Phantom Effect

by Michael Aronovitz

  He kept catalogues on all his friends and those who passed in and out of his circles for this very reason, this very thing. If you had big monkey ears or a gap in your teeth or something goofy in your past like getting caught snitching, chances were it was somewhere in his spiral-bounds colored green or red, buried in harsh rhymes with punch-lines meant to bury you. He had specific things about family members and friends of friends in his blue notebook, stuff about your fight game in the neon pink one, and rhymes in fluorescent purple if you were unlucky enough to be a guy who had ever been socked in the jaw by a female.

  But all his stuff was at home. At first he had considered trying to get signed out to take the sub back to his crib in Olney, but there wasn’t enough time. And it would have been difficult to splice the personal flaws of others into the little he knew about Adonis Baxter anyway. He needed to think! All he had in his backpack for reference was his black five-section job, filled with more scratch-outs than he’d ever had to do before and intricate political rhymes. He’d been moving away from the cut-throat personal stuff for months now, trying to come up with material that had more meaning and lasting power. He would not have admitted this aloud, but he never liked being an attack dog in the first place. It wasn’t satisfying, and he was smart enough to realize how short-lived was the glory. Everyone had chinks in the armor, and payback sucked. Besides, it wasn’t . . . nice, and even though he despised himself for being so lame, he couldn’t help the fact that he was growing, becoming a man, leaving behind the petty stuff.

  And now this.

  He was going to have to scratch down something in math class, and whatever he couldn’t hack out at the desk would have to be freestyled live. And Jerome Anthony Franklin didn’t like freestyling, not his thing, and that was another issue that was difficult to admit, especially now when he’d sold himself so long as one who could rap on the spot, always making up for his lack of improvisational ability with secret anticipatory planning.

  Did he go for the kid’s handicap? That was the real question, and the issue wasn’t only that it was a huge gamble in terms of what would be considered uncool and off-limits. Finally, he didn’t want to go there because for reasons he couldn’t quite articulate even to himself, it felt wrong. And while he wanted to avoid it, he was terrified that in the heat of the moment he’d slip back to the subject, turning the sway of the mob against him and at the very least, feeling like he’d fought dirty to get a cheap win.

  The minute security gave the green light for lunch Jerome headed for the bathroom, knowing he would have at least a few minutes of peace and quiet in the third stall down that still had the door on it with a working lock. Math had been a huge distraction, with Isiah Thompson continually hitting the button on his Bart Simpson keychain so it whined, “Are we there yet?” and the ongoing argument Mr. Ratcliff kept having with Alysse Hicks, Kianna Drysedale, and Faith Bryson, in that he could see them texting even when they hid their cells in their laps or an open pocketbook up on the desk.

  Jerome didn’t have much. He’d put together one short stanza, talking about his adversary’s height and the fact that he was a bookworm. Shaky. Kevin Hart had paved the way for the short guy even more than Allen Iverson did back in the day, and black nerds like Dave Chappelle and Kanye West had all but destroyed the idea that it was only the stone-hard thugs who had the right to interpret the hood. Of course, this nixed the idea of going gangsta with it as a fall back, and to tell the truth Jerome had always been bored with that old-school mess anyway, rhyming “glock” with “cock” and talking about the fifty million ways you could write yourself a one-way ticket to prison.

  He was going to have to rap about his philosophies, his newer material that left his opponent out of it altogether, and this was riskier than attacking a handicap. It would give Adonis ammunition, food for his own freestyling if he was capable in the first place, and Jerome didn’t like leaving himself open to potshots.

  Someone banged on the stall door.

  “Go to lunch!” It was Farell, the ninth-grade history teacher who had the room next door to the bathroom and therefore felt he had the right to police it. “Now,” he said.

  Jerome pushed out with his shoulders back and walked past into the hall. His face was set, black notebook in hand.

  He had nothing.

  He made his way slowly downstairs.

  The cafeteria was a loud, numbing buzz. There were old withered ladies wearing rubber gloves and hairnets trying their best to rotate stock on the steam table, and the quiet woman with the humpback from the accounting office stood at the front messing with the state’s ticker-counter that kept a record of who got a plate. The walls were dirty white with these big dog-eared posters of Sojourner Truth, Maya Angelou, Frederick Douglass, and Barack Obama staring down on the barely controlled pandemonium, with all those on the girls’ side sitting in throngs, some up on their knees on the benches shouting in one another’s faces. Others sat still trying to act sophisticated, looking off into space, chewing slowly as if unaware that right beside them there were girls putting on too much lipstick, practicing cheers, playing pattycake, and sometimes screaming for no reason at all.

  The young bulls in the front of the boys’ section had gathered in a mob. They were sitting fifteen guys per bench where they would normally fit ten. The pack was thirty rows deep, and there were mini-rapshows going on, where some dude would stand on the bench in the crowd and get animated, calling it out, showing his teeth, flicking his fingers. There would be a ripple effect of those laughing with him or at him, open mouths shouting “Ohh!” with fingers to the lips if the mini-rap was outstanding, then a cheer and more goofing with the guys slapping fives, wrestling around, and jumping out to the long aisle down the middle of the room, some of them bobbing in and out of the surging crowd, pretending to do crossovers and swim moves and running-back jukes around others moving in opposite directions through the slim arteries alongside the food lines.

  Jerome slipped in and sat with Frankie and Desmond’s crowd, chock full of the jokers he’d gone to school with for years, all of them pumped to the gills, but smart enough to save him a space so he could think. Leon cleared the place before him with his forearm, pushing the trash down and cursing when he got taco juice on his sleeve. None had gotten streaked on the table. Saved it. He nodded, and Jerome stuck his treasured notebook up there, flipping to the page where he thought there might be some ammo, some early stuff right after he’d transitioned that still had the right kind of venom in it.

  He smiled. Old times. In his head he could hear the beat behind it, and he clearly remembered writing it on that school trip to the Franklin Institute late last year.

  I ain’t no actor when power is a factor,

  My body be charged like a nuclear reactor,

  And you’re always working,

  And jerking,

  And calling out sick, just a niggah with a dick, and

  Irking.

  For certain.

  Pastor in the church of Chick-fil-A

  There’s meat on the fire,

  noise like a choir,

  hymn on a napkin, that’s your rap-game,

  scripture in the fryer.

  Maybe. But there was too much laughter in it, and you could tell he was moving on to a different kind of thing than rap battling in the lunchroom or the parking lot with this one. The rhythm of it was more about smiling and moving your head back and forth than shouting your throat raw for the thrill of the kill. Maybe if . . .

  Wait.

  Something had changed. There was a hush about the place and then a low roar, as heads turned and people stood, all of them jockeying for position, telling others to get the fuck out of the way, craning their necks for a view of the archway that led to the main corridor where Adonis Baxter had just made his grand entrance.

  He stalked past the juice machine and people erupted in a primal rousing cheer. He was strutting in such an animated manner that it first seemed he was limping. His shirt was unt
ucked. His tie was off. His hair was tied up on one side in a mini-pigtail, but the other had come loose in full frizz. He’s lost one of his shoes and his eyes were crazy.

  Somehow through all the mayhem, he found Jerome and tramped over, everyone trying to convince the ones in front of them to sit and chill, the place slowly settling into a tense crowded ring of anticipation, the two lunch monitors in the back looking around nervously, not knowing what exactly was happening and clueless as to how to put a stop to it.

  Adonis came up to the row where Jerome sat five bodies in and kicked at one of the table legs.

  “Fucking cheater,” he snapped. “Y’all got your book!”

  Jerome didn’t flinch.

  “I’m studying for a physics test. Ain’t even thinking ’bout you.”

  Adonis folded his arms.

  “Go ahead then. Spit. Y’all’s first.”

  The place really quieted and you could have heard a pencil hit the floor. Jerome shut his black book and closed his eyes, reaching deep for it, a couple of the old rhymes forming in his head trying to connect. No problem. He’d outclass him, do his transition piece and tailor in the one he wrote a month later about niggahs disrespecting females. He’d slow it all down to make it real gangsta and aim his inflections as if it were about Adonis all along. He put up his hands, fingers spread.

  “Yo, yo, bitch,” he started, and Adonis cut him off to the quick.

  “Bitch?” he said, and then his voice jumped up a notch. “Bitch?” He started climbing into the row through the thick knots of boys sitting there, tone rising like a siren, “You call me a bitch?” He pushed his way in directly behind Jerome Anthony Franklin, “A fucking bitch?” and by the time he leaned over him just above his right ear, he’d worked himself into an absolute fit.

  “Who the fuck you think you’re talking to?” he shouted. Saliva sprayed out of his mouth, and Jerome looked straight ahead. A rock. Adonis went almost hoarse with it then, hollering on one side of Jerome’s head then the other, one ear then the next. “I’m a bitch? Just a dumb, fucking bitch? Then spit it to me, bitch! Spit it loud! Spit it hard! You big black dummy, you retarded jungle monkey, always playin’ with your pisser, just to stick it in your sister!” He stopped suddenly and played the dynamics of the untimely pause. He pushed back straight and folded his arms, standing right behind, breathing heavily, a runner of snot gleaming under his left nostril.

  “So spit,” he whispered finally. “Spit to the bitch.”

  Jerome closed his eyes again and raised up his hands, focusing harder than he ever had in his life. The crowd was a wire, taut and ready to snap.

  And nothing.

  Dead battery.

  His hands came down and his head followed, those sculpted shoulders making humbled points beneath the creases of his dress shirt.

  Adonis didn’t wait for the mass of students to voice an opinion. He jumped out into the aisle where everybody could hear him and started rapping so fast it was like a machine gun. The crowd stood and hooted along, echoing him. Adonis was marching back and forth, pants low, shirt filthy, face twisted. Then he turned from Jerome, turned to the girls’ side, turned to the heart of the swaying mass.

  “I’m more man than you, I’m more black than you,

  I’m a fuck your ma, and I’m a smack your boo,

  I’ll say it slow so you’ll understand,

  I can even beat you with my fucked up hands!”

  The cheers were deafening. Adonis fell into the swarm of boys, and they were congratulating him, giving high-fives, slapping him on the back. A lunchroom monitor named Mr. Ditno finally grew a set of balls and ambled on over to the row.

  “Come here,” he said.

  Adonis ignored him. Next came the curling finger.

  “Come out of there. Now.”

  Adonis ignored him still. Then Ditno became the airline technician waving in the craft, hand extended out flat and arm bending up at the elbow.

  “Let’s go.”

  Ignored a third time, Ditno pushed in and through and tried to grab Adonis by the shoulder.

  “Keep your hands off me,” the new hero cried, shaking him off, coming out by himself. He raised up his crab claws and said it again,

  “Keep your hands off me.”

  And then it sunk in, and Adonis Baxter left that cafeteria to the most deafening applause Jerome Anthony Franklin had ever heard in his life.

  And now he was in an all-white school in an all-white town where uncomfortable silences were louder than Broad Street subway trains and people looked at you funny even when you chilled. And he was rapping in the stairwell, rapping angry, cussing enough to get suspended but finally not caring.

  Marissa walked toward the doors, one of them not quite flush with the other, the young man’s beautiful classic figure hunched over and sitting on a high stair, distorted and blurred through the green marbled glass. She felt as if she were walking on air and her heart was a triphammer. She pulled open the door and it gave a loud creak, and he stopped rapping and looked at her with wide staring eyes. His mouth dropped open just for a moment, but long enough to make it more than obvious that he thought she was pretty. Then his face closed up, jaw tight, lip curled, his eyes working down to mere slits.

  “What’s up?” he said. He had a short crop-cut going straight across and thin tailored sideburns. His graphic fleece hoodie was black and silver with a dragon pattern, and it didn’t hang loose like that of some weak little punk, but lay almost form-fitted along his cuts and toned edges, nice and tight especially in the arms. “Gun show,” Marissa thought crazily. He had core denim jeans and light brown Timberland hiking boots without even one scuff on the nubuck leather. His frame was iron and his skin was dark silk.

  “Your rap game is weak,” she said, “Pop Warner at best, and even if you came up with current and relevant rhymes, your breathing is all wrong. You’re straining on every third sentence and losing your breath at the punch-line. It’s a dead horse, so stop riding it. That rap battle with Adonis Baxter was the best thing to ever happen to you, because it gave you two valuable things.”

  His eyes flashed. If he was amazed that she knew these particular details about his past, he wasn’t showing.

  “And what do you think those two things are?” he said. Marissa folded her arms and shook her hair back over the shoulder.

  “A broken heart, and the knowledge that you’ve outgrown what a lesser man used to hurt you. So now it’s time to utilize that knowledge and admit who you are.”

  He got up off the step and walked over, head slightly tilted.

  “And what’s that, fortune teller?”

  She raised her chin, eyes locked with his.

  “A crooner. A heart-throb who writes and sings love songs, real sensitive stuff, with lots of background violins and keys accenting vocal climaxes in the high falsetto range you don’t even know you have the ability to manipulate yet. And you’ll bury that anger, that failure, that lunchroom, and you’ll put velvet over it, letting it simmer and reforge down there into a razor’s edge, barely perceptible as it hides there in the honey, and you’ll cut your listeners right to the bone with it, breaking their hearts, wringing them dry.”

  He didn’t respond, and her eyes then did lower.

  “You don’t believe me,” she said.

  “I didn’t say that.” She looked back up, and he moved a step closer.

  “I never even sang in church or nothing.”

  “Well, that’s gonna change.”

  “I write hip-hop.”

  “Not anymore.”

  He rubbed his thumb and index finger down along the corners of his lips, and Marissa had a feeling he was thinking about his breathing, about the credibility of her plea and the way one art form demanded a certain rapid-fire execution, where a soft sort of singing would let him do what he did best. Take his time. He nodded his head at her again, except this time it had a question in it and an indication that he was ready to start believing her answers, at least
in a cautious, preliminary kind of way.

  “Where am I gonna get my material?”

  Marissa formed her lips into that sexy little smile she’d perfected.

  “From the girl you can’t have.” She turned and started walking out of the stairwell, turning back for one last look over the shoulder.

  And Jerome Anthony Franklin was smiling back openly, no slitted eyes, no curl of the lip. He finally knew the shape of his fortune. He’d finally met up with his muse.

  THE RISE

  AND THE FALL

  Yeah, he fucked her, but not in the biblical way. At first it was all peaches and cream because all the teasing and pleasing or whatever you’d call it was part of the game, asshole. It was business. They had a no-touch rule and they let it fester, building the tension and using it to write pop music meant to make the girls groan. Marissa Madison could play the piano just good enough to compose the grass-roots accompaniment to their shitty little love songs, and Jerome Anthony Franklin became a staple in that split-level on New Ardmore Avenue. Mother was cautious at first and Daddy secretly hated the idea, but Franklin won them over with good old-fashioned manners and a lot of “yes suh, no suh.” And Marissa just melted for him. She even bought him an etiquette book off Amazon and gave him speech lessons. Turned him white.

  The cocksucker.

  I’m so filled up with Marissa Madison’s visions of him that I’d like to punch her straight in the face (if she had a full one left). I don’t know why she has to keep pouring this particular strain of poison into me, but I’ve been drenched with their short history, all those hours they leaned over the lyric pages and sheet music together, listening to each other’s breathing, making themselves speechless.

  But why the fuck would I care in the first place, Madison? If you’re gonna torture me, why don’t you pull my eyelids back and aim my face at the sun, stick bamboo splinters under my fingernails, chop off a toe, take a branding iron to a soft spot? Get to it! Enough of the gauze and the fluff and molasses. I already know what it’s like to love him, so the bang for the buck ain’t deafening no more, it’s just long and drawn-out. I ain’t gonna turn gay, so that can’t be the plan.