Dirty South

by Ace Atkins

  He grunted. “Man, I don’t go to places like that no more.”

  “Do you know it?”

  “I can make some calls,” he said. “Sure my boys know.”

  “I need you to take me there.”

  “Thought you was leavin’ to see your woman in Mississippi,” he said. “Why you want to go out and party?”

  “I think I found the folks who took ALIAS for his money.”

  “What you mean?”

  “A con man named Bloom and a stripper that goes by the name of Dahlia.”

  “They workin’ with my brother?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But they got the kid’s money?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Where you want me to pick you up?”

  “The warehouse.”

  39

  “I TOLD YOU, I ain’t never been to this place Body Shots and never use to hang with Malcolm and ALIAS at the Booty Call,” Teddy said as we pulled away from Julia Street in his new white Escalade with gold rims and Gucci interior. “What kind of shit is that? That was some half-assed movie with Will Smith’s wife and I don’t do strip clubs. Not anymore.”

  “ALIAS said you owned a table there.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Teddy?”

  “A strip club is like goin’ to some buffet where they show you the food but you can’t eat,” Teddy said, wheeling up Canal and down onto I-10, headed to Airline Highway, the beginning of old Highway 61. The old road now filled with abandoned roadside motels and diners and places once used by travelers before the interstate. Now it was empty pools and crack dealers and motel rooms rented by the hour. “You know? Like, look at all these beautiful steaks. And all that baked potato with sour cream and chives and shit. But if you try and get one mouthful, you get arrested. Ain’t that fucked-up?”

  A 1950s drive-in movie theater sat between a decaying motel advertising AC and color televisions and a defunct steak house. The lot had been surrounded with wire but the tall screen and speaker boxes still stood. Everything still neat and tidy, only a few weeds growing through the cracked asphalt as if the owner waited for the day that the old highway would be back. Until then, it seemed the movie would remain private, only something a few could imagine.

  “I just bought this,” Teddy said, thumping his steering wheel. “You like it?”

  “Did you really need it?” I said. “Why don’t you put that money to some good use?”

  “What, you a communist, Travers?” he asked.

  “No, man,” I said. “I just don’t like to see a waste.”

  “You remember that community center where we had Malcolm’s wake?”

  “Sure.”

  “Ninth Ward Records built that shit, man.”

  “Good.”

  “But you think all the jewelry and cars and homes and women are… what did you say? A waste.”

  “Aren’t they?”

  “See, you still don’t get it,” he said. “The culture of our world, right. That’s what my people want to see. They want to see you livin’ large and steppin’ out with the Gucci and Vuitton and all them suits from Armani and your woman wearin’ Versace and gold and platinum and diamonds.”

  “Maybe you could be different,” I said. “Maybe you could set a better example for the kids who buy those CDs in Uptown, spending the only thirteen dollars they have on a Ninth Ward record.”

  Teddy turned down the Master P and looked over at me, the highway whizzing past. “You ever been black?”

  “One night,” I said. “But I was very drunk. Someone told me about it later.”

  “No playin’,” he said. “You got to know what it feels like to walk into a restaurant or bar or Saks or some shit and have people not wait on you. Have security guards followin’ you while you tryin’ to pick out some goddamned gloves for your brother’s Christmas or bein’ asked to leave a movie theater ’cause you talkin’ too loud.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” I said. “I never thought you wore blackness on your sleeve.”

  “I wear something else, man,” he said. “I wear the car, the jewelry, the two-thousand-dollar suit ’cause that makes people respect me. When I walk into Canal Place, man, people waitin’ for me at the door. They don’t see black no more; they see green. You understand?”

  Teddy parked close to the door of the strip club and we could hear the bass-driven funk rattling the corrugated tin of the building. He locked up the Escalade from his key chain and buttoned up his black suit.

  He carried a carved wooden cane under his arm as we walked inside.

  He didn’t even try to pay a cover.

  The little black girl in leather pants and snakeskin bikini top just giggled when he walked in, and ran to get the manager.

  “Clout,” I said. “You got it.”

  “I got the cash.”

  Teddy didn’t look around at the women or the layout, he just took a quick turn and walked up a small flight of steps where there was a circular table and booth. A card on the table read RESERVED.

  “This is Stank’s place,” he said. “He called ahead.”

  We took a seat. A waitress came over, tight T-shirt with no bra, hoop earrings, and bleached hair, and asked what we wanted. I ordered coffee and Teddy wanted some brandy. He asked for the best they had and I was wondering if Teddy thought the Body Shots had some kind of private reserve.

  “What ever happened to that good-lookin’ girl you was seein’ when we played?” Teddy asked.

  “The blonde?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She left me when I quit,” I said. “I wasn’t as good-looking without a salary.”

  “Wasn’t into that whole cool blues professor shit?”

  “She thought McKinley Morganfield was a former president.”

  “Who the fuck was McKinley Morganfield?”

  “Never mind.”

  As the waitress laid down the drinks, the manager of the bar – a short, swarthy little guy in a black polo shirt and pants – took a seat with us. He shook Teddy’s hand and presented him with a few cigars. Teddy handed one to me but didn’t introduce us. I nodded at the guy and drank my coffee.

  The song changed to “Don’t Mean Nothin’” by Richard Marx. I wondered if I’d just entered some kind of eighties time warp or if Richard Marx singing about having self-worth had somehow made him a patron saint to strippers.

  “You like Richard Marx?” I asked the little manager.

  “Sure, yeah,” he said, snorting, giving Teddy a “you believe this guy” look. “Whatever.”

  “Beni?” he asked. “Stank drop some money here.”

  “You know it.”

  “He works for me.”

  “I know.”

  “Nick, show him the picture.”

  I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the photo of Dahlia. The good one from Pat O’s.

  “Know her?” Teddy asked.

  Beni nodded. He looked up at me and back at Teddy.

  “She don’t work that way,” he said. “The girl onstage. The little one with the chain-mesh bikini. You have an hour with her in the back room for free. On the freakin’ house. For him, how ’bout a hundred.”

  “We don’t need our dicks jacked, Beni,” Teddy said. “We need a name.”

  “She rob you?” Beni asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Cut you?”

  I shook my head again.

  “Don’t tell me you’re in love.”

  “That’s it, Beni,” I said. “I’m in love. What’s her name?”

  “He ain’t in love,” Teddy said. “What’s her name?”

  Beni looked down at his hands and adjusted some horrible gold rings on his hairy knuckles. “How much?”

  Teddy reached into his wallet and laid down four hundred dollars.

  “I shouldn’t pay you shit with all the business that Stank give you.”

  Beni scraped up the cash and said, “She quit las
t week. Left with some other rapper.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did he look like?” I asked.

  “He was a freakin’ black guy. What can I say?”

  Teddy shook his head and then shook it some more.

  “What’s her name?” I asked.

  “Dahlia,” he said. “That’s all I know.”

  “What’s her Social Security card say?”

  He looked over at Teddy and raised his eyebrows. “Is this guy joking?”

  “Didn’t she fill out anything to get paid?”

  “Let me check.”

  He returned about ten minutes later with a little index card marked with the name Dahlia, a social with the name Dataria Brown, and an address in Midcity off Esplanade.

  “You won’t tell her that we seen each other,” Beni said.

  “Why do you care?”

  “I just don’t like her is all,” he said. “The way she’d look at me made me not want to turn my back. Like she’d stick a freakin’ knife in it if I looked the other way.”

  “Dataria,” I repeated. “You know a guy named Bloom? Boyfriend or something. Has a bad ear?”

  “That’s all I know.”

  “You sure?”

  “She danced, got naked, took her cut, and left,” he said. “What can I say?”

  “Was she a good dancer?”

  “What?”

  “Was she a good dancer?” I repeated over the music.

  “Yeah,” he said. “She was. The best I’d ever seen. She could move.”

  We drove back in silence. Teddy just kept watching the road, steering with those two fingers like he always did.

  “Sure would like to find that money,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “You want me to go with you?”

  “No, I’ll handle it.”

  “Nick?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Open that bar up,” he said. “Be true to your dreams.”

  40

  I LEARNED HOW TO TAIL people when I was traveling through the Delta with my tracker mentor Willie T. Dean, and Willie T. wasn’t too big on taking no for an answer. I remember we’d once been searching for this man outside Jackson who knew something about the last days of Tommy Johnson and we were tired as hell. We’d been in the Delta for two weeks collecting stories and recording them on video and audio, and here was this guy who thought that white people were an abomination.

  He’d rather sell his soul than have us sit up on his porch and ruin his reputation with his neighbors.

  So instead of driving back to Oxford, where Willie T. had been teaching blues history for the last thirty years, he told me to park down this dirt road and wait till the old man’s pockmarked red Ford pulled out from the trailer.

  We did. After a near fistfight, the purchase of a case of beer, and Willie T. warming him up with stories from our road trips and a little song he played on his 1920s Dobro, we got him talking.

  But New Orleans wasn’t the Delta and this Dahlia woman was no bluesman.

  I wanted to work alone, so I’d dropped Teddy at home. I soon found out the address in Midcity was bogus and had to have a friend of mine in Memphis run the social. Ten minutes later, he gave me an address back in Uptown, not far from the streetcar line. He used the same computer service as bill collectors, no one more tenacious.

  I didn’t know how long it would take for Dahlia – if she even lived there – to pop her head out of the little carriage house where she lived in the Garden District. You could always tell someone lived in a carriage house when the street number contained a “1/2.”

  I sipped on a Barq’s, ate some Zapp’s Crawtaters, and leaned back into the seat of the Ghost, my stereo tuned low on some ’68 Comeback, a band out of Memphis. The air was sticky and thickly humid. Huge brown elephant ears grew in rotted rows along the steps to the second floor. A collection of rusted wind chimes and flowers rubbed against one another in the summer heat.

  I was parked under a huge oak on a little side street near the cross of St. Charles and Napoleon. The streetcar clanged and rolled in the distance. I could smell the Mississippi and the sugary-sweet smell of decaying magnolia flowers. I finished the bag of chips.

  I could not see inside the carriage house – the building leaned a little to the right, probably a casualty of the city’s termite plague – but could see blue light leaking through her curtains. I heard the wind chimes ringing and the sound of drunks on the patio of Copeland’s restaurant at the corner.

  Forty-two minutes later, Dahlia ran down the creaking wooden steps, past a car covered in a mildewed tarp, and down the narrow gravel drive to a brown Miata. I started to grab her right there, but she was too fast and I was curious about where she was headed.

  She started the car, drove a block down Napoleon, and then circled back to St. Charles. I did the same, keeping about three cars back. We passed rows of restaurants and dry cleaners and Victorian houses, up and around Lee Circle. Neon and brightly fluorescent in the night.

  She turned on Poydras, headed to the river, stopping down by Peters by Harrah’s Casino. I found a pretty quick parking place, slapped The Club on my steering wheel, and followed. I stayed about eight yards back. I was pretty sure she was headed into the casino, but two seconds later, she ducked into the W Hotel.

  I watched from a large bank of windows along Peters as she gave a kiss on the cheek to the bouncer at this place called Whiskey Blue, a bar I’d heard was the top place to be seen in New Orleans. One of those beautiful-people hangouts where everyone dressed like they’re trying to imitate Dieter from the Sprockets skit on Saturday Night Live.

  The bouncer – of course dressed in all black – waved me in, unconcerned about my age.

  The bar vibrated with techno music and had been softly lit with track lighting and candles. All leather and velour. Soft cushioned sofas and high bar stools. Lots of health-club-muscled men with goatees. A few of the golf-shirt crowd with cell phones on hips. The bar was spare and obsessively clean.

  Martinis and Manhattans. Few smokers. These people were too beautiful to smoke. Too rich. Too perfect. Maybe she was moving up from Airline Highway, found her a little sugar daddy.

  Dahlia had found a place in the far back corner of the bar. A little cove of low sofas and curved love seats. She’d taken up a comfortable spot on the lap of some white man in a black suit.

  I ordered a Dixie from the bartender.

  “A what?” asked the bartender. She wore a tight black tank top and a very short miniskirt. Long tanned legs and knee-high black boots.

  “A Dixie.”

  “Is that with rum?”

  “Hops.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “What?”

  “It’s a beer,” I said.

  She pointed to a shelf of imports and other microbrews. I accepted a Sam Adams and waited at the bar, the techno making my ears bleed, some jackass next to me talking to someone about where they “were going to hit next” and a “kick-ass deal” he’d made with a client. I watched Dahlia, keeping my head turned away. The man in the black suit swatted her butt playfully and wrapped his fingers around a frosted martini glass.

  About five white people around them laughed at something he’d said. But I could not see his face.

  I took a sip of the Sam Adams.

  Dahlia snuggled her face into the man’s neck.

  He took a broad, self-indulgent smile. Martini in the right hand. Dahlia’s muscular ass in the other. He turned.

  Trey Brill.

  41

  BEEN A DAY. Been a year. You ain’t sure. All you know is that you left in some broke-ass town with two T-shirts to your name and an old man ridin’ you hard about work. You become just a slave to him. He’s about a hundred years old and old school as hell, the way he play records on this phonograph and sip beer out on his porch with his old lady. You like the old lady. She buy you some new clothes and cook you some food that’s ’bout the ta
stiest shit you ever put in your mouth. Chicken pie. Greens.

  She respect you. She call you ALIAS.

  Not the old man. That old man call you kid or Tavarius or just Stovall with a laugh. You ain’t nothin’ but a punk to him, puttin’ up fences till you have blisters, paintin’ some raggedy-ass barn till it get dark. Yesterday he take you fishin’ and think you a fool for not knowin’ how to work a hook.

  He don’t know shit.

  Tonight he brought you downtown and you think this gonna be all right. You down off another road called Martin Luther King. He tellin’ you all about when he was your age, like you give a shit, and all about whiskey and women – all the money that was floatin’ down these cracked asphalt streets.

  But you can’t see it. Clarksdale had to be a broke-ass city from the start, man. The stores have sheets of wood in the windows, just like the places round Calliope, and boys work the corners with their rock just the same. The old man just shake his head at those fools and take you into this old brick building that look out onto the corner. A yellow light comin’ from the door like a candle glow in a skeleton’s mouth.

  The corner is workin’ tonight. You can smell the funk sweat off the crackheads’ bodies and that lazy eye from the women in tight skirts. You don’t mess with that. You got your life.

  Old man take you inside. The floor is concrete but worn smooth from dancin’ feet. There’s a pool table in the corner with some green felt burned by cigarettes and a small bar where they only serve beer and whiskey. Christmas lights – blue, green, and red – hang from the walls.

  You order a forty and get one but the old man swipes it from you.

  Two old men sit down with you. Just as old and black and gray as the man and you gettin’ tired. You walk over to the jukebox and check out the tunes while the old men start talkin’ about cotton and farming and some man named Sonny Boy.

  Juke has some old-school joints. Run-D.M.C. like Malcolm used to play for you. Music made before you was born. Something called “It’s Like That and That’s the Way It Is.”

  You kick it up. Even other punks noddin’ with the music, ’cept the old men.

  In the dark bar, concrete cave over your head, you get the mean eye.