Doctor Sax (4 page)

SMILEY BULL BALLOON
(out of the mouth like a cigar and a
yellow tooth): Say Raymond-O, don’t you think this romance has gone far enough?

SAX
: Why do you say that Pops? (Neatly rubbing chalk to cue as 8-ball plunks into corner pocket in the mill.) Anything you say Pops.

BULL
: Why (bending over the table to take a shot as Sax protests and everybody roars) m’boy it sometimes occurs to me, not that I haven’t been to see the doctor lately (grunting to take a shot with cue)—the perfect disposition for your well-known little ten dollar ass is over by the table benches there with the Pepsi-Cola box and farmitures, whilst I becalm myself in a dull weed (puffing cee-gar) and aim this rutabaga stick at the proper ball–white—for old yellow number one–

SAX
: But I sank the 8-ball!—you can’t shoot now!

OLD BULL
: Son (patting the flask of Old Granddad in his backpocket with no deprecatory gesture) the law of averages, or the law of supply and demand, says the 8-ball was a goddamn Albino 8-bawl (removing it from pocket and spotting it and lining up white cueball with a flick of his forefinger to a speck on the green beside it, simultaneously letting out a loud fart heard by everybody in the poolhall and some at the bar, precipitating various reactions of disgust and wild cheer, as the Proprietor, Joe Boss, throws a wadded paper at Old Bull Balloon’s ass, and Old Bull, position established, whips out a bottle to the light (said flask) and addresses it a short speech before taking a shot–to the effect that alcohol has too much gasoline in it but by God the old Hampshire car can go! promptly thereafter re-pocketing
it and bending, neatly and briskly, with amazing sudden agility, neat and dextrous, fingertip control of his cue-stick, good balance, stance, the forefingers all arranged on the table to hold the cue just so high, just right, pow, the old man pots the yellow one-ball into the slot, plock, and everybody settles down from the humor to see a good game of rotation between two good players–and though the laffs and yaks continue into the night, Old Bull Balloon and Doctor Sax never rest, you can’t die without heroes to look after).

This was the Butte background of Doctor Sax–in Butte Raymond the miner–a miner indeed!—he searched the mine and ore-source of the Great World Snake.

He looked all over for herbs that he knew someday he would perfect into an alchemic-almost poison art that could cast out a certain hypnotic and telepathic light that would make the Snake drop dead … a terrible weapon for some old hateful bitch, people would be dropping dead all over the streets… Sax figures to blow his powder poof! for the Snake–the Snake ’ll see the light–Sax will wish it dead, the Snake will die from just seeing the telepathic light … the only way to transmit messages to a Snake, where it will understand what you “really” mean … beware, Doctor Sax. But no,—he himself screams “Palalakonuh beware!” in his noonday fits in the woods with his afterdinner peps darting his black slouchcape like ink in the sun, diving under his trapdoor like a fiend … “Palala-konuh beware!” is written on his wall. In the afternoon he naps … Palalakonuh is merely the Aztec or Toltec name (or possibly Chihuahuan in origin) for the World
Sun Snake of the ancient Indians of North America (who probably trekked from Tibet before they knew they had Tibetan backgrounds or North American foregrounds spreading huge in the World Around) (Doctor Sax had cried “Oh Northern Heroes Trekking from Mongolian Glooms & Bare Korean Thumbs to the Mango Paradises of the New World South, what bleak mornings did you see over the stone humps of Sierra Nueva Tierra as you bowled in a heavy wind with posts, strapped and gear to the night camp to the clanking Prokofiev music of Indian Antiquity in the Howling Void!”)

Sax worked on his herbs and powders for a lifetime. He couldn’t rush around like The Shadow with a .45 automatic battling the forces of evil, the evil that Doctor Sax had to battle required herbs and nerves … moral nerves, he had to recognize good and evil and intelligence.

When I was a little boy the only occasion I happened to make a connection between Doctor Sax and a river (therefore establishing his identity) was when The Shadow in one of his Lamont Cranston masterpieces published by Street & Smith visited the shores of the Mississippi and blew up a personal rubber boat of his own which however was not perfected like the new one concealed in his hat, he’d bought it in St. Louis during the day with one of his agents and it made a bulky package under his arm as they cabbed for the evening scene along the water glancing anxiously at their watches for when to turn into Shadows– I was amazed that The Shadow should travel so much, he had such an easy time potting racketeers in New York Chinatown Waterfront with his blue .45 (glint)
—(roar of The Shadow’s Speech in Lead)—(toppling forms of tight coat Chinese gangsters) (falling Tong Wars from the Gong) (The Shadow disappears through Fu Manchu’s house and comes out in back of Boston Blackie, whaling with his .45 at the gawkers on the pier, mowing em down, as Popeye comes in a motor launch to carry them away to Humphrey Bogart) (Doctor Sax bangs his knotty cane on the door of an Isadora Duncan-type party in the Castle in the Twenties when the batty lady owned it, when they see who’s at the door all greenfaced and leering and blazing-maniac-eyed they scream and faint, his hollow laugh rises to the maddened moon as she screams across those shredded croos in the hue up-night Bending–to the rattle of a million croaks like lizards in a–the toadies—) whoo! Doctor Sax was like The Shadow when I was young, I saw him leap over the last bush on the sandbank one night, cape a-flying, I just missed really seeing his feet or body, he was gone–he was agile then … it was the night we tried to trap the Moon Man (Gene Plouffe disguised and trying to terrify neighborhood) in a sand pit, with twigs, paper, sand, at one point Gene was treed and almost stoned, he escaped, he flew like a bat in every direction, he was 16, we were 11, he could really fly and was really mysterious and scary, but when he vanished one way and we ran under the lamp a bit so I got a little light blinded I saw and knew Gene the Moon Man over in those trees but on the other and upper bank, by shrubs, stood a tall shadowy figure in a cape, stately, then it turned and leaped out of sight,—
that was no Gene Plouffe–that
was Doctor Sax. I didn’t know his name then. He didn’t fright
en me, either. I sensed he was my friend … my old, old friend … my ghost, personal angel, private shadow, secret lover.

AT THE AGE OF SEVEN
I went to St. Louis Parochial School, a particularly Doctor Saxish school. It was in the auditorium of this kingdom that I saw the Ste. thérèse movie that made stone turn its head–there were bazaars, my mother officiated at a booth, there were kisses free, candy kisses and real kisses (with all the local mustachioed Parisian Canadian blades rushing up to get theirs before they run off to join the Army in Panama, like Henry Fortier did, or go into the priesthood on orders from their fathers)— St. Louis had secret darknesses in niches… Rainy funerals for little boys, I saw several including the funeral of my own poor brother when (at age 4) my family lived exactly on the St. Louis parish on Beaulieu St. behind its walls… There were dignified marvelous old ladies with white hair and silver pince-nez living in the houses across the school–in one house on Beaulieu, too … a woman with parrot on varnished porch, selling middleclass candies to the children (discs of caramel, delicious, cheap)—

The dark nuns of St. Louis who had come to my brother’s hoary black funeral in a gloomy file (in rain), had reported they were sitting knitting in a thunderstorm when a ball of bright white fire came and hovered in their room just inside the window, dancing in the flash of their scissors
and sewing needles as they prepared immense drapes for the bazaar. Incredible to disbelieve them … for years I went around pondering this fact: I looked for the white ball in thunderstorms–I understood mysticism at once– I saw where the thunder rolled his immense bowling ball into a clap of clouds all monstrous with jaws and explosion, I knew the thunder was a ball–

On Beaulieu St. our house was built over an ancient cemetery—(Good God the Yankees and Indians beneath, the World Series of old dry dusts). My brother Gerard was of the conviction, ark, that the ghosts of the dead beneath the house were responsible for its sometimes rattling– and crashing plaster, knocking pickaninny Irish dolls from the shelf. In darkness in mid-sleep night I saw him standing over my crib with wild hair, my heart stoned, I turned horrified, my mother and sister were sleeping in big bed, I was in crib, implacable stood Gerard-O my brother … it might have been the arrangement of the shadows. —Ah Shadow! Sax!—While I was living on Beaulieu Street I had memories of that hill, and Castle; and when we moved from there we transferred to a house not far from an across-the-street haunted Pine ground with deserted Castle-manse (near a French bread-bakery back of woods and skating ponds, Hildreth St.). Presentiments of shadow and snake came tome early.

ON BEAULIEU STREET
I have a dream that I’m in the backyard on a spectral Fourth of July, it’s gray and somehow
heavy, but there’s a crowd in the yard, a crowd of people like paper figures, the fireworks are being exploded in the grassy sand, pow!—but somehow too the whole yard is rattling, and the dead underneath it, and the fence full of sitters, eyerything rattling like mad like those varnished skeletal furnitures and the unfeeling cruel uncaring rattle of dry bones and especially the rattle of the window when Gerard said the ghosts had come (and later Cousin Noel, in Lynn, said he was the
Phantome d’l’Opéra
mwee hee hee ha ha, gliding off around the goldfish bowl and glazed fish picture over mahogany mountains in that dreary Lynn churchstreet home of his mother’s)—

AND YET DESPITE ALI THIS RACKETY GRAY
when I grew to the grave maturity of 11 or 12 I saw, one crisp October morning, in the back Textile field, a great pitching performance by a husky strangely old looking 14-year-older, or 13,—a very heroic looking boy in the morning, I liked him and hero-worshipped him immediately but never hoped to rise high enough to meet him in those athletic scuffles of the windy fields (when hundreds of less important little kids make a crazy army benighted by individual twitchings in smaller but not less tremendous dramas, for instance that morning I rolled over in the grass and cut my right small finger, on a rock, with a scar that stays vivid and grows with me even now)—there was Scotty Boldieu on the high mound, king of the day, taking his signal from the catcher
with a heavy sullen and insulting look of skepticism and native French Canadian Indian-like dumb calm—; the catcher was sending him nervous messages, one finger (fast ball), two fingers (curve), three fingers (drop), four fingers (walk him) (and Paul Boldieu had enough great control to walk em, as if unintentionally, never changing expression) (off the mound he may grin on the bench)— Paul turned aside the catcher’s signals (shake of head) with his French Canadian patient scorn, he just waited till the fingers three (signal for drop), settled back, looked to first base, spit, spit again in his glove and rub it in, pluck at the dust for his fingertips, bending thoughtfully but not slowly, chewing on his inside lip in far meditation (may be thinking about his mother who made him oatmeal and beans in the gloomy gray midwinter dawns of Lowell as he stood in the dank hall closet puttin on his overshoes), looks briefly to 2nd base with a frown from the memory of someone having reached there in the 2nd inning drat it (he sometimes said “Drat it!” in imitation of B movie Counts of England), now it’s the 8th inning and Scotty’s given up two hits, nobody beyond second base, he’s leading 8-0, he wants to strike out the batter and get into the ninth inning, he takes his time–I’m watching him with a bleeding hand, amazed–a great Grover C. Alexander of the sandlots blowing one of his greatest games—(later he was bought by the Boston Braves but went home to sit with his wife and mother-in-law in a bleak brown kitchen with a castiron stove covered with brass scrolls and a poem in a tile panel, and Catholic French Canadian calendars on the wall). —Now he winds up, leisurely, looking off towards third base
and beyond even as he’s rearing back to throw with an easy, short, effortless motion, no fancy dan imitations and complications and phoniness, blam, he calmly surveys the huge golden sky all sparkle-blue rearing over the hedges and iron pickets of Textile Main Field and the great Merrimac Valley high airs of heaven shining in the commercial Saturday October morning of markets and delivery men, with one look of the eye Scotty has seen that, is in fact looking towards his house on Mammoth Road, at Cow Field–blam, he’s come around and thrown his drop home, perfect strike, kid swinging, thap in the catcher’s mitt, “You’re out,” end of the top of the 8th inning.

Scotty’s already walking to the bench when the umpire’s called it—”Ha, ha,” they laugh on the bench knowing him so well, Scotty never fails. In the bottom of the 8th Scot comes to bat for his licks, wearing his pitching jacket, and swinging the bat around loosely in his powerful hands, without much effort, and again in short, unostentatious movements, pitcher throws in a perfect strike after 2 and 0 and Scotty promptly belts it clean-drop into left over the shortstop’s glove–he trots to first like Babe Ruth, he was always hitting neat singles, he didn’t want to run when he was pitching.

I saw him thus in the morning, his name was Boldieu, it immediately stuck in my mind with Beaulieu–street where I learned to cry and be scared of the dark and of my brother for many years (till almost 10)—this proved to me
all my life wasn’t black.

Scotty, named that for his thrift among 5¢ candy bars
and 11¢ movies, sat in that wrinkly tar doorway with G.J., Lousy and me–and Vinny.

VINNY WAS AN ORPHAN
for many years ere his father came back, got his mother out of some tub-washing strait, reunited the children from various orphanages, and re-formed his home and family in the tenements of Moody–Lucky Bergerac was his name, a heavy drinker, cause of his early downfalls as well as Old Jack O Diamonds, got a job repairing rollercoasters at Lakeview Park– what a wild house, the tenement screeched– Vinny’s mother was called Charlotte, but we pronounced it Charlie, “Hey Charlie,” Vinny thus addressed his own mother in a wild scream. Vinny was thin and skinny boyish, very clean featured and handsome, high voiced, excited, affectionate, always laughing or smiling, always swearing like a son of a bitch, “Jesus Crise goddam it Charlie what the fuck you want me to do sit in this fucking goddam bath tub all goddam day—” his father Lucky outdid him unbelievably, the only eloquence he had was curses, “Jey-sas Crise gawd damn ballbreaking sonofabitch if I ain’t an old piece of shit but you look like a goddam fat ass old cow tonight Charlie …” and at this compliment Charlie would screech with joy–you never heard such a wild screech, her eyes used to blaze out with the intensity of white fire, she was crazy as all get out, the first time I saw her she was standing on a chair fixing a bulb
and Vinny rushed up and looked under her dress (he was 13) and yelled “O Jey-sas Crise what a nice ass you got Ma!” and she screeched and whacks him one on the head, a house of joy. Me and G.J. and Lousy and Scotty used to sit in that house all day.