King Suckerman Read online

  “Hey, Rasheed!”

  “Yeah.” Rasheed, not looking up, standing behind the counter, tagging LPs with the price gun, mouthing the words to Curtis Mayfield’s “Back to the World” as it came at three-quarter volume through the house KLMs. That was the other thing about Rasheed: always playing the music too loud in the shop. At least he had Curtis on the platter, though. The boy had enough good sense for that.

  “I’m not gonna tell you again about moving Hendrix into Soul. I’m getting tired—”

  “I hear you, boss.” Copping to it, but still not looking up.

  “See that you do hear me, man.”

  “Solid.”

  “Just see that you do,” said Clay, turning his back.

  Rasheed said, “I guess you ain’t heard Band of Gypsys, then.”

  There it was. Clay closed his eyes, breathed deep. He stared at the Rufusized poster on the wall, let his eyes linger on Chaka Khan—man, she was fine—to make himself relax. “I heard it. So what?”

  “With Buddy Miles on the sticks? Jimi steps up and plays some serious funk, no question. ‘Machine Gun’ and all that. So now you gonna make the claim his catalog don’t belong in Soul? Cause you know funk was where he was headed when—”

  “What you think you are, man, the Amazing Kreskin, some bullshit like that? You gonna tell me now where a dead man was headed with his shit? I’m telling you that where he was when he died was rock, and that’s where his shit’s gonna get filed long as it’s in my shop. Dig?”

  “I dig, boss,” Rasheed said, with his put-on white-boy enunciation. “I do dig your heavy vibratos.”

  The front door opened then, which was a good thing for Rasheed since right about then Clay had gone about as far with all that as he would go. It was Cheek, Clay’s big-as-a-bear assistant manager, entering the store. Cheek, a half hour late and higher than a hippie. Despite his Sly Stone oval-lensed shades, Clay could see from his tentative steps that the boy was damn near cooked.

  Cheek stopped, grinned, cocked an ear in the direction of the speakers, cupped his hands around an imaginary mike, went right into a Curtis falsetto. Truth was, Cheek’s tone was too high, closer to Eddie Kendricks than it was to Mayfield. But Clay had to admit the boy was pretty good.

  “You’re late,” said Clay.

  Cheek stopped singing, removed his shades, wiped dry his buggy eyes. “Yeah, I know it. And I do apologize. But I was out late last night—”

  “Gettin’ some of that stanky-ass pussy,” said Rasheed, “from that Hoss Cartwright–lookin’ bitch of his over in Capitol Heights.”

  “Naw, man,” said Cheek. “And shut your mouth about Sholinda, too, nigger.” Cheek looked at Clay. “Guess where I was last night, Marcus.”

  “I suppose you’re gonna tell me.”

  “Listening to some funk. Or should I say, listenin’ to some uncut funk.”

  “You went to the P-Funk show?” said Rasheed.

  “Damn sure did,” said Cheek. “I’m talkin’ about the Bomb.”

  “Dag, boy!” Rasheed shook his head. “I wanted to check that motherfucker out my own self!”

  “Well, you missed it.” Cheek paused, waited for Rasheed to lean forward. “Yeah, Cole Field House, man. Seven hours of festival-style throwin’ down with the Funk Mob. Bobby Bennett emceed—”

  “The Mighty Burner was there?”

  “That’s right. Introduced the opening act.”

  “Who was it?”

  “The Brothers Johnson. Thunder Thumbs and Lightnin’ Licks.”

  “Fuck the Brothers Johnson.”

  “Yeah, I know. They was there is all I’m sayin’. But Gary Shider came out next. Wearin’ a diaper and shit. Then Bootsy with the Rubber Band, played the fuck out that bass of his and then let loose with the Horny Horns. Fred Wesley and Maceo. Right after that? Starchild, citizen of the universe. The niggers was trippin’! Doin’ it in three-D….”

  “All right,” said Clay, “we get it.”

  “We gonna turn… this mu-tha… out,” sang Cheek.

  “I said we get it. I’m goin’ out for a couple of hours, so it’s time you got to work.”

  “You ain’t gonna be too late, are you?” said Cheek.

  “Why?”

  “Thought I’d check out this new one they got opening up at the Town.”

  “I won’t be late,” said Clay.

  “What new one?” said Rasheed.

  “King Suckerman,” said Cheek.

  Rasheed looked up. “That the one about the pimp?”

  “Not any old pimp. The baddest player ever was. ‘The Man with the Master Plan Who Be Takin’ It to the Man.’ ”

  “Who be. That’s what the ad says, huh? I bet some white man wrote that movie; produced it, too. Even wrote that line about ‘the Man’ that’s gonna get you in the theater. Like by goin’ to that movie, givin’ up your cash money, you gonna get over on the Man yourself.”

  “So?”

  “So it’s you they gettin’ over on, blood. Don’t you know it’s those Caucasian producers out in Hollywood makin’ all the money off you head-scratchin’ mugs, pushin’ your dollars through the box-office window for the privilege of watchin’ two hours of nothin’? Puttin’ money back into the white machinery so that they can go right on back and do it again? And all the while they be gettin’ richer, and you just stuck where you’re at, not goin’ anywhere at all.”

  “It’s called havin’ a little fun, Rasheed. Ain’t you never heard of that?”

  “You’re just ignorant, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, I’m ignorant. I’m good and ignorant, bleed. And while you readin’ your Little Red Book tonight, I’ll be out havin’ a good-ass time at the movies. And then, inside my crib a little later on, while you’re still recitin’ your proverbs and shit, I’ll be hittin’ the fuck out of some good pussy. You can believe that.”

  “Sholinda?” said Rasheed.

  “Got-damn right.”

  Rasheed and Cheek were still talking shit as Clay walked to the back room. He washed up and changed into a pair of shorts, put his Superstar-highs on his feet and laced them tight. He was back out front in a few, and now Rasheed and Cheek were arguing about some detail on the Pedro Bell cover of America Eats Its Young. Cheek had laid side two on the platter, and the instrumental that kicked things off, “A Joyful Process,” had come on in. Clay liked that one; the comic-book stuff in their lyrics, that he could do without, but Clinton and those boys in Funkadelic, no question, they could play.

  “I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” said Clay, raising his voice over the horns.

  Cheek, shaped like a brown snowman with a full Teddy Pendergrass beard, looked up. “What time you want me to cut the register tape, Marcus?”

  “ ’Bout an hour from now should do it.”

  “Playin’ a little ball today, boss?” said Rasheed.

  “Yeah.”

  “With your Caucasian friend?”

  “He’s Greek.”

  “He looks plenty white to me.”

  “Claims there’s a difference,” said Clay. “Damn if I know what it is.”

  Clay looked back at them before he left the store, standing there, smiling like fools. He knew, soon as he left, they’d be in the stockroom, firing up some of Cheek’s Mexican. It made no difference to him, long as they did their jobs. Way he saw it, if they rang a few sales, didn’t burn the place to the ground, and kept their hands out of the till, he’d be coming out ahead.

  Dimitri Karras watched Marcus Clay leave his store, emerge from under the Real Right Records awning, head down Connecticut toward R, where Karras held the ragtop maroon Karmann Ghia idling by the curb. Clay with his smooth, dark skin, a modified Afro and thick mustache, walking with that head-held-high way of his, a kind of bounce, really, not exaggerated but earned. Karras didn’t blame him; if he had Clay’s looks, shit, man, he’d be strutting, too.

  Karras checked himself in the rearview: black hair falling in waves to his shoulders, a blac
k handlebar mustache, deep brown eyes picking up the chocolate color of his pocket T. Not bad. Not a stone swordsman like Clay, but not bad. Yeah, Karras, when he smiled—and he was smiling now, giving it to the mirror full on—he could turn some heads.

  “Easy, lover,” said Clay, dropping into the shotgun seat. “Next thing you know, you’ll be picking out a ring.”

  “I thought I had something in my teeth. I was just—”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Karras pushed the short-stick into first, checked the sideview before pulling out. “Too hot for you, Marcus? I could put the top back up.”

  “Naw, leave it down. That way I don’t have to fold myself up to get in and out of this motherfucker. Course, this toy fits you just fine. Big man like me, though…”

  Karras headed up Connecticut. The VW lurched into second, causing Clay’s head to bob involuntarily, like one of those spring-necked dogs set in the back windows of cars. Clay gave Karras a look.

  “Poor man’s Porsche,” explained Karras with an apologetic shrug.

  “And a Vega GT’s a poor man’s Vette.”

  “Some do claim that.”

  Karras cut right, headed down into Rock Creek, reached back behind the passenger seat, pulled free a leatherette box filled with eight-track tapes. Clay held the wheel steady while Karras flipped back the lid and looked through the box.

  “What you puttin’ in? ’Cause I don’t even want to hear no Mo the Rooster.”

  “Mott the Hoople.”

  “Yeah, none of that. Put somethin’ in there that’s got some bottom, man.”

  Karras slipped a tape into the deck. “Robin Trower. Bridge of Sighs. Rightful heir to Mr. Hendrix—”

  “I don’t want to talk about Jimi, now. Okay?”

  Karras found a joint in his shirt pocket, fired it up off the VW’s lighter. He hit it, passed it over to Clay. They exited a long tunnel and went by the National Zoo.

  “Nice taste,” said Clay.

  “The end of my Lumbo. I’m pickin’ up an LB later on today.”

  “What you going through now?”

  “I move about a pound, pound and a half a week, keep just enough for myself. It’s a living, man, you know?”

  “Educated man like you, you ought to find yourself a real job. A good one, too.”

  “Smoke a little weed, play some ball, listen to tunes… get some P now and then—I gotta look at it this way: How could my life get any better?”

  “For you, maybe. Me, I like to work.”

  “I know you do, Marcus.”

  Karras took in a deep hit of the pot. He offered it to Clay, who hit it again, passed it back. Karras kissed it one last time, butted what was left, pushed the roach to the back of the ashtray.

  Clay checked out the sneakers on Karras’s feet. “Where’d you get those Clydes, Dimitri?”

  “Up at Mitchell’s, on Wisconsin.”

  “I ain’t seen ’em in that neutral color, though. They look good like that.”

  “Mitchell’s,” repeated Karras.

  “I’ll have to tell Rasheed. He’s been lookin’ for just that shade.”

  “Rasheed X.”

  “That boy’s all right. You two just need to sit down and talk.”

  “Right.”

  “So where we headed, anyway?”

  “Candy Cane City, I guess. Always get a decent game up there.”

  Clay nodded, then found his head moving to the gravelly Bill Lordan vocals, Trower’s blues guitar working against a thick slab of bass. The Columbian was talking to him now, pushing him to find things in the music he might have otherwise overlooked. “This is a bad jam, you know it?”

  Karras nodded. “ ‘The Fool and Me.’ ”

  “Your boy Trower, he can play.”

  “Yeah,” said Karras. “Trower’s bad.”

  Clay put on his shades; Karras put on his. The Karmann Ghia moved through the warm summer air beneath a cooling canopy of trees.

  THREE

  Eddie Marchetti opened up the Post, checked out the TV Highlights chart for the day, went down the grid to four o’clock. The menu showed Money Movie Seven, the one where Johnny Batchelder gave away small-time dollars at the commercial break. It was Yul Brynner week, and today they were running Taras Bulba. Tony Curtis as Yul Brynner’s son—what were they, five, six years apart in age? Right. Marchetti had seen it, and it wouldn’t get any better a second time. Over on 9 was Dinah Shore: Ethel Merman, Frankie Valli, and Jimmie Walker, the skinny titsune with exactly one joke in his repertoire. No, thanks. He could watch Robert Young, Family Doctor on channel 4, but that was nothing but the old Marcus Welby, M.D. in syndication, and he had seen all of those on the first go-round. Anyhow, those geezer shows—Welby, Barnaby Jones, like that—Marchetti could only take so much of those.

  Dinah was just about to start. Marchetti pointed the remote in the direction of the nineteen-inch Sony across the room, cut the power. He dropped the remote in the center drawer of the varnished desk in front of him. He swiveled in his chair, looked out the big picture window to the street.

  A million-dollar view! A ’dozer pushing gravel into a mountain of it, and past the mountain of stones some kind of tepee-shaped silo. Beyond the fenced-in lot that housed the miniquarry was a big windowless structure of brick, a dead building by day but a fag club by night. Huge, sweaty dance floor, dick shots projected on the walls, angled mirrors in the johns so the tail-gunners could check out your equipment while you were trying to take a leak, disco music so loud you couldn’t even taste the liquor in your drink. Fuck all that. Before Marchetti’s cousin Arturo had gone back to North Jersey, just after he had set Eddie up down in D.C., the two of them had checked the place out, Arturo Marchetti claiming that it would be easy pickings for a couple of swingin’ dicks like them, on account of in a fag joint there wasn’t any competition for the broads. But none of the women had wanted to dance with them, which left Eddie and Arturo standing there, sipping their drinks like a couple of mo-mos, looking at slide shows of bright-eyed, toothy guys with lizards hanging down to their knees. Eddie wanted to leave, but Arturo, he wanted to stay, ride the night out. For all Eddie knew, maybe Arturo was half queer. And the bitches, the ones that wouldn’t dance with Eddie? He figured they must have been faggids themselves.

  So the view, it sucked the high hard one. When the family had asked him to leave Jersey, set up a little business out of town—they were only trying to get rid of him, he knew—they had promised to put him in a nice office in a beautiful part of town. First and Potomac, they said, and when he heard the address it sounded so goddamn right. Like it caught a breeze off the river and shit. Well, it was a few blocks from the water, but not that you could tell, and when the odd breeze did come through, it stank of sulfur and diesel. So here he sat, in a moldy cinder-block building in a hot, treeless, dead-ass warehouse district in Southeast D.C. The absolute shithole part of town.

  Eddie would show them, though. He’d stick it out. He’d make something happen down here and then he’d go back to his sweet hometown like the fattest motherfucker who ever rode in on four wheels. He would do that if he ever did one thing.

  “Come here, baby,” said Marchetti, spreading his arms out wide.

  Vivian looked up from her place on the wine leather couch across the room. She tapped some ash onto her jeans from the joint dangling between her long thin fingers and returned her gaze to the paperback resting in her lap. Keeping her eyes on the page, she rubbed at the ashes until they had disappeared into the denim.

  “Hey, Viv!” said Marchetti, more jovial now. “Come on over here, give Eddie Spags a hug.” The kids used to call him Eddie Spaghetti back in Jersey, on account of he was a guido and he did love his pasta. Then Eddie Spags for short, which stuck. Marchetti liked the sound of it. Like it was right out of The Valachi Papers or some shit like that, though Eddie knew down deep that the Marchettis were strictly small-time players, double zeros on the back of a uniform. He and his relatives were about as connected
as an amputated leg.

  Vivian, still not looking up, said, “How about this, Eddie? How about you get up out of that chair, walk across the room, give me a hug? How about that?”

  Eddie said, “Forget it,” though he wished right away he hadn’t spoken so quick. A hug, you never knew, if you forced it just a little, it could turn into something else.

  Eddie opened the center drawer of his desk, brushed aside the snub-nosed .38 that lay there, grabbed the remote. Christ, if his own girlfriend was more interested in getting high and reading some make-believe story than paying a little attention to him, he might as well watch a little tube. It felt like a morgue in there, anyway, without the sound of the Sony.

  Eddie switched on the set, sighed at the snow running across Dinah Shore’s face.

  “Hey, Clarenze!” he yelled, loud as he could. And Vivian looked up.

  Clarence Tate was listening to Eugene Record’s tenor, the harmonica drifting in behind the vocal, when he heard the sound of Eddie’s voice. “Oh, Girl,” that was one of the prettiest records the Chi-Lites had ever cut, and Tate had been sitting way back in the other side of the warehouse, just getting into the tortured beauty of the song, doing nothing but minding his own self. It would be just like Eddie to bust on Tate’s groove at a time like that.

  Tate got out of his chair, pulled the eight-track from the Capehart compact system, went through the doorway, headed on down the hall.

  He passed rows of television sets still in their cartons, stereo systems, compacts and components, some boxed, some not. They’d have to move these right quick. Tate had hooked himself up with a delivery man—cat by the name of Bernard—who drove a truck for the big electronics distributor up in Baltimore. Bernard’s company supplied all of D.C.’s electronics retailers—Luskin’s-Dalmo, George’s, Nutty Nathan’s, and others—with their goods, and Bernard had a deal with one of the warehousemen, who’d load up Bernard’s truck with a couple of extra pieces on every run. Tate figured it wouldn’t be long before either that boy Bernard or the warehouseman would be caught, because that’s the way things always ended for small-time boosters like them. So he thought it’d be a good idea to maximize the profit potential while the getting was still good. Profit potential—he’d been reading books lately on how to run a hard-goods operation. Course, the books never said a damn thing about fencing hard goods. But he figured the basic principles, they had to be about the same.