Rage Is Back (9781101606179) (32 page)

“What she say, that I bogarted the opening, and it's my fault nobody else sold their little bullshit canvases?”

“I seriously have no idea.”

Cloud shook his head. “Fuckin' Wren, boy.”

My phone rang. I took it from my pocket, looked at the screen. It was the Uptown Girl.

“Yo.”

“Are you there? I can't see you!”

“Am I where?”

“With your father, on TV!”

“What? Where?”

“He's giving a press conference. Turn to New York One.”

“Hold on, hold on, I gotta get to a TV. What's he saying?”

“What is it?” Cloud demanded.

“Billy's on TV,” I told him, and took off toward the stairs. “Kirsten, you still there?”

“You're breaking up. Where are you?”

I jackknifed my way through the flow of downward traffic, dashed toward the turnstiles. “Kirsten? Can you hear me? What's he saying?”

“It just started. He's standing next to that gay guy we had lunch with that one time.”

“Nick? Nick Fizz?”

Static dissected her response. People were lined up behind the turnstiles, waiting to swipe and pass. It's a stupid fucking system, if you think about it, making the entrance and the exit the same.

“Coming through! Emergency!” I shouted, and ran toward one of the turnstiles, figuring I'd back down whoever stood opposite. It was an old lady, clutching her Metrocard in a bony hand. She paid no attention, backed me down, brushed past muttering aspersions. I tried again, got shoulder-banged by a beefy businessman. Broke through on the third try, reached the street, and spun around looking for an electronics store. There were a half dozen within blocks, but none in sight. I picked a direction and lit out, doing that stressed-out top-speed too-cool-to-run New Yorker walk.

“Kirsten? What's happening?”

“He's about to read a statement.”

“Can you turn it up for me?”

“Yeah, sure.”

She cranked the dial. Billy was reading the message he'd recorded for the trains.

“Why is he doing this?” the Uptown Girl asked. “What about the cops?”

“I don't know. He didn't tell us anything.” I saw a store across the street, JP Discount Electronics, and cut toward it, dodging through four lanes of crawling traffic.

An Indian guy in a cheap suit greeted me at the front door. “Hello, my friend. What can I do for you?”

“Just looking.” The TVs were in the back. I found the channel just as Billy was reaching the end of the statement. The reporters seemed to know it—maybe they'd already gotten ahold of the tape. I could hear them outside the frame, shouting for his attention.

How did Billy look? I believe the expression is “preternaturally calm,” and it's usually applied to psychopaths and athletes. The shot was tight on his head and shoulders, making it impossible to tell where he was. If he hadn't been squinting, I might not have known he was outside. Fizz was behind him, hands folded behind his back, his stance that of a bodyguard or a manager.

Billy looked up, into the cameras. From the way one shoulder rose, he appeared to be shoving the paper into his back pocket. A flurry of shrill questions filled the pause. Billy ran his eyes back and forth over the throng—trying to find one he felt like answering, maybe. It made him look as if he were reading a teleprompter. Even in the sunlight, you could see the flashbulbs going off. I guess in news photography school, they teach you to catch your subject with his mouth closed. Then he opened it, and the reporters fell silent.

“I figured maybe people needed to see my face. So they could look into my eyes, and believe me.”

There was no clamor this time. They waited. My palms started to sweat, and the thought of vomiting crossed my mind.

“You look like him,” the Uptown Girl said in my ear.

I'd forgotten we were still on the phone. Remember how when you're thirteen or fourteen, just falling in love for the first time and too young to go out on a school night, you spend hours and hours on the phone with your girlfriend every evening? The two of you might watch a whole movie together on the phone, talking and not talking, might even fall asleep listening to one another breathe.

“I guess I do, a little,” I mumbled back.

The reporters stopped waiting. One did, anyway, and the others, caught flatfooted, didn't try to compete.

“Billy, you've been a wanted man for sixteen years. You were convicted on multiple charges of felony vandalism, and fined two million dollars. Where have you—”

“Graffiti was the only voice I had then,” my father said, “and it's the only voice I have now. I tried to tell people the truth about Bracken—that he's a murderer, that he killed my friend. Nobody listened. So I'm trying again.”

“This is crazy,” said the Uptown Girl. “He's got to get out of there.”

“He will,” I croaked, suddenly understanding. “He's leaving. He's doing it again.”

It was his eyes that told me. There was something heavy and defeated in them, something incongruous with the victory all around. He looked like a man who was bowing out. A man preparing to live with his decisions, and live with them alone.

“Not like this,” I whispered, a hot sadness welling in me. “Please. We need more time.”

He took another question.

“All due respect, Mr. Vance, you expect us to believe you did this by yourself? With no help?”

Billy blinked a couple of times. “I'm a master painter. One of the best in the world.”

The media exploded into chaos, and for a moment Billy stood still, staring into their lenses.

“I'm not going to tell you my secrets, but look: I've been gone for many years, and in that time I've studied with some of the wisest men in the world, and learned how to do things most Westerners would think are impossible. The whole time, I was preparing for this. To come back and do this. So don't be too quick to think you know what's possible. You'll see what I mean when the cops get here.”

“Oh my God,” said the Uptown Girl. “Dondi, what's he talking about? He sounds crazy. Is that the point? Is he going to plead insanity?”

Before the reporters could recover, my father resumed.

“That reminds me, has anybody heard from Bracken? A statement? Anything? Not like the candidate to be so quiet, is it?”

The briefest flicker of a smile crossed his face, and I felt myself tear up.

“Will you turn yourself in, Billy?”

“Where did you go when you left New York?”

“Can you elaborate on what you studied, and with whom?”

But Billy was looking past the cameras now, tracking something farther away.

“Oh, shit,” I said. “Go. Go.”

The cameramen were no dummies. They turned to capture whatever was distracting Billy. Four police cars, regular city rollers, skidded to a halt at the curb. The doors flew open, and out poured the uniforms.

I recognized the block.

Hardy-har, we live in a flying elephant.

“He's gone,” I told the Uptown Girl. “He's gone, or he's dead.”

The cameras swung back toward Billy.

“I'm sorry, Dondi,” he said. “I wish—”

His eyes darted to the street, and Billy turned and ran. Threw open the front door, sprinted through the lobby. Fizz was right behind him.

Thank God for a free and independent press, hellbent on getting the scoop. The reporters chased Billy. The cameramen chased the reporters. The cops had to fight their way through all of them.

The New York One team led the pack. Their cameraman got a shot of Billy and Fizz slipping into the stairwell, plus some nice audio: the distinct click of the door closing, and then a sound that probably mystified the majority of those watching at home, the Uptown Girl included.

“He's welding it shut,” I told her.

“What's the point of that? He's got nowhere to go! He's trapped! They'll search every apartment!”

I was too anxious to respond. There are no fresh metaphors left in the English language to describe an overtaxed tickbox, or any of the physical sensations endemic to extreme duress, but you can probably imagine the state your boy was in. If motherfuckers had to feel that way all the time, human life expectancy would be like ten, fifteen minutes.

The cops got there thirty seconds later, charged through the newspeople and started throwing their shoulders at the door. I figured Billy could climb a flight every ten seconds—the first few, at least. That put him on the fourth floor by the time they turned their attention to the elevator. It would have been half that, but these guys were determined to take the door. They looked like idiots: seven or eight boys in blue hulking around, trying to appear useful, while two young bucks, the first to arrive, slammed themselves against the ungiving metal again and again.

When they did think to find an alternate means of pursuit, it took the po-pos another minute to realize that the elevator was stalled on the second floor—Fizz and Billy must have taken care of that before they called the press. If there's anything that looks dumber on TV than a bunch of New York's finest outsmarted by a door, it's those same ten guys jabbing at a button again and again, as if they think the problem is that they haven't pushed it hard enough. I could almost see the commissioner throwing shit around his office as he watched this.

“Five minutes,” I muttered. “Five minutes, that's all he needs.” It had been three and change. The Uptown Girl didn't ask what I meant. I think she was too busy willing Billy to make it, even if she couldn't imagine how.

“Crowbar!” shouted the cop in charge. An eighteen-second dash to the patrol car and back. Ten more for one of the disgraced young bucks to redeem himself and pry open the door.

“Richards, second floor—unstick that elevator! Ufland, third floor, search every apartment! Donnelly, four, Wilson, five, Cabrera, six. The rest of you, take the elevator to fifteen, and work your way down! He's here somewhere!”

Four minutes. I decided to revise my estimate. Four was plenty. My father was gone.

As for that sentence he never finished, it hasn't kept me up as many nights as you might think. There are only a few basic directions it could have taken
: I wish I was different
,
I wish you were
different
,
I wish things were
. I agree with all of them.

You never know it's too late until it's too late. That's what makes it too late, I guess.

16

he end. Basically.

By that evening, a chemical death bath had washed the burners from the trains. You could almost hear them screaming as they melted into Day-Glo puddles.

But trains are easier to buff than reputations. Losing a guy in an apartment building on live television when you've got half the police force camped out in the lobby is hard to explain. Especially when he's just confessed to the splashiest and slickest crime in city history. That's not me bragging; that's a quote from
The
New York Times
. Okay, a paraphrase.

The story went global. Interstellar, probably. I've got no interest in cataloguing the particulars of the coverage. Fame wasn't why we did it, and besides, there are plenty of other places you can go to read about that.

I will tell you about Bracken, though.

Credit where credit is due: he played it smart. I suspect one of those high-priced public relations firms that specialize in crisis management was calling the shots, but I'm just guessing. If that is the case, though, they earned their fee without working up much of a sweat. On Tuesday morning, Bracken released a statement to the press. Then he walked straight off the map, disappeared as utterly as Billy.

I'm not talking unavailable for comment, or disgraced and reclusive. I'm talking Abominable Snowman, Serengeti Yeti, some cryptozoological shit. The crowd of reporters outside his apartment dwindled every day, with the holdouts from the retard networks abandoning their vigils on Friday. Maybe he sent somebody for his personal effects, or maybe he left everything behind.

His statement was the tersest, most inscrutable document in the history of printed matter. It didn't address Billy's accusations, neither accepted nor dodged the blame for Amuse-A-Thon 2005, offered nary a clue as to his whereabouts for the previous twenty-four hours. He suspended his campaign and resigned from his job, effective immediately, “in light of recent events.” That was all. Didn't even bother to endorse a candidate.

Naturally, the disappearance of both hero and villain only gave the story legs. Funny how everybody wants closure, and nobody realizes they already got it.

Karen and I unplugged the phone, and put on a show of acting normal—for ourselves and each other and whoever else was watching. Fizz had a PR guy issue a statement on our behalf, a Brackenesque two-liner saying that we were estranged from Billy and hadn't even known he was back in New York, much less what he'd been plotting or where he was now, and we asked the media to respect our privacy and our total lack of connection to recent events. What a fantastic phrase,
recent events
. It adds so much, yet says so little.

We spent Tuesday waiting for the NYPD to show up and search the apartment, but it never happened. They were in spectacular disarray, seemed like, between the Bracken press release and the Billy fiasco, and if they raided us and came up empty, it would have been an embarrassment trifecta. Which is exactly what would have happened, because we'd dumped all the maps and notepads and shit on Sunday night, even moved Karen's old blackbooks and photo albums to her homegirl's place. They would've sulked back out with nothing but a twenty-year-old jean jacket covered in tags. And we would have made damn sure the press was there to see it all.

On Wednesday, Karen went to work, and I went to Theo Polhemus's funeral. It was at a chapel in Harlem, and the service was in French. Turns out the dude was Haitian. I played the back, paid my respects from a distance. The casket was closed, and probably empty, considering how much time had passed since his death. I'd been to a couple of funerals for young people before—a girl I went to elementary school with died of cancer, awful thing, and a guy I'd played on summer league ball teams with caught a stray bullet last year, which is no fun either. Worst thing in the world, burying a kid. You can't say the person lived a full life, or it was his time to go, or any of that. All the rules of decorum are suspended: people
wail
. But T's was not the funeral of a young person. It was the funeral of a gangster. His mom, his sister, everybody was blank-faced, like the only surprise was that he'd lived this long.

On Thursday morning, I schlepped out to Staten Island, and took a cab to the Arthur Kill Correctional Facility. Signed in, followed a series of increasingly authoritarian signs to the visiting room, sat down before five inches of grimecaked duroplastic, picked up the phone. Wiped away the condensation of sharp, cheap aftershave, the spit flecks of the previous conversationalist. Waited.

Abraham Lazarus loped into the room. His eyelids rose slightly when he saw me, from half-mast to three-quarters. His dreadlocks were tied into a massive beehive at the back of his head. It wobbled as he walked over, stabilized as he sat down. With an arm scarcely thicker than the stray ropes of hair falling over his shoulders, he reached across himself and grabbed the receiver.

“Dondi. What's up, bro?”

I'd expected a little more effusion, or surprise, or something. But I guess when you're in prison, you pretty much just take things as they come.

“Not much, man. How you doing?”

Lazarus shrugged, and slid lower in his chair. “Getting by.”

“Right, right.” I nodded. Lazarus tapped his thumb against the phone and waited for me to explain my presence. For some reason, I didn't want to come right to it. But I couldn't think of anything else to say that wasn't totally inane.

“You heard about T?”

“I heard he got shot.”

“Heard why?”

Lazarus studied me a moment. His eyes were the color of prison. “Nobody knows.”

Which was what I'd figured. Terry would have had to be a whole different type of dude to go see Everton.

“I do. T put you in here, man. We found out, and did what had to be done.”

“
We
who?”

“Me and one of my partners, dude name of Cloud 9.” I unfolded my “Crown Heist”
printout, pressed the first page against the glass. “You know my mom's a literary agent, right? Well, T wrote the whole thing down, and sent it in. He set Jumpshot up, got you popped, took your connect, and went into business for himself.”

Truth be told, I wasn't entirely sure what I was doing. But I figured the gratitude of Abraham Lazarus was a good card to hold, whether I ever played it or not. For Cloud, too. Sooner or later, both of us were going to need sources of income. No sense leaving lemons rotting on the ground when you've got sugar and water and a pitcher full of ice.

I watched Lazarus's eyes scan the text and thought of Billy's on TV, flitting across the throng of reporters.

“Turn the page.”

I did. He worked his way down.

“Turn.”

No cobwebs on Lazarus. He finished the story in five minutes, then sat back and stroked his chin.

“So . . . what?” Lazarus asked softly. I half heard him and half read his lips: a bad connection to three feet away. “You tryna come up in the game, K.D.?”

“I don't know. Kind of weighing my options right now.”

Which was true, but that wasn't why I said it. Naked ambition from the guy who took out the guy smart enough to play your ass into a cell without you even knowing what had happened seemed ill advised.

“I got kicked out of school,” I went on. Lazarus knew me as a college-bound kid dabbling in the bougiest and lowest-risk sector of customer service; some serious explanation was in order if he was to believe I'd started blasting on drug bosses. Desperation seemed like a plausible motive, and if I cut it with loyalty, I figured it would go down smooth. “School and my mom's crib both. I'm not sure what comes next.”

The moment I said those words, they became untrue. Funny how that works, right? You declare yourself tired and snap alert, or reply that no, thanks, you're not hungry, and feel your stomach growl.

I was going to write a motherfucking book. Obviously.

Not obviously like,
because you're holding it in your hands right now!
, which is lame, but like, of course. I had to do something, and somebody had to do this. It felt right, by which I mean the idea was chaperoned by a convoy of endorphins: the body's way of applauding a decision it can get behind. Or maybe it's the body's way of whisking you past the complicated crannies, the second thoughts,
I have no idea how to write a book
,
what are the legal ramifications of said project
,
is this one of those pretentious An Artist I Shall Be epiphanies you read about in boring old-timey novels
, etc. It beats me. I don't really know that much about endogenous opioid polypeptide compounds.

The immediate result of my revelation or whatever was that the conversation I was having with Lazarus became meaningless. There he sat, playing Kingpin on Lockdown—which is the kind of role you could fuck around and score a Best Supporting Actor nomination for, if you really kill it, but most likely it doesn't even get your name mentioned in the reviews—while your boy here, more excited than I'd been all week, was busy composing first sentences in my head and spending my advance.

“You always been a smart dude,” Lazarus said, slitting his eyes in what he probably considered a savvy look of appraisal. Hilarious, right? I mean, how savvy could dude have felt, just then? How savvy could I have believed him to be?

“You and your boy, you showed some real initiative, bredren. I like that. My people like that.”

I nodded my head, and let him steal his scene. Trust me, it's not worth running down in any further detail. You've already seen that movie. Walked out on it, maybe. Suffice to say that by the time we parted with a fists-pressed-to-the-Plexiglas pound, Gangster Movie Cliché #234, a future I didn't want was mine for the taking. And for Cloud, the door to Healthy Living Vegetarian Café and Juice Bar had swung wide. It was a portal through which he would soon pass, and reemerge from five pounds heavier for reasons that had nothing to do with cuisine.

On Saturday morning, I had brunch with the Uptown Girl. She talked about my future. I refrained from asking why she cared, since she clearly didn't intend to be a part of it, and told her I was writing a book. It became realer the moment the words hit the air, so I said it a couple more times. Then I told her I had to go to the bathroom, and paid for our meal at the register in back, before they could bring the check to the table and she could make a show of grabbing it.

I got back to my building around three, unlocked the door, and held it open for a guy on his way out. There was something furtive to him. Probably visiting shady-ass Hector and them up on the top floor, I thought, not giving a shit. Then I caught a whiff of the smell he left in his wake. Campfire.

I charged up the stairs in a panic, and stopped short in front of Karen's door. Sitting on the welcome mat was a two-liter plastic bottle, smudged with black fingerprints and full of rust-tinged water. A card dangled from the neck, attached with a piece of string.

Thanks
, it read, in its entirety.

Nice gesture, Lou.

That night, I went to Sleet. Joyce got me drunk, and I learned two important lessons: carrying on a conversation with a busy bartendress is impossible, and trying makes you look like a sucker and a lush. I woke up with a hangover, and chilled all motherfucking Sunday, as the Good Lord intended, me and Karen and dumb movies on TV, neither of us saying much that didn't involve pizza toppings. On Monday, I found a proper café, with power outlets and no Wi-Fi, and started writing—though not really, because it was all too raw, and I was too stupid to wait, and thus I didn't produce so much as a usable paragraph for the first month and a half, and depression at my newfound inability formed an alliance with all the numbness and lethargy and panic and fury of losing my father and my future, and together they nearly beat my ambition into a coma. But that's a different story and besides, I'm better now. Fake it till you make it, as they say. Keep sitting in that chair.

The end. Except for one last thing.

A few weeks ago, when I was working on chapter 7, Cloud's homecoming, I had a visitor. I'd stepped up my café game by then, was rotating between one in Park Slope with sexy-ass baristas but not enough light, one around my way that was cool until lunchtime and too crowded afterward, and one in Carroll Gardens that was always peaceful because the coffee and the food both sucked. That afternoon, I was at the Park Slope spot, two espressos deep, wrestling with the teargas sequence and having all sorts of problems. I was in a zone. Not a productive zone, but a zone nonetheless. I didn't see him come in, didn't look up until I heard a body settle into the chair across from mine.

“You're Billy's kid.”

I slapped my laptop shut. He looked as if he'd aged two decades in two months. Gaunt cheeks beneath an unkempt salt-and-pepper beard, red sunken eyes, skin loose and gray. Clothes filthy and random: a too-big Oakland Raiders sweatshirt, acid-washed jeans, a baseball cap bearing the logo of a failed brokerage firm.