audience is eating it like dessert. Camera phones flash all over capturing this. It’ll be on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and anywhere else they can find to upload it before the night is through.
When our song is over, Qwest wears my outer shirt as usual tied around her waist. At least tonight I’m wearing a T-shirt under it. I don’t want to perform this next song with chest and abs out. “Bruise” means too much. I don’t want to set it up, explain it, excuse it, defend it, or make either side of the black and blue debate feel better or worse.
“This song is called ‘Bruise,’” I say simply and quietly once Qwest has left the stage. “It’s my next single, and I hope the lyrics speak for themselves. I hope they speak up for the kids in my neighborhood who get pulled over for nothing or whose dignity is dinged and chipped from the time they understand what those flashing blue lights mean. I hope my words rise up on behalf of my cousin Greg and other cops who put themselves in the line of fire every day, running toward the dangers the rest of us flee. I hope this song is a dirge for lives lost on both sides of a debate that has divided us, when we should unite. I hope this song is common ground.”
The last chorus is more spoken word than rap, with the music and the beat falling away. A capella. When the final word leaves my mouth, disappearing into thin air, it lands in the total silence I’ve come to expect when people hear the song for the first time. A silence loaded with contemplation. The sound of walls dropping and assumptions combusting. Ignorance running from the room. The trickle of applause swells to the loudest it’s been all night in here, and now, my smile is real. That dream I sketched in the air with Rhyson, suspended above a theatre, to be a voice for my generation, that just happened.
I check stage right where I saw Rhyson last. He wears the same look he did the first time he heard “Bruise”, like his eyes open wider every time. He grins and tosses his chin up. Amir stands just behind him, and I’m struck by the two friends who have been mainstays in my life. They come from completely different paths and are completely different types of men, but they are both exactly what I need them to be.
Seguing from “Bruise” into the last song I’d ever want to perform tonight is tough. I’d usually talk a little about the story behind the song, but “Top of the World” is no one’s business but mine and Bristol’s. Or I’d share what it was like to write it, but it wrote itself on a night when I couldn’t sleep. I’d fucked some random chick, whose name I’m ashamed I can’t even remember. The smell of her perfume clung to my sheets, hung on my body. She lay curled up beside me, sweaty, naked, and sated. Disgust and frustration and loneliness and longing waged a blood war in my veins while I wondered what Bristol was doing at that very moment. If she was in bed with some other guy, thinking of me. Or if she was in bed with some other guy, and I wasn’t on her mind at all. And, yeah, I hated her. For a sliver of a second, I hated her for throwing up road blocks and smoke screens and barriers every time I got close enough to see she felt the same way. And there was just enough hate and too much passion to hold in. So, I’d rolled out of bed, lit a joint, and these words puffed from my lungs and fell from the burnt tips of my fingers.
I can’t say any of that, so I just signal the drummer to drop the beat. And my tongue is a stiletto that breaks the seal of my lips. It cuts the lining of my jaw, every word slitting my throat. I’m bleeding out over the infectious sample of Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” in a room full of people, and none of them know.
I exit the stage with the sound of their applause battering my ears. I hope the executives are happy with the pound of flesh I just carved out of myself for them. I hope Bristol’s happy, too, hearing my feelings spread out and tied down on