Soul Siren (2 page)

“Not interested,” I said. And I wasn’t. I was intent on doing my job. Protect the Star.

I slid open the glass panel of the shower, not caring about the flying specks of water drenching my T-shirt, and Erica was on her toes as she plunged her face into the spray of water overhead. “I know,” she said. She was aware she was running out of time.

“You’ve got maybe three minutes tops,” I scolded and took her gently but firmly by the arm.

“Mish!” she squealed, covering her breasts as she stepped out of the shower, her eyes flicking towards the naked man on the table. As if there truly was anything left for her to be modest about. But her indignant noise made a peculiar kind of Erica-sense. The moment was over. They’d had their fun, and she didn’t want him seeing her like that anymore.

“What the hell do we do about your makeup?” I asked.

“Forget makeup,” said Erica. “I sweat it off anyway under those lights. I need to get dressed.” And she gave me the eye while her hand made a coded gesture:
shoo
. I had to get rid of the dancer on the table.

“Oh, man,” he was groaning.

I turned around and stood between him and Erica. One word should give the hint. “Please.”

In this business, I tried to be the last ambassador of good manners, and sometimes people were astonishingly grateful for it, sometimes the effort was wasted.

“What the fuck am I supposed to do?” the dancer was whining at me, though I was glad he was finally getting off the table and shuffling to the door. His right hand had grabbed a fistful of the waistband to tug up his pants. “I can’t go out there like this! What the hell am I supposed to do?”

“Have more control,” muttered Erica, sitting at her mirror.

“Hey!”
he yelled angrily.

“Hey, yourself,” I told him. “Aren’t you on in a minute?”

They were barking his name up the hall, losing their patience, and the floor director was saying,
“You are thirty seconds from getting your ass fired!”

The dancer uttered the “c” word under his breath and ran out the door.

L
ook,” I told him when he had finished his rant over the phone, “I was just going to ask some general questions about the tour, about how the crew and the dancers were, confirm a couple of things. I wasn’t going to get into all this sh—”

“Well, if you don’t include shit like this, then you ain’t telling the whole story now, are you, Michelle?” he fired back.

Which is why it’s included. I still can’t summon much sympathy for him. If he had come first and taken his pleasure inside her, I doubt he would have given any thought that he was making Erica Jones late without getting her off. She had just done a wham-bam to him the way men had been doing it to women since Creation, and I told him so.

“That just explains why you’re the way
you
are, Michelle, that doesn’t explain her,” he said.

He must have heard my sharp intake of breath over the receiver, because he added in a quiet, reflective voice, “But I thank you for saving my job.”

“Erica spoke to the director.”

“The hell she did.”

He was right. I had spoken to him, using her name. Erica was oblivious to the guy’s fate.

She still missed a cue during that concert, but not because of her tryst in the dressing room. Thirty thousand fans cheering and calling for her return forty-five minutes later, and Erica was behind the roadies’ trailer with her mobile in a serious long-distance conversation.

She was helping her nephew Jake back in Scarborough, Ontario, with his homework, doing her best to remember the original provinces of Canada’s Confederation in 1867. “Nova Scotia was definitely one, so was Prince Edward Island, ummm, Quebec, Ontario—oh, shit.
Maybe
New Brunswick? Doesn’t your Mom have an encyclopaedia in the house? Vi?” Calling now. “Vi! Violet, I will
buy
you an encyclopaedia, girl, okay?”

She saw the production assistant with his pleading open arms.
Just a minute,
she mouthed. This was Family, capital
F
. She would take as much time as Jake needed.

W
e lost Erica Jones,” opined
Maclean’s,
Canada’s own homegrown version of
Time
and
Newsweek
. “We lost her because of the blinkered incompetence of a complacent music industry.” Harsh but true.

It had started for her up in Canada. She was the fifth child of a reasonably well-off dentist who had a practice in the West End of the country’s biggest city, Toronto. We laughed our heads off when we read the publicity bios Easy Carson released for her second album. Then we were appalled. “Erica Jones grew up on the mean streets of Toronto’s Jane and Finch district, Canada’s own version of Compton.” Yes, Jane and Finch used to be known as a poor and rough part of town, but it sure as hell was no Compton.

“Easy, what is this shit?” Erica demanded. “I grew up five blocks from High Park, man!”

High Park. It was one of the most solidly middle-class neighbourhoods in the city, and it’s nowhere near Jane and Finch. I knew this because I was one of six black students who went to Sir John A. MacDonald High School, and Erica was one of the others. High school wasn’t where Erica first discovered music—no, she got that at home, her gift nurtured by the family piano, her parents and the choir of her local church. But school was where she
knew
beyond doubt she’d become a star. School was also where I discovered what I was, and Erica played a part in that discovery, too.

Easy, however, didn’t want to settle for the dewy image of star-struck talented girl flees secure middle-class background. Like his would-be rap stars, Erica was supposed to bloom through the cracks of cement and deprivation.

Easy Carson himself can be a stereotype: the shady black music executive with the grim past. That is sadly part of him. His big joke—his one joke—was that he wasn’t a record producer back then, he was a “motivator.” To be near him in real life as he said this, you took his meaning, because Easy is six foot one and over two hundred pounds. A black man who gets what he wants by intimidating with his size—or so you might believe. His face is that of a big ebony baby, and I suspect he keeps his hair cropped short just to make you think that. His face reminds me of the actor Forrest Whitaker. The rest of him is a wall of muscle. Some of what you hear about Easy Carson and Easy Roller Records is true, and some of it, well…

He tells people today that he got his nickname because his Mom liked Walter Mosley books, and the “Easy” handle came from borrowing the nickname of Mosley’s Easy Rawlins. But Carson was born LaMarque Daniel Carson, and when he started weightlifting in his teens a smartass buddy called him “Easter Island,” suggesting he looked like one of those dark monolithic statues. Easter got shortened to “Easy.” He did have a long juvenile record, mostly for petty break-ins and threatening assaults. And while he calls himself a producer, I know for a fact that Easy cannot read or play one note of music. He wanted—still wants—to make money.

“Easy went into music because he was smart enough to realise he was heading for a prison cell,” recalls one old friend. “He says, ‘This is the quick way, and it’s legal.’ Everybody thinks he just glares at you and folks give in, but he’s also a sweet talker.
He spots talent
. He gets the creative folks together. People winced at the beginning because he put his name down in credits as a producer, but he worked his ass off to get them the right equipment, to hustle the money for studio time, to promote the shit out of a tune. If he didn’t do the mixing, so fucking what? He did practically everything else.”

Carson got his start by chasing squatters out of an abandoned paint warehouse on Lexington and then corralling friends into helping him fix it up into a nightclub. “It was typical of him that he ran the joint for three months without giving a goddamn thought to any liquor licenses or building codes or whatever.” But this, too, was eventually all taken care of. He found talented DJs to play and used the place to test-drive new artists and groups. A former bouncer told me that Carson’s policy was very clear over any trouble at the club, whether gang related or petty squabbles over a jostled arm or talking to the wrong fellow’s girl. “Your job is protect the furniture,” he instructed. “People can duck and shit. People can get the hell out of the way. There ain’t no Blue Cross for our glasses and chairs.”

His music label was born in a back room of the club. As late as my coming onboard with Erica, all the equipment for those modest early sessions was still in there—a Zoom MRS-1044CD hard disk recorder that allowed you to record instruments on 100 virtual tracks (you even had reverb and equalization on that puppy), a Yamaha S80 keyboard and two Rode NT2 microphones. That was their whole kit, and it had cost Easy less than $3,000. Of course, Erica didn’t record with that stuff. Easy’s business had grown by then, and he wanted the best for his artists.

He also wanted to keep those artists around. When contract disputes dragged on, he would sic lawyers on a guy for taking freelance producing gigs to keep groceries on the table. I personally saw him fire people when he learned they were scouting for a job at another label. But no one has ever offered me a tale of him physically harming anyone.

People actually ask me today why
I
didn’t do anything about Easy Carson. As if I hadn’t thought of starting what I did earlier. I always have to laugh.

I tell them the truth. Erica took care of Carson in her own way. She didn’t need me that time. And if I had known, oh, if I had known…

When I met him, Easy was boyishly shy, his eyes nervously checking the ground as he asked how I liked New York and where I hoped my own career would take me. “He’s clumsy when he flirts,” I was told by a woman bartender from the club. “He’s got no confidence at all, and if he gets with women, it’s because his friends hook him up. When I went out with him, he put his big meaty paw on my thigh and confessed how he really liked me. It was kinda sad.”

He met Erica, in fact, because one of his hangers-on pointed her out to him at a party up on 127th Street—not because she was a promising vocalist but in the hopes that Easy could get her into bed. Like Lurch from the Addams Family, Carson lumbered over to her, interrupting the conversation she was having with one of the guys from the group Blue. “I hear you sing. Maybe you heard I produce records.”

Erica smiled at his bluster, sizing him up in one look, and said, “I haven’t heard of you at all.”

“Well, we should fix that,” said Easy, and he gave her a toothy grin.

Erica told me later that she wasn’t taking the conversation too seriously. She wasn’t so naïve as to think a guy wouldn’t try to get her into bed by claiming he had his own record label. “But, Michelle, he kept putting his weight on one foot then the other, looking around, biting his lip, I thought: he’s either really what he says or the boy’s completely deluded!”

Easy talked about how he wanted the label to expand beyond hardcore rap and take on a couple of promising R&B artists. Erica listened carefully. She hadn’t heard of his performers, and Carson sheepishly mentioned that he wouldn’t expect her to—he “hoped” they would be big. He didn’t brag. He didn’t name-drop. He didn’t even have a business card. He held up one of his huge hands palm forward and begged her to stay put. Then he went and begged the host of the party to go dig out a magazine that mentioned him and his label. She began to think he was sincere. When he actually came back with a little sidebar article with his name in bold, she agreed to meet him for lunch at Sylvia’s Soul Food restaurant and talk business. And that was how Erica Jones joined Easy Roller Records.

I don’t know what you’d call their relationship. If you stood in the company office’s foyer and watched their conversation in those days, there were times when Erica would still be nodding her head like a little girl, saying, “ ’Kay, ’kay…” She used to defer to Easy on matters of promotion, on when to bring her album out and why it was better to wait, on how she shouldn’t take this or that gig because it made her look small-time. And yet Easy didn’t interfere with her sound. I recall one instance when he poked his head in the studio, and Erica put down her Coke and asked, “What can we do for you, Easy?”

“Oh, nothin’.”

“Well, it’s a pretty small room, and you take up the space of three people,” Erica shot back.

And with that, he turned and left. He was her manager, and this is the way she would talk to him. She hadn’t yet turned twenty-one.

“Do you tell people about us?” she asked him once as we all piled into his four-wheel and headed out to a gig at a club in Brooklyn.

“Shit, no!” he declared, his baby face scrunched up in disgust at the question.

“You don’t?” said Erica, which was her way of saying,
Why not?

Easy Carson doesn’t have an MBA or even a lot of common sense, but he does have cunning, and his explanation gave me one of the best displays of it. “Because, Erica, if I go around town with you on my arm, bragging how we do it, how much fucking credit they gonna give you, huh? That gonna make you look good? Or me? They’ll think I front every pussy who comes along and smiles my way, and they’ll think you get to open your mouth on stage after sucking my cock out back.”

“Can you
please
rein in the gutter mouth?” I asked from the back seat.

I could never stand him talking like this. The fact that he did was a reminder of his emotional immaturity, how he had never learned to talk like an adult male who discarded the crude vocabulary back at the playground.

Easy grumbled that “Hey, Erica asked”—as if he couldn’t have put it a nicer way—then made a poor joke about how Canadian black girls were so uptight. We were the only ones he knew. Neither of us was in the mood to challenge this assertion.

I never asked Erica why she was briefly with him because the reason was obvious. She used him. They used each other. Erica claimed that she had genuine sexual curiosity about him in the beginning, and that he was almost sweet in how passive he was.