Soul Siren (7 page)

Erica haunted a jazz club where Morgan played, a basement joint in Morningside Heights so it could pick up the college crowd, and when he was on a break, she crept over and put one of her compositions over his sheet music. To her surprise, he sat down and started to play her song as an instrumental, then ignored her bridge completely and improvised something completely different, shaking it up, showing her new paths to consider. But when she turned up on his doorstep the very next day, he told her he was busy.

“You’re not busy, you’re just reading.”

“Exactly. I’m busy reading.”

“That’s busy for you?”

“It is at the moment. I’m also drinking.”

“You got a real heavy load there,” she said.

“I’m drinking Scotch, neat.”

She stopped by his jazz club again. She fed him another composition. He used it the same way. Again, she was refused at his door. When she gave him her first try at “Late Night Promises” out of desperation, he called her at her studio apartment and, without a hello, asked, “I see you’ve decided to do some work. Get your ass over here.”

He was not only her new music teacher. Erica calls Morgan her Professor of Coping. He told her where she could buy sheet music for less, where to go for the best fruit down in Chinatown, where to find meat for curried mutton. He took her on a tour of Harlem music spots like Minton’s Playhouse and Smalls’ Paradise. He was her guide to New Yorkers’ quirky social behaviour. When she asked why everyone instantly apologised after bumping into you on the subway or on the street, he explained, “Paranoia as inspiration for good manners. No one knows what anyone’s gonna do anymore. You might get shot. And the goddamn crazy thing is—it works!”

People who knew Morgan say he loosened up around Erica. Even they wondered if something wasn’t sparking between the two, despite the difference in age. He liked to go downtown and play chess at the outdoor tables near Washington Square so they could take in the street performers. As he covered his eyes, knowing people could be heartless in their reactions, Erica sang “Late Night Promises” a capella and got five bucks in coins in Morgan’s borrowed cap. She was more delighted with the applause than the spare change. She tagged along when he spent hours at the sprawling, endless Strand bookshop. They talked. They talked music. And they mostly talked about what kind of career Erica would have, because Morgan was beginning to believe. He did, however, have his reservations.

“Pop music by definition is ephemeral, disposable,” he argued. “Listen: what is this?” And he began to hum a few bars of something.

“ ‘Round Midnight,’ ” she said promptly. “So what?”

“So that lasts. It’s delicately constructed, and it’ll stand the test of time. And it’s
good
music.” To reinforce his point, he started humming Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

“I can’t believe you cop an attitude like this!” she laughed. “They’re still melodic, they’re still popular. And there are classics that were pop tunes first! When you got started in music and heard ‘Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,’ did you think people would still love it later?”

“Hey, watch it,” he growled. “Yes, I was around, but I am not
that
old. And I’m not saying one kind of music’s superior to another. I listen to all kinds of shit. Look, Erica…” He stopped in the park, and she recognised he was being serious. “It’s just that I don’t think they’re going to
let
you be the kind of artist you want to be,” he said gently.

“Oh, come on—”

“No, you come on,” he said, and he dug into his coat pocket and pulled out her scribbled lyrics to “And You Think That Makes It All Right?,” her blistering attack on proposed compensation for descendants of slaves. She had wanted his opinion. “You think you can say the stuff you want to say?”

“You know my Dad didn’t only listen to Duke Ellington and Miles Davis,” said Erica. “We also played Bob Marley in the house.”

“I like Bob Marley, too—”

“They got artists doing political songs all the time,” said Erica.

“No, artists
say
a few things that can almost be called political,” he corrected her. “They’re forgotten ’cause they go into newspapers or magazines. Tossed out the next day or in a week. People hang on to CDs. And their songs are the tamest shit compared to what real people
think
—”

“That’s not always true, Mor—”

“Show me the hard stuff, and I’ll show a guy that’s been slapped down. Or grown tired and faded away. Nobody is saying things in their music as strongly as you want to say them, not in the commercial mainstream in between the Madonna and Snoop and Red Hot Chili Peppers shit. You want to say this stuff, and you want the music to last? To become classics? I don’t think they’ll let you. I am telling you—you want to be provocative while you climb the charts? Shake your ass, don’t speak your mind.”

“Morgan, that’s a horrible sexist thing to say!”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. I’m not saying that’s my opinion. Get a grip. At the end of the day you want to be a
musician
. A composer. You want to say things? Say it through the notes, the chords. Make
music
that’s provocative. Forget the words. Any fool can rhyme or paint a placard.”

Erica stared at him, refusing to budge from her spot on the pavement.

“Don’t give me the hurt puppy dog expression,” he said brutally. “You forfeited the right not to listen when you called yourself an artist! You’ll get people who won’t love everything you do. You’ll get asshole reviewers. Suck it up, young lady. The roller coaster hasn’t even started. Go prove me wrong.”

“Christ, you do sound like my Dad sometimes,” she told him, taking his arm.

“Your father was smart,” said Morgan. “He got out.”

“Then why’d you stay in?”

“For the same reason he sent you to me.”

Erica thought she understood. Her father wanted Morgan to teach her how to love the craft beyond the glory. It was a rather bittersweet compliment to his talents, since that kind of lesson is best learned from the one who has failed, the one who stays behind to keep watch, to hold the sacred ground. This was the “Just in case” that her father communicated to me, that if Erica didn’t make it, she could keep the music. If she did succeed, then Morgan’s training would prove immeasurably beneficial. She walked with her arm linked through his, humbled by the knowledge, both of them saying nothing for a couple of minutes.

“Why don’t you have a girl?” she asked.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Just curious.”

“
Noooo,
you’re being nosy,” he growled. “And don’t think I’ve never noticed the wheels grinding with you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I want to go play chess,” said Morgan, and the subject was dropped.

She admitted to me that she did creep into his apartment late one evening after that walk in the park. The freight elevator didn’t tip him off to her arrival because he was in the shower. Morgan stepped out of the bathroom, he told me later, to walk around and get out of the cloud of steaming vapour, towelling himself off as he paced around his apartment with only one lamp on near the television. And there was Erica standing in front of him.

“Hi, Morgan,” she purred.

He towelled the nape of his neck, not bothering to cover himself up. Erica told me he was “an impressive hunk of man standing like that.” Yes, he was old enough to be her father—he was her father’s contemporary, after all—but his body had chunks of compact muscle, his broad chest with a sprinkling of silver grey hairs, his wide smooth thighs the most youthful part of him. His cock was for the most part in shadow, his ball sack visible and hanging down like a tiny velvet pouch.

“What is this?” he said, sounding more disappointed than outraged. “What are you doing here?”

“What do you think?” she asked.

She knelt in front of him, but he didn’t move. He looked at her as you would a child acting out.

“Erica…”

She reached her hands around and felt his buttocks, surprisingly firm to her touch, her caress working the circumference of his waist until her spread fingers rested delicately on his hips. His penis sprang to life, and he was thin but long. Erica let out a slow, steady warm breath, and his cock stirred, hardening until he was a hot brown pillar, and she saw him grit his teeth but still show no embarrassment or modesty. Or affection.

“This is not,” he said firmly, “the way I want or need to be compensated.”

She grabbed him—literally grabbed him—at the base of his cock, and while the motion surprised him, tugging him off his heels and forward a step, she didn’t hurt him. “That’s a shitty thing to say! Take it back.”

Amazingly, he said, “No.”

Her fingers softened on his flesh, and she began to stroke him, keeping him hard, her other hand feeling the strength in his chest, lightly dancing over the silvery hairs.

“You don’t think I feel something for you?” she asked indignantly.

“You want to bring me down just like you’ve done with other fools,” said Morgan. “I know your type. Yeah, sure, hon, it’s an enormous compliment that you thought of me for your recreational amusement, but I told you, I can see the wheels turning. It just sticks in your craw that you’re getting all these lessons, and I haven’t tried to feel you up. Doesn’t it?”

She couldn’t speak. No man had called her on this in her entire young life so far, and here was Morgan, naked as a babe but wiser than sin, catching her out. She took him into her mouth.

He laughed cruelly. “Come on, stop. You won’t be happy until I fit your definition of an asshole. Everybody must want something, huh? Is that it? So you came out to prove it with me? ’Kay, Erica, I do think you’ll become famous. You got the talent. And you’ve got the attitude already. You don’t need folks swarming around you, begging for favours to make you jaded. You’re there.”

He stood there waiting for her to deny it. She didn’t. She sucked him, tenderly cupping his balls in the palm of one hand. At last, she let him go.

“Morgan, I’d believe you if you weren’t hard as rock.”

He lifted her to her feet and kissed her then, hard, passionate, wet and presumptuous. Erica laughed. Not at him but because his beard tickled her chin. She found herself being lowered onto the couch, and as she felt the muscles of his back, he pushed up her skirt and stripped off her panties, his light brown hand with its pianist fingers pressing on her mound, her juices coming in a tide of astonished lust. Erica was trying to pull her thin top over her head but got as far as her breasts before he entered her in a rush, and she keened loudly. She was willing his hands on her breasts, to feel her nipples as he thrust harder and harder inside her until she screamed, and the echo bounced off the dark brick chasm of the freight elevator shaft.

“Morgan, honey, come into me—”

With a groan, he rolled away.

“Morgan?”

“No.”

She saw that his cock was still hard, his chest heaving, the tiny white hairs glinting in the illumination from the lamp, and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his eyes shut tight as he struggled for control. She thought he might ejaculate then and there as he fought his own desire. He had taken her to an exquisite high then had torn himself away from the brink of his own release. She didn’t get it.

“You were so good,” Erica was whispering. “Let me make you—”

“No…”

“Come on,” she said, reaching out to touch his penis before his hand gently but firmly intercepted it. “Is it because of—?”

“No, not because you’re his daughter,” he groaned. “None of that shit. You got me as far as this, okay? Satisfied?”

“No,” she pouted. “I think I’m in love with you.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

She touched his face, caressing his cheek. He allowed her to, but even this tender gesture made him harden even more. His control had been amazing, was amazing. She wanted him back inside her—

“We have work to do, you and me…” He was still panting. “We can do this, but…I’m not going to get the issue…clouded in my head, so don’t you…” He took a deep, decisive breath and told her, “We’re going to work…on your songs.”

Half naked in the near darkness, her hands clasped in her lap, she nodded. She had both won and lost.

She says he made her come again with his hand as she lay there in her dishevelled clothes, and as her mouth opened for a soundless cry of ecstasy, he penetrated her again in one thrust, pulled himself out, and she watched, fascinated, as a syrupy jet stream of cum flew across her belly and another hit her neck just above the collarbone. “I love having him come on top of me,” she whispered to me once. “Mmmmphh!”

Morgan kept his word. He helped her with the songs. You would think that maybe his show of integrity would adjust her outlook, but it only changed her view of Morgan. It was special to him, no others. This is how she could still behave the way she did towards Easy later, towards Luther and others right into her signing with Brown Skin Beats. After the success of the first album, she called me and said she’d pay my way to visit her in New York. At the time, I didn’t believe she could ever change.

But what brought me down to Manhattan was not only the chance to visit my friend the new star but also the opportunity to investigate what was wrong. Because my friend Erica Jones had actually told me over the phone, “Oh, God, Mish, I met this new guy, and I think I’m in love with him!”

As it happened, she wasn’t talking about Morgan.

So I went down to New York an innocent, a babe in those big woods of steel and stone. I am not making excuses for myself. There are people who will tell you that, yes, I was a gentle person, a harmless one. I can honestly tell you that I flew down to New York and never dreamed that I would murder those men.

Shop Talk

I hold an x-ray up to candlelight
of your transparent lies

The roses died two days ago

No big surprise

Tired of needing, emotional bleeding,

of all your disappointments and how you criticise

Don’t whisper to me any more in darkness

Don’t tell me you’ll change in warm sunlight…

T
he song was
“Late Night Promises.” Erica’s voice, unmistakable, coming out of the speakers of the hired car’s stereo as I was chauffeured through the Queens Midtown Tunnel. Not quite a limo, but I could tell my best friend must be moving up in the world, especially since her song had been on top of Billboard’s charts for God knows how many weeks now.

After I had pulled my bags off the carousel at LaGuardia, I spotted the young white guy. He was checking a borrowed Christmas photo of me and holding up a cliché strip placard with MICHELLE BROWN neatly printed on it in felt marker.

“My name’s Justin, and I got your ride for you, Miss Brown. Oh, here, let me get that for you.” I detected an Alabama drawl. “Miss Jones says she’s real sorry she can’t be here, but today’s supposed to be big for laying down the backing vocals on the eighth or ninth track. Maybe track seven, I can’t remember exactly.”

I made a nervous laugh, my usual preface to an intrusive question. “So, like, who are you with?” Common sense told me the guy couldn’t possibly work for Erica. I knew she’d only just signed with someone, but she wasn’t that big yet. “You with the record company?”

Discreet smile here. “I’m with
a
record company.”

That’s about as much as I got out of him about his employer. He was chatty about everything else. Yep, this is Manhattan, Manhattan’s the best. So he lived somewhere in the city? Hell, no! He couldn’t afford that. He lived out in the Bronx with a couple of other guys for roommates. At the corner of 57th Street, I got out of the back seat at the stoplight and jumped in up front, confiding to him it just felt too weird being driven around like that.

“Now aren’t you a breath of fresh air!” he chuckled. “I’ve had folks thundering and hollering at me because they didn’t send a stretch job with the tinted windows and the mini wet-bar inside. I guess it’s true what they say about you people.”

“You people?” I echoed, instantly on my guard.

“Canadians.”

“Oh! Yeah, I guess it is, eh.”

“You guess it is,
eh
? I love that!”

He pulled the car into the narrow parking strip in front of a sumptuous hotel, and I looked up and saw the gilt logo for the Lockwood-Tremblay. This was the brand spanking new luxury job along “Museum Row” designed to rival the Plaza for views of Central Park. There’s got to be a mistake, I told him. I sure as hell wasn’t booked in here. In fact, I didn’t know where I would be staying that night, presumably in a sleeping bag on the floor of Erica’s closet of an apartment up past 135th Street or in Midtown or who knows, maybe out in Queens if she were so lucky.

“They’re expecting you.”

“I can’t be staying here,” I insisted.

“I don’t know if you’re
staying
here,” he said with a shrug. “Miss Jones said bring you to the party, and she’d come as soon as possible. Look, don’t worry about it. Go on in. Your name’s on the list. Nobody’s going to give you no hassle.”

I was staring like a fool at the doorman, waiting like all doormen in one of those ridiculous outfits that are a cross between a Beefeater uniform and the wardrobe for an organ grinder’s monkey. He wore a rather benign expression on his face, considering I’d arrived in faded jeans and a sweater over a tank top with my knock-off Fendi luggage. I thanked him as he pulled on the large brass handle that formed the “L” of the “TL” logo and walked in.

Ssshhhheeee-it.
Thirty-foot-tall mirrors, oxblood wingback chairs and framed sepia photographs of old New Yorkers. Yes, I had had passing brushes with luxury before—I’d gone into the King Edward Hotel in Toronto, and, yes, my parents did take my brother and me to restaurants with napkins of linen instead of paper. But this wasn’t like creeping timidly into the lobby of the Plaza or the Waldorf Astoria as a tourist and maybe splurging on the seven bucks for a lousy bottle of Evian by the fireplace. I was twenty years old, and someone had my name on a list and was expecting me. I thought the best way to limit embarrassing myself was to find the youngest clerk behind the front counter and appeal to his pity.

“Look, I’m supposed to be here,” I explained after providing my name, “and I don’t know where I’m going.”

“Here?”
The blonde girl in the navy blazer poked her finger downwards as if to mean “this spot.” It didn’t seem such a stupid idea when you thought of how I was dressed and what little information I had. For all she knew, I had come for day work. “Hang on. Brown…No ‘e’?”

“That’s right.”

She tapped my name into her computer terminal. “Yeah, here you are. Floor twenty-one. Here’s your swipe card, and if you can please return it to us when you leave. Elevators to your left.”

“What room?”

“Sorry?”

“What room?” I asked again. “You said
floor
twenty-one.”

“The whole floor, Miss Brown. Mr. Swann has booked all of Park View C for the weekend.” Sensing the enormity of my ignorance, she leaned in and said, “Umm,
do
remember to hand in that swipe card. It’s got a sensor in it. It’s not like it’ll set off the doors at Bloomingdale’s or anything, but the security guys come after you outside, and people feel silly forgetting.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Uh, who did you say booked it?”

“Steven Swann,” she said, smiling and slightly shaking her head in surprise. As if she couldn’t believe I didn’t know my host.

S
teven Swann. Yes, I knew
of
him. I didn’t know I’d be sharing the same oxygen with him two and a half hours after escaping New Haven. And I certainly didn’t expect Erica to know him.

Jesus. Steven Swann. One hundred and seventy-five pounds of fair-haired, blue-eyed teen girl dream worth at least twenty million in soft drink concert sponsorship and athletic gear endorsement, and that wasn’t counting posters, T-shirt sales, television appearances or the “likeness” licensing for a kids’ board game. I haven’t even got to the albums yet. Twenty-three and already incorporated. I learned later that a rumour was out he was supposed to do one of those live appearances in Times Square that afternoon. A
rumour
had sent ten thousand of the devoted jamming West 43rd Street, which brought out the cops with their crowd-control rails and a couple of mounted patrols. The Lockwood-Tremblay management were probably crossing their fingers he didn’t poke his head out a window.

He had a little more respect than Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears for not starting out on some God-awful Disney Mousketeer show. But he was still a refugee from one of the boy bands, Trust. Remember the song “Ashamed of Us” that climbed the charts for six weeks about five years ago? He was part of that. When he signed as the first white solo artist for Brown Skin Beats (and didn’t that just ensure
reams
of pop music criticism), the label waged a detailed PR campaign to build up his musical credibility. It suddenly emerged that Steven had toiled away as the real creative force behind the band with little recognition.

“Stevie did a lot of our choreography on ‘Small Wonder,’ ” said fellow bandmate Tyler Shaw, which no doubt came as news to Luba Kauffmann, who planned the steps of the video shoot and who went on to actually block all the routines for Trust’s concert tour. And there was producer Jake Monkhouse telling MTV Base, “The bridge for ‘Ashamed of Us’ is all Steve. We really slaved on that one until he came up with it. I mean, it’s just flippin’ inspired!” But if you talk to enough people, you learn the bridge was written and even the arrangement set before Steven walked into the studio.

And none of this mattered.

Erica had to use her creativity to scale the mountain. Having proved his bankable potential with a hot boy band, the mountain for Steven came with a ski lift. His creativity was invented for him. Ever notice how no one bothers to ask certain stars how they came up with their hits? It’s a dead end query if the songs are written for them. Instead reporters ask how they “feel” about their tunes, what they’re “trying to say.” Believe me, it’s something else to take in a “creative” meeting in which a couple of producers sit at the boardroom punching CD decks of potential tracks to record, the talent nodding or shaking his head. Cut to the talent waxing rhapsodic six months later over how “I was going through a real difficult stretch in my life, just broke up with my girlfriend, and I wanted to say…”

Steven was a master at this sort of thing. When he took off into mega-stardom, he began this habit of putting little Zen sound bites into his interviews. Someone would ask him about the relentless media attention, and his answer would be (boyish grin, hanging his head a little in early George Clooney heartthrob style): “Yeah, it is relentless, but this is part of the price you pay, man. So like, I just dive into it. I think handling media attention is like the story of the guy who put his hand over a flame, and somebody asks him, ‘Dude, what’s the trick?’ And he shoots back, ‘The trick is
not minding
.’ ”

By the time someone figured out that the clever anecdote had nothing to do with the question, he was already talking about something else. I know the British tabloids absolutely loathed him, and that was because he had played them for fools.
The Sun
and
News of the World
and the others always claim they can’t be fooled, or will get theirs back in the end. It didn’t exactly happen that way with Steven. First, his people carefully “leaked” fuzzy, grainy photos of him with a boy of about four years old while he was on tour in the UK. Out went the story that this was Steven Swann’s love child with an old English girlfriend, and certain sources on the peripheral circle told tales about how he was completely devoted to the little tyke but wanted to protect him from the paparazzi. More photos—Steven taking the boy to the London Zoo, buying him toys at Hamleys. Funny thing was, the American papers never matched copy on these daily episodes.

The reason being that the record label clued them in it was all nonsense. Check the photos. The kid’s always blurry and if you looked carefully, it was a different kid each time. Soon enough it emerged that the child in the original photo was a desktop amalgamation of a bunch of composite features. And when asked, Steven said, “I never claimed I had a son. A few friends wanted me to visit with their kids because they’re fans, that’s all. And I did some work for a Big Brothers association.”

Played. Perfectly played with no one but themselves to blame. The tabloids swore vengeance, tried to take the spin that they were victims of a publicity stunt, but they couldn’t connect the dots back to him.

The ironic thing was, in all my short years of witnessing the pop world Steven Swann was the most
authentic
guy I met.

D
rambuie.”

There I was, having walked into the enormous cavern of Park View C of the Lockwood-Tremblay hotel, my bag over my shoulder. Catering staff made their rounds with silver platters of drinks. Guests were decked out in everything from track suit chic to formal wear, laughing and talking, while Steven Swann’s cover of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” played through the stereo speakers. (I never much cared for this version, since Steven’s voice sounds thin and whiny compared with Gabriel’s robust heartbreaking vocals, and instead of Youssou N’Dour for backup, he gets that Algerian singer.)

Here I was at this party where Erica hadn’t arrived yet and I knew absolutely no one. I had found myself standing next to a gigantic fountain with an ice sculpture of two elephants spouting creamy brown liquid out of their trunks. For a brief moment, I was captivated by this whole garish display. I reached out a finger to the cascade as if I were about to touch a hot stove.

“Drambuie,” explained a gentle voice next to me.

And there he was, shorter of course in real life than you’d expect, maybe half an inch taller than me, smiling pleasantly and offering me a clean glass. Blue eyes with their sincere glint, and I swear it was like peach fuzz on his upper lip, even though he was twenty-three. He’d been cast as seventeen when he did that guest shot on
Smallville
. It helped at the moment that he was wearing jeans, too, with a T-shirt for the Lobos, the football team from his home state of New Mexico. He swept a comma of blond hair out of his eyes and tipped his glass into the waterfall of the fountain, taking a quick sip.

“Hi, you must be Michelle, Erica’s friend. I’m Steven.”

I nodded, staring at him. You know the gears in your head that make you say stupid things in nervous moments? The switch got flicked for me right then, and I pointed to the elephants and the fountain of booze. “This must cost a fortune!”

Idiot
. Who cares?

“Awww, no,” said Steven, scoffing at the bizarre thing. “You want to know something? Not even the label is picking up for this. We tell the liquor distributors, the flower guys, the movie studios we’re having a shindig, and they send us out freebies. For a three-second shot of this on
Entertainment Tonight,
it’s worth the gallons getting pumped through here. My idea.”

“No kidding?”

“Honest. My MBA has to be good for something. Here, let me show you around. We’re just kicking back. More people are coming, and things’ll liven up a little. You missed Elton John.”

“He was here?” I asked in disbelief.

“No, I’m kidding. We had to settle for Elton’s ‘significant other.’ Or at least he claimed to be that guy, I can’t be sure. Don’t know how he heard about it. Couldn’t get him out the door fast enough.
Fuuuuuck!
Come on. You want something to eat? Sure?”