Ten Thousand Saints Page 0,122
they watched another friend paint a train car in Harlem, a city of skyscrapers and lights and highways as intricate as any eight-headed dragon, then watched the police paint over it. They were starting to crack down now. Even in the month Johnny had been gone, the police had begun to multiply all over the city, lifting their rodent heads out of the manholes. You could hardly suck a token anymore.
On Thursday they walked to the West Village, where gay men strolled hand in hand, walking good-looking dogs, licking ice cream cones, wearing shirts or maybe not. Johnny felt that he knew his city, that New York belonged to him, but sometimes he skated into a neighborhood that felt like a foreign country. The gray calm of the Upper East Side, the flamboyant calm of the West Village—he was not certain he was comfortable with either of their customs. On Christopher Street—barely a mile away from Tompkins Square Park, the AIDS center of the city—it seemed possible to forget about spermicide and sterilized needles. Up in their clean, spacious bedrooms, surely men were dying here, too, but on the street it was like Candy Land for fags, all these gorgeous, healthy men snuggling up to their soul mates. Experimentally, Johnny let Rooster lean him up against someone else’s building and kiss him in front of the world, and in Rooster’s mouth Johnny tasted each flavor he’d eaten himself, painfully intensified. For a sun-blinding moment he was not Patient 9602. Then they walked back to Rooster’s.
Alphabet City, the Bowery, the Lower East Side, Loisaida—these were the places where Johnny belonged. In Alphabet City, there were shadows to hide in. Here you didn’t advertise being gay or straight or rich or poor; you just tried not to get your ass kicked. You just tried to get by. This attitude had been evident the past Saturday night, when the neighborhood of blacks, Puerto Ricans, Eastern Europeans, Italians, Jews, Yippies, skinheads, bohemians, anarchists, artists, musicians, squatters, gutter punks, junkies, and drunks gathered in Tompkins to unite with the homeless against the extravagant monolith of the Christadora House, the sky-high rents of the East Village, against the army of Mayor Koch. Keep Tompkins homeless! This was what Johnny loved about his home: its homelessness. Everyone was displaced, everyone was half-vagrant. $1500 Rent said the Missing Foundation’s graffiti, and the neighborhood said fuck that. The Missing Foundation were there on Saturday night, and Blind Jack and Froggy and Jones, kids on bongos, maracas, conch shells. Someone threw a bottle against a police van, and Jerry the Peddler got arrested, and the rest of the park’s residents were scattered about the Lower East Side, or who knew where.
As for Blind Jack’s friend Vinnie, he was dead of AIDS—he’d died in the park while Johnny was on the road, Rooster told him. “Jack tried to wake him up one morning, and he wouldn’t budge. Just lay himself down on the ground with a newspaper spread over his face, like he knew it was time.” Johnny would have expected Rooster to deliver this news with spite, to use it to turn the knife of guilt in Johnny’s gut, but he looked too frail to fight. And who else was there to blame, besides the city itself?
Johnny’s beloved slum was under attack, and already the neighborhood was planning a rematch for next weekend. Now these mutineers of the Lower East Side, the miscellaneous fuck-ups who’d had no one to prey on but one another, had come together to rage against something else. The curfew. They were as pure and as primal as teenagers revolting against their parents.
On Friday morning, Johnny knocked on Eliza’s bedroom door to tell her they had plans. He had made an appointment to see an apartment, and then another to see a doctor. He was wearing his linen jacket and a thin black tie.
“I was going to feed the ducks with Jude,” she said.
“Well, you’ll have to feed the ducks another time.”
In the bathroom, she brushed her teeth, put in her contacts, and put on her makeup. Usually Johnny’s plotting worried her, but she was more relieved than suspicious. She had a picture in her mind of the apartment—it was one of the pictures that she called on to put her to sleep. It would be necessarily small, but it had an eat-in kitchen with a window box of geraniums like Harriet’s, and an exposed brick wall, which she would paint white. Everything in the baby’s