Soul Siren Read online

  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.

  We 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.

  She says they stopped by the nightclub one evening, and under the flashing red and blue lights, surreal with no music on and an empty dance floor, she undressed him until he stood before her completely naked.

  Tree trunk legs, a chest like a menacing storm cloud, wide and dark. He towers over me, she thought. She went to embrace him, and his massively thick arms completely enveloped her, his dark brown cock hot against her short belly and so long that its red bulb brushed the under curve of her left breast. When she lay down and opened her legs for him the very first time on the blanket of their coats, the size of him simultaneously scared her and thrilled her. She gasped as more and more of him pushed into her vagina, but she couldn’t take him all the way in. She says that making love to Easy was like swimming underneath docks, her shoulders gated by the thick posts of his arms, lying in the shadow of that chest, and he rammed like a bull inside her until a hot stream of his spunk poured into her like a flood. She says she came the first time they slept together, but she never did again.

  “You hurt me when we try,” she told him.

  Easy had dropped his eyes to the floor. Erica didn’t go into how he had no concept of foreplay, of seduction, that after a few kisses and a couple of hugs, he was ready for his jackhammer performance. She claimed he was simply too long and thick for her, which may well have been true, and though he lost out on sex, it was an explanation that consoled his childish ego.

  They didn’t sleep with each other anymore, but it didn’t put an end to their sexual involvement. They needed each other for business. By now, there was a buzz in the clubs about Erica, and she had a use for her manager. Carson also knew he had a good thing, too good to get ruined by spats and atmosphere. I suspect what happened between them was Erica’s idea, and it was this: Easy had installed a two-way mirror that looked out on the dance floor. “Check this out!” he’d giggle, a kid with a new toy, showing how no one could see into the side office unless he switched a specific set of lights on the glass. Several of us warned him it would be pointless to have it if he didn’t shut up about it.

  Erica knew about the glass. And it was perfect for her to give Easy a very different kind of performance. She would give him an informal message earlier in the day, “Video night tonight,” or ask me to pass it on to him with a word or a phone call, thinking they were both cute. He’d know to be in the club ahead of her that evening.

  She brought casual lovers there after hours, never anyone serious. She put something on the stereo system, and as her man of the evening pulled her into a clinch, she always suggested, “No, no, over here…It’s sexy over here.” Here on the black leather couch, where she could urge her man to sit down, and then fall backwards into his lap, pushing herself against his groin. A tug of the zipper, and her dress was a satin halo around her hips, her breasts practically spilling out of her bra cups. Fingers checked her erect dark nipples, pinching them, rubbing them urgently, and as Erica’s mouth opened in a gasp, she half rose to ease down her soaked panties, the hand of her lover slipping down from her midriff to her inner thigh.

  She opened her legs much wider than she needed to, hooking them behind his ankles as his fingers strummed her clitoris and felt the shining wet lips of her pussy. Craning her head back to kiss her man, the lift of her ribs like the spread of dove’s wings with the arch of her back, and there was the sweet flex of her thigh muscles as she opened her legs still wider, and his fingers disappeared into her vagina.

  Kissing him, tasting him, one eye open and staring ahead, her man always thinking it was a turn-on to see the two of them in the mirror. And behind the glass was Easy. I’ve caught the fingerprint smudges of that wide hand on the glass, evidence that he must have leaned against it, his hungry concentration so intense, his want so close to its object of desire but separated from her, his other fist kneading that huge cock she said he had, brown flesh reddening, veins like tree roots into the black bush of his pubic hair, his testicles contracting into a tight round ball of skin.

  And now the couple had progressed to the patch of carpeted floor in front of the couch. Erica’s mouth was open in a kind of plea as her face appeared to him upside down, eyes shut as her orgasm made an exquisite warning deep in her core, gathering strength, her fingers clawing into her date’s chest as she struggled to raise her knees higher, and her lover’s swollen penis sunk into her again and again, Erica’s breasts quivering with the momentum.

  “See me! See me! Ahhhh—ahhh—ahhh!” she chanted. Her date assumed she was speaking to him, taking it as a prompt to be even more aroused by her coming. “I see you, babe,” he groaned back. And with a final groan, the dam inside him would burst. Or a guy would pull out of her and shoot streams of his sticky warm sauce onto her breasts and stomach. Or one night, her man reared up out of her, calling for her to please take him into her mouth, and Erica gripped him in one confident motion and sucked him in, digging her fingers into the base of his cock, making it swell even more as he cried out with his release. Behind the glass, stifling a tortured whimper, Easy unravelled. I could never find Easy Carson attractive, but I think if I saw him that way, the great muscled tower of him naked like that and stroking himself in worship of Erica, I believe I would have found him at least briefly…noble. It sounds peculiar to use that word for it, but to me it’s right. Or maybe it’s because I thought for the longest time we could all be better because of Erica.

  I knew what she did in that club for him, or if you want to be harsh in your judgement, to him. I knew her little suggestive smiles when her date wasn’t looking, her eyes searching for contact behind the glass, how she actually enjoyed him watching her like this and how it reinforced her upper hand in their relationship. Because one night I didn’t pass on the message to Easy, and the spectator in the office behind the two-way mirror was me.

  The loft space. I am back in the loft space often when I dream. It’s peculiar, but I don’t castigate myself over and over for the studio. No, it’s the loft that plays a loop in my head. Nights when I can see the framed posters of Blue Note album covers for Miles Davis and Theloni
us Monk, when I have to involuntarily smile again at the black lacquer bust of Beethoven. What am I doing here? I’m making mistakes. I know enough not to touch the dead body at my feet, but I still make fatal errors.

  It is someone else who did this, not you. That’s what you have to tell yourself. Emotional detachment. You’re going to find what you came for and go, because that’s what you do. You’re Michelle, and you clean up the messes. You’re loyal.

  I go through a mental checklist of what I’ve touched without gloves, still dithering whether to leave them be since I’m a regular visitor here, or to wipe them clean. I opt for wiping them, erasing my presence here tonight. I will be careful, I will be so careful.

  And as I rifle anxiously through the drawers wearing my latex surgical gloves, a onetime friend cold at my feet behind the couch, I curse under my breath and chant that I did it for you, Erica, I did it all for you….

  Beginnings

  It was ironic that Easy Carson, projecting all his gangsta rap executive bluster and never dreaming of backing it up, became a target for Jamal Knight. Because Knight was the real deal. As much effort as Easy put into his bad boy front Knight dedicated to his own illusion of respectability. He had a handsome square face of pecan colour and light brown eyes, a thick moustache above his ready smile of caps, and he favoured Hugo Boss suits. I have been told that he owned nice cars but made sure that he never drove himself—not because he wanted to push an image with a chauffeur but to avoid any police harassment. He didn’t like being pulled over. If he had to be ordered out of the car, he would suffer it in the role of a passenger. If cops were going to dream up a BS charge then it could stick to someone else’s licence and not his own.