Rage Is Back (9781101606179) (3 page)

Now, I'm high as shit here, keep in mind. As a matter of fact, from here on out, assume that unless otherwise specified, I'm probably high as shit. But in a charming, articulate way. Naturally, I assumed Patrick the square-ass stockbroker was trading in hyperbole, so I flipped open my cell phone and confirmed that yes, okay, I was running fifteen minutes behind, whatever, old Pat's more of a dick than I thought.

“Sorry, man,” I said. “Train was running weird.” Standard New Yorker excuse, totally unverifiable.

Patrick crossed his arms over his chest. “You fucking with me?”

That right there should have given me pause. The only time a stumpy white twenty-nine-year-old
Wall Street Journal
–reading spaz like Patrick will act even the slightest bit aggro toward a six-foot mocha teenager is when there's a formal hierarchy in place to back him. He'd have no problem loud-talking a waiter or cursing out the mailroom guy at work, but he won't say shit if he gets jostled on the subway, you know what I mean? The power structure that's had his back throughout his life isn't enough. He's gotta see it practically in writing.

I adjusted the strap of my bag, and spread my legs a little. “Why?” I said. “Do people fuck with you a lot, Patrick?”

He leaned forward without uncrossing his arms, and addressed me in the tone and speed of voice a junior high school teacher might use with her thickest student, about a week before giving up forever and applying to business school.

“Buddy. It's
Tuesday
. I called for a delivery on
Monday
.”

“Well, then,” I said, “one of us is crazy.”

I looked at my phone again, and goddamn if it wasn't the next day, and I wasn't twenty-four hours and fifteen minutes late. I had eight missed calls, too. Three from my boss, five from Karen.

Whatever was happening, I wasn't going to recruit Patrick to help me figure it out. “Wow,” I said, “I'm really sorry—I guess my phone is on the fritz. I just got the message an hour ago.” I ran a hand over my dome. “You still need?”

Patrick stared a second, then nodded. “Yeah, sure. Come in.”

I sold him his weed, and Patrick flipped the script and offered me a rip from the glass bong he kept on his coffeetable. Swear to God, if I ever get to be his age and pot paraphernalia is occupying a place of honor in my living room, punch me in the throat.

I had no desire to get further stoned, but there was the matter of precedent to consider, so I obliged. Ben Franklin or Hitler or somebody once said something to the effect of “if you want a man to like you, don't do him a favor, ask him to do you one.” And by the same token, I guess being a deranged, incompetent asshole had endeared me to Patrick.

I thanked him, hustled down the stairs, and checked my phone in the lobby. Still Tuesday. I turned around and started trudging back up, holding the cell in front of me like a compass. I'll say it again: fourteen flights is a lot of stairs. The moment I stepped across the top floor's threshold, my digital display flipped from
Tuesday, 5:50 PM
to
Wednesday, 5:50 PM,
and I threw up on Patrick's doormat.

Karen was livid when I got home. She'd called the hospitals, the morgue, even the police—and in our family, you don't involve the cops in anything, for anything. Before I got to Whoopty Whoo Ivy League We's A Comin' Academy and started kicking it with rich kids, I never even realized you
could
call the police, unless you were calling them
on
somebody.

There weren't a lot of plausible places I could have disappeared to for forty-eight hours without answering my phone, and me and Karen were on decent terms then—as close to trusting one another as we'd been since the cataclysmic autumn of 2000, when we'd sort of crossed paths on the road to adulthood, traveling in opposite directions with knives to our backs. If we had put that year behind us, it was by centimeters. Karen still kept her hospital bracelet on her nightstand. I never unlocked the door of our apartment without steeling myself to find my mother gone, and a neighbor I barely knew waiting for me in the living room.

So I told her the truth, which she did not for one second believe. I asked her when I'd ever lied, and offered to take her to the building right then and prove it, and Karen sucked her teeth and said she couldn't force me to tell her where I'd been, but if I was going to start pulling vanishing acts and talking crazy like my father, then I could go sleep on Dengue's floor like he had, or take my weak shit to 79th and Madison and see what kind of reception I got from the Uptown Girl's legendary parents, and was that clear?

It was. I went to my room, passed out, never brought it up again. That didn't stop Karen from treating me for the next month like the guy in the zombie movie who says he hasn't been infected, but he's lying. As if I might turn into Billy at any second, and she was going to pump me full of buckshot at the first clear sign.

That was a year ago. I hadn't come back to this building until Karen tossed me, but since then? Shit, I'd hoofed the stairs seven or eight times, skipped ten percent of my days. Gained nothing, and learned less. Wherever you go, there you are. It was an addiction without a high, just one more stupid thing I watched myself do again and again. You ever fast-forward through a movie, trying to skip past the boring parts or find some tits, and all of a sudden the credits are flying up the screen and you're like
damn, I played myself?

I banked past the elevator, flung open the stairwell door and started climbing. Maybe Karen was right, and I was turning into Billy. I wondered how I'd know. My actual memories don't amount to much, and they've been beat-matched and blended with everybody else's so many times that I've lost track of what's lived and what's received.

I only knew the dude for two years and change, and even before he left, Billy was a man of absences, the type of guy whose attention was thrilling because you could never take it for granted. I remember the glee I felt when he came home and scooped me up and airplaned me around the room, and the tantrums I threw every time he bounced. Or maybe I don't remember those things at all. I was about to say something regarding a sense of grim determination about him, a kind of permanent, distant fury, a perpetual thousand-yard-stare, but those are all ridiculous things for a toddler to notice unless he was born on leap year day, and I was not.

July 1, 1987, baby. 8:09
P.M
. Seven pounds and eight ounces of funkadelic soul. A Cancer, and don't think I don't know it. No fault of your boy's, but the night I was born was also the night everything started falling to shit. Karen's maternal fam is Trini, and apparently her grandma, rest in peace, had spent months cautioning the happy couple (not for long) against speaking the baby's name out loud when he was born, or remarking on his being cute or perfect or anything like that. Your first comments were supposed to be negative and misleading,
what an ugly girl,
because otherwise the various spirits would get jealous and have your 411 to boot and bam, start fucking with you. Maybe Rage and Wren should have taken that to heart. My mother's certainly mused on it a few times in the years since, joint in hand usually.

Three hours into my earthly existence, Billy went bombing, because that's what a fiend does. Triumph and tragedy are met identically. Boredom too. Something happens, or nothing happens, and you need a fix.

He kissed us both, left me snoozing the snooze of the innocent on my mother's chest, swung a backpack containing spraycans, a sketchbook, and some just-in-case bolt-cutters over his shoulder—yup, he brought it to the hospital; that was Billy's version of a maternity bag—and bullshitted his way past his parents and Karen's mom. He scooped Amuse, his ace, the Immortal Five's only other whiteboy, half-Jewish just like Billy, from the hospital lobby. The two of them rode the iron horse out to the Coney Island Yard, the city's biggest, and met up with Dengue, Cloud 9, and Sabor, the three of whom popped out from behind a work shed to surprise Billy with champagne, cigars, good wishes, and ten tabs of Donald Duck acid, two hits to a man. Billy took one. Faint stirrings of parental responsibility, perhaps. Amuse had three.

I was gonna do this as a footnote, but I think it's disrespectful to make a motherfucker rove his eyes all the way down to the bottom of the page and up again—plus, if the words matter, print them in a font I can read, you know? It occurs to me that a lot of people peeping this might already be like “Fuck that narcissistic, no-account asshole. Fuck him in his neck.” I'm not disagreeing. But: I didn't say Billy had to bullshit his way past Karen, did I? Naw. The Train Queen of Fort Greene was like “Have fun, kill it, I love you so much, save some of the Baby Blue Krylon.” Don't cry for Wren 209. At least, not yet. And also: the last twenty times somebody in your life gave birth, you found out about it by opening your inbox, right?
Mother and child are resting comfortably
, vital stats, kid's name (pretentious), one to three flicks?

Well, this was '87. What you call a mass email, my parents called hitting trains.

The Immortal Five unpacked their special-occasion stashes, out-of-production colors you had to trade for or hoard (or, if you were Cloud 9, spend a day boosting from dustcovered hardware stores in Virginia): Krylon Hot Raspberry and Aqua Turquoise and Icy Grape, Federal Safety Green and Sandalwood Tan Rustoleum, Bermuda Blue Red Devil. The lysergic diethylamide dissolved on tongues and swirled into bloodstreams, chased by the bubbly and then a couple six-packs of Bud tall-boys. Few sticks of weed to keep things copacetic. Toasts every few minutes, to me and Wren and fatherhood and family, as the squad lined up and commenced to bomb the living hell out of a lucky F train.

Billy rocked a wildstyle window-down whole car, KILROY DONDI VANCE, with the Cheech Wizard holding a bassinet next to the
K
, and then for dessert he caught a top-to-bottom: IT'S A BOY in silver blockbuster letters, with CAN'T BELIEVE IT—I'M A DAD! and 7 LBS 8 OZ and I LOVE YOU KAREN in True Blue script. Cloud and Dengue split the next car down and put up WREN 209 and HOT MAMA. Sabor, short on paint, helped with the fills, then bailed Amuse out on the IMMORTAL 5 ALIVE car he'd started before the tabs hit him full-on and he decided, googly-eyed, to sit down for a while and watch. On that much acid, the smallest sounds became a symphony; your senses were fizzing over, flowing into one another, and all you could do was breathe everything in. Especially since (who knew?) the rhythm of your own personal inhalation turned out to be the ordering principle of the entire universe.

Two tabs, though, was a time-tested burner-painting dosage, and for the next couple of hours the
pssht
and
clicka-clacka
of paintcans sufficed for conversation as Billy, Sabor, Dengue and Cloud got down. Amuse had the crew camera, and the few flicks that aren't of his thumbs—not on some
oops
shit, but because homeboy developed a profound interest in the delicate ovaline swirls of his fingerprints that night, and spent most of the roll trying to do them justice—provide excellent evidence in support of the argument that the Immortal Five, whether at the top of their collective game or fried out of their collective brain, were some of the illest motherfuckers in the history of the movement.

Naturally, there are any number of qualitative criteria by which to evaluate graff—how crisp are the cuts? how architecturally sound and imaginative the letterforms? how hot the color combos? does the shit flow?—but I don't give a fuck about all that. You either connect with art or you don't, right? Who cares why Nas is nicer than Jay-Z, or even why he's nice at all? He just is, so fucking enjoy it.

I once said as much to this woman who taught tenth grade art history at Whoopty Whoo Ivy League We's A Comin' Academy, accused her mid-slideshow of robbing me of my ability to dig art. She told me I'd dig it more if I knew why I was digging it, and I said that implied there was one proper way to dig something, or that hers was better than mine. I brought up this interview with Branford Marsalis I'd just seen on PBS, where the host says all this smart-sounding crap about why Branford's last album was a trio recording instead of the usual quartet, and Branford nods and nods, smirk plastered across his mug, then says “actually, what happened is that Kenny missed his plane,” and next thing I knew me and Ms. Art Appreciation were discussing the metaphor of the cave in Plato's
Republic
, me claiming I'd read it even though I hadn't rather than letting her slay me with the bullshit trick of citing something the other person doesn't know to win the argument. We went back and forth until the bell rang, and the upshot of it all was that I got an A for the course without doing diddly-squat to earn one, so in the end she recognized game and is okay in my book.

Four, five in the morning is every writer's favorite time. The city's as quiet as your apartment right after the refrigerator cycles down. Nobody's alive except you and your boys and your recently completed joints, voluptuous and razor-sharp, vibrating and bulging with the struggle of containing their own energy. You're backstage grinning at the newest-freshest, knowing that soon you'll be home asleep and the burners will roll out on their maiden voyage. Civilians will try to read the words and get lost in the style, while your name pops off the lips of those who know. The heightened alertness of the mission has smoothed itself down to a glossy pride, and you're enjoying your last few minutes with an oblivion-bound creation you're never gonna see up-close again. Maybe you're doing some touch-ups or taking a few tags on the insides, or passing a final roach. For sure, you're talking late night trash, trading lies and war stories, or else an early morning spasm of sincerity has gripped the crew, and love and loss and life and death are on the table.