Once the thing was down in black and white and signed, Alex and Daniel talked one on one for a long time, and Alex came away from it a good deal richer than the check in his pocket.
Calling it a conversation undersold it.
It was more like being taken apart and reassembled.
Ever since the Revelation had landed in his head, the whole of his thinking had run along one narrow groove: study hard, keep his head down, let the gift dig up his first pot of gold, and then step out into the open and enjoy a comfortable life.
Daniel told him how it actually went.
Among the stars of this industry, the ones who came out the far end of fame still solvent were a tiny minority.
Most of them spent everything they had and more, and a great many of them died young, with liquor and pills and powder all working on them at once.
You get drunk, for instance, and a close friend hands you a document, and you sign it, and your name is quietly no longer on a piece of property — or is suddenly on an enormous debt.
One unremarkable one-night stand, and months later you’re in a courtroom answering a rape accusation you know to be false.
Either you pay a great deal of money to settle it privately and carry the reputation for the rest of your life, or you pay a great deal more to lawyers to win your name back, and then collapse anyway, body and mind, under the endless hearings and the media barrage.
Or the woman keeps the baby on purpose, and you’re looking at eighteen years of support payments at the high end of the scale and a standing invitation to be squeezed.
Or you pick up one of the new venereal diseases and you’re dead in a few years.
For a Black star out of the projects, the unresolved relationship with the gangs was a bomb under the floorboards.
Growing up in that place, you were tangled up with them whether you chose it or not; and that same background made you a permanent object of interest to every law-enforcement agency in the state.
Get famous, then make a single mistake, and where a white man of the same standing would spend money and make the trouble go away, you would go to prison.
Greedy relatives and childhood friends.
Small-time hustlers who got in through every crack.
Big-time hustlers who came down from Wall Street in packs.
Agents, managers, lawyers, accountants.
The gun somebody left in your car; the drugs somebody left in your room.
The tax return you didn’t mean to get wrong.
The sentence you didn’t mean to say.
Not one of those things, on its own, would fail to be enough to kill him.
Which meant he needed energy, self-control, judgment and wariness far beyond the ordinary man’s — further, in fact, than a white man in the same position would ever need.
And at the same time as he laid out how mined the road was, Daniel also told him that in an age turning steadily toward equality and correctness, his skin was going to hand him advantages he could collect on.
The price of collecting them was that he had to understand, thoroughly, how American politics and American social life actually operated, and he had to have the manners and the mobility to work inside them.
Keep your head down all the way to the top?
No such road existed.
A quiet boy with good grades was a nerd and a target.
It was the leader with good grades who was worth anything.
Take this BMI membership, for example.
“If you want an organization like BMI to move faster, you have to apply pressure, and the race card is an excellent instrument of pressure. Which means you have to understand how to actually deliver that pressure — through politics, and through public opinion.” Visit novelping.com for the full chapter.
“And besides money, there’s one other thing Americans love.
Think of it like the points they give you at the supermarket.
Supermarket points buy you merchandise.
Save up enough of these and people will trade them for money, for power, for friendship, for attention, for a feeling of having risen above themselves.
Look at the rich people who’ll put a hundred thousand dollars into a charity dinner in New York and then spend a fortune flying to Africa and back just to hand out schoolbags.
Why don’t they simply buy a few hundred thousand plastic schoolbags and ship them?
Because the point isn’t the schoolbags.
It’s the picture of the bag going into the child’s hands.
The rich man spends his points on moral satisfaction and prestige.
A celebrity spends them on goodwill from the public and the press.
A high school student spends them on a line in a college application that says he does community work.”
“There are a hundred ways to earn points and a hundred ways to spend them. But remember this: the only real winner is the man who becomes a source of points for other people.”
Under Daniel’s instruction, Alex rewrote his plans for his life.
Then he went back to school and, first thing, went to find the music teacher.
“Alex! So you’re the A Plus who wrote that thrift-shop song. You did a wonderful job. Congratulations — and you kept every one of us completely in the dark.”
That was her opening line.
“Thank you. And I mean that,” Alex said.
“Everything I know about music I learned from you. I never imagined the song would go anywhere. Lori is my cousin’s best friend — we’re around each other all the time — and I wrote it for him on a whim, and then… sometimes a beautiful thing just happens to you, all at once, like a dream. And when I came out of the dream there was a voice in me telling me to thank God, and to thank a lot of people. In this school you were the first person I thought of. Without your help and your encouragement there is no me standing here.”
The music teacher laughed.
“Nonsense. I teach all of my students exactly the same way, and you’re the only one who’s made anything of it. That’s personal talent, nothing else.”
“You’re too generous.” Alex was the picture of humility.
“Actually, I had wanted to thank you somewhere more fitting. Because of the song, BMI — Broadcast Music, Incorporated — has agreed to take me in as a member. They were going to hold a small ceremony for it, nothing grand, a few folding chairs in the gymnasium, you know the kind of thing. But unfortunately—”
He arranged his face with some care into a rueful half-smile.
“Oh?” Her interest came up sharply.
“Why isn’t it happening?”
“It’s… hard to say. Something’s stuck somewhere in their process. To be honest, it feels a little like racism to me,” Alex said.
“Racism!” Her eyes went wide.
“It’s only a feeling. But — you know how it is, we’re very sensitive to it, you can sort of smell—” Alex shrugged.
“I was going to go to the principal about it.”
“We’re going right now.” She pulled him out of his chair.
“There is nothing to hesitate about where discrimination is concerned. Now. Come on.”
So he was marched to the principal’s office by his music teacher.
The principal was an old Black man, bald as an egg, and he heard Alex’s account out with great patience.
“They arranged a small ceremony, and then deliberately stalled it.” New chapters come out on g.com first.
He picked up his phone.
“This is not a thing we tolerate. I understand exactly. There are certain white—” He glanced at the white music teacher and changed gears.
“In institutions as old as BMI you very often find racists of the old school buried in the machinery.”
Alex had no idea which social connection he was calling.
When the call was finished the principal smiled at him.
“So the man who wrote the thrift-shop song has been sitting in my school this whole time. What grade are you in? And how old — good Lord. A fifteen-year-old composer and a member of BMI. Yes. That does require a ceremony. Anything you need, you ask me.”
“About that.” Alex said, “My agent suggested I ask whether you could get our district’s elected representative to help. He also told me to write a letter to one of the affirmative-action organizations here in Chicago.”
“Very good thinking. I’ll call Congressman Underwood — he’ll be glad to help with this. As for the affirmative-action people, better that you contact them yourself, personally. Son, you’ve got a good agent. Let me give you an address and a phone number. They keep an office at the University of Chicago.”
Between the music teacher and the principal, Alex executed Daniel’s idea to perfection.
Maybe too perfectly.
Once this gets big enough, is BMI going to hate me for it?
They didn’t actually do anything…
He drummed his fingers uneasily.
He came out of the principal’s office, said goodbye to the music teacher in the hall — and then found himself blocked by two gangbangers in the corridor.
“Yo. A Plus.” One of them sidled up.
“You the one wrote Lil Lori’s song?”
“Yeah.” The reborn Alex did not so much as blink.
“So let’s talk about you writing one for my boy here.” He pointed at the other one.
“His rap is nice too.”
Alex shoved him in the chest.
“You serious? Huh?” He took the initiative, put his forehead against the other boy’s forehead, and stared straight into his eyes.
“You know I wrote a song for Lil Lori and you don’t know to ask who my boss is? Huh? You ever hear of the Bobcats out this way? Huh? And you’re gonna stand in front of me?”
The kid backed up, and Alex kept shoving until he had him against the wall.
“You want me to write you a song? Huh? Your rap is nice?” He turned and started on the second one the same way.
Both of them ran.
Alex wanted to put his hands on his hips and laugh out loud.
Unfortunately, joy has a way of curdling.
When he turned his head he saw the cheerleading goddess coming down the hallway straight at him — and at the far end of the same hallway, the football team’s defensive forward, already warming up his knuckles.
“Fuck.”
Panic bred invention.
He took three quick steps toward a group of girls walking past, picked out the one most pleasing to look at, and said, “Hey. Can I get to know you?” In the service of not getting beaten half to death, he was prepared to work hard.