Joey Cloudy online

chapter 11

TRAMP: A Song Ain’t Nothing But A Poem Set To Music

– Hank Williams

Xavier had been working security here since they renovated the Santa Fe building and turned the old warehouse into lofts. The place had been renovated with the help of taxpayers’ dollars for Dallas’ burgeoning urban chic. It was an attempt to lure a certain demographic from the suburbs. The children whose parents had fled to the suburbs following the successful implementation and enforcement of civil rights laws during the 1960s and 1970s.

They had grown up hating the suburbs and unlike their parents. Most had fewer of their irrational fears of living Downtown near black and brown people. The economic engine that fueled the city was growing fast and drawing Fortune 500 corporations. They were happy to relocate their corporate headquarters in the state of Texas. That was because of generous tax breakers and the nearly complete absence of organized labor.

The people who followed the companies down from larger more progressive urbane cities such as New York and Chicago weren’t as bigoted as the locals. They didn’t have the same deep-seated paranoia and hatred of blacks and Mexicans. They had prejudices, but they were more directed at Armenians or Puerto Ricans and Indians, depending on what part of the country they’re from. The Yankees and the young suburbanites were accustomed to living in the city. For the kids from the ‘burbs, Dallas was where the clubs, bars, and parties were. The city is where you wanted to be.

They had grown up traveling to the city to party in the west end before it became as Disneyfied as Las Vegas. After the mega-corporations came in the late eighties and pushed out the mob legally. When corporate raiders forced the old Italian mob families to the fringes of the gaming industry in a series of hostile takeovers, the gun-toting gangsters were out, and the mob with economic muscles was in, as the briefcase-toting gangsters with business accounting and computer degrees. Those poor old-school pin-striped Guido’s never had a prayer once Wall Street smelled all of that sweet green money.

Xavier saw the man dressed in black jeans and a black long-sleeved dress shirt and wraparound sunglasses, wave, and buzzed him in right away. Aaron walked through the big glass double doors into the foyer of the Santa Fe Lofts. The man in black was his boy, Aaron. He guessed he was going to see his friend’s girl, that tall drink of water up on the eighth floor, the lawyer, what’s her name, Tavah Frankfurt.

Xavier had been working as a security guard ever since he had been discharged after his tour in Somalia. He had only done two years in the army before he received a medical discharge after he had caught some shrapnel in the leg. An RPG struck near his unit’s position on a routine patrol of the airport’s perimeters where he was stationed. He had spoken to Aaron on several occasions briefly, and he had asked where he got his ALICE pack from. Aaron confessed that he stole it just before he was discharged from the Marine Corps. They both got a laugh outta that one.

If Aaron was on his way into the building and he saw Xavier outside taking a smoke break, he would always come over and give a brother some dap. He would smoke a square himself and shoot the shit for a minute. Aaron had even given him a pack of squares one night when he was out. He had arrived early to see Tavah and asked if he wanted to smoke a cigarette with him out front while he waited. When Xavier told him that he was out, he took out one cigarette and gave him the rest of the nearly full pack.

“Hey, if we don’t watch each other’s back, ain’t nobody else gonna do it.”

Xavier had told his wife about Aaron, and she went off. “Don’t come in here telling me that yo boy is cool, ‘cause ain’t nothing cool about no nigga’ fucking a white bitch, not when there’s millions of single beautiful black women all over this goddamned country can’t find a man. The ones who ain’t in jail are dope fiends, and the ones who ain’t crackheads are queer. Why is it every time one of you sorry black assed motherfuckers manages to get any kind of education, the first thang y’all all do is abandon your own for the first pale bitch that winks her blue eyes at you? Niggas like that mutha fucka ain’t about shit. He’d fuck a refrigerator if you painted it white.”

Xavier didn’t argue with her, even though he didn’t agree with her and all the other sisters out there who thought they were the dick police. He didn’t see the point of hating on somebody because you didn’t approve of who they were fucking. Like a grown-ass nigga was supposed to call a meeting on Oprah to get some goofy-assed two-faced ho’s approval before he decided to take a woman out. Shit, what folks did with other folks was none of nobody else’s goddamned business. As far as he was concerned, that was their personal business.

The whole thing seemed even more stupid because he could tell that Aaron had been one of those nerdy-assed brothers with his head in a book all the time when he was a kid. The kind of kid that they all used to pick on for fun or beat up when they were kids. Even now, he could tell that sisters like his old lady wouldn’t be interested in a goddamned thing a brother like Aaron had to say. The brother didn’t sport no bling; his grill was raggedy, and he stomped around in those broken-down old kicks all the time.

The nigga didn’t even have a car. Most of the time, he showed up in a cab or on foot. His wife’s attitude toward Aaron reminded him of the time he went to his cousin’s house and asked to play with his cousin’s new remote-controlled car when he was a kid. When his cuz’ told him no, Xav started playing with the empty box, and when his cousin saw him having fun with something he had just thrown away, he wanted the box then. Aaron was like that box to his wife, a piece of trash that they had thrown away that they now wanted back, now that someone else was playing with it.

Aaron had corrected him when he had asked if he was on his way to see his girlfriend. He told him that she was just a friend, but Xavier didn’t really believe men and women could be just friends, at least not and hang as tight as Aaron and Tavah did. There were other guys who came by to see Tavah, but not very often. Sometimes the brother was here so much he wondered why they didn’t just quit fucking around and move in together.

He could tell by how comfortable they were with each other that they were close, and they just seemed like a couple to him. He figured they were just keeping things on the cool. Maybe ole girl’s kinfolk wouldn’t approve of their baby girl having a black man for a lover, or maybe she was cool with getting dicked down by the brother but didn’t want her business in the streets. Hell, everybody that saw them together assumed that they were a couple. Who were they fooling?

Aaron was cool with Xavier. The brother always looked you in the eye. It was his way of acknowledging your humanity, not like the few other stuck-up motherfucking Nigga’rows who would come through here with their rich white friends, looking at him like he was beneath them or pretending that he wasn’t there, as if somehow they were embarrassed by him when they entered and exited the building. He knew that Aaron was a writer, a poet who worked in an art gallery. He had even seen Aaron come in a few times with his little boy, Ahmaad, and you could tell by how well-behaved the boy was that Aaron didn’t put up with any shit when it came to his kids.

When Aaron told Xavier that he was a poet, Xavier confessed that he didn’t know jack shit about poetry.

“You listen to music, don’t you?” asked Aaron, his tone suddenly growing more serious as he looked hard at Xavier.

“Sure, I like old school hip hop mostly.”

“You can tell if it’s good poetry if it survives alone. If the lyrics keep their power without the music, then it’s poetry.”

Xavier took a drag on his square as he listened intently to the brother standing next to him. They both leaned back against the rough brick wall, looking out towards the Mickey D’s across the street from the parking lot of the building, taking it all in. There was an earnest certainty in his tone. He cocked his head to the right as he stared at Xavier for an uncomfortably long minute. Then Aaron quoted DMX, his voice suddenly lower and harsher, full of raging love of the words, meaning,

“Cause I got love for my nigga’s,

I shed blood for my nigga’s,

anybody talking ’bout where my nigga,

all you gotta say is right here my nigga.”

Xavier stood stunned into silence.

“Well, if you know the words to a song, then you know a poem. Like Hank Williams said, ‘A song ain’t nothing but a poem set to music.’”

Xavier knew lots of songs. For reasons unknown, it felt good knowing the lyrics that he carried around in his head were poems.

-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.