The Fugitivities, стр. 10
Octavio and Isaac had met a couple of times, usually at whatever bar Jonah had invited them both out to. In theory they should have vibed well, but more often than not Jonah found himself trying to mediate and preempt miscues between the three of them, the minefield of perceived slights or challenges that masculine conversation cannot seem to avoid. This often meant that even if he didn’t fully perceive himself to be doing so, he was taking sides. Music was especially unforgiving territory.
As a New Yorker, Octavio felt a homegrown entitlement to hip-hop, a fierce pride that could abide no pretenders, and he brought up his favorites with a defensiveness that they didn’t need. Isaac respected, even appreciated, the depth of Octavio’s knowledge. But that was as far as he was willing to go. Because there wasn’t nothing in the world like being born to it. Cradled and raised in it. He never missed an occasion to remind them that the real home of the music would always be the South. They heard about it all the time because apparently Isaac had never loved and understood what made him Southern until he got to the city. As he saw it, Octavio was like an ambassador of the city. Isaac had talked with Jonah separately about his problems with some of the black administrators at his school, the ones he sensed would have called him country if they could say it to his face. Who kept an attitude but played like it wasn’t nothing, like they could afford to deny what they were made of, like it wasn’t all those dusty front porches and tiny one-room churches across the South that their families had made their way through and left people behind in. Like the South wasn’t the lifeblood that made everything how it was in the first place. He was always complaining to Jonah about the way they talked, the way they leaned over you with their corporate-seminar lingo. Isaac said he hadn’t seen a square mile so ignorant, so dissonant and confused about how to live, as the core of the rotten apple between the bottom of Central Park and Canal Street. He wouldn’t dispute Octavio’s claims to NYC’s hip-hop bona fides. But as far as he was concerned, the South was never wrong when it came to the sound. New York didn’t know shit about drop-tops and candy paint. And there would come a day when the South finally had its say. When all that funk leaking out of Houston and Atlanta would bubble up like an unstoppable lava. Rising up out the Louisiana low-rises of Calliope and Magnolia. Pumping the full repertoire of low life into every nook and cranny of George Bush’s patriot-acting U.S.A. Flooding it with criminal hieroglyphics and underworld lore cooked up in dank bedrooms and basements. Exorbitant odes to pimpology served up on mellifluous flows. Mortuary tales of the long drug wars of the nineties rattling a trunk on the outskirts of Memphis where a box Caprice with a pint of Crown Royal in the dash creeps through the twilight bumping Tupac’s “Lord Knows.” That bass turned all the way up, soaked in so much pain it slows the heart.
Despite their territorial and musicological disputes, Isaac and Octavio got along all right enough, and in certain moments Jonah even felt a spark of mutual understanding between them that he was fundamentally left out of. Sometimes they would suddenly lock in and start trading bars, flipping back and forth, sometimes pulling from tracks that he recognized, or thought he recognized, and sometimes breaking out into a mutual hilarity that Jonah couldn’t parse. On the other hand, now and then Octavio would go out on a fiery tirade, causing people to stare and bartenders to call for the bouncer, and Isaac would always refuse to move, shake his head, directing a look squarely at Jonah like this your man, disowning any association with either of them. For Jonah they read like devastating verdicts on him as a person, throwing into question how he carried himself along and across the color line, a potential laser beam that could appear at any time, snapping subtextual lines of force together with sudden, icy coherence.
Isaac would switch off sometimes, his whole frame of mind gone to a place where he was only half in the room, following the scene from afar. Jonah could tire of Octavio’s high-strung energy just as easily. But he also felt a special closeness there. They shared a fanatical love of film; besides, Octavio’s eccentricity appealed to him, he interpreted it as an assertion of defiant personal freedom. It did not occur to him that Isaac might resent that very freewheeling quality as something he could not afford himself.
And this hairline fracture running beneath the surface of things extended to an unnamed reserve between Isaac and Jonah. It was never a resentment exactly, although Isaac hinted once that he might well have gotten his much tougher assignment, in a much rougher part of the city, on account of his dark skin—though of course it would be impossible for him to locate exactly when or by whom this calculation had been made. Isaac would just say stuff like that. “Color just has to be navigated, bro, it’s sad but we got to face that shit.” He told Jonah that it was like a student going to a math exam with formulas programmed into his advanced calculator. Like a cheat code that allowed you to skip