Bliss (40 page)

Sunny was torn. Does she stay at the Lost City resort and debut
Hymn to Humanity
to radio execs anxious to hate her? Or does she run all over the (seven hundred!) islands of the Bahamas looking for him?

This is where Eva Glenn comes in with a power move. Eva, repping for the scandalous Roadshow Records (in real life, Sebastian Turcos did his six months and is living fat somewhere near Marbella, Spain), and in order to keep Sunny on point for her do-or-die showcase, and also because Eva was in love with Dart (though she loved bigwig Ron
Littlejohn, too, but he wouldn’t have her because his parents wouldn’t accept a black woman for their son), Eva ran off to get Dart.

Eva knew Dart was into voodoo, and knew (how?) the special island on which the most intense Bahamian voodoo was practiced.

So Eva went there, found Dart, met superproducer “Giant” Eddie Innocent (who was supposedly captain of a ship!) at an open-air market. “I was not a
captain
“, says Innocent, from his car. He says he’s on the Williamsburg Bridge, and his music is blasting. “And my sister’s name is no one’s business. She loves Eva, though. Just like I do.”

Eddie liked Eva, but she was in love with Dart (and Lil’ John, as he used to be known back when he was down with hip hop). Eddie’s sister was a voodoo priestess and put a spell on Eva, and Eva had a breakdown. Her fingernails started falling out, her hair started falling out, her legs had sores, and all kinds of craziness. All Eva wanted to do was sit and stare into the sun.

Sun
. Get it?

Dart couldn’t help Eva because he was kind of suicidal still, so he wanted it to rain. For some reason, he started singing “I Wish It Would Rain” to the sky, like a prayer.

Eddie heard him, and—not even knowing D’Artagnan was a multi-platinum star’s brother—recorded him in his own raggedy studio, using the actual ocean breezes from the Bahamian shores for sound effects. “I did not know who was Eva, or Dart,” says Innocent, who seems to be turning up the volume of his stereo as he speaks. “I thought they were a couple, running away for adventure.”

Did you love Eva?

“Hahahahahaha,” Eddie laughs, like I have got to the heart of something hilarious. “Hanging up now.”

Did they stay at a place called the Roll House? The Roth House?

Innocent’s laugh only gets bigger. “The
Rowe
House,” he says. “That’s it.” And he hangs up.

D’Artganan has an incredible song on his debut called “Sunrise on the Rowes,” which people think is a misspelling, a typo of “Sunrise on the Rose.” The whole thing just gets murkier and murkier, especially when I receive a callback from a Thaddeus Rowe of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
On the voice mail he says, “Because you were courteous with my wife I am returning your call. I will tell you what I have told every … reporter who has asked: I do not know of a Sunny Addison, a D’Artagnan Addison, or an Eva Glenn. My wife and I did, at one time in the nineties, own a small home on Cat Island in the Bahamas. We had wonderful neighbors whose names I do not care to mention. Wishing you the best of luck in your quest. Please don’t phone again.”

Huh?

Meanwhile.

Sunny was worried. She somehow (how?) found out where Dart and Eva were, went there, and laid her background vocals in on “The Rain Song.” Sunny’s voice (what? crazy!) lifted the spell Eddie’s sister had placed on Eva. And then the sister (Anne? Audrey? Anita? The name is never the same) put a
nice
voodoo spell on the song. Some say Anne/Audrey/Anita never existed. Some say she works in Sunny’s home. Some say she cooks for Dart. Some say she lives in Haiti with her husband, surrounded by grandchildren.

They—Sunny, Eva, D’Artagnan, Eddie—came back, and Eva, back to her usual self, crashed the song onto the album, even though the masters had already been finalized.

Sunny and D’Artagnan’s 1999 “I Wish It Would Rain” broke sales and radio-play records for months. Sunny and Eva left Roadshow right before the Feds shut it down. D’Artagnan (who is now managed by Eva Glenn and Ron Littlejohn) released his debut,
Kindness for Weakness
, early in 2001. The rest, as is said, is (multiplatinum) history.

On a final note, little Lanie Littlejohn, Eva and Ron’s older daughter (Lanie is four, Dinah is almost two) has long been rumored to be Eva and Dart’s love child.

Whew
.

“Hm. I’ve heard all that, and it’s all real cute except the part about my brother being suicidal. He talks about his depressions through his music. He never wanted to kill himself.” Then Sunny gets up and pours herself a glass of merlot. “To call a kid’s parentage into question
is a serious thing. Lanie and Dinah are my godchildren. Ron’s like my brother. Please.”

As if on cue, Sunny’s manager and proclaimed “best friend” walks on deck looking like the proverbial million dollars.

“Hey, miss,” she warmly says to her client/friend, and gives her a huge hug. Then Glenn eyes me suspiciously. “Thought I’d pop by and see how everything’s going. You have ninety minutes, right? We’re at what, eighty-nine?”

“Here she is,” Sunny Addison says to me while handing Glenn a glass of wine. “My secret weapon.”

Eva Glenn must be forty and she looks twenty-nine. In an Italian suit probably from next spring’s collections, an antique designer bag that has one-of-a-kind written all over it, Glenn’s gumball of a diamond flashes in the sunlight.
Bling
, as the saying goes,
bling
.

Glenn’s engaged to Ronald Littlejohn after seven years and two daughters. She and Littlejohn are partners in Bona Fide, a thriving music management and film production firm (their second film was the audience fave at Sundance last year, and, according to Sunny, their next film stars her) based in Los Angeles.

“I hear you out here denying rumors, Sun. You’re above that. Let fools think what they want.”

Sunny knocks back her wine in three gulps, and seems exasperated, but she wants to discuss the Rain Song. “It’s always been hard for me to talk about it, because it’s really Dart’s. I fucking sing
background
on that song.”

In fact, she does, but the way the lyrics were written (by a Motown tag team), and the way Sunny sings them, the background vocals work with the main vocals as a poignant duet.

“The simple fact is,” Eva pipes in coolly, “Dart and Eddie had already recorded the vocals by the time Sun got to the island.”

“I didn’t sing on that song until we got to
Nassau
,” Sunny says. “To a better studio. Dart wasn’t even there. Just me, Ron, and Eddie.”

I wonder aloud where Eva Glenn was.

“Sick,” she says quickly. “I was at a doctor’s office. My mother had just died.”

“Oh,” says Sunny with a smirk. She pours herself more wine. “And your girl Pritz was there.”

“Pritz?
My
girl?” Eva looks at Sunny like it’s time for Sunny to shut up. “Pour me a glass of imaginary Scotch, Sun. And pass me an imaginary cigarette.”

“You got jokes,” Sunny says with slitty eyes. “I can talk about what I want to talk about.”

“Keep fucking with me and I’ll go get the imaginary wine.”

Sunny smiles at me, while Eva glances at her dainty yellow gold watch. “Prizzi,” says Sun, mischeviously, “gets on Eva’s nerves. Eva don’t like her skin to be got under. Don’t like to be got over on.”

“All right, Sunny,” Glenn says.

“I love you,” Sunny says, “too.”

The villain in the story is Giada “Pritz” Biasella. She sued Sunny and D’Artagnan and Eddie Innocent and Roadshow for production credit on Dart’s version of “I Wish It Would Rain,” and she got it. It was a seven-figure payout, and the kind that keeps paying out. Biasella has points on the single and the
HTH
album. Reached at the recently relaunched Solaar Records, where she is general manager, Biasella seems bored with any discussion of Sunny and Dart. “I am no heavy. I don’t like to comment on Sunny or Dart, or those crazy days. I got what was owed to me for setting things up, for helping produce that song. That’s it. Eva, Leetle John, all of them, they know how it was.”

At the Rowe House? Were you at the Rowe House?

“
Roll?
What? I don’t have an idea of what you are saying.”

“If you start asking me a whole bunch of stupid questions about who was where when and all that, I’m going to shut up and you can take your little recorder and pens and be out.”

The sun is setting on the California coastline, but Sunny Addison is at full heat. She’s talking, and while her manager had been trying to curtail her, now Eva Glenn sips at her iced water like it’s a cocktail, and listens like Sun’s story is new to her.

“Eva was packing to leave for the States because her mom … had passed. I was going to stay on Nassau for a few more days with Pritz. Eddie came up to my hotel room with a DAT and played the song for me, Pritz, and Ron. Dart was God knew where, but as soon as Eddie pressed PLAY, my brother was in the room with us.”

“On the original,” Glenn says evenly, “Dart was singing his own background and it sounded weird and too heavy—you know how his voice is—”

“And all Pritz said,” said Sunny, “was ‘it needs something different—’”

“—‘a girl on the track. That would be good.’ That’s all the bitch said.”

“I
stepped up,” Sunny says, “saying I’d sing something on it. We weren’t even thinking of it being a big deal. More a present to Dart. For when we found him, to make—”

“Like a souvenir,” Glenn says, “from the trip.”

“Eva and Ron saw the money,” says Sunny with a cackle.

“Recognized Dart’s talent and potential as a superstar. He was positive. Sun is positive. It was a tough time—Tupac and Biggie had been dead a year, we were all still reeling. It was time for some old-fashioned rhythm and blues.”

Then Addison gets up and leaves me with Glenn. I ask her if she’s happy.

“I can’t complain,” she says. “And if I did, who would listen?”

“Your fiancé must listen.”

“He’s the only one.”

Sunny rushes back out with a CD. She slides it into the system she has built into the outer wall of her pool house. The first bluesy notes of the Rain Song come streaming from the big speakers.

Sunshine, blue skies, please go away
.

“Sun,” Eva says sharply, “don’t play that.”

But Sun waves her off. Then Sunny starts singing her part, and her brother’s parts. Rays of light come from her mouth. D’Artagnan can sing—his voice is undeniably lovely. But his sister got to the table first. Sunny Addison’s voice is otherworldly Strong. Full. Beyond
beautiful. She has almost too much inside her. Her voice is trembly when it gets big, barely able to contain the searing love and searing pain of a sun’s heart. That’s what listening to Sunny is like—you’re watching her, hoping she’s going to keep it together, knowing, hoping she’ll hit those notes, match the sweetness of the last time you heard her, touch your every sadness and happiness like she always does. Sunny makes you worry, though, because she has that little tremble in her voice—but then she hits it. Not the high note, though she hits that, too—but the emotional note, the love note the hate note the true note. And you can’t take it. You have to listen and cry or laugh or dance or do whatever it is you’re moved to do.

Listen, I gotta cry, ‘cause crying thins the pain
.

And then, right there in front of a reporter from
Groove
, Eva Glenn—power woman, executive supreme—starts weeping. Not just a tear or two, but sobs. Sunny keeps right on singing. And Glenn doesn’t excuse herself, or care even that I’m there. She flips off her pumps, places her bare feet on the hot ground. With her legs uncrossed I can see a horrible, V-shaped scar on her calf. Under the V are four blue, round dots. They look like the kind of tattoo girls get in juvenile hall. Addison sings more loudly, a strong angel swaying before her own cherry-orange sunset.

Raindrops will hide my teardrops, and no one will ever know
.

Eva Glenn has to have heard the song hundreds, maybe thousands of times—either the Temptations’ version, or Sunny and D’Artgnan’s version, or the many other adaptations out there—but when Sunny Addison sings for you like maybe she used to when she brought down the sky for quarters in parks in the flatlands of San Diego, you have to cry.

Because everything seems possible.

Maybe someone can understand me. I understand her
.

That’s what you think.

For a few moments, there was no industry churning behind our Sun. There were no deals.

It didn’t last, though. The song ended. Sun dashed off, said she had to call her brother. Eva’s cell chirped out a kicky ring tone. She told me I could go in a snappish way that meant I should have been gone. She ran her hand over her tattoos, slipped back into her pumps.

But for a few verses, it was bliss. Everything came together. Nothing hurt.

It’s music. Thank God for it. We all cried.

Thanks to Janelle and Reginald Jones.

Thanks also to Raquel, Parker, Hunter, and Marco Williams.

Thanks to Lottie Fields, Victoria Jones, and Brandon Wells Jones.

Thanks to Robert and Cherrie Carter.

Thanks to Nicole Jones. Thanks to Khalief, David, Maiya, and Zoe. Thanks to Amorette Brooms.

Thanks to Gail Clifton, to Robert Stoller, to Mary Fletcher and her family, and to Romaine Clifton.

Thanks to April Jones, Candi Castleberry-Singleton, and Karen Lewis Farrelly

Thanks to Karen Renée Good for her listening ear and constant friendship. Thanks to Tamara Warren.

Thanks to Dayna Clark for her sisterhood, friendship, and for all the homemade CDs.

I would also like to thank the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the New School Writing Program, as well as agents Paula Balzer and Sarah Lazin.

Thanks to the Wilsons—Berta, Elliott Sr., Steven, and Kenny.

Thanks to my own Wilson—Elliott Jr.—for the love, and for pushing me out of my holding pattern.

Thanks again to Chris Jackson for his encouragement, expertise, and guidance.

Thanks, too, to everyone who’s ever written or performed a song.