The Stardust Lounge (4 page)

Something like gunshots followed by laughter brings me to my feet as I sprint down the path and flatten myself against the outside wall. It is like looking into an enormous tortoise shell, or a cave whose entrance your head barely clears, then opens before you like a cathedral.

I can see that the explosions are the result of ignited spray cans flaring to small fires along tracks that run the length of the enclosure. The litter of fires from one end of the trestle to the other creates enough light that the ten or eleven boys there, including Stephen, take to clowning in front of them, casting huge shadows on the opposite walls like the shadows of the carriers behind the screen in Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

And I can't help thinking of the caves of Lascaux as I
take in the huge, colorful paintings, many of them elegies as I observe, elegies for friends who have been shot, or died of overdoses, or who, as the captions read, were
sent up da riva to juvie.

Obscenities, rap lyrics—
-fuck da police, bum rush the show,
and
a little somtinfo da younstas
—are brandished in black under the faces of the dead. Valiant swan songs, ballooned speech announces
see ya lata
and
live and let live2X.

The walls are a swarm of tags overlaid, painted out, rewritten, and resurfacing, secret names the boys have given themselves or their gangs. Tags ladder the walls like a catalogue of ships, or a roll call to something—to arms, to the New Jerusalem—the effect of their numbers glorious, disturbing.

The boys choose names of one or two syllables, perhaps because they are easier to remember, or because of the hammer-blow of the sound. They spell their tags phonetically, as if to translate as far away from culture as possible without losing meaning, tags like
abuz, sez, chek, beepr, alirt, myo, hed,
and many, many others scrawled elaborately across the walls and up to the dank, green-to-black mildewed ceiling arcing at thirty or forty feet.

I slide a bit on the steep embankment, find my footing. But I'm undetected in the shadows outside the abutments, the traffic sounds, amplified inside the tunnel, covering the noise of my bumbling in the weeds as every now and then I glance behind me to the cardboard houses, then peer around the wall to watch Stephen, at the far end of the trestle, unload his backpack of paint cans.

He lights a few empties to the delight of his comrades.
His laughter, so childlike, so catching, sounds both liberating and exclusive, as if I'd stumbled into the wrong dream. The cans hiss, spray fire like heavy rain that weirdly illuminates the floors littered with freebase lids, broken syringes, homemade bongs, rolling papers.

Stephen begins squaring off a section of wall with white paint and fills it in, creating for himself a field. Then he backs away to let it dry. The exhilaration of the night's discoveries begins to dissipate in waves of dizzy fatigue as I survey the scene. Paint fumes hit my nostrils and I step back in the dark.

Drawing of guns by Stephen Digges, age 5

Christmas Eve, 1991. We are passionately pretending at
normal.
Charles is home from college, in his room wrapping presents, listening to Mozart. Stephen is “at a friend's” until seven, when we intend to have our holiday dinner. Stan is here, in the bedroom reading. Against his wishes I've asked a few of Stephen's friends, albeit possible gang members, and their mothers to stop by before dinner for holiday drinks and treats.

The turkey's in the oven. Things smell good. I have just finished wrapping gifts and set them under our enormous tree—as if the size of a tree could make up for the emptiness we feel—and I am setting a fine table. Against the Mozart there are carols on the radio. The collision is lovely; between the iambic of the carols runs Mozart, bodiless, into the high octaves.

A week ago tonight Stephen was booted unequivocally from his private school. He had brought a gun with him
one morning with the purpose of scaring, he said, a girl. He alleged that the girl had threatened to turn him in to a rival gang.

She was angry with Stephen because he'd slept through one of her 5:00 A.M. taxi rides in from Newton to our apartment. Apparently she'd even thrown rocks at his bedroom window. So, he hadn't shown up for what must have been some sort of tryst, or drug deal.

I'm acquainted with the girl because one night this past October she ran away, in a taxi, to our house. Disheveled, she wept that her father had beaten her. I'd called the police, then the girl's parents. The father and the police met in our apartment. After much conversing—in my bedroom with the door closed—the police sent the girl and her father home.

But she'd called again moments later, this time from her father's car phone. She cried for help. I was suspicious. Was she, in fact, being beaten? I could hear her father's voice pleading, practical.

The thought police would surely have me on this one: A child claims she is being abused, and I suspect she is lying? At the same time I doubted that the cops, in a ten-minute chat in my bedroom, had got at the truth.

Once more I called the police, who tracked down the girl and her father, pulled them over. Once again the police released them.

As it turned out, the gun Stephen had packed to school was unfireable, and for this fact the officials simply booted him, leaving the parents of the girl to press charges if they liked. Since there was no one to corroborate Stephen's side of the story, they took no action against the girl. The parents filed a restraining order against Stephen.

The police who delivered the order to our apartment advised me simply to get him out of town.

Stephen is fourteen, proud, ashamed, sick at heart, angrier than ever. Since the incident he has been unofficially attending classes at the public high school. He hates the sudden attention from the community. The story has been in the papers. Either at the high school or roaming the streets, he is out all day and most of the night.

And he is wary of my new, desperate tactics of
welcoming
his gang into our apartment, walking directly into Stephen's smoke-filled bedroom to engage them in conversations, offering them snacks and sodas. Their contempt for me is as thick as the smoke. They watch as I open a few windows.

“The landlords,” I shout over the rap playing on the boom box. “We could get busted.”

They laugh. They see through my housing and feeding them, anything not to lose my boy. Still, after a few days of this, they do come over more frequently, spend some of their evenings here instead of in the streets. God knows what they're planning. But we seem to have made a kind of sick deal: They are willing to use me; I am willing to be used as long as I know where Stephen is.

For the occasion of Christmas Eve, I have dressed up. The table is laid with a pale green satin cloth, the Lenox china, silver napkin rings, candles. In the living room I have set on the coffee table a punch bowl, cheeses, crackers, shrimp and oysters, holiday napkins, poinsettia paper plates.

I welcome Teddy, Alex, Jason, their mothers. Two speak little English, but their boys interpret for them from Spanish. Our guests are likewise dressed up. The
mothers are single, and tonight I learn that these are their youngest children, all
prodigals,
my mother would say, like Stephen.

Teddy's mother has been of help since she owns a police scanner. Many nights she has called to warn me of reports of arrests she has overheard—car thefts and busted drug deals in which our boys might be implicated.

Though Stephen is still not home, we sit down in front of the fire. Charles emerges, sets his gifts under the tree. If I could stop the story here, it might appear to offer some potential for change. Imagine the city pausing to look in our windows, observing mothers and sons around a fire, carols on the radio, everyone lingering longer than they'd planned, having one more drink, another cake.

And assume that because of this stumble in time, some footfall on future disaster is averted. Such things happen: The delay in traffic means missing the collision head-on; a late airplane departure translates time and you arrive just
after the
bomb explodes.

Or maybe the delay isn't so monumental. Say it is only a minute or two inhabiting and inhabited by a little peace, a slight tripping of the dark. Maybe Teddy stays at our house later than he intends.

So he isn't on the scene when his gang sets fire to a car. He's late, he's simply not there, not for the arrest, nor for arraignment, the trial and sentencing. He isn't sent off to DYS for the rest of his adolescence. And after his release, more arrests, more sentences.

Nor will his friend Alex disappear, living child or body never found. We will never see Alex's face on posters
around Brookline, later on milk cartons. What was waiting out there for Alex has left. He missed that bus.

Say something slides into civility.

When you can see a long way you think it is the future.

I move to our windows above the street to see a small dark-clad figure walking up the hill, head down against the cold.

“Well, here comes Steve!” I interrupt the conversation. I'm a little mad these days, I know. My voice comes out of me shrill and too buoyant.

Stephen walks directly up the flights of stairs and into his room. In the wake of him the night air stirs the fire.

In a minute he appears at the end of the hall and signals his friends to join him. Sitting next to their mothers, Teddy, Alex, and Jason look at each other. I sense that they are enjoying the fire, the good food, this stab at pretending almost realized.

Then they get up and go to Stephen. Left in our ring, the adults are silent. Jason's and Alex's mothers begin to speak to each other in Spanish, gather their skirts around them and stand.

“I'll go see,” says Charles, but he reappears pale, his face rigid. The mothers shout commands in Spanish to their sons down the hall. They nod to me and get their coats.

No telling what's coming, what's going on. But I am amazed that the boys obey their mothers. Teddy, Alex, and Jason appear outside Stephen's room. They are members of a gang. They steal cars, drive them around all night, then shove them off a cliff into a quarry. They
run drugs, rob places, fight with knives, hurt some and plot to hurt others.

Tonight, obviously, there has been some kind of trouble outside, something that has caused Stephen to attempt to rally forces, but caught between the gang and their mothers, these boys choose, at least for now, the latter. They ready themselves to escort their mothers home.

I'm stricken with envy at this shred of respect.

“Merry Christmas!” I sing too loudly and head down to Stephen's room to find him unwrapping a gun, a real gun, maybe a forty-five, the bullets spilling out of the brown paper bag.

“It's not mine,” he sneers, “in case you're wondering. Back off.” Stephen waves the gun and grins at my fear. “I'm just keeping it for a friend …”

Before I can respond there's yet another knock on the front door. And at this moment—his first appearance of the evening—Stan comes up behind us. Surprised by his presence, I understand suddenly that he has been lurking, listening outside Stephen's bedroom.

“Give me that gun!” Stan swoops in on the brown bag and heads toward the door.

The gun's owner, a boy of about fifteen, waits in the entry. Behind him his own mother waits in the street, her car idling.

Stan bursts past the boy and heads out to the car. He leans down to the mother and exposes the gun.

“Your son just gave this gun to Stephen …” Stan is pale. “Take it now. Please take it out of our house.”

But the mother speaks no English. She misunderstands. She thinks that Stan is pointing the gun at her. She speeds
off, leaving her son, Stan, the gun, and now Stephen and me in the street.

Nine years later, I can't remember certain details of the evening. What happens to the kid? Soon the police arrive. They have been summoned by the mother from a pay phone at the corner of Beacon and Washington. At first the police intend to arrest Stanley for assault with a deadly weapon. Stan composes himself and explains.

As he speaks, the cops size him up. Stan's reading glasses hang around his neck, Bate's biography of Keats under his arm.

I think we end up again in our living room, the police, the kid, Stan, Stephen, and I. The cops take the gun, yes, but the kid vanishes from my recollection. Does he go with the police? Does he simply walk out the door?

And where is Charles in all of this? Among us? In his room? Not for the first, or the last, time, his brother's troubles eclipse him.

Then, when everyone leaves, the cops, the kid, I think we sit down to dinner.

Christmas Eve dinner, damn it.

And then Christmas day. We open gifts. Stan keeps the fire going. No one takes pictures.

And then we are relieved of the holiday.

Stephen flies with his brother to Missouri on the twenty-sixth “to celebrate the New Year.” We are living inside pat cultural cliches these days, newspeak, huge warehouse phrases that are cold and empty.