Authors: Ace Atkins
Back then, you hold your own in the Calliope yard, the ole CP-3, and find your only friends are a mean-ass pit bull you call Henry and a little rottweiler with short legs you name Midget. Your mamma stay alive to you for weeks underneath that blanket. Through it all, she stay like she is ’cause that room don’t have no heat and it’s February, like it is now, and her own family live on the other side of the project.
Y’all know Calliope — its own little galaxy in New Orleans. Findin’ your people on the other side is like shootin’ over to the moon. They long ago forgot about her. Don’t know you. Your daddy ain’t nothin’ but a word and the only future you see come from a box of Bally shoes you traded for two of your mamma’s rocks out in the yard. Henry and Midget backin’ you up like thugs in the rope-and-barbed-wire collars you made for them. A hundred windows covered in aluminum foil watchin’ you like eyes stand on the grassless ground.
You take those shoes down to some fancy-ass shoppin’ mall by the Quarter. The dollar you spend on a streetcar is the last green you have. Ten minutes later, that worn box of shoes you was gonna return for a hundred dollars — like that man said — is dumped out on the street along with your ole mongrel ass. But you don’t cry.
Why would you?
Don’t take that streetcar. You walk. All damned day. It’s a day from Calliope.
It’s dark when you get back. You remember. You thinkin’ about it all tonight with the sirens and the spotlights and them ghostful sounds.
It was Friday and Calliope was workin’ plenty down the cross streets. Strawberries’ heads bobbin’ in white men’s Lexuses and Hondas. Boys you once knew jacked up as hell, wide-eyed and watchin’ for drugheads to slow down and make that deal. Shit made out of flour and toilet water.
Room a hotbox when you crawl up the fire escape. Television on, playin’ BET and Aaliyah. She on a sailboat but dead. Like your mamma. You can smell Mamma now and you want to shake her awake, have her find people she know but you don’t, to get somethin’ to eat. Your belly all swole up after four days without food. You hungry and you know you need it. It hurt to even swallow.
Knock on the door. Ole man who you seen your mamma kneel before on the stairwell is smilin’ at you with a wrench in his hand. He tell you he hooked you up, but then he see your mamma, nothin’ but a hidden hump, and you duck under his arm as he walk back and puke on hisself.
Five days out of juvie, you back with a forty-year-old woman callin’ herself your grandmamma. You only know her as a woman your mamma would see and turn the other way to spit. Your grandmamma don’t like you. Make you run around like you work for her, makin’ corner deals by the Stronger Hope Church. Bringin’ her weed pipe to her with copies of
Jet
and
Star.
But you got a place on a small couch next to your twelve-year-old uncle who has fits and drools on himself when he don’t take his pills.
They got food, too. Cold Popeyes and cans of green things you ain’t never tasted. You gain a little weight, start pocketin’ bus money she give you to go to school, and buy a dictionary, even though you don’t know most of the words in it. You want to be like the silver mask on the bus signs. Diabolical. He don’t have no eyes or a body, just a silver face. God? You’d heard about him comin’ from the Calliope and how he makin’ rhymes from all the words he know.
Sometime when you on the corner, hearin’ your own beat and bounce in your head, rhymin’ for fifty cents for some hustler to smile, you see Dio’s face on a passin’ bus. He comin’ back. He’ll hear you.
One night you find a white girl and you rob her with a knife you made from an oak tree splinter. Don’t feel bad. She’s pretty fucked up and lookin’ for some more shit to fill her head. You scare her good and she runs away. With that money, you start it all.
Thirty-two damned dollars. Water into wine, what Teddy always say.
You buy a minimixer with a dual cassette made for a kid and a beat tape. You got a microphone about the size of your finger. But it’s all you need to make your own.
It’s all you do. Sleep on Grandmamma’s couch, run her business, run her drugs a bit, and make them tapes. You sell them. They cost you a dollar at Rob’s; you sell ’em for three. Pretty soon — we talkin’ weeks, man — you known. Calliope ain’t no galaxy; it’s a planet. It’s your planet. You grabbin’ your toy and hittin’ Friday-and Saturday-night block parties and you eatin’.
Then — don’t know how — Teddy Paris finds you at that Claiborne corner with your dogs. Kids swallow his Bentley and mirror rims. You don’t. You hang, till he call you over and offer you a ride. At first you don’t, everybody workin’ you. Everybody a freak.
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.
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 borrow $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.