Ten Thousand Saints (18 page)

“D
on’t get too attached to these,” Johnny told Jude. “It’s just so you don’t get your ass kicked in the pit.” When he was finished with one hand, he started on the other, two Sharpie-black
X
s, each leg an inch wide.

“Where’s the
X
come from?” Jude wanted to know. The smell of the marker was making him dizzy.

Johnny told him. When Ian MacKaye’s first band, the Teen Idles, wanted to play all-ages shows in D.C., they proposed that the 9:30 Club mark kids’ hands with an
X,
the way they did on the West Coast, to show that they were underage. Before long, the straight edge scene had co-opted the symbol. “You don’t want us to drink? Fuck you, we don’t want to drink anyway!”

“How long’s this going to last?” Jude asked. He held up his hands, making two fists.

“Long as you want it to,” Johnny said.

In the fall, CBGB & OMFUG had banned Youth of Today, Gorilla Biscuits, and Side By Side for stage diving, a legendary show according to Johnny, but Army of One was still allowed to play. The place was dark and small and packed with bodies and Johnny strolled onto the stage as though he were not a person who appeared in fanzines pasted up by fourteen-year-olds in their tighty whities in Albany, Cleveland, and L.A. He strolled out with Rooster and the rest of the guys and, midstride, without a word of introduction, began convulsing. There seemed to be a malfunction with the sound system, a tape in fast-forward, a ribbon of feedback. Then the guitar started up, and the nuclear explosion of drums, and Jude realized that the sound he’d heard was Johnny’s voice. He was not having a seizure but singing. Not singing but vomiting a ceaseless torrent of small, sharp objects—nails, needles, gears, batteries, Hot Wheels, pennies—which came clanking out as though they’d been swallowed.

The shrooms had been a bad idea.

They used to hunt for them, Teddy and Jude, on the farms along Dairy Road, leaving their bikes in the ditch and crawling on hands and knees through the dark. Maybe a cow pie would be flung, maybe a cow would be tipped. Maybe they’d eat a handful right there in the grass, like hunter-gatherers, and trip on the stars, and go or not go to class the next morning.

So when the guy approached Jude at the edge of Tompkins that afternoon, selling not some sidewalk-cooked chemical compound but Mother Earth’s gold-flecked mushrooms, Jude had bought a bag and eaten two right there, popping them like Twinkies. It was his exception to his father’s rule—an exercise in reminiscence. Still, Johnny had promised to take him to his show today, and then to the temple in Brooklyn. If he knew he was on something, he’d leave his ass at home. As they walked together to CB’s, Jude had tried hard to straighten the bending buildings, to calm the breathing trees. He was good at nothing if not faking sobriety.

But now, safe inside the club, there was no reason to fight the trip anymore. No one was looking at anyone but Johnny. The stage wasn’t a stage but a knee-high platform, and Jude was drawn to it, as if tied to a rope. Was it fame? The band was glowing. It was the yellow lights, the vibration of the speakers through the concrete floor, but it was also just the band, it was Johnny, the loops in his ears shining like real gold. It wasn’t fame. Famous people were untouchable, unknowable. Jude could see the pores glistening on Johnny’s scalp. It was unfame, the opposite of fame—he was touchable and entirely knowable, he was memorizable, like a sister or a dog. Jude fought through the field of bouncing bodies. A dance had started up in front of the stage, a boisterous, good-natured ritual that involved hurling one’s body, like a sack of flour, at other bodies. Arms windmilled, shoes flew. Everything within an inch of stage diving. Jude was close enough to the band to feel the radiance of their sweat, their spit.

He found himself in the middle of things. Or he put himself there. He jumped, and his body remained in the air for several hours before he landed on somebody’s shoulder. He was half helped up, half shoved away. He spun sideways into another wall of people, his chin smashing against someone’s tattooed head, his sweat-soaked T-shirt sealed to someone else’s back. Not one of them was a girl. One girl, or two. Some dude, passed above their heads, fell on him. The rubber heel of a sneaker came first. For a second, he stood on Jude’s arm, climbing down him like a ladder. Then there was Johnny—was the show over, or just his set?—helping them both to their feet.

“Steady!” Johnny called. Or had Jude only read his lips? He couldn’t hear him. Johnny mouthed something else, smiling sadly, and then was sucked back into the crowd. The words formed a silent space in Jude’s empty head.

Steady!

Teddy!

He felt suddenly that he was in hell. It was wonderful. The room was black and close and singed with the forbidden, it felt miles underground, the perfect expression of testosterone and the structures of sound stimuli. The set wasn’t over; Johnny was still singing. He’d stepped down from the stage. Johnny drifted back toward him, his face appearing and disappearing like a strobe. Jude shoved him, without malice, only because that was physics, only because Johnny had a body and so did Jude. Between them, a pit opened, the size of a body that could have dropped from Earth but didn’t.

Then the train rocketed beneath the river, transporting him from one room to another. But the room he landed in was the same one he’d left: bodies, music, stage. Only here they left their sneakers at the door, and this room was bigger, big as a ballroom, and filled with an apricot light and incense so sweet Jude had the urge to wet himself. From each corner of the room, a voice wailed

Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare

Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.

It was the walls. It was God. God was singing. Then he saw the man sitting in the middle of the room. He was an ancient Indian man in a white robe, playing an organ and singing into a mike. Around him, men and women sat chanting with him, some on mats, some on the lacquered wooden floor. In front of him, gold curtains hid the stage; behind him was another man, also old, also Indian, propped in a throne, draped in orange, topped with what looked like an orange bathing cap. He sat very still. Men and women and children approached him with candles and incense and flowers, sprinkling the petals at his feet. They bowed down to him, kneeling and pressing their foreheads to the floor. Jude watched from the sidelines as Johnny did this, as naturally as if he were putting on a kettle for tea. It was only when Johnny returned to him that Jude saw that the man was a statue.

“That’s Krishna?” he whispered.

Johnny shook his head. “His Divine Grace Srila Prabhupada. Before we worship Krishna, we worship his devotees.”

A drum circle was forming around the organ player, boys and men joining him one by one. They wore robes or jeans, sherbet orange sweatshirt over sherbet orange skirt. Some wore beads like Johnny’s around their necks; some wore a smudge of white paint on their foreheads; some had bald heads with a tuft of hair at the back. The drums were grenade-shaped, two-headed; someone was playing hand cymbals; then someone else was, too. Jude had a rubbery memory of the gymnastics class he’d taken with Prudence as a kid, the two of them tumbling across the slippery floor in their socks.

Then the music stopped. Slowly, the gold curtains drew back. Bodies scattered, found an empty space, bowed to the floor. On the stage, nestled in an elaborate, canopied throne, adorned with a jeweled crown and a brightly colored lei, was Krishna. Krishna was smiling a beatific smile. Krishna’s face was milky blue. He was rosy-cheeked, bare-chested, no bigger than a fifteen-year-old boy. Krishna looked like a mannequin in the window of Macy’s, a queenless king riding a float in the homecoming parade.

The organ started up again, then the drums. People sprang up from prayer, started dancing. They sang,
Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare
. They sang to the stage, swaying, as though watching Krishna perform. Jude would not have been surprised if they had raised their lighters. Bodies pressed in. Painted women danced by, raising carnations to his nose; he breathed them in. He closed his eyes for some time, floating, and when he opened them, Johnny was gone. Jude turned, blinded by the golden stage—there
were
lighters, darting around the room like fireflies—and stumbled into a log. It was a soft log, damp and mossy. The log was Johnny! Johnny was still lying facedown on the floor, his arms spread out in front of him like Superman.

Heavily, Jude fell to his knees and cat-stretched out beside him. The floor was cold and smooth and smelled of a piney wax. Here were the parts of his body that touched the ground: his forehead, his armpits, his chest, his belly, his hips, his knees, his toes. His hands, each scored with an
X
. He had never lain like this before. A socked heel stepped apologetically on his pinky; a gauzy skirt tickled the nape of his neck. His eyelashes fluttered against the floor. He felt long, emptied, flattened.

A tide ripped through him, first a ripple, then a roar.

The subway.

The train sped under him, rattling his ribs. Head still down, Jude slipped the bag of mushrooms from the pocket of his jacket and gobbled the rest of them up. Maybe because he feared his trip would wear thin, because he wanted, why not, for the night to go out with a bang. Maybe because he knew already it was the last night he’d be high. He felt himself peel away from the past, saw the hollow corpse of his former self, lying like a log, as he stood.

The room was on fire. Krishna was aglow on the stage, smiling at Jude through the flames. Arms windmilled, shoes flew. Bodies passed, hand over hand, above the crowd. They levitated above him. The wax dummy smiled his Mona Lisa smile at Jude. Half-boy, half-god. Half-Indian, half-white. Jude danced for the god boy, and the god boy let him dance.

The flames came up to greet him. Jude passed one of his
X
’d hands through them, felt the white heat melt his fingertips, then his wrist, then catch his sleeve. Then he fell to the ground.

L
es Keffy had just sat down on his futon, to the Yankees’ opening game, to a cold can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and three hot dogs bedecked with mustard and relish, when the phone rang. It was April already, and the breeze floating through the open door to the fire escape carried the promise of reasonable temperatures, and the smell of fried food from the restaurants downstairs, and the voices of the fifty thousand fans 150 blocks north, his own not among them. He had scored two MVP tickets from a guy he knew who sold faux Rolexes in Chinatown, but Jude had turned him down to attend a show at the Ritz. Di was at a dance conference in Chicago, but he wouldn’t have asked her to go with him anyway, had stopped asking her years ago, and Eliza, who was usually reliable for that sort of thing, he hadn’t seen in weeks. He had sold the tickets to one of his distributors, lost twenty bucks.

With reluctance he stood and moved away from the TV, where Mattingly was walloping a double. Picking up the phone on its fifth or sixth ring, Les muttered, “Good boy.”

“What?” It was Eliza.

“I’m watching the game. Yanks and the Twins.” He stretched the cord as far as it would go, craning to see. Only when he was on the phone did his apartment seem large. Standing at the kitchen counter, he might as well have been watching the TV across the street. “How lovely to hear from you. I thought you were MIA. Were you sick or something?”

“I was. I’m better. Now I’m better.”

“I wish you’d called earlier. I could have used a date for this game.”

“Is . . . air?”

Di’s cordless phone, for which she had paid six hundred dollars, produced an irksome static; it sometimes captured the voices of her neighbors, or the line of her live-in housekeeper, who wandered in and out of the conversation, oblivious. Les called them the voices in his head.

“Stand still and say it again, honey.”

“IS JUDE THERE?”

Strikeout for Ward. A cordless phone would come in handy now. “He’s not. He bailed on me. It’s too much to ask that my one and only son show an interest in baseball. Or meat eating, or any other, you know, institution of male bonding. He’s not even smoking reefer with me anymore.”

“Really?”

“You think he’s maybe a queer?”

“I don’t
know
.” Eliza sighed. “I don’t even know him. I met him
once
! Where is he?”

“He’s at a
show
. With his pal Johnny.”

“Johnny?”

“They’re thick as thieves. He’s brainwashing my boy. He quit smoking, quit drinking, quit eating
meat
. You want to come over and eat some wieners? Smoke some happy stuff?”

“
Jude
quit all those things?”

“He saw the light. He had a conversion experience. An eight-hundred-dollar conversion experience. Stuck his hand in a plate of candles at the Krishna temple and got second-degree burns up his arm. Landed in the ER.”

“Oh, shit. A plate of
candles
? Is he okay?”

“Aside from having his arm all wrapped up. Johnny tackled him before the burn got too deep. It’s his left one, so he can still wipe his ass.”