Rage Is Back (9781101606179) by Adam Mansbach Page A

should have been. At first, he kept trying to bolt for the door, but they weren’t done and he couldn’t get past. By the time they were ready to toss him, though, Reggie would not be moved:
This is
my
fuckin’ house! You guys get out!
That was when Twenty-Twenty grabbed the butcher’s knife. Reggie went wild when he saw it, lifting up his tattered shirt and yelling
You gonna fuckin’ cut me, Twenty-Twenty? Huh? Go ahead then, fuckin’ cut me!
    Twenty-Twenty, in his goofy nasal voice, said,
Naw, man, I’m not gonna cut you, I’m gonna take your locks. You don’t deserve them shits no more
, and for maybe the first time, some kind of fear jumped into Reggie’s eyes. They wrestled him down, no easy feat, and yanked each and every last dread out of his dome, Knowledge Born yelling some crazy shit about the Sword of Justice all the while. Reggie was wrenching back and forth, bellowing
Take them! Take them all!,
and when they let him up, he took off running.
    You know a man has pulled some foul shit in his life when you kick his ass and throw him bald and bleeding into the street, and the person he runs to calls you and instead of yelling
what the fuck!
she sighs and says,
What did Reggie do now?
That’s what Christine, his ex-girl from up the block, inquired of Knowledge Born an hour later. He ran it down, and she asked if Reggie had cheated on her while they were together.
Hell yes, he did
. With that girl Barbara?
Among others
. And Christine gave him the boot, too.
    Even now, I still expect to run into Reggie, or hear something, or get jumped on my way home and stomped to death. That was it, though. He never even came back for his clothes. Knowledge Born took over his room, and a guy named Roam the Wanderer, another rap star in the Sigma Phi constellation, filled the vacancy before the sun set. The leather couch was smeared with blood, so I moved to the futon. Twenty-Twenty gathered Reggie’s locks into a Dutch Masters cigar box and left it on top of the refrigerator—whether deliberately or forgetfully I don’t know, but it stayed there.
    The next day I was back to school like Rodney motherfucking Dangerfield—school, and an algebra midterm I’d forgotten all about. I caught a dizzy spell halfway through, sat with my thumbknuckles pressed to my eyelids for five minutes, never quite recovered. Ended up with what your man George W. Bush would call a gentleman’s C. A month before, it would have been my biggest problem. Biggest I’d admit, anyway.
    I had another spell the next day, soon as I woke up. What was equilibrium, in a crib like that? I felt dizzy even when I wasn’t, just from the combo-stench of blood and misjudgment hanging in the air. It was astonishing how quickly those guys turned a good thing, a rent-free life, into a hot mess. They saw it as an opportunity to concentrate full-time on their music—so far so good, right?—and to that end Knowledge Born quit his part-time bar-backing gig, and Twenty-Twenty one-upped him by canceling his already-theoretical job hunt. I never knew what Roam did; his primary skill appeared to be passing out in midsentence, with a lit blunt in hand or a fork frozen halfway to his mouth, and holding the pose through eight hours of slumber. Made me feel like I was in one of those movies where some asshole has the power to freeze time, waking up to that shit.
    The studio never opened for business until nine or ten at night, when everybody was good and bent. I did my homework then, with the goal of falling asleep before they resumed their living room salon. The TV jabbered all day long, and K and Roam and Twenty stayed parked on the couches, talking over it, too broke to do anything else. They somehow managed to pull together six dollars for a nickel bag and two Optimos every few hours, but the process was rife with bad feelings and caustic remarks and compromise. It was like watching a Senate subcommittee