The Stardust Lounge_ Stories From a Boy's Adolescence - Deborah Digges [9]
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