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EMPEROR JONES was dismayed. He and his aides had counted the ballots three times, and every time they’d gotten the same answer. It was Soul City election tradition that Wednesday at ten a.m. the old mayor’s music would stop, the new mayor would be announced, and right then he would start DJing. But this Wednesday, ten a.m. came and went without a word from Emperor Jones, even though thousands were crowded on the lawn outside the mayor’s mansion with collective bated breath. Inside the mansion, after many tense hours of vote counting, there was a clear margin of victory for one candidate, but Emperor Jones ordered that the ballots be recounted yet again. “This cannot be!” he yelled.
Soul City had made a grave mistake. Emperor shut the windows, locked the doors, and launched a fourth recount as the music stopped and Soul City was engulfed in silence. In order to let the people know he was still alive and working on an answer, he burned some paper, making white smoke emerge from his chimney. Each hour more smoke appeared, but for the Soulful the silence was like fingernails on a chalkboard. People began singing and clapping and playing homemade guitars, but it wasn’t the same. The music that defined Soul City had stopped. The town shut down. Everyone came out from stores and restaurants, stopped doing laundry and playing basketball. A siren of silence had enveloped them in confusion. They had no idea what to do without some sort of music to underscore their lives. For five days the city stood in limbo, watching the hourly puffs of white smoke, waiting desperately for the killer silence to end, while Emperor Jones pulled the last hairs from his head as the seventh full recount yielded the same result as all the others, and he was forced to come out and announce the dreaded winner.
On Sunday at four p.m. the chimney produced black smoke. Emperor Jones put on his best suit and his fakest smile and opened the front doors wide. He tried to be happy, but it was just too hard. Soul City had truly disappointed him this time. The wrong choice had been made, the dunce of the group had won, and he knew that soon all of Soul City would be paying for it. “The next mayor of Soul City . . .” he said lifelessly, “is Cool Spreadlove.”
Pandemonium ensued. The Soul Music masses leaped for joy as if they’d won the lottery. The Jazz people and the Hiphop Nation began citywide sulking. Spreadlove’s campaign manager, Lovely Brown, ran up three flights of stairs, pulled him off of Sera Serendipity, and told him the good news. Spreadlove finished off Sera, then threw on his mink and hightailed it over to his new crib, the mayor’s mansion in Honeypot Hill. As he walked up people were standing outside the mansion, drenched in silence, their eyes as vacant as drugless addicts. “We need some music, man,” they said. “We’re gonna die!”
Spreadlove looked them in the eyes and said, “I feel your pain.”
He strolled inside and had one of his women pull a record from the stacks, put it on the turntable, and introduce the vinyl to the needle. After 102 hours of eerie quiet, the first record of his administration was on its way to the people. The Soulful smiled when they heard the snap, crackle, and pop of vinyl silence, and then, all over Soul City they heard Marvin Gaye and that honey-sweet, pimp-smooth falsetto, talkin bout let’s get it on. “We gon be one city under a groove,” Spreadlove told them, and he wasn’t lying.
Spreadlove went directly for Soul City’s libido, wanting the entire city to have as much sex as he did. All day and night he played records meant to induce sex and lust. Within a week the city had changed.
Spreadlove had the mansion’s speakers put in the windows so the sound boomed out over the Great Lawn, and soon it was a place to picnic and party. The mansion became a twenty-four-hour house party, a carnival of free drugs and free sex with new panties constantly hanging from the chandeliers and the smell of sex oozing out onto the Great Lawn. An air of carnality gripped the city and the sound of bass-driven funk and soul was thumping day and night, and during the first two weeks of his administration, at any given moment you could open any window in Soul City and catch at least two people engaged in sexual congress. Spreadlove’s soul and funk onslaught pushed the civic sexual tension to the limit and launched a citywide saturnalian fuckfest. In one corner of town Hueynewton and Precious were having sex so hard they fractured their pelvic bones. In a darkroom somewhere, Zeitgeist Jones, fully recovered from his whuppin by his grandmother, was suffering through a vicious spanking from slutty little Sera Serendipity. Over at Lolita innocent Erendira was making love for fifty pesos a turn with any man willing to wait in the hours-long line minded by her heartless grandmother. And down at the church, in Revren Lil’ Mo Love’s office, all standards were lost as the Revren was devoured and deflowered by Miss Birdsong, Mrs. Lovejoy, and Miss Delicate Chocolate.
Carnality was a mist slithering through the streets. Lust engulfed and blinded them like fog. No one knew whose bed he or she would be magnetized to at any moment. Late one night during this free-love frenzy, Cadillac was at the Biscuit Shop watching Mahogany spin.
In the three weeks since they’d met, they’d had no official dates because she refused to allow them to be called dates, but they’d gone to see Coffy at Bring the Noise Movie Theater, had had dinner at Roscoe’s, and had gone late-night vinyl shopping at Delicious Records. But this certainly wasn’t going anywhere. She didn’t particularly like him. Besides, she was a Sunflower, and in her family you only dated others who could fly because only two flying parents could make a flying baby, and the Sunflowers had to keep the flying going. Mahogany was the oldest Sunflower of her generation, and for three hundred years the Big Mamas have said that if a firstborn Sunflower has a child who can’t fly, that’ll signal the beginning of the end of Soul City. Mahogany never believed the prophecy, but everyone else in town did and carefully watched her love life, groaning each time she dumped another flying guy. Everyone knew she would end up with a flyer, Sunflowers always did, but for the first time in years a Sunflower firstborn was having a hard time finding a flyer, and the town was getting nervous.
But that Friday night Mahogany wasn’t thinking about all that. She wasn’t thinking much at all. She was unspeakably horny. Nearly every man in Soul City would’ve dropped everything to go home with Mahogany Sunflower, but somehow Cadillac was in the right Biscuit Shop at the right time. When closing time came she grabbed him by the arm and took him home. Yes, all of this started because of what they call a lucky fuck. She knew he knew she could fly. She’d seen him looking that night at her mom’s. So when they got into bed she climbed atop him, slipped her legs within his just so, and lifted up into the air, gliding in circles around her apartment like a child’s toy plane. She had to be on top, that was just her style, so as they moved through the air he clutched tightly beneath her as if clinging to the underside of a sweaty, naked, curvy missile, orbiting her place ten feet above the floor while Prince seeped in through the windows and the cracks in the door. When she was about to come she doubled her speed and it got scary for him. He got nauseous watching the room spin around him upside down, but he wasn’t complaining at all. She was riding the air while doing the same to him. He just had to try and hold on for dear life.
It didn’t last long but was so amazing. Flying sex was incomparable. He had to do that again.
“We can’t ever do that again,” she said, as if she were afraid of herself. She was lying in bed, exhaling smoke, her heart pounding.
She’d loved the sex. His quick, rapid fear-filled thrusts had driven her over the edge in record time. But she was a Sunflower and a firstborn. They both knew it could and would go nowhere. So they did what young lovers often do. They did the least sensible thing possible.
They had flying sex again.
That’s when she got pregnant.