Doctor Sax (10 page)

Snazzz!)

—but in that room all converted into something dark, cold, incredible gloomy, my room on rainy days and all in it was a saturation of the gray Yoik of Bleak Heaven when the sides of the rainbow mouth of God hang disfurdled in a bloomy rue–no color . . . the smell of thought and silence, “Don’t hang around in that stuffy old room all the time,” my mother had said to me when Mike came for our Dracut Fields Buck Jones appointment and instead I was busy running off the Mohican Futurity and digging back into earlier records of my antiquity for background material for the little newspaper story announcing the race … printed by hand on gloomy gray-green sheets of Time.

EIGHTH RACE: Claiming $1500, for 4 year olds and up. Six furlongs

Post: 5:43 TIME 1:12 4-5

CAW CAW (Lewis)$18.60 7.40 3.80

FLYING HOME (Stout)…. 2.40 2.30

SUNDOWN LAD (Renick).. 11.10

ALSO RAN: Flying Doodad, Saint Nazaire, a-Rink, Mynah, a-Remonade Girl, Gray Law, Rownomore, Going Home. Scratched: Happy Jack, Truckee. a-Jack Lewis entry.

—or my newpapers would have headlines:

Lewis P
redicts Third
Straight
VICTO
RY FOR TH
E KING

APRIL 4, 1936-Mighty Repulsion arrived today by van from his resting-place at Lewis Farms; accompanying him were Jack Lewis, owner and jockey, trainer Ben Smith and his trusty Derby-cups and assistants.

Bright skies and a fast track preceded the arrival of these tremendous luminaries upon the scene of a great week’s end of racing with a thousand dollars pouring from individual pockets of wild jockey club bets, while less swanky Turf fans (like me and Paw from Arkansas) hang on the rail, railbirds, steely-eyed, far-seeing, thin, from Kentucky, brothers in the blood on the score of hosses and father and son in a tragic Southern family left destitute only with two horses that sometimes I’d actually rig races by putting solid champion types in workouts’ among less luminous luminary marbles, and call the winner on my Tips’ corner for that honor and also for hardboot father-and-son who need the money and have followed my, Lewis’, advice– I was Jack Lewis and I owned the greatest horse, Repulsion, solid ballbearing a half inch thick, it rolled off the Parchesi board and into the linoleum as smooth, and soundless but as heavy as a rumbling ball of steel all tooled smooth, sometimes kicked poor aluminum-marbles out of sight and off the track at the hump bump of the
rampbottom–sometimes kicked a winner in, too–but usually rolled smoothly off the plank and mashed any litde glass or dust on the floor (while smallest marbles jiggled in the infinitesimal lilhputian microcosmos of the linoleum and World) — and zoomed swiftly all shiny silver across the race-course to its appointed homestretch in the rockly wood where it just assumed a new rumbling power and deep hum of floorboards and hooked up with the finish line with a forward slam of momentum–a tremendous bull-like rush in the stretch, like Whirl-away or Man O War or Citation–other marbles couldn’t compete with this massive power, they all came tagging after, Repulsion was absolute king of the Turf till I lost him slapping him out of my yard into the Phebe Avenue yard a block away —a fabulous homerun as I say, turned my world upside down like the Atombomb–Jack Lewis, I, owned that great Repulsion, also personally rode the beast, and trained him, and found him, and revered him, but I also ran the Turf, was Commissioner, Track Handicapper, President of the Racing Association, Secretary of the Treasury–Jack Lewis had nothing lacking, while he lived–his newspapers flourished–he wrote editorials against the Shade, he was not afraid of Black Thieves– The Turf was so complicated it went on forever. And in a gloom of ecstasy. —There I am, clutching my head, the fans in the grandstand go wild. Don Pablo at 18-1 upset the applecart, nobody expected he’d even make it to the wall with his half gait and great huge chips, he’d a been 28-1 if it wasn’t for his old reputation as a battered veteran before he was chipped–
“He went and done it!”
I’m saying to myself in astonishment–boom!

SCENE 19
I’m at the Victrola putting in a new record, Swiftly, it’s
The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers,
everybody’s leaving the racetrack–

SCENE 20
You see me marching up and down where I stand, moving slowly around the room, the races are over, I’m march
ing out of the grandstand but also shaking my head quizzically from side to side like a disgruntled bettor, tearing up my tickets, a poor child pantomime of what sometimes I’d seen my father do after the races at Narragansett or Suffolk Downs or Rockingham– On my little green desk the papers are all spread, my pencil, my editorial desk running the Turf. On the back of that desk still were chalkmarks Gerard had made when he was alive in the green desk–this desk rattled in my dreams because of Gerard’s ghost in it—(I dream of it now on rainy nights turned almost vegetable by the open window, luridly green, as a tomato, as the rain falls in the block-hollow void outside all dank, adrip and dark . . . hateful walls of the Cave of Eternity suddenly appearing in a brown dream and when you slow the drape, fish the shroud, shape your mouth of mow and maw in this huge glissen tank called Rainy,—you can see the void now). —Pushed against the corner by the Victrola, my little pool table–it was a folding pool table, with velvet green, little holes and leather pockets and little cues with leather tips you could cue-chalk with blue chalk from my father s pool table at the bowling alley– It was a very important table because I played The Shadow at it– The Shadow was the name I gave to a tall, thin, hawknosed fellow called St. Louis who came into the Pawtucketville Social Club and shot pool sometimes with the proprietor my father … the greatest poolshark you ever saw, huge, enormous hands with fingers seemingly ten inches long laid out spread-claw on the green to make his cue-rest, his little finger alone sprouted and shot from his handmountain to a distance of six inches you’d say, clean, neat, he slipped the cue right through a tiny orifice between his thumb and forefinger, and slid on all woodsy shiny to connect with that cue-ball at cue-kiss–he’d smack shots in with no two cents about it, fwap, the ball would cluck in the leather hole basket like a dead thing– So tall, shroudy, he bent long and distant and lean for his shots, momentarily rewarding his audience with a view
of his enormous gravity head and great noble and mysterious hawk nose and inscrutable never-saying eyes– The Shadow– We’d see him coming in the club from the street–

SCENE 21
And in fact this is what we see now, The Shadow St. Louis is coming into the Social Club to shoot pool, wearing hat and long coat, somehow shadowy as he comes along the long plywood wall painted gray, light, but’s coming into an ordinary bowling alley four of which you see to the left of The Shadow, with only two alleys going and two pinboys at work (Gene Plouffe and Scotty Boldieu, Scotty wasn’t a regular like Gene but because he was the pitcher on our team my father let him make a few extra pennies spotting at the alleys)— A low ceiling cellar is what the joint is, you see plumbing pipes,— We are watching The Shadow come in and up the plywood walls from our seats at the head of the alleys, Coca Colas, scoresheet boards that you stand at, by the rack, and the duckpin balls in the rack and the duckpins set up down the alley squat and shiny with a red band in their goldwood–rainy Friday 6:30
P.M.
in the P.S.C. alleys, we see smoke shroudens even the shroudy Shadow as he moves up, we hear murmurs and hubbubs and echo-roars of the hall, click of pool games, laughter, talk …

SCENE 22
My father’s in the little cage office at the rear near the Gershom street-door, smoking a cigar behind the glass counter, it rises from him in a cloud, he is frowning angrily at a piece of paper in his hand.
“Jesus
Christ now where did
this
thing come from?—” (looking at another)—”is that a?—” and he falls into scowling meditation with himself over these two little pieces of paper, the other fellows in the office are talking … there’s Joe Plouffe, Vauriselle, and Sonny Alberge —everything’s jumping– We are only looking in at the door, can’t see the entire office, in fact we are looking in at the office from about six feet up in the door a foot from it on a stone step level with the office floor, we are just about as
high as The Shadow’s nose as we look in with The Shadow whose hawk visage slants from us in a Huge. My father never looks up, except briefly, coldly, to see who it is, then a mere look of the eye signifying greeting–in fact no greeting at all, he just looks up and down again with that bemused perused expression my father always had, as though something was reading him and eating him inside and he all wrap’t and silent in it. So St. Louis, his face doesn’t budge anyway, just addresses the three–
”Ca vas?
(it goes?)”—
”Tiens, St Louisl Ta pas faite ton 350 Tautre soir–ta mal au cul
(you didn’t make your 350 t’other night, you got a sore ass).” This being said by Vauriselle, a tall, unpleasant fellow that my father didn’t like–no answer from St. Louis who has just a fixed hawklike grin. Now Sonny Alberge, tall and athletic and handsome, became Boston Braves shortstop in a few years, with a big clean-teeth smile, a real bumpkin boy in his prime at home, his father was a little sad shrivelly man who adored him, Sonny responded to his father like an Ozark hero grave and Billy-the-Kid tender, but with French Canadian stem gravity that knows what’s coming to everybody in Heaven later on inside Time–it’s ever been so in the bottom of my soul, the stars are crying down the sides of Heaven–Sonny says to Louis–
“Une game?”
St. Louis’ grin though moveless gains significance, and he opens his blue hawklike lips to say with sudden surprising young man voice “Oaf–and they look at one another the challenge and cut out to bowl– Vauriselle and Joe Plouffe (always a short solid wry listener and chieftain among the heroes of Pawtucketville) follow– my father’s left alone in the office with his papers, looks up, checks the time, slaps cigar in mouth and cuts out following the boys in a thing-to-do of his own, fiddling for keys, bemused, as someone yells out at him in the next view

SCENE 23
(as he steps down from office with fat busy proprietor key look at chain from pocket), from the auras of smoke
and pooltable glow a dark shaded man with a cuestick in the pissy background of cans and wood is calling “Hey, Emil,
il mouille dans ton pissoir
(it’s raining in your toilet)—a
tu que chose comme un plat pour mettre entours?
(got anything like a pan to put under?)” There’s another poolshark in the dark green background of blue rain evening in the golden club with its dank stone floor and shiny black bowling balls-In smoke–shouts (as Emil my father is muttering and nodding yes) (and St. Louis, Joe, Sonny, Vauriselle cross the scene in file, like Indians, Shadow’s removing his coat)—
“Pauvre Emil commence a avoir des trou dans son pissoir, cosse wui va arrivez asteur, whew!—foura quon use le livre pour bouchez les trous
(Poor Emil’s starting to have holes in his pissery, what’s gonna happen now, whew! we’ll have to use the book to block the holes!!!)”
“Hey la tu deja vu slivre la—(Hey
didja ever see that book?)” a poolshark in the light, young Leo Martin saying to LeNoire who lived directly across the street from the club, on Gershom, adjoining Blezan’s store, in a house that always seemed to me haunted by sad flowerpots of linoleum eternity in a sunny void also darkened by an inner almost idiot gloom French Canadian homes seem to have (as if a kid with water on the head was hiding in the closet somewhere)—LeNoire a cool little cat, I knew his kidbrother and exchanged marbles with him, they were related to some dim past relation I’d been told about–ladies with great white hair periwigs sewing in the Lowell rooms, wow– LeNoire: (we’re watching from the end of the plywood wall, but almost on alley Number One at this spread-out smoky scene and talk)
“Quoi?—Non. Jaime ra ca, squi est?
(what, no, I’d like that, where’s it?” LeNoire says this from a crouch over his cueball– He was a very good bowler too, St. Louis had trouble beating him bowling–faintly we see brown folding chairs along the Gershom wall, with secret dark sitters but very close up to the table and listening to
every word–a Fellaheen poolhall if there ever was one– The door opens quickly and out of the rain and in comes I, silent, swift, gliding in like The Shadow–sidling to the corner of the scene to watch, removing not coat nor budging, I’m already hung up on the scene’s awe.

SCENE 24
“Tiens, Ti Jean, donne ce plat la a Shammy,” my
father is saying to me, turning from the open storage room door with a white tin pan. “Here, Ti Jean, give this pan to Shammy.” My father is standing with a peculiar French Canadian bowleggedness half up from a crouch with the pan outheld, waiting for me to take it, anxious till I do so, almost saying with his big frowning amazed face “Well my little son what are we doing in the penigillar, this strange abode, this house of life without roof be-hung on a Friday evening with a tin pan in my hand in the gloom and you in your raincoats—”
“II commence a tombez de la neige”
someone is shouting in the background, coming in from the door (“Snow’s startin to fall”)—my father and I stand in that immobile instant communicating telepathic thought-paralysis, suspended in the void together, understanding something that’s always already happened, wondering where we were now, joint reveries in a dumb stun in the cellar of men and smoke … as profound as Hell … as red as Hell.—I take the pan; behind him, the clutter and tragedy of old cellars and storage with its dank message of despair–mops, dolorous mops, clattering tear-stricken pails, fancy sprawfs to suck soap suds from a glass, garden drip cans–rakes leaning on meaty rock–and piles of paper and official Club equipments– It now occurs to me my father spent most of his time when I was 13 the winter of 1936, thinking about a hundred details to be done in the Club alone not to mention home and business shop–the energy of our fathers, they raised us to sit on nails– While I sat around all the time with my little diary, my Turf, my hockey games, Sunday afternoon tragic football games on the toy pooltable white
chalkmarked … father and son on separate toys, the toys get less friendly when you grow up–my football games occupied me with the same seriousness of the angels–we had little time to talk to each other. In the fall of 1934 we took a grim voyage south in the rain to Rhode Island to see Time Supply win the Narragansett Special–with Old Daslin we was … a grim voyage, through exciting cities of great neons, Providence, the mist at the dim walls of great hotels, no Turkeys in the raw fog, no Roger Williams, just a trolley track gleaming in the gray rain– We drove, auguring solemnly over past performance charts, past deserted shell-like Ice Cream Dutchland Farms stands in the dank of rainy Nov.—bloop, it was the time on the road, black tar glisten-road of thirties, over foggy trees and distances, suddenly a crossroads, or just a side-in road, a house, or bam, a vista gray tearful mists over some half-in cornfield with distances of Rhode Island in the marshy ways across and the secret scent of oysters from the sea–but something dark and rog-like.— J
had seen it before
… Ah weary flesh, burdened with a light … that gray dark Inn on the Narragansett Road … this is the vision in my brain as I take the pan from my father and take it to Shammy, moving out of the way for LeNoire and Leo Martin to pass on the way to the office to see the book my father had (a health book with syphilitic backs)—