Rage Is Back

by Adam Mansbach

  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 betwee
n 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.

  “You don’t have to be scared of me.” He laid his hands on the table. “There’s nothing I could do to you now, even if I wanted. Your father and his friends took care of that.”

  “The ones who are still alive,” I said.

  Bracken stared into his lap. The smell was slow in coming off him, bound to his body by a shroud of grime. I knew it well. It was the stench of the underground, of depth and blackness, fire and fear.

  You can’t walk off one map without walking onto another.

  He raised his eyes to me. “I have to see Billy.”

  “That’s a good one.”

  “Please. I need his help.” Bracken’s lips trembled. He started to speak, changed his mind, leaned back. Changed it again, bent over the table, and hissed the words.

  “I need to be free.”

  “From what?”

  Long pause. Slow dissolve into silence.

  “You know something, Bracken? He’d probably give it if he could. I want you to think on that. Billy Rage would help you if he could.”

  Behind the counter, the barista and the café’s owner were conferring in hushed, agitated tones. It seemed like a good bet that We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone would be invoked shortly, if Bracken stayed.

  “I need his help,” he said again, and slumped lower in his chair.

  “I have no idea where my father is. He could be anywhere. He could be dead.”

  We stared at each other for about a minute, and then his eyelids started drooping, lower and lower, until at last they closed. His head lolled with an agonizing slowness that ended when chin met chest. Anastacio Bracken had passed out. Of all the goddamn things. I packed my shit and bounced.

  My father could be anywhere, I guess. I tell myself that. But there’s only one place I can imagine Billy going, and that’s back to the jungle. The thought terrifies me. I can’t dwell on it for long, or I start feeling sick. At the same time, though, I understand. I get why. I get him. I didn’t have that before.

  I try to hold that close.

  —

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  hanks to the following writers, without whose vast understanding of graff history and practice this book could not have been written: KET, LORD SCOTCH, TRUE MATH, BOM 5, ZEPHYR, PART ONE, FABEL, UPSKI, Jacob Kimvall and Tobias Barenthin Lindblad. I’m doubly thankful to KEO, a font of knowledge with a knowledge of fonts who drew the jacket and the illuminated letters that begin each chapter. I’m grateful to Daniel Alarcón, Vinnie Wilhelm, Theo Gangi and Alain Maridueña for their invaluable notes on the manuscript, to Eugene Cho for his design expertise, to Joel “J.PERIOD” Astman for proofreading and mixology, and to Victoria Häggblom and Vivien Mansbach for their love and support throughout the writing process. I’m also indebted to my agent, Richard Abate, and my editors at Viking, Amber Qureshi and Liz Van Hoose.

  ALSO BY ADAM MANSBACH

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  Shackling Water

  Angry Black White Boy

  A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing

  (editor)

  The End of the Jews

  Go the F**k to Sleep

  Nature of the Beast

  (graphic novel)