A Star is Born (8 page)

O
ne thing about Mr. Lord, he doesn't give up easily. When our principal, Mrs. Maxwell, announced that we were going to give
Act Six
for the community, I thought it was over. But Lord showed up with his people and they came early to get front-row seats.

“Almost all of the seats are filled!” LaShonda was looking out from between the curtains. “I see some of the ladies from the Virginia Woolf Society there, too.”

I didn't see them at first but then Kambui pointed them out in the middle seats on the left-hand side.

“You think Lord's people are going to stop the play?” Bobbi asked.

“Five minutes!” Miss LoBretto, our drama coach, called. The play was going to start on time if she could help it.

Then Mrs. Maxwell walked out onto the middle of the stage.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the teachers, administrators, and student body all join in thanking you for coming out to see our play tonight. We think you will be pleased and hope you will encourage our young people in their performances. They're a bit nervous tonight because they want to do well, and I
know
you want them to do well.”

“Amen to that, sister!” An old black man was nodding his head.

I saw Mr. Lord look over to where the old man sat and throw down a halfhearted mean mug.

“Our children learn in school,” Mrs. Maxwell went on, “but they also learn from the community. How you receive them will go far in teaching them how much they are appreciated.”

“Preach it, sister!” The old man was getting into his thing.

“After the play is over, the students will answer any questions you might have,” Mrs. Maxwell said. “And you'll see how much work they have put into this production.”

“Suffer the little children!” The old man was nodding again.

“Can we give our children a big hand even
before
they perform to tell them how much we love them?”

“She's working it!” Bobbi said as the audience started applauding. I looked over at Lord and he had to go along with the program. He was applauding, too. Then he was whispering something to his people and I knew we were over.

With everybody behind us the play went better than it had before. People were laughing at all the right places and some were even talking to themselves about what was happening on the stage. At the end we got another big round of applause, and even Mr. Lord's people applauded for us.

During the question-and-answer period, one of the ladies from the Virginia Woolf Society rose and told everyone that LaShonda had designed and made the costumes, and she got a big hand over that.

What I was waiting for was Mr. Lord to step up and try to rain on everybody but it didn't happen. Like Bobbi said, Mrs. Maxwell had stopped him before he even got started.

I didn't expect Mrs. Maxwell to be so sneaky. Okay, she wasn't really sneaky but she knew how to deal when it was time to deal.

“I think we should do a puppet play next,” Kambui said. “Then we could go to hospitals and perform for sick kids.”

“I can make puppets!” LaShonda said.

I had a feeling we were going to be doing a puppet show.

The Cruisers shook hands with everybody in the audience and they gave us a lot of hugs and too many kisses.

“Aren't you that weatherman's boy?” a little dark-skinned woman with a squeaky voice asked me.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Well, I liked your play a lot and you could be in the movies,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“Was it about anything in particular?”

“It was just supposed to be funny,” I said.

“Well, it wasn't funny, but you young people were trying your little hearts out and that's what counts,” she said. “Don't stay out too late.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

I found Mom in the audience and we walked home together. She was happy with the play, too.

“I heard some people saying LaShonda should team up with Beyoncé or somebody and open up a clothing store in Harlem,” Mom said. “That's probably too hard a gig, really.”

 

The phone was ringing when we got home. It was my father calling from Oregon. It was eight o'clock in New York and five out there. He told Mom he wanted to speak to me and she gave me the phone.

“Have you thought any more about an amount for your allowance?” he asked, very clearly and concisely.

“I was going to say sixteen dollars a week,” I said. “But if I'm going to be making cass-oo-lays and stuff I'd better make that twenty dollars and fifty cents a week.”

“Making
what
?”

“Cass-oo-lays,” I said. “It's a French dish with duck and white beans from the hilly areas of France, south of Paris.”

“Oh.” This from my father.

Mom was grinning all over herself and I held up my hand so she could give me five.

“I have to go now,” I said. “My theater group just put on a play for the community and I'm quite tired.”

“Oh.”

He said he would think about the amount. I imagined him writing it down and comparing it to the figure he had in mind.

Everybody called everybody at least twice to congratulate us and then we texted each other. By the time I got to Facebook somebody had already uploaded the program and said that the play was dynamite. They added that it was better than anything that Frederick Douglass Academy could do, which was true, but I was mad that they even mentioned FDA.

One time I figured out how much I spent a week and it was about $23, which I bummed off Mom. If I did get the $20.50 a week from my father, which would be $1,066 a year, which was the year they fought the battle of Hastings, I would almost be phat. Not quite, but I was getting there.

M
r. Siegfried thinks he's slick. He's always trying to teach us something in a sneaky way. So that's why he got together with a teacher from some charter school in Jersey City to hold a debate. The debating team from Da Vinci was Bobbi McCall, Kelly Bena, Ashley Schmidt, Phat Tony Williams, and me, the Zander man. It was a stupid debate from the get-go because the topic was Are Wars Necessary? Everybody knows what the answer to that is supposed to be so we were figuring we would get a free ride out to Jersey City and just chill our way through the set. To make it even more stupid, the school from Jersey City had to argue that wars were not necessary and we were supposed to stand up and say they were.

“Then everybody is going to boo us and say that they're the winners,” Bobbi said.

Which is the way I figured it was supposed to go, but I had never been to New Jersey, so it was all good.

We got to the school, which is on this big boulevard, and met their debating team. I think I could have beat up their whole team by myself. They had these two fly Indian girls, a black dude, and two scared-looking kids I couldn't tell what they were. We flipped a coin and we lost so we had to start the debate. Ashley was up first.

“My people are from a little country in Eastern Europe,” she said. “We have been run over many times. During these times our people have been killed, put into camps, and displaced from their homes.”

She went on to talk about how people weren't free to speak the truth if there were people over them who didn't want to hear that truth. She even talked about her own family and how some of them had been killed and some had just disappeared.

“We don't know what happened to them,” Ashley said. “They were taken away in the middle of the night and we never heard from them again. This is why my people think that if we are ever invaded again we must go to war or forever be slaves.”

That was strong and I was ready to go to war already.

The other team's debater came back with some fuzzy idea about how the possibility of war against Ashley's people made people think about it in the first place.

“If everyone in the world condemned war, if there was no glory to conquering another people, then we would not support leaders who would seek war as a solution to international problems.”

The dude went on about how war was a global mentality kind of thing and we had to change that mentality. To me it was the same old same old. Bobbi was up for us next, but Phat Tony wanted to go and Bobbi let him. I thought it was a mistake because Phat Tony is dumb — in a smart kind of way — but dumb.

“My name is Tony and I ain't no phony and they call me Phat because I'll give you a fat lip, a fat jaw, and a fat head when I be beating your brains out and spreading them across the street so the pigeons can eat, and when I turn your head inside out and you hear all the people shout that the inside of your head all bloody and red looks like a Domino pizza with extra ketchup and all those little black things ain't olives but little pieces of my black past which have caught up to you and now you ain't nothing but a memory of what used to be and as you lay down dying with your nose on the cold cement with your head busted open and your body bent in ways you didn't even know it could fold and you realize for the first time that the world belongs to the strong and proud and not to the can't-we-all-just-get-along crowd and as your miserable life comes to a cease the only thing that'll come into your mind is later for peace! 'Nuff said!”

Mr. Siegfried was mad. He turned red and gave Phat Tony a look that would have killed a lot of kids. But that wasn't the worst thing that happened. The worst thing that happened was that Bobbi got the giggles and couldn't stop, and even Kelly put her head down and smiled. I decided to be good and stay above the whole thing but then I saw Phat Tony mean-mugging the kids from Jersey City and that was funny, but then Bobbi tried mean-mugging them, too.

Bobbi is barely five feet tall and her eyes are too squinty to mean-mug anybody. If she tries to mean-mug you she looks as if she's got her eyes completely closed.

The rest of the debate was stupid, just the way I thought it was going to be, and when it was time for us to go and we were supposed to shake hands with our hosts they didn't look us in the face.

The three judges all picked the Jersey charter school as the winner.

“I have
never
been so embarrassed by a group of students in my
entire
life!” Mr. Siegfried was saying as we passed through the Holland Tunnel. “You did not represent Da Vinci well, you did not represent New York City well, and you did not represent
yourselves
well.”

Nothing we could say, really. We were busted, guilty, doing the perp ride back to Harlem, and we were just waiting for our sentences. I came up with an idea I thought would save the day.

“Mr. Siegfried, we were just trying to show how wars developed when people refuse to debate stuff,” I said.

“Zander, shut up!”

I dug where he was coming from. For a while. Until exactly six-fifteen when I was checking out “What did the fish represent in Ernest Hemingway's
The Old Man and the Sea
?” and Mom banged on the door, opened it before I could say anything (again!), and announced that Mr. Lord was on a cable channel.

I went in to check it out and saw Lord wearing a shiny suit and a little African hat standing next to one of the ladies from the Virginia Woolf Society.

“Turn up the sound!” I said, looking around for the remote. Mom had it and turned up the volume.

“So I went to Mrs. Brownstein from the Virginia Woolf Society and asked her for her support not just for a few gifted children, but for our entire community!” Lord was saying. “And she has graciously agreed to expand their level of support to include as wide a range of programs as possible.”

“Yes.” Mrs. Brownstein looked a little nervous. “I did speak to Mr. Gourd this morning —”

“That's Lord.”

“Yes, of course.” Mrs. Brownstein moved her head away from Mr. Lord as she spoke. “And he agrees with the changes we have proposed to St. Francis.”

“This is a result not just of my efforts, but the efforts of a
community
that has stepped forward!” Lord went on.

“That dirty —”

“Watch your language!” Mom put her hands over her ears.

Besides me, only Kambui had seen the interview, but by the next day we were all talking about it in school.

Bobbi said we should send an op-ed piece to the
Amsterdam News
exposing the truth.

Kambui said that we should picket Mr. Lord's office on 138th Street.

“I don't care what he says,” LaShonda said. “St. Francis is really happy with me and Chris because they're going to get some additional funding from the Virginia Woolf people and they got this guy who's going to work part-time for them — for free — to help them raise more funds. If nothing else happens, me and Chris will be able to stay together until I get a job and get my own place.”

“Amen to that,” I said.

The question we were debating in Jersey City was if war was ever necessary. Lord seemed to think so. And he could make himself a winner even if he lost. Which he did. The Cruisers beat him fair and square but he turned it around to make it look like he was a winner.

It's hard to tell who wins sometimes. Phat Tony thought he won in Jersey City even though our team lost. I thought the Cruisers had beat down Mr. Lord but he was declaring himself the winner.

LaShonda won in a way and in another way she didn't win because her situation was still bad. It just didn't get any worse and I guess that can be a win sometimes.

Mom won when we made the duck thing but when we were sitting around the table it wasn't our true family, just a made-up family of the Santanas, the Cruisers, Chris, Mrs. Owens, and Mrs. Askew. But it was something she could say to my father that we did together and that was something. Maybe that's what life was all about, finding something to say was a win.