Free Rage Is Back (9781101606179) by Adam Mansbach Page A

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 which Patrick and I were roommates and this was just a ho-hum weekend at the crib, then declined a hit and dialed my phone.
    â€œThe 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