Rytius Records (Substack Edition), Ch. 8

Ch. 8: GJ and Sugarpie and Huggums and Koleeko

8. GJ and Sugarpie and Huggums and Koleeko

The nave of St. Mark’s was cold and empty, but the annex housing Fila’s Finds was warmly lit against the sunless morning. Rytius could see the figure of his friends moving distorted through the fine stained glass window in the door. The skittering of the freezing drizzle seemed to rush and drag behind the rhythm it played against the windows, a popcorn rattle echo, never matching the taps on his back.

“Rytius,” his friend greeted him through the door. He opened it. “You’re a little early.”

“Now, you know I’m coming to help set up,” Rytius smiled and stepped across the threshold. “Break down, too.” It was warm inside and the air was spiced with fruitwood smoke. Fila Green, the first recordkeeper, was having breakfast with his wife Carnation, at the table, by the window, next to the wood furnace.

“What are you doing? Get in here,” rushed Carnation. “And close that door!” Rytius hustled in and threw his coat over the deer skull and antlers on the wall. Carnation had made a coat rack of sanded driftwood and some oversized hand-wrought galvanized nails she bought from D-Man, and she had placed it right near the door, but there was something special about the skull. No one used the rack until the head and all the antlers were full.

Rytius held his tongue and was patient as Carnation got in his business, encouraging him to go out with Vinilla or Bonbon or Xena or Tracey, and he cherished his friends with special greetings, pouring himself a cup of coffee, seating himself, brewing another pot, and refilling their cups. Rytius began to wonder whether his patience was not actually cowardice, and he turned words over in his mind to come up with the right ones to tell Fila and Carnation about the prince’s tower, and then he wondered whether he should wait until after the ceremony, because this was their daughter’s naming day. And then Sugarpie and GJ arrived.

George Jefferson Wallace, a refugee from Brooklyn before the war, was a couple of years older than Fila. Born to the game, he had always kept his own records in stories and music. He was their living link to the recordkeepers of New York, who mostly lived in Brooklyn and the Bronx, often facilitating trades between them and those of New Ark. Even in New York he had made his living as a painter of houses and a decorator of walls, an artist of a sort with a curious geometric style, making his own pigments from stones, plants, and various chemical compounds. He did the same in New Ark.

Sugarpie Freeman was a Newark native but was orphaned in the war at 11. She ran with a gang of street children for a year and a half until she was arrested with some others from her gang in a bakery after hours. The policeman cited the girls for solicitation, knowing full well that they had only been stealing. That set them up for the convict trade, and Sugarpie was set to be sent down to Atlantic City, then still dominated by a ruthless Dominion mafia fending off the attacks of the Illadelph Lunatix on its drug dealers, casinos and brothels. The Dominion representative and his van of convicted accountants, plumbers and electricians was kidnapped in transit, and did not arrive to complete the prisoner swap, and so she was conscripted to an industrial hemp farm near Berlin, in southern New Jersey. An old Gardener family named Mead owned the farm, but slowly lost it to debts incurred to the Omega Detachment over the next 5 years. They encouraged the Meads to borrow against their property to contract for a new roof, to purchase new tractors, and to install a custom-built irrigation system. She was among a group of convict laborers who took off on foot through the forests the night before the foreclosure, but they split up at Lake Pine, where some went south to maroon at Wildwood, where the Belleplain forest would protect them from assaults over land, and others headed east to the piers at Tom’s River, hoping to catch a ship bound south for the Dominion, and the rest, including Sugarpie, followed Wharton forest trails to Princeton and points north, back to Newark and New York. But she had learned all that there is to learn about weaving bast fibers.

She and GJ joined forces to manufacture and dye their own textiles, which were prized for their quality, pattern, and color, and they married soon after that. GJ had a good 15 years on Sugarpie, and so he had some business cards printed:

If an old man loves a young woman, that’s his business.
And if a young woman loves an old man, that’s her business.
If they decide to get married, that’s their business.
If you turn this card over, that’s our business.

Sugarpie was provocative, and GJ was subtle in gameplay. Together they were masterful, each playing to the other’s strength. They played one another in the oldest continuous game, rooted in Sugarpie’s long-ago kickoff of the Comedy Games, and they often polled colleagues, recruiting them to join one side or the other of this game, conducted by means of posing subtly variant thought experiments constructed to highlight aspects of the question of the exhaustion or renewal of the blues legacy of the olden United States by the turn of the twenty-first century.

Prince Kudu’Ra, Fieldwork: The Blues (2023)

GJ was for the exhaustion, and Sugarpie defended first continuity and then renewal. They even wove it into their fabric, different approaches to pattern and color identifying their opposing perspectives, and they treated it as though it had dispositive implications for literally every other game played in those days. If GJ was right, and the blues legacy had been exhausted by the end of the Nixon Administration, then the relevance of various records created after the exhaustion would need serious devaluation.

Exacting recordkeepers assuming continuity between, say, 1968 and 2000 would be horrified to have to discount many folk classics, from “Rock the Bells” to “black owned,” and the records indeed showed resistance to that discounting, even in those days, when folks staunchly defended whatever blues-based artists managed to produce. If Sugarpie was right, and the musical flowering of the late twentieth century was a revival and not a last gasp, then the relevance of records created after this renaissance would need serious revaluation. Naïve recordkeepers would have misunderstood new subjectivities politicking or making art with new powers in a new freedom. Sugarpie came to understand that assuming continuity between, say, 1948 and 2000 would be to abandon the search for these lost new notions of freedom, as propounded perhaps by her favorite historical avatars Queen Latifah and President Barack Obama. For Sugarpie, they were signs of renewal. To treat work produced in the early 1950s the same as work produced in the 1990s would be to ignore the radical change in concrete life possibilities over that time. Freedom itself would need to be made an object of any inquiry into its effect on the art produced. This was provocation, indeed, because it sounded like allowing different standards for art, depending on the marketing, which is a rotten kettle of fish best left unopened. Their duel had dark implications for most games in those days, and they proceeded in spite of the social effect of their debate. It gathered and built, piled and darkened like a summer cumulus, shading all proceedings below.

They hustled in—the raindrops had grown too large to freeze in the air—and GJ took Sugarpie’s coat before he took off his own, and he stood looking wondering whether to use the antlers or the hook. He chose an antler for her coat and the hook for his own.

GJ reached into the inside pocket of the coat he had just hung up, and withdrew three saddle-stitched octavos.

He took his seat and slid one copy of each to Fila, Carnation, and Rytius.

“What’s this?” asked Fila, superfluously, reading the title.

Shady and the Soul Stealers

by

G.J. Wallace

“You finished? Congratulations!” Fila jumped up and embraced him.

GJ grinned from ear to ear. “Thank you, Fila. You know it’s been a long time coming.”

Carnation clapped. “Oh, my goodness, I can’t wait to read it.”

“This looks amazing,” Rytius added. “I mean the book looks great.” It was pressed on a thin cream-colored paper, with a beautiful purple-black ink. He flipped it over to read the back cover blurb.

His acts are the hottest, his woman is the baddest, and his lifestyle is the finest.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Houston, Texas, music mogul Peter “Shady” Cross, C.E.O. of Axe-’Em Records, takes the hip-hop world by storm, with hardcore acts from the Bayou City, like the Head Cutters, the Flood Pushers, and the Fifth Ward Trap Dawgs, but also cutting-edge lyricists like the Sinaesthetics and the conscious and progressive Sugarland Plan Station.

But he has a soft side. He discovers, signs and produces Tanasia Bellfort, a k a Bella Bodaccio, who rises to the top of the soul and r&b charts.

She also steals his heart.

But everything changes when his old friend Martin Milkie comes back to town with questions about Pete’s past…a studio fire destroys Axe-’Em’s unreleased master tapes, and Bella disappears without a trace…

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” —Mark Twain

“I can’t wait to read it either,” Rytius agreed.

“You all know Huggums, right?” Sugarpie asked, pulling her chair closer to GJ, pulling his right arm around her shoulder.

“Huggums Dearly? Who makes those little gyroscope toys? He lives in Brookside,” Rytius answered. “With his girlfriend, Koleeko.”

“Jensen. Koleeko Jensen. I know her auntie, May Bee,” said Carnation. “She made me a basket.”

“I saw him getting breakfast a couple days ago, near that market over there,” Fila added. “Right around the corner from you, Rytius.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the spot,” Rytius said. He sold duck eggs to Skyfire Adams at least once a week, and sometimes more. She ran a dairy stand at one of a couple of usual spots in the arcade, and he sold her cider for various holidays. Sometimes all the vendors couldn’t fit into the space, and they spilled out up and down the street. The prince had given up trying to lease spots because anybody who had enough money for a store would get one. It would be stupid to waste money renting a stall in a street market. So the rule was first come, first reserved. You move, you lose.

“Well,” Sugarpie began, leaning in. “Yesterday he came home from the market and he was mad about getting cheated out of money, like with counterfeit coins. Copper-plated zinc instead of copper, and silver-plated steel instead of silver. She asked him who cheated him and he said ‘everybody,’ and he started crying, so she started trying to calm him down, right? So she gets him sitting down and she wants to find out names so she can get the police or at least the market security. He won’t tell her who, because he says they’ll kill him, because they’ve been cheating him for years, and he wasn’t ever supposed to find out. She started getting scared, but she kept on trying to keep him calm. He jumped up and ran to get the money to show her, ’cause he started talking about how if she didn’t believe him he would show her. He got them, and she looked but it was copper and silver. He fell on the floor laughing, talking about how somebody switched it back.”

“Oh, no,” Fila moaned. Carnation sighed. GJ sat silently, and began to roll a marijuana cigarette in the old double-twist style, with thin paper. “Anybody want one?” he asked. “I have tobacco, too.” “I’ll take one of those,” Fila said. Sugarpie grew both plants herself.

“Yes. But then he stopped laughing and started crying again. I don’t know how well you know Koleeko, but she’s trying to stay calm and just figure out what in God’s creation must have happened, because he can’t be so upset about the money because the money can’t be the problem, right? It’s got to be something else. She starts trying to find out what set him off, but he keeps going on about how he wants to move somewhere else, he wants them out now, tonight, and she’s trying to think up who might have made him so mad and she showed him the coins again and said they’re real, you know what I mean? Like just look and you can see. He knocked the coins out of her hand—I mean all over the room—he hit her hand so hard he broke her pinky—and started talking about how they have to leave right now, tonight. She tried to hug him and get him to sit down on the sofa, but he pushed her on the sofa and wouldn’t let her get up, trying to make her answer if she was going to leave with him or not. She said she would, and she said he had to let her get up if he wanted her to pack and he fell down laughing again, and he said he was sorry, and he was on the floor crying and laughing, so she got up and ran into the bedroom and locked the door. He started accusing her of helping them to cheat him, and kicking on the bedroom door. She started screaming out the window for somebody to go get a police.”

“Oh, my God,” said Carnation, mouth agape.

Rytius drawled a wordless horror. GJ finished twisting his joint and set it down, unlit. He drew a mechanical finger roller and some wadded filter cotton from a pants pocket to complete Fila’s tobacco cigarette.

“Yes. Somebody did go get a police, and it was three of them as a matter of fact. Huggums wouldn’t open the front door and he was still shouting and beating on the door inside so they kicked in the door and took him out.”

“Where is he now?” asked Fila, taking the tobacco cigarette from GJ and putting it in his breast pocket. GJ likewise stashed his joint. Rytius wanted to ask for one now, but it was too late. Besides, he was already, still, a little drunk.

“They’ve got him in the jail infirmary,” Sugarpie said. “They charged him with assault and battery on Koleeko and one of the officers.”

“We should go see him,” suggested Carnation, and of course everyone agreed.

“How is Koleeko?” Rytius asked.

“Devastated. How you think?” Sugarpie answered.

Thus deprived of light conversation and unsure what to do or how to help, it wasn’t long before the five colleagues moved to the nave to finish the decorations before everyone else arrived.