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The beat was impossible to replicate. Too many layers, obscure riffs from pop bands that never popped, folk music from countries without folksiness, sea chanteys from landlocked nations, all overlapped with my favorite idiosyncratic sounds and pressed into a musical ore as unidentifiable as a fragment of flying saucer metal in a 1950s sci-fi film. I was worried, though, that it was too long to be a beat or break. That what I had composed was an interlude or, even worse, a song.
    When the music ended, all the Beard Scratchers scratched their beards save for Elaine Dupree, aka DJ Uhuru, the only member of the collective for whom a beard was an impossibility. But Elaine wasn’t even rubbing her chin: She was dialing a number on the phone.
    â€œWho you calling?”
    â€œBitch Please.”
    Bitch Please was an aging, once-platinum-selling rapper who occasionally purchased beats from us whenever her latest career reinvention called for some sonic esotericism. She once said about me that when I spun, no matter how frenzied or attentive the crowd was, I always looked unsure of myself. Looked as if I smelled gas but didn’t have anyone to ask if they smelled it too, much less the nerve to strike a match.
    Elaine put the phone on speaker and held it up.
    â€œHello, this Bitch Please, the world’s only rhinestone rock-star doll, baby baba. Please leave a message.”
    On the beep, Elaine motioned for me to hit the play button. The beat was only ten seconds in when Bitch Please answeredthe phone: “I don’t know who this is, but I’ll give you thirty thousand dollars cash for that track right now.”
    Elaine hung up.
    Thirty thousand dollars was an absurd amount of money to pay for a beat, and after the poor sales of her latest release,
Bitch Please Raps the Cole Porter Songbook
, I doubted that her bank account held half that amount. Still, it was a meaningful gesture.
    â€œSo it is a beat?” I asked.
    â€œA damn near perfect one at that,
presque parfait
, as the French would say,” said DJ Umbra. “What’s in it? Anatomize, yo, anatomize!”
    I began to break down some of the more obvious samples, getting only as far as the de rigueur Mantronix, when Elaine interrupted me by blurting out, “Popsicle!”—the name of the only Swedish pop group worth blurting out. And it was without trepidation that DJ Skillanator followed with, “Foreigner, ‘Feels Like the First Time,’ opening lick, second and third chords transposed with the handclap from the Angels’ ‘My Boyfriend’s Back,’ interpolating on the downstroke.”
    DJ So So Deaf, a beat jockey who is in fact deaf, and who made a decent living playing bass-heavy music at dances and sock hops at schools and universities for the hearing impaired, began waving and gesticulating wildly in his slang B-boy sign language. His brother, DJ You Can Call Me Ray or You Can Call Me Jay but Ya Doesn’t Have to Call Me Johnson, whose bailiwick was comedy albums and television theme songs from the seventies, interpreted. “So So Deaf says, ‘Only Roger Daltrey’s epiglottal scream from “Won’t Get Fooled Again” can raise the hairs on his arm like that.’ He loves how you flared it.”
    I touched my hand to my lips and kissed out a sign language thank-you to So So Deaf in return for his compliment. As the music played on, our thoughts returned to the beat
presque parfait
.
    There were no more guesses and the Beard Scratchers leaned in, eager for just a taste of the beat’s trace elements; and seeing the wide-eyed puppy-dog looks of inquisitiveness on their faces, I felt compelled to recite the only true truism I’d ever heard. “I should warn you before we begin,” I said loudly and urgently, as if I were delivering a line from the final act of a Tennessee Williams play, “that I’m not going to necessarily tell you the truth.”
    The Beard