Joplin's Ghost

There was a rapper in the booth. Phoenix hadn’t noticed him at first, but she heard rapid-fire words from a coarse voice that sounded midway between a playground and a battleground. The boy had a crisp, stutter-step delivery.

  All these niggas tellin’ lies, sayin’ cold is hot,

  Niggas tellin’ lies bout how they ass was shot.

  Yo’ mouth is always movin’ but you ain’t sayin’ a lot.

  You spent up all yo’ loot cuz you ain’t savin’ a lot.

  My flow’s my gat, my gat’s my flow;

  I’ll murder yo’ ass in a studio.

  Like the nigga say in Amistad, “Give us free!”

  Yo’ time’s up, BITCH—you can’t flow like me.

  The boy in the booth spat the final words into the microphone, and he suddenly backed away from it, throwing his baseball cap against the glass, his flurry of bravado finished.

  “Oh, shit!” D’Real said, whipping his wiry arm around to find Ronn’s in a tight clasp. D’Real was only five-foot-four, and he was Ronn’s age, but he had a face that would always look like a teenager’s, almost hairless. D’Real lived in his off-center white Howard University baseball cap and white Pony jogging suits. Strangers who saw D’Real would never guess he was the mastermind behind a string of multiplatinum hits, but Phoenix had learned in the studio that D’Real was as intractable as he was unassuming. All she remembered about recording her CD was arguing with D’Real. And Ronn always taking his side.

  “They on notice!” D’Real told Ronn, nearly breathless. “ I told you all them mush-mouthed, no-rapping niggas out there is on notice.” Phoenix envied the boy in the booth. He might have found a real advocate in D’Real, which was more than she could say.

  The boy in the booth was slender and almost pretty, a stark contrast to his husky voice, and he looked barely old enough to shave. He reminded Phoenix of Chingy. His smooth face betrayed nothing of what he must be feeling, save for a small tugging at one corner of his pink-tinged lips. Trying to pretend he wasn’t excited. When will these young brothers feel safe to show their true hearts to the world?

  “T’s our battle champ up in Oak-Town,” said one of the strangers in black, who looked like a schoolteacher behind wire-frame glasses. “Can’t nobody touch him.”

  “T, your flow is sick,” Ronn said with a curt nod, grabbing the boy’s hand. Ronn’s face, too, was as unyielding as iron, with no hint of a smile. “I can work with that.”

  “Hell, yeah, we can work with that,” D’Real said. “It’s new-school West Coast.”

  “And so photogenic,” Katrice murmured, half to herself, imagining his cover shot.

  The boy couldn’t hide the luster in his eyes. Phoenix knew that look, because that was how she’d felt when Ronn first anointed her: He couldn’t wait to call his mother.

  Ronn suddenly seemed to feel Phoenix’s presence. He turned over his shoulder to meet her eyes. Phee, he said, surprised, only mouthing her name. The iron melted from his jaw.

  Phoenix had researched Ronn Jenkins before she ever visited Three Strikes Records. Knowledge is your best weapon, Sarge always said, and she’d arrived with a full arsenal.

  Ronn had been thirty-two when they met, so now he was thirty-three. He’d been raised in subsidized housing in St. Louis, until his family left Lou’s and moved to L.A. when he was fourteen. He was the second of three children, the youngest of two brothers. Ronn refused to talk about his older brother, Darnell, who’d been killed in an unarmed police shooting, although there was plenty about it on internet tabloid sites. Ronn’s mother was a postal clerk, still working, and his father had been a phantom from the time he was five. (“I cut off a piece of my soul and buried it when that nigga split,” he’d told Touré from Rolling Stone in a reflective mood.) He’d been selling weed when he was fourteen, crack by sixteen.

  And he was a genius. He had such a quick business mind that within three years, by nineteen, he’d been running his own crews and earned enough money to buy houses in cash for both himself and his sister. He was popped in a sting at twenty, but released on a technicality. Then he’d begun rapping with his best friend D’Real, and scored a record deal by fooling a record exec into believing they already had a following when all they had was a suitcase full of demos and attitude to spare. (“Music was an easier hustle than slingin’,” he’d told Vibe.)

  The rest was rap history. G-Ronn had been born.

  Mom freaked out the day Phoenix told her she was dating Ronn.

  Listen to the terrible messages in his music. Think of all the good he could be doing for his community, and all he talks about is getting laid, getting rich and getting even with his enemies. Phoenix was surprised Mom knew that much about G-Ronn’s music, and she couldn’t argue with the summary. She also couldn’t defend Ronn’s lyrics, because she didn’t like them much herself. Hell, when Ronn was at home, he listened to Miles Davis and Stevie Wonder.

  To Ronn, the violent scenarios in his lyrics were part reportage—he’d lived it, after all—and part fantasy—because he hadn’t lived it in a very long time. Either way, it was all money to him. He’d put it this way: He could follow the path of a poet, or he could be a multimillionaire. To a man who remembered picking wildflowers for his mother to boil for dinner when money was tight, financial security was its own religion. Ronn might be shortsighted, but he was honest.

  Mom wasn’t looking at the big picture either, Phoenix thought. Instead of imagining all the things Ronn should be doing, why couldn’t Mom let herself see how far Ronn had come? He was a child of poverty who was now the CEO of a major corporation, he’d just launched a film production company, and his two children (by two previous girlfriends) went to private schools and had college funds. Maybe Ronn wasn’t Malcolm X, but he was his own miracle. The age of thirty was a milestone in Ronn’s circle, a defiance of the laws of probabilities.

  On some days, despite herself, Phoenix felt she was too good for Ronn; but on other days, she didn’t feel good enough. How were her choices so different from his? Her truest expression had always been through her fingertips, on her keyboard. Three Strikes hadn’t wanted a band, only a new singer to put a voice to their vision—any voice would do—and Phoenix’s keyboard had been relegated to the shadows. The label had refused to consider hiring her band, and the band wouldn’t have followed her if she’d asked. Not if they were playing someone else’s music.

  You’ve got to go for what you need, Phee, and nobody but you needs to understand, La’Keitha had told her when she emailed her about Three Strikes, more condolences than congratulations. By then, La’Keitha had moved to New York to tour with rock bands, and hers was the most polite response from her former band-mates. They had once assumed their music would bond them forever; but Phoenix had not heard from them, or reached out to them, in almost a year. Jabari, typically, hadn’t minced his words in his last phone call: If you’re gonna sell out, sistah-girl, I’m glad you’re doing it in style.

  Fuck them. What good was music nobody would hear? Maybe D’Real was right: Their two CDs had sunk to the bottom of the music world’s ocean because their music wasn’t radio-friendly. Their band had been too eclectic, too self-indulgent—and you never said it plain, but let’s be real, D’Real—too white. Phoenix wasn’t interested in genteel poverty. She wanted to be heard. She wanted people to know her name. Once she established herself, she could do whatever she wanted, like Alicia Keys. Like Prince, she could turn herself into nothing but a symbol one day. But Kendrick heard, didn’t he? He rode a bus to tell you. Who else heard?

  “You had me worried, baby girl. Come here,” Ronn said, outstretching his arms to her once they were alone in his office. Ronn’s voice changed, softening the way it did when he was at home, and no one but her could hear.

  Ronn’s face was too pitted with razor scars to be handsome, but she was a hostage to his large brown eyes, and in his ample lips, which, whenever they touched her, seemed to wrap her in a cocoon. He kept his body padded with tight muscles in his weight r
oom at home—he got up to work out every morning at five-thirty, no exceptions—and he had shed most of the tackier hallmarks of wealth he’d been famous for years ago, when his mouth gleamed in gold and his chest was bedecked in chains. Nowadays, Ronn had his own teeth, favored tailored suits over baggy jeans, and his six-karat diamond stud earring was the only jewelry he wore. He had made the transition from child to man, as he liked to say. In the world of hip-hop, you were a seasoned statesman at thirty-three, a tribal elder, and he enjoyed dressing the part.

  Phoenix hesitated slightly before she walked around Ronn’s large marble desk and scooted herself up onto his lap, where he hooked his arm around her middle, a gentle giant. They were not usually this familiar at his office, an unspoken rule. She felt awkward, expecting someone to come crashing through his door and look at her like a hoochie. One bitch in the hand, one hand in the bush, as one of G-Ronn’s most popular anthems went.

  Ronn rested his chin on her shoulder from behind. “You sure you’re a’ight?”

  She leaned back against him, relaxing at last. His body heat was an electric blanket beneath her, and she could feel his heavy heartbeat. “Yeah.”

  “You wanna tell me what happened?”

  Phoenix didn’t know how to answer, or which what happened to tell him about.

  “I need to show you something. Don’t trip,” Ronn said, and pulled open his desk drawer. He pulled out a tabloid newspaper and laid it atop his desk. “What do you see?”

  In the blur of newsprint, her eye found a photo of Ronn with his arm around her, one that must have been taken when he visited her on South Beach last January, in those early days when his courtship rocked her mind. (“Girl, he’s calling me from home right now!” she’d screeched into Gloria’s ear, nearly hyperventilating when she saw Ronn Jenkins’s name on her caller ID.)

  Someone had snapped a photo of them eating outdoors at the News Cafe on Ocean Drive. In the photo, Ronn was wearing his sailing whites (he had a yacht docked outside his home on Fisher Island), and she looked respectably fine in her bikini and shades, her face burned bronze, her hair wet and wild from a recent swim. Not the most flattering picture, but a candid one that captured the glow on her face, all the wonder she felt.

  “I never saw that picture of us,” she said, smiling.

  “It just came out. Now read what it says.”

  It took Phoenix a few seconds to find the story that accompanied the photo, and when she did, the pint-sized headline made her tongue swell in her mouth.

  WHEN THE FAT CAT’S AWAY…

  Rap mogul G-Ronn might want to keep an eye on girlfriend Phoenix Smalls (pictured left), a 21-year-old R&B princess-in-waiting on G-Ronn’s Three Strikes label. Our spies in St. Louis say a male fan talked his way into Phoenix’s upscale hotel suite and didn’t leave until morning. Where was G-Ronn? In Los Angeles, finalizing plans for his upcoming movie The Yard.

  Pretty gutsy move, Phoenix, since G-Ronn’s biggest hit this year is “Don’t F*** with What’s Mine.”

  Strike one?

  Phoenix had heard the term speechless with no understanding of what it meant, until that moment. Her mouth and throat felt like a wind tunnel, her brain had ceased all function, and she had only the barest memory of language. Everything vanished except the article, which she read and reread, hoping the words might be different. She read until she couldn’t see past a sudden sheet of tears that fell across her eyes. She sat on Ronn’s lap with her head bent over his desk, frozen.

  Ronn spoke first. “What pisses me off, they didn’t mention the name of your CD.”

  Phoenix felt her head shaking back and forth, a silent denial. “R-Ronn…”

  He squeezed her from behind, his large arm locking around her middle, then letting go. “Welcome to the big-time, baby girl. If anybody says shit to you, just say it ain’t true.”

  Phoenix blinked, and one fat droplet fell onto the newsprint, leaving a splotch across the photograph. “It is true,” she whispered.

  Instead of answering right away, Ronn opened another desk drawer, and Phoenix tensed. Shit, he has a gun. The thought made her feel guilty even before Ronn produced a Kleenex instead. Phoenix took the tissue gratefully. She no longer wanted to be in Ronn’s lap, but she couldn’t think of a polite way to climb down. She couldn’t even look Ronn in the face.

  Ronn sighed, and she felt his breath against her neck, scented with weed and clove cigarettes. “Listen, Phee, Lou’s is where I came up, and people gon’ talk. Somebody got paid fifty bucks for calling that shit in, maybe some maid in the hall. Maybe somebody you know. Besides, you think I wasn’t all over that police report tryin’ to see who was messin’ with you? I had that report faxed to me that night.”

  “It wasn’t him, Ronn. I swear it wasn’t.” Sarge had told her a private detective in New York had questioned Kendrick, but he had an alibi. His bus ticket and other receipts proved he’d been on his way back home that night, confirming what she’d always known. “I swear.”

  “Naw, that’s what I heard. I ain’t tryin to fuck with nobody. Don’t cry, girl.”

  “I feel like such a jerk. It was just that one time. I don’t even know why I did it.”

  Taking her shoulders, he gently turned her around. He bent close to her, probing her with his eyes, those paired brown lances. “Well, you’re the best one to answer that question, but I guess you was lonely. We never said where we was at.” She saw sadness in his eyes, and she hated feeling responsible for other people’s sadness.

  “I’m sorry, Ronn. Shit. Everybody’s gonna read…”

  Ronn laughed, and his laugh almost sounded genuine. “Nobody thinks that shit is true.”

  He was downplaying it, Phoenix thought. Everyone would know.

  “Are you gonna kill the CD?” she said. The question hidden in her mind popped out.

  For the first time, Ronn looked genuinely hurt. His head snapped back. “What? Phee, I ain’t that petty. We’re about to bust this shit wide open.”

  Phoenix’s nose was leaking, so she plugged her nostrils with her Kleenex. She’d need another one soon. She had never felt this combination of horror, guilt and something else: relief. Yes, relief was buried in there. She was glad he knew. She hated secrets.

  Ronn patted her knee with slow, deliberate beats. He was warming up to something.

  “Look,” he said, blinking. “You blow my mind, Phoenix. I learn something new every time I talk to you. Some days I run in here and look up words you said in the dictionary. You said something one day—you said I was canny. I realized I was a grown-ass man and didn’t know what that meant. So I looked it up. It means shrewd, right? Wise.”

  Silently, Phoenix nodded. She didn’t remember using that word with Ronn.

  “You know the other day, when you said you were at Scott Joplin’s house? I was like, ‘Shit, who is that?’ I kinda knew the name, but I couldn’t remember. So I went to Katrice and asked her—Miss College girl and all that—and she told me he was that guy from The Sting, the one who did all that music, ‘The Entertainer,’ right? I remember that song when it was all over the radio when I was a little kid, back in the seventies. You couldn’t go nowhere without hearing that song. You make me remember things I’d forgot, things I should know. History and shit. I love that about you. Me and school didn’t get along too good when I was coming up. But see, you were lucky, Phee. Sarge brought you up in those books. I wish I’d had that. Mama couldn’t make me do shit I didn’t want to do.”

  “You’re one of the smartest people I know,” she said.

  “Shit, I’m one of the smartest motherfuckers out there. Smart ain’t what I’m talkin’ about. You make me see what else I coulda done, that’s all. I’m hangin’ with you, and I get ideas for these new sounds, you know what I’m sayin’? And Rising, that shit’s just the beginning. That kid, T, you saw rapping? I’m gonna sign him. His flow is different from my other artists, and I’m groovin’ to that about now. But if he’d come in here a year ago with that Amis
tad shit, I wouldn’t have been feeling that for Three Strikes. You did something to my ears, Phoenix. You got powers, baby girl.”

  The patting had stopped while he spoke, but it started again. Ronn sighed. “Anyway, I’ve had too much drama in my life to try to bring some where there don’t need to be none. All you gotta know is, I respect you, and I ain’t mad at you. For real. But I don’t think we’re in the same place when it comes to the romance part. You feel me?”

  Phoenix struggled to swallow despite the new mound in her throat. Slowly, she nodded. There wasn’t a damn thing she could say.

  “Good.” This time, he squeezed her knee, lingering before letting go. “Nothin’ else is gonna change. I got a lot more shit I want to learn from you, and I think I got a couple things to teach you, too. Right?”

  “Hell, yes. You’re amazing.” Her voice was thin, because her brain was beating in a frenzy: Since we’re being so honest and intimate, Ronn, can I tell you that Rising isn’t half of what it could be, even though it’s about to be In Stores Everywhere? Can I tell you I’ll be sleepwalking because the music isn’t mine? Would you hear me if I said to dump D’Real and let me get my band so I can bring myself back to life? But Phoenix spoke none of those thoughts aloud. Most often, she did not even let those thoughts out for air.

  Ronn smiled, and his face dimpled boyishly. “A’ight then. I’ll take you to dinner somewhere there’s lots of paparazzi this weekend, keep the buzz goin. Publicity is paper. But on the real, we’re just friends.”

  Her face hot, Phoenix fumbled to unfasten her Rolex. “I have to give you this…”

  “Aw, hell no. That’s a gift, baby girl. You keep that.”

  Phoenix sighed. “I can’t, Ronn.”

  “Think of it like a ‘welcome to the label’ gift, something like that. Strictly business.”

  Ronn was canny, all right. That was the only thing he could have said to convince her.

  Phoenix almost walked away believing Ronn’s patience and understanding were superhuman. She was halfway down the hall before she heard him slam his door.