Shackling Water by Adam Mansbach

Author:Adam Mansbach [Mansbach, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780385505369
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2002-05-14T04:30:00+00:00

HANG/OVER | PROPERTY | SILENCE

Latif woke in the sunshine, feeling like a tube of toothpaste squeezed to flatness. The long peppermint rope of his emotions was a dry, crusted mound lying in the sink; so much had happened yesterday that only his body felt anything: stiff, achy, hollowed, bleary. Outside, the street was as deserted as he'd ever seen it, everybody sleeping off the anger hangover. They'd wake up like people after one-night stands, sneaking glances at their bedfellows and wondering what came next.

Latif put on a sweater and his too-light jacket and ambled down the stairs to find some food, walk and eat, think, decompress. He bought a buttered bagel and a coffee at the bodega, glancing at the headlines. The trashy tabloids screamed Free! in huge letters, above smiling courtroom pictures of the exonerated cops, and Latif felt validated until he looked at a real paper. On the New York Times front page, the trial was just one of seven stories, pictureless. It would blow over like everything else.

I should be happy, he told himself. It mighta been a rough day for the bulletriddled ghost of Kofi Ogunde, but Latif James-Pearson's still alive and intact, dreams coming true. I should be popping champagne, fucking my girl. He breathed deep, trying to stir up enough wind to rouse the exhilaration lining the bottom of his stomach like a sheet of paper.

After “The Omen” and before the first set, Albert had invited Latif down to the Sunday Jam, a weekly session Van Horn hosted at his home. An ever-changing aggregate of young cats gathered there to soak up what they could, apprenticing themselves to an underspoken mentor. Van Horn didn't invite just anybody, and as word spread of Latif's performance, cats at Dutchman's lined up to slap him on the back—harder than necessary, some of them—and congratulate him as if he'd just won the Downbeat poll. The kind of guys who always had to answer somebody else's success with a tale of their own made sure to tell him they'd been to The Horn's house too. Other cats grinned with delight and told Latif they hadn't even known he played, were sorry they'd missed it, and had heard he'd killed. As if out of respect for his accomplishment, nobody purchased any dope.

Latif walked down to 110th Street and into Central Park, trying to shake off the clammy feeling and revel in his own badness, but simple sights hit him at symbolic angles, in soft spots free of callused flesh, and reminded Latif that there was trouble, sadness, horror in the world. He lingered at the edge of a sandlot playground and watched young children scream in glee and race in circles on their fat, still-clumsy legs and found himself abruptly and intensely saddened. He felt cowardly in his art, thinking of Spliff's words, pathetic for living in a timewarped jazzworld bubble and—as his trainride with Tristan, forgotten in the folds of the night, came back to him—foolish for thinking that a life of creativity could not itself leave him a broken man.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.