Ten Thousand Saints (38 page)

The venues themselves, and the places they slept, also took on a resemblance. They played two churches, a VFW Hall, the Knights of Columbus, a roller rink, a few clubs. In Atlanta, while Jesse Jackson and JFK Jr. slept at the Omni, where the Democratic National Convention was taking place across town, they stayed at the Super 8, which they learned had been dubbed the Eight-Ball Inn, for the coke outfit that ran out of a block of rooms. When they could, they stayed with friends, guys from other crews they met on the road. Once, they slept in someone’s dorm room; once, they camped out in a couple of tents in someone’s parents’ backyard. In return, the band offered free T-shirts, or copies of their record. Several nights, they slept in their cars—in cranked-back seats, in the musty roof compartment of the van. They parked under the extraterrestrial lights of rest stops, Jude’s gun tucked into the waistband of his shorts.

The money they made at shows—five- or six-dollar covers split among five or six bands of five or six guys each—barely covered gas. It would not pay for college or a Lamborghini Countach. It might cover a bean burrito. If you wanted to talk to your mom, you called collect.

The bathroom routine. Seven sets of teeth to brush, and Jude’s retainers to clean when he remembered, and Eliza’s contacts to remove from and return to their pink plastic bed. There were the politics of showers and bowel movements, of pubic hair left on the soap. Who had slept on the floor last time, and who got the sleeping bag with the broken zipper, and who had blown his load while sleeping next to whom. The hours in the car—the burn of a sun-baked pillow on your ear, the clammy perspiration of a paper cup of soda, the arguments over directions, the arguments over who got to drive, who had to drive, who had driven from Rocky Mount to Fayetteville, the gas station bathrooms, the gas station pay phones to call some guy who set up shows in Gainesville, Florida, to make sure he could fit you in. Then piling out of the car. The anxious hours before a show, the twilight rush of finding a Laundromat, finding something to eat, meeting the other bands, we played there, love your record, of giving an interview for some kid’s zine, of loading in their equipment, of skating some cobblestoned corner they didn’t know. The sound check, the merch table, the kids milling about out front, comparing new tattoos, Delph selling the
X
stamp he’d had made for fifty cents a hand. Then the dimmed lights. The roar, as inevitable as gravity.

Then the blackout hour. It was a sensation Jude could only imagine was like sex. If the hours beforehand were like the anticipation of a date—not
Will I get a blow
job?
but
Will there be a fight?
—the show was sex itself. It was carnal, it was communal, it was religious. It was Harriet and Les’s orgy. Yes, there would be a fight. Yes, someone would misinterpret dancing for fighting, or fighting for dancing. Some jock would push some skinhead too hard, and someone would get a boot in the face. Yes, someone would grab the microphone, tongue it, and then hand it back. Mucuses would abound. Someone would dive into the crowd, and his balls would accidentally get fondled. In the morning, they would be purified. The shows purified them. Yes, it would be a night to remember.

It was in D.C.—no, Baltimore—where Jude, bleary-eyed, in the middle of the night, stumbled into the bathroom of a kid Johnny knew, above a noodle shop. They’d had dim sum after their show, and that duck sauce wasn’t sitting right. The apartment was packed tight with people. When Jude found his way to the bathroom, the door was unlocked and the light was off, and when he turned it on, four guys were crammed elbow to elbow in a ring-around-the-rosy with their pants around their knees, jerking one another off. Their eyes had been closed, and what haunted Jude later was the dreamy look on their faces, just before he blinded them with the light. They scrambled to get their pants up—“What the fuck, man?”—except one of them, who put his hands on his hips and narrowed his eyes at Jude. “You in or out, Green?”

He was out.

He turned off the light and closed the door. He lay down on top of his sleeping bag and stayed there until the sun came up, his stomach cramping into knots, and he didn’t say a word about what he saw, not to Eliza or Johnny or Delph or Kram, who’d put the phrase
circle jerk
in his head in the first place. He pictured Tory Ventura in the locker room with the rest of the football team, the same retarded look on his face. There were black smudges of paint under their eyes, they were wearing cleats, the white knickers around their knees were grass stained. This is who they were running from?

On they went, to the next city, and the next. Were they any good, the Green Mountain Boys? They were fast. They were new; they were becoming familiar with their own talents. They were the band penciled in at the bottom of the flyer, the last-minute guys who rounded out the bill. They were the guys from Vermont who played New York hardcore. They were sort of Krishna-core, they were sort of radical, they were sort of backwoods, like some lumberjack crazy with an ax, all those songs about brothers and brotherhood, you had the warrior and you had the guru, you had the whole package, they were hard and they were straight and they were fast. Wicked. Even after so many nights on the road, they seemed a little amazed that they were here. They were amazed, and they were grateful, and they soaked their shirts. Those who followed them from town to town witnessed a slight but perceptible maturity of sound, a compression. They responded to one another; they began to breathe together. The singer went, “One, two, three, go!” And the band did.

Eighteen

F
or fifteen years, every letter that Ravi Milan received was from his son. If the address was handwritten, or the sender’s name unfamiliar, or if the letter was forwarded from the post office, Ravi maintained a hope, until the seal was broken, that the contents of the envelope would lead him to Edward. The letter he’d retrieved from the mailbox that June evening, postmarked New York, New York, had been no different, but he had never imagined that the news, when he finally received it, would be of his son’s death.

This letter had been followed rapidly by two others, to which Ravi had made his swift, somber, and increasingly concise replies. Then came a short period of silence. By the time he heard from Johnny again, by phone, he had been able, for some hours of the day, to put Edward out of his mind. He had a new wife to distract him, and her two lunatic Pomeranians, and the hibiscus hedge they were putting in, and, at the office, countless cases involving other people’s doomed families, including the divorce of a couple who, after spending months torturing Ravi’s answering machine with details of the other’s affairs, cocaine binges, and shopping sprees, decided that they wanted to remarry. He had all but forgotten that, in his last letter to the boy, in his grief-stricken desire to keep his son in his life, he’d written, “If you ever find yourself in Miami, I hope you’ll call.”

He recognized Johnny—no longer a boy, but a full-grown man—as soon as he entered the restaurant. Ravi was unfashionably early and was already nearing the bottom of his first Manhattan. Should he have invited him over to the house instead? He’d worried that his decision to forgo a tie was too casual—with his navy blazer, he’d chosen his gold anchor cuff links—but Johnny was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, like an American film actor from the fifties. He was also wearing earrings and an eye-catching assortment of tattoos, but there was no doubt in Ravi’s mind: he was the little boy he had loved for a short time, and had sheltered in his home, before Bonnie Michaels had run off with him and with their son.

“I thought even vegetarians ate fish these days,” Ravi said once they had dispensed with their hellos and their orders. He’d chosen a seafood place on the bay, with tanks of lobsters and rafters cobwebbed with fishing nets.

“Not this one,” Johnny said, but his smile was meant to reassure. Ravi could tell already he was a good kid. Tattoos or no, Bonnie or no, he’d done well for himself.

“So, tell me about this rock band,” Ravi said, as though Johnny were his stepson, and they were meeting for their weekly meal together. They had a lifetime to catch up on, but the conversation had settled on the present. Neither one of them seemed anxious to overturn the facts of Edward’s life and death, which had already been exhumed, examined, and buried again during their brief exchange of letters. Johnny had written that Edward—Johnny called him Teddy, an infantile name—had died of a drug overdose. This just after Bonnie—who now called herself Beatrice McNicholas—had left the town they were living in, Lintonburg, Vermont, which had followed six or seven other hamlets of similar camouflage. And this just after Johnny, in response to Edward’s questions about his father, had threatened to help find him, sending Bonnie running again. The fact that his son had wanted to know him was a sour comfort, like the taste of a red wine turned to vinegar.

In a manila envelope, Ravi had sent Johnny the mementos, carefully copied on the office machine, that had lived in a shoe box for so many years.
HOUSEKEEPER SNATCHES SON?
from the local section of the
Herald,
the question mark that had embittered Ravi more than any epithet; police reports detailing the search for the missing child Edward Michaels; and a photo of the four of them at the beach—Bonnie and Ravi in plastic beach chairs, the baby in her lap, towheaded Johnny in a diaper in the sand, their eye sockets blackened spectrally by the sun. These were the days before the faces on the milk carton, but Ravi would have tried that if he could. He had driven all over the country. (His wife, Arpita, had learned about the United States in a boarding school in Connecticut. Ravi had learned about it by searching for his son.) He had offered a reward. He had hired the best lawyers he could afford on a gardener’s salary. When that hadn’t worked, he’d become one himself. Fifteen years later, he had not found his son, but he had made a decent living furnishing divorces to disgraced American wives.

Ravi did not fail to appreciate the irony: Bonnie had left him because she was disgraced. She had never been his wife, but the day she’d discovered his dalliance with the woman who worked behind the front desk, she and the boys were gone. He’d expected her to be back in a day or two, once she’d cooled off. Bonnie had been a drinker. (He hadn’t been then, but he was now.) She had a temper. They’d go dancing in South Beach—it was the seventies, they were young—and he’d dance too close to another woman, and she’d take the boys and stay with a friend, and come back in the morning, hungover and forgiving. But this time she’d also taken Ravi’s prized family possession, his grandfather’s marble statue of Lord Krishna, no taller than a bottle of wine, with a flute raised to his lips. The heirloom had made its journey across the ocean with Ravi, and no doubt Bonnie had hocked it at some pawnshop off the highway for a few hundred bucks. With it, she had the means to move into a place of her own, and after stealing from him, she knew he wouldn’t take her back.

And now there was this irony, too: that after fighting so spitefully for Edward, the coward had abandoned him. He wondered if Bonnie, who had callously killed off Ravi long ago, knew their son was dead, and hoped she did, and hoped she blamed herself.

Ravi sucked on the ice from his vanished Manhattan. Johnny was talking about his band. Their letters had been written so hotly, as though the two men were young lovers discovering each other. Now they sat in the air-conditioned calm. What was the word? Anticlimactic. There was little that connected them, besides their grim fascination with their roles in Edward’s story. “It’s just a thing for the summer,” Johnny said. “In the fall, I’ve got other things to focus on.”

“Are you going to college?” Ravi signaled the waitress for another Manhattan.

Johnny was drinking water. He was too young to drink alcohol, but the waitress had offered him wine, and he’d declined. The tattoo circling his elbow was Sanskrit, and he was wearing one of those beaded necklaces the Hare Krishnas wore. Did the boy’s fascination, Ravi wondered, extend into the realm of his brother’s heritage? The thought appealed to Ravi’s pride, and also insulted it. Was the boy disappointed that Ravi hadn’t chosen an Indian restaurant? That he was not dressed in a kurta and turban?

“Well, no,” Johnny went on. “I’ve sort of got news. I should have told you already, but I wanted to tell you in person.”

This meant that he’d wanted to size him up, Ravi deduced. He was a cautious kid, not quick to trust. That was the result of being raised by Bonnie. Johnny whipped his napkin into his lap and said, “Ravi, you’re going to be a grandfather.”

Ravi smoothed his mustache, pressing it down with his thumb and forefinger, a habit he did not like, but now could not help. Yes, he had once loved this boy, but he was not his father! The kid had written something about searching for his own father, Marshall, who had not surprisingly turned out to be a con. Bonnie had never had anything good to say about the man, but later, Ravi had wondered if she had demonized Marshall, too, if he was out there searching for Johnny the way Ravi was searching for Edward. Okay, so the guy really was a deadbeat, and Ravi felt sorry for the kid. But what did he want from him? Did he want him to be a substitute, now that he was starting a family of his own? Ravi was no substitute for his father, and Johnny was no substitute for his son. Was it money the kid wanted?

“Congratulations,” he managed to say as he arranged an inane smile on his face. “You’re going to be a father. And not long ago you were just a boy yourself.”