Rage Is Back (9781101606179) (14 page)

“Yo. Billy.”

He tried to look over without moving his head.

“Did you ever think about me, all that time you were away? I mean, I know your life was hectic. But were you ever like, ‘Damn, Dondi is growing up without a father'?”

“I thought about you all the time.”

“Yeah? And how did you
think
I was doing?”

The barber threw me a glance, then pretended to mind his beeswax. Billy sighed, and stared out at the street. “I don't know.”

“Well, do you want to know? Because you could ask. That'd be a start.”

“Dengue told me some,” he said softly.

“Oh yeah? Like what? Because I'm sure Dengue's a
great
source. I'm sure he knows exactly what it was like for me.”

Billy turned, and nearly caught a scissor in the eye. “He said you tried to write my name.”

I wasn't expecting that—didn't even remember telling Dengue. It had happened on the heels of everything fucked up: Karen just back from the hospital, the ground trembling beneath our feet and fury swirling in the air as thick and green as flare smoke and me desperate for some kind of outlet. I bought a can of Rusto, went down to the Navy Yards. The name that came was his. I put up a lone tag, learned that my handskills were garbage, tossed the paint, and went home more confused than ever.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure, Billy. One time, just to see what it felt like. That's the most irrelevant shit Dengue possibly could have told you.” I was doubly heated now, and when he kept quiet, I kept going.

“You fucked us both up, man. Maybe you didn't mean to, but you did, and now you need to man up and face it.” I meant me and Karen, not me and him, but whatever, he could take it how it worked.

The barber hit the lever and spun the chair ninety degrees, in concession to our conversation. Then he resumed the business at hand, palmed Billy's head and pushed it down and kept on trimming,
ho-hum, just another morning at the ol' haircuttery
.

Billy looked at me over his brow. “I'm sorry, Dondi. I don't know what else to say.”

Something in me unclenched, hearing those words, but Billy didn't need to know it. I felt a tear oozing its way toward the duct and stopped that motherfucker cold, sheer force of will.

“You could have stayed,” I said.

“I don't know what your mother's told you, but I couldn't.”

“Well, you could've not done the shit that made you have to leave. You could've said ‘You know what, fuck it, let me raise my kid instead of leaving him out here to fend for himself, so he can end up in fucking jail.' Which I almost did.”

Billy interlaced his hands, beneath the sheet. “I wasn't much older than you are now, Dondi. I did what I thought was right.”

I faked a laugh, ran my palms up and down the thighs of my jeans. “Motherfucker,
I
know better and I'm eighteen! You were twenty-four.”

I glanced away, trying to chill myself out, and happened to catch a look at a
U.S. News & World Report
topping a stack of magazines. On the cover was George W. Bush, smirking liplessly behind some podium. No sight puts me in a fouler mood.

“Just tell me this, man. How come Amuse was more important to you dead than me and Karen were alive, huh? Were y'all fuckin' or something?”

The chair squeaked as Billy jacked himself out of it. He loomed over me, waiting, but I didn't look up. Little bits of hair slid off the sheet and stuck to the backs of my hands. I ignored those too. He was going to have to lower himself into my field of vision if he wanted to see my eyes.

He didn't.

“I was a soldier,” my father said. He turned on his heel, walked back to the barber's chair, sat down. “A soldier. Do you know what that means, Dondi?”

I didn't answer. I couldn't. For a few brief moments, it seemed like a soldier was the only thing worth being in the world.

7

don't mean to jerk you around, but Billy's reunion with his parents was sort of boring, so we'll be skipping it. Maybe this is my philosophy of life, that the moments you'd think would be important aren't. Or they are without managing to be interesting, while the crucial ones fall out of the sky like poorly installed air conditioners, and break your neck.

Dana cried, Joe cried, Billy did a lot of mumbling and shrugging and proved generally incapable of answering questions about the past or future. There were turkey sandwiches for lunch. My grandmother spent the visit trying to gauge whether Billy was well enough to be let back out of the building. I cued our exit around four-thirty, when I saw she was beginning to conclude that he was not. I said we had a party to attend. Which was true.

Cloud 9 had done his bid like a gangster, and he was coming home the same way, with a throwdown that proved his investments had matured more than he had. We could hear the music from three piers away, inside our cab, and by the time we pulled up it was deafening, monumentally obnoxious. Although not compared to the yacht.

Imagine the boat you'd build if you were the richest man in the world, and had the smallest penis. The lower deck was crammed with early-comers, drinks in hand, grooving to techno or one of its infinite, indistinguishable variants, all of which sound to me the way a Eurotrash guy's cologne smells. Hundreds more were lined up on the dock, spilling from the ass-end of a velvet-rope maze. At the front, three bouncer-sized men holding clipboards they never looked at and walkie-talkies they never spoke into beckoned people up the gangway in groups of three and four.

Billy unfolded himself onto the curb and blinked at the commotion. He didn't even have the presence of mind to close the taxi door behind him, just stood there running his palm over his crewcut again and again. It made him look freshly lobotomized, and his scalp was forty percent lighter than his forehead, but two-toned psych-ward-deserter was an improvement.

“Come on,” I said, “we better get in line.”

“Like hell.”

I turned to look at him, but Billy was already fifteen feet away, and all I could make out was the bob and weave of his shorn dome. At every moment, my father simply occupied the one spot where nobody was; if you shrank the people down to molecules, it would've been the kind of phenomenon a physicist would name after himself. For a second, I wondered if Billy had learned it in the rainforest. Then I realized this was some graffiti-shogun shit.

I tried to follow him, and within seconds found myself as stymied as a spiderwebbed fly. I always imagine Stymie was a real person, by the way, a guy so hapless that his buddies started using his name as a synonym for failure. I turned around and began trying to retrace my long-gone path, then froze when I heard my name over a bullhorn.

“Paging Kilroy Dondi Vance. Mr. Vance, please step to the front of the line.”

“Ayo!” I threw my hand up, waved it around. Dozens of older, better-dressed people turned to suck their teeth at the kid acting a fool. “That's me,” I announced, and the masses parted grudgingly, salty as the Red Sea. I strutted through a corridor of bodies and joined Billy. A bouncer fastened orange paper bands around our left wrists. “VIP lounge is on the top deck,” he said, stepping aside to let us board.

We climbed the gangplank, and both flights of stairs. At the top, another bouncer flicked his eyes at our wrists, then reached for the handle of a smoked-glass door. Weird, I thought, that a dude fresh out the penitentiary would be so into security. Or maybe it wasn't.

I'd never been in any kind of VIP section in my life, but as soon as the frosty air hit me and my eyes adjusted to the pale green hues and ten-watt lighting, I knew I could get used to it. It's a disgusting idea, that a room is worth occupying just because other people aren't allowed to enter. Until you're inside.

Cloud was no longer the lithe, skinny kid I'd seen in photos, his high-top fade unintentionally cropped out of every frame. The first thing I thought when he sprang off the couch was that we'd walked into the wrong room, and the King of Bouncers was going to throw us through the wall and into the right one. The guy looked like a black He-Man action figure somebody had painted a linen suit and a ridiculous jaunty captain's hat on. Before I knew it he had Billy in midair, locked in a bearhug worthy of an actual bear.

“Aaaaaaaaah! Welcome to your welcome home, baby! God
damn
, you a sight for sore eyes.”

The guest of honor set my father down, and threw an arm around my shoulders. “Last time I saw
this
cat,” he announced, “nigga dookied right through his diaper and ruined my, ha, what was it? One of those silk house shirts with the big Kwame polka dots, I think. Did me a favor. Show some love, dog.” My feet didn't leave the ground, but the embrace popped three vertebrae.

Cloud lifted his chin toward yet another bouncer. “All right. Everybody I care about's on board. Tell your man to weigh anchor or whatever the fuck.”

“Yes sir.” To his lips, with a burst of static, came the walkie-talkie.

“Good. Ay mister DJ, you ready to do the damn thing, or you need another mojito first?”

“I
been
ready,” came a voice from the bar in the rear. “This weak shit they playing, it came with the boat or what?”

“Yeah. Got a rule about no live performance till you leave the dock.”

At that moment, the ship lurched into motion. I felt it for a few seconds, a horizontal version of that strangely pleasant elevator-drop nutsack-tingle-tug, and then it became so normal that if not for the shrinking Manhattan outside the window, I would have forgotten. There was something very liberating, though, about seeing the skyline fade into miniature, as if New York was loosening its vise-grip on all our lives.

“See you on the dancefloor, party people.” The DJ slurped the last of his drink—whatever a mojito was, I wanted one—doled out a few knuckle-bumps, and moseyed toward the door. He had it open when the Ambassador, present despite his agoraphobia, piped up. Perfect timing on the blind man, as usual.

“Naw man, you're for the common folk. We got a special DJ coming for the VIPs. Brother named Doo Wop.”

The room galloped with laughter, Cloud's roar leading the charge. The DJ grinned and raised a pair of middle fingers to his chest, then slapped the door back open and was gone.

I sidled up to Karen. At least two dudes, a dread in tinted glasses and a stocky goateed whiteboy, peeped the familiarity of my approach, decided I was her man, and turned their attentions elsewhere.

“Explain.”

My mother smiled around the Heineken tipped to her lips.

“That was Kid Capri. You ever heard of him?”

“Sure. But I thought it was pronounced ‘Kiiiiiid Capri.' That's how he says it on those old mixtapes. I always wanna be like ‘we know your name, fool, we bought your joint. Shut up and play the music.'”

She laughed. The green of the bottle matched her dress, which was sleeveless. Whatever she'd rubbed into her skin gave it a glow. For a second I saw what those guys did—or, at least, I noticed how pretty ol' Wren 209 could be when she felt like it.

“He and Doo Wop had this huge battle back in '91, '92, dissing each other on mixtapes. Everybody thought Capri was Puerto Rican until Wop outed him as a whiteboy.”

Billy sauntered over from the bar. “His father is Italian, moms is Jewish. Which makes him Jewish. Like me.”

Karen plucked the highball glass from his hand. “Name one Jewish holiday, and Chanukah doesn't count. Ew, what is this, rum? Who drinks straight rum?”

“Yom Kippur,” said Billy. “Day of Atonement.”

“Take your rum.” She shoved it at him. “Your father's got a lot of balls, talking to me about atonement.”

“You asked him to name a holiday.”

Karen's hands fell to her hips, a kind of first-position for her. “So how will you be spending Yom Kippur, Billy? Any plans?”

My father shrugged. Either he didn't get it, or he was doing a brilliant not-getting-it impression. “You're supposed to fast, I guess.”

Enter the goateed whiteboy, no longer sweating my mother so as to concentrate on jocking my father. He flanked our perimeter and did a little weight-shifting foot-to-foot two-step, the hip-hop cracker version of a jazz bandleader counting off the tune. When he had his entry timed, he laid a hand on Billy's shoulder.

“Excuse me, dude, but . . . are you Rage?”

My father clanged the ice cubes around in his glass, drizzled the last of the liquor down his throat.

“I used to be.”

“No shit? Oh, man, I knew it!” His hand sprang up like it was on hydraulics. “Dregs, TWS—Total Wreck Squad, Toys Won't Survive, whatever. Yo, you were my
man
when I was a kid. Yo—” He reached into his shoulder bag and brought out a hardcover sketchbook plastered with stickers, and a fistful of Sharpies. “Do me the honor?”

Billy accepted the blackbook in slow motion—as if the action were involuntary, the ritual a dim muscle memory. A blackbook was the first thing a writer bought, or stole: diary, guest register and laboratory in one. Billy had probably blessed thousands in his day; style was DNA, and these things spread it the way bees spread pollen. Go to a graffiti gallery opening, and all you'll see is writers bent double, using their knees and one another's backs as drafting tables, a spectacle every bit as orgiastic and aesthetically unpleasant as a million horseshoe crabs propagating the species on a beach.

My father blinked at the selection of writing utensils. It was as if everything were in code for him. Like instead of markers and a blackbook he saw some rekmras and a kablobcok, and was paralyzed until he could unscramble what and why.

He picked a red, uncapped it one-handed, began to write. The Sharpie never broke contact with the page, and I thought of the Japanese black water painters Fever had told me about. They used parchment stretched so thin that any unnatural stroke or interruption to the line, any attempt to correct an error, would destroy the piece. It was supposed to force you to communicate without deliberation. Much as breaking the law did.

Billy's eyes roamed as he wrote. He could have been a doctor signing a prescription pad, a lawyer initialing a page his secretary thrust at him while they marched down a corridor. I looked out the window. We were gliding through open water now, someplace south of the city, and the sun was flirting with the horizon. A drumbeat I vaguely recognized shook the floor, competing with the growling engine.

Billy finished, and me and Dregs and Karen nearly bumped heads leaning in to look. I braced myself for a jumble of mystic symbols, or even BRACKEN KILLED AMUSE. But on the upper right quadrant of the page was a vintage RAGE tag. The hands didn't forget.

Dregs nodded. “Fucking cool, man. Right on.”

Billy capped the marker, held it out to him. Karen beat Dregs to it.

“May I?”

It threw Dregs for a loop, I could tell, but he played it off, “please, be my guest,” and cocked his head to watch. A dude his age—I put Dregs at twenty-five, old enough to remember seeing Billy's name fly by but too young to have bombed the lines himself—probably didn't know a single female writer. I doubt you'll find too many women dressing up in Union blues and spending their weekends reenacting the battles of the Civil War either, if you get my meaning.

A hardcore Rage-ophile would've known who had bogarted his book, or at least had a strong hunch. Dregs wasn't that. When Karen handed it back, it took him several seconds to decipher the signature under Billy's—time enough for me to imagine the days when the 2s and 5s had been my parents' love letters, chugging from Prospect to Crotona with their names entwined for all to see. Motherfuck an oak tree and a knife.

“Immortalette 1?”

Karen returned his pen. “A.k.a. Wren 209.”

Dregs nodded. “Right on.” There's some kind of protocol about when you explicitly acknowledge knowing who somebody is and when you don't. I'm not sure which is more respectful or when you do what, but many an eye's been blackened over such things. Karen's hands stayed at her sides, so I guessed everything was cool.

Dregs turned back to Billy. “So like, where have you been, dude? I heard you were dead, heard you were underground, heard you were doing Pepsi murals in Japan. . . .”

My father rubbed his head, scratched his ear. Rubbed his head again. Little fragments of scalp fell, dusted Billy's shoulders.

“I've been learning shamanic healing from plant spirits in the Amazon.”

I tried not to laugh as Dregs rifled through his brain for an appropriate response.

“Right on, right on. Been painting at all?”

All of a sudden, a kind of frenzy seemed to fill Billy, and he grabbed my wrist. “Nobody can know I'm here,” he blurted. His eyes bored into Dregs, then into me. “Who is he? Why are we talking to him?”