Soul Siren (4 page)

When the years passed and Erica had three number ones on the Billboard chart, I was in the Jones house on a wintry afternoon for the Christmas holidays, and I put the question to him. “You and Erica’s Mom were always so supportive. Didn’t you ever try to get Erica to think of something else for a career? Like a backup, you know? Just in case?”

Mr. Jones adjusted his spectacles and stared ahead at the Christmas tree. “Didn’t have to.” And when he saw that I missed his point, he explained, “Michelle, she wanted to be a pop star. She was hell-bent on trying no matter what we said. Well, how many years of shelf life you figure they got on the charts? You see them leathery old Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger and that Sting guy and Bono doing their best to claw and hang on to their popularity! How many girls you see up there besides Madonna? And when you do, isn’t it goddamn sad?”

I didn’t believe this was really accurate or fair, but I didn’t interrupt.

“Pop music is a young person’s game, especially a young
man’s
game,” he went on. “You either hit it big right away, or you crash and burn. You’re on the clock. Erica’s making enough money now that she’ll be set for decades if she’s smart, and she is. But if she didn’t get her break—if it had never happened, or if it came and went in a one-hit blur—there would have been plenty time for her to turn it all around and start again.”

He sipped his eggnog and added darkly, “I certainly had to.”

There was nothing I could think of to respond to this, and no answer was really needed. I don’t think he was ever jealous of his little girl’s success. I don’t think he could have been more overjoyed. But in his words was a bitter contempt for the record industry machine that assumed its customer must be a child with a Ritalin attention span. This was the dragon his little girl was eager to slay, and she had to take her shot. He knew it.

“That’s why you sent her to Morgan,” I said.

He nodded gently and echoed the thought. “That’s why I sent her to Morgan.”

It would be a long while before I learned there was much more to it than that, more than even Mr. Jones knew was going on.

M
organ would be her “thesis work,” as she sometimes called him, while her first big lesson came in high school. We both learned things about ourselves back at MacDonald High in Toronto.

People don’t believe me when I say our high school experience was unique, which means they don’t believe me when I say that, despite going to school in the Nineties, hey, we were up in Canada, so no metal detectors or pat-downs in the hall. Why should there be when even in Toronto gun crime used to be so rare? They don’t believe me when I tell them we didn’t have the American-style caste system where jocks and cheerleaders ruled. It just didn’t happen that way. Maybe it’s a Canadian thing. Canadian football is so poor we sure as hell were not likely to worship players of the high school version. After all, the national sport is
hockey
. No, in an upscale neighbourhood where folks drove Beamers and Mercedes and lived in five-bedroom houses, the cool kids, as strange as it sounds, were the intellectuals.

The whole thing was reinforced by who was teaching us—a bunch of left-wing expats. I said there were damn few of us black kids, but there were teachers of colour, ones like Mr. Emeruwa who taught us Chemistry. A Nigerian, he got on the wrong side of the Biafran War in the Sixties and lost his job at his nation’s embassy in Washington, and he had nowhere to go. There was Mr. Charlton, a man with a ruddy light brown complexion whose South African accent always remained thick, who had killed for the ANC and who had fled to Canada. He used to hold up a textbook in our Political Science class and declare, “This book is published by Praeger Press, and who is behind Praeger Press? The CIA. Question
everything
you read.”

And there was Miss Ogis, an exotically beautiful Indian woman, twenty-nine years old, with long black hair and a round face who taught Math and Physics and who coached the girls’ basketball team. Every so often, because she was so gorgeous, one of the boys would make a come-on remark, thinking it was a code that only his giggling pals could understand.

Miss Ogis would flutter her lustrous eyelashes at the freshman teenager and say, “Mr. Hart, you make one more stupid comment about
Kama Sutra
or anything else like that in my presence, you will find yourself with so much trigonometry homework you’ll be collecting your pension as a senior. Clear?”

She was petite but there was something challenging in those glamorous Indian features that made the boys back off, that in one glance immediately sized you up and found you wanting. She treated Erica no different from any other student, but I think she was irritated by Erica’s popularity. In handing back a marked paper, I can remember Miss Ogis raising her voice from her desk, miffed that Erica and Debbie Farmer were softly rehearsing a number for Choir Class, “Miss Houston, can we talk about your grade or do I need to get clearance from the entourage?”

I think that’s what influenced Erica’s choice at the talent showcase, the Toni Braxton tune. She was being cheeky. And it was in the first term of our senior year when she got up on that stage and blew ’em away that things began to change. I have a copy of that videotape because I’m in it, and it’s fascinating to examine the pre-star Erica. The girl smiling nervously, not knowing what to do with her hands, not yet groomed by the record industry. The cheers reaching a crescendo as she relaxes and begins to move around the stage for her second number, doing Lauryn Hill’s “Everything Is Everything.” “Come on, y’all, sing with me!” she shouted to the students in the gym, and suddenly we were not at a little talent show under basketball hoops and near bleachers, we were at a concert, her first one.
After winter—

After winter,
sang girls standing below, moving with the beat.

Must come the spring,
sang Erica, and she let out the throttle on her voice and gave those white kids a gospel wail they had never heard before.
Change, it comes eventuallyeeee…

We had agreed that for the show, we’d each take turns backing up each other’s numbers, with me bowing out of my chance to be in the spotlight alone. As the applause went on for the Lauryn Hill cover, Deb, who was right next to me, laughed and said, “There is
no way
I’m gonna follow that!”

So while other kids could be the Great Brain or the Stoner or the shy guy who bloomed in Drama class, Erica became The Voice. She was already trying to write songs but she wouldn’t show them to anyone except me. I can recall her humming something as we sat in the hall, our backs leaned against our lockers over Spare Period, and I asked, “What’s that?”

She flashed me one of those neon smiles of hers and said, “Something of my own. Well, my Dad helped a lot with it really. Mostly the bridge. He lets me use some of his old songs to put in my own.” She laughed suddenly and added, “Sometimes I can’t remember what I wrote and what he did anymore! You really like it, Mish?”

“Yeah,” I answered, and I did. Funny to think that three years later, that snippet of music she sang for me would become “Late Night Promises.” “Do some more.”

“Nah, Deb’s coming,” she said, nodding her head towards our friend down the hall. Debbie Farmer, wearing at the moment Erica’s borrowed sweater over a peach-coloured top—one that was the same design as the top Erica bought at the Suzy Shiers store on Yonge Street last week.

“So what if she is?” I whispered.

Erica ignored my question. “What do you think, Mish? You really like it?”

“This is what I mean,” I complained. “I can barely pass Choir! Deb knows music theory—you should sing it for her.”

“Michelle,” she groaned. “Of course, Deb will like it! She likes
everything
. It’s like…she tries too goddamn hard.”

“She wants to be like you, that’s all. You know? Imitation the sincerest form of flattery and all that?”

“I’m sorry, but it’s embarrassing,” said Erica. “I like her and all, but, Jesus, girl, find your own style. Doesn’t she know I’d like her more if she thought for herself?”

“Why don’t you tell her, then?” I suggested. Then I added, “In a
nice
way.”

Erica laughed. “This is why I love you, Mish. I don’t have to tell you stuff like that. And
you
help me. You make me think.” Her face clouded as a fresh notion occurred to her. “That shit never bothers you, does it?”

“What?”

“What they say about you when we hang,” explained Erica. Then she dismissed the notion with a wave. “Forget it, it’s stupid.”

“Erica,” I said, “you trying to spare my feelings over something?”

“No, no,” she said, avoiding my eyes. “They shouldn’t talk about you like Deb. It’s not the same…I mean
you
don’t copy me, so I don’t understand the seven-point-five on the bitch-o-meter. You’re just…quiet. Always scribbling in your notebooks. Now that—that’s not fair! I sing you everything I come up with, and you never show me—”

I clutched my notebook close to my chest and leaned away from her. “Hey, I didn’t ask you about your songs!”

By now Erica was half hugging me, half trying to tear the notebook out of my arms, and Deb bounded up, calling out, “Hey, what’s going on!”

“Mish is writing porn for Jason Todd to give to his new girlfriend,” said Erica matter-of-factly. “He’s paying her to do it.”

“I am not!” I protested. “Shut up!”

“Fifty bucks,” said Erica, making up a commission price for my talents on the spot.

And Deb, so trusting, laughed and looked at me as if I would actually make a confession.

I pointed a finger at Erica. “You! You are
evil
. People believe you when you say shit like that, and I don’t know why!”

Erica was rolling on the floor, laughing away. “I know! Ain’t it great? You have to look ’em straight in the face and talk about it like you heard it on the news.”

“You love pulling stuff like that,” I said, pretending to still be disgusted with her, but I couldn’t. I never could.

Erica, making up stories just to test whether folks would believe her. Erica and her quirky sense of humour, which I suppose is another Canadian thing, when you think of a country that gave the world Mike Myers, Dan Aykroyd and Jim Carrey. And then Erica, The Voice. We reminisced about high school one night over a bottle of rum at her apartment in Manhattan, talking about teachers, talking about old boyfriends, which meant mostly hers since I only ever had two, and I learned something new about that time that helped shape her perspective. She recognised it herself.

“Alex Hardy.” She said the guy’s name like a swear. “Right after the talent show, he told everyone we slept together a couple of times. The son-of-a-bitch.”

Her first taste of tabloid gossip without the tabloid. He hadn’t breathed a word about their intimacy until she had sung those two songs up on the stage in the gym.

“You just can’t trust them,” she said. “They always want to get into your pants, then they want to advertise it.”

“What are you going to do?” I said, which was my way of asking: What
do
you do? Because I told you at the beginning: Erica Jones likes sex. A lot. I had seen her appetite outweigh her judgement over discretion plenty of times.

“Never let ’em be able to talk about it,” said Erica. “Ever, ever, ever.”

It would be a while before I learned how exactly that was done in each case, before I learned all the corollaries of this maxim and what it meant for how Erica treated men, how she lured them in but kept them at bay. I don’t think either of us dreamed it would put us both in such hot water.

O
f course, there was a backlash in school over The Voice, and since we were Erica’s crowd, we sensed and felt it first. I remember Deb, Sarah Copps and I all hanging around the Clinique counter in the Eaton’s department store at Toronto’s best-known mall, the Eaton Centre, when the peroxide bitches as we called them decided to accost us. Jasmine Dorsey, the leader, Natalie Blumenthal and Anna Wakowski.

“Hey, Deb, you did a really good job of imitating the scenery behind Erica,” said Jasmine, and she and her friends broke into a spontaneous off-key imitation of our backing vocals. Then they burst into catty giggles—it was how the game was played.

“At least we had the nerve to get up there,” snapped Debbie.

“But you backed out of following Erica, didn’t you? I know
Michelle’s
happy following her around like a puppy dog, but shit, Deb, I gave you credit for wanting to grab some spotlight for yourself.”

“I didn’t see you shaking your bony ass up on stage, Jasmine. But then I guess you’re tired of putting out in the gym. And the lights
were
on that day.”

We watched Jasmine’s eyes widen.

My one contribution to all this smartass banter was to whisper to Deb, “You got to give her a two-second delay for it to click.”

“Shut the fuck up, Brown!” Jasmine was telling me, while to Deb, she said, “You fucking—”

I saw Jasmine reach into her purse for her pepper spray. The story had gone around school that she liked to pull this trick on somebody she didn’t like. She would need it, too. Deb was a tall girl with four brothers who had taught her how to fight dirty. She’d scratch the hell out of Jasmine and yank her hair out if she got a fistful. I would be out of luck if the other girls went for Sarah and me. I had never been in a fight in my life, not even in grade school, and my mother would have been horrified if I ever was.

“Just what are you girls doing?”

Miss Ogis. It was surreal to find her here, our teacher, dressed down in a T-shirt, jeans and a denim jacket. She looked even younger in casual dress, and I wondered if she would get carded if she decided to walk into a bar. Her soft yet stern voice made every one of us straighten up even though we were on neutral territory. I don’t know if I even hid my relief.

“Jasmine was just complimenting our performance at the show,” said Deb, folding her arms and giving her enemy the thousand-mile stare.