Ten Thousand Saints

Seven





They’d arrived just after dark, the Manhattan skyline a shadow through the van’s windshield. They might have made better time had Les not insisted on pulling over to the side of I-87, upon learning that Jude had never driven a car, to give him a lesson. For nearly an hour Jude had maneuvered the Purple People Eater ineptly down the emergency lane, the vehicle flying out in front of him, then jerking to a stop, a sequence for which Les had an odd patience, as though they had all the time in the world here in this dimly lit pod, until finally Jude got the van into gear and stayed in the driver’s seat until they had to stop for gas. It was a long drive, and both of them, exhausted, had gone to bed as soon as they were home.

Now, waking up from a deep sleep, Jude blinked his eyes at the ceiling, uncertain for several seconds where he was. He sat up and hung his legs over the ledge of the loft. From his point of view he could see the closet-size kitchen, the open door to the bathroom, and the living room, which consisted of a television on top of a barrel, a chest serving as a coffee table, and a futon, on which his father sat, packing the bowl of a glass bong. The place wasn’t big enough to turn a skateboard around in. Through the tall window was a row of storefronts across the street—one sign said simply EAT—against a bright winter sky.

“This place is a shoe box,” said Jude.

Les looked up. “It is indeed, but it’s a rent-controlled shoe box. Got it years ago from a lady friend who went back to her husband. Left me the apartment and a cat. It died.”

“Was it the lady friend you got pregnant and left your family for?”

Les took a deep hit—he used a barbecue lighter to light the bowl—and savored the smoke for a moment. He was wearing a long, twill nightshirt, steel blue with white piping at the collar and sleeves, and a pair of ancient leather slippers. Also his Yankees cap. So long ago had his father confided in him, so silent was his family on the subject of Les’s betrayal, that Jude was no longer sure he hadn’t made it up. At some point he had learned, perhaps through osmosis, that Ingrid Donahoe, who had salvaged her own marriage, had ended up having an abortion.

“It was not. It was another lady friend, after. Before I met the lady friend I have now. Come down and join me.”

Jude climbed down from the loft, every muscle still sore. He took a seat beside his father on top of a knit blanket and pillow. “You slept here last night?” Gratefully he took the bong and, with the barbecue lighter, fired it up. It had been a few days. It hit him hard.

“You can see why Eliza’s mother doesn’t spend much time here. It’s my master plan. If you’re going to bring a woman home, make it her home. That’s a good rule in general, but especially considering the size of this place. You okay?”

Jude was coughing like an amateur.

“Am I making you nervous with the girl talk? Listen, you’re going to see a lot more girls with that new haircut of yours.”

“You like it?” Jude rubbed his head, then his chin, a habit he’d picked up in the last thirty-six hours. He’d sprouted some bristle.

“No, I mean you’ll actually be able to see them, without all that hair in your eyes. Do you see the positive influence I’m having on you already? I thought your mother was going to kiss my feet when she saw you.”

“It wasn’t you. My hair was all”—he coughed again—“knotty.”

“Take it easy, champ.” Les gave Jude’s back a few slaps. “You haven’t tried reefer till you’ve tried Uncle Lester’s reefer. Do you know what today is?”

Jude took another hit. “Saturday?”

“Monday. The fifteenth. Distribution day.” He looked at the clock on the wall. “In exactly five minutes, my first guy will be here for a pickup. They come one by one. Six guys in six hours, twice a month, in and out, clean as can be. Don’t even have to leave the apartment.” He lit a cigarette. “This business is a science, like anything else. You have to have a schedule. You have to have rules. So, like us.”

“What?”

“This new arrangement. There’s some other matters to discuss.”

“Like what?”

“Like I snore. I move my bowels from six-fifteen to six-thirty-five every morning. And I own a handgun.”

“Does it shoot?”

“That’s what they do, champ. It’s in a case under the kitchen sink. A thirty-eight special. I call it McQueen. Don’t touch it unless I tell you to, in which case it’s loaded, so watch out.”

“Why would you tell me to?”

Les gave an I-know-nothing shrug. “Also, there’s the matter of a curfew.”

“Great,” said Jude, but when he thought about it, his brain stretching the word, softening it—was his dad’s shit that good?—it seemed a shiny fragment of adult vocabulary, somehow alluring. He’d never had a curfew before. Delph and Kram did. “When is it?”

Outside the window, a bird flickered on a tree branch. A bird in New York. All his life Jude had seen the same birds, and this one—he’d never seen it before. It was an amazement. When he thought about walking downstairs and outside into the daylight it was difficult to control his nerves. “Well,” Les said, “if you can demonstrate that you’re in possession of your faculties, if you return eventually from wherever it is you’re going, which proves you can remember where you live, if you’re wearing the same clothes you went out in, if you can continue to convince me, Hey, Dad, I’m just a kid having fun, I drank a beer at the Centre Pub, or what have you, but I don’t have a knife sticking out of my stomach—then I’m willing to forgo a curfew.”

“Did Mom say that was okay?”

Les stood, put out his cigarette, picked up the blanket, and began sloppily to fold it. “It doesn’t matter what your mother thinks. Look, I know she has serious concerns about you staying here. I can’t blame her. Would you help me with this thing?” Jude stood up and took two corners of the blanket. “Put it this way. If you don’t get into trouble, your mother doesn’t have to know about it. Now, we happen to have different definitions of trouble. Your mom wants me to be a rehab clinic for you, man, but come on, you’ve got a liking for this stuff I can dig.” Jude matched one of his corners to the other. “But I happen to have a classy operation here that could get screwed up overnight if, you know, Officer Friendly started sniffing around. Which means if I catch you stealing a candy bar, you’re going straight back to the Green Mountain State. Understand?” Like dancers, they stepped toward each other, the blanket dipping between them. Les took it, folded it in half, and stuffed it and the pillow inside the coffee table/chest.

Then he led Jude through the closet under the loft—through coats and dry-cleaning bags, his old dashiki—to a padlocked door. Jude never would have known it was there. “Voilà,” Les said, spinning the combination, and opened it onto another closet, walk-in size. The smell hit Jude like whiplash. He hadn’t smelled marijuana like this since his father’s greenhouse, and the memory of that place, mixed with the heavenly bouquet of free-flowing drugs, produced in him a strange quickening. The walls of the closet were lined with shelves, which were lined with plants, which were green and farmy and rich, their leaves crawling with flowers like lavender caterpillars, the sodium bulbs beaming lovingly upon them.

From behind them, muffled through the closet, the buzzer rang. “What’d I tell you?” Les said. He picked up one of the five-gallon buckets, then closed the door and locked it, and they shoved through the hanging clothes back out into the apartment. Les pressed the intercom button by the front door, and a voice said, “Trick or treat. It’s Davis.” Les buzzed him in, and a moment later, someone could be heard clunking up the stairs and then panting into the apartment, in a ski cap and a red leather jacket, trailing frosty air. He called Jude’s father my man and flashed a gold tooth when Les introduced him. Jude could count the number of black people he’d had a conversation with on one hand. There were two black kids at his high school in Vermont, and both of their parents were professors.

“I didn’t know you had a kid, man. He’s a little man himself.” Davis asked Jude what was hanging and said he looked like his dad. Les winked at Jude and said thanks. He said that Jude had come to stay with him to experience some of his world-famous Purple Haze.

“I was just going to tell Jude that this is the only stuff on the market worth smoking.” Les sat down on a kitchen stool. “Would you agree, Davis?”

Davis nodded heartily, resting a foot on the bucket of pot. “Premium stuff.”

“Jude got in a little trouble up north. Too much of a good thing, if you know what I mean.”

“I hear you.”

“What my thinking is, is the key to enjoying reefer is moderation. You know what I’m saying, Davis—you’re a moderate fellow, aren’t you?”

“You know I am, man.”

“You’re a smart guy,” Les said, crossing his legs, ankle to knee. “You’ve got a day job. Have I ever seen you on the steps next door with a needle in your arm?”

Davis said he hadn’t been over there in years.

“Let’s be realistic,” said Les. “A fifteen-year-old kid in New York—”

“Sixteen.”

“—he’s going to find some fruit if he wants it, no matter how much Mommy and Daddy say no. And when he does, you don’t want him getting shwag from some Joe in Tompkins.”

Davis admitted he used to buy from one of those guys. A guy who carried a grenade in the pocket of his trench coat.

“So I can’t tell my kid not to smoke reefer,” Les said. “But I can tell him not to smoke other people’s reefer.” One of his slippers was dangling from a white, veiny foot. “My stuff’s safe. It’s robust. It’s cut with nothing but love. And it won’t get you arrested or dead.”

“Is it free?” Jude asked, rubbing his head.

Davis laughed and started counting out his cash. “A smart-ass,” he said. “Like his pop.”

Before, when Jude had allowed himself to imagine the city of his birth, he’d pictured it the way he’d pictured faraway capitals like London or Berlin—wide gray sidewalks choked with adults in long coats, with leather briefcases and good haircuts, no children in sight. They might as well have spoken a foreign language. It was the New York he’d seen in the pages of a social studies textbook—a woman with a mild-mannered Afro waiting for a bus, smiling at her newspaper. In the caption was the word commute.

In the stories that had been passed from Johnny to Teddy to Jude, fun in New York came in pockets—an underground tattoo parlor, a bar fight with nunchucks. The hardware of Jude’s and Teddy’s fantasies all surrounded a shadowy, borderless colony called the Lower East Side, the graffitied place where kids zipped by on their skateboards, too fast to see. Jude had known he wanted to find that place.

So when he got there and found out that there was practically on his doorstep, that his father’s apartment on St. Mark’s Place was a Chinese-star throw from the Lower East Side, he was both elated and wary. He wasn’t used to this kind of luck. A day didn’t pass when Jude didn’t see a Mohawk. Mostly the Mohawks hung out in front of Sounds, the record store with the neon sign humming in the window. Jude knew this because, the first week he lived in New York, that was mostly where he hung out, too, burning through packs of cigarettes. When he wasn’t there, he was in front of Enz or Manic Panic, looking at all the leather in the windows. Once he saw Keith Richards or someone who looked very much like him walk his dog out of Trash and Vaudeville. Otherwise, he was at Gem Spa, buying lottery tickets or cigarettes or beer (all of which, to his astonishment, he could buy if he said they were for his dad), or playing one of their sidewalk arcade games (Paper Boy was his favorite—when you rode your bike too slow, you got attacked by bees) or drinking a delicious beverage called an egg cream. There were also games at the Greek place at the Third Avenue end of the street—they had Tetris, as well as hot, dripping gyros served so fast they smoked while you ate them. And the video games at the Smoke Shop, which Jude thought of as the Smoke Sho, since the p no longer lit up, were inside, which was good when it snowed. The Pakistani couple that owned the place gave him change for a dollar, smiling crookedly and calling him my friend.

You couldn’t say it wasn’t a friendly street.

There was the woman standing outside the St. Marks Hotel. Dark-lashed, peroxide blond, in an acid-washed jean jacket, she placed one of her leg-warmered ankles in Jude’s path. “You need a smoke, honey?” He’d finished the first cigarette and had started the second, chatting amiably with her about Vermont, a place she’d never been—“It’s quiet,” he said, struggling for the right word, “and cold”—when she took a step toward him, so that the zippers of their jackets kissed. While studying her face from this proximity (his brain was slowed by pot, he couldn’t be blamed), he began to suspect that a woman like this did not talk to a boy like Jude for free. He thanked her for the cigarettes, called her “ma’am,” tripped on a shoelace as he turned to walk away.

There was the guy in the Coca-Cola sweatshirt, walking up and down the block, singing, “Whatchyou need? Whatchyou need?” He wore another sweatshirt underneath, hood up, and he took big, loping steps, as though about to bounce into a run at any time. He bounced directly into Jude, clapped him on the shoulder. “Whatchyou need, my man?”

“Nothing. I was just—”

The guy spun away, had a place to be. He walked backward down the street, pointing at Jude. “You know me, man. I’m here.”

After a few days, Jude learned to keep his head down. He bought a cone at the Korean ice cream shop downstairs, trying a new flavor each time, and then he walked back and forth, up one sidewalk and down the other, listening to the melody of Spanish and something like Russian floating on the cold air, over car horns and boom boxes and backing-up trucks. (Two or three times, at night in the loft, Jude thought he heard gunshots. “A truck backing up,” his father would say. “Go back to sleep.”) Jude walked past the punks, the bums, the Hare Krishnas, past the Italian restaurant where a body had been discovered in the Dumpster out back, past the rehab center next door, a beaten-up warehouse where people attended AA and NA meetings on the first floor and then spent the rest of the day shooting up on the stairs in front of the building. On each of the orange steps was a verse of the black stenciled warning NO DRINKING, NO SMOKING, NO POT SMOKING. He’d never seen anyone shoot up before. Often they fell asleep, their bare, mottled arms flung across the steps.

There were days when he thought this street might be his future. Getting high with his dad in the morning, chain-smoking, giggling at the news—the Supreme Court ruling against Jerry Falwell, Mayor Koch calling Reagan a wimp in the War on Drugs. A wimp! “You wimp!” they called each other for the rest of the day. Besides his father (and his mother, who had called to make sure he hadn’t run away), he talked only to strangers. When he had the energy, he did a few push-ups, trying to gain back his strength.

Some weekend, Les said, when Eliza was home from boarding school, they’d go up to Di’s for dinner. Les didn’t ask Jude about Teddy or Eliza or Johnny, or what had happened that night; he didn’t talk about school or a job; he didn’t ask Jude to do anything he didn’t want to do. Whether this was out of respect for Jude’s fragile state or because it didn’t occur to him to do so, Jude could not be sure.

Whatchyou need, my man? For days afterward, the question turned over in Jude’s baked brain. He imagined the hooker’s red mouth, the silk of her baby-doll hair, the sublime dilapidation of a room inside the St. Marks Hotel. He imagined the uncharted highs of some powder or serum or plant, the crinkle and weight of a plastic bag in the hand. Why the f*ck had he said no? From his father, he already had a generous supply of marijuana, and money to buy whatever other vices he desired. He had only to decide what.

After a week in New York, bored and stoned and brave, he ventured eastward, toward the place he understood to be Alphabet City. Somewhere over here lived Johnny McNicholas. Wind whistled through empty windows. Bums lay mummified in doorways. When he paused to admire the two stone-faced buildings from the album cover of Physical Graffiti, two men across the street watched him from a set of steps. Jude kept walking, trying to keep his eyes down, noting the artifacts of the gutter. Cigarette butts. An island of snow impaled by a syringe. When he reached Tompkins Square Park, a square of land so unparklike, so like a cemetery of living dead, he turned immediately around. His dad’s block was scary enough.

“Where you going, amigo?”

The two men he’d passed before crossed the street toward him. One had his hands deep in the pockets of his coat, a posture that Jude was learning to fear. The other was sipping from a bottle in a brown bag and staring at Jude with a single, yellowy eye. The lid of the other was sealed like an envelope. Jude couldn’t help staring back. Before he could move, the first guy stepped up to him and patted him down. He dipped his hand into Jude’s jacket pocket, withdrew his Walkman, and, tugging at the wire, whipped the headphones off Jude’s head. From one of the back pockets of Jude’s jeans, he removed his wallet; from the other, a pack of cigarettes. The Misfits’ Walk Among Us was still playing distantly. The guy ejected the tape, glanced at it, and handed it back to Jude. “You can keep this,” he said and winked.

This little tango, from beginning to end, took no more than ten seconds, and the swift, shrewd incursion of another person’s body recalled the beery breath of Tory Ventura. But Tory wouldn’t have bothered to pat Jude down. Only later did it occur to him that the guy had been checking for a weapon.

He’d had the foresight to remove the picture of Teddy from his wallet, to hide it among his father’s books. Forty or fifty of his father’s dollars—money he would have blown on the temptations of St. Mark’s—was all that was stolen from him. Who did he have to tell about girls and drugs, anyway? Whatever Teddy could reply, from Les’s dusty shelf, would come with the narrow-eyed disapproval of the dead.

And Jude was glad for a reason to stay away from Alphabet City. What he wanted he couldn’t buy on the street, and even more than hookers and dealers and bad-ass, one-eyed Puerto Ricans, he feared Johnny McNicholas.

Keffy-Horn, you son of a bitch.”

Jude looked up from the screen, where he was pedaling diligently away from a swarm of bees. Johnny was standing at the edge of the sidewalk. A woman in a headscarf steered a shopping cart between them. When she passed, Jude’s mouth was hanging open, as though he should be the one surprised to find Johnny here, living and breathing on a street corner in New York. His cigarette fell to the street. He was high as the moon.

“Hey, Johnny, hey.”

Jude stepped off his skateboard and shielded his body with it. Johnny could see him taking in the tattoos through his thin white T-shirt. “What the f*ck you doing here?” He put his hand on Jude’s shoulder and gave him an ambiguous little shake.

“I’m here. I’m here, I’m living with my dad now, yeah.”

“Here?”

“Across the street, yeah.” He pointed.

“I been there.” Johnny crossed his arms. “He was real good to me, your pop. He helped out.” Johnny was about to say Teddy’s name, but he stopped. Instead he said, “Did I say you could wear that jacket?”

Jude looked down at his body. The parka was reversible, army green on the outside, bright orange on the inside, fat and shiny as a sleeping bag. “It’s not . . . it’s mine. It’s not yours.”

Johnny had once bought an identical one at the Salvation Army in Lintonburg. The thought of that store, with the ceramic bowl of freebies at the counter—broaches and buttons and little bottles of half-used nail polish and eight tracks no one wanted—and the terrified look on the poor kid’s face, this kid from Teddy’s life who now wore Johnny’s uniform—made Johnny want to give him a bear hug. He did, slapping him several times on the back.

“I’m just f*cking with you, man! Shit, you live in the Village. We’re practically neighbors.”

When Johnny released Jude, Jude was smiling a large, uneasy smile. “I tried to find you yesterday, but I didn’t know where you lived.”

“I live, like, four blocks that way.”

“Yeah?”

“You doing anything right now?”

“Just, no, just nothing.”

“Can you drop your board at home? I’m meeting some guys at the subway, going to play some tag.”

Jude said he had not yet been on the subway.

“What color shirt you got on?”

Obediently, Jude unzipped his jacket. Under it was a Black Flag shirt, white.

At the cube sculpture on Astor Place, a dozen guys were selecting laser guns from a duffel bag, strapping targets to their chests. Half were in black T-shirts, half in white. Some wore sweatshirts underneath. Some had Xs drawn on their hands. Two had Xs shaved in the back of their heads.

“Mr. Clean!” one of them said.

“You got an extra?” Johnny asked. “I found this guy on St. Mark’s. Name of Jude.”

“Hey,” Jude said, tying his jacket around his waist. They chorused back.

“Gentlemen,” Johnny began. “Astor Place to Union Square. Use only number six trains. Anyone who gets arrested is on their own this time.” Over the St. Marks Hotel, the early moon was pale as a cloud in the ice blue sky. Jude took a gun and a target. “Stay off the third rail. And no pulling the emergency stop. Elliot.” They all glared at a kid in black, his laser gun resting sheepishly on his shoulder. “Black shirts first.” The black team filed down the uptown subway stairs, and a few minutes later, when the sound of a departing train rumbled beneath them, the white team, Jude and Johnny among them, descended behind them.

In the cold, dank dungeon of the station, the smell of urine took Jude’s breath away. Graffiti, as thick and indecipherable as the tattoos on Johnny’s arms, covered the walls. Garbage, decomposed beyond recognition, littered the floor, and it took Jude a moment to distinguish a body among the wreckage, bundled under a dust-coated blanket, alive, he hoped. Without a glance at the sleeping man or the attendant in the glass booth, each of Johnny’s crew jumped over the turnstiles. Jude did the same. When the next train arrived, a sluggish, green-eyed 6, they all stepped into different cars, except Johnny and Jude, who got in together. Then, when the train got going, Johnny led Jude to the back of the car. He yanked open the door, and they watched the black walls of the tunnel fly past. Jude’s legs felt as though they were made out of sand. He held tight to an overhead bar while Johnny dashed across the platform to the other car. “Come on!” He stood in the doorway, waiting.

Jude could feel his lungs heaving. It was freezing down here. He braced himself against the door frame to keep it open, clutching the stitch in his side.

“What’s wrong?” The door was still open, the train clacking.

Jude glanced over his shoulder. A few people were sprawled across the orange plastic seats, listening to headphones, sleeping, none of them aware of the plastic machine gun Jude held at his side. Three kids near the opposite end of the car were tagging one of the doors, two of them standing guard while the third sprayed. Jude closed his eyes. He kept them that way for a long time, or what seemed on his father’s pot to be a long time. His high had diminished only faintly, and Jude was aware of the flux of his thoughts, rocking roughly along with the engine, the open door roaring. The metallic rattle of a can of spray paint. The fumes, overwhelming. Even across the train car, they were as strong as if Jude were huffing them himself.

They’d played laser tag before, Jude and Teddy and Johnny and Delph and Delph’s cousin, who owned the set. Running barefoot on the pavement, in summer grass. Jude and Teddy hiding behind a parked car: shhh.

How to say how shitty he felt at that deafening threshold, how unworthy, nearly sick, so cowardly he couldn’t open his eyes, the guy whose brother he’d killed waiting for him on the other side? He shivered at the thought of Johnny finding out how low he’d sunk, stealing drugs for a free high, while all this time Johnny, sober and upright, had been hopping train cars. “Just don’t look down!” Johnny called helpfully, and it was suddenly so ridiculous, this fear of the subway—he’d huffed freon!—“You wimp!” said his father, “you wimp!”—that Jude opened his eyes and, laser gun cradled across his chest, crossed the platform in one dexterous leap—Mario sailing from cliff to floating bridge, Pitfall Harry traversing tar pit—and when the train screeched to a halt (“Fourteenth Street, Union Square”), Jude kept going for one slow-mo second, hooking an arm around a pole to catch himself, laser gun ch-ch-ch-ing to a stop.

Here he was. The noise was gone and he was inside again, in another, identical, freezing cold car.

“C’mon,” Johnny said, unfazed. He dragged Jude out through the doors just before they slid closed again. They raced down the platform, their laughter echoing against the Lego-yellow tiles, the aroma of wet garbage and hot exhaust and the cool iron earth, a man pissing in a corner, a woman shaking a can of change, Johnny winning by a good ten yards, until, halfway up a flight of stairs, he was shot. Jude heard the sound—keo, keo, keo, the fighter planes of Space Invaders—and saw the red light exploding from Johnny’s chest. Staggering backward two steps, Johnny clutched the target over his heart with one hand, grabbed the railing with the other, and groaned, “Go, man! Go on without me!” Jude did, but not before firing up at the top of the steps, illuminating the target of Johnny’s dark-shirted killer, who fell quickly, without ado, out of sight.

Jude turned around and ran in the other direction, up another set of stairs. He ran past a homeless mariachi band, a troupe of break-dancers, endless stretches of graffiti. He ran past a white-shirt and returned his salute as they crossed paths. He ran past a black-shirt and fired at him from the waist, but it was just a regular guy smoking a cigarette, his eyes filled with confusion and fright. At the end of the corridor, Jude followed the signs to the downtown platform and the sound of the arriving train, and slipped into the last car just as the doors sighed closed. He kept running, car to car, his legs throbbing, his breath inflating his smile. People looked at him, people looked away, some gasped or screamed, he could be arrested or chased or shot at for real, but he was too fast. Jude had not yet been told about Bernie Goetz, the Subway Vigilante, had not heard the Agnostic Front song “Shoot His Load”; he did not comprehend fully the fear of the woman he sent shrinking into her husband’s overcoat. In one car, he shot and killed an unsuspecting black-shirt who’d made the mistake of putting down his gun to tie a shoe. In another, he shot poor Elliot, whose gun, apparently broken, fired soundlessly back at Jude. At Astor Place, he ran off the train, outside, down the uptown stairs again, under the turnstile, and back on the 6. And back and forth, uptown, downtown, until he couldn’t find anyone anymore, until it seemed he was the only man left alive.

When he finally surfaced, it was dark. Aboveground, the air smelled as clean as New England, and the sky was like a deep blue sheet unfurled above him, like the sheet his mother would put on his bed, letting it hang in the air for a moment before it dropped. The stars were coming out above the newsstand on the corner, the magazines and candy bars lit up like prizes. For the first time in many weeks, he felt awake. He thought about lighting a cigarette but instead inhaled the evening tonic of the street as he walked up and down his block for a while, then home.