Ace Atkins: Dirty South

“The ‘popo’ didn’t like that too much?” I asked.

Teddy nodded his head.

“Guess not,” I said.

We followed ALIAS into a small room with three filthy windows crowded with dead plants and covered in comic strips. A haggard woman, oddly old in a way I couldn’t quite place, had her feet up in a ratty recliner chair. She flipped through channels on a television that flickered so much it made me dizzy.

No one spoke to her. ALIAS disappeared down a short hall and returned with a leather duffel bag with the Timberland logo.

“That’s it?” Teddy asked.

ALIAS said, “You locked me out of my own home.”

“Did I?” Teddy asked, leading the way as we passed the silent old woman living in her TV.

When we got back to his Bentley, the commons was bare of the children. A low bank of dark clouds rolled toward the river and there was the slight smell of rain in the distance mixed with the loose dust of scattering feet.

ALIAS held his bag. No expression.

Teddy circled his ride, searching for scratches or dents.

He shook his head. We both scanned the four clusters of housing projects surrounding us. No one. Loose popping of dried clotheslines stretching from metal crosses.

He pressed the release on the locks. The alarm chirped and I looked back at the long row of clouds. The silence was almost electric as I waited for him to take me home.

We rolled away in the Bentley, his car smelling of leather and new wood and some kind of lime perfume he sprayed on the rabbit fur. When we drove away, I watched three teenagers being hustled into the back of a black Suburban by about ten DEA officers. An old woman in pink house slippers yelled at them and kept throwing rocks at their back as they all loaded into the car.

“HOW DID YOU MEET this man?” I asked ALIAS, while we waited for a streetcar to move on St. Charles Avenue heading uptown to Lee Circle. Rain splattered the hood of my truck and wooden shop signs in the Warehouse District shook in the wind. Teddy had left me with the kid at my place and had gone back to the studio to make calls for last-minute loans. I told him I’d do my best but wished he’d just leave town.

ALIAS wasn’t listening to me. He’d busied himself by flipping through some blues CDs in my toolbox as we headed to the office where he’d had most of his business meetings. “Who the fuck is Super Chikan?”

“A guy I once got drunk with in Clarksdale. Can make his guitar talk like a chicken.”

“Man, that’s country-ass.”

More and more abandoned brick warehouses sported new rental and sale signs for the district. One showed a mural on an old cotton warehouse advertising white couples playing tennis, swimming, and drinking foaming coffees.

“How did you meet this guy?” I asked again.

“Through this woman I knew,” ALIAS said. He’d moved from the blues CDs to a cardboard box holding articles on Guitar Slim. I watched in the rearview as he scanned the articles and moved his lips.

“Who was she?”

“She came up to me when we was at Atlanta Nites,” he said. “Don’t remember her name. But man, she was fine.”

“That doesn’t help much.”

“She just gave me his card and was sayin’ that he worked with Mystikal and shit.”

“Where did you first meet him?”

“At my lake house. Dude just knock on the door like we old friends. Knew my name. Started to talkin’ to me right off about my Bentley. Knew all about my ride.”

“Who else was there?”

“That fine-ass woman.”

“You know anything else about her?”

“She smelled real nice.”

“Stinky ones don’t get much work.”

I downshifted, rain against my windshield, and saw a parking spot by the Circle Bar. The bar made me think of cigarettes and Dixies and Jack Daniel’s and me about five years ago.

Robert E. Lee stood tall on his pillar at Lee Circle, where streetcars made wide turns around its grassy mound and headed uptown.

I reached across ALIAS and into my dash for a pack of Bazooka.

I offered him a piece.

“What’s that shit?”

“Gum. You chew it. Brings enjoyment.”

“Man, that shit looks old as hell.”

“I will have you know that Bazooka is the finest damned gum ever known to man. All other bubble gum tastes like rubber paste. And they have comics inside. Brilliant.”

He looked at me and flashed a gold grin.

“What did he look like?” I asked.

“Kind of bald but kept his hair real tight. Like shaved so no one would notice. White.”

“You said that.”

“Well, he kind of dark for a white dude. Nose kind of big.”

“I’d ask how he dressed but it doesn’t matter,” I said. “Anything different about him? Moles? A tattoo?”

“Naw, man. He did have this weird shit about his ears,” he said, and rubbed the cartilage in his ears. “Like he got shit stuck up in it.”

“You mean like cauliflower ear?”

“Yeah, sumshit like that.”

We stopped at this three-story tan brick building on the Circle and got out. Most of the windows were open and we could hear a construction crew with their drills and hammers blaring Tejano music from small radios while they worked. We walked right into the first floor. It was gutted and open with exposed metal support beams. Even with the air flushing through the open space, it smelled of hot wood and oil from their tools and lifts.

No one was on the floor.

“Where were they?” I asked.

“Second floor.”

Upstairs, we found the office. Two Mexican workers were inside cleaning up a mess left by Sheetrock hangers. They swept the floor in their hard hats, T-shirts bulging with cigarette packs. They didn’t even look up at us as we walked over the stained plywood floor. I watched ALIAS taking it all in.

“Tell me what you remember.”

“They had a secretary. Every time I come in, she’d make me sit there awhile and read magazines till Mr. Thompson was ready.”

“Did Mr. Thompson have a first name?”

“Jim. He acted like we was friends.”

“How’d you get here?”

“Drove.”

“By yourself?”

He nodded.

“Anyone know about this besides you?”

“Naw.”

He walked over to a window where you could see the statue of Lee on his pillar. A streetcar lapped him. Clanking bell. Gears changing. You could only see the back of Lee.

“What’d they promise you, kid?”

“ALIAS.”

“What’s your real name?”

“Tavarius.”

“I like that better.”

“Whatever.”

I smiled.

“I got a business card they gave me.”

I shook my head. “Won’t do any good. Were any of these construction crews here when you came in?”

“No.”

“Didn’t see anyone else in this building except Mr. Thompson and this secretary? Who was she?”

“I don’t know. She was just always runnin’ around and answering phones and interruptin’ his meeting with calls from Britney Spears and shit,” he said, dropping his head.

“So how did it work?” I found a huge paint bucket to sit on and nodded to its mate by the window. He seemed pretty embarrassed. He prided himself on being smart and quick-witted. It was his job. He was a rapper.

Basically, this guy said he represented a ton of celebrities and boasted a long list of phony clients that included everyone from B. B. King to the Nevilles. He even had eight-by-ten photos of clients hanging above the secretary’s desk both times ALIAS visited the office. Once for the hook. The second was the yank.

He told ALIAS long stories about his clients losing millions to their record companies – a common and unfortunately all-too-often-true tale of the recording business – and that he wanted to protect him. He said his group – ATU, or Artists Trust Union – would handle the major balance of ALIAS’s earnings that up until that point had been kept in a trust fund because he was a minor. The guy spun wild tales about potential earnings and even hooked ALIAS real good about being able to invest in a private island in the Caribbean. This all sounded like complete 101 con horseshit to me, but then again, I’m not fifteen years old. He exploited every facet of ALIAS’s teenage dreams and paranoid fantasies about Teddy and Malcolm ripping him off.