Angry Black White Boy (14 page)

Macon loved knowing the codes; he had studied graff history assiduously from afar, read everything he could get his hands on before he’d ever boosted a spray can. His adrenal glands splayed open as the older heads on the subway station benches handed down the folklore: stories of how writers had taken over New York City, juiced by the prospect of outlaw fame and the double impulse to decorate and decimate a place that had pushed people who looked like them to the margins of existence. Middle-class straphangers commuting in from Jersey and Long Island had been horrified by the secret conversations taking place on public property, the thought that insane black/Latino vandals were beating the city, hiding and striking like ninjas, Zorro to their corrupt Spanish colonizing force, mastering the subterrain and sneaking in and out of train yards and eluding cops and dogs and deadly electrified third rails to rock their shit.

The politicians found it a convenient code. The Mayor’s Office declared a War on Graffiti, which sounded nicer than a War on Young People of Color, and beefed up yard security. The city removed perfectly functional trains from the tracks until they could be cleaned, and encouraged the good citizens of the five boroughs to rat out writers and reclaim their neighborhoods and transit lines. They forced captured writers to destroy their own work, jailed and fined them, tried to demoralize them by repainting whole subway lines at once, erasing thousands of pieces.

All of it backfired. Writers met and networked while cleaning cars, formed new alliances and traded information. The clean trains solved the dilemma of artistic overcrowding, and ushered in a golden age as masters competed to cover the new spaces with burners. It took New York City almost twenty years to win the war—from the early seventies to 1988, when the deadly chemical buff finally eradicated all train art with pure robotic precision. And even then, it was a Pyhrric victory, because graffiti had gone worldwide and cats in Copenhagen and Berlin and Johannesburg, not to mention in every town and hamlet of the United Snakes, had picked up on the vibe, studied the New York masters, and started painting burners of their own. Graffiti proved to be the element of hip hop culture that translated best; kids across the globe could understand graff’s twin cultural pillars of resistance and self-representation. Even on the home front, it was hip hop’s most integrated art form, the only one with a tradition of white innovators: Billy 167 and Smith and Sane and Zephyr.

Hall of Famers like Drum and Blade and Phase 2 and T Kid 170 and Lee and Seen got superstar welcomes from writers worldwide, showed up and vitalized the local scenes. In New York, fresh generations of artists hit up handball courts and walls, and later freight trains, and stubborn, nostalgic old-schoolers kept right on hitting subway cars, knowing full well that their work would never leave the yards and would only be seen by other writers, ghosts, and transit cops. It was sad and elegant and noble, Macon thought, reminded him in some vague way of elephants marching to the graveyard. The dignity and genius of graffiti always made him shiver if he thought about it long enough. The fact that plenty of rank-and-file black and brown people—their neighborhoods doubly bombed by aerosol and urban decay—had hated graff as much as the mayor did only made Macon feel more special, for understanding what they’d failed to.

He stared at Drum’s doorbell and wondered what came next. He could wait, but for all Macon knew, Drum was out rocking a mural in Senegal, or informing a breathless delegation of Australian graff nerds that he, and not Kid Panama, had been the first to paint the flying eyeball character.

Street bombing, Macon mused, clouds drifting through his mind. The medium is the message. . . . Clouds massing, growing darker. Take it to the people. Flash. Thunderclap. Brainstorm.

He flipped open Nique’s cell phone and called home. Andre picked up and Macon told him to get the word out: Nueva York’s favorite alleged criminal slash race theorist slash now-and-again poet will be giving a free public reading tonight on some ol’ grassroots rock-the-boulevard shit.

“He will?” asked Andre.

“Old school, baby. Can y’all find me a soapbox?”

“I don’t think soap comes in boxes anymore, dude. What about snipers?”

“They don’t come in boxes, either.” Macon heard Nique shouting in the background, then a muffled argument. Then Nique was on the phone.

“I’m feeling you, Moves. Some underground messiah shit. We’ll hook it up so only the media and the truly down will be there. I’ll do some real selective publicity, hold it to like a hundred heads. NYU, Columbia, a couple little hip hop activist chat rooms . . . Hell yeah. Have cats standing in the pouring rain to hear you. Where you want to do this?”

“One Two Fifth and Lenox, right where Malcolm used to preach.”

“Perfect.”

Chapter Four

Macon sidled through the early-bird crowd, hat pushed low and
got to wear your sunglasses so you can feel cool.
But he didn’t. An hour earlier he’d had to corral himself against the bulletproof impulse to walk amongst his teeming enemies, and now weaving through a crowd gathered on his behalf scared Macon numb. He clenched his teeth and prayed for a few more minutes’ anonymity, a chance to gather up his cool before they clamored at him. Eyes downcast and slicing left-right-left as he navigated the umbrellas, Macon recognized his homeboys by their footwear and grabbed Nique’s elbow from behind.

Nique whirled with caffeine reflexes, then smiled. “Damn, Big Time, look at you. Incognegro like a mug.” Macon glanced around, dreading the recognition that might come at any clock-tick. A hundred people? Shiiit. Three times that were huddled underneath umbrellas, rain bouncing syncopated on black, white, and blue vinyl. The whole northern side of the block was crammed solid with folks; the occasional unaffiliated pedestrian had to cross the street just to get by. Television trucks bookended the crowd, parked against either curb. Stage lights threw heavy beams across the area and baked the masses in their raingear. Visibility was fifteen feet, and a strange hush hung weighty; Macon had the bizarre realization that this was the quietest he’d ever seen three hundred folks outside a place of worship or a movie house. Anticipation simmered and mumbled, but the stage lights and the rain, the heat and wetness, had wilted conversation down to nearly nothing.

Andre’s massive black umbrella domed the three of them in privacy. “This is fifteen phone calls and two chat-room postings,” Nique confided with glee. He pushed his sweatshirt sleeves to his elbows, and Macon watched the steam rise from his skin.

Andre rolled his eyes. “Of course, Yolanda Prince was first. She’s Dominique’s new girlfriend.”

“Yolanda’s a hell of a reporter,” said Nique, flicking a sidelong glance at a cluster of NYU girls smoking cigarettes, “with her fine ass.” Macon followed Nique’s gaze, then snapped his head away as he made inadvertent contact with a white girl in a baby-blue jacket, neck open to reveal a gold name-chain that matched her hoop earrings, each one the circumference of a coffee cup. Her eyes jumped and she whispered to her friends.

“I haven’t even told you the best part,” Nique began, then stopped and jabbed his chin as if to say,
Look behind you.
The Franchise turned to find the baby-blue girl poised to tap him on the shoulder. Before he could speak, she leaned forward and pecked his cheek, leaving a dark red imprint on Macon’s face and blotting the lipstick left on her own grill down to a matte. She rested one hand on her jutting hip and gestured with the other, sending several bangles clattering up her arm.

“I been, like, watching you on the news, man,” she said, pointing a three-inch fingernail at him. A Latina inflection tinged her words and bent her
L
s. “And my family is like, ‘Who is this asshole?’ but I feel you. For real. I told all my girls, ‘You need to listen to what he’s saying because he’s telling the truth.’ ” Macon squeezed her hand, half-listening, and wondered if she’d set off a ripple, broken the seal; was a line forming? The combination of his distaste at the thought of interacting with his fans and the false intimacy of the hand squeeze—where had that shit come from?— made Macon feel like a hack politician.

“I appreciate that,” was the best he could do, weak and low-spoken. He knew it wasn’t what he should have said, who he should have been, by the slight dulling of homegirl’s eyes. The refracted failure slapped him in the face and Macon’s spine straightened; his mind perked into new alertness. The shittiness of missing like that, failing to connect, overrode Macon’s reticence and
boom
: He had his game face on.

The girl was doing her best fade away. “I’m gonna let you do your thing,” she said, twisting to look over her shoulder and locate her crew. “I just wanted to say hello.”

She gave his hand a little good-bye squeeze, and Macon responded with a hold-on-a-second tug and said, “Hey.” She looked up, surprised, and found his eyes sizzling; a smile like sunrise blazed across his face, and she grinned back. She loves me again, Macon found himself thinking, delighted. I’m such an idiot, he rhapsodized. “Listen, thanks for coming,” was his benediction. She beamed at him and slipped away, demure and happy. Macon slid back beneath the safety of the umbrella, reinvigorated.

“Question,” he said to Andre.

“Shoot.”

“Why is it that white b-boys try to act black and white b-girls try to act Puerto Rican?”

Before Andre could posit a theory, a stocky white kid in a matched-set PNB Nation sweatshirt and baseball cap muscled up into the cipher out of nowhere. “Yo, son,” he said, voice straining to function in the octave at which he had submerged it, and gave enthusiastic pounds all round, ignoring the who-is-this-fool browbeats they threw him in return. He hunched in close, as if he were outlining a play, and out of habit Macon, Andre, and Nique pricked up their ears and bowed their heads, eyes trained solemnly on the circle of pavement between their eight shoes as they waited for the jewels of wisdom to drop from the dude’s goatee-encircled mouth.

“You keeping it mad real, na’mean?” His face was taut with earnestness. “Yo, people wanna hate, you know what I’m sayin’, but you just gotta keep ya head up, na’mean? No justice, no peace. Power to the people. You don’t vote, you don’t count. No more Chernobyls. Tawana told the truth. Free Mumia. Free the Chicago Seven. Save the whales. It’ll be a great day when our schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber. Rock the vote. Chevrolet: We build excitement. One love, dog.” He tapped his chest with an open palm, then hit Macon’s with the back of his hand. “I got your back, dog. Stay up. Harambe. Peace and blessings. I’m out.”

“A’ight,” said Nique, bobbing his head. The kid bobbed back, gave Nique a forceful, finger-snap-release pound, and stood nodding in rhythm at the ground, showing no signs of being out. Nique decided to ignore him, and turned to Macon.

“So anyway,” he said.

“Hi, Andre!” called Amy Green. They turned to face a Columbia BSU squad rolling twenty deep. Ms. Green stood beneath a two-handled Kinte-striped umbrella held for her by a pair of twin freshman two-guards. She air-kissed Andre three times, left-right-left, squeezing his shoulders with her palms to hold him in place so she could properly execute the Continental maneuver. “Thanks so much for the invite.” She grinned at Macon and offered her hand. “And you,” she said.

Macon waited for her to finish her sentence, then realized she was being fabulous. “Did you tell Macon what we talked about?” she asked Andre, fluttering thick eyelashes over wide Japanimation eyes until Macon swore he could feel a light breeze on his cheeks.

Flustered, Andre looked at the BSU troops massed behind her. “It’s like this,” he said to Macon.

“Well, I’m here now,” snapped Amy, charm-school finish falling to the pavement like a chrysalis. “I can tell him myself.” She cocked her head toward Macon and the smile reappeared. Andre retreated half a pace and wondered what it was about Amy that made him want to impale himself for failing her.

“Columbia is auditing us,” she said. “They know you got arrested at our meeting, and they think you gave the BSU the money from the—”

Nique, in the middle of a new conversation but standing back-to-back with Macon and monitoring this one, turned his head and interjected. “Alleged money.”

“Alleged money,” repeated Amy. “From the alleged robberies. So now they’re looking into our financial records, which means they’re going to find out that we’re insolvent because nobody came to Karen’s stupid Come As Your Favorite Broadway Character dance last spring. We need money, Macon. And as I was telling your roommate”—she ushered him back into grace with a smile, and Andre bounded to her side and backed her with a steady head nod, feeling like a Pip—“it would really help us out if you’d be our Black History Month speaker. You’re a major draw.”

Macon’s grin felt huge even to him. “I’d love to,” he said.

“Wonderful.” She nodded to her umbrella bearers, and lifted a thumb-and-pinkie telephone to her ear. “I’ll give you a bell.”

The Tourettic, high-end jerking of synthesized horn stabs, whistles, and sirens cut short further political pleasantries, and three-hundred-plus heads whirled to see a neon-green-streaked van pull to the curb, quivering with earthquake bass.

“They’re here,” Nique enthused, turning to throw an arm around The Franchise. Macon scowled at him, refusing to shape the obvious question into words. “I been trying to tell you, dude.
Rebel Yells
is doing a segment on you. International exposure.” He smiled with self-satisfaction and presented a fist for Macon to boom. “Who’s your boy, Moves?”

“Are you kidding me? The MTV show that interviews pretty-boy actors about nuclear proliferation and then acts like mufuckers are radicals? That tails junkie rockers and pretends their tantrums are political?”

“They do some real shit, too. Your boy KRS been on there.”

“It was him, Reese Witherspoon, and Iman talking about organic farming, Nique.”

“Well, they’re here for the Macon Detornay Show today, so get ready to freak some shit. I’ll introduce you.”

The van door slid open and the music blared out in concentric circles, pushing back the crowd. A fortyish technician wearing a Pantera T-shirt poked his shaggy head out and took quick stock of the audience, then disappeared inside. The techno cut off, and the boho boom-bip of A Tribe Called Quest’s second album, awash in mellow horn loops, silky live bass lines, and abstract poetics, replaced it at a lower decibel. A good choice, Macon had to admit. It was a perennial progressive favorite, an album white college kids bumped in their dorm rooms, feeling hip, included, unthreatened, and hard-rocks acknowledged as a classic, a beat fiend’s uncut fix. Musical crossover without compromise, something neophytes and old-schoolers alike could dig. An album that, when it dropped in ’91, made even novice listeners self-righteous and indignant about the other directions the music was taking. My First Album and This Is What Hip Hop Should Be wrapped into one.

Eight young women, outfitted for spring break in Miami, bounced from a second vehicle. They surrounded the music van and squealed with wholesome sexy delight, shaking ass and tits to the music, whipping manes of hair back and forth over their shoulders and smiling invitations to the hoodied-down default-position-surly
I don’t wanna see no dancin’ / I’m sick of that shit / Listen to
the hit
nine-decca stalwart b-folks, who looked at them and then each other and then patted their breast pockets on this-shit’s-too-bugged bluntquests.

So that’s where girls like that come from, thought Andre. Crates of beverages appeared along the dancing girl circle’s perimeter, and the crowd edged forward suspiciously to squint at the proffered refreshments. Andre craned his neck to read the flowing script air-brushed on the van’s side:
When a Rebel Gets Thirsty, a Rebel Yells
Fruitopia.

“A toast,” Nique said, returning from the front with three bottles of Revolutionary Raspberry Iced Tea and distributing them to his cohorts. “To The Franchise. The baddest whiteboy going. Personally, I still think you’re full of shit, but hell, go ’head and keep proving me wrong. Let’s take it to the stage.” He bent the bottle skyward and gulped the sugary contents until his Adam’s apple piston-pumped.

“I’ll drink to that,” said Andre quickly, hoping his roommate would let it go and knowing there was no way.

“Full of shit how?” Macon inquired.

“In all the usual fake-martyr, last-ferry-to-the-mainland ways. Don’t take it as a dis, though, dog. It’s more of a disclaimer.”

Macon pursed his lips so hard they whitened. “Fair enough.” For all his rhetoric, he tired easily of black people’s skepticism; by now, he expected to be off the hook. “Maybe I am. But here’s to showing and proving.” Andre exhaled relief.

Macon took a nip of iced tea and felt it dribble down his throat, dissolving patience. “All right,” he said, “let’s do this thing.”

“They’ve got some kind of soundstage by the vans, it looks like,” Andre observed, standing on tiptoe. A wolf pack of dudes had formed around the dancers, hands pocketed and backpack zipper-strings swaying.

“Fuck a soundstage,” said Macon. “This is my show, not theirs. People can turn around, shut up, and listen.”

Nique shrugged. “Keep it rugged, I guess.” He took a deep breath and cupped his hands into a makeshift bullhorn. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he bellowed, “children of all ages.” A few dudes half-turned to look at him, without unplanting their feet. “Turn off the fucking music!” Nique yelled, and moments later it faded out. The dancers retreated to their van, donned sweatshirts, and left the doors open to listen. The crowd reshuffled to face Nique, who dropped his hands and paced a little figure eight as he spoke, marking off some territory. Macon, sensing that he’d have to make an entrance of some kind, receded back into the fringes and stood with Andre, the umbrella low enough to shield his face. The rain had eased into a drizzle.

“I’m about to bring on Macon Detornay,” Nique hollered, drawing claps, whoo-hoos, and whistles from the crowd. He swung his arms, long-striding, bright-voiced. “And I know y’all want to see my man. Right?” The backpacked masses validated the assumption with more noise. A lifetime of viewership had versed them in the tropes of hype-man theatricality; like every audience everywhere, they knew what was expected of them.

“We got some ground rules for y’all first, though,” continued Nique, scanning the crowd on tiptoe when he hit the far curves of his eight. “Cuz this a poetry reading, yunno? It ain’t a press conference, a rally, or none of that shit. There’ll be a time for all those things, too, but we out here tonight to check out my man’s artistic side, and we out here on the street because this is all about the people, you know what I’m sayin’, coming together and grabbing ourselves some public space instead of paying to be up in some wack-ass club.” He paused, and the crowd took its cue and clapped.