Rage Is Back (9781101606179) (8 page)

It was probably for the best that Billy chose a workshop night to rejoin the world in more than flesh; who knows what would have happened if he'd segued into lucidity with Karen nearby. Besides which, one more day of playing Florence Nightingale and I might have spazzed out and stopped feeding his ass.

The irony of taking care of a father who'd never taken care of me is so obvious I'm loath to dwell on it. When you're responsible for somebody with whom you've got so much unresolved shit, you've either gotta find the inner strength to make each act a tiny gesture of forgiveness, or else spend every stagnant, housebound hour pulsing with resentment.

Your boy here, I opted for the latter. The problem, as always, was how to throw darts at an invisible man. I could only measure the stone of Billy's absence by the water it displaced, the ripples shuddering across my life—convict him not just in, but
of
absentia. I kept circling back over the same memories all week: that autumn 2000 chain of events that made me realize how narrow life's margins were, how easily the simplest shit could snowball if you didn't have the right support, until your whole reality got yanked out from underneath.

It all jumped off a couple months into eighth grade at MS 113, when I started getting these dizzy spells. My vision would go sort of smeared, and I'd have like these hiccups in my brain, as if a loose wire were giving off electrical bursts—which makes no sense, as I learned a year later in biology, because the brain doesn't have the right kind of nerves to feel anything. It only happened two, three times a week, and looking back now I can't fathom why I told Karen, since I was in the throes of puberty and all kinds of equally incomprehensible and frightening crap was also happening to me, such as unprovoked rock-hard erections lasting upwards of forty-five minutes.

Like a responsible parent, Karen took me to a doctor, who scheduled an MRI or maybe it was a CT scan, and told me to stay up for twenty-four hours beforehand, and not eat anything for twelve. Karen all-nightered with me. We rented a bunch of movies, made a party of it. In the morning I went in, drank a glass of mysterious thick pink shit and lay down and let them slide me into one of those pod things for about three minutes so they could look at my brain. The nurse or technician or whatever seemed surprised I'd stayed awake and fasted, as if that part had been a joke. When it was over, Karen took me to Junior's for breakfast and let me order cherry cheesecake.

For your boy here, the whole thing was mildly troubling, quickly shrugged off. I had high school applications to write, b-ball tryouts looming, girls to ponder. Not only did I forget we were waiting on the test results, I was too absorbed in my own shit to notice that Karen was trying to hide something from me—and my mother wears her heart on everybody else's sleeve, so that was some major-league obliviousness right there. I don't know how or when she decided I had a brain tumor, but after that all-nighter Karen pulled three or four more, consecutive and unintentional.

They say sleep deprivation is a form of torture, and that information acquired through such means is unreliable because a motherfucker will say whatever she thinks might stop the pain. But what if you're torturing yourself? When Karen's diet of terror and exhaustion started to yield results even my dumb ass couldn't miss, the most prominent was honesty, unfettered and raw. The unspeakable became small talk. It was like one of those old cartoons where somebody's shadow achieves consciousness and starts moving independent of the body. Nothing good ever comes of that.

On the fourth night, I awakened to find Karen sitting on my bed, talking. I don't mean
hey, Dondi, wake up
; I mean it was two in the morning and she was in the middle of a speech, describing what she would do to me if I turned into a man like my father and illustrating the case against Billy with a litany of
I should have known then
examples of selfishness and misplaced loyalty, spanning from the teenage dawn of their relationship to the very day of his departure—all of them new to me, which you've gotta understand was like happening upon a Biggie Smalls bluegrass album, or a new book of the Bible in which the various exploits of Jesus, God, Methuselah, et al. are revealed to be an elaborate fairy tale dictated by Hasaan the Joker to his manservant Sparkles during a fortnight's binge at an Assyrian opium den.

Maybe it seems weird of me to put such stock in the ramblings of a woman spiraling toward delirium. But I knew Karen well enough to understand that this was the realest she had ever been, even if I couldn't put together why. And besides, people don't wake you at the darkest hour of the night to lie. The Billy-as-Batman posters came down off the walls of my psyche then and there, leaving me with nothing to stare at but the faded paint beneath.

The next day, when I got home from school, Reggie from the fourth floor was sitting in the living room. There'd been an incident that morning at Authors' Inc. Karen was in the hospital. I was supposed to stay with him.

An incident
, I said, trying not to panic.
What does that mean, an incident?

She'd attacked a UPS guy with a letter opener, he told me. Her coworkers had to pull her off. Nobody knew why she'd done it, Karen included. She'd sounded pretty out of it when she'd called, said they'd given her something to calm her down. Been under a lot of stress, something about some test results.

Can I see her?
I asked.

He shook his head, dreadlocks skritching against an orange corduroy buttondown, and told me to pack up what I needed for the night.

No offense
, I said,
but why would she call you? Why not my grandparents?

Reggie rubbed his hand against his stubble, like he was having trouble staying awake, and said
That's, um, are their names Joe and Dana?

Yeah. My dad's folks.

She probably don't want me telling you, but what the fuck, you grown enough. Your mom's afraid if they find out she's in the psych ward, they'll bug out and try to take you away.

I think I nodded. “Grown enough” and “test results” and “psych ward” rattled around inside me, and I knew that this was my fault. My faults. And Billy's.

The eventual diagnosis was a psychotic break catalyzed by exhaustion, but once you break you're broke and it's not as simple as just catching up on Z's and clocking back in. It took them three weeks to get Karen stabilized and rested and all that. Which made me a long-term resident of Reggie's apartment.

Longer than Reggie, as things turned out.

He had a three-bedroom—the same layout as ours, which really banged home the whole different-world-inches-away thing. It was one of those dynasty apartments you'll find close to any college campus. Got handed down year after year along a line of descent that included Pratt students, graduates, and drop-outs affiliated with Sigma Phi, this co-ed artsy-druggy-hippie frat some knuckleheads formed in the sixties as a way to score campus housing, back when there was some.

Reggie seemed really charged about the crib's history: the bands that had formed there, none of which I'd ever heard of, the illustrious alumni, the fact that every year it was a stop on Sigma Phi's twenty-four-hour initiation ritual, a psychedelic tour of Brooklyn they called the Epic of Gilgamesh. How all the furniture and artwork marked different epochs, and past residents often dropped by to smoke a joint and make sure their Bob Marley wall hanging was still tacked over the couch or whatever the fuck.

His pride struck me as kind of misplaced, since Reggie himself was totally off-brand—not a Pratt guy or a Sigma, not even an artist. He'd moved in as a summer subletter, and become permanent when some chick left unexpectedly that August. Listening to him talk reminded me of the time I went to Passover dinner at my boy Greg Weiner's house and his Scots-Irish aunt lectured everybody about the amazing resilience of the Jewish people for three hours.

Reggie's roommates were a pair of luxuriously dreadlocked musicians, Twenty-Twenty and Knowledge Born, the former a recent Pratt drop-out from Massachusetts who was still cashing his student loan checks, and the latter the homey of the former, source of income unclear, arrival date recent, Five Percenter name uncorrelated to lifestyle. The two of them were always referring to “the studio,” which I soon realized meant Twenty-Twenty's room. They talked music all day, but in highly technical terms: how to quantize a drum loop or filter the lows out of a sample. Reggie would chime in and bring the discourse to a dead halt, which made me feel sort of sorry for him.

Nobody seemed fazed by the random thirteen-year-old sleeping on the couch. Which makes perfect sense in retrospect, because two thirds of the population was busy gearing up for war, and whatever went on in Reggie's mind had nothing to do with me.

A couple days into my tenure, Reggie drove upstate for the weekend, to visit some people he worked with every summer at a kids' camp. Five minutes after he left, Twenty-Twenty and K-Born charged into his room and commenced drawer-dumping and mattress-flipping like they had a motherfucking search warrant, in pursuit of evidence that he'd jerked them out of some money on a phone bill.

I couldn't really follow the particulars, and they weren't too keen on making sure I understood, but that was just the flashpoint anyway. Reggie had been under suspicion of plenty more, for plenty long. Sue, the girl who bounced unexpectedly the summer he moved in, had done so after a couple hundred bucks went missing from her bureau. She was a willowy young stoner chick, not the type to confront anybody and especially incapable of stepping to Reggie. Not just because he weighed two-forty but because he worked with kids and had a pretty smile and was Your Friendly Neighborhood Dread, the kind of black dude who made white people feel super-awesome about themselves. To accuse him of stealing would have filled her with guilt and shame even if it was true, so instead she just mumbled something about bad vibes and left, and a year later when she was good and toasted at a Sigma Phi party she told Twenty-Twenty all about it.

Then there was the fact that Reggie dated white women exclusively—that is, the women he dated four at a time were exclusively white—and according to Twenty-Twenty and K-Born all his homeys were white too, which is definitely how you roll if you're a shady black dude looking not to get your card pulled; that's a no-brainer. Also, he really liked the Wyclef Jean album, and he couldn't play chess for shit, and he was always incredibly proud—
gleeful
, K-Born said,
like, holding up his palm for high fives and shit
—whenever he two-timed one of his waifish, non-rocket-surgeon-ass girls with another.

They tossed his room, and just like that some petty-money stern-talking-to shit became a beef you could legitimately disfigure a dude for. What they found (aside from a bunch of nasty porno mags which, oddly, featured nothing but black women) was a nightstand drawer crammed with the kind of overdue-rent notices they slip under your door when you're seriously fucking up. Month by month, the debt increased by Reggie's share of the rent. As the ranking member of the apartment, he made it his job to collect K-Born's and Twenty-Twenty's checks. He'd been mailing them in; he just hadn't been writing his own. They owed eight thou and change, and E.B. Holding Company claimed to have initiated eviction proceedings. Why they'd even been this patient was a mystery—until K-Born discovered the lease itself, in a shoebox on the top shelf of Reggie's closet.

I have no idea how E.B. Holding Co. managed to botch a simple document so badly, but it suggested that real estate might not exactly be their bread and butter. Reggie's surname was Troutman, but they had it as Fuentes—the dude whose room Twenty-Twenty had taken over. K-Born, government name Kemmit Bannon, was listed as Karriem Banwon, a definite improvement. Twenty-Twenty wasn't named at all, but one of the original dynasty dudes, a trumpet player named Joel who'd been living in Brazil since the early nineties, was still a leaseholder. His was the only name typed right.

Maybe you're wondering what kept me from jetting, when my apartment was right downstairs and my ace dude Cedric lived on Greene and Vanderbilt and Billy's parents were an easy subway trip away. I guess I wanted to prove I could hold down my square, to myself and to Karen. Keep the secret, and the faith. Besides which, there's nothing like other people's drama to make you forget your own.

Being present at the fact-finding mission made me a mascot, if not a co-conspirator. When Reggie's room had been thoroughly swept, the three of us convened in the living room to pore over the mess of papers red-stamped with
PAST DUE
and
FINAL WARNING
and
EVICTION PENDING
, marveling at the thought of Reggie early-morning tiptoeing to the front door to retrieve the notices, and puzzling over why he'd kept them. K-Born lit a blunt, started to pass it to me, then had his doubts and froze, arm half extended, eyebrows raised, cheeks pouched with smoke. I nodded. He handed it over. A star was born.

Remember when he told us he made that painting
? said Twenty-Twenty, using the blunt to point.
Across the room, balanced against the metal fire-escape door, was a small watercolor rendering of the door's latticework. That might sound dumb but it was actually pretty cool, kind of tied the indoors to the out.

You know Chynetta, who used to live here? I ran into her at Frank's Lounge one time, and she was like “That painting of the fire escape grille I did, is that still in the apartment? I'd like to get it back.” I said yeah, come over whenever, I'll put it aside for you. So I went home and took it down, and Reggie was like, “Nah, nah, she didn't paint that, I did. There's two versions.” And he got me. I was like, “Okay . . . if you say so. Can't see why you'd lie about that.” And I put it right where it is right now.