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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 house 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–

“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.

Dr. Sax

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