Ten Thousand Saints (15 page)

“This place is a shoe box,” said Jude.

Les looked up. “It is indeed, but it’s a rent-controlled shoe box. Got it years ago from a lady friend who went back to her husband. Left me the apartment and a cat. It died.”

“Was it the lady friend you got pregnant and left your family for?”

Les took a deep hit—he used a barbecue lighter to light the bowl—and savored the smoke for a moment. He was wearing a long, twill nightshirt, steel blue with white piping at the collar and sleeves, and a pair of ancient leather slippers. Also his Yankees cap. So long ago had his father confided in him, so silent was his family on the subject of Les’s betrayal, that Jude was no longer sure he hadn’t made it up. At some point he had learned, perhaps through osmosis, that Ingrid Donahoe, who had salvaged her own marriage, had ended up having an abortion.

“It was not. It was another lady friend, after. Before I met the lady friend I have now. Come down and join me.”

Jude climbed down from the loft, every muscle still sore. He took a seat beside his father on top of a knit blanket and pillow. “You slept here last night?” Gratefully he took the bong and, with the barbecue lighter, fired it up. It had been a few days. It hit him hard.

“You can see why Eliza’s mother doesn’t spend much time here. It’s my master plan. If you’re going to bring a woman home, make it
her
home. That’s a good rule in general, but especially considering the size of this place. You okay?”

Jude was coughing like an amateur.

“Am I making you nervous with the girl talk? Listen, you’re going to see a lot more girls with that new haircut of yours.”

“You like it?” Jude rubbed his head, then his chin, a habit he’d picked up in the last thirty-six hours. He’d sprouted some bristle.

“No, I mean you’ll actually be able to
see
them, without all that hair in your eyes. Do you see the positive influence I’m having on you already? I thought your mother was going to kiss my feet when she saw you.”

“It wasn’t you. My hair was all”—he coughed again—“knotty.”

“Take it easy, champ.” Les gave Jude’s back a few slaps. “You haven’t tried reefer till you’ve tried Uncle Lester’s reefer. Do you know what today is?”

Jude took another hit. “Saturday?”

“Monday. The fifteenth. Distribution day.” He looked at the clock on the wall. “In exactly five minutes, my first guy will be here for a pickup. They come one by one. Six guys in six hours, twice a month, in and out, clean as can be. Don’t even have to leave the apartment.” He lit a cigarette. “This business is a science, like anything else. You have to have a schedule. You have to have rules. So, like us.”

“What?”

“This new arrangement. There’s some other matters to discuss.”

“Like what?”

“Like I snore. I move my bowels from six-fifteen to six-thirty-five every morning. And I own a handgun.”

“Does it shoot?”

“That’s what they do, champ. It’s in a case under the kitchen sink. A thirty-eight special. I call it McQueen. Don’t touch it unless I tell you to, in which case it’s loaded, so watch out.”

“Why would you tell me to?”

Les gave an I-know-nothing shrug. “Also, there’s the matter of a curfew.”

“Great,” said Jude, but when he thought about it, his brain stretching the word, softening it—was his dad’s shit that good?—it seemed a shiny fragment of adult vocabulary, somehow alluring. He’d never had a curfew before. Delph and Kram did. “When is it?”

Outside the window, a bird flickered on a tree branch. A bird in New York. All his life Jude had seen the same birds, and this one—he’d never seen it before. It was an amazement. When he thought about walking downstairs and outside into the daylight it was difficult to control his nerves. “Well,” Les said, “if you can demonstrate that you’re in possession of your faculties, if you return eventually from wherever it is you’re going, which proves you can remember where you live, if you’re wearing the same clothes you went out in, if you can continue to convince me,
Hey, Dad, I’m just a kid having fun, I drank a beer at the Centre Pub, or what have you, but I don’t have a knife sticking out of my stomach
—then I’m willing to forgo a curfew.”

“Did Mom say that was okay?”

Les stood, put out his cigarette, picked up the blanket, and began sloppily to fold it. “It doesn’t matter what your mother thinks. Look, I know she has serious concerns about you staying here. I can’t blame her. Would you help me with this thing?” Jude stood up and took two corners of the blanket. “Put it this way. If you don’t get into trouble, your mother doesn’t have to know about it. Now, we happen to have different definitions of trouble. Your mom wants me to be a rehab clinic for you, man, but come on, you’ve got a liking for this stuff I can dig.” Jude matched one of his corners to the other. “But I happen to have a classy operation here that could get screwed up overnight if, you know, Officer Friendly started sniffing around. Which means if I catch you stealing a candy bar, you’re going straight back to the Green Mountain State. Understand?” Like dancers, they stepped toward each other, the blanket dipping between them. Les took it, folded it in half, and stuffed it and the pillow inside the coffee table/chest.

Then he led Jude through the closet under the loft—through coats and dry-cleaning bags, his old dashiki—to a padlocked door. Jude never would have known it was there. “
Voilà,
” Les said, spinning the combination, and opened it onto another closet, walk-in size. The smell hit Jude like whiplash. He hadn’t smelled marijuana like this since his father’s greenhouse, and the memory of that place, mixed with the heavenly bouquet of free-flowing drugs, produced in him a strange quickening. The walls of the closet were lined with shelves, which were lined with plants, which were green and farmy and rich, their leaves crawling with flowers like lavender caterpillars, the sodium bulbs beaming lovingly upon them.

From behind them, muffled through the closet, the buzzer rang. “What’d I tell you?” Les said. He picked up one of the five-gallon buckets, then closed the door and locked it, and they shoved through the hanging clothes back out into the apartment. Les pressed the intercom button by the front door, and a voice said, “Trick or treat. It’s Davis.” Les buzzed him in, and a moment later, someone could be heard clunking up the stairs and then panting into the apartment, in a ski cap and a red leather jacket, trailing frosty air. He called Jude’s father
my man
and flashed a gold tooth when Les introduced him. Jude could count the number of black people he’d had a conversation with on one hand. There were two black kids at his high school in Vermont, and both of their parents were professors.

“I didn’t know you had a kid, man. He’s a little man himself.” Davis asked Jude what was hanging and said he looked like his dad. Les winked at Jude and said thanks. He said that Jude had come to stay with him to experience some of his world-famous Purple Haze.

“I was just going to tell Jude that this is the only stuff on the market worth smoking.” Les sat down on a kitchen stool. “Would you agree, Davis?”

Davis nodded heartily, resting a foot on the bucket of pot. “Premium stuff.”

“Jude got in a little trouble up north. Too much of a good thing, if you know what I mean.”

“I hear you.”

“What my thinking is, is the key to enjoying reefer is moderation. You know what I’m saying, Davis—you’re a moderate fellow, aren’t you?”

“You know I am, man.”

“You’re a smart guy,” Les said, crossing his legs, ankle to knee. “You’ve got a day job. Have I ever seen you on the steps next door with a needle in your arm?”

Davis said he hadn’t been over there in years.

“Let’s be realistic,” said Les. “A fifteen-year-old kid in New York—”

“Sixteen.”

“—he’s going to find some fruit if he wants it, no matter how much Mommy and Daddy say no. And when he does, you don’t want him getting shwag from some Joe in Tompkins.”

Davis admitted he used to buy from one of those guys. A guy who carried a grenade in the pocket of his trench coat.

“So I can’t tell my kid not to smoke reefer,” Les said. “But I can tell him not to smoke
other people’s
reefer.” One of his slippers was dangling from a white, veiny foot. “My stuff’s safe. It’s robust. It’s cut with nothing but love. And it won’t get you arrested or dead.”

“Is it free?” Jude asked, rubbing his head.

Davis laughed and started counting out his cash. “A smart-ass,” he said. “Like his pop.”

B
efore, when Jude had allowed himself to imagine the city of his birth, he’d pictured it the way he’d pictured faraway capitals like London or Berlin—wide gray sidewalks choked with adults in long coats, with leather briefcases and good haircuts, no children in sight. They might as well have spoken a foreign language. It was the New York he’d seen in the pages of a social studies textbook—a woman with a mild-mannered Afro waiting for a bus, smiling at her newspaper. In the caption was the word
commute
.

In the stories that had been passed from Johnny to Teddy to Jude, fun in New York came in pockets—an underground tattoo parlor, a bar fight with nunchucks. The hardware of Jude’s and Teddy’s fantasies all surrounded a shadowy, borderless colony called the Lower East Side, the graffitied place where kids zipped by on their skateboards, too fast to see. Jude had known he wanted to find that place.

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 verse of the black stenciled warning
NO DRINKING, NO SMOKING, NO POT SMOKING
. He’d never seen anyone shoot up before. Often they fell asleep, their bare, mottled arms flung across the steps.