Rage Is Back Read online

  The remains were “found” in the tunnel the next day, by Bracken. Amuse had been run over by a train—got high and passed out on the tracks, that was the story. A tragic accident, Bracken called it in the NYPD’s press statement, and a lesson to those who persist in glorifying a criminal activity and downplaying its risks. Amuse was described as a career vandal, wanted by police for inflicting hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to MTA property.

  It’s practically a cliché now, cops killing writers. Happens in every graffiti movie, even that German one. The police are always evil incarnate, menacing the ragtag underdog crew from the margins and then showing up when the dramatic arc starts sagging and taking somebody out, accidentally-on-purpose. All the adolescent shenanigans screech to a halt and the remaining characters reevaluate their lives and either pay tribute to their fallen comrade with a major artistic accomplishment or decide to get out of the game and go legit.

  In real life, motherfuckers just lose their minds and destroy everything around them.

  When I was younger I used to fantasize about killing Bracken for what he did to Amuse—and by extension to Billy, to Dengue, to Karen, to me. I’d imagine everything from elaborate kidnap-and-torture scenarios to simple ruses where I’d pretend to be hurt or demented and get his guard down, then cast off my infirmity and pull a weapon. The last thing I always did before slitting his throat or click-clacking the rifle or pressing the trapdoor button was reveal my identity and watch his eyes register the knowledge that yes, this kid had every right to end his life.

  I gave it up when I started high school, on a hunch that the guidance counselors at Whoopty Whoo Ivy League We’s A Comin’ Academy would consider Obsessively Plotting Filial Revenge a poor extracurricular activity. And also after staring myself down and admitting that I wasn’t really that guy.

  Instead, I started casting around for a way to grant Bracken and his porcine brethren some humanity, out of a desire to preserve my own. I mean, look: exterminators kill roaches. That’s their job. To them, roaches are vermin. They need to get got. When the exterminators go home at night they aren’t fretting about all the bugs they’ve gassed. They’ve got kids and wives—the exterminators, that is, although I guess the roaches too—and they drive them to swim meets and oboe lessons and tuck them into bed at night and all that.

  You see what I’m getting at. Vandal Squad cops don’t view writers as anything more than a problem to be solved, and if you can accept that they see it that way, and that they lack the imagination to see it any other, you can let them off the hook. Except, that argument would exonerate Nazi death camp guards, and also exterminators don’t lie awake visualizing what they’re gonna do to the roaches when they catch them, or circulating lists of the Top Five Most Wanted Insects among themselves so everybody can be on the same page, poised for the stomp-out.

  I was better at letting Billy off the hook—when it wasn’t his eyes widening in moments-to-live recognition instead of Bracken’s, anyway. A one-man judicial system, your boy here. Judge, jury and executioner. Prosecution and defense. All varieties of witness: star, character, hostile, expert, discredited.

  When grandiosity seemed like it would play, I told the court my father had faced the same choice as every hero for millennia, and made the same decision: to lay aside all he held dear and go to war. That it was some epic, Odysseus-type shit to backburner his newborn son and loving common-law wife and take up arms. Except that the wily King of Ithaca, on whom we spent the better part of a semester my sophomore year, pretended to be batshit insane so they’d leave him and Telemachus and Penelope the fuck alone, hitched his plow up to a mule and an ox and sowed his fields with pebbles. And when Agamemnon called his bluff, O got on a ship and waved farewell and sailed off to chuck spears and reap glory. Whereas my father ran his war, if you could call it that, out of our apartment.

  Billy went bombing. That’s what a fiend does, all he knows how to do. The objective was simple: broadcast the truth, bring Bracken down. It’s not as naive as it might sound. When you’re an outlaw to begin with, and your outlaw best friend’s been killed by a cop, all you’ve got is your word. Justice doesn’t come and ring your doorbell. The DA’s not trying to build a case. The police, forget about it. You’d be a fool to even show your face.

  All you’ve got is your word. The word. And paint.

  No more trains for Billy Rage. No more wildstyles, no more festivals of color, no more leaning over a blackbook, souping up his name until it flew, chased its tail, spat flame. No more art, or sleep, or lust for fame. Now it was about size and visibility, placement and relentlessness. Results.

  On July 3, 1987, Billy embarked on what is widely considered the sickest run in planetary history. It would take me pages to catalog the spots he hit, some so implausible that dudes are still trying to divine his modus operandi. The medium wasn’t the message anymore, the message was the message, so sometimes spraypaint was the delivery system and other times he used regular latex house paint and a roller, wore an orange jumpsuit and hid in plain sight, just another schmuck humping it out. Except an hour later he’d be gone and the brick wall or the billboard would be covered in ugly squared-off letters twelve feet tall and visible from a half-mile away:

  7/2/87

  NYPD’S ANASTACIO BRACKEN

  MURDERED ANDREW ‘AMUSE’ STEIN

  IN COLD BLOOD

  Some nights he dressed in rags and sloshed himself with gin, staggered around Soho with a bum-sack full of cans and marked each square of sidewalk with a homemade stencil:

  OFFICER BRACKEN KILLED AMUSE

  DEMAND JUSTICE!

  He rocked every concrete overpass—what writers call heaven spots or hangovers—above the FDR freeway on Manhattan’s east side. He tagged a goddamn polar bear with the BRACKEN KILLED AMUSE stencil, red paint on white fur. I shit you not, a Central Park Zoo polar bear that not only could kill you with one paw-swipe but spends its whole life fantasizing about doing just that.

  Billy got half the other animals up in the piece, too: all the goats and sheep from the petting farm, two monkeys, a penguin. Went up to the Bronx Zoo a month later and wrote an essay in Flat Black Krylon on the see-through wall that separates the guests from the gorillas:

  ANDREW ‘AMUSE’ STEIN’S DEATH ON 7/2/87 WAS NOT AN ACCIDENT! AMUSE HAD TAUNTED OFFICER ANASTACIO BRACKEN FOR YEARS WITH GRAFFITI MESSAGES AND BRACKEN SHOT HIM OUT OF HATE!! I KNOW BECAUSE I WAS THERE. END THE COVER-UP—DEMAND AN AUTOPSY!!

  TRY BRACKEN FOR MURDER!!!!

  He hit the wild boars, too: scrawled PIGS AGAINST BRACKEN across their coarse-haired flanks. So there is some evidence that he allowed himself a little fun.

  A little rest? A smidgeon of fatherhood? Doubtful. Billy worked a typical graffiti day-job as a bike messenger, earned just enough to cover bills on the rent-stabilized Fort Greene apartment Karen had grown up in, hers since her mom left the city for New Rochelle. In theory, my mother was watching me during the day, with Billy taking over at night so she could finish her degree at City College and become a literary agent or an editor. Suffice it to say that Karen got incompletes for her whole fall semester.

  You can imagine the fights. Or, rather, I can imagine the fights. Hell, I might even remember them. According to most childhood development experts—Whoopty Whoo’s tenth grade Health and Human Development class is no jizoke—parents shouldn’t argue in front of their kids, because trauma stays in the body, like THC. It’s a good thing they don’t screen for it; can you imagine what a vial of trauma-free piss would cost?

  My mother claims she never threw Billy out—that on the contrary, she looked up one day and realized I guess he doesn’t live here anymore. I tend not to believe it. Karen’s the throw-a-motherfucker-out type.

  What I do believe, though—what she’s always said, both during the era of tightlipped equanimity and the post–autumn 2000 era of talking s
hit—is that if Billy had demonstrated anything less than total obsession, Karen would have had his back. She loved Amuse like family, and she was a trouper—not a graffiti-groupie or a girl whose boyfriend put her name on trains, but a hardrock, down by law. She’d rolled with grimy crews, counted Drum One as a homeboy, once kicked a toy in the nuts for disrespecting her at the Writers’ Bench. Sure, she’d outgrown graff by then and gotten on with her life, but when she fell for Billy it was because of his passion, not despite it. Half their courtship took place underground; I may or may not have been conceived atop an army blanket on the floor of an out-of-service R Train. She got him cans and fatcaps for his birthdays—got, not bought—and until she was six months pregnant, Billy and the crew were still cajoling Karen into the occasional night of mayhem. One of her alternate names, which writers take the way a dude in Africa takes a second wife, to show he’s wealthy enough to support one, was Immortalette 1. Forget halfway; Karen would have met my father on her own ten-yard line.

  The way she tells it, all she really asked was that he stop and grieve. He said he couldn’t stop, and that he was grieving—this was how he grieved. She called bullshit, told him he was afraid of what stillness would bring and that the longer he put off facing it, the harder it would hit him when he did. But by then he was too far out of earshot to respond.

  What, one might wonder, were Dengue, Cloud and Sabor doing while Billy was razing the city in Amuse’s name? Were they, too, devoting every minute and muscular decussation to bringing the hand of justice down?

  They were not. Sabor crumbled into a depression so severe he didn’t leave his house for weeks. By the time Cloud and Dengue made it up to Washington Heights to see him he was barely speaking, and his mother Esperanza was making plans to take him back to Santo Domingo, where his grandparents lived, for recuperation. I say depression, but she thought Sabor had been cursed. The only thing to do was put it in the elders’ hands. His grandpops knew a brujo.

  Maybe Sabor was too American for the healing rituals of his homeland to take hold, or maybe Esperanza misdiagnosed her son. Sabor left in October, and in January word came back that he had killed himself. Hired a cab to drive him to the seashore, brought his cousin’s pistol, didn’t leave a note.

  Billy blamed Bracken. Now he’s killed two of us, was the way my father saw it. Dengue accepts that logic, even now. I suppose it’s easier than reconciling yourself to suicide, to the notion that tall, wavy-haired, Valentino-handsome Sabor, who’d bring huge Tupperware containers of his mother’s arroz con pollo to the yards and tell everyone you gotta try this, bro, Sabor who juggled three women at a bare minimum at all times, as a philosophy, one always scandalously older and one dangerously young and one who lived within walking distance of his crib, Sabor who rapped Spanish lyrics over salsa records and swore it would be the next big thing, Sabor who called himself Sabor the Saber and Sabor the Savior, who once painted a whole car reading WHITE GIRLS CALL ME FLAVOR, had decided that taking his chances with oblivion beat spending another day alive. It didn’t seem to fit. Maybe it never does.

  Billy was living with Cloud by then, in a loft on 139th and Lenox. It was near Karen’s campus, and she’d drop me there before class, making Billy and whoever else was hanging out—a couple of writers if she was lucky, a six-pack of Cloud’s criminal running buddies if she wasn’t—swear to keep the baby away from all species of secondhand smoke. She’d spend the next four hours spaced out, imagining the unsavory activities being planned or executed in the loft and worrying that Billy would sling me across his back and go out bombing. Again.

  What if you’d been caught, she’d demanded, when she found out. They’d have taken our son to Child Protective Services. You ever think of that, you asshole? He’d protested that it hadn’t been risky, just some roller-work from the window of an abandoned building, but Karen didn’t let him see me alone for a month, and if you’re waiting to hear from the defense, you can keep waiting. Ain’t shit to say on this one that can’t be articulated by a middle finger swaying in the air.

  From what Dengue’s said, the reason he and Cloud didn’t participate in Billy’s campaign was simple: it seemed like a waste of time. It was some whiteboy shit, to think anybody else would care about your dead. As if New Yorkers were going to rise up at the bidding of some anonymous vandal who used too many exclamation points? The same people who’d authorized a parade of douchebag mayors to blow three hundred mil in taxpayer revenue fighting not homelessness nor crime but the graffiti plague?

  The quest betrayed a lack of understanding about the means through which power operated and survived, how and who the police were, what they existed to protect and serve. When one of your homeboys got killed you rocked a memorial mural on the wall of the bodega nearest to his crib, got drunk, and tried to move on, regardless of the circumstances and how bizarre or infuriating they might be. For all Billy’s hard-thumping heart, all the creativity and technical proficiency he’d demonstrated and the all-city mega-upness he’d achieved, Cloud and Dengue found the shit depressing. Seeing Amuse’s name everywhere, with Bracken’s never more than a few words away, made them sick. And even though it came as no surprise, so did New Yorkers’ capacity not to care.

  Three or four things happened in quick succession around that time, in the spring and summer of ’88, all of them presumably set to a soundtrack of Big Daddy Kane (with whom Cloud had played a year of varsity basketball at Sarah J. Hale High School in Brooklyn), Boogie Down Productions (Dengue used to swap KRS-One graffiti outlines for nickel bags on the Patterson Projects’ playground) and Rakim (who was from boondocksical Wyandanch, Long Island, and thus the rare rapper nobody could claim to have known back when he wasn’t shit).

  Some of the chronology is fuzzy, but the first thing to go down was that Cloud got serious about armed robbery. He had a four-man crew, him and two of his uncles and some cat named Sour Patch, and they were into everything, from hijacking cigarette trucks en route from Maryland to smash-and-grab jobs at jewelry stores down in the Diamond District to petty bodega holdups. One time Cloud donned a ski mask and robbed the pizza parlor on the first floor of his building, where he ate probably five nights a week. Went back an hour later, knocked off a meatball sub.

  Cloud robbed like he wrote: not for the crown but for the fuck of it—to show the world he was a fly dude who could do anything and do it with style. Maybe losing Amuse and Sabor made him reckless, or maybe it turned him grim and grown. Either way, graffiti got deaded except for the part he loved best: stealing absurd quantities of paint. So Billy never hurt for supplies.

  My father put his head down and kept bombing. Walled off a bedroom of sorts by stacking boxes of soon-to-be-fenced stereo components around his mattress, the better to sleep off the all-night missions. The messenger gig slipped away after one blown shift too many: goodbye income, farewell civilian world. Cloud stepped in and gave Billy work as a stock boy, inventorying merchandise and working out percentages and wholesale-resale differentials—pure charity, since Cloud could do it better in his head than my father could manage with a calculator.

  With his days free, Billy branched out into fake-permission walls, the new game in town as the train scene came sputtering to a halt. You chose a spot you wanted to piece and did it in plain view, with a crowd watching, made a big all-day production of it. In your back pocket was fake paperwork signed by the building’s fake owner, stipulating that he was paying you such-and-such amount to beautify his property. At the bottom of the contract was a fake name and a buddy’s phone number that a nosy beat cop could call for fake verification: “Yes indeed, Officer, I appreciate your concern, but this young fellow is most certainly in my employ. And a jolly fine artist he is, too.”

  I don’t even have words to express the sheer perversity of painting an unreadable fifty-can wildstyle BRACKEN KILLED AMUSE mural on a downtown corner. Billy did dozens. Maybe he missed making art.

  Or maybe he was g
oing nuts. Swinging-dick spots came next: the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, Gracie Mansion. Maybe he thought landmarks would generate publicity, or maybe he’d gotten so used to being ignored that he felt like he could get away with anything.

  What boggles the mind is that my father never once thought to pick up the phone and tell the press what he was doing. Nowadays that would be thing-the-first, but ’80s motherfuckers had the media savvy of sea snails. Granted, there are libel-related reasons a newspaper isn’t going to suggest a cop’s a killer just because somebody writes it on a polar bear, but there were angles Billy could have played. Whatever, not like it matters now. And soon enough, he had more attention than he could’ve imagined, all of it the wrong kind.

  November 1988. The Jungle Brothers dropped Straight Out the Jungle, everybody bought African medallions, and Transit Authority spokesman Charles Robicheaux announced that after an exhaustive search it had hired a new Chief of Security, selecting Detective Anastacio Bracken from the ranks of the NYPD’s Vandal Squad. Bracken’s long record of distinguished service and his administrative experience in coordinating a highly successful task force made him ideal for the position.

  The Immortal 3 caught the press conference on TV, melting into Cloud’s leather sectional as Bracken bellied up to the podium in a dark suit and a paisley tie, his thinning squid-ink hair combed back from his forehead and a modest civil-servant smile curling up around his bulbous drunkard’s nose.

  No wonder the fucker hadn’t been heard from in so long: busy improving his prospects. But it didn’t add up. Bracken was a low-level sadist with a high school education. Who the hell would make him chief of anything?

  He adjusted his tie, looked straight through the screen at Billy, and announced that his first act as chief would be the introduction of a new tactic in the war against the vandals. Although the ongoing campaign to eradicate graffiti from the subways was experiencing success, an undesired side effect was that the criminals were coming above ground. Like rats fleeing a ship. Chuckle-chuckle-chuckle. To better combat the graffiti scourge, the city was going to begin prosecuting vandals in civil court, to the fullest extent of the law.