As D took a few steps further, the tallest one said, “Yo, LeeLee, that’s that nigga.”
Three of the four quickly surrounded D with lots of “Yo, nigga!” chatter. Though all were smaller and collectively barely matched D’s weight, the trio moved around him with confidence.
“Yo, ARoc is looking for you!” the one called LeeLee said, standing right in front of him.
“I was just up at the ARoc office. I left him a message.”
“Them niggas up there don’t know shit. We his people. We are who you need to speak to.”
“Okay. You’re LeeLee, right?”
“Yeah, that’s me, nigga.”
“Well, you tell Asya he’d better not snitch me out.”
“What, nigga?”
“Tell him that I haven’t said shit and he better not either. You got that?”
LeeLee was a little thrown off, as were his crew. They huddled quickly when the fourth kid, the one who’d stood a few steps away from the confrontation, called them over and started talking. LeeLee clearly wasn’t happy but fell silent. The huddle broke and, as if D had disappeared, they walked right past him and into the building. LeeLee didn’t even toss him a threatening glance.
* * *
That evening D was back in the Brownsville McDonald’s with Ride, the former enforcer hanging on his words about Eryka and, of course, Eve.
“You think she lied to you?” Ride asked.
“I’m not 100 percent sure,” D admitted, “but she was friendly enough that I don’t think so.”
“Yeah?” Ride smiled. “If she’s as good as her little sis, you need to go tap that.”
“Do you know this Detective Rivera?”
“Yeah, he arrested me.”
“Well, I have somehow got connected to him.”
Ride looked at him warily. “You working for him now?”
“Hell no,” D said harshly. “But I do have some of his property. You think I can make a deal with him?”
“A deal? That spic nigga loves to squeeze people. He lives for that shit. My old homey got down with him; he bled him dry, then set him up. My man B. Brown is upstate and gonna be there another seven years. Me, personally, I would stay away from that dirty motherfucker. He’s not just a cop. You feel me? Truth be told, he scares me. I can’t go back in. I’d rather die. That nigga spic, he’d violate me and laugh while doing it. So that’s what I know. D, you should stop whatever foolishness you got with Rivera. It ain’t smart.”
* * *
It was dark when D got off the 3 train from Brownsville at the Brooklyn Museum stop. He walked over to Islands, a tiny Jamaican spot not far from Eastern Parkway operated by two feisty middle-aged women who made the most succulent curried goat he’d ever had. So he waited patiently, cramped together with five other folks in a narrow waiting area, and then, sweaty from the oven’s heat, paid for his takeout and headed home.
As he strolled down Washington, a Black Pearl taxi pulled parallel to him. D felt eyes on him. To his relief he spotted Ice in the back in a loose-fitting black-and-white Nets sweat suit. When D approached the vehicle, he saw crutches on the backseat floor.
“So,” D greeted casually, “what it look like?”
Ice leaned up toward D and said, “I’ve been shanked worse than this. Get in.”
When the car pulled away D said, “So, the guns, right?”
“Sure.”
“My instinct was to dump them down the sewer.”
“Understandable,” Ice said.
“But I dropped them off somewhere.”
“You did? Can you can get them?”
“Sure,” D said. “Right now, if you want.”
“No,” Ice replied quietly. “Hold onto them. We both have questions, right?”
“A gang of them,” D said. “Who goes first?”
“You can, but lemme help you. Far as I know, it was a straight-up sale. I brought the guns, the rapper had the cash. Shoulda been simple. I didn’t set up the deal. One of my kids did. He’d hung with that rapper but felt it would be treated more professional if I handled things.”
“So you were set up?”
“Not by him,” Ice said. “Remember that thing that happened to your friend?”
D flinched at the reference to the death of Dwayne Robinson and the mess surrounding his book The Plot Against Hip Hop, especially coming from Ice, who knew most of the story and had much to do with its nasty ending. “I’ll never forget it,” D said.
“He was one of the kids involved and I kept him out of the light, so he owes me. But I think it was these other niggas up in Brownsville who he used to play dice with. Think he spoke too much. I’ll deal with him. Believe: if I was robbing that rapper I would have called it off as soon as I saw you. Word is bond. Besides, if I was gonna do it I would have done it. I wouldn’t have let those midget bangers handle my business.”
“The police are very interested in you,” D said. “Very.”
“Until my leg is healed and I’m not limping, I’m out of state. That’s the word on the street. Ice is out of state. If anyone asks, that’s where Ice is.”
“Shit, if anyone asks, I won’t even know that.”
“Understandable,” Ice agreed.
“But what isn’t understandable is why those two guys in the car were so committed to capping my ass. The guns must have been more valuable than they looked, cause those guys ended up dead behind them.”
“Or they were just stupid,” Ice said. “There’s a lot of that goin’ round. Niggas ain’t thinking clearly. You pull a hammer, it would be wise to know how to fucking shoot it.”
“Real talk,” D said. “I still think you were being set up.”
Ice looked out the window as the car cruised down Eastern Parkway. “So you moved back to Brooklyn?”
“It was time, I guess.” D laid back, waiting to hear what his dangerous friend was thinking.
“Well,” Ice said after a long pause, “I’m doing my own investigating. We’ll compare notes real soon.”
“What about the guns?”
“Leave them wherever you have them. The last thing I want is those things in my possession. I get caught with them and I’m upstate forever.”
“So why’d you take the risk of making the delivery?”
Ice, usually poker-faced, gazed at D with a pained expression. “I got softhearted,” he said bitterly. “Look what the fuck it got me. I’ma drop you off on Flatbush. The police or whoever may be on you, but I wanted to have this chat face-to-face. By the way, good looking out in that restroom. Despite this bullet I think I owe you, D. Could have been way worse.”
“I’d say we’re even.”
“No.” Ice was serious as a heart attack. “We aren’t yet. You got the same e-mail?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ma hit ya. If you get an e-mail from earthwindandfirethatass@gmail, it’s me.”
“Okay,” D said, and got out of the Black Pearl happy to be, finally, headed home.
LIVE LIKE A KING
The walls of the apartment were still white, but D had purchased several cans of a light-beige paint, thinking it would be soothing. Considering the police, the minigangstas, the OGs, and the general sense of disorientation in his life, soothing was a priority. He was watching Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless yell at each other on ESPN about some basketball recruiting controversy as he used Skype to call one of his family’s oldest friends and his sometime savior, retired NYPD detective Tyrone “Fly Ty” Williams.
The old man’s face appeared on his screen with new gray on his temples and deeper cervices in his reddish skin. Yet despite the morning hour, Fly Ty was looking good in a nylon knit sweater and Kangol cap.
“How’s retirement?”
“Relaxing. Very relaxing. Twenty-four hours a day of relax.”
“Bored out of your mind, huh?”
“Bored blind. Can’t even see myself.”
“Well I see you, Fly Ty. You look good. Can only see ten o
r eleven wrinkles. They say black don’t crack but I can see that’s not quite true.”
“Ha. Well, D, I see every furrow in your supposedly young brow. You looking old, motherfucker.”
“No doubt,” D admitted. “Shit is hectic between the office closing, the move out of Manhattan, and all the stuff I e-mailed you about.”
“It makes me wish I was back up in the Rotten Apple. Sounds like there’s a lot of fun to be had getting you out of trouble.”
“Can you do anything for me from down there?”
“There are still a few old heads at that precinct in Brownsville. I should still have a friend or two out there. Tell you what: you going out today?”
“I think my ass needs to stay home, don’t you?”
“Okay. Let me get off this Internet and do some old-fashioned phone calling. Get back to you soon.”
* * *
D started painting his living room and had applied a solid coat by the late afternoon. The Yankees, meanwhile, were behind by two runs during a day game in Detroit. He was having a bowl of microwaved lentil soup when another old blast from the past popped up on his BlackBerry.
“It’s the great Al Brown!” D said gleefully into the cell. “The world’s leading ancient-school road manager. To what do I owe this honor?”
Much like Edgecombe Lenox, Al Brown had begun in the business back when classic R&B singers walked the earth and soul didn’t need “neo” tacked in front of it to make it relevant. “Night hasn’t been on the road in seven years,” he said.
“And hasn’t put out a record in nine. So that’s nearly a decade he’s been out of the market,” D replied.
Night was the great sphinx of R&B, a legendary talent who had become as infamous for his mysterious absences as Sly Stone or D’Angelo, gifted men who had the unfortunate habit of missing recording sessions and gigs, punctuated by arrests and teasing glimpses of greatness. D knew Night’s backstory as well as anyone. He had been one of Night’s best friends back when he dropped his landmark debut, Black Sex, a neosoul-meets-G-Funk mash-up that harmonized warring elements of popular black music. What Stevie Wonder had been to the ’70s and Prince was to the ’80s, critics and industry insiders predicted Night would be for the new millennium.
And it wasn’t just music heads who dug Night. The video for his song “Untouched” featured a slow pan down his back, butt, and muscular legs that made Night a sensual sensation. Rumor had it that he had been a male prostitute for rich older women. Night denied it in interviews but D knew this was no rumor. It was the dark-chocolate truth.
“But the love is still there,” Al said. “I know the fans are there and the music out in the marketplace hasn’t gotten any better. There’s still a space out there for him. I think even he knows that. But getting him to show up and on the tour buses and planes and into venues—he’ll need help doing that.”
“Sounds like you need a good assistant road manager more than a bodyguard.”
“What Night needs, at least for this tour, is a supportive environment. We’re hoping you can help with that. I’m sure you have some other commitments, but we have a short UK tour coming up. Just a week, really. You could do much worse.”
“No question about that. I have absolutely done worse.”
“I know you and Night have history.”
“We do.”
“I think he feels he owes you.”
“I could see how he feels that,” D said.
“Okay. Come to MSR Studios tonight. Don’t show up too early, you know dude’s a vampire.”
* * *
When D got off the N train that night at 49th Street, he bumped and grinded through clumps of tourists down to “music row” on 48th Street where a bunch of music stars camouflaged the presence of several state-of-the-art recording studios, including MSR, a few steps from Seventh Avenue. Up in a third-floor studio, he sat on a sofa munching on almonds.
Night’s Filipino engineer Reg was there, as was the assistant engineer, a young white kid named Carson, and Al, the singer’s comanager, road manager, friend, and personal savior. It was a congenial group who’d worked together for years, bonded by a love of Night’s music—though waiting on him had definitely worn them down.
“He said ten thirty,” Al said blandly, “but that wasn’t gonna happen.”
D looked at his cell phone. Eleven fifteen p.m. “When do you guys usually start cutting?”
“One or one thirty. We’re usually cooking by three a.m.,” Reg said, then paused. “When he shows up.”
“If he shows up,” Al corrected.
Carson, the assistant engineer, came over and offered D a menu book. “If you don’t mind eating late, there’s lots of options around here after midnight.”
“So,” D said to Al, “we’re settled in for the long haul.”
“Funny. That’s one of the potential titles for the album. The Long Haul.” They all chuckled. Then Al added, “Remember that old song ‘Long-Ass Journey’?”
“Kinda.”
“That’s a possible title too. It’s that old Adrian Dukes jam. He was a one-and-a-half-hit wonder and that was his half hit.”
“Night is that self-aware?”
“He reads blogs just like everyone else,” Al said.
To Carson, D said, “I’ll just have a fruit salad.”
“Watching your girlish figure?” Al asked.
“When you get older you are bound to put weight on. I just wanna control where it goes,” D said. “By the way, Al, who’s bankrolling all this? From what I hear, Night is six figures in debt to his label and they are through upping cash.”
“We found someone who believes in Night as much as we do—except he has money.”
“Who? Jay-Z?”
“Our sponsor wants to keep it on the low for now,” Al said, sounding a bit cagey. “My feeling is that if Night makes it back, this guy will bask in the limelight. If it doesn’t work out, no one has to know.”
“Oooh,” D said, “mysterious.”
“Ours is not to ask why.”
“Okay, it’s dropped.”
“Here he is,” Reg chimed in.
On a monitor in the studio, Night could be seen being buzzed in from the street and walking languidly down a hall, guitar case in his left hand, can of Red Bull in his right. He had on baggy black jeans, working man’s Timberlands, a garish Ed Hardy T-shirt that would have been cool in 2009, and his bushy hair was sticking out over the sides of his sky-blue bandanna. Night looked like a man just slightly out of sync with this era.
“It’s only twelve forty-five,” Al said. “You are in luck, D.”
Night’s team moved around the room, getting ready for their tardy star’s arrival. It had been many years since D had spoken with the singer. He remembered when Night had been kidnapped by a slick-ass crew who rolled through New York City on Japanese rice rockets, running cars off the road, swarming people on the streets and city parks, and even raising havoc out on highway 27 through the posh Hamptons. That had been when Night was the hottest young voice in music, a sex symbol’s sex symbol, leading R&B into the new millennium.
Night didn’t stop in the control room to say hello, he just strode through a side door and into the studio, his brown eyes on the floor.
Al whispered, “That’s a good sign. He wants to get to work. Otherwise he’d come in and shoot the shit until three a.m.”
D hadn’t noticed the vocal “cave” they’d created in the studio until Night ducked his head and disappeared into it. Using black tarp as a cover and mic stands held in place by gaffer’s tape, Team Night had jerry-rigged a space separate from the drum set, keyboards, and monitors in the studio’s main tracking area.
“When he’s experimenting with his vocals he likes that privacy,” Al told him. “He’s got a humidifier in there, a keyboard, and some legal pads. When things are going well he works in there for hours.”
For the next ninety minutes D sat with the others as the singer’s dulcet tones emanated
from his cave and flowed out of the studio speakers like pieces in a puzzle. The song in question was titled “Wallet, Cell Phone, Keys,” which was also the hook and was followed by the line “What else a young man need?” (or “young woman,” “young nigga,” or “young bitch,” depending on his mood). It was a sexy song about materialism that, if you didn’t listen closely, could be heard as a celebration of it, an ambiguity that added great depth. It had the sophistication of a Stevie Wonder melody, the metaphorical splendor of a Rakim verse, and a sullen intensity solely of Night’s making.
At some point during the session Al mentioned to Night that D was in the studio but the singer hadn’t reacted. But after laying down some magical bits of melody over the lead vocal tracks, Night asked, “Is D still in there?”
“Right here on the sofa,” Al replied.
“Send him in here.”
D walked out of the control room and over a mess of scattered black wires into the cave. Standing up, with open arms, was Night. He gave D a big hug. D could smell the ripe scent of marijuana, funky armpits, and Red Bull all coming from the singer’s body.
“It’s been too long, Night.”
“I know. I know, man.” He laughed. “You looking good. Been liftin’?”
“Not like I want to,” D said. “People think a guy who does what I do should be big up top, but it’s not good being too muscle-bound.”
“Shit, people think I should be working out like that too. Thing is, I thought I was supposed to be a musician. But I guess I was wrong.”
“You gotta be you.” D was trying to sound supportive.
“If I was really being me, there wouldn’t be a biscuit or a waffle left in the state of Virginia. You feel me?”
D smiled and copped a squat on Night’s monitor.
“So, you know, they want me to go over to London and do some shows,” Night said.
“They love soul music over there and I know they love you.”
“I haven’t done a full-on show in seven years,” Night said quietly.
“And?”
“And that shit worries the fuck out of me. People have their memories. I’m not that man anymore.”
“Well,” D said, “let them see who you are now. That’s all any true artist can do. If they wanna see a ghost they can watch YouTube.”
The Lost Treasures of R&B Page 7
