Rage Is Back (9781101606179) (27 page)

I have this tendency to suspect that anything I've never done before, I might just be a natural at, a prodigy. The one time I went to the driving range with Andy Simpkins in tenth grade to “hit a few buckets,” I could already see the lead paragraph of the
Sports Illustrated
profile as I was renting my club. The first ball I hit was going to soar whatever an astronomical distance was in golf. Inside of two weeks I'd be inking Tag Heuer endorsement deals, bagging Swedish broads, and denying I was black.

I was mistaken, naturally, just as I had been about tennis, chess, sexual intercourse, and billiards. But graffiti? Shit, aptitude had to be inscribed on both sides of the double helix; that eighth-grade misadventure was too small a sample size to be scientifically significant. As I moved from window to window, I spun a fantasy about sneaking down a few rows and quietly rocking a ridiculous burner—but not just ridiculous, revolutionary: the letterforms pulsing with a style nobody had ever thought of, so daring and iconoclastic that only a brilliant neophyte could have conceived it. I'd be adding the finishing touches when Karen and Billy happened by, and . . .

And, my fucking arm felt like it was going to fall off. My hand was cramping up, to the point where I had to switch my grip, press the nozzle with my thumb. I'd painted a grand total of eleven windows. Badly. Billy had covered the glass and nothing but, whereas my lack of can control yielded a kind of lipsticked-clown effect. It didn't matter, of course. Except to me.

My father was halfway through his second top-to-bottom. I paused to watch.

“Come on, come on, back to work,” he ordered, without looking up. I climbed my ladder, raised my arm.
Clicka-clacka. Psshht.

This was a waste of time, I found myself thinking. Why couldn't he do window-downs? The obvious answer,
because whole cars are iller
, I pretended not to know.
Clicka-clacka. Psshht.
I switched arms, painted with my left. The quality of the work didn't suffer.

I was two windows short of done—with that side of that train, anyway—when Dengue bellowed.

“Yo! Billy! Little help! It's fuckin' Wild Kingdom in here!”

I jumped off my ladder and ran. The Ambassador stood outside the car, back pressed against its center doors. I peered inside. One guard sat balled beneath a corner seat. The other lay wrapped around a pole. The sound coming from their mouths was animal in the purest sense, an expression of a pain experienced in the eternal now. If there was a hell, that's what the residents' wails would sound like, if you lowered the volume on the Black Eyed Peas CD enough to hear them.

“I don't know what happened,” said Fever. “One minute everything was quiet, and then bam, freakout city.”

“Fuck it,” said Karen. She and Billy had both arrived while my back was turned. “There's nobody around. Let 'em go nuts.”

Billy didn't even bother to answer, just pried open the doors and climbed inside.

“Oh, for God's sake.” My mother ran through a greatest hits medley of pissed-off poses—arms crossed, hands hipped, chin lifted to commiserate with God, body angled away from the offender—performed in such swift succession that it looked like something you might see the Pips do behind Gladys. Then she clambered up into the train herself and crouched opposite my father, on the other side of the guard he was trying to soothe.

“We're on a schedule, Billy.”

“Give me a minute.” He held the guy's palm in both his hands, doing acupressure or something. The screams were coming at intervals now.

“We don't have a minute.”

Billy knelt over the guard, and began whispering into his ear.

Karen bent lower. “Billy. Listen to me.”

Yeah, right. He finished whatever he was telling dude, leapt up, and headed for the other one.

Karen stood. “Fever? Dondi? Care to weigh in here?”

Guard number two wouldn't budge. He kicked at Billy, from his fortress beneath the bench, and howled bloody homicide. My father reached out to him over and over, repeating low, calm words I couldn't quite make out.

I stuck my head inside. “Dad?”

Billy's head jerked up. “Get me my bag.”

“Listen, we've really gotta—”

“I'm not leaving them like this. I can't.” He turned back to the guard.

Karen watched for a few seconds, then jumped off the train.

“You know what your father's problem is? He says ‘can't' when he means ‘won't.' Fuck this, and fuck him. I'm going back to work.” And off she stalked.

Dengue's walkie-talkie crackled. “Yo, Fever, you there?”

“This is Fever. Go ahead. Over.”

“We're in. Rock and roll, baby.”

“Sambo's in,” the Ambassador called. “Yo, Wren! You hear me? Sambo's in. We're up in three yards, going on four!”

“Yeah, great.” She didn't turn around. “I guess I'll just paint all these fucking trains myself.”

Clicka-clacka, psshht.

Your boy? I did as I was told. By the time I came back with Billy's bag, guard number two wasn't cowering in the corner anymore. He'd graduated to wild spasms, torso bucking and limbs whipping out like jellyfish tentacles, and he seemed hellbent on murdering his coworker; Billy and a total lack of bodily control conspired to stop him. Twenty feet away, the prospective murderee moaned with operatic gusto, clutching the base of the pole like a stripper with a stomach virus.

I tossed the bag into the car, and climbed in after it. “You got an antidote in there?”

Billy pulled open the zipper, and removed a bottle of water. I took it as a no.

“Talk to him,” my father instructed, as he daubed the madman's face with a wet rag. “Tell him not to fight it. Be calming. You can even hum.”

I knelt over guard number one, realized dude had shit himself, and backed away in a hurry.

“Sorry, Billy. I've got trains to paint.”

I found Karen doing window-down throw-ups, red and black, four to a car. She slung a can at me the way a whiteboy in a high school sex comedy slings his buddy a beer from the cooler, and taught me to do fills.

Our collaboration was a three-part, two-color process. First, my mother sketched the letters. Then I stepped up, tried to color inside her lines. It was easier with my feet on the ground, not the rungs of a ladder. When I finished, she painted a real outline, thick and black: erased the mistakes, solidified the form, imposed the style. We knocked off three cars in silence, trying to ignore the waxing and waning of the guards' screams, before Karen stepped back, cocked her elbow, and read her watch.

“This isn't gonna fly. Get Fever.”

“Why?”

“He's gotta paint.”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

She pointed a spraycan in his general direction. “That's Ambassador Dengue Fever, okay? One of the all-time greats. He can paint.”

“Karen, he's blind.”

“Ah, that's a crock of shit. It's all in his head. Hurry your black ass up.”

I found the Ambassador at the gates of Billy's makeshift mental hospital, debating the head nurse. They both wore their T-shirts hooked over their noses, to mitigate the stench. I leaned around them, got an angle on the car. One guard lay atop a row of seats, curled toward the wall, arms shielding his face. He was quiet. The other, the bowel-voider, sprawled on the floor, eyes closed. If you listened hard, you could discern a low, quivery moan.

“Looks like you've got it under control in there,” I said. “Come paint.”

“I can't. Their journey will take many turns. You know what it's like. So do you, Dengue. Please, you've gotta call Zebno.”

“Call him for what?”

The Ambassador's face was grim. “Blam, Fizz, Dregs and Species have all got psychotic guards on their hands, too.”

“So, everybody who's in.”

“Except Stoon and Vexer. Both Vex's guys are cool. Stoon, it's too early to tell.”

“We've got to get them here,” said Billy. “All of them. They could be permanently damaged, without guidance.” He stared balefully at the ground. “This was wrong. I should have known better. I
did
know better. I fooled myself into believing . . .”

He shook his head inside the T-shirt. It made a frictive sound, against his stubble.

“Get them here, Dengue. Please. I don't care what it takes. And don't say another word to me about the trains, either of you. These are human beings.”

The “I don't care what it takes” was my tip-off. That's a movie line. I couldn't tell you which movie—all of them. If you utter that phrase in real life, a part of you is acting, whether you know it or not. I'm not saying Billy wasn't sincere. Just that this situation had begun to serve a second purpose as a stand-in, a do-over, a shadow version of previous dramas.

Certainly, my father had plenty to reprise. And I could see how, in his mind, going off-mission to help the guards might feel like refusing to repeat the mistakes of the past. Like compassion was finally trumping graff and justice and revenge.

Except for one thing: that so-called compassion was every bit as misplaced as it had always been. He was still helping the wrong people and turning his back on the ones who mattered. Still waving a flag of sanctimonious morality to justify it all. Same tired-ass hero-on-a-quest man-apart narcissism.

I reached out, grabbed his shirt, jerked it off his nose.

“You know what that stink is, Billy? That's your fucking bullshit. I been smelling it my whole life, but here I am—talk about
should have known better
. Talk about
let myself believe
. And what do I get for it? I get fucked over again—we all get fucked over again—and
you
get to act like you're doing the right thing. Selflessly
.
”

I was right up in his face. He didn't even blink. A second ticked past.

“Dondi . . .”

“Stay out of this, Fever.”

I poked Billy in the shoulder with two fingers. “Don't you
dare
look at me all serene. Go ahead, say you have no choice. Right?”

My father leaned back against the train—all passive, like if I wanted to push him he'd comply and retreat. But it wasn't that. He wanted to make a show of sizing me up. As if the additional two feet had given him perspective.

“You haven't forgiven me,” he said, slow and pained, like he was reading the words off an eye chart he had to squint to make out. “Not really. I understand. I should have known.”

It was true and false at the same time, and it threw me for a loop, scrambled my circuitry. Was it possible that I was wildly off base, and Billy was indeed acting out of moral necessity—acting like the father he'd never been while I, in turn, acted like the father he
had
been, blind to everything beyond the mission?

I've been wondering ever since. This, however, was not the time.

“What kind of slick shit is that? Don't be psychoanalyzing me, motherfucker—that's first of all. Second, whether or not I've forgiven you is fucking irrelevant. And third, I
have
forgiven you. But I won't again. So you need to decide what's important right now: feeding your ego, or playing your part? Doing right by them, or doing right by us?”

Billy raised up to his full height. “I am playing my part. I'm sorry you don't—”

“Yeah? Fucking one-man show, huh?”

“Think whatever you want.”

His eyes flashed and his face went hard, and I knew Billy had finished listening. It was impossible not to picture him doing the same thing eighteen years earlier. I doubted my father had ever really listened to anybody.

From inside the train came a wail, and then another. The journey, apparently, had taken another turn. Billy boosted himself up and in.

“Call Zebno, Fever.”

The Ambassador raised the phone to his ear as if it were a gun, and paced off.

Billy looked down at me.

“You were such a beautiful baby,” he said. “So smart. So fucking smart. We couldn't believe how smart you were, Dondi. I missed you so much.”

“What the fuck does—”

But he'd already vanished into the car's interior.

I caught up with Dengue just as he was finishing his convo.

“You gotta come with me,” I told him.

“For what?”

“A bunch of reasons. But mostly because I'm not gonna be the one who tells Wren we're about to be running a funny farm.”

“I got business to attend to, Dondi.”

“I'm sure you do.” I took him by the elbow.

Karen looked up when we turned her corner. “Finally,” she said. “Fever, sack up and paint. We're way behind.”

She tossed him a can. It bounced off his stomach.

“Ouch. The fuck is wrong with you?”

“You really have to ask? The train is two feet to your right. Get cracking. That was black. Here's silver.” She chucked another can. Dengue managed to catch the rebound off his chest. Karen shot me a triumphant look. I ignored her.

“It's not as bad as it seems,” said Dengue.

My mother snorted. “It's quarter past nine, and we've finished one train.”

“Yeah, but this is just one yard. Everybody else is rocking, or will be within the hour. Worst comes to worst, we'll bust the windows, so they can't put these puppies in service.”

“Yeah, right—and live
that
down for the rest of my life? I'm a writer, not some fucking . . . vandal.”

Both of them were quiet. It was a double fault; breaking windows was a borderline-dishonorable solution, and mentioning bragging rights was just as bad. Treating the word
vandal
with such contempt wasn't cool, either. Writers had always embraced it.

I seized the chance for diplomacy. “Mom, you haven't written for eighteen years. Stop throwing paint and calm down. Dengue, enough with the silver linings. Tell her.”