Rage Is Back (9781101606179) (31 page)

Hello, New York. My name is Billy Vance. I was born on the Lower East Side, and I've lived my whole life in this great city. I spent the weekend painting my best friend Andrew Stein's nickname, Amuse, on every single subway train there is. Andrew was killed on July second, 1987. He was shot to death in cold blood, and I saw it. I saw it with my own two eyes. So did three of my friends. The man who killed him was a police officer. He made it look like an accident, and he was never arrested. Now, that man is running for mayor. His name is Anastacio Bracken. I don't think he'd make a very good mayor. For one thing, he's a murderer. And for another, he's the president of the MTA, which means that his job is to make sure nobody writes graffiti on the subway trains. As you can see, Anastacio Bracken is not very good at his job. I'm asking you to do two things today, New York. I'm asking you to remember my friend Andrew, who didn't deserve to die. And I'm asking you not to make Anastacio Bracken your mayor. That's all. I hope you enjoy my paintings. Have a nice ride.

By four, the welding was done, and by quarter past cats were popping bottles of the cheap champagne Fuck and Gotch Uno had brought back on the last supermarket run. Except for the tumor of trepidation metastasizing in my chest, it was all sublime. The vibe was beautiful, everybody giddy with the knowledge of what we were pulling off. Dengue's radio crackled with extensions of those feelings, from all over the city. It felt like all across the world.

At 4:25, Karen was pulling Billy through the yard by his hand. I looked up, saw them coming toward me, and hid as much of my face as possible behind an upturned beer bottle.

“Time for a toast.” She beckoned for the six-pack in my hand, popped a couple, handed one to Billy.

“I don't think Dondi wants to drink with me,” he said.

“I'm surprised you have time. Isn't there a treed kitten you should be off rescuing or something?”

“Knock it off,” said Karen. “Drink.” She raised her bottle. I looked across her at Billy, saw my expression mirrored on his face. Slowly, we both lifted our Coronas, clinked, and drank.

At 4:28, the shouts started.

“Five-oh! Five-oh!”

Karen dropped her bottle. I heard it break as if the ground were a mile away, as if she'd dropped it down a well. Trash tore past, his long form shattered into blurred parts like a cubist painting: elbows, knees, neck, fingertips. A pack of bodies followed in his wake. Karen joined it.

My father stared at the approaching stampede and did not move. I grabbed his arm, jerked. Nothing doing. I knew it as soon as I touched him, as if the knowledge had passed from his skin to mine: Billy would not be denied a look. I prayed it would be brief, and distant.

Then I ran.

The options were the same as they'd ever been. Tunnel. Fence flap. Hide. My first assumption was that only hiding was viable: if the cops knew, they knew everything, and if they knew everything they'd brought as many bodies as they could muster, covered every exit, parked wagons outside the gate to load us all aboard.

I was wrong. An instant later, Billy got his glimpse: five men dashing toward us down the passageway between the trains, guns in their hands, light beaming wildly from their fists. That was all of them. I knew it on sight, twisting backward toward the sound: this was no departmental matter, no detachment of officers responding to a radio call. This was as personal on one side as it was on the other. This was Bracken and his flunkies, the quartet from the helicopter. Cops who did whatever he said, played by no rules but his, played to the death. They were young and fast, and they were leaving their boss in the dust, the V-formation elongating with every step.

Three members of Matamos Todos ran before them, losing ground fast. All at once, two broke left and the other right, into parallel aisles. I could see the indecision in the lead cops' hips. Bracken bellowed at them from behind, voice thick with phlegm.

“Ignore them! Get Vance! There he goes!”

I heard the cops accelerate behind me, their boots falling harder and more frequently. I imagined them straining to achieve top speed: the grimaces, the peeled-back lips, the extra tension in the calves and thighs as the stride lengthened. The burst of sweat, the thinning of the air—not that I needed to imagine any of it, because I was experiencing every bit myself.

Before me loomed the tunnel's wide black mouth. I didn't want to go in, but I knew the yard. Far off, the chain-link rattled as someone yanked back the flap, escaped as we could not.

Ahead of me, Karen raced through the foyer of pale light the moon managed to throw inside the tunnel, and the darkness swallowed her whole. I followed, then turned in time to see Billy hesitate, lingering in that pool of luminescence.

“Come on!” my mother shouted, and he sprinted to her, to us. The next sound was the clatter of the cops' boots as they came to an abrupt stop, there at that place that was tunnel but was not yet underground. Their flashlights darted left and right, but could not pick us out. They were perhaps fifty feet away, but this darkness would not be penetrated. It was too deep, too suffocating. Like swimming in some viscous liquid.

If we ran, they would hear us. If they heard us, we were dead. And so there we stood, invisible and paralyzed—and shivering. Maybe it was me; maybe it was fear. But I could hear Billy and Karen shaking too, gripped by the same bone-deep chill.

For a moment, I thought it was keeping Bracken's boys at bay, that they were too scared to advance. Then I realized they were waiting for orders.

Bracken caught up, pushed through their ranks and passed into the darkness smoothly, like he was a piece of it being restored. His footfalls crunched over the gravel, as if with each step he were crushing the skulls of tiny animals. The sounds came slow. Bracken was strolling.

“There's nowhere to go,” he said in a low, even voice that reverberated off the walls and came back hard, metallic. “You know that, Billy.”

I felt Karen's fury rising from her like heat, reached out and clamped my hand around her wrist.

More footfalls. Slower. A voice coiled tense as braided steel.

“You and me have got to talk, Billy. It doesn't have to be like before. That's up to you.”

I realized this was our chance. His men couldn't fire, not with Bracken standing between us and them. That left only his gun to elude.

His gun, and the abyss ahead.

I tugged my parents close, cupped my hands, spoke almost soundlessly. “They don't have a clear shot. We've got to run. Now.”

The air moved slightly as Billy shook his head. His whisper was too loud. “I can't do this again.”

“I'm giving you five seconds, Billy. We can help each other. We have a common—”

I never heard the last word.

Shots rang out in a long, tight cluster, and I dove to the ground. I couldn't feel Billy or Karen, didn't hear their bodies fall beside mine. The noise was deafening, seemed to go on and on. I groped until I found my mother's hand. I squeezed; she squeezed back. Twice. I knew it meant that she was touching Billy, that he had not been lost.

Finally, the air was still. I raised my head a few inches, saw that the bodies blocking the entrance were gone. I strained to see Bracken, but he had been hidden all along. My chest was pressed against the iron train track, heart pumping so hard I was afraid it would betray my location. I had no idea what the fuck had just happened.

Footsteps broke the silence—footsteps coming closer.

Closer.

Stopping just above my head. The legs adjusting, planting themselves wider.

I held my breath. There was a click. I heard it in slow motion. It had four parts. The nearly inaudible application of pressure to metal by rough hands. The sound of metal sliding into metal. The backfire of its withdrawal. The jagged, slicing echo.

I knew it was a shotgun.

My lungs began to ache, to beg for air. Then came the moist thud of a heavy object meeting ground.

To not see is frightening. To know that you are seen is terror.

A voice.

“Y'all motherfuckers didn't really think I'd miss this shit, did you?”

A far less sophisticated click, and light beamed down upon us. I turned over, sat up, stared into it. Karen was already on her feet, pulling Billy to his.

Cloud 9 leaned against his shotgun, sixty watts radiating from his forehead.

“Howdy, youngblood. You like that shit?”

I took my time standing. My legs quaked.

“Uh, yeah,” I managed.

My mother threw herself at him. Cloud caught her with one arm. Her face was buried so deep in his chest that it took me a moment to understand that she was sobbing.

“That my apology?” he asked.

Karen sniffled, nodded.

“Accepted.” Cloud lifted his head, directed the miner's light at Billy. “How come I always gotta
ask
you for a hug, nigga?”

Billy walked over and joined Karen in his arms. The light moved when Cloud did, and as he shifted to grab my father the beam passed over Bracken, sprawled motionless on his side with his gun in his hand. I started. He was almost close enough to touch. I caught a quick glimpse of another cop, laid out behind him. He wasn't moving, either.

“You killed them?” I heard myself say. “Cloud, you
killed them
!”

“Relax, youngblood. Nobody's dead. I spent my money wisely.”

“What money?”

“The hundred grand I got back from Bracken, when I told him where he could find Rage.”

“What?”

“Yeah, dog. I was like halfway to Virginia when I decided, you know what, fuck this, I'm not running from a motherfucker dumber than me.”

He raised his voice, and his chin. “That's right, Bracky-Brack, I'm talking about you! So I got off that bus, and caught another one. Been back in the city since Tuesday, making my little plans. On Wednesday, I called up shithead here, told him I'd had some revelations about what friendship was really worth. Had me a lovely little rendezvous with Officers McGrath and Downing over there on Thursday—whaddup, McGrath? How you feeling, homey? Downing, my nigga! You holding it down over there, partner? All right, then! Do you, baby!”

Cloud turned back to us. “I told them Billy had a plan to sneak a couple BRACKEN KILLED AMUSE cars into service around four in the morning, here where all of us have so much history. Then, I hired me some goons. Goons, meet Rage, Wren and Dondi. Rage, Wren, Dondi, these are my goons.”

Three headlamps flickered on, along the walls of the tunnel.

“Hello, goons,” I said.

“Mufuckers is top-notch, the best money can buy. Got a couple more stationed out there in the yard, but I was pretty sure it'd go down here. All right, fellas, back on alert.” The lights vanished.

“And finally, I bought a bunch of hi-tech fly shit, you know what I mean? All the stuff we talked about. Got me some infrared goggles, some laser scopes. And that old cellmate of mine, the Gulf War cat? He hooked me up with these tranquilizer rounds. The army uses them for interrogation and shit, to fuck with niggas' heads. They leave you fully conscious, but they knock out your whole nervous system for like twelve hours, from the brain down. Mufuckers can't move, can't talk, but they can see and they can think. I'ma get Bracken settled in at the old Writers' Bench up on Grand Concourse, so he can appreciate the many fine burners you all took the time to paint. Speaking of which, I hope there's some space left, 'cause you know me—I
will
cross somebody the fuck out if I have to.”

15

hat do you do when the mission is over? Most of the guys, local and imported alike, wanted only to find themselves a clear vantage point, sit down, and watch the trains go by. A bench at an elevated station, an apartment window looking out onto the tracks, a milkcrate outside a bodega with a view of an overpass, whatever: savor the sight, burn it into your brain, squeeze off some flicks, bug out.

Dengue had gotten on the horn and cautioned everybody against drawing attention to themselves. When the story broke, the city was going to be embarrassed and desperate—to disprove Billy's claims, and to find somebody they could parade past the cameras in bracelets. There was a good chance they'd sweep up all the writers they could find—for questioning, and for appearances' sake. The smart play was to make yourself scarce, sleep at your girl's house for a few nights, train-watch in groups of three or fewer and keep the pointing and backslapping to a minimum, the technical analysis and newly minted war stories under wraps or at least your breath.

After some debate, Cloud was prevailed upon not to install Bracken at the Writers' Bench, that being the first place the Vandal Squad would look for celebrants. Better that the MTA president remain mysteriously unavailable for comment while the story swirled into enormity. That he only emerge hours later, with a fantastic, unbelievable account of his whereabouts, one that raised more questions than it answered. If he dared to tell it at all.

Various poetically just options were put forth, and rejected: let Bracken and his men ride the trains, have them locked up for vagrancy, and, naturally, Karen's go-to, dump everybody in Brownsville (what fate she believed awaited anyone who set foot there, I can only imagine; yeah, it's a grimy neighborhood, but it's not like mortar rounds rain from the sky). In the end, function trumped form and we decided to install the five of them in one of Times Square's few remaining round-the-clock porno theaters, where the risk that they would be discovered before the tranq-pellets wore off was nil, and they might even make a few new friends.

Despite Billy's wishes, the guards were not laid gently on the welcome mats outside their apartment doors. Even Zebno, who'd been a fucking Viking, didn't have the patience for that. He offered to return them to their yards of origin, where they could sleep away the final hours in the comfort of the worksheds. Billy decided to be okay with that, though he insisted on coming along to supervise. If he'd had business cards, he probably would have slipped one into each of their pockets, in case they needed post-cambiafuerza counseling. I watched him climb into the van's shotgun seat, jabbering like an asshole about how a violent trip was often a transformative one, and perhaps these people we'd assaulted and drugged and gagged and imprisoned would rejoin the flow of reality changed, healed, opened. Zebno threw him a look that suggested he thought it was Billy who needed to rejoin the flow of reality, and mashed the gas.

My own postmission inclination tended toward a scalding shower, a hearty, carbohydrating breakfast, and a nap of epic duration. There was something depressing about the notion that in addition to making history, we also had to sit and bear witness to it. Surely, riding off into the sunset was a classier move.

I said as much to Dengue. He assured me I was a fool, and asked if I knew what he would give to watch just one train burst from the 116th Street tunnel, climb the bridge to 125th and Broadway, and slide to a blazing, rainbow halt along a platform teeming with commuters and schoolchildren. I told him I did not, but that it would be my pleasure to stand next to him and describe the experience in vivid detail.

Cloud's goons piled Bracken and company into a van of their own, and I do mean pile. Karen, Dengue and I hitched a ride to 42nd and 7th, hopped out in front of a street vendor just opening his cart. Cloud got off with us, entrusting the porn-theater placement to his underlings, and we copped coffee and bagels and stood beside the stairs to New York's biggest subway station, chewing and slurping, postponing our gratification, letting the anticipation build. It was that time of day when the city always seems fresh and clean and slightly desolate, and you feel as though you share a strange, vague secret with every other person walking the streets at such an uncivilized hour. And also that you have a secret
from
them, the secret of what you're doing awake.

At seven on the dot, we shuffled down the steps and saw our particular secret transformed into a proclamation. An Uptown-bound 1 Local was just pulling in; it was the train we needed to get to 125th Street, but getting on board would have required a fight. People stood three and four deep, from one end of the platform to the other, jockeying for a look. One tiny flash of light after another, everybody snapping photos, crappy cell phone cameras raised above their heads. Motherfuckers balanced atop the benches for a clearer look—and I'm talking guys in business suits, en route from their houses in Montclair to their jobs on Wall Street. Parents squiring their kids to school lifted the tots onto their shoulders, oohing and pointing. There was less noise than you would have expected, as if the commuters were ogling some rare wild animal that had just wandered onto their front lawns.

The hush burned off fast. Before the 1 even opened its doors, a downtown 2 Express arrived on the opposite track. Everybody whirled, saw that it was equally bombed, and started New Yorking it up. Across the way, the people coming off the 2 did the same. One train covered end-to-end with burners was an oddity you mentioned to your coworkers. Two, and you turned on the news to find out what the fuck was going on.

“I'm telling you, they're all like this,” I heard a guy say, as the four of us strolled slowly through the din. It all sounded like one big conversation, though of course it was a hundred small ones. Dengue had a look on his face like he was listening to a symphony. And getting a blow job.

“I can't read that one, but that one says ‘Amuse.'”

“Yo, they
all
say Amuse! That nigga kilt it!”

“Daddy, I want one.”

“One what, sweetheart?”

“Whatever they're selling.”

“This takes me back to the bad old days, when this city was falling apart.”

“Let's wait for a clean one.”

“What's Amuse?”

“It's that new PDA I was telling you about.”

“My son got mixed up in this graffiti business when he was a kid. Thank God he straightened out.”

“How many trains you think they did?”

“This shit is crazy!”

“No, Amuse is some guy's name.”

“It's a fuckin' disgrace, that's what it is.”

“It's gotta be an ad campaign.”

“My cousin told me it has something to do with that MTA guy who's running for mayor.”

“What does it say?”

“Yo, quick, get a flick of
that
one, down there.”

“Amuse was this kid got himself killed writing graffiti.”

“I hope they arrested whoever did this.”

“Lord have mercy, I haven't seen anything like this in thirty years. Back then, New York had
character
.”

“Why don't they take these trains out and wash them?”

“How come graffiti disappeared from off the trains, anyway?”

“You know what this makes me think of? Terrorism. If they can do this to our subways, think how vulnerable we are.”

“I don't know if it's all of them, but it's a lot. I took the C from Brooklyn, and it was all graffitied up, too.”

“It can't be just one guy.”

“Yo, yo, c'mere, c'mere! This one down here is sick!”

“The Q was just like this. Amuse, Amuse, Amuse.”

“They should lock him
under
the jail.”

“Okay, I admit it, I'm Amuse.”

“You stupid, Jerome.”

“No, no, listen. It was a guy named Billy. He recorded a tape on the D train, I just heard it like five hundred times. Amuse was his friend, and he says that guy who's running for mayor killed him. Shot him, or something. Bracken, the MTA guy. So he did this to tell people don't vote for Bracken.”

“How'd he get a tape on the train?”

“Same way he did all this.”

“Way better than those stupid NBC Thursday Night Line-Up ads inside the train.”

“
That
, we used to call a burner, and
that
, we used to call a throw-up.”

“Eewww, why'd you call it that, Uncle Bernard?”

One after the other, the trains pulled out, leaving the crowd on either platform halved. Seeing the trains behave like trains, running just as if they had not been transformed into a moving art gallery, was an odd thing—a stark illustration of just how absurd this “war” had always been, with its nine-figure budgets, its “bombing” and “killing” and “kings.” The subways' job was to move people around the city, and they performed it equally well whether or not they carried a few extra coats of paint. That much couldn't be debated, and for a moment it thrust all the rest into the realm of the absurd.

But the majesty of what we'd done refused to stay tamped down. I glanced up the line at the Ambassador. He'd found a seat on one of the benches, and was slumped there with his hands folded over his stomach. Karen stood behind him. I thought of all the hours they'd spent camped out at subway stations, waiting to see last night's burner once more, pining for a sixty-second fling with that one car out of thousands. Such a strange fidelity. And now, after two decades of abstinence, to know that whatever pulled in next was sure to be yours? I could hardly imagine the feeling. It would be like walking the streets, knowing you'd had sex with every single girl you passed.

Or maybe it would be nothing like that. It occurred to me that I should be wondering what I was feeling, not what they were. The answer was, a little hollow. At first, I attributed it to simple letdown, postpartum depression. Then I found myself thinking about
The Great Gatsby
, eighth grade, fall semester, and that scene where Gatsby (I think) says to whatshisname, the narrator (I think), something like, “You know who that was? That was the man who fixed the World Series.” They meet the guy in a bar—old F-Dot, not exactly a regular contributor to the B'nai B'rith, describes him as vile and hook-nosed—and then a few minutes later, it's like the Wizard of Oz in reverse: this nothing-looking old fart sitting there eating his sandwich or whatever is revealed to be a criminal mastermind who once knocked the entire country on its ass. My memory of the book is pretty much limited to this one astonishing moment in which the world distorts, fills up with mystery.

It came to mind now, I realized, because it was precisely what I craved: to be pointed at, whispered about. I only wanted to be the man behind the scenes, the invisible mastermind, if everybody knew it. It was so silly and selfish, it made me want to slap myself in the back of the head.

I did the next best thing and sidled up to Cloud. He was leaning against a support beam, smoking a cigarette like he didn't give one single solitary fuck about any law, rule or regulation on the books.

An Uptown 2 was docking. We turned to stare at it.

“Thing of beauty, eh youngblood?”

“I feel like getting a bullhorn and telling everybody it was me. I mean, us.”

He brought the cigarette to his mouth, index finger hooked around the top, and nodded as he took a pull. “Yeah, I remember that feeling.”

I waited.

“Vexer,” he said, nodding at a panel piece. “Or somebody biting him. Nobody else does
E
s like that, with the arrows all coming back in on themselves. You see?”

The doors closed, reopened, closed again. As if the train were clapping its hands.

“You were saying, you remember that feeling . . . ?”

“Yeah, man. You gotta think about it like this: only fly niggas appreciate fly shit. And they gonna find out on their own. For everybody else, fame is the opposite of fame.”

“I'm not following.”

He flicked his cigarette onto the tracks, and cocked his head enough to look at me. “The way you think about fame, like an accomplishment? Some shit to pursue? That's how you should think about not being famous.”

I mulled that over, while Cloud smoked another one. My mother joined the Ambassador on the bench. I took it we were in no rush to get Uptown.

“Cloud?”

“Something else on your mind, youngblood?”

I wanted to ask him about T. Whether everything had gone down as he'd claimed, whether he'd left anything out. Whether it was all intricately concocted bullshit, and he'd just walked into the apartment and lit the man up. I couldn't, of course.

“What happened with you and my mother at Fashion Moda?”

He squinted at me. “Say what?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“Naw, why, she said something happened?”

“Forget it.”