Platinum

by Aliya S. King

  “And I’m only four months. They say when you carry low, it’s usually a girl.”

  Kipenzi rolled her eyes and went to the sofa. She wasted no time digging into the fruit basket that had been waiting for them.

  “Who’s going on first?” Kipenzi asked, her mouth full of melon.

  “Z, right? Doesn’t he always?”

  Kipenzi kicked off her shoes and shrugged her shoulders. “I think I heard they were changing it up. Just for tonight.”

  Beth cocked her head to one side. “They who?”

  Kipenzi froze with a piece of pineapple still in her hand, the end of it sticking out of her mouth. She looked at Beth and then finished the fruit.

  “Don’t listen to me. I’m retired.”

  “So you’re not going to do your part on any of Jake’s songs?”

  “How come no one believes me? I’m done. Not singing. For real.”

  “Is it gonna be hard for you? Don’t you think you’re going to miss it?”

  Kipenzi let out a deep sigh, put her feet on the coffee table, and yawned. “No, and no.”

  “Did you talk to Zander about his music?”

  “Girl, your son is incredible. He just needs to find the right team. Songwriters. Producers. Management.”

  “Puff wants to manage him.”

  Kipenzi snorted. “Right. Like Puff managed me. Zander needs a hands-on manager. Don’t get me wrong. I love Puff. But not for Zander. He needs someone who is going to do more than just show up in the video and wave his hands around. You think Puff ever actually took a meeting for me? Looked at my budget? Fought for a third single? Um. No.”

  “I don’t even know if I want Zander in this business. He’s still young …”

  “I got his back. Auntie Penzi is officially unemployed and I’m going to be watching him like a hawk. No worries.”

  “What do you think about Bunny?”

  “I think she’s going to be huge.”

  Beth’s shoulders slumped. “I do too. Why does that make me feel weird?”

  “’Cause she’s a bitch, that’s why.”

  Kipenzi and Beth locked arms and went down in the elevator, talking rapidly and hugging spontaneously for no reason except that they were together in person in the same city at the same time, an extremely rare occurrence. They dashed into the restaurant and headed straight back to the Cheater’s Booth before anyone recognized Kipenzi.

  The Cheater’s Booth was a special, oversized seating area at the Atlanta Grill, in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton. It was a roomy booth with a table large enough for the amounts of food that Z and Jake could put away. It even came with a discreet curtain that could be pulled around the two couples if they wanted to go for ultimate privacy. Beth would not have minded being completely hidden from the other diners in the restaurant. But Kipenzi, Jake, and Z were all famous. And she noticed that famous people needed to check their celebrity recognition gauges at least twice a day.

  Z came next, kissing Kipenzi on the cheek and sliding into the booth next to his wife. He looked over the menu, holding it with one hand, and continually stroked Beth’s belly with the other. When Jake arrived, he and Z performed an elaborate handshake, complete with loud finger snaps, that lasted for a full fifteen seconds. Kipenzi and Beth sat there, waiting for them to finish, rolling their eyes at each other in solidarity.

  They didn’t even pretend to be two couples on a double date. Kipenzi and Beth shared one side of the booth, picking off each other’s plates and finishing each other’s sentences. Jake and Z sat on the other side, trading industry gossip, constantly checking their various gadgets, and going over song selections for the show.

  Later a convoy of Navigators and Suburbans pulled up to the restaurant and the two couples met up with their security detail, who led them all outside. The plan was for one truck to take Kipenzi and Beth to the show, along with a few record label executives. Dylan, Jake and Z’s publicist, stood outside, speaking into her earpiece and yelling out orders to a few people milling about.

  Beth saw Bunny exit a Town Car and tap Zander on the back. He spun around quickly and they immediately started arguing.

  “I saw that picture in your email. Who the hell is Tonya?” Bunny screamed.

  She put her pointer finger in Zander’s face, edging it closer and closer to his nose. Zander’s hands were at his sides.

  Before Beth could reach Z, who was climbing into one of the trucks, Zander and Bunny were a cartoon-style ball of dust rolling around on the ground and Z and Jake were diving in to break them up.

  “Yo, what the fuck is wrong with you?” Jake said, dragging Zander to his feet. Zander swatted the air, trying to get another smack in Bunny’s direction.

  “Bitch is always trying to start some shit,” Zander screamed.

  “You trying to get locked up?” said Z. “You can’t be hitting no girl, yo!”

  Kipenzi and Beth stood side by side, staring at the scene. Both were thinking about the five times Beth had ended up in Kipenzi’s apartment, bleeding and crying. There had been a bloody nose, a black eye, a dislocated shoulder, a cracked rib, and once her two front teeth had gone missing. But that was a very long time ago. Z hadn’t hit Beth in ten years.

  Bunny got up, shadowboxing and dancing around, trying to get another shot at Zander. Dylan kept trying to grab her, but she managed to slip away each time.

  “You better listen to your daddy, Zander,” she taunted. “I know you don’t want to go to jail. Punk bitch.”

  “No, she didn’t,” Kipenzi said.

  “Yes, she did,” said Beth.

  “Zander, I will see you after the show,” Bunny shouted. “You wanna keep fucking with other girls? This shit is not over—asshole!”

  Hotel security came out, and Kipenzi and Beth watched the scene. Z had his arms wrapped around his son as they talked to the police officers. Dylan had dragged Bunny back to the Town Car and stuffed her in the back seat. She was moving and squirming, clearly holding up her middle finger to the glass. One of the officers walked over to the car to talk to Dylan.

  Beth walked over to Z, as Zander climbed into another Suburban with security.

  “I don’t like this girl,” Beth said to Z. “She’s going to get Zander in trouble.”

  “Let’s talk about it after the show,” Z said.

  “You need anything before I go?” Beth asked.

  “I need some ass,” Z said. He didn’t even bother to whisper.

  “Stop it,” she said, smiling. “For real. Me and Kipenzi are going to the arena.”

  Z palmed her behind and squeezed. “I’m serious. I need it. Before the show.”

  Beth swallowed. He was serious. But she was so tired. So weak. She wanted to go to the show, stay for just his set, and then come back to the hotel and pass out.

  “Z. Baby. I’m so—”

  Z waved off the first driver. Kipenzi, on her phone and surrounded by other people in the car, didn’t even notice that Beth was missing. Z grabbed Beth’s wrist and pulled her in the direction of the hotel entrance.

  The elevator arrived just as a young white girl recognized Z and began to walk over with a paper and a pen. Z shoved Beth into the elevator and jabbed at the button for the door to close. He turned Beth around so that she faced the wall.

  “I love you, Beth,” Z said and pulled her pants down just enough on one side. “You know that, right?” He grabbed Beth’s hair and wrapped her blond ponytail around his right hand. He yanked it just a bit and Beth obeyed, bending over at the waist. Random thoughts filled her head: Are there cameras on this elevator? Are my pants wet? Do the black girls let him do it like this?

  She opened her legs, put her hands on her belly, and waited. By the time they reached the top floor of the hotel and the doors opened, Z was done. He didn’t come into the room with her. There was no need to. He zipped himself up, then pressed the button for the first floor.

  “Take a shower,” Z said. “I’ll send a car to come get you in ten minutes.”<
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  BETH HAD NOT WANTED TO BRING HER YOUNGEST SON TO Z’S SHOW. She wasn’t ready to lose him yet. With her three older boys, the moment they saw their father onstage, their love affair with the woman who washed, fed, and dressed them was over. Zander had sat in the wings of the Apollo Theater in Harlem and watched, mesmerized, as his father stood in one spot and preached a sermon through a rap song. The energy from the frenzied crowd seeped backstage and washed over Zander like water at a baptism. When the show was over, Beth noticed her oldest son was different. He understood that people worshipped his father. And so, he began to worship him as well.

  And now that he was beginning to amass his own following, Zander had only enough room in his heart for his father and himself.

  Zakee had followed the next year. Zachary, though he knew his father hated him, had still become a convert after a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden. The only one left was Zeke, nearly three years old. She kept him behind at hotels or backstage any time Z performed. When he fully understood who he was related to and how that man was perceived, Beth would be childless again.

  Boo came to pick her up. They were waved through three security checkpoints in the Philips Arena parking lot and driven all the way up to a nondescript door. A few of Z’s friends from home milled about the backstage door, along with oversized bodyguards keeping a few women from entering.

  Beth kept her head down and walked right through the crowd. Someone on the other side of the door opened it and pointed her to the right, in the direction of Z’s dressing room. She heard the usual whispers: That’s Z’s girl right there. Yup. Is she white? Nah, I think she Puerto Rican. No, she white.

  Beth only darted her eyes as she read the handwritten signs on each door: Lighting, Sound, Crafts Services, Talent No. 2, and then, finally, Talent No. 1. Again, the door swung open before she had to knock.

  The chemistry of the room changed as soon as Beth entered. She recognized most of the men in the room; half of them were on Z’s payroll. But as always, the women were all strangers. The only woman she recognized was Dylan.

  Dylan winked and waved, holding tight to her clipboard and then returning to a rapid-fire conversation with a member of Z’s crew. Dylan was a different kind of white girl, and she reminded Beth of it as often as she could. Her father was a judge. Her mother was in the House of Representatives. Dylan had gone to Spence and then Harvard. She carried herself like she was better than Beth. Because she was. Like the three publicists before her, Beth knew she’d leave and take a proper job. She was slumming in hip-hop because it was cool to be a white girl who could boss around rappers, telling them what to do and where to be.

  Beth’s four sons were playing video games in a corner of the loft-like room. She scanned the room for her husband.

  “Boo, where’s Z?”

  “Just stepped out for a minute,” Boo said. “He’s on in fifteen.” Beth looked at her watch. “Jake already went on?”

  “Z’s on first.”

  Beth felt a prickly sensation up and down her arms. For ten years, Jake had always opened for Z. Why would that change tonight?

  “Don’t worry, it’s no big deal,” said Dylan, sidling up to Beth. She looked down at her clipboard, and Beth stared at the three inches of jet-black roots Dylan had coming out of her scalp. The rest of her hair was white blond, something that fascinated Beth, a natural blonde who’d never touched a bottle of dye.

  “The fucking guitarist for Jake’s acoustic set totally missed his flight,” said Dylan, her voice musky and deep. “He’s on his way now from the airport, but we totally don’t wanna hold up, like, the whole show, so the promoters are gonna put Z on first. That’s cool, right?”

  Dylan gave Beth a quick, plastic grin that translated to Deal with it.

  Beth resented that Dylan had a better command of her husband’s schedule than she did. If he missed a birthday party, here was Dylan: “We had a shot at an Oprah interview, so he had to fly out to this event. That’s cool, right?” And then when Beth was suffering from postpartum depression and needed Z to come home and help her with just one of the kids, here was Dylan, on speakerphone. “He just got two hundred fifty grand—cash—to perform for five minutes at a bat mitzvah. I’m sending him home as soon as he’s done. That’s cool, right?”

  No, Dylan. It’s not cool. It’s never cool, Beth thought to herself as she made her way to the stage.

  When Boo helped her and the boys up the steps to watch the show, Beth got a look at the crowd gathered at the Philips Arena to see Z perform a decade of hits. Her jaw dropped. The place was barely half full. Beth could not remember the last time she’d seen him perform before a noncapacity crowd. And this was Atlanta, not New York, where everyone was jaded and too cool for live shows. She turned around and looked back at Z’s people. They were lip-synching to his songs, waving their hands in the air and rhyming back and forth, their faces inches apart and contorted like Z’s. Either they didn’t notice that the place wasn’t full or they were pretending not to notice.

  Beth heard the opening chords of her favorite song, “Die Tonight.” She had been sitting next to a fifteen-year-old Z when he wrote it. She’d just given birth to Zander and they were all living with Z’s grandmother Zena in the Bronx. It was the song that got him signed to the label. It was the song that got him on the radio. It was the song that writers always asked him about. They couldn’t get enough of the story: Z holding his two-day-old son and a crack pipe in one hand, scribbling lyrics on the back of an envelope at Grandma Z’s kitchen table with the other hand.

  A year after the song went to number one, a fourteen-year-old girl in Compton killed her mother, who had abused her for years. In court, she said she had listened to “Die Tonight” on repeat for six hours until she got the courage to shoot her mother in the head at point-blank range. And there was the white boy in Houston, blasting the song in his car when he got pulled over by the police. He shot them both dead.

  While politicians and do-gooders insisted that Z’s lyrics and sentiments, Kill them before they kill you, were responsible for the crimes, Beth knew better. Z just wrote down what he felt. And it turned out that other people could relate, fifteen million times over.

  The music came to an abrupt halt and Beth noticed Boo standing just offstage with Zeke in his arms. Her youngest looked confused and tearful and reached his hands out toward his mother. She didn’t want him to see the show, but it was too late to ask Boo to take him back. She reached out for him and adjusted Zeke on her hip.

  Zeke craned his neck, looked back at Beth, smiled, and then looked back at his father. Beth could see Zander, Zakee, and Zachary on the other side of the stage, nearly visible to the crowd. She knew it was just a matter of time before Zander would be actually onstage with Z, serving as his hype man.

  Z stood at center stage and held his arms out wide. He dropped the microphone and remained still and silent. Then, without warning, he began to yell out the lyrics to “Die Tonight,” sending the crowd into screams. When he got to the chorus and the music began to slowly build up, an intense rhythmic bass line and a creepy piano riff, Beth instinctively put a hand over Zeke’s ear to protect him from the wave of screams that always poured out from the crowd.

  But this time something was different. No screams. Beth looked around the stadium, wondering if the lighting was bad. She couldn’t understand why Z’s performance didn’t seem as awe-inspiring as usual. He had the same amount of energy. He performed with the same vigor. So why did it seem like this was a dress rehearsal for the real show? Beth peered out into the crowd, trying to fix and focus her eyes on individual people. When she did, she realized: the people in the crowd were young. Zander’s age. They didn’t know Z. For them, “Die Tonight” was the theme song to a movie that they’d seen on DVD or a video game that featured one of his songs.

  It wasn’t the anthem of their angst years. They didn’t learn how to drive with that song banging in the speakers of their parents’ cars. Z was a relic, at least in
this room. And when he threw his arms out in his faux-Jesus pose and they clapped, they weren’t worshipping him, they were tolerating him.

  Back in the dressing room, Beth stayed in a corner with the boys, making them snacks and talking to them about the show. Z played a dice game with his boys in another corner of the room. They were waiting for Boo to return with the money from the promoter. Normally, when Z was done, the whole show was done. But this time Jake was getting ready to go on. Z told Beth they were going to a skybox in the arena to watch Jake perform.

  As soon as Boo walked back in, Beth noticed how everyone in the room except Z looked up with expectancy in their eyes. Boo had everyone’s lives in the front pocket of his jeans. The manager, the bodyguard, even the man whose only job was to hold Z’s jewelry, they all knew they had to get paid off the cash Boo had just gotten from the promoter. Beth never liked to be around when the men got those glassy, furtive looks in their eyes. It seemed pathetic, living off a man like Z, who rapped for a living. Boo crossed the room and whispered something in Z’s ear. Z was standing in a half squat; he was just about to throw his dice, which were still in his cupped hand. He listened intently, moved back to look at Boo, and then laughed, long and hard. The whole room seemed to exhale and Boo began his walk around the room, passing out wads of cash to different people there.

  “What the fuck was that?” Z asked, looking around the room.

  Beth had felt it too. It was like thunder. It sounded as if it was coming from the walls and the ceiling but she could only feel it under her feet. She picked up Zeke from the couch and walked to the door of the dressing room. As soon as she opened the door, a wave of sound forced its way into the room. It was piercing and all-encompassing and Beth was frightened. She thought of the concert at CUNY, one of Z’s first, where there had been a stampede. Seven people had been trampled to death.

  “They oversold the show?” Z asked no one in particular.

  Z’s best friend, Donald, clapped him on the back. “Nah, son. They want you back for an encore!”