1

Sirens ain’t nothin’ but ghosts. They reach out every damn night, red and blue, white spotlight flashin’ ’cross your eyes as you sleep on that concrete floor patterned in blood and dirt. You covered in a torn yellow blanket that once hid your dead mamma for weeks. In its touch, you see a bit of her cold ear and the edge of that face you tried not to imagine while you kept goin’ to school, cuttin’ her las’ ten dollars in a hundred ways at Rob’s Party Store down on Claiborne. You remember? Don’t you?

Back then, you hold your own in the Calliope yard, the ole CP-3, and find your only friends are a mean-ass pit bull you call Henry and a little rottweiler with short legs you name Midget. Your mamma stay alive to you for weeks underneath that blanket. Through it all, she stay like she is ’cause that room don’t have no heat and it’s February, like it is now, and her own family live on the other side of the project.

Y’all know Calliope – its own little galaxy in New Orleans. Findin’ your people on the other side is like shootin’ over to the moon. They long ago forgot about her. Don’t know you. Your daddy ain’t nothin’ but a word and the only future you see come from a box of Bally shoes you traded for two of your mamma’s rocks out in the yard. Henry and Midget backin’ you up like thugs in the rope-and-barbed-wire collars you made for them. A hundred windows covered in aluminum foil watchin’ you like eyes stand on the grassless ground.

You take those shoes down to some fancy-ass shoppin’ mall by the Quarter. The dollar you spend on a streetcar is the last green you have. Ten minutes later, that worn box of shoes you was gonna return for a hundred dollars – like that man said – is dumped out on the street along with your ole mongrel ass. But you don’t cry.

Why would you?

Don’t take that streetcar. You walk. All damned day. It’s a day from Calliope.

It’s dark when you get back. You remember. You thinkin’ about it all tonight with the sirens and the spotlights and them ghostful sounds.

It was Friday and Calliope was workin’ plenty down the cross streets. Strawberries’ heads bobbin’ in white men’s Lexuses and Hondas. Boys you once knew jacked up as hell, wide-eyed and watchin’ for drugheads to slow down and make that deal. Shit made out of flour and toilet water.

Room a hotbox when you crawl up the fire escape. Television on, playin’ BET and Aaliyah. She on a sailboat but dead. Like your mamma. You can smell Mamma now and you want to shake her awake, have her find people 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.

Загрузка...