For the Love of Money (17 page)

“So, what kind of projects do you plan on writing?” Rich asked me once we were seated. We both ordered tropical blend drinks with a touch of rum in them. They called them Havanas.

I was skeptical about being too open with my film ideas though. I didn't know this guy like that. He
seemed
honest enough, but still.

“I don't know what kind of projects I plan to write yet,” I told him. In reality, I was still thinking about writing something based off of my drive on Crenshaw.

“What did you think about the crash course?” he asked me.

“It was okay,” I answered. I was barely paying attention to him, daydreaming about my thoughts for story ideas. I guess I wasn't the best of company that night. I was there physically, but not there mentally. I had a two-month screenwriting course coming up with the UCLA Extensions program later on that September. I heard that UCLA's courses were more in-depth than the Hollywood Film Institute's, and the instructors there were supposedly better connected in the business.

I decided to ask Rich what he knew about it.

He said, “;I've been there and done that. You get to work on and complete an actual screenplay. Then you go from there and try to find a writing job.”

“So what happened to your job?” I asked him.

He looked shocked at first before he smiled and shook his head. I guess he didn't expect me to be so forward.

“I was briefly writing for a show that was canceled. That's part of the business out here.”

“What do you do for money in the meantime?” I asked. I was still concerned about that myself.

He said, “Fortunately, I still have enough saved for a few rainy days from when I was working.”

I had about three thousand dollars left in my bank account after paying for the townhouse, and I was not due a check for the republication of
Flyy Girl
until after the publishing date in October. That seemed like forever!

“So, what made you decide to write for Hollywood after teaching English in Philly?” Rich asked me.

“Boredom,” I answered. “I needed something more challenging, something that would pick me up in the morning.”

He grinned and said, “Whatever happened to coffee?”, which I felt was pressed and corny. You don't have to comment on everything a woman says. That's why he wasn't my type; he was too short, too ordinary, and not hardly cool enough for me. I hated to admit it, but that Philadelphian cool that I was so used to was a hard thing to replace. However, that didn't mean that Rich and I could not be associates in the business.

All of a sudden, a lot of the customers started standing up and walking over to the television set in front of the bar.

“What's going on over there?” Rich asked our waitress.

The tall, attractive blonde was ready to take our dinner orders. She gave us the shocking news, blow for blow. “Tupac Shakur was shot while riding in the passenger seat of Suge Knight's car after the Mike Tyson fight in Las Vegas.”

I looked at Rich and Rich looked at me. We both had wide eyes.

“And he survived again?” I asked our waitress. Tupac Shakur was always slipping away from fatality, like a real-life ghetto hero who wouldn't stay down. The boy seemed to have nine lives, and every time he escaped from death his popularity increased.

“Oh, I don't know,” our waitress answered. “They just said that he was taken to a Las Vegas hospital in critical condition.”

Rich said, “Critical condition means that he
did
survive. I heard he wears a bulletproof vest anyway.”

“They said he wasn't wearing one tonight,” she told us.

I began to wonder if our blonde waitress listened to rap music herself. She sure seemed keen on who Tupac was
and
who he was connected to. He
was
an actor. Our waitress probably wanted to be an actress herself. She sure didn't look like your average waitress.

It was just my luck when the news reports began to talk about feuds between LA's Bloods and Crips as a possible motive for Tupac's shooting. I just couldn't get a damn break out in LA! I still had to drive the hell home to Baldwin Hills.

Shit!
I thought to myself. I knew enough about retaliation to not get caught up in the crossfire, and I was not planning to go anywhere
near
Crenshaw that night.

Suddenly I lost my appetite. I thought about ordering take-out from my townhouse for the next month until the tension cooled down. You could feel it in the California air as soon as they started talking about the Bloods and Crips.

Rich asked me, “What's wrong with your food?” He was eating like there was no tomorrow. I guess the craziness out in LA didn't bother him at all, but it bothered
me.
I wanted to get the hell out of there, and I was just starting to get my feet wet in Hollywood. I hadn't even taken off my towel to jump in the water yet.

Rich wanted to hang out and show me around, but I had no plans at all for that. I wanted to get back inside the house like a damn mouse myself. I couldn't believe that I was acting so damn paranoid, but like they say, Better safe than sorry. Rich didn't sweat it. I guess he had other women to entertain. So I drove back to my townhouse in Baldwin Hills as nervous as I could be, and rushed to my bedroom to listen to more news about Tupac's shooting. It was all over the radio stations and everything.

All that next week I received phone calls from my family and friends back home in Philly:

“Is everything all right out there? You sure you don't want to come back home for a while?”

Even Kendra was nervous about things:

“I told you, Tracy. I bet you'll listen to me now. These guys out here in LA are not to be played with.”

I had definitely learned to believe her, but I was not a punk either. I had relocated to LA to put my thing down in the industry of Hollywood, and that's what I planned to do! If I was shot and killed in the process, then that bullet must have had my name on it. Nevertheless, I prayed in my bed every night that it didn't. I wasn't even a church-going woman.

It was not hardly a pleasing twenty-fifth birthday treat that September in Los Angeles for me, but like they say, Only the strong survive, and I was damn-sure strong. Or at least I liked to
believe
so, and I was prepared to find out.

A fast mind leads to
fast situations.
A fast body leads to
fast boys.
A fast boy leads to
fast sex.
Fast sexuality leads to
fast reputations.
A fast reputation leads to
fast propositions.
And fast propositions lead
your fast ass down
empty, one-way streets
that have dead ends
and nowhere constructive to go.

So if I could
do it
all over again,
knowing what I now know,
I would choose to drive
slowly,
and obey the speeding laws.

Copyright © 1992 by Tracy Ellison

A
fter the visit to King of Prussia Mall, I made it back to my parents' house in Germantown right at five o'clock and beat the rush-hour traffic. I was anxious to call up Raheema in central New Jersey (where she still lived after earning her Ph.D. in African-American Studies at Rutgers) to give her the news on Kiwana. Raheema had to pick up her kids from day care, so I knew that she would be home. Imagine that. After all of the daydreaming that
I
did in our youth concerning a husband and a family, and the fear of boys that
Raheema
had, it was ironic that
she
ended up happily married with the husband and kids and
I
ended up single and was hardly even
looking
for a mate. Go figure that out.

“Hello,” she answered on the first ring.

“Hey, girl, it's Tracy.”

“Haaay, you're back at home now, right? How have things been back home?”

“Drama, drama, and
more
drama,” I told her. “I haven't been able to relax at home
yet.
I almost got carjacked. My visit to Germantown High School bombed out. I was accused of being a lesbian on Power 99 FM this morning, and you would
never believe
who ended up marrying a white man?”

“Who?” Raheema asked me.

“Kiwana.”

“Kiwana? From Cheyney?!” her voice went high. “Get out of here!”

“I'm serious,” I told her. “I bumped into her today at King of Prussia
Mall, and she showed me pictures of her two daughters with her white husband and everything.”

“Did she have the daughters with him, or were they with a brother?”

“No, they were with the white husband, and both of her kids are
lighter
than you,” I added.

“Oh, well, thanks for the reminder, Tracy. Thanks a lot,” Raheema cracked. “I forgot how light I was for a minute.”

I just laughed it off. Black people would never be able to get away from color complexes, because every day new babies are born with different shades, and we are damn-sure not color blind! Raheema even went through a radical stage in college where she got heavily into Black Power, culture, and politics, and started to remind me of Angela Davis or somebody, wearing her hair in a short Afro. She wasn't as outspoken about things as Angela Davis or I was, but Raheema kept it real, and she was very much pro-black.

“Well, I can just imagine what she told you,” she said, referring to Kiwana.

“Okay, what did she tell me?” I quizzed her. I loved letting my girl use that brain power of hers.

“She told you that she couldn't find a supportive brother who could handle her strong independence or understand her career as a stage performer.”

I nodded to myself with the phone in hand. “Basically, yes, that's what she told me. She said the more ambitious you are as a black woman in America, the less you'll find brothers who can deal with that, and basically, she said that it wasn't her problem anymore and she was moving on.”

Raheema was speechless for a second. I heard her three-year-old son, Jordan, asking for help to use the potty.

“Excuse me for a minute, Tracy. You don't mind if I take the phone in the bathroom with me, do you?”

I laughed. “Do what you have to do. I remember those days of trying to potty train my brother Jason.”

“Well, Jordan only asks for help when he has to do number two, because he likes to sit on the big toilet like his father.”

I laughed again.

“Ernest takes him in the bathroom with him?” I could see it in my head, Raheema's husband taking their son into the restroom and suffocating the little boy with funk.

Raheema caught on and laughed herself.

“We all have to learn. Lauryn is starting to go now, and she's only fourteen months. Would you like to talk to your aunt, Tracy?” she asked her son.

“Yes,” I heard Jordan speak up.

“Hi, Aunt Tracy.” Actually, Raheema had made me his godmother, but “Aunt Tracy” made us seem a lot closer, and it felt appropriate to me.

“Hey, Jordan. Did you enjoy your birthday party last week?” I asked him.

I had just missed it, but Raheema understood. You can't make too many promises when you have a busy schedule.

Jordan answered, “Yes. We had balloons, ice cream; I blew out the candles on my cake. I hurt my knee playing outside in the grass. I'm three years old now. I have a new red bike.”

I laughed even harder. He sounded like your typical smart kid. His little mind just lined the subjects up and spit them out, just like my brother used to do.

Raheema reclaimed the phone to continue our discussion.

“The saddest thing about what Kiwana is saying is that it's true,” she told me. “If you don't find a black man who basically does the same thing that you do, or something close to it so that they can understand the support that you need and the schedule that you keep, then the courtship can lead to a short, rocky road and a dead end.”

I guess Raheema lucked up, because her husband Ernest was an associate law professor and moving his way up at Seton Hall, not far from Rutgers. They were both high achievers in education.

“In other words, you're saying that I'll need to marry someone in the entertainment business now, is that it?” I asked her rhetorically.

“Or at least someone who understands the demands of the business,” she said.

Thinking of Seton Hall, I asked Raheema, “Have you heard from Jantel lately?” Jantel, another friend from our high school days, was awarded a track scholarship to Seton Hall.

“Last I heard, she was still trying out for the Summer Olympics in the quarter mile.”

“I wonder if she'll be in this year's Olympics then,” I said out loud.

“Maybe. They say that women peak later than men. Twenty-nine is a perfect age for the Olympics.”

“Not if she's up against Marion Jones. That girl can outright
fly,
and she's still in her
early
twenties,” I commented.