Ten Thousand Saints

Twenty





Hey, baby.

After Jude hung up the phone, he lay down on the bed again. Down the hall, a door opened. The TV cut off. “Will you guys help me carry this shit?”

He had never heard Johnny call anyone that. Not his wife. Not as a joke. Baby was not dude or man or fag. He’d said it with an adult affection, a degree of intimacy that made a fist of Jude’s balls.

He said the words aloud. “Hey, baby.”

And he felt Teddy’s hot breath on his face. Teddy blowing a gust of pot smoke into his mouth.

On the phone, no voice had answered Johnny. The empty space rang in Jude’s ears. Then the front door, again opening, then closing, silenced it.

Sitting up, he looked at the number he’d scribbled on the back of a flyer. Di’s hotel room in Chicago. How had his mother managed to get that?

Jude put the paper in his pocket and walked down the hall. Everyone was gone. He knocked on Eliza’s door. He didn’t expect her to open it, but she did.

“I thought you were Johnny.”

Jude’s balls loosened. On the TV behind her, Santa Barbara was on pause. Julia was embracing Mason, but over his shoulder, her face had an unsettled look. Eliza had taught Jude all the characters’ names.

“He just left. I think everyone went to the protest.”

Leaving the door open, she turned, walked to the unmade bed, and lurched backward onto it. She laid her wrists over her eyes. The lower half of her body hung over the edge, her knees dropping gently apart, her nightgown draping a shadow between her thighs. His body went rigid. He closed the door behind him.

He deserved her, and Johnny didn’t. This had been his belief all along, but he had lived with his discontentment uneasily; he’d felt unentitled to it. Now his desire flamed up in him, fully formed, righteous; he held a ticket; he had the burden of proof . . .

“You know how your phone does that weird thing with the voices?”

Eliza lifted one of her wrists from her eyes.

“I just heard Johnny talking to someone. He was on Neena’s line. He called the person ‘baby.’ ”

Slowly, she sat up. His heart was pounding with anticipation, but the look of dread on her face brought it under control.

“Who was he talking to?”

He sat down beside her. He tried to remember what he’d heard. Johnny was moving back out. He was probably staying with Rooster. He was always staying with Rooster. Unless he was lying about that, too. There could be someone else. But Jude didn’t think there was.

When his father had told him that he was adopted, the revelation was both terrible and gratifying—a piece of news that restored order to his universe, an answer to a question he hadn’t thought to ask. Of course. He knew with that certainty that the person Johnny had been talking to was Rooster.

But he would give the truth back if he could. At sixteen, he still wished he could shake his father’s words out of his ear.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I couldn’t hear her.”

Who was he protecting, Eliza or Johnny? She was looking at her bare feet, which dangled off the bed, not touching the carpet. Sometime when Jude hadn’t been looking, her henna tattoos had faded and then disappeared. He looked at his own feet, in a pair of white tube socks with a hole in the right toe.

“You wanted me to tell you, right?”

She looked at him sharply. Then she leaned across the space between them and kissed him on the mouth.

At first, they remained perfectly still, their lips joined in patient purpose, like the ends of two cigarettes, one igniting the other. She tasted like Yoo-hoo. It took him some time—ten seconds, a minute?—to realize that his eyes were open, intent on the fact of each of her eyelashes. Closing them, he sank into a deep dark. His mouth was open, too. Mouth-to-mouth. How long had she wanted to do this? Their tongues were unmoving, the breath through their noses shallow and rough. For the first time, the hard-on in his lap seemed appropriate. He was unembarrassed of it, grateful for it. His friend was gay, and Jude—here was the evidence—was not. Of this he was ecstatically sure. Casually, as though he happened to feel like it at the moment, he slipped his tongue over the ridge of her bottom teeth and into the cocoa sweet galaxy of her mouth. Her tongue curled over his, a sprouting vine, a wave. He felt electrified. He felt as though something amazing and rare were happening to him, like becoming famous. His tongue grazed the gap between her two front teeth. It found a favorite molar, it toured her scalloped gums. Was it vegan to kiss her like this, to want to eat her mouth? Was it straight edge to want to be inside her?

Without unfastening their mouths, they eased back onto the bed. They did this with the care and determination of two people setting a heavy tray on a table. They lay on their sides, each of their heads on her pillow. The spongy interior of her cheek, the canal under her tongue. Thank God he’d removed his retainers this morning! His erection was lodged between her hip and her belly and the bed. He was dangerously close to bursting. Touching her was a bad idea, it was asking for trouble, but here was his left hand, his burned, ruined hand, now rising from the ashes, now slinking without his permission from her wrist up the length of her forearm, pausing at her elbow, circling the reed of her bare bicep, as though testing her, determining if she were fat enough to eat, and then, satisfied (their kiss still unbroken), making a sly dash for second base, fitting itself under the soft globe of her breast.

He didn’t explode. She didn’t say no. Once there, his hand knew what to do, making a slow meal of it, taking its time. It was surprisingly full, unlike anything his hand had felt before, and she did not seem to be wearing a bra. No, she certainly was not wearing a bra. Nothing separated his hand and her breast but the thin cotton of a white nightgown. He could feel the ridge of her nipple, goose-bumped, warm, and now wet. Her nipple was wet. Was that something that happened to girls? Was that good? For a moment he was relieved, that she had burst before he had, that the glow radiating inside him had held its ground, while hers, irrepressible, had spilled forth. It wasn’t until she withdrew from their kiss that he realized this was not a normal fluid of carnal excitement. It was something new, a substance neither of them had encountered for many, many years, and it was filling his palm. Breast milk.

He whisked away his hand. Rolling away from her, he wiped it on the thigh of his jeans. “Sorry!” both of them gasped.

Eliza struggled to sit up, clutching her leaky breast. “Oh, God,” she said just as Jude said, “What the hell?” Spreading outward from her right nipple was a yolky yellow stain.

“This has never happened before!” She looked at Jude. Her expression passed from worry to amazement to humiliation, then back to worry again. Then her jaw dropped comically, and her face attempted a bitter, grown-up wit. “Oh my God, I guess they work!”

“They definitely work,” Jude said. He was still wiping his hand on his jeans. Eliza closed her mouth, straightening it into a firm line.

“I didn’t mean to,” she said.

“It’s okay,” he said, but he sat up, too. His erection had faded. She folded her arms over her chest, closing her eyes. He wanted to put his hand on her shoulder, but he was afraid to touch her again.

“I guess you won’t be doing that again,” she said.

He dropped his eyes to the bed. The sheets and blankets were pink—rose pink and a meaty pink, like the inside of a mouth. A newborn baby. This had been the bed the three of them had been sitting on when she’d told them she was pregnant. This was the nightgown she’d been wearing.

When he looked up, her eyes, still closed, were leaking now.

“Eliza,” he said, but he didn’t move. He was frozen by the feeling that they were not alone. Teddy was there in the room with them. So was Johnny. Most of all, the baby was there with them, under her nightgown, not to be forgotten, even for an hour. This was what happened when you lay down beside a girl.

Eliza swung her legs over the side of the bed. She struggled to reach the Keds on the carpet and to fit them on her feet. He felt that he should help her, but didn’t.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’m used to it. Johnny didn’t want to touch me, either.” She stood up and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist.

“Eliza,” Jude managed, “that’s not it.”

“Don’t tell me. If I weren’t pregnant, right?”

Crossing the room to the closet, she whipped off her nightgown, turning the back of her nearly naked body to Jude. Again, he looked away.

“You and Johnny are exactly the same. I thought you weren’t, but you are. I know you both want it to be a boy. The only reason you’ve stuck around this long is because you expect me to have a little Teddy for you to play with.”

“That’s not true!” Jude sprung up from the bed. “I liked you, even before I knew about the baby.”

“Well, you don’t have to anymore. You’re off the hook, because I’m giving it up.”

She yanked her yellow dress off a hanger, pulled it over her head, and turned around.

“Eliza, you don’t mean that.”

“I do mean it. It’s not some spur-of-the-moment decision. I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided, and it’s my decision, not anyone else’s. Do you want to know why?” She put her hands on her widened hips. “Because it’s my baby. Not yours. Not Johnny’s.”

From her closet, she took out a cardigan and buttoned it over her dress.

“Where are you going?”

“To find Johnny. I’m going to tell him.”

“No, you’re not,” he said. Then, “I’m going with you,” and when he followed her, she didn’t protest.

The taxi could only get them as far as Third Avenue. St. Mark’s Place was choked with people, people spilling out of bars, people hanging off of balconies. An ambulance screamed toward the park, parting the sea of bodies, nudging cars to the curb. On the sidewalk, two cops on horseback galloped past.

“Hey, Eliza! Jude! Welcome to Mardi Gras!”

On Les’s fire escape, Davis and a friend were leaning over the railing, smoking cigarettes and watching the show.

“Hey, Davis!” Jude called. “What the hell’s going on?”

“The pigs are back, man. Be careful out there.”

Jude tried to cover Eliza’s body as they made their way down the street, steering her with one arm, shielding her with the other. In the cab, she’d listened to her headphones. The space between them was incalculable. If he hadn’t stopped kissing her. If he hadn’t pulled away. It all seemed like hours ago. Now, as he ushered her along, the faintly sour heat of her body brought back their kiss with violent clarity. On his lips, her saliva had dried to a delicate crust.

“This is stupid,” he said. “Can’t this wait until tomorrow?”

“I’m fine,” Eliza said, pushing her way through the crowd just as a couple of punks sprinted by, jostling her elbow.

“Watch it!” Jude shouted after them. To Eliza he said, “This is why we don’t let you in the pit.”

“What?”

He leaned close to her ear. “This is why we don’t let you in the pit!”

Tonight the pit was Tompkins Square Park. The same dark, festive atmosphere hovered over it, the feeling that you might get kicked in the nuts at any time, that it would be a night to remember. Who would show up, what were the teams. He should have turned her around and forced her back into a cab, but he didn’t.

Why should he protect her anymore? If she was giving up the baby, what did it matter? A loud pop, an M-80, sounded in the distance. They both jumped. “That was a firecracker,” Eliza asked, “right?”

The crowd thickened. Arms windmilled, shoes flew. Some people were running toward them and other people were running past them, toward the park. Near First Avenue, a stalled fire engine blasted its horn. In front of it, a wall of people was blocking its passage. “Hell, no! We won’t go!” they were shouting, and a bottle flew through the dark and broke against the side of the truck, and then another, shattering a headlight. The truck kept honking, but no one in it was moving.

The crowd surged. From behind Jude and Eliza, a team of horses came galloping toward the truck. The mounted cops were wielding nightsticks. Leaning out of their saddles, they brought their clubs down on the crowd. A polo match. Two cops thrashed their clubs against a passing bike, the handlebars, the tires, the guy’s legs. He fell off onto his side.

Jude and Eliza kept moving. “This is over a park?” she yelled in his ear, tripping behind him. “Slow down! My feet hurt!” He yanked her roughly by the hand. The smell of gasoline, a tattoo of firecrackers, a broken bottle under Jude’s foot. A cone of light from a video camera, and then a crash as it met a nightstick. “Fascists!” someone yelled. Beside them, a girl on a boy’s shoulders fell headfirst into the crowd. Men poured out of a bar carrying bottles of foaming beer. It splashed all over them, all over everyone. Somewhere someone was on a megaphone, but the voice was just a voice, without words. It was drowned out by something powerful and bright. They moved forward as if into a wind, shoulders together, heads down. They were moving into a wind. Trash scuffed against their ankles. Eliza’s dress whipped against her knees. Jude lifted his face. High above Avenue A, over the entrance to the park, a police helicopter hung from the black sky, its propeller churning up a dust storm in the street below. Its searchlight sifted through the crowd with a superhuman glow. An alien invasion, a hurricane. It found a soaring bottle, a horse rearing up on its hind legs.

“We’re never going to find him,” Jude shouted to Eliza.

“Fine!” Her hair was lifting off her shoulders. “Go home!”

Under the drone of the helicopter there was the weak beat of bongos. A drum line was wending its way through the mob. “Die, yuppie scum!” their voices were chanting, just loud enough to hear. One of them, a woman with two long braids, struck Jude’s hand as she thumped past him.

“You die!” he called after them. “You go home, you hippie shits!”

“I think I hear him!” Eliza yelled. “On the megaphone.”

Jude listened. From across the street through the park, a voice was speaking with a placid urgency, like the voice of God at the Krishna temple.

“Where did he get a megaphone?” Eliza wondered.

Of course Johnny was on a megaphone. What the f*ck was he defending? The junkies? The dealers? He’d been handing out fruit to the homeless, playing priest to Tent City, while all the time he’d been butt-f*cking Rooster. How many times had he claimed to be going to the park, or the temple, or to do a tattoo, when he’d been going to Rooster’s place?

There was no way into the park. They shoved south, squinting into the flying debris, their hands slippery with sweat. “Pregnant lady here,” Jude said. “Watch the f*ck out.” There were all the times he’d gone to Johnny’s place in the middle of the night and he wasn’t there. There were all those weeks, after they were in Vermont, he’d been in New York, playing with his old band.

He spit on the ground, kept moving. The dust and dirt needled his skin.

After their first show, when everyone was crashing in the basement, Johnny and Rooster were alone in Jude’s room. In his bunk bed.

“WHOSE PARK? OUR PARK. WHOSE PARK? OUR PARK.”

“I see him! You see him?”

Eliza pointed. Facing a brigade of thirty or forty cops, two rows of demonstrators were sitting across Seventh Street like kindergartners at story time. Some were playing drums, maracas. There was Delph, and Kram, Matthew, Ben, Rooster. Johnny sat in front, leading the chant, wearing the white robe he was married in.

“WHOSE PARK? OUR PARK.”

It was a voice meant to hypnotize. Trust me, you’re getting sleepy.

It worked. Jude stood still in the middle of the street, under the spell of Johnny’s voice. He was suddenly very tired of moving.

Eliza’s hand slipped from his. Without looking back, she darted ahead, the space between them stretching wide, and wider, uncrossable. He watched the black broom of her head bob through the crowd. He lost sight of her, then found her, then lost her again. The dust storm lashed around him.

Slowly, Johnny’s voice came to a stop. Eliza dropped to his side. Across the crowded street, Jude watched their mouths moving. What were they saying? The things that people said. F*ck you, I hate you, it’s over. Whatever they were talking about, they weren’t talking about Teddy.

Jude floated through the crowd. Watch it, watch out. Eliza was handling her necklace. She was handing something to Johnny. It glinted dully under the streetlamp. It was her ring. Jude moved toward its light until he reached them.

“Johnny, get up.”

Johnny looked up at him. His face was in shadow, but Jude could see on it an older brother’s irritation. He was tired of Jude playing at his feet.

Beside him, Rooster put a hand on Johnny’s shoulder. “This is a f*ckin’ sit-in, kid,” Rooster said.

“I’m not talking to you, Rooster.”

“Jude, go home,” Johnny said. “This doesn’t concern you.”

They were all looking at him. They were all wrong. Nothing had concerned him more.

He was thinking of Hippie and Tory as he kicked Johnny in the gut, Hippie crumpling against the fence, Tory’s screams rocking the van, and now Johnny slumping over into Rooster’s lap as Rooster pulled Jude’s other leg from under him, toppling him to the ground. Jude lifted Johnny by the back of the neck and landed two punches dead in the center of his face before they all fell on top of him—Rooster, Delph, Kram. There must have been more, but he couldn’t see. He felt the tread of rubber on his body, knuckles. The sirens howled. The M-80s popped. The fists rained down on him, cleansing him. He didn’t fight back. And yet they were the ones crying out. The pummeling slowed. The mass lifted. The cops were clubbing them off of him.

Then, through the megaphone, Johnny’s voice. “She’s pregnant!”

The helicopter swept its spotlight over them. It found a shield, a helmet, a club; Jude, struggling to sit up; Rooster on his hands and knees; and Johnny flying to Eliza, who lay on her side, her hand to her head, spilling blood on the street. Her eyes were open, and she was looking at Jude. Then the light swept away.