Jamal Knight was actually a mere two inches taller than me and not a muscular guy, but he exuded violence in a way that Carson’s bulk never could. I was told that he attacked people who wronged him like a rabid dog. The person who told me this walks with a metal crutch and moves in a limping palsy gait, suffering permanent neurological damage. He had made the mistake of trying to attack Knight with a beer bottle over a gang slur.
“Man smiles a lot,” says another former associate. “When he stops smiling, someone will bleed.” Knight had taken over whole blocks with the old stand-by of the protection racket. When a storeowner lay with his face on his floor tiles and his arm pinned behind his back, Knight often informed him, “Look, even if we kill you, man, you’re still going to have to pay.”
And Easy Roller Records owned recording studios in Jamal Knight’s Brooklyn neighbourhood.
While Easy couldn’t relate to women and had trouble asking them out, Jamal thought he was smooth, Brooklyn’s new improved Samuel L. Jackson, taking his dates to the Rainbow Room and then up to the Empire State Building roof. Erica told me that she did find Knight attractive, even clever and fun to talk to. He told funny self-deprecating stories, accidentally locking himself out of his house (when, of course, he was never alone) or having to endure brothers who were dull tourists from Georgia on a flight home. But she had also heard the anecdotes of his real business, and they repelled her. “I don’t want to go out with some criminal,” she said.
Still, she found herself in a long conversation with him in Easy’s nightclub when the place was hopping. Erica said that Jamal managed to cast doubt on his reputation by pretending he didn’t know about it, that he must be a victim of nasty gossip. I saw him lead her towards the cloakroom, and Erica says that in the darkness, they began kissing, that Knight was a good kisser, stroking her chin and not rushing things. But he thought he didn’t have to.
“We should get back,” said Erica.
“Oh, come on,” Knight told her with a laugh, “I’m not settling for just that.”
Erica pulled back, and Jamal Knight’s face was still trying to be smugly charming.
“Why shouldn’t you settle for that?” she snapped.
“I thought there was an understanding,” he replied, which pretty much explained everything to her. Not we have an understanding, the two of them. He said: I thought there was an understanding.
There was a lounge area near the second bar off the dance floor where you could actually hear yourself talk and it was nice to sit and chill. Easy was there with his pals, a few other people, including myself, getting numb on my fifth rum and Coke. I was sober enough to watch Erica march up to us, and in one swift move, she grabbed the old-fashioned grey phone that sat on the bar counter. She ripped the receiver of hard plastic and metal right out of the unit and began pistol-whipping Easy Carson with it, shouting all the time.
“You fucking son-of-a-bitch! You pimp me out like that? Where do you get off? You want to pimp me out? This how you manage your artists, you lazy-ass fucking pimp? Go solve your own goddamn gangsta shit! You have the nerve to—”
It would have been comical, this girl of about five foot four, wailing that phone receiver on that huge man who was cowering under her blows—if not for her volcanic rage, and the revolting and even potentially dangerous situation he had put her in.
“Erica!” pleaded Carson, and then he shouted, “Owww!” Because she had hit him right on the skull, and he was starting to bleed. And still she kicked and swung the phone club in her hand. “Erica, listen, I just figured you two would hit it off, never meant anything by it or—”
“He—said—you—had—an—understanding—” Every word punctuated with a blow of the phone. A couple of the guys came out of their stupor on the couch and rushed forward to pull her off, which prompted, “Get off me! Let me go! I’m gonna kill this bastard!”
Easy Carson was busy panting and holding his head, saying over and over, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”
I went to bed that night thinking: Well, that’s it. They had a deal together, but she’d find an excuse to slip out of it. I proved once again that I didn’t have the mind of a record producer or a star. By Wednesday morning over orange juice and toast, Erica said to me, “Mish, let’s go see that stupid tree of a man.” She wasn’t going to break her deal. In the industry, his little stunt would become gossip but any breach of contract would be a point of fact. It wasn’t the kind of history you wanted to carry with you when you tried to sign with Warner or Brown Skin Beats. She still needed Easy Roller Records if only for a while.
She confronted him with me in tow, and Easy, doing his best to keep what dignity he had left in front of his staff and buddies, ushered us politely but stiffly into his big office with the plush sofa, the wet bar and the PlayStation hooked up to the forty-inch TV in the corner.
“Erica—”
“Just let me get through this, please,” she cut through him. “What I did last night—”
“Was justifiable, babe, completely,” he said. “You within your rights, but I’m just sayin’ I thought you two would hit it off, I never meant to give Jamal an impression you was—”
“Easy.”
He knew he’d better stop.
“I lost it, okay?” Erica gave a great sigh. “That was really stupid, Easy, but I wasn’t very…smooth about telling you off. It’ll make us both look like fools. So this is what we are going to do.”
He was listening intently now, because the local media had heard about the bust-up in the club and was phoning the reception, wanting to know what had happened. He had so far ordered “no comments,” which only left the press free to speculate.
“Whatever you tell me, I’m still gonna have that fool Knight on my ass wanting to cut into our business,” grumbled Easy.
“That’s not Erica’s problem!” I protested, but she gave me a look to say it was all right.
“Jamal will leave you alone,” said Erica. “You’re going to pay him a different way.”
Carson forgot himself and lost his temper. “You want me to pay? How—”
“Yes,” she hissed. “And you’ll do it because it’s the smart move. Look, Easy, you are sitting on a couple of these recording studios out in Brooklyn, and half the time you’re bitching about the maintenance—the roofs, the plumbing in the johns, whatever. You are going to sell these buildings to Jamal, and he will lease them back to you at very generous rates. You want him out of the music business? Well, I talked him into real estate. Your cleaning contractor, your maintenance contractor, all of ’em, will be your choices. It’s a clean break, and it’s only going to come around once. Take it.”
I could almost see the gears moving behind Easy’s forehead. As I said before, Easy was not the sharpest businessman, but he had an animal cunning, and he knew that if Jamal Knight craved respectability, their new relationship meant Knight would no longer have a victim but a tenant. He would gradually learn to solve any problems in the future with lawyers, not baseball bats.
“What about us?” he asked. “What about that whole bust-up in the club? How you gonna sprinkle magic fairy dust on that whole scene?”
Erica frowned as if he was being a bore. “Easy, you honestly think anyone was listening closely to what I was saying? They were paying more attention to me wailing on you.”
“And you did a damn good job of it, babe.”
Her voice yanked firmly on the leash she now had on him. “You said it was justifiable.”
He nodded, swallowing hard. I noticed that the phone on his desk had been moved to the bookshelf behind him.
“This is how we play it,” said Erica. “You have your buddies leak the word that I was pissed you were going to sign Kelly—” Kelly was one of the regular backup singers the producers used. “You were going to let her have a couple of my studio musicians while I’m busy cutting the album. So I came in and lost it. You make out that Kelly and I can’t stand each other…”
Easy and I both
traded looks of startled wonder. She had clearly thought out all the angles. “But you’re not—you’re not going to look good from spin like that!” he argued.
Erica laughed. “I am going to look very good, Easy. Your label gets in the press, a little opera with the R&B, and you even have reporters licking their chops over the idea of a catfight. Look, I’d rather play a diva than a chump. Or a whore. Do I have to say it, Easy?”
Carson met her eyes and then looked away once more to the blotter. Did she have to say it? That he better not ever try such an ugly stunt again? No, she did not.
As Erica and I left, I told her how I was amazed that she had managed to talk Easy into giving up his buildings like that.
“Thank your Dad for me next time you talk to him,” she explained. “Your sixteenth birthday party, he started talking to me about how the only sure investment is real estate. The man must have learned something from building all those houses. Your Dad’s really smart, Mish.”
“Yeah, he is,” I said idly.
Erica had always been sharp—sharp enough to know that once you have a lot of money, you have to learn how to hang on to it. But I was still thinking about the deal she had cooked up for the others. It seemed to me that Carson hadn’t properly thought it through. Yes, Erica and I were both so young, but even then I knew it was better to be a landlord than a tenant. Maybe Easy figured selling the studio buildings was more appealing than having his legs broken.
“In six months, Jamal Knight won’t be a problem anymore for Easy. I did him a favour. I did us all a favour.”
“How do you get that?” I asked.
“Mish, all these guys think about is tomorrow, they never think about the day after tomorrow. The authorities are planning this major new road to connect Jervis Street to Stone Concourse over in Bedford Stuy. Guess where it runs through? Anyone reading a paper with a map and a felt marker can draw a line right through Easy’s buildings.”
“Holy shit!”
“Hey, don’t worry, Michelle. Do you honestly believe Easy Carson or Jamal Knight read The New York Times? Do you think they even pick up The Post? I remember reading about it because I was scouting around in the papers for the new apartment. So in six months, the government will knock on Jamal’s door and say, hey, we’re taking these whether you like it or not, here’s your compensation. Which, of course, will be below market value, but he’ll take it because he won’t have a choice. And Jamal knows Easy Carson would never be aware of this in advance. So Easy will look blameless. Jamal thinks I came up with the real estate scheme to fuck Easy over for his little pimping stunt.”
“Isn’t Jamal suspicious that you’d want to help him?” I asked.
“We were kissing in the coatroom so I can’t look too pissed at him, just annoyed over his expectations. The guy can understand that I don’t like to be taken for granted.”
“Jesus, after this, I’ll never take you for granted!” I said. Not that I ever did.
Erica tossed her head back and laughed, then threw an arm around me. “Ah, come on, Mish! You’re my friend. They were screwing me around, so I got them out of my way.” She shook her head. “Men. You always have to treat ’em like pets or children.”
Do you know he begged to stay with me? He wasn’t man enough for me….
The camera moves only a little as Mr. Jones does his best to keep it on his seventeen-year-old daughter up there on the stage of Sir John A. MacDonald High School. Erica doing a cover of a Toni Braxton song, and she is wearing an ear-to-ear grin because there are amazed cheers and whoops from in between the green and black lines of the basketball and volleyball courts. I was up there, too, supposed to be helping out on backup vocals, though you can barely hear my nervous soprano voice. I was only along because Erica begged me. I’m the one off to the right, out of focus. Michelle, reliably in the background.
I think that might have been the moment when she knew—she just knew it could happen, would happen for her.
As with so many other stars, for Erica Jones there had always been music in the family home. Her mother’s old LPs and CDs included Chic, Al Green, Luther Vandross, Toni Braxton, Lauryn Hill, Eric Benét, Elton John, Tracy Chapman and vintage Earth, Wind and Fire. I remember being thirteen years old with Erica and another friend, all of us thinking her Mom was so cool as we danced around the kitchen to “Boogie Wonderland.” Erica’s Mom called it old music, we teased her by calling it prehistoric. But we danced happily away.
Erica’s Mom was a singer, able to make incredible harmonies with anything that was playing on the stereo. It was her father who first sat Erica down at the piano, and on the shelf was a collection as impressive as his wife’s—only it was mostly classical and jazz. Chopin, Bizet and Beethoven in the company of Lee Morgan, Charles Mingus, Art Blakey, Charlie Parker and Erroll Garner. Before becoming a dentist, Erica’s father had tried to make a living with an alto saxophone. But in all the years I stopped by the house and heard Erica singing upstairs, her mother singing something else in her back garden, I never once heard her Dad play that saxophone—always the piano. Erica told me that her Dad used to compose songs, too, but I never heard him play one on that ivory keyboard either. She would. Erica’s fingers would run along the keys for this or that bit of jazz fashioned by Mr. Jones, and then she would shrug over how Verve or Blue Note simply hadn’t wanted it. If I politely asked her father about them, he’d smile shyly and mutter something about “artistic taste being subjective.” I don’t want you to think the man wore his grief over failed dreams on his sleeve—not at all. He hardly ever mentioned his old life.
When the years passed and Erica had three number ones on the Billboard chart, I was in the Jones house on a wintry afternoon for the Christmas holidays, and I put the question to him. “You and Erica’s Mom were always so supportive. Didn’t you ever try to get Erica to think of something else for a career? Like a backup, you know? Just in case?”
Mr. Jones adjusted his spectacles and stared ahead at the Christmas tree. “Didn’t have to.” And when he saw that I missed his point, he explained, “Michelle, she wanted to be a pop star. She was hell-bent on trying no matter what we said. Well, how many years of shelf life you figure they got on the charts? You see them leathery old Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger and that Sting guy and Bono doing their best to claw and hang on to their popularity! How many girls you see up there besides Madonna? And when you do, isn’t it goddamn sad?”
I didn’t believe this was really accurate or fair, but I didn’t interrupt.
“Pop music is a young person’s game, especially a young man’s game,” he went on. “You either hit it big right away, or you crash and burn. You’re on the clock. Erica’s making enough money now that she’ll be set for decades if she’s smart, and she is. But if she didn’t get her break—if it had never happened, or if it came and went in a one-hit blur—there would have been plenty time for her to turn it all around and start again.”
He sipped his eggnog and added darkly, “I certainly had to.”
There was nothing I could think of to respond to this, and no answer was really needed. I don’t think he was ever jealous of his little girl’s success. I don’t think he could have been more overjoyed. But in his words was a bitter contempt for the record industry machine that assumed its customer must be a child with a Ritalin attention span. This was the dragon his little girl was eager to slay, and she had to take her shot. He knew it.
“That’s why you sent her to Morgan,” I said.
He nodded gently and echoed the thought. “That’s why I sent her to Morgan.”
It would be a long while before I learned there was much more to it than that, more than even Mr. Jones knew was going on.
Morgan would be her “thesis work,” as she sometimes called him, while her first big lesson came in high school. We both learned things about ourselves back at MacDonald High in Toronto.
People don’t believe me when I say our high school experience was unique, which means they don’t be
lieve me when I say that, despite going to school in the Nineties, hey, we were up in Canada, so no metal detectors or pat-downs in the hall. Why should there be when even in Toronto gun crime used to be so rare? They don’t believe me when I tell them we didn’t have the American-style caste system where jocks and cheerleaders ruled. It just didn’t happen that way. Maybe it’s a Canadian thing. Canadian football is so poor we sure as hell were not likely to worship players of the high school version. After all, the national sport is hockey. No, in an upscale neighbourhood where folks drove Beamers and Mercedes and lived in five-bedroom houses, the cool kids, as strange as it sounds, were the intellectuals.
The whole thing was reinforced by who was teaching us—a bunch of left-wing expats. I said there were damn few of us black kids, but there were teachers of colour, ones like Mr. Emeruwa who taught us Chemistry. A Nigerian, he got on the wrong side of the Biafran War in the Sixties and lost his job at his nation’s embassy in Washington, and he had nowhere to go. There was Mr. Charlton, a man with a ruddy light brown complexion whose South African accent always remained thick, who had killed for the ANC and who had fled to Canada. He used to hold up a textbook in our Political Science class and declare, “This book is published by Praeger Press, and who is behind Praeger Press? The CIA. Question everything you read.”
And there was Miss Ogis, an exotically beautiful Indian woman, twenty-nine years old, with long black hair and a round face who taught Math and Physics and who coached the girls’ basketball team. Every so often, because she was so gorgeous, one of the boys would make a come-on remark, thinking it was a code that only his giggling pals could understand.
Miss Ogis would flutter her lustrous eyelashes at the freshman teenager and say, “Mr. Hart, you make one more stupid comment about Kama Sutra or anything else like that in my presence, you will find yourself with so much trigonometry homework you’ll be collecting your pension as a senior. Clear?”
Soul Siren Page 3
