10

TONIGHT, I HAVE THIS INCREDIBLE DREAM. I DREAM my family is together and happy. My father is still alive, still sitting in his lounger smoking weed and sipping on Hennessey. He works hard at the shop fixing people’s cars and spends as much time as he can at home. Ma still works her old waitressing job at Jake’s Diner. She smokes weed and drinks sometimes, but that’s it.

When Ma isn’t working she’s home. But she doesn’t lie on the couch letting the pillows suck away at her soul. She spends her time with Pop. When he cooks, she hangs out in the kitchen; when he watches TV, she keeps him company. She’s healthy and she’s happy.

Later in the dream, I walk down a narrow, brick-layered path and come across a massive home, a two-story white mansion with deep green trim and an actual picket fence surrounding it. I climb the front steps and, as I do, the door swings open and there is Mrs. Hall with her hair done, her diamonds intact, and her makeup set. She opens her arms wide and gives me a warm, gentle, motherly squeeze.

“Welcome, Marley,” she says as she holds me tight. “Lea is waiting for you inside. We’re all so pleased that she’s dating you.” She places a delicate arm around me and leads me into the house.

On Friday night, I dream these things.

But when I wake up Saturday morning, my mother is still sedated, lounging in our front room with the new loser boyfriend who replaced Frederick. The fridge is once again empty except for the half a stick of butter and the jar of applesauce that has now begun to mold over. And my father is still dead.

“What’s with you guys and the food lately?” I call into the front room as I toss out the applesauce, but no one seems to hear. I know the harshness in my voice comes from the fact that some cokehead named Don is sitting in Pop’s lounger instead of Pop, but at the same time, I really would like to know what’s happening lately to all the groceries I buy.

“You know, it’s okay to make a trip to the store to buy more food when it runs out. Can you do that please?” I walk into the front room and glare at Ma’s new boyfriend for a moment before turning to Ma, who’s posted expressionless in front of the TV, slowly transforming into just another couch cushion.

Sometimes, when I look at her, I think about taking off, running away to see what she’ll do. My hope is that she’ll suck it up and get her act together and get a job. But then I walk outside our building and see what will become of her if she doesn’t. One long look at the homeless addicts that line the streets in our neighborhood and I change my mind every time.

Some of the women even make the trip down to Fourth Street to do tricks for drugs or for money to buy drugs with. That could have been Ma if it weren’t for me. That could still be Ma if I’m ever unable to hold things down. She’s that far gone and only wasting away in an apartment instead of on the cold, hard concrete because she has a “responsible” son to take care of her.

Well, I don’t want to be responsible. What I want is to go off on my own, not fight to succeed in school and come up with money for us to live off of. I want to go out and party and be sixteen while I still can. I want to accept the truth—that she’s a lost cause, a full-fledged dope fiend who can barely function anymore.

But I can’t leave her. I’m all she has now. Sure, there’s the revolving door of boyfriends, but they’re only good for keeping her company and helping her get high. I’m the only one doing her any good and I’m big-time burned-out on coddling her. I know she’s been through a whole lot since my father was killed in that hit-and-run accident, but then I’ve been through a whole lot too. Pop dying didn’t just happen to her; it happened to both of us.

I stand there for a minute, waiting for my mother to answer me about making a trip to the store and buying food next time, but she keeps watching her show like I’m not even in the room and suddenly I have to get away from her. I go to my room and double-lock the door behind me.

My bedroom is like this little eight-by-ten square of freedom in the middle of our apartment. I’ve got a twin bed, a dresser, a bookshelf, and a tall metal desk I keep my turntables set up on. The mere sight of my decks is enough to make me breathe easier.

My turntables are the only thing I really have left of my pop. He loved these tables. Back in the day, when he used to throw parties in our studio apartment in the Eaver Projects, he’d pull out his turntables and spin. There were always people over. Our place was constantly bubbling with energy and all kinds of action, yet the only action I wanted any part of when I was a little boy were my father’s decks. I’m positive those turntables are what saved me from ever even getting curious about shooting up when Ma started using.

Why put a needle in my arm when I can put a needle on a record?

I remember when I was little I would stare at Pop in wide-eyed fascination as he pulled record after record, carefully placing them like fragile china plates onto the left or right deck. He’d listen in his headphones to things the rest of us couldn’t hear, then suddenly switch songs without ever missing a beat. Each time he changed up a track, something exciting and new would take over the room, something so great I couldn’t even remember what the song playing before it was.

My memories of him spinning are just as fond as the rest of my memories of my father. Unlike Ma, who never really took to the idea of parenting, Pop worked hard at being a good dad. Maybe because he lost his own parents at such a young age, I don’t know. But to me he was like a superhero who did things I was convinced no other human being could possibly do.

“Little Mar,” he’d say, “choose a record for me.” I would rush over to his crate of records and choose one with a cool-looking cover, since I couldn’t read well enough to pick one with a cool-sounding name. I was five years old and already had my whole life figured out. When I grew up, I would be a DJ just like my pop. It was one of many ways I wanted to be like him.

Then it was my sixth birthday and my parents were inviting all their friends over to celebrate. “Little Mar, choose a record,” my father said. I eagerly picked out an album with a cool-sounding name from his crate. Even though I wasn’t in school yet, Pop had been teaching me how to read and I loved to practice on the weird band names sketched across his album covers. I selected the next track he would play, walked my chosen record over, and tried to hand it to him, but he shook his head no.

“It’s your turn now, Little Mar. Pull the record out of the sleeve. Go on….”

I carefully placed the record onto the left turntable like I’d watched him do so many times before.

Pop stood behind me and gently guided my arm with his big, dark hands as I picked up the needle and swung it over to the record.

When the needle touched down and I stepped back and my father pulled off his headphones and pressed them to my ears so I could hear the song I’d picked playing, I felt like I was on top of the world.

Pop smiled at me and winked as he re-cued the track and slid the control lever over from the other deck in one swift movement so Digital Underground’s “Doowutchyalike” flowed from the speakers for everyone in the room to hear, and I laughed and turned to hug him tight.

“Check out my son, y’all!” he’d shouted. “My boy is gonna be a star one day. DJ Marley Johnnywas!” Everyone had cheered and I’d beamed with pride at my six-year-old accomplishment.

I gaze down at those same turntables now. They’re super old-school, belt driven, with homemade slipmats, and a dying motor, but they’re still full of moments spent with my father.

I’ve been saving for several months now to buy a laptop. Once a month I put fifty bucks aside for emergencies and fifteen or twenty aside for myself. I used to spend the money I put aside for myself on music, but now I’m investing it in my future—in my laptop. Sure, college is my main goal for the future, but as long as my grades stay where they are, graduating from Ellington will pretty much guarantee me full scholarships to several good schools.

What it won’t guarantee me is a future as a DJ. How will I ever get gigs if I don’t even have the tools of the trade? It’s not like I can borrow a laptop and decks from my high school when I’m twenty-one, and I can’t drag my pop’s rickety old decks from gig to gig. I only need forty more dollars for the laptop I’m planning to buy, and then I’ll be ready to save for some sturdy secondhand Technics 1200s.

I’m saving for a cheap laptop and used decks so I can get them soon, but for my mixer I’m willing to put away money for years if that’s how long it takes to purchase something top-of-the-line. I’ve got my eye on that Rane/Serato Scratch Live combo. That way I’ll be able to download and mix with any song I want as if it’s vinyl, but I can still play all the records I’ve collected over the years and inherited from Pop. Then I’ll really be ready to get out there. It’ll be a major investment but worth the wait.

I run my hand across my metal desk in front of Pop’s old Technics. By the time I’ve saved enough money to purchase my own gear, there might be something available that’s so ingenious it hasn’t even been invented yet. But no matter what I buy in the next couple of years, I’ll never, ever get rid of these.

I scan my records, which fill five crates at my feet, slowly trailing my fingers over thin, worn jackets that cover amazing sounds of joy, love, anger, sadness, courage…. For the next few hours, my life belongs to me.

I am at peace in the silence right before I play when my headphones are quiet and my mind is free. I pull a record from its sleeve and hold the large, flat, circular black disc by its edges, and smile to myself for a moment before placing it onto the left turntable and pulling on my headphones. I start the left deck spinning, and align the needle to the second track, “Enter My Domain.”

Music starts, and I breathe in the beat like oxygen, absorb the melody like a sponge, feel the singer’s voice in the tips of my fingers and the soles of my feet. I begin to come alive, and my blood starts to really flow as my imagination stretches out in every direction like rays of bright light.

This is when I feel closest to my father. When I’m playing music, I’m bringing Pop back to life, almost as if he’s in the room with me. I can talk to him through music. It’s always been our connection, and the connection is still here, even though he isn’t. I know he’s watching over me, making sure everything is cool. Even when things are bad, I know they could always be worse, and I know it’s Pop who’s up there somewhere keeping the worst away.

I grab my next record and place it on the right deck, dropping the needle in a premarked spot two-thirds of the way between the first and second song and then patiently tracking it in my phones and fine-tuning the beats of “Darker than the Light” until everything fits. I swim in the feeling of control over the vinyl beneath my fingertips as I pull the record backward, then forward, then back again over the beat I want to start on, like I’m giving it a massage.

I love this part, when I have all the control of when I drop that new track and no one else has any clue what I’m about to hit them with, or when, or how. I slide the crossfader over halfway with my left hand as I drop the new record into the mix with my right.

Usually I spend about half my time spinning spontaneously, letting the way each track makes me feel inspire the next one I play. Then I practice a couple of what I like to call my preset mixes, blending the same records and the same premade beats at the same time every time, sort of like a piano player playing scales. After that, it’s on!

At school I’ve started to work on my own tunes—totally original stuff, thanks to the amazing support and encouragement I get from Mr. Faulkner, who’s also been teaching me to play the keyboards and helping me create my own beats on a computer. My work on originals is still in the beginning phases, though. Most of my time is focused on trying to hone my current skills, not create new ones.

I’m starting to get really good and I know it. It’s rare for me to train wreck these days even when I’m improvising with unfamiliar tracks and my musical tastes continue to grow. I am lucky enough to love all kinds of music, so I work with a little of everything: hip-hop, house, reggae, R & B, drum and bass…. I’m proud to have schooled myself in so many different genres. But now I want to find ways to pull other music into my mixes too: jazz, Latin, blues….

I want to find ways to add samples of tracks DJs usually wouldn’t even touch, like country or death metal. And one of these days I’ve got to find a way to mix with elevator. Elevator music doesn’t get nearly enough credit in this world. I happen to love the stuff. Sure, it’s made up of cheesy renditions of famous songs never meant to be played on a stringed instrument, but that’s what’s so great about it.

One time I heard an elevator music rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” with flutes and violins each taking a stab at the melody and every other instrument that has no business playing that song performing in the background. It was just plain wrong. I died laughing. The entertainment value of Muzak is priceless and I’m determined to find a place for it in my sets.

That’s the thing. I don’t want to be the DJ who simply gets people dancing. I want to be the one who makes people think and surprises them and shows them something new and takes them on a journey and gets them moving on the dance floor to tunes they used to hate but that I’ve made beautiful by pulling sounds, switching beats, adding samples.

I spin for most of the day, caught in a trance, floating on air and living in an alternate state of consciousness. Then it starts to get late and I have to return to reality and leave my safe haven to clean the apartment and cook for Ma. I stop playing suddenly, and the return to the real is like a massive jolt to my system, but that’s the way it has to be. Otherwise, I’d go on mixing forever.

I drag two bags’ worth of dirty clothes down to the laundry room in the basement of our building and start three loads. I scrub down the bathroom and kitchen, and clean the main room as best I can, considering I have to work around my mother, her scrawny, grungy, mega-loser new boyfriend, Don, and a couple of their friends who’ve all been sitting comatose in the living room the whole day, taking on a vegetative state. I prepare a huge dinner for Ma that I’m hoping will be enough food to last her all weekend.

I’m giving the kitchen floor a quick once-over with the mop before leaving for work when my cell rings. I pull it out of my pocket and see a number I don’t recognize.

“Hello?”

“Hello there,” a man’s voice says. “I’m looking for Marley.”

“I’m Marley,” I tell him, picking up the mop again.

“I saw you last weekend. I was watching you.”

“ ’Scuse you?” I answer a little harshly, hoping what he said came out wrong.

“I said I was watching you. I watched you and then I asked about you and got your phone number.”

I don’t respond. What do you say to something like that? The guy sounds like a straight perv, and I’m about ready to hang up on him.

“Marley? Are you still there?”

“Yeah, for about ten more seconds. Where is it exactly that I’d know you from?”

“From DRC.”

He says more, but I don’t catch it. I’m too busy thinking back to a week ago at that club DRC. For the most part no one paid me any mind, but there was one exception. A funny-looking guy who showed up during my second hour. He sat on a bar stool and stared up at the little DJ room.

He was much older than the rest of the crowd, and white, with dark, thinning hair and Coke-bottle glasses, and the only time he wasn’t keeping an eye on me was when the club manager came over to shake his hand and chat with him. This has to be that same guy.

“Sorry?”

I cradle the phone between my ear and shoulder and begin to mop the floor again. I missed pretty much everything he said.

“Look, Marley, my name is Lonnie Kert. I have a twin brother named Donnie Kert.”

I’m not following him at all. “I think you have me mixed up with someone else,” I say, thinking I need to get off the phone if I’m going to finish cleaning before leaving for work. “I don’t know who you’re looking for, but I’ve really got to—”

“We own a club, my brother and I.”

“Oh yeah?” I say, because now he’s got my attention. What if he’s not a stalker at all, but a guy who likes my music? And if he’s calling for the reason it’s occurring to me he could be calling…

“I went to DRC to see Collin Stan, a DJ I’ve been hearing good things about. I wanted to talk to him about possibly working at my club one night a week as a warm-up DJ, but, wouldn’t you know it, the guy broke his arm and wasn’t there. But you were there that night. I saw you play and thought you were quite talented. The manager over there, Freddy, says you spin house music too. Is that right?”

“Yup,” I reply, and then sigh because the phone call suddenly makes sense. I know exactly what’s going on. “So which one of them put you up to this?”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s okay, you can tell me. Was it Chuckie or was it Will?”

A long silence follows. And then, “I don’t know a Chuckie or a Will. I’m calling because I’m interested in hiring you to DJ as a regular at Cream.”

I don’t remember letting go of the mop, but I do hear it hit the floor with a loud wooden clatter. “Hiring me?”

“Of course, you’d still need to audition for my brother, so I’d like to have you come to Cream and spin next Wednesday night. Assuming you’re available.”

“Cream?”

“Cream is a club.”

Like hell it’s a club. Cream is one of the best-known clubs around. Oh man, everybody’s heard of Cream.

“Here’s the thing, though, Marley. I noticed you use a laptop.”

“Yeah?”

“And I think the things you can do as a DJ with the software out today are incredible.”

“Yeah.”

“But I need someone who works with vinyl. I wasn’t even going to call because I knew it’d be a long shot that you’d know how to work with both software and vinyl, but—”

“I do!” I blurt out. “I work with both. I use vinyl. It’s all I’ve got at home.”

“You sure?” he asks. “Because I find more often than not these days it’s one or the other with DJs, and I know laptops are really the future.”

“I’m sure,” I tell him. “I’m just as good with vinyl.”

“All right then,” he says, “you’ve got the audition.”

“Do I need to bring turntables?”

“Of course not. Just your records. If the audition goes well, I’ll give you the eight-to-ten spot on Wednesday nights.”

“You mean like every week?”

“Yes, every Wednesday night from eight o’clock to ten o’clock. The pay would be seventy-five a night. I know that’s not as good as some clubs, but it’s better than others, and we pay in cash. Besides, our club is pretty well known. We’ve been featured on late-night TV on club-life shows like The Nightshift and VIP Room. And if you do well, we’ll bump you to a hundred a night after a few months.”

“A hundred,” I repeat, in a monotone voice like some kind of idiot robot.

“Well, seventy-five to start, but yeah. If everything works out. So are you interested?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’ll come in and audition on Wednesday?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Great, then be at Cream at seven thirty this Wednesday night and ask for Donnie. Normally we’d have you bring a demo in first, but since I’ve already seen you in action, that won’t be necessary. You can bring a history of your experience for us to review during your audition, though. Oh, and bring your ID. I hate to even ask, but you look so young, and our spot is strictly twenty-one and up. You are over twenty-one, aren’t you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Perfect. Wednesday night then. Who knows, maybe Collin Stan’s broken arm will end up working in both our favors. Good-bye, Marley.”

There’s an abrupt click and his end of the line goes dead.

I hit the End button on my phone and put it back in my pocket.

I feel like I should do something.

Pass out maybe.

Just pass out right here on my freshly mopped kitchen floor.