The Plot Against Hip Hop (16 page)
Back at the set, all was right with the world. Rappers rapped for their pay. Beermakers hawked their brew. Directors went over storyboards and met with advertising agency reps. Everyone got paid. D took it all in, his body back on the job and his troubled spirit far away.
D returned to the Standard on Sunset about one a.m., after dropping the KAG crew off at the W in Hollywood and handing them over to a local man, who’d accompany them on a club crawl into the netherworld of after-hours joints and Hollywood Hills parties. D didn’t realize that anything was wrong in his room until he’d shed his clothes, taken a shower, and was brushing his teeth.
Usually the Standard’s cleaning staff placed his pill bottles right next to his deodorant and aftershave. Not tonight. A hasty inspection of his bags and pockets revealed his HIV medications were not in his room. Not good, but hardly fatal. They could have easily mixed some poison in with his meds and deaded him. This seemed like just another warning. He could go a day without his meds. They had to have known that.
D laid back on the long bed, looked up at the ceiling, and fell asleep, but only after jamming a chair under the doorknob.
J
ersey was beginning to appeal to D. Between his trips to Dwayne’s house and out here to Amina’s, the Garden State was growing on him. He’d been in his Manhattan cave for so many years that he’d forgotten (actually never known) how it felt to experience a life not dominated by noise, hustle, and concrete. He was even falling in love with Newark Airport, which felt more user friendly than JFK. He had to admit that driving, something he’d only done sparingly in his life, was okay (though he was sure he didn’t have the patience to regularly survive rush hour).
Now, as he drove his rental Lexus close to Amina’s house, he contemplated buying a car. D was surprised that even after that threat in Los Angeles, he felt so positive. Amina made all the bad stuff out West seem like background noise. It was his mother’s words, often spoken and seldom paid attention to, that came to him: “There’s nothing better for a silly man than to have a good woman to come home to.”
The only dark cloud in his sunny thoughts was that Amina hadn’t answered her phone since he landed. It was 8:42 a.m., so she should have been up already and anxious to see him too.
As soon as he turned onto Amina’s block, he saw the ambulance and police car in front of her house. The ambulance had run over a few of her flowers. Instead of rushing into the house, D sat behind the wheel, somehow already knowing he was too late. An officer came out, walked over, and asked his name. It didn’t go well after that.
Fly Ty didn’t know anyone in that neck of the Jersey woods, so D had to sit alone through the long hours of questioning and the looks and the dark sense of guilt and dread that filled his mind. This was so much bigger than hip hop.
“So,” said one of the detectives, “that’s what you believe?”
“You asked me what I thought,” D said emphatically.
The detective, white, thirties, sandy-haired, and portly, looked over his shoulder at his older partner, short, black, forties, who leaned against the wall before turning back toward D. “You have AIDS for seven years. You know unprotected sex would put her at risk. You don’t tell her you’re positive. She gets infected. She gets depressed. She kills herself.”
“Well,” D replied, glancing back forth between the two men, “that didn’t happen. I didn’t infect her. I didn’t lie to her. I would never do that. Plus, I don’t believe that’s why she killed herself—
if
she killed herself.”
“So someone else, not you, gave her the virus?”
“That’s all I can imagine.”
“Homicide by AIDS is not unheard of, and you can be charged for it.”
“I would never do a thing to hurt her. Have you checked her body for it yet?”
“We will,” the older black cop said, “but this whole conspiracy-against-hip-hop thing doesn’t help your credibility.”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense to me. I know it sounds crazy. But while I’ve been investigating my friend’s murder, people have been dying around me.”
“All right,” the older detective replied, “okay.”
D wasn’t sure what that meant.
Okay, I believe you. Okay, I believe you believe that crap. Okay, I’m hungry and it’s time for dinner
. Whatever the black detective thought, he tapped the white one on the shoulder and they left the room. About two hours later they released D into a bright Jersey afternoon and to his thoughts.
There was an empty bottle of sleeping pills and a scrawled note by the bed when the Jamaican cleaning woman found the body. Was Eric Mayer behind this? He’d gotten that warning in LA, but why Amina? They’d had great sex but he never penetrated her. He’d been more like a very muscular lesbian lover. Maybe Mayer was an insane man on a rampage, but it felt like there was another player in this game. And if so, Amina’s death was it for him. He was through with it. He just wanted to get back to his dungeon.
T
here was a damn conspiracy. They took it from us, kid. It used to be about skillz. A nigga like me on the mike droppin’ knowledge and shit. Now they got these mush-mouthed bamas all over the videos saying nursery rhymes. If I did ‘Humpty Dumpty’ over a beat I’d be displaying more lyrical content than these country motherfuckas! Sheet!”
D was in the wings at the BET Awards taping at Shrine Auditorium, standing in front of an old-school icon from the Boogie Down as he yelled at Ludacris on stage. What had set this brother off was Luda at the center of a tribute to old-school hip hop, intoning Kurtis Blow’s classic “The Breaks” before an adoring crowd of black celebs.
The man wasn’t just ranting because of the diamond-studded MC’s presence (though he was definitely offended by the Southern MC performing an old-school rap). The other half was that D was unsympathetic and was threatening to have him thrown out of the building.
“Brother, if you do not shut up and leave this area I will have you removed,” D told him.
The old-school MC continued on, undeterred. Despite the gray in his locks, the bags under his eyes, and the paunch that was his belly, the man still had some fire left. “How you gonna talk that way to me! How you gonna talk that way to me! I was there before this shit even had a name. But can I get on stage? These motherfuckers wouldn’t know real hip hop if it hit them in the mouth!”
And then, of course, he took a swing at D, which the security guard deftly avoided before grabbing the MC and wrapping him in a bear hug, as other members of his team rushed over.
“You all right, D?”
“I’m good. I’m good. Just make sure you don’t hurt him.”
“Fuck you, D! Fuck you!” the MC screamed as he was led away.
D watched this ugly scene with his hands at his sides. He could smell the bad cologne and the sweat of his attacker on his clothes. Years ago, when D had been a bouncer and the MC was a legend in New York, they’d see each other all the time. Back then the MC had a hi-top fade, dukey gold, and always a fly girl or two by his side. Now he was an angry, not-quite-middle-aged man who’d somehow found himself backstage at an event he probably should have been honored at (at least he thought so).
D felt his pain, but there was nothing he could do. BET was paying him to keep the peace and that’s what he was gonna do, as sad as it made him.
On stage, Wale and Kid Kudi had joined Luda in performing a series of old-school hits in a bout of hip hop nostalgia. Nicki Minaj was in the wings, a few feet from D, getting ready to perform Roxanne Shanté’s “Roxanne’s Revenge.”
It was a month after Amina’s death. D hadn’t been indicted. The death had been deemed a suicide. He hadn’t been invited to the funeral, though. It had all been a disaster. A woman he cared about was gone and no one out in Jersey gave a damn about his theories other than to eye him suspiciously and tell him to stay the hell out of their town.
Now he was back in Cali, working at the BET Awards, getting a nice check, and trying to figure out what to do with his life. The old-school MC’s rant brought back a lot bad feelings about all he’d heard and learned and what little he could prove. He’d been in Los Angeles for several weeks. Part of it was getting away from New York and thoughts of Amina. Part of it was heading back to the place where he might be able to provoke whoever came to the set of the KAG video shoot, stole his meds, and somehow drove Amina to kill herself.
But nothing had happened. Not a weird look or an off-color remark or anyone trying to intimidate him via words or deeds. Except for the angry MC, the evening had been uneventful. He was just a hired gun at the BET Awards and not a supervisor, so once the last award had been given out and the last limousine had pulled away, D was out the door.
The awards taping ended at five p.m. and D skipped the official after-party and ended up in the Hollywood Hills, at a sexy purple-themed house, for Prince Rogers Nelson’s semiannual post–awards show house party. By getting there early, D avoided the cars stacked up on the soon-to-be-impassable canyon roads and got a leg up on the glittering, gifted, gassed-up gaggle of black star power who would be arriving after their courtesy appearances at the BET soiree. Even better, D was not working. He was just another guest.
So he sat cross-legged on the floor as Mavis Staples sang “I’ll Take You There” with Prince on bass, D’Angelo on keyboards, and some talented kid on guitar who D didn’t recognize but greatly enjoyed. It was the most fun he’d had in a very long time. Just good music played by exquisite musicians for fun (and reputation) at a impressive place full of famous people, none of whom D was obligated to give a damn about.
Then his BlackBerry buzzed in his jacket pocket. It was a text from an unexpected source:
Come to my house 4 a special after party. Amos.
This was followed by a Malibu address. He hadn’t seen Amos Pilgrim since that night with Amina so many months ago. It seemed like a cool thing to do.
A
mos Pilgrim’s house was on the beach out in Malibu, a few doors down from David Geffen’s and a stone’s throw from producer Brian Grazer’s. From the Pacific Coast Highway, the house was obscured by a nondescript long, tall, white fence, as anonymous as beachfront property can be. Seven security cameras discreetly lined the wall with only two covering the entrance. Other than that, you’d never suspect that a sprawling three-story Colonial house sat behind the wall, a bit of sturdy New England construction bordering the Pacific.
Inside, Amos’s walls were decorated with an impressive collection of African art, along with the odd African-influenced Picasso or other unusual painting hung in between. There were no gold or platinum records or framed posters or anything to suggest that Amos Pilgrim’s career stretched back to the age of soul or that he’d advised most of black entertainment’s power brokers on career moves and tax shelters. After the celebrity muscle of Prince’s house party, this event was more low-key, but hummed with the subtext that this was an event for movers and shakers. Amos was deep in conversation with some older white dude who had something to do with cell phone contracts in Asia, so D wandered over to a window and stood there, transfixed, watching the Pacific lap up against the California shore.
As Marvin Gaye’s
Here, My Dear
album played quietly in the background, D smiled to himself and sipped mint tea. It had always tripped him out to be near the Pacific Ocean. He’d often gone to Coney Island as a kid and now, somehow, he’d made it from one end of America to the other, a journey very few of the people he grew up with would ever make. Hell, D thought, some of the folks I grew up with never left Brownsville, much less made it out of Brooklyn.
Yet there he was, sipping on some high-quality herbal tea with Marvin Gaye crooning in the expensively decorated home of a legendary black man. This had to be someone else’s life.
“You a tea drinker, huh, D?”
There was Amos Pilgrim, standing arm-in-arm with a gorgeous Asian girl in an aqua slip dress with matching heels and dangling gold earrings. D didn’t want to be disrespectful, so he did his best to look at Amos, though the contrast between him and the young lady made it extremely difficult. Since D had last seen Amos, he had put on some weight. He had a scruffy white beard and a patch of bald skin on top of his head surrounded by a crown of graying hair. His eyes were sleepy, his lips red and thick, and his clothes expensive but seemed a sloppy fit. If this wasn’t his house and this fine-ass girl wasn’t on his arm, you’d think Amos was, perhaps, a well-paid gardener. Compared to their meeting at Hip Hop Honors, he looked unhealthy.
“I don’t drink much alcohol, sir.”
“So I hear. Well, welcome to my home anyway,” he said. Then he followed D’s gaze and chuckled. “This is Vanessa. She’s what I like to call a black-a-pina.”
“Stop that, Amos,” she scolded him gently, then explained that her mother was Filipina and her father was black. “Amos came up with that name. I don’t like it too much but Amos thinks he can categorize everything and everyone.”
“Maybe I can’t,” Amos replied, “but I do like to try.”
“I hear you,” D said back, more because he wasn’t sure what to say next than because he understood what Amos and Vanessa were getting at.
Amos chuckled and said, “You know, we should talk.”
“Any time you’d like.”
“Fine. Let’s sit down right now. Vanessa, make sure these people are okay while I go have a chat with D. You good with that?”
“Only if you two come back.” She kissed Amos on his bald spot, smiled at D, and moved away.
Amos took him by the arm and guided him out of the room. D felt the eyes of many at the party on them, probably wondering why Amos was being so chummy with a bodyguard when there were so many more important people anxious for quality time with their host. D was wondering the same thing.