Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [40]
“Was he your first love?”
“Not exactly.”
Shelby turned on her side. The bedsprings creaked. “Well, who is he?”
Eliza wished she had a cigarette to take a drag from now. She would send a cloud of smoke out into the black-and-white night, dense and full of meaning, interpretable.
“He’s a boy who died,” she said flatly, picking up her pencil, but there were real tears in her eyes, for she wasn’t selfish, she wasn’t unfeeling, she wasn’t. But were the tears for Teddy, or for her? Were they for what she’d lost, or what she’d done?
She hadn’t given a thought to the cocaine. She’d nearly forgotten about it—barely two lines apiece!—until the look Johnny had given her there at the edge of the park, the phone hanging limply in his hand, her nostrils burning in the cold.
Teddy was a big boy, she told herself. He could have said no.
If only he’d gotten on that train with her!
She had wanted to make something happen; she had asked for heartbreak and she’d gotten it. And it was bigger than anything in her life. She wanted to forget Teddy, and she wanted something to remember him by.
She was aware of this paradox in a subliminal way, and of Johnny’s and Jude’s part in it. She wanted to know them, too; she wanted to forget them. She tried hard to drown them out. She ignored the blank page of her underwear, didn’t count the days, thought past and around and through them. If she occupied her brain—If only we may be killing / kill the goat!—she could think herself out of it. Because she couldn’t be. There was no fucking way.
The thing was, no one in New York knew Teddy was dead, because no one in New York had known Teddy existed. New York was its own solar system. Maybe once Sid or Kevin had seen a letter hanging around, had said, “Hey, who’s this from?” and Johnny’d said, “My kid brother.” Maybe not. Maybe someone had said, “Hey, Johnny, you got any family?” And maybe Johnny, keeping it simple, had said, “Not really.” He’d left Teddy with his mom so he could live with his dad, and after his dad went to jail, Johnny didn’t go home. He was doing his own thing. He’d send Teddy a mix tape now and then, a subway token with the center cut out. Now the subway token was gone, who knew where.
Through January, into February, in Chuck Taylors and undershirt, over cracked sidewalks, under claws of elms, Johnny skated. He tried to get lost, make a maze of the city, turned north, then left, then right, then west, chased a bumper sticker, a blue jay, turned up the volume on his Walkman. Through both sides of Minor Threat’s Out of Step and through both sides again, through paradise and slum, past falafel cart and flower shop and carriage ride, over cobblestone and manhole, past brownstone and mirrored steel, past Les Keffy’s lavender Dodge van, on a different block each week, the parking tickets on the windshield faded and dried like autumn leaves, past the vacant, piss-stinking newsstand, past one building that had burned down, past another, past the dealers and the crackheads and the squeegee men, past every bum who knew his name, past every thug who’d stared him down, Go ahead, asshole, kill me, but no one did, and always when he stopped, lungs packed full, expelling white breath into the air, there would be the city, inexorable and vast, and a subway station that threatened to lead him home.
He skated to the river, to the bodega, to Venus or Sounds or Some Records or Bleecker Bob’s, or Angelica Kitchen, or across the Williamsburg Bridge to the Hare Krishna temple in Brooklyn, to shows at CBGB, the Ritz, the Pyramid, the Limelight, Irving Plaza, ABC No Rio, Wetlands, Tramps, skating home in the dark bruised and frosty with sweat, standing under the showerhead until the water went cold. He did push-ups and sit-ups and chin-ups—up! up! up!—cleaned the minifridge, fed the cats, made the bed, made a pot of chamomile tea, teapot whistling on the hot plate, the space heater and the stereo and the tattoo machine, the mouth of the guy he was