Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [43]
That was what he thought of, what had kept him on the morning of the funeral from strangling Jude Keffy-Horn. He’s just a kid. How many mornings, when Johnny was his age, could he have been the one to wake up dead?
A true sannyasi, he told himself, neither hates nor desires.
Johnny prided himself on his forbearance, his adaptability, on his skill in coexisting with all walks of life. In his neighborhood, it was a matter of survival. Before he had laid claim to it, or it to him, he had wandered into Tompkins Square Park one evening to get some sleep after his falling-down-drunk con of a father, whose couch he’d been sleeping on in Staten Island, had stolen all his money. That night in the park, his guitar case was stolen with all his clothes inside. The next day, he found the guy around the corner—the case still had the Bad Brains sticker on it—and Johnny picked it up and used it to break the guy’s jaw. Turned out the guy was blind. Robbed by a blind guy. After that, Johnny watched his back. But rather than making him enemies, the incident had made him allies. He’d broken Blind Jack’s jaw! Dude didn’t mess around. They were all scraping by together.
But there had been other rituals of neighborhood hazing. He’d been robbed again, chased, roughed up to the point of needing stitches, which he didn’t get, wearing the scars like tattoos. Compared to some, he was lucky. One night in Tompkins, he saw Rafael, one of the kids who turned tricks in the park, stumble out of the bathroom they called the comfort station soaked to the waist. Johnny kept walking, didn’t offer his help. You didn’t go in there, not if you weren’t looking for something. He’d thought that some guys had just dunked him in a toilet, but Blind Jack told him later that Rafael had been raped, that some ladies from St. Mark’s Church had taken him to the hospital to get stitched up. Johnny didn’t see him again.
Then one night Johnny ended up at a straight edge show at CBGB, alone and falling-down drunk, and met a hardcore drummer named Rooster DeLuca, the first straight edge kid he’d ever known. That was the beginning of the end for him. In no time, Johnny was staying at Rooster’s place, and Rooster had him hooked on the drug that was no drugs. Fuck the dealers, Rooster said, fuck the drunk drivers, fuck the frail-ass gutter punks with marks up their arms, fuck Robert Chambers and the prep school jocks with coke up their noses and their dicks in some crying girl.
At twenty-two, Rooster was hardly a kid. He lived on Avenue B, across the street from the park. He was built like a lumberjack—big, hammy shoulders, muscular legs—and he had a Brooklyn accent like a mouth full of chew. If he’d grown up in Lintonburg, he might have played football with Kram. But he’d grown up in Bensonhurst, and his only sport, other than skateboarding and stage diving, was running deliveries for his uncle’s deli, driving around salami sandwiches on his BMX. To the milk crate bungee-corded to the handlebars he’d attached a cardboard sign that spelled out, in black electrician’s tape, GO VEGAN. He’d gotten his name from the red Manic Panic Mohawk he’d sported back when CB’s was barely open. Now he was as bald as Johnny—it helped in their neighborhood to look like a skinhead, and the tattoos helped, too. Johnny’s earrings and Krishna beads did not, nor his new straight edge status. Dealers tried to bully him into buying and selling. “You too good for us, Mr. Clean?” Johnny winked and negotiated. When he got his own apartment, and then started tattooing, he offered them free work. When he and Rooster and a couple of other guys started a straight edge band called Army of One, and started getting good, and put out a record, people from the neighborhood came