IN THE MIX
ERIC RED
EAST ST. LOUIS in August was like drowning in snot, Underdogg thought. The choking summer humidity was a smothering wet blanket on his head and shoulders. It weighed the scrawny black teenager down onto a squalid gravel of empty plastic crack vials that crunched under his stolen unlaced sneakers as he walked the sidewalk. Underdogg’s jeans were hanging off his ass, and his turned-around baseball cap was bathed in sweat. Voices pounded inside his skull, forming words, lyrics to his rap song. With every step he took on the street, he looked at the words written in black Magic Marker on his wrist, palm, and back of his hand.
“Dust the motherfuckers with my nine.”
“Gonna get paid, it’s gonna be fine.”
No, that wasn’t right.
He glowered as he trudged on through the punishing heat. A car lumbered past with low sonic boom beat blasting out of the speakers. It fueled Underdogg.
“Dust the motherfuckers with my nine …”
“Gonna get paid, gonna get mine.”
The sixteen-year-old looked up.
There he was, above it all.
Scratchmaster ruled over all he surveyed.
The peeling billboard was a giant picture of the local music producer impresario that loomed over Missouri Avenue by the congested overpass of the 55-64 freeway interchange. Yellow smog and wet waves of heat rising off the simmering asphalt distorted his looming, melting figure. Scratchmaster was tall, thin, dapper, a full grill of gold teeth glinting. He struck an iconic figure. Bald. Black shades. Black leather suit. Two bimbos, one black and one Latino, stuck their exaggerated big butts out, thongs jammed up their cracks, one on each elbow of the producer. One of the bitches’ faces was by the Man’s crotch, looking like she was about to start sucking him off. Shee-it, Underdogg thought. The Man had bank. The Man had bitches. The Man was not down here in the motherfucking shit, that’s for damn sure. The kid sighed.
The billboard boasted that the top rap record on the charts was produced by legendary producer Scratchmaster, recorded and released on his independent 666 label. The local music mogul’s rap songs owned a dark and disturbing power. There was an indefinable something behind the sledgehammer bass, pounding funk drumbeats, and brutally assaultive exclamations in the vocals. It was a subliminal suggestion in Scratchmaster’s popular records that got listeners’ blood boiling to where they sometimes were driven to acts of violence. It was the primal jungle beat in the bass-heavy sledgehammer pounding rhythm. But there was something else. Something in the mix, under the music. Like the sound of breaking bones and squishing guts. It gave the listener the satisfaction of a pipe collapsing some motherfucker’s jaw and teeth. Or their skull caving in with a brick in your hands, brains flying out. Shit, sometimes it was like you could hear the screams way back in the music underneath it all.
That was Scratchmaster’s genius, Underdogg knew in his gut, and what made him a great rap producer. The 666 label’s patented brand of Rap Music was the real deal. To be a gangsta rapper, you had to be hard core. Any dumb niggah can spell and some who can’t could write and perform a rap song. But Scratchmaster, nobody could do what he could do in the studio. His mix. It was all in the mix.
Scratchmaster’s music was everywhere.
Pumping out ghetto-blaster boom boxes on gangbangers’ shoulders.
Pouring out of the sweltering open windows of the tenements.
Thundering out of cars with huge backseat speakers.
It provided the depressed streets violently vital sonic lifeblood, the deranged musical pulse of a psychopath strung out on crystal meth.
It was what Underdogg was listening to on his iPod when he got the gun and robbed the liquor store. He was so high he was halfway inside before the boy realized he was busting into the Dry Spin Laundromat instead. Bunch of stupid-ass old lady faces and homeless mofos giving him blank looks when he was going for his gun. Sheee-it. He was this close to putting a cap in the ass of the old bitch cussing him out like she was his mama or something, but he didn’t have no mama, so he just grabbed her purse and knocked her on her bony ass. Then he walked out to find that liquor store. Underdogg had smoked so much weed in his sixteen years he could barely remember his birth name of Rufus. He didn’t do crack though. Well, maybe just a taste now and again. He had to keep his head straight, not like the other niggahs on the block.
After all, he wasn’t going to be pulling holdups and robbing old ladies his whole life.
This was just something he was doing until he became a rap star.
And his dream was, Scratchmaster would be his producer.
Just needed to use the holdup money to buy a huge ghetto-blaster radio.
Underdogg looked up at the billboard across the street and made eye contact with the Satan in satin and shades.
Payday, motherfucker.
He wrote down some rap lyrics on his hand with a Magic Marker.
“Got that welfare check from the old bitches’ bag.”
“Stuck up the liquor store grab the swag.”
“Don’t mind no life of crime.”
“Gonna get paid, gonna get mine.”
“Indeed.”
“Indeed.”
* * *
The recording studio was the basement of a boarded-up bombed-out crackhouse on Ohio near the train tracks. Recording studio was what Underdogg called it anyway. He lived there too. His equipment basically consisted of an old beat box and a CD recorder. The kid would prance around and punch the air and yell out his rap lyrics as the beat box backed him up with an electronic drumbeat. He would grab a hammer and pound on the bricks and pipes. This shit was on.
Wiping sweat from his face with a filthy towel, Underdogg took a seat and pressed Play on the CD recorder.
His teenage crew, Infamous DKX and Hi 5 Jam Boy, hunkered in the darkness, lounging on the junkyard sofa, their shades and jewelry glinting. A black steel Beretta 9mm sat on the table. The powdered remains of a few lines of cocaine on a mirror were beside it. Empty McDonald’s and Popeyes food containers were everywhere, along with half-eaten food. The teens passed a jay and listened to the primitive rap song their friend recorded on the boom box. Thick, noxious smoke filled the air. Somewhere outside, backfire or gunshots sounded, and then a dog barking, then a siren wail. Underdogg took a hit. This weed is rank, and he struggled not to cough as he held the smoke in his mouth and breathed out. One day he was going to afford the good shit. That day was going to be a great day.
Infamous DKX shook his head. “Niggah, them lyrics of yours is some nasty shit.”
“Tru dat.” Hi 5 Jam Boy nodded.
“What the fuck you talkin’?” Underdogg shot them a defensive glance.
“I’m talkin’ you be all rapping about beatin’ your ’ho’s brains in, and then fuckin’ her after you killed her shit because the bitch held out on you the money she made turning tricks for you. Damn, boy. That’s harsh.”
“To be a gangsta rapper you gotta be hard core,” Underdogg told his crew.
“Tru dat.” Hi 5 Jam Boy nodded.
They listened to the tape, and Underdogg heard how cheap it was compared to the violent subliminal force of a Scratchmaster CD. He got up and paced around his filthy basement crib, making a long expression. “Man, listen to that Scratchmaster mix, y’all, it’s all in his mix. If my record had the sound that Scratchmaster gets, I’d be there. I’m gonna get him to produce my record.”
“How you gonna do that, dawg?” jibed Infamous DKX. “Scratchmaster is big time and he ain’t gonna bother with your scrawny ass.”
“Scratchmaster listens to my stuff, he’ll know I’m his boy,” Underdogg bragged, squeezing his package with one hand and pointing two fingers with the other. “He’ll beg me to produce my record.”
“You’ll be Scratchmaster’s bee-yach you go messin’ with him,” said his friend. “He been in jail for murder, and they say he had three East Coast rappers capped in drive-bys last year.”
Underdogg grinned approvingly. “Like I said, to be a gangsta rapper you gotta be hard core.”
“Tru dat.” Hi 5 Jam Boy nodded.
* * *
Underdogg and his peeps hung out on a street corner across from the 666 studio, scoping it out. The record company was in a local warehouse down on State Street and Gray Boulevard. There was a fence topped with razor wire around the alley. Doberman pinschers skulked behind the chain links, choke chains on their necks. The area used to be a meat-packing district, and heavy rusted hooks hung in the heat of the abandoned loading bays. The boys knew this hood. After-hours clubs kept popping up around here until cops busted them, and crack and pussy was always available for a price. The rappers had the ghetto blaster with them, with Underdogg’s CD. They had been waiting for hours, and no sign of nobody.
Soon, a huge, garish limo rolled up and parked.
Scratchmaster got out. He looked smaller and older in real life than Underdogg figured he would. The music producer was a tall, rather sunken man with a black leather coat and rings and jewelry on his neck and fingers. He had a voluptuous ’ho on each arm, each wearing a mink coat. As he helped one of the girls from the backseat, her fur opened along with her legs as she stepped out, a flash of bush on her naked thighs underneath. Across the street, the three boys silently eyeballed their appreciation to one another. The girl licked her gloss lipstick, tossed her frizzed hair, and walked toward the building wearing only the coat and high heels.
“I’m gonna go get up in his grill,” said Underdogg, and he crossed the street. “Hey, Scratchmaster, lemme talk to you a minute.”
The music producer turned, radiating intimidating boss-man charisma. “What do you want?”
“I want to play my tape for you. I’m Underdogg, a rapper from the hood, and after you hear my sound you’ll wanna make my record.”
“Send me a CD.”
“No, I want to play it for you now. I got it right here on my box.”
Amused at the kid’s juice, Scratchmaster exchanged a wink with his ladies. “Okay, my man, let’s see what you got.”
“Check this out.” Underdogg pressed Play and held up his boom box. His crude song blasted out of the speakers.
Not for long.
Scratchmaster winced in pain. “Turn that off. That is the worst thing I ever heard. Boy, get yourself a real job.” The foxy women on the producer’s arm laughed derisively in the gangsta rapper’s face.
Underdogg cringed in humiliation as Scratchmaster and his women turned their backs and walked into 666 Records. When the disgraced kid turned around, he saw his crew, Infamous DKX and Hi 5 Jam Boy, buckled over in laughter. “So Scratchmaster give you a record deal?” they chortled, and headed off down the street.
“Screw you man, you’ll see” the embittered Underdogg called after them. His eyes turned to flint. “To be a gangsta rapper you gotta be hard core.”
* * *
Night.
Underdogg stood across the street from the quiet warehouse. He kept his mouth closed so his gold tooth wouldn’t catch the light.
He had the nine stuck in his pants.
He knew Scratchmaster was in the building and that he was alone because the bitches had gone in the limo hours ago. Once, the record producer had come out the back, behind the barbed wire, and fed the Dobermans some kind of meat. The dogs were insane the way they chewed it down, getting blood everywhere, but they licked that up too.
He was glad he was packing the nine.
Presently, the front door opened, and Scratchmaster left the studio alone.
The gangsta rapper walked up to him on the sidewalk, fearless belligerence on his face.
“What do you want now, sucka?” whispered the producer.
Underdogg pulled the gun and aimed it at him sideways. “You gonna produce my record, Scratchmaster. Right now or I’m gonna go hard core on you.”
“Take it easy,” Scratchmaster said, looking like a very old man.
Prodding him in the chest with the barrel, the kid forced the heavyset producer back in the building. “What’s your plan, my man?” Scratchmaster said. “This a robbery? We ain’t got no money here.”
“This ain’t no robbery, like I told you. Don’t you listen? We gonna go into your studio, and you gonna set me up on the mike, and I’m gonna do my rap, and you gonna record and mix it with that Scratchmaster sound that you do. Then you gonna gimme the masters, and I gonna split.”
“That’s your plan?”
“And I’m gonna take the tapes with me and go get it released and the record we done gonna go platinum.”
“That’s it?”
“Indeed.”
“Boy, I thought I seen some far-out things people do to be breaking into the business, but this takes the cake.”
Underdogg followed Scratchmaster down the hall, gun in hand, but spoke with reverence. “I jus’ wanna say I respect you.”
“Say what?”
“I respect you.”
“You gonna put a cap in my ass and you say you respect me?” The old man shook his head.
“I didn’t want to do it this way. You watch. You listen to what I record. You gonna make a million dollars. I let you manage me.”
“I ’preciate you manage not shooting me in my damn head is all. Watch that gun. Studio back here.”
All along the wood inlay walls were 60s- and 70s-era music posters of R&B and soul stars. There were mounted LP records from that time on all the walls. Several framed photographs showed a much younger Scratchmaster with a huge Afro and sideburns and mustache, standing and grinning with Smokey Robinson in one and Sly Stone in the other. But Underdogg’s blank stare showed he didn’t know who they were. The music producer shook his head sadly. “Boy, bet you don’t even know who those people are. Hell, bet you don’t even know what an LP is.”
“Shee-it, what I don’t know is how motherfuckers dressed like that.”
Scratchmaster seemed eerily cool as he did as he was bid and took them into the secluded, soundproofed recording studio of 666 Records.
“Yo, Scratchmaster, what’s the secret of your sound?”
“It’s all in the mix.”
“I knew that!” Underdogg chortled. “I tell all the motherfuckers that! Scratchmaster’s music, it’s all in the mix! Don’t I tell everybody that! Damn. You ’n me, Scratchmaster, we gonna be boys.”
“In my day, we said brothers.”
They went into the darkened, low-tech room filled with tape reels and mixing banks. Underdogg ordered Scratchmaster at gunpoint to get the tapes and put them up on the reel-to-reel. “Don’t you use digital? This shit looks like what they used in the seventies.”
“No.” Scratchmaster smiled. “I’m what you call old school.” The music producer showed Underdogg into the recording booth.
The teen gangsta rapper noticed that the floor was covered with sheets of black plastic. “Y’all got plastic on the floor.”
“We doing some renovations,” said Scratchmaster.
He checked the levels on the mixing board. And pressed Record …
“Sit down by the mike. You ready.”
Underdogg sat down in the chair behind the microphone, his eyes filled with excitement. “Hot damn,” he chortled.
Sticking the pistol in the belt, the kid eyeballed the producer through the booth window. “Don’t try nothing funny, dog, I got my nine right where I can get it.”
Then Scratchmaster pressed another button.
Four steel clamps shut over Underdogg’s wrists and ankles. He was firmly pinned. “Wha—?” he gasped.
Scratchmaster turned up the lights.
The walls were covered with all forms of knives, scalpels, cleavers, drills, truncheons, tongs, and death apparatus. Some still had dried blood.
The recording studio was a torture chamber. Underdogg whimpered, completely pinned. And suddenly realized why there was plastic covering the floor.
Scratchmaster tugged on rubber surgical gloves.
“Helllllllllppppp!!!” screamed Underdogg.
“The studio is soundproofed, fool,” said Scratchmaster as he moved some microphones into position and turned on the recording machines.
“I’m sorry I’m sorry!!!”
“Please scream a little louder,” said Scratchmaster as he tweaked a knob. “I need to get a level.”
Underdogg looked on in shuddering, helpless terror. Scratchmaster perused the torture implements and selected a power drill.
He approached with it.
The tape rolled, recording.
“Maybe I was wrong about you,” said Scratchmaster. “Could be you do have what it takes to make a hit record.”
Underdogg screamed hysterically as the producer revved on the power drill with a hideous whirrrrrrrrrrr.
“Nnnnnnnnooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo—!!!”
‘This is a take.”
The reel-to-reels turned.
The drill cut.
The microphone was splashed with blood.
“… Because it’s all in the mix, baby, all in the mix.”
“Ohmigoooooood!” The drill bit stopped, caked with blood-ribboned flesh as it was ripped out of the reamed cartilage of Underdogg’s kneecap. “Please stop please stop why you doing this to me, man, why why?”
Scratchmaster laid the power drill on the splattered, black plastic duct-taped to the floor. A jet of pumping blood ejaculated out of the kid’s knee. The record producer went out of the booth and got behind the mixing board, checking some levels. “You want to know why I’m doing this?”
“Please don’t hurt me no more, man. Why?”
Straightening up, Scratchmaster removed his shades. He eyeballed Underdogg through the glass. “Because I hate rap music!”
The kid’s eyes blinked incredulously through his agony. “But … you Scratchmaster, man. That’s what you do, bra, that’s what you do!”
“I’m gonna school you, boy. Rap ruined the music. Back when I started out, we knew how to play. R and B. Soul. Even funk. Motown. Smokey. Aretha. Even Teddy Pendergrass. Even Sly. You know those names? I sessioned with them. I was by their side in the recording studio making their records. And it didn’t start with them. Shit no. You know who Robert Johnson is, boy? Sonny Boy Williamson. Howlin’ Wolf? They was giants. That’s who we listened to when we was comin’ up. Then you dumb fuck can’t-play-a-note-crackhead-rap-motherfuckers come along with your bullshit rhymes and your ’hos and you ruined the music. Put me out of business.” The venomous old man spewed bitterness and bile from a ruined, disappointed life, twisted into insane viciousness. “Nobody puts me out of business.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, you crazy old niggah, I don’t know what you’re talking—!” Underdogg twisted in the chair in the mechanical restraints.
Scratchmaster continued on his bipolar rant, his mood veering schizophrenically from righteousness to murderous fury. “All you rap motherfuckers want to do is wear your chains and smoke your crack and act like gangstas with your bitches. We was musicians in my day, boy. We learned guitar. And we learned piano. We could play. And we hung with cats could play. And we toured our shit. We worked hard. Hard work. And now it’s all gone. The music is gone. Because. Of. Rap. You punks all think it come easy. You think you put on chains and strut like an ape to a beat box with a cheap rhyme and you get yours. I’m getting mine. The people want this rap shit, I give the people what they want. Always give the fucking fuckers want they want …”
The record producer returned to the booth. Opening a closet, he pulled out a stand with a saline drip on an intravenous tube.
“W-what’s that?” Underdogg mewled.
Taking the hypodermic syringe at the end of the tube, Scratchmaster injected it in the kid’s forearm. “Why, this here is saline drip. Make sure you don’t go all into shock and pass out on me. You got a lot of screaming to do, and for that, your ass gotta be awake.” The record producer looked disgusted when Underdogg began to snivel. “Don’t you want to be a star, boy? Don’t you want people to listen to you on the radio?”
“I-I just want to go home. Please let me go.” The kid was bawling like a bitch.
“Well now, that’s no way for a … what do ya call it … gangsta rapper to act. What would 50 Cent say? He’d say ‘see ya wouldn’t want to be ya.’ I want to hear what you got!” Scratchmaster’s bony fingers closed on the long handle of a fire hatchet.
Underdogg’s vision blurred as he saw the tall and skeletal old man grab the heavy axe from the table, heft it high above his head, and swing it down hard. Wfffffffft. The kid heard a wet snapping crunch and watched the front of his sneaker shoot like a rat across the floor with his severed toes and half his foot still in it.
The last thought that passed through his mind was, where was he going to steal a new pair of Nikes.
Then he wasn’t thinking anymore. Just screaming. Someone was screaming louder than him. “And my name ain’t Scratchmaster, boy! You hear me?” roared the old man as he swung the bloody axe home again and again in red volcanic eruptions of gore. “My fucking name is Leon!”
He hacked and hacked until the tape ran out.
The following morning, warm summer rain pelted the decrepit warehouse of 666 Records. The rundown area was bleak and deserted. From somewhere in the building, the cool R&B strains of Smokey Robinson floated out into the humid air. Behind the rusty razor-wire fence, the feral Doberman pinschers skulked, drenched. The heavy industrial rear door creaked open and Scratchmaster stepped out in his robe. The air blossomed with Smokey’s lyrical falsetto in an old Motown classic song pumping from the stereo inside. The guard dogs snapped and growled hungrily, straining on their chains. Adjusting his shades, a cigarette dangling from his lips, the Afro’d record producer carried a bucket of chopped meat he dumped in the dog-feeding trough. He got away from his animals quick as they attacked the meal. Scratchmaster hummed “Just take a good look at my face” along with the music as he went back inside. The feral canines dug into the bloody chum slopping out of the trough, digging their jaws into the red, dripping shags of flesh. They devoured all traces of it in a few bites.
One of the Dobermans suddenly yelped, whimpering as it spit out something hard lodged in its molars.
A gold tooth.
* * *
Snow fell on the peeling billboard for 666 Records lording over the frozen December Missouri Avenue. Cars hissed by on the slushy sleet-encrusted street.
A local record store was open.
Posters were everywhere for the new “Underdogg” CD.
Blasting out of the store speakers, a song with the vaguely recognizable hideous screams, power drilling, and hatchet chops of Underdogg’s dying moments.
A line of local teenage boys and girls were waiting outside to purchase the first copies, shivering in the cold.
Scratchmaster watched from his heated limo, puffing a cigar. He wore his black suit and fingered his ivory cane.
“Excuse me.”
Scratchmaster turned to see the eager face in the opposite window.
“You Scratchmaster, ain’t you?” It was another belligerent young gangsta rapper holding a homemade CD. “Would you listen to my stuff?”
The record producer watched the kid, and he sort of smiled.
Then opened the door to his limo….