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, and the CBGB OMFUG shop. A few doors down are Andy’s Chee-pees St. Mark’s and Search and Destroy, where the punk rock kids are paying fifty bucks for vintage Misfits T-shirts. Dressing like a punk doesn’t get your ass kicked anymore. The biggest miracle of all: children are playing in Tompkins Square Park. Nannies, jungle gyms. The band shell has been taken down, and there’s a dog run now. On the walk back to Les’s, they counted the tattoo and piercing parlors on his block. Eight. They joked about stopping to get the baby’s ears pierced—Jude’s wife has always wanted a baby girl with pierced ears—but they kept walking. They didn’t want to be late for the show. Les is babysitting tonight. It’s the first time he’s met his granddaughter, but he’s not the first to nickname her Red.
In Jude’s wife’s locket? A picture of Red, a picture of Jude.
Not a bad thing, for your daughter to be able to play in a park. But Jude’s glad Johnny isn’t here to see what’s happened to the neighborhood. Johnny would have something to say about the $19,000 rent that shut down CB’s. Johnny would start a riot. Part of Jude expects to see him here, sacrificing himself to the pit. Jude would know him if he saw him, just as well as he’d know Teddy. He misses them both in the same way, as though they are both gone to the same world.
“Do you see him?” his wife asks.
But it’s the kids’ show tonight. There are ten thousand Johnnys and ten thousand Judes, throwing themselves against one another to see what they can start.
“No,” he says. He doesn’t tell her who else he’s looking for, the boy who is eighteen now, older than Teddy ever was. The ink black hair, the eyelashes like the bristles of a paintbrush, the look like he’s got a secret up his sleeve. How old will Jude be when he stops looking for that boy in the crowd, at the supermarket, in the airport, wondering which gate he’s flying out of?
The show comes to an end. Feedback, applause, that ringing in the ears when voices rush in to fill the void. They linger outside for only a few minutes, waiting to see if something else will happen. Then they start on foot for St. Mark’s. The baby is asleep, waiting for them, and they have a flight to catch in the morning.