Alex might have been worrying, but that evening Lori called the house himself and told Tony the shoot for his first music video was about to happen.
Ten days later, one o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, the four of them came out of the house.
Tony had one arm around a woman with a body on her.
The two of them stayed glued together the whole way, unable to walk in a straight line, and every so often a burst of frank sweet talk and laughter carried back to the people behind them.
“Bitch.”
Connie sneered at the outrageous backside swinging along in front of her, and leaned in to Alex.
“Look at that nasty butt. It was definitely not that big when she was with Tony before. Who even knows how many men’s beds she’s climbed into since they broke up.”
Alex, with Emily’s small hand in his, smiled and said nothing.
Men and women out here kept things messy.
Splitting up and getting back together was as routine as eating and drinking.
Tony had made one phone call, and the second his ex-girlfriend heard there was a chance to get her face in a music video she had “changed her mind about him.”
No wonder Connie was in a mood.
Still, Alex was a month into this life now, and he had Tony’s character pretty well mapped — a blunt instrument with a surprisingly fine edge on it.
It wasn’t at all clear who was playing with whose feelings here.
The group crossed the street and arrived under the sign for the dance studio.
Muffler was posted at the door in a pair of cowboy-movie sunglasses, with AK holding the other side.
“Hey now — look at this. Look who it is. I almost couldn’t recognize the man!”
Tony went straight at him with it, and Muffler answered with a bashful little smile.
“All right, all right, let’s move it along. We’ve only got the place rented until five, and this block is no kind of safe after dark.”
With the hellos out of the way, AK produced a stack of paperwork and dealt it out neatly, one to each of them.
Alex looked over the sheet that had been pressed into his hand.
A release for the use of his likeness in the video, as far as he could tell.
“We’re not eighteen. Don’t we need a guardian’s consent to sign this?” He genuinely wasn’t sure.
“Will you die if you don’t talk?”
Tony waved the question away, flipped the pen into Alex’s hand, tapped a finger against his own temple and said to AK, “Don’t mind him. He’s got a problem up here lately.”
AK clapped Alex on the shoulder and explained, smiling, “Nobody cares about the small stuff like that.”
While Alex signed, he turned back to Tony.
“Once you’re inside, help A.l. keep order. Once we’re officially rolling, everything comes from the director.”
“Don’t worry about a thing. I got it.”
Tony led the way in, stopping to kiss his ex-girlfriend on the cheek again.
“You hear that? As of today, your man is in the entertainment industry.”
Connie rolled her eyes behind them.
Alex hadn’t stopped studying everything around him since his first day here.
Since public safety in the city had gone the way it had, Chicago had tightened up on permits for entertainment venues, especially any club licensed to sell liquor.
Which meant that behind every one of these rooms stood somebody who ate off both sides of the law and took his cut every single day.
From the obvious seventies-and-eighties hippie graffiti along the entry hall, the mottled, unrepaired fixtures, the faint smell of urine in the corners, and the old-fashioned dance floor sitting in the middle of the room, Alex was fairly sure this “dance studio” had been a disco once.
After it had been run dry, somebody had converted it into a place to teach dance.
Apart from the director and a handful of crew fussing over the equipment, twenty or thirty young men and women were already out on the floor moving to the music.
The mood in the room was good.
What was playing was Lori’s rap album.
Alex’s first impression of it…
honestly wasn’t good.
It was rap, sure, but Lori’s tracks were noticeably more ordinary than what the radio played, and the words especially.
Best not to get into the words.
A.I.
was waving at him from the DJ booth.
“Come here!”
Tony jogged over.
A.I.
hung a pair of monitor headphones around his neck.
“Don’t touch any of the settings. All you need to remember is this volume knob. When I give you the signal—” He walked him through a few simple moves.
“Got it!”
Tony put the headphones on, thrilled, and immediately started working his shoulders to the music way past what the music called for, hands hovering over the board, doing a full impression of the man.
“Hey! Aren’t you Tony?”
The instant Al walked off, a young girl with a heavy paint job was leaning over the booth.
“You remember me? I’m in eleventh—”
“Bitch!”
The ex-girlfriend was already cursing and moving in to plant her flag.
Alex took it all in, and thought about Muffler out front in his sunglasses, acting like somebody.
Ten days ago these two had been a pair of whipped dogs who’d just been run off the football team.
Look at them now.
So Tony’s “career” plan is a complete success, he thought.
“We’re up!”
Connie’s whole attention had been on the dance floor, and when she saw Al already assigning positions she grabbed Alex and Emily and hurried them over.
“Hey — A Plus!” A.l.
winked at Alex.
Well.
Ten days, and the nickname had reached everybody.
Connie got what she wanted and ended up standing with Alex in a prominent spot.
Tony’s ex leaned in off to one side, and Emily and a few kids her own age were placed in the front row.
“Everybody! Everybody!”
The director was the only white person in the building today.
With the camera set, he stood behind it and shouted with his arms wide.
A.l.
snapped his fingers at Tony, and Tony killed the music.
“When we start rolling, every pair of eyes comes to me—” The director launched into his list of instructions.
This was the cheapest kind of video there was, really.
The singer sings up front, the people behind him move to the music, and that’s the whole production.
“Okay. Ready to go.” Done talking, he went back and put his eye to the viewfinder.
Several high-powered fill lights came on at once.
Tony brought the music back up on A.l.’s signal.
“Action!” the director shouted.
Whatever was in the water out here, Alex thought, look at them: everybody moved like that, everybody could make it up as they went, and the floor got hotter by the second.
“Cut!” The director stopped them cold and the music died.
He pointed at Alex.
“You! Quit looking side to side! Find the beat! The beat!”
“Oh — okay, okay, sorry.” Alex had a feeling he was in for it.
Sure enough, a little while later the director called stop again.
Alex again.
“You. Back row!”
“Cut!”
Alex was starting to get irritated, because he couldn’t dance, and the crowd smelled of perfume mixed with a room’s worth of excitement, and he couldn’t get a good breath.
“Forget it, I’m not dancing.” He simply walked off the floor and withdrew to a spot near Tony.
“You got a problem! You got a serious problem!” Tony glared at him, exasperated rather than angry.
“You think chances like this come around a lot?”
Alex shrugged.
“I’m just not very comfortable at this kind of thing.”
Lucky for the director, Lori turned up at the edge of the floor right then and pulled everyone’s attention off the delay.
“Everybody welcome — Lil Lori!” A.l.
boomed, working the room.
Every young woman in the place started screaming.
Lil Lori had been made up, and cleaned up sharp in his clothes.
He wasn’t like the other rappers: no tattoos, nothing that flew any gang’s colors.
Nothing in his lyrics about killing anybody or moving anything, no bragging about what he did to women, and not more than a few swear words in the whole album.
Self-centered aside, Alex thought well of him.
Lil Lori took the center spot, and the director announced that they were officially rolling.
It hadn’t felt this way out on the basketball court, but as a spectator Alex found that time barely moved at all.
“I’m going out for some air,” he told Tony.
Tony had the headphones on and was moving to the beat, eyes fixed on Al out in the middle of the floor.
He hadn’t forgotten that A.l.
had told him to watch for the signal, and he was concentrating like his life depended on it.
But A.l.
was busy at the moment.
A.l.
handled the beatboxing side of the act — imitating drums and whatever other instruments were needed with his mouth, a thing that seemed to be in fashion now.
He stood beside Lori and fired it straight at the camera.
Not that any of it was live, of course.
The whole thing was lip-synced.
So Alex slipped out of the camera’s line and went out alone — except he misremembered the direction, followed the corridor the wrong way, and ended up walking into an office somewhere in the back of the building.
“The DJs in all the major cities got our unofficial album in the mail. You want to know what they said back.”
The voice coming through the office door was an enormous bass.
“Go ahead,” said someone else.
“Philby in Philadelphia says if a man sings like a little girl, looks like a little girl, and writes lyrics like a little girl, then he is a little girl. Luke in Miami says he refuses to admit this is rap music. BOI in Atlanta told us to stay up north and eat shit. New York says the music coming out of a Brooklyn garbage can is better than ours. Los Angeles mailed us back a stack of records — said we should listen to some real music!”
“Whose fault is that? You never listen to me. I’m your agent. My plan was to build the reputation in Chicago first, and then nationally—”
“There is no reputation! The DJs in Chicago play me for my rep and my money!”
“Then we give Philadelphia money too. We give New York money—”
“Fuck! That is a bottomless pit! And it’s too late for money now. Money could only have kept them from being the first ones to jump out and play the villain. Those shameless bastards who make a living stomping a man when he’s down, they jump out the second they smell blood. Laugh at Lori, laugh at you, laugh at me, laugh at all of it!”
“Then… we leave them alone. When the video’s out we push hard at the young women. Girls love Lori’s image.”
“That’s all that’s left to do. But my label is a small business and I can’t carry any more big risk. The first run of cassettes is cut to five thousand, Chicago only. Vinyl and CDs are on hold. We’ll make a plan for after the video’s had its run on TV.”
“Fuck! Five thousand? That’s surrendering before the battle. That’s admitting we’re finished!”
“We are finished!”
“No. Ten thousand, minimum. Any dog off the street can sell ten thousand records these days.”
“Six thousand.”
“Eight thousand—”
“Seven thousand. Fuck! Why the hell are the two of us standing here haggling over this?”