Joplin's Ghost (8 page)

Arturo’s ego must be screaming, Phoenix thought. She’d met him at Miami’s New World School of the Arts when they were both fourteen, and he was still one of the most dynamic dancers she’d ever seen, able to make his body defy physics. After studying dance on a college scholarship, he’d somehow ended up back in Miami managing a Domino’s Pizza. She didn’t want Arturo to blow this chance. She could take him with her, if only he’d get out of his own way. Under the table, Phoenix squeezed her friend’s hand.
Chill, sweetie. It’s just Sarge.

As Sarge beckoned Olympia through the door to tell her something privately, Arturo spoke close to Phoenix’s ear. “He’s got it twisted if he thinks I’m a sissy queen shaking in my shoes. I
will
take him outside to throw down, whether he’s your father or not,” he said. Arturo had a low-pitched, satiny voice that had always made Phoenix wish he weren’t gay.

“No stress,” Phoenix said. “It’s just trash talk, Arturo. You know Sarge.”

He pecked her lips, standing. “Only for you do I tolerate this,
chica
. Believe that.”

The dancers rushed their lunch, since no one wanted to wait for Sarge to come back, so Phoenix waited for her father alone. She pulled one of the plastic chairs up to the piano and tested the keys. Surprisingly, it was nearly in tune. She slid her foot to the sustaining pedal and ran her fingers through a hurried version of the largo from Dvorák’s
From the New World Symphony,
which had been a recital piece her freshman year in high school. Playing felt good, a chance for her fingers to dance. She hadn’t brought her red Roland AX-1 or Moog Liberation shoulder keyboards for this tour, the first time ever. But there was no substitute for a piano.

Phoenix didn’t realize Sarge was behind her until she heard his chuckle. “Haven’t heard that in a while,” he said. “Your mama would be glad to know you can still play it.”

“By heart,” she said, concluding with the stately D-flat chord.

She played better than she sang, Phoenix realized, and the thought made her spirits wane. In high school, she had told Mom she would attend one of the arts colleges that had been cramming her mailbox with solicitations by the time she was a sophomore, Juilliard included. But when Phoenix was sixteen, she decided she wanted to be a star like Janet Jackson, and Juilliard didn’t have classes on that.

The band Phoenix started in high school, Phoenix & the New Fire, hadn’t worked out, even with Sarge’s contacts and enough momentum to get bookings and a small record deal. Their two CDs got great reviews (
when
they were reviewed), but they never found an audience in R&B, pop, alternative or anywhere else. Maybe she could have stuck it out like Lenny Kravitz, waiting for the audience to find
her,
but there were plenty of bands whose music was never heard, and never was a long time. Sarge had known multiplatinum rapper G-Ronn since his first tours, so when Ronn said he was looking for an R&B singer, Sarge suggested her. Just like that. Now, Phoenix was flying solo.
And it’s a long way down by myself,
she thought.

Sarge looked at her closely. “What time did you get to sleep last night?”

“Late,” Phoenix said, guiltily. Her hair still smelled like strawberry bubble bath, and the scent irritated her now. She’d been in such a hurry to get to rehearsal that she’d barely said a word to that boy as she walked him to the door, much less offered him a number. She wished she could erase last night.

“You know better,” Sarge said, as if he knew everything. “Your voice sounds worn-out. Where’s Gloria?”

“Probably at the hotel ordering room service and watching pay-per-view.”

“Tell her to stop wasting up our money, hear? Ronn isn’t paying our tab, and nobody here is rich. Your advance has to last.”

A hundred thousand dollars had sounded like a fortune a year ago, but no more. Phoenix had banked a chunk of her first major advance so she couldn’t touch it, but she hated to think about how much of the rest she had already spent. “I’ve told her,” Phoenix said.

“You should have left her home, Phee.”

“Don’t start, Sarge.” Her cousin could be a pain in the ass, no doubt, but without Gloria, the road would be a cruel companion, beyond lonely. Sarge had agreed to Gloria’s presence on the tour, and Phoenix had agreed to give D’Real and Ronn the creative direction of
Rising
. Most days, it hardly seemed like a fair trade.

Phoenix heard the Egyptian string tracks from “Party Patrol” squall through the open doorway as Olympia queued up the CD. Although she’d heard it two hundred times, Phoenix still felt a charge when her multitrack violin solo came on the club’s speakers. Kendrick was right about this song: It was a hit-in-waiting. It didn’t all belong to her, but a piece was enough.

“The show doesn’t feel right yet, Sarge,” Phoenix said. She almost called him
Daddy,
craving comfort, but he preferred
Sarge
when they were working.

“It isn’t right. But you’ll get there. Give it a couple more hours, and come back strong in the morning. We have time to tighten it up before tomorrow night.” Sarge had promised never to bullshit her when it mattered, so she prayed this was one of those times.

“The radio stuff is really splitting my attention,” she complained.

“There’s no more radio interviews in St. Louis. You got bumped because of the blues festival. You’re a free woman until the show.”

Good. Canceled interviews would give her more time to rehearse, rest and watch a couple movies with Gloria, even if Ronn and the publicity department wouldn’t like it.
Publicity is paper,
Ronn always said. Even though she was sure Ronn had nothing to do with the shooting that killed DJ Train’s bodyguard in Brooklyn, Ronn said he’d seen a big bump in his SoundScan numbers because everybody said he was behind it. Publicity was paper, all right. If anybody knew about money in the bank, it was Ronn.

“I talked to Serena today,” Sarge said. “She’s coming out to join us in L.A., and she says she’ll stay on through New York.”

Phoenix hardly knew her two half brothers, but Serena was a true sister despite their twenty-four-year age difference. Phoenix had only seen Serena two or three times in the past few years, and she’d been begging her to come on this tour. “She said she’ll sing with me?”

“We’ll work on that. For now, she says she’ll do your hair so you won’t look so nappy.”

Phoenix laughed. Serena owned a beauty shop in Atlanta, and was a virtuoso with hair. Ronn wanted Phoenix to get a more television-friendly weave, and Serena would hook her up. At the moment, Phoenix’s blowout Afro was a curly brown-red crown reaching toward the sky, virtually untended. Not suitable for mass consumption. Ronn hadn’t said it quite that way, but that was what he’d meant.

“What about Mom?” Phoenix said.

“Call her yourself, but she still says she’s not coming until New York. Sorry, Peanut.”

No surprise there. For years, on the rare holiday occasions they all stayed in the Miami house, Mom slept in the master bedroom and Sarge hibernated in the garage he’d refinished for himself. Her parents were married only in name, and probably had been longer than she’d known. Phoenix wondered how much of her parents’ long, slow drift she could blame on her career.

“I’m gonna go hit that stage again,” Phoenix said.

“Save your voice for tomorrow night, though. Work on your moves.”

Sarge followed her through the doorway back out to the cavernous nightclub, where the bass for “Party Patrol” resounded like thunder.

Le Beat was a two-story nightclub bedecked in mirrors and shiny poles against a black dance floor and dark walls. The deejay booth lorded high over the stage like the control panel of a space shuttle. They passed the VIP section just beyond stage right, with a velvet rope partitioning off Art-Deco-style furniture, the room’s only bright colors. There might be more than five hundred people there Friday night, the club owner had told them, and the most important ones would be in the VIP section: deejays, music writers, record buyers. The airplay sentinels.

Olympia was taking Arturo and the other two dancers through the opening, which started with them lying flat on their backs, thrusting their torsos high and leaping to their feet after a B-boy-style spin. Phoenix could see that Arturo had taken Sarge’s criticism to heart: His motion was energetic and crisp, the way she remembered him at New World. His body sailed through the air, and he landed solidly, cranking his shoulders into the next move, hitting his beats. The other two dancers looked like children at play beside him. She could only imagine how lame
she
must look trying to pull off Olympia’s moves.

“Ronn knows I’m not Janet Jackson, right?” Phoenix said to Sarge.

“You don’t have to be. But trust Olympia. She understands illusion, how to make you look like you’re doing more than you are. By the way, Arturo looks good. A little discipline, and he’ll shake things up when it’s time to start shooting that video.”

“I know,” Phoenix said, smiling. Arturo’s personality clashed with hers too much for a deeper friendship, but she and Arturo had lived through a storm when their friend Jay died of AIDS complications in high school. She and Arturo had shared their first tragedy in common. “Could you just ease off on him a little, Sarge? He’s touchy.”

“Why quit a tactic when it works?” Sarge said, winking. “I’ll think about it. Listen, where are you going after rehearsal?”

“Back to the room with Gloria, I guess. Why?”

“I’m gonna make a call and set something up for you.”

“Please don’t, Sarge. I’m tired.”

“Not an interview. I want you to go to the Scott Joplin House. It’s near the hotel.”

For an instant, Phoenix was sure her father was just trying to get a rise out of her, but no smile cracked his face as he gazed at the stage. It was bad enough rehearsals and interviews were driving her into the ground, but in each new city Sarge was trying to be a tour guide, too. In Atlanta, he’d dragged her to the King Center when she’d barely gotten four hours of sleep. In Memphis, the Lorraine Motel.

“Sarge, I said I’m
tired
.”

“That’s your own fault for staying up late. It’s a state historic site. I’d go, too, but I have to work my phone. Gloria can drive you. Make her earn her damn keep for a change.”

One oversight in Phoenix’s quest for stardom had been learning how to drive. She’d better
hope
she could afford a driver one day. “OK, you’re not hearing me. I can’t be running all over the place twenty-four/seven on some kind of history lesson.”

As always, her words seemed to have no effect on Sarge, as if they were a wind gust he had to tolerate before he spoke again. “Just go for an hour. You can’t get where you’re going until you know where you’ve been, Phee.” His voice quieted as he locked their eyes. “Remember me telling you about how you played that Joplin in your sleep? And the two of us played a duet in the living room while your mom watched?”

It isn’t fair to bring up those days,
Phoenix thought.

“I wasn’t asleep. I just don’t remember it,” she said. The skin on her forearms fluttered every time Sarge talked about that night. That year came with a slew of bad memories: a long, boring hospital stay; painful therapy; and worse, seeing for the first time how fragile her mother was, understanding what a
nervous breakdown
was. That was a bad year.

And the story of the piano at the center of it all scared the hell out of her. That damn thing had almost killed her. And she’d never
heard
the pieces Sarge told her she’d played in her sleep, much less should she have been able to play them. She could hardly remember the piano anymore. If not for her family’s corroboration, she wouldn’t believe it had happened. And whatever it was, Phoenix didn’t want to nudge it to see what else might stir.

“You need to go over there and pay your respects,” Sarge said. “That man helped open the door for every one of us in music with black or brown skin. Simple as that.”

“You say that about everybody.”

“And it’s true about everybody I say it about.”

This was her punishment for hiring a former Black Panther as her manager, Phoenix thought. Hell, this was her punishment for hiring her
father
. Why was it so hard to stand up to him?
Gloria’s right. I’m too old to be such a Daddy’s girl.

Phoenix had forgotten Scott Joplin ever lived in St. Louis, and she didn’t care. She’d played a little of Joplin’s ragtime in high school as part of her classical piano curriculum, but the happy syncopation sounded like the soundtrack to old black-and-white movies, and she’d never even seen
The Sting,
the movie Sarge told her had made Joplin internationally famous. When it came to old music, Phoenix preferred blues. Or even jazz, Sarge’s favorite. Maybe Scott Joplin had been ruined for her that night when she was ten, she thought.

What if you’ll jinx yourself if you diss Scott Joplin on his home turf?
The last thing she needed before this show was a jinx.

“OK, I’ll go to the Joplin House. But this is the last diversion, Sarge. I mean it.”