The Stardust Lounge by Deborah Digges Read Free Book Online Page B

Notre Dame, the Cyclops, Cerberus, the Phantom of the Opera.
    But the night Stephen decided no more stories, no more Huck Finn, he took down the drawings. He did so ritualistically carefully removing the tacks and putting them in a box, piling the drawings, facedown, under his bed.
    Against my attempts to rearrange our lives to minimize his brother's absence, it was as if Stephen decided to represent physically the emptiness he felt, and punish or deprive himself for the pain it caused.
    “Be real,” he'd mumble when I suggested how much fun the two of us could have.
    “Well, we'll find a way. Honey, look at me. We'll be all right,” I'd offer. That autumn an aspect of Stephen's charactersurfaced, as intensely dark as was the light we'd known him by.
    “Stephen, you burn so bright!” we'd say when he was younger.
    As an infant, Stephen smiled for the first time for his brother. But it wasn't just a smile. Stephen's face lit up in a wide grin. As Charles again and again brought his seven-year-old-face close to his three-week-old brother's, Stephen gurgled, struggled with laughter.
    Stephen so captivated us that I forgot the tub water I was running for Charles. Not only did it spill over, but as Stephen smiled and shrieked, water poured down the stairs of our California condominium.
    Eleven years later, as suddenly as that first brilliant smile, Stephen had gone dark. He behaved as if he were in mourning: for the loss of the brother who could make him wriggle with laughter, for the threeness of our family, and perhaps for what—as he moved into adolescence—he intuited as the end of childhood.
    Even the clothes he chose to wear to school were dark— gray or black sweatshirts, black jeans. Day in, day out, his colorful skateboarding T-shirts, his bright jackets stayed in the drawer as he wore black, brown, black, gray, black.
    What might help? How about someone besides Mom to talk to? A therapist named Mike. How about a new skateboard? In spite of the landlords’ complaints, we actually built a four-foot-ramp for it in our living room. And how about trips to see his brother, his grandparents, his cousins? All of the above, none of the above, some—.
    Through the autumn of 1988 there were fewer and fewer moments of closeness between Stephen and me. Ifelt like Chekhov's darling, Olga, whose obsessive doting on the boy Sasha pushed him further and further away.
    “You must try to do your lessons well, darling. Obey your teachers.”
    “Oh leave me alone,” Sasha said.
    “Sa-a-sha!” she called after him
    Where do the guns come from, into the hands of boys like Stephen, boys who for reasons as various and unique as the boys themselves have fallen into that well between the living and the dead world, who have not yet made the leap, as others have, over the gulf, boys who are grieving, bored with the old games, who have been left behind, lost in grief, isolated and angry. And dangerous in their confusion.
    “It's easy to get a gun,” Stephen says to me over the phone several nights after my trip to Amherst. He knows his future has once again been placed in my hands. If I don't allow him back to Massachusetts, he may be sent to military school. Perhaps for this reason he is forthcoming.
    “It's easy. Mom, listen. People just have ‘em. The right people. Kids know who to go to.”
    “But where do
they
get them?” I ask.
    “They case cars and houses and steal them. Mom, there are lots of guns out there. All kinds. Sometimes dealers send runners to states where the gun laws are easy. The runners buy the guns and drive them back. Kids have fake IDs that say they're old enough. Or they get them at gun shows. There was a gun show here last weekend. I could buy one in Missouri if I wanted. No problem.”
    “But don't parents find them? Doesn't somebody keep tabs? Don't the gun dealers double-check?”
    “Mom. Get real. Where have you been? They don't care. They just want their money. Besides, if you get busted you just