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–
“Pauvre vieux Destouches” sometimes they’d call him because in spite of the horrible reports about his health they’d pity him for those rheumy eyes and shuffling, dull gait, he was the sickliest man in the world and had dumb hanging arms, hands, lips, tongue, not as if idiot but as if sensual or senseless and bitter with venoms of woe … an old dissipate, I can’t tell what kick, drug, drunk, illness, elephantiasis or whatall he had. There were rumors that he played with the dingdangs of little boys–would go back there in the gloom offering candy, pennies, but with that dull, sick sorrow and weary face, it no longer mattered– obviously all lies but when I went in there to buy my candy I was mystified and horrified as if in an opium den. He sat on a chair, breathing with a bestial dullmouth honk; you had to get your own caramels, bring the penny to his listless hand. The dens I imagined from The Shadow magazines that I bought there. They said he played with little Zap Plouffe. . . Zap’s father Old Hermit had a cellarful of Shadows that one time Gene Plouffe gave me use of (about ten Shadows and sixteen Star Westerns and two or three Pete Pistols I always liked because Pete Pistol looked simple on his covers though hard to read)—buying Shadows at Old Leper’s candy store had that mixed quality of the Plouffe cellar, there was old dumb brown tragedy in it.
Next to the candy store was a shop, ribbons for sale, ladies of the sewing afternoon with pendant ringlet wigs advertising round blue-eyed mannikin doll-heads in a lace void with pins on a blue cushion … things that have turned brown in our father’s antiquity.
9
THE PARK RAN CLEAR to Sarah Avenue across backyards of old Riverside Street farms, with a path in the middle of the high grass, the long block wall of the Gershom garage (lovers of evil midnight made blotches and squirting sounds in the weeds). Across the park, at dirtstreet Sarah Avenue, a fenced-in field, hilly, spruces, birch, lot not for sale, under gigantic New England trees you could look up at night at huge stars through a telescope of leaves. Here the families Rigopoulos, Desjardins and Giroux lived high on the built-up rock, views of the city over back Textile field, high-flats of the dump and the Valley’s immortal void. O gray days in G.J.’s! his mother rocking in her chair, her dark vestments like dresses of old Mexican mothers in tortilla dark interiors of stone–and G.J. glaring out the kitchen window, through the great trees, at the storm, and the city faintly etched all redheap white in the glare behind it, swearing, muttering, “What a gad-damn life a man has to live in this hard rock ass cold world” (over the river gray skies and storms of the future) and his mother who can’t understand English and doesn’t bother with what the boys are saying in afternoon goof hours off school is rocking back and forth with her Greek bible, saying “Thalatta! Thalatta!” (Sea! Sea!)—and in the corner of G.J.’s house I smell the dank gloom of Greeks and shudder to be in the enemy camp–of Thebans, Greeks, Jews, Niggers, Wops, Irishmen, Polocks… G.J. turns his almond eyes at me, like when I first saw him in the yard, turning his almond eyes on me for friendship–I thought Greeks were raving maniacs before.
G.J. my boyhood friend and hero–
10
IT WAS IN Centralville I was born, in Pawtucketville saw Doctor Sax. Across the wide basin to the hill–on Lupine Road, March 1922, at five o’clock in the afternoon of a red-all-over suppertime, as drowsily beers were tapped in Moody and Lakeview saloons and the river rushed with her cargoes of ice over reddened slick rocks, and on the shore the reeds swayed among mattresses and cast-off boots of Time, and lazily pieces of snow dropped plunk from bagging branches of black thorny oily pine in their thaw, and beneath the wet snows of the hillside receiving the sun’s lost rays the melts of winter mixed with roars of Merrimac —I was born. Bloody rooftop. Strange deed. All eyes I came hearing the river’s red; I remember that afternoon, I perceived it through beads hanging in a door and through lace curtains and glass of a universal sad lost redness of mortal damnation … the snow was melting. The snake was coiled in the hill not my heart.
Young Doctor Simpson who later became tragic tall and grayhaired and unloved, snapping his—“I think everything she is going to be alright, Angy,” he said to my mother who’d given birth to her first two, Gerard and Catherine, in a hospital.
“Tank you Doctor Simpson, he’s fat like a tub of butter–mon ti riange …” Golden birds hovered over her and me as she hugged me to her breast; angels and cherubs made a dance, and floated from the ceiling with upsidedown assholes and thick folds of fat, and there was a mist of butterflies, birds, moths and brownnesses hanging dull and stupid over pouting births.
11
ONE GRAY AFTERNOON in Centralville when I was probably 1,2 or 3 years old, I saw in my child self dream-seeing voids a cluttered dark French Canadian shoe repair shop all lost in gray bleak wings infolded on the shelf and clatter of the thing. Later on the porch of Rose Paquette’s tenement (big fat woman friend of my mother’s, with children) I realized the brokendown rainy dream shoeshop was just downstairs … a thing I knew about the block. It was the day I learned to say door in English … door, door, porte, porte–this shoe repair shop is lost in the rain of my first memories and’s connected to the Great Bathrobe Vision.
I’m sitting in my mother’s arms in a brown aura of gloom sent up by her bathrobe–it has cords hanging, like the cords in movies, bellrope for Catherine Empress, but brown, hanging around the bathrobe belt–the bathrobe of the family, I saw it for 15 or 20 years–that people were sick in–old Christmas morning bathrobe with conventional diamonds or squares design, but the brown of the color of life, the color of the brain, the gray brown brain, and the first color I noticed after the rainy grays of my first views of the world in the spectrum from the crib so dumb. I’m in my mother’s arms but somehow the chair is not on the floor, it’s up in the air suspended in the voids of sawdust smelling mist blowing from Lajoie’s