A Right Spirit: Chapter 1

The first chapter of my new novel.

I try to call him Rodney. Rodney Shannon. The exact government name: Rodney Alan Shannon. The name my passed down to by my family. The name no one knows now

Terrence Shannon kept talking as the Amtrak car closed. From the Seattle Station, he conducted monlogues to the window as it moved past shipyards to dilapidated caul-de-sacs. From the window, scenery repeated on a loop, changing in decay and architecture but remaining similar in the backdrops of madrone and strawberry trees to confuse him as to where he was. As the car hit a broken rail, he took a shot of Kaopectate then opened his computer. The emails about his brother numbered 400 in April and a hundred in the past four days. He tried to blur the stories flooding into his brain, the people looking at him, and the uncertainty that the voices he was hearing were real. .

Terrence opened his laptop, then put it on the tray and leaned to the window. Until the last 48 hours, I couldn’t even think of Rodney or the assassins(and if he did, he ended up getting or staying high. He was grateful for the circumstances in which he could live at the Harbor Springs residence rent-free: his estranged girlfriend’s father was a wastrel with money. A life on the dime of a Cola Heiress has been seductive purgatory, he said to the mirror. devoid of fire, full of paid amenities, and an atmospheric numbness as close to a dope stupor as one can legally have. I thought he could do this indefinitely, at least until the Assassins made their comeback.

Ever since he heard “Stupid Biiiih” on the Lunch room radio, he knew his time there was limited. As the song gained in popularity and the staff and patients talked about it more, the places for him ignore his history became smaller. After the third staff member quizzed him incessantly on how Rodney Shannon became Rodney Rage, he planned his first exit. The train left the sticks, went past exurbs in Federal Way and Auburn, and made a right bend toward the woods.

“No, ma’am, I’m fine. I’m sorry for talking to myself ”

Terrence grabbed a hold of his Oregon Coast Brochure as the train gave its final warning before their food car closed. He had planned the potential joy he could have when he got off the train to the charterbus, then got off the chatterbox to the breezy landscapes of Oregon where he could forget his life ever happened. Steve Bernard, former head of the North Puget Sound Democrats and his college debate foil., offered him a job tending bar by Cannon Beach. He would text Terrence every month when he was in rehab, referencing iton several occasions, which had surprised him because of their rancor of their campus debates . When he said yes two days before and was told he would start training in five days, he bought the ticket until he got the book offer.

“Sorry to be talking again, ma’am. I’m making notes for a book on my phone. I usually talk while I type. I’ll be quieter.”

Theresa Robinson, an executive editor of The Pacific Magazine, had emailed him four times that month; and it was only 24 hours ago when she wrote “REAL MAGAZINE SERIES OFFER. NO JOKE. PAY YOU MONEY”- did he respond. She had made her literary name as their first pop culture correspondent with the Assassins her first subject: describing the group’s group’s history, her belief in their political singles, dismay at their horrorcore remixes, and agony over his brother’s death that convinced her to quit hip-hop journalism altogether. She had given him an offer for a series of stories about the group’s reunion at OG Yacht Boy’s Video Premiere in Tacoma. With it, he would get a room at the Luxor that was hosting it, plus an expense account. After signing it online, he took a leave from the rehab center, cabbed it to the Bremerton ferry going to Seattle, walked across Pioneer Square to the Amtrak station, and changed his ticket to Tacoma.

The train stopped suddenly, and he noticed the car was full of people seeing him. People in Tacoma seem to have been in a bigger frenzy than when the single came out. Everyone who knows me or has discovered who I am and who my brother was decided they want to quiz me incessantly on the legend of Rodney Rage. I’ve done so many drugs in the last few years; it’s gotten to the point where I’m beginning to not know either.

I need to quit bullshitting My name is Terrence Steven Shannon and my brother’s name was Rodney Shannon. Not Rod the Predator. Not DJ Rodney. Rodney Steven Shannon, Jr. My brother didn’t come from a family of gangsters, killers and crack dealers. His story and mine both begin at The Black Cascadia, a DIY socialist weekly Sarah Shannon and Cecil Robinson ran for 10 years. Sarah and Cecil , our mother, came to radical publishing via becoming disillusioned as a professor of African American literature at Nisqually University and a deputy minister at the Black Nation Collective. Cecil, our late uncle, was also a professor at Nisqually, the chief accountant for the BNC, and the Chief of Staff to my father’s two successful and one failed state senate campaign against his father. After his campaign for state senate failed, he turned to drugs and alcohol and blamed my mother for ruining his campaign ( a theory that many people in the neighborhood believe to this very day. This was the story he tried to tell in his early song and demos. I don’t know how that changed. I don’t know if it was the block or his father…

Terrence couldn’t form another sentence about his father. He tried to think of his memories of Rodney Sr on Hilltop, wearing faded fatigues and lecturing him about something his mother wrote in the paper that was insufficiently conscious. His fathers resume has been a pension of sorts: after his loss, he blamed his mother and uncle for his problems and consoled himself with drugs and alcohol. He could tell when a college had rewarded him for it by whether or not he was dressed up on the intermittent occasions I saw him, either disheveled and wearing military fatigues or wearing a pinstripe suit on Pacific going to be the life of the party at the roach motel. The extent that his theory about his mother and uncle ruining his career is still believed is why he avoided sections of Black Tacoma as much as the infamy of his brother. I have to start writing. I can fill out the rest of the book cover when I can fill out the book itself: my plan will be to report the video and the BET hip-hop live show, interviewing the surviving members of the Assassins and outside players in the process

He thought of saying how he was a harmless but distant figure but thought of the cognac bottle he hit over his brother’s head when he was 10. He took a deep breath and felt grateful that his father wasn’t a physical presence in his life at all; never there, other than being the existential specter that came up in so many people’s conversations with his mother, brother, and aunt, so prominent in these people’s recollections and memories of him that his actual presence didn’t seem real.

My childhood memories were the Black Cascadia being my brother and my mother’s life. A house tied into a rickety garage that used to be one of John Brisker’s car hideouts when he played for the Sonics.

He tried to think the feeling of that place: Hot in the garage press, cool in the living room, full of the smell of paper, books, and the juices his mother and uncle had next to the stove. He remembered how even though it was only a two-mile distance from his father’s housing project, it felt like a continent and how he loved to live in that continent in the first 13 years of his life. As a child, he felt less an invalid than a guardian, being his mother’s jack of all trades for the paper, her aid in her journey to give back to the community.

My mother and uncle Cecil ran the paper for 10 years. They had invested so much in helping manage my father’s state senate campaigns, and when that failed and when my father and his surrogates blamed them, they wanted to let people still know that she cared about the hill. This was my growing up. And growing up, I knew nothing of DJ Rodney rage. I thought of my brother as only Rodney, or tall Rodney as the aunties in the neighborhood used to call him.

As the train crossed the city line, Terrence thought of him in movement, at work, and being protective. He remembered every morning when he would walk him to school, every late afternoon when he met him at the city bus, every night when he would cook and play the free jazz hip hop records when their mother and Cecil were either doing layout, finagling an article or trying to convince a sponsor to buy space. In his mind, he could still grasp those mental pictures of him that were idyllic. Him zipping his winter coat in the morning. The saran wraps of food from Nisqually Academy that he would pick and save for him. Those spring and summer days when the family would load the weekly paper in their mother’s Oldsmobile and have their heads full of ideas from syndicated columnists. They would have long-range free-flowing conversations about who should be mayor, what block was safe, or what specific figure or star was doing what was beneficial to the community.

I didn’t hear anything about Rodney Rage until I heard Rodney Rage on the Radio.

He remembered how It started as a monologue: the front of the garage, the door open, a little after 6:55, his mother talking to him in the garage that was her layout room and office. After an issue was in the can, she would sit in the rickety rocking chair gifted to her from goodwill and go stream of consciousness. After he finished his homework, Terrence’s job was to make her a ginger ale, and a meatball sandwich, and listen.

“See that song, boy,” she said. A jeep drove by, dingy but with 28-inch rims and its top surprisingly down. It was April, not warm, but the first warm enough day to open the Garage door. “You remind me of my jeep. I want to ride it. Something like my sounds, I want to pump it? That man doesn’t love a woman, Terrence; that man loves his car.”

She sipped her Ginger ale, took a bite of her sandwich, then turned her chair toward the street. To the left was a sliver of the Nisqually university cathedral. Though a hundred years from being a men’s catholic school, it still rang loudly every half hour. Even from a distance, Terrence was transfixed by it: in the tiny, lower working-class division houses, that idea that college was seeable, within reach, had power. He could hear that bell in its differences, echoes, and rings in his head for hours at a time.

“That’s what that dumb ass little boy was listening to in his car when he came up here trying to get this internship. And he got mad I turned him down. And the school got mad when I turned them down. I don’t care what the journalism department at Nisqually says, son. If the TA department doesn’t send me somebody who knows the culture, then I’ll look for somewhere else to get the funding. At least until you get old enough.”

Another Jeep rolled by, a little fancier and with louder speakers. “There again, the same goddamn song,” Sarah said. “Turn on the radio, Terrence. Something to drown this out. He turned on the radio to a song that sounded like Betcha By Golly Wow, but slower. He suspected it was some sort of remix, but Sarah waved her arm when she tried to turn the dial. “I need to hear that today. Something sweet. Something quiet”. Yet the song moved slow. too slow for the mental memory they were used to

“Something wrong with the radio?”

“Maybe the station, mama, let me turn it to….”

“You’s a stupid bittttch. you a stupid biittch..you a stupid ass bitch…” the words came from the speakers both slow and as a shock.

“mama is?”

Sarah grabbed his hand before Terence could utter his name. She would do that instead of corporally punishing her children because of the bit of glass still embedded in his older brother’s skull. He looked to her to try to and say something. The song went on. “You a stupid ass bitch..hating on a nigga trying to get rich…I wish I could put your black ass into a ditch…you as dumb bitch you a dumb bitch. All in place of “there’s a sparkle in your eyes. Candy land appears each time you smile,” All sung/rapped by boys who were trying to sound with lower voices than they were. One of them had a tone so similar to the brother he had known for 14 years.

“It’s not him, mama,” Terrence said, trying to reassure her. “He’s gonna come in and…

“Turn it to the classic soul station.”

He turned it while he heard the front door opening. The sound of the DJ Came on. Mrs. Willis’s Evening Slow Jam Hour. She had been a staple of their funding by paying for half of a page of space on our paper every year for 10 years.

“I’m so sorry to cut the Cascadia off, but we had to do it. It hurt my heart to too much hear Sarah’s baby rap that song. I aint against rap, baby: Heavy D and Father MC treat me better than Ishmael Reed. I even liked some of the protest records the Assasins used to play when they were the assists. But they aint the assists no more, lawd Jesus!.Never mind that the culture ain’t the same no more here before all this. When I came up, y’all, we had “Cold Bold and Together.” “A Brighter Tomorrow.” “Bold Soul sister.” And what do we have no,. Folks? Gangster gangster ganger gangster music! And What do we have from our Marxist proletariat royalty? The 11th Street Assassins. Madder at me than they were once madder at the white man. “You’s a Stupid Bitch.” ‘Burn That Bitch Down” “Money, cars, and hoes” .”Rape Rod” “Rodney the predator” “Put em In The Furnace.” and ‘Burn That Bitch Down” And all these white folks is just eating it up. “

Terrence leaned toward the radio station to change the channel, but his mother grabbed his hand.

“Burn that bitch down, huh? Does this negro think that’s sentiment is new? Everybody wanna burn something down here. Crips want to burn shit down. Bloods want to burn shit down. White folks cruising for that dope wanna burn shit down. Junkie ass Rodney senior wanna burn down every woman, every woman who won’t yass his radical rap on the street. And that radical ass playland paper wanna burn down everything we have to survive here In Theory. In Theory. Lord, I am so tired of Theory. I and so many of you have spent so much money keeping that damn vanity project alive, have spent so many hours, so many hours of my life telling Sarah Shannon that you cannot eat theory, that you cannot keep telling us what’s wrong with us for trying to make it in this capitalist system and then tell the crips and the bloods that they are the victims of a racist system. I’ve buried so many babies, so many elders, so many people who died in the wrong place here or just died of here, and had to hear from her about what they should have done in the broader scope of shared oppressions. I have wasted so much of my life hearing her discount my misery and now I got to deal with her son making money off of it.

Terrence rushed to the radio, turned it to the NPR Station, then slumped to the wall to catch his breath. It was Big Sam, with the word of the day before his Jazz hour

“I thought these negroes were better than this. I bought into the lie that these negroes were better than this. I went to school with they black asses. I wanted them to do well more than anything in this damn world. I knew Weldon Robinson didn’t do a damn thing getting sadiddy negroes jobs and having a grip of side kids in the neighborhood. And I thought the Black Action Network was going to do something for the community. When that went south, I even bought the Assistants because I thought they were speaking some truth. But what did I get and what did we get? And what have we got? Rodney Shannon , the king of legal embezzlement and crack? His punk ass boy being a gun moll for all this street violence. And now his boy with bunch of sheltered and connected negroes talking about raping and killing women? These people have taken so much, And I am so upset that his mother would let him..”

Terrence turned off the radio before his heart exploded. His mother sat in the rocking chair. “Can I get you some water, mama?” he said, but she stayed still.

He struggled to go to the makeshift kitchen that felt so comfortable only a few minutes ago. Leg muscles he would move around the house with thinking seemed labored, and he walked to the kitchen as if on an invisible tightrope. He struggled to turn the water on and almost dropped her crystal drinking glass on the second counter. He turned the water off and looked back at her. Rodney was outside at the front of the garage. Even in the light of the street, he seemed pale.

“You okay?” said Rodney. Terrence could see a bead of sweat come over his face. He presented the drink in front of her, and she threw it on the side of the wall.

“Mom. Mom”

“Am I a bitch, Rodney?”

Sarah’s mother moved slowly toward him while he gangly-legged went back. “Momma, momma, I was gonna tell you.”

“Am I a bitch, Rodney?”

They gave us a half-million-dollar deal, momma.”

“They gave you a half a million-dollar deal.”

“No mama..us..us… The three of us. 167,000 dollars, and I would”

“Am I a bitch, Rodney”

Sarah went into his room. Terrence followed her halfway, and in the middle of the living room, Rodney looked at him. He could barely get words out. “I…I…The money. I wanted to get us out, and I was gonna find the right way to tell her. The news would have got out, anyway, Lil bruh. I was doing my DJing with Nona and Aubrey, and we got an offer. I’m gonna give all the money to mama; this is a way to get us out.”

“Under whose rule, Rodney?” said Sarah. She took one of his belts and cracked it like a whip.” And you want me to deal with you as the boss of my house. I made this house, Rodney. I did. It’s ain’t no 500,000-dollar mansion. But it’s stable. It’s honest. It’s doing something for my community. It’s what I know.”

“You could still do that, mama, I buy you a house, and you can still.”

“You could still do that. you could still do that.” My mother swayed as she mimicked him. “You’re daddy told me I could be a journalist if I sacrificed myself to him first. My high school teacher told me I would get a Woolworth job if I wasn’t too uppity. My great uncle told me I could be a loving wife and mother someday if I cleaned floors hard enough, and everybody told me how I could be a successful little black girl if I just did what they said .”

‘I don’t want you to be in the kitchen, mama.”

“Yes, you do, boy. All of you. You, your daddy..”

“I’m not my daddy.”

“The hell you ain’t your daddy. You worse than your daddy. Your daddy didn’t even think to say something like Rodney The Predator.”

Rodney fell down twice before he went out the door. His mother got a hold of the belt and started to swing, “Why don’t you listen to me, mama. I didn’t mean bad from this.”

“You wanna rape me, Rodney.”

“Mama.”

“I spend all my life raising you to be better than that. I went to schools teaching myself to be a good parent, and all that got me was Rodney the Predator.”

“mama”

“All that got me was Rape Rod,” she swung the belt and hit him. “You wanna be Massa, Rodney?”

SIR

“I don’t wanna be Massa.”

SIR, ARE YOU OKAY, SIR? ARE YOU, OKAY SIR

“I can’t deal with Massa no more. I can’t deal with mass no more.”

SIR, ARE YOU OKAY, SIR? ARE YOU OKAY, SIR?

And with that, he left. Within weeks Rodney Rage became a household name in the Pacific Northwest. Terrence remembered not being able to go anywhere without people talking about it. He, his mother, and Cecil were accosted everywhere they went with questions about him and the group as they tried to replace the funding they had lost at the radio station. At the store, the bus stop, the library, and the fish house, people would dump their pent-up feelings, mythologies, and second-hand rumors they had heard about them and their entire family. On Hilltop, they could not breathe unpopulated air without hearing the maelstrom of wonder, curiosity, and rage people had toward the sound of their last name.

And as all this was going, “Stupid Bitch” got bigger and bigger and bigger. It sold 200,000 records in a month in the pacific northwest. People debated them on the radio. National interest was piqued. The record went gold by the first of April. Broader shipping was all but set, and a video was set up to be made. Reviews of the mixtape were going to be on the source and rap pages. And right before all of this was about the happen, they found Rodney hung from a tree on the Eastside Terrace projects.

SIR, I’M GONNA CALL A CAB FOR YOU. THE TRAIN AND THE STATION IS CLOSED. YOU HAVE TO LEAVE. JUST TELL ME WHERE YOU NEED TO GO, BUT I HAVE TO CLOSE NOW. YOU HAVE TO LEAVE. YOU HAVE TO LEAVE.