy limousines of adolescent whim–

  “Take note, take note, well of them take note,” I’m saying to myself in the dream, “when you pass the doorway look very close at Gus Rigopoulos, Jackie Duluoz and Lousy.”

  I see them now on Riverside Street in the waving high dark.

  3

  THERE ARE HUNDREDS of people strolling in the street, in the dream … it’s Sanurday sun Night, they’re all roshing to the Clo-Sol– Downtown, in real restaurants of reality, my mother and father, like shadows on a menu card sitting by a shadow-grill window with 1920’s drapes hanging heavy behind them, all an ad, saying “Thank you, call again to dine and dance at Ron Foo’s 467 Market Street Rochester,”—they’re eating at Chin Lee’s, he’s an old friend of the family’s, he knew
me, gave us lichee nut for Christmas, one time a great Ming pot (placed on dark piano of parlor glooms and angels in dust veils with doves, the Catholicity of the swarming dust, and my thoughts); it’s Lowell, outside the decorated chink windows is Kearney Square teeming with life. “By Gosh,” says my father patting his belly, “that was a good meal.”

  Step softly, ghost.

  4

  FOLLOW THE GREAT RIVERS on the maps of South America (origin of Doctor Sax), trace your Putumayos to a Napo-further Amazonian junction, map the incredible uncrossable jungles, the southern Parañas of amaze, stare at the huge grook of a continent bulging with an Arctic-Antarctic —to me the Merrimac River was a mighty Napo of continental importance … the continent of New England. She fed from some snakelike source with maws approach and wide, welled from the hidden dank, came, named Merrimac, into the winding Weirs and Franklin Falls, the Win-nepesaukies (of Nordic pine) (and Albatrossian grandeur), the Manchesters, Concords, Plum Islands of Time.

  The thunderous husher of our sleep at night–

  I could hear it rise from the rocks in a groaning wush ululating with the water, sprawlsh, sprawlsh, oom, oom, zoooo, all night long the river says zooo, zooo, the stars are fixed in rooftops like ink. Merrimac, dark name, sported dark valleys: my Lowell had the great trees of antiquity in the rocky north waving over lost arrowheads and Indian scalps, the pebbles on the slatecliff beach are full of hidden beads and were stepped on barefoot by Indians. Merrimac comes swooping from a north of eternities, falls pissing over locks, cracks and froths on rocks, bloth, and rolls frawing to the kale, calmed in dewpile stone holes slaty sharp (we dove off, cut our feet, summer afternoon stinky hookies), rocks full of ugly old suckers not fit to eat, and crap from sewage, and dyes, and you swallowed mouthfuls of the chokeful water– By moonlight night I see the Mighty Merrimac foaming in a thousand white horses upon the tragic plains below. Dream:—wooden sidewalk planks of Moody Street Bridge fall out, I hover on beams over rages of white horses in the roaring low,—moaning onward, armies and cavalries of charging Euplantus Eu-dronicus King Grays loop’d & curly like artists’ work, and with clay souls’ snow curlicue rooster togas in the fore front.

  I had a terror of those waves, those rocks–

  5

  Doctor Sax lived in the woods, he was no city shroud. I see him stalking with the incredible Jean Fourchette, woodsman of the dump, idiot, giggler, toothless-broken-brown, searched, sniggerer at fires, loyal beloved companion of long childhood walks– The tragedy of Lowell and the Sax Snake is in the woods, the world around–

  In the fall there were great sere brown sidefields sloping down to the Merrimac all rich with broken pines and browns, fall, the whistle was just shrilled to end the third quarter in the wintry November field where crowds and me and father stood watching scuffling uproars of semipro afternoons like in the days of old Indian Jim Thorpe, boom, touchdown. There were deer in the Billerica woods, maybe one or two in Dracut, three or four in Tyngsboro, and a hunter’s corner in the Lowell Sun sports page. Great serried cold pines of October morning when school’s re-started and the apples are in, stood naked in the northern gloom waiting for denudement. In the winter the Merrimac River flooded in its ice; except for a narrow strip in the middle where ice was fragile with crystals of current the whole swingaround basin of Rosemont and the Aiken Street Bridge was laid flat for winter skating parties that could be observed from the bridge with a snow telescope in the gales and along the Lakeview side dump minor figures of Netherlander snowscapes are marooning in the whorly world of pale white snow. A blue saw cracks down across the ice. Hockey games devour the fire where the girls are huddled, Billy Artaud with clenched teeth is smashing the opponent’s hockey stick with a kick of spiked shoes in the fiendish glare of winter fighting days, I’m going backwards in a circle at forty miles an hour trailing the puck till I lose it on a bounce and the other Artaud brothers are rushing up pellmell in a clatter of Dit Clappers to roar into the fray–

  This the same raw river, poor river, March melts, brings Doctor Sax and the rainy nights of the Castle.

  6

  THERE WERE BLUE HOLIDAY EVES, Christmas time, be-sparkled all over town almost the length and breadth of which I could see from the back Textile field after a Sunday afternoon show, dinnertime, the roast beef waiting, or ragout d’boullette, the whole sky unforgettable, heightened by the dry ice of weather’s winter glare, air rarefied pure blue, sad, just as it appears at such hours over the redbrick alleys and Lowell Auditorium marble forums, with snowbanks in the red streets for sadness, and flights of lost Lowell Sunday suppertime birds flying to a Polish fence for breadcrumbs–no notion there of the Lowell that came later, the Lowell of mad midnights under gaunt pines by the lickety ticky moon, blowing with a shroud, a lantern, a burying of dirt, a digging up of dirt, gnomes, axles full of grease lying in the river water and the moon glinting in a rat’s eye —the Lowell, the World, you find.

  Doctor Sax hides around the corner of my mind.

  SCENE: A masked by night shadow flitting over the edge of the sandbank.

  SOUND: A dog barking half a mile away; and river.

  SMELL: sweet sand dew.

  TEMPERATURE: Summer mid night frost.

  MONTH: Late August, ballgame’s over, no more home-runs over the center of the arcanum of sand our Circus, our diamond in the sand, where ballgames took place in the reddy dusk,—now it’s going to be the flight of the caw-caw bird of autumn, honking to his skinny grave in the Alabama pines.

  SUPPOSITION: Doctor Sax has just disappeared over the sandbank and’s gone home to bed.

  7

  FROM THE WRINKLY TAR corner Moody begins her suburban rise through the salt white tenements of Pawtucketville to reach a Greek peak at the Dracut border wild woods surrounding Lowell, where Greek veterans of American occupation from Crete rush in the early morn with a pail for the goat in the meadow–Dracut Tigers is the name of the Meadow, it is where in the late summer we conduct vast baseball series in a gray clawmouth rainy dark of Final Games, September, Leo Martin pitching, Gene Plouffe shortstop, Joe Plouffe (in the soft piss of mists) temporarily playing rightfield (later Paul Boldieu, p, Jack Duluoz, c, a great battery all in time when summer gets hot and dusty again)—Moody Street achieves the top of the hill and surveys these Greek farms and intervening 2-story wooden bungalow flats in dreary field-edges of Marchy old November dropping his birch on a silhouette hill in silver dusk-fall, craw. Dracut Tigers sitting there with a stonewall behind, and roads to Pine Brook, wild dark Lowell so swallowed me doom its croign of holobaws,— Moody Street that begins a den of thieves near the City Hall concludes ‘mongst ballplayers of the windy hill (all roar like Denver, Minneapolis, St. Paul with the activities of ten thousand heroes of poolhall, field and porch) (hear the hunters crash their guns in skinny black brakes, making deer covers for their motors)—up goes old Moody Street, past Gershom, Mt. Vernon and furthers, to lose itself at the end of the car line, top of the switchpole in trolley days, now place where busdriver checks yellow wristwatch–lost in birch woods of crow time. There you can turn and survey all of Lowell, on a dry bitterly cold night after a blizzard, in the keen edgeblue night etching her old rosy face City Hall clock to the prunes of heaven those flashing stars; from Billerica the wind came blowing dry sun-winds against moisty blizzard-clouds and ended up the storm and made news; you see all Lowell …

  Survivor of the storm, all white and still in a keen.

  8

  SOME OF MY tragic dreams of Moody Street Pawtucketville on a Spectral Saturday Night–so unreachable and impossible-little children jumping among the iron posts of the wrinkly tar yard, screaming in French–In the windows the mothers are watching with wry comments “Cosse tué pas l cou, ey? (Dont break your neck, ey?) In a few years we moved over the Textile Lunch scene of greasy midnight hamburgs with onion & katchup; the one horrible tenement of collapsing porches in my dreams and yet in reality every evening my mother sat out on a chair, one foot inside the hous
e in case the peaked little porch on top of things and wires with its frail aerial birdlike supports should fall. Somehow enjoyed herself. We have one smiling photograph of her on this incredible height of nightmares with a little white Spitz my sister had then–

  Between this tenement and the wrinkly tar corner were several establishments of minor interest to me because not on the side of my habitual childhood candy store later becoming my tobacco store–a great famed drugstore run by a white-haired respectable patriarch Canadian with silver rims and brothers in the windowshade business and an intelligent, esthetic, frail-looking son who later disappeared into a golden haze; this drugstore, Bourgeois’, chief in interest in an uninteresting configuration, was next door to a vegetable store of sorts completely forgotten, a tenement doorway, a scream, an alley (thin, looking into grasses behind); and the Textile Lunch, with pane, bent fisty eaters, then candy store on corner always suspect because changed ownerships and colors and was always haunted by the faint aura of gentle elderly neat ladies of Ste. Jeanne d’Arc church on Mt. Vernon and Crawford up the gray neat hill of the Presbitère, we therefore never patronized that store for fear of such ladies and that neatness, we liked gloomy tromping candy stores like Destouches’.

  This was the brown establishment of an ailing leper–it was said he had nameless diseases. My mother, the ladies, such talk, every afternoon you’d hear great wrankles and grangles over billowy foams of sewing cloth and flashing needles in the light. Or maybe it was the gossip of sick masturbatory children in pimply alleys behind the garage, horrible orgies and vice by the villainous brats of the neighborhood who ate fieldstraw for supper (where they were at my beans hour) and slept in mummies of cornstalk for the night in spite of all the flashlights of the dream and of Jean Fourchette the Rosemont hermit stalking over the corn rows with his vine whip and spit can and come-rags and idiot giggles in the full of midsleepnight Pawtucketville of wild huge name and softy Baghdad-dense-with-rooftops-lines-&-wires hill–