Rage Is Back (9781101606179) Read Free Page A

that turned forty percent of New York’s writers into dealers and another forty into fiends in the mid-eighties, had sufficient foresight or small enough cojones to retire from trains before the buff started decimating the best lines in 1986, forcing everybody to crowd onto the Js, Ms, Bs and Ls like emergency rafts and then killing the scene entirely, eternally, by ’89. Weird that all these so-called hip-hop heads consider ’89 the heart of the “golden era,” when it was also the year graffiti died.
    Anyway, Fizz decided it was graphic design he loved, not vandalism, and started an ad agency. Now he’s right back on the trains, all-city via the cheesy banners lining the insides of every car—saturation-bombing at its most annoying, except that instead of some teenager’s messy mop-tag repeated and repeated and repeated, it’s “Now You Can Have Beautiful Clear Skin! Visit Dr. Jonathan Zizmor M.D.! As Seen On TV!”
    Fizz’s crib was bright and spacious, decorated with the kind of pink-fur-Kangol flair only a gay Puerto Rican b-boy can pull off. Better yet, Fizz lived on 108th and Broadway, half a block from the best Dominican restaurant in the city, La Rosita, which I discovered through this older chick from Whoopty Whoo Ivy League We’s A Comin’ Academy who was my Peer Mentor when I started there in ninth grade and who actually took the concept seriously and schooled me on which teachers to avoid like the zombie death plague and which like the common cold, what culinary options the neighborhood afforded, how to restrain myself from smacking the tonsils out of some ignorant rich kid at least twice a day, that sort of thing.
    She was the only black girl in her class, which is why the administration hooked us up, although in her case the struggle was not attending Manhattan’s third-most prestigious prep school under the auspices of the coveted What the Hell, Let’s Give a Clever Young Colored Boy a Chance to Transcend His Race Scholarship like me, but being the daughter of Tom Petty’s attorney, caked up to her clavicles and yet still presumed a welfare case. She graduated and went on to major in art history at Columbia, and until I got a girlfriend the big-sister/little-brother thing endured and I’d cross town and eat lunch with her sometimes, always at La Rosita. I can’t explain why a simple plate of yellow rice and red beans and a side of yucca con ajo should be so much better there than at the other three hundred spots just like it, but there you go. So I could hardly wait to get to Fizz’s spot and breathe air and eat good and sleep in a bed and jerk off in peace.
    Fuck it, I thought, why wait for tomorrow when you can have tomorrow today. I hopped the 2 Express to Dumbo, which is this stupid yuppie acronym meaning Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass, like hardy-har, we live in a flying elephant, and made my way to this one particular building I discovered a little more than a year ago.
    I’m not going to say exactly where it’s located, although I guess you could figure it out by process of elimination if you spent long enough in the neighborhood—which was not a neighborhood at all a few years back, just a wedged-in ghost town of moldering factories and deserted cobblestone alleys. I haven’t bothered to find out what the building was before they gutted and condominiumized it. If I were a different type of kid I’d have visited some windowless city planning office, claimed I was doing a school project and gone down to the basement and unrolled a set of decomposing blueprints beneath a flickering yellow lamp and had some kind of revelation.
    Your boy here, I figured out as much as I needed to know and then left it alone. I’m crap at science to begin with, so if there’s some monumental discovery about wormholes and the rending of space-time to be made, I’m not gonna be the guy who makes it. Nor am I