Nightcrawling(7)
“No. I don’t got a problem with that, just like I don’t got a problem with Uncle Ty buying a Maserati and a mansion down in L.A. and leaving us out here alone. Just like I don’t got a problem with Marcus spitting rhymes in a studio while I’m just tryna pay our rent. It ain’t my place to have a problem with somebody else’s survival. If the city get they money from paying to smooth over the roads on some rich-ass street, then they should go ahead and do that. Lord knows I won’t be thinking ’bout nobody else if someone offers me a wad of cash.”
I wiggle my toes in my Sunday Shoes as the swing comes to a halt and I feel Alé’s eyes on me, determined.
“I don’t believe none of that,” she says.
“What you mean you don’t believe it?”
She shakes her head, her own high making her slow. “Nah, you got too much heart to be a sellout, Ki, you ain’t cruel enough for none of that. I know you wouldn’t go leaving Marcus or Trevor or me just to make bank.”
I’d like to think she’s wrong, but if she was then I would stay on these swings all day, get so high I don’t have to think about nothing but Alé’s tattoos and how the streets are fragmenting and will keep disintegrating until we are walking on dirt.
Instead, I think of Marcus, how we used to stand on street corners trying to sell paintings I made on cardboard. It barely made us enough to buy more paint, but Marcus and I were in it together, choosing each other. It’s time I go tell him I can’t be doing all the hard shit for him if he ain’t gonna do nothing for me. Tell him it’s time to put the mic down and face these streets like I’ve been for the last six months.
“I gotta go find Marcus,” I say, hopping from the swing set and seeing the world fuzz, go in and out of focus, all of it sharp yet spinning. I leave her there, on the swings, a puff of smoke exiting her lips like she was holding it in this whole time, and she don’t even have to look at me again because now this blazer smells like her Sunday Shoes and, today, on funeral day, that is all I need.
It sounds like someone is giving birth. I descend the stairs to the recording studio cautiously, not sure if I’m about to find some strange woman with her thighs above her head, erupting.
Instead, the steps give way to the basement filled with Marcus’s best friend’s girlfriend—Shauna—moaning, throwing Taco Bell to-go cups into a trash can with more force than she needs to, and waiting for someone to ask her what’s wrong. The remaining soda in the cups dribbles onto the beige rug and nobody asks Shauna nothing because Marcus is rapping in the next room and they’re all trying to find a single word in his mouth’s jumble.
After I left Alé at the park earlier today I went home to find Marcus, but he wasn’t there. So I flipped through the yellow pages for hours planning where to go to ask for a job until it started to get dark and I knew I could find him at the studio. Now I’m preparing to enter the boys’ sanctuary to see if I can get Marcus to hold me close again, like Alé does, and figure out how to escape this mess.
Marcus’s best friend is Cole and his recording studio is hidden in the corner of his mom’s basement, behind a closed door, the house stuffed on a deserted street in the Fruitvale district, a short walk from the Regal-Hi and East Oakland’s own sort of downtown: always alive. The boys all pay Cole for studio hours, trading off nights of the week to record songs that never go further than SoundCloud.
Shauna’s newborn lies sleeping in a crib in the center of the room while Shauna huffs, groans, tries to drown out Marcus’s quick talking, but I’m the only one who really hears her. I reach the bottom of the stairs, the ceiling only seeming to get lower, competing voices filling up the empty space until the whole room is about to burst. The basement is smothering, but my brother’s voice is the flat familiar that makes me remember why I stay down here, breathing this recycled Old Spice air and listening to Shauna’s noises.
I enter the studio and I’m immediately thrust into a world of men and music that leaks into every corner of the room, some track Marcus is laying down in the booth. I see him there, behind the glass, eyes closed, wingspan stretching into some mythical version of my brother’s embrace. Tupac might just be shivering in his grave because my brother don’t know how to spit, and the only words I can hear in the mess of his tongue are bitch and ho and this nigga got chains and I wanna tell him this room knows how he hurled into our toilet for two weeks after Daddy died because his body cannot bear grief. This room knows how the only chains he got are from those machines that spit out plastic containers for fifty cents at the arcade. This room knows the only bitch he got is me and I’m shrinking back, trying to disappear myself into the doorway the way Marcus disappears us in his lyrics.
The studio isn’t clean or expensive enough to be considered a recording studio by any professional standards, but my brother and his boys have made it into a haven and decided they are godly in this room, the same way I felt godly at the height of the swing with Alé, before reality hit. An illusion that just keeps feeding itself.
Marcus recedes into silence and the beat stops still, his eyes settling on me through the glass. The boys chorus my name, Tony standing up from the couch to put his arm around me, his body engulfing mine in its muscle mass and quiet. Marcus nods to me from behind the glass and I exit Tony’s arms, pushing open the door to the recording booth, where I find my brother’s warmth, his body beyond the beat.