Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [27]
I’m as straight as the line that you sniff up your nose
I’m as hard as the booze that you swill down your throat
I’m as bad as the shit you breathe into your lungs
And I’ll fuck you up as fast as the pill on your tongue!
Before she could change her mind, she knocked insistently on the metal door. No answer. She knocked again. A few seconds later, the music stopped, and a voice called, “Who is it?”
“I’m looking for Johnny?” she said.
The person on the other side struggled with the door, kicking it several times. Then slowly it squeaked open. Eliza’s eyes alighted on a guitar, a drum set, a card table, a couch, and an orange cat sitting in what looked like a dentist’s chair before landing on the blue-eyed boy of eighteen or twenty who stood in the doorway. His head was stubbled, all but bald, muscular as an apple, but the hair he did have, on scalp and cheek, was as yellow as a toddler’s. His face was heart-shaped: broad forehead, severe cheekbones, chin like a spade. He wore a small gold loop through each earlobe, a strand of wooden beads wound three times around his neck, and although it was nearly as cold inside the apartment as it was out, only a pair of camouflage shorts. From his waistband, the dark, serpentine shapes of tattoos climbed up the downy path to his navel, across the ladder of his ribs, circling the pale sinew of his arms, feathers and scales and flames and gods, sea green and devil red.
Across his chest were the words TRUE TILL DEATH.
“I’m sorry,” she stammered, trying not to stare. “I thought you were someone’s brother.”
He tugged at one of his earrings. The nest of hair in his armpit was golden and sparkling with sweat. “What makes you think I’m not?”
Absently, she introduced herself. She must have looked like a runaway, shivering in her coat, standing on broken beer bottles in a neighborhood she didn’t belong in. Maybe that was why he was so quick to extend his hand—each tattooed from wrist to knuckle with a fat, black X—and smiling, as though any friend of his brother’s was a friend of his, say, “Johnny McNicholas.”
On the way to the pay phone at Tompkins Square Park, walking back across the four avenues, they talked about everything but the boys’ mother. Eliza was brief on that point, because it was difficult, she realized, to relay bad news to a stranger, and because she didn’t really remember what Teddy wanted her to say. She said, “I guess your mom’s missing? He wants to know if you know where she is,” but she didn’t think that was quite right.
She almost said, “He wants to move in with you,” but how could Teddy live with him there? In the glimpse she’d gotten of his apartment, it was surprisingly—even hauntingly—neat, but the couch seemed to be the only place to sleep, and the whole room was warmed by an ancient space heater. She counted three cats. He was paying next to nothing in rent, he’d said, and the place was buried enough to serve as a tattoo studio and big enough to serve as a practice space for his band. “Prewar,” he’d joked. “Private entrance.” While he’d looked for a quarter, she’d explained her tenuous link to his brother—through her mother, Les, and Jude. Acquaintances, four times removed.
They passed two clusters of pay phones with the phones missing entirely, the arterial wires flowing to nothing. Eliza offered him a cigarette, but he declined. He was straight edge—didn’t smoke, didn’t drink.
“I heard the song,” she said, exhaling. “It’s funny, you having a brother that’s, like, the opposite of you.”
“We’re more alike than we look,” he said, and Eliza worried that she’d offended him. She hadn’t wanted to get Teddy in trouble. She hadn’t told Johnny anything about last night.
“I don’t know Teddy that well, actually.