“Where’d he come from? What does he do these days?”
“He does what we all do these days, Michael. He gets by.”
I’m not satisfied by any of this. I watch as he removes his headphones and gently cups them over Mother’s ears. He’s still using a Walkman, old-school weirdo, and when he presses play she listens, her eyes widening, the sheer volume carrying as far away as the kitchen. Mother shakes the headphones off her head, smiling in a wrinkled-nose sort of way. He smiles back with teeth.
—
Jelly must sense my wariness towards him, because shortly after the tea, he leaves without a word. Through the window, I see him pass Mrs. Henry, who stops to stare before shaking her head and muttering something disapproving to the invisible congregation of souls forever accompanying her. If Jelly can hear the rebuke, he very wisely doesn’t respond and continues walking down the avenue. He’s taken his backpack, and for a moment I wonder if he’s left for good. Should we have tried to talk? Ten years and not a single word between us. Should I at least have said goodbye? I feel more relief than guilt. But in a couple hours he returns with his backpack full, as well as two plastic bags of groceries in his hands. And there’s another surprise.
He can cook.
He moves fluently through the inexpensive ingredients he’s bought, bags of vegetables as well as dried peas, rice, little containers of seasonings he produces from his backpack. He chops like a chef, the sharp steel edge loud and quick upon the wood. Soon he’s got the entire kitchen in chaos, no free space on the counters, all stove elements on. Mother has begun to pitch in too, and she sorts dried peas at the kitchen table, dropping them into a ceramic bowl with the sound of small pebbles. Even Aisha is participating, fetching pots and pans, washing vegetables in a big colander at the sink. I catch Jelly’s eyes.
“Is that bodi?” I ask.
“Couldn’t find it,” he says. “Just string beans.”
“We’ll be ready to eat in a few minutes,” says Aisha. “That right, Jelly?”
He nods and tilts a chopping board full of diced onions, garlic, and peppers towards a hot and oiled cast-iron pot. Instantly, there’s a fierce scorching sound, the kitchen air quickly filling with a smell at once spiced and buttery and harsh. I’ve always had a weakness for fried hot peppers, Scotch bonnets in particular, and I feel my eyes tearing up. I do my best to swallow the tickling in my throat. I try holding my breath, but then blow out a loudly snotty bout of uncontrolled coughing. Aisha and Mother are laughing, but Jelly looks genuinely concerned.
“Maybe open the front door a bit?” he suggests.
“It’s okay,” I say, fighting for breath. “I have to leave now anyway.”
—
I have another precious long shift at the Easy Buy, and I make sure to be on time. I perform a bunch of jobs, unloading skids, bagging groceries, cleaning up spills in aisles. Mr. Mississauga is with me again, and Manny tells us we need to unload the five skids at the back of the freezer section before we leave tonight. We bust our asses, and manage to finish, but then, just at the end of our shift, a stacked skid topples and a couple dozen cases of cola piss out their stickiness when they hit the floor. Mississauga sucks his teeth at me for the whole unpaid half-hour we’re mopping up the mess. I’m in the staff dressing room, getting ready to head home, when Manny confronts me. But not about the cola.
“Heard you have a houseguest,” he says.
“We’re friends. She’s just visiting.”
“Not the girl, sly dog. Homeboy headphones, I mean.”
“He’s nobody,” I say, hearing annoyance in my own voice. “A friend of my brother’s. Your people in the Park got nothing better to do than spy on me?”
He begins a new lecture. There are lowlifes, he warns. There are people who attract all sorts of problems. I’m in no mood to listen, I’m sure my impatience shows on my face, and Manny’s message gets more threatening. He warns that he can’t employ someone who associates with criminals, degenerates. I nod, then walk out of the staff room, hurry through the empty aisles of the Easy, risking my job, I know, with this show of attitude. Manny follows, asking me if I ever look good and well at myself. When I step out into cold, he halts at the sliding doors.
“You ever actually think about your future?” he yells after me.
—
I spend a couple hours, maybe more, walking round and round the block, trying to think, trying to even name the emotions within me. I step into puddles of slush, heedless of the cold and wet. I cross the Lawrence Avenue bridge at least a half-dozen times, back and forth, getting splashed by cars. After an hour, my feet are stumps.
When I finally make my way to my block again, my head is foggy, but I notice, not far from our unit, the parked police car. When I open our front door, I see the whole living room and kitchen filled with strangers, mostly young people, standing about silently. I look about the room for Mother but I can’t see her. It takes me only a moment more to notice the two figures in uniform standing inside. Suddenly too close, unreal, like a dream.
“Are you Michael?” asks one of the cops.
She’s a woman with short blond hair, green eyes. She’s young, maybe in her mid- to late twenties. Her name is Bev, and I actually know her. She’s a regular face in the Park. I’ve seen her talk down a drunk man when a confrontation could have easily escalated into violence. I’ve seen her chat casually with teenagers in the neighbourhood, really talk with them, not fish for information. She gets things, I know. She’s a good cop, but none of this helps me right now. Every nerve in my body is alert. I can smell leather and a strong underarm deodorant from her partner, standing a few feet away. I can hear her creaks when she subtly adjusts her stance. Maybe the equipment on her belt, the black nightstick, the holstered gun.
“You’re Michael, right?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“We’ve had a noise complaint from your neighbour.”
“Yes. Okay.”
“We’re just following up. Your friends have agreed to turn down the music.”
“Okay.”
“Are you all right, Michael?”
“Okay. Yes. I’m okay.”
A noise complaint, nothing more. But I start when a metallic voice sounds over Bev’s walkie-talkie, numbers being called out, an address. She says good night to me, and I watch both cops leave. I wait for the door to close behind them, I even peek through the curtains to see them walking to their car, before I turn to the crowd of strangers in my house.
They’re younger than me, wearing the fashions, big and loose and colourful, of their time. Many are black and brown, but others are Asian, white, and who knows what else. They’re beautiful, I can’t help but see this even now. But right now they are intruders, lowlifes, entering without my permission, and attracting the attention of the authorities. They’ve been eating Jelly’s food and leaving dirty plates scattered throughout the place, a fresh purple stain on the carpet right in front of the recliner. They’ve taken other liberties, resurrected Mother’s old turntable, pulled out albums I haven’t heard for ages. Aretha Franklin, Percy Sledge. Nana Mouskouri? Where the hell is my mother?
“Michael,” says Aisha, appearing beside me, touching my arm. “Can I explain?”
I pull away because I’ve finally spotted her. She’s wearing Jelly’s Walkman, the headphones around her neck. She’s sitting on the couch between Jelly and a big woman with hoop earrings. On the coffee table before them is a small green suitcase, the one Mother used decades ago to move to this country, the one she now uses to store pictures and memorabilia. Normally it’s on a shelf high up in her closet. But it’s been retrieved and opened wide for anyone to see. Pictures of Mother’s life before this one. Pictures of me as a child. Pictures of Francis. I push through the crowd towards Mother and grab her elbow to help her up from the couch, the photographs on her lap scattering to the floor.
“Michael,” says Aisha, “what are yo
u doing?”
I’m conscious, suddenly, of squeezing Mother’s arm. She pulls hard away from my grip and smacks me across my face. For a moment, we stare at each other.
“We were…listening to music,” she says. “We were…talking.” Her voice cracks. She is shaking.
The attention of the whole room is upon me now. Anger on the face of the woman who’d been sitting beside Mother. Sadness on Jelly’s. I turn to Aisha, still staring quietly at me.
“I warned you about strangers.”
“These are my friends, Michael. They’ve heard the story and they want to know more. They want to show their respect.”
“I don’t want their respect. I want them out of this house.”
As gently as I can, I take the ridiculous Walkman and headphones off Mother and throw them down on the couch. I take her hand and lead her through the crowd to her bedroom, closing the door behind us. Mother immediately goes to her bed, lies down with her eyes open. I try to touch her shoulder and she pulls away, the faint light from the street painting her face. I move closer to the door and stand listening to people in the living room asking questions in low voices, Aisha responding, and then the sounds of hasty tidying, furniture being moved around, hopefully back to its proper place. In time, I hear the sounds of people leaving.
When I’m sure everyone’s gone, I gently close Mother’s bedroom door behind me. The place is still a mess and the purple stain on the carpet looks permanent. Surprisingly, Jelly’s Walkman is still on the couch, and I pick it up. I press play, listen to the whine of the machine, the slight sound of a voice, perhaps a man’s, before putting on the headphones. I recognize the music from a barbershop a decade ago. Nina Simone, her opening to “Feeling Good.” But changed, remixed, so that the band never arrives, the lonely voice forever looping back.
AFTER ANTON WAS KILLED, you could feel it more than ever. You caught in the eyes of strangers the suspicion or outright fear. You sensed the halo of menace above your head, glimpsed the turbulence swirling behind as you walked. On TV and in the papers, politicians promised to crack down on criminals, with echoed agreements from suited community spokesmen. But criminals weren’t the only target. Every day, neighbourhood kids were stopped by the cops, the questions about their actions and whereabouts more probing. We were being watched by everyone, shopkeepers, neighbours, passersby. Maybe because he knew I was suffocating on my own, Francis, despite his disappointment with me after we tried to visit our father, made space for me to hang out with him at Desirea’s.
The shop was Dru’s, but it wasn’t your typical business. Prospective clients were almost never welcomed. On my first afternoon, I watched a neighbourhood kid named Trance shyly enter the shop, produce nothing but pocket change and lint for a service that I observed was less of a haircut than a punishing rite of passage. Trance sat obediently in a barber’s chair as Dru mercilessly went to work, pushing his head forward to buzz a neckline, yanking it to the side to reach that difficult spot behind the ears. Dru’s thumb now digging into the poor boy’s eye socket for steadiness. (“Of course you got nicked, fool! I told you not to move!”) Most of the anger was show, and when it was over the kid was offered a beef patty and a Coke with the luxury of ice, and he was allowed to stay for the rest of the day.
When hanging out at Desirea’s, I saw cash change hands, a modest income generated. But whether Dru willed it or not, the shop seemed to run on a different economy. In the thin light filtered and refracted through those untidy storefront windows, in the spell of Jelly’s music, lives and names emerged. I watched a young man get a shave. He leaned way back in the chair, his eyes draped with a cloth, his cheeks and neck piled with lather. Jelly worked at his mixing board and turntables, and in that space of sound Dru used a straight razor, cutting a face out from underneath the white. And here, now, was Kev, who after his shave spent at least five minutes admiring the work in a mirror, then carefully adjusting his mesh-backed cap, the brim set perfectly flat and cocked to the right. Here too was big-boned Abdi, who every day requested “just a little touch-up.” Here was Gene, a girl B-boy who sported the tightest fade. And here was the Professa, in his late twenties, his academic credentials uncertain, but always able to name the track Jelly was messing with.
“Otis Clay, ‘A Lasting Love,’ ” he would announce, not even looking up from his copy of The Source.
Here was Raj, the Talker, and the only one among us lucky enough to live in a home his parents actually owned (or so he said). He wore a Kangol hat low over his eyes and a long chain of plated gold. He was a skinny guy, but he’d perfected a brawling posture that made him look bigger than he was, his arms propped out by the invisible bulk of his back and chest muscles. On my second day at Desirea’s, he reluctantly confessed to having a rare medical condition. An elephantiasis of the penis, a burden that had nevertheless won him the tender sympathies of several ladies. Although, later that evening, when certain flesh-and-blood women came into the shop, Raj’s tone suddenly changed. Carla, Yash, and Meeshi, official neighbourhood Beauties, their fingernails honed like weapons, their eyes squint-pools of steel. They sported designer jeans and bossy hairdos. In the suddenly quiet shop, they sat scowling, chewing gum, looking bored, waiting for something to happen. And during the hour the girls were there, Raj, the boy who’d once bragged magnificently about pussy, could barely get a sensible word out of his mouth.
“Um…like…you know…you girls want me to get you, like, a soda?”
Everyone laughed at Raj. Everyone laughed at each other. In Desirea’s, you postured but you also played. You showed up every one of your dictated roles and fates. Our parents had come from Trinidad and Jamaica and Barbados, from Sri Lanka and Poland and Somalia and Vietnam. They worked shit jobs, struggled with rent, were chronically tired, and often pushed just as chronically tired notions about identity and respectability. But in Desirea’s, different styles and kinships were possible. You found new language, you caught the gestures, you kept the meanings close as skin.
—
It was the Professa who first explained the music to me. That summer, rap went mainstream, sucking up all the attention of television and radio, of promoters and record labels, and suddenly all ears were on MCs. In the moneyed rush for the next big voice, the DJ was abandoned, his work onstage easily replaced by pre-recorded tracks and engineers working in studios. But as a result, something else became possible. The DJ, now fired from his day job as backup for the mike, was free to return to the origins, to the materials. Old heroes like DJ Kool Herc were remembered, and a new generation of innovators was left to experiment on their own.
Almost every day, Francis and Jelly brought in a new crate of records scavenged from garages and secondhand shops. They would carefully assess their finds, nudging shoulders, touching hands, laughing quietly to each other over some cheesy album covers water-blistered or faded with time. They would pull out the vinyl, use a soft cloth to gently wipe the surface, check for scratches in good light, and then cue the record up. They’d make all the boys in the shop listen, at first just listen, without messing with things. We heard, as if with new ears, the music of our parents, the lost arts of funk especially, but also ska and soul, blues and jazz. We heard an album by Toots and the Maytals, “borrowed” from a parent whose musical tastes you would never think to trust. We heard Coltrane as if for the first time. (What the fuck, whispered little Trance. Language, bitch! scolded Dru.) We listened patiently to Satchmo and Aretha Franklin, Marley and Harry Belafonte, stuff too sweetly familiar from TV commercials and movie soundtracks. But Francis and Jelly stole it all back for us, the dead and the living, made it ours to listen to, before Jelly went to work.
He spent hours every day at his set-up of Technics 1200s, the turntables easily the most expensive things in the shop, and probably in our lives. With a headphone on one ear, his fingers moving from mixing board to the twinned vinyl, he’d discover and isolate the break beat, that precious particle of meaning, that three-second glimpse of the
bigger story of a song, extending now forever. Jelly was a master at this, and he could also scratch as good as anyone we’d heard. But he was weird even among the new class of DJs, for his genius was all about continuous flow, about ceaselessly mixing in one sound, one style, one era with another. He worked magic with the cross-fader and the different equalizers, allowing us to recognize connections we’d never otherwise imagine. Between ska and blues. Between Port of Spain and Philadelphia. Between the 1950s and the late 1980s. Sometimes it failed, and the noise had no resonance. Even I could understand that. Other times it worked, the old and elsewhere summoned back and enthroned in an amplified rhythm that sent everyone in the shop suddenly pouting and nodding and calling back.
“That’s brilliant, Jelly,” said Raj. “You’re a…what do they call it now? A metaphysician. A goddamned metaphysician!” “I predict multitudinous felicitations at the Ex,” said the Professa.
I learned it then, their big plan. A major hip-hop concert at the CNE was just days away. Big names and acts were coming from the cities that mattered, New York and L.A. At the promotional events leading up to the concert, there’d be talent scouts and official auditions, and record deals might be on offer. The world-famous artist the Conductor would be there. And this would be the chance for Jelly to take stage and shine, to represent.
“So true,” said Raj. “You’re going to kill it at the Ex.”
“It’s true,” Francis said to Jelly, touching hands and pulling him close. “We’re gonna do it.”
Francis had always before played cool and sensible. He protected himself, the way you had to. But now I glimpsed in him not only a strange and dangerous hope but also something else. There is a thing that sometimes happens between certain neighbourhood boys. It shows itself, this thing, in touched hands, in certain glances and embraces, its truth deep, undeniable, but rarely spoken or explained. Sometimes never even truly spotted. Although now, in the midst of my own thing, I could see.
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