"Rap is all Black. The Spanish guys don't get no love. Know what I’m saying?"
Balmy sweat poured from Rube's pits. Late afternoon wind pushed off the side of the bridge. Sweet relief as they hit the corner of South 5th and Driggs Ave in Williamsburg. The gentle twists of air coiling his skin was almost enough distraction to let Deuce's comment slide. Almost.
"What you talking bout, son? Heresy. Cuban Link? Fat Joe? Terror Squad? Pun? Capital Punishment murdered the game ass-cheese. Platinum beeyatch. Nominated Best Rap Album, 1999 Grammy Awards--"
"Yeah, but it lost to Jay-Z, ese." Deuce said, shielding a pristine custom lowrider with his fat ass.
"Z got nothin' on the Pun," Rube spat.
"Jay-Z's put out a dozen studio albums, not to mention collaborations, Pun drops one disk, flatlines from a heart attack."
"Stupid fuck. Yeah Baby? That shit went gold."
Rube whipped his “master key”, a pair of colossus bolt cutters, from his backpack. Deuce glanced over his shoulder, half-assed lookout that he was.
"The studio released that record after Pun was a corpse."
"I oughtta split you in two for this shit. You got no pride? A heart attack weaken the Pun's legacy? Who’s this I'm talking to, anyhow? You're well on your way to morbidly obese, fat boy."
"I ain't no 700 pounds."
"Maybe you oughtta be. Might help out your MC skills."
"Suck it bitch."
"You'd like that wouldn't you? A man sucking off your Bicho?"
Deuce grimaced--checkmate fat boy.
Rube shifted his stance to shield his activities, slicing through the chain securing the lowrider to a lamppost. Another day, another sucker.
“Wuss-ass white boy don't deserve such a nice ride anyhow.”
Hopping the leather banana seat, he peddled from the scene with Deuce trailing on his clown BMX. Up the ramp, Manhattan bound.
Weaving through Hasids and posers crowding the Bridge footpath, Rube and Deuce tried to knock each other from their cycles as they wove figure eights. Their wheels traced the colorful squiggles of dripped paint, dropped long ago by a midnight street artist with serious surplus pigment.
As they shot down the chainlink tunnel into the city, Rube eased his roll and pulled a blunt. He baptized the dutchie, savoring the sweet tobacco pulp taste. Rube deftly lit up with one hand, his other pulling the handlebars to thread the needle between a pair of wig wearing brunettes, his pedals rotating inches from one of the tiny faces inside their double strollers.
"You coming out clocking for Angel with me tonight?" Deuce asked.
Rube offered the smoke, leaning left for counterweight.
"Got my own thing going at the pizzeria."
"The pizzeria my ass... Not for nothing, that slick land-owning motherfucker, Axlerod, gives the rest of these Heebs a bad name."
Rube nodded coldly at the unsolicited advice.
"That a fact?"
"Why you hanging with that fool anyhow?"
"I'm the talent. Motherfucker scouted my ass."
"What you talking bout?"
"Remember the night I sliced that emo cocksucker on Clinton. Axlerod peeped that shit."
Deuce took a hit, cupping the blunt in his palm--unlike Rube who brazenly hauled between index and thumb.
"The Rod’s blackmailing your ass?"
"Nah. Ain't like that. Think he just liked what he saw. What we got's a mutually beneficial understanding. Mothafucka pays cash, son."
Deuce looked at him skeptically, "Then why you still slinging pies?"
"How else my clients gonna find me? Besides, Rosarita's be a front for how I pile my stash. Tax purposes, biatch."
Deuce shook his head, "Ain't no IRS looking into your retarded ass."
That was just because he hadn't racked a cold million yet. All Rube knew, he wasn't going down like his ma and pops, cleared from their home in the seventies under some Title I redevelopment bullshit, relocated to the L.E.S. 1 houses like yesterday's garbage. Or for that matter Abuelo and Lita, who ditched their island paradise off the Puerto Rican mainland after World War II, seeking out some "better life" crap in América, only to find Los Estados Unidos weren't hard pressed for a middle-aged conch diver who couldn't speak a lick of English. He wanted nothing to do with the losers that carried down the Carbia name. Who beat his ass senseless like it might fix the troubles they brought on themselves.
No, Rube saw himself as USA prime for organized crime. The gangsters and bankers, who'd taken New Jack City through an unending campaign of pillage and plunder. The Five Families of Sicilian mobsters. Infamous. John Gotti and Vincent "The Chin" Gigante. Bookmaking, loan-sharking, extorting their way to the top, all the while hedging more viable racketeering endeavors to invest and launder their so-called ill-gotten gains in "legitimate" industries. Even the drug-lords and pimps of his childhood--before Alphabet City got a clean sweep--held a special place in Rube's heart. But most of all, the modern moguls, the Bloombergs and Trumps, who gobbled wealth like anteaters sucking up entire insect colonies with their snouts, claws slashing anything and anyone in their way, dropping vast vertical empires on the landscape. Miraculous. Those were the motherfuckers to look up to, for real, and he'd be a motherfucking anteater too.
“Any pussy ass bitches standing in my way better look out.”
“Wassat?” Deuce said, struggling to hear through horizontal air.
Rube took a hit off his blunt and gazed at the sweeping East Side, glowing orange as it slid sideways in the sun and smog. He had a good little mental smog of his own going now. He pedaled harder, wise to the fact they would have to hit the downward slope towards Delancey Street at speed, if they wanted to keep the piff burning and bypass the chump traffic cops at the intersection below.
CHAPTER 02
CHAPTER 03
CHAPTER 04
CHAPTER 05
CHAPTER 06
CHAPTER 07
CHAPTER 08
CHAPTER 09
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
UPDATE: LOOKING FORWARD - CHAPTER 16
BEHIND THE KEYBOARD
One thing I love so much about writing is the quality of deepening your experience. I’ve crossed the Williamsburg Bridge on bike and foot countless times, but it’s the culmination of those experiences that informed Rube and Deuce’s journey. All of those fragmentary memories interwoven like the figure eights their bike wheels make as they intersect. The rich slices of life that you experience when you cross that bridge informing the quality of the prose.
The Williamsburg Bridge from the perspective of my friend Ryan and Henry’s urban farm. If you look closely enough you’ll see one of my little ones leaping for joy in the farm dirt.
Another form of deepening experience is being able to interpret societal forces through news, conversations, internet crawling, and experience. Rube’s aspiration to be somewhere between a gangster and a modern mogul is something that started informing his character 10 years ago.
Is that a grocery store self portrait, or something more sinister?
Now the United States has a president who has blurred the lines so distinctly between the two I think Rube would feel really good about his ambitions reaching fruition… even if it may give the rest of us pause.
Yours In The Chain,
Doug Karr
SPECIAL THANKS to my wife @zenmommas for years of support during the writing process, @ericvancewalton for his trailblazing, inspired collaboration and incredible guidance, @andrarchy for his mind blowing insight and friendship, @bakerchristopher for being an inspiration as a human artist and bro, @complexring for his brilliance and enthusiasm, Masie Cochran, Taylor Rankin and @elenamoore for their skillful help in editing the manuscript, and to @opheliafu for the fantastic illustrations she created exclusively for the novel's launch on Steemit and to Elena Megalos for her wonderful character illustrations. I’d also like to thank Eddie Boyce, Jamie Proctor, Katie Mustard, Alan Cumming, Danai Gurira, Stephan Nowecki, Ron Simons, Dave Scott, Alden Karr, Missy Chimovitz, my dad Andy Karr and late mother Wendy, and everyone else who helped lead me to this moment.
I am a Brooklyn based writer, film & commercial director, and crypto-enthusiast, my projects include @HardFork-series an upcoming narrative crypto-noir and my novel Dwelling will soon be premiering exclusively on Steemit, and you can check out more of my work at dougkarr.com, piefacepictures.com, and www.imdb.com/name/nm1512347
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