Rage Is Back

by Adam Mansbach

  I sat crosslegged on the floor and started twisting open bottles and sniffing their strange, earthy contents. Tried to pretend I was browsing a curbside cardtable on the Fulton Mall manned by one of those Kufi-rocking cats who always push the blackest shit they’ve got—“here, smell this one, brother, it’s called Super Nubian Kemetic Zulu Musk, the sisters love it”—and steer any whiteboy who comes along toward the Coolwater and Polo knockoffs, somehow failing to understand that white dudes who wear oils want the Super Nubian Kemetic Zulu Musk or that what I want is to smell like Polo for five bucks, not the lead djembe-thumper in some wack Central Park drum circle.

  The baggie inches from my toe was obviously a better place to look for hard evidence, so I ignored it for as long as possible, spent the next five minutes thinking about the night I ran into Ravi Coltrane at Ben’s Pizza on 3rd and MacDougal, around the corner from the Blue Note.

  If you’re wondering how I recognized him, it’s simple. In addition to being a tenor saxophonist like his old man, Ravi happens to be John’s spitting image. I’m talking doubletake-level resemblance. I watched him go to work on his slice at the next table over—they have these high circular ones that customers stand at—and imagined Ravi growing up with A Love Supreme and Impressions, Blue Train and Africa/Brass, but not his father. John checked out in 1967, when Ravi was two. Liver failure. I read a biography; Trane is my man.

  Word, I thought. This is a cat I should be friends with. I’d just smoked a bowl. I finished my pizza, walked over, and said, You’re Ravi Coltrane.

  He looked up, checked me out, and said yeah through a mouthful of cheese and pepperoni.

  My name’s Dondi. My dad, he was a painter—he’s not as famous as your dad, but people who know his stuff think a lot of it. He died when I was two, so I know him mostly through his work.

  He saw where I was going, and nodded.

  So I just wanted to ask you, and if it’s too personal I apologize, but do you feel like you know your father from listening to his records?

  He dabbed his lips with a napkin. I know him as a musician through his records. But what I know about him as a man, I know because of my mother.

  We talked for a couple minutes. I asked whether he liked any of the various books about his dad and he shrugged, said they were all okay except when they tried to make John into someone he hadn’t been—someone political, someone angry. I asked who Ravi was playing with tonight, and he said Elvin Jones: his dad’s old drummer, seventy-plus now, full of stories about John that he mostly didn’t tell because he still missed him so badly.

  I wondered aloud what it was like for Elvin to look over from the drums and see Trane’s son where his father had once stood. Ravi shook his head, said he wondered that himself. He glanced at his watch, crumpled his paper plate into a ball, and said he had to get back, then asked if I’d like to check out the second set. I said I would, very much. We walked across the block together. Ravi nodded at the doorman and we slipped inside.

  I ordered ginger ale for fear of getting carded, and watched the show from the bar. Elvin played the greatest drum solo I’d ever heard in my life, as good as anything he’d laid down forty years earlier on any of the CDs I owned. But there was something about watching Ravi that unsettled me. He wasn’t bad. Not at all. But he wasn’t John. And yet he looked so much like him. It bothered me throughout the set, in some way I couldn’t define, and so did the fact that I’d described my dad as dead.

  I cut the water, opened the Ziploc. And just like that, he was alive.

  Grinning from atop the stack of snapshots in my hand was Wren 209, sun-faded and begrimed and looking all of seventeen: her hand a jutting peace sign, her hair a peace-out natural, her earrings huge gold doorknockers. Of course the Karen Billy chose to carry with him would be a Karen he hadn’t yet fucked over, a Karen unaware of the bullshit he’d soon pull. I had the urge to press a thumb to my mother’s eyes, shield her from both of us.

  Patrick appeared, handed over two Pad Thais, then had the class to make himself scarce. I sat on the toilet lid, shoveling spongy noodles into my mouth and waiting. Billy Rage nestled beneath his blanket of water, did his corpse impression. It wasn’t until I’d devoured everything including that little mound of bean sprouts they always give you that I caught him peering out from his thicket of dreadlocks.

  I pretended not to notice; I’d fucking done enough. Once or twice, my father shifted his lips and swallowed a mouthful of bathwater. Otherwise, nothing. Just eyes in the primeval forest, like this shit was a Joe Conrad novel. In the next room, Patrick fired up his Xbox or his PlayStation or whatever and the sounds of carjacking and cop-killing wafted through the air.

  Half an hour ticked away before Billy’s fingers slithered out of the water and his talons curled around the scalloped edges of the tub. The bald mountain peaks of his knees disappeared as he leveraged himself upward, inch by shaky inch. Finally, and with great strain, he managed to raise his entire mossy, dripping head above the surface.

  “Será este lugar el infierno?” His voice was sludgy with disuse, but calm. I had no idea what he’d said.

  “Dígame,” he whispered. “Es el infierno?”

  “Mi español es muy mal,” I told him. “You remember how to speak English?”

  Billy laughed, if you could call it that: a dastardly, low rumble like the sound of a kid falling down a flight of stairs.

  “I should have known,” he said, skull falling back against the porcelain with a dull knock, “that they’d speak English in hell.”

  “There’d be no bathtubs if this was hell.”

  His arms slipped out of view, and some part of him beneath the water made a swishing sound.

  “This is Brooklyn,” I offered.

  Billy parted the curtain of his hair with his left hand, and before it fell back over his face I caught a quick freeze off his eyes.

  “Don’t fuck with me. If this is hell, say so.”

  “It’s Dumbo. Have some Pad Thai.”

  A grunt, a squelchy sound, a flash of limbs, and then Billy was on his feet, looming tall and gaunt as filthy water sloshed over the bathtub’s sides. I was eye-to-dick with my father. His was the same as mine. I’m talking Ravi-John identical. Except for the color.

  Before I could grant that fact the proper scrutiny, Billy threw back his head and bellowed a stream of syllables, in a language I had never heard.

  I didn’t need to understand to feel its power, the same way you see a ceremonial mask in a museum and know it was used for some diabolical shit before reading the info plaque. These sounds were an incantation, or a prayer—what you’d say to the devil if he offered you some lunch, I guess. The veins of Billy’s neck engorged and he clutched his stomach with both hands, like he was trying to push the noise out. Or hold his guts in.

  Not for nothing? I felt like blood was going to start trickling from my nose. There was an echo in the chant of that eternal, animal now I’d seen in Billy’s eyes when he’d attacked. As if these sounds did not come from but through him, my father’s body the amplifier for some ancient dirge.

  Billy lost his balance and the sound broke off—or perhaps it was the other way around, the incantation all that had been holding him upright. He latched on to the cheap plastic shower curtain, trying to break his fall. It ripped free of its metal rings, cloaked itself around him as he crumpled back into the tub: big splash, small rustle, silence.

  I checked to make sure he was okay, or as okay as he had been before his aria, then decided to give him some alone time. I draped Patrick’s bathrobe over the toilet, balanced Billy’s Pad Thai on the edge of the sink, and stepped into the living room.

  Patrick paused his game, picked up his bong. He took a practiced rip, aimed a train of smoke at the ceiling, and thrust the blown-glass monstrosity toward me, fist wrapped around its neck. I flashed on a pocket universe in wh
ich Patrick and I were roommates and this was just a ho-hum weekend at the crib, then declined a hit and dialed my phone.

  “The fuck your punk ass want?”

  And hello to you too, Mom.

  4

  uring the eighties, everybody making movies had mad coke and no patience, so they conveyed the passage of time—a boxer training, a romance blossoming, a teenaged werewolf partying—by splicing together a bunch of four-second scenes denoting incremental progress and setting them to peppy power pop. Like the decade’s other defining concepts—greed, crack, arms for hostages, the religious right, new jack swing—it was crude and tasteless, but effective.

  I’d love to montage my way past the ordeal of nursing Billy back to what some might call sanity, drown the tedium and the frustration in a rockin’ Tears for Fears jam and pick up a week down the line, when he started to do more than sleep and eat, and things got interesting. You might think there’d be some instances of high drama in between, but the truth is that they mostly happened in my head. Take the moment when Karen first laid eyes on Billy, lugged across her threshold by your boy here, my father’s limbs stuffed into a too-small ensemble of stockbroker chinos and blue oxford buttondown. Wow, very emotional stuff, seeing him after all these years, right? Plus he’s totally fucked up and incoherent? Presumably anger and relief and fear are playing double Dutch inside of Karen as she stands gripping the doorknob, with love and hate and fifteen other feelings waiting for a chance to jump in too. It doesn’t sound like the kind of scene you skip, I realize that. But you don’t know my mother.

  Karen said “Oh my God” and one huge sob jumped out of her, like the first dude to leap from the North Tower. Then she cupped her hands over her nose and mouth, took a deep breath, and turned away. Stalked into the kitchen, slammed her teakettle onto the burner, called “put him in the guest room” like I was delivering a rug.

  And that was that. The fact that Karen didn’t kick me out meant I could stay. We discussed neither Billy’s presence nor mine. Not then, and not during the five days Billy spent sleeping, scanning the walls with the uncurious, vacant expression of a senile old man, and jamming food into his mouth, half-vegetable and half-animal. That Karen didn’t have a breakdown was good enough for me. Once you’ve watched your mother lose her shit you never stop waiting for it to happen again, no matter how strong she might look. So if Karen needed to handle this by ignoring both of us and keeping her routines, that was fine by me.

  She’d always been a creature of habit: up by quarter of eight and out by quarter-past, Monday through Friday, bodega coffee (“light and sweet, Ismail,” as if, after a decade, Ismail had to be told) on the way to the C train, a buttered breakfast-cart bagel and a second coffee (“light and sweet, Sanjeev”) when she resurfaced on 23rd. Food devoured, left hand free to flip the bird by the time she passed the construction crew perpetually not-working on the corner of 9th Ave, with their gutbusting bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches and reliably ass-related compliments. Coffee cool enough to drink by the time her fêted hindparts met the nubby fabric and peekaboo foam of a swivel chair on the second floor of the townhouse that was Authors’ Inc., a second-tier literary agency whose most bankable client was Madeline Mannheim of Horse/Shoe Crew fame.

  In case you happen not to be a twelve-year-old girl, it’s a book-franchise-cum-TV-series that brilliantly cross-stitches female-tweener passions for equestrianism and shopping. A new volume hits the shelves every six months, outlined by Mannheim and written by somebody—anybody—else. Karen penned one herself, when I was ten. The New Boy, it was called. Paid seventy-five hundred dollars, flat fee, no rights and no credit. Took her a year of nights and weekends, then another month of rewrites because she’d inadvertently given all the choice lines to Missy Silver, the token black chick.

  Karen had been an assistant agent then, and she was an assistant agent now. Authors’ Inc. gave her a four percent annual raise, and on Fridays they ordered sushi for the whole office, and unlike the actual agents, she was under no pressure to sell. These were the things that kept her at a job she loathed. That and the fact that she had keys to the building, which allowed her to run her Friday writers’ group undetected.

  I can’t prove the workshop kept Karen on an even keel, but the math checks out. It was insane by design, my mother at her most perverse. The off-the-books loot it brought in wasn’t insubstantial, but it wasn’t the point.

  I’m not sure what the point was, why Karen chose to spend an evening a week amongst the Tri-State Area’s most hopeless literary aspirants. Every day at work, she read through the dozens of unsolicited query letters and manuscripts and book proposals that streamed into Authors’ Inc., in case amid the turds lay a diamond, or a marketable turd. Her first year, she handed one package up the ladder, a short story collection she thought was beautiful. The boss passed: no hook, no market. On the sly, Karen began compiling a file of the looniest letters. She’d whip out the folder when her college friends came over and read a few aloud.

  Dear Ms. Spondrey,

  Often I have thought of the daunting amenities of materials consumed. Some were a welcomed fancy and others a dose of unsavoury medicine of lament and righteousness. Though both are important components to which we live our lives, all of which that defines relevance. With this long-since digested epiphany, I have been convinced to surrender the charge for composing the vehicle of such to the liking of balderdash to some, knowledge in others, that to which we have so cleverly labelled as “book.” As you are dealer of this so celebrated meal to the minds, I should like to present you an offering for the palette of mankind’s favour.

  Valence, The Unexamined Life is just such the feed for relevancy and influence, two of the most important elements that lend definition to our stay. Most of my twenty-some years of existing among life’s queerisome travels I have sought after the values, influences, and forthcomings of others. It’s a primal inhibition we so often indulge. Even arrogance is chided whilst hiding behind the cloak of darkened deceit in hopes of harvesting the lessons of one other’s lot. The fictitious state of Valence is an exact presentation of these rudimentary values. It offers a window and synopsis of life’s offerings of obscure randomness. Valence is ordinary. She is dangerous. She is loving, caring, deceiving and evil. She offers the grace of God. Her people are everyone you know, love and hate. Growing up in a household of Morticians, corrupted politicians, educators, gays/lesbians, and clergy, I have benefited life long insurance of roundness certainly in the least. No, it’s more complicated than ‘roundness.’ I have survived a twisted and curved road of values that have been tested, re-tested, and then redefined by rules created by those who live without rules. Which is a good thing (to vernacularize). A broad thing, certainly. Valence holds the best of these interests, pleasures and tragedies. She develops their potentials and unfolds them into useful satire to the followers of her tarry. A publishable tarry—I shall leave to your regard.

  Thank you,

  Samuel Ward-Corman

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN,

  I, Jacob Navidad, I have written two stories, one is about me on the ships, the name of the story is the name is Journey of a Seaman. The other story is about a white pigeon flying from Europe to A America, the name is Coming to America. I have some photos of the white pigeon and some squirrels is in the story, I need a Agency to help me to Publisher the stories.

  Jacob Navidad

  Dear Sir or Madam,

  The bloodthirsty dogs drove the three boys deeply into the woods. The mayor and sheriff were seen tying up the two frightened men. They pleaded for their lives, but betrayed their secret oaths. Now death would be their gift. They strung them up and watched. All those dogs, all sizes and colors, attacked the men. Slowly, they were devoured. The birds of prey picked at their remains, eating their flesh, picking it clean to the bone.

  Scott wanted to find his father. He had left him. There was talk th
at he was living with Abby Smith, the town tramp, at the edge of the woods, near the railroad tracks. Scott, Jack and Joat were relentless in this quest.

  The ring Joat wore brought back memories. It was Charles. He had been brutally killed along with his lover, Bruce. They were both only 15, too young to die. Their homosexuality was known throughout Concord. The residents had made a vow for their demise.

  On that early spring morning, the two young boys were beaten by the group, then laid across the cold steel tracks. The train was right on time, like usual. Their bodies were scattered for miles. Nobody cared, except Scott. He knew that once he found his old man, things would come out. Scott fought off the attacks by the dogs. He ignored death. Life itself was cheap. Death took a holiday. What Scott didn’t know was that the killer had been with him all the time.

  I have written many plays. I recently had a poem published called “April.” Your agency is excellent. It brings the reader to the finest fiction, to be read and enjoyed. I have read your credentials in the Directory of Agents. I believe this book will be a number one bestseller. My proposal to you is I am offering you 70% of the commission of sales, and I will take 30%.

  Sincerely,

  August Chong

  Query Letter

  I’m not some big time graduate from Harvard University nor am I some well-known author. I’m just the new kid on the block wanting to do something that I like to do best, write. During my college days I took a few creative writing classes. I also wrote many of the term papers for my friends. I like to sit and write short fictional stories about any and everything. I can relate to one of the characters in my short story “Caught Up.” Her name is Lisa. She is married to a man who loves her very much but he decided to tell her one night that she was not sexy enough for him. Of course, she started working out at one of the popular gyms in her area. She became so caught up in what she looked like that she forgot about her family at home. She has this one friend from high school that seems to try and sabotage everything she attempts to do, but she keeps her around anyway. This time her friend persuades her to go out with the new aerobics teacher at the gym and a few others guys and she gets caught up. I can relate to this young lady because I too was in a relationship like that. I was not married to the guy but I was very much in love with him. I guess you can say that my self-esteem dropped lower than what it already was when he told me that I was not sexy enough for him. I began going to the gym hoping that I could tone up for him and I even changed my style of dressing. I was beginning to dress more with the latest trends. I too was caught up beause I liked the way the guys were noticing my new look. I ended up being hurt by those guys, with my new look. The moral of the story, if someone loves you they will only mention little tidbits to enhance you, not hurt you.