Rage Is Back (9781101606179) by Adam Mansbach Page B

debate a bill on C-SPAN, only with profanity and black people.
    I anted up for smoke when I was asked, but that wasn’t often, because nobody wanted to sponge off the mascot. You can’t freeload when nobody’s paying, so I no longer felt particularly indebted, either. I was torn between trying to stay unobtrusive—hard when your room’s a futon—and this unspoken thing of wanting to be around K-Born and Twenty-Twenty all the time because we’d been through some fucked-up shit together and it needed talking through, or communal ignoring. I still hadn’t been to visit my mother. I didn’t even know which hospital she was in, because by the time I’d thought to ask, Reggie was gone. I pushed all that away—the new Karen, the new Billy—with a vehemence and a rigor that shocks and saddens me, when I look back at it now. At the time, I guess I called myself growing up.
    A week later Twenty-Twenty pawned his eight-track, and the studio shut down for good. Knowledge Born was furious, whether he had a right to be or not, and the two of them nearly came to blows in the living room. The beef got drowned beneath a fifth of gin Roam sprang for, but by midnight Knowledge Born was two hours into a drunken talking jag, oblivious to the fact that nobody wanted to hear a word he had to say, and Twenty-Twenty walked across the room and knocked him out. Didn’t utter a word, just swung that big right meathook, dropped him from the couch onto the rug. He was still there when I woke up the next morning. Everybody acted like it hadn’t happened.
    The three of them lasted another eleven months in there, ran the tab past thirty grand before E.B. Holding finally got it together and threw them out. What they lived on, how they ate, I don’t know. I didn’t visit. Twenty-Twenty bugged out when the eviction finally came—got drunk, broke back into the apartment the next night and smashed every window in the place with that same baseball bat. The cops showed up and hauled him off, with half the building watching. I have no idea where he and Roam and Knowledge Born are now.
    As for my dizzy spells, they went away about a month after Karen came home, all on their own. Go fucking figure.

5
    ll that history was pressing down on me with a particular weight the day Billy started talking, because my big morning activity had been appropriating Karen’s prized chef’s knife and sawing my father’s locks down to a reasonable length. The pile of hair-ropes on the floor looked like a litter of newborn rodents, but as Twenty-Twenty had taught me and various Rastas real and pseudo had since reconfirmed—in particular my former herb-game boss, Jafakin’-ass Abraham Lazarus, and the posse of bobo yardie motherfuckers who spent their lives in his Crown Heights apartment watching cricket matches on cable and chanting down Babylon—severed locks were to be disposed of carefully, if at all.
    A bluish twilight was creeping across the ceiling when I looked in on my father. He’d just put the finishing touches on a six-hour nap, and he was sitting up, rubbing his thumb against the blunt cross section of a dread. I’d clipped his nails and buzzed his beard a few days earlier and he hadn’t even appeared to notice, so this seemed like a good sign.
    â€œBilly,” I said, sitting on the bed’s edge. He turned his head without dropping the lock, looked at me through the cracks between his fingers.
    â€œYou know who I am, right?”
    He blinked.
    â€œI’m Dondi, man. Your son.”
    â€œDondi,” he repeated. Whether it was awe or stupor that robbed him of inflection, I couldn’t tell, didn’t know him well enough to judge.
    â€œHow did you die?” he asked.
    â€œHow—what?”
    â€œI killed myself,” my father whispered. “I did it with a rope.” His hand swept toward his neck and halted inches away, as if it were too