“Thank you,” she mouths, blinking rapidly and biting her lip.
There’s no one in the room but her right now. We may as well be alone at the top of that Ferris wheel, lips seeking and hungry, trading breaths and heartbeats. The cheers, all eyes in the club on me, none of it registers. There’s a web that traps us together, silky and fine, tensile and fragile. A sticky mess I’ve never wanted to escape until now.
Maybe it’s time to let go . . .
I turn my attention back to the crowd before it gets awkward and make my smile as natural as possible. I have to shake this off. Truly this is the moment I’ve been waiting for and working for, and I’m not going to let my obstinate, misplaced feelings for Bristol ruin it.
“Where’s Qwest?” I boom into the mic.
The room explodes with wolf whistles and catcalls and suggestive remarks as Qwest swaggers onstage, one hand wrapped around a mic, the other hand wrapped around her hip. Oversized safety pins tenuously hold scraps of material together on her tight, curvy body. Very little is left to the imagination, and I bet every man in here is imagining.
Except Rhyson, of course. He’s backstage cuddled up with his wife, I’m sure.
The first hard beat of “Queen” drops, and it’s like opening the gate on a charging bull. As my first verse starts, Qwest circles me in a sensual stalk that elevates the sexual tension so high the whole audience is probably lightheaded. When I reach the chorus, she bends over in front of me and starts twerking. I can barely get the words out I’m laughing so hard, and the audience is eating it like dessert. Camera phones flash all over capturing this. It’ll be on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and anywhere else they can find to upload it before the night is through.
When our song is over, Qwest wears my outer shirt as usual tied around her waist. At least tonight I’m wearing a T-shirt under it. I don’t want to perform this next song with chest and abs out. “Bruise” means too much. I don’t want to set it up, explain it, excuse it, defend it, or make either side of the black and blue debate feel better or worse.
“This song is called ‘Bruise,’” I say simply and quietly once Qwest has left the stage. “It’s my next single, and I hope the lyrics speak for themselves. I hope they speak up for the kids in my neighborhood who get pulled over for nothing or whose dignity is dinged and chipped from the time they understand what those flashing blue lights me
an. I hope my words rise up on behalf of my cousin Greg and other cops who put themselves in the line of fire every day, running toward the dangers the rest of us flee. I hope this song is a dirge for lives lost on both sides of a debate that has divided us, when we should unite. I hope this song is common ground.”
The last chorus is more spoken word than rap, with the music and the beat falling away. A capella. When the final word leaves my mouth, disappearing into thin air, it lands in the total silence I’ve come to expect when people hear the song for the first time. A silence loaded with contemplation. The sound of walls dropping and assumptions combusting. Ignorance running from the room. The trickle of applause swells to the loudest it’s been all night in here, and now, my smile is real. That dream I sketched in the air with Rhyson, suspended above a theatre, to be a voice for my generation, that just happened.
I check stage right where I saw Rhyson last. He wears the same look he did the first time he heard “Bruise”, like his eyes open wider every time. He grins and tosses his chin up. Amir stands just behind him, and I’m struck by the two friends who have been mainstays in my life. They come from completely different paths and are completely different types of men, but they are both exactly what I need them to be.
Seguing from “Bruise” into the last song I’d ever want to perform tonight is tough. I’d usually talk a little about the story behind the song, but “Top of the World” is no one’s business but mine and Bristol’s. Or I’d share what it was like to write it, but it wrote itself on a night when I couldn’t sleep. I’d fucked some random chick, whose name I’m ashamed I can’t even remember. The smell of her perfume clung to my sheets, hung on my body. She lay curled up beside me, sweaty, naked, and sated. Disgust and frustration and loneliness and longing waged a blood war in my veins while I wondered what Bristol was doing at that very moment. If she was in bed with some other guy, thinking of me. Or if she was in bed with some other guy, and I wasn’t on her mind at all. And, yeah, I hated her. For a sliver of a second, I hated her for throwing up road blocks and smoke screens and barriers every time I got close enough to see she felt the same way. And there was just enough hate and too much passion to hold in. So, I’d rolled out of bed, lit a joint, and these words puffed from my lungs and fell from the burnt tips of my fingers.
I can’t say any of that, so I just signal the drummer to drop the beat. And my tongue is a stiletto that breaks the seal of my lips. It cuts the lining of my jaw, every word slitting my throat. I’m bleeding out over the infectious sample of Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” in a room full of people, and none of them know.
I exit the stage with the sound of their applause battering my ears. I hope the executives are happy with the pound of flesh I just carved out of myself for them. I hope Bristol’s happy, too, hearing my feelings spread out and tied down on an altar like a still-breathing sacrifice for slaughter. I brush past her in the wings, deliberately not looking at her face. It’s the first time I’ve performed the song live, and I hate it as much as I did the night I wrote it. And I love it just as much, too.
With the hard part—the performance—behind me, I’m deter- mined not to waste another moment brooding over the woman who wants someone else, or at the very least, doesn’t want me. We’re popping bottles and celebrating in earnest. Only my mother would look right at home in VIP and with her very own bottle of Ace of Spades.
“Baby, I’m so proud of you.” She takes a delicate sip straight from her bottle. “When Marlon was growing up, I always said my baby won’t have any strikes. That was all I wanted. My dream for him was just staying out of jail and not having a bunch of nappy headed kids running wild all over the neighborhood.”
“Ma, in your stories, why my imaginary kids always gotta have nappy heads?” I tease her with a grin, drawing from the bottle of Cristal on the table beside me.
“Because your imaginary baby’s mama has no idea what to do with their hair.” She cackles and passes a fresh bottle to Amir. “Then Grandma has to come in with bows and brushes to save the day.”
Everyone cracks up. Kai and Qwest sit on either side of my mom, and her hilarious commentary keeps them in stitches. Luke, our friend since high school and a certified pop star in his own right, has been in the studio non-stop recording his next album, so he looks like a convict on furlough. He signed to Prodigy shortly after Kai. Bristol manages them both.
“Luke, where’s Jimmi?” I ask. “I miss her crazy ass.”
“She’s in London.” Luke’s blue eyes are slightly glazed, maybe from smoking a little something. “She’ll be back in a couple of weeks. Hates she missed it.”
“She texted me, but I haven’t had a chance to open it,” I tell him. “She’s actually back next week,” Bristol pipes up from the corner of the velvet sectional taking up the entire wall of the VIP section.
Jimmi is the only non-Prodigy artist Bristol manages. They met on that fateful spring break trip, too, years ago and have been close ever since. If there’s trouble to be gotten into, they’ll get into it together. Jim’s one of the few people who can corrupt Bristol into outrageous behavior.
Like walking naked into the ocean at midnight.
I didn’t ask for the image of Bristol’s long, slim body nearly naked plunging into the Pacific between waves and moonlight, but it floats to me unbidden. I wonder if she ever thinks about that night. About that string of nights when she pulled me into her unexpected depths where I’ve been drowning ever since.
“Well, if it isn’t The One!” a slightly accented voice yells from a few feet away.
Hector, the owner of my favorite strip club in New York, Pirouette, crosses the space with sure, swift strides. His real name is Martin, but “Hector” suits his image of the first-generation Cuban- American who pulled himself up by the proverbial bootstraps. He launched his first high-end strip club in Miami, and New York soon followed. “Hector” has become infamous. His own mama probably doesn’t call him Martin anymore.
“This is amazing, Grip.” Hector squeezes into a small space between Amir and me, gaining a deep frown from my friend/body- guard/babysitter. “Feels like just yesterday you were in the strip club spinning for my grand opening in New York.”