had co-opted the symbol. “You don’t want us to drink? Fuck you, we don’t want to drink anyway!”
“How long’s this going to last?” Jude asked. He held up his hands, making two fists.
“Long as you want it to,” Johnny said.
In the fall, CBGB & OMFUG had banned Youth of Today, Gorilla Biscuits, and Side By Side for stage diving, a legendary show according to Johnny, but Army of One was still allowed to play. The place was dark and small and packed with bodies and Johnny strolled onto the stage as though he were not a person who appeared in fanzines pasted up by fourteen-year-olds in their tighty whities in Albany, Cleveland, and L.A. He strolled out with Rooster and the rest of the guys and, midstride, without a word of introduction, began convulsing. There seemed to be a malfunction with the sound system, a tape in fast-forward, a ribbon of feedback. Then the guitar started up, and the nuclear explosion of drums, and Jude realized that the sound he’d heard was Johnny’s voice. He was not having a seizure but singing. Not singing but vomiting a ceaseless torrent of small, sharp objects—nails, needles, gears, batteries, Hot Wheels, pennies—which came clanking out as though they’d been swallowed.
The shrooms had been a bad idea.
They used to hunt for them, Teddy and Jude, on the farms along Dairy Road, leaving their bikes in the ditch and crawling on hands and knees through the dark. Maybe a cow pie would be flung, maybe a cow would be tipped. Maybe they’d eat a handful right there in the grass, like hunter-gatherers, and trip on the stars, and go or not go to class the next morning.
So when the guy approached Jude at the edge of Tompkins that afternoon, selling not some sidewalk-cooked chemical compound but Mother Earth’s gold-flecked mushrooms, Jude had bought a bag and eaten two right there, popping them like Twinkies. It was his exception to his father’s rule—an exercise in reminiscence. Still, Johnny had promised to take him to his show today, and then to the temple in Brooklyn. If he knew he was on something, he’d leave his ass at home. As they walked together to CB’s, Jude had tried hard to straighten the bending buildings, to calm the breathing trees. He was good at nothing if not faking sobriety.
But now, safe inside the club, there was no reason to fight the trip anymore. No one was looking at anyone but Johnny. The stage wasn’t a stage but a knee-high platform, and Jude was drawn to it, as if tied to a rope. Was it fame? The band was glowing. It was the yellow lights, the vibration of the speakers through the concrete floor, but it was also just the band, it was Johnny, the loops in his ears shining like real gold. It wasn’t fame. Famous people were untouchable, unknowable. Jude could see the pores glistening on Johnny’s scalp. It was unfame, the opposite of fame—he was touchable and entirely knowable, he was memorizable, like a sister or a dog. Jude fought through the field of bouncing bodies. A dance had started up in front of the stage, a boisterous, good-natured ritual that involved hurling one’s body, like a sack of flour, at other bodies. Arms windmilled, shoes flew. Everything within an inch of stage diving. Jude was close enough to the band to feel the radiance of their sweat, their spit.
He found himself in the middle of things. Or he put himself there. He jumped, and his body remained in the air for several hours before he landed on somebody’s shoulder. He was half helped up, half shoved away. He spun sideways into another wall of people, his chin smashing against someone’s tattooed head, his sweat-soaked T-shirt sealed to someone else’s back. Not one of them was a girl. One girl, or two. Some dude, passed above their heads, fell on him. The rubber heel of a sneaker came first. For a second, he stood on Jude’s arm, climbing down him like a ladder. Then there was Johnny—was the show over, or just his set?—helping them both to their feet.
“Steady!” Johnny called. Or had Jude only read his lips? He couldn’t hear him. Johnny mouthed something else, smiling sadly, and then was sucked back into the crowd. The words formed a silent space in Jude’s empty head.
Steady!
Teddy!
He felt suddenly that he was in hell. It was wonderful. The room was black and close and singed with the forbidden,