Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [55]
So when the guy approached Jude at the edge of Tompkins that afternoon, selling not some sidewalk-cooked chemical compound but Mother Earth’s gold-flecked mushrooms, Jude had bought a bag and eaten two right there, popping them like Twinkies. It was his exception to his father’s rule—an exercise in reminiscence. Still, Johnny had promised to take him to his show today, and then to the temple in Brooklyn. If he knew he was on something, he’d leave his ass at home. As they walked together to CB’s, Jude had tried hard to straighten the bending buildings, to calm the breathing trees. He was good at nothing if not faking sobriety.
But now, safe inside the club, there was no reason to fight the trip anymore. No one was looking at anyone but Johnny. The stage wasn’t a stage but a knee-high platform, and Jude was drawn to it, as if tied to a rope. Was it fame? The band was glowing. It was the yellow lights, the vibration of the speakers through the concrete floor, but it was also just the band, it was Johnny, the loops in his ears shining like real gold. It wasn’t fame. Famous people were untouchable, unknowable. Jude could see the pores glistening on Johnny’s scalp. It was unfame, the opposite of fame—he was touchable and entirely knowable, he was memorizable, like a sister or a dog. Jude fought through the field of bouncing bodies. A dance had started up in front of the stage, a boisterous, good-natured ritual that involved hurling one’s body, like a sack of flour, at other bodies. Arms windmilled, shoes flew. Everything within an inch of stage diving. Jude was close enough to the band to feel the radiance of their sweat, their spit.
He found himself in the middle of things. Or he put himself there. He jumped, and his body remained in the air for several hours before he landed on somebody’s shoulder. He was half helped up, half shoved away. He spun sideways into another wall of people, his chin smashing against someone’s tattooed head, his sweat-soaked T-shirt sealed to someone else’s back. Not one of them was a girl. One girl, or two. Some dude, passed above their heads, fell on him. The rubber heel of a sneaker came first. For a second, he stood on Jude’s arm, climbing down him like a ladder. Then there was Johnny—was the show over, or just his set?—helping them both to their feet.
“Steady!” Johnny called. Or had Jude only read his lips? He couldn’t hear him. Johnny mouthed something else, smiling sadly, and then was sucked back into the crowd. The words formed a silent space in Jude’s empty head.
Steady!
Teddy!
He felt suddenly that he was in hell. It was wonderful. The room was black and close and singed with the forbidden, it felt miles underground, the perfect expression of testosterone and the structures of sound stimuli. The set wasn’t over; Johnny was still singing. He’d stepped down from the stage. Johnny drifted back toward him, his face appearing and disappearing like a strobe. Jude shoved him, without malice, only because that was physics, only because Johnny had a body and so did Jude. Between them, a pit opened, the size of a body that could have dropped from Earth but didn’t.
Then the train rocketed beneath the river, transporting him from one room to another. But the room he landed in was the same one he’d left: bodies, music, stage. Only here they left their sneakers at the door, and this room was bigger, big as a ballroom, and filled with an apricot light and incense so sweet Jude had the urge to wet himself. From each corner of the room, a voice wailed
Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare
Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.
It was the walls. It was God. God was singing. Then he saw the man sitting in the middle of the room. He was an ancient Indian man in a white robe, playing an organ and singing into a mike. Around him, men and women sat chanting with him, some on mats, some on the lacquered wooden floor. In front of him, gold curtains hid the stage; behind him was another