Rage Is Back (9781101606179) by Adam Mansbach Read Free Book Online

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 shit—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’