Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [47]
So when he got there and found out that there was practically on his doorstep, that his father’s apartment on St. Mark’s Place was a Chinese-star throw from the Lower East Side, he was both elated and wary. He wasn’t used to this kind of luck. A day didn’t pass when Jude didn’t see a Mohawk. Mostly the Mohawks hung out in front of Sounds, the record store with the neon sign humming in the window. Jude knew this because, the first week he lived in New York, that was mostly where he hung out, too, burning through packs of cigarettes. When he wasn’t there, he was in front of Enz or Manic Panic, looking at all the leather in the windows. Once he saw Keith Richards or someone who looked very much like him walk his dog out of Trash and Vaudeville. Otherwise, he was at Gem Spa, buying lottery tickets or cigarettes or beer (all of which, to his astonishment, he could buy if he said they were for his dad), or playing one of their sidewalk arcade games (Paper Boy was his favorite—when you rode your bike too slow, you got attacked by bees) or drinking a delicious beverage called an egg cream. There were also games at the Greek place at the Third Avenue end of the street—they had Tetris, as well as hot, dripping gyros served so fast they smoked while you ate them. And the video games at the Smoke Shop, which Jude thought of as the Smoke Sho, since the p no longer lit up, were inside, which was good when it snowed. The Pakistani couple that owned the place gave him change for a dollar, smiling crookedly and calling him my friend.
You couldn’t say it wasn’t a friendly street.
There was the woman standing outside the St. Marks Hotel. Dark-lashed, peroxide blond, in an acid-washed jean jacket, she placed one of her leg-warmered ankles in Jude’s path. “You need a smoke, honey?” He’d finished the first cigarette and had started the second, chatting amiably with her about Vermont, a place she’d never been—“It’s quiet,” he said, struggling for the right word, “and cold”—when she took a step toward him, so that the zippers of their jackets kissed. While studying her face from this proximity (his brain was slowed by pot, he couldn’t be blamed), he began to suspect that a woman like this did not talk to a boy like Jude for free. He thanked her for the cigarettes, called her “ma’am,” tripped on a shoelace as he turned to walk away.
There was the guy in the Coca-Cola sweatshirt, walking up and down the block, singing, “Whatchyou need? Whatchyou need?” He wore another sweatshirt underneath, hood up, and he took big, loping steps, as though about to bounce into a run at any time. He bounced directly into Jude, clapped him on the shoulder. “Whatchyou need, my man?”
“Nothing. I was just—”
The guy spun away, had a place to be. He walked backward down the street, pointing at Jude. “You know me, man. I’m here.”
After a few days, Jude learned to keep his head down. He bought a cone at the Korean ice cream shop downstairs, trying a new flavor each time, and then he walked back and forth, up one sidewalk and down the other, listening to the melody of Spanish and something like Russian floating on the cold air, over car horns and boom boxes and backing-up trucks. (Two or three times, at night in the loft, Jude thought he heard gunshots. “A truck backing up,” his father would say. “Go back to sleep.”) Jude walked past the punks, the bums, the Hare Krishnas, past the Italian restaurant where a body had been discovered in the Dumpster out back, past the rehab center next door, a beaten-up warehouse where people attended AA and NA meetings on the first floor and then spent the rest of the day shooting up on the stairs in front of the building. On each of the orange steps was a