Johnny told Jude that Army of One’s new singer had a bad case of mono, so he had to take the train down to New York to stay with Rooster and play a few dates with his old band. He wanted to show there were no hard feelings. This was fine by Jude. With Johnny gone, they could go after Tory Ventura without his interference. Tory couldn’t stay out of town forever—graduation was coming up.
So Jude was left to lead the growing Vermont crew—the old metalhead friends of Kram and Delph who used to gather on Queen Bea’s porch, the skaters Jude had seen smoking in front of the mall. There was Big Ben and Little Ben. There was the Korean kid, Matthew Stein, in the grade above Jude, who wore a caramel-colored hoodie summer or winter. There were two or three freshmen Jude had known in school, and twin brothers who trailed behind them on their matching BMX bikes, fingers cut off of their racing gloves. They couldn’t have been more than thirteen. They’d been found outside the middle school one day while skipping class, eyeing Les’s old van as if waiting to be kidnapped. They climbed into the back, bikes and all.
They’d arrive at Jude’s in clumps after school, sometimes greeting Harriet or Prudence at the door, clambering down the steps to the basement. They’d sit in the school chairs and listen to the Green Mountain Boys practice, thumb through records, mine the quarts of hummus Jude had his mother buy, pen the outline for a future tattoo with a Sharpie marker. The morning after the show at the rec center, Johnny had taken one look at Jude’s tattoo and said, “That’s awful DIY of you.”
Everyone had a job. Jude strung the phone down the basement steps and made long-distance calls to remote time zones, booking hardcore bands to play at the rec center on their summer tours. Delph was talking to a guy he knew in New Jersey about how to start his own label. You just needed five hundred bucks (always five hundred bucks!) and you could send a demo off for pressing. Kram was printing T-shirts with the iron-on logo Johnny had designed, and Little Ben, who was on the newspaper staff at school, oversaw the zine. Someone was on the typewriter; someone was on pasteup on the floor; someone was on research and fact-checking; someone was on the phone, interviewing. Matthew inked the flyers for the next show, then headed to the A&P’s Xerox machine with a sock full of quarters, then led a team to the streets to post them.
DIY was Jude’s middle name.
There was no induction ceremony, no melding of spit and blood. Those who tattooed themselves did it with no pressure from Jude or anyone else. The only thing they had to give was their word—no drinking, no smoking, no drugs. Extra credit for no fucking or flesh eating.
“I heard going out with girls is okay, just no sex.”
“I heard sex was okay, just not promiscuous sex.”
“What about making out?” one of the twins asked.
“Look, you want to feel up girls,” Jude said, “no one’s stopping you. Just don’t come hanging around here. You can’t contribute when you’re thinking about, like, whose skirt you’re going to get your hand under in homeroom.”
They stayed. They were scared of girls, anyway. Jude was handing them a get-out-of-sex-free card. I’m not ugly, I’m straight edge.
He was not so bold to think the same reasoning didn’t apply to him; he was as horny as they were. But he enjoyed the challenge of self-restraint. He enjoyed the exercise of it. It was the one straight edge department in which he trumped Johnny, who’d been the guru of abstinence until he started sleeping with pregnant Eliza. It was also a game of stamina Jude played against himself. He would count the number of days he could go without jerking off, and each time he broke down (often after Eliza, the only girl he really saw, went braless under her pajamas, or leaned down to reach something in the crisper), his consolation would be a new personal record to break. Wet dreams, a lamentable side effect of his discipline, didn’t count.
Bolstering this discipline were feelings of true nausea. If he had been intimidated by girls before he’d met Eliza, he was terrified of them now. The ease with which she had become impregnated—he had left them alone for an hour!—baffled him; it was as though, just by thinking about having sex with her, he’d willed her pregnant himself. Girls were incubators, they were ovens, they were uteruses. He could barely look at one without projecting a diagram of her reproductive organs over her clothes. He hated the associations that girls now engendered in him. He hated thinking about Harriet’s fallopian tubes. He hated thinking about the insides of his birth mother, a teenager herself. A vagina was a thing he had squeezed bloodily out of before being given away.
Not that he hadn’t daydreamed about being the father of Eliza’s baby. If he’d been the one who’d found her upstairs at the party that night. In his more desperate moments, it seemed as though this future had been stolen from him. He was the one she had come to see; it had been his birthday. He’d all but claimed her. And if he were the father, she would not have to face having the baby of someone she’d never know.
This fantasy rarely lasted long. Dreaming about being the father was like dreaming that Teddy’s baby didn’t exist, and no one had more reverence than Jude for the DNA Eliza was carrying. Quickly he would revise the dream so that it was Johnny’s place he took instead. It was Jude who had swooped in and married her, who was sharing hotel rooms with her, who would raise Teddy’s baby with her. Why hadn’t he thought of that himself?
Johnny chose a neighborhood he’d never set foot in before, in a borough as crumbling as his but anonymous. In the clinic-on-wheels, parked at the curb of a graffiti-faced church, he was Patient 9602. “For privacy,” the nurse said. Apparently he wasn’t the only one who didn’t want his name recorded in some manila folder. He leaned his head back against the miniblinds while the nurse sunk the needle into his arm. He felt sorry for the woman, who spent her days searching for veins that had not already been destroyed. “It’ll only hurt a little,” she said.
At Rooster’s place, Johnny took his kit and walked into the hall and dropped it down the trash chute. A moment later it crashed.
“What the fuck’d you do that for?”
“I’m done,” Johnny said, coming back into the apartment and lying on his back across the bed. The eight-headed dragon would have seven heads.
“It wasn’t your needles, John. But if it makes you feel better, if it makes you think I’m less of a scumbag, go ahead and think it.”
Rooster was the only person Johnny had been with, but it had been five years since Rooster had started cruising Central Park: 1983. “Why the fuck you think they call me Rooster?” he’d liked to joke back then. “I’m the cock that rules the roost, that’s why.” He’d quit cruising when he went straight edge, before he met Johnny, but who knew how many men there had been before him?
Of course it wasn’t Johnny’s needles. But he couldn’t ink another body. Not after this.
Rooster lay down beside him. What were they supposed to do now?
“The waitin’ is the worst. Once you get the results, at least you know one way or the other.” Of course, if the test was negative, Johnny would have to be retested in six months. He wouldn’t be out of the woods. “We were careful,” Rooster reminded him, and the past tense rang through the room.
The kids kept coming.
Jude smelled cigarettes on one guy’s breath and sent him home; another guy went with him, saying “Fuck this shit” and walking fast. But the next afternoon, two more came to take their places, skinny, zitted-up kids with Bert and Ernie eyebrows who’d heard from someone who’d heard from someone else that they played killer music here; could they sit in? With Johnny gone, Delph and Kram were instantly the elders; no one knew that they were new recruits, too, that they were still imploring their mothers to leave the carne out of the chili. To show up the other kids, they gave up dairy and eggs, too, scowling at boxes of cookies and crackers that contained sodium caseinate, dry milk powder, whey. “Don’t you know this shit shrinks your balls?” One by one, kids would sidle in and say, “Eaten nothing but plants for three days, man!” And they’d get noogies and ass-slaps from Jude and Delph and Kram, more approval than they’d gotten all year for their mediocre performances as students and athletes and sons, and they’d come in the next day as though they had no other place to be.
And Jude’s contest of self-restraint went on. He gave up honey. He gave up Coke. Mouthwash. Processed sugar. His multivitamin, encased in gelatin. He went so many days without jerking off that he lost count. He worried that he might forget how to do it, as he might forget where Mario’s secret coins were hidden in the Mushroom Kingdom, but he was committed, those were the breaks. Sometimes, when he thought about the genius ridiculous fun he used to have with Teddy, or when he’d accidentally listen to a really good Black Flag song about getting fucked up, or when he’d come across one of his old hiding places (he actually found a little shwag in the toe of a pair of leather sneakers he was throwing out—what he would have done for that a few months ago!), he’d get a whiff of the old Jude, who’d say, What’s next, man? A Megalife T-shirt? But it didn’t take long to shake him off. “By the restraint of his senses,” said Johnny’s Laws of Manu, “he becomes fit for immortality.” He’d be lying if he said the Krishna stuff didn’t weird him out a little, but he did feel immortal, he felt fabulous, indestructible, he was a straight edge god. Flushing the shwag, he felt a rush of righteous adrenaline in his veins. So maybe he was addicted to the game itself. What was wrong with that? It was like being addicted to wheatgrass, or jogging.
And he could read. He read antivivisection newsletters and liner notes and even a few pages of Johnny’s Bhagavad Gita. On the back of the toilet was a stack of dog-eared, water-ruined zines, all of which Jude had read more than once. “Are you hooked on phonics, Judy?” asked Delph. It was still hard; he still struggled to align his letters; he still had to rest his eyes. But maybe he didn’t have dyslexia; maybe he didn’t even have FAS. Maybe he’d just been a burnout, and now his synapses were awakening after a long hibernation.
Meanwhile, the band practiced. Matthew filled in for Johnny on second guitar. On afternoons when Delph had to work, one of the twins played bass. By the middle of June, they had enough tracks for a seven-inch. They had at least twenty guys with their fists full of dollars, ready to buy it. Army of Four, they’d call it. An homage to Gang of Four and a nod to Army of One, but irresistible, said Jude, for a band named after one of the greatest military companies in history.
But they were broke.
“What are we waiting around for?” Kram said, working the bass pedal restlessly. Delph, too, wanted to get on the road, wanted to quit his job at the Record Room and haul ass out of Vermont. He was days away from graduation.
“We got to record the album before we can do a tour,” Jude said. He wanted to do it right, to save enough to record at Don Fury’s in New York, like Agnostic Front and Youth of Today. “Otherwise what are we going to sell at the shows?”
“We won’t have money for the album until we can sell some merch. And we can’t sell any merch till we go on the road.”
“What about your old man, Jude?” Kram asked. “He’s got dough.”
But Jude didn’t know where his dad was. In May, a child support check had been mailed from Las Vegas; a postcard had arrived a few weeks later, postmarked Tequila, Mexico, and written entirely in Spanish. The only word Jude recognized was señorita.
They could wait. They were booking more shows; they were gathering fans; they were picking up recruits off the street. They were out and about, in hiding no more. More than once, Jude had watched some hippie turn around in the street and change direction—duck down an alley, cut through a yard—when he saw their crew approaching, innocent as ice cream, out enjoying the spring day. That was the clout of the Green Mountain Boys. They were all the Green Mountain Boys now; the name had bled beyond the band to its crew of scouts, its brethren.
There had been a few situations. One midnight, they attempted to liberate a herd of cows from the confines of their pen on Dairy Road (the offspring of the cows they used to tip over in their sleep), but Delph’s thigh was impaled on a barbed wire fence. No cows were freed. Delph had to get six stitches. Another time, Little Ben had called with news of a neighborhood barbecue, and they’d gone over with piss-filled water guns, fired them over the fence onto a sizzling rack of ribs. Cops were called by the neighbors, but Little Ben was the only one who got in trouble, a slap on the wrist, and the attention only made him more faithful to the cause. And another night, as they patrolled University Avenue with their baseball bats, a Jeep Cherokee full of drunk frat boys had lunged at them, and if Kram hadn’t knocked out one of the headlights with his bat, they all could have been taken out at the knees. Since then, they’d tried to travel on skateboards, or to keep the van idling close by. More often than not, the Green Mountain Boys and their hodgepodge crew went unscathed, going out under cover of night, seeking out the small-town drunks and the stoners and doling out a temperate pounding, not threatening their lives but giving them something to remember in the morning.
Hippie had proved to be a problem no longer; word was that he now did business solely out of his apartment. Jude had heard stories about Boston crews following dealers into bathrooms, beating them up, flushing their drugs, and keeping their cash, but he didn’t know any other dealers to harass, now that his father was gone and Delph was transformed.
But to Jude, Hippie’s disappearing act was a promise. Sooner or later, his best customer would sniff them out. In the mall, on the street, Jude saw the fast-fingered mirage of Tory Ventura, snapping his belt from the loops of his Duck Heads. Jude’s heart was a crowing bird, a rooster before a rain. In his mother’s studio, where Tory had taken his bat to her work, where grains of glass still glittered on the floor like sand, he practiced taking a bat to the mattress that leaned against the wall. He swung until his arms ached.
If Teddy had been there, in the troposphere of Earth, in the spring of 1988, he’d have seen Lintonburg from above, hovering somewhere over the center of town, over the oblong bell tower of the cathedral, the streets a grid of budding green beneath him, bowing at the horizon with the gentle curvature of the globe. He’d see the uniformed figures on the baseball field, hear the snap of bats and the rustle of cleats on freshly shorn grass. At the high school, the final bell would be ringing, the kids gathering on the sidewalk, the golden buses slinking through the bus loop like the conjoined cars of a train set. Beneath a purple umbrella on Ash Street, Harriet would be minding her table, and Prudence would be drinking a wine cooler on Dena Jeffries’s back porch. From Jude’s basement, he’d hear the subterranean thump of the Bastards’ old bass drum.
By night the town goes black and gold, the lake a riot of waves woken from months beneath the ice. Across Main Street, an army of boys marches eastward. They’re hard to distinguish, clothed darkly against the dark streets. Ronald Reagan in a JUST SAY NO T-shirt, Kram also in green, an I L♥VERMONT shirt he found at the Salvation Army. A crowbar, a spring billy, pepper spray, a couple of baseball bats. A striped sock filled with three rolls of quarters—city weapons they wield with the workmanlike purpose of New Englanders. They won’t use any of them but the BB gun, a relic Kram used to train on squirrels but now wouldn’t point at any animal but a person, and now reverbs off the blue-jeaned buttock of some guy no one knows the name of. He’s taking a leak behind the Dumpster of Wayne’s Billiards, so drunk he doesn’t seem to feel the impact, just falls over obligingly, heavy as a grandfather clock.