The Stardust Lounge_ Stories From a Boy's Adolescence - Deborah Digges [10]
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