Something She Can Feel (20 page)

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Authors: Grace Octavia

BOOK: Something She Can Feel
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“The club must be at capacity,” Mr. Green said to us. “I know they've opened the doors.”
“Is it normally like this?” I looked down at my slacks, and realizing I hadn't seen one pair in the crowd, I thought of the jeans Kayla had been wearing at Fat Albert's.
“Yeah. The shows get pretty crazy. Mr. Mitchell doesn't like performing in the arenas—he actually enjoys these smaller stages—so he has his manager book the Apache when he's not on tour.” He beeped his horn at someone walking in front of the car. “All of the fans know about the shows, so it gets a little nuts. Sometimes he just comes outside and gets on top of one of the cars.”
“I guess they think he's in this one,” Mustafa said, pointing to a group of girls who were walking beside our slow-moving car and peering inside. One of them put her phone up to the window and took a picture, thinking Mustafa was Dame.
“Oh, my!” Billie jumped at the flash.
Just then another flash went off on my side and a thump came at the back, shaking the car a bit.
“Dame, you in there?” a girl shouted.
“I know my man's inside!”
“You the same Dame! You the same! Get out and show your people some love!”
And then a pair of silicone-filled breasts were exposed right in my face.
“They don't even know if he's in here?” Billie said, pulling my arm.
“Can you imagine what it's like when he is?” Mustafa added.
“I guess we know why he leaves the curtains closed.” I drew my curtain even though the breasts were still glued to the tinted glass.
“How did she do that while the car was still moving ?” Billie asked.
“Groupie skills,” Mustafa answered.
“Okay, guys,” Mr. Green said, stopping the car in front of the club. “You're here. Benji's waiting right inside the door and I'll be out here all night. Have fun.”
It seemed that they were giving away money inside of the club from the way people acted when Mr. Green let us out of the car. All eyes shifted to us, cameras went flashing, and two brothers with muscles bulging out from their tight shirts pushed everyone back, so we could go right to the door.
“They with me,” Benji said, standing inside the doorway beside a woman with a clipboard in her arms. A red, velvet rope was holding us at bay. “All comp.”
“Who said? They on the list? I can't let them in if they ain't on the list.” She was trying to sound as annoyed and frustrated as possible. She glared at us like we weren't even supposed to be there. “We're already at capacity, Benji.”
“Naima, they with me. Dame's people,” Benji said.
“Fine,” she said, shaking her curly brown hair in disgust. “Let them in.”
She pointed to the red rope, as if she wasn't an inch away and had a hand free, and one of the bouncers undid the rope.
“Who they?” a woman wearing short shorts at the front of the line said. “That ain't fair. We been standing here for an hour. They ain't no stars.”
The inside of the club was no bigger than my parents' tennis court. There was a tiny stage hugging the window and probably 100 to 150 people standing in front of it, dancing to music as they waited for Dame to come out. Smoke drifted closely above them and I could even smell the sweet and unmistakable odor of marijuana burning from every direction.
“Dame's in the back,” Benji said, knocking people aside as we weaseled behind him. I could hardly breathe; there were so many people pushing in.
“We're going to get a drink,” Billie said, pinching my arm.
“But how will I find you?”
“We'll be right here.”
She pointed to the bar.
“But—”
“Look, Journey, don't chicken out now. You need to see him.”
 
Another one of Dame's bodyguards was standing in front of the door Benji was leading me to. Benji whispered something in his ear and they both looked at me before the guard moved to let us through.
Benji and I ended up walking outside the back of the club where there was a little outdoor patio set up.
There were only a few groups of people sitting out there. Scantily clad women and rappers whose faces I'd seen in the few music videos I caught by mistake on television.
I saw Dame sitting at a table with a group of these rappers. He had his foot up on one of the chairs, and they were laughing. Plumes of smoke came rising from most of their hands. Dame's hand was empty.
“Yooooo,” Dame said when he saw me. He didn't smile wide like he did at home. Instead, he grinned slyly and nodded in my direction. He got up with an air of careful coolness and came over to me as Benji took his seat at the table.
“Hi,” I said, noticing again how handsome he was. Even in the same white T-shirt I'd seen him in every day, he looked brand new. Clean.
“I can't believe you came. I just knew you weren't going to make it.”
“Here I am,” I said.
“Well, welcome to my world.” He raised his arms and looked around. “Lord of the flies.”
“I see,” I said, watching Benji puff one of the joints.
“What?” Dame turned to look over his shoulder. “Oh, don't pay those fools no mind. They just in the cypher.”
“Are you smoking?” I asked and suddenly I regretted it. I sounded like his mother.
“I'm on my best behavior,” he said. “None of that for me.”
“Oh.”
“Dame, we can't wait any longer,” Naima said, rushing onto the patio with her clipboard. “The crowd is about to get rowdy.”
“I'm good,” he said. “My guest is here.”
“Wonderful. It's so nice to see your family supporting you,” she said disingenuously. She looked me up and down and sneered, as if to say in so many ways she was sure I was Dame's older sister or aunt visiting from wherever. “Nice slacks.”
I was growing tired of her nasty routine. I said, “I can't wait to see you onstage, baby,” and kissed Dame on the lips.
Her eyes went from tired to tortured. She slammed the clipboard at her side and trotted off in a huff.
“Now, I went from being
a baby
to being
your baby
?” Dame laughed.
“I was just fighting fire with fire.”
“Yeah, Naima is one of my promoters. She's never been shy about wanting to come home with me.”
“I guess you haven't done that,” I pressed.
“Of course I have. Did you see her butt?” he joked playfully.
“See, that's why she was acting crazy.” I slapped his arm.
“I'm a man... . I'm a man.”
 
 
Dame's show was fully phenomenal. Just as he'd mesmerized the kids at school, he easily controlled the crowd at the Apache. He had a live band and two backup singers. “This is what I do for fun,” he said when he finally managed to get through the crowd and was up on the stage. “Other people go to the mall, go out for dinner, kick it with some broads, but when I'm not selling out arenas around the world, I do this. Up close and personal. Because I'm a real MC and ain't nobody gonna test you like the people in the street.” Everyone went insane, hollering praise at him. And by the time I paddled up to the front so I could see just a bit of the show in the packed room, Dame was hopping around the stage, pushing his energy off into the crowd like he'd been performing all his life. He was electric. On fire. Sweating and flexing. Building up so much intensity in the room, so much give and take between him and the crowd that was so close they could touch him, it had almost become sexual. And then he took off his shirt and a girl standing right in front of me nearly fainted into my arms. It was a good thing she had her girlfriend there to help though, because I didn't even move to catch her. Like the other open-mouthed women standing around, I was too busy watching Dame. Beads of sweat dripped over his tattoos. They rolled down slowly as he continued to rhyme about something I couldn't hear, tumbling toward his navel and then around the V-shaped slits his taut pelvic muscles made just above his—
“Journey !” Dame's voice boomed through the microphone. Hearing my name, I shook and refocused my attention away from the V shape to see that it was now right in front of me. “Journey!”
Dazed, I looked to see that all of the women lined up in front of the stage were now looking at me.
“Journey!”
I looked up at Dame.
“Yes?”
“Come on stage,” he said, holding the microphone to his side and reaching down to help me up.
“Me?”
“Come on.” He beckoned again and I reached for his hand.
“Now y'all know when Dame comes to town, there's always gonna be something real special,” he said as one of the band members brought a chair up on stage and instructed me to sit in it. I sat down and looked at Dame, wondering what he was going to do and praying he wasn't about to embarrass me in front of all of these faces I didn't know. “This time, something real special came to me,” he went on and I saw the girls I was just standing beside turn from looking confused to jealous. “I won't bore y'all with the details, so let's just say, this is someone from my past. And I brought her up here tonight because I'm about to drop a rhyme that's going on my next album. Y'all all right with that?”
Excluding the sour-faced women, the crowd cheered and Dame looked at me and smiled.
“And she needs to be up here because the song's about her.”
“No,” I mouthed to him nervously. I couldn't believe he was putting me on the spot. I looked at him hard, but he just kept smiling and turned back to the audience.
“You know how when MCs be about to spit a rhyme about some personal shit, they usually be like, ‘I don't want people to get the wrong idea'? Well, I do want you to get the wrong idea about this one. It's called ‘Teacher's Pet.' Yo, drop it.”
The band laid down a melodic, upbeat groove. The two singers, who'd stepped away to sip on water bottles placed on a table at the side of the stage, rushed back to their microphones.
“Teacher's pet. Teacher's pet. Everybody wanna be the teacher's pet,” the two women sang slowly in unison as he bopped his head to the beat.
Sitting there, I didn't know if I wanted to hear what he was about to say or if I was dying to hear everything he had to say. I looked out to see if I could find Billie's face, but instead, there was just Naima, standing at the foot of the stage with a grimace on her face.
Dame looked back at me and then he started rhyming:
It's like you and me,
And me and you,
I couldn't pass your test
even if I wanted to.
 
It's like me and you,
And you and me,
I couldn't pass your test
because past you I couldn't see.
His flow was quick enough to keep up with the tempo set by the band but still slow like a poet's, so I could hear each line. A serious and almost longing look on his face, he turned from me to the crowd and stepped up to the edge of the stage.
“Yo, check it,” he went on:
I wanted so bad to leave childhood behind,
My childhood crush, I'd leave that at the same time.
Her hair, her scent, her smile just let it go,
But you can never leave your teacher, you can never let
her go.
Between the verses, the singers sang the chorus, improvising in the background in call and response fashion when he started to rhyme.
I used to sit in the back with my boys and just chill,
But when she walked into the room, my universe just
went still.
 
She was the sun, the moon, the stars and I was just in
orbit,
Do anything to touch her, I'd do anything just for it.
 
I thought the love would end when I got up and left,
But the real truth is, your face was etched in my chest.
Like a poem, like a song, like a book, like a psalm,
You had the teacher's pet, wrapped up inside your palm.
 
And it's no mystery now, no secret anymore,
I've been to hell and back and you're the one I long for.
I'm haunted by your beauty, your angelic face,
And then I came home to see that someone took my place.
 
But it's nothing 'cause I've been at this hustle for a long
time.
And if I have to reach you, love, then teacher's pet will
have to climb.
 
Go however, wherever you say it's gonna take,
And tell old boy that even Jesus couldn't stop the Lord's
fate.
 
So,
It's like you and me,
And me and you,
I couldn't pass your test
Even if I wanted to.
 
It's like me and you,
And you and me,
I couldn't pass your test
Because past you I couldn't see.

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