Ace Atkins: Dirty South

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.

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 that sad ole music?”

“The blues ain’t nothing but a botheration on your mind,” I said, speaking low.

“No wonder it makes me depressed.”

“What? You want me to ‘Shake That Ass’?” I asked, naming one of his New Orleans competitor’s top-ten hits. Asses, champagne, and platinum usually dominated his preferred style of music. Dirty South rap. I shook my butt a little while continuing to work under the hood of the truck before turning back around.

“Travers, you got to remember, I seen you dance,” Teddy said, straightening out the folds in his tent-sized black double-breasted suit. Teddy was 300 pounds plus with a deep insulated voice from all the fat around his neck. His words seemed to come from inside a well. “Ain’t pretty.”

As I leaned back into my thirty-year-old truck, I noticed his newest electric blue Bentley parked outside. Chrome rims shining like mirrors into the sun. I’d heard the inside was lined with blue rabbit fur. Real rabbits died for that.

One of those new Hummer SUVs painted gold with black trim pulled in behind the Bentley, shaking with electronic bass. Teddy’s brother, Malcolm, walked across Julia.

I grunted as I fit a pipe plug into the heater hose outlet of the new water pump. Malcolm wandered into the garage, decked out in hard dark denim, a tight stocking cap on his head and a platinum cross ticking across his chest. “What up?”

“Hey, brother,” I said, reaching back from the hood and giving him the pound. I liked Malcolm. Always streetwise and hard. Sometimes in and out of trouble but always himself.

“Came by to see if you want to have lunch at Commander’s,” Teddy said.

“I’d settle for fried chicken and greens at Dunbar’s.”

“Travers, you are the blackest white man I know.”