The Stardust Lounge

by Deborah Digges

  “Right!”

  “And were he to flunk out of school, it would be unfair of him to expect you to support him. Nope,” Ed spoke casually, “that would be unfair, and we've agreed, haven't we Steve, that it's important to be fair. No, it wouldn't be fair for you to support Steve, any more than it would be fair for him to have to support you if you lost your job. Steve wants to be independent, right, Steve?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You want to be able to do what you want, when you want to. Right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Good man. Of course. We all do. We all want to be independent. So Steve would need to find his own place to live, get a job to support himself. In fact, look here, Steve. I saved the want-ads section of the paper for you. And here is a list of apartments.”

  Ed opened the paper and began reading descriptions of apartments aloud. “Here's one: ‘one bedroom apartment in North Amherst.’ Whoops,” he interrupted himself. “If you live in North Amherst you'd need a car … can you get a car?”

  “My license is suspended.”

  “Who needs a license? Weren't you by yourself when you were driving Ray's car the other night? You know, the night they picked you up …”

  “Ya, but…”

  “But you got caught, huh. Well. Maybe you couldn't depend on Ray's car every day. Or if you got caught again driving alone—what'd they say?”

  “They said if it happened again, I go to juvie …”

  “Bummer,” Ed replied. “Geez! Those Amherst cops are rough. Wait! Here's one. It says, Apartment on bus route …’ “

  The concept of fairness is the method by which Stephen and I decided to adopt Buster the bulldog.

  “I think he's going to need a lot of care,” I'd said when I hung up the phone with the woman in New Hampshire.

  “Like what?” Stephen asked.

  “Well, she said medicate him every morning at seven. And he takes some other kind of medicine on his food, so he has to eat then, too. And we can't just feed him and not the other dogs. G.Q. and Rufus will have to eat then. Some mornings I've already left for Tufts by seven.”

  “We could take turns,” Stephen suggested.

  “But that's early for you. It's hard for you to get up and off to school. I'm not sure it would be fair to ask you to do that.”

  “They're probably going to kill him if we don't take him.”

  “True.”

  “And I'll be away now and then … I have some readings next term. One's in California. What if he's having seizures?”

  “I could take care of him. Mom, listen. Let's do a trial. Let's say we'll try it with this dog. Two months. Let's say a two-month trial. In that time we'll learn what to do. We'll teach each other. If it's just too hard, we'll find him another home. I'm willing to try if you are.”

  “It's crazy,” I said.

  “Kinda.”

  “A third dog?”

  “I know!”

  “With epilepsy.”

  “Fits!”

  “Fits, as in Hey, kid, you're a step ahead of a fit!”

  “Named Buster.”

  “Who likes to play with balls.”

  “Get the ball, Buster!”

  “Get it? Get the ball-buster!”

  It's a cool, drizzly fall day and the 7-Eleven is busy as a car pulls up, the driver scanning the parking lot where I wait, a brindle bulldog hanging eagerly out the window. I wave and the woman stops her car and nearly runs to the passenger side. She leads Buster on a leash toward me.

  “Are you Deborah?” she asks, thrusting the leash in my hand.

  “This is Buster. Say hello, Buster! Now you hold him while I get his meds.”

  I kneel in front of the dog, his beautiful bulldog's face—not quite as flat as G.Q.'s—thrust into mine. He is also somewhat taller, a lighter golden brindle, more sleek, as if he might be part boxer. We smell each other. He licks my face as I hug him.

  “Buster,” I say. “Hello, Buster.”

  “Here.” The woman hands me a plastic bag full of meds. “The instructions are on the bottles. A Valium in the morning at seven, and one at seven in the evening. Feed him twice a day at those times and put a capful of the potassium bromide on his food.”

  “Do you have his records? His shots and stuff?”

  “I'll send them. Okay? I forgot them.”

  The woman bends briefly to pet Buster on the head. “ ‘Bye, Buster,” she says. “She'll take good care of you.”

  Some years later, the morning following his death, while I'm digging Buster's grave, digging a deep, fine hole back near the woods in which I set down pictures of us, Buster's basketball, and a couple of Valium for the afterlife, not without popping a few myself, I'll remember the day I met Buster the bulldog at a 7-Eleven in New Hampshire, and fell in love.

  As I struggle against tree roots, the mossy black soil, I'm thinking how from the day I brought him home to Amherst Stephen and I came to love this dog.

  We loved him ridiculously, without self-consciousness, as did the other dogs and cats of our household. Our cats came to greet Buster as they greeted us, rubbing against him and purring. They curled up next to him on my bed. After a while Rufus and G.Q. allowed such greetings and sleeping arrangements since Buster had shown them the way.

  “He's our Vergil,” Stephen once said.

  During his seizures we learned to hold him while he frothed at the mouth, lost control of his bladder and his bowels. And then, covered in slobber, urine, and feces, we helped him to his feet as he recovered, praising him, offering him meds in a hot dog, the water he so badly needed after an episode, washing him down with warm towels before we washed ourselves.

  Often Buster would begin a cluster of seizures during the night. I'd be awakened as the bed in which both of us slept began to vibrate, Buster rigid, rising toward something, his eyes fixed on the ceiling as if someone were calling his name, or he envisioned a ball being held up just out of his grasp. Then he would fall into a seizure, flailing, arcing his back as he rolled and wheezed and panted.

  Stephen, who at 5:00 A.M. might well be in the shower or cutting his hair, would hear the commotion and know to run down to the kitchen to get the Valium. Then, as I lifted the dog to the floor to clean him up, Stephen stripped the bed and changed the sheets.

  Once Buster wandered through our gate and was lost for an afternoon. Banking on the basset hound Rufus's strong sense of scent, we instructed him, “Find Buster, Rufus!” and Rufus had pulled us with authority on leash through the backyards of Amherst, but, as it turned out, in the opposite direction.

  Buster had wandered down to the retirement home a few blocks from us. There he was befriended by the residents and the nursing staff, who let him wander about the halls while they called the police.

  “I'm so relieved he's safe,” I said to the nurse leading me to the dayroom where Buster sat eating potato chips fed to him by a man in a wheelchair.

  “He has epilepsy” I told her.

  “Well, honey don't worry” the nurse responded as she knelt to pet Buster. “He's come to the right place.”

  If Eduardo instilled in us the idea of fairness, then Buster gave us the opportunity to practice through our shared responsibility of his care. His condition demanded discipline—we must get him fed and medicated by seven or by mid-morning he would be seizing.

  And when seizing, he couldn't be left alone. Someone needed to be with him. Often the local vet kept an eye on him the days I drove into the university. Like the retirement home staff, the clinic allowed Buster the run of the office. After school it would be Stephen's job, rain or shine, to go to the vet's and walk Buster home, have him fed and medicated as well as feeding Rufus, and G.Q., and the cats, by the time I walked in the door at seven.

  Because a ride in the car calmed a seizing Buster, I sometimes took him in to Medford with me, stopping at rest areas to let him pee, wandering around the area a bit with him so he could stretch his legs and explore, then loading him back in the ca
r. Were this the case, I needed to leave an hour or so earlier than usual. His needs insisted that we plan our days; at the same time we must be willing to depart from our plans.

  Maybe Stephen promised friends he'd hang out after school. Maybe I was tired and could have used an extra hour's sleep. Or maybe I was working on a poem. Things must be put aside in deference to Buster. Because he was so lovable, earnest, and good-natured, Stephen and I worked willingly together for his best interests.

  We learned that Buster might seize if things were stressful. Stephen's loud rap made Buster twitchy a sign we learned might bring on a seizure. Shouting drove him trembling into a corner.

  We adjusted the music and our tempers. If Stephen and I disagreed about something, we kept our voices calm, or stepped outside to figure it out.

  In our efforts to care for Buster, we needed to keep in touch with the other's schedule. The fall Buster came to live with us Stephen convinced me that beepers for both of us were a good idea.

  I didn't like the idea of beepers. Unless one was a doctor, beepers seemed to suggest illicit activities. Stephen's friends at the Park School had used beepers for such purposes. And I knew that teachers at the high school frowned on them.

  But in those first months when we were learning to care for Buster, Stephen convinced me. And so we purchased a pair of beepers, opened an account, invented codes for each other, and used them to communicate.

  Each time Stephen's beeper was confiscated at school, I called, to the surprise of the counselors, to say that Stephen owned the beeper with my permission, that he needed it to communicate with me regarding our epileptic bulldog, and may he please have it back?

  And Stephen learned not to flaunt the instrument, or allow friends to call him at school. “They could take it away for good,” he said one night. “And then how would I know if Buster needed me?”

  Through Ed's intervention and our love for G.Q., Rufus, Mugs and her kittens, and now Buster, we began to create a home, a family of humans and other beings caring for each other. There turned out to be no one Stephen trusted more with Buster than me, and vice versa. I might not always trust Stephen with my car, trust his efforts in school, that he would, as he'd promised, clean out the gutters, shovel the driveway, or rake the leaves.

  But I knew I could trust him to see to Buster's best interests, trust he would give him the right medications, limit Buster's playtime with the ball, and know exactly what to do if and when he seized.

  Pulling in our driveway from New Hampshire with Buster, I'm greeted by Stephen and a boy who introduces himself as Trevor. They help me unload the car, pet and play with Buster. Then Stephen takes me aside.

  “Mom,” he says. “Now, Mom, listen. I've got to talk to you about something important.”

  “Okay.” I take a deep breath. I'm beginning to know this preamble well.

  “Promise you won't interrupt.”

  “Okay.”

  “Say you promise.”

  “I promise.”

  “Okay. Mom, Trevor's homeless.”

  “What?”

  “You promised.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You're forgiven. Mom, listen. He's homeless. He can't go home. He's been kicked out. He's been away this whole past year at DYS. I knew him a little last summer, but then he got shipped off.”

  “May I ask for what?”

  “You can ask. Things.”

  “What things?”

  “Things, Mom. Stuff like I've done. What does it matter? He paid his dues. He just got home from a year in juvie, but no one wants him. They say he'll just make trouble again. He's been sleeping in a friend's car. I told him maybe he could stay here—just for a night or two. Mom, I'll cook the dinner. I'll make it fair, Mom.”

  “Just for a night or two,” I answer. “We've got a lot going on, huh? School's just started. I'll be at Tufts three days a week now, and you've got school, and your community service, and the animals …”

  “I know.” Stephen is clear, earnest. “I've been thinking about all that. But look, Mom. We just rescued a dog who's epileptic. Here's a kid, Mom, a kid who's homeless …”

  Trevor in trees / Photo by Stephen Digges

  Fall, 1994

  In late October Mugsie the cat gives birth to a second litter of kittens. A week later she is killed by a car on Blue Hills Road. Trevor finds her as he walks home from God knows where. He places her on the front step. The dogs solemnly circle and sniff her.

  It's about three in the morning of a weeknight, but we're all up, our lights burning on through the November night, each of the boys carrying out some business of his own, music or reading. I've been what might roughly be called asleep, released for a while upstairs like a flag at the top of the house.

  Stephen kneels and weeps. He lifts Mugs's head to see and to show her slack gaze, the small stretched body pooling a bit. Steve gently turns her over.

  Trevor curses and goes to his room. Later we will hear from him bitterly. We're still getting to know each other, though he's lived with us now for a year.

  Things hadn't gone well regarding his return home to his family from DYS. After a month or so it was clear that if he didn't stay on with us, he'd be returned to the Department of Youth Services shelter in Springfield. Though he was living at our house, attending high school with Stephen, I had no authority to speak with his teachers about his work, his status.

  “I'm sorry,” the guidance counselor would say, flatly satisfied, “but you have no rights in this matter.”

  In the end I applied to the state boards to become his foster mother.

  At sixteen, Trevor is quiet, thoughtful by nature, an observer of life. It's hard for me to imagine him acting out the trouble everyone, including the school, holds against him. He loves the animals, especially the cats, and he has given African names to several.

  One must look closely into his dark eyes to get a fix on his mood. He is polite, solitary, powerful in his silences.

  I've begun to think of him as our Queequeg. Who can explain it? His presence has completed the circle around us. Trevor and Stephen call each other brothers, defend the other in all things. By way of their pact, they are willing to take on new responsibilities.

  They work together for hours making music, beats, sampling, and Trevor is brilliant in his rap freestyling. Words come out of his mouth in a deep baritone that resonates a sadness and a will, an intimation of the islands his absent father immigrated from. Listening to Trevor freestyle, I've come to believe in the phenomenon of the gift of speaking in tongues.

  Now from his room comes a loud thud. Maybe he's hit the wall with his fist.

  Charles lays his hand on Stephen's head and looks hard at me. We read the other's thoughts.

  “I guess we could try an eyedropper with milk,” I say. “But can kittens drink cow's milk?”

  “We could mix it with water and a little sugar,” Charles answers.

  “And warm it up,” I say. “We'll get a book tomorrow. We'll ask the vet…”

  “Can I stay home from school?” Stephen holds the dead cat in his arms. I look at poor Mugs and the blond head of the boy kneeling over her, that head with such an inventive haircut—shaved bald on the sides with a sort of mane ridging the top. Trevor hits the wall again. The buzz of the halogen light behind us burns on conspicuously, expensively, as it does every night near 5:00 A.M.

  I'm aware of a sort of dream-portent, a forerunning into the crazy imminent dawn-to-day a day through which large adolescent boys sleep on, their backpacks full of unopened schoolbooks by the door. Six tiny kittens cry to be fed while our dogs romp, slide through the kitchen, our other cats leap through the kitchen window, then out again, knocking Buster the bulldog's many epilepsy medication bottles into a sinkful of dirty dishes.

  “You've missed a lot of school already,” I sigh. He and I know I'm stating the obvious.

  “So? For God's sake, Mom.” Stephen's tears come freely. Everything about his demeanor insists that this above
all incidents, accidents, illnesses, or just plain fatigue is the exception to beat all exceptions. This is it and I as his mother am missing the point.

  “Look,” Charles offers, “I'll run by school and pick up their work.”

  “Uh-huh.” Something sharpens in me. “Who in the world let Mugs out? How did she get out? She was supposed to stay in the basement. We were supposed to keep that door shut.”

  “We need to figure out about feeding the kittens,” says Charles. “Who knows how she got out? No one did it intentionally. Steve, go get a box and some blankets.”

  Charles has been home now for a week or so. For the past year and a half he has been living and working for a human rights organization in St. Petersburg, Russia. Now he is on leave until January. I'm thrilled to have him home and at the same time I find myself oddly self-conscious around my reasonable, conscientious, worldly, grown-up son. Life is so crazy around here. I wonder if he can adjust.

  At twenty-four Charles is tall and handsome, unshaven and swarthy these days as he gets over the huge time change from St. Petersburg to Amherst. He has always been disciplined, enthusiastic, capable. I'm afraid he actually believes that with his influence now the sixteen-year-old Trevor and seventeen-year-old Stephen will turn a corner.

  The most trouble—that I'm aware of—Charles has ever been in took place some years ago while he was studying in London. He and some friends climbed over the wall into the Regent's Park Petting Zoo. More than a little intoxicated, Charles fell asleep among the young goats and sheep. He was awakened by a guard who took him to jail for the night. The next morning he was released with a warning, the incident merely noted.

  Charles is at heart philosophical, a peacemaker. He wrestles with his nature.

  “Never mind,” I say. “Steve, go to bed. Maybe you can go to school at noon.”

  “What about Trev?”

  “He can go at noon, too.”

  “What will you tell school?” Stephen wipes his nose on his sleeve.