Soul Siren (3 page)

She says they stopped by the nightclub one evening, and under the flashing red and blue lights, surreal with no music on and an empty dance floor, she undressed him until he stood before her completely naked.

Tree trunk legs, a chest like a menacing storm cloud, wide and dark.
He towers over me,
she thought. She went to embrace him, and his massively thick arms completely enveloped her, his dark brown cock hot against her short belly and so long that its red bulb brushed the under curve of her left breast. When she lay down and opened her legs for him the very first time on the blanket of their coats, the size of him simultaneously scared her and thrilled her. She gasped as more and more of him pushed into her vagina, but she couldn’t take him all the way in. She says that making love to Easy was like swimming underneath docks, her shoulders gated by the thick posts of his arms, lying in the shadow of that chest, and he rammed like a bull inside her until a hot stream of his spunk poured into her like a flood. She says she came the first time they slept together, but she never did again.

“You hurt me when we try,” she told him.

Easy had dropped his eyes to the floor. Erica didn’t go into how he had no concept of foreplay, of seduction, that after a few kisses and a couple of hugs, he was ready for his jackhammer performance. She claimed he was simply too long and thick for her, which may well have been true, and though he lost out on sex, it was an explanation that consoled his childish ego.

They didn’t sleep with each other anymore, but it didn’t put an end to their sexual involvement. They needed each other for business. By now, there was a buzz in the clubs about Erica, and she had a use for her manager. Carson also knew he had a good thing, too good to get ruined by spats and atmosphere. I suspect what happened between them was Erica’s idea, and it was this: Easy had installed a two-way mirror that looked out on the dance floor. “Check this out!” he’d giggle, a kid with a new toy, showing how no one could see into the side office unless he switched a specific set of lights on the glass. Several of us warned him it would be pointless to have it if he didn’t shut up about it.

Erica knew about the glass. And it was perfect for her to give Easy a very different kind of performance. She would give him an informal message earlier in the day, “Video night tonight,” or ask me to pass it on to him with a word or a phone call, thinking they were both cute. He’d know to be in the club ahead of her that evening.

She brought casual lovers there after hours, never anyone serious. She put something on the stereo system, and as her man of the evening pulled her into a clinch, she always suggested, “No, no, over here…It’s sexy over here.” Here on the black leather couch, where she could urge her man to sit down, and then fall backwards into his lap, pushing herself against his groin. A tug of the zipper, and her dress was a satin halo around her hips, her breasts practically spilling out of her bra cups. Fingers checked her erect dark nipples, pinching them, rubbing them urgently, and as Erica’s mouth opened in a gasp, she half rose to ease down her soaked panties, the hand of her lover slipping down from her midriff to her inner thigh.

She opened her legs much wider than she needed to, hooking them behind his ankles as his fingers strummed her clitoris and felt the shining wet lips of her pussy. Craning her head back to kiss her man, the lift of her ribs like the spread of dove’s wings with the arch of her back, and there was the sweet flex of her thigh muscles as she opened her legs still wider, and his fingers disappeared into her vagina.

Kissing him, tasting him, one eye open and staring ahead, her man always thinking it was a turn-on to see the two of them in the mirror. And behind the glass was Easy. I’ve caught the fingerprint smudges of that wide hand on the glass, evidence that he must have leaned against it, his hungry concentration so intense, his want so close to its object of desire but separated from her, his other fist kneading that huge cock she said he had, brown flesh reddening, veins like tree roots into the black bush of his pubic hair, his testicles contracting into a tight round ball of skin.

And now the couple had progressed to the patch of carpeted floor in front of the couch. Erica’s mouth was open in a kind of plea as her face appeared to him upside down, eyes shut as her orgasm made an exquisite warning deep in her core, gathering strength, her fingers clawing into her date’s chest as she struggled to raise her knees higher, and her lover’s swollen penis sunk into her again and again, Erica’s breasts quivering with the momentum.

“See me! See me! Ahhhh—ahhh—ahhh!” she chanted. Her date assumed she was speaking to him, taking it as a prompt to be even more aroused by her coming. “I see you, babe,” he groaned back. And with a final groan, the dam inside him would burst. Or a guy would pull out of her and shoot streams of his sticky warm sauce onto her breasts and stomach. Or one night, her man reared up out of her, calling for her to please take him into her mouth, and Erica gripped him in one confident motion and sucked him in, digging her fingers into the base of his cock, making it swell even more as he cried out with his release. Behind the glass, stifling a tortured whimper, Easy unravelled. I could never find Easy Carson attractive, but I think if I saw him that way, the great muscled tower of him naked like that and stroking himself in worship of Erica, I believe I would have found him at least briefly…noble. It sounds peculiar to use that word for it, but to me it’s right. Or maybe it’s because I thought for the longest time we could all be better because of Erica.

I knew what she did in that club for him, or if you want to be harsh in your judgement,
to
him. I knew her little suggestive smiles when her date wasn’t looking, her eyes searching for contact behind the glass, how she actually enjoyed him watching her like this and how it reinforced her upper hand in their relationship. Because one night I didn’t pass on the message to Easy, and the spectator in the office behind the two-way mirror was me.

T
he loft space. I am back in the loft space often when I dream. It’s peculiar, but I don’t castigate myself over and over for the studio. No, it’s the loft that plays a loop in my head. Nights when I can see the framed posters of Blue Note album covers for Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk, when I have to involuntarily smile again at the black lacquer bust of Beethoven. What am I doing here? I’m making mistakes. I know enough not to touch the dead body at my feet, but I still make fatal errors.

It is someone else who did this, not you. That’s what you have to tell yourself. Emotional detachment. You’re going to find what you came for and go, because that’s what you do. You’re Michelle, and you clean up the messes. You’re loyal.

I go through a mental checklist of what I’ve touched without gloves, still dithering whether to leave them be since I’m a regular visitor here, or to wipe them clean. I opt for wiping them, erasing my presence here tonight. I will be careful, I will be so careful.

And as I rifle anxiously through the drawers wearing my latex surgical gloves, a onetime friend cold at my feet behind the couch, I curse under my breath and chant that I did it for you, Erica, I did it all for you….

Beginnings

I
t was ironic
that Easy Carson, projecting all his gangsta rap executive bluster and never dreaming of backing it up, became a target for Jamal Knight. Because Knight was
the real deal
. As much effort as Easy put into his bad boy front Knight dedicated to his own illusion of respectability. He had a handsome square face of pecan colour and light brown eyes, a thick moustache above his ready smile of caps, and he favoured Hugo Boss suits. I have been told that he owned nice cars but made sure that he never drove himself—not because he wanted to push an image with a chauffeur but to avoid any police harassment. He didn’t like being pulled over. If he had to be ordered out of the car, he would suffer it in the role of a passenger. If cops were going to dream up a BS charge then it could stick to someone else’s licence and not his own.

Jamal Knight was actually a mere two inches taller than me and not a muscular guy, but he exuded violence in a way that Carson’s bulk never could. I was told that he attacked people who wronged him like a rabid dog. The person who told me this walks with a metal crutch and moves in a limping palsy gait, suffering permanent neurological damage. He had made the mistake of trying to attack Knight with a beer bottle over a gang slur.

“Man smiles a lot,” says another former associate. “When he stops smiling, someone will bleed.” Knight had taken over whole blocks with the old stand-by of the protection racket. When a storeowner lay with his face on his floor tiles and his arm pinned behind his back, Knight often informed him, “Look, even if we kill you, man, you’re still going to have to pay.”

And Easy Roller Records owned recording studios in Jamal Knight’s Brooklyn neighbourhood.

While Easy couldn’t relate to women and had trouble asking them out, Jamal thought he was smooth, Brooklyn’s new improved Samuel L. Jackson, taking his dates to the Rainbow Room and then up to the Empire State Building roof. Erica told me that she did find Knight attractive, even clever and fun to talk to. He told funny self-deprecating stories, accidentally locking himself out of his house (when, of course, he was never alone) or having to endure brothers who were dull tourists from Georgia on a flight home. But she had also heard the anecdotes of his real business, and they repelled her. “I don’t want to go out with some criminal,” she said.

Still, she found herself in a long conversation with him in Easy’s nightclub when the place was hopping. Erica said that Jamal managed to cast doubt on his reputation by pretending he didn’t know about it, that he must be a victim of nasty gossip. I saw him lead her towards the cloakroom, and Erica says that in the darkness, they began kissing, that Knight was a good kisser, stroking her chin and not rushing things. But he thought he didn’t have to.

“We should get back,” said Erica.

“Oh, come on,” Knight told her with a laugh, “I’m not settling for just
that
.”

Erica pulled back, and Jamal Knight’s face was still trying to be smugly charming.

“Why shouldn’t you settle for that?” she snapped.

“I thought there was an understanding,” he replied, which pretty much explained everything to her. Not
we
have an understanding, the two of them. He said: I thought
there was
an understanding.

There was a lounge area near the second bar off the dance floor where you could actually hear yourself talk and it was nice to sit and chill. Easy was there with his pals, a few other people, including myself, getting numb on my fifth rum and Coke. I was sober enough to watch Erica march up to us, and in one swift move, she grabbed the old-fashioned grey phone that sat on the bar counter. She ripped the receiver of hard plastic and metal right out of the unit and began pistol-whipping Easy Carson with it, shouting all the time.

“
You fucking son-of-a-bitch!
You pimp me out like that? Where do you get off?
You want to pimp me out?
This how you manage your artists, you lazy-ass fucking pimp? Go solve your own goddamn gangsta shit! You have the nerve to—”

It would have been comical, this girl of about five foot four, wailing that phone receiver on that huge man who was cowering under her blows—if not for her volcanic rage, and the revolting and even potentially dangerous situation he had put her in.

“Erica!” pleaded Carson, and then he shouted,
“Owww!”
Because she had hit him right on the skull, and he was starting to bleed. And still she kicked and swung the phone club in her hand. “Erica, listen, I just figured you two would hit it off, never meant anything by it or—”

“He—said—you—had—an—understanding—” Every word punctuated with a blow of the phone. A couple of the guys came out of their stupor on the couch and rushed forward to pull her off, which prompted, “Get off me! Let me go! I’m gonna kill this bastard!”

Easy Carson was busy panting and holding his head, saying over and over, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

I went to bed that night thinking: Well, that’s it. They had a deal together, but she’d find an excuse to slip out of it. I proved once again that I didn’t have the mind of a record producer or a star. By Wednesday morning over orange juice and toast, Erica said to me, “Mish, let’s go see that stupid tree of a man.” She wasn’t going to break her deal. In the industry, his little stunt would become gossip but any breach of contract would be a point of fact. It wasn’t the kind of history you wanted to carry with you when you tried to sign with Warner or Brown Skin Beats. She still needed Easy Roller Records if only for a while.

She confronted him with me in tow, and Easy, doing his best to keep what dignity he had left in front of his staff and buddies, ushered us politely but stiffly into his big office with the plush sofa, the wet bar and the PlayStation hooked up to the forty-inch TV in the corner.

“Erica—”

“Just let me get through this, please,” she cut through him. “What I did last night—”

“Was justifiable, babe, completely,” he said. “You within your rights, but I’m just sayin’ I thought you two would hit it off, I never meant to give Jamal an impression you was—”

“Easy.”

He knew he’d better stop.

“I lost it, okay?” Erica gave a great sigh. “That was really stupid, Easy, but I wasn’t very…smooth about telling you off. It’ll make us both look like fools. So this is what we are going to do.”

He was listening intently now, because the local media had heard about the bust-up in the club and was phoning the reception, wanting to know what had happened. He had so far ordered “no comments,” which only left the press free to speculate.

“Whatever you tell me, I’m still gonna have that fool Knight on my ass wanting to cut into our business,” grumbled Easy.

“That’s not Erica’s problem!” I protested, but she gave me a look to say it was all right.

“Jamal will leave you alone,” said Erica. “You’re going to pay him a different way.”

Carson forgot himself and lost his temper. “You want me to pay? How—”

“Yes,”
she hissed. “And you’ll do it because it’s the smart move. Look, Easy, you are sitting on a couple of these recording studios out in Brooklyn, and half the time you’re bitching about the maintenance—the roofs, the plumbing in the johns, whatever. You are going to sell these buildings to Jamal, and he will lease them back to you at very generous rates. You want him out of the music business? Well, I talked him into real estate. Your cleaning contractor, your maintenance contractor, all of ’em, will be your choices. It’s a clean break, and it’s only going to come around once. Take it.”

I could almost see the gears moving behind Easy’s forehead. As I said before, Easy was not the sharpest businessman, but he had an animal cunning, and he knew that if Jamal Knight craved respectability, their new relationship meant Knight would no longer have a victim but a tenant. He would gradually learn to solve any problems in the future with lawyers, not baseball bats.

“What about us?” he asked. “What about that whole bust-up in the club? How you gonna sprinkle magic fairy dust on that whole scene?”

Erica frowned as if he was being a bore. “Easy, you honestly think anyone was listening closely to what I was saying? They were paying more attention to me wailing on you.”

“And you did a damn good job of it, babe.”

Her voice yanked firmly on the leash she now had on him. “You
said
it was justifiable.”

He nodded, swallowing hard. I noticed that the phone on his desk had been moved to the bookshelf behind him.

“This is how we play it,” said Erica. “You have your buddies leak the word that I was pissed you were going to sign Kelly—” Kelly was one of the regular backup singers the producers used. “You were going to let her have a couple of my studio musicians while I’m busy cutting the album. So I came in and lost it. You make out that Kelly and I can’t stand each other…”

Easy and I both traded looks of startled wonder. She had clearly thought out all the angles. “But you’re not—you’re not going to look good from spin like that!” he argued.

Erica laughed. “I am going to look
very
good, Easy. Your label gets in the press, a little opera with the R&B, and you even have reporters licking their chops over the idea of a catfight. Look, I’d rather play a diva than a chump. Or a whore. Do I have to say it, Easy?”

Carson met her eyes and then looked away once more to the blotter. Did she have to say it? That he better not ever try such an ugly stunt again? No, she did not.

As Erica and I left, I told her how I was amazed that she had managed to talk Easy into giving up his buildings like that.

“Thank
your
Dad for me next time you talk to him,” she explained. “Your sixteenth birthday party, he started talking to me about how the only sure investment is real estate. The man must have learned something from building all those houses. Your Dad’s really smart, Mish.”

“Yeah, he is,” I said idly.

Erica had always been sharp—sharp enough to know that once you have a lot of money, you have to learn how to hang on to it. But I was still thinking about the deal she had cooked up for the others. It seemed to me that Carson hadn’t properly thought it through. Yes, Erica and I were both so young, but even then I knew it was better to be a landlord than a tenant. Maybe Easy figured selling the studio buildings was more appealing than having his legs broken.

“In six months, Jamal Knight won’t be a problem anymore for Easy. I did him a favour. I did us all a favour.”

“How do you get
that
?” I asked.

“Mish, all these guys think about is tomorrow, they never think about the day after tomorrow. The authorities are planning this major new road to connect Jervis Street to Stone Concourse over in Bedford Stuy. Guess where it runs through? Anyone reading a paper with a map and a felt marker can draw a line right through Easy’s buildings.”

“Holy shit!”

“Hey, don’t worry, Michelle. Do you honestly believe Easy Carson or Jamal Knight read
The New York Times
? Do you think they even pick up
The Post
? I remember reading about it because I was scouting around in the papers for the new apartment. So in six months, the government will knock on Jamal’s door and say, hey, we’re taking these whether you like it or not, here’s your compensation. Which, of course, will be below market value, but he’ll take it because he won’t have a choice. And Jamal
knows
Easy Carson would never be aware of this in advance. So Easy will look blameless. Jamal thinks I came up with the real estate scheme to fuck Easy over for his little pimping stunt.”

“Isn’t Jamal suspicious that you’d want to help him?” I asked.

“We were kissing in the coatroom so I can’t look too pissed at him, just annoyed over his expectations. The guy can understand that I don’t like to be taken for granted.”

“Jesus, after this, I’ll never take you for granted!” I said. Not that I ever did.

Erica tossed her head back and laughed, then threw an arm around me. “Ah, come on, Mish! You’re my friend. They were screwing me around, so I got them out of my way.” She shook her head. “Men. You always have to treat ’em like pets or children.”

D
o you know he begged to stay with me? He wasn’t man enough for me….

The camera moves only a little as Mr. Jones does his best to keep it on his seventeen-year-old daughter up there on the stage of Sir John A. MacDonald High School. Erica doing a cover of a Toni Braxton song, and she is wearing an ear-to-ear grin because there are amazed cheers and whoops from in between the green and black lines of the basketball and volleyball courts. I was up there, too, supposed to be helping out on backup vocals, though you can barely hear my nervous soprano voice. I was only along because Erica begged me. I’m the one off to the right, out of focus. Michelle, reliably in the background.

I think that might have been the moment when she knew—she just knew it could happen,
would
happen for her.

As with so many other stars, for Erica Jones there had always been music in the family home. Her mother’s old LPs and CDs included Chic, Al Green, Luther Vandross, Toni Braxton, Lauryn Hill, Eric Benét, Elton John, Tracy Chapman and vintage Earth, Wind and Fire. I remember being thirteen years old with Erica and another friend, all of us thinking her Mom was so cool as we danced around the kitchen to “Boogie Wonderland.” Erica’s Mom called it old music, we teased her by calling it prehistoric. But we danced happily away.

Erica’s Mom was a singer, able to make incredible harmonies with anything that was playing on the stereo. It was her father who first sat Erica down at the piano, and on the shelf was a collection as impressive as his wife’s—only it was mostly classical and jazz. Chopin, Bizet and Beethoven in the company of Lee Morgan, Charles Mingus, Art Blakey, Charlie Parker and Erroll Garner. Before becoming a dentist, Erica’s father had tried to make a living with an alto saxophone. But in all the years I stopped by the house and heard Erica singing upstairs, her mother singing something else in her back garden, I never once heard her Dad play that saxophone—always the piano. Erica told me that her Dad used to compose songs, too, but I never heard him play one on that ivory keyboard either.
She
would. Erica’s fingers would run along the keys for this or that bit of jazz fashioned by Mr. Jones, and then she would shrug over how Verve or Blue Note simply hadn’t wanted it. If I politely asked her father about them, he’d smile shyly and mutter something about “artistic taste being subjective.” I don’t want you to think the man wore his grief over failed dreams on his sleeve—not at all. He hardly ever mentioned his old life.