_____
SHE WAS lazing in back of the Biscuit Shop on her break. She was wearing Jimmy Choo heels with her Biscuit Shop uniform, smoking with postcoital aplomb. Her name tag said MAHOGANY. It was Saturday afternoon and on the city speakers Prince was droning on about a strange relationship.
She was being interviewed about her love life by a man from the Soul City Inquirer, paying as much attention to him as to her cigarette. She’d dumped yet another basketball player because even though he could fly, his superiority complex was too much for her. The whole city was buzzing.
She took a slow drag. “Flyin’s gettin a girl nowhere with guys,” she said drolly. “I hate men.”
Cadillac was standing a few feet away, staring at his shoes, and eavesdropping.
The reporter asked her something about a prophecy, but Cadillac couldn’t understand the question.
“I’m so sick of talking about that,” she said, rolling her eyes.
With the trepidation of someone sticking his hand into the lion’s cage, the reporter asked her about the rumors that Granmama secretly wants to die.
“I hate interviews,” she said and dismissed him.
Cadillac’s heart was careening around his chest. But with the hope of a man leaping with his eyes closed, he said, “Excuse me. I’m writing a book about Soul City and —”
“I get off in two hours,” she said. She hated interviews, but she never turned them down. “Meet me right here.” And that’s how Cadillac Jackson met Mahogany Sunflower.
After work, in the parking lot behind the Biscuit Shop, she let him know that he was going to be buying lunch for her and her friend Precious Negro at a place in town that she’d choose. She told him she was driving before bothering to find out he didn’t have a car. She was really bossy. Her car was a silver 1940 Mercedes convertible coupe with a white-rimmed fingertip-wide steering wheel and white leather seats. The ride was pristine except for the back corner of the driver’s side, which was horribly crushed, the metal crinkling in like a hideous mouth. Mahogany turned the key and Billie Holiday’s ancient, plaintive wail washed over them. The sound was so clear you could hear the uncried tears in Billie’s throat. Mahogany and Precious sat there for a moment, listening so intently it seemed they were trying to go inside the music. He thought the car itself wasn’t unlike Billie: rare, old, venerable, and once the world’s finest. The crushed back corner spoke of Lady Day, too. The car had known tragedy and pain and was scarred, but had survived.
“I’ve never been in a Benz like this,” Cadillac said.
“This is the fruit of lots of painful labor,” Precious said. “This woman is the best baby-sitter in all of Soul City!” Mahogany had eight younger brothers and sisters, so everyone trusted her with their kids. “I’m her agent,” Precious added. “For a Saturday night in the summer she gets one hundred dollars an hour.”
“The important part of the story,” Mahogany said as she turned onto Freedom Ave, “is that this is a Billiemobile.” She’d gotten it at Groovy Lou’s Loco Motives, the only place in the city that sold cars with a built-in jukebox that held all the music ever made by one genius. Your system would play nothing but the music of that one genius. That made your vehicle a sonic temple, a rolling emblem of you. “I had to have a Billiemobile,” Mahogany said, “because she’s a tortured goddess.”
They cruised down Funky Boulevard and passed Groovy Lou’s. Groovy Lou himself was outside arranging test-drives, which were really just listening sessions. He had a Ferrari Testarossa that his people had made into a Milesmobile, a Humvee converted into a Wu-Tangmobile, and a Cadillac from the 50s that was now a Jamesbrownmobile. There was a Beatlesmobile, a Gayemobile, a JayZmobile, a Marsalismobile, which played music by the whole family, and, his latest creation, a black stretch limousine with all the trimmings that was, of course, a Sinatramobile. The amount of care he put into his work was touching.
As they drove, Mahogany pointed out some of the town’s landmarks. They saw the Gravy Shop, which boasted 186 varieties of gravy, 97 kinds of hot sauce, and Boozoo BBQ Brown’s Patented Barbeque to Screw Mopping Sauce, which was known among aficionados as the hottest sauce in the world and, somehow, as an excellent sexual aid. They passed the Teddy Bear Repair Shop, U Drive-Thru Liquor Store, the Poetry Slam Café, and the roller-skating rink. They passed a Funkadelicmobile and a Monkmobile. They passed Dapper Dan’s, where the legendary tailor would affix any high-fashion label to anything you wanted, from a hat to a suit to the interior of your car. He’d escaped to Soul City back in the 80s after the government ran him out of Harlem for trademark infringement. Now he was making Louis Vuitton leather suits, Gucci parkas, and Versace Toyotas and making some dead Euros do in-grave headspins. They passed Delicious Records, Bring the Noise Movie Theater, where yelling at the screen was encouraged, Soul Scissors, the twenty-four-hour hair salon, and Roscoe’s House of Chicken N’ Waffles. They passed a Biggiemobile and a beautiful Ellingtonmobile. Then they came to Lolita.