B-Sides and Remixes, page 1
B-Sides and Remixes
A Novel
Ran Walker
All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author. The author may be reached via his website, www.ranwalker.com.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
© 2011 Randolph Walker, Jr.
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Images used courtesy of Pixabay.com.
Cool Empire Press
For Elle
SIDE A
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
7. Date One
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
10. Date Two
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
14. Date Three
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Other Books By Ran Walker
Acknowledgments
About the Author
1
“Page forty-nine,” J says. He tosses the magazine on the counter, barely able to hide his smile, then grabs the stool next to mine.
“What are you talking about?” I ask. I stare at the beautiful black model on the cover. “Soul Sista? Dude, you know this is a women’s magazine, right?”
“Page forty-nine,” J repeats.
Opening the magazine, I laugh when I see a picture of myself at the front of the eligible bachelor feature. I had agreed to do this so long ago that it had slipped my mind. In the amount of time it took for them to actually run the issue, I could have long since met Miss Right—not that I had, but I just could have.
“Cool, this is exactly what we needed, man. Maybe now we can get the word out about this place on a national level,” J says, hovering over me while I scan the profile.
That was our hope, assuming the profile ever ran. We were barely getting by, and if things didn’t pick up soon, we would probably have to explore our exit options—not that we didn’t plan to go out swinging like Ken Griffey, Jr., though.
When I see the words “co-founder of C&J’s Rare Grooves, Harlem” beneath my picture, I smile. In the grand scope of things, this is a relatively small coup, but with our micro-budget for advertising, publicity is better than any ad we could run.
“Look here,” I say to J, pointing at the page. “Out of all the stuff I answered in the profile, this is all they printed: ‘My dream woman would embody the lyrics of a Stevie Wonder song.’”
J nods. “Yo, that’s hot.”
“Dude, I said a lot more than that, but they trimmed most of it out.”
“Come on, Cool. It’s like twenty-something other guys in this section. They couldn’t make you the only brotha on the list. Trust me. You still get to be ‘the man’ for a month. Don’t sweat it. They just better be glad they didn’t put my ass up in that piece.”
I chuckle. “J, you might’ve been too direct.”
“I definitely wouldn’t have said that smooth shit you said. I would’ve been like, ‘Just hook a brother up with YaYa Da Costa and I’m straight.’”
“Where’s the poetry in that?” I offer.
“I’ll leave the poetry to Hill Harper-looking negroes like you.”
“I’m taller, dude.”
“Not from where I stand,” J laughs, while extending his six foot four inch frame.
Scanning the bachelor section, I see all kinds of brothas: the dressed-to-impress brotha, the Morris Chestnut-type brotha, the Christopher Williams-type brother, a Wesley or two, a rookie pro athlete, an R&B singer looking for a contract, and me, the entrepreneur. I almost don’t fit into this group. My t-shirt and jeans are the simplest of the lot, and while I might look decent enough for women to not ask why the hell I was on the page in the first place, I know I was selected primarily to rep for the business brothas, not the model brothas.
I close the magazine and put it under the counter. “What time is Ray-Ray coming in?”
“He called in saying he had to drive his girl to the dentist. She’s getting her wisdom teeth taken out or something.”
“Does he even own a car?”
“Shit, I don’t know,” J says, reaching under the counter for the magazine and continuing to scan the issue.
“If you ever give me the green light, you know I’m gonna kick that brotha to the curb,” I say.
Ray-Ray has been the subject of a never-ending discussion between J and me. The only reason he is even here is because J feels we need to have one actual employee in order for us to consider ourselves legit entrepreneurs. Apparently, if you have no one to call you “boss,” then what’s the point?
Even if we needed an employee, I thought we could do a lot better than Ray-Ray’s silly ass, but every time J mentioned that no one else would take a job with so little money and keep coming around, I had to just nod and agree. It was clear that Ray-Ray couldn’t live off of what we were paying him. Hell, we were barely getting by ourselves.
“The new website launches this Friday. This merch shit better work or we’ll have to see if we can keep the doors open,” J says, not looking up from a picture of Kerry Washington.
I nod, scanning the space of our small shop. We have no customers and a room full of CDs, t-shirts, posters, and stickers. Lalah Hathaway’s heavy, raspy voice sings “For Always” through the speakers in the upper corners of the shop.
“Dude,” I say. “Riddle me this: why in the world would we open a record shop in 2010? We must be the dumbest Morehouse Men in history.”
J looks up from the magazine. “Cool, you gotta have faith. This store might sell music, but make no mistake, brotha, this is much more than a record shop.”
Any brotha at the age of thirty who is still single is single for a reason. That’s not to say there was never “the one”—chances are there was—but something happened to mess everything up. And once a sista has whipped your heart like Denzel in Glory, it’s easy to shoot the deuces to the idea of true love.
My story went something like that.
I was a senior at Morehouse and head-over-heels in love with this sista from Spelman named Rhonda. This was the way I dreamed it would go down: we’d get married at Dansforth Chapel on Morehouse’s campus, the customary spot for “Spel-house” hook-ups, move to the outskirts of Charlotte, have some crumb-snatchers, and spend our days sipping sweet tea on the porch of a renovated antebellum house. Damn, I was naive. I don’t know which part stung the most: the fact that she was cheating on me with a football player from Georgia Tech or the fact that he had gotten her pregnant. I had been strapping up with her since day one—thank God—but she had been letting this other dude raw-dog her the entire time. Needless to say, that was the last serious relationship I had ever been in, and that was over nine years ago.
Not that there hadn’t been opportunities to have something serious with someone else along the way. I just didn’t want it. I’d be a fool if someone else got a chance to run that number on me again. It’s like they say, “First time, shame on you. Second time, shame on me.” And I’ll be damned if I have to sing that tune again.
One of the ironies about dating is that I can be honest about all of this up front. But no matter how many times I tell a woman that I don’t want anything serious, she keeps soldiering on under the mistaken assumption that she can be the one woman who can change my mind. It took a lot of experiences for me to get to this point, so it’s beyond me why anyone would think I just hadn’t met the right person. No, I had met her. It was just that she decided to do a number on me. And whether that’s holding all women guilty for something that one woman did, so be it. My pops used to say it’s okay to sleep with a snake…as long as you know where the head is.
When the editor from Soul Sista called about being one of their twenty-five most eligible bachelors, I was going to pass, but J was convinced it would be a good look for our business. He had said, “Cool, you see what being on a list like that does for actors in Hollywood? All we need is just a little bit of that at our store.” I guess in his mind he figured women would just trek up here to Harlem to look at the guy from the magazine profile and maybe buy a CD before they left.
I can’t blame him though. He coordinates the marketing for C&J’s Rare Grooves, so I’m just doing my part. But I hope no one really takes seriously the idea that I’m looking for that special someone, even if she does turn out to be the embodiment of a Stevie Wonder song.
2
The idea for C&J’s Rare Grooves didn’t originate in Harlem. It actually started in Atlanta.
During one of my trips down to the ATL for Morehouse’s homecoming weekend, I had heard about a small record shop in Little Five Points called Moods Music. Because my taste in music tends to stray from the radio, I was impressed to find that they carried so many neo-soul artists I had discovered only by downloading the occasional “grown & sexy”
I can still remember the day I submitted my letter of resignation to my boss, Grant Fields. At first he laughed.
“What the fuck is this?” he finally managed, when he saw I wasn’t laughing along with him.
“I’m leaving to start a business.”
He stared at me for a moment before leaning in closely, his eyes squinting. “You know there’s a non-compete clause in your employment contract.”
That had always bothered me when I went to work at the firm, but I suspected that I couldn’t work as an analyst forever, so I went along with it. Hearing Grant toss it back in my face irked me a little, but I shrugged it off.
“I’m opening a store with a friend.”
“Really?” Grant said, lightening up. “What are you going to sell?”
“Music. Soul music.”
Grant shook his head, his black moussed hair looking like a plastic helmet atop his pale face. “Good luck with that,” he offered sarcastically.
I started to tell him all of the things I had stored in the back of my mind for a day like this, all of the curse words and names I had come up with for him in the last eight years. Instead, I only muttered the word “fucker” under my breath as I turned away from him, and I seriously doubt he even heard it.
At least I was now free to explore my dream.
It had taken J and me a while to get everything set up, but now we’ve been open for about eight months. Business has been pretty dismal. It turns out that we found a niche market, but most of our market would rather buy their albums much cheaper on iTunes, and we can’t compete with that. Somewhere in the past few months we got the idea to create merchandise for the store and hired a freshman at Parsons to create a few designs. Now we’re moving just as much merchandise as we are music, which, while encouraging, isn’t saying much.
Just last week a woman dropped by the store looking for a Beyonce CD and wound up getting into an altercation with Ray-Ray in the process.
“Where y’alls Beyonce stuff at?” the woman huffed.
“We don’t carry Beyonce in here. This is a specialty shop for real soul music, lady.”
“Y’all ain’t got no Beyonce? What the hell kinda record store ain’t got no Beyonce?”
“We deal primarily with independent artists and smaller labels,” Ray-Ray said, sticking to the script we wrote for him for just this type of occasion.
“Y’all got all these black folks ain’t nobody ever heard of, and y’all ain’t got no Beyonce? Well, do y’all got some Chris Brown?”
“No Chris Brown either. We have some good stuff in here though. Ever heard of The Foreign Exchange?” Ray-Ray said.
“The Foreign who? Y’all trippin’ up in here. Y’all need some Beyonce or Chris Brown.”
Finally, Ray-Ray lost his cool. “If you want that pop shit, then take your ass down to K-Mart. They got plenty of it over there. Good prices, too.”
“Don’t tell me where to take my ass, motherfucker,” the woman started, before I came around the counter and apologized for Ray-Ray’s comment. I even offered her a free t-shirt, but she responded, “Y’all ain’t gonna have me out here in these streets advertising for y’all’s asses and y’all ain’t got no Beyonce!”
The biggest ray of light for C&J’s Rare Grooves in the days after Soul Sista hit the newsstand, though, was the mail the magazine forwarded me. Apparently, a lot of women were struck by that profile and a few went on to place orders online.
“See? That’s what I was saying,” J said, after he started to run the numbers. “I wish they could put your ass in every issue.”
We had a good laugh back then, but in these three weeks since the issue came out, we’ve moved more product this month than in the last three months combined.
Some of the letters included pictures, some like glamour shots, others of women standing on beaches in bathing suits. One of J’s favorite games is sorting through the various pictures telling me which ones I should make a play for. I don’t plan on following through on any of them, although some of them are pretty fine.
Most of the letters read the same way. Woman X is looking for a real man, one who can appreciate the delicate flower she is. (Okay, I’m being a little “extra” here.) Some of them even quoted lyrics from their favorite Stevie Wonder songs. One woman went so far as to record herself onto a CD singing “Overjoyed.” She didn’t sound too bad either, but I have no idea of what she plans for me to do with that CD. We’re a record store, not a record label.
J suggested that we send each of the women a flyer for the store, but I think that would be kind of crass. It seems like a poor consolation, if you ask me, especially if you had your hopes set on something more, like making a romantic connection.
I live in a one-bedroom apartment in a brownstone off of St. Nicholas, just a few blocks from the A/C 145th Street subway station. It’s a pretty decent neighborhood and becoming more gentrified by the day—but what part of Harlem isn’t these days? There are more whites than blacks on my block, and the look of 125th Street these days reminds all who visit that Bill Clinton still has a presence here.
Still beautiful Black faces of every shade abound, reminding me of the rich history of the area. But it’s much more than that. Harlem has a kind of spirit—energy—that permeates every crack in the sidewalk, ever light bulb in a sign, and every neighborhood stoop. Most of the people are good, hardworking people, and being from the South, I can appreciate that a great deal. But I’m no fool. I know that New York is not Mississippi and that there must be a reason for the bulletproof glass at the neighborhood Popeye’s Chicken.
How J and I both wound up in Harlem is a whole other story altogether. We were roommates in college and both accepted job offers on Wall Street. Although we both ended up moving to Harlem, we opted to get our own places. Still it’s ironic that we would go into business together. Now we see each other even more than we did in college. Yes, Julian Saddler a/k/a “J” is my brother, my right hand, my ace boon coon. I don’t think I would have ventured into entrepreneurship if he hadn’t been so persuasive. I’m glad that we decided to do it though. Even on days when we have only a handful of sales, it beats the long, intense hours of shuffling around non-disclosure agreements for various clients and preparing modified models for my bosses, based on the latest financial statements of whatever company I was assigned to work on. While the salary was good, if I did the math, with the number of hours I worked in any given week, I made slightly more than a manager at a fast food restaurant, and there was no job fulfillment at all.
Now, job fulfillment is about all that I do have.
“Chauncey, I saw your picture in the magazine. All of the women at the church are talking about it. Even that Edith Hopper—you know the girl who just finished up at Meharry Medical College. I’m telling you, you gotta settle down at some point. May as well be with a doctor,” my mother says, barely taking a breath between sentences.
I squeeze my cell phone tighter and try not to roll my eyes. “We’ll see,” I offer as a consolation.
“You ain’t getting no younger, boy. By the time you give me some grandchildren, I’ll be so old I can’t do nothing with ‘em.”
