I’ll admit when we rolled up to the photo shoot for the album cover, I might’ve partaken a bit too much on the way over.

But, that’s just ‘cause I got excited an’ all. I’d finally made it, the labels had picked me and I was gonna be the next big thing.

“Playa’ has arrived! Where the ladies at!” I shouted as I walked into the warehouse-sized photo stage. A semi-circular green screen hung from floor to ceiling.

“Shot them earlier. Don’t need all of you here at once.” Said the photographer, fiddling with the buttons on his camera.

“But the Bentley stretch limousine, that’s here right?” I asked, my mellow suddenly fading.

“Did that, too. We’ll put it all together later in Photoshop. Stand on the X over there, please.” He pointed at a duct tape cross near the green screen.

“That seems kinda, ya know, dishonest.”

A stage hand walked over and gave me a fan of hundred dollars bills. They were fake, only printed on one side, and taped together to hold their fan.

“Welcome to the rap game!” smirked the photographer. “Now let’s get to it, got three more shoots just like this today.”

Memphis Note
I’ve got a friend that’s a local rapper, been working at it for years and years. He once told me how he hated all that stereotypical crap they put on the covers of start rap records. Girls, cars, money, jewelry, explosions, all of it faked with a computer. Catch was, people didn’t buy your record if you didn’t have that stuff on it. It was the catch-22 of underground rap.

“The kid ain’t ready.”

There were four of us in the expansive suite at the Hotel Chisca.

“I’ve seem him spit. He can sell.”

The two standing men, arguing about whether or not I could hack it as a mule auctioneer.

“You know, I could just talk to him myself.”

Me, the twenty-something kid, sitting on a stiff chair, eager to take his piece before the mule market dried up.

“Think you’re ready, boy? To step into the walls of my castle? To work under my name?”

Lastly, the Colonel. Mister M.R Meals, the obese god of mule sellers. He sat on a loveseat, taking up the entire thing by himself. A cane with a mule’s head and inlaid gold filigree was propped off to the side. His white seersucker suit was impeccably pressed.

“Back in ’39, there was a day I sold two mules a minute for the whole damn day.” The Colonel pointed at me with a sausage finger. “You think you could keep up with somethin’ like that?”

“I suspect. Least if I don’t, I know I can out run you.”

Silence.

Then a guffaw of laughter from the Colonel.

I was hired on the spot.

Memphis Note
An extension of Memphis being the cotton capital of the world was that it was also the mule capital of the world. Why? Because mules were the main tool of the farm to plow the fields. Amongst the auctioneers that made the mule trading business run, Colonel M.R. Meals was the best. Over the course of his extensive career he sold nearly a hundred and seventy million dollars worth of mules, much of that here in Memphis. Sadly, the mule market shrunk dramatically with the rise of industrial farm tools after World War II.