BEEF: VOLUME I
An Everything But The Fiction Joint
Real beginnings are conceived of belief. Inspiration ain’t magic, it ain’t some manic feeling. It certainly ain’t beef. It’s belief, nigga, plain and simple.
Entering his mid-20s, Drew’s belief had been drained to the point little remained. What did he have left? He believed in himself, in the truth to be found in the best fiction, in glimpses of baptism in deep art. The rest of life seemed like politics and bullshit.
This was Drew’s state of mind early one Friday as he rushed to his janky, self-built desk, overlooking a littered Bed-Stuy street. The approach of rain whispered through the cracked window. He could smell the leafiness of the oncoming storm. He hoped it wouldn't be loud.
Little did Drew know, the gathering storm foreshadowed a battle that would stretch him to the core over decades. Only when he healed from its trauma, and faced what this experience woke inside him, would he reap the most unexpected of spoils, belief.
The day before, he had published his latest review on EVERYTHING BUT THE FICTION, a blog he had recently started that analyzed THE NEW YORKER’S short stories. A couple weeks into writing the blog, the construction of the critiques had been consuming hours of his daily life.
It was late spring of 2007, a season when blogs were novel and cutting edge; a season when Drew could bring the last, purest parts of his belief to life – without asking anyone for endorsement, or permission.
The public reviewing experience empowered and humiliated him. Publishing the posts animated the voices in his head that called him a nobody Black kid from a tiny southern town, a nigga who had managed to drop his accent only a few years back.
The louder voice, his voice, didn’t give a damn, delighted to be the realest nigga to ever criticize the canon of contemporary literary fiction, fuckas.
High school, he had wanted to be a filmmaker. He focused on screenwriting because a summer film program instructor said his screenplay had been the best one written in a class filled with middle-aged professionals.
He joined the Film Club at Columbia and wrote a short screenplay his freshman year, but he quit film for fiction his sophomore year after a DP abandoned him in the middle of the production.
He figured with his personality, niggas was gonna be quitting on him his whole life. He wouldn’t need anyone with fiction, and he could do shit the way he wanted within that tradition without disturbance from, or dependence on, others.
He became part of the creative writing workshops community on Columbia’s campus; otherwise composed of white nerd motherfuckers who had imagined themselves to be writers since elementary school.
He was the jock in the movie who decided last minute to take a hard left, go for broke on the goth artsy chick. Man, this deathly chick sure knew how to play hard to get.
Drew tortured himself with self-doubt his senior year, waiting to hear if he would get into an MFA program. He worried about those letters with more anxiety than he had waiting for his first HIV test results.
He got into a couple programs, was rejected from a bunch, ended up heading to NYU right outta college, making him one of the youngest students in the program.
He tore through the two-year MFA and graduated with the first few chapters of his novel in tow, and six years’ worth of creative writing workshops –consumed addictively– under his belt.
Semester after semester, Drew had returned to these cannibalistic spaces where egos were sliced open in the effort to connect the love of reading with the agony of writing. Coarse discourse worse than underground battle rap ruled the day.
Drew’s educational bid had now ended. He didn’t want to become a writing professor, but his need to eat made him hungry enough to make THE NEW YORKER writers his beef.
And so he started a blog to critique whichever writers the magazine’s editors had deemed worthy of publication in their prestigious as fuck fiction section.
He had not seen the blog as a confrontation with other fiction writers. The instinct was more to communicate his language of literature with other readers.
He wanted to create a community that gave analysis separately and together to mimic his recent workshop experiences.
He didn’t want to gossip about writers, or other fan writer foolery. He wanted to build the sharpest knife for the best meat.
There was a combative element, but it had been towards the whole publishing industry. He had laid his stake in the ground.
He considered his first, introductory post funny and well written. He had been able to capture his voice’s natural cadence, a struggle in his previous fiction.
The intro mentioned Junot Diaz and Jhumpa Lahiri as contemporary writers he admired; even if, in reality, he admired Junot and found Jhumpa boring and redundant.
First-generation immigrant writers had become the rage – so much so that Drew felt his own experiences and the experiences of his ancestors in America were now considered dull to readers in elite, literary circles.
He was not without sympathy. How many times could you read about Black people dealing with racist bullshit in Mississippi? How subtle could anyone make that fucking message?
How many epiphanies could be wrung out of being from a place, but not accepted by that place, and having nowhere to run home to except the one that mistreated you?
Apparently the limit had been met. Black American literature touching upon race was now considered passé.
Over the years of his training, one writing professor had become his most cherished mentor. Peña Ramirez, a Dominican American writer, like Junot, also with a first book set on the islands of DR and Manhattan. Drew had read her novel front to back twice and had taken the maximum classes possible with her.
Peña was his dream writer. She spoke across the immigrant story to his southern Black ass life experiences and treated him like they might one day have value expressed in written form.
The two became friends after he finished undergrad. They slept together, spent hours arguing literature and art and movies and rap and philosophy and life, stopped sleeping together but remained friends.
Now he was living in her sister’s house sharing rent with her younger brother and another mutual friend in Bed-Stuy.
Coffee in hand, Drew reread his previous day’s post about Junot Diaz’s WILDWOOD.
Wwweepppsss, duck left, Wwweepppsss, duck right.
Drew had spoken to Peña about Junot many times. The first conversation had been after one summer workshop he took with her.
Drew would walk Peña to the subway after class then skip home to read her book or Roth or watch SIX FEET UNDER on DVDs he had asked his parents to buy him for Christmas.
Peña had curly hair, brown skin, and a sly smile. She had more energy than Woody Allen and could outtalk him. She had the most interesting motherfucker in the world energy. She gave you the feeling of Teyana Taylor in her ROSE IN HARLEM music video.
One walk, Drew told Peña he wanted to meet Junot. She asked why, what did he think that would accomplish?
He wanted to tell Junot how much DROWN had meant to him, how profound he had found that book.
She ballooned her left cheek slightly and looked past him. “And what do you expect him to say back?”
Drew stumbled through more clichés. Peña shrugged and ran off to catch her train.
People beef for countless reasons but there are four major ones that pop up most consistently.
The most basic one is motherfuckers in the same band break up. The Beatles, N.W.A, G-Unit, prime examples. Rarely do artists in the same group separate without disses directed by the desperate parties at some point.
John got them other Beatle niggas, though. How Do You Sleep banged the hardest.
The next, competition between big talents co-existing, without care, you can count on an explosion between the two parties. Lil Kim and Foxy Brown, Jay-Z and Nas, Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul.
Pop stars can’t avoid the demand for confrontation, either; Taylor Swift and Katy Perry, those bitches making radio records saturated with subliminals.
Drew finds this conflict the least compelling. Get off each other’s dicks, why don’t you? Aspirations to be the one, just keeps motherfuckers from growing up.
A couple years into their friendship, Peña and Drew spoke more candidly about Junot. She not only knew him but had been in the background for his literary crowning. She had close female friends who had dated him with as much success as the women in his stories.
Their disconnect started the afternoon Peña attended a book party for DROWN with her partner at the time, her daughter’s father.
The other attendees groveled over Junot’s dick to the extent her boyfriend said some random embarrassing latino tough guy shit to Junot that had only weakened Peña’s look.
She had to apologize for this nigga to save face. Not Peñaesque.
She had published her debut novel a few years after Junot’s book of short stories. His work had blown up so much, its momentum likely generated the interest for her book deal. They orbited one another without him co-signing her, and her making less than no attempts to grasp at his coattails.
There was exasperation in her voice when they discussed him, not hate nor disrespect, more like embarrassment. She seemed embarrassed for herself, for him, for the whole literary charade. The notion of one relevant Dominican American literary voice per generation irked her; that much was obvious.
Drew had known Peña lived in Brooklyn upon first moving to Forte Greene, but he was stunned to run into her at Blockbusters in the middle of the day his first month in his new apartment.
He had emailed her a couple weeks prior and had not received an answer. She acted like a kid caught shoplifting, but got annoyed when he complained about her not responding to his email. You fiction niggas be expecting me to respond taya emails like y’all bill collectors or somethin.
She lived a few blocks from him. They spent the entire day together. Drew felt excited to be reconnecting with his mentor, no longer her student. He enjoyed her company so much he ignored the rumbling volcano in his stomach from how much he had to shit.
They became friends, in touch daily, together weekly. They talked about literature hours into the night. Drew just read more and more. Peña followed his reading with close insight into every tool he discovered while dissecting books, as if she could learn more about the craft from his reading than he could.
She would connect his notes to her work, to the fiction she was reading and teaching, and he would lay on her Fort Greene couch and exchange ideas with her.
To think, he had once read her novel and been swept away by her imagination, and she was now his friend. Her brilliance felt like his acceptance into the last universe he respected.
Maybe a part of him knew how fleeting this feeling would be and that fueled his immersion into her world. Temporary visit. Niggas couldn’t stay prostate forever.
He told her this much one shared cigarette after fucking. Sadly, he suspected they would fall off one day. He didn’t know why. He just had a feeling.
Whatever. Shit was not that serious for her. She had real life problems.
They drank and smoked weed when her daughter was asleep. She shared her new writing. Drew found her to be the most dexterous of writers. Her fluidity with words, her figurative flexibility, her ability to find rhythm in prose, to avoid being captured by your expectations, just her raw talent – they reminded him of Nas.
Pure talent, she was in conversation with Nabokov. She could shether any nigga time to put ink to paper, but she was struggling with her second novel.
She had given Drew chapters for his notes, and he had been hyper-critical, but his stabs at her work were bullshit, because he would read everything she published with astonishment for the rest of his life.
Peña introduced Drew to her middle brother, Jacob, who lived in her building and helped with her daughter whenever he could.
Jacob, in turn, introduced Drew to almost every friend he came to make in Brooklyn through a poker game that rotated locations.
These were inverted times in his life. Drew had fudged his age by more than ten years to Peña, which ostensibly gave the poker game fellas the impression he was older than he was.
He enjoyed these men. These weren’t rock stars. Many would achieve important accomplishments, but none would be discussed among the public, and they didn’t appear disappointed by life or to be striving for anything out of their reach, or to be in competition with themselves or anyone else.
They built lives filled with authentic multicultural families and simple, loving vacations and family photos laminated into shower curtains.
They were knitted together emotionally in a way Drew never felt. He was poisoned with egotistical, narcissistic ambition like Peña. This, and a love for talking shit, they had in common.
Sipping coffee by the window that June morning, the first comment on Drew’s blog simultaneously rattled and awakened his most narcissistic self.
Junot Diaz had commented on his response to WILDWOOD.
Blahu! Blahu! Blahu! Gun-fire! Niggas ducking for cover.
First off, with his post, this nigga Junot was lying his ass off, talking about some student sent this to him. Get the fuck outta here, Junot. You googled yourself and your story, stop fucking lying. You was as cap as young Drake with that bar.
And if you read the post closely, you see the fucking subliminal diss he sent towards Drew, being the bitch ass bully he was.
“At least next time I’ll have a chance to get it right.”
What the fuck does that mean? Drew won’t get that chance, because Drew won’t be getting published in the THE NEW YORKER, nor published anywhere else, and no one will ever remember Drew, and Drew will spend his whole life crying at his desk, thinking about the meaninglessness of his writing, while you get published over and over and over again, just working on getting it right.
Twenty-five-year-old Drew missed that sub, more stunned this nigga Junot had bothered to walk down the mountain for a game at the park with the kid who didn’t make the high school team.
Drew stood and spread out his fingers over his forehead, like Spiderman realizing his fingers had power. He jumped. He pumped his fist. This was better than fucking.
His adrenaline coursed through his veins like he was surrounded by a stadium screaming his name. He sat down, he stood up, he sat down, he stood up. He called Peña.
“Junot responded to my blog.”
Peña’s hazy voice: “Whaaaat? Noooo!”
The rustling sound of her fully waking up; she stepped over to the desk snuck between her kitchen and her living room inside her tiny Brooklyn apartment.
Her home office was hidden by a midnight blue shawl with the cosmos woven into it. This was where Peña the Great wrote. Drew waited for her to open her laptop and boot up the internet.
Peña talked often about her pre-teen daughter. She analyzed and inspected her relationship with her daughter more than the most serious authors did the relationships of their main characters.
She had anxiety about the competing interests of providing stability for her daughter to thrive, and meeting the demands of a writing career that required her to remain ruthless.
The lit game let male fiction writers be selfish assholes their whole career but female writers didn’t get that same luxury, certainly not in those days.
Peña was the most talented and the most ruthless truth-teller Drew knew, never believing her gifts were inferior, never wavering in her certainty about the power of her imagination… She wasn’t wrong, either. No bullshit in art got past Peña. She never published a single fraudulent word in her life.
A dying breed, fiction writers those days held a fanatical ethic about truth. To them, the best fiction revealed the psychology and fuckedupness of people and the world, and no writer was allowed to sugarcoat that shit – or do word gymnastics to impress the reader.
These niggas would spit on you if you called their writing kitsch. They would slit their own throat before they would give you a fucking false epiphany. Irini Spanidou was like this, none more than her.
Peña respected quality without bitterness, maintaining her excitement about the craft, searching for new weapons and styles in other writers before the mainstream found them. She was on Percival Everett’s dick way before that nigga went Mark Twain.
She admired motherfuckers with a certain disregard for fiction - like this Mexican American writer in his 50s she met in Texas she couldn’t stop talking about - more than book nerds like Drew, who wanted the prestige that came from the genre so bad they could hardly sleep at times.
“This puta really came on here and responded to your blog. He’s definitely lying about the student. Your blog is way too new to believe that.”
“I can’t even front, I was hype when I saw the comment. Almost couldn't stand still.”
“Well, what’s your next move, Papi, huh, what you gonna do?”
Peña was obsessed with chess. Despite years of playing, Drew wasn’t a competitive opponent for her; she could jadakiss this nigga half paying attention. She played online super late. She cared about chess almost more than fiction.
She once wrote a magazine piece about fashion and chess that had not a single imperfect or uninteresting beat. It was undeniably the best prose published in 2011, basically predicting THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT (talk about sappy endings) in character and style. And barely anyone read it. Look it up, you’ll see.
Drew: “He hides behind the narrator to make my points sound dumb. He pretends like he could care less, but in reality, he’s definitely being defensive and dismissive.”
Peña laughed in between smokes on her cigarette. She was an avid smoker – like Richard Yates, like Roberto Bolaño, like Grace Paley and so many other writers Drew revered. Subsequently, she quit.
“You can’t back down. He stepped into the ring with you. You can’t ask for his email.”
They spent the next hour talking through what he should write. She wasn’t ghost-writing; she wouldn’t dare insult his integrity with that perversion. No, she listened and guided him like a boxing coach, wanting him to succeed, not to make a fool of himself, nor of her.
The mic dropped from the ceiling and Peña pushed Drew out to the ring to exchange commentary with the biggest dick in the literary industry.
Boouuuuooouss! Boouuuuooouss! You wanted that heat nigga, you got it.
The most timeless beefs are the struggle of a younger person to establish themselves in a space already occupied by an older successful figure. Oh fucking boy. Lil Kim versus Nicki Minaj, then Nicki Minaj versus Remy Ma, Cardi B, Latto, Megan thee Stallion. Pastor Troy taking on Master P’s southern behemoth, No Limit Records.
Talk about reverse racism, watching Eminem fight off MGK from bullying himself into the spot of legitimate white rapper, gave a certain ironic American justice to the astute Hip Hop philosopher.
Drew felt good about his track. He came back within a respectful 14 hours. He had not backed down but had not escalated the stakes like a cornball.
He had not fangirled out or said any dumb shit to reveal shock at the fact that the hottest fiction writer in America felt compelled to defend/concede himself to Drew on the internet.
To fucking Drew. That’s right, nigga. Drew was important. When Drew spoke, Junot listened!
Outside, a mother of three children named Roxanne yanked her children down the street and yelled with spittle launching from deep in her lungs.
“That motherfucker raped me and all you bitches know it! That motherfucker live right there done raped me and not a one of you motherfuckers doing a fucking thing!!!”
Drew cringed. Had he heard her right? This couldn’t be life.
A day passed with no new Junot activity on the EBTF blog. The next day he tagged along with Peña, her daughter, and her wider family on a trip to Dyckman Beach.
Drew helped carry the blankets, games, and other beach fare with the group. Halfway to the beach, Peña’s sister stopped everyone because her skin condition required her to use vaseline after swimming in the ocean and she had left hers in the car.
The group hung back while her son grabbed it.
The beach was crowded. A variety of immigrant families with a wide color palette from various islands of the Caribbean and countries in South America shared the beach and barbecue stations and park benches without visible tension despite the density.
Drew enjoyed Peña around her wider tribe. She was the strongest personality in a family of strong ones. Her dad and mom were like that immigrant super team elder couple that reeked of authority and disapproval, smiling and following the social script of a dedicated Dominican Catholic family.
There was a lonely cousin with a recent full scholarship to a decent school out of state.
Drew stood knee deep in the water with Peña and talked about books. His current obsession was Roberto Bolaño, the latest, biggest wave on the literary scene because of the recent publications of translations of his novels THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES and 2666.
Drew believed Roberto Bolaño - a former and self described failed poet - to be the GOAT fiction writer. His two final novels were such monumental accomplishments that he may have topped the genre of literary fiction.
Bolaño fucked with the mythology of his own life and his work like he was Tupac and Biggie combined.
“You read too much, Drew,” Peña told him. “Like this is when I need you to speak Spanish cause I can’t say it in English exactly like I want, but it messes you up. You make it where the books aren’t quite good for you sometimes.”
Drew looked at her then looked down at his feet in the water, then shifted his eyes up to his shins. They looked the same in the Bronx now at 24 as they had at 12 on the shores of Biloxi, Mississippi.
They had disagreed about one part of his take on Junot’s story. He thought Junot had unrealistically skimmed over the main character’s molestation. Drew found the mother’s refusal to redress or acknowledge the abuse caricaturish.
Peña argued shit like that happens in families and was tricky and niggas be sweeping shit under the rug more than he probably realized.
She didn’t have a problem with that part – that, she had liked. Drew felt no room to disagree with her. Her opinion was like Bible.
Drew got back home to Brooklyn, turned on his computer, and found Yunior had shot again! The second response after the first bomb.
Pppptttttsssssuuuu, Pppptttttsssssuuuu, everyone duck!!! Yunior's hitting the whole block.
Another reader had backed Drew’s point of view with a similar take, prompting Junot to write a comment he deleted before posting his final record in the battle.
Clearly irritated, Junot doubled down on separating himself from the narrator. “Representing doesn’t mean condoning! Representing doesn’t mean condoning!”
Shut up, that’s deflection nigga, but Drew would get to that representing versus condoning dilemma on a later track.
No, the real fucking issue was, what was that fake short story doing there in the first place?
Junot’s first and only novel to date came out a few months later and not a word was different from this “short story” and these same scenes in that novel.
Truthfully, “WILDWOOD” was a mislabeled novel excerpt, cause THE NEW YORKER Fiction issue needed a nigga, and there could only be…
Peña invited Drew to a writer's conference in Baltimore. He didn’t get a hotel where the conference was happening, instead staying with his boy Maxim in his post grad school apartment outside the city.
Drew met a girl in line to catch the bus to Baltimore. She asked him to hold her place while she used the restroom and when she came back, he bowed and pretended to tip his non-existent top-hat. She found this amusing and they began to chat.
She was reading ELEVEN MINUTES by Paulo Coelho on recommendation from a fashion colleague who had declared the book her favorite novel. Drew had read ELEVEN MINUTES upon suggestion from one of his ex girls.
He found the characters trite and unbelievable, Paulo’s prose and storytelling mawkish and infused with pop psychology banality. She agreed this novel lacked appeal, but she loved Coelho's other most famous novel, THE ALCHEMIST.
Drew explained to Bus Girl that authentic and compelling writers considered everything Paulo wrote to be fast food lit, published to keep the masses distracted from the works of genuine transformational power to be discovered by a more sophisticated reading public.
She should read LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, instead of filth like Coelho.
A couple hours into the ride, Bus Girl disclosed she lived with her boyfriend of four years and would never break up with him. Devastated, Drew asked why she hadn’t told him earlier in the trip. She claimed to have assumed he knew.
She thought they should be friends. Drew made a rule of not being friends with girls he wanted to fuck but couldn’t. She understood.
She gave him her number. They agreed he would text her after they separated. She would text him back in the event her and her boyfriend ever broke up.
Sitting in the passenger seat next to Maxim, Drew messaged her,“it was inevitable: the chaos of bus stations always reminded him of the fate of bad romance.”
The hotel hosting the well-attended annual literary conference was close to the Baltimore harbor. Here, Drew discovered Peña the academic. She wore a tweed skirt and a power sports coat. She coulda been a politician running for Lit President.
She was rolling with a model skinny dark-skinned female writer friend whom Drew had never met. She was a published writing professor and treated Drew like another writer groupie.
He spent the afternoon with Peña and her burgeoning crew of female writers. They ate lunch together, chattering about stories and sharing book nerd gossip.
They were drug addicts talking about their best highs, the safest corners for coping, the dealers they had taken for good smack. And what drug were they chasing? Awards? Legacy? Status?
Definitely not money. Whatever they were chasing, it got further away, the closer you got to it.
Drew joined the women in Peña’s hotel room while they changed for the banquet. Teaching creative writing at different universities, the women compared notes on how much their students demanded from them compared to their male writing professors.
They witched about male colleagues sleeping with students, how rampant and absurd the narratives were; daddy issues, nostalgia obsession, mediocre god mimicking.
They talked about the rape and incest and violent shit they had to read from their students. Peña described them as other people’s nightmares that sometimes invaded her actual dreams.
Drew went to piss and accidentally dribbled on the toilet seat. He noticed right before leaving and freaked out. He used the toilet paper to wipe off the piss; still nervous, he went and moistened more toilet paper to clean and dry the seat again. He stepped out of the bathroom.
Peña watched him leave, took a few seconds, and replaced him in the bathroom. She returned clapping, looking quite impressed. “Ladies, he passed. Totally clean.” The writers clapped and Drew felt infantilized.
Falling asleep on the couch in Maxim’s living room, Drew got a text from Bus Girl about his story, DISENGAGEMENT. The short had a stream of consciousness scene with the main character and his two balls that she had found super unique. She loved his story and his writing. She could not stop thinking about him. She may be in love with him.
Drew raised his wings out to the sky and walked Maxim’s apartment like Junot had just signed him to a writing deal and dropped a diamond encrusted pig chain around his neck.
Drew could not be stopped, he was like a nigga who flipped a coin that landed on heads 77 times in a row.
He texted Bus Girl back and the bad romance began.
The truest beef comes from heartbreak. There are too many songs and novels and plays that come from that violence to list.
Rap romance diss songs, Ghostface Killah has the best to an unnamed jilted lover in WILDFLOWER.
The worst, Limp Bizkit dissing Britney Spears, straight sucka shit.
Drew owned a black Yukon truck from high school that he had driven from Mississippi to NYC after he had crossed Alpha. The SUV was beaten down and rode like it might collapse – various tires had numerous times.
He had had to pay thousands in parking tickets to retrieve the car from the tow a few months earlier because his pledges had left it parked illegally in the same spot for months, walking past it daily while it accumulated parking tickets until the front windshield looked NY Knicks orange.
He was pissed at his pledges but forgave them. Road rage run amok wasn’t no beef he could heat.
Drew had agreed to drive Peña all afternoon, first to help move furniture for her divorcing cousin in Queens then to ship a bunch of boxes to Texas from the post office in Manhattan.
Drew hadn’t expected the battered woman scene they came upon in Queens but kept his cool and helped with silent determination.
They finished and Drew was relieved to be free from the harrowing experience. He didn’t ask any questions and Peña thanked him profusely.
The bridge Peña had expected them to take from Queens to Manhattan was closed permanently, forcing them through the tunnel.
The shock of the previous scene transformed into a light, breezy dynamic for the next errand.
The pleasure of Peña’s wit and personality made navigating shitty Manhattan traffic more thrilling than MARIO KART.
They discussed Kara Walker and Lars Von Trier – how both were celebrated for using antebellum slavery images in over-the-top ways for mainly humorless white audiences.
Neither was certain what to do with that observation, but both knew they didn’t like that shit.
Peña and Drew got into an argument on the drive home. The disconnect erupted over a conversation about readers.
Peña made a comment about how they made her uncomfortable and how they expectations freaked her out, knowing these people wanted her fiction and took her work to have meaning to their lives and their images of themselves.
Drew called bullshit. He fumbled a quote about Bob Dylan being the type of artist to take his fans where he wanted, instead of following them where they wanted to go.
The main point was she shouldn’t waste her time thinking about the fans, the readers, she should just drop her fucking bombs in her sharp and innovative way and let whatever reader eatadick.
He didn’t understand. Her experience wasn’t the same as a Black American writer with plenty of people before her. He wasn’t expected to represent a larger culture the same way she was, especially being a woman.
Hold up, he wasn’t representing Black culture or any culture, but truth culture, fiction culture, and she should do the same. He was Fox News certain. She told him he sounded stupid.
A burst of light, pitch darkness. That was beef with Peña.
Drew sold this Yukon for pennies just before he left NYC for good. He hadn’t been able to start the ignition to take the car to a mechanic for weeks and he didn’t have money to pay one regardless.
He watched the car sit unused; Bus Girl complained he should have gotten it repaired, she would have enjoyed the ability to ride around with him.
He sold the car online for $1,906.77, much less than it was worth. The tow truck pulled up to find the Yukon suddenly able to be started. One white worker grinned and drove his car away.
The bad romance with Bus Girl continued to escalate. She wanted to leave her man, she didn’t want to leave her man. She needed desperately to be with Drew, Drew made her feel alive. She didn’t trust Drew to stay with her even if she did leave her man. She didn’t want to leave her man, where would they live, what would her life be like? She told him she wanted her life to be finished like one of those skyscrapers in the fashion district. She was 26.
She had this nigga Drew like a yoyo in her hands. She wanted her sister’s opinion of him, this potential replacement for her current beau. They met at one of those expensive bright colored dessert restaurants in Manhattan.
Kanye West’s mother had just died in surgery. Drew predicted Kanye would be fucked up for life over the tragedy, not able to stop blaming himself, but Bus Girl and her sister dismissed him, said Kanye would be fine.
They knew the trauma of sudden death. Their taxi-driver father had been shot and killed eight years ago. Drew didn’t debate with them.
The introduction went smooth. Her sister was a researcher who wrote medical papers and considered herself a writer. The sister and Drew shared writing habits. She had to write every day. Consistency was her method through the madness.
Drew struggled to write with that level of discipline, especially in that space between completing one failed story and starting another attempt to avoid dashed hopes.
Being a writer was like being a surgeon with hundreds of dead patients. The disappointment seeped into his veins, weakened his esteem, making him tender tinder for turning rage into depression.
They talked about hip hop. Older sister was a big fan, more so than Bus Girl, who was insane over M.I.A but generally indifferent to rap. The big sister asked where he was during the Jay versus Nas battle.
First semester of his first year of college, Drew had been walking through the West Village after buying his first fake ID, trying to avoid skips while listening to THE BLUEPRINT on his CD player.
He gave up and took off his headphones. A few blocks later he heard gunshots and those infamous two words, Fuck Jay-Z.
He had itched with excitement for the blow he just knew Hov had coming for Nas, and when SUPER UGLY dropped, he tried to convince himself Jay had taken back the lead, but between the Hot 97 radio calls and the voting, the truth of the mob couldn’t be denied. Drew’s adolescent legend had been defeated.
Drew relayed that detailed answer and Bus Girl’s older sister laughed. She said Nas ate that nigga. Hov only got shine cause Biggie died, come on.
Damn.
Beef could get historical. South Bronx and Queens debated the origin of rap over tracks and fuck, there had to be one. The South Bronx claimed the crown.
You could find beef in the strangest places. iLOVE FRiDAY dissed a porn star on a hoax, hoe didn’t say shit to them.
Jermaine never released his diss track towards his own brother, but you can find it online. That crazy nigga MJ dissed the District Attorney pursuing him for child molestation, called that nigga a cold man.
Wrestlers done released diss tracks against one another. Ozzy Osborne dissed a preacher. Lil Wayne and Ice Cube both dissed Republican Presidents they later kinda endorsed. The Outlawz dissed people who claimed rap hurt the Black community.
The wildest beef record belonged to B.o.B, who dropped a track dissing Neil De Grass Tyson, for believing the earth was round. The Flat-Earth gang ain’t to be fucked with. Delusional fucks.
One evening towards the end of summer, Drew and Peña were drinking beer in his backyard. The lawn was large and the grass brown and discolored. The neighborhood boomed a competition between reggaeton and hip hop.
A few hours earlier the street had been ablaze with police officers and an ambulance taking a man covered in a white sheet without much urgency.
Drew learned through street talk that Roxanne had shot and killed the guy she’d been yelling about earlier in the summer. Niggas on the block shook they heads, sad but they understood.
Drew internalized a fleeting realization – her revenge had been upon them.
Drew had recently completed a blog post on Lara Vapnyar’s LUDA AND MILENA. Another monumental amount of time and effort had been invested into his thoughts on the story.
Peña stood over him while he held the rail at the bottom of the stairs. “You know, the thing is you critiquing people is cool and all, don’t get me wrong, but it's kinda limiting, you know. It would be more interesting if you were celebrating as well, not just taking people down and pulling their work apart, but also highlighting the work you loved, the books you dig, like the way we talk about shit that blows our mind.”
“Yeah, you’re right, being a critic is wack, no writers respect critics; it's like the better you get at it, the further you get from being a writer yourself. Like being a rap journalist or host or some shit instead of a spitter when that’s what you really want. I want to be a writer, not anyone’s fucking groupie, not anyone’s fucking hater.”
Peña shook her head. “That’s not what I’m saying.”
He never wrote a single additional word for EVERYTHING BUT THE FICTION. He pulled a Connie Converse, vanished with little explanation.
Years later, he would look back and realize none of the 15 stories that Drew opined upon during the four months of that spring-summer 2007 had been written by a descendant of any of the hostages brutalized in legal forced labor terror camps over generations during the antebellum period of US history in these southern united states.
He never thought to check that until 2023. Back then, he must have understood the way of their world.
Here’s the thing about beef: them shits can be everlasting. Niggas wanna yap about rap beef, Drew could tell you about a fiction beef worse than any of that rap shit.
James Baldwin 50cented Richard Wright so far down from his post, Wright is dead but he is still trying to Ja Rule his way back to where he once was. Nabokov beefed with a pussy over a translation; imagine that? Fuck ya want from Drew?
Drew knew back in 2007 he had sonned Junot. He had won that battle before losing the war. He had wondered how to use his victory over the years — understanding the value of beef, win or lose.
Things were bad with Bus Girl. She’d cut him off only to change her mind.
He had broken up with two beloved stick-arounds he had cultivated for years; yet she was spending most of her time working on her relationship with her man.
She claimed she no longer wanted to be with anyone, like an audience disgusted by both rappers in a beef.
Drew kept telling her she needed a clean break, to admit the encounter had changed their lives. She told him she needed space to think.
He threw himself into his passion to distract himself from the distraction. He worked his latest story to completion and shared with Peña.
Peña and Drew met at a bar in lower Manhattan to discuss DISENGAGEMENT. He had lost a playoff basketball game in the amateur league he had joined with the poker crew. The second or third best player on the team, he had arrived late, distracted from fight-texting with Bus Girl.
Losing had released the last drips of hope from his spirit. He pretended to be unbothered and went to see Peña as planned.
The bar had a TV with a newscaster exhibiting rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel. He couldn’t hear what the suit was saying but the guy’s bloated red face resembled an oncoming heart attack.
Drew walked into the bar finally happy with a story for more than a few days. The story was truthful. It was present. It was technically sound. He wanted Peña’s help finding a publication.
They sat at the end of the bar. Peña ordered a common Mexican beer. She was in a reserved mood. She wore a colorful, longish skirt and a white tank top with a subtly designed image of Frida Kahlo’s face, accentuating her mustache.
“Drew, I think the story is good, definitely much tighter than your previous work, but I don’t think it's ready to be published.”
His heart raced faster than when he had gotten the post from Junot. Critical feedback made him feel like a warring king lifting a bridge down across his moat to let in an enemy messenger.
“But come on, you just helped that Mexican guy and you barely know him.”
“That was different, he had a story that was ready. It was ready. He knew what it wanted to say.”
“But Peña, I think this story is ready. It’s just, I really think it's good. This one I really like.”
“I don’t think so. I get your passion. I can see it, but this ain’t it, papi. Look, you talk about the female character like a whore in this one section, but really the story has to find where the narrator is a whore to be true. He is a whore to something. Until you find that, this story got no wings, papi, hate to tell you.”
There were few ways to revise his anxiety. Drew bought weed from his plug, T-Mack, a nigga from Queens he met back in college through Patel.
T-Mack was a short mid-lightskinnned hood nerd nigga with a scar over his neck from some rando taking a slice at him years back.
He walked up the stairs to the front door listening to Cormega on his iPod. They weighed the buds and completed the sale.
T-Mack pulled a plastic red Swisher Sweet container from his back pocket and unzipped the package to tap out the two already skinned, gutted, and re-rolled blunts.
“Smoke one, son.”
“My nigga.”
They shared the blunt. Drew told T-Mack about Bus Girl and the bad romance he had created for himself.
“You need to leave other niggas’ bitches alone. Niggas catch bad karma and worse off that shit.”
T-Mack was living in Harlem with this west coast white chick he had met at Columbia hanging with Drew and Patel. That white chick took care of this nigga and he never betrayed her, married to her now with a daughter.
His pops had recently got out of prison after a fucking 20 year bid. The new beginning T-Mack had imagined his whole childhood, was happening, and he was finding it quite the adjustment.
His father moved right back into the house and took over the family club and every other business his mom had going, immediately and with little restraint or consideration.
The volume on life had increased a few decimals with how loud this intruder talked.
Motherfucker sounded like he had a bullhorn, just saying good morning. “In prison you gotta talk loud, I guess,” T-Mack told Drew.
They finished smoking and T-Mack shared his dream from the previous night. There was a bizarre figure made of spider web material, a gargantuan beheaded butterfly with severed heads within its arms and shoulders. The figure had both genders; a being neither God nor human.
“The creature floated above me like in that fucking Matthew McConaughey flick, you know, ahhhhh, you know, fuck.”
“Frailty.”
“Yeah, that joint, shit freaked me the fuck out, never experienced any dream like that.”
Drew said hearing the description was fucking with him, too. Imagine falling in love with that? They both shuddered.
They finished smoking and shared laughter about crazy old stories of Patel.
The following week, Drew found a lighter he’d been missing and summoned Peña to a Williamsburg diner they’d frequented a few times.
They sat outside at the curb. He needed to share with her the big news that he was breaking off their friendship.
She didn’t respect him as a friend or as a writer, she didn’t understand him, respect his voice or his talent. The way she treated people was abusive and mean-spirited. The whole world had to revolve around her. She was more the villain than the hero she pretended to be.
She cut him off, mocked him, asked him for specifics. He told her she would just ridicule whatever he said.
She insisted, demanded a specific example. He bitched about her teasing him in front of her girlfriends about urine not being on the toilet seat. He told her how much her comment the next day about the way he dressed hurt his little feelings.
She resisted, argued, then accepted he was determined to declare an end to their friendship. Her eyes began to tear up.
Drew had his legs laid out past the curb, his arms stretched out to his shins. He was certain he had to do this, and her emotions would not dissuade him.
Drew was writing a screenplay about the bad romance between him and Bus Girl. She had ended it for good. Their last conversation when she was breaking up with him, he had screeched that he would kill himself, that he couldn’t believe what she was saying, he couldn’t believe she was doing this. Real bitchass shit, son.
She told him, he better believe it. Their bad romance was over. She left him another suicidal simp. He survived the heartbreak through his older sister’s emotional labor and by writing Bus Girl an approximately 77,777 word letter.
This fucking letter was the revival of the epic poem without the poetry or the gentle breeze. He emailed her the tome on his 25th birthday. She never responded.
His response? Fawning for ole cliches, he was escaping to LA. He wanted to be a TV writer. He had always struggled with descriptions because he never had any fucking clue what anything was called, he couldn’t remember or write details to save his life. His strengths were dialogue and character.
Despite claiming to end their friendship, Drew asked to see Peña in person before leaving NYC. He told her about quitting fiction, about his LA plan.
She wished him luck at the aspiration and said she worried his transition would be a rough go. She wanted there to be a way for people to know he was good, to have trust that he was talented.
She was in a cheerful mood, days from moving to a more secure teaching job in Texas with her daughter. She slapped her right palm with her left hand and popped her new university’s t-shirt high up in the air to Drew, who caught it – opening the gift.
She said she hoped he would change his mind about fiction one day. She loved his blog, thought the concept had been so cool, missed it even, kinda wished someone would pick it back up.
She was trying to reach out to him even though he had hurt her. He was too young to understand what it meant to hurt a mid-30s Dominican American artistic genius, who was also a single mother with a family and a community expecting everything in the world from her, everything but the fiction.
The gift Drew most wanted.
Why had Drew allowed a heartbreak from a girl he barely knew to twist and squirm and transform into the dismissal of Peña from his life? Why had he punished himself like that? What was the first sentence of that fake short story, WILDWOOD?
Peña called him the day before before he left the city for good. His pledge had bumped into his bedroom wall during set and left a hole.
He knew he could pay to have it repaired and hadn’t considered the problem a big deal but Peña was enraged.
She told him, “he needed to grow up. He had a lot to learn about life.”
Beef created intimacy between one person and another, either hyped for promotion or from genuine dislike, or for protection of a position.
Years later, living in Mississippi, not writing and wringing his hands in fury at the Gods of Art for his total dismissal from any scene, his humbling comeuppance sweeter than an Orson Welles film, Drew called Peña and apologized.
He agreed he had shown his true age, had taken things out on her that she had not caused.
She listened and accepted his apology with forgiveness, her parent’s daughter. She talked to him about the literature world and her life. It was pleasant.
He loosely mentioned working together on a TV project one day and she dismissed him off-hand.
She had learned from their experience to set boundaries, not to let herself get too close to her students, even former ones. That last comment had stung.
He swallowed what he had cooked.
Confrontation remained part of your legacy for a reason. You don’t battle nobody. Unless you a fool?
The last time Drew spoke of Junot was in the backyard of a family home in Southwest Detroit. He was with his soon-to-be fiance and one of her closest friends in Detroit, a legendary journalist named Martina Guzman.
Drew admired Martina most of his fiance's friends. She had grown up in the heart of Mexicantown within a family that had played both sides of the law.
Martina had survived damn near as much trauma as her city, and she had come out on the other side braver and clearer eyed. Detroit’s best chance against the revanchists came from her pen, her brain, and her heart. She reminded Drew of Peña.
They were in a small group, and one of Martina’s friends was this Dominican guy in his mid 40s with chill and gentle energy, a combo found in truly confident men. Drew immediately warmed to him.
The guy loved fiction, which threw Drew for a loop. He had ceased reading like he did when he lived and died that shit, but he kept his ear to the bookstore more than the average Joe, especially the literary fiction section.
This guy read the greats and contemporaries – and he wasn’t another failed writer, just a reader. Drew asked his opinion about Junot.
“Read everything he wrote. Used to love him, then with the Me Too thing, I just kinda felt differently about him.”
The guy sipped his beer and smiled at Drew as if to sigh, oh well, the lost innocence of youth. The small group hummed their agreement.
“Well, I mean, what about that last piece he wrote in The New Yorker about getting raped. That kinda, I don’t know, I feel like you gotta look at that. Did any of you read that?”
Crickets.
“That was really a remarkable piece of writing, the way he came clean for his readers, saying how they would tell him they knew. I mean, for him to admit he was sexually assaulted, that most of the time, the playboy of the western world wasn’t even fucking.”
A few chuckles.
“He came clean to his readers, agreeing he owed them, giving them his vulnerability in the way he most feared, for the only true love he had ever known, the fiction, his gift. I don’t know if you can throw away a writer who can give you that. For what? He was a fucking asshole and he pretended to sleep around and played king shit of the literature world like he wasn’t a nigga at the end of the day with a fucking time clock ticking on his pedestal the minute he dared to step up on it.”
The group looked at Drew unimpressed, like he was naive. “I think he wrote it to cover his own ass, man. Look at the timing.”
The guy said this shit like he was happy the Tigers had traded the bum.
Drew let the group change the subject but he couldn’t believe what they were saying.
Had Junot’s piece lost the right to a sympathetic ear? Was he like a spouse that had cheated on his beloved fans, so now everything he said was a lie, was toxic, manipulative and abusive?
Maybe it's not that they forgive mistakes, Junot, maybe it's that - blinded by that treasure - they don’t see them. But when they do, maybe they’re worse than writers?
None of these people saw Drew as a writer and none of them knew he had once battled lits with Junot on a blog he had created about fiction.
He rarely told anyone about his fiction days, beyond his go-to narrative: he had graduated from Columbia with a bachelor in literature and creative writing, had gotten a full scholarship from the New York Times to get his MFA from NYU in Fiction, but he had never been able to monetize his writing.
He wrote scripts and short films independently while pursuing real estate ventures.
Drew came back to fiction not to beef with Junot. Niggas had long been bitching the fiction genre was dying out. That lit shit wasn’t hitting nomo. With the exception of a few zombie kings, TikTok dancers had more fans than the biggest fiction writers alive.
Sales were declining year after year. Writers got shiny awards for books that sold less than a rack. Fuckoutta here. Niggas supposed to be impressed you selling drugs but you got no buyers?
Not Drew. The rich pricks subsidized the charade through the university system to keep Americans pretending to look cultured like the Euros, them bitches.
Junot couldn’t help, this nigga was depressed. The fuckas got in his head, had him doing interviews about his writer’s block. Had this nigga playing political pundit on podcasts; he wrote a do-gooder lefty children’s book. Was this nigga for real? We need them fucking slaps, nigga!
Drew could give a fuck about Junot’s writer’s block, happy the spot he left wide open, ready to take Junot’s throne.
Fuck them limb-dicked-leftists, they didn’t have shit in the tuck to stop the biggest fiction writer in the game, the duckish motherfucker running the insurrection gang.
Chief-Fucka, the man out here riffing fictions on stages without a pen like he Hov, and Junot got writer’s block?!?! Noooo, tell Drew it ain’t so.
Whateva, fucka, Drew would never start dissing niggas for the whites; sprouting more cotton for them to cloak white trauma with Black trauma. He would never diss Peña, that would be dumber than when Justin Timberlake dissed Prince. The fuck?
But Drew do got a list of haters that have to be controlled. Fuckas that played him during his incubation, he fantasizes about the stain he has in store for they generations.
His eye ain’t on the sheep though, the henchmen either; naw, his eye on the general, and the kluckers like him.
See, nigga, it's not about left or right; it’s not about fake morals, or asshole behavior; it’s not about sitting at the head of the nerd table; it’s not about living up to nobody’s expectations.
It’s about bringing back the dead; it's about keeping the genre active, relevant for real; it's about slaps and hits; it's about forcing them motherfuckers who killed to prevent niggas from learning how to read, to face the fact that - they last hope, language, stories - belonged to niggas now.
Your shit is our shit now.
This is way better than most of the bullshit published on Substack.
i remember i was conflicted. i had a sensible life ironed out in front of me. i thought i was adulting, rejecting my past antics. we sat in the middle of the bus, not the front, not the back. u charmed me like my home city. but i had to be what you wanted from me, the goddess who rejected u. a sniper from a baltimore art school. evolution is the only promise i make to you.