Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [95]
An hour later, ten of them were crowded in Jude’s basement, spread out in sleeping bags. Several were wearing an article of Jude’s clothing—sweatpants, a T-shirt, socks—to replace the torn or dirtied or bloodied clothes they’d arrived in. Several were in their underwear. Some held plastic bags of ice to a forehead, or jaw, or ribs; some sat with their chins tipped to the ceiling, toilet paper clogging their nostrils. Jude was one of them. In addition to the steady stream of blood, his nose issued a slimy black fluid, like oil. They assured him he was fine—it was the natural grime of a hardcore show.
Jude had already gotten permission from Harriet to put up Army of One for the night, but after they’d all come to his defense, he’d had no choice but to ask them to stay, too. Harriet liked very little about the idea. She’d come downstairs in her nightgown to find ten teenage boys standing in front of her open refrigerator, looking as if they’d been mauled by a pack of lions. “We were playing football,” Jude explained. “Tackle,” someone added. Jude took her into the living room and told her calmly, reasonably, that these guys were good guys, clean guys—like Johnny—that they just needed a place to sleep. Did she remember when she was young, when she hitchhiked and protested, remember Woodstock, when she lived in a tent with strangers? She was not accustomed to discouraging Jude from making friends—his new popularity, he could tell, relieved her—so after a round of questions and conditions, she let them stay. Everyone agreed, within Harriet’s earshot, what a rad mom she was.
Besides! they said, crashing on some dude’s floor was the whole point of being on the road. They sat Indian-style, lay on their stomachs, on the floor, on the old row of seats from the van, chugging Gatorade, staying awake through the Teen Idles’ Minor Disturbance, through Minor Threat’s self-titled, 7 Seconds’ United We Stand, Agnostic Front’s United Blood. The room was filled with the faint fumes of deodorant and the mothball aroma of sleeping bags. Tomorrow, they said, they were going to see Bold at the Anthrax in Stamford, Connecticut, then back to school on Monday morning. “Want to come?” they asked, but Delph and Kram had to work, and Jude didn’t have a ride home. They were used to that, weekends in their parents’ crappy cars, driving to shows in Boston, Baltimore, Syracuse. They were all skinny from meals-on-the-go—most of them were vegan; it was hard to find health food in drive-thrus on I-95—and most of them bore the bruises and scars of their nights in the pit. One kid had broken his ankle jumping off a stage at a Verbal Assault show. The kid with the missing teeth had lost them in a fight at the Starlight Ballroom in Philly; the skinhead who’d removed them had given him fifty cents, like the tooth fairy—a quarter for each. They talked about the people they’d met on the road: the SHARPS, Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice—you had to look hard to see the Xs through their swastikas; the fruitarians, who ate only food that grew on trees; the freegans, vegans who dove through Dumpsters for all their meals. Someone knew someone who tied bells to his shoelaces to warn insects on the ground that he was coming. Those posi guys could take a good thing too far.
Hippies, though—that was a new one.
“Dude,” said one of them, “when Mr. Clean took out that knife, I was like, whoa.”
It occurred to Jude that Johnny had been offering Hippie an out. What had passed between them in the