plant, the crinkle and weight of a plastic bag in the hand. Why the fuck had he said no? From his father, he already had a generous supply of marijuana, and money to buy whatever other vices he desired. He had only to decide what.
After a week in New York, bored and stoned and brave, he ventured eastward, toward the place he understood to be Alphabet City. Somewhere over here lived Johnny McNicholas. Wind whistled through empty windows. Bums lay mummified in doorways. When he paused to admire the two stone-faced buildings from the album cover of Physical Graffiti, two men across the street watched him from a set of steps. Jude kept walking, trying to keep his eyes down, noting the artifacts of the gutter. Cigarette butts. An island of snow impaled by a syringe. When he reached Tompkins Square Park, a square of land so unparklike, so like a cemetery of living dead, he turned immediately around. His dad’s block was scary enough.
“Where you going, amigo?”
The two men he’d passed before crossed the street toward him. One had his hands deep in the pockets of his coat, a posture that Jude was learning to fear. The other was sipping from a bottle in a brown bag and staring at Jude with a single, yellowy eye. The lid of the other was sealed like an envelope. Jude couldn’t help staring back. Before he could move, the first guy stepped up to him and patted him down. He dipped his hand into Jude’s jacket pocket, withdrew his Walkman, and, tugging at the wire, whipped the headphones off Jude’s head. From one of the back pockets of Jude’s jeans, he removed his wallet; from the other, a pack of cigarettes. The Misfits’ Walk Among Us was still playing distantly. The guy ejected the tape, glanced at it, and handed it back to Jude. “You can keep this,” he said and winked.
This little tango, from beginning to end, took no more than ten seconds, and the swift, shrewd incursion of another person’s body recalled the beery breath of Tory Ventura. But Tory wouldn’t have bothered to pat Jude down. Only later did it occur to him that the guy had been checking for a weapon.
He’d had the foresight to remove the picture of Teddy from his wallet, to hide it among his father’s books. Forty or fifty of his father’s dollars—money he would have blown on the temptations of St. Mark’s—was all that was stolen from him. Who did he have to tell about girls and drugs, anyway? Whatever Teddy could reply, from Les’s dusty shelf, would come with the narrow-eyed disapproval of the dead.
And Jude was glad for a reason to stay away from Alphabet City. What he wanted he couldn’t buy on the street, and even more than hookers and dealers and bad-ass, one-eyed Puerto Ricans, he feared Johnny McNicholas.
Keffy-Horn, you son of a bitch.”
Jude looked up from the screen, where he was pedaling diligently away from a swarm of bees. Johnny was standing at the edge of the sidewalk. A woman in a headscarf steered a shopping cart between them. When she passed, Jude’s mouth was hanging open, as though he should be the one surprised to find Johnny here, living and breathing on a street corner in New York. His cigarette fell to the street. He was high as the moon.
“Hey, Johnny, hey.”
Jude stepped off his skateboard and shielded his body with it. Johnny could see him taking in the tattoos through his thin white T-shirt. “What the fuck you doing here?” He put his hand on Jude’s shoulder and gave him an ambiguous little shake.
“I’m here. I’m here, I’m living with my dad now, yeah.”
“Here?”
“Across the street, yeah.” He pointed.
“I been there.” Johnny crossed his arms. “He was real good to me, your pop. He helped out.” Johnny was about to say Teddy’s name, but he stopped. Instead he said, “Did I say you could wear that jacket?”
Jude looked down at his body. The parka was reversible, army green on the outside, bright orange on the inside, fat and shiny as a sleeping bag. “It’s not . . . it’s mine. It’s not yours.”
Johnny had once bought an identical one at the Salvation Army in Lintonburg. The thought of that store, with the ceramic bowl of freebies at the counter—broaches and buttons and little bottles of half-used nail polish and eight tracks no one wanted—and the terrified look on the poor kid’s face, this kid from Teddy’s