Rage Is Back (9781101606179) (4 page)

I don't know which it was. Dengue retains only flashes of that night. What Billy told Karen doesn't help—it's mystical, confused, impressionistic. There's nothing in his letters. And Cloud got an extra year tacked onto his grand larceny bid for the beating he threw a fellow inmate who asked him what really went down, legends aside.

This much is indisputable: if anybody had a bigger hard-on for graffiti than the writers, it was the NYPD's Vandal Squad. They were almost like writers themselves. They stayed up on who was hot, read wildstyles the average person could never decipher. They took train flicks, even brought cans to the yards and crossed out people they particularly hated. They wanted fame as bad as any new-jack thirteen-year-old, and they got it. Everybody knew Curly and Ferrari from Queens, Ski and Hickey from the Bronx, Tom and Jerry from Manhattan. Writers made reps by putting in work, inventing style, hitting five hundred cars in six months, splashing color through the city's hardened arteries. For cops, it was busting heads and taking down prize bucks.

Most times you got popped, it happened after the fact. The police sat in their car, watched you sneak in and out of the yard. They caught up with you later, at a bar or in front of your building, tapped you on the shoulder just when you thought you'd gotten away with it but before you'd scrubbed the paint off your hands. They knew better than to match speed and wits with kids who, if they didn't outrun you and vanish through some escape-hatch you and your partner never even knew about, might very well turn around and knock your fat twelve-sandwich-eating ass the fuck out. A lot of distinctions blurred in the yards; a badge didn't shine as bright there. The boys in blue only invaded in pursuit of big game, and always in big numbers.

And so it is written that on July 2, 1987, at approximately the asscrack of dawn, fifteen po-pos rode down on the Immortal Five, with Officer Anastacio Bracken, the biggest asshole in the history of cops and robbers, leading the charge.

Surprise, niggers.

Due diligence is never getting so fucked up that you can't run. It's never entering a yard without having an emergency route mapped, plus a backup and a place to hide. Coney Isle was the I5's living room; all that was second nature, even on a double-dose of Donald Duck, and they played it by the books.

Billy heard the footfalls first, lots of them, pigs on the creep but coming fast. He shouted a warning, grabbed Amuse by the armpits, hoisted him onto his Pumas. A heartbeat later, the Immortal Five was in the wind. Billy and Amuse sprinted north, toward a ladder leading to a street grate a hundred yards inside a tunnel. Sabor and Dengue ran south, weaving between rows of trains, doubling back toward the entrance the cops had used and knowing that if it was blocked they could hide behind the work shed, or lay low underneath a car. Cloud 9, who loved paint as much as any writer dead or alive, wasted thirty seconds dumping cans into a pair of paper shopping bags, then shimmied up the side of a car and hauled ass eastward, leaping from the roof of one train to the next.

All good ideas, but not tonight. When Billy reached the ladder, he looked up and saw two cops smiling down at him, hands hipped,
hello sweetheart
. Sabor and Dengue couldn't get clear either; the Vandal Squad was everywhere. They had to reverse course, head for the street grate themselves. Bracken went after Cloud, the two of them racing across the cars—Bracken knowing exactly who was in front of him and chugging along with a stiffy, no doubt, at the sight of Cloud's skinny black ass.

A gunshot pinged against metal, and everybody froze—even the cops, according to Fever. Bracken had actually squeezed off at Cloud, tried to pop him in the back. No fair, no fair, no fair. Rules of the game were they could beat you silly when they caught you, but to draw a gun was crazy. Everybody kinda-sorta knew Bracken was a little nuts, but no one appreciated the extent until that night.

The Immortal Five were among those with a claim to stake about making him that way. Bracken had arrested Amuse back in '79—no big deal from a legal standpoint, since Amuse was a minor, plus lucky enough to get bagged taking street tags. Tons of guys were active then, so a dorky fourteen-year-old Heeb with one spraycan in his possession meant nothing to Bracken. He never suspected Amuse had been ripping up the 2s and 5s for eighteen months—didn't even ask what he wrote, just smacked him around and brought him in. Pop goes the cherry.

Amuse never forgot his first time. He was a real late-breaker on the puberty tip, thickly bespectacled and kind of soft, having been under Cloud 9's considerable protection from jump. Amuse and Billy were junior crew members back then, high school classmates of Cloud's little brother Finster. Too talented to leave off the team, but not yet ready for Cloud, Dengue and Sabor to party with after an evening's bombing was complete.

Nobody had ever laid hands on Amuse before, probably, but more to the point was that Bracken had disrespected him by not knowing who he was. I also suspect that getting arrested was a badge of honor—some quintessential whiteboy shit, right there—and Amuse didn't want to let it go when the city cut him loose eight hours later, so he declared jihad on his arresting officer.

Going after the cops who were coming after you was a graff hobby, pen versus the sword and whatnot. You dedicated pieces to them on the catch-me-if-you-can tip, dissed them on the insides—OFFICER BRACKEN AMUSE FUCKED YOUR WIFE. EAT A DICK UP AND HICCUP ANASTACIO—brilliant, witty commentary like that. Amuse took it a giant step further, off the trains and into Bracken's neighborhood: covered Bay Ridge with BRACKEN RAPES BABIES
and the like. A year later, crazy angel-dusted Drum One caught Bracken asleep in his patrol car outside the Ghost Yard with the window down, woke him up and knocked him out. Robbed him for good measure, in one of the most celebrated incidents in aerosol history. The taunts became BRACKEN GOT HIS ASS KICKED and DEAR BRACKEN, WHERE'S YOUR BADGE? LOVE, AMUSE, and dude got upgraded from just another dickhead member of the Pork Patrol to a certified psychopath, tireless and hate-driven, a cop even other cops despised. A guy unhinged enough to shoot a kid in the back for vandalism.

He fired and missed and Cloud dropped flat, rolled off the car, hit the ground running. Bracken pulled up into a marksman's stance, feet planted, both hands wrapped around his revolver, and tracked Cloud through the narrow corridor between the trains.

More shots. Cloud sprinted for the mouth of the tunnel, shopping bags swinging from his fists and banging against his knees, and then blammo, Bracken put a hole through a can of Krylon Pastel Aqua and a geyser of depressurized paint exploded against Cloud's gut and he thought he'd been hit, started hyperventilating, couldn't understand how his legs still worked. By the time he figured out that human blood is not the color of swimming pool water, an adrenaline-fueled burst of speed had carried him out of Bracken's range, and all five Immortals were in the tunnel.

The only thing to do was keep going. See who gave up first, hope not to get hit by a train in the meantime, pray there wasn't a second unit waiting at the next station. They could hear Bracken charging after, calling out their names so that they'd know he knew. Up ahead was blackness, utter and engulfing, the kind in which you can't tell if your eyes are closed or open. Far scarier than actual blindness, according to Dengue, who would know.

If you've ever been on acid, you know that the last place you want to be on three fat tabs is trapped inside a sensory-deprivation chamber with your heavily armed worst enemy afoot and an indiscernible number of rough hands yanking at you while strange, breathless voices demand you run for your life.

Amuse lost his shit. He wrenched away, screaming, throwing wild punches through the air, catching Cloud in the stomach and freaking when he felt the sticky wetness. They tried to orient him,
Amuse
,
it's us, we're your friends, come on, we gotta go
. More flailing and incomprehension and the crunch-and-slap of cop boots coming closer, the crazed black tragicomedy of four sightless men trying to corral a fifth. Amuse had assigned his boys new paranoid-delusional identities by now; they were demons or goblins or who-knows-what. He started trying to bite them.

“You cocksuckers got five seconds to stop running, then I swear to Christ I'm emptying my clip.”

That's an actual quote, according to Dengue, and this is where the frame would freeze and the voiceover would begin if The Death of Amuse were a Hollywood movie: Bracken with his gun cocked, snarling; Sabor, Billy, Cloud and Dengue pushing Amuse forward like he was the flagpole and they were those Iwo Jima motherfuckers. And . . . fade to white. I would say something like
This is where the story starts to come apart
.

Dengue might or might not have banged his toes against a hard flat metal edge, reached down and felt around and pulled a manhole from its mooring and felt a gust of hot rank air. Maybe the I5 dropped into an unmapped chamber, twisting their ankles when they came down on the decayed pilings of a long-abandoned train line. Maybe Amuse landed on his feet, or maybe he landed wrong and cracked open his skull.

Maybe none of that happened and they kept running and Amuse broke free and scrambled the other way, straight into Bracken, and got shot in the chest. Or maybe the cop fired blind, and some grudge-bearing god grabbed his bullet like Aphrodite in the Trojan War and pulled it through Amuse's dome. Maybe Sabor found a door, and they hustled down a staircase to a lower tunnel and Bracken followed—with five other officers behind him, their names lost to history. Maybe the I5 decided to turn and rush the Vandal Squad, on some last-stand shit, and in the blind insanity Amuse drowned facedown in a puddle, or the stress and the hallucinations were too much and he busted a ventricle all on his own. Maybe the crew inhaled noxious trapped gasses in that lower chamber, passed out, and woke up four instead of five.

I'd heard all those versions, plus versions of those versions. Every graff vet had a different story, and Dengue's memories kept changing, or he forgot what lies he'd told me last and made up new ones. The notion of stumbling upon a lower tunnel came up enough that I figured there was truth to it, the way anthropologists know there really was some kind of catastrophic, ancient flood because every society's got one folded into its mythology.

Somehow, the Immortal Five-minus-One got clear and surfaced above ground. No record of how or when or where, not even a snarl of competing stories, just an infuriating and impenetrable
somehow
. Maybe they regrouped outside the yard, rancid with panic but still hoping Amuse would pop up magically unscathed,
hey guys, looking for me?
, and they'd all have a laugh, gloom and horror flash-melted, disbelief turned inside out. Maybe they propped each other up, each man refusing to let the next think the worst, and fanned out to their parents' apartments to wait in vain for his call, straining to imagine the jubilant escape story Amuse would whisper from inside his bedroom closet, or the jailhouse check-in he'd mumble through aching, swollen jaws.

I think they knew, though. Whatever happened and however they got free, I've always had the sense they saw and heard and felt him die. I see them sprawled across a curb, keening hysterically at the dawn sky, sucking down long shuddery drafts of air as if oxygen were comprehension. Staggering home numb and weak, vomiting on their own stoops, waking up in bed unable to remember how they got there.

The remains were “found” in the tunnel the next day, by Bracken. Amuse had been run over by a train—got high and passed out on the tracks, that was the story.
A tragic accident
, Bracken called it in the NYPD's press statement,
and a lesson to those who persist in glorifying a criminal activity and downplaying its risks.
Amuse was described as
a career vandal, wanted by police for inflicting hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of damage to MTA property.

It's practically a cliché now, cops killing writers. Happens in every graffiti movie, even that German one. The police are always evil incarnate, menacing the ragtag underdog crew from the margins and then showing up when the dramatic arc starts sagging and taking somebody out, accidentally-on-purpose. All the adolescent shenanigans screech to a halt and the remaining characters reevaluate their lives and either pay tribute to their fallen comrade with a major artistic accomplishment or decide to get out of the game and go legit.

In real life, motherfuckers just lose their minds and destroy everything around them.

When I was younger I used to fantasize about killing Bracken for what he did to Amuse—and by extension to Billy, to Dengue, to Karen, to me. I'd imagine everything from elaborate kidnap-and-torture scenarios to simple ruses where I'd pretend to be hurt or demented and get his guard down, then cast off my infirmity and pull a weapon. The last thing I always did before slitting his throat or click-clacking the rifle or pressing the trapdoor button was reveal my identity and watch his eyes register the knowledge that yes, this kid had every right to end his life.

I gave it up when I started high school, on a hunch that the guidance counselors at Whoopty Whoo Ivy League We's A Comin' Academy would consider Obsessively Plotting Filial Revenge a poor extracurricular activity. And also after staring myself down and admitting that I wasn't really that guy.

Instead, I started casting around for a way to grant Bracken and his porcine brethren some humanity, out of a desire to preserve my own. I mean, look: exterminators kill roaches. That's their job. To them, roaches are vermin. They need to get got. When the exterminators go home at night they aren't fretting about all the bugs they've gassed. They've got kids and wives—the exterminators, that is, although I guess the roaches too—and they drive them to swim meets and oboe lessons and tuck them into bed at night and all that.

You see what I'm getting at. Vandal Squad cops don't view writers as anything more than a problem to be solved, and if you can accept that they see it that way, and that they lack the imagination to see it any other, you can let them off the hook. Except, that argument would exonerate Nazi death camp guards, and also exterminators don't lie awake visualizing what they're gonna do to the roaches when they catch them, or circulating lists of the Top Five Most Wanted Insects among themselves so everybody can be on the same page, poised for the stomp-out.