The next morning he really was gone.
Deejo and I waited for a letter, but neither of us heard anything.
“He must have taken the vow of silence as far as writing, too,” Deejo figured.
I did get a postcard from Pepper sometime during the winter, a scene of a tropical sunset over the ocean, and scrawled on the back the message “Not diggin’ much beauty lately.” There was no return address, and since Pepper’s parents had divorced and moved out of the projects I couldn’t track him down.
There was a lot of moving going on. Deejo moved out after a huge fight with his old man. Deej’s father had lined up a production-line job for Deejo at the factory where he’d worked for twenty-three years. When Deej didn’t show up for work the first day his father came home in a rage and tried to tear Deejo’s beard off. So Deej moved in with his older brother, Sal, who’d just gotten out of the navy and had a bachelor pad near Old Town. The only trouble for Deejo was that he had to move back home on weekends, when Sal needed more privacy.
Deejo was the last of the Blighters still playing. He actually bought a guitar, though not an electric one. He spent a lot of time listening to scratchy old 78s of black singers whose first names all seemed to begin with either Blind or Sonny. Deejo even cut his own record, a paper-thin 45 smelling of acetate, with one side blank. He took copies of it around to all the bars that the guys from Korea used to rule and talked the bartenders into putting his record on the jukebox. Those bars had quieted down. There weren’t enough guys from the Korean days still drinking to field the corner softball teams anymore. The guys who had become regulars were in pretty sad shape. They sat around, endlessly discussing baseball and throwing dice for drinks. The jukeboxes that had once blasted The Platters and Buddy Holly had filled up with polkas again and with Mexican songs that sounded suspiciously like polkas. Deejo’s record was usually stuck between Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles. Deej would insert a little card handprinted in ballpoint pen: HARD-HEARTED WOMAN BY JOEY DECAMPO.
It was a song he’d written. Deejo’s hair was longer than ever, his Vandyke had filled in, and he’d taken to wearing sunglasses and huaraches. Sometimes he would show up with one of the girls from Loop Junior College, which was where he was going to school. He’d bring her into the Edelweiss or the Carta Blanca, usually a wispy blonde with scared eyes, and order a couple of drafts. The bartender or one of us at the bar would pick up Deejo’s cue and say, “Hey, how about playing that R5?” and feed the jukebox. “Hard-hearted Woman” would come thumping out as loud as the “She’s-Too-Fat Polka,” scratchy as an old 78, Deejo whining through his nose, strumming his three chords.
Hard-hearted woman,
Oh yeah, Lord,
She’s a hard-hearted woman,
Uuuhhh…
Suddenly, despite the Delta accent, it would dawn on the girl that it was Deejo’s voice. He’d kind of grin, shyly admitting that it was, his fingers on the bar tapping along in time with the song, and I wondered what she would think if she could have heard the one I wished he had recorded, the one that opened:
The dawn rises,
Uuuhhh,
Like sick old men,
Oh, Lord,
Playing on the rooftops in their underwear,
Yeah…
Back to blight.
It was a saying that faded from my vocabulary, especially after my parents moved to Berwyn. Then, some years later, after I quit my job at UPS in order to hide out from the draft in college, the word resurfaced in an English-lit survey class. Maybe I was just more attuned to it than most people ordinarily would be. There seemed to be blight all through Dickens and Blake. The class was taught by a professor nicknamed “the Spitter.” He loved to read aloud, and after the first time, nobody sat in the front rows. He had acquired an Oxford accent, but the more excitedly he read and spit, the more I could detect the South Side of Chicago underneath the veneer, as if his th’s had been worked over with a drill press. When he read us Shelley’s “To a Skylark,” which began “Hail to thee, blithe spirit,” I thought he was talking about blight again until I looked it up.
One afternoon in spring I cut class and rode the Douglas Park B back. It wasn’t anything I planned. I just wanted to go somewhere and think. The draft board was getting ready to reclassify me and I needed to figure out why I felt like telling them to get rammed rather than just saying the hell with it and doing what they told me to do. But instead of thinking, I ended up remembering my early trips back from the North Side, when I used to pretend that Debbie Weiss was riding with me, and when I came to my stop on Twenty-second Street this time it was easier to imagine how it would have looked to her — small, surprisingly small in the way one is surprised returning to an old grade-school classroom.
I hadn’t been back for a couple of years. The neighborhood was mostly Mexican now, with many of the signs over the stores in Spanish, but the bars were still called the Edelweiss Tap and the Budweiser Lounge. Deejo and I had lost touch, but I heard that he’d been drafted. I made the rounds of some of the bars looking for his song on the jukeboxes, but when I couldn’t find it even in the Carta Blanca, where nothing else had changed, I gave up. I was sitting in the Carta Blanca having a last, cold cerveza before heading back, listening to “CuCuRuCuCu Paloma” on the jukebox and watching the sunlight streak in through the dusty wooden blinds. Then the jukebox stopped playing, and through the open door I could hear the bells from three different churches tolling the hour. They didn’t quite agree on the precise moment. Their rings overlapped and echoed one another. The streets were empty, no one home from work or school yet, and something about the overlapping of those bells made me remember how many times I’d had dreams, not prophetic ones like Ziggy’s, but terrifying all the same, in which I was back in my neighborhood, but lost, everything at once familiar and strange, and I knew if I tried to run, my feet would be like lead, and if I stepped off a curb, I’d drop through space, and then in the dream I would come to a corner that would feel so timeless and peaceful, like the Carta Blanca with the bells fading and the sunlight streaking through, that for a moment it would feel as if I’d wandered into an Official Blithe Area.
Outtakes
The usher scans the credits for his name.