Ten Thousand Saints

I had barely heard of "Straight Edge" before reading Ten Thousand Saints, which is set in the late '80s. A sub-genre of the punk movement, straight edge kids rebelled in the opposite direction--they swore off drugs, cigarettes, drinking, and sometimes even meat and sex. Eleanor Henderson uses a handful of teenagers to create a world, divided between the Lower East Side of New York and a thinly-veiled Burlington, Vermont, that is ground zero in the straight edge community, as well as a portrait of the connection between parents and children.

The story begins with two sixteen-year-olds, Jude and Teddy. Both are taking all sorts of drugs, from pot to huffing turpentine. It is New Year's Eve 1987, and they meet Eliza, who is Jude's father's girlfriend's daughter, who is up from New York. They all go to a party and she hooks up with Teddy in a bathroom, his first time. Teddy will ingest cocaine and die before the night is over, after huffing air conditioning coolant. Eliza is carrying his child.

She wants to keep the child, and ends up enlisting Johnny, Teddy's half-brother, to act as father and marry her. Johnny is a punk musician, tattoo artist, and local straight edge legend. He is also gay, and secretly has an affair with his bandmate, who has AIDS.

"Now that the scene was exploding in New York, everyone had started to look the same--kids from Westchester and Connecticut loitering on the sidewalk in front of CB's, sporting the band t-shirts they'd brought the previous weekend, looking for drunk kids to beat up." So writes Anderson about the scene around Tompkins Square Park, where squatters will eventually be forced out in police riot. I knew nothing about this scene, remembering walking down St. Mark's Place and looking at punks as if they were zoo animals, but she brings it to life and helps me understand the raw excitement of the time period.

Jude goes from drug freak to straight edge, much to the amusement of his father, who is a pot dealer. His mother, back in Vermont, makes glass bongs. In some ways, though he he may have fetal alcohol syndrome (he is adopted), Jude matures faster than his parents do. The father, Les, is a fun character, the kind of father you might wish you had, who gives you the best dope, and is there when you need to go to the hospital, but is emotionally retarded.

Eliza's mother, a British ballet dancer, tries to find her daughter in hopes of getting her to give up the baby, but the little family eludes her. A few references are made to S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, and there is a sense that these kids are taking care of themselves in a parentless world, as the boys in that book are: "They liked to conceive of their situation in terms they were familiar with. Punk bands, musicals, young adult novels. Jude and Johnny were the Greasers fleeing the Socs, and Eliza was Cherry Valance, the girl from the right side of the tracks. They were the Runaways, betrayed by their parents, only they'd stitched their way into and out of so many states it was hard to keep track of which one they were running from."

Anderson's prose is butter, going down easily. It's so good that only after putting the book down for awhile does one realize this is just a very well-written Afterschool Special, with a lot more drugs. Structuring a book about a dead teen and his unborn child isn't exactly breaking ground, but setting in the relatively unmined world of punk in the 1980s is.

I also appreciated the fear of girls that is exhibited by the boys in the novel, or should I say men, as Jude's father doesn't fear women, but he certainly doesn't understand them. From Jude's perspective: "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."

Even if you don't care for punk rock or drug abuse, read for amazing paragraphs like this one: "At the Texaco station on Grammer Streeet, the only gas station in Lintonburg open in the middle of the night, two cars sat in the parking lot, and one of them was a shit-colored Camaro with a Black Flag bumper sticker and a Pizza Hut dome on the roof."