The Turnaround Read Free Page B

heard on the soul stations while walking his deliveries, and sometimes would sing them in empty elevators, learning through experimentation which ones had the best acoustics. “Groove Me.” “In the Rain.” “Oh Girl.” And he plotted his routes so he would spot particular young women he liked, knowing just where they might be at certain times of day. Most of them thought of him as a kid, but sometimes he would smile at them and get a smile in return that implied something else: You are young but you have something. Be patient, Alex. This will come to you. You are not that far away.
    Everything was in front of him and new.

Two
    T WO BROTHERS walked up a slightly graded rise toward a small market and general store called Nunzio’s. They had just finished playing one-on-one at the outdoor court of a recreation center that adjoined an African Methodist Episcopal church. The older of the two, eighteen-year-old James Monroe, held a worn basketball under his arm.
    Both James and his younger brother, Raymond, were long and thin, cut in the solar plexus and flat of chest, with good definition in the shoulders and arms. Both wore their hair in blowouts. James, a recent high school graduate, was good-looking and fully formed, and stood over six feet. At fifteen years old, Raymond was just as tall as James. As they walked, Raymond used a fist-topped pick to upcomb his hair.
    “James,” said Raymond, “you seen Rodney’s new stereo yet?”
    “Seen it? I was with him when he bought it.”
    “He got some big-ass Bozay speakers, man.”
    “Call it Bose . You sayin it like it’s French or somethin.”
    “However you say it, those speakers is bad.”
    “They are some nice boxes.”
    “Man, he played me this record by this new group, EWF?”
    “They ain’t all that new. Uncle William got their first two records.”
    “They’re new to me,” said Raymond. “Rodney put on this one song, ‘Power’? Starts off with a weird instrument —”
    “That’s a kalimba, Ray. An African instrument.”
    “After that, the music kicks in hard. Ain’t no words in this song, either. When Rodney turned it up . . . I’m telling you, man, I was trippin .”
    “You shoulda heard those speakers at the stereo store we went to,” said James. “Down on Connecticut? They got this sound room in the back, all closed up in glass. Call it the World of Audio. The salesman, long-haired white dude, puts Wilson Pickett on the platter. ‘Engine Number Nine,’ the long jam. Got to be the one record he spins when he trying to sell a stereo system to the black folk. Anyway, Rodney, you know he don’t play that. So he says to the dude, ‘Don’t you have any rock records I can hear?’ ”
    “Messin with the white dude’s head.”
    “Right. So the salesman puts on a Led Zeppelin. That song with all the weird shit in the middle of it, music flyin back and forth between the speakers? One where the singer’s talking about, ‘Gonna give you every inch of my love.’ ”
    “Yeah, Led Zeppelin . . . he’s bad .”
    “It’s a group, stupid. Not just one dude.”
    “Why you always tryin to teach me?”
    “You shoulda heard it, Ray. Those speakers liked to blow us out the room. I mean, Rodney couldn’t pull his wallet out fast enough. Fifteen minutes later, the stock boy is cramming a couple of Bozay Five-Oh-Ones into Rodney’s trunk.”
    “Thought it was Bose.”
    James reached out and tapped his brother’s head with affection. “I’m just playin with you, son.”
    “I’d like to have me a stereo like that one.”
    “Yeah,” said James Monroe. “Rodney got the baddest stereo in Heathrow Heights.”
    Heathrow Heights was a small community of about seventy houses and apartments, bordered by railroad tracks to the south, woods to the west, parkland to the north, and a large boulevard and commercial strip to the east. It was an all-black neighborhood, founded by former slaves from southern Maryland on land deeded to them by the