Pepper could play. He was a natural.
“I go crazy,” was how he described it.
His real name was Stanley Rosado. His mother sometimes called him Stashu, which he hated. She was Polish and his father was Mexican — the two main nationalities in the neighborhood together in one house. It wasn’t always an easy alliance, especially inside Pepper. When he got pissed he was a wild man. Things suffered, sometimes people, but always things. Smashing stuff seemed to fill him with peace. Sometimes he didn’t even realize he was doing it, like the time he took flowers to Linda Molina, a girl he’d been nuts about since grade school. Linda lived in one of the well-kept two-flats along Marshall Boulevard, right across from the Assumption Church. Maybe it was just that proximity to the church, but there had always been a special aura about her. Pepper referred to her as “the Unadulterated One.” He finally worked up the nerve to call her, and when she actually invited him over, he walked down the boulevard to her house in a trance. It was late spring, almost summer, and the green boulevard stretched like an enormous lawn before Linda Molina’s house. At its center was a blazing garden of tulips. The city had planted them. Their stalks sprouted tall, more like corn than flowers, and their colors seemed to vibrate in the air. The tulips were the most beautiful thing in the neighborhood. Mothers wheeled babies by them; old folks hobbled for blocks and stood before the flowers as if they were sacred.
Linda answered the door and Pepper stood there holding a huge bouquet. Clumps of dirt still dangled from the roots.
“For you,” Pepper said.
Linda, smiling with astonishment, accepted the flowers; then her eyes suddenly widened in horror. “You didn’t—?” she asked.
Pepper shrugged.
“Lechón!” the Unadulterated One screamed, pitching a shower of tulips into his face and slamming the door.
That had happened a year before and Linda still refused to talk to him. It had given Pepper’s blues shouts a particularly soulful quality, especially since he continued to preface them, in the style of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, with the words “I love you.” I love you! Aiiyyaaaaaa!!!
Pepper even had Screamin’ Jay’s blues snork down.
We’d stand at the shadowy mouth of the viaduct, peering at the greenish gleam of light at the other end of the tunnel. The green was the grass and trees of Douglas Park. Pepper would begin slamming an aerial or board or chain off the girders, making the echoes collide and ring, while Ziggy and I clonked empty bottles and beer cans, and all three of us would be shouting and screaming like Screamin’ Jay or Howlin’ Wolf, like those choirs of unleashed voices we’d hear on “Jam with Sam’s” late-night blues show. Sometimes a train streamed by, booming overhead like part of the song, and we’d shout louder yet, and I’d remember my father telling me how he could have been an opera singer if he hadn’t ruined his voice as a kid imitating trains. Once, a gang of black kids appeared on the Douglas Park end of the viaduct and stood harmonizing from bass through falsetto just like the Coasters, so sweetly that though at first we tried outshouting them, we finally shut up and listened, except for Pepper keeping the beat.
We applauded from our side but stayed where we were, and they stayed on theirs. Douglas Park had become the new boundary after the riots the summer before.
“How can a place with such good viaducts have blight, man?” Pepper asked, still rapping his aerial as we walked back.
“Frankly, man,” Ziggy said, “I always suspected it was a little fucked up around here.”
“Well, that’s different,” Pepper said. “Then let them call it an Official Fucked-Up Neighborhood.”
Nobody pointed out that you’d never hear a term like that from a public official, at least not in public, and especially not from the office of the mayor who had once promised, “We shall reach new platitudes of success.”
Nor did anyone need to explain that Official Blight was the language of revenue, forms in quintuplicate, grants, and federal aid channeled through the Machine and processed with the help of grafters, skimmers, wheeler-dealers, an army of aldermen, precinct captains, patronage workers, their relatives and friends. No one said it, but instinctively we knew we’d never see a nickel.
Not that we cared. They couldn’t touch us if we didn’t. Besides, we weren’t blamers. Blight was just something that happened, like acne or old age. Maybe declaring it official mattered in that mystical world of property values, but it wasn’t a radical step, like condemning buildings or labeling a place a slum. Slums were on the other side of the viaduct.
Blight, in fact, could be considered a kind of official recognition, a grudging admission that among blocks of factories, railroad tracks, truck docks, industrial dumps, scrapyards, expressways, and the drainage canal, people had managed to wedge in their everyday lives.
Deep down we believed what Pepper had been getting at: blight had nothing to do with ecstasy. They could send in the building inspectors and social workers, the mayor could drive through in his black limo, but they’d never know about the music of viaducts, or churches where saints winked and nodded, or how right next door to me our guitar player, Joey “Deejo” DeCampo, had finally found his title, and inspired by it had begun the Great American Novel, Blight, which opened: “The dawn rises like sick old men playing on the rooftops in their underwear.”
We had him read that to us again and again.
Ecstatic, Deejo rushed home and wrote all night. I could always tell when he was writing. It wasn’t just the wild, dreamy look that overcame him. Deejo wrote to music, usually the 1812 Overture, and since only a narrow gangway between buildings separated his window from mine, when I heard bells and cannon blasts at two in the morning I knew he was creating.
Next morning, bleary-eyed, sucking a pinched Lucky, Deejo read us the second sentence. It ran twenty ballpoint-scribbled loose-leaf pages and had nothing to do with the old men on the rooftops in their underwear. It seemed as though Deejo had launched into a digression before the novel had even begun. His second sentence described an epic battle between a spider and a caterpillar. The battle took place in the gangway between our apartment buildings, and that’s where Deej insisted on reading it to us. The gangway lent his voice an echoey ring. He read with his eyes glued to the page, his free hand gesticulating wildly, pouncing spiderlike, fingers jabbing like a beak tearing into green caterpillar guts, fist opening like a jaw emitting shrieks. His voice rose as the caterpillar reared, howling like a damned soul, its poisonous hairs bristling. Pepper, Ziggy, and I listened, occasionally exchanging looks.
It wasn’t Deejo’s digressing that bothered us. That was how we all told stories. But we could see that Deejo’s inordinate fascination with bugs was surfacing again. Not that he was alone in that, either. Of all our indigenous wildlife — sparrows, pigeons, mice, rats, dogs, cats — it was only bugs that suggested the grotesque richness of nature. A lot of kids had, at one time or another, expressed their wonder by torturing them a little. But Deejo had been obsessed. He’d become diabolically adept as a destroyer, the kind of kid who would observe an ant hole for hours, even bait it with a Holloway bar, before blowing it up with a cherry bomb. Then one day his grandpa Tony said, “Hey, Joey, pretty soon they’re gonna invent little microphones and you’ll be able to hear them screaming.”
He was kidding, but the remark altered Deejo’s entire way of looking at things. The world suddenly became one of an infinite number of infinitesimal voices, and Deejo equated voices with souls. If one only listened, it was possible to hear tiny choirs that hummed at all hours as on a summer night, voices speaking a language of terror and beauty that, for the first time, Deejo understood.