The Stardust Lounge_ Stories From a Boy's Adolescence - Deborah Digges [1]
“If Stephen doesn't mind.”
“Stephen? “ the woman says softly as she moves toward him and kneels. “Stephen, my name is Beth.” She places her hand on his head.
“Hi, Beth,” Stephen says easily. “I'm Thteve.” He smiles, revealing his missing teeth as he looks into her face.
As I see it, the stars were once nameless, and the days and the months of the year. Then they had many names, the names we gave them and forgot and misremembered. They fell in and out of their own timing, the seasons particular to the angle of the light, the pitch of the planet—by the laws of gravity earth's one moon decided the tides.
Maybe with people it is different. Certain people emanate something other, some newness, time or timelessness. They enlighten or shadow others. It is in them and little gets in its way.
So it is with a woman named Beth and a child with a lisp who calls himself Thteve at the threshold of the laundromat one summer day in Iowa, a moment I'll remember, a moment so many others will fall into to lose themselves or find direction.
Beth is kneeling. She is laying her hand on my son's blond head and nodding. “Oh, yes,” she says as she smooths his hair and stands. She touches my arm. “Deborah—your Stephen? He'll know a higher turn in the spiral.”
Stephen in Iowa, 1983
Fall, 1991
Thirteen-year-old Stephen has run away again. He's out there somewhere with his gang, all of them dressed for the dark in black-hooded sweatshirts, oversized team jackets, ball caps, baggy pants that ride low on their hips. Inside their pockets they hold on to guns, switchblades. Recently Stephen has shaved part of his right eyebrow.
It's about 4:00 A.M., late September. I'm in my study on the east side of our brownstone apartment house in Brookline, Massachusetts, three stories above the street.
Maybe Stephen can see that my study light is on. I imagine him looking up from one of the condemned train cars’ shot-out windows in the rubble field not far from us, looking up to this coin of light like a lighthouse beacon in one of my mother's favorite hymns.
But Stephen would protest he is no flailing ship. He is Henry Martin, the youngest of three brothers in the Scottish ballad I used to read to him, Henry Martin, who became the robber of the three, having drawn the losing lot.
But as fate would have it, Martin was good at pirating—brutal, unequivocal, the beloved captain of a ship that cruised the shoals off Britain, pillaging shipwrecks and intercepting inbound merchant vessels.
All night in Boston sirens close in, scale back. We are as far north as we have ever been, the light here opening on a series of stingy, frigid days, shutting down suddenly.
Maybe the cops have picked Stephen up, in which case I will hear something soon. More likely he has fallen asleep on the floor of someone's room. It might be hours before I hear from him. He has run enough times that I know he will call. He hates himself for having to, but he can't help it. When he hears my voice he will be profane.
It's cold in my study, cold throughout our rooms. Stunningly beautiful is our apartment, but cold, often barely fifty-five degrees. But cold as it is, the oil bills are enormous, midwinter, half my salary.
I'd build a fire but this would mean my taking the back stairs to the yard, opening a common door. We are in enough trouble. Our landlords, who live below us, call often these days to tell Stephen to turn down the rap music. And sometimes he brings his gang home, ten or more boys stomping up the front flight of stairs.
Then there are the shouting matches between Stephen and his older brother, between Stephen and his stepfather, Stan, who visits when he can, these days about every third weekend.
And there are the shouting matches between Stephen and me. They get us nowhere despite my wailing, begging, and then my sudden turns from despair to fury that find me chasing after him down the stairs, out the double doors and over the back wall, up the eighty or so steps to the car.
At forty I am amazed at my speed, my skill. But Stephen is faster. Just