Rage Is Back (9781101606179) (6 page)

November 1988. The Jungle Brothers dropped
Straight Out the Jungle
, everybody bought African medallions, and Transit Authority spokesman Charles Robicheaux announced that after an exhaustive search it had hired a new Chief of Security, selecting Detective Anastacio Bracken from the ranks of the NYPD's Vandal Squad. Bracken's long record of distinguished service and his administrative experience in coordinating a highly successful task force made him ideal for the position.

The Immortal 3 caught the press conference on TV, melting into Cloud's leather sectional as Bracken bellied up to the podium in a dark suit and a paisley tie, his thinning squid-ink hair combed back from his forehead and a modest civil-servant smile curling up around his bulbous drunkard's nose.

No wonder the fucker hadn't been heard from in so long: busy improving his prospects. But it didn't add up. Bracken was a low-level sadist with a high school education. Who the hell would make him chief of anything?

He adjusted his tie, looked straight through the screen at Billy, and announced that his first act as chief would be the introduction of a new tactic in the war against the vandals. Although the ongoing campaign to eradicate graffiti from the subways was experiencing success, an undesired side effect was that the criminals were coming above ground.
Like rats fleeing a ship
. Chuckle-chuckle-chuckle. To better combat the graffiti scourge, the city was going to begin prosecuting vandals in civil court, to the fullest extent of the law.

For example,
he harumphed, pretending to consult his notes,
there is the case of a vandal who has recently done grave damage to historic sites including the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. I'm not going to give him the satisfaction of mentioning his name, but this sociopath has cost the taxpayers of New York considerable money, to say nothing of the psychological effect his crimes have had on residents, tourists, and international visitors to our great city. This will not stand. That is why the City of New York, in addition to pursuing criminal charges, is also suing this individual for damages in the amount of two million dollars. We have built our cases carefully for months, and we intend to win.

Why don't you tell them what he wrote?
Cloud screamed at the television.
Why don't you tell them what it said on the goddamn motherfucking bridge?

Billy didn't speak. For all I know, relief was blooming in his belly like some nasty flower. Here was a giftwrapped excuse to abandon everything he couldn't handle, and maybe he'd been waiting for one all along.

My father slipped away that afternoon, eased into exile. For what it's worth, he tried to stay close, ghostwalking the five boroughs and checking in by telephone, blending fact with fiction to keep eavesdroppers guessing. Every week, Cloud left him an envelope full of money at a Harlem jazz bar. Billy picked it up more often than he didn't. He forwarded most of the cash to Karen, folded inside long, apologetic letters that he asked be read to me when I was old enough to understand. I found them in Karen's dresser a couple of years ago, when I was looking for Zig-Zags. They were infuriating from the grammar on up: you could almost hear the bugle fanfare playing behind his words, see Billy striking a chest-puffed pose before vanishing into the night to continue the crusade for truth, justice, and the American way. The next day, I asked Karen why she'd never showed me, and she rolled her eyes up from her book in super-slow-mo and said
I was waiting until you were old enough to understand
.
Did you understand?

Not like he probably hoped.

She turned back to her book.
Mmm-hmm.

The money and the letters stopped when Cloud got knocked. Seems the boy Sour Patch felt the rest of the crew had violated kindergarten principle #1, share and share alike, cut him out of an afternoon's action and a corresponding chunk of cash. Cloud, being Cloud, told Sour Patch to suck his motherfucking dick. Next day, the local precinct got an anonymous tip about some stick-up kids hunkered down with guns and stolen merch, and an hour later Cloud was being stuffed into a squad car. Guess who was waiting for him downtown, ready to cut a quick deal if the vandal-cum-larcenist provided information about the whereabouts of a certain old friend?

Cloud, being Cloud, told Bracken to suck his motherfucking dick, and got a vicious closed-door pistol-whipping just in case fifteen years of felony charges hadn't packed sufficient sting. I always imagine Bracken crouching over Cloud's bloodcaked body and growling
I shoulda did you when I did your boy Amuse
, but that's just too many cornball movies tentacled around my brain.

It was the summer of '89 when my father left—late August, Dengue thinks, because the new BDP album had just dropped. In Billy's absence, the civil judgment had gone against him full force, two million smackaroonies—probably would have come down by a decimal point if he'd stood trial, since two mil is absurdly inflated for the removal of a few thousand hits unless you're painting over everything with liquid gold and using stegosaurus-tusk-handled brushes, but what did it matter? It was money Billy didn't have and the city would never see cent-the-first of even if he hit three lottos.

There was nothing left to do but get out and start over. That, or go to prison and start over ten years down the line as a wage-garnered ex-con, never mind what horrors of incarceration might await an unaffiliated whiteboy who'd never done dirt worse than coloring outside the lines. Even I can't fault Billy for jetting at that point. Just for every decision he made in the twenty-six months leading to it.

Rage rang Fever from a payphone around two in the morning, told him it was time
.
The Ambassador grunted, swung a gym bag over his shoulder, shuffled to the street. He fired up the windowless white jump-out van Cloud had bequeathed to him before heading upstate for ten to fourteen Christmas Eves, and rolled to the predetermined pickup spot, an all-night diner on West 5th. Billy hopped in, smelling not just sweaty but deeply, darkly unclean. The rosacea that sometimes turned his face and scalp an irritated, scaly red was in full flare, worse than Dengue had ever seen it. Destination, Mexico.

Why not Canada, you might ask, where people mostly spoke English and they had that delicious bacon? Because Billy thought passport control, and everything else, would be tighter to the north. Why take chances among drunken moose hunters and Royal Mounted Police when you could stroll right into a country every third
pendejo
was indenturing himself to the mob to sneak out of?

Nice logic, asshole.

3

robably you forgot that I was hoofing fourteen flights of stairs in Dumbo. My bad. Flashbacks are like heavy drinking. It's easy to start, easy to keep going, hard to wake up the next morning knowing where you are. I tried coming straight out of it, like a DJ slamming the next song over on the snare instead of bothering to blend, on some “Nice logic, asshole. I reached the top of the last flight and opened the door . . .” but it seemed like a lot to ask. I've never done a book before, as you've no doubt guessed, and a lot of little technical things I didn't even notice as a reader are already kicking my ass. Old-timey writers had it easier; a couple hundred years ago you could just lay it out, like “Chapter Three, In Which the Explanation of Why Billy Left (Such as It Is) Has Concluded and Our Faithful Narrator Reaches the Top of the Last Flight and Opens the Door.” Nowadays, forget about it. Everybody's busy trying to prove how smart they are. As if that counts for something. Fuck writers.

In biology class, they tell you sight is our quickest sense, because light travels at 186,000 miles per second and sound a paltry Mach 5 or 3 or something. Nobody bets on the olfactory. But smell is a sleeper, cheating the starter pistol and sprinting straight at you, and when it hits you it can knock you down. Especially when that smell is a festering mélange of shit and piss and puke and panic, a toxic bouquet of everything a human being can secrete and reabsorb.

You experience an odor of this magnitude maybe once a year; it's only found haloing the farthest-gone of the unhinged and homeless. The hallway throbbed with it, and I threw an arm over my face and buried my nose in the crook of my elbow as I peered down the corridor, toward the source.

A man was slumped beneath the window at the far end of the hall. His legs were horseshoed out in front of him, arms at his sides, chin touching chest. An inverted forest of matted hair hung to his beard, obscured his face. The clothes were a mass of torn rags, layer atop layer, hints of the original colors showing through the greasy black filth like one of those drawings you make with Cray-Pas and a paperclip in a third-grade art class. On his feet appeared to be a pair of Converse All-Stars, but one sole was attached only in the middle of the shoe, front and back bowed down away from it, and the other sole was gone.

I took a step forward, eyes narrowed against the stench, and as I gained a better angle on the hallway, I saw the walls. All around the low corner in which the man sprawled were broad thick smears of red paint, applied to the beige wallpaper with bare hands. It looked as if a person had scooped himself out and spread the viscera into an ornate warning before his body understood it had been gutted and collapsed. Or like the mathematical proof of some impending planetary doom, worked out in great haste by a madman writing in the language of a savage alien race. It did not look like the shamanic symbols in Dengue's book but a corruption of them, a diseased and desperate mockery.

Nine long strides and I stood over him, waiting for the chest to rise and fall. It didn't. Not that I could see. I found myself counting my own breaths. To inhale even through the mouth was disgusting, so close to that smell, maybe even worse than through the nose because you cut the nasal cilia out of the action and their job was filtration, whereas mouth-breathing entailed gulping the microscopic shit-particles straight into your system.

I sucked down five lungfuls, and then the dude's leg twitched and I jumped back, startled, and kept watch for maybe a minute more, still seeing no evidence of respiration but at least sure he was not putrefying on the penthouse floor. Were I a clearer thinker, maybe I would have wondered how he'd gotten there, or where all that paint had come from, but all I really did in those sixty seconds was sack up for the possibility that this rancid motherfucker was my father.

“Billy?”

No response. I said it louder. Nothing.

“Billy!” I was shouting now, bent to his ear. “Yo! Rage!”

The head flew up. The eyes sprang open, animal with fear. And then his body shot up like something on marionette strings and he slammed me back into the wall. His forearm pressed across my windpipe, hard as bone, and he jammed the vampire-nails of his other hand into my gut. Animation could illustrate the feeling better than words: if we'd been cartoon characters, his arm would've disappeared into me until its shape emerged from my back, stretching my skin like rubber. I wondered if it was possible to throw up when you couldn't breathe.

I tried to speak, managed a strained “Billy” that only made him press the arm more violently against my neck. His eyes, inches from mine, bulged with panic and nothing more: no internal scramble to make sense of his situation, only the shock of the moment and the instinct to survive. This dude, Billy or not Billy, was feral. He was adrenaline and the wasted shell through which it coursed, rallying strength.

Or trying to. There wasn't enough, not even for the ninety seconds he would've needed to choke me out. I understood that before I had time to get scared. He was stink and bones, probably delirious with hunger.

I looked down at his smudged, leathery face and bloodshot ice-blue eyes and had to admit that yes, this could be Billy. Then I lifted my leg and kneed him in the nuts, and he howled and collapsed into a puddle on the floor.

I reared back and kicked him again, hard in the soft parts. He balled up, clutching at himself, eyes clenched, and I gave him another, heel to vertebrae. The stink was inside me now, pushing its way back out through my pores.

The ugly truth is this: I stomped the everloving shit out of that man, with a fury I'd never been able to wrap my hands around before, a fury that had been floating through me for years in wisps and rumors. I stomped him for being Billy and for not being Billy. For his trespasses, and so that if my real father ever returned, I'd already have offloaded my hurt feelings on this doppelgangly cocksucker and could, I don't know, roll out the crimson rug and give the man a hero's welcome.

Tears and snot were pouring out of me and spattering onto him. I'd switched legs, the right fatigued, the left awkward and ineffective. Which might have been the idea, if there was an idea. I suppose I knew that when I stopped, I'd have to make some kind of decision: to walk away, to help him up, to find out—how's the song go?
Who is he, and what is he to you?

He didn't make a peep throughout the stomp-down—further provocation for your boy, a final round of silence-as-guilt and judgment-in-absentia. It must have been my own subverbal utterances or the slap of rubber against flesh that brought good old stockbrokin' Patrick out into the hall, crinkling his cute little button nose and demanding to know what the hell was going on.

I stepped over the body and loped toward him. It took Patrick all of three seconds to announce that he didn't want any trouble, and reach for the door he'd just heaved wide.

I thrust my shoe against the jamb just in time and there we stood, slivers of me and Patrick visible to one another and the kind of smell people like him pay big dough to avoid wafting right into his sanctuary and nestling in the fibers of his Restoration Hardware couch. Patrick yanked stupidly at the doorknob. If anything, he should've been trying to kick my foot away.

“Get out of here,” he said. “I'll call the cops.”

I'd been planning to nice-guy him, but when a cat like Patrick starts invoking the police, your best bet is to play to expectations, become the thug he sees rather than confuse him with politeness.

In case this all sounds calculating and calm-under-pressure, let me assure you that I was a quivering wreck in need of a hug and two-and-a-half thorazines, and alpha-maling Patrick was like kicking a cat after you've been ass-raped by a gorilla. Yes, I'm from Brooklyn, and yes, I do illegal things and threaten to smack people and harbor homicidal revenge fantasies. But until that day, the only beatdowns in which I'd ever partaken had been intellectual, or as recipient. I'm no hardrock. I'm a nerd with swagger, one of those rodents or moths or whatever who knows how to secrete a pheromone that tricks predators into thinking I'm something else and deciding there's probably a dude farther down the late-night train car who's more muggable than me.

I pushed my way inside the condo, grabbed the cordless off the marble kitchen countertop, and ripped the battery out of the back.

“No cops,” I said. “Give me your cell phone, Patrick.”

His eyes saucered. “How do you know my name?” I could see the home-invasion nightmare centrifuging into his cerebellum like a movie newspaper. As if anyone would take the trouble to go unwashed for months just for the sake of luring this schmuck into the hallway and jacking his plasma screen.

“What, all black people look the same to you? I'm your marijuana delivery man, jerkoff. Now help me out here.”

He peered at me. “Mike? Jesus, what the fuck?”

“What the fuck is, I gotta get that guy out there cleaned up. Help me haul him to your bathroom.”

To his credit, Patrick didn't answer right away. He thought about it, weighed the options, saw he had none.

“Who is he?” he said at last. “How'd he get here?”

“I have no idea. He was here when I came. But he might be my father.”

“What are
you
doing here?”

Time traveling, dickface. “I had another drop-off in the building. Figured I'd see if you needed anything, long as I was in the neighborhood.”

Patrick leaned into the hall. “
That's
your father.”

“Like I said. Maybe.”

“You were—”

“I know what I was doing.”

“You're not gonna hurt him any more, are you?”

“I'm done. Come on.”

I could have borne the weight myself, but I didn't want Patrick alone in his apartment, growing the balls to lock or rat me out. We draped the dude's arms over our shoulders, hustled him inside, and lowered him into the bathtub. His eyes fluttered open once when we lifted him, once when we set him down. Otherwise, he was dead to the world.

“Turn it on, turn it on, save us,” Patrick shouted into the towel he'd wrapped around his face.

“Okay, but I'm warning you, he might spaz out. No telling.”

“I don't care.
I'm
gonna pass out if I have to smell him any longer.”

“You got anything to eat? He could probably use some food.”

“All I've got is beer. But I can order something. There's a new Thai place on Water Street that just opened. It's supposed to be—”

“Dude!”

Dude as a complete sentence is one of the best things I've learned from white people. It shut Patrick up, and I stared at him until he bumbled off to reconstruct his telephone and contemplate whether the fucked-and-filthy prefer prawns or chicken in their curry.

I don't know how long I sat on Patrick's toilet, staring at the bum in the tub. The fact that I'd attacked him had become incomprehensible; finding that anger now was like searching the ocean for a broken wave. The fortitude to do what lay ahead—to touch this man, strip him of his rags, meet his naked body with my eyes—was unfathomable. My body begged for sleep, that most reliable of cop-outs, and I felt my eyelids dip to halfmast. Unbelievable. A lifetime of wheedling information and poring over blackbooks, and
this
is the moment I choose to decide nah, forget it, my daddy ain't shit, I got nothing to say to dude, our business here is done? What kind of fucking punk was I, if I couldn't man up for this?

I stood, rifled through Patrick's medicine cabinet until I found a pair of scissors, and cut from the waist to the neckline. Three layers of fabric gave with ease, so soft I could have torn them with my hands. I stepped back, realized I was holding my breath, exhaled. Took another one, and held that too.

There was a travel-pouch strapped to his sunken, sunburned chest, the kind paranoid German tourists tote their passports around Times Square in. I crouched, sliced it off him, retreated to the toilet and tried to work the zipper. The metal was full of grit, so I just slit the whole thing open and shook the contents onto Patrick's floor, covered in tiles so tiny and white they looked like baby's teeth: a dozen miniature cut-glass bottles full of different-colored saps and powders, amber and pale-green and gold, and a Ziploc bag, the contents wrapped in a shred of checkered fabric.

I stared down at all of it awhile, then forced myself back over to the tub. I tossed away the scraps of his shoes, grabbed the jeans by the cuffs, and yanked. They slid easily off his hips, and his tan came with them; below the waistline he was paler than Darth Vader's head. I glimpsed the snarl of pubic hair, turned before I saw more. Spun both faucets until water chugged into the tub, opened a bottle of liquid hand soap sitting on Patrick's sink and emptied it into the stream. An army of bubbles rose up around the body, like grass around a badger's corpse in one of those time-lapse nature films.