Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [98]
“Come back with me,” Rooster said. He didn’t have much time. In the light from the desk lamp, Johnny could make out Rooster’s blood-limned knuckles. He wondered how much of Rooster’s blood had been spilled that night, if he knew how reckless it was to start a fight. He was a brutal son of a bitch. He would go down swinging.
But Johnny didn’t go back with Rooster. He couldn’t do it anymore—watch the people in his life drop like birds shot from a branch. Rooster slept on the bottom bunk, and in the morning he got into someone’s car and went back to New York, where he delivered his uncle’s sandwiches on his bike, fed the ducks in Central Park, and, for the first time, rode the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building and saw the city smoking all around him. When he got back to his apartment, Johnny was sitting on his bed, folding Rooster’s laundry. It had taken him a little less than a week.
Fourteen
Johnny told Jude that Army of One’s new singer had a bad case of mono, so he had to take the train down to New York to stay with Rooster and play a few dates with his old band. He wanted to show there were no hard feelings. This was fine by Jude. With Johnny gone, they could go after Tory Ventura without his interference. Tory couldn’t stay out of town forever—graduation was coming up.
So Jude was left to lead the growing Vermont crew—the old metalhead friends of Kram and Delph who used to gather on Queen Bea’s porch, the skaters Jude had seen smoking in front of the mall. There was Big Ben and Little Ben. There was the Korean kid, Matthew Stein, in the grade above Jude, who wore a caramel-colored hoodie summer or winter. There were two or three freshmen Jude had known in school, and twin brothers who trailed behind them on their matching BMX bikes, fingers cut off of their racing gloves. They couldn’t have been more than thirteen. They’d been found outside the middle school one day while skipping class, eyeing Les’s old van as if waiting to be kidnapped. They climbed into the back, bikes and all.
They’d arrive at Jude’s in clumps after school, sometimes greeting Harriet or Prudence at the door, clambering down the steps to the basement. They’d sit in the school chairs and listen to the Green Mountain Boys practice, thumb through records, mine the quarts of hummus Jude had his mother buy, pen the outline for a future tattoo with a Sharpie marker. The morning after the show at the rec center, Johnny had taken one look at Jude’s tattoo and said, “That’s awful DIY of you.”
Everyone had a job. Jude strung the phone down the basement steps and made long-distance calls to remote time zones, booking hardcore bands to play at the rec center on their summer tours. Delph was talking to a guy he knew in New Jersey about how to start his own label. You just needed five hundred bucks (always five hundred bucks!) and you could send a demo off for pressing. Kram was printing T-shirts with the iron-on logo Johnny had designed, and Little Ben, who was on the newspaper staff at school, oversaw the zine. Someone was on the typewriter; someone was on pasteup on the floor; someone was on research and fact-checking; someone was on the phone, interviewing. Matthew inked the flyers for the next show, then headed to the A&P’s Xerox machine with a sock full of quarters, then led a team to the streets to post them.
DIY was Jude’s middle name.
There was no induction ceremony, no melding of spit and blood. Those who tattooed themselves did it with no pressure from Jude or anyone else. The only thing they had to give was their word—no drinking, no smoking, no drugs. Extra credit for no fucking or flesh eating.
“I heard going out with girls is okay, just no sex.”
“I heard sex was okay, just not promiscuous sex.”
“What about making out?” one of the twins asked.
“Look, you want to feel up girls,” Jude said, “no one’s stopping you. Just don’t come hanging around here. You can’t contribute when you’re thinking