The Plot Against Hip Hop

by Nelson George

  “I know that. He e-mailed me quite a bit recently. We ran some theories back and forth. He never thought I was too extreme. Not like some people. Everybody perceived him as real mainstream … and me? I’m supposed to be out on the fringe. Underground and shit. But Dwayne knew firsthand how shit can get twisted up.”

  “Where’s the memorandum?”

  “You meet me in front of my apartment building in three hours with the rest of the money and I’ll give you a copy and fill in some of the blanks.”

  “Five thousand isn’t a lot of money if it’s as important as you say.”

  “I’ve been offered more for it. I even got an offer once just to put it up on my website. But secrets only have power as secrets. I knew if I put it up on my site I’d just be another angry old-schooler with a beef.” Truegod took a piece of paper out of his pocket and wrote out his address with a pencil.

  “People would probably think I made the whole thing up. That it’s a hoax or something. If Dwayne Robinson had used it in his book, people would have paid attention. They would have listened to him. I think that’s why he’s dead. Now, that $5,000 is no money to a lot of people, but it’s a lot of money to me. It’ll get me down to Costa Rica and a little place by the beach. I can still blog from there, you know. So meet me at my place and bring cash.”

  CHAPTER 9

  BLACK STEEL IN THE HOUR OF CHAOS

  D didn’t come back to Harlem with $4,500 in cash. He brought $1,500 in cash—three five hundred–dollar bills. The rest was in a cashier’s check made out to Harry Tate. Truegod clearly wasn’t big on banking, so the check was intended more as bait than payment. Truegod, he thought, didn’t figure to tell him everything he knew right away. D hoped the check would both distract and frustrate the writer into revealing more than he planned. If things went well they’d roll down to D’s bank together to cash the check. If Truegod tried some sneaky shit D would just tear the check up and, maybe, stomp a hole in the dreadlocked man’s chest.

  While the block was dotted with signs of rehabilitation (scaffolding, dumpsters, lunching workmen), Truegod lived in a dingy tenement yet untouched by the forces of development. There were even two redeyed, jail-looking dudes lounging outside—one shirtless with a white skullcap and sagging jeans, the other in a red T-shirt and matching red Yankee cap. D hated the liberties people took with tradition in the name of style even more than the reckless eyeballing this dynamic duo aimed his way. The kid repping the Bloods’ colors raised a red flag, so to speak, but D felt confident he could subdue them efficiently if it came to that.

  The rank aroma of mildew and garlic filled his nostrils in the building’s small lobby. Next to the mailboxes and buzzer was a notice that the city was foreclosing on the property. It was only a matter of time before someone scooped the building up and made the place safe for white-collar folks looking to cut ninety minutes off their commute. For the moment the tenement was still home to working-class people like the nice Haitian woman and her heavyset daughter D encountered in the lobby; he helped navigate their shopping cart past the heavy metal front door. D then eschewed the elevator and took the gray marble staircase, which was dusty and had windows that looked out onto a narrow, sunless alley.

  He had ventured up staircases like this a million times to visit friends, see women, and, for pay, instill fear and/or confidence in someone. A lot of these places tended to be shotgun buildings with rooms off a long central hallway. Some were so ancient that showers were in the kitchen and the toilet in some other room, the plumbing having been installed in the early twentieth century and then fitfully updated every other decade or so. D knew all that history would be cleaned up as soon as the building was finally purchased. They’d probably have Jacuzzis and shit.

  Truegod would be long gone by then. So would the smell of pig’s feet and vinegar that filled the air on the fourth floor. It was a lingering scent of Southern black life that reminded him of Sundays when his mother’s cooking chased him out of the apartment in search of Mc-Donald’s french fries.

  When D knocked on the door, Truegod popped open three locks before cracking the door open. “Wasn’t sure you were coming,” he said.

  “Well, I’m just full of surprises,” D replied.

  There had once been a great store called Rock and Soul Records on Seventh Avenue near Madison Square Garden that was always the best place to grab the hottest twelve-inch singles. Truegod’s apartment was a reasonable facsimile. There were racks of vinyl against the walls. Posters and photos were taped and tacked up everyplace else. A recording of Mr. Magic’s legendary radio show on WBAI was playing low on some unseen boom box. A banged-up Intel desktop sat on what would usually be called the living room table. Next to it was an old warhorse of an HP printer and clippings above it from periodicals as diverse as Nylon, the Economist, and Vibe.

  “You got the money?” Truegod stood in the center of the room eyeing D nervously. D reassured him by pulling out a white Chase envelope and handing it over to the writer. Truegod immediately ripped it open and his face registered despair. “A check? I said cash only.”

  “Okay, we’ll go to my bank and cash it. But we don’t make another move until you hook me up.”

  “A check?” Truegod muttered again, and then disappeared into another room.

  Under different circumstances D would have enjoyed rifling through Truegod’s inviting collection of old-school vinyl. D noticed the Classical Two’s Rap’s New Generation, Teddy Riley’s first credit as a full-blown producer, which made him half smile, but his face quickly reverted to stone when Truegod reappeared. There was a stack of papers in his right hand and a small-caliber revolver in his left. “They got Dwayne Robinson, but they ain’t getting me. You hear me?”

  “I won’t let that happen, Truegod.”

  “But you were there when Dwayne died. Who’s to know you didn’t do the deed?” Truegod waved the gun threateningly in D’s direction.

  “Listen, motherfucker,” D said, and took a step forward, “if I was gonna kill you I would have tossed you to the ground and stomped you the minute I came in the door. I’m not a killer and you know damn well you’re not either, so put the jammy down and hand me those papers.”

  Truegod contemplated D’s words and then tossed the pile of paper over to him. Roughly fifty pages were held together by a single brat clip squeezed into a hole in the upper left-hand corner. It looked like a third-generation copy and was printed on a kind of treated fax paper D vaguely remembered from his youth. The cover sheet read: THE HIP HOP AUDIENCE: Its Attitudes, Trends, Demographics, and Future. Below that was: SAWYER MARKET GROUP, 1700 Broadway, New York City. It was dated February 1989.

  “I need to make a copy,” D said.

  “And I need that check cashed.”

  D nodded at the gun. “Let’s go then.”

  Truegod slid the weapon between his belly and belt.

  As they moved toward the door, D asked, “You do know how to use that?”

  “Aim and pull the damn trigger. Stupider guys than me have shot people.”

  “And smarter guys than you have shot innocent people.”

  As they walked down the staircase Truegod made an important admission: “Yours wasn’t the only e-mail I got recently about the memorandum. Lately I’ve been receiving more inquiries about that than where Tupac’s living now. No one cared before Dwayne was assassinated.”

  “But you trusted me?”

  “As much as I could anyone. I knew I needed to make a move. You seemed the least dangerous. You have a rep for being soft-hearted.”

  “Thanks. I try.”

  “But you see I still got my piece.”

  “Who contacted you?”

  “Some people I’ve heard things about, you know. It made me look under my bed at night. I guess I could have made a deal with them, but then you got at me.”

  “So Dwayne’s death and this pile of papers are somehow connected.”

  “Just like I believe Kanye West is a follower of S
atan.”

  “As in the devil?”

  “Believe me,” Truegod said, “I’ve seen the psychiatric reports.”

  The two youngsters hanging outside the building were gone now. The workmen had finished lunch and were back grinding on the soon-to-be-revived buildings. A gypsy cab rolled past on its way toward St. Nick.

  D clutched the report in the crook of his arm, like a Bible or a football. Truegod glanced nervously up and down the block. D could feel that the molecules on the street had shifted in the twenty minutes he’d been in Truegod’s apartment. A gray cloud had appeared overhead. Rain was imminent. D took Truegod by the arm and they headed toward the waiting black sedan.

  “It’s not gonna take long to get that cash, is it? You know how things are. Cash is the only way to keep a secret. It’s the only thing without a real computer trail now. I get your cash and I can make it to Costa Rica with only small blips on the screen. Little blips, you know. Nothing too traceable. Nothing worth remembering.”

  Truegod’s rambling was irritating D and taking up a little too much of his attention. So D was a beat late in noticing the two youngsters from earlier come running out of an alleyway, their eyes John Blazed on herb, with box cutters poised to strike. D caught the bare-chested one with a side kick, buckling the fool’s right knee and sending him screaming to the ground.

  Unfortunately, the delay in D’s awareness would prove fatal for Truegod. As the writer attempted to draw his gun, the red-garbed attacker slashed his face, his arm, and then his jugular in three rapid back-and-forth swings with his left hand. Truegod went down to his knees, clutching his throat, trying to hold back the blood as his life flowed away through his fingers.

  D knew he had a problem. This wasn’t just some kid with a blade. This guy was a trained killer. He turned toward D and chuckled, amused by the spasm of fear that crossed D’s face. At first D was gonna go for the bare-chested dude’s cutter, but they were too close to the second assassin. D dropped the Sawyer memorandum on the ground, freeing his right hand. The papers, not very well secured, scattered along the Harlem sidewalk. A few broke free, getting stuck in Truegod’s blood.

  As the kid moved toward him, D snatched the plastic lid from a garbage can and flung it hard with two hands into his face. The Blood raised his hands in defense and D threw himself into his attacker’s midsection, sending them both to the pavement with D’s skull driving into the guy’s sternum. When they landed, all the wind went out of his opponent and the box cutter fell to the ground. D rolled off him, landed on his knees, and then reared back to push a heavy right hand into the fool’s face.

  But that intention was never realized. Cause the next thing D knew everything had changed to his favorite color—black.

  That night D had a dream.

  He was standing in the middle of a two-lane highway surrounded by desert. He was wearing blue jeans and a torn sack of a canvas shirt. He was barefoot. His back was in pain, as if he’d been sliced in vertical lines by a long slender knife or whip. There was the metal taste of blood in his mouth.

  Dwayne Robinson sat behind a desk on the side of the road with the glow from his laptop on his face, but this glow wasn’t blue or white. It was reddish rose, the color of blood diluted with water. Dwayne was typing and oblivious to D’s presence. A sheet of paper, pushed by a sudden gust of wind, brushed against D’s leg and then fluttered away. Another sheet floated up. Then two, three, ten, twenty sheets came his way, bouncing over various parts of his body and down the empty two lanes.

  D snatched one paper out of the air and tried to read the words, but it was nearly impossible. They were typed, tight together, single spaced, and fractured. Andyoudon’tstopthebodyrockfeeltheheartbeat. Hip hop phrases turned into unreadable gibberish.

  A tour bus came down the road and deafening break beat accompanied it, something by Clyde Stubblefield chopped, sampled, and enhanced by the Bomb Squad. The bus stopped and revelers of all persuasions suddenly stood in front of him—their hands filled with popcorn, St. Ides malt liquor, Cîroc vodka, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Sprite.

  At the end of the line of people there was a faceless, raceless man somehow guzzling Olde English 800 without a mouth. The can now empty, the faceless man looked up, as did his fellow travelers, at a noose hanging from a lamppost.

  Then it was dark and the two-lane highway was now a country road and the moon hung low and the revelers held torches and wore white hoods, and Dwayne, still sitting by the roadside, kept on typing. A cheer went up and the faceless man held up D’s penis for inspection and D looked down as he twisted in the heavy wind from the noose around his neck.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE BLUEPRINT FOR HIP HOP

  You could never tell whether it was day or night in D Hunter’s apartment. Heavy drapes covered the windows; the walls and ceiling were black, as was most of the furniture. On one wall was a framed photo of D and his relatives from back when he was the baby of the Hunter family. Next to it was a letter from his mother, written years ago, when the psychic wounds from the deaths of his three brothers were still painfully fresh.

  D’s apartment was a place of mourning, his own personal tomb of grief. It was twelve noon outside, but you’d never know it if you saw D curled up under black sheets, bandages on his head, hands, and shoulders, and a bottle of painkillers on the nightstand. So when he slowly awakened there was nothing that suggested day or night, the ambiguity that he craved, a sense of being lost in a dayless time. He’d always felt time was a trap. Everything that took place in the past was so present in his life, it was like tragic events kept happening over and over, even as new memories—many of them equally painful—rolled atop them, adding layer after layer, each darker than the one before.

  This day, however, his physical pain was more pungent than any memory. The slashes on his body stung, particularly a nasty one on the fat part of his left hand. The back of his head throbbed where a baseball bat had introduced itself to the base of his skull. Pain pulsed through his head as D stirred, so he moved slowly, hoping it would delay the feeling he’d had his ass kicked.

  Being HIV-positive always complicated his recovery from any altercation. How would his body respond? Would it weaken his already questionable immune system? Would it take him months to come back from something that, in his otherwise great condition, should take just weeks?

  So far, so funky. Since returning home from the hospital D had laid up, hoping to get back out in the field by the weekend. He’d promised himself to chill out, especially after the shouting match he’d had with Fly Ty.

  “Why is it that old hip hop writers die when you’re around?” Ty had asked sarcastically.

  “Because I’m apparently a bad bodyguard but a damn good detective.”

  Ty was actually very concerned about D and, also, quite embarrassed that a glorified security guard had apparently flushed out Dwayne’s assassins. The MO had been the same as Dwayne’s hit: two Bloods with box cutters, plus a third—who in D’s case applied the game-winning blow with a baseball bat. D knew he was lucky to be alive. The third man, who a workman described as a light-skinned black man or Latino in a Phillies jersey and cap, could have just as easily cut his neck when he fell to the ground.

  The facts of the attack were these: the getaway car, a blue Audi, had been abandoned in Washington Heights with bloodstains on the seats, along with red clothes and a old Westside Connection CD (which D couldn’t believe anyone would still listen to, much less any self-respecting East Coast thug). The cops did their CSI thing to the car, comparing fibers, etc., from the Dwayne Robinson crime scene, but there were no matches. They did find hair in the Audi that belonged to a Caucasian, but since the car had been stolen from a white family in Hackensack, New Jersey, they weren’t convinced it was significant. In short, no forensic evidence tied the two stabbings together beyond the choice of weapons and the presence of a third man with a car.

  The gang squad found the evidence inconclusive. Gang initiation or paid hit? A paid hit o
ver a decades-old marketing report? No, two paid hits over articles about hip hop. That didn’t impress the NYPD. Fly Ty thought it was too much of a coincidence that D was involved in two initiation incidents so close together. But he too found the Sawyer memorandum theory “a silly load of bullshit.” Hence the shouting match.

  It didn’t help that Fly Ty had answered, “It’s in our system,” when asked about the cassette found on Dwayne’s body.

  “Which means we’ll hear it when?”

  “It’s an audio tape that is, as far as we know, tangentially, if at all, connected to an gang initiation.”

  “I thought murders in Soho were a priority for NYPD.”

  “They are. Except when it conflicts with matters of national security.”

  “What’s a terror threat have to do with the cassette?”

  “Don’t act stupid, D. The team that handles audio recordings and such is backed up with intercepts of phone calls and tapes of meetings about possible terrorism in the city. It’s a major investigation.”

  “And you know about it?”

  “Yeah, they like to share here at NYPD. Anyway, you silly motherfucker, Dwayne’s tape isn’t on the back burner. It just isn’t in the front. Our folks are excellent. As good as the FBI. But we only have so many ears.”

  D mulled all this over as he stood in boxer shorts in his small kitchen dropping strawberries, bananas, and whey protein into his blender. As he poured apple juice over this healthy concoction and turned on the blender, he wondered why that third attacker hadn’t taken another whack at him. Prone and unconscious, D had been an easy target. Another hit and he wouldn’t be making a fruit shake. No, he would be up in heaven joining his brothers in a two-on-two game like the ones back in the Tilden projects.

  Maybe it was the workmen, one of whom came over with a hammer, or the approaching sirens of New York’s Finest alerted by the call of one of Harlem’s model citizens. When the police finally arrived there were just two men on the pavement, one dreadlocked and dead, the other bald and bleeding. And there were the papers. Tattered, dirty, ripped, and floating away in the breeze from a coming rainstorm.