she know but you don’t, to get somethin’ to eat. Your belly all swole up after four days without food. You hungry and you know you need it. It hurt to even swallow.
Knock on the door. Ole man who you seen your mamma kneel before on the stairwell is smilin’ at you with a wrench in his hand. He tell you he hooked you up, but then he see your mamma, nothin’ but a hidden hump, and you duck under his arm as he walk back and puke on hisself.
Five days out of juvie, you back with a forty-year-old woman callin’ herself your grandmamma. You only know her as a woman your mamma would see and turn the other way to spit. Your grandmamma don’t like you. Make you run around like you work for her, makin’ corner deals by the Stronger Hope Church. Bringin’ her weed pipe to her with copies of Jet and Star. But you got a place on a small couch next to your twelve-year-old uncle who has fits and drools on himself when he don’t take his pills.
They got food, too. Cold Popeyes and cans of green things you ain’t never tasted. You gain a little weight, start pocketin’ bus money she give you to go to school, and buy a dictionary, even though you don’t know most of the words in it. You want to be like the silver mask on the bus signs. Diabolical. He don’t have no eyes or a body, just a silver face. God? You’d heard about him comin’ from the Calliope and how he makin’ rhymes from all the words he know.
Sometime when you on the corner, hearin’ your own beat and bounce in your head, rhymin’ for fifty cents for some hustler to smile, you see Dio’s face on a passin’ bus. He comin’ back. He’ll hear you.
One night you find a white girl and you rob her with a knife you made from an oak tree splinter. Don’t feel bad. She’s pretty fucked up and lookin’ for some more shit to fill her head. You scare her good and she runs away. With that money, you start it all.
Thirty-two damned dollars. Water into wine, what Teddy always say.
You buy a minimixer with a dual cassette made for a kid and a beat tape. You got a microphone about the size of your finger. But it’s all you need to make your own.
It’s all you do. Sleep on Grandmamma’s couch, run her business, run her drugs a bit, and make them tapes. You sell them. They cost you a dollar at Rob’s; you sell ’em for three. Pretty soon – we talkin’ weeks, man – you known. Calliope ain’t no galaxy; it’s a planet. It’s your planet. You grabbin’ your toy and hittin’ Friday-and Saturday-night block parties and you eatin’.
Then – don’t know how – Teddy Paris finds you at that Claiborne corner with your dogs. Kids swallow his Bentley and mirror rims. You don’t. You hang, till he call you over and offer you a ride. At first you don’t, everybody workin’ you. Everybody a freak.
The kids tell you it’s about your tapes.
You go.
You ride. Ninth Ward Records.
You keep ridin’.
Four months later, you livin’ Lakefront.
You got a half-built house with iron gates and three girls who clean your underwear and wash you in the shower. Henry and Midget wearin’ Gucci and eatin’ filets.
Ain’t nothin’ but rhymes and ambition.
Ambition feel somethin’ like that heat in the room when they took your mamma away.
It’s all what you believe. You can believe anything.
Least that’s what you tell yourself as you slip that gun in your mouth, listenin’ to the sounds of the Calliope around you. It’s old beats, old music that you never wanted to hear again. It’s shoes and cold gray skin and swollen bellies and a shakin’ uncle whose eyes disappear into his head.
But you back.
They say you $500,000 less a man.
It all look good, you told yourself that day back in December when that white man came to you. It all look good on paper when they tell you about this trust fund you had and all the money Teddy and Malcolm keepin’ from you.
You saw it all until they worked you. Then everythin’ disappeared. That office on the Circle sat empty. Them business cards that felt like platinum, all to disconnected phones.
Teddy didn’t talk to you.
Everythin’ was gone.
Tonight, you hear the bus make its stop outside and you pull the gun from your mouth, gag a little. You bend back that foil in the window. Just a bit.
You got to smile, huggin’ arms round your body, metallic taste of your gold teeth in your mouth. It’s your face out there. All thuggin’ and mean-lipped on the side of the bus. Platinum and diamonds. Do-rag cocked on your head.
You like that until you hear that Raven pop in your hand and feel your legs give out and a hot, sticky mess spread across your belly and leg.
It was all there.
Now you ruin.
You ruined as hell.
You are fifteen.
2
Within the first twenty-four hours I’d known Teddy Paris, he’d stolen my Jeep, bruised my ribs in the ensuing fight, almost gotten me cut from the Saints, and become one of the best friends I’d ever known. I often wondered why he found it so funny to break into my Wrangler while we were at training camp that summer and disappear in it with a few buddies to blow their rookie paychecks on stereo equipment at a mall in Metairie.
I thought he was making a point because I was white and from Alabama and he hadn’t known I’d lived in New Orleans since I was eighteen. But I later learned, while we bonded over our mutual love for Johnnie Taylor ballads and a nice shot I’d given him in the jaw, that Teddy chose me, out of the dozens of players, because he thought I could take a joke.
Teddy and I had been friends even after our short-lived careers in the NFL ended, mine trailing into getting a doctorate and becoming a roots music field researcher, and his into a multimillion-dollar rap music partnership with his brother, Malcolm. His professional path came in a dream – he’ll tell you complete with a sound track – after opening five failed nightclubs and a pet photography studio.
Teddy was always into something.
I’d been back from the Delta for only two weeks and already missed JoJo, Loretta, and a woman I’d been seeing for the last few months in Oxford. It was early on Friday, about 10 A.M., and I’d just turned in my students’ grades for spring semester and was looking forward to heading back to Mississippi.
The day was crisp and blue with a warm white sun peeking through a few thin clouds. The air seemed clean, even for New Orleans, tinged with the tangy brackish smell of the Mississippi. Muddy Waters’s Folk Singer album with Willie Dixon slapping and plunking his big stand-up bass in stripped-down perfection played on an old cassette player.
I needed to finish up this job and pack, I thought as I pulled out the old water pump from my Bronco. I inspected its rusted blades and wiped the blackened oil and grime from my hands onto my jeans and prized Evel Knievel T-shirt. I thought about Maggie and her farm. And her legs and smile.
Polk Salad Annie trotted by, sniffed my leg, and then rummaged for a bone she’d hidden in a pile of old milk crates that held my CDs and field tapes. She chomped the bone, found a nice spot on an old pillow she’d grown to love, and then started to sniff the air.
My five-dollar dog.
I was already planning out the day’s drive when Teddy walked through the gaping mouth of my garage and called my name. I knew the voice and told him to hold on.
I heard the familiar click of his Stacey Adams shoes nearing on the concrete floor. “My woman so mean she shot me in the ass and run off with my dog,” Teddy sang, his voice booming in the small cavern. “Why you listen to
