On snowy days Jack came home from school and cranked up the phonograph to play thick, gutta-percha discs that provided the sound track for the race-meets, the ballgames, and the movies of mystery and adventure that played continuously in his head. But in spring and summer his fantasies spread to a wider stage, the sandbanks of the Merrimack, the woods of Dracut, the grounds of the mansion on Wannalancet Street, and the orphanage on the hill that he would consolidate into a single Castle and populate with a cabal of vampires and hangers-on, the arch-enemies of his shadow hero, Doctor Sax.
In Doctor Sax, Jack’s novel about the last weeks of childhood, Lowell’s ordinary, small-town shadows deepen and spread to contain a counter-world in which Doctor Sax, a shrouded figure with a green complexion, is pitted against the forces of evil, acting through comic and banal agents. Jack wrote the book when he was thirty-five and visiting William Burroughs in Mexico. Sax himself contains elements of Burroughs, and W. C. Fields appears under the name Bull Balloon, along with a good deal of intellectual décor that was no part of Kerouac’s boyhood world. There is, for example, a funny set-piece portrayal of Bohemianism, à la Isadora Duncan or Amy Lowell. But all of this material is identified with Kerouac’s fantasy subplot, a titanic struggle between good and evil played out under the unsuspecting noses of the Lowell townspeople. The sounds and smells and tastes of a Massachusetts boyhood are here, and the underground bungalow where Doctor Sax hides out is located on the real road that Jack and his friends walked to reach their playing field at the edge of the Dracut woods, just north of town.
The same small circle of boys—“a summer baseball team, a winter basketball team, and an invincible autumn football team”—populates all of Jack’s writing about Lowell. The boys do ordinary things, play ball, pull pranks, swim in the raw, and talk to one another in a code language designed to confuse their elders while cementing their alliance. But in all of his books and stories about boyhood Jack makes a clear distinction between himself and the others. He looks down on those who found their heroes in the pages of Alexandre Dumas instead of in Maxwell Grant’s chronicles of the Shadow. It is Jacky alone who can see and speak with Doctor Sax. There is a suggestion that the other boys do not realize what evil lurks in the hearts of men, but that Jacky does. He gently indicts his friends for the crime of insufficient imagination. As it turned out Jack was the only one of the circle to leave Lowell to seek his fortune.
George J. Apostolos was Jack’s closest boyhood friend. In the books, as in life, he is “G.J.,” sharp and aggressive. There is a well-thumbed copy of On the Road on the shelf behind his desk at the insurance agency he owns in Lowell.
G. J. Apostolos:
Everything hurt the guy. Just a drizzly November day would zing him. I guess if you read his books, I guess somewhere you’d find the answer.
Jacky’s mother wanted so very much for him. Jack had everything. His mother tried to get him to associate with “better” people.
“I can never be what she wants. I can’t live with her. I’m disappointing her,” he’d say. Jack always tried to please his mother. It seemed to eat away at him. He went off with the Beat Generation, but he always worried about his mother.
Roland Salvas stayed in Lowell, too. He is the Albert “Lousy” Lauzon of Jack’s novels, a member of a teeming French-Canadian family that Jacky Duluoz (Kerouac) encounters in crowded kitchen parties or accompanies on summer picnics by the river.
Roland Salvas:
I always thought Jack was going to get up there somehow. I mean, being a writer—wanting to be a writer—you don’t become a writer in your own town. You have to go out and give what you can and learn what you can. But you don’t do that around your own town or city. You get the education step by step. That’s what he did.
He was a clean-cut kid—clean-cut and clean-shaved. He was a hard-nosed backfield man. Right halfback or left halfback, I don’t remember which one. He liked football. He used to tell the quarterback, “Pete, let me take the ball next. I know I can outrun that guy.” He was a speeder, a real speeder.
In the neighborhood there was all French. His mother spoke French. I don’t think the father did much of it, but his mother was a true Frenchman. Jack’s father was a big man and a chain-smoker. A tremendous man, really big. He liked to joke with you. I can’t say anything bad about that family at all.
I think Jack wanted to be something out of life rather than just normal. He did talk much about the Shadow. He liked that kind of stuff, you know: “Mwee-hee-hee-hee-hee!”
He really did like the Shadow.
G. J. Apostolos:
I remember one time he was the Silver Tin Can. If there was a window open, or a door, he’d throw a tin can through it with a note: “The Silver Tin Can Strikes Again!” He’d wear a cape and give his Doctor Sax laugh. “Mwee-hee-hee-hee-hee!”
Everybody thought it was the dirty Greek, me. Jack’s mother just couldn’t believe Jack would do anything like that. He’d be in his cape—thirteen years old—jumping over fences and running, always running.
I’ll tell you something about Doctor Sax’s castle.
We met an old man walking along Textile Bridge, and he was drunk and we took him home to this big old house, and he kept saying, “There’s Chinamen under the floors.” We put him on the cot and he rolled off the other side and hit his head. This house was off Riverside Street, down in Dracut.
Writing about that incident in Maggie Cassidy Jack recalled that G.J. was convinced that the old man had died of his head injury. The next day the three boys waited in suspense for the afternoon edition of the Lowell Sun. To their relief the old man’s obituary was missing.
Joseph Henry “Scotty” Beaulieu, Scotty Boldieu of the novels, was nicknamed for “his thrift among five-cent candy bars and eleven-cent movies.” Jack described him in Dr. Sax as “a very heroic-looking boy in the morning.” He was a bit older than Jack and something of an idol, especially when it came to sports.
Scotty Beaulieu:
Jack was hard as a rock, a great athlete. When I tackled him, or tried to, once, when I grabbed his legs—man, I saw stars! He plowed right through me.
He was a funny guy. His family had a lot of problems and bad luck, but Jacky never mentioned them. Of course, we all had problems, but us boys never talked about them, so maybe it wasn’t so unusual.
Me and Jack and G.J. were like the Three Musketeers. We were always together and never had no fights. Jacky’s parents didn’t like us hanging around him, though, like we wasn’t good enough for him. But his mother was a very nice woman. His father was nice, too, but never had much to do with us.
In the spring of 1936, the year that Jack turned fourteen, floods swept New England. Safe on the Pawtucketville hill, Jack and his family watched the Merrimack rise out of its banks, covering the sandbars that were the boys’ usual playground and, finally, the Textile Bridge itself, isolating Little Canada from downtown Lowell. One of the old locks protected the business section from thorough destruction, but as it was Leo’s shop was filled with water to a depth of six feet. The flood drowned his prospects as an independent businessman. From that point on he made his living working for whatever printer would hire him, picking up extra money by tending the bowling concession at the Social Club.
At first, Jack, G.J., and the others regarded the flood as a wonderful adventure. For a moment Lowell was important. Photographers came up from Boston to record the devastation. Interesting flotsam from New Hampshire rushed downstream, and Jack watched it drifting out of sight, out of Lowell. Remembering the occasion twenty years later as he wrote Doctor Sax, Jack more or less ignores the effect of the flood on his family’s fortunes, recording