Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [115]
Johnny saw it, and Eliza saw it, and Jude saw it. Never mind that dangling cigarettes were the least of their own transgressions. They were past that now. They were going to do better, for their baby.
Johnny pressed his palm to the horn.
Seventeen
When they got to the motel outside Philly, Jude said, “You might as well tell us everything,” and they did. Delph and Kram were both smoking again. Delph had quit for a while, he had, but it was the road, he said, being in a car. It was like drinking a beer; it just went with smoking. At which point Kram cleared his throat. He’d had a few beers with the boys. The boys? Well, Delph. And Matthew. They’d gone to a girlie bar near Times Square. Kram and Delph had introduced Matthew to his first beer and his first naked girl. They were in New York, man. When else were they going to live it up?
Little Ben remained pure, perhaps only because he was so radically underage.
Also, Kram had eaten three Whoppers and the beef-flavored fries.
No meat for the rest of them, but come on, some Doritos every now and then? A little bit of mayo?
“We’ve met these straight edge guys,” Kram said, draped across one of the double beds. They’d gotten two rooms adjoined by a bathroom, four beds for seven people. It struck Jude that Kram was a man with nothing to lose. No college. No plans. He wore the same reckless, hungry look he’d seen on Tory Ventura on New Year’s Eve. “They have girlfriends. They’re not all vegan.”
Delph said, “They’re not even all vegetarian.”
“That’s good,” Jude said. “Good for them. Let’s all lower our standards because everyone else is fucked up.”
Johnny tossed his bag on the floor and said, “Go easy, Jude. You can’t force a man to do what he doesn’t want to do.”
Go easy? How had Johnny gone so soft? Now he was the peacemaker, the Zen master. As long as he had his hands on that baby, he didn’t care about anything else.
“I’m still into the whole lifestyle thing,” Kram said, picking a scab on his arm. “I mean, it’s cool, I totally respect it.”
“We’re trying,” Delph said.
“Well, try harder,” said Jude.
At the show that night, at the Starlight Ballroom, Jude sang with unusual vigor, barking orders between songs. “Hoods up, motherfuckers!” and “Let’s fuck this place up with some positive aggression!” The kids roared. At the end, he threw down his Les Paul, barked “True till death!” and catapulted off the stage, running in the air until he fell into a forest of raised arms. The rest of the band unplugged their equipment and loaded out in silence, and it was only when they returned to the motel that Jude had the feeling it was a silence built not against one another but against him, that in a matter of hours, when he wasn’t looking, the scrimmage lines had shifted. Johnny and Eliza said good night, shuffled into the marital chamber, and closed the door. Jude was left with the weak-willed pussies in the second room. Delph and Kram claimed one bed, Matthew and Ben the other. Jude spread out one of the sleeping bags on the floor. He attempted some tired banter about homos—he’d rather sleep on the floor!—but they were already asleep, or pretending to be.
Next door, Johnny spent half an hour sorting needlessly through his duffel bag, brushing his teeth, doing push-ups, until Eliza did him the favor of asking him to sleep in the other bed. “Would you mind?” she said.
It was true, now that she was so big, that she slept more soundly on her own. Back in New York, she’d shared Rooster’s Murphy bed with Johnny—there was no room to spread out—and as exhilarating as it had been to curl up beside her husband (not quite touching, but close enough to feel his warmth), and to sleep at the head of seven underdressed boys (as though she were the queen bee of their little honeycomb, and Johnny her lucky mate), that week had been hard. She’d tossed and turned, and Annabel had tossed and turned,