“Yeah, but he’s raised the most dough,” countered Stoon. “That’s all that counts in politics, watch.”
“You crazy, man. In this city, it’s union endorsements. Bracken—”
“Fuckin’ MacNeil and Lehrer over here,” said the Ambassador. “So what’s up? Everybody ready to rustle up their people and make history, or do I have to give my big inspirational speech?”
“I know I need to be inspired, dog. I was at Cloud’s party. Billy ripped his name out of my blackbook and ate it. You saw it, Vex. So did you.”
He pointed at me. I guess I forgot to mention that Dregs was in the house.
“Yo, mega, mega-respect, Billy, man, but are you sure you’re up to this? I mean, you been off in the jungle, just got back, probably haven’t, like, totally readjusted yet. . . .”
“Painting that creepy juju shit in the tunnels . . .” Sambo added, under his breath.
“Yeah, yeah, right. I know if it was me, I’d need a year just to get my head straight. I damn sure wouldn’t be ready to organize no Mission: Impossible shit.”
My father smiled indulgently. “I wanted to learn how to defend myself. For when I came home. Those symbols in the tunnels were for spiritual protection—if they’re what I think they are, anyway. I, uh . . . don’t remember painting them.”
The silence this time was tender.
“I heard the shamen taught you how to throw hex,” Blam 2 tossed into the void.
“Shamans, ninja. Not shamen. Read a fuckin’ book one time in your life.”
“Word?” said Vexer. “You on some Obi-Wan Kenobi Gandalf Merlin shit now, Billy?” Grateful laughs. Dregs’ was the loudest.
Billy stared into the darkness. “I learned some things,” he said. “But this city’s no rainforest.”
Supreme Chem’s throaty voice rose from the back. “Ayo, B, you bring any bazaguanco back with you? I been trying to get my hands on some, but ninjas won’t send me any; they all say you gotta come to it, it doesn’t come to you.”
Billy looked startled. “That’s kind of the rule.”
Sambo raised his hand, waved it around. “Uh, hello? Hi. What the fuck are we talking about here?”
Supreme Chemistry turned toward him. “Whatchu wanna talk about, Sambo? How your man Shamrock went over me on the 1 train with his little bullshit straight letters and you ain’t stop him? ’Cause Kimza told me you was there, ninja.”
“I don’t give a fuck what Kimza told you, dude. Ask that nigga why he started putting up CFC, when he was never even down for one second.”
“Cuz Shamrock’s a fuckin’ basehead, that’s why,” called Klutch One, from across the room. “He’ll put anybody down who gets him high. Should call that shit the Crack Fiend Crew.”
“Yo,” said Vexer, rising, “it’s kings or better in here, man. Chill. Put it aside.”
“Shit, if these ninjas is kings, I know I’m an Or Better. I carried the cross on my back for decades, and now these little pisswater ninjas—”
“Fuck this,” said Blam 2. “I didn’t come down here to reheat twenty-year-old beef.”
“Yo, it is what it is, B. Certain shit gotta get rectified, you feel me?”
“No,” said Billy, loud enough to turn heads. “I don’t feel you. I don’t feel any of you.”
He walked to the front of the room, paused for a second as if about to speak, and then changed his mind. Stepped down from the Parlor into the gaping nothingness, and was gone.
“Billy!” His name echoed in the tunnel. “Come back, man!”
Dengue pointed after him. “There goes the readiest, downest, uppest dude in history. You goddamn . . . children!”
He roared the word, and banged his walking stick against the floor for emphasis. Poseidon couldn’t have done it any better; I half-expected a river to gush forth where wood met ground. “We come to you with a plan that can redeem all your sorry old asses, make it all mean something. But you don’t even see that, because you don’t know what you are.”
He turned on his heel and walked away, behind the piano, only to double back. “This should be a New York City thing, strictly. But it’s gonna happen, with or without you petty motherfuckers. I got Germans who are down. Niggas from Brazil who wreck shit. If you want it to be them who take your trains back, fine.” He spun away again. For a couple of seconds, all you could hear was the scuttle of rats.
“Was that your big inspirational speech?” asked Fizz.
Dengue spoke without turning around. “Give or take.”
“Not bad. You got it in your pocket in braille or something?”
“Go suck some dick, you fuckin’ corporate sellout.” But the Ambassador was trying not to smile.
“You know, Fev,” said Vexer, “none of us said no.”
“Far from it,” added Stoon.
“And no doubt, it’s gotta be an NYC exclusive,” Sambo said. “I think even me and ’Preme can agree on that. Am I right?” He raised his fist into the air, behind his head. Supreme Chemistry came forward, bumped it with his own.
“Yeah, ninja. You right about that, if nothing else.”
“Awww. Now hug.”
“Fuck you, Fizz,” ’Preme and Sambo said together.
Blam 2 tapped me on the knee. “Little Rage, go see if you can catch up with your old man.”
Billy stepped into the light. “I’m right here. Let’s get down to business.”
—
“Yo, ninja, lemme bark at you right quick.” Supreme Chemistry loped over, threw an arm around my father’s shoulders, glanced over both his own as if to make sure nobody was eavesdropping. Only Dengue, Vexer and I were left; the other writers had melted back into the blackness when the meeting wrapped, minutes before.
“What’s up?”
He rubbed his thumb against his nose, sniffed, cracked his neck. “Check the flavor, my ninja. Long as you down here, you best to go see Lou. You know she gonna hear about this, if she ain’t already, and you don’t need homegirl throwin’ salt in the game, on some ol’ ‘how Billy gon’ be in my neighborhood and not pay his respects?’ type shit.” His arm swung up again, and Supreme Chemistry pushed his shades flush to his cheekbones. “I’m saying, Vex Boogie can take Little Rage and Fever topside, and me and you can dap her up real quick, you feel me?”
Billy goggled at him for what felt like an epoch.
“Lou?”
“Lou, ninja. Don’t tell me you don’t remember Lou. Who you think kept you alive in these tunnels, gave you paint and fed you track rabbits and shit?”
“The Mole People,” said Dengue, strolling over. “Of course.” He brightened. “Hey, maybe they’d help. You all could ask.”
“Come on,” I said. “There’s no Mole People. You guys are fucking with me. I saw C.H.U.D. That shit was bullshit.”
“Rats?” Billy blinked at Supreme Chem. “You’re saying I ate rats?”
’Preme turned his head and hocked a snotwad into the abyss. We all watched its majestic arc.
Splat.
“Time’s a-wastin’, B, and Lou’s camp is a hike. We going or what?”
“I guess so,” said Billy, slow. “If you guys think I should.”
“Yo, Lou got mad people,” Vex put in. “If she wanted to help niggas, she could help niggas.” He spit through his front teeth, a sleek bullet of saliva that landed without a sound. “Not that she’s gonna help niggas.”
“I’ll go too,” I said. “Maybe I can help convince her.”
The Ambassador smiled. “Getting a taste for downstairs, huh?”
I shrugged it off, but he was right. Being underground touched some vigorous, neglected part of me that had never stopped wanting to have adventures and explore new lands—the part graffiti channeled when my parents were my age, and nothing c
hannels today, to my generation’s great misfortune. No options for a city kid who likes scrabbling up stuff and outgrows jungle gyms, unless you want to go balls-to-the-wall and do that Parkour shit and break your skull. You could join one of those rock-climbing gyms, I guess, but it always smells like farts in there. Besides, scaling some fake wall while a harness hugs your nuts might be good exercise, but it’s got nothing to do with freedom.
We said goodbye to Vex and Fever, and got moving. Half an hour of winding, forking tunnel brought us to a flight of metal stairs, and then we were trudging through a series of cavernous rooms separated by grated doors. The ground was littered with lean-tos, sleeping bags, mattresses, fresh human shit—like a foul, Mole version of Central Park during the Great Depression.
“Night camps,” Supreme Chemistry explained, covering his nose with his shirt. “Fuckin’ trailer parks of the tunnels. You want a ten-dollar suck-off from a foster-care runaway with trackmarks, come back through here in about six hours.”
“Thanks, I’ll set my watch.”
“Oh, Rage-ito got jokes, huh? Let me guess. You’re the funny black dude up at that hincty-ass school.”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Where is everybody?” Billy asked.
“Upstairs hustling. We still close to the surface. These mufuckers come downstairs to crash, but they don’t live here. Cops bust this up like once a week. The real camps are deeper. Harder to find.”
“How do you know where?”
“I’m Supreme Chemistry, B. The world is my living room. Here, have a granola bar. I got Peanut Butter Chocolate or Cookies and Cream.”
We stopped before a cement wall. “First the doggie door,” ’Preme said, and dropped flat to arch himself through a sledgehammered opening. Billy and I followed. On the other side was a narrow ridge, overlooking an abyss, though I use overlooking loosely. I couldn’t see a thing.
“Now the monkey vine.” He reached into the blackness and grabbed a thick cable, like a magician pulling a card out of thin air. Wrapped his legs around it. Vanished.
I went next, and came down a three-count later, atop a layer of trash bags stuffed with clothes—to cushion the drop, Supreme Chem said, but also to make the floor invisible, so that if somebody uninvited made it to the ledge and looked down, he wouldn’t risk a jump.
The eyes tricked the brain all kinds of ways down here. You’d catch a flash of light in your periphery, whirl toward it and find nothing, only the darkness spinning itself up around you as punishment for turning your head too fast. Sounds echoed above, in the cubbyholes hollowed from the walls, and you’d look up and see vampiric silhouettes swoop toward you, only to disintegrate an instant before fang found neck. Or your eyes picked out a shape that seemed impossible, and you dismissed it, told yourself no rat could be that big—and then whoosh, the figment brushed against your leg and trundled past like the sale at Macy’s was ending in fifteen minutes and you were just one more street-clogging imbecile.
Before long light breached the horizon, cold and pale like it was coming from one of those lamps set toward the bottom of a swimming pool, with none of the flicker or heat of the few campfires we’d passed. I looked away and my eyes seared a bright square blotch onto a charred wall: my own personal Rothko.
“Hold up.” Supreme Chemistry stopped short, and I walked into his forearm like it was a turnstile bar.
“Good guests don’t show up unannounced.” He leaned past me, grabbed a stick propped up against the tunnel wall, and thwanged a pipe running just below the ceiling. A few seconds later, someone on the other end tapped back.
We rounded a final bend, and stepped into an enormous natural cavern, so high and wide that for a moment it seemed we weren’t underground at all. Light trickled in through a street grate, bounced off the craggy walls and reached the dwellings speckling the flat ground stripped of warmth, more like moonbeams than sunshine.
Cardboard and bedsheets and black plastic were the primary building materials, plus the occasional beam of salvaged wood. Sounds humble, but some of these structures wound on and on, like the pillow-fort a rich kid with mad couches would build in his living room. There were a few proper tents, too, and as I looked up I saw that every suitable nook and hollow in the high rock walls served as a domicile. Candles threw skittish light on bedding and bookcases; clotheslines sagged with wash. From one of those aeries, a radio wheezed a Bob Dylan song. I’m not sure which one, but Kid Capri wasn’t DJing, so it wasn’t “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” though that is by far the man’s best work. Or at least the only joint I found listenable on the Greatest Hits CD the Uptown Girl gave me as part of the Advanced Whiteness Studies curriculum that dating her required me to master.
Billy and I just stood there, at the mouth, trying to absorb it all. In front of me, a swarm of kids chased a soccer ball. Behind them, two women cooked over a waist-high metal trashcan, pots balanced on chickenwire, flames oranging their faces.
A sense of peace, of stillness, seemed to permeate the place. That lasted for about thirty seconds, at which point the largest female human being I had ever seen walked straight up to my father, reared back her oven-mitt-sized hand, and slapped Billy across the jaw so hard she turned his head.
“You got a lot of balls, showing up here. And you got a lot bringing him, Drum.”
I waited for Supreme Chemistry to tell her his new name.
He didn’t.
Billy rubbed his cheek. “You must be Lou.” If it sounds like a funny thing to say, it wasn’t.
She looked him over. “Heard you were gonna be downstairs. Heard you got your life together.”
“You hear a lot,” I said.
She snapped a look at me, the kind the pitcher gives the runner on first base, then stepped in close to Billy. “Half these people think you cursed us, man. Come on, before the whole world sees you.”
Off she loped. We jogged to keep up. It was like crossing the set of a Civil War movie—you know, the scene where you see the whole bustling battlefield tent city laid out, and then come to the general’s quarters, full of crystal decanters and elaborate furniture some battalion of assholes had to lug across four states. Lou’s residence was a deep natural recess, a cave within the cave. Cinderblock bookcases lined one wall. The other was a pantry, stocked with cans. Near the entrance, two wooden park benches faced off over a milkcrate coffeetable draped with a piece of coarse African-patterned fabric, the kind you can buy at any street fair. It matched the curtain she’d slapped aside to admit us, and the one obscuring whatever lay farther in.
Billy, Supreme Chemistry and I squeezed onto one bench. Our hostess took up most of the other.
“I didn’t curse anyone,” my father said. “That wasn’t in my training.”
“I don’t mean you threw a curse, Billy. I mean you are one.” Lou leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and used one dreadlock to fasten the rest into a ponytail. “Last week, some real nasty cops started fucking with my people. Asking questions about you.”
“Bracken? The one running for mayor?”
“You think I’m living in a goddamn cave so I can follow politics? No pig yet knows how to find my camp, and I don’t leave but once a month. A white cop who likes to hurt people, that’s all I know. Him and his boys. They been grabbing our runners on the way down. Making threats, and making good on those threats. Look.”
Lou pointed halfway up the cavern wall. I squinted and saw a thick pipe jutting from the bedrock. Below it, on the ground, was a toppled stack of white plastic buckets, the kind painters use.
“He made the Tears of Buddha dry up,” she said. “Without a water source, this place can’t last.”
“Maybe the city fixed the leak,” I suggested.
“After ten years?” Lou’s bench creaked as she sat down. “‘Bring him to me, or you’ll be drinking each other’s piss
,’ that’s what he told my guy. Next morning, dry.”
We took that in.
“All your work’s been painted over, Billy. You probably wouldn’t know where to look, but if you did, you’d see.”
“Who?” I asked. “How?”
“The same way your old man had everybody bringing him paint to ‘defend’ us against demons to begin with.” She turned to Supreme Chemistry. “He staggers in a few weeks ago, smelling like year-old ass. No fucking grasp on reality whatsoever, even for down here. Ranting and raving about all type of evil spirits and shit—when he was strong enough to speak at all, which was about an hour a day before these good-hearted, gullible motherfuckers started forcing whatever food they could spare down his throat.” She spread her arms across the top slat of the bench and glowered. “Belief is destiny down here. Folks scare easy, and they do what they think they have to. They listened when he told them he needed paint to make us safe from the fuckin’ boogeyman, and they listened when the cop said get rid of it or get their legs broke. Busted their tails until everything was gone.”
“Wait a sec,” I said. “The guy defending you leaves, and you get attacked? You ought to be glad he’s back.”
“That’s some faulty-ass logic.”
“I know.”
My father stood. “I’m sorry, Lou. I never meant to cause you any trouble. Is there anything we can do to help?”
She eyed Billy from her bench. “Why don’t you just tell me what you want, man? I know you didn’t drop by to thank me for saving your life, because you haven’t.”
“No, no, I . . .” My father clasped his hands behind his back, but they only stayed that way a second. “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.” Lou raised her eyebrows and treated him to several theatrical blinks.
“We, uh, we were hoping you might . . .”
“Let me guess. Y’all got some fuckin’ scheme to paint them trains, and you want my people’s help.”
“How did—”
“I hear a lot.”
“Yeah, you sure do, girl,” Supreme Chemistry chimed in. “That’s what I always tell ninjas: Don’t nothing get by my honey Lou. She the boss of the tunnels and shit, like Don Corleone meets fuckin’ . . . fuckin’ . . .”
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