them, looking through the window at the empty incubators, where he’d spent the first hours of his life. They were waiting for the next baby, maybe Eliza’s. Beside Jude, Di tapped her fingers on the glass and made grotesque faces at the babies, as if she were going to gobble them up or kidnap them on the spot. They paid her no attention. She’d been more relaxed since the annulment had come through and the Milans had dropped the adoption suit. In a single envelope, Ravi had returned the annulment forms with Johnny’s signature and wrote that he had decided, with his wife, to adopt a child from India. Whether he had had a change of heart on his own or with Johnny’s help, Jude could only guess. In another envelope, postmarked San Francisco, Eliza found a series of large, crisp bills, and a note, in Johnny’s elegant script, that read simply “For the baby.”
September, going on October. Jude was wearing the new Converse he bought with his dad’s back-to-school money. East Side Community High School, where he was actually reading The Outsiders in English II and had a D in biology for refusing to dissect a pig fetus. He went to an assembly on AIDS, skated the basketball court after school. Two of the guys had devil locks. There was a girl with a Black Flag T-shirt who sat next to him in world history, but he told her he had a girlfriend. He told her she was in Europe. When she got back, she’d be going to Emily Dickinson on the Upper West Side—that part was true. For lunch he went to San Loco with one of the guys from Army of One, who was a senior there, and it was from him that Jude learned Johnny and Rooster had taken a Greyhound to California to start a band and see what the scene was like out there.
It was early evening when the baby finally arrived. Eliza wanted Jude and her mother in the room. Even when the baby was out of her—not a girl but a boy, although this, too, Jude wouldn’t ever have the heart to tell her (dark-haired and terrified, testicles swollen as big as a peach)—she kept her eyes closed tight. She knew how easy it is to fall in love.
He wouldn’t tell her, either, about visiting the baby in the nursery, hours old and sleeping, Eliza’s blood still smudged on his skin. In a rocking chair, Jude accepted the bundle from the nurse, and despite himself, the first thing he did was hunt for evidence of the baby’s genes, the science project—blue and yellow make green—at which no one in the history of the world has ever failed to be amazed.
But the baby looked like no one, not his mother, not his father. If it weren’t for the bracelet cuffed around his inconceivably tiny wrist, he could have been mistaken for any other baby in the room, plucked up by any parent who walked by. For a moment, that possibility seemed within the natural order of things, and before it ended, Jude handed the boy back to the nurse.
October 11, 2006
The last show is technically on Sunday, with Patti Smith headlining, but for hardcore fans the night to say good-bye to CBGB is the last night the Bad Brains play, with Underdog and the Stimulators. It’s their third night in a row at CB’s, and you can tell. H.R. is singing with his hands in his pockets. He’s fifty fucking years old; he can sing with his hands in his pockets if he wants. Jude does his own hands-in-pockets sort of dance, though the kids are trying to stir up trouble in the pit. He’s still a skinhead, but only to hide his male pattern baldness.
The place seems no older than it ever did, still stuck together with gum and sweat. Security is there to make sure you don’t take a piece of history home with you, but there are a dozen cell phones raised like lighters, catching the video footage to be uploaded to the world in the morning. Just the kind of forced ceremony that Jude had expected, but he’s a dad now—it doesn’t take much for him to get emo.
Earlier, they walked the neighborhood, Jude’s wife carrying their daughter in her sling. Stomp is playing at the Orpheum on Second Avenue. The rehab center next to Les’s place has been converted into luxury condos, a St. Mark’s Market, a Chipotle,