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

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