“No way, man,” Pepper said. “We ain’t winos.”
“We got class,” I said.
The road was intersected by railroad tracks. After half an hour of rocking and heaving we got the Chevy onto the tracks and from there it was downhill again to the railroad bridge. We stopped halfway across the bridge. Pepper climbed onto the roof of the car and looked out over the black river. The moon shined on the oily surface like a single, intense spotlight. Frankie Avalon was singing on the radio.
“Turn that simp off. I hate him,” Pepper yelled. He was peeing down onto the hood in a final benediction.
I switched the radio dial over to the late-night mush-music station — Sinatra singing “These Foolish Things”—and turned the volume up full blast. Pepper jumped down, flicked the headlights on, and we shoved the car over the bridge.
The splash shook the girders. Pigeons crashed out from under the bridge and swept around confusedly in the dark. We stared over the side half expecting to see the Chevy bob back up through the heavy grease of the river and float off in the moonlight. But except for the bubbles on the surface, it was gone. Then I remembered that my sax had been in the trunk.
A week later, Pepper had a new car, a red Fury convertible. His older cousin Carmen had cosigned. Pepper had made the first payment, the only one he figured on making, by selling his massive red-sparkle drum set — bass, snare, tom-tom, cymbals, high hat, bongos, conga, cowbell, woodblock, tambourine, gong — pieces he’d been accumulating on birthdays, Christmases, confirmation, graduation, since fourth grade, the way girls add pearls to a necklace. When he climbed behind those drums, he looked like a mad king beating his throne, and at first we refused to believe he had sold it all, or that he was dropping out of school to join the marines.
He drove the Fury as gently as a chauffeur. It was as if some of the craziness had drained out of him when the Chevy went over the bridge. Ziggy even started riding with us again, though every time he’d see a car pass with a GO GO SOX sign he’d get twitchy and depressed.
Pennant fever was in the air. The city long accustomed to losers was poised for a celebration. Driving with the top down brought the excitement of the streets closer. We were part of it. From Pepper’s Fury the pace of life around us seemed different, slower than it had from the Chevy. It was as if we were in a speedboat gliding through.
Pepper would glide repeatedly past Linda Molina’s house, but she was never out as she’d been the summer before, sunning on a towel on the boulevard grass. There was a rumor that she’d gotten knocked up and had gone to stay with relatives in Texas. Pepper refused to believe it, but the rest of us got the feeling that he had joined the marines for the same reason Frenchmen supposedly joined the foreign legion.
“Dave, man, you wanna go by that broad you know’s house on the North Side, man?” he would always offer.
“Nah,” I’d say, as if that would be boring.
We’d just drive, usually farther south, sometimes almost to Indiana, where the air smelled singed and towering foundry smokestacks erupted shooting sparks, like gigantic Roman candles. Then, skirting the worst slums, we’d head back through dark neighborhoods broken by strips of neon, the shops grated and padlocked, but bands of kids still out splashing in the water of open hydrants, and guys standing in the light of bar signs, staring hard as we passed.
We toured places we’d always heard about — the Fulton produce mart with its tailgate-high sidewalks, Midway Airport, skid row — stopped for carryout ribs, or at shrimp houses along the river, and always ended up speeding down the Outer Drive, along the skyline-glazed lake, as if some force had spun us to the inner rim of the city. That was the summer Deejo let his hair get long. He was growing a beard, too, a Vandyke, he called it, though Pepper insisted it was really trimmings from other parts of Deejo’s body pasted on with Elmer’s glue.
Wind raking his shaggy hair, Deejo would shout passages from his dog-eared copy of On the Road, which he walked around reading like a breviary ever since seeing Jack Kerouac on “The Steve Allen Show.” I retaliated in a spooky Vincent Price voice, reciting poems off an album called Word Jazz that Deej and I had nearly memorized. My favorite was “The Junkman,” which began:
In a dream I dreamt that was no dream,
In a sleep I slept that was no sleep,
I saw the junkman in his scattered yard…
Ziggy dug that one, too.
By the time we hit downtown and passed Buckingham Fountain with its spraying, multicolored plumes of light, Deejo would be rhapsodic. One night, standing up in the backseat and extending his arms toward the skyscraper we called God’s House because of its glowing blue dome — a blue the romantic, lonely shade of runway lights — Deejo blurted out, “I dig beauty!”
Even at the time, it sounded a little extreme. All we’d had were a couple of six-packs. Pepper started swerving, he was laughing so hard, and beating the side of the car with his fist, and for a while it was as if he was back behind the wheel of the Chevy. It even brought Ziggy out of his despair. We rode around the rest of the night gaping and pointing and yelling, “Beauty ahead! Dig it!”
“Beauty to the starboard!”
“Coming up on it fast!”
“Can you dig it?”
“Oh, wow! I am digging it! I’m digging beauty!”
Deejo got pimped pretty bad about it in the neighborhood. A long time after that night, guys would still be asking him, “Digging any beauty lately?” Or introducing him: “This is Deejo. He digs beauty.” Or he’d be walking down the street and from a passing car someone would wave, and yell, “Hey, Beauty-Digger!”
The last week before the Fury was repoed, when Pepper would come by to pick us up, he’d always say, “Hey, man, let’s go dig some beauty.”
A couple of weeks later, on a warm Wednesday night in Cleveland, Gerry Staley came on in relief with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth, threw one pitch, a double-play ball, Aparicio to Kluszewski, and the White Sox clinched their first pennant in forty years. Pepper had already left on the bus for Parris Island. He would have liked the celebration. Around 11:00 p.m. the airraid sirens all over the city began to howl. People ran out into the streets in their bathrobes crying and praying, staring up past the roofs as if trying to catch a glimpse of the mushroom cloud before it blew the neighborhood to smithereens. It turned out that Mayor Daley, a lifelong Sox fan, had ordered the sirens as part of the festivities.
Ziggy wasn’t the same after that. He could hardly get a word out without stammering. He said he didn’t feel reprieved but as if he had died. When the sirens started to wail, he had climbed into bed clutching his rosary which he still had from grade-school days, when the Blessed Mother used to smile at him. He’d wet the bed that night and had continued having accidents every night since. Deej and I tried to cheer him up, but what kept him going was a book by Thomas Merton called The Seven Storey Mountain, which one of the priests at the parish church had given him. It meant more to Zig than On the Road did to Deejo. Finally, Ziggy decided that since he could hardly talk anyway, he might be better off in the Trappists like Thomas Merton. He figured if he just showed up with the book at the monastery in Gethsemane, Kentucky, they’d have to take him in.
“I’ll be taking the vow of silence,” he stammered, “so don’t worry if you don’t hear much from me.”
“Silence isn’t the vow I’d be worrying about,” I said, still trying to joke him out of it, but he was past laughing and I was sorry I’d kidded him.
He, Deejo, and I walked past the truck docks and railroad tracks, over to the river. We stopped on the California Avenue Bridge, from which we could see a succession of bridges spanning the river, including the black railroad bridge we had pushed the Chevy over. We’d been walking most of the night, past churches, under viaducts, along the boulevard, as if visiting the landmarks of our childhood. Without a car to ride around in, I felt like a little kid again. It was Zig’s last night, and he wanted to walk. In the morning he intended to leave home and hitchhike to Kentucky. I had an image of him standing along the shoulder holding up a sign that read GETHSEMANE to the oncoming traffic. I didn’t want him to go. I kept remembering things as we walked along and then not mentioning them, like that dream he’d had about him and me and Little Richard. Little Richard had found religion and been ordained a preacher, I’d read, but I didn’t think he had taken the vow of silence. I had a fantasy of all the monks with their hoods up, meditating in total silence, and suddenly Ziggy letting go with an ear-splitting, wild, howling banshee blues shout.