Rage Is Back Read online

  Three hours into my earthly existence, Billy went bombing, because that’s what a fiend does. Triumph and tragedy are met identically. Boredom too. Something happens, or nothing happens, and you need a fix.

  He kissed us both, left me snoozing the snooze of the innocent on my mother’s chest, swung a backpack containing spraycans, a sketchbook, and some just-in-case bolt-cutters over his shoulder—yup, he brought it to the hospital; that was Billy’s version of a maternity bag—and bullshitted his way past his parents and Karen’s mom. He scooped Amuse, his ace, the Immortal Five’s only other whiteboy, half-Jewish just like Billy, from the hospital lobby. The two of them rode the iron horse out to the Coney Island Yard, the city’s biggest, and met up with Dengue, Cloud 9, and Sabor, the three of whom popped out from behind a work shed to surprise Billy with champagne, cigars, good wishes, and ten tabs of Donald Duck acid, two hits to a man. Billy took one. Faint stirrings of parental responsibility, perhaps. Amuse had three.

  I was gonna do this as a footnote, but I think it’s disrespectful to make a motherfucker rove his eyes all the way down to the bottom of the page and up again—plus, if the words matter, print them in a font I can read, you know? It occurs to me that a lot of people peeping this might already be like “Fuck that narcissistic, no-account asshole. Fuck him in his neck.” I’m not disagreeing. But: I didn’t say Billy had to bullshit his way past Karen, did I? Naw. The Train Queen of Fort Greene was like “Have fun, kill it, I love you so much, save some of the Baby Blue Krylon.” Don’t cry for Wren 209. At least, not yet. And also: the last twenty times somebody in your life gave birth, you found out about it by opening your inbox, right? Mother and child are resting comfortably, vital stats, kid’s name (pretentious), one to three flicks?

  Well, this was ’87. What you call a mass email, my parents called hitting trains.

  The Immortal Five unpacked their special-occasion stashes, out-of-production colors you had to trade for or hoard (or, if you were Cloud 9, spend a day boosting from dustcovered hardware stores in Virginia): Krylon Hot Raspberry and Aqua Turquoise and Icy Grape, Federal Safety Green and Sandalwood Tan Rustoleum, Bermuda Blue Red Devil. The lysergic diethylamide dissolved on tongues and swirled into bloodstreams, chased by the bubbly and then a couple six-packs of Bud tall-boys. Few sticks of weed to keep things copacetic. Toasts every few minutes, to me and Wren and fatherhood and family, as the squad lined up and commenced to bomb the living hell out of a lucky F train.

  Billy rocked a wildstyle window-down whole car, KILROY DONDI VANCE, with the Cheech Wizard holding a bassinet next to the K, and then for dessert he caught a top-to-bottom: IT’S A BOY in silver blockbuster letters, with CAN’T BELIEVE IT—I’M A DAD! and 7 LBS 8 OZ and I LOVE YOU KAREN in True Blue script. Cloud and Dengue split the next car down and put up WREN 209 and HOT MAMA. Sabor, short on paint, helped with the fills, then bailed Amuse out on the IMMORTAL 5 ALIVE car he’d started before the tabs hit him full-on and he decided, googly-eyed, to sit down for a while and watch. On that much acid, the smallest sounds became a symphony; your senses were fizzing over, flowing into one another, and all you could do was breathe everything in. Especially since (who knew?) the rhythm of your own personal inhalation turned out to be the ordering principle of the entire universe.

  Two tabs, though, was a time-tested burner-painting dosage, and for the next couple of hours the pssht and clicka-clacka of paintcans sufficed for conversation as Billy, Sabor, Dengue and Cloud got down. Amuse had the crew camera, and the few flicks that aren’t of his thumbs—not on some oops shit, but because homeboy developed a profound interest in the delicate ovaline swirls of his fingerprints that night, and spent most of the roll trying to do them justice—provide excellent evidence in support of the argument that the Immortal Five, whether at the top of their collective game or fried out of their collective brain, were some of the illest motherfuckers in the history of the movement.

  Naturally, there are any number of qualitative criteria by which to evaluate graff—how crisp are the cuts? how architecturally sound and imaginative the letterforms? how hot the color combos? does the shit flow?—but I don’t give a fuck about all that. You either connect with art or you don’t, right? Who cares why Nas is nicer than Jay-Z, or even why he’s nice at all? He just is, so fucking enjoy it.

  I once said as much to this woman who taught tenth grade art history at Whoopty Whoo Ivy League We’s A Comin’ Academy, accused her mid-slideshow of robbing me of my ability to dig art. She told me I’d dig it more if I knew why I was digging it, and I said that implied there was one proper way to dig something, or that hers was better than mine. I brought up this interview with Branford Marsalis I’d just seen on PBS, where the host says all this smart-sounding crap about why Branford’s last album was a trio recording instead of the usual quartet, and Branford nods and nods, smirk plastered across his mug, then says “actually, what happened is that Kenny missed his plane,” and next thing I knew me and Ms. Art Appreciation were discussing the metaphor of the cave in Plato’s Republic, me claiming I’d read it even though I hadn’t rather than letting her slay me with the bullshit trick of citing something the other person doesn’t know to win the argument. We went back and forth until the bell rang, and the upshot of it all was that I got an A for the course without doing diddly-squat to earn one, so in the end she recognized game and is okay in my book.

  Four, five in the morning is every writer’s favorite time. The city’s as quiet as your apartment right after the refrigerator cycles down. Nobody’s alive except you and your boys and your recently completed joints, voluptuous and razor-sharp, vibrating and bulging with the struggle of containing their own energy. You’re backstage grinning at the newest-freshest, knowing that soon you’ll be home asleep and the burners will roll out on their maiden voyage. Civilians will try to read the words and get lost in the style, while your name pops off the lips of those who know. The heightened alertness of the mission has smoothed itself down to a glossy pride, and you’re enjoying your last few minutes with an oblivion-bound creation you’re never gonna see up-close again. Maybe you’re doing some touch-ups or taking a few tags on the insides, or passing a final roach. For sure, you’re talking late night trash, trading lies and war stories, or else an early morning spasm of sincerity has gripped the crew, and love and loss and life and death are on the table.

  I don’t know which it was. Dengue retains only flashes of that night. What Billy told Karen doesn’t help—it’s mystical, confused, impressionistic. There’s nothing in his letters. And Cloud got an extra year tacked onto his grand larceny bid for the beating he threw a fellow inmate who asked him what really went down, legends aside.

  This much is indisputable: if anybody had a bigger hard-on for graffiti than the writers, it was the NYPD’s Vandal Squad. They were almost like writers themselves. They stayed up on who was hot, read wildstyles the average person could never decipher. They took train flicks, even brought cans to the yards and crossed out people they particularly hated. They wanted fame as bad as any new-jack thirteen-year-old, and they got it. Everybody knew Curly and Ferrari from Queens, Ski and Hickey from the Bronx, Tom and Jerry from Manhattan. Writers made reps by putting in work, inventing style, hitting five hundred cars in six months, splashing color through the city’s hardened arteries. For cops, it was busting heads and taking down prize bucks.

  Most times you got popped, it happened after the fact. The police sat in their car, watched you sneak in and out of the yard. They caught up with you later, at a bar or in front of your building, tapped you on the shoulder just when you thought you’d gotten away with it but before you’d scrubbed the paint off your hands. They knew better than to match speed and wits with kids who, if they didn’t outrun you and vanish through some escape-hatch you and your partner never even knew about, might very well turn around and knock your fat twelve-sandwich-eating ass the fuck out. A lot of distinctions blurred in the yards; a badge didn’t sh
ine as bright there. The boys in blue only invaded in pursuit of big game, and always in big numbers.

  And so it is written that on July 2, 1987, at approximately the asscrack of dawn, fifteen po-pos rode down on the Immortal Five, with Officer Anastacio Bracken, the biggest asshole in the history of cops and robbers, leading the charge.

  Surprise, niggers.

  Due diligence is never getting so fucked up that you can’t run. It’s never entering a yard without having an emergency route mapped, plus a backup and a place to hide. Coney Isle was the I5’s living room; all that was second nature, even on a double-dose of Donald Duck, and they played it by the books.

  Billy heard the footfalls first, lots of them, pigs on the creep but coming fast. He shouted a warning, grabbed Amuse by the armpits, hoisted him onto his Pumas. A heartbeat later, the Immortal Five was in the wind. Billy and Amuse sprinted north, toward a ladder leading to a street grate a hundred yards inside a tunnel. Sabor and Dengue ran south, weaving between rows of trains, doubling back toward the entrance the cops had used and knowing that if it was blocked they could hide behind the work shed, or lay low underneath a car. Cloud 9, who loved paint as much as any writer dead or alive, wasted thirty seconds dumping cans into a pair of paper shopping bags, then shimmied up the side of a car and hauled ass eastward, leaping from the roof of one train to the next.

  All good ideas, but not tonight. When Billy reached the ladder, he looked up and saw two cops smiling down at him, hands hipped, hello sweetheart. Sabor and Dengue couldn’t get clear either; the Vandal Squad was everywhere. They had to reverse course, head for the street grate themselves. Bracken went after Cloud, the two of them racing across the cars—Bracken knowing exactly who was in front of him and chugging along with a stiffy, no doubt, at the sight of Cloud’s skinny black ass.

  A gunshot pinged against metal, and everybody froze—even the cops, according to Fever. Bracken had actually squeezed off at Cloud, tried to pop him in the back. No fair, no fair, no fair. Rules of the game were they could beat you silly when they caught you, but to draw a gun was crazy. Everybody kinda-sorta knew Bracken was a little nuts, but no one appreciated the extent until that night.

  The Immortal Five were among those with a claim to stake about making him that way. Bracken had arrested Amuse back in ’79—no big deal from a legal standpoint, since Amuse was a minor, plus lucky enough to get bagged taking street tags. Tons of guys were active then, so a dorky fourteen-year-old Heeb with one spraycan in his possession meant nothing to Bracken. He never suspected Amuse had been ripping up the 2s and 5s for eighteen months—didn’t even ask what he wrote, just smacked him around and brought him in. Pop goes the cherry.

  Amuse never forgot his first time. He was a real late-breaker on the puberty tip, thickly bespectacled and kind of soft, having been under Cloud 9’s considerable protection from jump. Amuse and Billy were junior crew members back then, high school classmates of Cloud’s little brother Finster. Too talented to leave off the team, but not yet ready for Cloud, Dengue and Sabor to party with after an evening’s bombing was complete.

  Nobody had ever laid hands on Amuse before, probably, but more to the point was that Bracken had disrespected him by not knowing who he was. I also suspect that getting arrested was a badge of honor—some quintessential whiteboy shit, right there—and Amuse didn’t want to let it go when the city cut him loose eight hours later, so he declared jihad on his arresting officer.

  Going after the cops who were coming after you was a graff hobby, pen versus the sword and whatnot. You dedicated pieces to them on the catch-me-if-you-can tip, dissed them on the insides—OFFICER BRACKEN AMUSE FUCKED YOUR WIFE. EAT A DICK UP AND HICCUP ANASTACIO—brilliant, witty commentary like that. Amuse took it a giant step further, off the trains and into Bracken’s neighborhood: covered Bay Ridge with BRACKEN RAPES BABIES and the like. A year later, crazy angel-dusted Drum One caught Bracken asleep in his patrol car outside the Ghost Yard with the window down, woke him up and knocked him out. Robbed him for good measure, in one of the most celebrated incidents in aerosol history. The taunts became BRACKEN GOT HIS ASS KICKED and DEAR BRACKEN, WHERE’S YOUR BADGE? LOVE, AMUSE, and dude got upgraded from just another dickhead member of the Pork Patrol to a certified psychopath, tireless and hate-driven, a cop even other cops despised. A guy unhinged enough to shoot a kid in the back for vandalism.

  He fired and missed and Cloud dropped flat, rolled off the car, hit the ground running. Bracken pulled up into a marksman’s stance, feet planted, both hands wrapped around his revolver, and tracked Cloud through the narrow corridor between the trains.

  More shots. Cloud sprinted for the mouth of the tunnel, shopping bags swinging from his fists and banging against his knees, and then blammo, Bracken put a hole through a can of Krylon Pastel Aqua and a geyser of depressurized paint exploded against Cloud’s gut and he thought he’d been hit, started hyperventilating, couldn’t understand how his legs still worked. By the time he figured out that human blood is not the color of swimming pool water, an adrenaline-fueled burst of speed had carried him out of Bracken’s range, and all five Immortals were in the tunnel.

  The only thing to do was keep going. See who gave up first, hope not to get hit by a train in the meantime, pray there wasn’t a second unit waiting at the next station. They could hear Bracken charging after, calling out their names so that they’d know he knew. Up ahead was blackness, utter and engulfing, the kind in which you can’t tell if your eyes are closed or open. Far scarier than actual blindness, according to Dengue, who would know.

  If you’ve ever been on acid, you know that the last place you want to be on three fat tabs is trapped inside a sensory-deprivation chamber with your heavily armed worst enemy afoot and an indiscernible number of rough hands yanking at you while strange, breathless voices demand you run for your life.

  Amuse lost his shit. He wrenched away, screaming, throwing wild punches through the air, catching Cloud in the stomach and freaking when he felt the sticky wetness. They tried to orient him, Amuse, it’s us, we’re your friends, come on, we gotta go. More flailing and incomprehension and the crunch-and-slap of cop boots coming closer, the crazed black tragicomedy of four sightless men trying to corral a fifth. Amuse had assigned his boys new paranoid-delusional identities by now; they were demons or goblins or who-knows-what. He started trying to bite them.

  “You cocksuckers got five seconds to stop running, then I swear to Christ I’m emptying my clip.”

  That’s an actual quote, according to Dengue, and this is where the frame would freeze and the voiceover would begin if The Death of Amuse were a Hollywood movie: Bracken with his gun cocked, snarling; Sabor, Billy, Cloud and Dengue pushing Amuse forward like he was the flagpole and they were those Iwo Jima motherfuckers. And . . . fade to white. I would say something like This is where the story starts to come apart.

  Dengue might or might not have banged his toes against a hard flat metal edge, reached down and felt around and pulled a manhole from its mooring and felt a gust of hot rank air. Maybe the I5 dropped into an unmapped chamber, twisting their ankles when they came down on the decayed pilings of a long-abandoned train line. Maybe Amuse landed on his feet, or maybe he landed wrong and cracked open his skull.

  Maybe none of that happened and they kept running and Amuse broke free and scrambled the other way, straight into Bracken, and got shot in the chest. Or maybe the cop fired blind, and some grudge-bearing god grabbed his bullet like Aphrodite in the Trojan War and pulled it through Amuse’s dome. Maybe Sabor found a door, and they hustled down a staircase to a lower tunnel and Bracken followed—with five other officers behind him, their names lost to history. Maybe the I5 decided to turn and rush the Vandal Squad, on some last-stand shit, and in the blind insanity Amuse drowned facedown in a puddle, or the stress and the hallucinations were too much and he busted a ventricle all on his own. Maybe the crew inhaled noxious trapped gasses in that
lower chamber, passed out, and woke up four instead of five.

  I’d heard all those versions, plus versions of those versions. Every graff vet had a different story, and Dengue’s memories kept changing, or he forgot what lies he’d told me last and made up new ones. The notion of stumbling upon a lower tunnel came up enough that I figured there was truth to it, the way anthropologists know there really was some kind of catastrophic, ancient flood because every society’s got one folded into its mythology.

  Somehow, the Immortal Five-minus-One got clear and surfaced above ground. No record of how or when or where, not even a snarl of competing stories, just an infuriating and impenetrable somehow. Maybe they regrouped outside the yard, rancid with panic but still hoping Amuse would pop up magically unscathed, hey guys, looking for me?, and they’d all have a laugh, gloom and horror flash-melted, disbelief turned inside out. Maybe they propped each other up, each man refusing to let the next think the worst, and fanned out to their parents’ apartments to wait in vain for his call, straining to imagine the jubilant escape story Amuse would whisper from inside his bedroom closet, or the jailhouse check-in he’d mumble through aching, swollen jaws.

  I think they knew, though. Whatever happened and however they got free, I’ve always had the sense they saw and heard and felt him die. I see them sprawled across a curb, keening hysterically at the dawn sky, sucking down long shuddery drafts of air as if oxygen were comprehension. Staggering home numb and weak, vomiting on their own stoops, waking up in bed unable to remember how they got there.