Ace Atkins - Dirty South

Teddy squashed the new cigar into an empty coffee can filled with roach clips and the beat started once again. He slid his fat fingers across the mixing board, that same bounce that every other rapper in the country had tried to copy ever since it had been born in the South. The sound track to every black neighborhood in the U.S. Women and ice. Cars and clubs. Stank took a deep stance, hat sideways on his head, and rolled into it.

I watched Teddy’s head bobbing up and down, almost hearing the cash falling from the sky in green rain as he moved with his arms. I smiled.

Teddy smiled too until he swung his big arm too close to his food and knocked the Mello Yello all over the console, seeping into all those tiny knobs.

The equalizer’s green and red lights dimmed and then shut down. The music ceased in the monitors above us and I watched Stank’s hands turn to fists. “What the fuck’s up?”

Teddy grabbed his Italian leather jacket and started dabbing off the console. I pulled the jacket from his hands and found some napkins near a pizza box. I wiped the metal and plastic clean but knew it was no use. He’d shorted out the system.

He stood and kicked open the door, leaving the room. I sat there for a while and watched the others clear out. Some more of Teddy’s men walked around, prowling, making sure I didn’t start any shit. I saw some accusing stares and I smiled back. These boys were in their late teens. Twenty if they were lucky. Their scowls and the hard-edged violence in their eyes reminded me of angular men who’d worked the Delta land and had been beaten down for generations. They were teens; they were old men.

I grabbed a cold Coke from a cooler and found Teddy in his office. Glass desk. Black leather furniture. Boxes and boxes of CDs obscuring the windows. He yelled for everyone to leave him the fuck alone. About a dozen men streamed from his office, a couple of obscenely beautiful women. Black with ringlets of soft hair, T-shirts cut off below their breasts.

I found a comfortable place on the sofa and lay down like you would in a shrink’s office. I noticed one of Teddy’s old game balls from the Saints and read the writing. It was a play-off game against Atlanta where Teddy had picked up a fumble and ran it back fifteen yards for a TD to win the game.

I tossed the ball up in the air and remembered the party at Teddy’s house when we got back to New Orleans. He’d shook his fat butt on the counter of his kitchen with two women and an honest-to-God midget someone met in the Quarter.

I tossed the ball up in the air again. “ALIAS is safe,” I said. “He’s with JoJo. But in case anyone asks, you don’t know shit.”

“A’ight,” he said, burying his big head into his beefy arms. I heard him sniffle and cough, his body shaking loud and hard deep inside, and the rippling pain hurt my heart so badly I worked to change the subject.

“You can buy a new mixing board. That’s what, five thousand? Man, that’s how much you paid for those rims on that Bentley.”

“If I don’t get another album from the kid, man…”

On the wall, he had a picture of him and Mike Tyson and Don King. Another showed a picture of Teddy and Sherman Helmsley. He signed the photo “Movin’ on Up.”

“He’ll be back,” I said. “I promise.”

“He always come back here,” he said. He nodded to a long row of keys that hung from gold hooks behind his desk. “You see all that? I let all my talent see where I can take ’em. You see I got two Bentleys. Three Escalades. And that little one there, the one with the platinum fish? Man. That’s my baby right there. Sweet little Scarab boat. Got to slap ALIAS hand every time he come in here tryin’ to take them keys. I said he cut some platinum albums and he can have it. That’s how I know he’ll be back. He want it so bad it hurt him.”

“This album was the trade with those people in L.A.?”

“No,” he said, pulling his head free from his arms and settling into his large desk chair. “That’s the last of the Dio tracks. This is for somethin’ else I owe.”

“What about Cash?”

“Don’t worry about Cash,” he said. “He know the money comin’.”

“You paid him back?”

“Waitin’ on the call,” he said. “We got to meet. Calm things down. Smooth it over.”

Teddy’s face sagged and his expression turned inward, looking down at the calluses on his hands and the manicure on his fingers.

“Talked to Jay Medeaux,” I said. “Cops don’t think Malcolm killed himself. Didn’t think he could hang himself in that tree.”

Teddy shook his head. “He hung himself.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Can I see his papers now?”

Teddy shook his head and buffed his nails on his pant leg. “It’s over,” he said. “We straighten this thing out with Cash and we done. What Malcolm done was not right. He took a kid’s money and killed the best rapper we ever had.”

“He was your brother.”

“Let’s not talk,” Teddy said. The room quiet as hell, Teddy’s face only lit with a small banker’s light. “Okay?”

The phone rang and Teddy took it, slumping back into his leather office chair. He grunted a couple times and then said, “I got it.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“You roll with us?” he asked.

“Where to?”

“Antoine’s,” he said. “Cash ready to make the deal.”

ANTOINE’S ISN’T MY FAVORITE restaurant. Most of the places I enjoy are far out of the Quarter in little neighborhood pockets where the food’s cooked on broken-down stoves by women who look on their customers as extended family. But I used to eat at Antoine’s and Commander’s Palace – one of my favorites – for special occasions with JoJo and Loretta. They found it very important that I know how to handle myself in nice places. Sit up straight. Use the right fork. They also taught me how to order and how to dress and how to recognize the better foods. “Don’t be so country,” JoJo said to me about a thousand times. Antoine’s used to have a menu printed completely in French with waiters who held their jobs as lifelong professions.

But recently I’d noticed a change in the old place. You saw more and more out-of-town businessmen walking from its century-plus doors chomping on toothpicks, wearing golf shirts without a tie or jacket. The waiters had grown ruder, the food a shadow of what it had once been. The menu printed in English.

We rode in a stream of Bentleys and Escalades rolling into the Quarter. I’d grabbed the sport coat that I’d worn to Malcolm’s wake over my white T-shirt. Jeans and boots were at least better than a golf shirt. The music battling from each car didn’t even stop when we rolled onto St. Louis near the old Wildlife and Fisheries Building and Teddy’s flunkies were left to go park.

We were seated at a huge rectangular table in the center of the restaurant. White tile floors. Café chairs with tables covered in white linen. The walls lined with pictures of dead starlets and U.S. presidents.

A man in an out-of-style Italian suit sat with a peroxide-blond woman with mammoth breasts. He fed her ice cream from his spoon and nearly dropped the white mess in his lap when Teddy’s boys walked in.

We didn’t even have time to settle our asses in our seats when Cash parted a scurrying group of waiters with about ten of his men and found a seat opposite Teddy. He wore a white linen suit without a shirt. Platinum weighing hard on his neck and fingers. Teddy nodded but did not get up.

Bad energy filled the room.

He saw me but didn’t look at me. My hands clenched at my sides and my mouth grew dry.

Teddy motioned over the waiter, ordered chilled shrimp for his people and five bottles of Dom Pérignon.