Rage Is Back (9781101606179) (9 page)

We all stared at it for a while. Some people claim they didn't get high the first time they smoked. I can't see how that's possible.

Yo
,
remember the zip drive?
K-Born turned to me.
One day, Reggie comes home from the Y and he's like “My boss said I could borrow this zip drive. Can you use it?” Keep in mind, this fool doesn't even own a computer. I said no. Then, two days later, he's like “My boss said I could keep it, you know anybody I could sell it to?”

See, man,
said Twenty-Twenty. He had this off-kilter, adenoidal voice, badly matched to his enormous head and regal mane.
That's that squeaky clean shit. If you boosted a zip drive from your job, just say, “Yo, I boosted a zip drive from my job.” If the lease is botched, just say, “yo, the lease is botched, y'all wanna stop paying and ride it out as long as we can?” Don't try to play me like one of your white girls.

Maybe he thought paying two thirds would keep them quiet
, I offered.

Maybe he's a pathological liar
, said Knowledge Born. He pressed a finger to the lease.
Look. The rent is eighty dollars more than he said. There's no angle to that.

He's gotta be out
, said Twenty-Twenty.
Whatever it takes
. K-Born nodded. Twenty-Twenty looked at me, and I guess I nodded too.

I don't know how I ended up with what might be the only copy of “The Truth,” the song they made using sampled snippets of the beatdown. Twenty-Twenty had a portable tape recorder running on the window ledge, so that whatever Reggie said he couldn't unsay. They laid the track the same day, before the blood on the lampshades was even dry.

I'm listening to it right now, on a Maxell cassette labeled in black marker. Part of me admires the fact that they turned an ugly thing like kicking a dude's ass and making him homeless into art, but it's some pretty ugly art. You can hear the rawness in their voices, the attempt to tell a story that hasn't yet been processed, the bravado layered over something rappers are supposed to pretend doesn't exist, maybe shame.

The song starts with Twenty-Twenty and Knowledge Born trading off, line for line. K sounds amped, like he took a quick time-out from the fight to drop a verse. Twenty-Twenty sounds exhausted.

You got treated like family

Uncannily, I got suspicious

The truth shall set you free

But if you lyin' we turn vicious

Extended, the benefit of the doubt

And heard you out

Your facts don't correlate

Grab your shit and fuckin' bounce

Before we go upside your head

to change your mindstate

When I find snakes

there's no mistake

I'll see you at the wake

I peeped the moves you made

Plus I know the girl you date

She told me everything . . .

That's how I know you fake

When Reggie came home, the three of us were waiting in the living room: Knowledge Born on the couch, a baseball bat stashed beneath him, Twenty-Twenty leaning on a metal cane he'd found in the back of the hall closet, and your boy tucked well out of the way, over by the fire escape.

Sit down
, Twenty-Twenty said, as scripted
. We need to talk.

Reggie parked himself on the futon.
What's up, fellas?

I called Verizon
, Twenty-Twenty said, hand on his hip.
There's no such thing as a reinstatement fee. You owe me sixty bucks
.

It wasn't a reinstatement fee, dude, it was the money we owed on the bill, plus they said they had to charge us for basic service in advance because we didn't pay
. Reggie looked around the room, then raised his voice a little, slapped his palms against his knees and bowed his arms out from his sides.
What, you think I tried to rip you off?

My heart was bucking, and if Reggie had so much as made eye contact I might have jumped out the fucking window, but it was interesting to see how fast he played the wounded-indignation card. I could see why it had been effective in the past, with people like Sue: it forced your hand, flushed any inner doubt up to the surface. And at the same time, there was a current of intimidation running below it, like
even a righteous man will rise up to defend his honor, and lest you forget I happen to be a large bearlike motherfucker.

The plan was to pick Reggie apart point by point, get him to cop to the small offenses before they raised the major stuff, but that opening statement killed Twenty-Twenty's patience. He dipped into his room while Reggie was trying to clarify the phone situation, came back with a stack of papers.

Call Verizon right now, man. Ask them if we—

Twenty-Twenty flicked the latest overdue notice into Reggie's lap.

You know what? Fuck the phone bill. Why are we eight thousand dollars in debt?

I gotta give Reggie credit. His face fell, but he picked it right back up and tried to turn the tables
.

What the fuck were you doing in my room?
he demanded, rising a few inches off the couch.

Knowledge Born sprang to his feet, bat in hand
. We about to get evicted! You better tell us something!

I can explain!
Reggie yelled, finally starting to appreciate the situation.

Explain, then
, from Twenty-Twenty. Reggie sputtered for a second, just long enough to not explain, and then Knowledge Born hit him in the shoulder with an aluminum Louisville Slugger left over from some departed dynasty king's softball league of yore. Reggie doubled over, and Twenty-Twenty brought the cane down on his back.

They both backed off, and Knowledge Born yelled,
Why we getting evicted?
and Reggie, still doubled over, said
Fuck you, when's the last time you even paid rent?
and got hit again.

I'll give them this: they kept it civilized. Two on one, with weapons, you could easily kill a man. Nobody hit him in the head except once, accidentally, ten minutes in, after countless starts and stops and fruitless demands. Reggie was punch-drunk and leaning back against a wall while Knowledge Born shouted the same questions and swung the bat in the air to keep him at bay. For some reason, Reggie walked into the swing, and got clipped in the forehead. His eyes rolled back and he buckled at the knees, but even then, the dude never went down.

He never admitted anything either, except lying about that watercolor. Twenty-Twenty threw it at his feet during a lull,
Who painted this shit?
and he looked up, groggy-eyed from being beaten, and said Chynetta's name.

Getting him out of the apartment was harder than it should have been. At first, he kept trying to bolt for the door, but they weren't done and he couldn't get past. By the time they were ready to toss him, though, Reggie would not be moved:
This is
my
fuckin' house! You guys get out!
That was when Twenty-Twenty grabbed the butcher's knife. Reggie went wild when he saw it, lifting up his tattered shirt and yelling
You gonna fuckin' cut me, Twenty-Twenty? Huh? Go ahead then, fuckin' cut me!

Twenty-Twenty, in his goofy nasal voice, said,
Naw, man, I'm not gonna cut you, I'm gonna take your locks. You don't deserve them shits no more
, and for maybe the first time, some kind of fear jumped into Reggie's eyes. They wrestled him down, no easy feat, and yanked each and every last dread out of his dome, Knowledge Born yelling some crazy shit about the Sword of Justice all the while. Reggie was wrenching back and forth, bellowing
Take them! Take them all!,
and when they let him up, he took off running.

You know a man has pulled some foul shit in his life when you kick his ass and throw him bald and bleeding into the street, and the person he runs to calls you and instead of yelling
what the fuck!
she sighs and says,
What did Reggie do now?
That's what Christine, his ex-girl from up the block, inquired of Knowledge Born an hour later. He ran it down, and she asked if Reggie had cheated on her while they were together.
Hell yes, he did
. With that girl Barbara?
Among others
. And Christine gave him the boot, too.

Even now, I still expect to run into Reggie, or hear something, or get jumped on my way home and stomped to death. That was it, though. He never even came back for his clothes. Knowledge Born took over his room, and a guy named Roam the Wanderer, another rap star in the Sigma Phi constellation, filled the vacancy before the sun set. The leather couch was smeared with blood, so I moved to the futon. Twenty-Twenty gathered Reggie's locks into a Dutch Masters cigar box and left it on top of the refrigerator—whether deliberately or forgetfully I don't know, but it stayed there.

The next day I was back to school like Rodney motherfucking Dangerfield—school, and an algebra midterm I'd forgotten all about. I caught a dizzy spell halfway through, sat with my thumbknuckles pressed to my eyelids for five minutes, never quite recovered. Ended up with what your man George W. Bush would call a gentleman's C. A month before, it would have been my biggest problem. Biggest I'd admit, anyway.

I had another spell the next day, soon as I woke up. What was equilibrium, in a crib like that? I felt dizzy even when I wasn't, just from the combo-stench of blood and misjudgment hanging in the air. It was astonishing how quickly those guys turned a good thing, a rent-free life, into a hot mess. They saw it as an opportunity to concentrate full-time on their music—so far so good, right?—and to that end Knowledge Born quit his part-time bar-backing gig, and Twenty-Twenty one-upped him by canceling his already-theoretical job hunt. I never knew what Roam did; his primary skill appeared to be passing out in midsentence, with a lit blunt in hand or a fork frozen halfway to his mouth, and holding the pose through eight hours of slumber. Made me feel like I was in one of those movies where some asshole has the power to freeze time, waking up to that shit.

The studio never opened for business until nine or ten at night, when everybody was good and bent. I did my homework then, with the goal of falling asleep before they resumed their living room salon. The TV jabbered all day long, and K and Roam and Twenty stayed parked on the couches, talking over it, too broke to do anything else. They somehow managed to pull together six dollars for a nickel bag and two Optimos every few hours, but the process was rife with bad feelings and caustic remarks and compromise. It was like watching a Senate subcommittee debate a bill on C-SPAN, only with profanity and black people.

I anted up for smoke when I was asked, but that wasn't often, because nobody wanted to sponge off the mascot. You can't freeload when nobody's paying, so I no longer felt particularly indebted, either. I was torn between trying to stay unobtrusive—hard when your room's a futon—and this unspoken thing of wanting to be around K-Born and Twenty-Twenty all the time because we'd been through some fucked-up shit together and it needed talking through, or communal ignoring. I still hadn't been to visit my mother. I didn't even know which hospital she was in, because by the time I'd thought to ask, Reggie was gone. I pushed all that away—the new Karen, the new Billy—with a vehemence and a rigor that shocks and saddens me, when I look back at it now. At the time, I guess I called myself growing up.

A week later Twenty-Twenty pawned his eight-track, and the studio shut down for good. Knowledge Born was furious, whether he had a right to be or not, and the two of them nearly came to blows in the living room. The beef got drowned beneath a fifth of gin Roam sprang for, but by midnight Knowledge Born was two hours into a drunken talking jag, oblivious to the fact that nobody wanted to hear a word he had to say, and Twenty-Twenty walked across the room and knocked him out. Didn't utter a word, just swung that big right meathook, dropped him from the couch onto the rug. He was still there when I woke up the next morning. Everybody acted like it hadn't happened.

The three of them lasted another eleven months in there, ran the tab past thirty grand before E.B. Holding finally got it together and threw them out. What they lived on, how they ate, I don't know. I didn't visit. Twenty-Twenty bugged out when the eviction finally came—got drunk, broke back into the apartment the next night and smashed every window in the place with that same baseball bat. The cops showed up and hauled him off, with half the building watching. I have no idea where he and Roam and Knowledge Born are now.

As for my dizzy spells, they went away about a month after Karen came home, all on their own. Go fucking figure.

5

ll that history was pressing down on me with a particular weight the day Billy started talking, because my big morning activity had been appropriating Karen's prized chef's knife and sawing my father's locks down to a reasonable length. The pile of hair-ropes on the floor looked like a litter of newborn rodents, but as Twenty-Twenty had taught me and various Rastas real and pseudo had since reconfirmed—in particular my former herb-game boss, Jafakin'-ass Abraham Lazarus, and the posse of bobo yardie motherfuckers who spent their lives in his Crown Heights apartment watching cricket matches on cable and chanting down Babylon—severed locks were to be disposed of carefully, if at all.

A bluish twilight was creeping across the ceiling when I looked in on my father. He'd just put the finishing touches on a six-hour nap, and he was sitting up, rubbing his thumb against the blunt cross section of a dread. I'd clipped his nails and buzzed his beard a few days earlier and he hadn't even appeared to notice, so this seemed like a good sign.

“Billy,” I said, sitting on the bed's edge. He turned his head without dropping the lock, looked at me through the cracks between his fingers.

“You know who I am, right?”

He blinked.

“I'm Dondi, man. Your son.”

“Dondi,” he repeated. Whether it was awe or stupor that robbed him of inflection, I couldn't tell, didn't know him well enough to judge.

“How did you die?” he asked.

“How—what?”

“I killed myself,” my father whispered. “I did it with a rope.” His hand swept toward his neck and halted inches away, as if it were too sore to touch.

I'd forgotten his questions about hell, written them off as rhetoric or gibberish. Now, I realized they were neither.

“Listen, Billy. We're not dead. This isn't hell.”

He laughed, poked me in the arm like I had told a good one.

“It's not heaven, either.”

His face closed up.

“Follow me, here,” I said, not wanting to give Billy time to reflect on what he'd just lost. If you're under the impression that you're chilling in the afterlife, problem-free, lying on clean sheets and being groomed and waited on and drifting peacefully in and out of consciousness and then
blam! Uh-uh, pal, welcome back to earth,
that could kind of break you. Re-break you, whatever.

“You came to New York, alright? Dengue drove you to Mexico sixteen years ago, and I don't know what happened after that, but now you're home. I found you a few days ago, but you've been back longer. You were writing stuff in the tunnels. Do you remember that?”

He shook his head.

“What's the last thing you do remember?”

“Putting the rope around my neck.”

“So you don't know how you got to the States? Or how you wound up on the fifteenth floor of a building I just happened to be at?”

He swallowed, and then, ever so gingerly, touched the fingertips of his right hand to his throat, and winced. I realized I was asking the wrong questions.

“Why were you trying to kill yourself?”

Billy closed his eyes. After a moment, his hand moved from his throat to his forehead.

“Who's still alive?”

I knew what he meant. “Just Dengue and Cloud.”

“Bring them here.”

“Cloud's locked up. And Dengue's blind. He doesn't leave his house.”

Neither fact seemed to surprise. “So we'll go to him. You know where.”

“Of course. He's the guy I ask about you.”

Billy straightened, looked me in the eye. “And what does he say? What do you know?”

How do you answer that? How do you even try?

“What do I know? I know I grew up without a father. I know there was nobody here for me when—”

Billy cut me off, and not with a sob or an apology. “What about Bracken?”

It was unseasonably hot that day, every window open wide and saying
Aaaah
, and just then crazy-ass Rockwell, wandering the handball courts in the park across from our building, cawed his trademark salespitch. The most indiscreet dude in the history of illegal business, Rockwell distinguished himself from the competition by shouting “I got crack for sale” at the top of his lungs, like a human Mister Softee truck.

I used it as a chance to count to ten, the way they say you should when you feel anger welling up. Who
they
are, I don't know, but I'm glad I didn't buy their book, because that shit doesn't work at all.

“What
about
Bracken?”

“Is he still—is he powerful?”

“He's Transit president. Running for mayor.”

“Oh, God.” The back of Billy's skull thudded against the headboard. “Oh, Jesus Christ. Please, get me to Dengue right now.”

He reached for his pants. I went and brushed my teeth. Ten minutes later, we were on the train. It was the first time my old man and I had ever been out together without one of us carrying the other.

The ride was quiet—standoffish, I'm tempted to say, but a standoff takes two. Your boy here, I was trying to keep hold of my dignity: ask no questions if he had none for me, show no further emotion until Billy flashed some of his own.

Dengue buzzed us in, and by the time we reached his landing the Ambassador's body filled the doorframe, backlit by the glow of a reading lamp he must have turned on for our benefit. Glue fumes wafted down the hall. Normally, he'd have been more cautious about letting them escape.

“Billy motherfucking Rage,” Fever boomed, lifting a Wray & Nephew bottle in salute. “Welcome home, brother. Get over here and give me a hug.” Billy walked into his arms and disappeared, like an insect enveloped by a Venus flytrap.

I couldn't believe how easy it was, or how angry that made me. But if you look at anything for long enough, it gets complicated, becomes more than one thing. The hug stretched on, and the second thing revealed itself as fear, and I felt better. Dengue and my father did not want to let go because everything that followed this embrace would be harder and more painful. The questions and the answers, the ordeal of accounting for all that time.

Eventually they shuffled inside, elbows hooked around each other's necks. Dengue palmed my father's face, then flopped down on his throne.

“You look like shit, brother,” he said, resting the bottle on the windowsill and plunging his hands down the chair's various cleavages in search of errant glue tubes. “Now. Talk to me.” His hands reemerged empty, and he snatched up the rum. “K.D., get us some glasses. He's a prince, your son. Much respect to Wren for that. K.D., what a' gwan wi de ishen? You holding?”

“Yeah,” I said from the sink. Every vessel in the house was filthy. “But I'm not sure he should be smoking. Or drinking.”

Dengue reclined and spun the bottlecap back and forth in its grooves with his thumb, loosening and tightening. “Of course he should. Find some papers and roll up. None of your glass-dick hippie shit tonight. You in the presence of kings.” He grinned. “Billy Rage. What the fuck, nigga? What letter you wanna be?”

I bent to look at Billy through the space between the rangetop and the cabinets. It was clear he had no idea what the Ambassador was talking about.

“R.”

“No doubt.” Dengue heaved himself up and turned to face the industrial shelving unit lining the wall. He ran his hands over a dozen alphabet racers, reading the giant letterforms glued to each vehicle like b-boy braille, and stopped when he found
R
.

“I'll take . . .” The Ambassador's fingers fluttered. “
A
.” He placed the two cars on the ground and switched them on, then located their remote controls and tossed one at the couch.

“First one clockwise around the room wins. See if you can beat the blind man. Your son can't.”

Billy picked up the controller, fisted the lever, and pushed it forward. The
R
car's monster tires spun against the carpet and took off. Dengue's truck pursued. The Ambassador navigated by sound; the vehicles had a particular pitch when they were stuck, another while cruising close to the baseboards or the furniture, a third when they were marooned out in the middle of the floor.

Billy's face brightened with attention and delight as his racer careened around the room, slamming against Dengue's machine and dodging obstacles. For a minute, the two of them were twelve again. Younger, actually, since at twelve their playthings had already been giant steel monsters.

The
A
sideswiped the
R
, knocking it over, and Dengue, cackling, cruised to victory. I deposited three glasses on the coffeetable, which was a sheet of fiberglass laser-cut into the jagged shape of the wildstyle piece painted on it, and supported by three sawed-off portions of a parking meter leg. These things had once sold for mid-four figures, during the '90s graffiti-design renaissance—or had been on sale for that amount, anyway; who knows if anybody ever bought one. Dengue had traded for his. Owning it constituted legal proof of blindness.

The Ambassador splashed rum into and around the glasses. The toast went unspoken. We drank. Billy's eyes roved over Dengue's floor-to-ceiling collection of art, junk, ephemera. I wondered what he thought of it all, but that was low on the list of things I wondered.

Looking at Billy was like watching a steak thaw. I realized I should've brought him here right off the bat. It was Dengue who'd seen my father off, after all, not Karen. Served me right for being a fucking romantic.

I balanced a Les McCann album on my knees—I have perhaps failed to mention that Dengue was once known as DJ Fever Funk, and thus long winding snakes of LPs buttressed the stereo cabinet, with Count Machuki leaning against Count Basie and the Lafayette Afro Rock Band rubbing up on Millie Jackson—and began breaking apart a nugget of Blueberry Clusterfuck. Dengue sniffed the air and nodded approvingly, then turned to Billy.

“I want the whole story,” he said. “Everything, from the time you stepped out of my van to when you walked in here just now.”

Billy rolled his glass between his palms. He'd only nipped at the rum. “There's a lot I don't remember. I sent some letters, didn't I?”

“Yeah,” I said. “At first. You were working your way south. Said you wanted to get to the Amazon and see the rainforests. Last letter I'm aware of, you'd gotten there and you said the plants were sentient beings, and you were going to learn how to cure diseases and shit by communicating with their ‘higher energetic selves.'”

Billy nodded. “Their spirits.”

The way he said it, I knew sarcasm wasn't the appropriate response. But it was all I had. I grew up with my mother.

“How'd that work out?”

Billy placed his drink on the table. “It almost killed me. I thought it had. But . . . it was amazing.”

He dug into his pocket and pulled out the travel-pouch I'd cut off him at Patrick's, rolled thin. He unfurled it, dumped six of those cut-glass vials on the table, opened each and smelled the contents. Five went back into the pouch. The last he handed to me.

“Drip half on there. As evenly as possible.”

“Drip what where? In case y'all forgot, I don't see so goddamn good.”

“I can fix that,” Billy said.

“What, you learn optometry too?”

“I just need the right plants.”

“No shit?”

“Billy,” I said, “what am I dripping on the joint, and why?”

“It's an entheogenic resin made from the essences of four different plants cooked together. Plus my blood, and ash from burnt pieces of my hair. The recipe was given to me by a shaman who received it from a very wise tree called El Purga.”

Entheogenic
is a word you probably don't know, but I do because the shit is Greek, which is not to say that I'm smarter than you.
En
meaning in,
theo
meaning God. The god within. The ancients used it to compliment writers and artists so dope they seemed divinely inspired, like my boy Homer. We use it to mean a substance on which you will trip balls.

“And why?”

“Because I can't remember everything important, but the resin can. It will show you.”

You recall a few chapters back when I was popping all that junk about
skepticism is an admirable trait, but so is asking yourself if you're really such a fucking Master of the Universe that things might not be happening
blah blah blah, something about the duckbilled platypus? Well, that shit is difficult to put into practice when your father's talking about getting psychedelic cooking tips from a tree, even if you found his ass atop a magical staircase and consider yourself willing to entertain whatever.

I'm taking the time to acknowledge this out of respect for you, the reader, because I hate stories with fuzzy internal logic. Kids who've grown up on Harry Potter don't know any better, poor schmucks: the people in those books are constantly doing things that were impossible five minutes earlier. In a few years, you'll see. The Rowling generation's going to be the most fucked up yet. Whereas you could break into George Lucas's house right now, traipse into his study, and say, “Hey George, what exactly is a parsec?” and as soon as he finished taking his bong hit, he'd be able to explain. Probably before security arrived. Or take Tolkien: not only could J.R.R. have told you why they didn't just ride those giant fucking eagles straight into the heart of Mordor instead of walking, he'd have done so in High Elvish, or the Tongue of the Woodland Realm, your choice.