Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [120]
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
For 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