Do you think I’m about to change in terms of my “humanity”? Is that it? You think I’m gonna “evolve” or some such shit, just because you drag me through the wet trenches of your broken heart?
Well, what if I don’t evolve, or have some dawning realization about anything, or bother to say I’m sorry? What does that make you? Take a rat from a dark sewer to appreciate the sunrise and all you might get is a blinded rat, sweating, squirming, and yelping.
So you’re making me sweat, taking me through the process of launching an overnight pop sensation, proving that it’s not only talent and looks but packaging and timing, and that creating exposure creatively is as important as the material. You gathered all his precious notebooks and pored over every word together, finding the most important phrases especially from the black five-section job, and cutting them out like Scrabble pieces. You put them up on the glass-top coffee table and looked at the scatter together, the winter wind blowing through the pines outside and the glow of the fireplace reflecting off the polish of the baby grand sitting by the cherry wood mini-bar.
You almost held hands after tossing all the scraps into the fire along with the green and red notebook covers and the blue and neon pink, but for the sake of the project, you settled for leaning in toward each other and letting the shadows of the flames play off your faces as if the reflections were mystic cursive script of your private ritual or some such romanticized bullshit, and up on the glass of the coffee table there were two last scraps left, two of Jerome’s phrases you’d put together in an unexpected way that said,
“You made me a memory.”
That was it. That was your hook, simplified dumb-dumb stuff, and it doesn’t matter that the verses looked too short on paper and the bridge seemed out of place. All of it was an excuse for those rainforest keys, the symphonic foreplay to the big chorus where Jerome Anthony Franklin could take the microphone, close his eyes, and hit those glorious notes of falsetto:
“Can’t you see that you and me
Were never meant to be.
I’m holding on to what’s long gone
Just sunset in the trees,
You made me a memory.”
One song. One hook. Absolute simplicity, the project’s attraction and eventual doomsday button, but you were falling in love, living in the moment, planning to put Jerome Anthony Franklin into the public arena through the back door so he could blindside the industry with a local send-off no one was expecting.
And now I’m squirming, asshole, as his big Philadelphia run that these two both secretly named “Project Launch” flickers inside me like snapshots run together movie-style with a loop of that fucking maple syrup song droning on in the background. They hooked up with this New York-based team called “In It to Win It,” doing a tour of seminars to urban high schools during late day assemblies, with its two masters of ceremonies, the first a short black dude in a white blazer claiming that this wasn’t a lecture, but more of a show, preaching the gospel of study, image-making, and money management, stalking back and forth, talking way too loud into the microphone, overplaying how “down” he was with what the students were going through in the hood, and intersplicing poorly produced video interviews he’d had with Spike Lee and Carmelo Anthony. Then there was his assistant, this hawk-faced witch with frizzy hair, tight jeans, and lime-green hightops who waited for the attention to fray at the edges and would then interrupt with this question-answer “Whoop-Whoop-are you feelin’ it?” thing that would have been clever in the hands of someone like Jesse Jackson, but sad and pathetic here, and just too damned loud.
But even without Jerome Anthony Franklin closing the seminar, it would have been successful in its own clumsy, stupid way. Through the patchwork, Madison saw that these presentations were common in poor urban schools, where the message wasn’t really so much about discovering the golden key out of the ghetto as that motivational speaking was a good fallback that proved the downtrodden loved getting stroked by the feelgood phrases, like “Keep on striving to be the best that you can be” and “If you work hard you can achieve anything,” even though all that limp backwash had long fucking numbed them.
But then there was Jerome, their new secret weapon, and they hid the instruments under painter’s rag covers for effect, making the keys, drums, and bass look like lumps of insignificant background until two muscle-bound roadies dressed in jet-black performed the unveiling of all the shine and gleam. Of course, Jerome had the good PA system with the soundboard, and even though the MCs complained a bit at first behind the scenes, they were smart enough to understand that the producers of “In It to Win It” weren’t interested in a perfect, balanced show. They weren’t even concerned with educating children, but were more about booking events, fulfilling obligations to their investors this first rocky year, and closing strong. They understood contrast, and the warm-up act, even the one with “the message,” could never sound as good as the headliner.
And they made damned sure they closed strong.
Jerome Anthony Franklin would walk out with his low-cut crimson V-neck, dark blue straight jeans, red Prada kicks, and black Ray Ban sunglasses, and whether it was an auditorium stage or a gymnasium floor laid at the base of a packed set of bleachers, the crowds went insane.
Contrast.
Marissa Madison knew what she was doing. It was a sellout every show, an assured bull’s-eye for age bracket, and a guaranteed positive response rate, as these kids had all been stuck under the buzzing fluorescents all day prior, cramped in their chairs, bored out of their skulls, then crammed into the silo.
Madison made sure to turn the heat up, and I ain’t being “metaphorical,” asshole. She literally asked the administrators running these things to crank up the heat past 78 degrees, said it was these new types of cellanoid triaxials in their computer link-ups that demanded a particular high temperature, and if they ever went below it there was a chance that they’d have a freeze-up, blank screens, dead space in the middle of the show. If there was anything administrators dreaded, it was dead space where student behavior deteriorated. They knew from their years in the classroom that you had to keep the kids occupied to keep order, that every moment had to have purpose, that long transitions were deadly, and they turned the heat up for Marissa without question (all except the principal at Goretti, who claimed it was all on a timer and he didn’t have his head maintenance man there to change all the codes).
Uh-huh.
Cram a bunch of frustrated kids in the silo, make them hot on top of it, and what do you get when the god hits the stage, when the lights come up sharp, when the thump of the good sound system kicks in at full volume?
A near riot, and that’s when Madison started filming on her iPhone, borrowing a strategy from the Justin Bieber playbook.
Jerome Anthony Franklin didn’t only go viral. He had an entire catalogue of YouTube video clips, none with less than 300,000 views within his first month of touring (legally, Marple Newtown couldn’t let him out more than twice a week during class time), and five with over 700,000 views by mid-March.
“You Made Me a Memory” was the first number one hit on the Billboard top 100 in history that was produced as a video on a cell phone, no label or backing, no radio play, no sales. And even though this was really an industry joke at first, all that changed when Geffen and Island made legitimate offers for legitimate backing. Jerome’s one regret was that he never went back to People First to make things right, to finally conquer the lunchroom, but Marissa had advised against that move from the start. He was bigger than that and you never looked back. It was getting difficult not to believe her.
Jerome Anthony Franklin signed with Geffen Records for $200,000 up front and an obligation for a quick summer tour. The language of the contract was utterly incentive-based, cautious no doubt, but it gave a shot at fame, real fame to this kid from North Philly who only weeks before was staring dully into the lonely stretch of the suburbs and rapping to no one in the hollows of stairwells.
It was overwhelming actually, and two nights after the signing Jerome and Marissa tried to break a rule, make a new kind of memory that was just between them if you know what I’m talking about.
I’m the rat in the sun yelping now.
I know Marissa Madison is a stone beauty, or hot as all shit, or classically gorgeous, or whatever spin you want to put on it. That’s why I chose her in the first place, asshole, and if you think I don’t want to live the scene where she goes and gets pumped till she’s breathless you’re crazy; it don’t matter whose consciousness lends me the side-saddle either, his or hers, fuck it.
But that’s not what happened, just between the two of them. Anything but.
See, to begin with it didn’t start out as any romantic get-together. It was an argument they were having in the car on the way to Jerome’s granny’s house after going out for specialty coffees at Starbucks (of course, both in hoodies and shades ’cause Jerome was getting recognized in public more and more lately).
Jerome was sort of wealthy and there were problems. He was almost a star, and there were pressures he hadn’t expected, not this fast in the process. There had always been time. He was used to being ignored, barking in the woods to no one, making plans, dreaming.
Now he had accountants trying for his business, talking about investment portfolios he didn’t understand. He had a temporary publicist telling him how to dress, and a lawyer working on papers that would give him a legitimate high school diploma a few months before graduation, playing the idea that he was a legal adult at eighteen along with the fact that there were some credits from People First they could use to “forward this process,” as long as they had his grandmother’s signature and a special exception drawn up by the superintendent in triplicate. His cell phone never stopped ringing, he was getting texts from New York to go on Letterman, and he didn’t even have more than one song yet.
“It’s a problem,” he said.
“Why?”
“Really?”
“Exactly.”
He laughed through his nose and looked out the window, leaning his forehead against it.
“Glad we had this conversation.” With his finger he was making lines through his breath oval, and Marissa signaled to turn down Sproul Road. That was usually one of his grand openings for sarcasm, the sequential turn-signal lamps lighting one-two-three back there like a cheap neon. He busted on her constantly for her ride, for having an automatic, for buying a V6 instead of a V8 and driving a “girly hotrod” in general, but not tonight.
“You know there’s nothing to be scared of,” she said. “Part of the fun of it is jumping into the unknown.” He shifted in the seat, and she caught the scent of his Polo cologne. It made her a bit dizzy.
“That’s easy for you to say,” he said. “I’ve got a record deal and only one song. I have concerts booked for this summer already and no choreography. I don’t really know how to write the follow-up tunes. You said you were tapped out at ‘You Made Me a Memory,’ and I can’t use my high school musicians anymore—”
“Says who?”
“Says Mr. Fienstein, my contact at Geffen! Also Ms. Finley at Marple. Gary Acchione’s parents have never been excited about his missing school two days a week, besides the fact that he’s suddenly being uncool about practicing his classical piano scales. And the band instructor’s drawlin’ about his drum core being all a mess.”
“You mean,” she corrected softly, “the band instructor disagrees with allowing Fred Schuster out of band practice because it weakens the drum core.”
“Yeah, he trippin’,” Jerome returned. Marissa looked over and tried to read how much of the spite in his voice had carried over to his face. They were coming up on that tricky curve where the road forked at the library, however, and he was looking away. She stared back out through the windshield.
“You’re doing quite well, in fact, with your . . . speech,” she said carefully. “You should be happy with your progress.”
“But I don’t want to change my speech. Shannon Sharpe don’t change. Allen Iverson never changed.”
“We’ve talked about this.”
“Yeah . . . and I didn’t git the right ansuh, Boo-Boo.”
“Sure you did. You just didn’t like it.” She sped through a yellow light. “Those two are sports stars. You’re primed to take over the world, cross new cultural barriers. It’s different.”
“And I gotta change how I talk, like a hundred percent?”
“Like ninety-five percent. It was in the patchwork.”
“Did it say I had to give up my new white homeboys for studio musicians so fast?”
“I don’t know.”
“What you mean?”
There was a long pause.
“Jerome. I only get the flashes once per person. And they’re partials. I never see the whole story and I can’t get that initial part of the ‘cloth’ back. It’s a one-time thing. Thrill of the unknown, right?”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me this before?”
“I didn’t want to scare you.”
“You already scare me. You made me into this rich guy with a mirror that talks back to himself like a British prince or something.”
He was staring intently; she could feel it.
“Jerome,” she said slowly, “I want to talk about us. My feelings. Where we’re going to go—”
“We’re here.”
She pulled into the gravel driveway of the corner plot, no car, his grandmother was working a double again. Marissa had met the woman once. She was beautiful and unsmiling, tall with silver hair in a tight bun and thick eyeliner pointing up at the edges like some ferocious tigress. She was polite and cold, soft-spoken and proud, making it clear she didn’t want any of her grandson’s money and that her house was off-limits for girls if she wasn’t there to chaperone. But she never said anything about the driveway, now did she?
Marissa turned off the headlights and it was dark out there. The houses were spread relatively far apart from each other on this stretch of back road, and Jerome’s neighbor to the left was on a late winter vacation or something, all the shutters latched, the boat in the driveway covered with a tarp. There was no lamppost or walkway lighting, and the only illumination filtered weakly through the trees from up on the hill in the back parking area of the vendor who sold gas logs and hearth accessories out on West Chester Pike. She shifted in her seat and reached across, putting her hand on Jerome’s knee.
“Oh,” he said.
“That’s all you’re going to say?” She was doing her best to steady her voice. This was big-time. Her hair was in her face, her breath was husky, and she didn’t have a condom. “I want to come over there with you in the passenger seat.”
“C’mon then,” he said. She didn’t move, and they both laughed. Short exhalations, then silence, smoothed over by the Mustang’s idling engine, but not smoothed over all that much. The dashboard lights were making wavy lines across the side of Jerome’s face. “Maybe not then,” he said, and Marissa sat back. She carefully removed the sunglasses she wore 24/7.
“Well, which is it then?” she said. “I like you, Jerome. I think I might be in love with you, and I want to give you something, ya know?”
“Yeah. I know. But what about the no-touch policy? What about the credibility of the heartbreak music and all?”
“You’ve got studio musicians for that now,” she said. “And I don’t think I matter like that anymore.”
“Oh, you matter, girl.”
“Then show me.”
He reached across and touched her hair. It was awkward and at the same time kind of heavenly, like a good movie script neither was qualified to act in quite yet. His finger ran along the edge of her forehead, and she shivered. She had the sudden wild vision that she was about to close her eyes, cradle her head in his palm, and purr. She didn’t. She just stared at him staring back at her, and she felt it in the tips of her breasts, down the slope of her back, inside her vagina, but deep in
the back of it, like hunger.
They reached for each other and her hip glanced the steering wheel. They were kissing, kneeling on the leather seat cushions on either side of the central storage compartment, sort of holding each other up because of the angle, and in the close space their lips made smacking sounds that almost sent Marissa into a gale of giggles she would have hated herself for, and then the patchwork hit her in waves.
Visions.
Of Jerome. Right now, what he was thinking, what he needed for completion, and she had lied to him when she had insisted that the patchwork only played out once per person, and she wanted to giggle madly again because her lie was that she hadn’t told him the patchwork was limited so she wouldn’t scare him, and all the while she had lied about that so she wouldn’t scare him.
And she saw that Jerome Anthony Franklin was terrified inside, almost struck dumb with it, not only because he didn’t feel worthy of any record deal, but in the sense that he thought she was amazingly beautiful, like goddess-beautiful, and he was afraid of holding her wrong, of being too rough, of coming off the virgin that he was and messing it up so bad that she’d find a way to send him back to the hood where he didn’t think he’d ever again find a way to belong. Prince in the mirror, shadow in the alley, an invisible man without her to define him now, and he was vulnerable, wishing deep down that she would just relieve him by hand, give him release nice and hard so he didn’t have to get involved with unfamiliar choreography, a theme that was becoming familiar, and he’d never thought in themes before, not like these, and he just wasn’t ready for any of this.
She reached for his zipper. He adjusted for her and she still couldn’t find the tab. It was stuck facing up, caught under the fold of denim just under the snap button, and the jeans were stiff and brand new and she wasn’t going to get at this thing even if she broke a nail trying.
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