CHAPTER EIGHT
“Well if it ain’t Shelton Dobson! Welcome back, Shelly.”
Hawk’s executive secretary, Greta Jacobs, had a big smile on her face as she sat behind her desk just outside of Hawk’s office and watched the company’s CEO walk in.
Eagle Records was bursting at the seams with activity as artists and producers clogged the offices and studios making deals and hit records.
Even on the top floor where the major execs were, it was hectic.
As if nobody died downstairs a month ago.
That was how brutal that business was. “How do you feel?” Greta asked him.
“Like I’ve been laid up in a hospital for two months.”
Greta’s smile left. That was a dark day at Eagle. They were all crying when they heard the news.
“But no worries,” Shelly said when he saw that concerned look appear in her small, blue eyes. “I’m not a hundred percent yet granted. But I’m getting there.”
She looked down the length of his slender frame. “You still look good. Even in those stuffy suits you love to wear.”
“A record company is the only place in America where wearing a suit is considered a crime. To shame,” he said, waving his finger, and they both laughed. “He’s in, right?”
“Since five a.m. according to Security.”
Shelly shook his head. “That man. He’s still going hard.”
“Every day God send. I arrive at my desk in the mornings, he’s in that office working his life away. I leave for home at night, he’s still working his life away in that office. Does the man ever even date?”
Shelly ignored that question. He didn’t get to be Hawk Webster’s best friend by telling Hawk Webster’s business. “But why is he going so hard now? I can understand when an A-level talent is on the market and we’re going all out for it. But why now?”
“We had major success last quarter. Now everybody’s getting bold, believing they’re the reason for the success.
Renegotiating contracts is the new black.
And their demands are getting crazier and crazier.
And since you haven’t been here for the past two months as the gatekeeper that kept them in check, their bold butts are going over senior management’s heads and straight to The Hawk. ”
“I told them to never disturb the boss. They know better than that.”
“But you told them two months ago, before you were hospitalized. They stay so stoned they can’t remember two days ago.”
Shelly laughed. He knew it too. “How are negotiations?”
“Brutal. They want what they want, but Hawk won’t budge. Not even for our biggest talent. Not even for Kemberly.”
That surprised Shelly. He figured Hawk had a thing for her. He figured he wasn’t ever letting her go.
“What I don’t understand,” said Greta, “is why is he playing hardball like that? Why would he risk losing such major recording artists?”
“That man made this company, over twenty grueling years, into the largest independently owned and operated record label in the entire country. Bigger than Arista. Bigger than Columbia. Bigger than RCA, Interscope, Def Jam, and Atlantic combined. Mainly because all those companies are subsidiaries of Sony and other billion-dollar conglomerates. They have backup. But we’re completely independent.
And the way he got ahead was by bucking the system.
He’s the biggest and those artists have to pay to play to stay at Eagle.
They can get more money elsewhere, that’s a fact. But they can’t get more prestige.”
“And Hawk knows it,” said Greta.
Shelly nodded. “He knows it,” he agreed as he began leaving Greta’s desk.
But Greta stopped him. “Oh, Boss?”
Shelly turned around.
“What happened here last month? Nobody will give us a straight answer, and none of us have the nerve to ask Hawk.”
“What did you hear happened?”
“They said some kid was shot by the guards and the whole front window was shattered. When I came to work that day it happened, the window was getting repaired. But that’s all I saw.”
“And now you can’t even see that. It’s as if nothing ever happened.”
“But what happened?”
“A boy band was trying out for contract consideration something like four or more months ago. I decided against signing them, so one of the bandmates, months later, decided to shoot up the place. Unfortunately for him, the guards had to shoot back.”
Greta exhaled. “We need more security.”
“And we shall have it,” Shelly said as he made his way into the double doors of the office that had CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD written just above its ten-foot doors.
But as soon as he walked in, Hawk was standing up to head out.
But Hawk stood still when he saw his best friend. “What are you doing here? I thought I told your ass to take the rest of the year off whenever they checked you out of that hospital.”
“And I told your ass that was a ridiculous suggestion even when I was still in traction. What are you doing is the question? Greta says you won’t give an inch, not even to Kem.”
Hawk stared at Shelly. Although he always made the final decision, he valued his opinion. “You disagree?”
“Hell nall. Playing hardball got you where you are today.”
Hawk smiled and grabbed his suit coat off of the back of his highbacked chair. He could always count on Shelly.
“I heard there was some action last month while I was gone. Sorry about that. He was a member of a boy band called Blood that I declined to contract.”
“You remember him?”
“Hell yeah. I remember every one of those meth-heads. They were drama kings like you wouldn’t believe. Divas every one of them and didn’t have shit. I almost got into a fist fight with one of them myself. No loss there. For real. Where you headed?”
“A meeting at Sony,” said Hawk. “After the huge success of the Miley/Carzo collab, they want to do about fifty more.”
“Fifty? Damn, that’s good news.”
“I agree.”
“But why can’t our negotiators handle it?”
“It’s strictly off the record at this point,” Hawk said as he put on his jacket. “They want a chairman-to-chairman meeting before we even address it with the artists they have in mind. We don’t want anybody else involved.”
“And then?”
Hawk knew what he was talking about. “And then what?”
“And then after that meeting, you’re heading straight to Tennessee for the wedding rehearsal and for your family dinner afterwards, right?”
There was no response.
Shelly stared at his childhood friend. Although Hawk was biracial with a white father and a black mother, his outward appearance was decidedly that of a black man.
And Hawk was a brother through and through.
But that contradiction had always been Hawk for as long as Shelly had known him.
His exterior never equaled his interior.
He had the look that allowed him to fit right in with the Hip Hop crowd as well as the rockers and stoners, but Shelly knew he was nothing like any of those groups.
Hawk, instead, was a shrewd businessman go-getter from a rich family who never stopped going for more.
Who viewed all of that partying and bedhopping and drug usage his singers and producers and songwriters constantly engaged in, even in the studios inside his huge office complex, as the activities of weak and ineffectual people.
He was smart and savvy and relished the fact that after only twenty years in the game his record company had more assets and net worth than most labels combined.
He was, in Shelly’s view, a glaring contradiction.
“Man, I know you heard me. You have to go.”
“I don’t have to do a gotdamn thing.” Hawk’s voice had that sharp edge he was known for. But he wasn’t fooling Shelly.
Especially when Hawk frowned. “Why would I stand up there like some devoted half-brother and support that bullshit, Shell?”
“You aren’t supporting it. You’re supporting your mother.
Imagine how she feels, man? Miss Reecie’s been married to your father for forty years.
She was only nineteen and was carrying you when they got married.
But all those years later, and after she birth five more children for that man, he has this bitch out of wedlock for all the town to see?
And she’s not the only one he’s had either.
But you know W. He wants all his children together for his daughter’s wedding.
And what W wants, W gets. And yet your mother has to sit up there smiling like y’all one big happy family because that’s what a Webster does? How do you think she feels, man?”
Hawk knew it was true, too, as he zipped up the briefcase, grabbed it off his desk, and began heading for the exit.
His mother was a strong woman in every way, but he still couldn’t understand why she still loved and stayed with his father.
And why his father, given his antics, constantly confessed his love for her.
It was a trainwreck of a marriage that seemed to have no end.
But when he got parallel to his best friend, he stopped walking.
They looked into each other’s eyes. As two black men in a corporate world that never wanted them at that level of success, they understood each other.
That was why Shelly wasn’t going to let his friend off the hood.
“You have to go, man,” he said. “You have to.”
Hawk had more half-brothers than he ever bothered to count, but Shelly, albeit of no blood relation to him, was his true brother. “If I go,” he said, “your ass going with me.”
Shelly, who hailed from the other side of the tracks in Brackenridge, hated going to their hometown as much as Hawk did. But he’d do anything for his best friend. “Cool,” he said.
Hawk laughed out loud because he knew Shelly hated the mere thought of going to that place too. But if Hawk was going to be miserable, his best friend was going to be miserable too.
He squeezed Shelly’s shoulder, told him he was glad he was back to work, and then he left the office.
When he plopped down in his Corvette, he squeezed his eyes shut.
Because he’d just walked through the lobby once again that just a month ago was covered in blood.
And although it wasn’t true, he couldn’t help but feel as if the blood of that young man, and his kicked around dream, was still on his hands.