Bliss (6 page)

Eva was also unsettled because she’d only just heard about Sunny.
I’m losing it. Losing my ear, losing my connections
. Eva’d been locked down in the Bronx, in an ancient producer-DJ’s state-of-the-art basement studio, trying to revive the career of Miz Novymber, a woman who’d been a so-so success as an MC. In the late eighties, the girl had rapped over an atomic bass line about loving the black man, about loving oneself, about buying black, and about not calling people “bitches” or “niggas.” Miz Novymber rose to the top in fluorescent fatigues while Eva—who’d believed completely in the lyrics and the music—zealously assisted the A & R guy who okayed the fatigues and plotted the charge. When he moved back to Charleston to open a restaurant with his point money, Eva’d stepped into his shoes like they’d been hers all along.

But by 1994, the girl MC’s ghostwriter boyfriend was writing dick raps with titles like “Sweet Rock in the Honey” It’s not like Eva had any-thing against dick raps or against dicks themselves, she just wanted the music to make her feel something.

Scare me, shit. Make me hot, offend me, something. Just don’t be half-assed. Don’t be weak
.

Eva’d been deep in love with late-eighties hip hop—Public Enemy, Eric B. & Rakim, Salt ‘n’ Pepa, Doug E. Fresh. Back then, hip hop had the thick limbs of an infant the village was trying to raise, and possibilities for big change seemed endless. The music was all grown up by 1994—Nas’s ill
Illmatic
, Biggie’s
Ready to Die
, Snoop’s “Gin & Juice”—husky and loud with the love of those who’d stood up and cared for it early on. But Eva thought rap could die at any moment. It was too vulnerable to execs and artists shearing luscious roughness off songs and beats, and too much a pawn of wannabe moguls still in the dope and/or extortion game. By the mid-nineties, hip hop had been seduced by America itself. The U.S. pop machine inhaled the music, then exhaled the smoke in which kids swayed and jumped with the gusto of those aware of but detached from the forensic files of the crimes that set hip hop in motion.

Eva’s reaction to the world’s newfound love of the music was split. It was great: the money, the acceptance, the pride-by-proxy of
invention. It was terrible: the exploitation, the watering down, the idea that hip hop was being enjoyed by people who had only a tangential way of relating to it. People wanted to touch parts of it, love parts of it—people who didn’t know anything about hip hop before Run-D.M.C. In the eighties, Eva believed you had to know where you’re from to know where you’re at. Had to know about obscured African-American firsts and slave revolts not mentioned in high school history books and about the financial rape of black musicians by the ever-strong cartel of Whites in Charge of Money and Music and Information Dissemination. Had to
fervently
know all of it and more, or you didn’t have the right to love hip hop, let alone be
in
it. Things became more complicated when hip hop won, though, was no longer the underdog, and had gotten Eva and lots of other people crazily paid. It became more complicated for Eva when she could imagine the end of it more clearly than she could recall the beginnings.

But rhythm and blues, on the other hand, had been around for so long, Eva was certain it would be around forever. Eva was certain that by trying to find a singer, she was on her way back to the future.

So, as she’d done with rappers, Eva paid attention only to a pre-selected group of singers. She listened to no unsolicited demos—paid attention mostly to phone calls from her company’s regional radio reps. Some of them had side businesses as showcase promoters. These neighborhood treasure hunters booked nightclubs or community centers. They charged singers a fee to perform, and charged admission. Folks paid good money to be swept up in a young person’s desire to be found and celebrated for the part of themselves they believed most golden.

Some regionals paid their mortgages with showcase profits. Others, on a religious mission to get a pre-superstar signed, went broke trying to interest towns deafened to raw talent by local radio station playlists and national video channels. This was the kind of ardent regional rep Eva had been. Down to her last $100—in Chicago, and again in Fresno—Eva stayed at it because to be the anointing angel, the one with “an ear,” to become the manager of a still-grateful artist,
or to be in A & R and bring songs to life, was a dream as specific and seductive as an artist’s own.

Even the regionals I trust to bring me news of someone making waves in a good-size city have been bringing me bullshit
. By the time she got to Cannery Row, Eva needed more than just a singer. She needed a maniac—someone consumed with succeeding. An obsessive who’d reneged on debts and alienated family with dreamy talk and dead-end jobs and the audacity to press up his own discs and sell them at swap meets. Eva needed a new R & B singer with the heart of an old-school MC.

And it was on a hellish cell connection from that basement Bronx studio that she first heard about Sunny. Tired of Zapp-y samples blasting from the tiny, mighty speakers, Eva was damn near begging, trying to convince an older but still starry R & B star to release a bar of his from an ancient slow jam about making love last forever and ever. The old song had been a regional hit, and Eva was fiending for some old-school, underived bounce.

The Memphis star said no in the end, but teased Eva about Sunny. He scolded Eva for being “old” and “late,” and for not being up on this new California sensation, this chick flattening crowds for free in city parks. “Blowing minds is what’s she’s doing,” the old star said. “Singing from her gut while you sit on your ass. I love money like the next nigga, but your little—what? Forty grand?—for some rap that’s not even gonna hit? Gon’ make me look like I
need
money? Where’s your head, anyway? Need to be in Cali is where you need to be.”

All Eva could do was say, “I hear you,” and press OFF. She was twenty-nine, and feeling like a senior citizen in hip hop.

I’ll show a motherfucker “late”

Eva could buy clothes, and she always had her passport on her. She called her assistant to arrange a ticket. And the traffic from the Bronx to JFK International hadn’t been bad at all.

On the pier off Cannery Row, Hakeem leaned against bleachers set up in front of a restaurant called Bubba Gump Shrimp Company Restaurant & Market. He drank red wine from a plastic cup.

“Looky here,” Hakeem said. “Eve arrives in Eden.” Eva and Hakeem had spent two room-serviced weekends together during the early nineties while working on an album that only they believed in until it spawned three number one singles and a Best New Artist Grammy. Hakeem mostly remembered the way Eva’s mouth felt. Took some pride in the fact that while everyone else took in her body he could look at her lips and feel his joint jump in his pants.

“And I got your apple, too,” Eva said.

Hakeem smiled. He was pleased, as always, to be in the heat of Eva’s snappy attitude. She proved to him that the music business was where the top girls migrated. The hardest, fiercest, strongest girls. Whether ugly or okay or bizarrely attractive, they were mission-minded and liked glamour, which made them unsuitable for marriage and unlikely to want it until their uteruses had damn near scaled over from a lack of babies. Hakeem had to respect that.
Tough
, he thought,
to be a chick in this game
. Hakeem waved his arm toward the food and souvenir stands. “All-natural everything, baby,” he said, bullshitting, like he’d arranged it that way, to her special tastes. “Wine’s organic. Just for
you
.”

“As fucking if. Unless they got some organic Scotch. Who you here to see?”

“There’s just Sunny worth the drive. But play coy. It’s cute on you.”

Hakeem and Eva walked along the pier mall, ended up before a creaky bandstand, and then walked to the left edge of the rapt crowd.

Sunny sat on a stool onstage, guitar on an improvised stand next to her. A long, bushy braid hung over each breast.
Overalls over a tie-dyed tank top. Feet filthy and bare. Toe rings. Jeez. Take a bath
. From where Eva stood, Sunny’s left arm seemed painted in fresco with reds, golds, and blues. Then Sunny got to a rising part of the last chorus, pushed patchy bangs from her eyes, and stepped away from her seat. She belted notes a cappella, and minus a mike, like it was the first time she’d sung the words. Like it would be the only time.

Eva thought that folks could probably hear Sunny in Spain.

She had never heard anything so full and sweet.
Like boiled-down
sap from a tall, thick tree. Like that crystallized-to-amber rock candy. Sun’s voice surging soft at first, then hard, and certain of her volume and range. The girl takes bottomless breaths. No worry—not before the highest or the lowest note. Heart’s on her sleeve, too. Her whole body’s heart. I feel it, so they’ll feel it—feel like they’re living
.

Thump fucking thump-thump-thump
.

Happy-ass critics’ll reach for words and they’ll come up with Crucial. They’ll say her shows are Sticky, warm as blood. Sunny. Dirty bare feet and all
.

Eva was glad she could hear Sunny because she knew that no matter how loud and clear Sunny sang, not all on the pier could hear. No matter how healthy their eardrums.

Eva knew you were deaf to Sunny unless you were young enough to romanticize soft rape. Deaf unless you still craved being blindfolded, kidnapped, and persuaded in 4/4 time of your waning conviction that love is real/love is pain/love is all/love is nothing. Couldn’t hear Sun unless you still had the heart strength of brightly dressed poor folks yelling, “These. Are. The. Good. Times,” while paying $6 for a short bottle of German beer. Stone-deaf to Sunny unless through closed eyes you could see your lover’s face in the low, moaned verses of another

For Eva, Sunny was a pealing bell.
Thank God
, she thought.
Thank God
she felt—a slight shudder through her back and thighs, a desire to stretch her limbs, to think lonely thoughts, and to dance.
I was almost dead. Should’ve known somebody would bring me back. Music
does not
fail Somebody’s song always comes up from the cracks
.

Eva’d been in the music business for what seemed 101 years, seen too many artists chase speedballs of fame and fear with coke and cognac and quaaludes and crank. Seen artists piss away cash so plentiful it seemed as pink and yellow as Monopoly money.

This is work. I’m at work. I can hear her, though
. On the pier, Eva swayed only barely to Sun’s sound, keeping her excitement in check.

Every week, since bands were white and hairsprayed and named after cities, Eva’d perused music trade magazines, burned her irises searching for bullets next to charting singles and watching for bullets
in makeshift discos. She worked for people whose son’s tuition and wife’s new Jaguar depended on how much sadness or glee or anger Eva could milk in the studio and market to colleagues over cocktails. Eva’s own retirement and supersoft Italian boots depended on what MTV did with the video and what mix-tape DJs did with the B-side and what the urban black press did with the sex and “negativity” and what the mainstream white press did with the previous arrests. Eva was tired, had grown up and gotten wise enough to know that unless you were still open to at least the idea of purity, there was only silence from Sunny’s mouth, even as it stretched into a long and long-lasting O.

Eva was grateful, if only for ten or twelve seconds, to be among the lucky ones for whom Sunny bellowed the note. Sunny’s eyes were closed, head tilted to the left like she was listening to her painted shoulder. Like Sunny’s body whispered messages to her soul for interpretation. Fingers curled loosely at her sides, her thick contralto bent the tail end of phrases like petals. Her knees bent slightly. Sunny sang.

Then she collapsed to the floor.

The crowd gasped. Hundreds of necks stretched cobra-curious, hypnotized.

After ten seconds, Sunny got to her knees smoothly and sat on her heels. “Imagination,” Sunny said solemnly. “Imagination! Who can sing your force?” Her face was raspberry-flushed and grime-striped. “Or describe the swiftness of your course?”

Eva didn’t realize then that Sunny was paraphrasing Phillis Wheatley. Sunny was fascinated and inspired by the poet, and within a year, Sunny’s love for Wheatley would be a part of a list of quirks chronicled in newspapers and music magazines, a literary inspiration bolded in the label bio and whispered to reporters before interviews. That Wheatley was Sunny’s muse sparked renewed interest in the poet and branded Sunny as deep and thoughtful and more interesting than more conventional nineties bare-midriffed R & B singers. Sunny would come to be considered, especially by the white press, the kind of guitar-toting black eccentric they could comfortably chat with. And
due to Sunny’s early vocal rawness, her songwriting ability, and the intellectual value placed on that by the rock music critics that dominate pop journalism, Sunny would be deemed a more light, “pretty,” MTV-friendly version of Tracy Chapman—and so as much artist as product. To the black music establishment and to most African-American critics (before the embrace of her by the mainstream was complete, and so by definition, suspicious), Sunny was regarded as earthy and positive and obviously light-skinned enough to be chosen as special by editors and photographers and fashion designers.

Still on her knees in Monterey, Sunny bent forward and put her forehead on the boards. Then she swept her arms over the floor of the stage and behind her, palms upturned.

On the pier’s planks, many in the audience hurried to copy Sunny. They folded themselves into
balasana
, the Child’s Pose. The most submissive yoga position of all.

They’ll say it, and they’ll be right—they’ll say Sunny is the Real Thing
.

“Close your mouth, girl.” Hakeem ran a knuckle down the back of Eva’s neck.

Eva had been standing there with her mouth open. The crowd was multiracial, young. College kids and street kids. Parents with pre-teens. At least half of the spectators were down, foreheads on the pier.