Kill Kill Faster Faster

Praise for
Kill Kill Faster Faster

“Kill Kill Faster Faster
should be set to a pantherlike Lou Reed bass line: It’s one of his songs come to life as a novel. … If the whole downtown sensibility seems to have become as dry and weightless as old newspaper lately,
Kill
redeems it with sorrowful beauty.”

—
Time Out
New York

“Joel Rose has written a raw, compelling novel about a violently confused man who destroys those he most needs, and in the process destroys himself.
Kill Kill Faster Faster
is a New York tragedy—streetwise, stylish, and desperately, savagely sad.”

—Patrick McGrath, author of
Asylum,
The Grotesque
, and
Spider

“An audacious and thrilling novel that’s as dynamically stylish as it is brutally authentic. Joel Rose has written a necessary, unforgettable book.”

—Dennis Cooper, author of
Frisk
and
Try

“The recent avalanche of white-boy-hipster pulp novels clogging superstore aisles are about as vital as a Vanilla Ice/Spice Girls double bill. In this book, on the other hand, homegrown homey Rose has crammed the crime genre into a pulverizing blender and spewed out a terrifyingly violent, funny, sexy, and hypnotic novel…. Throughout, Rose slips the reader literary Mickeys, and by the twisted conclusion you won’t know whether to laugh, cry, or grab the nearest body for a quick roll in the hay. The only certainty is that once you’re sucked into Joey’s violent, erotic world, his tortured voice will be lodged in your head long after you’ve sped through his story in one can’t-put-it-down read.”

—Details
magazine

“In
Kill Kill Faster Faster
, Joel Rose takes a great idea—a contemporary, urban rags-to-riches narrative—and stomps the shit out of it until it’s bleeding severely and pleading for mercy. This beating should have taken place years ago.
Kill Kill
also has the ring of an authentic New York experience to it. God help Mr. Rose.”

—Rick Moody, author of
The Ice Storm
and
Purple America

“The poemlike voice of this book develops relentlessly, pulling you along with it. Its rage builds and builds and builds, creating a world and a vision of that world as compellingly unique as it is frighteningly passionate.”

—Lucy Grealy, author of
Autobiography of a Face

“Joel Rose is one of my favorite writers.
Kill Kill Faster Faster
is a modern urban masterpiece pulsating with wit, energy, and empathy, putting on the center stage a world and its characters, which are either ignored in modern fiction or dealt with in a patronizing and exploitative way. Forget all the tiresome eighties tales of yuppie excess, this book is destined to become the classic New York novel. Brash, violent, sexy, ugly, and beautiful, it demands to be picked up and read. Then just try putting it down.”

—Irvine Welsh, author of
Trainspotting,
The Acid House
, and
Ecstasy

KILL KILL FASTER FASTER

Joel Rose’s first novel,
Kill the Poor
, spent four months on the
VLS
bestseller list. He is also the co-author (with Amos Poe) of
La Pacifica
, a graphic novel, and the graphic nonfiction book,
The Big Book of Thugs.
His journalism has appeared in
The New York Times, New York
magazine,
New York Newsday
, and various other publications. His screenplay
Dead Weekend
was produced in 1995 (directed by Amos Poe), and he has written for several television shows, including
Miami Vice
and
Kojak.
With Catherine Texier, Rose established and co-edited the legendary literary magazine
Between C & D.
He lives in New York City.

“The Hit” by Ruben Blades © 1988 Ruben Blades Production, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 by: Joel Jose

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 1-466-49822-6

ISBN-13: 9781466498228

eBook ISBN: 978-1-61914-600-6

Designed by Mercedes Everett

F
OR MY DAUGHTERS
,
C
ÉLINE AND
C
HLOÉ

B
IRDS DO IT
. B
EES DO IT
. L
ET’S DO IT
.
—G
ARY
G
ILMORE

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT PAGE

THE BEGINNING

I
been shot.

I been shot in the head. In the heart.

I been shot in the cheek. In the jaw. In the mouth.

I been shot in the gut.

I been shot in the back, in the arm, in the neck.

I been shot in the balls.

My daughters, my daughters.

My twin daughters.

I’m telling you the truth when I tell you there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for them.

Nothing I wouldn’t do for my daughters.

You grow up where I grew up, you wonder what’s in store for you. You wonder where you’ll wind up, what you’re going to see.

The way I see it, it’s a father’s duty—a man’s duty—to impart knowledge to his children.

Still, forgive me for what I done.

The city. The city made me do it.

The sun is out, but my side of the street is in shadow. Know what I mean?

If you ask me, Is this a confessional? Yeah, this is a confessional.

I got out of jail, ninth of September 1996, after serving seventeen and a half years of a fifteen-years-to-life sentence. I did my time at Attica, Dannemora, Stormville, Sing Sing, Elmira. Finally where I got out from was Auburn. I walked out of the Auburn lockup. Stood under the stone walls. The 5 and 20, looking down the big boulevard.

You know what the payoff was, man? The payoff was nothing. There was no nothing there. Just a limo.

A big black one.

The ground is falling away. You need help. You know you need it. You reach out your hand.

It’s like having it cut off at the wrist, man. It’s like having your friggin hand lopped off right there at the payoff.

You ain’t stupid, man. You put out your hand, but then you pull it back. So you deny them. You deny them that. And then what do they have? They have nothing. They have fucking nothing, and you have your name.

My name is Joey One-Way.

What’s yours?

But people don’t know.

They don’t know.

My mother-in-law used to say those exact words. People don’t know, Joey. They don’t know.

To me, the cardinal rule of child rearing is watch your ass.

My daughters. My poor beautiful daughters. What have I done to them?

This is before I went away. They’re like four. Four years old. I used to call them Vile and Bile, the Piss-off Twins. I come to their room. One of them’s lying on the floor. I don’t even remember which one. There’s a carpet, but it’s thin and the floor is hard. I say, Man, why you do that shit to your mother? And she say, the one who’s doing the talking, she say, What I do?

You hurt her, I said.

No, I din’t.

Yes, you did.

On and on like that. Like I had some responsibility. I the father, speaking up for the mother.

I don’t have no responsibility. I’m lost. I’m lost in the ionosphere. Don’t be coming at me.

Don’t be coming at me with that shit.

It ain’t pretension or preclusion, none of that shit, but when the needle used to go in my arm, the edge came off, everything go away. I know it ain’t doing me no good to think like that, the limo right there in front of me. Still and all, I’m thinking, you know what I’m saying?

I been shot, man. I been shot.

In the gut. Twicet in the head.

In the balls.

Doc says I can still have kids.

But like I’m telling you, I already got kids.

There’s a little girl on the sofa. She my girl. My daughter. I’m responsible for her. She’s one of the ones. One of the two. The two the twins. The one take down her pants. She touch her vagina. She say, Daddy, when I make pee-pee my vulva stings.

Man, it smells feisty down there.

I say you got to wipe yourself better, baby.

When I used to take the dope from the foil, put it in the cooker, I believed that was the real thing.

If it were to go up my nose, it wouldn’t have been the same. It wouldn’t have been nothing to my mind.

When it come inside me through the vein, and then go back out through my eyes, through my ears, into the brain, direct hit, from the TV, no matter how fucked up I was, that’s what I don’t want. Life is tough. Life, it go round and round.

I’m doing battle. I ain’t give up. Day after day. There ain’t no stopping me really. I accept my fate. Whatever it is, I ain’t scared. I always said I’d die young. Leave a good-looking corpse. I ain’t young no more, but I ain’t no corpse neither.

You give a kid life, all innocent, and what do you get?

I’ll tell you:

You get to watch your baby.

You get to watch your baby’s fear.

You get to watch your baby’s fear grow and grow.

I remember.

I remember my wife. I remember her like it was yesterday.

Our daughters was giving her a hard time. She hated when I stuck my nose in their business, between them and her, but finally I could take it no longer and I stepped in in spite of myself. I said to them, they was just little ones, I said to them, Why do you treat your mother like that? And the two of them looked at me, and then looked at her, and without batting a eye or breaking off their stare, they said, Because she don’t fight back.

Let me tell you something.

A male in a house of females. The deed is done by the setting sun.

The truth of it is, really, even if you don’t expect nothing from yourself, you expect everything from your children. You expect better than you got.

So like I say, if you ask me, Is this a confessional? Yeah, this is a confessional.

It’s not like one or two people are disturbed around us in our society, it’s like everybody’s disturbed. Know what I’m saying?

Nowadays, it’s like everything’s out of focus on the street on a rainy night.

I got too much to lose to be walking too slow.

I won’t let nobody grab me.

All them years lost.

Man oh man.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

Cause for whatever reason, my mind, I’m fucked, man. I’m thinking how Kim’s family didn’t even bury her properly.

She never would have wanted to be put in the cold, cold ground. They should have burnt her up. That’s what she would have wanted. Burn her up good. Her ashes spread under a tree. In some vacant lot or something.

Man, look at me. All of a sudden I’m like a fucking critic of funerals.

Man, don’t that beat all.

I stood in my cell at the proper time. A moment of silence, out of respect.

Man, I was bluto.

Bluto with grief.

Hey, I don’t speak for no one but myself. I ain’t no everyman. I’m more like no man.

No man on every occasion.

You been out there—who am I?

And I’m scared, man…

I’m scared.

What I done?

What I done?

I don’t remember. I don’t fucking remember. Seventeen and a half years away and I’m a fucking blank.

In my eyes it seems like I got the ability to see the old person in everybody. What that person’ll be when they grow old and older, what they’ll become. Even the youngest, littlest girls on the street. My own daughters. I see them old. I see them buried.

I had a dream.

I been shot.

They had shot me.

They had shot me, but they hadn’t killed me.

They should have killed me, but they didn’t.

They should have shot me and killed me and put me out of my misery.

But, to tell you the truth, I’m not miserable. That’s the thing with me—I’m not miserable.

It’s the anger, man.

The red haze. Come down over my brain. The anger.

That’s the thing—the
anger.

The red haze.

And what am I angry about?

You know, I don’t have a clue.

Not a clue.

Or I ain’t talking.

One or the other.