“Drug dealer central.” This was history D knew very well. “Folk Nation and some other gangs made that home.”
“Cut off from prying eyes, those interconnected backyards were a haven for crack sales. All the things that the planners thought would make Marcus Garvey superior to Tilden and other high-rise developments actually made it worse.”
“So you guys are gonna do a better job than the government?”
“We certainly hope so. Couldn’t do worse, right? As a person raised in this community, you would know how desperate life can be out here.”
“I appreciate the history, Cassidy. I lived a lot of it. But you own this AKBK Realty so you must have a plan.”
Now Ronson’s rhythm slowed and he began picking his words carefully. “Well, Mr. Hunter, that’s still evolving. If you look at the demographic patterns in Brooklyn you’ll see that Brownsville is no longer only African American. On Pitkin you’ve had a significant influx of West African merchants. There’s a growing Asian community in the western part of Brownsville. When you look at what’s happening in East Bushwick with postcollege whites and the artist community there, you see that Brownsville’s future is, like all of New York, about change.”
D poked gently for more: “But what about the projects? You think people are gonna have chai lattes across from those ghettos in the sky?”
“Do you still spend time out there?” Ronson replied.
“I have some old friends and clients there,” D said neutrally.
“What’s up, D?” Night, looking healthy and accompanied by a stunning young model named Porsche, had just arrived. Faith Newman hopped off the banquette, smoothed out her dress, and smiled beatifically. D gave Night a hug and quickly introduced the singer to the tech mogul and her ghetto real estate–speculating boyfriend. Quickly Ronson and Faith cornered Night, speak-shouting into his ear as D watched from a few feet away. He’d gotten a reluctant Night to come out to this benefit by promising to go on the road with him despite the presence of Amos Pilgrim.
Time passed. D chatted with Porsche and thought about that receptionist at ARoc, wondering why he hadn’t invited her. D was dancing with the model when Ronson, looking increasingly wired, tapped him on the shoulder.
“This is my card,” he said. “Let’s meet tomorrow about the concert.”
“The concert?”
“Yeah. The free show Night is gonna play for Grow Brooklyn at Betsy Head Park in Brownsville.”
D headed over to Night, who was sitting at the VIP table while Faith danced on top of the banquette next to him. The singer was chuckling and taking quick peeks up the woman’s dress.
“You gonna do this?” D asked.
“It’s your hood, right?”
“But you haven’t done a show in New York in years. Don’t you wanna speak with Pilgrim?”
“Faith just talked to him. She guaranteed X amount of dollars. You handle the arrangements.” Then Night laughed and said, “I’m gonna make a manager out of you, D.”
LONELY TEARDROPS
Junior’s had never been D’s favorite restaurant. He of course loved the cheesecake though otherwise wasn’t a fan of their kitchen. But Edge had wanted to eat there and was picking up the check, so here he was at the downtown Brooklyn institution, sitting under a painting of the Brooklyn Dodgers’s sainted Ebbets Field. The place was gonna close soon and be torn down to build the latest Brooklyn condo, but D didn’t have the heart to tell Edge the bad news.
“I have some news for you,” Edge said after he settled into the booth. “I’m out.”
“What do you mean out? Out of what?”
“I’m leaving New York. I just got a gig that’s gonna take me down South, and once I get there I’m staying.”
“I thought the Englishman was paying you to find that record,” D said.
“Well, you met him. Archer liked you and decided to let me go.”
“What? He liked me? That man talked to me like a servant.”
“And you gave as good as you got. At least that’s his story. He respected that. So you’ll deal with him directly from now on.”
“I dunno,” D said.
“I do. I got his last check in my pocket. With that money and the new gig, I’m ready to settle down South.”
“What kind of job does your old ass have?”
“I’m gonna hit the road from New York to Florida with some young rapper. Gonna take him to radio and clubs along the way.”
“That’s a job for a kid, not an AARP member.”
Edge chuckled. “Flattery will get you nowhere. One of the last remaining black record executives owed me a favor, so he threw me a bone. I can’t go back to that seniors’ home in the Bronx. Can’t happen. I was gonna be dead up there in a year. That arrogant-ass Englishman gave me a new lease on life. Now I’m buying the property.”
“I’ll miss you, Edge.”
“If I stayed in this city any longer I was gonna miss myself. This city isn’t made for poor people and it’s got nothing to offer an old black man but sad memories and pity. Shit, barely a bar I liked in Harlem or Bed-Stuy that ain’t gone or started selling Italian coffee.”
“Yo!” It was Ray Ray, with a flat-brimmed black Nets hat and pants sliding off his ass, bounding up the aisle looking even more boyish than usual.
“You are way early,” D said. “We’re supposed to meet at three p.m.”
“Sorry, D. I got a lift down here and I took it. Besides, I think you told me once that early was on time.”
“Nothing wrong with a young man being early, D,” Edge said. “That’s as rare as a summer tan in January. It’s a twenty-first-century miracle. Young man, my name is Edgecombe Lenox but my friends call me Edge.”
Ray Ray introduced himself, and to D’s surprise, the old man moved over and let him sit down.
“Where you from?” Edge asked.
“Like D, I’m from Brownsville. I’m not trying to stay there. I wanna see the world too. D has helped me get out a bit. I’m looking for more.”
“Yeah,” Edge said, “you gotta have a dream. When I first came to New York I didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to toss it out of. But I knew what I wanted and was willing to do what I had to do.”
“I feel the same way, yo.”
“It almost goes without saying. Without money there’s no food and shelter, and without food and shelter there is no life. You can go without love a lot longer than you can go without food or shelter. But aside from making money, what are you into?”
“I like music,” Ray Ray said. “I’ve been making beats and looking to get some MCs to spit over them.”
“Does that idea make you happy?”
“Of course. I want people to hear my shit.”
“You go to church?”
“Not really,” Ray Ray responded, slightly embarrassed. “My moms takes me on Easter. Sometimes we go during Christmas when we’re feeling like Santa was good to us, you know.”
“The reason I ask is I was wondering if you had a spiritual practice,” Edge said. “It’s useful to have some kind of god in your life when your money ain’t right.”
“There are some Five Percenters in my building. I chop it up with them sometimes.”
“You live in Medina, so I could see how that would interest you.”
“You down with the Gods? A lot of old heads are into that shit.”
“I have pursued knowledge of self my whole life,” Edge said sagely. “Read a lot of the Koran. A lot of the Bible. When I read them I see what’s similar. You don’t have to believe in every part of a spiritual practice to get value out of it. Any system man creates has value, though man—and woman—will eventually fuck it up cause that’s just what we do.”
“What? You a philosopher or something like that?”
“No, man. I sold records for a living. Should have been a philosopher cause records are a business that’s no longer in business.”
“I got a friend that had two hundred thousand hit
s on YouTube for this beat he made. He hooked it up and got some cash for it. He made money on his music just like that.” Ray Ray was schooling Edge on twenty-first-century YouTube economics. D was worried the old man would be offended but he seemed to be enjoying it.
“You may be right, Raymond—I assume that’s the name your mother gave you?”
“Yeah,” Ray Ray admitted reluctantly.
“Maybe there’s new ways to earn from music, but I’m just too damn old to evolve.”
“I don’t know, Edge,” D said. “You seem to be doing fine right now.”
“Lemme ask you something, Raymond. You know who James Brown is, right?”
“Of course. The Godfather of Soul. Lots of crazy beats that have been sampled. Every now and then my moms plays one of his jams at home.”
“But do you know who Jackie Wilson is?”
“Naw,” Ray Ray said.
“Well, he was better than James Brown onstage.”
“Oh yeah?”
D felt a history lesson coming on, though he wasn’t sure if Ray Ray would be receptive. This could be fun or quite painful.
“They were both Golden Gloves boxers and had that good footwork. They both did splits. Weren’t afraid to get on the floor. Not spinning like hip hoppers but they would get on their knees to sell a song. Jackie was actually more flexible than Brown. That man could get on his knees in his suit and bend backward like he was doing the limbo. Could limbo like that Harry Belafonte.”
Knowing that limbo and Harry Belafonte were references the young man might not get, D suggested, “You should show him some footage.”
“There’s film out there,” Edge said. “Shit, I have a VHS somewhere with all Jackie’s TV appearances. The man was bad. I mean everyone talks about Michael Jackson being influenced by James Brown. That’s not even near the truth. The truth was Michael came out of Jackie, from his posture onstage, his leg movements and spins. I mean, it’s not even a question.”
“Edge,” D said, trying not to sound too amused, “no one has a VHS player anymore.”
“What’s a VHS?” Ray Ray asked.
“Go to YouTube on your phone, Ray Ray, and type in Jackie Wilson,” D said, ignoring the question.
While the young man tapped on his Samsung Galaxy, Edge defended his VHS ownership. “In fact, I have two of them bad boys in a basement somewhere. Shit, I used to give them to program directors as gifts. D, if you need one, I can hook you up.”
Laughing, D said, “No thanks. You hold onto that.”
Ray Ray offered his phone to Edge and asked, “Which one of these clips should I watch?”
The elder man slid on a pair of glasses, peered at the little screen, and selected a clip of Wilson performing “Lonely Teardrops” in black-and-white on some early ’60s TV show. Ray Ray watched it, mildly bored until about a minute into the song when Wilson leaped off a platform, gracefully landing on his spread-eagled knees and then, without breaking a sweat, sliding up to his feet.
“He’s smooth!” Ray Ray said.
“The smoothest, Raymond. Can I tell you a story?”
Ray Ray knew instinctively there was no refusing. Even the fact that he had to go take a leak would have to be ignored for the moment. The youngster hadn’t known either of his grandfathers and had only fleeting contact with older men. He was enjoying the attention. Edge even made the usually hated “Raymond” sound respectable.
D actually had some things he needed to do. He wanted to go back with Ray Ray to his apartment to look at some more footage of Rivera. Against his wishes, the kid had followed the detective a few more times. It was extremely dangerous, but what was done was done. Yet D had a bit of a plan developing, one that could hurt Rivera.
But he was in no rush right now. He had always enjoyed Edge’s tales of R&B past, the kind of stories Dwayne Robinson used to tell him over drinks. He didn’t think he’d heard this particular Jackie Wilson story and was looking forward to either some wisdom or chuckles, and hopefully both.
“When I was no older than you,” Edge began, “I used to run errands at the Apollo. Go get me a beer. Go get me some Parliaments or Kools. Jackie was a star. Just about the biggest star a black man could be back then. But he was real regular with me. Real regular. So one day he was headlining a bill with a singer named Marv Johnson. Like Jackie he was from Detroit and had a couple of hits. Nothing that lasted but he had a little thing happening.
“Before the first show of the day, Jackie tells me to watch Marv Johnson and notice the mistake he makes every time. So I go stand in the wings. Marv is okay. He ain’t James Brown or Jackie Wilson but he gets a nice ovation. I tell Jackie I don’t see anything. Jackie laughs and says, You see how Marv only sings to the pretty girls? Okay, so I wanna know how the hell is that a mistake cause it sounds like a winning program to me.
“Jackie just says, Watch who I sing to. So he goes out there and is just Jackie Wilson. ‘Baby Workout.’ ‘Lonely Teardrops.’ ‘To Be Loved.’ Dancing his ass off. Leaping to his knees. His process starts to loosen from the sweat. Shirt goes untied. The usual exciting shit he does. Then I see it: Jackie is at the edge of the stage and the girls have come down the aisle. They are screaming like he’s about to start rubbing that mic stand between their thighs. They are pulling at his sharkskin suit and they are ripping buttons off his creamy white shirt—the man’s clothing bill must have been goddamn enormous—and, like I said, I see it. Genius.”
“Damn, what the fuck was it?” Ray Ray asked.
“Jackie is singing to the most unattractive woman on 125th Street. I mean he is eyeballing this woman like there was hundred-dollar bills stuck between her eyes. And she is ecstatic like she has been anointed and Jackie is the Lord. I mean this woman is all aflutter.”
Ray Ray was skeptical. “Making an ugly bitch come is genius?”
Edge ignored the question. “After the show Jackie quizzes me. Did you see? I said, Yes sir. I saw you didn’t sing to the pretty women. By singing to the homely woman you made every woman in the room think they had a chance with you, not just the fine girls. And the fine girls, they respect you for that. They know they got a shot with Jackie but they like how you are generous. Marv Johnson was just trying to line up a hot girl to take back to his hotel and everyone in the Apollo knew it. Either of you remember Marv Johnson?”
Both his listeners shook their heads.
“See, there was a science to what Jackie did. Cause and effect. Shit, it was scientific. It ain’t just about singing. It ain’t just about dancing. You do something to create an effect. People feel it. They might not even know in their front mind what’s going on, but in the back of their head they feel it.”
“So if I manage an artist I gotta get them to sing to the ugly women?” Ray Ray had seen a hint of disapproval in Edge’s eyes when he said bitch, so he was cleaning up his language.
“Or ugly men. It works both ways. What’s good for the bitch is good for the bastard too.”
Ray Ray and D laughed. Edge beamed. It had been awhile since he’d had the ears of two young listeners, particularly someone Ray Ray’s age. He hadn’t seen his grandkids in years. They lived down South and after his oldest son had deposited him in the elder-care facility in the Bronx six years earlier, it was like they were embarrassed to come see him. Until this lost-record opportunity came his way, Edge had felt like a buried treasure, as forgotten as the “Country Boy & City Girl” single he was supposed to be finding.
But on this afternoon, in this company, Edge felt valued. For him, the real lost treasure of R&B was his self-respect.
GETTIN’ IN THE WAY
On the wall in Cassidy Ronson’s office was a framed blowup of Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, the famed literary critic’s memoir of growing up in Brownsville in the 1930s, a time when the area was a notorious Jewish ghetto. That, D assumed, was where the AK in AKBK came from. On the opposite wall hung a huge map of Brownsville and neighboring East New York with different pins representing, D guessed,
real estate holdings and possible acquisitions.
Other than that the office was pretty bare. Some file cabinets. A cappuccino machine. Ronson sat behind an battered wooden desk with some papers scattered across it. Now as clear-eyed as he’d been buzzed at the charity event, Ronson wore a bow tie, black-framed glasses, and a white shirt with suspenders. He looked like a parody of a 1950s banker.
D sat there amazed at this turn of events. He’d almost been shot and/or stabbed on the pavement outside. He’d watched videos of Rivera selling guns he had stored somewhere in this space. Now he was sitting across from an Ivy League guy working out the details for a free concert in the same public park he’d spent countless hours in as a youth. It was sweet in a way, but D knew this conversation was probably not going to end smoothly.
They’d spoken for thirty minutes with Amos Pilgrim via Skype. Once he’d clicked off and they’d completed D’s checklist, Ronson went into a spiel that seemed a sober continuation of his Output rant.
“Before they built all this public housing, Brownsville’s tenements were filled with Jews from Eastern Europe,” Ronson explained. “Change happens. Our company will be here when it happens. We’ll help it happen. We’ll be stakeholders here. You are a stakeholder too. Which is why this concert should be the first of many projects we work on out here together.”
“Real estate is not my game,” D said bluntly.
“It’s about much more than real estate, D. We are talking with the city about building a large cultural center in Brownsville called the Brevoort, after the vaudeville house that was kind of Brooklyn’s Apollo. It was on Bedford off Fulton Street. We are giving it a classic old-school name but it’ll be a totally modern venue where Brownsville’s musical future can be developed. That sound good to you?”
“Sure,” D said, “if you can pull it off.”
“We need men of respect to represent us as we create our plan for Brownsville’s development. You are from the area, you’ve worked with many celebrities, and then you moved back to Brooklyn. It’s a great narrative—you’d just have to do some presentations initially. As our plan develops you’d be included in what we do. We won’t make the same mistakes that happened in the past.”
The Lost Treasures of R&B Page 13