Ten Thousand Saints

Six





The classrooms were cold, the buildings square, the grounds skirted by leafless bushes as stiff as coral. The teachers were overdressed. The kids were gloomy and skittish, with poor posture, aggrieved by their low PSAT scores. Eliza decided if she heard one more person say “I’m just not good at taking tests,” she would hang herself. Every weekend she could, she took the train from Jersey an hour back to her mom’s place in New York.

Perhaps because the curators of the school were accustomed to this breed of luckless, moneyed offspring—those plagued by attention deficit disorders and indiscreet drug habits—they were as surprised as Eliza herself that she was, when she applied herself, good at taking tests. She was good at reports and papers and presentations, a diorama of the Globe Theatre, with a square of tissue paper for each window, canary yellow. To say that she had lost herself in her studies would imply a surrender, an accident; she was lost, but she had lost herself willfully, as one does when being chased. Into each fluorescent classroom she leapt sharpened pencil first, into Western Civ and British Lit and Algebra II and Attic Greek, into the labyrinth of protasis and apodosis and second aorist subjunctive active and her favorite, the optative of wish:

May we be killing / kill the goat.

If only we may be killing / kill the goat.

I wish that we may be killing / kill the goat.

Cocaine had been until then purely recreational; only now did she understand its functional power. She stayed up late, long after lights-out, listening to the Buzzcocks on her headphones and studying flashcards by flashlight until her contacts burned her eyes; she woke early, read The Canterbury Tales in the dining hall over breakfast: a cinnamon-raisin bagel, dry. It was all she could get down. For her intramural, she swam lap after lap. That she had no friends was of help. She didn’t bother making any. She was glad enough to be rid of the old ones. She sniffed around only enough to find some Izod who sold coke, which she cut in her dorm room on a Bakelite hand mirror while her roommate Shelby Divine was at squash practice or in the bathroom, or behind the sheet Shelby had hung on a clothesline between their beds, for privacy. The most skin Eliza had seen on Shelby was her wrists. “I’m not a lezzy, you know,” Eliza said, the first time Shelby had disappeared behind the sheet in her bathrobe. “Oh, I know,” Shelby had apologized. Shelby was from Charleston. She had a voice like sweet tea.

One evening late in January, as the two of them lay belly-down on their beds, the curtain drawn back, textbooks spread before them, Shelby asked, “Who’s T.M.?”

On the front of her chem folder, Eliza had drawn a pulpy heart, stabbed with an arrow, Teddy’s initials bleeding fatly inside. She slipped off her headphones. “Teddy,” she said, surprising herself. “Teddy McNicholas.” She hadn’t spoken his name aloud before, and the peal it produced was more solid than the hollow sound that had tolled and tolled in her head.

“Is he your boyfriend?”

Shelby was wearing an ankle-length nightgown of virginal white and a spotless pair of socks. Eliza pressed her pencil into the seam of her open book. “Not exactly.”

“Was he your first love?”

“Not exactly.”

Shelby turned on her side. The bedsprings creaked. “Well, who is he?”

Eliza wished she had a cigarette to take a drag from now. She would send a cloud of smoke out into the black-and-white night, dense and full of meaning, interpretable.

“He’s a boy who died,” she said flatly, picking up her pencil, but there were real tears in her eyes, for she wasn’t selfish, she wasn’t unfeeling, she wasn’t. But were the tears for Teddy, or for her? Were they for what she’d lost, or what she’d done?

She hadn’t given a thought to the cocaine. She’d nearly forgotten about it—barely two lines apiece!—until the look Johnny had given her there at the edge of the park, the phone hanging limply in his hand, her nostrils burning in the cold.

Teddy was a big boy, she told herself. He could have said no.

If only he’d gotten on that train with her!

She had wanted to make something happen; she had asked for heartbreak and she’d gotten it. And it was bigger than anything in her life. She wanted to forget Teddy, and she wanted something to remember him by.

She was aware of this paradox in a subliminal way, and of Johnny’s and Jude’s part in it. She wanted to know them, too; she wanted to forget them. She tried hard to drown them out. She ignored the blank page of her underwear, didn’t count the days, thought past and around and through them. If she occupied her brain—If only we may be killing / kill the goat!—she could think herself out of it. Because she couldn’t be. There was no f*cking way.

The thing was, no one in New York knew Teddy was dead, because no one in New York had known Teddy existed. New York was its own solar system. Maybe once Sid or Kevin had seen a letter hanging around, had said, “Hey, who’s this from?” and Johnny’d said, “My kid brother.” Maybe not. Maybe someone had said, “Hey, Johnny, you got any family?” And maybe Johnny, keeping it simple, had said, “Not really.” He’d left Teddy with his mom so he could live with his dad, and after his dad went to jail, Johnny didn’t go home. He was doing his own thing. He’d send Teddy a mix tape now and then, a subway token with the center cut out. Now the subway token was gone, who knew where.

Through January, into February, in Chuck Taylors and undershirt, over cracked sidewalks, under claws of elms, Johnny skated. He tried to get lost, make a maze of the city, turned north, then left, then right, then west, chased a bumper sticker, a blue jay, turned up the volume on his Walkman. Through both sides of Minor Threat’s Out of Step and through both sides again, through paradise and slum, past falafel cart and flower shop and carriage ride, over cobblestone and manhole, past brownstone and mirrored steel, past Les Keffy’s lavender Dodge van, on a different block each week, the parking tickets on the windshield faded and dried like autumn leaves, past the vacant, piss-stinking newsstand, past one building that had burned down, past another, past the dealers and the crackheads and the squeegee men, past every bum who knew his name, past every thug who’d stared him down, Go ahead, a*shole, kill me, but no one did, and always when he stopped, lungs packed full, expelling white breath into the air, there would be the city, inexorable and vast, and a subway station that threatened to lead him home.

He skated to the river, to the bodega, to Venus or Sounds or Some Records or Bleecker Bob’s, or Angelica Kitchen, or across the Williamsburg Bridge to the Hare Krishna temple in Brooklyn, to shows at CBGB, the Ritz, the Pyramid, the Limelight, Irving Plaza, ABC No Rio, Wetlands, Tramps, skating home in the dark bruised and frosty with sweat, standing under the showerhead until the water went cold. He did push-ups and sit-ups and chin-ups—up! up! up!—cleaned the minifridge, fed the cats, made the bed, made a pot of chamomile tea, teapot whistling on the hot plate, the space heater and the stereo and the tattoo machine, the mouth of the guy he was tattooing, staring down the needle for hours, at hair follicle and inky vein, busy busy busy, and the mouths of all the guys in his band, and all their amplifiers, as much noise as electronically possible without blowing the circuits, that was the trick.

Sometimes his skateboard would take him to the southern point of Manhattan, and he’d look out over the bay past the dollar-green Lady Liberty to the distant biscuit of Staten Island. Somewhere over there was the Arthur Kill Correctional Facility, where his father and uncle lived. Now that his mother had disappeared and his brother was dead, they were the only family he had left, but his father was dead to him, too, as dead as his mother had told him he was in the first place.

For his antiseptic lifestyle, plus the white T-shirt, bald head, and gold hoops, Johnny had been dubbed by his friends Mr. Clean. He hadn’t had a drink or eaten meat or smoked a cigarette in almost two years. There was no reason to start now. The sannyasis at the Hare Krishna temple promised that renunciation of desires brought peace.

She chose a New Jersey town she’d never set foot in before, whose name she’d heard uttered only by the train conductor. Cissy’s older sister had had one, and Eliza’s own mother had had two. You called; you made an appointment. Eliza made the call from the hall phone in the dorm, cut swimming that afternoon, and walked from the station to a clinic in the corner lot of a Grand Union shopping center, next door to a travel agency. One of the clinic’s store windows was shuttered with plywood; the miniblinds in the other were shut tight.

Inside the door, behind a chest-high counter, stood a security officer dressed in a blue shirt and tie, like a person who worked in a museum or airport. His mustache was tobacco stained like Les’s, and his name tag said BILL T. He gave her a brisk nod, not quite looking at her, and made a motion with his hand—C’mere—that implied he wanted her to hand something over. A form of some sort? Her fake ID, also from her coke dealer, which put her at twenty-two?

“Your handbag, miss.”

Eliza took off her headphones and tapped the bottom of the book bag hanging on her back. “I just have this.”

“Let’s see it, please.”

To her left, framing the entrance into the office, stood what appeared to be a metal detector. Beyond it, the waiting room was nearly full. A dozen girls, black, white, Hispanic, all of them looking exactly fifteen, sat staring into magazines and clipboards, beside mothers or boyfriends or sisters, silent. She said, “It’s just a backpack.”

“You’ll get it back directly, miss. Just need to take a look.”

One of the girls, wearing a pinafore dress and Keds, was very pregnant. About three inches from her face she held a book with a plain red cover, titled in gold letters You Can Live Forever in Paradise on Earth. Eliza had been trying to keep Teddy out of her head, but now she couldn’t help picturing him in heaven, a place she was pretty sure she didn’t believe in, sending down a quizzical, disappointed look.

“I’m not—comfortable,” she said, looking from the man to the girl, back to the man, “giving you, since I have some private things in here. Can I—”

“It’s policy, miss.”

“Okay.” The girl flipped a page and rested an absent hand on her belly. “I’ll leave it in the car.” Before he could say anything, she turned around and pushed herself out the door, the chime ringing blandly behind her.

When she walked in the door of her mother’s apartment on Riverside Drive, a cone of incense was burning on the coffee table beside a glass of blood-colored wine. Eliza’s mother was perched on the divan, pumping a ThighMaster between her knees and talking on the cordless telephone. It was Friday evening. Neena’s night off.

“All right, darling, she’s here,” she said and hung up. To Eliza, she said, “I thought you might be the delivery boy. I ordered from the Brazilian place.” She glanced at the watch face on the inside of her wrist. “You’re a little late.”

Eliza slipped her keys into her backpack. “I missed the first train.”

“Did you?” Her mother put the ThighMaster aside, picked up the wineglass, and padded across the wood floor in her ballet slippers to kiss Eliza between the eyes. “I just ordered some feijoada, with hearts of palm. I wasn’t sure.”

Eliza plucked the glass from her hand. “Can I have a sip?”

“You don’t normally ask. How was your week?” Taking Eliza by the shoulders, she kissed her repeatedly on the forehead, pecking like a bird, while Eliza looked deeply into the pool of wine. When the kissing was over, Eliza put her lips tentatively to the glass and drank. “That was Les. Guess what. He’s gone to Vermont, to fetch his son.”

Eliza swallowed. “To fetch him?”

“Yes, to bring him here, to live with him for a while. I’m so—”

“Why?” said Eliza.

“Well, he’s been having a difficult time. Of course he has. I think it’ll be good for Les, don’t you? And the son, I hope.”

“When will he be here?”

“Tomorrow, I guess. If that vehicle will make it back.”

“I’m going to start on some homework real quick.”

“Oh, you had calls. Nadia and Cissy both called the other night—they said they’ve been trying to reach you at school.”

“Okay. I’m going to real quick just start some algebra, while it’s fresh.”

“Darling?” Diane Urbanski had a pert, compact face, her eyes dark and round, eyebrows full, skin white as cream; she wore her black hair, always, in a French braid. Her grandparents had been Russian Jews. Together they had sailed to England from Murmansk, her grandmother pregnant with their only child, her grandfather fleeing the Great War. On the passage over, he died of the 1918 flu, and their daughter, Eliza’s Babushka, never met him. “I’m happy you’re making a fresh start,” Diane said and smiled.

In her room, Eliza locked the door, took off her coat, turned on the stereo, and emptied her backpack on the bed—sweater, wallet, keys, books, makeup bag, which she also emptied, hands shaking as she dug through it, the lipstick and mascara and contacts case clicking as they fell, and the itty-bitty plastic bag dusted pink on the outside with a bit of stray rouge. She enclosed it in her hand and held it to her heart, which was racing. The security guard wouldn’t have looked through her makeup bag. He wouldn’t have found it. And what if he did? It wouldn’t have been the first time she was caught with drugs. Why had she let him scare her away?

She dumped the cocaine on the glass nightstand, cut it into four pretty lines, and then, kneeling on the carpet, staring at it with such concentration she felt she might have an aneurysm like her father, that her brain might burst from uncertainty, she swept the powder onto the floor and collapsed crying across it, a soundless crying that hurt.

Something to remember him by. She wondered if this was how her great-grandmother had felt, sailing across the Arctic to a strange country, suddenly alone. Eliza was pregnant by a dead boy, and whatever was growing inside her felt dead, too.

As a brother, Johnny had been unreliable, usually in and out of the house, like their mother, usually high on something. Perhaps because of this, his memories of Teddy were disturbingly few, and without pattern. Traveling with their mother from motel to motel. Climbing the yellow tree behind their trailer in Delaware, where someone else’s father had left a tree house. Locking him in the trunk of Delph’s car. Walking him to the emergency room when Queen Bea was off somewhere, Johnny’s T-shirt pressed to Teddy’s bloody forehead, when he fell off the porch banister trying to do a rail slide. Johnny had slept in Teddy’s bed with him that night, Teddy spooked and pretending not to miss their mom, the stitches through his brow bone as clumsy as shoelaces.

Most of his memories of Vermont did not have Teddy in them. Filling notebooks with band logos, supermen, marijuana leaves. Getting stoned before school in the Kramaro. Waking up hungover in the parking lot behind Birkenjacque’s. He had always been careful to exclude Teddy from his fun, even after Teddy was running around with Jude, stealing their mothers’ cigarettes—“Not yet, little man, get out of here”—but he, too, had huffed, he and Delph and Kram, from a gas can in Kram’s garage. He had once been stopped by a cop north of town, high on ludes, driving along the lake in Queen Bea’s Horizon without his lights on. “I’m practicing,” was all he could think to say, and the cop had let him off with a warning. That was how lucky Johnny was.

That was what he thought of, what had kept him on the morning of the funeral from strangling Jude Keffy-Horn. He’s just a kid. How many mornings, when Johnny was his age, could he have been the one to wake up dead?

A true sannyasi, he told himself, neither hates nor desires.

Johnny prided himself on his forbearance, his adaptability, on his skill in coexisting with all walks of life. In his neighborhood, it was a matter of survival. Before he had laid claim to it, or it to him, he had wandered into Tompkins Square Park one evening to get some sleep after his falling-down-drunk con of a father, whose couch he’d been sleeping on in Staten Island, had stolen all his money. That night in the park, his guitar case was stolen with all his clothes inside. The next day, he found the guy around the corner—the case still had the Bad Brains sticker on it—and Johnny picked it up and used it to break the guy’s jaw. Turned out the guy was blind. Robbed by a blind guy. After that, Johnny watched his back. But rather than making him enemies, the incident had made him allies. He’d broken Blind Jack’s jaw! Dude didn’t mess around. They were all scraping by together.

But there had been other rituals of neighborhood hazing. He’d been robbed again, chased, roughed up to the point of needing stitches, which he didn’t get, wearing the scars like tattoos. Compared to some, he was lucky. One night in Tompkins, he saw Rafael, one of the kids who turned tricks in the park, stumble out of the bathroom they called the comfort station soaked to the waist. Johnny kept walking, didn’t offer his help. You didn’t go in there, not if you weren’t looking for something. He’d thought that some guys had just dunked him in a toilet, but Blind Jack told him later that Rafael had been raped, that some ladies from St. Mark’s Church had taken him to the hospital to get stitched up. Johnny didn’t see him again.

Then one night Johnny ended up at a straight edge show at CBGB, alone and falling-down drunk, and met a hardcore drummer named Rooster DeLuca, the first straight edge kid he’d ever known. That was the beginning of the end for him. In no time, Johnny was staying at Rooster’s place, and Rooster had him hooked on the drug that was no drugs. F*ck the dealers, Rooster said, f*ck the drunk drivers, f*ck the frail-ass gutter punks with marks up their arms, f*ck Robert Chambers and the prep school jocks with coke up their noses and their dicks in some crying girl.

At twenty-two, Rooster was hardly a kid. He lived on Avenue B, across the street from the park. He was built like a lumberjack—big, hammy shoulders, muscular legs—and he had a Brooklyn accent like a mouth full of chew. If he’d grown up in Lintonburg, he might have played football with Kram. But he’d grown up in Bensonhurst, and his only sport, other than skateboarding and stage diving, was running deliveries for his uncle’s deli, driving around salami sandwiches on his BMX. To the milk crate bungee-corded to the handlebars he’d attached a cardboard sign that spelled out, in black electrician’s tape, GO VEGAN. He’d gotten his name from the red Manic Panic Mohawk he’d sported back when CB’s was barely open. Now he was as bald as Johnny—it helped in their neighborhood to look like a skinhead, and the tattoos helped, too. Johnny’s earrings and Krishna beads did not, nor his new straight edge status. Dealers tried to bully him into buying and selling. “You too good for us, Mr. Clean?” Johnny winked and negotiated. When he got his own apartment, and then started tattooing, he offered them free work. When he and Rooster and a couple of other guys started a straight edge band called Army of One, and started getting good, and put out a record, people from the neighborhood came to their shows. Seeing those bums and drunks in the audience, wearing his band T-shirt, filled Johnny with a backward sort of pride.

Now when Johnny and Rooster walked the streets together, they got nods, they got waves. Johnny knew their names. Jerry the Peddler, Mary, Froggy. Jones, who was always jonesing. Blind Jack’s friend Vinnie, who was going to die of AIDS any day. Soon enough Johnny’s own nickname was spoken with as much affection as ridicule, and Johnny liked it. He liked the goulash of his neighborhood, the alphabet soup, the insults spoken in foreign tongues. He liked the steady comfort of the Missing Foundation—anarchists, guerrilla musicians, graffiti artists—and the territorial badges they sprayed across the Lower East Side, warning off the encroaching slumlords of the East Village. $1500 Rent, your home is mine, 1988=1933. It was said that the toppled martini glass meant The party’s over, but Johnny liked to think of it as a symbol of sobriety, like the brave anomaly of the Temperance Fountain in the middle of Tent City. Faith, Hope, Charity, Temperance—like the lyrics to some straight edge song. He liked to think of his own role in the neighborhood as a force of benevolence. Not a missionary but a monk. He led by example.

So Jude Keffy-Horn? Johnny didn’t know if he could forgive him, but he could tolerate him.

Jude was on his mind a lot as he walked these streets. His brother’s best friend, the person who’d been with Teddy when he died. One February afternoon, Johnny hallucinated him. He was on his way to Astor Place to play laser tag on the subway when he spotted him, entranced by an arcade game in front of Gem Spa. Johnny stopped. Was it him? His head was shaved. He was taller. A frosty breeze shuttled down the block. A carousel of Oakley knockoffs spun. Across the street, a cigarette hanging from his mouth, yes, Jude was on a skateboard, but he was standing still.