“My number game is a bit fluid right now. But you can always count on Mark Zuckerberg to bring folks together.”
“You are serious, aren’t you?”
“You’ve turned me down before,” Eazy Stevie said. “Friend me tonight and we’ll hook up this week.”
D growled, “Okay,” and then walked away.
After wrapping at the Williamsburgh Savings Bank location, the team hopped into two Denalis and a makeup trailer and headed up Flatbush Avenue toward Prospect Park. They made a left onto Eastern Parkway and drove into the Botanic Garden.
The cherry blossoms were in full bloom and Rihanna, now dressed in a Japanese kimono, posed amid the wind machine–aided falling leaves, a vision of Asian elegance D thought modest for the risqué vocalist. But after a round of shots, the kimono bottom came off, long cinnamon legs were exposed, and the poses shifted from PG-13 to R.
The spring light was fading but the photographer insisted on squeezing in another setup. With Rihanna still in the kimono, the three vehicles rolled into Prospect Park where she began prancing through a large meadow. By now the bottom of the kimono had been reduced to hot pants, and D, aided by Parks Department personnel and NYPD patrolmen, kept a growing crowd of fans, gawkers, and paparazzi at bay.
As the last shots of the day were clicked off, Easy Stevie reappeared and, grinning, strolled over to D. “RiRi wants me to ask you something.” Tensing for the worst, D wondered what offense he’d committed against the pop siren. “She heard that you and Bridgette Haze had a thing when you worked for her.”
Back in 2003, before Beyoncé and Katy Perry and Lady Gaga and Rihanna, a blond white-trash chick with some dance moves was pop’s queen. That summer, Haze had camped in New York to record with hip hop–influenced songwriters and D became a part of her inner circle. That Haze was being stalked by a group of kidnappers, who had an insider in her camp, made for a twisty adventure that also ensnared his old friend, the now reclusive singer Night. One crazy weekend, D and Haze found themselves holed up in a Montauk beach house where some very unprofessional things happened between them.
“Tell her that’s just an urban legend,” D said, though there was a redness in his brown face that Easy Stevie read as a confession.
“I will do that,” the amused industry hustler replied. “Get back to you on that other thing.”
“Do that.”
D was assigned to help the singer to her car. Though she didn’t say a word, Rihanna recklessly eyeballed him, enjoying his discomfort. There was a moment, as he walked alongside her and some handlers, when D could have made some gesture of desire. A flirty comment. Maybe even just a bit of ass-kissing.
Instead he remained stone-faced and got her settled into her ride to Manhattan’s Trump Soho hotel. An hour later in the hotel’s lobby, Rihanna’s regular bodyguard, fresh off an emergency root canal, met D in the lobby, thanked him for having his back, and arranged the paperwork to get him paid.
* * *
D was still contemplating Rihanna’s flirty nonflirt when he exited the subway back in Brooklyn. While it was nice to know he still had some sex appeal, the idea that his summer with Bridgette Haze had reached Rihanna disturbed him. Was the legend of the big black bodyguard and the tiny white pop princess something passed on over drinks in Beverly Hills bars or on long tour bus rides across America? That wasn’t how he wanted to be discussed. That shouldn’t be his rep.
Who knows how many jobs that story had cost him? A rep as a randy bodyguard could have kept him from countless gigs and he’d never have known it. How much did this story contribute to D Security’s failure? He began calculating how many female clients he’d had after that. Was that why Jay-Z stopped working with him after he got married?
D had just crossed Grand Army Plaza when a police van pulled up next to him. Three uniformed NYPD officers jumped out and walked swiftly toward him. D stopped in his tracks and quickly removed his hand from his pocket. One policeman stood behind him, one placed himself by his side, and the third, a sergeant, stood in front of him.
“Excuse us, sir,” the sergeant said, “could we speak with you for a minute?”
“What’s the problem, officer?”
Instead of replying, the sergeant, a slim black cop with T. Riley on his name plate, looked toward the van. Another officer—young, anxious as hell, light-skinned—popped out and approached cautiously.
“Is this him?” Sergeant T. Riley asked.
D glanced back at the young officer, whose name was Hall. Though he’d done nothing wrong, D was filled with a nervousness endemic to black men dealing with cops.
“What’s going on, Sergeant Riley?” D asked.
“Just a minute,” he said.
Patrolman Hall now turned to his superior, shaking his head before replying, “No sir, this is not him.”
“Okay, sir,” Riley said, “thank you for your time.” Without another word the four cops walked back to the van and pulled away.
Ahh, Brooklyn, D thought, and headed toward Washington Avenue.
SUMTHIN’ SUMTHIN’
D always had a love affair with music that not only nurtured his soul but, in various ways, had paid his bills too. He’d never mastered an instrument (back when NYC public schools actually taught children exotic subjects like music) and he couldn’t sing (though he often lifted his voice to generate throaty sounds). Yet music was as much the through line of D’s life as his bulk, the HIV virus within him, and the black clothes he wore religiously.
D’s mother had loved R&B, particularly soul men like Teddy Pendergrass and more obscure performers like Adrian Dukes, whose “Green Lights” was her personal anthem. His three brothers had lived long enough to enjoy the prime years of the Time, Kurtis Blow, and Cameo circa “Word Up,” though never had to endure the reign of Waka Flocka Flame, Macklemore, and other twenty-first century “talents.”
But what D was encountering in Bushwick on this day was a culture of vinyl junkies more manic than anything he’d ever experienced. Unfortunately for D, the vinyl du jour was classic rock from the early ’80s. Hair bands like Whitesnake and Mötley Crüe filled bin after bin, with Japanese buyers moving between the aisles holding shopping bags and pushing laundry carts filled with albums. D wandered wide-eyed through this strange world until a sixty-ish white man in a light blue Stax Records T-shirt waved him over.
“You look like an R&B man to me,” the guy said.
“Not much R&B, soul, or funk in here.”
“It used to be a bigger business. There was a nice sweet spot where you could sell to both young DJs, who’d buy in bulk, and the old-school collectors who were looking for specific R&B, blues, or jazz LPs. But between Serato and age, those markets have dried up. If you wanna make real money in vinyl now, you have to sell ’70s or ’80s rock to buyers like these guys. If the band could have been inspired Spinal Tap, it has value now.” He shook his head.
“Well, I’m looking for something a lot older—a very obscure soul record. It’s called ‘Country Boy & City Girl.’”
“That’s interesting.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes indeed. I heard tell of it but never seen a copy myself. Suddenly it’s a hot record.”
“Other people asking for it?”
“Yeah. Had an inquiry just this morning asking about it,” the shop owner said. “By the way, my name’s Jerry Wexler, pleased to meet you.”
“Who was it?” D responded, staying focused on the business at hand.
“Well, they asked me to keep their interest confidential.”
“You good at keeping secrets?”
“I can be.”
D reached into his wallet and fished out a fifty-dollar bill.
“He said confidential,” Wexler said.
D pulled his wallet back out and dropped two more fifties on the counter.
The shop owner reached under the countertop and produced a card. D pulled out his cell phone and took a picture of it. It didn’t have a name, just a
n e-mail address at DONDA, Kanye West’s creative clearinghouse.
“I got another lead for you,” Wexler said anxiously. So D placed another fifty on the tabletop. The man wrote a name and telephone number on the back of the DONDA card. “Feel free to use my name.”
* * *
Two days later D was sitting in the Midtown Manhattan offices of Universal Records speaking to Lamont Holland, the man in charge of mining the company’s massive back catalog for reissues. Though the record industry had shrunk, catalogs were still a low-cost source of revenue. When D finished relating the tale of “Country Boy and City Girl”, Holland said, “I’ve definitely heard about this record.”
“Really? You think it’s in the Motown archives?”
“Maybe, but probably not under that name.”
“You think it was mislabeled?” D asked.
“Mislabeled, yes, but maybe on purpose.”
“Okay. Who would do that?”
“Someone who knew it was the rarest of the rare,” Holland said cryptically. “You see, these collectors are a devoted bunch. I mean their self-esteem, how they see themselves, is sometimes wrapped up in what they possess, especially if it’s a record no one else has and a lot of people want.”
“I hear that,” D said. “But why would someone go through the archives and mislabel such a rare record, especially if they could just grab it and bounce.”
“You don’t really understand what you’re dealing with, do you?”
“Is there some secret vinyl shit you’re not telling me about?”
“I’m not trying to patronize you, I’m just telling it’s not as simple as you think.”
“So school me.”
“If Otis Redding and Diana Ross really made a record together, that’s music history. I don’t know that a true fan would steal it—but they might mislabel it and wait for the right moment to reveal it.”
“Now you sound crazier than the people who hired me.”
“It is what it is, D. Between other archivists who worked here before me and staff at our warehouses, a lot of people could have gone in there and hidden it, waiting to be the one to discover it, or, and this is gonna sound crazy, misplacing it just so it wouldn’t be easily found, keeping it as a hidden gem for future generations, out of reach of collectors, people like whoever hired you.”
“Okay,” D said, growing irritated, “this feels like you’re fucking with me. So let’s cut the bullshit. Is there a copy of the record here or am I wasting my time?”
“You sure are blunt.”
D stood up and leaned over the table. “I’m not moved by all this mystical record mumbo-jumbo. Do you have the record or not?”
“Straight answer: I’m not sure.” Holland turned around and pulled two large black binders from a shelf. “There are so many vintage tracks in our archives that, even years after the Motown catalog was acquired, all of it hasn’t been digitized or properly inventoried. If this track was the Supremes or Marvin Gaye it would be easier to find. When you first called about this record, I looked under Little Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross’s solo work. Can’t find a reference to it. But maybe it’s under Earl Van Dyke, who cut an instrumental LP. I don’t know and neither do you. These binders have lists of miscellaneous tracks from 1966 when Hitsville was really cookin’. You can sit here, search through these binders, look for a session that sounds right, write it down, and pass it on to me.”
“Okay. If I find some sessions that work, how long would it take to find the actual tapes?”
“Couple of months is my guess,” Holland said. “You see, all the archival material was moved to California a few years back to a more secure warehouse with temperature control and all that stuff. I’ll send the numbers out there and, when they have time, they’ll dig them out, hope they’re not too brittle to play, and we will, hopefully, go from there.” Holland stood. “See you after lunch.”
* * *
Forty minutes later D was still there, combing through photocopies of handwritten and typed notes from 1966, a year when soul music thrived, Dr. King preached, and integration was the promised land. D felt lost in this past, so he was relieved when his BlackBerry buzzed. It was his old office building manager, Benito Benjamin, who he was tipping to take care of shutting down the Soho office.
“Yes, Benito. How are you, my man? Did I leave something in Soho?”
“No,” Benito replied hurriedly. “Some people came looking for you today.”
“Did they leave a business card?”
“No. Well, kind of. They wrote on your old office door.”
“What happened?”
“There were three of them.” Benito was suddenly whispering. “They were loud and caused a disturbance when they realized you no longer had an office there.”
“What did they look like?”
“Hip hop. They looked like hip hop. I didn’t call the police.”
For that D was thankful. Journalist Dwayne Robinson had died on his office doorstep, uttering his last words while holding a bloody cassette tape. Bringing in cops would have reopened that whole sad story.
“Benito, can you take a picture of the tag on the door?”
“Tag?”
“The markings they made.”
“Oh, I’m having someone erase them.”
“Please take a picture and text it to me,” D said, “and I promise you, Benito, they will not be back.”
Ten minutes later a photo popped up on his BlackBerry that was clearly a gang sign. It looked like the Asya Roc logo but with some scrawls on the edge different from the diamonds around the MC’s neck. D went over to Holland’s computer, got on YouTube, and typed in ARoc, the name of the MC’s record label, fashion line, and (reputed) gang affiliation.
Most of the videos were either promotional or live performances. Scrolling way down, he found some gang videos featuring young men (and a few women) who apparently were part of ARoc before it became a music brand. In one of them, three young fools around twenty, mouths and noses covered with red bandannas, each held up a gun for the camera, boasting about the seven bodies the weapons had murked. But then one of the masked men said, “Each gat got two bodies on them niggas,” which would be a total of six. So aside from their lack of remorse, this trio couldn’t count. No point in waiting for these fools to find him—D decided to take the offensive.
At that moment Holland walked in, clearly unhappy to see D on his computer. “You find anything useful?” he asked.
“Who knows?” D said. “I gotta go deal with the present of black music. Sorry about using your computer. Enjoy the videos in your history.”
ON & ON
The girl behind the desk at ARoc Productions was going over her Facebook page on the office laptop, while the Instagram feed on her iPhone made a pinging sound every time a BFF posted a picture. A couple of glossy celebrity rags and a copy of the Source lay on the white top of her Ikea desk. She was dark brown with prominent round lips and had a healthy thickness to her body that D noticed as he walked over to her desk.
“My name is D Hunter. I’m here to see Clee Davis,” he said, polite as pie.
She looked at up him with small brown eyes circled with black eyeliner behind red glassless frames. “What’s your name again?”
He repeated his name and said, “I don’t have an appointment but I know he wants to see me.”
“Okay. Take a seat, Mr. Hunter.”
Fifteen minutes later, D, after being given a bottle of water and having flipped through the Source a couple of times, was being walked back into ARoc’s offices by Lynda Creed (he’d gotten her name in casual conversation about Beyoncé’s newest album). Clee Davis, early thirties, white, with brown seriously peaked hair and a shirt with his client’s face on it, sat behind another white Ikea desk looking both curious and irritated. Davis was Asya Roc’s manager and a partner in ARoc Productions.
“I’m wondering why you’re here,” Davis greeted.
“Three young men claiming assoc
iation with this company stopped by my old office and placed this tag on my door.” D handed over his phone.
Davis glanced at it and then handed it back.
“Is there a problem?” D asked.
“I don’t know anything about this,” Davis said. “Anyone could have tagged your door. This doesn’t mean they were part of our crew.”
“Let’s cut the bullshit. I didn’t tell the police anything and I’m not gonna implicate Asya. So please call off the toy thugs.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Davis replied with a bored tone. “All I know is that we hired you the night of that attempted robbery. I heard you got him out of there, which I’m grateful for. But anything else I know zero about. I’m Skyping with Asya in France tomorrow morning, so I will ask him about it then.”
“Okay,” D said. “You tell him to chill out his posse. I’m sure the police are gonna talk to him about the shooting when he gets back. Just tell him that as long as he didn’t see anything, I didn’t either. I didn’t have a bag and he didn’t have a bag. If he’s gonna tell the police anything, I need to know what. It would be best for all involved if we saw the same things.”
“All right, I’ll keep that in mind, and you should keep in mind that Asya has a lot of friends. He helps a lot of people on the street.”
“And a lot on the Internet too, I see.”
“That too. My point being—”
“Asya doesn’t control them all.”
“We’re on the same page.”
As D was leaving, Lynda Creed said, “You on Facebook, D?”
“Well, my company is. D Security. You wanna be my friend?”
“I’ma check your profile and see what’s up.”
D smiled at the young girl. Not only was that pleasant, D thought, but it could also be possibly useful. LC was too young for him, though she didn’t seem to think so.
D was still smiling as he exited the building. Four loose-limbed, flat baseball–capped young black men sporting Asya Roc pendants crossed his path.
“Excuse me,” D said.
“Yeah, you better,” responded the smallest of the four.
The Lost Treasures of R&B Page 6
