Rage Is Back (9781101606179) Read Online Free Page B

all of a sudden the credits are flying up the screen and you’re like
damn, I played myself?
    I banked past the elevator, flung open the stairwell door and started climbing. Maybe Karen was right, and I was turning into Billy. I wondered how I’d know. My actual memories don’t amount to much, and they’ve been beat-matched and blended with everybody else’s so many times that I’ve lost track of what’s lived and what’s received.
    I only knew the dude for two years and change, and even before he left, Billy was a man of absences, the type of guy whose attention was thrilling because you could never take it for granted. I remember the glee I felt when he came home and scooped me up and airplaned me around the room, and the tantrums I threw every time he bounced. Or maybe I don’t remember those things at all. I was about to say something regarding a sense of grim determination about him, a kind of permanent, distant fury, a perpetual thousand-yard-stare, but those are all ridiculous things for a toddler to notice unless he was born on leap year day, and I was not.
    July 1, 1987, baby. 8:09 P.M . Seven pounds and eight ounces of funkadelic soul. A Cancer, and don’t think I don’t know it. No fault of your boy’s, but the night I was born was also the night everything started falling to shit. Karen’s maternal fam is Trini, and apparently her grandma, rest in peace, had spent months cautioning the happy couple (not for long) against speaking the baby’s name out loud when he was born, or remarking on his being cute or perfect or anything like that. Your first comments were supposed to be negative and misleading,
what an ugly girl,
because otherwise the various spirits would get jealous and have your 411 to boot and bam, start fucking with you. Maybe Rage and Wren should have taken that to heart. My mother’s certainly mused on it a few times in the years since, joint in hand usually.
    Three hours into my earthly existence, Billy went bombing, because that’s what a fiend does. Triumph and tragedy are met identically. Boredom too. Something happens, or nothing happens, and you need a fix.
    He kissed us both, left me snoozing the snooze of the innocent on my mother’s chest, swung a backpack containing spraycans, a sketchbook, and some just-in-case bolt-cutters over his shoulder—yup, he brought it to the hospital; that was Billy’s version of a maternity bag—and bullshitted his way past his parents and Karen’s mom. He scooped Amuse, his ace, the Immortal Five’s only other whiteboy, half-Jewish just like Billy, from the hospital lobby. The two of them rode the iron horse out to the Coney Island Yard, the city’s biggest, and met up with Dengue, Cloud 9, and Sabor, the three of whom popped out from behind a work shed to surprise Billy with champagne, cigars, good wishes, and ten tabs of Donald Duck acid, two hits to a man. Billy took one. Faint stirrings of parental responsibility, perhaps. Amuse had three.
    I was gonna do this as a footnote, but I think it’s disrespectful to make a motherfucker rove his eyes all the way down to the bottom of the page and up again—plus, if the words matter, print them in a font I can read, you know? It occurs to me that a lot of people peeping this might already be like “Fuck that narcissistic, no-account asshole. Fuck him in his neck.” I’m not disagreeing. But: I didn’t say Billy had to bullshit his way past Karen, did I? Naw. The Train Queen of Fort Greene was like “Have fun, kill it, I love you so much, save some of the Baby Blue Krylon.” Don’t cry for Wren 209. At least, not yet. And also: the last twenty times somebody in your life gave birth, you found out about it by opening your inbox, right?
Mother and child are resting comfortably
, vital stats, kid’s name (pretentious), one to three flicks?
    Well, this was ’87. What you call a mass email,