Rage Is Back (9781101606179) (15 page)

I put a hand on Billy's back. “It's okay. Relax. He's cool.”

Dregs just stood there, looking earnest. “There are some legal issues,” I told him, trying to sound offhand.

“My lips are sealed.” He performed a pantomime to that effect.

“Right on,” I said, filing the phrase under Whiteboy-Ubiquitous, and raised an eyebrow at Karen. “Time for another drink?”

“I think so.” She smiled at Dregs. “Nice meeting you.”

“You too. Enjoy yourselves.”

He was turning to go when Billy lunged, snatched the blackbook out of Dregs's hand, riffled to his page, tore out his name, and stuffed it in his mouth.

Dregs and Karen and I watched Billy's jaw work to break down the nice, thick paper stock. He looked at each of us in turn as he chewed, like the fucking classroom gerbil we had in second grade to teach us about loss and mourning. Spider-Man, we called him, the poor frail bastard.

Billy winced and raised his chin to swallow, Adam's apple bulging against his throat like an overtaxed bass woofer.

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

“Can I have my book back?”

Billy obliged.

“I guess we really need that drink now,” I said, with the least credible chuckle in the history of fake mirth.

Dregs tucked his book beneath his arm. “Take care of him,” he said to me, and walked away.

“I don't need this shit,” Karen announced, and followed.

I watched Billy watch her go. About twenty things I could have said came and went, from
don't worry, man, it's gonna be all right
to
how would El Purga feel about you eating a tree
to the punch line to that old Lone Ranger joke,
whatchu mean “we,” white man?
Finally, I just left him standing there. Got myself a mojito from the bar, took it downstairs and checked out chicks and sipped.

Kid Capri was in total control. The crowd trusted him, and from trust follows abandon. Girls get loose, because they aren't subconsciously anticipating the coming of a lame song that will give them cover to hit the bathroom or the bar. Dudes navigate with confidence, knowing they don't have to worry about a musical cockblock, an out-of-left-field switch from dancehall to merengue just when they're getting their swerve on.

Dengue likes to talk about how, back in the day, if the crowd didn't dig a record Afrika Bambaataa played, Bam would bring the needle back and play it again, and then a third time, and a fourth, until the people heard what he did. The party owed its existence to the benevolence and good grace of the DJ; he kept the peace and the pace, controlled the space-time continuum by backspinning beginnings, doubling a moment or erasing it, putting his fingerprints all over history. Today, he's treated like a servant, a human jukebox. Dengue calls that a tragedy, and I tend to agree.

Capri wasn't dishing up alien cuisine, but he wasn't serving the crowd a junk-food diet of new club hits either. He fed us tapas, just big enough to whet the appetite. You got a verse and a chorus, and then he dropped the next song, and the disappointment of goodbye vanished with the ecstasy of hello. He did a lot of teasing, which only works with an educated crowd: let us hear a famous horn fanfare and then pulled back the track just when we were ready to celebrate the blend. During the time it took me to finish my drink, he ran through fifteen minutes of nineties hip-hop, joints I recognized by Main Source and Black Moon, plus a bunch I didn't. Then he segued to reggae of the same era with Super Cat's “Ghetto Red Hot,” which was like taking a headcount of Jamaicans, since every last one of them kept a fist raised and swaying throughout the song, even the women.

Cloud stood in the middle of the floor, massive arms molding the air around his dance partner, a blonde whose chest bounced to the music in dizzying doubletime. She and Cloud were trying to carry on a conversation, which I took to be proof that they'd just met. Every few seconds, one would shout something into the other's ear, and they'd both nod or smile.

Guests interrupted them constantly, coming over to offer hugs, congratulations, who knew what—hot tips on cash businesses with lax security, perhaps. Now and then I'd strain to place someone who looked familiar, then realize he wasn't a writer Karen had gotten baked with in our living room, but a bonafide minor celebrity: Fat Joe, Kevin Powell, the fly Latina anchorwoman from New York One, a none-too-sober Dwight Gooden—who I only recognized because, Scout's honor, he was wearing a Mets jersey with his name on it. I even thought I saw Al Sharpton, but it turned out to be some other sunken-eyed old man with processed hair.

It was beautiful, watching this crazy cross section of old-school New York City sweating and swaying in the open air beneath the glinting gold and pink and purple of what was shaping up to be a stunning sunset. Things were okay, I told myself. Shit would work out. We'd get Billy normal. He had friends, and they were not without resources.

At first, nobody paid any mind to the Coast Guard chopper hovering overhead. Capri neutralized the noise by cranking up his decibels, and folks turned back to the business of shaking ass. But minutes passed, and the chopper didn't leave. All at once, the party started to understand that this was not a fly-by, but surveillance.

You know that sensation you get somewhere between your throat and stomach when you notice a cop watching? Doesn't matter if you're in the middle of a crowd; you still feel immediately and intensely alone. Five seconds before, you might've been the mixed martial arts champion of the world, but now you're a gazelle, and the lion has just yawned and lifted his head out of the underbrush.

Maybe white dudes in Dockers who are on some “Hello, Officer, I'm glad you're here, those darn kids have been messing with my lawn again” type shit don't know the feeling. And granted, I walk around with felony amounts of drugs on me, so I might be a little sensitive. But if you're black, you know the feeling. Even Clarence Thomas knows it.

The wave of menace hit us all, and several hundred people who'd been experiencing a rare sense of carefreedom and connection were alone and vulnerable and hate-filled once again. The music seemed suddenly crass, irrelevant. It couldn't save us. It wasn't even trying.

If there's some kind of disc jockey gold medal for skills under pressure, Kid Capri deserves like three. He slowed the record down until it sounded like a dying robot, let it grind to a halt. Silence for one second, two, and then Capri leaned over the mic and shouted, “New York City, make some noooiiiissseee!” and brought in a new jam at a volume that turned the chopper blades into mosquito wings.

When they heard the song, the crowd went bananas, and the stress of the moment exploded in a shrapnel-storm of sound and motion. We were partaking in one of the perfect moments in the history of DJing, and we knew it.

The first time Kool Herc went back-to-back on “Funky Drummer” had to have been one. A prepubescent Grand Wizard Theodore climbing atop a milkcrate to debut the scratch, another. But in terms of pure song selection, which Dengue always touts as ninety percent of the craft, I can't imagine anything more sublime than the rub-a-dub boom of “Police in Helicopter” at that moment and latitude and longitude. Not just for the topical poetry of it, but because if you listen to the lyrics—and I have, many times, because until he went away Abraham Lazarus kept the tune in heavy rotation—you realize that although John Holt sounds like he just smoked a pound of ishen, he's crooning some of the most militant, fuck-the-cops lines ever penned:

Police in helicopter, a search fi marijuana

Policeman in the streets, searching for collie weed

Soldiers in the field, burning the collie weed

But if you continue to burn up the herbs

We gonna burn down the cane fields

Everybody seemed to know the words. Capri conducted a massive sing-along, and between our volume and the song's, I thought we might blow the chopper right out of the sky. Which is stupid, I know, but until that day I never had much respect for helicopters. If you see one in an action movie, there's about a sixty percent chance it will go down in flames, and that climbs to ninety if Bruce Willis is around. In real life, too, they seem absurdly flawed: every time you open a newspaper, sixteen Marines have just perished in a crashed Blackhawk for no adequately explained reason.

The craft repositioned itself slightly, and then a door opened and out dropped a coil of rope. We watched it straighten as it fell. The people in its path backed away and it thumped to the ground in front of Cloud, who hadn't moved an inch. He scowled up at the chopper, and I imagined him yanking on the rope and bringing the thing crashing through the deck on some Incredible Hulk shit.

Fastened to the end was a white cardboard box tied up with red ribbon, the kind they put your leftovers in at a nice restaurant. Cloud turned it in his hands. Capri faded the music, and the whirring of the blades turned into a collective heartbeat.

Inside the box was an envelope. Cloud tore it open, removed a card, and read aloud.

 

Welcome home, Inmate #44823573.

Your friends in law enforcement

will be watching you.

A.B.

p.s.—I'd ask you for your vote,

but convicts don't get one.

The chopper swooped toward the deck, and the crowd scattered before it, at velocities ranging from panicked dash to my own casual speed-walk. Cloud held his ground, clenched his fists and tracked the helicopter with his eyes as it came out of its dive thirty feet above us and began easing itself down. At twenty, the doors opened, and out flew dozens of little metal canisters that tumbled to the deck and rolled around, spraying tear gas in every direction.

It's always the personal touches that show how much somebody cares. Like using aerosol dispensers instead of the more common gas grenades.

I wish I could better describe the chaos that came next, but only an omniscient narrator could pull it off—omniscient or goggled. I can tell you that getting gassed feels like rubbing fresh habanero peppers all over your eyes, and that before I had to squeeze mine shut I saw four guys in breathing masks slide down ropes until they reached the deck.

Then my memory becomes a soundtrack, filled with shrieks and smashing glass, charging feet that never get any farther away. There were runners and there were duckers. I was a ducker, and that was a mistake. Within seconds I'd been bowled over, trampled by about six pairs of shoes. I curled double and yelled out, but the people stepping on me could no better pinpoint my voice and body than I could theirs. I scrabbled to my feet, ricocheting off bodies, tripping over limbs, stepping on women I'd probably ogled five minutes before. We were crazed with pain and staggered by fear; we crashed into one another like hot molecules. It was a blind, mindless dance, and the enemy strolled through it, doing as he pleased.

I found the metal staircase leading to the VIP lounge, crouched underneath, and waited. I don't know if it took five minutes or fifteen, but eventually the tear gas started to wear off, and we all blinked our way back to sanity.

The chopper was gone. The ship, trashed. There had been three full bars on board, and not a single bottle had escaped the siege. People were picking diamond-sized shards out of each other's skin, pressing cocktail napkins to flesh and watching streaks of blood soak through. Kid Capri probably would've played a requiem, but his turntables were smashed to shit. Records floated on the surface of the water, like losing hands scattered across a poker table.

The boat was moving at an incredible speed, back toward the dock. The city rose to meet us, magenta reflections still glinting in the highrise windows, and I wished the sun would fucking wrap it up already. Some community-minded black chick was crisscrossing the deck with a champagne bucket, handing out wet washcloths for people to lay over their eyes. Nobody was okay, but nobody was dead, either. I wondered how many of Cloud's four hundred closest homies even knew what A.B. stood for, and whether any who did not intended to find out.

I found him and Rage and Wren slumped shoulder-to-shoulder on a couch in the deserted VIP, and Fever on the matching loveseat. Only one lightbulb still worked. The carpet squished with liquor, and an empty tear-gas canister lolled back and forth across it.

“Hey,” I said from the threshold. “Everybody okay?”

Karen beckoned me over for a kiss on the cheek, a double handsqueeze, some soulful eye contact. Billy glanced up, then right back down. Only Dengue spoke.

“Motherfucker, you know what to do.”

“Right.”

By the time I got the joint rolled, the yacht was docking. The captain brought us in with a bang that nearly knocked me off my chair; guess he was beyond trying to impress anyone at this point. I stood and peered down at the lower deck. People were pressing toward the exits.

Cloud joined me by the window, leaving a gigantic, Cloud-sized vacancy on the couch. Karen and Billy, who'd been wedged on either side of him, eased into it.

“Fuck them,” he said, waving a hand at the throng below. “I got this ship rented for another six hours. Light that shit.”

He walked over to the bar, picked up a walkie-talkie, flicked it on. “Cloud 9 to fucknuts one through six. Come in, fucknuts. Anybody out there?” A staticky voice assented. “All right, listen up, I need a case of Guinness Stout and about a hundred dollars' worth of Chinese food up here as soon as possible. I know that might not fall under y'all's job description, but somehow I don't feel like I've gotten my money's worth from you Barnum-and-Bailey-ass security boys, so make it happen. What the fuck, get yourselves some dinner too, it's been a rough night. Cloud 9, over and out. You sparking that or what, nephew?”

I handed him the joint, the lighter. “Don't you have piss tests?”

Cloud started to laugh, and then
bam
—I was in a headlock, and he was still roaring. “Nigga, you get here late or something? My homecoming just got Boston Tea Partied. Drug tests are the least of my concerns. But thanks for asking.” He planted a kiss on the top of my dome, then shoved me halfway across the room and shook his head. “Youngblood, he a trip.”