The Stardust Lounge

by Deborah Digges

  When I reach the other side, I peer down the path between high dead weeds to an old trestle. Even from a distance, in the midst of the rubble grown up around it, the trestle retains something of the baroque vision of its builders, elaborate scrolls and buttresses written into the behemoth stone and concrete structure.

  Here and there off the path, the homeless have erected low, tarp-covered houses. Just now no one stirs. They're either asleep or roaming. I can feel my pulse in my temples—I set off one morning for the mountain … —and squat to catch my breath as I behold the enormous ruin.

  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

  December, 1991

  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.

  The truth is that Stephen's father intends to keep him in Missouri. He will live there with his father and stepmother. Stephen's father and I have argued about the issue of how long Stephen will stay in Missouri. In the end he gives me an ultimatum: Steve goes to live with him for good. Or not at all.

  Of course Stephen doesn't know this. He thinks he's going for a brief visit. If he knew the truth he would run away.

  I watch him board the plane through the glass partitions at Logan Airport. I'm crippled by my betrayal, glad that his brother is with him.

  Once the boys have boarded, Stan and I walk to his flight, boarding now, back to Maryland. We say good-bye. He hugs me, as is his way, firmly around my shoulders, kisses me. All gesture, all simple cultural convention. I don't ask why he's leaving early.

  February / March, 1992

  Alone in Brookline, I've gone to bed. I nearly sleepwalk through the teaching of my classes at the university, make short trips to the grocery for soup, bread, coffee. But the rest of the time I stay in bed with the electric blanket turned on high. It's February now. Stan stays on in Maryland. Charles is back at school, and Stephen is living with his father and stepmother in Missouri.

  He's wreaking havoc on their household—sneaking out at night, inciting new friends to trouble—while I'm burrowed under, lost for a while, sad. I'm translating Dante.

  I've accepted the assignment from an editor to take on the thirty-second canto of the Inferno, the Ninth Circle, Hell's basement, in which those who have betrayed family and culture are locked in ice.

  So far I have written, Were there a language dark enough to speak / truly of that hole harrowed by crags / gravity itself could not fall through to…

  The original begins with S'io avessi—Had I. Sinclair's translation begins If I had. But I take liberties. Just now I am more likely to side with those poor traitors stuck in the ice than with Dante.

  For the past semester Public Enemy is what I've heard coming from Stephen's room, Public Enemy crowding me, crowding the spaces of this huge apartment while I wore headphones, the big kind that hug the entire ear. I listened to Beethoven's Opus 57, the Appassionata sonata, beginning to end. The little anthem with which the piece commences felt near to me even as the booming of open rebellion vibrated under my feet.

  Stephen would have laughed, disgusted with me, if he knew what I listened to. He would judge me as irresponsible, an ostrich, pathetically middle class, a white chick wearing blinders—or in this case, earphones—against the social and political chaos he recently discovered in his young life.

  Never mind my feeble offerings about growing up through the sixties, the marches I participated in, the protests. “I went barefoot,�
� I heard myself absurdly reporting, “in winter. I hitchhiked. I had a boyfriend who quit school to protest the war. What do you want from me?”

  Stephen wouldn't have it. “What about now,” he'd say. “What are you doing now. Teaching at a cushy school full of white bread, writing poems nobody gets about nature. Listen up, Mom. Listen to these lyrics. Mom, you're getting old.”

  As the Appassionata moved up and down the octaves, great spaces built around me, as though days, weeks, even years had passed. Inside those spaces, my rage could rise and recede, leaving me stumped at how a vigilant daughter of the sixties could be accused by her fourteen-year-old son of social and political indifference.

  I listened to Beethoven so many times that there were moments in the tape that garbled, went underwater. The music drowned. I listened driving to and from school, or driving around at night looking for Stephen, watching a weak sun rise over the abandoned train yards as Beethoven went crazy.

  Beethoven. Public Enemy. I'm lying in bed imagining Dante looking through the language as through the wide-angle lens of a camera, framing, over the full range of the octaves, a dark place, a lake of ice unremittingly cruel.

  It must be ice and not stone, not just because of the killing sensation of cold, but because of a fundamental belief humans hold in regard to ice. Ice cracks, it breaks up and thaws eventually.

  No, says Dante. Not this ice:

  Nonfece al corso suo si grosso velo

  di verno la Daniola in Osterlic,

  ne Tanal la sotto ilfreddo cielo,

  com ‘era quivi; che se Tambernic

  vi fosse su caduto, o Pietrapana,

  non avria pur dall'orlo fatto eric…

  But even places on earth that have been frozen for thousands of years thaw finally, shift and thaw to reveal ancient surprises, mastodons, woolly mammoths. My oldest brother has a mastodon's tusk that I have seen and touched. I've petted the coarse hair above the ivory.