Rage Is Back Read online

  The last thing I want to sound like is one of those black conservative TV pundits they’re always trotting out to declare that racism hasn’t existed since 1965 and the black community’s in tatters because of unwed mothers and rap music. Or a character from an early John Singleton flick, back when he gave an earnest fuck and wrote the same “it takes a man to raise a man” speech into every script. Or a whiny little punk. I haven’t sidestepped all the other hood clichés just to blame my problems on skewed values in the home, or a dearth of positive male role models. But the fucking path to success can be a little hard to discern when you’re walking around bent over double, dragging a cauldron bubbling with a four-part blend of molten anger—for those keeping score at home, that’s anger at Billy, anger at Karen, anger at not knowing how angry I should be, and anger at my inability to claim my anger—plus a full fondue set to spoon it up with.

  The assiduous consumption of Cannabis sativa has proved useful in reducing the flame. Where there’s smoke, there’s no fire: I figured that out a hell of a lot earlier than perhaps I should have. If stress had sent Karen foraging for Häagen-Dazs, I’d probably be wearing a fat-suit right now. Instead, I’ve got the lungs of a coal miner. Fuck it. Everybody self-medicates. Or maybe it’s just me. How should I know? Who am I, Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the father of sociology?

  It was Saturday afternoon, and I couldn’t think of a single person I could bear to kick it with. Tomorrow I was scheduled to housesit for Nick Fizz, one of Karen’s homeboys from the High School of Art and Design, a real graffiti hotbed back in the early eighties that had funneled a lot of kids right into the shortlived gallery scene. Karen had gotten a trip to London out of her fine arts career, and sold one canvas, for enough money to cover her inaugural semester at City College. It was a big aerosol portrait of this old-school rapper named Melle Mel, and she’d be the first to tell you that it was hideous and is almost certainly locked away in a storage unit now, regardless of the coked-up pricetag.

  Fizz, meanwhile, was the exception to the rule, a graff success story. He’d been smart enough to sidestep the crack epidemic that turned forty percent of New York’s writers into dealers and another forty into fiends in the mid-eighties, had sufficient foresight or small enough cojones to retire from trains before the buff started decimating the best lines in 1986, forcing everybody to crowd onto the Js, Ms, Bs and Ls like emergency rafts and then killing the scene entirely, eternally, by ’89. Weird that all these so-called hip-hop heads consider ’89 the heart of the “golden era,” when it was also the year graffiti died.

  Anyway, Fizz decided it was graphic design he loved, not vandalism, and started an ad agency. Now he’s right back on the trains, all-city via the cheesy banners lining the insides of every car—saturation-bombing at its most annoying, except that instead of some teenager’s messy mop-tag repeated and repeated and repeated, it’s “Now You Can Have Beautiful Clear Skin! Visit Dr. Jonathan Zizmor M.D.! As Seen On TV!”

  Fizz’s crib was bright and spacious, decorated with the kind of pink-fur-Kangol flair only a gay Puerto Rican b-boy can pull off. Better yet, Fizz lived on 108th and Broadway, half a block from the best Dominican restaurant in the city, La Rosita, which I discovered through this older chick from Whoopty Whoo Ivy League We’s A Comin’ Academy who was my Peer Mentor when I started there in ninth grade and who actually took the concept seriously and schooled me on which teachers to avoid like the zombie death plague and which like the common cold, what culinary options the neighborhood afforded, how to restrain myself from smacking the tonsils out of some ignorant rich kid at least twice a day, that sort of thing.

  She was the only black girl in her class, which is why the administration hooked us up, although in her case the struggle was not attending Manhattan’s third-most prestigious prep school under the auspices of the coveted What the Hell, Let’s Give a Clever Young Colored Boy a Chance to Transcend His Race Scholarship like me, but being the daughter of Tom Petty’s attorney, caked up to her clavicles and yet still presumed a welfare case. She graduated and went on to major in art history at Columbia, and until I got a girlfriend the big-sister/little-brother thing endured and I’d cross town and eat lunch with her sometimes, always at La Rosita. I can’t explain why a simple plate of yellow rice and red beans and a side of yucca con ajo should be so much better there than at the other three hundred spots just like it, but there you go. So I could hardly wait to get to Fizz’s spot and breathe air and eat good and sleep in a bed and jerk off in peace.

  Fuck it, I thought, why wait for tomorrow when you can have tomorrow today. I hopped the 2 Express to Dumbo, which is this stupid yuppie acronym meaning Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass, like hardy-har, we live in a flying elephant, and made my way to this one particular building I discovered a little more than a year ago.

  I’m not going to say exactly where it’s located, although I guess you could figure it out by process of elimination if you spent long enough in the neighborhood—which was not a neighborhood at all a few years back, just a wedged-in ghost town of moldering factories and deserted cobblestone alleys. I haven’t bothered to find out what the building was before they gutted and condominiumized it. If I were a different type of kid I’d have visited some windowless city planning office, claimed I was doing a school project and gone down to the basement and unrolled a set of decomposing blueprints beneath a flickering yellow lamp and had some kind of revelation.

  Your boy here, I figured out as much as I needed to know and then left it alone. I’m crap at science to begin with, so if there’s some monumental discovery about wormholes and the rending of space-time to be made, I’m not gonna be the guy who makes it. Nor am I foolish enough to run my mouth and blow my own spot, end up getting my foot run over by Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair or some shit.

  Sorry, I don’t mean to be mysterious. The deal is this: if you enter the stairwell of this building at lobby level and walk all fourteen flights of stairs—which nobody would, since there’s a very nice elevator tricked out with mirrors and wood paneling and it always seems to be idling right there, doors open no less—you emerge on the top floor having traveled exactly twenty-four hours into the future.

  And no, smart guy, you can’t walk down and go back. That would be hot, obviously. You could make a fortune, like the dude in Back to the Future Part II. It was the first thing I tried.

  I’m going to say this once and then I promise I won’t come back to it, or even address the reader in the second person anymore, which I can see getting annoying very quickly, seeing as most people want to lose themselves in stories, not open a book and have a finger pointing at them all the time, unless it’s a pop-up book. If you’re already frowning and thinking I’m an unreliable narrator, or going “oh goody, I love magical realism,” then you should cut your losses and go read Tuesdays with Morrie, before I get to the really wild shit later on. Skepticism is an admirable trait, but so is asking yourself if you’re really such a fucking Master of the Universe that things might not be happening beneath the surface of your world right now without you knowing. Or even in midair when your back’s turned. I mean, hell, they didn’t discover the duckbilled platypus until 1896, and then everybody thought it was a hoax because mammals aren’t supposed to lay eggs, you feel me?

  I’ve thought about it a lot, and as far as I can tell, there’s very little to be gained by jumping one day forward. It seems like there should be, but really you’re behind. You missed work, school, you don’t know if the Yankees won. Also, whenever I get my H. G. Wells on, I step into the future with a queasy stomach, spangly vision, a general desire to curl up and die that lasts an hour, maybe two. It didn’t happen the first time, before I knew what I was doing, so possibly it’s not travel sickness but some psychological aversion to flouting cosmic law, giving physics the finger.

  The whole thing reminds me of this game I used to play with my boy Cedric in sixth grade, where we’d invent th
ese doofus superheroes. Like, The Salamanderer, who has the regenerative powers of an amphibian: if you cut off his arm, it grows back, weaker and smaller, in about six weeks. Or Diner Man, who’s totally invincible, but only in diners, and spends all his time trying to convince supervillains to grab some pie. Or this dude we never got around to naming, whose power was that he could fly six inches off the ground. We used to convulse on the floor of my bedroom, laughing at this stuff. It wasn’t until recently that I realized it was a metaphor for something. And only as I write this does it occur to me that Graffito The Elusive should have been on the team: will go to any extreme to save the innocent, unless they’re his relatives.

  The reason I didn’t take the elevator up to fifteen to begin with is that I figured the stairwell in this yupster breeding tube would be as good a place as any to pinch a bowl out of my customer’s bag and get zooted. You can’t risk smoking on the street these days, not if you’re young and brown—Karen’s genes are the dominant ones, at least in my complexion—and especially not with a messenger bag full of seventy-dollar eighth-ounces of bomb O.G. Kush in miniature mason jars slung across your chest. Plus, unlike most people my age, I only smoke from glass pipes. To me, blunts are disgusting. You can’t even taste the weed. That might be the point if you’re smoking bullshit from the local herbgate, but to roll Cannabis Cup–caliber marijuana in some filthy, stale Dutch Masters cigar and then seal it with your own rank slobber is an insult to everybody who took the time to plant, grow, dry, smuggle and distribute it.

  I’m also unusual in that I like to exercise when I’m high. Pretty much only when I’m high, actually. It motivates me or something, I don’t know. Fourteen flights sounded like fun. So I blazed, climbed, slammed open the stairwell door all out of breath, and gave a discreet little rappety-rap on the door of Penthouse A.

  People think weedheads are spacey and laid-back, but not when they’re waiting for their nuggets and worried that the delivery service isn’t going to come through. Which they seem to be every time, even if I’ve been providing quality service for a year. So right away, it struck me as odd that this guy—his name was Patrick; he was a stockbroker or a financial analyst or a hedge fund manager or something, one of those money jobs where my eyes glaze over as soon as I hear the first syllable out of the person’s mouth, and unlike most custies he’d never invited me to smoke with him, which was why I’d thought to take preemptive measures—would leave me standing in the hallway for so long.

  I knocked harder. Maybe he was tore up already, and I was bringing by the reinforcements. Another few seconds ticked away, and then from deep inside the condo came the irritated bray of a man who’s sitting around in his underwear, or worse, and has no designs on being disturbed.

  “What? Who is it?”

  “Hey,” I called. “It’s Mike, from Organic Produce Delivery?”

  The door swung wide and Patrick faced me, hands pocketed in some raggedy and no doubt hastily donned sweatpants. I’d only seen him in his just-clocked-out gear before: necktie balled up in the pocket of his suit, bottled beer in hand, top two dress shirt buttons undone, white T underneath—I Hate My Job, by Calvin Klein. Seeing Patrick like this, I felt a little pang of sympathy. He looked like he’d worked out in college, and didn’t have the time to anymore.

  “You kidding me? You guys were supposed to be here yesterday.”

  Now, I’m high as shit here, keep in mind. As a matter of fact, from here on out, assume that unless otherwise specified, I’m probably high as shit. But in a charming, articulate way. Naturally, I assumed Patrick the square-ass stockbroker was trading in hyperbole, so I flipped open my cell phone and confirmed that yes, okay, I was running fifteen minutes behind, whatever, old Pat’s more of a dick than I thought.

  “Sorry, man,” I said. “Train was running weird.” Standard New Yorker excuse, totally unverifiable.

  Patrick crossed his arms over his chest. “You fucking with me?”

  That right there should have given me pause. The only time a stumpy white twenty-nine-year-old Wall Street Journal–reading spaz like Patrick will act even the slightest bit aggro toward a six-foot mocha teenager is when there’s a formal hierarchy in place to back him. He’d have no problem loud-talking a waiter or cursing out the mailroom guy at work, but he won’t say shit if he gets jostled on the subway, you know what I mean? The power structure that’s had his back throughout his life isn’t enough. He’s gotta see it practically in writing.

  I adjusted the strap of my bag, and spread my legs a little. “Why?” I said. “Do people fuck with you a lot, Patrick?”

  He leaned forward without uncrossing his arms, and addressed me in the tone and speed of voice a junior high school teacher might use with her thickest student, about a week before giving up forever and applying to business school.

  “Buddy. It’s Tuesday. I called for a delivery on Monday.”

  “Well, then,” I said, “one of us is crazy.”

  I looked at my phone again, and goddamn if it wasn’t the next day, and I wasn’t twenty-four hours and fifteen minutes late. I had eight missed calls, too. Three from my boss, five from Karen.

  Whatever was happening, I wasn’t going to recruit Patrick to help me figure it out. “Wow,” I said, “I’m really sorry—I guess my phone is on the fritz. I just got the message an hour ago.” I ran a hand over my dome. “You still need?”

  Patrick stared a second, then nodded. “Yeah, sure. Come in.”

  I sold him his weed, and Patrick flipped the script and offered me a rip from the glass bong he kept on his coffeetable. Swear to God, if I ever get to be his age and pot paraphernalia is occupying a place of honor in my living room, punch me in the throat.

  I had no desire to get further stoned, but there was the matter of precedent to consider, so I obliged. Ben Franklin or Hitler or somebody once said something to the effect of “if you want a man to like you, don’t do him a favor, ask him to do you one.” And by the same token, I guess being a deranged, incompetent asshole had endeared me to Patrick.

  I thanked him, hustled down the stairs, and checked my phone in the lobby. Still Tuesday. I turned around and started trudging back up, holding the cell in front of me like a compass. I’ll say it again: fourteen flights is a lot of stairs. The moment I stepped across the top floor’s threshold, my digital display flipped from Tuesday, 5:50 PM to Wednesday, 5:50 PM, and I threw up on Patrick’s doormat.

  Karen was livid when I got home. She’d called the hospitals, the morgue, even the police—and in our family, you don’t involve the cops in anything, for anything. Before I got to Whoopty Whoo Ivy League We’s A Comin’ Academy and started kicking it with rich kids, I never even realized you could call the police, unless you were calling them on somebody.

  There weren’t a lot of plausible places I could have disappeared to for forty-eight hours without answering my phone, and me and Karen were on decent terms then—as close to trusting one another as we’d been since the cataclysmic autumn of 2000, when we’d sort of crossed paths on the road to adulthood, traveling in opposite directions with knives to our backs. If we had put that year behind us, it was by centimeters. Karen still kept her hospital bracelet on her nightstand. I never unlocked the door of our apartment without steeling myself to find my mother gone, and a neighbor I barely knew waiting for me in the living room.

  So I told her the truth, which she did not for one second believe. I asked her when I’d ever lied, and offered to take her to the building right then and prove it, and Karen sucked her teeth and said she couldn’t force me to tell her where I’d been, but if I was going to start pulling vanishing acts and talking crazy like my father, then I could go sleep on Dengue’s floor like he had, or take my weak shit to 79th and Madison and see what kind of reception I got from the Uptown Girl’s legendary parents, and was that clear?

  It was. I went to my room, passed out, never brought i
t up again. That didn’t stop Karen from treating me for the next month like the guy in the zombie movie who says he hasn’t been infected, but he’s lying. As if I might turn into Billy at any second, and she was going to pump me full of buckshot at the first clear sign.

  That was a year ago. I hadn’t come back to this building until Karen tossed me, but since then? Shit, I’d hoofed the stairs seven or eight times, skipped ten percent of my days. Gained nothing, and learned less. Wherever you go, there you are. It was an addiction without a high, just one more stupid thing I watched myself do again and again. You ever fast-forward through a movie, trying to skip past the boring parts or find some tits, and all of a sudden the credits are flying up the screen and you’re like damn, I played myself?

  I banked past the elevator, flung open the stairwell door and started climbing. Maybe Karen was right, and I was turning into Billy. I wondered how I’d know. My actual memories don’t amount to much, and they’ve been beat-matched and blended with everybody else’s so many times that I’ve lost track of what’s lived and what’s received.

  I only knew the dude for two years and change, and even before he left, Billy was a man of absences, the type of guy whose attention was thrilling because you could never take it for granted. I remember the glee I felt when he came home and scooped me up and airplaned me around the room, and the tantrums I threw every time he bounced. Or maybe I don’t remember those things at all. I was about to say something regarding a sense of grim determination about him, a kind of permanent, distant fury, a perpetual thousand-yard-stare, but those are all ridiculous things for a toddler to notice unless he was born on leap year day, and I was not.

  July 1, 1987, baby. 8:09 P.M. Seven pounds and eight ounces of funkadelic soul. A Cancer, and don’t think I don’t know it. No fault of your boy’s, but the night I was born was also the night everything started falling to shit. Karen’s maternal fam is Trini, and apparently her grandma, rest in peace, had spent months cautioning the happy couple (not for long) against speaking the baby’s name out loud when he was born, or remarking on his being cute or perfect or anything like that. Your first comments were supposed to be negative and misleading, what an ugly girl, because otherwise the various spirits would get jealous and have your 411 to boot and bam, start fucking with you. Maybe Rage and Wren should have taken that to heart. My mother’s certainly mused on it a few times in the years since, joint in hand usually.