Ten Thousand Saints

Twenty-Four





The eastern perimeter of Central Park, from the waiting room window, was dappled orange and gold and apple red, the first insinuations of fall. It did not remind Jude of sex. There was plenty of that here on the maternity ward, where Jude had witnessed (in the cries of pain from Eliza’s next-door neighbor, a cart of metal instruments wheeled down the hall, the pink-skinned newborns behind the nursery glass) the inevitable end of the reproductive act. On the other side of Mount Sinai a glass pavilion was being erected, eleven stories high and a block wide, which according to one of the construction signs was meant to contribute to the patients’ sense of buoyancy and recuperation.

It was a coincidence that the baby would be born in the same hospital as Jude, but not a big one: it was, after all, one of the biggest hospitals in New York. There were three floors of nurseries, and he visited all of them, looking through the window at the empty incubators, where he’d spent the first hours of his life. They were waiting for the next baby, maybe Eliza’s. Beside Jude, Di tapped her fingers on the glass and made grotesque faces at the babies, as if she were going to gobble them up or kidnap them on the spot. They paid her no attention. She’d been more relaxed since the annulment had come through and the Milans had dropped the adoption suit. In a single envelope, Ravi had returned the annulment forms with Johnny’s signature and wrote that he had decided, with his wife, to adopt a child from India. Whether he had had a change of heart on his own or with Johnny’s help, Jude could only guess. In another envelope, postmarked San Francisco, Eliza found a series of large, crisp bills, and a note, in Johnny’s elegant script, that read simply “For the baby.”

September, going on October. Jude was wearing the new Converse he bought with his dad’s back-to-school money. East Side Community High School, where he was actually reading The Outsiders in English II and had a D in biology for refusing to dissect a pig fetus. He went to an assembly on AIDS, skated the basketball court after school. Two of the guys had devil locks. There was a girl with a Black Flag T-shirt who sat next to him in world history, but he told her he had a girlfriend. He told her she was in Europe. When she got back, she’d be going to Emily Dickinson on the Upper West Side—that part was true. For lunch he went to San Loco with one of the guys from Army of One, who was a senior there, and it was from him that Jude learned Johnny and Rooster had taken a Greyhound to California to start a band and see what the scene was like out there.

It was early evening when the baby finally arrived. Eliza wanted Jude and her mother in the room. Even when the baby was out of her—not a girl but a boy, although this, too, Jude wouldn’t ever have the heart to tell her (dark-haired and terrified, testicles swollen as big as a peach)—she kept her eyes closed tight. She knew how easy it is to fall in love.

He wouldn’t tell her, either, about visiting the baby in the nursery, hours old and sleeping, Eliza’s blood still smudged on his skin. In a rocking chair, Jude accepted the bundle from the nurse, and despite himself, the first thing he did was hunt for evidence of the baby’s genes, the science project—blue and yellow make green—at which no one in the history of the world has ever failed to be amazed.

But the baby looked like no one, not his mother, not his father. If it weren’t for the bracelet cuffed around his inconceivably tiny wrist, he could have been mistaken for any other baby in the room, plucked up by any parent who walked by. For a moment, that possibility seemed within the natural order of things, and before it ended, Jude handed the boy back to the nurse.





October 11, 2006


The last show is technically on Sunday, with Patti Smith headlining, but for hardcore fans the night to say good-bye to CBGB is the last night the Bad Brains play, with Underdog and the Stimulators. It’s their third night in a row at CB’s, and you can tell. H.R. is singing with his hands in his pockets. He’s fifty f*cking years old; he can sing with his hands in his pockets if he wants. Jude does his own hands-in-pockets sort of dance, though the kids are trying to stir up trouble in the pit. He’s still a skinhead, but only to hide his male pattern baldness.

The place seems no older than it ever did, still stuck together with gum and sweat. Security is there to make sure you don’t take a piece of history home with you, but there are a dozen cell phones raised like lighters, catching the video footage to be uploaded to the world in the morning. Just the kind of forced ceremony that Jude had expected, but he’s a dad now—it doesn’t take much for him to get emo.

Earlier, they walked the neighborhood, Jude’s wife carrying their daughter in her sling. Stomp is playing at the Orpheum on Second Avenue. The rehab center next to Les’s place has been converted into luxury condos, a St. Mark’s Market, a Chipotle, and the CBGB OMFUG shop. A few doors down are Andy’s Chee-pees St. Mark’s and Search and Destroy, where the punk rock kids are paying fifty bucks for vintage Misfits T-shirts. Dressing like a punk doesn’t get your ass kicked anymore. The biggest miracle of all: children are playing in Tompkins Square Park. Nannies, jungle gyms. The band shell has been taken down, and there’s a dog run now. On the walk back to Les’s, they counted the tattoo and piercing parlors on his block. Eight. They joked about stopping to get the baby’s ears pierced—Jude’s wife has always wanted a baby girl with pierced ears—but they kept walking. They didn’t want to be late for the show. Les is babysitting tonight. It’s the first time he’s met his granddaughter, but he’s not the first to nickname her Red.

In Jude’s wife’s locket? A picture of Red, a picture of Jude.

Not a bad thing, for your daughter to be able to play in a park. But Jude’s glad Johnny isn’t here to see what’s happened to the neighborhood. Johnny would have something to say about the $19,000 rent that shut down CB’s. Johnny would start a riot. Part of Jude expects to see him here, sacrificing himself to the pit. Jude would know him if he saw him, just as well as he’d know Teddy. He misses them both in the same way, as though they are both gone to the same world.

“Do you see him?” his wife asks.

But it’s the kids’ show tonight. There are ten thousand Johnnys and ten thousand Judes, throwing themselves against one another to see what they can start.

“No,” he says. He doesn’t tell her who else he’s looking for, the boy who is eighteen now, older than Teddy ever was. The ink black hair, the eyelashes like the bristles of a paintbrush, the look like he’s got a secret up his sleeve. How old will Jude be when he stops looking for that boy in the crowd, at the supermarket, in the airport, wondering which gate he’s flying out of?

The show comes to an end. Feedback, applause, that ringing in the ears when voices rush in to fill the void. They linger outside for only a few minutes, waiting to see if something else will happen. Then they start on foot for St. Mark’s. The baby is asleep, waiting for them, and they have a flight to catch in the morning.





Acknowledgments


I am enormously grateful to the following people and places for their help in writing this book.

For their information: Julie Babcock; Marty Babcock; Seth Duppstadt; Maria Greco; Esther Palmer; Richard Bailey of Club 242 Main, Bald Bill and Rob Dix of Yankee Tattoo, and Tom Toner of Good Times Gallery, all of Burlington, Vermont; Art Eisenberg of the DNA Laboratory, University of North Texas; Paul DeRienzo, “The History of the Tompkins Square Park Police Riot”; Noah Haglund, “Fire Sacrifice: A Hare Krishna Wedding”; Inside Straight Edge, a National Geographic documentary; Ed Rosenthal, Marijuana Grower’s Handbook; and especially the following authors and editors: Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life; Steven Blush, American Hardcore: A Tribal History; Ross Haenfler, Straight Edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean-Living Youth, and Social Change; Beth Lahickey, All Ages: Reflections on Straight Edge; and Cris Wrenn, Alex Brown, and John Porcelly, Schism.

For their insight: Ann Beattie, John Casey, Lan Samantha Chang, Robert Cohen, Deborah Eisenberg, Kathryn Kramer, Alice McDermott, Tom Paine, Francine Prose, and Helen Schulman, whose voices still ring in my ears, and especially Christopher Tilghman, who told me to keep going; all of my workshop friends at the University of Virginia, who made scrupulous comments on hundreds of pages; my brilliant and bighearted late-draft readers: Mary Beth Keane, Anna Solomon, Ursula Villarreal-Moura, Gina Welch, and Callie Wright; Adelaide Wainwright and Abigail Holstein, assistants extraordinaire; Jim Rutman, my dream agent and the smartest person I know, who gave me a second chance; Lee Boudreaux, whose unmatched enthusiasm and painstaking edits did as much for my manuscript in eight weeks as I’d done for it in eight years; and all the other talented people at Ecco who helped bring this book into the world.

For their support: the Poe/Faulkner Fellowship at the University of Virginia, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, my superb students and colleagues at James Madison University and Ithaca College, and all my friends and family, including Sandra Squadrilli and Ted Lech (the original saints of St. Mark’s Place), Sam, Keri, and Cameron. Thank you especially to my brother Peter Henderson, whose birth led me to ask questions; to my uncle Peter Babcock, whose death led me to ask more; and to my eternally generous parents, Ann and Bill, who told me I could do anything.

Nicolas, you can do anything, but don’t ever do any of the stupid things in this book.

Finally, for his information, insight, support, and much more: Aaron Squadrilli, whose story made this one possible.





About the Author


ELEANOR HENDERSON earned her MFA from the University of Virginia in 2005. Her story “The Farms” was selected by Alice Sebold for The Best American Short Stories 2009. Henderson’s fiction has also appeared in Agni, North American Review, Ninth Letter, and Columbia, among other publications. Her nonfiction has appeared in Poets and Writerss, where she was a contributing editor, and Virginia Quarterly Review, where she was the chair of the fiction board. An assistant professor at Ithaca College, she lives in Ithaca, New York.

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