“Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Alex. If Lori says no — if he says one word against it — then it stops right there. You don’t go bothering him about it again. What the hell are you doing with this busted-ass song anyway?”
It was the next day.
They were rolling along in Muffler’s old Toyota, and Tony, having listened to the demo all the way through, popped the cassette out and tossed it back into Alex’s lap.
“Fine. It’s not a problem. I already worked out how to put out a single on my own.”
That was the downside of confessing to Tony first.
Alex had come in hoping to gain an ally and instead had gotten himself filed under opportunist.
And, to be fair, saying you were going to put out a single was an obnoxious thing to say out loud.
In this decade, getting a debut single off the ground meant walking a long, crooked, punishing road.
You needed music radio DJs across the country to get behind it — which meant connections, a network, a background, money.
And the quality of the song itself was only half of it: the singer’s ability to work a room, to hustle, to get inside every door, had to be maxed out.
“Cool,” said Muffler, and pulled the car to the curb outside an office building.
The Chicago office of ASCAP was somewhere inside it.
“That’s robbery.” Alex stared at the price on the coin meter beside the car, stunned, fed a few quarters into it, and couldn’t help grumbling.
“I could’ve just come by myself.”
“Nah. I gotta take you seriously now.”
Inside the lobby, Tony turned a slow circle and announced, “Damn, it is white in here.”
He wasn’t wrong.
These days the downtown business district was more or less entirely white territory.
This was the real Chicago — a world center of scholarship, art, law, finance, business, and publishing, the birthplace of the skyscraper.
Men and women in expensive suits crossed the marble at a clip, carrying briefcases.
The tempo of life here had nothing to do with the South Side.
They walked over to the elevators.
A young white woman waiting there caught sight of the three of them, and immediately, without appearing to decide anything, took a few steps back, shifted her handbag to her other shoulder, and drifted from the near side of the elevator bank to the far side.
“Nazi bitch,” Tony muttered.
The doors opened.
The three of them got in.
The woman stayed where she was, head down, studying her own shoes with enormous interest, as though something were growing out of them.
Alex could feel Tony’s temper coming to a boil, and pressed the button to close the doors in a hurry.
“You see that? See that? It’s the last ten years of the twentieth century and white folks are still like this! They killed Dr. King and they got Area 51 locked down where nobody can—” And off Tony went, racial discrimination and white conspiracy theory braided together into one long rope.
Alex was used to it by now.
His brain had learned to mute Tony automatically at moments like this.
He had a goal these days: squeeze everything he could out of the Revelation and get his life off the floor as fast as possible.
The filing procedure was as simple as advertised.
Pay the fee, leave your name and contact information, put the cassette and the score into the folder ASCAP provided, and that was the job done.
Alex went back over the details with the clerk and confirmed that everything Goodman had told him was accurate.
Registration of this kind didn’t create copyright — copyright existed the moment he wrote the thing — but a dated record of exactly what he had deposited and when was very strong evidence, and if it ever came to a fight over who wrote what, it would protect him beautifully.
“Huh. You really are doing this for real.”
Tony watched Alex work through the paperwork step by methodical step, and a good deal of his suspicion drained away.
“Of course I’m doing it for real. This used up nearly all the money Aunt Susie gave me,” Alex complained.
The three of them came back out, Muffler started the car, and they drove straight to Lil Lori’s building.
Lori might rap, but he wasn’t a project kid.
He lived in a high-rise apartment — a slightly dated one, but with a buzzer at the door and a building manager on the payroll and everything else that came with it. Follow the newest chapters on novelping dot com.
They were let up.
AK was already waiting in the doorway.
After the usual round of greetings — the handshake, the shoulder bump, the whole Black hello — he waved them all inside.
The living room was big, laid with a carpet in some classic pattern.
Lil Lori was sprawled across the sofa with a guitar in his arms, visibly unenthused.
“Hey, A Plus! Come on! Let’s hear this music of yours!” He crooked a finger at Alex, and the tone was pure needle.
“Uh. All right.”
Alex took the demo cassette and the score out of his bag, and AK, smiling, took them off him.
“Sit,” he said, pointing at the sofa, then turned and lobbed the score to Lori and slid the cassette into the dual-cassette deck.
“Hey.” Tony seemed not to notice anything in the air at all.
He crossed the room, dropped down beside Lori, held out a fist, and said with real warmth, “Thanks for giving Ali a shot, brother.”
Lori smiled, a little helplessly, bumped the fist, said nothing, and turned toward the deck.
His boombox was the shoulder-carry kind everybody took to the courts and to parties.
There was a hiss, and then Alex’s unadorned, unaccompanied voice came out of it.
The thrift store song wasn’t long; three-odd minutes went by fast.
Then there was nothing but the faint whisper of tape running on empty.
AK switched it off.
Tony stared at Lori’s face, tense.
Alex’s attention was entirely on the other man in the room — Lori’s agent, who had come out of the back just as the song started, and now stood in the corner with his arms folded, listening with real care.
That was Alex’s doing.
He had promised Tony he’d turn around and walk away if Lil Lori said no, but in exchange he’d insisted that Lori’s agent be in the room.
Lori himself might well be in the dark about the fact that the new album was all but guaranteed to fail.
The man who’d said we’re finished out loud on the day of the video shoot knew exactly where they stood.
Not that you’d read any of it off him: a man that age didn’t let anybody see what he was thinking, and through the whole song he stayed stone-faced.
“Okay…”
Lil Lori thought about it for a while.
He had the score in his hand; he’d been reading along with it.
Conditions had been what they were, and Alex had cut the demo with no backing track — the only thing under the vocal was the click of a metronome.
Tony hadn’t been impressed on first hearing.
But Lori read music, and he could see what was standing behind those bars.
“Drums and sax?” he said.
He did not say no.
“Yeah.” Alex let out a quiet breath of relief and pointed at the pages in Lori’s hands.
“The other instruments come in later.”
“I see, I see…”
Lori read the score over, and over again, murmuring, “The lyrics are actually pretty funny.” He tapped the beat out against his knee, picked a passage, and hummed a couple of lines of it.
“That’s what Ali came up with in a thrift store, the day we shot the video. Ha! Sneaky little genius, this one,” Tony explained on Alex’s behalf.
“It’s very finished,” Lori said, raising his eyebrows at Alex.
“Yeah?”
Tony lit up.
“Told you. This kid’s got something. He’s lead trumpet in the school orchestra, teachers love him — the gear he cut this on, his teacher loaned it to him! We’ve got high hopes for this song, real high, and guess what, before we came over here we went and got it—” He stopped, and looked back at Alex.
“What’s the word?”
Brother.
Shut up.
Alex groaned inwardly, but there was nothing to do but answer.
“Registered.”
“Right, right, registered!” Tony couldn’t stop his own mouth now.
“Man, you should’ve seen it. Waiting on the elevator, there’s this white girl, she gets one look at us—” He did an impression of the woman’s little hip-swiveling shoulder-bag maneuver.
“—like she’s looking at a stickup crew—”
“Wow. Registered…”
Lil Lori smiled, handed the score off to AK, and settled back down onto the sofa.
“Racial discrimination! That’s what that is! Nazi shit! One look at a Black man and she’s thinking thief—” Tony was still going.
AK turned a page of the score and said, “I don’t think this song is right for you, Lori.”
“What?” Tony’s mouth fell open.
He turned and stared at AK.
“Uh…”
AK took a moment before he continued.
“This song is basically about buying secondhand clothes and secondhand stuff, yes? Lori, your whole thing is cool, good-looking, young, stylish. If you get up there and sing, in this big triumphant way, about the joy of buying used goods… is that… those girls are going to… well. You know what I’m saying.”
“Hey, AK, you—” Tony started to go at him, and then ran out of conviction halfway.
He looked back at Lil Lori.
“What do you think, Lori?”
“Mm…”
Lori shrugged.
“On a professional question like this, I respect AK’s judgment.”
“Okay,” Tony said.
“Okay.” The light went out of his face.
AK ejected the cassette and handed it back to Alex along with the score.
“Thanks.” Alex gave him a smile.
He was in considerably better spirits than Tony.
There was nothing to argue about; it just meant finding another road.
“Uh — hold on a second.”
The agent, who hadn’t said a word all afternoon, spoke up.
“Alex, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Alex nodded.
“Tony said just now that you play trumpet. But you’ve scored this for saxophone and a drum kit. Why don’t you—” He thought about it.
“Why don’t you play it for us, the trumpet part in place of the sax? Right here. We’ve got a trumpet, we’ve got drums—” He snapped his fingers at AK.
“Go in the back and get the trumpet and the rest of the stuff.”