Soul City

by Touré

  Spreadlove stepped to the stage in a white floor-length fur-lined mink draped over his white Gucci suit with a white shirt and white leather shoes that shined like diamonds. He had long manicured nails and a freshly sliced basketball-size fro, so you knew he wasn’t putting his hands on any records or any earphones over his doo. Instead, he had two fine mamas in short shorts and strappy stilettos running between the turntables, the crates, and his lips. Standing perfectly still, he whispered in their ears what to play, leading the party from an Al Green sermon about being tired of being alone to Prince saying you could smash up his ride—well, maybe not the ride—to P-Funk preaching about Chocolate City. That was always a Soul City favorite, but Spreadlove and his women got as much applause for their music as for their little show. Never let it be said folk don’t like the theater.

  Spreadlove had loved all sorts of women all around the world, but his kryptonite remained the blond, blue-eyed American white woman. He was transfixed by them, whether or not they were pretty. Just something about the sunshine in that hair made his mind all slushy. Emperor knew that if Spreadlove were mayor it’d be just a matter of time before John Jiggaboo was invading Soul City. Ten years ago Jiggaboo had come to town looking to sell some shampoo. Emperor used the stuff himself and felt Jiggaboo Shampoo’s malevolent tingle. He thought, There’s something real funny about this shampoo, and promptly banned it from the Soul City market. Black people across the country fell in love with Jiggaboo Shampoo, but Emperor steadfastly refused to let it into Soul City. Emperor thought, Will Spreadlove continue my ban on Jiggaboo Shampoo? No. He’ll probably invite Jiggaboo and his white women to come party in the mayor’s mansion.

  But Emperor wasn’t too worried about Spreadlove. He knew there was no way Spreadlove could win, because Spreadlove never campaigned, because he was always having sex. What neither Emperor nor Spreadlove knew was that his women loved him so well that they campaigned for him behind his back, even when they knew he was off somewhere inside someone else. Spreadlove couldn’t be bothered to look at the polls, but without even trying he was solidly in second place. Anybody but him, Emperor prayed.

  4

  _____

  SHE WAS lazing in back of the Biscuit Shop on her break. She was wearing Jimmy Choo heels with her Biscuit Shop uniform, smoking with postcoital aplomb. Her name tag said MAHOGANY. It was Saturday afternoon and on the city speakers Prince was droning on about a strange relationship.

  She was being interviewed about her love life by a man from the Soul City Inquirer, paying as much attention to him as to her cigarette. She’d dumped yet another basketball player because even though he could fly, his superiority complex was too much for her. The whole city was buzzing.

  She took a slow drag. “Flyin’s gettin a girl nowhere with guys,” she said drolly. “I hate men.”

  Cadillac was standing a few feet away, staring at his shoes, and eavesdropping.

  The reporter asked her something about a prophecy, but Cadillac couldn’t understand the question.

  “I’m so sick of talking about that,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  With the trepidation of someone sticking his hand into the lion’s cage, the reporter asked her about the rumors that Granmama secretly wants to die.

  “I hate interviews,” she said and dismissed him.

  Cadillac’s heart was careening around his chest. But with the hope of a man leaping with his eyes closed, he said, “Excuse me. I’m writing a book about Soul City and —”

  “I get off in two hours,” she said. She hated interviews, but she never turned them down. “Meet me right here.” And that’s how Cadillac Jackson met Mahogany Sunflower.

  After work, in the parking lot behind the Biscuit Shop, she let him know that he was going to be buying lunch for her and her friend Precious Negro at a place in town that she’d choose. She told him she was driving before bothering to find out he didn’t have a car. She was really bossy. Her car was a silver 1940 Mercedes convertible coupe with a white-rimmed fingertip-wide steering wheel and white leather seats. The ride was pristine except for the back corner of the driver’s side, which was horribly crushed, the metal crinkling in like a hideous mouth. Mahogany turned the key and Billie Holiday’s ancient, plaintive wail washed over them. The sound was so clear you could hear the uncried tears in Billie’s throat. Mahogany and Precious sat there for a moment, listening so intently it seemed they were trying to go inside the music. He thought the car itself wasn’t unlike Billie: rare, old, venerable, and once the world’s finest. The crushed back corner spoke of Lady Day, too. The car had known tragedy and pain and was scarred, but had survived.

  “I’ve never been in a Benz like this,” Cadillac said.

  “This is the fruit of lots of painful labor,” Precious said. “This woman is the best baby-sitter in all of Soul City!” Mahogany had eight younger brothers and sisters, so everyone trusted her with their kids. “I’m her agent,” Precious added. “For a Saturday night in the summer she gets one hundred dollars an hour.”

  “The important part of the story,” Mahogany said as she turned onto Freedom Ave, “is that this is a Billiemobile.” She’d gotten it at Groovy Lou’s Loco Motives, the only place in the city that sold cars with a built-in jukebox that held all the music ever made by one genius. Your system would play nothing but the music of that one genius. That made your vehicle a sonic temple, a rolling emblem of you. “I had to have a Billiemobile,” Mahogany said, “because she’s a tortured goddess.”

  They cruised down Funky Boulevard and passed Groovy Lou’s. Groovy Lou himself was outside arranging test-drives, which were really just listening sessions. He had a Ferrari Testarossa that his people had made into a Milesmobile, a Humvee converted into a Wu-Tangmobile, and a Cadillac from the 50s that was now a Jamesbrownmobile. There was a Beatlesmobile, a Gayemobile, a JayZmobile, a Marsalismobile, which played music by the whole family, and, his latest creation, a black stretch limousine with all the trimmings that was, of course, a Sinatramobile. The amount of care he put into his work was touching.

  As they drove, Mahogany pointed out some of the town’s landmarks. They saw the Gravy Shop, which boasted 186 varieties of gravy, 97 kinds of hot sauce, and Boozoo BBQ Brown’s Patented Barbeque to Screw Mopping Sauce, which was known among aficionados as the hottest sauce in the world and, somehow, as an excellent sexual aid. They passed the Teddy Bear Repair Shop, U Drive-Thru Liquor Store, the Poetry Slam Café, and the roller-skating rink. They passed a Funkadelicmobile and a Monkmobile. They passed Dapper Dan’s, where the legendary tailor would affix any high-fashion label to anything you wanted, from a hat to a suit to the interior of your car. He’d escaped to Soul City back in the 80s after the government ran him out of Harlem for trademark infringement. Now he was making Louis Vuitton leather suits, Gucci parkas, and Versace Toyotas and making some dead Euros do in-grave headspins. They passed Delicious Records, Bring the Noise Movie Theater, where yelling at the screen was encouraged, Soul Scissors, the twenty-four-hour hair salon, and Roscoe’s House of Chicken N’ Waffles. They passed a Biggiemobile and a beautiful Ellingtonmobile. Then they came to Lolita.

  5

  _____

  CADILLAC, MAHOGANY, and Precious walked into Lolita. Holden Caulfield lazily led them to a table and morosely tossed their menus onto it. “Bunch of phonies,” he said and went back to the host’s stand. He stared menacingly across the room at an oblivious Harry Potter, who was dutifully manning the cash register.

  Lolita was a restaurant in Soul City’s ritzy Honeypot Hill owned by a madman. No one knew his real name or where he’d come from. He’d arrived in Soul City thirty years ago calling himself Humbert Humbert. When they asked him where he’d come from, he said he’d recently escaped from a distressing little parody of a jail, but before that he’d been traveling around the country, sightseeing with his, uh, daughter. No one believed his story. They said, You can stay as long as you steer clear of our daughters.

  Humbert opened a restaurant an
d forced his waiters and waitresses to dress and act as though they were fictional characters. Sometimes this didn’t work out so well. The waitresses playing Sleeping Beauty took the liberty of napping in the employee lounge as long as they liked. Whoever had to play the role of Gregor Samsa from The Metamorphosis was certain to call in sick every time. No one wanted to wear that giant beetle getup. The Cheshire Cat was always disappearing when you needed him, Cinderella kept losing her shoe, and Pinocchio was constantly lying about the specials. (He told the table beside them, “I highly recommend the rhinoceros testicles.”) Professor Jack Gladney from White Noise spent all his time at the supermarket, Nancy Drew was always trying to figure every damn thing out, and of course the white waitresses were scared to death that Bigger Thomas would kill them. Not every character was a good fit. Lila Mae Watson from The Intuitionist applied to be elevator inspector, but despite her expertise Humbert judged her far too plain for Soul City and sent her packing. And don’t even mention the insane little drummer boy Oskar Matzerath from The Tin Drum, crazy Dr. Charles Kinbote from Pale Fire, annoying Enid Lambert from The Corrections, snot-nosed Saleem Sinai from Midnight’s Children, simpleton Jesse B. Semple, reluctantly slutty innocent Erendira (who was never left alone by her heartless grandmother), and that jealous wimp Gwyn Barry from The Information. They were all but impossible to deal with, as you can imagine. And no matter how much they docked her pay, Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout simply would not take the garbage out.

  Humbert also had twenty-four large-screen televisions placed around the restaurant, tuned to the twenty-four-hour news stations. He liked to sit back and watch fictional characters coming to life and real people becoming stories and patrons getting intellectual vertigo. He’d wanted to name the place Mind Fuck, but he would’ve never gotten a liquor license.

  Dolores Haze jumped down from Humbert’s lap, nonchalantly floated over to the table, and took their order, standing just four-feet-ten in one sock, repeatedly glancing over her shoulder at Humbert, who was ogling her way too much. It seemed as though she was quietly hoping to escape. “This place gives me the creeps,” Mahogany said, lighting up.

  “So,” Cadillac said, “how is it that flowers are able to come up through the concrete like that?”

  “People always ask about the flowers,” Mahogany said.

  “It’s difficult to explain,” Precious said. “It has to do with the soil here being unpolluted. I mean, unpolluted spiritually.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “You don’t have any way to organize the concept in your mind because it’s so new to you,” Precious said. “You’re basically gonna have to learn an entire language before you can understand a word of it.”

  “That’s why your little notepad’s still blank,” Mahogany said snidely.

  Indeed, Soul City was refusing to be captured by his pen. He could see his book was going to take longer than he’d initially thought.

  He asked if there was much crime in Soul City. They said no, very little. Well, OK, there was Hueynewton Payne, Precious’s boyfriend, a seeming one-man crime wave, but he never committed his crimes inside Soul City. They explained that most of the Soulful looked out for their neighbor even when they didn’t know their neighbor’s name. For example, late one night on Mumbo Jumbo Boulevard, Jitterbug Johnson slipped and fell through a window, fell a story, and broke his arm. He landed in front of Spoonbread’s, a twenty-four-hour French brasserie run by Spoonbread Sunraider, who had the seats arranged Parisian style—that is, facing toward the street so patrons could watch the Soul City sidewalk theater. Cool Breeze Blackmon and Audacity Brown were in the middle of a bottle of merlot when Jitterbug met the pavement. Cool Breeze jumped from his seat, snatched off the tablecloth without toppling his glass, and used it to apply a tourniquet to Jitterbug’s bloody arm. Then Spoonbread used his red Rover to race Jitterbug over to the House of Big Mamas. There are no hospitals in Soul City because the House of Big Mamas is filled with mothers, grandmothers, and great-great-great-grandmothers—women experienced in every possible medical contingency. Yes, everyone in Soul City looked out for one another and that’s why nothing ever happened.

  That was the public story. In truth, though no one wanted to admit it, the person most critical to maintaining peace and morality in Soul City on a day-to-day basis was triple chinned Ubiquity Jones, master of the terribly timed gossip bomb.

  The Soulful tried to keep their noses clean because they all feared Ubiquity Jones and her gossip bombs. Somehow, she always discovered your biggest secret and unveiled your dirtiest laundry in public at the most compromising moment possible. One day a few years back she discovered that Bootsy Jones, the official city gardener, had lost his mind one hot afternoon and enjoyed his eighteen-year-old apprentice, Sera Serendipity, while his wife, Sugarpie Jones, was home chasing after their three children. Well, that certainly wouldn’t do. Ubiquity knew Sugarpie well enough to call her immediately and tell her in private, as a concerned friend would do, but Ubiquity was neither concerned nor a friend. A few months later, at the Day of Flight Festival, Ubiquity laid eyes on Sugarpie and sashayed over, her smile beaming as if a piece of the sun were caught in her teeth, her notorious triple chins bouncing as she honed in. She quietly stood near Sugarpie until a few other women noticed her standing near Sugarpie and, relieved she hadn’t sashayed her chins over to them, surreptitiously planted themselves in her vicinity knowing what was about to be dropped.

  “Aft-noon, Mrs. Jones,” Ubiquity said in her fakest sweet voice.

  A hello from Ubiquity caused most Soul City women to panic like a trapped rabbit, but Sugarpie refused to surrender her ladylike composure even though she knew a gossip bomb was coming. “Aft-noon, Miss Jones,” she said stoically.

  “Ain’t it a shame . . .” Ubiquity said, letting her voice rise so the growing crowd could hear her end on a pregnant pause.

  “What’s that, girl?” Sugarpie said, cringing.

  “Just the way your husband’s been having little Sera for lunch lately!”

  The assembled crowd gasped as one. Sugarpie was shocked silent. Ubiquity considered gasps and shocked silences to be her applause.

  “Just tryin to help,” she lied. “Now, how old is that little girl? Sixteen or fourteen?” Ubiquity knew exactly how old Sera was. “Cain’t imagine how hard it must be knowin that while you’re at home playin with your children, your man is out in the streets . . . playin with children.”

  Sugarpie, embarrassed in front of lifelong friends, crumbled into hysterical tears.

  “Goddam you, Ubiquity!” she garbled. “How do you know?!”

  “Oh, chile,” she said, her smile beaming, her three chins bouncing. “Ubiquity is everywhere.”

  Sugarpie and Bootsy divorced within a week. They had been married fifteen years.

  Now, if you didn’t get your gossip from Ubiquity, you could get it from the Soul City Inquirer, whose twenty-seven men and women made it their business to know everyone else’s business. The Inquirer had photographers and reporters swarming all over town, trying to figure out what everyone was doing, like a ghetto Big Brother. Thanks to them, all but the best-kept secrets flew through Soul City at Internet speed. Of course, the people at the Soul City Inquirer never shared any of their scoops with Ubiquity. They hated her. Everyone in Soul City did. But somehow, despite all that rancor and all the manpower of the Soul City Inquirer, which occasionally rented a helicopter and flew above the city in search of gossip, Ubiquity Jones always had a monopoly on the best dish. They had no idea how she did it. Her secret was quite simple. Ubiquity Jones was a busybody and a mind reader.

  She could read women’s minds, but they were complicated places and took more effort. Men’s minds were easy to read. All she had to do was look a man’s way and she could rummage through his mind like a mental pickpocket. Anything salacious she found she saved in her gossip-bomb vault until the worst possible moment.

  Just then a few of Lolita’s twenty-four televisions flashed
to a news report about the Soul City mayoral race. The Soul City Defender’s latest poll showed that with less than two days to go before the Soulful went to vote, the race remained a dead heat. “Looks like it’s going to be a photo finish in the City of Sound!” the anchor said.

  Dolores finally returned with their drinks, but as she placed the glasses on the table, Humbert stood less than an inch behind her, brushing up against her ass. She struggled to place the glasses without spilling.

  “I fuckin hate this place,” Mahogany said.

  “You chose it,” Precious said. She leaned in to Cadillac. “So, you ever do B?”

  B was bliss, the newest drug. It was a brown syrupy liquid that you dropped into your ear. It made you limp and motionless but exponentialized your ability to hear. “It’s like,” Precious said, “you put your body in a coma and you just lay there, can’t move, can’t talk, but you hear amazingly.” There was a tweaked gleam in her eyes and a romantic thrill in her voice. She might’ve been talking about a lover. “You can go inside the music,” she drooled. “It’s like LSD for your ears.” Cadillac was reluctant.

  Mahogany said it was a fun way to pass an afternoon sometimes. Precious announced that after they ate they’d go score and then go drop and that was that.

  They were hungry and Dolores was nowhere to be found. “Good riddance,” Mahogany said, taking a drag. “I never understood why people cared so much about the little raggedy slut.”

  Suddenly, the twenty-four televisions exploded into the self-important Breaking News song and dance. Then Hueynewton Payne’s scarred face flashed on all twenty-four sets at once.

  “Your boyfriend’s on TV again,” Mahogany teased.