For the Love of Money (38 page)

Mother knows best
indeed. I was breaking my neck just to have family for company out in California. Just because I knew that I was being selfish, however, didn't mean that I would stop.

I left my room and went to find my brother before he disappeared. He was downstairs on the couch with Dad, watching the Los Angeles Lakers play the Minnesota Timberwolves for a late NBC basketball game.

I looked at my brother and said, “It's beautiful weather out there in California. We have palm trees, beaches . . .”
Pretty girls,
I thought to myself but
dared not to say in front of my father. I was being terrible, but what was so bad about having family over for the summer?

Jason asked, “Yeah, so you're gonna let me stay out there with you this summer?” just like I knew he would.

I said, “I don't know. Dad, you think your son's mature enough to come out to California with me?”

My father didn't even look at me. “Don't get me involved in this,” he commented.

“Mature enough?”
Jason asked me. He was offended, just like I figured he would be. Boy was he easy to pull by the nose!

I said, “Jason, they have a lot of crazy turf wars out there that I wouldn't want you to get involved in.”

“What, Bloods and Crips?”

“Exactly.”

“They're not where
you
live, are they? I'll just hang around where you live.”

He had a point. To my knowledge, there were no Crips or Bloods in the Marina Del Rey area.

I said, “What do you think, Dad? You think I should invite him?”

My father smiled, while watching the basketball game. He said, “Tracy, I think you need to stop the bullshit, because you wanted this boy to go to California with you from the minute you walked down those stairs. So stop bothering me while I watch this game in peace.

“If you want a
real
argument about it,” he said, “then you go on back upstairs and ask your
mother
if Jason can go.”

“Wait a minute, I have to
ask
for permission?” my brother asked rhetorically. “I'm in college now?”

“And?” my father asked him.

Jason looked at me and grimaced. “You see what you started, Tracy? You should have just asked me.”

I knew that I would have no problem getting my brother out to California with me, but Vanessa's situation was more tricky and urgent. I brainstormed for the rest of that night how to release her from the imprisonment of her mother, because that was all that it was, imprisonment, just because Patricia had given birth to her.

However, with the new law banning affirmative action programs at the university level, Vanessa would have to compete academically against thousands of white students who had more facilities than she had.
Ain't that a bitch!
I thought to myself.
My girl Kendra was right all along; that shit is an
outright
crime,
and nobody fought against it!
So if you could not dunk a basketball, run a touchdown, or long jump, and your family didn't have any money, you would basically have to be a black or Mexican genius, or leave the state of California in order to receive a higher education.

I went to sleep with that thought on my mind, as pissed off about it as Kendra was
years
ago. I guess you really have to see how a new law can immediately affect
you
and
your
family before you really give a damn.

Girl,
I called up my MAN last night
and told him, “Baby,
why don't you take a slow cruise
downtown for me.
And once you get there,
you gon' come up to this gate
with bushes in front of it.
And what you need to do, right,
is dip down real low
and push your way through the bushes,
but not too fast
because the gate is sensitive
and you might set off my alarm system.
But if you slip through the bushes
just right,
and inch your way across the lawn,
I can let you come up to my room
inside the house.
And please,
when we get good and busy,
don't tease me when I moan
because
I don't particularly care for that
disrespectful, macho shit!
Jus' like YOU wouldn't like it
if I slipped and got your name
mixed up
with the burglar who snuck in here last weekend.”

Girl,
my MAN said, “WHAT?!”
Then I said, “Si-i-i-ke.
You know you my only playa',
Boo.”

Then
me and my girl broke up laughing
on the telephone
all night,
talkin' 'bout guys
'n shit.

Copyright © 1995 by Tracy Ellison

B
y the summertime, I just couldn't take it anymore! I had to have some sex! I had gone nearly a full year out in California without having any. I think the guilt that I felt about new people reading my book and how fast I was back in the day, along with the sleaziness of Hollywood, had really turned me off from getting down and dirty. However, when those California brothers started getting suntans and shit, with the new summertime heat kicking in, I had to have myself some more chocolate, and I was a grown damn woman, so I could have a piece of chocolate if I wanted to, as long as it still came in the wrapper.

I wrote my second full script for
Conditions of Mentality
called “Bad Karma,” about a playboy who finds that all of his usual moves with the ladies were going sour on him, so he seeks out a spiritualist for answers. A decision was made to make my script the season's finale, and the catch was that I had to extend the plot with a part two to begin the next season. I was getting plenty out of my first Hollywood job; I even had a one-page profile in
Take 1
magazine, a Hollywood biweekly. I didn't sweat any of that stuff, though. I
really
wanted to sweat a man, or sweat
with
a man, to tell you the truth. I felt how guys did when
they
craved intimate companionship. Desperate!

Yolanda, however, was more concerned about my writing success.

“Shit, girl, you're gonna become a legend out here,” she told me. “Do you know how hard it is for a new writer to get a season's finale? You're not even a full staff writer yet. That's unheard of!”

It was a simple business decision to me.

I said, “Yolanda, they only used my script like that because they knew I could pull in more women viewers, and if we could hook them to wait for next season, we would have a better chance at getting picked up for another year.

“And I can tell you right now,” I added, “the head writer, Joseph Keaton,
hated
the idea, but I have to give credit to Tim, because he was probably the one who fought for it.”

Yolanda asked, “By chance, did you, ah—”

I cut her off and said, “Sleep with him?”

She chuckled like a witch.

I said, “No,” and didn't have to hesitate. I didn't get down like that. Business was business and sex was
not
included, or at least not with
me.

It was funny how Yolanda was asking me about
my
business after not discussing her own, but I didn't say anything about it. I didn't ask her anything else about meeting men in LA either, because her vibes were not the kind that I wanted to follow. It seemed to me (and I really didn't know because she never told me and I had stopped asking) that she fucked people more so for business, and I wanted mine purely for pleasure. The last thing in the world that I wanted was someone to believe that I made my way through Hollywood while on my back, because I was working
too hard
to come up with solid script ideas to make a name for myself. So I didn't hang out with Yolanda much, and when Kendra's mom got sick in Baltimore, Kendra went back home for the summer and I ended up hanging out with Susan Raskin. However, I didn't expect for Susan to be able to help me in my mission to hook up with a black man, so when push came to shove with meeting brothers, I had to go solo.

I visited Venice Beach with the sole purpose of meeting a chocolate brother to chill with. I still didn't want to attract any knuckleheads though, so I dressed conservatively with my nose up in the air to avoid the weaklings, because only the strong could survive, and I had no time to waste on underlings.

Venice Beach was jam-packed, but what did I expect on a hot Saturday afternoon? You had the bikers, in-line skaters, skateboarders, T-shirt vendors, fruit stand owners, lovebirds, the wanna-be basketball players, bodybuilders, blacks, Mexicans, stray whites, and plenty of competitive women showing their thighs, stomachs, and shoulders to anyone with their eyes open. Venice Beach may as well have been an outside singles' club with all of the posturing going on.

I thought,
Shit, this may be
too
much action for me. This place seems like a damn carnival! I can't hope to meet a serious man out here.

“Watch it!” a skateboarder warned me, zipping past on one of those giant, colorful skateboards.

“
You
watch it,” I mumbled to myself. He was long gone already.

I began to stroll up the beach while keeping my eyes open for anything that looked like fresh chocolate, but my view was mostly filled with Mexican men. Plenty of them were looking good too, but you know, I wasn't there for any caramel, I wanted chocolate brown. Every now and then a brother would pop out, but they were usually not my type, and when they were, they were already with a woman. So by the time I began to make my way back toward the basketball courts, I figured that Venice Beach would have been a better place to
take
a man to have a good time with than to
meet
one. I stopped at the basketball courts and watched plenty of out-of-shape men trying to run ball.

This looks like the place where Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson filmed
White Men Can't Jump, I told myself. I just stood there and daydreamed for a second trying to remember my favorite scenes in the movie.

“I can't even play basketball,” someone said to me.

I expected to spot some loser when I turned to match the voice with a face, but I was pleasantly surprised. The brother looked like he had never needed to shave a day in his life. His brown face was baby smooth. He was wearing a gray shorts outfit, with a white wave cap, the kind with the wraparound strings attached, and for what? It didn't look as if he had much hair under the thing for waves. That turned me off, and I let him know about it.

“Why do you have that
thing
on your head?” I asked him like his mother.

He smiled and answered, “I don't want my head to sweat.” He was not flustered by my forwardness. For that I gave him a plus; the brother was confident.

“Do you have a bald head under there?” I asked him.

He nodded. “Yeah.”

He seemed like he was showing off too, a definite California thing, or at least from what
I
had picked up while over there. Kendra had told me about that from day one; everybody wanted to be a star in California.

I said, “So is that your come-on line, telling women that you can't play basketball? Because I don't recall asking.” He
looked
tall and athletic enough to play. Maybe he was bullshitting.

He shook his head and said, “No, I can't play. I broke my ankle trying to play when I was a kid, and I haven't played since.”

“Are you a quitter?” I asked him.

He looked at me and frowned. “I don't quit, I'm just not a basketball player.”

“Nobody said that you were. That was
your
line,” I told him with a chuckle. I wonder where he really expected to go with that.

He asked me, “Why are you watching basketball then?”

“Because there's nothing else to do.”

He looked toward the water and smiled. “We could go swimming, walk on the beach, get something to eat, or whatever you want.”

I smiled back at him. “
We?
”

“You said you didn't have anything else to do.”

He caught me slipping. I laughed it off.

“All right, I did say that,” I admitted. I was tempted to ask him how old he was, because he didn't seem over twenty-five. Nevertheless, I didn't want to bust his groove with the particulars. I guess I was living out my own television script and being
seduced
myself because of my yearnings for male attention. If you stare at a dog long enough, they
will
bark at you.

I thought about that and laughed again.

“What's so funny?”

“What is your name?” I asked him instead of answering his question.

He said, “Co,” like in cobalt.

I looked at him and frowned.
“Co?”

“Short for Colby, but once Kobe Bryant signed with the Lakers, I just started calling myself Co with an
e
at the end,” he explained.