I read the note and then reread it:
To my big-brother Teddy and all my people at Ninth Ward,
Thank you for a great ride these last three years. Y’all made it happen. Put the Ward, NOLA, all of it, up on top.
But some of us make mistakes. Money make men be some evil people. Do evil things against family.
I ask for the Lord’s and my family forgiveness.
I can’t live another day takin’. I set up ALIAS and killed the best friend I ever had in Dio.
Lord forgive me. Bury me in the Ninth.
Y’all party, roll, and remember what I used to be.
I handed the note to Teddy.
I had to help him get to his feet. His whole body shook and he dropped to one knee. “Where’s the kid?” he asked.
“Home.”
“You sure?”
22
You asleep when Cash knock on your window holdin’ a tall forty and that little girl from the strip club by the hand. He say he want to take you on a ride and you crawl into your P. Miller jeans and Lugz shoes fast as hell. You want to be lookin’ tight for that girl, show you Uptown all the way.
Y’all soon kicked back in his Escalade, ridin’ past them projects that you share. You gettin’ high with Cash, that man promising you the world just to make him millions if you leave Teddy and the Ward. You marvel at that, the way your mind works, the way it brings in that gold, as you float by the strawberries givin’ out fifteen-dollar blow jobs and thirteen-year-olds on BMX bikes shufflin’ off that crack for grandmamma pushers. Grandmammas who watch their soap operas while their little boys carry Ravens and Glocks.
“That white man won’t bother you no more,” he says.
The girl, still don’t know her name, snuggle into your arm and play with that platinum necklace like a little drunk cat.
The blue-and-red neon in the all-night liquor stores and those hard crime lights over oak trees almost make your mind drunk while Cash tellin’ you why you should get out from Teddy and Malcolm.
He say they don’t want him tellin’ you the truth about yo’ man Dio.
You don’t ask questions. He don’t serve up no answers. To you, Dio was God. He started the whole sound. He played the block parties out in the yard. Showed you that you could break out of Calliope.
Sometimes you wear Dio’s clothes. Malcolm even give you that Superman symbol that the man used to keep on his neck. Sometimes you wonder if his spirit don’t move your rhymes.
Cash is smart the way he play you. He come from Calliope too and turned himself into a billionaire. That nigga just made a deal with some label in NYC that jacked him up about $10 million. Now that make him ’bout light-years away from Teddy and his brother. Cash don’t hustle. He don’t sell from the back of his car. He run with the big dogs.
He say he still tied to CP3. Still get his hair cut in the ’hood and rolls block parties. He say Teddy and Malcolm are just country-ass Nint’ Warders. And you can’t trust ’em. Cash been you, he says. He know what you need.
Even before it’s out his mouth, you down at this club off Airways Boulevard where nineteen-year-old women are grindin’ their sweaty asses in your lap and rubbin’ your head with their soft fingers and rakin’ their long red claws over your neck. Cash and his playas watchin’ you as you strut from that VIP room while he sips on a bottle of Cristal and nods to move on.
You do, leavin’ the girl at work. You move on to three other clubs before he drop you back lakefront, to that mansion you was designin’ from a space movie you seen on cable. High humpback gates like you seen on MTV, all surrounded by cement mixers, stacks of plywood, and plastic sheeting popping in your empty windows.
“Why Teddy kick you out and now he say he want you back?”
“Mad, I guess.”
“Friends don’t play like that.”
Cash’s boys crack open some Cristal and y’all drink it straight from the bottle. You take a couple hits from a joint, making it wash deep into your lungs, and listen to all them boys talkin’ shit ’bout their new Italian cars, freaks they met out on the road, and high-dollar restaurants with pink shrimp as big as yo’ big toe.
Cash tell you again about Teddy and Malcolm and all about what happened to Diabolical. He say that Teddy and Malcolm finally gonna pay for what happened to the man who made Dirty South. He say the Paris brothers only killed that young nigga so his sales would double. And truth be known, Dio weren’t nothin’ till they jacked his ass at Atlanta Nites.
You remember that thug’s face and his rhymes when you was a kid and now all them T-shirts and lost albums and tributes. Death make you live forever.
All that talk about Dio and your own chances and risks make you want to take the boat out.
When you start that motor, Cash flashes a smile loaded with platinum and diamonds on the dock and then you disappear. His dogs playin’ with green-and-yellow bottle rockets out by your pool and hills of green grass on the levee.
You take that boat way out in the lake, where the lights don’t mess with the crisp stars. You smoke a blunt to take it all down, flat back in that skinny little boat, just driftin’ in loopy choppy circles trying to figure out what happens next. You think about that, the way you drift, and that’s cool with you. Because you are a puzzle. Them pieces come to be known as you grow. Ain’t that right?
Because evil can’t touch you. You away from that evil and men that can pull a young brother apart. It makes you smile as the blunt stinks up your clothes – the Little Dipper burnin’ so bright it reminds you of the Christmas lights that used to frame your grandmamma’s window – to know you are safe. Goblins and them mean ole ghosts have disappeared from your life like the edges of the smoke into that cold wind at the lip of the boat.
23
We searched all night long. We took Teddy’s black Escalade with silver rims with a few of his people following. We used a ton of cell phones and followed a trail through so many strip clubs that I started to smell like smoke and could guarantee that they’d play some Aerosmith song before I left. We checked out late-night diners like the Hummingbird and clubs where he’d hung out. We checked out this Uptown apartment he’d shared with a woman who’d borne two of his children and even deep down into the Ninth Ward to the leaning shotgun houses where the Paris brothers had grown up.
Teddy told me stories about their grandmother and that an uncle of theirs had been some kind of soundman for the Ohio Players. He told me about his first business running dime bags for some local hustler in the early seventies and how Malcolm once had a box haircut so tall it bounced when he walked.
He talked about his brother’s talent and how he recognized hit songs the first time he heard them on the radio. Teddy talked about how Malcolm had found Dio and how it had changed him from a man selling CDs out the back of his Buick Regal to being one of the richest African-Americans in Louisiana. He smiled.
“We worked together, all right,” he said.
He steered the Escalade with both hands.
“We done all right.”
We drove.
No one knew a thing about his brother. ALIAS still wouldn’t answer his phone.
From cinderblock bars in Algiers to some backdoor clubs in the Quarter, we were worn-out by 6 A.M. I was outside the Ninth Ward Studio leaning against the gold brick wall and smoking when I heard Teddy walk back
