“Because I know something you don’t.”
“Oh yeah? What, how to catch a unicorn?”
The Ambassador interlaced his fingers behind his head. “Cloud comes home tomorrow.”
“Get the fuck outta here.”
“I’m dead-ass! Everything’s coming together, you see what I’m talkin’ ’bout? Me, Cloud, this nigga here, together we—”
“Dengue, stop.” Billy’s palm shook as he lifted it to ward off Fever’s words. “She’s right. Look at us.” He glanced at me. “I just wanna get to know my son.”
Yeah, I know: aaaawww. Well, fuck you. I teared up when he said it, shocked us all. Anger is a hard thing, but it’s brittle, too. And heavy. I’m not saying I shrugged off a whole life’s worth right then and there like James Brown does that cape, but I was ready for easy, for the past to be the past, questions and answers be damned. For the father-son reconciliation montage, the leaf-blown Central Park stroll, the joyous old-haunt watering hole return, the manly basketball-court squeeze around the shoulders, all of it intercut with shots of Karen watching us depart from various windows and doorways and looking decreasingly skeptical until finally the musical score swells and she shakes her head like oh, heck, and beckons her man into a big ol’ I-forgive-you hug and then you see the three of us cooking lasagna together, laughing our heads off. Then fade to black.
Or fade to Karen, faded off the herb, fading out of sight a quarter-hour later, claiming she had a date (almost certainly untrue) and encouraging me and Billy to spend this and subsequent nights somewhere other than her apartment, since she certainly didn’t want to get in the way of all the father-son bonding on which he was so eager to embark. Cut to your boy’s overloaded brain and body barking reminders that a state of altered consciousness is not the same as sleep, even if you’ve got your eyes closed, and shutting the fuck down. I dozed off to the sounds of Billy and Fever’s conversation through the bedroom wall, pitched low and serious.
The next morning, I took my father to see his parents. I know I haven’t said much about them. Truth is, I’m kind of a shitty grandson. But Joe and Dana are mad cool. I hadn’t visited since before Karen threw me out, because I didn’t want to put them in the awkward position of having to tell me I couldn’t stay there. Although more likely, they’d have broken whatever no-safe-haven promise Karen had extracted from Dana—whom she referred to as her mother-in-law and spoke with at least weekly—and made up the guest room bed.
Even then, I’d have had to powwow at the kitchen table with Big Joe, let the old softie do his best hamfisted sweat-of-my-brow Irish hardass impression while I hung my head and pledged to get my act together, finish high school, go to college. I’d have had to sip chamomile with Dana on the living room couch, endure her cocked-head sympathy and try not to think about how many promising dusky-hued young fuck-ups she’d used her streetsmart-white-lady routine on before me, my mother included. Dana had been Karen’s favorite painting teacher at Art and Design, the venerable guitar-strumming Ms. Weissman. Venerable even then, and still teaching now at sixty-nine. Hadn’t taken to retirement any more than her husband had.
Joe was a union carpenter when Billy was growing up. In the early nineties he’d gotten hip to the game and started contracting—partnered up with money-men he met along the way whose ambition was to leave no neighborhood in Brooklyn, Harlem, even the Bronx affordable for anybody with a normal job, replace every fifty-cent bodega coffee in the five boroughs with a $4.35 iced mocha latte. He took sweat equity and made a boom-time killing. When I was nine, my grandparents sold their third-floor L.E.S. walkup (worth a grip by then itself) and copped a ninth-floor spread on 94th and West End Ave, where Dana began pretending she wasn’t Jewish because the place was overrun with these rich, rabidly pro-Israel Members of the Tribe who voted Republican and made her sick. I take my iced mocha latte with a vanilla flavor shot, by the way, which balances the chocolate lovely.
It seemed wise to keep my father aboveground for now, so I splurged on a cab. For a guy who claimed he just wanted to get to know his son, Billy did a lot of silent window-staring as we crawled the West Side Highway. Sometimes he turned to look longer at a building, a billboard. I didn’t ask why. He might’ve been remembering that the words BRACKEN KILLED AMUSE had once blared from the surface, or just trying to assimilate the current, iced mocha latte New York with the one he’d left behind. The one with neighborhoods where being vanilla-flavored could get you shot. Sorry. I forced that one, I know.
Billy piped up as we passed 50th. “There’s nothing else I should know?”
“About them?” I said, all broad and italicized, but if he caught it he pretended otherwise, and I let it go. “I don’t know. Just that they got old. They’re pretty well off now, financially, but they’re uncomfortable about it. Whenever the building hires a new doorman, Joe takes the guy aside and tells him, ‘When you see me coming, don’t get up.’”
Billy ran his hands over his hair, trying to press it down. From a distance, he looked presentable—for a dreadlocked Caucasian, anyway. Up close, my chop job couldn’t hide the neglect. There were still twigs and pebbles and shit trapped in there.
“We could hit a barbershop first. Get you a cut.”
His hands dropped to his lap, and Billy nodded. Then, remembering: “I have no money.”
“That’s okay. I got you.”
His eyes flashed at me, grateful and ashamed, and we each looked out our windows. Strong wind on the water, little whitecaps. I appraised the distance to Jersey, thinking as I always did that it wasn’t so far, that I could swim it if I had to. What circumstances might require me to fling myself into a frigid river strewn with imprudent mobsters was harder to determine. A plague of zombies, perhaps. Zombies hate water.
“You must’ve had money at some point,” I said, breaking my rule. “You made it back here. And got your hands on a lot of paint.”
Billy spoke around a thumbnail. “Wish I knew.”
He tapped the glass. “There used to be a hardware store right there. Eighty-third and Riverside. The owner was this old Cuban guy, Mr. Jimenez. He kept the back door unlocked for load-ins, so it was real easy to rack paint. Sabor figured it out. One day I walk out the back, and bam—Mr. Jimenez hits me in the face with a two-by-four.
“Sabor jets. I’m lying on the ground, blood’s pouring from my nose. Mr. Jimenez freaks out. Can’t believe what he’s done. Thinks he’s killed me. He starts yelling for his wife, and she comes down from their apartment with her daughter, and the three of them carry me to a couch in his office. He wants to hand himself over to the cops. I keep saying ‘no policía, no policía.’
“After a while, things calm down, and I nod out for a few minutes. When I wake up, Mr. Jimenez is flipping through my blackbook. It’s full of outlines, train flicks, color lists—enough evidence to get me locked under the jail. I’m about to make a run for it when he looks up and says, ‘You are an artist. You are very good. You should not have to steal.’ And he hires me and Sabor to paint a mural on his outside wall. We did it that weekend. The whole time we were painting, he kept coming out and patting us on the back and saying ‘No more graffitis for you boys. Only good, honest work, for money.’”
“You should have listened.” I rapped on the partition. “Hey, yo, excuse me. Right here is great, thanks.”
I’d spotted an old-fashioned barbershop pole, two doors in from the corner of 95th and West End. We passed through the cold, sunny glare of mid-morning Manhattan, then entered the talcum-powder-and-hot-metal warmth of what I quickly realized was the whitest barbershop in New York City.
I don’t just mean that no black person had ever crossed the threshold in the three hundred and sixty-seven years they’d been in business, though I was certainly the first. Nor, when I say white, do I mean Polish, or Jewish, or Italian. This place was aggressively nonethnic, in the manner of a successful
presidential candidate, or the state of Kansas. I suspected that the only haircuts they offered were The Senator, The Stockbroker, and The Yachtsman—the only difference between the three being the location of the part.
In each of the two barber’s chairs sat a well-groomed sexagenarian frowning into the pages of the New York Post. The bell over the door clanged when we entered. They stopped frowning, raised their heads, and frowned again.
“Help you?” the bolder one inquired, looking at each of us in turn.
I jutted my chin at Billy, lowered myself into a cracked leather side chair. “Help him.”
One thing about these old crackerjacks, they never miss a beat. He was up in a flash, armpitting his paper and spinning the chair toward Billy. “Right this way, sir. Have a seat.” Voice smoother than a comb through Ronald Reagan’s hair.
The place was musky with propriety; you walked in and suddenly understood that there were correct ways to do things, manly things like applying aftershave or buying cuff links. You didn’t know any of the protocols, but these guys did, and that made them better than you in ways they were too genteel to point out. Your only comfort was the knowledge that when you left you’d be a coarse, blundering schmuck with a good haircut, and that would be a vast improvement. All this even though the place was a dump and no member of the ruling class would ever so much as housebreak a pedigreed hunting dog on the Post.
Billy clambered into the chair. The barber took a closer look, and experienced the first crisis of his entire life. It was over in three nanoseconds.
“Well. I don’t see this every day.” He snapped a sheet so that it billowed perfectly over my father. “What shall I do?”
“Cut it off and burn it.”
A smile trickled toward his eyes. “I’ll cut it off, anyway.”
He assembled his tools and went to work. Scissors. Straight razor. Clippers. It was slow going, hypnotic to watch, and this guy was the quietest member of his profession.
A man sitting in a barber’s chair is a prisoner of sorts. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
Your boy here? Not a patient dude. Also, I tend to break whatever rules I set myself. Self-discipline’s a problem.
“Yo. Billy.”
He tried to look over without moving his head.
“Did you ever think about me, all that time you were away? I mean, I know your life was hectic. But were you ever like, ‘Damn, Dondi is growing up without a father’?”
“I thought about you all the time.”
“Yeah? And how did you think I was doing?”
The barber threw me a glance, then pretended to mind his beeswax. Billy sighed, and stared out at the street. “I don’t know.”
“Well, do you want to know? Because you could ask. That’d be a start.”
“Dengue told me some,” he said softly.
“Oh yeah? Like what? Because I’m sure Dengue’s a great source. I’m sure he knows exactly what it was like for me.”
Billy turned, and nearly caught a scissor in the eye. “He said you tried to write my name.”
I wasn’t expecting that—didn’t even remember telling Dengue. It had happened on the heels of everything fucked up: Karen just back from the hospital, the ground trembling beneath our feet and fury swirling in the air as thick and green as flare smoke and me desperate for some kind of outlet. I bought a can of Rusto, went down to the Navy Yards. The name that came was his. I put up a lone tag, learned that my handskills were garbage, tossed the paint, and went home more confused than ever.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure, Billy. One time, just to see what it felt like. That’s the most irrelevant shit Dengue possibly could have told you.” I was doubly heated now, and when he kept quiet, I kept going.
“You fucked us both up, man. Maybe you didn’t mean to, but you did, and now you need to man up and face it.” I meant me and Karen, not me and him, but whatever, he could take it how it worked.
The barber hit the lever and spun the chair ninety degrees, in concession to our conversation. Then he resumed the business at hand, palmed Billy’s head and pushed it down and kept on trimming, ho-hum, just another morning at the ol’ haircuttery.
Billy looked at me over his brow. “I’m sorry, Dondi. I don’t know what else to say.”
Something in me unclenched, hearing those words, but Billy didn’t need to know it. I felt a tear oozing its way toward the duct and stopped that motherfucker cold, sheer force of will.
“You could have stayed,” I said.
“I don’t know what your mother’s told you, but I couldn’t.”
“Well, you could’ve not done the shit that made you have to leave. You could’ve said ‘You know what, fuck it, let me raise my kid instead of leaving him out here to fend for himself, so he can end up in fucking jail.’ Which I almost did.”
Billy interlaced his hands, beneath the sheet. “I wasn’t much older than you are now, Dondi. I did what I thought was right.”
I faked a laugh, ran my palms up and down the thighs of my jeans. “Motherfucker, I know better and I’m eighteen! You were twenty-four.”
I glanced away, trying to chill myself out, and happened to catch a look at a U.S. News & World Report topping a stack of magazines. On the cover was George W. Bush, smirking liplessly behind some podium. No sight puts me in a fouler mood.
“Just tell me this, man. How come Amuse was more important to you dead than me and Karen were alive, huh? Were y’all fuckin’ or something?”
The chair squeaked as Billy jacked himself out of it. He loomed over me, waiting, but I didn’t look up. Little bits of hair slid off the sheet and stuck to the backs of my hands. I ignored those too. He was going to have to lower himself into my field of vision if he wanted to see my eyes.
He didn’t.
“I was a soldier,” my father said. He turned on his heel, walked back to the barber’s chair, sat down. “A soldier. Do you know what that means, Dondi?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. For a few brief moments, it seemed like a soldier was the only thing worth being in the world.
7
don’t mean to jerk you around, but Billy’s reunion with his parents was sort of boring, so we’ll be skipping it. Maybe this is my philosophy of life, that the moments you’d think would be important aren’t. Or they are without managing to be interesting, while the crucial ones fall out of the sky like poorly installed air conditioners, and break your neck.
Dana cried, Joe cried, Billy did a lot of mumbling and shrugging and proved generally incapable of answering questions about the past or future. There were turkey sandwiches for lunch. My grandmother spent the visit trying to gauge whether Billy was well enough to be let back out of the building. I cued our exit around four-thirty, when I saw she was beginning to conclude that he was not. I said we had a party to attend. Which was true.
Cloud 9 had done his bid like a gangster, and he was coming home the same way, with a throwdown that proved his investments had matured more than he had. We could hear the music from three piers away, inside our cab, and by the time we pulled up it was deafening, monumentally obnoxious. Although not compared to the yacht.
Imagine the boat you’d build if you were the richest man in the world, and had the smallest penis. The lower deck was crammed with early-comers, drinks in hand, grooving to techno or one of its infinite, indistinguishable variants, all of which sound to me the way a Eurotrash guy’s cologne smells. Hundreds more were lined up on the dock, spilling from the ass-end of a velvet-rope maze. At the front, three bouncer-sized men holding clipboards they never looked at and walkie-talkies they never spoke into beckoned people up the gangway in groups of three and four.
Billy unfolded himself onto the curb and blinked at the commotion. He didn’t even have the presence of mind to close the taxi door behind him, just stood there running his p
alm over his crewcut again and again. It made him look freshly lobotomized, and his scalp was forty percent lighter than his forehead, but two-toned psych-ward-deserter was an improvement.
“Come on,” I said, “we better get in line.”
“Like hell.”
I turned to look at him, but Billy was already fifteen feet away, and all I could make out was the bob and weave of his shorn dome. At every moment, my father simply occupied the one spot where nobody was; if you shrank the people down to molecules, it would’ve been the kind of phenomenon a physicist would name after himself. For a second, I wondered if Billy had learned it in the rainforest. Then I realized this was some graffiti-shogun shit.
I tried to follow him, and within seconds found myself as stymied as a spiderwebbed fly. I always imagine Stymie was a real person, by the way, a guy so hapless that his buddies started using his name as a synonym for failure. I turned around and began trying to retrace my long-gone path, then froze when I heard my name over a bullhorn.
“Paging Kilroy Dondi Vance. Mr. Vance, please step to the front of the line.”
“Ayo!” I threw my hand up, waved it around. Dozens of older, better-dressed people turned to suck their teeth at the kid acting a fool. “That’s me,” I announced, and the masses parted grudgingly, salty as the Red Sea. I strutted through a corridor of bodies and joined Billy. A bouncer fastened orange paper bands around our left wrists. “VIP lounge is on the top deck,” he said, stepping aside to let us board.
We climbed the gangplank, and both flights of stairs. At the top, another bouncer flicked his eyes at our wrists, then reached for the handle of a smoked-glass door. Weird, I thought, that a dude fresh out the penitentiary would be so into security. Or maybe it wasn’t.
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