Joey Cloudy online

chapter 16

TRAMP: Organic Art

“I’m sorta doing what Trevor did in ‘thump thump thump’ and Brandon did in ‘Burning The Effigy Of Kyle Vaughn’ and you did in your poem ‘Prayer’ but I didn’t really think about it, it just sort of happened on its own you know you were there you understand my methodology.”

“I especially like the way you exploited linguistic ambiguity, and the way you play with assonance and the deliberate misdirection created by your line breaks, the lost and found meter that you weave in and out of as you seem to twist organically from prose to free verse.”

“Thanks, he said, squashing his cigarette butt in the ashtray, before taking a sip of coffee. I was thinking about how Monk used to play all the wrong notes and make it sound right.”

“Who’s Monk?”

“Thelonious S. Monk, the discordant jazz musician.”

“I don’t really know anything about jazz.”

“T. S. Monk is to jazz what cats like Bartok and Glass are to classical music.”

“I’m sorry but I’m still not really understanding what you’re saying. I’ve never heard of Bartok or Glass.”

Aaron lowered his head and sighed.

Mona had observed how he had developed over the last few years since she had first met him. Aaron had come a long ways from the reserved bookish little bohemian painter he had been when they first met on campus. It was the empathic way he seemed to anticipate her needs as if his being and her being were silently ringing in the same psychic frequency. It was this sensation of resonance that she found so addictive, so…comforting. Aaron was evolving, becoming something radically unlike anything he had been before.

Funny, she thought, sitting here looking at him, Aaron seemed unconscious of the metamorphosis, and other than in his writing, he wasn’t acting any differently. But, you could sense it when you were close to him in the warmth that most experienced when they were near him. She had read about something like this in the demeanor of spiritual beings, and he did now carry himself with an almost monkish bearing that emitted a holy quintessence when he was near you. She was wrong about him before; this was something far beyond the power of the Alpha.

Mona had been with Aaron both times this last week when complete strangers had approached him on the street and asked him if he was an actor or a rapper, one was a talent scout or agent for major record labels. The first time was at the Zen Sufi reading at the Cosmic Café restaurant when Ron Williams asked him to come on his TV talk show.

The second time was at the bus stop as you exited the Mockingbird station at City Place. A middle aged conservatively groomed black man in a designer suit walked by them on his down the steps to the underground parking. Mona saw the suit checking Aaron out as he sat there, oblivious as usual, writing in one of his black composition books while they waited on the bus. She had gotten used to people staring at Aaron; he didn’t look like a Greek god or anything, but no matter how crowded the room you would notice him, and you would definitely remember him.

She just assumed the suit with the Rolex and Caesar cut was gay, the way his stride slowed as he stared while walking by before he disappeared from sight into the stairwell that led down to the underground parking beneath the City Place pink stone high-rise offices. As the suit exited the submerged parking lot in a brand new burgundy Jaguar, he parked the car in front of the bus stop. The suit got out of the car and came over to speak with Aaron.

“Pardon me but, are you a rapper?”

“No.”

Aaron replied as he peered up over the top of his shades, obviously annoyed at the interruption.

“I’m a painter.”

He added somewhat indignantly.

“And a poet.”

He hated it when people automatically relegated him to the only acceptable position for articulate black men in America: rapper, preacher, and stand-up comedian. She remembered the woman in Highland Park who had seen Ahmad when he was only seven or eight years old, and after asking him how old he was, as she and Aaron hung a large turn-of-the-century oil painting in the living room of her Mac Mansion.

She commented on how tall he was and asked if he was going to be a basketball player when he grew up. Aaron could have spit flames at the condescending old cunts remark, but Ahmaad replied without hesitation that he was planning on attending either Stanford or Yale when he went to college, but that he hadn’t decided whether to major in political science or philosophy. The dilettante’s plastic lifted face slid off, fell to the floor, and shattered into a thousand humiliated pieces. Aaron couldn’t have been prouder of his son than he was at that moment.

Most of Aaron’s friends had majored in poli-sci or philosophy. Aaron and his ex-wife, Satan, were grooming him for college since birth. The suit could see that he had said something to offend Aaron, but he continued on undaunted, surprised by the sound of Aaron’s voice. White people were always surprised when they heard him speak, but this guy was obviously well educated and as articulate as Aaron. The suit explained that he was an agent and that he was always on the lookout for talent before he gave Aaron his business card.

“Please, call me. I trust my intuition and I think we should work on something together.”

Aaron placed the card in his pocket without even looking at it.

“I’m serious contact my office when you have time. I would like to hear your poetry. I represent some of the biggest acts in hip hop.”

The suit climbed back into the drivers seat of his rented Jaguar, Mona watched as he drove away knowing Aaron would never call the guy.

“How do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Get people to ask you to be on their TV shows and ask you if you want a recording contract.”

“It’s no big deal, the guy’s just some slimy fucking corporate suit.”

“Well, nobody has ever asked me to be on TV, and now you’ve been approached by people in the television and radio business twice this week.”

“Three times, actually, some chick gave me her card downtown the other day, claimed she was a talent scout for one of the big record companies. Probably a convention in town.”

“Did you call her?”

“No.”

“Jeez, I can’t believe you.”

“I’m not a rapper.” He said with a shrug and a grin.

“Well, nobody is approaching me while I’m walking down the street asking if they can represent me.”

“It’s no big deal.”

“It’s no big deal! I don’t even want to tell you what men say to me when they see me walking down the street.”

“I know what these people want: idiotic rhymed couplets, the saggy pants, ghetto boy grill, cliché gangster rapper posturing, and I ain’t interested. That’s not who I am.”

“People treat you as if you were Tyler Durden.”

Aaron didn’t believe in fate; he knew that your life, your future, was in your own hands. And if you ever wondered why your life was the way it was, you need only think of everything that you had done before, because that is what led you to this present where you now stood knee deep in imaginary blood atop the place of the skulls. Life had no meaning except that which we assigned to it. We become our history before it becomes ours.

Aaron looked out across the freeway at the cityscape, the skyscrapers rising up hundreds of babble-filled towers. He noticed a discarded lottery ticket on the sidewalk near the bench where they sat. He didn’t play the lottery; he believed that luck was a finite resource like the nine lives of a cat, and he would not waste his on a pile of useless money. He was saving it for the real treasure held by one of the nine muses, the only one of the sisters he knew by name, his sweet dominatrix Calliope.

-about the author

JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals: Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, TX.