The Darkest Hearts Read online

  Table of Contents

  SICKO MODE

  BACK TO BLACK

  WICKED GAMES

  MADE IN AMERICA

  NO CHURCH IN THE WILD

  CARRIED AWAY

  LIFE’S A BITCH

  FORMATION

  DNA.

  NICE FOR WHAT

  WHO GON STOP ME

  BEST PART

  SKY WALKER

  GET YOU

  WHITE MEN IN SUITS

  LET ME DOWN

  PRETTY WINGS

  LAKE BY THE OCEAN

  BAD AND BOUJEE

  THAT’S WHAT I LIKE

  BLEEDING LOVE

  I GET THE BAG

  MOTORSPORT

  SURE THING

  THE DARKEST HEARTS

  HUMBLE.

  N.Y. STATE OF MIND

  WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE

  FINESSE

  I FEEL IT COMING

  ON TO THE NEXT ONE

  FLASHING LIGHTS

  TEARS DRY ON THEIR OWN

  SAY HELLO

  YOU KNOW I’M NO GOOD

  MASK OFF

  COULD’VE BEEN

  RIVER

  FOCUS

  TILL IT’S DONE

  ANOTHER LIFE

  THE CHARADE

  HOW MUCH A DOLLAR COST

  THESE WALLS

  COME DOWN

  FOR SALE? (INTERLUDE)

  MARCY ME

  BACK TO THE FUTURE (PART I)

  BACK TO THE FUTURE (PART II)

  About Nelson George

  About Akashic Books

  Copyrights & Credits

  To the real Edgecomb Lenox

  and his friends

  If it is impossible to stop, then we must lead it and direct it.

  —Russian president Vladimir Putin on rap music in his country,

  December 15, 2018

  Like any good earth-spanning tale, hip hop started with truth, evolved into myth, and degenerated into a moneymaking enterprise. Along the way its roots were viewed as a discovery, an origin story, an oft-told tale, and then just that blah-blah-blah thing you’ve heard too many times.

  The myth outlived the truth (as it tends to), the details grew fuzzy (even to those who lived it), and eventually it all gave way to cliché.

  But the enterprise of hip hop lives on like Frankenstein’s monster, constantly updated, remixed, repackaged, rebranded, and rebooted, until all that is left is a series of craftily commodified gestures of rebellion. Such is the way of culture in the United States, a rapacious and gluttonous land where progress is a market-driven code word and technology a heedless gateway to obsoleteness. There are no real gatekeepers in America, only salesmen for whom this year’s model is next year’s landfill.

  So citizens of this republic of all colors and creeds, being Americans, took this cultural expression and squeezed it until it bled green. All manner of sex, love, fetish, stereotype, spirituality, dance, and rhythm could be poured into a glass of commerce like juice from a lemon. Let’s bring that bitter drink to our lips and taste what it has become.

  —Excerpt from the unpublished manuscript of The Plot Against Hip Hop by Dwayne Robinson (2011)

  CHAPTER ONE

  SICKO MODE

  D Hunter sat in a Cadillac Escalade rolling down Forsyth Street SW in Atlanta. He was sitting behind a man named Ant and studying the roll of fat on the back of the guy’s clean-shaven head. D thought this man desperately needed to change his diet. He had no idea if Ant was any good in his roles as road manager and bodyguard, but he was absolutely sure Ant had spent too many nights eating at a local Waffle House.

  “Turn that shit up!”

  The man who requested the increase in volume was the rising MC Lil Daye, a lean, handsome young black man in his early twenties who sat next to D, wearing a vintage Atlanta Braves baseball cap, Gucci shades, a $50,000 ring, and a $65,000 bracelet. He was also puffing chronic; acrid smoke curled around D’s nose like cooked cabbage.

  The driver, an older black man by the name of Sammy (a cousin of Lil Daye’s mother), turned up the volume on “Slip Slippin’,” a joint with a jittery beat that shook the SUV like the Batman ride at Six Flags. D felt his body inadvertently moving to the beat; his better judgment and old-school taste bulldozed by the volume.

  “You feel it, huh?” said Lil Daye.

  D laughed and admitted, “I guess my body can’t help it.”

  “Yup, pardner,” the MC laughed, “that’s why I fucks with you.”

  Lil Daye was a prime purveyor of trap, a music that had made the hip hop D had grown up with a twenty-first-century museum piece. Beats sampled from vinyl recordings had largely been replaced by digital files and “original” music, a.k.a. skittery, slithery, jiggling rhythms found in computer programs, sounding like C-3PO on E. Trap shouted, The future is now! The electronic farts and bleeps of today were the fat bass lines of the past.

  The gift of polyrhythmic delight, splendid syncopation, and complex wordplay that once delighted D had given way to lyrical repetition, fuzzy enunciation, and narrowly defined experience. There were scores of trap rappers who thought older microphone techniques were for middle-aged dinosaurs. Trap music sounded to D like punk rock must have sounded to Marvin Gaye fans in 1977: amateur, limited, unintelligible, and offensive.

  Yet there D was, sharing a ride with Lil Daye, heading to a strip club in ATL, and deeply in business with the paragon of the music that had killed his old gods. Atlanta was the official center of twenty-first-century hip hop and had essentially held that title since the late nineties. New York was the foundation, Los Angeles was the expansion, and Atlanta was the evolution.

  A former Atlanta mayor had represented local MCs on his rise to power. Ludacris had his own damn holiday weekend here. Whether you were born in NOLA or New York, if you were serious about hip hop now, you had a McMansion in DeKalb County. As parties in the park had been to the Bronx and swap meets had been to Los Angeles, strip clubs were ground zero for hip hop in Atlanta, because this was where hits were certified, legends created, and aspirations fulfilled. The cassette mixtape was dead. Big butts in clear heels were eternal.

  “I got you tonight, D,” Lil Daye said when they arrived. “It’s all on me, pardner.”

  Pardner wasn’t a regular part of Lil Daye’s vocab, but the twenty-three-year-old performer was being literal tonight. Earlier in the day, D had closed a lucrative deal between Facebook, his own management company, and Lil Daye’s Yung Culture. The trap star would create original content for Facebook Watch, using the ginormous platform to promote his new music. R’Kaydia Lelilia Jenkins, who ran Future Life Communications, a company that specialized in hologram technology, had helped D broker the deal with the aid of his longtime adviser and silent partner, Walter Gibbs.

  D and R’Kaydia’s relationship had as many ups and downs as a brightly lit yo-yo. It was a business relationship with a charged sexual subtext that neither openly acknowledged. But at the end of the day, she was a black businesswoman who enjoyed the chess of the white-boy tech game, and D had an uncanny way of dealing with mercurial musicians. (His years as a bodyguard, musician, and archivist always came in handy.) Gibbs had been a friend and occasional business adviser since the days when D ran a club-security concern in NYC. Now they were both LA-based expats whose Big Apple relevance had faded.

  There was no sexual subtext at Magic City; sex is the text of every strip club. Capitalism, fetishism, dominance and submission, erectile dysfunction, lesbian erotica, and bisexuality all fill in the subtext quite nicely. But to D, strip clubs were only about one thing—loneliness. He’d never been to one that wasn’t populated by sad-eyed, slack-jawed, robotic men who used greenbacks and mechanized dancers to fake real human connecti
on. It was also a site for contempt. He thought some dancers hid it well, but it was the coin of the realm for the women who looked down at their customers and saw graves behind their eyeballs. Strip clubs, for all their flashing lights, booming sound systems, and bodacious backsides, were mortuaries where true intimacy was embalmed.

  As Lil Daye, D, and Ant slid behind a VIP table, D wondered what it said about his love life that he’d agreed to a night in this emotional sinkhole. His thoughts flowed back to loves won and lost.

  There was Emily, his mixed Brit chick from the turn of the century, who was now a mother but still hosted old-school hip hop jams in Manhattan. There was Michelle Pak, his Korean almost–great love, who was building a business in South LA and, according to Instagram, had just spent a ski weekend in Aspen with some all-American white man.

  The saddest memory of all was Amina Warren-Jones, whose memory haunted even when he was happy. She was brown, lean, and had the loveliest voice that had ever whispered in his ear. Amina had been murdered because D had unearthed a crazy plot against hip hop and sought out its architects, one of whom was her ex-husband. D had her death avenged, but that act of violence brought no closure, no resolution, no satisfaction. Amina was dead and part of D had gone to the grave with her. She’d been poisoned with the HIV virus. D hadn’t infected her but the means of her demise had been devised to exploit his weakness.

  These days D’s T cell count was almost normal and his health was Magic Johnson remarkable. His HIV infection was not gone but was in a surprising middle-aged slumber. He still took his meds, but only in small doses, and sometimes forgot them for days at a time. D had outlived the plague years but the psychological damage, while muted, could still be felt. Revealing his status was not something he did easily. The words I am HIV positive made him feel guilty. To the world, D was a broad-backed African American man who favored black clothes that matched his ferocious game face. Inside, D was a small, fragile soul who couldn’t stand to see the fear in the faces of prospective lovers whenever he told on himself.

  D truly knew the deadness of the strip club since, for a time, he’d been addicted to its cosmetic eroticism. He had fallen for the brightly colored dance floors and the booming music. He’d indulged in this substitute for intimacy so deeply that he’d come to hate himself and the falsehood the whole enterprise was predicated on.

  When D pulled himself out of his own head and looked over at Lil Daye, he noticed that his new partner was not looking up at the dancers spinning and twirling in the vicinity. He was FaceTiming a woman. Lil Daye, like many MCs, had a steady woman and kids in a roomy ATL suburb. D hadn’t met them, but from the pictures in Lil Daye’s office and on social media, he seemed to be a doting daddy with his little boy, at least when he wasn’t talking about trap houses, sports, and haters on the mic. His wife, known as Mama Daye, was a large, fleshy woman who’d built a substantial social media following by giving fashion and grooming tips to big-boned women. Lil Daye had mentioned getting her on a reality show, which was something D would work on back in Cali.

  Like any good pop star, Lil Daye was a mythmaker and shape-shifter. The distance between his real life and his surreal persona was a map more complex than any of his fans could have drawn. So when Dorita Johnson showed up at Magic City, D had to make some new calculations.

  Dorita wore very little makeup on her honey-colored face, though her lip gloss did pop. Wearing ripped black jeans, fluffy mules, and a black tee with Lil Jon looking manic on the front, she was dressed conservatively (as far as strip club attire goes). She was clearly fit, with broad shoulders, a tapered waist, and legs that were no strangers to lunges. Her hair was cut into a black bob, kind of a young Halle Berry meets Toni Braxton look, which was a major contrast to the weave-centric hairstyles of the strippers and waitresses at Magic City. D knew that in Atlanta, strip clubs had been so normalized that couples went there on dates and straight women could be found there after work for drinks. Still, Dorita had a casual, unpretentious vibe that threw off D’s radar. She could have been an off-duty cop or a white-collar worker with a bit of after-work style.

  But wherever Dorita worked, it was obvious when she kissed Lil Daye and snuggled up next to him that their relationship was happily unprofessional. D was introduced as “the new business pardner I told you about,” a clue that this was not just a jump-off but someone Lil Daye confided in. Dorita surveyed D quickly, politely shook his hand, and then turned her attention back to the rapper. The two lovers whispered to each other, oblivious to the music, the lights, and the dancers. They may have been in a citadel of false intimacy, but these two resided in a lovestruck world.

  D just smiled and nodded when Lil Daye leaned over and said, “I gotta step. Whatever you want here is on me. See you tomorrow.” Then he exited with Dorita, while Ant moved into the seat next to D. For Lil Daye, this strip club visit was just a pretext for a romantic rendezvous, but Ant apparently had something he wanted to say. It was the first time they’d been alone since D arrived in Atlanta.

  “So,” D asked, taking the initiative, “are we cool, Ant?”

  “Pardner,” Ant replied with a sarcastic tone, “far as I’m concerned, you got nothing to worry about as long you deliver those bags for Lil Daye. Do your job and me and you are good. I’ll leave it like that right there.”

  “Looking forward to working with you, Ant.”

  Ant nodded goodbye and placed a small stack of singles in front of D, which somehow felt like a dis.

  D stayed another fifteen minutes before ordering an Uber to go to the Four Seasons in Midtown.

  That Lil Daye was a cheater was no surprise. That his mistress was an attractive, normal woman, and not a pole goddess, was. It made Lil Daye much more interesting, D thought, though now having to keep his secret was irritating.

  When he stepped outside Magic City his cell rang. Unknown number. As a general rule, D didn’t answer blocked numbers. He figured if he didn’t have their number, it meant he didn’t know them and may not want to. But it had been an evening with an unexpected twist so D decided to see where this call would take him.

  “This is Ice,” the voice said.

  Hearing the sandpaper voice sent a chill through D like it was January in Chicago. “It’s been awhile,” D said.

  He hadn’t spoken to Ice in several years, not since the ex-gangbanger and hit man had avoided incarceration in a case involving corrupt Brooklyn detectives and real estate speculation in gentrifying neighborhoods. But the connection between D and Ice was deeper than that. It was Ice, with D’s nodding approval, who’d eliminated one of the men behind that plot against hip hop. D didn’t know all the details since Eric Mayer’s body had never been found.

  “I know you’re in Atlanta,” Ice said. “So am I.”

  “You live here now?”

  Ice ignored the question. “We need to meet. Something has come up.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  BACK TO BLACK

  The Landmark Diner on Roswell Road was idyllically old school and all-American. Its signage was iridescent neon—its reds almost pink, its blues almost aqua. The big clock above the doorway was a predigital-era throwback.

  It had the long horizontal design typical of 1950s dining. Next to the windows were booths with Formica tables and aqua-colored seats. The Landmark had weathered Atlanta’s headlong rush into modernity by fetishizing the Eisenhower years.

  Of course in that decade, one much beloved by both godless plutocrats and working-class Christians, the idea of two black men sitting for a late-night chat at the Landmark would have been impossible unless they were in the back sharing Newports and washing dishes. These days the Landmark was a nonsmoking establishment. So instead of cigarettes, the two men shared a plate of fries doused in ketchup, which Ice was supplementing with a strawberry milkshake. The drink left a little pale ring around the mouth of Ice’s otherwise dark-chocolate face.

  Back in crack-era Brownsville, a Brooklyn hood filled with public housing, welfare recipi
ents, and poverty-stricken families, Ice had been a fearsome legend. He’d been a real-world boogeyman and a brutal role model. He’d emerged from the Jolly Stompers (an eighties youth gang that spawned “Iron” Mike Tyson) and blossomed into a fearsome contract killer: tall, wispy thin, and as adept with handguns as he had once been with a basketball. Word in the Ville was that Ice could have easily gotten an athletic scholarship and, with some weight training, made the NBA.

  Ice’s family was food-stamp poor so he chose fast, short money over potential long green. First it was just robbing drug dealers—busting into fortified apartments, snatching girlfriends and sisters as bargaining chips, digging strongboxes out of public housing concrete. One robbery had gone badly and he had to shoot a dealer; the man bled out.

  Word spread that Ice was fearless, and an offer came his way for $10k to go up to the Bronx and put a bullet in the head of a man just back from upstate. For a day, Ice had wrestled with the ethics of it. That first killing had happened in the heat of the moment, but this job was to be done in the coldest of blood.

  Well, Ice went to the Bronx and did the job. Then another. Then another. To justify this new profession, Ice decided to view people as a farmer did. Some animals were food. Either they died or you died. Some animals were milked and their product could feed you or be sold. You stayed alive when they did. This way people, like animals, existed to either feed you or make you money.

  This allowed Ice to ignore the reality that these dead human beings had all been a black or brown man just trying to feed their family outside the “official” economy. Ice had spent a lot of his days not acknowledging that he was what Public Enemy called a real-life “antinigger machine.”

  Ice was a grown man now. What he’d done at sixteen and seventeen could not be undone. Over time, Ice had owned a video arcade (back when that was a viable ghetto business), financed several barbershops, and would hit off promising young people who needed cash for clothes or computers. If the god his mother prayed to on Sundays really did exist, Ice hoped he’d balanced the books enough to reserve a room in hell’s coolest condo.