Rage Is Back (9781101606179)

by Mansbach, Adam

  I was out cold by the time the sushi arrived, lulled to sleep by an hourlong discussion of escape routes. I woke up in the dark, to an empty living room and a Sashimi Combo missing all the yellowtail and half the tuna.

  Karen’s note said they’d gone to meet Dregs at some warehouse in Red Hook, to divvy up cans and responsibilities. For the first time in weeks, I was alone. I ate by the light of a Simpsons rerun, knowing it was anesthesia and praying another episode would follow. Instead I got Jerry Seinfeld and his merry band, mincing their way through a New York scrubbed Elmer’s white. I clicked all the way into the triple digits, but it was too late. I tried to worry about Friday; that wouldn’t take either. All I could think about was T, lying lonely in his apartment, and Terry stepping over his body with a sheaf of pages in his back pocket that I’d held in my hands a day before. I reached for Vex’s phone, thought the better of it, and threw on my shoes instead.

  I didn’t even know where to find a payphone, which made me feel old and sad. At twelve, I could have told you the location of every jack in Fort Greene, and whether its coin slot had ever yielded a quarter. To pass without checking would have been sacrilege, despite the minuscule likelihood of anybody forgetting his change in this neighborhood, and the even slimmer chance that some marauding basehead wouldn’t beat me to the payday.

  I walked all the way to the dry cleaner’s on the corner of Lafayette and Cumberland, where Karen took her stuff. There were a couple closer by, but the old lady who ran this one was a church friend of my grandmother’s. She’d decided early on, through some private form of divination, that I was going to be a movie star. Every time I saw her, it was how’s the acting going? The first time I didn’t try to correct her, just said great, great! had been one of those innocence-sapping moments you never forget.

  The night was warm, the receiver cold against my ear. I dialed information, asked for a nonemergency police number in Crown Heights. The operator connected me for free. Who knew?

  “Seventy-seventh Precinct. Officer Harris speaking.”

  “I’m calling to report a dead body. 290 Utica. Second floor.”

  “Who—”

  Click.

  It occurred to me that the location of this payphone might be materializing on Officer Harris’s computer screen right now, in case he felt like sending a roller screeching over to find out who had made the call. It seemed unlikely, but I set off in search of a different phone. Took me ten minutes of aimless wandering to remember that there was one a block down Lafayette, in front of what had long been a shitty Middle Eastern restaurant—shitty in the literal sense, a surefire constipation cure—and was now a hipster bar, Moe’s. Conveniently located across the street from another hipster bar. I’m sorry, wine bar.

  There’s not much to say about gentrification that hasn’t been said before. Nor am I one to embark on a there-goes-the-neighborhood whining jag, any more than I plan to boycott the new gourmet cheese shop located two blocks east of Karen’s, in what used to be a crack house. I mean, I don’t plan to buy anything there either, but bumping into cheese-loving motherfuckers on the street beats running into rock fiends any day of the week. I’m not saying I want to see my grandma’s friend’s dry cleaning business fold (haha—fold, get it?) or see folks go for the okey-doke and call one of those “We Buy Houses” companies and take fifty thousand cash-in-hand so the property can get flipped to some Lehman Brothers executive for twenty-seven times that, but I’m also—ah, you know what, forget it, I don’t even have the energy.

  There were two listings for Polhemus in Manhattan, both in the same building on St. Nicholas Ave. Regina and Rukiya. Clearly, like many women of her generation, Theo’s mother had succumbed to a brief bout of Afrocentricity, from which he had escaped but to which his sister would bear testament forever. I wrote Regina’s number on my hand, fished some more change from my pocket. Then the magnitude of what I was about to do hit me, and I backed away from the phone.

  “Dondi? Is that you?”

  I turned. Standing beneath the awning of Moe’s, cigarette cocked by her ear, was Joyce Dayton. If my adolescent psyche were a bedroom, Joyce would have been the poster thumbtacked to the ceiling right above the bed. She was my boy Cedric’s older sister, four years our senior, exploding into bodaciousness right when I was in seventh grade and it mattered most. I used to stay over at Cedric’s just to get a look at Joyce in her bathrobe the next morning, you know what I mean? Shit, a glimpse of her bra lying in the laundry hamper, even.

  “Hey, Joyce. Long time no see.” I walked over to the waist-high fence, presumably constructed so that patrons wouldn’t get any big ideas about strolling across the street to check out the competition, or feel threatened by the occasional late-night hedonist meandering up Lafayette to buy a Heineken and a loosie. That’s the true line of demarcation, if you ask me: long as you’ve still got a bodega that will sell you a single Newport for twenty-five cents, your neighborhood is not yet fully gentrified.

  “You got a cigarette for me?” I asked.

  “Bummed it from him,” Joyce said, indicating one of two skinny-jeaned, trucker-hatted chuckleheads slouched a few paces away. These weren’t Fort Greene hipsters. Fort Greene hipsters wore limited-edition Nikes and bought Jadakiss mixtapes at the Fulton Mall. That was the arrangement: Williamsburg sent us their blue-eyed rapsters, and we sent them our freaky, pierced-the-fuck-up black rock dudes. The fact that these guys were drinking in Fort Greene on a Wednesday night was what Homer would have called a sign of ill portent.

  I leaned toward Joyce’s benefactor, separating my index and middle fingers at a jaunty, non-threatening angle. “My man, could I possibly bum one too?”

  He waved his cancer stick at me. “Sorry, bro. Last one.” I was so relieved, I swallowed the “bro.” I hate cigarettes. That was Joyce for you. Or rather, that was me in Joyce’s presence.

  She tapped the ash from hers with a manicured nail, and handed it over. A sweetheart all the way.

  “So where have you been hiding?”

  I brought the filter to my lips, turning toward the street to hide my fake-inhale.

  “I’ve been around. What’s up with you? Getting ready to graduate?”

  “I wish. One more semester, if I take five classes. And write a thesis.”

  “How’s your brother?” A sad story, Cedric. Got to high school, made the football team, turned into a full-blown jackass.

  “The same.” She knew it as well as I did. Better. Joyce still lived at home.

  “He playing ball?”

  She nodded around her final drag, then dropped the butt and eliminated the threat of wildfire with a practiced ankle-twist.

  “I’m bartending a few nights a week at a place called Sleet, over on Twelfth Street and Sixth Ave. You should come by sometime. We’ve got pretty good DJs on the weekends.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Cool. That’d be fun.” I was feeling very weird, all of a sudden. This conversation was like a page torn from a normal life, and it was making me realize just how isolated and bizarre my shit had become. Not since February had I hung out with a friend, somebody my own age, and I couldn’t tell you the last time I’d seen a movie, or gone to a party that wasn’t teargassed by a chopper.

  It had been months since I’d even worried about anything a regular person could relate to. What did I have to say to Joyce, whom I’d adored since before any of these bars were bars, who lived eight blocks away, who studied urban planning and danced capoeira, who’d told me I had pretty eyes when I was ten? At what coordinates did my existence meet hers? Where had I been hiding? What was I up to? I couldn’t answer those questions without exposing myself as a fuckup of Olympian proportions, and making her an accessory to crimes so numerous and elaborate I wasn’t even sure how they’d be charged.

  Hell, the only reason I was even outside was to make a couple of phone calls I didn’t wa
nt traced. Oh, hey Joyce—damn, girl, you’re looking fine as usual, gimme one second, I’ve just gotta ring this slain drug dealer’s mama and break the news real quick, and then I’d love to buy you a drink. But just one, I gotta get to bed early, I’m kinda beat because I just spent half of yesterday down in the tunnels planning a conspiracy and talking to the chief of the Mole People, at gunpoint. And I really need my rest, ’cause this weekend we’re gonna bomb every train in the city and force-feed psychedelic drugs to a bunch of security guards, so as to bring down a mayoral candidate who murked a homeboy of my parents’ back in the day, although actually a demon might have made him do it. So, what are you drinking?

  Fuck.

  We chatted a while longer, but my heart wasn’t in it. Joyce had to go back inside; her friend Tamika was waiting. I had no ID anyway, and getting denied in front of Joyce would’ve been too much to bear, even on the best of nights. We hugged goodbye. It seemed full of promise, hug-as-rain-check, and that made me feel worse. Like I was deceiving her, somehow.

  I watched the door to Moe’s swing shut, then walked straight past the payphone and back up the block. What had I been thinking? What in the world did I imagine I’d say to Regina Polhemus? What speck of morality did I hope to salvage?

  An asshole, that’s what I was. I knew it then, I knew it as I pulled out my phone, and I knew it as I pressed speed dial and watched the Uptown Girl’s number blink onto the screen.

  “Hello?” It was a thing she always did, pretending not to know who was calling despite the name and number spelled out before her. I’d never asked why. It was sort of charming. Old-timey.

  “Kirsten,” I said, that being her name. Kirsten Kennedy. No joke.

  “Hold on, let me step outside.” That meant she was at home, and so were her parents. As far as they knew, we weren’t speaking. “Outside” was a private roof deck larger than most apartments in my zip code.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s getting so I can’t tell up from down.”

  It was the kind of thing I’d been saying to her lately: vague, melodramatic, pithy. I don’t think I was looking for sympathy. More like envy. If the Uptown Girl had one complaint about her life (and to her credit, she knew even that many was pushing it), it was that nothing exciting ever popped off.

  “Why? Did something happen?” I could see her arching her back, sliding the flat of her hand into the back pocket of her jeans.

  “It’s about to. Monday morning, go check out the trains.”

  “Yeah? Really? Which line?”

  Which line. Thatagirl. I’d schooled her a little, you know.

  “All of them.”

  “What?”

  If you’re feeling an urge to wince and slap your forehead, you can relax. This isn’t some big plot pivot where I spill the beans and she throws a monkey wrench, out of some misguided sense of concern. That’s not how the Uptown Girl was built.

  “I know. Crazy, right? It was my idea.”

  “Holy shit. Dondi.”

  A pause. Maybe she’d brought her wineglass and was sipping. The Uptown Girl’s family usually popped a bottle with their gourmet takeout. Monstrously pricey stuff, in glasses so enormous I thought it was a joke the first time I ate over. And yes, I was a frequent dinner guest. Bill and Alexandra loved my ass until it got thrown out of school. The fact that their daughter was dating a black guy proved to them that they’d raised her right, nice and colorblind. Until I showed my true colors, anyway.

  You know, I never thought before about the fact that my father and the Uptown Girl’s share a first name. Maybe the differences in our lives can be traced to what they chose to call themselves, these two men christened William. Vast distances are wrapped up in that semivowel. Sometimes-Y should have been Rage’s nickname.

  “What for?” asked the Uptown Girl.

  I thought about it.

  “For Billy.”

  This time, I was sure I heard her take a sip. A nice, long one. She was no doubt savoring the subtle overlays of anise and cranberry, the slight intimations of walnut, the almost autumnal shades of the bouquet.

  “So, yeah, Yale,” she said.

  “Wait, what?”

  “I got in.”

  “Holy shit. When did you find out?”

  “Two days ago. I left you a message. I thought that’s why you were calling.”

  “If I’d checked my voicemail, it would’ve been. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks.” She drained the glass. “So what are you going to do, Dondi?”

  I was walking in little circles, in front of Vex’s building. “Make history, for starters. Nobody’s ever pulled something like this off.”

  “Okay. I mean, great. And then?”

  “Ask me on Tuesday.”

  Awkward pause.

  “Your dad must be ecstatic,” I said, “daughter following in his footsteps and everything. You know, Skull and Bones is co-ed now. You could join. Find out if the head of Geronimo that Preston Bush stole from that museum really has magic powers, like they say.”

  She sighed. “Dondi . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “Nothing. It’s Prescott Bush. Not Preston.”

  “See? You’re halfway there already. Just promise you’ll teach me the secret handshake, the one Dubya gave Kerry before the last debate.”

  I was under no illusion that I was making sense. Nor, probably, was the Uptown Girl. This was her cue to tell me she had to go, that she was in the middle of dinner. I could feel it coming.

  Wrong.

  “I spoke to Moya today.”

  My peer mentor. Remember? Studying art history at Columbia?

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “She’s friendly with a guy who works in the admissions office.”

  I let it hang there for about a five-count. A courtesy of sorts, like giving somebody a head start before you throw a rock at them.

  “So?”

  “Maybe there’s—”

  “I already got in, Kirsten. The fuck is Moya’s friend gonna do?”

  “I just thought—”

  “Yeah, well, think again. Better yet, don’t. Fuck college. I don’t even wanna go anymore. That shit’s for losers.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Look, I gotta go. Me and my parents, we’ve got a reservation at Nobu.”

  “Really?”

  “Fuck no.”

  “You don’t have to be an asshole, Dondi. It’s not my fault.”

  “What? What’s not your fault?”

  Here came the shrug. She had a great shrug. Excellent clavicles.

  “Anything.”

  “I never said it was.”

  I watched the old lady two buildings down carry her garbage to the curb, a little parcel tied up so neatly it could’ve been a present for her grandkids.

  “Fine.”

  “Fine. Congratulations, again. My best to Bill and Alexandra.”

  Meaning: plenty of shit’s your fault. You let your parents run your life. You let them break us up.

  “Fuck Bill and Alexandra,” the Uptown Girl replied, and we proceeded to goodnights.

  Vexer was playing the couch when I entered, a lit blunt in his hand.

  He threw me a chin-nod. “Ay.”

  “Hey. Everybody else go home?”

  He nodded. “I’ma crash soon myself.” As in, I’m not trying to mack your mom.

  In walked Karen, a beer in each hand. She didn’t look like she expected him to toddle off to bed. But she didn’t look like she understood that he might linger for reasons unrelated to smoke or strategy, either. Same old Karen.

  “We got the paint,” she t
old me, handing Vex his bottle.

  “Great. I’m going to sleep.”

  “What? It’s only nine-thirty. We’re just about to start calling the first guard shift, the twelve-to-eight boys.”

  “Yeah, well, what can I tell you? It’s been a long day. See you tomorrow.”

  I hit the futon full of dread and resignation, expecting to toss and turn and think. But as it happened, I caught a break: conked out within minutes and slept like I was getting paid to do it. Sometimes the body pulls rank.

  13

  ur crew had two hundred and twenty-nine cans of paint, four army rucksacks, eight hands, six working eyes, a bag of sandwiches, a bunch of water. Two Maglites, a welding torch and goggles, ten portable tape players, five prespun joints, two small ladders, a roll of toilet paper, three cell phones, one thing of pepper spray, one set of bolt-cutters, a shitload of extra batteries. Two watches, mine and Karen’s, both of which read 4:37 P.M.

  We were sitting in a van outside the Coney Island Train Yard. Inside, Mop And Go, as Supreme Chemistry’s advance strike team had come to be known, was getting acquainted with the guards who’d recently clocked in for their Saturday evening shift. The other nine crews were in position around the city, waiting their turns. We were shorthanded, so we were first.

  Dengue, of course, would not be painting. Instead, he was running point for the whole operation, cell phone tricked out with a walkie-talkie feature that turned it into something like a CB radio. Each crew had one. Hitting the trains was up to Wren and Rage and me. Wren and Rage mostly, since fills and the occasional spot of light welding were the only things I was qualified to do, and in both cases qualified was pure speculation.

  If we fell behind schedule, the plan called for Mop And Go to augment us after they finished their duties, but Billy and Karen scoffed at the idea that we’d need bailing out. The two of them were cockier and more buddy-buddy than I’d ever seen, talking shit all morning about how they we were going to finish so early they’d be able to paint a whole train’s worth of burners.

  That was the reward speed won you: knock out your allotted cars with time to burn, and you got time to burn, a chance to cap your marathon of simple blockbuster straight letters with a bona fide wildstyle or two. Who was going to rock the illest AMUSE piece was a subject of much discussion. At this very moment, everybody was probably sitting around sketching the outline they hoped to execute.