Alex knew perfectly well that Pablo wasn’t simply impressed.
It would be closer to say that the song the Revelation had given him had only now, with Old Joe singing the hook, been properly unveiled.
Put another way: it wasn’t that the thrift store song happened to suit Old Joe.
It was that Old Joe’s clothes and Old Joe’s voice were what had opened the Revelation in the first place.
Old Joe was the cause and the thrift store song was the effect.
At the present level of things, there was no one on earth better suited to the hook than he was.
Lori’s rap, by contrast, still fell a long way short of the original artist — but with the bottom of the song in place, its flavor came out immediately.
Still, this was only a first pass.
Old Joe was getting on, and the more complicated stretches in the back half of the lyrics still gave him a great deal of trouble.
When he finished he spread his hands in the universal gesture for well?, and Alex at once put two thumbs up against the glass and laid the flattery on thick.
Old Joe found this very agreeable, and bowed from the waist like a man taking a curtain call.
“No more. I’m done in. I need a drink and a sit down.” Old Morgan got out his handkerchief, mopped his face, and walked out of the live room.
“Hey!”
Old Joe’s blood was up and he wasn’t about to let it go.
He followed the old man out.
“Don’t you quit on me, you old bastard. I haven’t even warmed up yet!”
“Let’s work on the words first. Weren’t you biting your own tongue back there?”
Old Morgan gave nothing away.
He opened the little liquor cabinet beside the sofa with the ease of long practice, rummaged through it, finally turned up a bottle of Chivas, poured himself a small glass, and tipped his neck back and drained it.
Then he let out a long, satisfied breath and slumped into the cushions.
“You ought to restock this cabinet, Joe.”
“Shut your mouth and drink your own piss!”
Old Joe was a little put out.
“I haven’t turned a profit in this place in a long damn time.”
Pablo cleared his throat lightly.
At that moment Eric opened the door and came in, Tony behind him hollering with laughter.
“She dumped him!” Tony pointed at Eric’s cheek.
“Look at this!” There were five white fingerprints on it.
Eric couldn’t be bothered with him.
He walked silently over to the desk, sat down, put on the monitor headphones, and shut himself off from the world.
“Pizza’s here,” AK called from the hallway.
“Then let’s eat first. Everybody take a break.” Pablo threw Old Joe a look, then pointed at Alex.
“You. With me.”
He led Alex out, took a box off the stack in the hall, and handed Muffler back his change.
“Idiot. Take it,” he said, then went down the corridor and opened the door of the office at the far end.
“Sit.”
He put the pizza on the big desk, pointed Alex at the chair across from it, and then took a seat on the corner himself.
He waited for Alex to sit down.
“What’s your plan?”
“Uh…”
Alex pulled himself together.
“I don’t quite follow. What plan?”
“Copyright. The lyrics. Management. All of it.” Pablo took out his cigarette holder and fitted a cigarette into it.
“The song is good. Mm — it’s very good. I’m high on you. All you need right now is one person to walk you into this business.”
“Right.”
Alex felt he was being led around by the nose.
In the car, this man had said the lyrics question had to be settled first.
So why skip it now and jump straight to the management deal?
“But I thought you said the copyright on the words had to be dealt with first?” Alex decided to play dumb.
“Of course. We’ll talk about that first.”
Pablo gestured with the holder.
“You don’t know this world, so at first glance you think I’m being a bully. Let me tell you, this is absolutely necessary. Lil Lori has to appear as a writer on those lyrics, or it isn’t his song at all, and if it isn’t his song you could put any rapper alive in that booth and get the same thing. The bar in this business is on the floor. Give people a sore spot to squeeze and there’ll be no end of nobodies trying to make a name dissing you — a shakedown with a microphone. And the radio DJs love it, a fight is good for ratings. So: I’ll pay you a buyout on the lyrics for Lori’s account. Name your price.”
Having said it, he got up, went to the window, lit the cigarette, and started smoking it slowly.
How the hell would I know the right price?
Alex swore at him privately.
Asking a total rookie to make the offer.
He looked at Pablo’s back and grew steadily more wary of the man.
“Uh — could I run this past a lawyer first?”
“God damn it!”
Pablo blew up.
“The fewer people who know about this, the safer it is, you understand me, boy?” He turned around and looked straight into Alex’s eyes.
“I have explained this to you twice. Don’t make me say it a third time.”
It read like a pressure tactic, standard negotiating stuff.
The old Alexander Song might well have folded under it.
But Alex was a good deal shrewder than that and knew that softness beats hardness.
“The way I hear it, a lawyer’s mouth is a whole lot safer than any of ours.”
Pablo’s eyes went dark.
“They’ve got… what’s it called… a duty of confidentiality—” Alex could feel that this time Pablo’s face had genuinely changed, and his own voice shook slightly.
Pablo moved through Black neighborhoods and was well received in them; men like that generally came with a gang somewhere behind them.
And on top of that he was Mexican.
The Latin American crews were a level of ruthlessness all their own.
In the neighborhood, dying really wasn’t much of a problem.
So what do I do?
Don’t panic. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
Money has to get spent somewhere—
Then, thank God, in the middle of Alex’s private war between heaven and man, Old Joe came twisting through the door humming the song to himself — the boast about how good a dead man’s hand-me-downs looked on him.
“Why isn’t anybody eating the pizza?” He took off the pink jacket, hung it on the coat stand, opened the box, pulled out a slice, and got his mouth around it.
He ate without taking his eyes off the score in his other hand.
“Hey! A Plus. What did you think of the way I did that passage? Give me some notes,” he said.
“Uh…”
Alex glanced at Pablo, who had sat back down, then shut his eyes and played the original back in his head.
“I think you could be more playful with it.”
“Playful? Meaning what?”
“It’s — um—” Alex stood up and acted a little of it out, copying the man in the video, both hands tugging at the front of an imaginary suit and turning up the collar.
“Something like that.”
“I got it, I got it.”
Old Joe finished the slice in a few bites and started singing again, stopping now and then to check something with Alex, enjoying himself completely.
Pablo looked over at Alex.
Alex wore an expression of perfect innocence.
“Joe.”
Pablo gave it a while and finally couldn’t take any more.
He stopped Old Joe and laid out where the two of them differed.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“Hmm.” Old Joe sat down behind the desk, considered it a moment, then said to Alex, “I want you to go find a lawyer you trust. Okay?”
“Oh! God!” Pablo shot to his feet and put both hands on his own head.
“This kid bought you off?”
“Please, let’s not make this more complicated than it is,” Old Joe said.
“My order’s already in at the tape plant. It’s only because you said you wanted another song that I held the master back instead of shipping it. We cannot drag this out. That master needs re-cutting and it needs to be at the factory as fast as possible, or I’m paying penalties I can’t afford.”
“You do not say that in front of A Plus. We have no agreement with him yet—” Pablo, entirely unbothered by Alex sitting right there, shouted at Old Joe.
“What you just said puts us in a terrible position with his lawyer!”
“I don’t mind.”
Old Joe spread his hands.
“I don’t care anymore. I’ve been carrying Lil Lori and Al in your hands for two years. I’m out of patience. I just want it finished. It’s time for this thing to either fly or flop. Understand?”
“Fuck!”
Pablo was so angry he slammed the door on his way out.
“Never mind him. Where were we? What else besides more playful?”
“Uh — could you also keep the breath noise down?”
“Yes, yes, no problem. I’m a professional, I’ve had hits before, don’t you underestimate me. Remind me about it when we go in.”
“Okay.”
“And then? What else should I watch for?”