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

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 going 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