by Danyel Smith
Eva stood back a step. Lois had found something else to do. Had become somebody else, and had the calm, bright-eyed face of a person who’d found the right place on the way to someplace different. Eva felt good giving the sincere compliment, felt open, and kind of square, for feeling anything.
“You feel good, Eva?” Lois searched Eva’s face for evidence of joy. “Sun did real good.”
“She did,” Eva said flatly, wanting to escape Lois suddenly. “Thanks. And good luck to you.” Eva gave Lois a last quick hug. “Anything I can do, ever, let me know.” Then Eva walked toward the long balcony with a flushed face.
Dart saw her through the doorway and stepped out. “You look tired,” he said.
“That’s what I like to hear. Where’s Sunny.”
“Sunny’s grown.” He was holding a bottle of water.
“What are you doing here?”
“It’s dark in my room.”
“Turn on the goddamn lights.”
“I see. You’re in this”—he took a glance around the party—”kind of mood.”
There was no dancing in this room, either, weighted down as it was by melted butter and heavy-bottomed bottles. Like stock vases at a florist’s, Make use of me, the bottles seemed to say, and the response was long kisses and caresses to glass necks from open-shirted hip hop execs, double-breasted pretenders, queens requesting Prince, dykes in business-lady drag, and wise chicks like Eva held together with earned sweat, $100 pressed powder, and the kind of masochism necessary to undergo Brazilian bikini waxes. The various factions, more apt to explode among themselves than in an integrated group, churned to a mild froth. Eva knew the currents. She knew the rocks, and the fallen trees, too. Eva wondered if she’d ever have the babies she’d aborted. If, somehow, some part of them had remained. She’d seen a pale-brown baby with pretty lips at Miami International. The infant was in a pink jumper. It had been sleepy and pouting. Eva had smiled at the baby and it looked at her blankly, like Eva was benign, but alien.
“Can you get me a drink?”
“Tell Ron to get you a drink.”
“Dart. Can you get me a Scotch, please.” Eva needed a sting on her lips. That hot menthol on her throat.
“Yeah, Dart,” Ron said as they trudged by each other. “Can you get her a Scotch, please.” He dangled a green bottle by the neck like a chicken he’d killed. Ron no longer had the bodyguards that had attended him for a few years. As hip hop had moved from the political eruptions of bands like Public Enemy and Poor Righteous Teachers and Arrested Development and Boogie Down Productions, there were fewer ideological reprisals. People still got stomped, but the beatdowns—which in the past had seemed more spontaneous and emotional—weren’t over message as much as they were over money. With the exceptions of the murders of Biggie and Tupac, even the newer, more financially planned brawls were sporadic. Gangsta and dance rap was keeping everybody paid and much more chill.
“Don’t,” Eva said to Ron, “start.”
The fact that he was king of the room wasn’t enough. Ron was jealous of what he imagined to be a metaphysical bond between Eva and Dart, and he was mad that Eva had swung Sun’s bright night. Almost drunk, Ron fell back on mockery. “Congratulations, Evey! Sunny blew up the spot tonight.” His eyes were damp and angry as a hungry baby’s. “You had that shit down to a science, didn’t let nothin’ get out beforehand. And then“—he crouched a little—” just when everybody thought the show couldn’t get any better, you had your boys come out with that boomin’-ass set—” Ron’s eyes were sour and laughing at the fiascoes he saw in Eva’s future. Dart returned and handed Eva her Scotch.
“Can you walk me to my room?” she said to him.
“You got fools walking you to your room now?” Ron shook like he was amused, but no laughter came out. He tilted the champagne to his lips.
Eva walked toward the door of the suite, thinking Dart was behind her.
“Keep fucking with me,” Dart said, still near Ron. His voice thundered under the party buzz like a bass line.
“Walk Eva to her room. That’s what she told you to do.” The three of them were back in the suite, in front of everyone.
“You think I won’t fight.” It was more a realization from Dart, than a question. “I don’t need to fight you. You’re killing yourself. Smell like doom.”
“Fight me.” Ron snorted. “Wow.” He watched Dart’s face. The champagne bottle went from dangling between Ron’s fingers to being enclosed in his fist. He was flushed more with fear, though, than liquor. “You don’t wanna do that.”
There was no puzzled or uneasy halt to the partying. There were those, like Min-Hee, who baldly watched, others who looked on with an irritated hopefulness, wondering why Ron and Dart couldn’t enjoy the party or take their beef elsewhere. There were the oblivious, too, but mostly people were calculating the potential brawl, adding and subtracting with quantities based on what they knew of the neighborhoods Ron and Dart were raised in. Factored in was race, as well as whether either of them had ever been arrested, as well as to what degree Ron and Dart were more than normally (for the record business) egomaniacal. People calculated how much either man had to gain or lose in terms of being sued by the other, and in terms of reputation. They gauged each man’s history of viciousness, diagrammed in algebraic detail the business dealings between Ron and Dart, and, of course, the women they had in common. The calculations happened so instantaneously, and so subconsciously, the partiers had no idea they were doing math. In a blink, sums were considered. To a person, it was decided that the worst case would be shoving and cursing.
“Dart.”
“Momma’s calling,” Ron said.
“Ron,” Eva said with a death glare. “Shut. Up.” She looked at him like he should feel lucky he was at his own party.
Dart looked past Ron’s bulk at Eva. Wary, his intensity cracked. Eva seemed to be on his side.
The instinct to go over, get between them, was the kind Eva could resist. She knew Ron was radiating belligerence to give the impression that he was not down, let alone out.
Ron knew, as most did, that Dart was impulsive, and Ron wanted Dart to embarrass himself—and so Eva and Sunny as well.
Eva didn’t get in between the two of them because she’d busted up enough fights at parties. Been called every bitch possible.
“Go on, Dartan-yan,” Ron said, sounding almost authentically hard-core. “‘Fore you get your nose broke.”
And with another shift of his eyes and a surge of his shoulders, Dart was back in the scrap. Ron stood fast. He had to in front of the room, and in front of Eva.
“What y’all doin’ over here? What’s the tension, children? Jeeeezus. Jeezus, Mary, and Joseph!” Myra tipped over on the balls of her feet, grabbed Ron’s wrists in her hands and swung them. “Somebody peed in the sandbox? Ron, come with me, baby. Your Myra needs some more of this good wine you got up in here. Where’s your people? Have ’em call for some more of those fritters and things. Ev aaaaa,” she sang out, “take Dart.”
Myra was sure she knew who Eva was. And Myra liked her. Eva was renowned for liking sex. She had her own cash. Any observable need for a man’s guidance and support, Eva’d have to manufacture and work to maintain. Eva could and did fuck men in the same set. She seemed to snicker at the contempt of women and men who judged her. Myra’s educated guess was that Eva’s fantasy included marrying someone who was paid. Maybe the guy would be in love with Eva, but maybe not. They’d have a friendship, though, a partnership through which they’d have one child. Eva and her husband would divorce when things got tough or boring, or when one of them, high hopes in a new, truer love, yearned to marry another. The only thing Myra envied of Eva was youth. Myra had been beautiful herself. And in the Oprah-sanctioned adventure that was her middle age, Myra thirsted for her thirties like she did for bourbon.
At Ron’s party, Myra, flat-footed, turned to Eva—eyes clear with compassion. She thought the girl folks called Evil Eva was a throwback
to a time when women and men had sensible expectations. Still holding Ron, Myra wasn’t as drunk as she seemed. “I said take him and go-go-go, sweetums,” came Myra’s trill. Merrily, she swung Ron’s champagne jug. “Put Dart to bed.”
Walking back to her suite, Eva was working a problem at her own blackboard. Just when what Ron needed was to mark himself a clear winner in at least one Lost City battle, the spat he started had been stopped by a referee, and a woman—and scandalmonger Myra, at that. So even with the splotch of Vic and Swan, the convention was almost over, and back in the world, the phoenixlike rise of Sunny would be the only tale worth telling. Eva knew Ron wouldn’t sleep until he could chalk himself up, in some way, as one of the night’s champions.
CHAPTER 4
Eva met Sunny in Monterey, California, at a music festival on Cannery Row called Innovative Music for Innovators. Two hundred miles north of Los Angeles, right on the peninsula. Eva swooped down the Row in her leased SUV, bumping old Niggas With Attitude so loud the dash trembled. It was 1994.
She wore cargo pants to the event, some work boots, and a short, sheer shirt. Along with a web of rubber bands and dollar bangles at her wrist, Eva wore what she thought of as her hippie-dippy sterling and garnet jewelry. Except for the diamond studs—near colorless, set in platinum—she sported no real jewels to alienate the hippie-dippy crowd. No bright gold to give the targeted artist a clue to her newly acquired tastes for glittery, affirming bangles. And, so as to seem extra down-to-earth, Eva left her designer tote under the seat of the car. She tied a black hoodie around her waist, figuring no one would know it was cashmere.
Mostly lightweight freaks here, she thought, smoking way too much weed. Lugging army-green canvas knapsacks. And not using quite enough of that crystal deodorant rock. Eva was in familiar territory. While she was in the fourth and fifth grades, Eva’s parents had rented a groundskeeper’s bungalow in Carmel, a few miles north of Monterey. Vehicle neatly parked, Eva hopped out and began walking toward the pier. She tapped her pants pockets for credit cards and passport and beeper, and the unfussy, mannish gesture made Eva feel free. Monterey, Eva remembered with a tremble, was where her father made her mom go for better grocery deals.
Eva was also unsettled because she’d only just heard about Sunny. I’m losing it. Losing my ear, losing my connections. Eva’d been locked down in the Bronx, in an ancient producer-DJ’s state-of-the-art basement studio, trying to revive the career of Miz Novymber, a woman who’d been a so-so success as an MC. In the late eighties, the girl had rapped over an atomic bass line about loving the black man, about loving oneself, about buying black, and about not calling people “bitches” or “niggas.” Miz Novymber rose to the top in fluorescent fatigues while Eva—who’d believed completely in the lyrics and the music—zealously assisted the A & R guy who okayed the fatigues and plotted the charge. When he moved back to Charleston to open a restaurant with his point money, Eva’d stepped into his shoes like they’d been hers all along.
But by 1994, the girl MC’s ghostwriter boyfriend was writing dick raps with titles like “Sweet Rock in the Honey” It’s not like Eva had any-thing against dick raps or against dicks themselves, she just wanted the music to make her feel something.
Scare me, shit. Make me hot, offend me, something. Just don’t be half-assed. Don’t be weak.
Eva’d been deep in love with late-eighties hip hop—Public Enemy, Eric B. & Rakim, Salt ‘n’ Pepa, Doug E. Fresh. Back then, hip hop had the thick limbs of an infant the village was trying to raise, and possibilities for big change seemed endless. The music was all grown up by 1994—Nas’s ill Illmatic, Biggie’s Ready to Die, Snoop’s “Gin & Juice”—husky and loud with the love of those who’d stood up and cared for it early on. But Eva thought rap could die at any moment. It was too vulnerable to execs and artists shearing luscious roughness off songs and beats, and too much a pawn of wannabe moguls still in the dope and/or extortion game. By the mid-nineties, hip hop had been seduced by America itself. The U.S. pop machine inhaled the music, then exhaled the smoke in which kids swayed and jumped with the gusto of those aware of but detached from the forensic files of the crimes that set hip hop in motion.
Eva’s reaction to the world’s newfound love of the music was split. It was great: the money, the acceptance, the pride-by-proxy of invention. It was terrible: the exploitation, the watering down, the idea that hip hop was being enjoyed by people who had only a tangential way of relating to it. People wanted to touch parts of it, love parts of it—people who didn’t know anything about hip hop before Run-D.M.C. In the eighties, Eva believed you had to know where you’re from to know where you’re at. Had to know about obscured African-American firsts and slave revolts not mentioned in high school history books and about the financial rape of black musicians by the ever-strong cartel of Whites in Charge of Money and Music and Information Dissemination. Had to fervently know all of it and more, or you didn’t have the right to love hip hop, let alone be in it. Things became more complicated when hip hop won, though, was no longer the underdog, and had gotten Eva and lots of other people crazily paid. It became more complicated for Eva when she could imagine the end of it more clearly than she could recall the beginnings.
But rhythm and blues, on the other hand, had been around for so long, Eva was certain it would be around forever. Eva was certain that by trying to find a singer, she was on her way back to the future.
So, as she’d done with rappers, Eva paid attention only to a pre-selected group of singers. She listened to no unsolicited demos—paid attention mostly to phone calls from her company’s regional radio reps. Some of them had side businesses as showcase promoters. These neighborhood treasure hunters booked nightclubs or community centers. They charged singers a fee to perform, and charged admission. Folks paid good money to be swept up in a young person’s desire to be found and celebrated for the part of themselves they believed most golden.
Some regionals paid their mortgages with showcase profits. Others, on a religious mission to get a pre-superstar signed, went broke trying to interest towns deafened to raw talent by local radio station playlists and national video channels. This was the kind of ardent regional rep Eva had been. Down to her last $100—in Chicago, and again in Fresno—Eva stayed at it because to be the anointing angel, the one with “an ear,” to become the manager of a still-grateful artist, or to be in A & R and bring songs to life, was a dream as specific and seductive as an artist’s own.
Even the regionals I trust to bring me news of someone making waves in a good-size city have been bringing me bullshit. By the time she got to Cannery Row, Eva needed more than just a singer. She needed a maniac—someone consumed with succeeding. An obsessive who’d reneged on debts and alienated family with dreamy talk and dead-end jobs and the audacity to press up his own discs and sell them at swap meets. Eva needed a new R & B singer with the heart of an old-school MC.
And it was on a hellish cell connection from that basement Bronx studio that she first heard about Sunny. Tired of Zapp-y samples blasting from the tiny, mighty speakers, Eva was damn near begging, trying to convince an older but still starry R & B star to release a bar of his from an ancient slow jam about making love last forever and ever. The old song had been a regional hit, and Eva was fiending for some old-school, underived bounce.
The Memphis star said no in the end, but teased Eva about Sunny. He scolded Eva for being “old” and “late,” and for not being up on this new California sensation, this chick flattening crowds for free in city parks. “Blowing minds is what’s she’s doing,” the old star said. “Singing from her gut while you sit on your ass. I love money like the next nigga, but your little—what? Forty grand?—for some rap that’s not even gonna hit? Gon’ make me look like I need money? Where’s your head, anyway? Need to be in Cali is where you need to be.”
All Eva could do was say, “I hear you,” and press OFF. She was twenty-nine, and feeling like a senior citizen in hip hop.
I’ll show a mother
fucker “late”
Eva could buy clothes, and she always had her passport on her. She called her assistant to arrange a ticket. And the traffic from the Bronx to JFK International hadn’t been bad at all.
On the pier off Cannery Row, Hakeem leaned against bleachers set up in front of a restaurant called Bubba Gump Shrimp Company Restaurant & Market. He drank red wine from a plastic cup.
“Looky here,” Hakeem said. “Eve arrives in Eden.” Eva and Hakeem had spent two room-serviced weekends together during the early nineties while working on an album that only they believed in until it spawned three number one singles and a Best New Artist Grammy. Hakeem mostly remembered the way Eva’s mouth felt. Took some pride in the fact that while everyone else took in her body he could look at her lips and feel his joint jump in his pants.
“And I got your apple, too,” Eva said.
Hakeem smiled. He was pleased, as always, to be in the heat of Eva’s snappy attitude. She proved to him that the music business was where the top girls migrated. The hardest, fiercest, strongest girls. Whether ugly or okay or bizarrely attractive, they were mission-minded and liked glamour, which made them unsuitable for marriage and unlikely to want it until their uteruses had damn near scaled over from a lack of babies. Hakeem had to respect that. Tough, he thought, to be a chick in this game. Hakeem waved his arm toward the food and souvenir stands. “All-natural everything, baby,” he said, bullshitting, like he’d arranged it that way, to her special tastes. “Wine’s organic. Just for you.”
“As fucking if. Unless they got some organic Scotch. Who you here to see?”
“There’s just Sunny worth the drive. But play coy. It’s cute on you.”
Hakeem and Eva walked along the pier mall, ended up before a creaky bandstand, and then walked to the left edge of the rapt crowd.
Sunny sat on a stool onstage, guitar on an improvised stand next to her. A long, bushy braid hung over each breast. Overalls over a tie-dyed tank top. Feet filthy and bare. Toe rings. Jeez. Take a bath. From where Eva stood, Sunny’s left arm seemed painted in fresco with reds, golds, and blues. Then Sunny got to a rising part of the last chorus, pushed patchy bangs from her eyes, and stepped away from her seat. She belted notes a cappella, and minus a mike, like it was the first time she’d sung the words. Like it would be the only time.