Ten Thousand Saints

Sixteen





ON THE EDGE

XXX Fanzine XXX

FALL 1988, 2.50$

Interview with Jude Green and Mr. Clean of the Green Mountain Boys

ON THE EDGE: Your new seven inch [Army of Four] is totally hard. My favorite song is “Str8 or Die.”

MR. CLEAN: Thanks man.

JUDE GREEN: We all worked on that one.

OTE: What are you guys up to now?

JG: We’ve been touring all up and down the coast this summer. We were in New York for a little bit, we played a matinee with Youth of Today and Uniform Choice and Army of One at CB’s, that was a beautiful experience.

OTE: Your songs seem to promote a pretty strict straight edge lifestyle. And I heard about the fight at 9:30. Would you say your intolerant of other hardcore bands and fans that aren’t straight?

MC: No were certainly not intolerant. Were friends with some guys who are straight and some who aren’t. Were about inclusion, not exclusion. Yes there have been fights but there sort of typical. The thing at CB’s was just one of those things where some guy kicks you in the face and there was good-natured dancing and Kram just gets sort of sensitive. Well you’ve seen Kram, he’s our drummer, you don’t want to mess with him.

OTE: Do you think the incident contributed to the rumors about closing down the hardcore matinees?

JG: That’s not going to happen. Let’s face it the scene will never be without violence. If some guy isn’t respectful of us and he’s blowing smoke in our faces and that’s only happened two or three times, yeah, there will be some shit going down. Look at our song “Blowing Smoke.” I mean frankly you should know better than to start shit with us.

OTE: When did you start going by Jude Green?

JG: That started I think at CB’s, too, sort of as a joke you know like Kevin Seconds of 7 Seconds, but it stuck.

MC: Its not like I call him Jude Green or anything.

OTE: And how’d you get your name, Mr. Clean?

MC: Yea, some guys started that when I shaved my head. But I’m not really into nicknames. The way I look at it is, the atman in all of us is a pure force, without ego.

OTE: Is that Krishna consciousness or something?

JG: Yea, you know, like Ray Cappo’s into.

MC: Krishna isn’t a trend. He’s the Supreme Godhead, is the way I look at it, and my music, at least, is an expression of his love.

OTE: So all of you guys are into that?

JG: We’re straight in every way. A hundred percent vegan and we don’t do drugs of any kind. I don’t feel they have any place in my life, which I keep as pure as possible. The body is a temple and all that, but my temple is at the shows, with the people, you know what I mean?

OTE: OK, Mr. Clean, I’m sure lots of people have been wondering about this. What’s it like to be in the scene and be married?

MC: Oh, its wonderful. Its wonderful. To be on the road and be able to share that with someone you love . . . its just amazing.

OTE: So your wife is straight too?

MC: Oh, yeah, yeah. We both lead a clean lifestyle. Especially seeing as she’s expecting! [laughs]

OTE: So its true she’s pregnant?

MC: Our family will be expanding in September.

OTE: What about you, Jude? What’s your take on girls in the scene?

JG: I’d like to talk about the music, if that’s OK. Were talking to X-Ample about doing a split seven inch. That’s something cool.

OTE: That is cool. What about you, Mr. Clean? Will you be able to stay active in the band with a newborn baby?

MC: Oh, definately, definately. I can do both at once. I might not get much sleep, but I’ll be at practice!

OTE: That’s cool, brothers. I wish you all the luck in the world.

JG: Thanks, man.

OTE: True till death man.

JG: True till death.

MC: Hare Krishna. Thanks a lot.

photo courtesy of Ben Leblanc

Ben Leblanc



September 5, 1988



3rd per.



How I Spent My Summer Vacation



Have you ever driven up and down the eastern United States? Have you ever been to cities such as New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and Atlanta GA? Well I have. These are just some of the many places I went this summer with a hardcore band called the Green Mountain Boys who are from Lintonburg. They range in age from 16 to 18 yrs. and follow the straight edge way of life. I take pictures for their zine and they needed someone to help with their equipment etc. which is how I got to be their roadie.



Not only did I get to see amazing sights such as the Empire State Building, I also slept on people’s floors, attended countless exciting concerts and learned life lessons such as how to change a tire. Before this I had never seen the ocean before and now I am proud to say that I have been swimming in the Atlantic. I also skated down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial which was amazing.



All in all I wouldn’t trade my summer for anything. It was a truely musical experience.



The high point came early. A day close enough to the Fourth of July, birds circling low over Manhattan, Don Fury’s studio on Spring Street. In Delph’s pocket were the five hundred dollars for which he’d sold his car. The Green Mountain Boys were freshly showered and freshly shaved, their clothes freshly laundered. They’d stayed up late tuning their guitars. They’d eaten a hearty breakfast at Angelica. Eliza was wearing her yellow summer dress, and a man on the corner was selling enormous Technicolor fruit, and they all stood on the sidewalk, waiting to be buzzed in. Jude was already in the future, looking back at himself.

Back in Lintonburg, Jude had packed up the band with his father’s gift for speed. It had taken under twenty-four hours to get the proper people in the proper vehicles; to fit their suitcases into the back of the van, Tetris-style; to fit the drum kit into the camper compartment; for Delph and Kram to quit their jobs, both without notice and without their final paychecks; for Matthew and Little Ben to beg permission from their parents to tag along; for everyone else’s parents to say no; for Little Ben to get his deposit back on break-dancing camp; to transfer all rec center business to Big Ben; to bid good-bye to Harriet, who did not try very hard to stop them. When they left, they left in a caravan: Delph, Kram, and Matthew in the Kramaro; Eliza, Jude, and Little Ben—who was now, inadequately, just Ben—in the van.

Of course she didn’t try to stop them. What could she do, short of putting the lock and chain back on his window, but watch from the door of the greenhouse as the cars pulled out of the alley, kicking up gravel and dust? Look at Eliza’s mother. Look at what happened when you tried too hard to dictate your children’s choices—they ended up running even farther from you.

With the kids gone, Harriet spent the afternoon busying herself in her studio. She still had work to do to replenish her inventory. She didn’t know how much the marijuana Jude had stolen was worth, but surely her glass had been worth more. And surely the boys who had destroyed it were the ones Jude was running from again. Maybe, as she believed before, he’d be safer out of town. Only now, she had three children to worry about. She tried not to think about which cities they’d be driving through, whose floor they’d be sleeping on, but she was clumsy, distracted. Her hands shook; she cracked two tubes. She chatted too long with a ponytailed man who had come by yesterday. He hadn’t bought anything then, but again she walked him through her gallery, all the pieces she displayed in fish tanks turned on their sides (the fish tanks, too, she’d had to replace). She shared a pack of American Spirits with the man, sitting in the plastic patio chairs that overlooked her garden. Normally, this was her least favorite part of her occupation—the exchange, the chummy small talk. That was Les’s talent. He used to spend hours with his customers, shooting the shit while they smoked up the greenhouse; only when she called him in for dinner did he remember to collect any money. Her customers often seemed as puzzled as she was about what exactly the interaction required of them, whether the rituals that were in the job description of the drug peddler, the prostitute, the illegal arms dealer, even, in this state, the tattoo artist—those professions more clearly on the other side of the law—applied to the traffic of glassware. It had been many years—and a few drop-ins by the local police—since Harriet had inaugurated a bong with its new owner. Now she kept things simple. Rarely did she talk like this. She told the man with the gray ponytail about her work, her ex, the carload of kids who had just disappeared. It was almost dark when he kindly extinguished his third or fourth cigarette and left with his newspaper-wrapped bundle. Alone in the moon-shadowed alley, the folded bills in the breast pocket of her overalls, Harriet felt unclean, as though she had engaged in something illicit. Did he think she was hitting on him? (Was she?) Did he think she was some doped-out old tramp?

She returned to the studio, turned on the lights and the hood. Pru was staying at Dena’s, and unless they’d broken down or been hit by a truck or killed by a hitchhiker, Jude and Eliza were safe in their van. They would be fine. They could take care of themselves. Leaning a knee on the rickety desk chair, she selected two glass tubes from the plastic pitcher at her workstation. She turned on the clock radio, tuned since the 1970s to Lintonburg’s classic rock station. What had classic rock been called then? Just rock, she supposed. After hunting for a moment for her safety glasses, she found them hanging, along with her other glasses, on their separate chain, around her neck. She got her torch going, and she got her tubes spinning, and then, a miracle of molecules, it was one tube. Her hands were steady now. She fumed some silver onto the pipe and raked it. Nothing fancy, but it was a clean design. This is what she loved: the work. The evening hour, the smell of the propane, the industrious whirr of the hood. She lit a candle, then used the flame to light a cigarette. Paul Simon was on the radio. Just drop off the key, Lee. She turned it up. Maybe the pipe did look a little like a dildo. Maybe there was something unsavory about her line of work. The man with whom she’d apprenticed in Brattleboro at the age of seventeen (glassblowing had been only one of the skills he’d taught her) had later gone on to specialize in glass sex toys. Harriet had stuck nobly to her roots, though over the years, often while sitting in the principal’s office at one of Jude’s schools, she had questioned the nobility of pipes and bongs. Somewhere along the way, she had lost her fondness for pot; since Jude’s hypothermia scare, she’d smoked it just once, missing him after the first time he’d left for New York, when she’d found a forgotten stash. But the fact was pipes and bongs were her livelihood. They bought cough syrup, field trips, socks. They had histories; they had temperaments; they were as knotted and regal and individual as trees. It still pained her, like some irrecoverable loss, to recall the grisly sight she’d encountered here those months ago, the glass bodies broken beyond recognition. She propped her cigarette in the ashtray and began to blow out the bulb, filling it tenderly with her breath. Nobody loved a vase the way they loved a bong.

Her lips were pressed to the tube like so, the bulb swelling like a soap bubble on the end of a child’s wand, when she heard the door slam shut. Harriet turned her head, and her hands followed, and her left pinky, alert, trailed through the flame. The pipe bounced once on the edge of the table, not breaking, and then broke on the floor.

A man and a woman stood by the door. Harriet could see, through her UV lenses, as she jogged to the sink and held her hand in the cold stream, that they were as startled as she was. But she felt her heart slow: for an instant, as she heard the crash of the glass, she had expected boys with baseball bats.

“I’m terribly sorry,” said the woman, not coming closer. Her British accent had a cooling effect, like a salve. “We heard the music. We knocked.” She turned to the man, who was wearing the sleek uniform of a chauffeur. “Could you wait in the car, Dwayne? We’ll be a while.”

Do you take milk, or . . . ?”

“Lemon, if you have it.”

In the crisper, Harriet found a quarter of something that resembled a lemon, its tissue eaten gray by mold. She served tea because she’d imagined serving tea, but a lemon had not figured into the picture. Harriet was a coffee drinker; she was one of those Vermonters with the liter-size mug, drowned with sugar and cream. Of course Diane Urbanski took lemon with her tea.

“I’m sorry,” Harriet said, the tea spilling a little on the coffee table as she set the mugs down, “I don’t.” Would this be, in Di’s mind, Harriet’s first act of hostility? Or would she just read her as a bumpkin, the lemonless bumpkin ex?

Di waved her ringed fingers. Not to worry. Despite the fact that the couch was sculpted from a bathtub six inches off the ground, she appeared to have found a comfortable position. She was dressed for an interview: black pants and black heels and a white blouse winged open to reveal a sturdy rope of pearls. She was pretty, but not as pretty as Harriet had feared. Hers was the kind of makeup you could see from across a coffee table, dusting each of her perfect pores as pale as chalk.

“It was the ponytailed man, wasn’t it,” said Harriet, feeling foolish. “Gray hair? Glasses?” He’d been awfully friendly.

“Bob,” Di confirmed, her eyes hard. “I would have been here earlier,” she said, “if Bob hadn’t taken so long to locate his backbone.” He’d succeeded in convincing Di that there was no sign of any of the kids in Lintonburg, as Les had paid him handsomely to do, but after taking care of his mother’s medical bills, he’d had second thoughts, sleepless nights. He couldn’t, after all, keep a child from its mother.

“I know you wouldn’t want to do that, either,” Di went on, reaching for her mug.

Would Harriet want to keep a child from its mother? She studied her tea. An old friend of hers had once told fortunes by reading tea leaves. She’d had a little tea booth on Ash Street, a gypsy kerchief, gold hoops in her ears. Where was she now? Was Harriet the only grown-up stuck in the sixties, hawking her juvenile wares? Who was she fooling, playing this game of hide-and-seek with a woman she didn’t know, pleading to be on the kids’ team?

“She was here, yes,” Harriet said into her mug. “But now she’s gone. They just ran off, and that’s the truth. They’re on tour. They’re on tour with the boys’ band. I don’t know how that happens, exactly.” She was turning chatty again; she couldn’t stop herself. “How can a bunch of boys just decide to start a band and go on tour? But that’s the way they do it, I understand.”

Di lowered and raised her tea bag. Lowered, raised. Harriet tried to decide whether she hated her. Did she resent her? Was she insulted by her? “I’d hate to resort to Les’s level,” said Di, looking truly repulsed. “But I’m willing to pay you whatever it takes.”

Harriet, in the director’s chair, cradled her tea in her hands. The liquid through the cup was hot, threatening to scald the bandaged finger she’d already burned. “Money?” she said stupidly.

“I won’t press any charges,” Di promised. Lowered, raised, plodding as a backhoe. “I’ll forget she was ever here.”

Harriet could not bring herself to feel sorry for Les, who had been duped out of his own bribe. But now this woman, too, thought she could buy her way into anything? What a match! Harriet put down her mug, rattling it against the table. “Do you think I’m holding the girl for ransom? Do you think I have her bound and gagged in the basement? Christ, I wish money could fix this.” Yes, she hated her, she resented her, she was insulted by her, but she hated herself, too. “I let the kids stay here, and I probably shouldn’t have, and I’m sorry. And I let them leave, and I even gave them a little money. Yes, I have a little money, too! But when I look back at these months, and I try to identify what I could have done differently, to keep my son from backing me into this corner, I honestly don’t know what it is.” She reached for her cigarettes and stabbed one in her mouth. “Do you think I don’t want to know where my son is? Ever since your daughter rode that goddamn train into town, he has vanished. Do you know that? He might reappear every now and then, he might leave me his cats to look after”—she shoved the tiger-striped one off the arm of her chair—“but he’s gone. He’s gone, too.”

On the top shelf of the homemade bookcase, white built-ins that stretched up to the ceiling, a wooden owl perched. It was a crudely carved statue, and Di had never liked it. Les had an identical one in his apartment in New York. The pair of birds must have divorced, too, and now Harriet and Les each kept one.

“How is Jude?” asked Di, attempting to recover some civility. She hadn’t expected Harriet to be angry, angry at her. And she certainly hadn’t expected to feel so shut down by Harriet’s anger, to feel her own anger drain before it had the chance to surface. She hadn’t expected tea. She’d expected pot, maybe. Over the years, she’d imagined getting stoned with Les’s ex-wife, bonding, trading demeaning stories about Les’s lack of ambition, the size of his anatomy, etc. But he was the last person she cared to talk about now. Les was an idiot. What else was there to say?

“I’m not sure,” Harriet answered.

“I really like Jude,” Di said pathetically. “He’s a good kid.” A series of expressions flickered across Harriet’s face: surprise, possessiveness, pride.

“I like Eliza.”

“She’s a good kid, too.”

“She is.”

“How is she?” asked Di.

In a photo album in her apartment in New York, nine pictures chronicled Di’s single pregnancy. In each picture, taken by Daniel, she held up an assortment of fingers: one for one month, two for two months. In the seven-month photo, she was posed in an arabesque, her leotard stretched tight over her expanding belly.

“I think she’s scared,” Harriet said.

“Of what?” Di demanded, her voice trembling. “Is she scared of me?”

Harriet put out her cigarette and lit another one, and when she offered the pack to Di, she was surprised that she accepted. “This may not be any of my business. But when you live in a house with four teenagers, you start to make observations.” She had not expected to offer Di any counsel. “You probably know that we”—she waved her cigarette vaguely—“adopted Jude.” That was when the problems began, Harriet thought. Not a few months ago, but on Jude’s ninth birthday, the day her husband told their son he was adopted. She’d been so angry at Les, but she knew they shouldn’t have waited so long to tell him. Even then, when Jude was a small child, she’d been so scared he wouldn’t forgive her, that he’d love her less. And now look what had happened! It was keeping the secret from him that had turned him away from her. “She was just sixteen,” said Harriet, “the girl who gave birth to Jude.”

Di balanced her cigarette while she sipped her tea. The mug said DR. GERALD F. STEIN, D.D.S.: BRIGHTENING THE WORLD ONE SMILE AT A TIME. It was strange to be here and yet strangely familiar; she felt as uncomfortable here as she had in Les’s apartment. The house even smelled a little like Les. It smelled lived-in, the air dense with dust motes and cigarette smoke and the gas from the stove. The cushions of the couch were slightly damp, as though they were sweating.

“I would hate to think,” Harriet went on, “that she had been forced to give him up. That I had stolen him from his rightful mother.”

Di smiled around her cigarette. She couldn’t help it. She brushed a tuft of cat hair from her pants. “What on earth is a ‘rightful mother’?” Were they rightful mothers? In Di’s mind, there was no such thing. No parent ever acted in her child’s “best interest”; no parent was a hero. A parent wrote her child’s story every day; the story was what the parent left behind. Teenage pregnancy had not been in Di’s script for Eliza. Di had the power to revise this scene; she could excuse Eliza from her own bleak future. She didn’t want her daughter to be trapped in telling someone else’s story before she’d had the chance to tell her own.

“I guess I have no idea,” Harriet admitted. She blew two tunnels of smoke from her nostrils. All these abandoned children, she was thinking. Jude, and poor Teddy, and she guessed Johnny and Eliza, too, and Prudence—lost, inscrutable Pru. All left by one parent or both, in one way or another.

Yet here they were, Di mused (snatching up the thought like a cigarette): Les’s two exes, trying to recover them, and now it was they—the mothers—who had been deserted by their children.

How odd! thought Harriet, that Les was the least they had in common. It was their children’s desertion that mattered to them, that left them alone. Jude and Eliza and Johnny had devoted themselves, fiercely and exclusively, to one another, but Harriet and Di weren’t capable of forging an alliance together, despite what they shared. The only people they’d ever felt that kind of loyalty toward—perhaps this was the mistake they both had made—were their children.

Well, that was what loyalty did, didn’t it? It corroded. It collapsed on itself. Harriet thought of the songs Jude sang. About Loyalty. About Purity, Brotherhood, Trust.

Originally a cheery two-tone—the bottom half white, the top robin’s egg blue—the Dodge A100 van was first owned by a Canadian cannabis farmer, who had converted it into a camper by the time he sold it to Lester Keffy in 1970. Back then, with its split windshield, its bug-eye headlights, its overall grooviness, you could almost pretend it was a Volkswagen bus, which was the effect Les had been going for. Later, to mask the pockmarks of rust, Les painted the van lavender, baptizing it the Purple People Eater. Over the years, the elements had worn away the paint; behind the greasy prints of muted purple, streaks of rusty white and blue shone through.

Intent on renovation, back in Lintonburg, Jude had administered his own streaky coat of paint, this time with the nearly empty can of green Les had once used on the greenhouse, and to Jude’s satisfaction, the camper van now looked more like an army tank than a hippie bus. He’d taken down the flower-print curtains, and over the rust-eaten IMPEACH NIXON—HE “BUGS” ME, he’d affixed a newly pressed bumper sticker: GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS.

Inside the shining armor, however, the contents of the van were familiarly rank. The one row of seats that remained was seamed with duct tape; in other places, the corn dog stuffing spilled forth. The carpet was clumped and flaked with ancient contaminants—gum, potting soil, pot—and had over the years loosened itself from the floor, so that the edge of its layers—the mud-gray crust; the spongy, marbled mantle; the black, gelatinous core—now curled into a crisp tongue, and upon entry via the side door, was something to trip over. The headliner had also become unglued, so that sitting in the backseat was like sitting in a drooping tent. Jude had tried to thumbtack it back into place, but the tacks stuck fecklessly; every now and then one fell like the first startling drop of rain. Between the low-slung ceiling and the equipment piled high in the back half of the van, rearview visibility relied mostly on faith.

For the first time since Jude had transported the householders to Vermont, the three of them were alone in the van. Now they were leaving New York again, and he was in the backseat, sharing it with Eliza’s oversized suitcase. Johnny was at the wheel, and on the other side of the blusterous engine, sitting above the front axle, was Eliza, sunning her bare feet on the dash. The Kramaro, crammed with the rest of the crew, darted ahead of them; Delph hung his middle finger victoriously out the passenger window. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and it was summer, and these were the best years of their lives, and they were crossing the George Washington Bridge, the Hudson a spangled blue ribbon laced through it. On the boom box that served as car stereo was the new album by Side By Side, with whom they had just performed; behind Jude were one thousand copies of their own seven-inch record, which had just been pressed in Haworth, New Jersey, and released on Green Mountain Recordings, the label Delph had produced out of thin air.

On the front jacket was the logo Johnny had sketched—two pine boughs forming an X. In light of the band’s name, Jude had requested bayonets instead, preferably dripping with blood, but he’d acquiesced, and the logo now decorated their bass drum, their T-shirt, their sweatshirt, and their bumper sticker. On the reverse side of the album was a photo taken by Ben, the four of them posed in the band shell at Tompkins, where Mayor Koch was trying to enforce the 1:00 A.M. curfew. Wasn’t going to happen. Curfew? said the look on the faces in the picture. F*cking curfew? Ben and Matthew and Delph had never been to the city before; Kram had once visited a Long Island aunt who’d said, “Manhattan? You got a death wish?” During the week that they’d crashed at Rooster’s place, Eliza and Jude and Johnny had done their best to show them around. They spent an entire day skating Washington Square Park, waited three hours for the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, which Delph insisted on seeing. Went to shows at Wetlands, the Ritz, the Pyramid. Ran into guys. So many guys. On any given afternoon twenty of them could be found hanging out at Some Records on the Lower East Side, selling demos and T-shirts, posting flyers for the next show. It was there they ran into two guys from the show in Vermont; their poke-and-stick Xs had healed thick and dark. Then they all found their way back to Rooster’s, whose apartment was as packed and disheveled as Tent City. Delph slept in a chair, and Ben slept in the bathroom, curled around the toilet like a cashew. And though they imagined once or twice that they saw Di walking out of a building, or thought they heard her calling their names, they never did. The city sheltered them.

Harriet had reported, when they’d called collect, that Di had come and gone. “I think she might have said something about heading for Chicago.”

“Chicago?”

“She might be looking for Eliza there.”

“Why there?”

“She might have been . . . thrown off.”

Jude’s mouth dropped open. “Mom, did you tell Eliza’s mom we’re in Chicago, because if so, thank you.”

As for Tory Ventura, Big Ben had learned through his girlfriend that Tory, who had three broken ribs, a few missing teeth, a shattered kneecap, and a concussion, had decided not to press charges. “He must be scared shitless,” Kram had said, but Tory Ventura hadn’t left Kram in the snow with a mouth full of piss. Jude knew Tory wanted to keep this off the record so he could come after Jude himself.

It gave Jude a sense of satisfaction, that his instincts to run had been right. But now, after this weeklong high, this breathless bodega-food binge, they were rocketing out of New York, light-years away from Vermont. They were reunited, and they had made another narrow escape, and not only from Tory and Di. They were safe also from the secrets they had kept from one another, and the secret they had all kept together. Johnny was a model husband. Eliza was a model wife. Jude was a model friend, his Converse straddling the engine between them. “What about Joan?” he asked. “For Joan Jett.”

They were discussing girls’ names for the baby, rock-and-roll alternatives to the southern, dour Annabel Lee. Theirs would be a punk rock baby.

Over the clamor of the engine, Johnny said, “Jett isn’t her real last name. It’s Larkin.”

“I don’t care what her last name is. I’m not naming my baby Joan.”

“I’ve always liked La Toya,” Johnny said.

“Belinda,” Jude offered.

“She’s not punk enough anymore.”

“You know Joan Jett ran away at fifteen?” Johnny, who was cupping a bag of sugared peanuts in his lap, tossed a handful into his mouth and passed them to Eliza. “Her mother was sleeping with her boyfriend. That’s when she formed the Runaways.”

“Like us?” Eliza wondered, adjusting her sunglasses. They liked to conceive of their situation in terms they were familiar with. Punk bands, musicals, young adult novels. Jude and Johnny were the Greasers fleeing the Socs, and Eliza was Cherry Valance, the girl from the right side of the tracks. They were the Runaways, betrayed by their parents, only they’d stitched their way into and out of so many states it was hard to keep track of which one they were running from.

“She’s also vegan,” Johnny said. “And she produced the Germs’ album.”

“Wait, what was Belinda Carlisle’s name in the Germs?”

“Dottie Danger.”

“Dottie Danger! That’s good.”

“And Lorna Doom. Lorna Doom played bass.”

“Or what about Exene,” said Jude, “from X?”

“Ooh, that sounds very edge,” Johnny said. “A straight edge baby.”

Would their baby be a straight edge baby? Jude caught a glance from Eliza in the rearview. Would their baby, Exene McNicholas, toking on her mother’s THC-rich umbilical cord, be received into the straight edge order? They’d made a pact, Eliza and Jude: he wouldn’t tell Johnny if she quit; she’d quit if he didn’t tell Johnny. What had she been thinking? Did she have a shred of self-discipline? Did she believe for a second she was mommy material? These were the accusations Eliza had spewed, not Jude, as she paced Prudence’s bedroom, holding her hair in her hands. Jude had listened quietly as she bawled herself out, and when she was done, there was little he could add. Then she’d answered herself with explanations: she’d just been so lonely, so hopeless, it was so hard for her to get out of bed, did he know what she meant? She’d never really been into pot—maybe it was Les pushing it on her all these years—but now she could see its allure, its sedative weight, it sent her on a vacation from herself. Of course she had thought about Annabel. But that was why she had done it—so she wouldn’t have to think about Annabel. It had been weeks since she’d seen her husband, months since she’d seen her mother, even Jude didn’t pay attention to her anymore.

That even had plunked on his heart, heavy as a nickel. As though Jude were the one she’d thought was a given. What else could he do but cover for her? And watch her like a hawk? There had been only one other time, she told him. All in all, she hadn’t even smoked a whole joint. Would that kill anyone? Harriet had smoked pot, Jude reasoned, and Prudence was alive. Prudence did not have three ears, or her liver on the outside of her body. The baby would be okay.

What made him furious—was this irrational?—was that she’d gotten the pot from Pru. Eliza had found it in her backpack. In a lipstick case. Prudence.

And what was silly was that it had been unnecessary. She had been mourning her lampoon of a teen marriage, and then the moment she returned to New York to reclaim her husband, it was as though all her fears had been made up. Another, more paranoid, more self-destructive and hormonal Eliza had invented them. And this Eliza, the Eliza she truly was, was being greeted by her groom with a kiss, a brotherly kiss but an earnest one, and she was enjoying the scrape of his stubble on her cheek, and the patting of her belly, as though it were a cocker spaniel he was meeting for the first time. “What are you doing here? You got so big!” They were standing on the stoop in front of Rooster’s building on Avenue B, everyone embracing, the boys calling one another uncouth nicknames. It was as though Johnny had just been away on a business trip. He had just been away on a business trip!

Johnny had been making Rooster dinner when the caravan had arrived in New York. A mashed banana and peanut butter, sprinkled with Grape-Nuts. It was Roo’s favorite, innocent as baby food. This they had planned to eat on the Murphy bed out of Roo’s grandmother’s Depression glass bowls while they watched The Wonder Years on the rabbit-eared TV. For a while there, in the sanctuary of Rooster’s studio, they had been the householders, one husband taking care of the other.

Then the buzzer had buzzed. “Don’t come up,” he’d said. “I’ll come down”—as startled and ashamed as if he’d been caught midf*ck. Downstairs, his friends’ bright, eager cars were double-parked at the curb. There was his pregnant, radiant wife, carrying his dead brother’s child, and who gave a shit that the guys had gotten into a little trouble with Tory Ventura while Johnny was gone. The prospect of returning to these simple, juvenile crusades, of breaking out of the contaminated apartment for the open road, was suddenly too sweet to resist.

And on the road, Johnny could track down Ravi. A man in a house in Miami—it was a treasure hunt he could win, a tangible destination in the intangible summer that lay before him. His brother’s father—didn’t he owe it to Teddy to find him?

He’d broken it down for Rooster over breakfast at a diner on Second Avenue, where they could be alone.

“Teddy’s dad could be helpful with the baby,” Johnny said. He didn’t say, He could have money.

“So take me with you,” Rooster said. “I never been to Florida.” A road trip; palm trees; Army of One and the Green Mountain Boys, reunited for a summer tour. Johnny could play with both bands. This time he really would need to fill in for Army’s new singer, who was doing a study-abroad summer semester in “f*cking Paraguay.”

But Johnny was tired of doing double duty. He was tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop. In a year, maybe less, maybe more, Rooster would be dead. And Teddy’s baby would be alive.

“You got to understand,” Johnny had said, mashing his toast under his fist, “you’re not the only person who needs looking after.”

Rooster skated his thumb over the bread crumbs on the table. His own toast was untouched. He didn’t have much of an appetite these days. “I’m not sayin’ you need to look after me,” he said quietly. “I’m sayin’ you need to look after you.” He squinted at Johnny, his eyes as black and wet as a lamb’s. The skin beneath them was shadowed with gray.

But Johnny had paid the bill and said good-bye and climbed into Jude’s van, and now he was steering it over the bridge, heading for the New Jersey Turnpike and points south. Their van. Their baby. Their punk rock child.

“I still like Annabel,” said Eliza. She passed the peanuts to Jude. Later, each of them would remember these sun-dappled minutes in the van, the last stretch of peace they’d have together before pulling into the dense, slippery traffic of the highway. Not far past the bridge, the cars slowed for the toll. The lanes separated, rivers into rivers, and along the booths ahead, the green and red lights blinked a distant message. In the lane to the left, two cars up, the Kramaro was idling. It was the music that caught their attention—No for an Answer. Out of the open window, Delph’s arm was dangling a cigarette.

Johnny saw it, and Eliza saw it, and Jude saw it. Never mind that dangling cigarettes were the least of their own transgressions. They were past that now. They were going to do better, for their baby.

Johnny pressed his palm to the horn.