Rage Is Back (9781101606179) (13 page)

“Recognize,” said Billy. “Recognize and use. Against you.”

“That was when Bracken dropped into the tunnel. And lemme tell you, he grabbed that motherfucker's full attention. Fast. They liked each other. They
connected
. We saw this pulse of light, running over his body. I don't know for how long. A few seconds. And we were paralyzed. Not physically—”

“Maybe physically.”

“—but because there was nowhere to run. We were trapped between Bracken and the tunnel. And then suddenly the light, the pulse, left Bracken and jumped over to Amuse and lit him the fuck up. As if he had light bulbs inside. And Bracken made this awful noise—a howl that sounded like it was being dragged out of him. Then we heard the gunshots, and saw Amuse fall. Bracken shot him over and over—bam bam bam bam bam, until it was just the empty gun, clicking. And then everything went black again.”

“Tell him what happened next.” Billy was clutching at himself, squeezing his thighs, his biceps, rocking back and forth. I worried that this was more than he could handle, wondered how little it might take to push him back into dementia.

“Bracken started laughing. It wasn't much different from the howl, and it went on and on. If he knew we were there—”

“And he must have!”

“—he didn't give a shit. I don't know how long we huddled together on the ground, too scared to move. And numb—from the temperature, not just the fear. I swear to god, the tears froze on our faces it was so cold. Sabor was hyperventilating; he wanted to go over and pick up Amuse, but we wouldn't let him.”

Billy dug furiously at his scalp, fingers probing the space between two matted vines of hair. “Bracken just stood there, like an animal over his kill. Making that noise. Eventually we walked right past him, and climbed out of there.”

Dengue hunched forward, elbows on knees, and opened his milky, vacant eyes. “Shit was never the same, Dondi. Not just because we lost Amuse. We brushed up against something we were never meant to that night, and we've been fucked ever since.”

“The curse of the Immortal Five,” I said. I didn't believe or doubt it, wasn't ready to commit. The mere existence of answers where there'd only been emptiness had me teetering, off-balance, like the account possessed a physical weight. As if it were a dense, black marble lodged in my brain.

“You goddamn right,” Dengue grunted.

“We got cursed,” said Billy. “Bracken got blessed, if you can call it that. Every move he's made since—he's not acting alone. That thing's giving him juice.”

Dengue palmed his chin. “Shutting off those tunnels, it's gotta be some kind of power move—make sure nobody else can get to whatever's down there. We've gotta do something. Before that motherfucker ends up running the city. The country. The world.”

“That didn't go so well last time,” said Karen, from the carpet's edge. “Let's pretend for a minute that you're right and the source of Bracken's success
is
some mystical alliance with a demon—because scumbags and murderers never get ahead in politics on their own, right? Let's pretend Bracken didn't just shine a Maglite at Amuse, like I've been saying for eighteen years, and you guys really have been hoodooed by some evil spirit that made
you
go blind, and turned
you
into a fugitive—and an asshole, too, might as well blame it for that. If that's the case, then starting some shit when he's forgotten all about you would be pretty retarded, don't you think? Or are your lives not fucked up enough? You wanna end up dead or in jail like Andy and Sabor and Cloud? And what the hell you smiling at me like that for, Fever?”

“Because I know something you don't.”

“Oh yeah? What, how to catch a unicorn?”

The Ambassador interlaced his fingers behind his head. “Cloud comes home tomorrow.”

“Get the fuck outta here.”

“I'm dead-ass! Everything's coming together, you see what I'm talkin' 'bout? Me, Cloud, this nigga here, together we—”

“Dengue, stop.” Billy's palm shook as he lifted it to ward off Fever's words. “She's right. Look at us.” He glanced at me. “I just wanna get to know my son.”

Yeah, I know:
aaaawww
. Well, fuck you. I teared up when he said it, shocked us all. Anger is a hard thing, but it's brittle, too. And heavy. I'm not saying I shrugged off a whole life's worth right then and there like James Brown does that cape, but I was ready for easy, for the past to be the past, questions and answers be damned. For the father-son reconciliation montage, the leaf-blown Central Park stroll, the joyous old-haunt watering hole return, the manly basketball-court squeeze around the shoulders, all of it intercut with shots of Karen watching us depart from various windows and doorways and looking decreasingly skeptical until finally the musical score swells and she shakes her head like
oh, heck
, and beckons her man into a big ol' I-forgive-you hug and then you see the three of us cooking lasagna together, laughing our heads off. Then fade to black.

Or fade to Karen, faded off the herb, fading out of sight a quarter-hour later, claiming she had a date (almost certainly untrue) and encouraging me and Billy to spend this and subsequent nights somewhere other than her apartment, since she certainly didn't want to get in the way of all the father-son bonding on which he was so eager to embark. Cut to your boy's overloaded brain and body barking reminders that a state of altered consciousness is not the same as sleep, even if you've got your eyes closed, and shutting the fuck down. I dozed off to the sounds of Billy and Fever's conversation through the bedroom wall, pitched low and serious.

The next morning, I took my father to see his parents. I know I haven't said much about them. Truth is, I'm kind of a shitty grandson. But Joe and Dana are mad cool. I hadn't visited since before Karen threw me out, because I didn't want to put them in the awkward position of having to tell me I couldn't stay there. Although more likely, they'd have broken whatever no-safe-haven promise Karen had extracted from Dana—whom she referred to as her mother-in-law and spoke with at least weekly—and made up the guest room bed.

Even then, I'd have had to powwow at the kitchen table with Big Joe, let the old softie do his best hamfisted sweat-of-my-brow Irish hardass impression while I hung my head and pledged to get my act together, finish high school, go to college. I'd have had to sip chamomile with Dana on the living room couch, endure her cocked-head sympathy and try not to think about how many promising dusky-hued young fuck-ups she'd used her streetsmart-white-lady routine on before me, my mother included. Dana had been Karen's favorite painting teacher at Art and Design, the venerable guitar-strumming Ms. Weissman. Venerable even then, and still teaching now at sixty-nine. Hadn't taken to retirement any more than her husband had.

Joe was a union carpenter when Billy was growing up. In the early nineties he'd gotten hip to the game and started contracting—partnered up with money-men he met along the way whose ambition was to leave no neighborhood in Brooklyn, Harlem, even the Bronx affordable for anybody with a normal job, replace every fifty-cent bodega coffee in the five boroughs with a $4.35 iced mocha latte. He took sweat equity and made a boom-time killing. When I was nine, my grandparents sold their third-floor L.E.S. walkup (worth a grip by then itself) and copped a ninth-floor spread on 94th and West End Ave, where Dana began pretending she wasn't Jewish because the place was overrun with these rich, rabidly pro-Israel Members of the Tribe who voted Republican and made her sick. I take my iced mocha latte with a vanilla flavor shot, by the way, which balances the chocolate lovely.

It seemed wise to keep my father aboveground for now, so I splurged on a cab. For a guy who claimed he just wanted to get to know his son, Billy did a lot of silent window-staring as we crawled the West Side Highway. Sometimes he turned to look longer at a building, a billboard. I didn't ask why. He might've been remembering that the words BRACKEN KILLED AMUSE had once blared from the surface, or just trying to assimilate the current, iced mocha latte New York with the one he'd left behind. The one with neighborhoods where being vanilla-flavored could get you shot. Sorry. I forced that one, I know.

Billy piped up as we passed 50th. “There's nothing else I should know?”

“About
them
?” I said, all broad and italicized, but if he caught it he pretended otherwise, and I let it go. “I don't know. Just that they got old. They're pretty well off now, financially, but they're uncomfortable about it. Whenever the building hires a new doorman, Joe takes the guy aside and tells him, ‘When you see me coming, don't get up.'”

Billy ran his hands over his hair, trying to press it down. From a distance, he looked presentable—for a dreadlocked Caucasian, anyway. Up close, my chop job couldn't hide the neglect. There were still twigs and pebbles and shit trapped in there.

“We could hit a barbershop first. Get you a cut.”

His hands dropped to his lap, and Billy nodded. Then, remembering: “I have no money.”

“That's okay. I got you.”

His eyes flashed at me, grateful and ashamed, and we each looked out our windows. Strong wind on the water, little whitecaps. I appraised the distance to Jersey, thinking as I always did that it wasn't so far, that I could swim it if I had to. What circumstances might require me to fling myself into a frigid river strewn with imprudent mobsters was harder to determine. A plague of zombies, perhaps. Zombies hate water.

“You must've had money at some point,” I said, breaking my rule. “You made it back here. And got your hands on a lot of paint.”

Billy spoke around a thumbnail. “Wish I knew.”

He tapped the glass. “There used to be a hardware store right there. Eighty-third and Riverside. The owner was this old Cuban guy, Mr. Jimenez. He kept the back door unlocked for load-ins, so it was real easy to rack paint. Sabor figured it out. One day I walk out the back, and
bam
—Mr. Jimenez hits me in the face with a two-by-four.

“Sabor jets. I'm lying on the ground, blood's pouring from my nose. Mr. Jimenez freaks out. Can't believe what he's done. Thinks he's killed me. He starts yelling for his wife, and she comes down from their apartment with her daughter, and the three of them carry me to a couch in his office. He wants to hand himself over to the cops. I keep saying ‘no policía, no policía.'

“After a while, things calm down, and I nod out for a few minutes. When I wake up, Mr. Jimenez is flipping through my blackbook. It's full of outlines, train flicks, color lists—enough evidence to get me locked under the jail. I'm about to make a run for it when he looks up and says, ‘You are an artist. You are very good. You should not have to steal.' And he hires me and Sabor to paint a mural on his outside wall. We did it that weekend. The whole time we were painting, he kept coming out and patting us on the back and saying ‘No more graffitis for you boys. Only good, honest work, for money.'”

“You should have listened.” I rapped on the partition. “Hey, yo, excuse me. Right here is great, thanks.”

I'd spotted an old-fashioned barbershop pole, two doors in from the corner of 95th and West End. We passed through the cold, sunny glare of mid-morning Manhattan, then entered the talcum-powder-and-hot-metal warmth of what I quickly realized was the whitest barbershop in New York City.

I don't just mean that no black person had ever crossed the threshold in the three hundred and sixty-seven years they'd been in business, though I was certainly the first. Nor, when I say white, do I mean Polish, or Jewish, or Italian. This place was aggressively nonethnic, in the manner of a successful presidential candidate, or the state of Kansas. I suspected that the only haircuts they offered were The Senator, The Stockbroker, and The Yachtsman—the only difference between the three being the location of the part.

In each of the two barber's chairs sat a well-groomed sexagenarian frowning into the pages of the
New York Post
. The bell over the door clanged when we entered. They stopped frowning, raised their heads, and frowned again.

“Help you?” the bolder one inquired, looking at each of us in turn.

I jutted my chin at Billy, lowered myself into a cracked leather side chair. “Help him.”

One thing about these old crackerjacks, they never miss a beat. He was up in a flash, armpitting his paper and spinning the chair toward Billy. “Right this way, sir. Have a seat.” Voice smoother than a comb through Ronald Reagan's hair.

The place was musky with propriety; you walked in and suddenly understood that there were correct ways to do things, manly things like applying aftershave or buying cuff links. You didn't know any of the protocols, but these guys did, and that made them better than you in ways they were too genteel to point out. Your only comfort was the knowledge that when you left you'd be a coarse, blundering schmuck with a good haircut, and that would be a vast improvement. All this even though the place was a dump and no member of the ruling class would ever so much as housebreak a pedigreed hunting dog on the
Post
.

Billy clambered into the chair. The barber took a closer look, and experienced the first crisis of his entire life. It was over in three nanoseconds.

“Well. I don't see this every day.” He snapped a sheet so that it billowed perfectly over my father. “What shall I do?”

“Cut it off and burn it.”

A smile trickled toward his eyes. “I'll cut it off, anyway.”

He assembled his tools and went to work. Scissors. Straight razor. Clippers. It was slow going, hypnotic to watch, and this guy was the quietest member of his profession.

A man sitting in a barber's chair is a prisoner of sorts. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

Your boy here? Not a patient dude. Also, I tend to break whatever rules I set myself. Self-discipline's a problem.