The Call of the Weird (18 page)

Overall, the crowd seemed to favor the louder, more aggressive rappers, even when the words themselves weren’t clearly tailored to the occasion. A big part of it was intimidation. The rapper whose turn it was would jump around his opponent, bring his face close, getting “right up in his grill,” as the expression has it, while the passive party stared off into the middle distance. In round five, “Jeru” or possibly “J-roo” started by shouting, “Be for real, nigga, you ain’t no thug / That shit don’t fit you like OJ’s glove,” before being disqualified. “I done told you three motherfuckin’ times, no touching,” the host said. The final, between Dirty D and Charlie, went to two rounds, but there was no clear winner. By this time, my second cognac was kicking in and I was having trouble following the proceedings. Then suddenly, the competition was over. A draw, apparently. The music came back on: Lil’ Jon shouting, “Get crunk in this bitch.”

I was about ready to leave, but I kept being approached by rappers who’d heard I was a reporter and wanted to give me their phone numbers. In the VIP area, I was interviewing a pair called Two-twelve and Q, both friendly, both looking extremely stoned, when some bouncers dragged a kid outside. Then a little pack of young men chased another man round the corner. I cowered behind
the bar, convinced a gunfight was moments away. But the skirmish was over quite quickly and I reflected it was no more violent than the fights one saw in West London on a Friday night. Just as I was thinking this, my gaze settled on a familiar face.

It was Mello, but a different Mello. Gone were the tailored three-piece suit and bowler hat. Now he had on a boxy tan-colored shirt, tan trousers, both pressed and pristine, and a backwards baseball cap. I wondered if he’d seen me. Conspicuous as I was, I found it hard to believe he hadn’t. I went up to him and said hi.

“Louis, man, I been tryin’ to get to you!” he said. “I been on a righteous pilgrimage. I sponsor after-school programs, Little League baseball. I’m the George Steinbrenner of Little League. I’m like the Moses of the Ghetto saying, ‘Follow me out of Egypt.’”

He was oddly incurious about what I was doing there. I’d thought he might say. “So what brings you down this way?” Perhaps he assumed I’d been living in Jackson for the past five years and our paths simply hadn’t crossed.

It was too loud and chaotic to have much more of a conversation. But I took Mello’s numbers, and two days later I visited him at the studio where he was laying down tracks for a new album.

I hadn’t actually given too much thought to what I was expecting from the encounter with Mello. I may have been slightly naive, but since I basically liked him—or remembered liking him—I assumed he might like me too and I imagined that the meeting would be unproblematic, like two friends getting together. I wanted to get to know the real person, to see him at home, to meet his stable of women in less artificial conditions, maybe even meet his family. For some reason I didn’t ask myself why, given that Mello had stayed in character during my entire first visit, he would suddenly want to reveal himself.

The studio was a smart, custom-built facility, with padded doors and blonde wood, vast boards of knobs and switches and recessed TV screens. The control room resembled the bridge of a spaceship. In the corridors were framed photographs of local gospel singers. Mello was standing at the mike wearing a Detroit Lions sports shirt and a backwards baseball cap, sipping an energy drink. “We got a refrigerator full of Red Bull,” he said. “Y’all drink that up there in London? I got some good herb from Mother Earth, too, if you need some! Ha ha ha!” His two front teeth were gold, his face faintly pock-marked. He was in constant motion, and there was a gracefulness to his conversational gestures, the way he bobbed his head and swept his hands.

The track he was recording was called “Stop Lyin’.”

During a break, I told Mello about my reunion visits. I mentioned I’d heard he’d recorded a track for kids called “If You Try You Can Do It.” Then I asked about the lyrics to this new track, which, truth be told, sounded more like the old pimping Mello than the new positive one I’d heard about.

But Mello glossed the lyrics as a plea for rappers to tone down their music: not to rap about selling drugs if they’d never sold drugs. “I’m tryin’ to tell the kids, they might be focusing on, ‘I wanna be like him.’ But I’m letting them know he didn’t get that car or that video and them girls slangin’ no dope. He ain’t never shot nobody. I don’t want no more thugs or gangstas. I’d rather develop congressmens and doctors.” On a flight of eloquence, Mello went
on to decry the system that creates poverty, “Where ten percent of the population runs the ninety.” Then, somewhat confusingly, having just called for more black professionals and fewer thugs, he began lambasting black politicians, lawyers, and doctors as “sellouts.” “But you know, I’m a honky-tonk killer and I’m comin’ to kill the sellout!”

It was too exhausting to take issue with the contradiction, so I ignored it, and asked if he was still pimping. This led to a long disquisition on the nature of pimping, the fact that George Bush was a pimp, that I too was a kind of pimp, that I was pimping every time I went on TV, which culminated in Mello issuing a plea for any women interested in prostitution to give him a call. “So if they some females out there worldwide who really want to go from zero to a whole lotta zeros, they can holler at me.’Cause pimpin’ and hoin’ is the best thing goin’! Ha ha ha!”

I seemed to be back at square one with Mello—a place of highflown rhetoric and boasts that might or might not hide some reality underneath.

Three other rappers arrived: an ex-crack dealer named Donnie Money; another pimp named J-Mack; and Ice Cold, a family man who laid epoxy floors for a living. Donnie put down a verse for “Stop Lyin’.” Then Ice Cold recorded a hook for a new track, about friends who become envious when drunk. A few hours later, their parts done, they left—and then something strange happened. Now that it was just me and Mello, his tone softened. His posturing melted away and he spoke lovingly about his two daughters, aged two and eight—the younger one by Sunshine, the older from a previous relationship with a schoolteacher. He mentioned he’d had run-ins with the law since I’d last seen him, been charged with homicide and making pornography. He spoke vaguely about it all, but I sensed it had scared him. Oddly, the legal problems had come
at a time when he was straightening out, he said. His father had died, which had prompted him to think about his life. He’d started coaching Little League, teaching after-school reading programs. “Yeah, baby, I been tryin’ to be a hundred percent square. I just want to be a good father.”

And like that, we began making plans for the coming week. He offered to show me his house, his neighborhood, introduce me to his friends. He said he had a little poster board he brings when he speaks at high schools showing the names and photos of all his friends who died before they reached twenty-one. “I tell them ‘He died at sixteen, he died at eighteen, he died at nineteen. But all of them dropped out of school.’” I could meet Sunshine again too. She was in Chicago but would be back on Tuesday. Only his two daughters were off-limits. “For security reasons.”

Then he disappeared. I tried his cell phone, left messages. No reply. “This is Mello T,” his message went. “You know I’m out there tryin’ to chase that cheddar,’cause cheddar sho’nuff make it better. So just leave your name at the tone and I’ll get right back to ya.”

After a day and a half lounging at my motel, writing up my notes, waiting for him to call back, I made other plans. I arranged with a rapper named Coup Dada to visit one of Jackson’s bad areas, a neighborhood called Wood Street. I’d recently met Coup Dada as part of a musical collective called US From Dirrt. Interestingly, their latest release,
I’m a Hater,
was a “beef ” record—it contained a dis of the one Jackson rapper to make it big internationally, David Banner. “Mississippi superstar / You know just who you are,” they rapped. They threatened to vandalize Banner’s luxurious Jackson house, specifying that they would send a goon squad to piss on Banner’s couch, then shit in his fridge, before finishing him off “execution-style with a dirty twenty-two.”

And yet US From Dirrt had seemed a modest and obliging bunch, thoughtful, unflashily dressed, just grateful for an opportunity to sound off to a visiting journalist. Coup in particular had struck me as sparky and playful. Dark-skinned and almond-eyed, twenty-something, his hair in a do-rag, he’d acknowledged that much rap was self-destructive. He’d admitted that some rappers became more out-of-control and lawless as they became more successful, seeming to want to imitate their lyrics to buttress their credibility. But then he had added, with a note of ironical indignation in his voice, “But even if what you’re implying is true, that rap is self-destructive, these guys get filthy rich before they self-destruct! So it’s still there for us! This the last great movement for us. This is our political party. It’s a hip-hop party, but it’s our party.”

Coup seemed a sensible choice as a guide around Wood Street since he’d grown up there. The journalist Charlie Braxton tried to dissuade me from going. “Wood Street?” Charlie said. “No, no, no, Louis. No, Louis. No. They shoot cops. You don’t want to go, Louis. They’ll smell tourist on you. You know what they call Wood Street? The area of terror!“ But I went anyway, meeting Coup late one morning at his mother’s house.

Though she’d raised him in Wood Street, Coup’s mother had recently moved to a nicer area, where the only sign of poverty was the age of the cars. A battered Buick with a smashed tail light was in her garage. Inside he introduced her to me as “Ma-Bay,” a tough-looking forty-three-year-old, in gray sweat shorts and sweat top, hair straightened and pulled back severely. She had a gold tooth, which looked odd on an older person. She was a security officer at a local college. Coup said she also used to own a bar in Wood Street.

The house was tidy and sparsely furnished. Candles, inspirational posters on the walls; the lyrics of “Amazing Grace” and a
prose poem called “The Miracle of Friendship.” We stood by her dining table, next to the kitchen. She called me “sir” and didn’t ask me to sit down or offer me water. As a white person and a journalist, I realized I represented something. I must have seemed like a social worker or a government inspector.

Ma-Bay downplayed the dangerousness of Wood Street. “It was a good area twenty years ago,” she said. “It’s getting back where it started from. If you not in no gang or anything, you don’t represent anything, you not going to have any problem.”

“I heard they shoot cops.”

“They never shot no police there,” Ma-Bay said.

“That’s ridiculous,” Coup said.

But once we were outside the house, Coup said, “My mom said we could go anywhere in the neighborhood, but that ain’t strictly true. She doesn’t like it when people speak bad about where she from, because that like speaking bad about her, her family.” Then, apropos of his mother, he commented mysteriously, “Maybe we just been speaking to one of the biggest players in the area, no one would tell you.”

This remark set the tone for the afternoon, which turned into a kind of litany of coded answers and circumspection. He wouldn’t tell me his age, though that may have been for the usual show business reasons. He was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of one of his dead homies on it, but he didn’t want to talk about it. Then, speaking about his wife and their four kids, who were living in Kansas City, he said, “She felt it would be better to shield them completely away from it by living in another area than the one I was brought up in. Because I might have made a lot of enemies along the way. Not saying that I have. But I don’t have any of those in Kansas City.

“This is Wood Street. This is the end I can take you to.”

We’d driven onto a rutted road. The only houses I could see were abandoned shotgun shacks with metal chain-link fences round them, and vacant lots where houses had been torn down, overgrown with vines, tall grass, saplings. We parked next to Coup’s uncle’s house and got out.

Wood Street itself ran parallel to a railroad track on one side and a creek on the other. At one end, it was bounded by a road bridge. Cut off on three sides, the neighborhood felt abandoned and stagnant. The houses, or at least the ones that remained, were wooden shacks on brick pilings, leaning and peeling and dilapidated, so broken-down they looked art-directed, like the set of a horror film. Mailboxes on posts at crazy angles, patched-up mesh over the porches, sofas on porches. Still, in the heat, there was a pleasant lazy mood. The only noise was the buzz of insects in the long grass. As we walked, Coup said again and again, “That’s another street I can’t take you to. I can go there, I just can’t take you up there . . . All these streets lead to Wood Street. These niggas gon’ call me and ask who I was with.”

As vivacious as he’d been before, he seemed to have become unsettled by his mother’s caginess. He worried about what it was appropriate to say, feeling it was disrespectful to his neighborhood to talk about the crime and the desperation. “I never seen any drugs in the hood,” he said, bizarrely. “The white man has taught me about hypocrisy. I learned what true mafia-ism is.” For me it was frustrating, since I’d been expecting a kind of ghetto safari. But it was laudable, too, his unwillingness to merchandise affliction. His sense that rap, for all its pitfalls, was a black movement seemed to extend to the hood and its lawlessness too. He felt protective.