Rage Is Back (9781101606179) Read Free

sometimes you don’t, to quote a candy bar commercial I never saw but Karen grew up loving.
    The Ambassador was spot-on correctamundo, of course, but you probably guessed that. Why else would I start the story here, right?

2
    reeloading is exhausting. All conversation, no alone-time, and for the only child of a single mother like your boy here, solitude is the base of the mental health food pyramid, the grain-and-bread group of not losing my shit rather than the occasional, Chili Cheese Frito-esque indulgence some people seem to find it. When I do get some quiet, it’s in the dead-sober middle of the day, when regular citizens are out getting paid or educated, and I fritter it away shaking my fool head at the parade of unsound ideas and irresponsible people I’ve spent my life in thrall to—a great word, thrall; sounds like a monster’s gullet—while normal kids were busy soaking up all types of valuable knowledge from their square-ass parents.
    I speak mainly of the Uptown Girl (Billy Joel, whaddup?), my girlfriend until some twelve hours after the expulsion. But also the general cast, or caste, of Whoopty Whoo Ivy League We’s A Comin’ Academy. I’m pretty sure none of my classmates’ mothers would’ve considered a son who sells narcotics a dream come true, any more than they themselves would have concluded that bopping around town holding the ripcord to an incarceration parachute was a reasonable way to earn a little cash—since, unlike your boy here, none of them needed to turn his classmates into customers so he could call his jealousy disdain.
    The last thing I want to sound like is one of those black conservative TV pundits they’re always trotting out to declare that racism hasn’t existed since 1965 and the black community’s in tatters because of unwed mothers and rap music. Or a character from an early John Singleton flick, back when he gave an earnest fuck and wrote the same “it takes a man to raise a man” speech into every script. Or a whiny little punk. I haven’t sidestepped all the other hood clichés just to blame my problems on skewed values in the home, or a dearth of positive male role models. But the fucking path to success can be a little hard to discern when you’re walking around bent over double, dragging a cauldron bubbling with a four-part blend of molten anger—for those keeping score at home, that’s anger at Billy, anger at Karen, anger at not knowing how angry I should be, and anger at my inability to claim my anger—plus a full fondue set to spoon it up with.
    The assiduous consumption of
Cannabis sativa
has proved useful in reducing the flame. Where there’s smoke, there’s no fire: I figured that out a hell of a lot earlier than perhaps I should have. If stress had sent Karen foraging for Häagen-Dazs, I’d probably be wearing a fat-suit right now. Instead, I’ve got the lungs of a coal miner. Fuck it. Everybody self-medicates. Or maybe it’s just me. How should I know? Who am I, Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the father of sociology?
    It was Saturday afternoon, and I couldn’t think of a single person I could bear to kick it with. Tomorrow I was scheduled to housesit for Nick Fizz, one of Karen’s homeboys from the High School of Art and Design, a real graffiti hotbed back in the early eighties that had funneled a lot of kids right into the shortlived gallery scene. Karen had gotten a trip to London out of her fine arts career, and sold one canvas, for enough money to cover her inaugural semester at City College. It was a big aerosol portrait of this old-school rapper named Melle Mel, and she’d be the first to tell you that it was hideous and is almost certainly locked away in a storage unit now, regardless of the coked-up pricetag.
    Fizz, meanwhile, was the exception to the rule, a graff success story. He’d been smart enough to sidestep the crack epidemic