“Focus.”
Shawn grinned.
“This shouldn’t just be something you’re doing. It’s something we’re doing, right? As a family. We can be smart about it, and strategic and do it together, and …”
He kissed her. And Riley put her arms around his neck, pressing her chest against his. When he pulled back, she brushed the pad of her thumb across his lower lip.
“I’m sorry about before,” she said. “I wasn’t … I was caught off guard, and all I could think about was what we might lose, and you being gone again. But this isn’t just what you do. You’re right. It’s what you are. And I would never do anything to keep you away from that.”
“You …” Shawn cupped her face with his hands, and pulling her down to him again, pressed his forehead against hers. “You are … so fuckin’ dope, y’know that?”
“I’m not,” she said, shaking her head. “I haven’t been. But I will be. I’m going to get my act together and we’ll figure this comeback stuff out together.”
“Comeback?” He grimaced at the word. “That’s a word you use for has-beens.”
Riley laughed. “Oh, excuse me, Mr. Super-Famous Rap Star.”
“Janica said the same thing though. That I need to get my team together.”
His tone had already picked up a little more energy, a little more enthusiasm, just at the idea that she was finally and fully onboard.
“Then let’s work on that. Who’re you thinking about? Brendan can’t be your manager anymore, and if you get someone new …”
“Not sure I’d want anyone other than B. I mean, that whole ‘getting to know you’ phase with managers can be rough. At this stage, I don’t know that I want to go through all that with someone new. Especially not right now.”
Riley shrugged. “So maybe you should ask Brendan?”
Tracy would kill her if she knew Riley was suggesting this. She already complained non-stop about how demanding Brendan’s schedule was. If he added managing Shawn to the mix, it would only become more so.
But she had an ulterior motive. Brendan was like her brother, and she knew he loved her like a sister. There was no one in the business she trusted to look out for Shawn’s interests as much as he would. And very few people she trusted to look out for her, Cullen and Cassidy’s interests at the same time.
“Yeah, maybe.”
Climbing off him, and heading for the dresser, Riley opened it and pulled out a long t-shirt. She was too tired to shower, and had no objection to sleeping naked, but something felt unfinished about their conversation from earlier, and it seemed less likely that they would get to it if she remained unclothed.
“Shawn?”
He was already fading again, his eyes heavy-lidded, his jaw slackening.
“What did you mean earlier? About wondering about a different life.”
“Nothing,” he said, sliding down so that he was under the sheets.
“No, don’t say that. It was something.”
Riley turned off the lights, realizing that she probably had little more than a couple of minutes anyway, before he was out. She slid in front of him, pulling his arm across her middle. Shawn reached down and hiked up the back of the shirt, pressing his pelvis against her backside. Riley felt him semi-hard and nestled into her.
“I walked out of the studio today,” Shawn said. “A bunch of folks spotted me before I got to the car, and … you know how that is … Then I went to the office which was supposed to be a safe place from all that and it was like … people looked at me the same way. Sometimes it’s just … drainin’, y’know?”
Riley held his arm, holding it tighter against her.
“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”
She thought of Brian, and the loose-limbed, relaxed way he was with her. The uninhibited way he shared details about his life, because to him she was just an old friend. He didn’t need to fear how one ill-considered confidence might be interpreted, and the consequences if it was shared with the wrong person. Riley hadn’t had that freedom in a long time, except with a small circle of people.
But Shawn hadn’t had that since he was seventeen years old. Most people would roll their eyes at that. Rich people problems, they might say. Or, it sucks to be famous, huh?
Riley held Shawn tighter, and kissed his forearm in reassurance. But he was already asleep.
9
These beats suck, man. You ain’t got nothin’ else? You picked this up off SoundCloud or what?”
Shawn took off the headphones and tossed them onto the coffee table where they skittered a few feet away from him.
“That’s ‘cause we listenin’ in here. Not in the studio,” Kio said. “How you gon’ get the flavor if we got freakin’ … Fireman Sam playing in the background?”
A few feet away, sitting on the carpet in his pajamas, Cullen was changing channels on the large screen TV. Every couple of minutes, he lost interest and reached for the remote.
“My son’s sick,” Shawn said. “So this is where I gotta be today.”
As if to add credence to what his father said, Cullen coughed.
Kio shook his head. “Yeah, but I can’t keep coming over here and having you tell me everything I bring is garbage, man.”
“What if everything you bring is garbage?”
“Or … I hate to say it, maybe you just lost touch a little bit. I mean, it’s been a minute since …”
“That’s really what you want to say to me right now?”
“Look, Smooth,” he drawled. “You know I keep it one-hunnit … You need to come out with me. Hear some music in the clubs. Not just in the studio and damn sure not in your living room with cartoons on the background.” Kio lowered his voice on the last part, as though trying not to offend the six-year-old in the room.
He had a point. And on top of that, he had more than a little authority on the subject.
Kio Yamato, barely thirty-years-old, and Japanese-American was a student of hip hop music and culture. He also happened to be one of the most talented beatmakers in the business. Give Kio a sheet of paper with words on it, and he processed the cadence within minutes, and had a brain full of obscure sounds catalogued and ready to use to make those words on paper into the next mega-hit.
Getting to work with Kio at all was difficult; and getting him to come over to your crib and sit in your living room while you were looking after your kid should have been downright impossible. But Kio, like many of the standout talents in the recording industry, was a Chris Scaife protégé. And while he didn’t work for any single label, he always remembered that he got his start as an intern while a scrawny freshman at Fordham University. Sitting in on recording sessions with Chris Scaife, Kio’s main role was bringing him coffee, soda, meals and way back in the day, occasionally blunts and women as well. So, when Shawn told Chris he needed some beats, Chris called on his former intern, and hip hop’s current magic-maker.
“When?” Shawn asked.
Kio sat forward. “When what?”
“When you want to go to the club?”
“Ahm …” Kio seemed not to know what to say, Shawn’s ready acquiescence throwing him off guard. “Tonight?”
“Cool. Let’s do it. Come scoop me ‘round eleven, and we’ll go hit a couple spots.”
Kio nodded, his long, spiky bleach-blonde bangs bobbing. “As much material as you got, Smooth? We can make somethin’ big happen, man. I’m tellin’ you. We just need to find you a cohesive sound. Me bringing you different beats is one thing, but if we have more live instrumentation, less sampling, we might be able to just invent some all new shi …” Kio stopped himself before finishing the curse word, glancing once again in Cullen’s direction.
“A’ight. Hook me up,” Shawn said. “I’ma put all my stock in you, man.”
“What you mean?”
“If we can work somethin’ out, you produce the whole damn thing. Not just one or two tracks.”
Kio’s eyes opened slightly wider for a moment and Shawn marv
eled at how far a little bluster could take a person. Him having Kio produce was a bigger win for him than it was for Kio, no question. But somewhere deep inside, Kio still saw himself sitting in the back of the control room, gamely absorbing all the ribbing about how a skinny Asian kid knew so much about rap music, just so he could quietly absorb the more important things—like all the skills and knowledge that Chris Scaife carelessly dropped on a daily, like someone disposing of pennies in an ashtray.
“Bet,” Kio said nodding, and smothering a grin. “So, eleven tonight?”
They both stood as Shawn prepared to walk Kio out, and Cullen looked around, jumping up from his place on the floor and rushing toward his father.
“Can I come?” he asked. “I want to come.”
“What you runnin’ for?” Shawn laughed, putting a hand atop his son’s head and rubbing it. “I’m not goin’ anywhere. Not till you’re ‘sleep. A’ight?”
“But I don’t want you to go when I’m …”
“Cullen,” Shawn said, warningly.
“See you later tonight, man,” Kio said. “Get ready to get lit.”
This time the warning look Shawn gave was in his direction, and Kio laughed. They parted at the front door and Shawn turned his attention to his son.
Sometimes it was like looking into a mirror, except one that looked back in time. The few pictures he had of himself as a kid were from his cousin, Shonda. She dug them up from an old trunk of photos that she’d found after their grandmother passed and had a few framed and sent to Riley as gifts after Cullen was born. Riley had pored over each one with a wondrous smile on her face—Shawn at six with a toy truck, Shawn at nine in a First Day of School outfit, Shawn as a sullen teenager, maybe around fourteen, wearing a Public Enemy t-shirt and throwing up gang signs.
Do you remember? she asked. Do you remember any of this?
He hadn’t. Childhood was a distant, and often unpleasant dream. He remembered loneliness, occasional bouts of hunger, his grandmother’s hushed tones as she negotiated with utilities companies, with the landlord, with his crackhead mother. And he remembered many years of anger, and the dim sense that the adults in his life were having conversations about circumstances they wanted to keep from him, but which involved him. There were broken bits of dialogue while he was half-asleep in his room and straining to listen.
Does he know …?
Should we tell him …?
But his daddy …
You know what his momma …?
What should we …?
The only balm was the calming, soothing, unfailing love of his grandmother, Alma. But even with her love and support, he didn’t remember ever feeling like a proper kid.
Look at my baby, his grandmother used to say. With yo’ old man’s eyes.
And she had sounded sad for him, regretful that there was something he may have needed that she didn’t have to give. Unknowingness. That was what she couldn’t give him. Where they lived, how they lived ensured that Shawn couldn’t help but know too much, much too soon.
So, looking down at his kid, who was definitely kid-like was the universe’s gift of a do-over. Cullen, his mini-me, would have a childhood that was a childhood. Full of magical thinking, surrounded by the love of his parents, protected from all the ugly. At least for now. For a little while.
He and Riley differed on that in a surprising way. She wanted to expose Cullen and Cassidy to grit. They need to know that some children are hungry. That just blocks away from here, people live on the street! she might say. She was terrified of raising kids who were, in her words ‘clueless, and privileged.’ She wanted them to go with her to soup-kitchens, to toy distribution centers for homeless children, to rallies for immigrant rights.
And Shawn wanted them to have a solid decade on this earth before being jarred into the realization that life wasn’t all rides in chauffeured cars, and pool parties in the Hamptons with pony-rides and carnival clowns, surrounded by similarly well-off friends.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to protect them, Shawn, Riley always said. But if we don’t tell them what it’s like out there, then we’re not protecting them, we’re lying.
So, he compromised. When they saw the man who slept on the corner near their school, he explained why that old man didn’t have a home. When they asked tough questions, they got the tough, and honest answers. But no soup kitchens, no toy distribution. Not yet.
“How you feelin’, little man?” Shawn cupped Cullen’s forehead with his palm and felt his son lean into it.
“Better,” Cullen said, grabbing ahold of his father’s thigh and hugging it.
But his forehead was still warm. A bug had been going around. It happened every fall when they started back in school. A stew of kid-germs, Riley explained with a shudder. So, they always expected one or another of the kids to get a cold, or slight fever, and right on time, Cullen had been the winner of the prize no one wanted. It had given Shawn a convenient excuse to tell Livia Kincaid to stay away. Two days down if you didn’t count the Saturday drop-in at the basketball court.
But now, maybe he would call her and have her tag along tonight with him and Kio. Nightclubs were loud. He could fulfill his obligation, and not have to do much by way of talking to her. She was a nice girl, but he’d already said and shown her too much.
The last time he went to a club as a regular person, Shawn was eighteen. It was three weeks before his CD dropped. It was him, Chris and a whole gang of dudes he didn’t even know that well. For months before that, he had been holed-up in a studio for fourteen-hour days, while Chris rode the heck out of him, trying to get him to “find your voice, young blood.” Young Blood. Before Chris, the only people who had ever called him that were the old men who sat on their stoop in his old neighborhood, trying to counsel him to stop his petty drug-dealing.
Shawn remembered hearing Chris use the phrase and thinking that he would have clowned him for it if he hadn’t been so intimidated.
Chris Scaife was close to a father-figure, a mentor and a teacher back then, but not yet a friend, so Shawn didn’t have much to say around him if he wasn’t talking about the music. He lived in a wing of Chris’ New Jersey mansion, because even though he had scored a record deal, he was too scared to touch the money, and didn’t quite know what to do with it all. He sent a big chunk to Shonda to make sure she and his grandma were looked after, but other than that, he didn’t buy much of anything. He checked his bank account ten times a day, though, just to make sure the money was still real, and was still all there.
He felt safe living at Chris’ house, not wanting to admit that living in some of the rougher neighborhoods in DC hadn’t prepared him for living in the nicer ones in New York City. Everything in New York was louder, bigger and just … more. He was eighteen and had spent much of his teenage years pretending to be a man. And now he was; and earning serious bank on the strength of his talent alone. Getting what he’d always wanted was as frightening as the fear of never getting it had been. At Chris’ house, though, he felt less afraid.
And in the studio, he was absolutely fearless.
That night in the club, the night Chris took him out to celebrate, Shawn made himself let loose. He drank, smoked the blunt that was being passed around—right there in the open—in the VIP area, and screwed some girl in the back of the club whose face he would forget an hour later.
When he stumbled back to the VIP, Jamal Turner was there. He hadn’t been part of the production of the CD because he was finishing up law school. He watched Shawn come staggering to the table, checking his fly to make sure he’d zipped up, and wiping lipstick from his mouth. Jamal had grinned at him and shook his head.
Popped your cherry, huh? he said.
Shawn bristled at that, letting Turner know in no uncertain terms that he’d been popped his cherry, way back when he was thirteen.
Nah, dummy, Turner said, shaking his head. I don’t mean that. I mean, ‘welcome to the high-life’, man. After this, ain’t nothin’ gon’
be the same.
He didn’t even remember how he got back to Chris’ place and into bed. He figured some of those dudes who he didn’t know that well, had carried him. He figured Chris had made sure he was alright, and he figured that maybe he’d found a different kind of family, a different kind of home.
10
Thank you for thinking to call me for this.”
Livia Kincaid yelled into his ear just to be heard.
“No problem,” Shawn yelled back.
Kio had come to pick him up and Livia met them at the first stop, Onyx which was still a top-tier trendsetting nightspot. From the balcony of the hip hop floor, they could look down at the dancefloor and see what people responded to, gauge the reactions to different songs and artists.
Kio didn’t stay on the balcony. Homeboy liked to get in the mix. Once he made sure Shawn was set up comfortably, and the groupies were being kept at bay by security, he went down and joined the throng. For a dude who was all about making and finding beats, Kio had some funny moves. He danced with motions that were more suited for sounds that were a cross between techno and ballet, but he didn’t give a crap. With his skater boy clothes, and spiky blonde hair, he moved like water, dancing alone in the middle of the enormous crowd, eyes closed, oblivious.
“He’s a character,” Livia yelled again, leaning in close. “How d’you think he got into rap music?”
Sick of the screaming, Shawn moved back, away from the balcony and took his place at the table they had commandeered for the evening. Livia joined him, sliding into the banquette seating.
“Thank you,” she said, settling back into the black leather. “I think I’m going to be hoarse tomorrow.”
Shawn said nothing but offered her a brief smile of acknowledgment.
For the evening, she had dressed up a little, and was wearing black leggings with black patent-leather lace-up boots, and a long-sleeved, fussy top that looked like something out of medieval times. In her ears, she had replaced the silver studs on her lobes with earrings that were skulls and crossbones. Her eyes were lined in heavy black liner, and her lipstick matched it. It was Goth-lite. Just enough ‘pretty’ to keep it from going over the edge.
Four: Stories of Marriage Page 7