Rage Is Back (9781101606179)

by Mansbach, Adam

  Even if Mop And Go mopped and went smoothly, some crews might not be working until eight or nine. There was a lot of grumbling about that, but not so much that a single squad opted to handle the guards themselves rather than avail themselves of M.A.G.’s talents. A felony assault charge—with a deadly weapon, maybe, never mind what the D.A. might slap on you for trickling cambiafuerza down a card-carrying, union-dues-paying city employee’s throat—was not something guys were willing to risk.

  Except for the guys who were thrilled to risk it, that is. M.A.G. was gelling into a real band of brothers. Supreme Chem had outfitted his squad in fatigues and black facemasks—I swear, the dude must’ve run an army surplus store on the low—and as if that weren’t enough, they were all done up with war paint underneath the masks, à la Martin Sheen shortly before he hacks up Marlon Brando. The horror, et cetera.

  Mop And Go was being chauffeured from one yard to the next by a cat named Zebno, long-dormant founder of the Crazy Fresh Crew. He painted houses now, out in Queens, owned a van that seated fifteen uncomfortably, and had agreed to pull transpo duty throughout the weekend. Coffee runs, high-speed getaways, whatever.

  A burst of static erupted over Dengue’s phone. Flaw in the technology; it happened whenever someone was about to speak.

  “Yo, Fev, y’all niggas still waiting?”

  The Ambassador lifted the mic until it brushed his lips. “‘Y’all niggas still waiting,’ what?”

  “My bad, my bad. Are you still waiting, over?”

  “Affirmative. Over.”

  “The fuck is taking M.A.G. so long, man? You think they got a problem? Over.”

  “No. Stay off the line unless it’s important. Over.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Over. I mean, out. Over and out, good buddy.”

  Dengue shook his head. “Give ’em radios, they gotta act all Dukes of Hazzard and shit.”

  “Here we go,” said Karen, and tapped the window. Somebody, Klutch One I think, was jogging toward us.

  “They look like a postapocalyptic boy band,” I said. I’d been saving it. Nobody laughed.

  The masked man beckoned. “Let’s go.” We grabbed our gear and followed. He yanked back the flap they’d cut into the fence, motioned us past.

  Karen glared. “What are you doing? Didn’t you take their keys?”

  “This is faster.”

  “Money, I asked you a question. You’re supposed to take their keys. You want one of these assholes locking himself in the booth? You take the radios, at least?”

  It’s easier than you’d think to read somebody’s expression through a mask.

  “Yeah, yeah, we got the radios. But look, once you see these dudes, you’ll understand. Ain’t no way they fitting no keys to no locks.”

  We followed him inside—a misnomer, since inside was still outside, a massive open-air holding pen topped with coils of razor wire. There were two guards’ booths, one by the tunnels that opened into the yard and one halfway across the lot. The only other buildings were a few scattered maintenance sheds, where workers stored their equipment and maybe watched a little TV if they had some downtime.

  Otherwise, it was all trains. Rows of them, stored end to end and side by side. A sea of steel, pristine and glistening. I was probably the only person there without a hard-on.

  To move through the yard, you had to find the gap between the front of one train and the back of the next. They were parked haphazardly, so it was a matter of instinct, whether a left turn or a right was faster. And the alleys between them were so narrow that you could extend your arms and touch two trains at once.

  “Any problems?” asked Billy.

  “Nah, easy. We all got these.” He pulled a blackjack from his pocket, held it up. “Guards were in their booths, so we just creeped up and banged ’em.”

  “You knocked them out.” Billy sounded grim, as if he knew he was asking questions to which he wouldn’t like the answers.

  “Knocked ’em out, gave ’em the stuff, got ’em both inside a train. Waited twenty minutes for it to kick in, like you said, then gave ’em the smelling salts.”

  “They throw up?”

  “Did they.”

  “And now?”

  We took a right, and stopped before the lead car of an F. “See for yourself.”

  The doors were open. Two paunchy, middle-aged white men in guards’ uniforms lay on the floor, eyes pinwheeling in their skulls.

  “I don’t see any puke.”

  “We moved them.”

  “These guys shouldn’t be alone.” Billy spoke in his thinking-out-loud voice. “What they’re seeing is very powerful.”

  “Aah,” said Karen. “Forget about it. They’re fine. Happy as pigs in shit.” She looked around. “Where’d everybody go?”

  Her answer was a vigorous clicka-clacka from the other side of the train.

  “Tryna help you ninjas out!” somebody called—Supreme Chem’s word, but not his voice. We all stepped over to the other side of the train. There stood the rest of M.A.G., one man to a car, paint cans in motion.

  Until that moment, I’d never really thought about spraypainting—the act itself, the kinetics. I’d never seen it live. Just lots of sped-up, Charlie Chaplin–looking videos of legal murals being produced, and maybe a few minutes’ worth of hazy footage from the yards.

  In real time, it’s mesmerizing. Like tai chi or something. The paint-hand is the focal point, but the entire body’s involved. Each movement is deliberate, calibrated, fluid. The knees bend. The toes point. The shoulders roll. Form follows form; the writer dances the word onto the surface. Paint arcs only as wide as the arm holding it, a line breaks only when the rhythm is ruptured. And that rupture is built into the design, the same way it’s hardwired into everything my parents’ generation of New Yorkers invented. They expected to get fucked with, so they wove interruption into their art, embraced it, made it fly, from the b-boy’s freeze to the DJ’s backspin.

  I couldn’t even see what the four of them were painting, because of my angle, but it didn’t matter. Billy and Karen and I just stood and watched for about a minute. Dengue, he listened. Each writer had a distinct physical style, covered space at a different rate, made of himself a unique paintbrush. But they all seemed to move together, like dancers in the same ballet. The matching costumes helped.

  Karen snapped out of it first. “You all better get the fuck on.”

  Nobody answered, but the duress wrought an instant change in the lines of their limbs, the speed of their movements. I wondered how many gears a writer had, and which one this was.

  Supreme Chemistry finished first, stepped back, nodded at his piece the way you’d acknowledge an acquaintance from across the street. The can dropped into a pocket.

  “One-minute warning,” he called, and sauntered over to us. “Brothers needed a taste. Gotta keep your troops happy.” He handed me a roll of duct tape. “Here. In case those guards give you any problems. Dengue, where we at with canceling the next shift?”

  “Eighteen down. Still can’t reach the last two. We’ll keep trying.”

  “A’ight, well, keep me posted.”

  “Will do. And hey, nice work.”

  “Much obliged.” He lifted his arm, and made an all-in motion. “Posse up, yo. Time to roll.” The arm dropped, then rose to elbow Billy in the ribs. “Don’t forget to have fun, ninja.” And M.A.G. was out. The Immortal Five controlled the yard.

  “Follow me,” my father said. “I’ve got a job for you.” He glanced down the line at Karen. She was already painting. He frowned.

  “We really shouldn’t leave them alone.”

  “Dengue can watch them. Fever, what are you doing, making calls?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you do it in the car with the guards?”

&nb
sp; “Guess so.”

  “Need help getting there?”

  “I’ll find it.”

  I turned to Billy. “There. Done.”

  The worry didn’t leave his face, but he pulled three cans from the rucksack by his feet, and offered me a silver. We trudged over to the next train, stood before the last car.

  “Okay, what you’re going to do is just paint over all the windows.” He took the can, removed the nozzle, replaced it with a fatcap. Climbed the train’s undercarriage, reached up, and covered the window in one continuous motion, left to right and back again.

  “Nice and easy, like that.” He shook the can, handed it over.

  “That’s it?”

  “The train’s already silver, right? So if you cover the windows, I can do top-to-bottoms with just an outline. Watch.” He fatcapped a red, tested it with three short blasts into the air. A wind I couldn’t feel grabbed the paint particles, carried them a few feet, made them disappear.

  Billy squared up to the train, crouched, and brought a line of color into existence along the baseline. He swept it up into a swirl that fell back over itself like an ocean wave, then left it alone, straightened, leaned across himself, began something else. Finished, raised his arm above his head, painted a third thing. This letter was being built in sections, in a manner utterly contrary to the way I would have thought to do it. The connections came last, bottom to middle, middle to top—and suddenly this collection of flamboyant lines had coalesced into a rakish capital E nearly the height of the train, leaning back against a field of silver like a pimp behind the wheel.

  It had taken Billy all of thirty seconds. I felt like I was watching one of those cooking shows where they mix up all the ingredients, put the pan in the oven, and take out a finished version at the same time.

  They say a great chef can make the simplest dish revelatory. Cereal with milk—reimagined, reinvented, better than it’s ever been.

  The letter E—nasty as fuck, ready to scrap. And this was just a straight-letter. No bars, no bits, no arrows, legible to even the squarest civilian. Its attitude was a matter of minutiae, of math.

  “See? Now a few highlights.”

  He switched cans and doubled the inside curves in white, the line emerging thin and sharp. Shifted a few paces to the left, and embarked on his S.

  I’d been trying to figure out what Billy’s painting stance reminded me of, and now it hit me: fencing. I’d taken one class, during the blink-and-you-missed-it try-new-things phase that marked my first semester at Whoopty Whoo Ivy League We’s A Comin’ Academy, and I remember the teacher demonstrating the correct posture, telling us it allowed the quickest, longest reach. By the end of the hour I’d determined that while the sport might fulfill my gym requirement, an hour a week crossing blades with a coterie of greasy-faced Dungeons & Dragons types was not going to turn me into the dude from Legend of the Liquid Sword, so that was that.

  “Go paint,” Billy said over his shoulder. “And don’t try to climb the train. Use the ladder.”

  “Yes sir.” It felt good to address my father as sir, to be under his command. I grabbed the ladder, set it up below the next window over, and quickly realized that was the wrong place for it. Climbed back down, moved it a few feet to the left so I could paint without being in my own way, reascended. Clicka-clacka, psshht, psssht, clicka-clacka, psshht. Descend, grab ladder, reposition, climb, repeat.

  I have this tendency to suspect that anything I’ve never done before, I might just be a natural at, a prodigy. The one time I went to the driving range with Andy Simpkins in tenth grade to “hit a few buckets,” I could already see the lead paragraph of the Sports Illustrated profile as I was renting my club. The first ball I hit was going to soar whatever an astronomical distance was in golf. Inside of two weeks I’d be inking Tag Heuer endorsement deals, bagging Swedish broads, and denying I was black.

  I was mistaken, naturally, just as I had been about tennis, chess, sexual intercourse, and billiards. But graffiti? Shit, aptitude had to be inscribed on both sides of the double helix; that eighth-grade misadventure was too small a sample size to be scientifically significant. As I moved from window to window, I spun a fantasy about sneaking down a few rows and quietly rocking a ridiculous burner—but not just ridiculous, revolutionary: the letterforms pulsing with a style nobody had ever thought of, so daring and iconoclastic that only a brilliant neophyte could have conceived it. I’d be adding the finishing touches when Karen and Billy happened by, and . . .

  And, my fucking arm felt like it was going to fall off. My hand was cramping up, to the point where I had to switch my grip, press the nozzle with my thumb. I’d painted a grand total of eleven windows. Badly. Billy had covered the glass and nothing but, whereas my lack of can control yielded a kind of lipsticked-clown effect. It didn’t matter, of course. Except to me.

  My father was halfway through his second top-to-bottom. I paused to watch.

  “Come on, come on, back to work,” he ordered, without looking up. I climbed my ladder, raised my arm. Clicka-clacka. Psshht.

  This was a waste of time, I found myself thinking. Why couldn’t he do window-downs? The obvious answer, because whole cars are iller, I pretended not to know. Clicka-clacka. Psshht. I switched arms, painted with my left. The quality of the work didn’t suffer.

  I was two windows short of done—with that side of that train, anyway—when Dengue bellowed.

  “Yo! Billy! Little help! It’s fuckin’ Wild Kingdom in here!”

  I jumped off my ladder and ran. The Ambassador stood outside the car, back pressed against its center doors. I peered inside. One guard sat balled beneath a corner seat. The other lay wrapped around a pole. The sound coming from their mouths was animal in the purest sense, an expression of a pain experienced in the eternal now. If there was a hell, that’s what the residents’ wails would sound like, if you lowered the volume on the Black Eyed Peas CD enough to hear them.

  “I don’t know what happened,” said Fever. “One minute everything was quiet, and then bam, freakout city.”

  “Fuck it,” said Karen. She and Billy had both arrived while my back was turned. “There’s nobody around. Let ’em go nuts.”

  Billy didn’t even bother to answer, just pried open the doors and climbed inside.

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” My mother ran through a greatest hits medley of pissed-off poses—arms crossed, hands hipped, chin lifted to commiserate with God, body angled away from the offender—performed in such swift succession that it looked like something you might see the Pips do behind Gladys. Then she clambered up into the train herself and crouched opposite my father, on the other side of the guard he was trying to soothe.

  “We’re on a schedule, Billy.”

  “Give me a minute.” He held the guy’s palm in both his hands, doing acupressure or something. The screams were coming at intervals now.

  “We don’t have a minute.”

  Billy knelt over the guard, and began whispering into his ear.

  Karen bent lower. “Billy. Listen to me.”

  Yeah, right. He finished whatever he was telling dude, leapt up, and headed for the other one.

  Karen stood. “Fever? Dondi? Care to weigh in here?”

  Guard number two wouldn’t budge. He kicked at Billy, from his fortress beneath the bench, and howled bloody homicide. My father reached out to him over and over, repeating low, calm words I couldn’t quite make out.

  I stuck my head inside. “Dad?”

  Billy’s head jerked up. “Get me my bag.”

  “Listen, we’ve really gotta—”

  “I’m not leaving them like this. I can’t.” He turned back to the guard.

  Karen watched for a few seconds, then jumped off the train.

  “You know what your father’s problem is? He says ‘can’t’ when he means ‘w
on’t.’ Fuck this, and fuck him. I’m going back to work.” And off she stalked.

  Dengue’s walkie-talkie crackled. “Yo, Fever, you there?”

  “This is Fever. Go ahead. Over.”

  “We’re in. Rock and roll, baby.”

  “Sambo’s in,” the Ambassador called. “Yo, Wren! You hear me? Sambo’s in. We’re up in three yards, going on four!”

  “Yeah, great.” She didn’t turn around. “I guess I’ll just paint all these fucking trains myself.”

  Clicka-clacka, psshht.

  Your boy? I did as I was told. By the time I came back with Billy’s bag, guard number two wasn’t cowering in the corner anymore. He’d graduated to wild spasms, torso bucking and limbs whipping out like jellyfish tentacles, and he seemed hellbent on murdering his coworker; Billy and a total lack of bodily control conspired to stop him. Twenty feet away, the prospective murderee moaned with operatic gusto, clutching the base of the pole like a stripper with a stomach virus.

  I tossed the bag into the car, and climbed in after it. “You got an antidote in there?”

  Billy pulled open the zipper, and removed a bottle of water. I took it as a no.

  “Talk to him,” my father instructed, as he daubed the madman’s face with a wet rag. “Tell him not to fight it. Be calming. You can even hum.”

  I knelt over guard number one, realized dude had shit himself, and backed away in a hurry.

  “Sorry, Billy. I’ve got trains to paint.”

  I found Karen doing window-down throw-ups, red and black, four to a car. She slung a can at me the way a whiteboy in a high school sex comedy slings his buddy a beer from the cooler, and taught me to do fills.

  Our collaboration was a three-part, two-color process. First, my mother sketched the letters. Then I stepped up, tried to color inside her lines. It was easier with my feet on the ground, not the rungs of a ladder. When I finished, she painted a real outline, thick and black: erased the mistakes, solidified the form, imposed the style. We knocked off three cars in silence, trying to ignore the waxing and waning of the guards’ screams, before Karen stepped back, cocked her elbow, and read her watch.