Something She Can Feel

“Good.”

I stood there, two inches from the car shaking my head in anticipation. Waiting for him.

“Oh you’re waiting to hear it now?” he asked, sounding confused.

“Yes,” I said.

“Come on now. You can’t be serious.”

“What? I said I would listen.”

“We got to roll. You don’t listen to something like this just anywhere.” He was laughing. “We got to roll with it. Drink it in with the breeze.”

“But I was about to ...” I looked back at my pile on the cement again and couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Dame helped me get the things into my car and we were driving away from the school in the pickup truck. He plugged his MP3 player into what was clearly a new radio in the old truck, turned the volume all the way down and pushed back in his seat. Looking around as we rode in silence, I noticed that there were no seat belts, the air-conditioning had been torn out, and there was a big hole in the floor beneath the gas pedal. I hadn’t been in a pickup truck in years, and this one had to have been old enough to belong to my grandfather. But Dame, who’d looked comfy riding in the back of a chauffeured Bentley days before, seemed just as natural here.

“Do we have to go somewhere to get the song?” I asked.

“No ... I’m just waiting until you can hear it.”

“Hear it?”

“Trust me,” he said smoothly. Still handling the truck, he looked over at me and I swore he winked without moving his eye.

I felt I should probably protest, but the heat in the car was getting to me and I just wanted to catch a breeze, so I sat back in my seat like him and held my head toward the window frame, just as I had when I was a little girl r

iding in my grandfather’s truck. I relaxed my neck and let my arms fall to my sides.

As we rolled down University Boulevard and through the middle of downtown, I wondered for a while who might be seeing me riding with Dame. The people from church. From school. My parents. What would they say? We weren’t doing anything. Just riding. But I knew they’d say something. I wasn’t where I was supposed to be and that was enough. And then I thought of how crazy it would look if we inched up to Evan at a stop sign. He’d look over at me. Open his mouth. Roll down his window. Say my name in a question. I searched the lanes, the parking spots for his silver BMW, but never saw it. And by the time I got tired of looking for the car and recognized that no one—not one single person walking by—even bothered to look, I realized that I’d been riding in silence for over thirty minutes. I’d unbuttoned the top of my shirt and taken out my earrings. The breeze had gotten into me and riding along beneath the steel top, I didn’t even feel the heat anymore.

“You ready?” Dame asked, turning the knobs on the radio.

“Sure,” I said.

Break out, his voice called through the speakers. Yeah. Break out. There was a pause and then a beat came in. Fast and full of a kicking bass that thumped in my chest, it vibrated through the truck, rattling so hard I could feel it in between my toes. It was loud. Loud and making the doors creak. But still the constant waves moving through my body made me remember when I used to ride in the front seat of Billie’s car freshman year in college as we listened to UGK, the 69 Boyz, 2 Live Crew, OutKast—all of the rap CDs my father would toss in the garbage had he found them in my room.

Then, just as I began to fall back into memory and nod my head to the beat, I heard something that was unfamiliar in a rap song, but very familiar to me—the unmistakable thunder of a Hammond B3 organ.

“Oh,” I said, straightening up, “that’s an—”

“No.” Dame stopped me. “Just stay relaxed. Feel it.”

I unfolded again and listened. Dame came in and rhymed on top of the beat. As I’d heard, his flow was fast and intense. I felt old just trying to make out the words and it was funny because when I stopped trying, I could hear and understand them perfectly.

In the verse, Dame was talking about the music industry and other rappers and how he wanted to break through. Everybody wanted something from him. Everybody wanted to “take” something and try to “remake something” and not give credit. Then he said only God could “take and make,” so he was going to take and make and he was going to be God. A god. Any god.

I felt my forehead crinkle. I was used to black men referring to themselves as God, a god, but it sounded ludicrous. The very concept of God was perfection and man, destined to die, was innately ungodly. A maker or not, it wasn’t something that could be debated.

“What you think?” he asked, turning the song off before it was over.

“Well, I think it’s ...”

“Be honest. I ain’t come all the way to get you to have you blow smoke. I want to know what you think.”

We were at a stoplight. I saw two girls from Black Warrior walking by on the sidewalk on the other side of the truck. They were wearing tight jeans and cutoff T-shirts that showed the muscles in their stomachs. Just before the light changed, one noticed Dame and pointed toward the car.

“Dame!” they both squealed, jumping up and down like kangaroos beside each other. A few other people walking by turned and looked, too. Dame nodded his head coolly as if we were in a music video and smashed his foot on the gas.