Read Online Rage Is Back (9781101606179) by Adam Mansbach - Free Book Online Page B

it into the stream. An army of bubbles rose up around the body, like grass around a badger’s corpse in one of those time-lapse nature films.
    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