It was that vision that turned him into a poet, and it was really for his poetry, more than his guitar playing, that we’d recruited him for the No Names. None of us could write lyrics, though I’d tried a few take-offs, like the one on Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire”:
My BVDs were made of thatch,
You came along and lit the match,
I screamed in pain, my screams grew higher,
Goodness gracious! My balls were on fire!
We were looking for a little more soul, words that would suggest Pepper’s rages, Ziggy’s prophetic dreams. And we might have had that if Deejo could have written a bridge. He’d get in a groove like “Lonely Is the Falling Rain”:
Lonely is the falling rain,
Every drop
Tastes the same,
Lonely is the willow tree,
Green dress draped
Across her knee,
Lonely is the boat at sea…
Deejo could go on listing lonely things for pages, but he’d never arrive at a bridge. His songs refused to circle back on themselves. They’d just go on and were impossible to memorize.
He couldn’t spell, either, which never bothered us but created a real problem when Pepper asked him to write something that Pepper could send to Linda Molina. Deejo came up with “I Dream,” which, after several pages, ended with the lines:
I dream of my arms
Around your waste.
Linda mailed it back to Pepper with those lines circled and in angry slashes of eyebrow pencil the exclamations: !Lechón!!!Estúpido!!!Pervert!
Pepper kept it folded in his wallet like a love letter.
But back to Blight.
We stood in the gangway listening to Deejo read. His seemingly nonstop sentence was reaching a climax. Just when the spider and caterpillar realized their battle was futile, that neither could win, a sparrow swooped down and gobbled them both up.
It was a parable. Who knows how many insect lives had been sacrificed in order for Deejo to have finally arrived at that moral?
We hung our heads and muttered, “Yeah, great stuff, Deej, that was good, man, no shit, keep it up, be a best-seller.”
He folded his loose-leaf papers, stuffed them into his back pocket, and walked away without saying anything.
Later, whenever someone would bring up his novel, Blight, and its great opening line, Deejo would always say, “Yeah, and it’s been all downhill from there.”
As long as it didn’t look as if Deejo would be using his title in the near future, we decided to appropriate it for the band. We considered several variations — Boys from Blight, Blights Out, the Blight Brigade. We wanted to call ourselves Pepper and the Blighters, but Pepper said no way, so we settled on just plain Blighters. That had a lot better ring to it than calling ourselves the No Names. We had liked being the No Names at first, but it had started to seem like an advertisement for an identity crisis. The No Names sounded too much like one of the tavern-sponsored softball teams the guys back from Korea had formed. Those guys had been our heroes when we were little kids. They had seemed like legends to us as they gunned around the block on Indians and Harleys while we walked home from grade school. Now they hung out at corner taverns, working on beer bellies, and played softball a couple of nights a week on teams that lacked both uniforms and names. Some of their teams had jerseys with the name of the bar that sponsored them across the back, but the bars themselves were mainly named after beers — the Fox Head 400 on Twenty-fifth Street, or the Edelweiss Tap on Twenty-sixth, or down from that the Carta Blanca. Sometimes, in the evenings, we’d walk over to Lawndale Park and watch one of the tavern teams play softball under the lights. Invariably some team calling itself the Damon Demons or the Latin Cobras, decked out in gold-and-black uniforms, would beat their butts.
There seemed to be some unspoken relationship between being nameless and being a loser. Watching the guys from Korea after their ball games as they hung around under the buzzing neon signs of their taverns, guzzling beers and flipping the softball, I got the strange feeling that they had actually chosen anonymity and the loserhood that went with it. It was something they looked for in one another, that held them together. It was as if Korea had confirmed the choice in them, but it had been there before they’d been drafted. I could still remember how they once organized a motorcycle club. They called it the Motorcycle Club. Actually, nobody even called it that. It was the only nameless motorcycle gang I’d ever heard of.
A lot of those guys had grown up in the housing project that Pepper and Ziggy lived in, sprawling blocks of row houses known simply as “the projects,” rather than something ominous sounding like Cabrini-Green. Generations of nameless gangs had roamed the projects, then disappeared, leaving behind odd, anonymous graffiti — unsigned warnings, threats, and imprecations without the authority of a gang name behind them.
It wasn’t until we became Blighters that we began to recognize the obscurity that surrounded us. Other neighborhoods at least had identities, like Back of the Yards, Marquette Park, Logan Square, Greektown. There were places named after famous intersections, like Halsted and Taylor. Everyone knew the mayor still lived where he’d been born, in Bridgeport, the neighborhood around Sox Park. We heard our area referred to sometimes as Zone 8, after its postal code, but that never caught on. Nobody said, “Back to Zone 8.” For a while Deejo had considered Zone 8 as a possible title for his novel, but he finally rejected it as sounding too much like science fiction.
As Blighters, just walking the streets we became suddenly aware of familiar things we didn’t have names for, like the trees we’d grown up walking past, or the flowers we’d always admired that bloomed around the blue plastic shrine of the Virgin in the front yard of the Old Widow. Even the street names were mainly numbers, something I’d never have noticed if Debbie Weiss, a girl I’d met downtown, hadn’t pointed it out.
Debbie played sax, too, in the band at her all-girls high school. I met her in the sheet-music department of Lyon & Healy’s music store. We were both flipping through the same Little Richard songbooks. His songs had great sax breaks, the kind where you roll onto your back and kick your feet in the air while playing.
“Tenor or alto?” she asked without looking up from the music.
I glanced around to make sure she was talking to me. She was humming “Tutti Frutti” under her breath.
“Tenor,” I answered, amazed we were talking.
“That’s what I want for my birthday. I’ve got an alto, an old Martin. It was my uncle Seymour’s. He played with Chick Webb.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, impressed, though I didn’t know exactly who Chick Webb was. “How’d you know I played sax?” I asked her, secretly pleased that I obviously looked like someone who did.
“It was either that or you’ve got weird taste in ties. You always walk around wearing your neck strap?”
“No, I just forgot to take it off after practicing,” I explained, effortlessly slipping into my first lie to her. Actually, I had taken to wearing the neck strap for my saxophone sort of in the same way that the Mexican guys in the neighborhood wore gold chains dangling outside their T-shirts, except that instead of a cross at the end of my strap I had a little hook, which looked like a mysterious Greek letter, from which the horn was meant to hang.