Easy Street Read online

“I just do. It’ll work, Rob, trust me. It has to.”

  “Why?” We were stuck in more traffic. I put the car into Park. It wasn’t even worth trying to move.

  “Because I need the money.”

  “For college?”

  “For life. Did you really believe I was serious about going to college?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Not a chance. Two more years of sitting around doing nothing? Getting nowhere? If I learned anything from my time…away, it’s that you can’t waste time. You have to use it or lose it. I don’t need to go to school to do what I want to do.”

  “And what is that?” The traffic started moving again. I put the car into gear and pulled ahead.

  “I’ve got this idea for a T-shirt company.”

  I shook my head. Everyone had an idea for a T-shirt company. “Really?” I said.

  “And other ideas,” Adam said defensively. “That’s just the start. I’m not going to be broke again, Rob. I’m not going to scrounge any longer. Not having money is the worst thing in this world. You can’t do anything. No one gives a shit about you. No one is willing to help you. Anyone with any brains is out there trying to make coin. Without money you’re nothing.”

  We’d made it to King Street. For some reason the traffic started flowing. “Park here real quick,” Adam said.

  I pulled into a spot but left the car running. The AC washed over us.

  “There it is.” Adam pointed at the club. Industrial. A small door in a large building. No windows. No top-floor apartments. Just an old warehouse with the name above the door.

  “They’re going to pull in fifteen grand there tonight?” I said.

  “People love this place. I looked it up.”

  I glanced over at him. He was staring at the building the way a dog stares at a raw piece of meat. “It’s a stupid idea,” I said.

  Adam kept staring. Finally he spoke. “I need you to do this for me, Rob. Okay?”

  I didn’t reply. Everything inside me told me to say no. To just start driving north and not stop until we got someplace where we could work a full day and get paid for it and make a good living. My brother and I.

  The only problem was, I had no idea where that would even be.

  “Rob?”

  “We can check it out,” I said. “That’s all I can promise.”

  “It’s going to work,” he said. A bus stopped beside us, its air brakes setting off a nearby car alarm. “It has to.”

  Chapter Seven

  There were no turntables. There hadn’t been turntables in years. I’d only had them when I was DJing because it was an older club and it had never thrown them out. I liked to actually feel the vinyl. It connected me to the old world of spinning actual records. But the truth was, I didn’t need turntables. And I was glad not to be hauling boxes of records with me.

  It was all digital. You had any song you wanted in the palm of your hand.

  The club was quiet. Adam and I had met with the manager, a guy in his early forties with a giant beard. He’d barely said a word, and the “tour” was basic.

  “Green room is over there. DJ booth here,” he’d said. Then he’d looked at me. “I thought you’d played here before.”

  “No.”

  He’d rubbed at his face. “A lot of these DJ names are the same. Bar’s over there. You’re of age, right?”

  “For sure.”

  “You’re on at eleven and five. No problem there, right?”

  “Nope.”

  “You bring a USB?” I’d held up the stick. “You have half an hour to get yourself familiar with the equipment and plan out a set.” And with that he’d walked away.

  There was some good music on DJ Oaklay’s USB. And some absolute crap. He did have a couple of sets laid out, and I was tempted to just grab one and play it. But that went against everything I’d ever believed in as a DJ. There was an art to mixing music. It wasn’t just twisting a knob now and then and bobbing your head.

  I began placing tracks next to one another to create a mix. They would still need to be blended together, but I was getting the general idea of how I would spend my hour.

  I’d just returned to the first track and was going to practice my fades when Adam stepped up beside me.

  “Come back with me for a sec,” Adam said.

  “Back where?”

  “The green room. I need to scope things out.”

  I was about to tell him to forget it. But I knew he’d just go on his own. That no matter what I did, Adam was determined to see this through.

  The green room was small, sad and musty-smelling. White walls with sagging posters. A sink and microwave. A little fridge.

  “Pretty extravagant,” Adam said. He shut the door and sat on one of the three couches. The first thing I noticed were the cameras. There were two of them. One facing each door.

  “Cameras, eh,” I said, opening the fridge. All that was in there was some bottled water and an open container of hummus.

  “Yeah. I see that.”

  “Not making things easy, are they?” I grabbed two bottles of water, handed one to Adam and opened the other.

  Adam stood. “Okay. Just wanted to see what we were dealing with here.” He hitched up his belt. But his jeans immediately slid back down his thin waist.

  Back out in the club, my mix was still playing. It was a combo of the old and the new. I was starting to kind of like DJ Oaklay and wondered what kind of trouble he’d gotten himself into.

  The mixing board was tight. None of the dials needed to be turned much for dramatic changes to occur. The bass was heavy and full. The treble high and crisp. Without a doubt this was the best system I’d ever played on.

  Adam had brought my headphones, and although I wanted to be angry with him for doing all of this without talking to me first, I also appreciated the comfort and familiarity of my old Sonys.

  I didn’t know the DJs booked to perform on either side of my slots, so I couldn’t build into their work. I decided to create a solid hour of old hard techno. Only one track with lyrics. The rest of the time I’d lay vocals on top of pure drums and bass.

  I felt excited to be doing this again. I was really getting into it. Loading the tracks into the mixer. Considering where the drop would be and how to drag it out as long as possible. That was the way I liked to DJ. Make people wait for the drop. Build the set slowly. Get everything to move faster and faster, harder, louder. Then suck the air out of the room with that unbelievable silence before the world came crashing down.

  “Nice!” Adam yelled.

  I’d decided how to set up the drop. The silence would be killer, followed by an explosion of noise that rumbled out to a heavy hard-techno beat.

  “This is a hell of a system!” I yelled. I must have been smiling my face off, because Adam threw an arm around my shoulder and pulled me in tight.

  “You still love it,” he said.

  “I didn’t,” I replied. “I mean, I quit. This is the first time in, like, three years that I’ve played.” Adam keyed in to what I was saying. “I got into a lot of alt rock stuff.”

  “What? Like, guitars and shit?”

  “Yeah. Deep. I even learned how to play guitar.” I shut the music down and ejected the USB stick.

  Adam wasn’t listening anymore. I looked to where his attention was directed. It seemed as though people were arriving for work. Two large men were sitting at the bar.

  “Those’ll be the bouncers,” said Adam.

  “I think we want to stay out of their way,” I replied.

  “Yeah, you do.” A voice behind me made me jump.

  Even with the music off, I hadn’t heard anyone approach. I spun to find a girl there. She was Asian, her hair was in pigtails, and she had on a panda backpack. She slipped a USB into the console and started flipping switches. “You playing tonight?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She held a hand out. “DJ Virtu.”

  “As in virtuous?”

  “No,
” she said, laughing. “Virtual.”

  “Oh, okay.” I shook her hand. I went to let go, but she held on.

  “And you are?”

  “DJ Oaklay,” I said. “With an a.”

  “Um, no you’re not,” she said.

  “Sorry?” Music suddenly started playing. It had a light, almost fantasy-sounding beat.

  “You’re not Oaklay. I know him.”

  “Oh,” I said, then didn’t know what to say next.

  “Oaklay got jammed up and couldn’t make it tonight,” Adam said. “But if he misses this gig…well, you know. No club likes someone who isn’t trustworthy.”

  “So you’re just pretending to be Oaklay?” DJ Virtu asked. I nodded. “You can DJ though, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Don’t give him a bad name,” she said, turning to the console. “He’s a friend of mine.”

  Chapter Eight

  We had dinner at a restaurant a block away from the club.

  “So,” I said, between mouthfuls of pasta. “Do you really think this is going to work?” I was still feeling pretty nervous about it all.

  “It’s going to work. Trust me,” said Adam.

  “There are cameras everywhere.”

  “I don’t think the point is that we’re going to get away clean and clear with this. I think the point is that no one knows me, and once we’ve done this I’ll be gone. Like, they aren’t going to call the cops on me or anything, right?”

  “But what if you wanted to come back here?”

  Adam wiped at his face with a napkin. “That’s in the future. I’m thinking about right now.”

  This was Adam all over. He’d only ever thought about “right now.” The future had always been something he couldn’t even imagine.

  “It’s stealing,” I said quietly.

  “I know it is. But they’ve been ripping DJs off forever. They tell everyone that the DJs get the door, but they don’t. It’s full-on Robin Hood, Rob.”

  “I’m not sure they’ll see it that way,” I said.

  “I’m not really worried about what way they’ll see it. I need to get paid.”

  I didn’t like it, but I finished my pasta and tried to imagine it all working out like he said it would. I knew I couldn’t stop him. But maybe, somehow, I could save him.

  We got to the club early. It didn’t open until ten. We were banging on the door at nine thirty.

  “Eager,” one of the giant bouncers said as he let us in. We were almost past him when he said, “Have I seen you guys here before?”

  “No,” I said. “We’re from New York.” I don’t know what made me say that. I guess it seemed possible, and to be from a place far away from Toronto made sense.

  “I expect to hear some solid NY beats then,” the bouncer said. He held out his hand, and we went through an elaborate shake that I always seemed to be a step behind with. DJ Virtu was already in the booth. The system was humming, but nothing was playing yet.

  “You came back,” Virtu said as I stepped inside and Adam went to the bar and settled himself onto a stool. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

  “Why not?” I replied.

  Virtu hit a button, and a steady, slow, heaving beat filled the room. Everything changed then, as it always does with the introduction of music to a silent room. “No reason!” she yelled. I stared at her, and she added, “You just looked like you might be in over your head.”

  The doors of the club opened, and a few people came in. I could see them handing over five-dollar bills. Virtu dropped a vocal line over the beats. I watched as she set the lights to pulse. She mixed one track into the next, and had I not watched her do it, I wouldn’t have known it had happened. She was very smooth.

  After she had the next track rolling, she turned to me, looking a little surprised. “You’re still here?”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  She shifted toward me and spread her arms wide. “Yeah, I need my space.”

  I stepped out of the booth and went to the bar.

  “This place is filling up fast,” Adam said. He’d spun around on the stool to take in the ever-growing crowd. “I don’t think they were shitting us about the three thousand.”

  We sat there just watching right up until I needed to get into the booth. There were at least five hundred people in the giant space by then. Eleven o’clock was pretty early for a club crowd. I was growing more convinced that there could very well be three thousand people coming through the door that night.

  “I gotta spin,” I said. Adam gave me a clap on the back.

  DJ Virtu spotted me as I climbed the steps to the booth.

  “Do you want me to end or let it ride?”

  “Let it ride!” I yelled. It was etiquette. If you had the preceding DJ shut their track down, you were pretty much saying you didn’t like their music and didn’t want to be associated with what they were spinning. If you let it ride, it meant you wanted to work with them. To blend your sets together because you approved of their set.

  “I’ll leave you something interesting.” She turned back to the console, and the beat suddenly pitched up. It sounded almost like a jungle track with its skipping, jumping beats. She hit the lights a few times, then raised her arms and screamed into the microphone, “DJ Virtu out. I’ll be back at four. See you all then!”

  People clapped and yelled. She leaned back over the microphone. “DJ Oaklay, people!”

  I shrunk. It wasn’t my name. But it was still me standing up there. As she passed me, Virtu said, “Do him proud.”

  “I’ll try.”

  I inserted the USB and found the directory I’d set up before. The songs I wanted to use were all there. I had planned out the order. But suddenly I was fumbling with the dials. I couldn’t get the first track started properly. I kept missing the timing as the crazy song Virtu had put on seemed to be constantly speeding up. I closed my eyes and breathed for a moment. Let the music swell around me. Then I tried again.

  Everything slowed down. And it was just like in the old days. I could slip into the beat wherever I wanted. Play with it. Blend the next track in as though the two had been made together. When I got the first track mixed, I looked up to see a room filled with people dancing. Adam was right there at the front, waving his arms and nodding to the beat. I played with the bass a little, making the speakers whomp. I held the treble a touch higher than it needed to be, then mixed in the next track, which had no real treble at all. It was like a mini drop. All that high end and then nothing but bass.

  The time slipped away. The room filled. The tracks seemed to mix themselves. I felt like the guy I had once been. The guy who loved this. Who wanted to control a crowd. To give these people what they demanded. To make music from music. None of it was mine, but in the end I created something new from it.

  I looked up at one point, and there was a skinny dude wearing all black standing there.

  “End it right at midnight,” he said. “I like a clean slate.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I yelled back. I’d been building the beat toward a drop. I could tell the crowd was feeling it. I checked the time. Inched the speed up one last step and then, when the music was no longer music, no longer sound but more of a force of nature throbbing in the empty spaces of the club, I cut to silence.

  It was as if all the air had been sucked from the room. Then I dropped a high-end track. All fast beats and dizzying whistles and bells. I pulled the USB from the console and nodded to the other DJ.

  “You can play with that or let it end,” I said.

  The crowd was going insane. The DJ looked at them, inserted his USB and said, “Yeah, man, I think I’ll keep this going.”

  Chapter Nine

  We spent the next three hours being pummeled by heavy, happy beats. I got so into the music, into the technicality of what was going on in the DJ booth, that I forgot why we were truly there. Adam would drag me into the green room every half hour or so. He’d open the fridge, look around and then go ba
ck out to the bar.

  “Do you think those cameras actually record? Or is it a live feed that someone monitors all the time?” Adam asked.

  “I imagine they record,” I replied. Maybe that would make Adam rethink his plan. It was four forty-five. I was about to go on again. “We don’t have to do this. I could get back into DJing. You could manage me, take a cut, take it all, whatever. We really don’t have to do this.”

  “What about school? And anyway, you wouldn’t make much DJing,” he said. “Not enough. We need capital.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If someone’s monitoring that feed, they’ll be on you right away. If they aren’t, they’re going to find out who you are and hunt you down.” I was thinking of myself as well. Thinking about how DJ Virtu knew I wasn’t Oaklay. There were so many ways that this might not turn out well for us. We could be caught immediately, and if not now, then later. They were not just going to let go of fifteen thousand dollars.

  I was exhausted. It had been an incredibly long day and night, and I’d spent too much of it trying to figure out a way to stop Adam from doing what he was about to do. I could tell he was prepared though. His eyes were wide open and wild. He kept jiggling his leg.

  “The bouncers stay at the door,” Adam said. “One of them went to the back once, but that’s been it. I haven’t seen anyone inside the office, not in all the times we’ve been in the green room.”

  “The cameras—”

  “I don’t care about the cameras. I just care about getting the money and getting out the door. After that we’re free.”

  “You really don’t think they’re going to try to find you someday?”

  “I don’t doubt they will,” he said. “But I don’t care. I’m going to be gone.”

  “You mean you want to stay up north forever?”

  “I don’t want to stay up north for even a minute.” He was staring at the mass of people dancing in front of us. When I wasn’t in the DJ booth, it always seemed like madness on the dance floor. People swinging, waving their arms, shaking their heads to the beat. I knew people for whom this was their entire life. They just spent hours shaking their arms and dancing, and for the rest of the week all they thought about was doing it again.