by Ace Atkins
The kids tell you it’s about your tapes.
You go.
You ride. Ninth Ward Records.
You keep ridin’.
Four months later, you livin’ Lakefront.
You got a half-built house with iron gates and three girls who clean your underwear and wash you in the shower. Henry and Midget wearin’ Gucci and eatin’ filets.
Ain’t nothin’ but rhymes and ambition.
Ambition feel somethin’ like that heat in the room when they took your mamma away.
It’s all what you believe. You can believe anything.
Least that’s what you tell yourself as you slip that gun in your mouth, listenin’ to the sounds of the Calliope around you. It’s old beats, old music that you never wanted to hear again. It’s shoes and cold gray skin and swollen bellies and a shakin’ uncle whose eyes disappear into his head.
But you back.
They say you $500,000 less a man.
It all look good, you told yourself that day back in December when that white man came to you. It all look good on paper when they tell you about this trust fund you had and all the money Teddy and Malcolm keepin’ from you.
You saw it all until they worked you. Then everythin’ disappeared. That office on the Circle sat empty. Them business cards that felt like platinum, all to disconnected phones.
Teddy didn’t talk to you.
Everythin’ was gone.
Tonight, you hear the bus make its stop outside and you pull the gun from your mouth, gag a little. You bend back that foil in the window. Just a bit.
You got to smile, huggin’ arms round your body, metallic taste of your gold teeth in your mouth. It’s your face out there. All thuggin’ and mean-lipped on the side of the bus. Platinum and diamonds. Do-rag cocked on your head.
You like that until you hear that Raven pop in your hand and feel your legs give out and a hot, sticky mess spread across your belly and leg.
It was all there.
Now you ruin.
You ruined as hell.
You are fifteen.
2
WITHIN THE FIRST TWENTY-FOUR HOURS I’d known Teddy Paris, he’d stolen my Jeep, bruised my ribs in the ensuing fight, almost gotten me cut from the Saints, and become one of the best friends I’d ever known. I often wondered why he found it so funny to break into my Wrangler while we were at training camp that summer and disappear in it with a few buddies to blow their rookie paychecks on stereo equipment at a mall in Metairie.
I thought he was making a point because I was white and from Alabama and he hadn’t known I’d lived in New Orleans since I was eighteen. But I later learned, while we bonded over our mutual love for Johnnie Taylor ballads and a nice shot I’d given him in the jaw, that Teddy chose me, out of the dozens of players, because he thought I could take a joke.
Teddy and I had been friends even after our short-lived careers in the NFL ended, mine trailing into getting a doctorate and becoming a roots music field researcher, and his into a multimillion-dollar rap music partnership with his brother, Malcolm. His professional path came in a dream – he’ll tell you complete with a sound track – after opening five failed nightclubs and a pet photography studio.
Teddy was always into something.
I’d been back from the Delta for only two weeks and already missed JoJo, Loretta, and a woman I’d been seeing for the last few months in Oxford. It was early on Friday, about 10 A.M., and I’d just turned in my students’ grades for spring semester and was looking forward to heading back to Mississippi.
The day was crisp and blue with a warm white sun peeking through a few thin clouds. The air seemed clean, even for New Orleans, tinged with the tangy brackish smell of the Mississippi. Muddy Waters’s Folk Singer album with Willie Dixon slapping and plunking his big stand-up bass in stripped-down perfection played on an old cassette player.
I needed to finish up this job and pack, I thought as I pulled out the old water pump from my Bronco. I inspected its rusted blades and wiped the blackened oil and grime from my hands onto my jeans and prized Evel Knievel T-shirt. I thought about Maggie and her farm. And her legs and smile.
Polk Salad Annie trotted by, sniffed my leg, and then rummaged for a bone she’d hidden in a pile of old milk crates that held my CDs and field tapes. She chomped the bone, found a nice spot on an old pillow she’d grown to love, and then started to sniff the air.
My five-dollar dog.
I was already planning out the day’s drive when Teddy walked through the gaping mouth of my garage and called my name. I knew the voice and told him to hold on.
I heard the familiar click of his Stacey Adams shoes nearing on the concrete floor. “My woman so mean she shot me in the ass and run off with my dog,” Teddy sang, his voice booming in the small cavern. “Why you listen to that sad ole music?”
“The blues ain’t nothing but a botheration on your mind,” I said, speaking low.
“No wonder it makes me depressed.”
“What? You want me to ‘Shake That Ass’?” I asked, naming one of his New Orleans competitor’s top-ten hits. Asses, champagne, and platinum usually dominated his preferred style of music. Dirty South rap. I shook my butt a little while continuing to work under the hood of the truck before turning back around.
“Travers, you got to remember, I seen you dance,” Teddy said, straightening out the folds in his tent-sized black double-breasted suit. Teddy was 300 pounds plus with a deep insulated voice from all the fat around his neck. His words seemed to come from inside a well. “Ain’t pretty.”
As I leaned back into my thirty-year-old truck, I noticed his newest electric blue Bentley parked outside. Chrome rims shining like mirrors into the sun. I’d heard the inside was lined with blue rabbit fur. Real rabbits died for that.
One of those new Hummer SUVs painted gold with black trim pulled in behind the Bentley, shaking with electronic bass. Teddy’s brother, Malcolm, walked across Julia.
I grunted as I fit a pipe plug into the heater hose outlet of the new water pump. Malcolm wandered into the garage, decked out in hard dark denim, a tight stocking cap on his head and a platinum cross ticking across his chest. “What up?”
“Hey, brother,” I said, reaching back from the hood and giving him the pound. I liked Malcolm. Always streetwise and hard. Sometimes in and out of trouble but always himself.
“Came by to see if you want to have lunch at Commander’s,” Teddy said.
“I’d settle for fried chicken and greens at Dunbar’s.”
“Travers, you are the blackest white man I know.”
I cleaned my hands with a gasoline-soaked rag and ran my fingers over the sleeves of his suit. “Nice.”
Malcolm laughed.
You would’ve thought I was a leper, the way Teddy yanked his arm away. “Get yo’ greasy-ass monkey hands off me.”
Malcolm crossed his arms across his ghetto denim, a scowl on his face. “Teddy don’t want no one messin’ with his pimpin’ clothes.”
“Nick-” Teddy began.
Annie ambled on over and made a slow growling sound. I scratched her antenna ears. She smelled his crotch and trotted away.
“What in the hell is that?” Teddy asked.
“A hint,” I said. “She says arf.”
“Look like a goddamn hyena to me.”
“So?” I asked, cleaning grease and oil off the timing cover. I reached for a putty knife resting on my battery. Teddy strolled in front of my workbench and admired my calendar featuring Miss March 1991. Annie found her bone.
Sweat ringed around Teddy’s neck and he kept patting his brow with a soiled handkerchief. Malcolm lit a cigarette from a pack of Newports and leaned against my brick wall. He kept his eyes on his brother and shook his head slowly. His beard was neatly trimmed, his thick meaty hands cupped over the cigarette as he watched us.
“Y’all never asked me to lunch before.”
“Sure we have,” Teddy said.
“When you wanted to bo
rrow $3,000 to start your own line of hair-care products.”
“Macadamia-nut oil. It would have worked.”
“Well?” I scraped away at the old sealant around the timing cover. I studied the crap caked over the cover after decades of use. At least the truck was running even after I ran it into a north Mississippi ditch last fall.
“You ever listen to the CDs I send you?” Teddy asked.
“Nope.”
“You know ALIAS, right? You ain’t that livin’ in 1957 that you ain’t seen him. BET, MTV, cover of XXL.”
“I don’t watch TV except cartoons. But, yeah, I know ALIAS. So what?”
“He got caught in some shit,” Teddy said. His voice shook and he wiped the sweat from the back of his neck. “Need some help.”
“I can’t rap,” I said. “But I can break-dance a little.”
“Not that kind of help,” Teddy said.
“Aw, man. Kind of wanted some of those Hammer pants. Need a long crotch.”
“Kind of help you give to them blues players,” he said, ignoring me. “Them jobs you do that JoJo always talkin’ ’bout.”
“Royalty recovery?”
Malcolm spoke up in a cloud of smoke: “Finding people.”
I began to remove the screws from the old pump and looked at Malcolm. I still remembered when he was a nappy-haired kid who shagged balls at training camp for our kickers. Now he was a hardened man. I noticed a bulge in the right side of his denim coat.
“Who do you need found?”
“A man who conned my boy out of 500 grand,” Teddy said. “Goddamn, it’s hot in here.”
“Sorry, man,” I said. “Sounds like you need more help than me.”
“You the best I got.”
“We’ll talk.”
“There ain’t time.”
“Why?”
Malcolm looked at his brother and put a hand on his shoulder before walking back to his Hummer with an exaggerated limp.
“Some Angola-hard punk gave me twenty-four, brother,” Teddy said. “I only got twenty-one hours of my life left.”
3
AFTER TEDDY DROPPED THE NEWS, we decided there wasn’t a hell of a lot of time for soul food at Dunbar’s. So when we watched Malcolm head back out to the studio, I pulled on my walking boots and a clean T-shirt, closed down the garage, and we rolled down Freret and headed up to Claiborne in Teddy’s electric-blue Bentley. I cracked the window, lit a Marlboro, and sank into the rabbit fur while he leaned back into the driver’s seat and steered with two fingers. A sad smile crossed his face as we moved from the million-dollar mansions off St. Charles to candy-colored shotguns and onto a street populated with pawnshops, check-cashing businesses, and EZ credit signs. Neon and billboards. Broken bottles lay in gullies and yellowed newspapers twirled across vacant lots.
The air felt warm against my face, heavy bass vibrating my back and legs, when we rolled low under the giant oaks that shrouded the corners around the Magnolia projects. The trees’ roots were exposed, rotted, and dry near portions of the housing projects that had been plowed under. Their tenants now living in Section 8 housing in New Orleans East.
I felt the rabbit fur on the armrest and looked into the backseat, where Teddy had a small flat-screen television and DVD player. A copy of Goodfellas had been tossed on the backseat along with a sack of ranch-flavored Doritos.
“Why don’t you sell your car?”
“It’s a hell of a ride but ain’t no way close to 700 grand, brother,” he said.
“Your house?” I asked. “That mansion down by the lake with your dollar-sign-shaped pool? What about a loan on that?”
“Ain’t time,” he said. And very low, he said, “And I got three of them mortgage things already.”
“Oh, man.”
“What about J.J.?” I asked, dropping the name of our teammate who had just won two Super Bowls. “He’s got more money than God or George Lucas. You try and call him? He’d float you a favor.”
“J.J. and I ain’t that tight no more.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I owe him $80,000.”
“Jesus.”
“Don’t you go blasphemin’ in this car.”
“Why?” I asked. “You pay to have it baptized?”
We stopped at the corner of Claiborne, where on a mammoth billboard two hands were held together in prayer. Someone had spray-painted the words WHY ME? over the address of the church. Across the wide commercial street, I saw another billboard of Britney Spears. She was selling Pepsi. Britney hadn’t been touched.
“You’re deep in debt and can’t get a loan from anyone else,” I said. “Who is this Cash guy? Just kiss and make up.”
He didn’t even look over at me as he accelerated toward the Calliope housing projects. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Crack a joke. See, Cash is a real humane individual.” Teddy licked his lips and wiped his face for the thousandth time. “Heard he once stuck a set of jumper cables in a man’s ass for spillin’ wine on his Italian leather coat. Up his ass, man. That’s fucked up.”
“Did the man turn over?”
Teddy shook his head. “Listen, I came to Cash ’bout two months back so we could get the money for ALIAS’s CD. Had to get some promotional dollars.”
“For what?”
“Advertisin’. This video we shootin’ tonight.”
“Call it off.”
“Too late,” he said. “Everyone’s been paid. See, we were all in some trouble and then Cash and me was tryin’ to put together this movie? I had this idea about New Orleans bein’ underwater and only the folks in the ghetto survived. You know like we were livin’ in this underwater world with boats made out of Bentleys and shit…”
“So he loaned you $700,000?”
“Half a mil,” he said. “He added another two for interest and his hard-earned time.”
Teddy shook his head as he drove, hot wind blowing through the car. The asphalt more cracked on this side of Uptown. We passed a Popeye’s fried chicken, a McDonald’s, some bulletproof gas stations. Barbershops. Bail bonds.
“Tell me about Cash,” I said. “Maybe I can reason with him.”
“You got a better chance of gettin’ a gorilla to sing you ‘Happy Birthday,’” Teddy said. “This ape raised in Calliope like my man ALIAS. But he don’t have no heart like the kid. He’s an animal. Bald head. Got all his teeth capped in platinum and diamonds. Stole everythin’ he have. Even his beats. Got his sound from this badass DJ ’bout five years back. Now Cash eatin’ steaks and lobster, screwin’ Penthouse pets and that boy coachin’ damn high-school football.”
“How’d he steal his sound?”
“The bounce, man,” Teddy said. He turned up the music. That constant driving rhythm I’d heard played all over New Orleans shook the car. The drums keeping the rap elevated as if the music was made of rubber-reflecting words.
“Why don’t you just run?” I asked. “Get out of town till you can raise the money?”
“I got family here,” Teddy said. “Besides, a Paris don’t ever run. You know that.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said. “Quit your posturing before you do get killed.”
“Ain’t no bullshit,” he said. “I leave and then he fuck with a member of my family? Man, I couldn’t live with myself.”
“Can’t you just sign over something to him? Just give him your house. You can stay with me.”
“I appreciate it, brother,” he said. “I really do. But there is only one thing this mad nigga want and he ain’t getting it.”
I looked at Teddy – out of breath, sweating like hell – as he turned into the housing projects. Two men on the corner with hard eyes and wearing heavy army coats watched us turn. Teddy lowered the stereo. The heat whooshed through the car, just making the silence between us more intense.
Teddy gritted his teeth as he passed the men. “ALIAS my boy and I ain’t neva losin’ that boy. Not again.”
I watched him. “I want y’all to meet,” he said.
4
“YOU GONNA VALET this thing in Calliope?” I asked. “Or are you trying to collect insurance?”
“You don’t know who I am,” Teddy said. “Respect everything around here.”
“Even for a Ninth Warder?”
“For Teddy Paris.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
He kissed a ruby pinkie ring on his fattened little finger and gave me a wink. “You’ll see.”
Calliope soon swallowed us into endless rows of four-story colorless brick buildings seeming to sag with exhaustion. Fire escapes lined each building in V patterns; some hung loose like broken limbs. In a commons that reminded me of a prison yard, Dumpsters spilled trash onto the wide dirt ground. Along the walls of project houses, signs read NO DOG FIGHTING.
We slowed and rolled into the commons.
As Teddy shut off his engine and coasted to a stop, dozens of black children wrapped their arms around the car. I could hear them laughing and breathing and giggling. Making faces with their eyes pressed against the glass. Teddy got out and ripped out a massive roll of ten-dollar bills, palming them off to more than a dozen kids.
Stay in school; get yo’ mamma right; no way, you been back twice.
I smiled as the kids formed a tight circle around the car, the chirp of Teddy’s alarm locking them out.
We walked along a buckled path and by a brick wall where someone had painted the huge face of a rapper named Diabolical. I’d read he’d been killed in some gang shit last year and now he’d taken on some kind of martyr status in the projects. The slanted warped image of his face in bright colors surrounded by painted candles reminded me of a Russian icon.
Teddy nodded to his face, “That’s the one I lost.”
We found ALIAS among a loose group of teen boys and two girls tossing quarters along a concrete staircase stained with rust. Teddy pointed out the kid, and as he saw Teddy’s wobbling figure coming toward him, he picked up the collection of cash and sat back down.
He didn’t look up. Teddy took off his coat and sweat stains spread under his arms and across his back in a big X. ALIAS muttered something and the kids broke away.
