The Plot Against Hip Hop (12 page)
“Naw. No way. Usually after a show like that I’d be in bed by now.”
“I hear that. But I’m gonna stay out. I don’t get to New York very often, so I’m gonna run around a bit longer. I’ve heard lots of good things about you. Feel free to look me up when you next get to LA.” Amos handed him a business card with his name and a telephone number embossed on it.
“A card with no e-mail address. That’s seriously old school.”
“Classic shit remains classic shit.”
And then Amos was off to a long night of clubbing, while D walked down Ninth Avenue with the man’s card in his breast pocket, Amina’s image in his mind’s eye, and the lyrics of Southern hip hop songs running through his head.
D
had never spent much time in Jersey. He’d seen some Nets games back when J Kidd was running the break and he’d bodyguarded a couple of wealthy swells who trekked out to the old Meadowlands Stadium to see U2. Actual time amongst the Garden State’s regular folks had been limited to a couple of dinners at Dwayne Robinson’s house and a shopping trip to Ikea with his ex Emily.
D had been so worried he’d get lost on the Jersey Turnpike on his way to see Amina Warren-Jones that he was actually a half hour early. He’d driven around a bit, looking at the suburban city in the encroaching darkness, deeming Short Hills not as pretty as Montclair and considerably more livable than rough-and-ready Newark. Looking at some of the black homeowners he spied exiting SUVs and tending to their lawns, D recalled how his mother had dreamed of such a life when they were kids. These days she was living comfortably in Flushing, Queens, with her second husband—but Queens was not as plush as this.
Amina’s home was a two-story brick Colonial with a good-sized lawn and a white lawn jockey in front. A late-model BMW sat in the driveway and D parked his rented Lexus behind it. The large man suddenly felt quite nervous, both because he hadn’t had a home-cooked meal in years and because instead of this being an interrogation, he was on a date. D’s butterflies were so strong he was at risk of mumbling his way through the entire evening. He was about to ring the buzzer when the door opened and Amina, all brown hues and blinding white teeth, looked him up and down.
“Welcome, D.”
“Oh, thanks for inviting me.” He stood in the doorway and held out two gift-wrapped packages.
“Why thank you. You can come in, you know.”
D smiled sheepishly and entered her home, feeling as awkward as a thirteen-year-old on his first date, and also a bit guilty, since this was not, at least for him, a totally social call.
“I brought red wine. I don’t actually drink,” he said, “but people who do tell me it’s a good vintage.”
“Okay,” she replied, eyeing the large square package under his left arm, “can we share
that
?”
“No,” he said with mock seriousness. “This is only for you.”
D began unwrapping the brown paper. When he finally pulled out the prize, Amina laughed.
“How’d you get that?”
“I called Rush Arts and found out who’d won the auction. Then I made an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
“This is amazing.” She reached out, kissed D on the cheek, and took possession of the Glen Friedman photo of D.M.C. that they’d both bid on at Russell Simmons’s house. Amina held the photo before herself with both hands and then turned and walked into her living room with D on her heels.
The scent of sandalwood incense filled the space, which had a warm beige and bronze color scheme with lots of pillows and a low coffee table by the fireplace. Unlike the tomb D called an apartment, Amina’s home felt like a place where you’d chant in Sanskrit and have couscous with lentils for dinner. It had turned out to be an easy place to find and would be a hard place to leave.
Amina had made a vegetarian feast with Indian accents. A huge salad laced with walnuts, raisins, hummus, chickpeas, brown rice, mushrooms, and a thick curry sauce. She’d traveled to an ashram in Goa a couple of times and had picked up a lot of cooking tips when she wasn’t chanting or doing backbends.
“Have you ever meditated, D?”
“I guess you could say I do every day. I keep my apartment very dark. Black, really.”
“Is that why your wardrobe is so consistent? Coordinating with the wallpaper?”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“No. I always invite undertakers over for dinner. What’s the deal with that?”
“Well, it’s a story.”
“And what else is dinner for?”
So D opened up to her a bit. He hated the instant sympathy the deaths of his three brothers generated in women. It brought out the mother in even the most cynical female and made him, the surviving son, seem a victim, a role he resisted at all costs.
What he rarely told, and wasn’t planning to tonight, was that he was HIV-positive. As much he was drawn to Amina, he wasn’t going there. Strictly on a need-to-know basis, and despite the obvious chemistry, he didn’t think any such revelation was at this point necessary. The tragically true tale of D being the last surviving Hunter son was enough for an introductory meal.
“So that’s why the all-black? You are in mourning.”
“Yeah.”
The story of D, his mother, and brothers made Amina tear up. D didn’t cry but made some mighty sad faces. So well before desert they were no longer at the table but hugging each other stretched out before the fireplace.
“I never had any kids,” Amina said quietly. “But I did lose my husband. In fact, we weren’t married very long before he became more a ghost than a husband.”
“Seems like he traveled a lot. Got into a lot of things.”
“Yes, Anthony did.”
“Anthony? I thought your husband was named Malik.”
“Malik Jones. That was his cover name. Anthony Jackson. That’s his real name. Actually, Malik was a nickname I gave him. Sometimes he’d get into his black militant moods and I’d call him that.”
D’s head was swimming now. Malik Jones was Anthony Jackson? His wife had given him the name?
“But your last name is Jones.”
“I adopted that to help him out. To keep his cover consistent if someone began checking up on him.”
“Cover? You make him sound like some kind of spy.”
“I guess he was, in a way.”
“Russell told me your husband was kind of a thug.”
“And Russell thinks he knows everything. But he doesn’t.” Amina’s tone was more melancholy than angry. “Russell didn’t really know him. At the end of the day I didn’t know him either.” She stood up and offered her hand to D. He rose without a word and let her lead him into the kitchen and through a door that opened to a furnished basement: pool table, leather sofa, video games, and old copies of
Sports Illustrated
and
Forbes
magazine. It was a man’s area. There was a light layer of dust, so different than the vibe upstairs.
“This was my husband’s space. It’s where he could be himself, I guess.”
D was looking around when he saw a picture of a man in a uniform. At first glance he thought it might be Anthony Jackson’s father or even grandfather. He stepped closer to the photo as Amina smiled.
“That’s him when he graduated from the Police Academy.”
“Police Academy?”
“First he was a police officer. Then he got recruited by the FBI.”
“Wow. That’s not what I expected.”
“Sometimes the whole thing still surprises me.”
“I’m trippin’ right now. I really am.”
“I debated what I would tell you all day. But it feels right. Especially after what you told me about your family. I guess we’re both a little damaged.” She came closer to him and wrapped her arms around his waist and placed her head on his wide chest. “Don’t hurt me, D, and I won’t hurt you.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“You’re supposed to say,
I won’t hurt you.
”
“I know, but I’ve seen too much to act like I can control anything, especially the future.”
Amina let D go and stared him in the eye. “Okay. I understand that. Would you like some dessert?”
“I’d love it.”
As they headed back upstairs, D took a glance back at Jackson/Jones’s suburban basement and felt the dead man’s ghost glaring at him from the shadows.
Standing in the kitchen as Amina sliced up a vegan sweet potato pie, D said, “Thank you for sharing that.”
“You’re not the only one who can use Google. I read about you and Dwayne Robinson. I asked Russell about you. After he got over—for about the fourth time—that we weren’t gonna sleep together, he said good things about you.”
“So Russell Simmons cosigned me?”
“As much as he can for any man closer than he is to getting something he wants.”
“Oh. Am I closer?”
“Closer than Russell Simmons doesn’t necessarily mean close.”
D laughed. “You got jokes.”
But he wasn’t laughing when she leaned, grabbed him by the head, and kissed him, parting his lips with her tongue and pulling him into her mouth. After a moment, D separated himself and took her by the arms.
“I have to let you know something about me. Something that could change how you feel about me.”
“You’re HIV-positive, right?”
“Yes.”
“I heard some rumors. I asked around. How long?”
“Six years now. I’m not gay. Didn’t shoot heroin. Best I can figure, I got it having unsafe sex with a young woman I didn’t know. Didn’t use a condom. But then it might not have been her. I’m not really sure. Not that it matters at this point. Not at this point.”
“You look great.”
D explained that he was one of the lucky ones. “Like Magic,” he said, “but without the long paper. I was in good shape when I found I had it and I’m in great shape now.”
“Yes indeed, you do look good.”
Half ignoring Amina’s comment, lost in his own confession, D continued: “The ‘monster’ didn’t destroy me. It just made me vulnerable. So every winter I worry about colds. I’m afraid the flu or some allergy will kill me. I’m as strong as a bull, but if I don’t take my meds, for whatever reason, I get afraid I’ll shrivel up like a raisin.”
D was now looking off into the distance, back into the past, to that day at the doctor’s office, like it was a scene from
Grey’s Anatomy
. When he gazed back at Amina her eyes were swelling, once again heavy with moisture.
“I’m sorry,” D said, not knowing what was appropriate. He hadn’t told many people. He’d only had one or two girlfriends and a few scattered lovers since he’d been diagnosed six years earlier. His great love, Emily, a mixed-race British party promoter with a taste for Cuban cigars, had taken the revelation well, telling D she had herpes and joking that they made a fine couple of losers. And even when Emily left him for a dreadlocked Jamaican man, D couldn’t be mad at her. She’d already been more understanding than he’d ever expected any woman could be.
“You are in such pain, D.” Amina reached across the table and held his large hands between her slender fingers. “I bet you don’t even understand how guilty you sound.”
“Maybe, Amina, but it feels like guilt I deserve. I don’t know why.”
“Cause your brothers are gone and you’re here?”
“Maybe.”
“D?”
“Yeah.”
“When was the last time you were intimate with someone?”
“With myself. Last night. That’s the safest sex I know.”
“You wanna come upstairs with me?”
“Would you hold me, Amina? I’d like that.”
“I think I can do that,” she said.
“I don’t want your charity.”
“And I don’t want yours.”
She took him by the hand and led him through the living room and up the staircase to her bedroom, which was as brown and inviting as her living room.
I
t was three weeks after his dinner with Amina-Warren Jones. Three weeks of pleading Fly Ty to contact the FBI and other feds to squeeze out some intel about undercover operative Anthony Jackson, a.k.a. Malik Jones. Reluctantly, Fly Ty finally agreed to dig deeper into the life and times of this increasingly mysterious man with multiple identities.
Which is why the two men were sitting at a corner table in Balthazar—one of the various Keith McNally–founded bistros that defined high-profile dining in downtown Manhattan—having roasted chicken, oysters, and sundry sides, and sharing a bottle of cognac on D’s tab. Fly Ty had demanded a princely meal for all the aggravation that the search for info on Amina’s husband entailed. Balthazar had been his choice. Luckily for D, he’d done McNally a service a few years back, so getting a power table wasn’t too difficult.
“This was like pulling the layers of skin off an onion,” Fly Ty said after a nice rich swallow of Chivas Regal. “People aren’t comfortable getting to the core. Besides, it appears only a select group of people knew what Anthony Jackson was into. You ever see
Apocalypse Now
?”
“Yeah. Good movie. Got a little weird at the end.”
“As you may remember, at the start of the film a general tells Martin Sheen that Marlon Brando’s methods are ‘unsound.’ That’s their bureaucratic way of saying the man was becoming a damn cannibal in ’Nam. Well, according to folks I spoke to, Jackson/Jones’s methods were just as unsound.”
“
Unsound
. That’s some real bureaucratic bullshit. Don’t act all cute, Fly Ty. I’m paying, so break it down for me. Who is Anthony Jackson?”
“Well, to start, all that stuff I told you about Malik Jones is both true and totally false. All that stuff I said that Malik Jones did, he did. Now, Anthony Jackson went from beat cop to an NYPD buy-and-bust when Harlem was crack-la-lane. He was decorated for his work and then recruited by the FBI. He started working undercover as a hip hop entrepreneur. Somehow around then he got involved with the Sawyer Group and met your man Dwayne Robinson.
“Because he was so well known in the streets of NYC, Jackson volunteered to work on the West Coast. Then it gets murky. He was assigned to a special unit that interfaced with a number of other units. His smart idea was to pose as a guy from the East Coast who wanted to invest in West Coast rap. In his cover role, Jackson/Jones got involved in record distribution and even got a piece of a record company.”