Hoax

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  So he’d come up with the idea of forming his own record company. He was calling it, logically enough, Rex Rhymes. His business manager, childhood friend and fellow Blood, Kwasama “Zig-Zag” Jones, had protested the move. He was worried that his own ride out of the ghetto was about to hit a brick wall, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. He wasn’t much mollified when ML Rex explained that this way they’d cut out the middleman, pocket all the cash, and “we’ll control our own des-tin-nees, dog.”

  ML Rex expected that Pentagram executives—a “bunch of white faggots in suits”—wouldn’t be too happy with his declaration of independence. So he was surprised when he and Jones met with them that morning and the company president listened quietly and then merely asked if he was sure he had “thought this through carefully.”

  “Fuck, yeah,” ML Rex said, adjusting his sunglasses with what he hoped looked like nonchalance and slouching even farther in his seat to demonstrate that his position on the matter was firm.

  “Word,” Jones added, adjusting his shades and slouching, too, in a show of solidarity.

  “Well, all right, then,” the executive said with a sigh and a shrug. “I’m sure we’ll find some amicable way to resolve the fact that you’re still under contract to Pentagram.”

  ML Rex scowled at this and prepared to tell whitey where he could shove the contract. But the man stood, held out his hand, and insisted that ML Rex continue to avail himself of Vincent, the bodyguard/chauffeur the company had sent to meet him at La Guardia. “We want your trip to New York to continue to be a safe one,” the man said with a smile. “You never know…we might work together again sometime.”

  The executive’s friendly response had at first unsettled the rapper, not to mention hurt his ego—he’d expected them to make a bigger fuss over losing a rising star of his caliber. “Fuck those muthafuckas,” he’d told Jones as they left the building. “Fuckin’ wit my head, thas what they tryin’ to do.”

  “Word,” Jones agreed.

  • • •

  Several hours and two grams of cocaine later, ML Rex was feeling better about how he’d “stood up to the man.” Still, he was happy to retain the services of Vincent, “jus’ call me Vinnie,” a huge white man he assumed was some sort of mobbed-up Italian. Vinnie was nearly as wide as he was tall, and with a round, pink face so fat that his beady brown eyes nearly disappeared into the slits above his cheeks. The rapper assumed that the lump beneath the chauffeur’s left armpit was a gun, which made him feel better as he’d been forced by airline regulations, and a previous felony conviction for distribution of a controlled substance, to leave his own heat at home.

  Despite the brave show, ML Rex was a little nervous about being in New York. He’d made his reputation by adding verbal fuel to the fire that perpetuated the West Coast versus East Coast rap wars that the general public had first been made aware of in 1996 with the murder of Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas, and then the shooting of Notorious BIG a year later in Los Angeles. Various truces had been arranged, but every so often someone would say something in a rap, someone else would take offense, and the bullets would fly. His own lyrics referred to the East Coast artists and males in general in numerous derogatory ways ranging from faggots to bitches to busters, and boasted about what he’d do to them if their paths ever crossed. Of course, that was safer to say when living large in LA on his own turf.

  Still, he felt safe enough in the Hip-Hop Nightclub when Vinnie said he needed to stay with the limousine. “Bad neighborhood,” he’d grunted. ML Rex figured he had Zig-Zag to watch his back, and it wasn’t a bad idea to have his ride ready for a quick getaway should the crowd prove hostile. He looked over at his compatriot, who was standing offstage with his arms around the two hookers they’d procured for the night by calling an “escorts” ad in the back of the Village Voice. The girls were a couple of Puerto Rican sisters who, high on crack and sure of a big payday, gyrated their hips and shook their breasts to the beat as if they’d never been happier in their lives, which might have been true.

  Yes, he thought as he glared down at his competition, life is good. In the morning he would consummate his business dealings in New York City by working out a deal with a national distributor to get his independent-label CD in stores for a percentage of the sales. Then in the afternoon, he would make the rounds of the big New York radio stations and sweet-talk the DJs (aided by gifts of cash and coke) into giving his forthcoming single plenty of airtime. He’d realized that to really make it big, he was going to have to move away from his West Coast–centric roots and go for a national audience. That was the reason he was going through with the appearance at the nightclub arranged by Pentagram and had agreed to a round of “battle rhyming” against one of the local rappers.

  Battle rhyming—essentially two opponents competing with lyrics to win over a live audience—was the roots of rap. It was part asphalt poetry—reflective of life in a ghetto—and part clever, and generally good-natured, put-downs. A way of establishing sidewalk supremacy without anything worse than someone’s ego getting hurt. But what had begun as social commentary and competition branched into gangsta rap—the anthems of the violent, cocaine-financed organized crime cartels that supplanted the old neighborhood gangs—until much of the music was little more than death threats and boasts of cuckolding each other’s bitches. This was the rap that shocked mainstream white America into assuming that all rappers were angry young black men with guns, and attracted white teenagers who, bored with their safe, middle-class suburban lives, wished they were black gangsters, too.

  As a whole, the rap genre had lost much of its street sensibilities when record companies finally recognized that poor urban teenagers who couldn’t afford to buy new laces for their Lugz would spend every last penny on the latest Wu Tang Clan CD. Slickly produced, with lots of bells and whistles, the commercialized rap had drummed the on-the-fly improvisation right out of the genre. Despite the success of Eminem’s film 8 Mile, the story of a battle-rhyming, odds-beating white rapper, it was hard to even find the art form away from the amateurs on the sidewalks where it all began.

  The Hip-Hop Nightclub, a formerly abandoned warehouse on West Thirty-eighth Street near the Hudson River, was one of the few venues left in the city. It had been open for two years, mostly struggling by in a neighborhood of boarded-up, graffiti-marred buildings. But slowly the club developed a loyal following of rap purists, and a reputation as the place for local would-be rap stars to catch the ears of record label scouts searching for new talent. Over the course of its existence, several rappers who’d appeared in the Friday night battles had been signed to recording contracts.

  ML Rex couldn’t have cared less about the history of his art. He was in it for the money and the prestige. Like most rappers, he got his start on the sidewalks and in gang hangouts, rhyming with his fellow Bloods while guzzling “40’s” of Schlitz Malt Liquor. But for a star such as himself, battle rhyming was generally seen as beneath his status, and he considered his appearance at the Hip-Hop Nightclub to be slumming.

  In fact, he’d regretted it as soon as he’d heard himself agree to “give the folks a thrill by participating in our little show,” as the owner/MC had put it. He’d have much rather just to have been introduced, perhaps hyped the audience with a little taste of something off the new CD, then waved good-bye and gone on a little booty call with the hookers back at his expensive suite in the Waldorf-Astoria. But there was that ego thing, emboldened by the cocaine, and he couldn’t back down once he’d accepted the challenge.

  Backstage in the waiting room he’d insisted on for privacy, he considered a variety of options that would allow him to leave before the show without losing face. It had been a long time since he’d participated in a battle, and he wasn’t thinking as clearly as he’d have liked. He was therefore relieved when he was introduced to his opponent, a short, stocky Puerto Rican teen who looked like he’d wandered in off the street. If this little spic’s what passes for a gangsta in New York City
, he thought, I got shit to worry ’bout. Li’l muthafucka can’t even dress hisself.

  The self-assurance, however, evaporated as he stared in his opponent’s eyes while the MC worked the crowd into a frenzy. He didn’t know what it was, but there was something about the other young man’s gaze that rattled him. The teen seemed so…calm, or maybe it was confidence, or both…like he didn’t need the bluster and bluff that defined ML Rex’s personality. Thrown off his game, he broke off from the staring contest and smiled at the crowd. “Sheee-it, this li’l bitch the bes’ ya’ll got?” he shouted into his microphone.

  2

  ALEJANDRO GARCIA’S FACE HARDENED FOR A MOMENT AT THE insult, causing the grin to disappear from the mouth of the black rapper, who quickly glanced back over his shoulder to make sure his manager was paying attention. But then Alejandro smiled—a wide, toothy Cheshire Cat grin that looked almost luminescent in the spotlight.

  Eighteen years old, he was short and barrel-chested with thick shoulders. As his opponent noted, he dressed plainly in a baggy Xavier High hooded sweatshirt and a pair of old worn jeans that hung halfway down his butt and gathered in pools at his feet. His neck was circled by a thin gold chain upon which dangled a simple crucifix, and a gold hoop hung from his left earlobe.

  Somewhere in the distant Caribbean past, Indian blood had mixed with Spanish and produced his handsome, bronzed, and angular face. Left alone, his hair would have been thick and black as coal, but he kept it shorn to a stubble that emphasized his soft, doe-like brown eyes. Eyes that were shining with excitement onstage because this night was his big opportunity.

  Pentagram Records had sent over one of its stars, asking to battle with him, and was said to have a scout in the audience. Not bad for an orphan who’d been born and raised in Spanish Harlem, most of it living with his maternal grandmother in a jaundice-colored brick warehouse, the James Madison tenements on 106th Street and Third Avenue.

  As a child, he’d loved the neighborhood just a few blocks east of the northwest corner of Central Park. On warm summer nights, he’d wandered the sidewalks with his crew of boys, skipping to the beat of the blaring salsa music that serenaded each block from the open doors of cars parked in front of the buildings, as the tenants gathered to drink beer and discuss love, life, and the New York Yankees in rapid-fire Spanish.

  Long before they noticed him, he admired the beautiful Latinas, with their dark shiny hair, flouncing along the sidewalks in their bright dresses, flashing smiles as they pretended not to hear the whistles and entreaties of the young men. They seemed to learn early how to move their hips in such a way as to drive all the Don Juans crazy. He also loved the smells that wafted from the tiny Puerto Rican restaurants—of carne asada with red rice and beans—and wished that he were old enough and had the money for a plate and a cerveza with lime.

  It was a tough neighborhood, too, though it wasn’t until he was older that he realized the rest of the world didn’t live with early morning hours punctuated by gunfire, sirens, and screams for the “POLICIA! POLICIA! AYUDA ME!” echoing up and down the dark and empty streets. The police didn’t like to venture into Spanish Harlem, and when they had to, they came angry, suspicious, and ready to bust heads or shoot first and ask for an interpreter later. So each generation learned to protect itself and its territory.

  Drugs were rampant and the root cause of most crimes committed in Alejandro’s neighborhood. The heroin junkies weren’t so bad—they were usually half-comatose under the influence of the drug, and when awake were mostly just petty thieves trying to steal enough for the next high. The crack cocaine trade that arrived in the late 1980s, however, had changed everything. It was controlled by the street gangs—not the old kind, like in the movie West Side Story, rumbling over turf, girls, and insults—but the sort whose reason to exist was the proliferation and protection of the lucrative crack cocaine trade. Crack meant money, money caused envy, and envy created a need for bigger and better guns to protect the crack and the money.

  Life was hard enough on girls and boys who came from relatively normal family lives. They saw too much, heard too much, experienced too much when they should have been allowed to just be children. But Alejandro’s childhood had been rough even by those standards. An incident when he was a boy—a memory he’d buried as deep as a well—followed by his father walking out on the family, and then his mother succumbing to a heroin overdose a year later, had left scars that he still felt but had covered beneath a tough exterior.

  He was fortunate to have his grandmother, Eliza Contreras, a tiny woman who had first come to the United States from Puerto Rico as a child to work in a sweatshop in the Garment District. She had married at fourteen to a twenty-one-year-old man who’d seen her on the bus and followed her home to ask her father for her hand. She had her first child, a boy, at age fifteen, but the infant died from measles within a year. A daughter, Alejandro’s mother, had been born shortly afterward.

  Eliza had grown to love her husband, who took his responsibilities to his young family seriously and worked two jobs toward their dream of someday moving to one of the suburbs where they might own a home with trees in the yard. She had hoped for many more children, but her husband was shot and killed by a robber as he made his way home one night from his second job. Their dreams had bled into the cracked sidewalk where his assailant left him, and she never remarried.

  Instead, she had hoped for many grandchildren when her daughter, Maria, married Alphonso Garcia, and Alejandro was born six months later. But Alphonso was no good, and her daughter was a slave to the heroin that eventually killed her. Alejandro was all she had left, and she’d done her best to raise him to be a good citizen. But he’d still gravitated to a gang—the 106th Street Inca Boyz—which provided the male role models, protection, and sense of extended family that he wanted.

  By age fourteen, he’d earned the street name Boom for his willingness to use a gun to protect himself, his homeboys, and his neighborhood from all encroachment. Unfortunately, the attitude got him into trouble at age sixteen when a trio of older black boys from a rival gang made the mistake of leaving Harlem to the north looking for trouble. They found it in the alley next to the tenement where Alejandro lived. Believing that they had located easy targets to bully, the older gangbangers suggested that Alejandro and his childhood friend, Jose “Pancho” Ramirez, perform certain sexual favors or “git your punk asses kicked.”

  “Chinga tu madre,” Alejandro responded, tilting his head back to look out from beneath the wide bandana covering his forehead to just above his eyes, Chicano-style. He then translated loosely. “Go fuck your mother.” One of the older boys reacted to the insult by reaching up under his New York Knicks sweatshirt as if he had a gun. The boy probably only meant to intimidate the younger teens, but he’d chosen the wrong pair to bluff.

  Without hesitation, Alejandro stooped next to the Dumpster at the mouth of the alley. When he stood up, he was pointing the .45 caliber Colt Mustang he hid there every morning just in case. His antagonists took off running, with Pancho, who’d grabbed a slat from a wooden box, in hot pursuit. As one of his antagonists tried to scale the chain-link fence at the end of the alley, Alejandro let off a round. He was holding the gun sideways and not really aiming, so he was just as surprised as the other boy when the bullet hit the target in his butt, catapulting him over the fence and onto the pavement on the other side, where he lay screaming.

  Alejandro tossed the gun into the Dumpster. Then he and Pancho ran inside the building to tell his grandmother what had transpired.

  The wounded gangbanger managed to get himself to Harlem Hospital, where he promptly described his assailant to the police. “A short Puerto Rican muthafucka.” Based on the location and his reputation, the cops went looking for Alejandro. But accompanied by his grandmother, he had already turned himself in. “I put a cap in some buster’s ass,” he confessed, and told the detective at the precinct house where to find the gun.

  Even though he had admitted to the
shooting, Alejandro still complained to his Eliza about the other boy breaking the code of the streets by reporting him to the Five-Oh, gang slang for the police, whose genesis was the old television police drama Hawaii 5-0. “What did you expect, hijo?” his grandmother replied. “The code of the streets is a lie. There’s no honor among criminals, and Alejandro, you are a criminal.”

  Eliza sighed as she wiped at the tears that filled the wrinkles around her eyes and from there spilled down her brown cheeks. She cursed the streets for their cruelty. She’d lost her daughter to them, but she’d had such hopes for Alejandro. Six days a week she caught the number 4 subway train down to midtown to cook and clean for a wealthy family to support herself and her grandson. He’d been such a sweet, smart little boy before he’d turned to the gang. Even then, he’d met her without fail every night at the subway station at 103rd Street to walk her safely home. But now the streets threatened to swallow his life. In despair, she’d called the man whom she trusted the most in the world, the priest who’d baptized Alejandro and the closest thing he’d had to a real father.

  • • •

  Michael J. Dugan of the Society of Jesus had known Alejandro off and on since he was a boy. He knew that the teen was not the semi-literate street thug he acted like around his peers, but the product of well-respected Xavier Catholic High School on West Sixteenth Street. The school was nearly a hundred blocks south of his home, which necessitated rising and leaving the tenement before the sun was up with his grandmother to catch the number 4, taking it to the Union Square station. No matter what the weather—bitter cold, driving rain, hot and muggy—he rarely missed a day. The priest, brothers, and lay teachers who toiled at Xavier were tough but fair. They’d turned many troubled boys into fine young men, and Alejandro was another.