Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [119]
Through the white-hot month of July, the Green Mountain Boys became well acquainted with I-95. The black-hole beltway of Washington, D.C., the Richmond cathedral so close to the highway you could lean from your car and almost touch the stained glass window. In Vermont, they’d grown up without billboards, but on 95 they were as regular as cows—South of the Border, Yeehaw Junction, Café Risqué, JR. “From Brassieres to Chandeliers!” The grand, gray cities were one and the same, a cordillera of skyscrapers and bridges and no-shoulder construction lanes, an industrial plant hanging over the plain of a rust-colored bay. The air was sweaty and sweet, thick as saltwater taffy.
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.