Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [99]
They stayed. They were scared of girls, anyway. Jude was handing them a get-out-of-sex-free card. I’m not ugly, I’m straight edge.
He was not so bold to think the same reasoning didn’t apply to him; he was as horny as they were. But he enjoyed the challenge of self-restraint. He enjoyed the exercise of it. It was the one straight edge department in which he trumped Johnny, who’d been the guru of abstinence until he started sleeping with pregnant Eliza. It was also a game of stamina Jude played against himself. He would count the number of days he could go without jerking off, and each time he broke down (often after Eliza, the only girl he really saw, went braless under her pajamas, or leaned down to reach something in the crisper), his consolation would be a new personal record to break. Wet dreams, a lamentable side effect of his discipline, didn’t count.
Bolstering this discipline were feelings of true nausea. If he had been intimidated by girls before he’d met Eliza, he was terrified of them now. The ease with which she had become impregnated—he had left them alone for an hour!—baffled him; it was as though, just by thinking about having sex with her, he’d willed her pregnant himself. Girls were incubators, they were ovens, they were uteruses. He could barely look at one without projecting a diagram of her reproductive organs over her clothes. He hated the associations that girls now engendered in him. He hated thinking about Harriet’s fallopian tubes. He hated thinking about the insides of his birth mother, a teenager herself. A vagina was a thing he had squeezed bloodily out of before being given away.
Not that he hadn’t daydreamed about being the father of Eliza’s baby. If he’d been the one who’d found her upstairs at the party that night. In his more desperate moments, it seemed as though this future had been stolen from him. He was the one she had come to see; it had been his birthday. He’d all but claimed her. And if he were the father, she would not have to face having the baby of someone she’d never know.
This fantasy rarely lasted long. Dreaming about being the father was like dreaming that Teddy’s baby didn’t exist, and no one had more reverence than Jude for the DNA Eliza was carrying. Quickly he would revise the dream so that it was Johnny’s place he took instead. It was Jude who had swooped in and married her, who was sharing hotel rooms with her, who would raise Teddy’s baby with her. Why hadn’t he thought of that himself?
Johnny chose a neighborhood he’d never set foot in before, in a borough as crumbling as his but anonymous. In the clinic-on-wheels, parked at the curb of a graffiti-faced church, he was Patient 9602. “For privacy,” the nurse said. Apparently he wasn’t the only one who didn’t want his name recorded in some manila folder. He leaned his head back against the miniblinds while the nurse sunk the needle into his arm. He felt sorry for the woman, who spent her days searching for veins that had not already been destroyed. “It’ll only hurt a little,” she said.
At Rooster’s place, Johnny took his kit and walked into the hall and dropped it down the trash chute. A moment later it crashed.
“What the fuck’d you do that for?”
“I’m done,” Johnny said, coming back into the apartment and lying on his back across the bed. The eight-headed dragon would have seven heads.
“It wasn’t your needles, John. But if it makes you feel better, if it makes you think I’m less of a scumbag, go ahead and think it.”
Rooster was the only person Johnny had been with, but it had been five years since Rooster had started cruising Central Park: 1983. “Why the fuck you think they call me Rooster?” he’d liked to joke back then. “I’m the cock that rules the roost, that’s why.” He’d quit cruising when he went straight edge, before he met Johnny, but who knew how many men there had been before him?
Of course it wasn’t Johnny’s needles. But he couldn’t ink another body. Not after this.
Rooster lay down beside him. What were they supposed to do