For the Love of Money (39 page)

“So, you let Kobe Bryant make you change your name. What, are you an actor, a model, or something?” I could see if it was a business decision for name recognition.

The baby-faced brother smiled with a mouthful of pearly white teeth and asked, “How'd you guess?”

He was so vain that I just started laughing again. His entire approach was obviously to lead a woman into asking him what he did, so that he could spring the whole model business on you.

“So, what's your full model name?” I asked him.

“Coe Anawabi.”

“Ah-na-wa-bee,” I pronounced correctly.

“Yes, my father's from Sierra Leone, Africa.”

That explained his baby face. African skin was the smoothest in the world, and Coe seemed to be bragging about his roots too. I couldn't blame him, though. I bragged about Philly, and everyone else bragged about where they were from.

I went ahead and teased him. “I guess that I'm supposed to be all over you now, right? Is that how you operate?” I was pumping his head up and having a good time with it whether it went anywhere or not. At least he was interesting.

He laughed and said, “I only want to know if you'll walk with me.”

I thought about it. “Why not?” I told him, grinning.

“Because you may fall for my charm,” he answered.

I said, “I already have,” and we started walking.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“Tracy Ellison from Philadelphia.”

“Oh, Philly . . .”

“Will Smith's town,” I added for him.

He smiled and said, “Yeah. So what do you do?”

“I write.” That's all I told him. I wanted to go question for question just to stretch out the conversation while we walked.

“You write what, articles for a magazine or something?”

I smiled. “No, but that's a good idea.”

“What do you write then?”

“Poetry, and a couple of scripts.”

“Scripts? For what, television?”

“Yeah, I write for a small-time cable show.”

“What's the name of the show?”

“You probably never heard of it.”

“What's the name of it anyway?”

“Conditions of Mentality.”

He looked at me and said, “I watch that show. It comes on the New Millennium Channel, NMC.”

I said, “Yeah, that's the one.” I knew he was younger than me then. I just didn't know
how
young he was.

“You write for that show? That's one of my favorite shows.”

I was suddenly embarrassed. I wasn't expecting that. I smiled, nodded, and said nothing. I wanted to change the subject.

“What kind of modeling work have you gotten?” I asked him.

He shrugged his shoulders and blew it off. “You know, basically sports stuff. So, how do you guys pick the actors over there, because you have, like, new actors for every episode, right?”

I could see where he was going. He was beginning to lean away from the personal and get into a business talk. He wanted to act. I cut that shit short, quick!

“I don't have any control whatsoever over the actors, and most of them have agents who call us up for auditions.”

Coe said, “Oh,” and nodded. “Sometimes, when you model, you want to do more than just sit there and take pictures, you know. That gets boring. You want to do something extra with your energy.”

I said, “I heard that modeling is
very
tiring, though, like you use up
a lot
of energy.”

He frowned at the idea. “Yeah, because you get tired of just standing around.”

I noticed that we were just standing around ourselves and had stopped walking. We had walked over to an area where cars were parked.

Coe said, “Wait right here,” as if I had somewhere to go. He beeped off an alarm system for a cream-colored Porsche that was two cars away from us and walked back over with a pager and a cellular phone with him.

I smiled and turned away momentarily to hide it. The boy was going into extra show-off mode, so I played my part for him.

“That's your car?”

“Yeah.” He attached his pager to his gray shorts, and strapped on a gun holder around his shoulder that fit his cellular phone.

I said, “Let me see what your car looks like.”

He grinned and walked me over to it. He had
COLBY
on his California license plates.

He saw me looking and said, “I still have to change that.”

Inside of his car he had tan leather interior. Nice.
Very
nice! I sat inside and started daydreaming about cruising down the highway.

Coe leaned into the driver seat and took his wave cap off. His bald head had the same baby's-ass smoothness as his face. I had to stop myself from grabbing it right then and there. I shook my head and climbed out of the boy's car. He was too young for me, and there was nowhere for me to go with that brother but to the bedroom. His entire approach was a set up to get him plenty of California punnany. If you asked me, I would say that he had bent over backward to buy that car, and was probably still paying for it.

He said, “You don't want to go for a ride?”

“I still have my car here,” I told him.

“We can come back to it.”

I said, “I thought we were walking on the beach.”

He nodded, seeing that I was not budging. “Okay, we can finish our walk.”

Finish our walk,
I repeated to myself. I think the young brother was a bit
teed off at me. Coe Anawabi was used to getting his damn way; that's what I read into it, and he didn't know who the hell he was dealing with. I may not have been a match for Victor, but I could eat most brothers alive, especially young,
rookie
players like Coe.

“I'm through walking anyway,” I told him. “I came out here to meet a man, and now I've met one.”

He just stood there and smiled at me, speechless.

I said, “So give me your number and we'll just hook up at another time.”

He nodded and said, “All right. I like that; a woman who knows what she wants.”

“Yeah, and I
don't
want your damn pager
or
your cell phone number. I want a
house
number. And if I call and find out that it's not a house number, then I'm throwing it away.”

He looked at me to see if I was serious. “Damn, it's like that?”

“Yes it is. My time is precious, and so are my phone calls.”

“Well, can I have your house number too?”

I said, “When I call you I'll give it to you then.”

He stared at me for another minute and said, “Man, is that how the sisters are in Philly?” and handed his phone number to me.

I said, “Why don't you go ask Will Smith? He seems to be the authority on Philadelphia out here. I'm just a pretty face.” I stepped away from him, but that didn't mean I didn't like him, nor did it mean that I wouldn't give him a call. I just had to let his young behind know that if we ever hooked up, it would be on
my
terms, and
my
terms alone!

$   $   $

Later on that week, I met a brother at the grocery store who was a dentist with his own office. He was thirty-one and had less reason to show off. However, we didn't talk too long when we first met, so I set up a weekend dinner with him to find out more about him. He suggested seafood at a place in Marina Del Rey. I told him I'd meet him there at seven. Eight would have been pushing it. Most times you don't actually eat until an hour after arrival, so I didn't want to lead the brother on by going too close to midnight on a first date with him. It was just a fact-finding mission.

Susan called me right as I got ready to go out.

“Hey, what'cha doin'?” she asked me.

She was so comfortable with me that she began to break the language down into real girlfriend talk: commonspeak.

I said, “Getting ready for a date.”

“Oh, that must be nice,” she responded.

“What are you doing tonight?” I asked her.

“Sitting here reading your book
Flyy Girl.
”

I froze on the phone. I still hadn't talked about it with her, nor had I given her a copy.

She said, “I can't believe that you didn't tell me you had a book out. As soon as someone told me, I went right out and bought it.”

I was still speechless. I didn't know what to say.

I finally said, “Well, I didn't know that you would be interested in a black book.”

“Really,” Susan responded. She sounded sarcastic.

I said, “Well, you know, they have the black sections in the bookstores for the black readers.” My explanation was so ridiculous that I began to laugh.

Susan said, “So the African-American section is off-limits to me because I'm Jewish, right, and I wouldn't understand? So I guess that
I'm
supposed to read in only the Jewish section.”

I stopped laughing and felt like I was in hot water for some reason. Did I offend Susan by not telling her about my book? I had to ask her to make sure.

“You're not offended that I didn't tell you about it, are you?”

Susan paused. I took that to mean that she
was
offended. “I wouldn't really say that I was offended by it, I just felt distant, like you had a part of you that you wanted to keep to yourself. However, you've published it now, so they're selling it. It's no longer private. So I didn't understand why you wouldn't tell me about it, that's all.

“I said, ‘Wow, we've been hanging out together and Tracy has told me
nothing
about it. What else hasn't she told me?'” she said.

“Well, now that you're reading it, what do you think?” I asked her.

She started to chuckle. I didn't take that too well but I had to wait for her to answer before I could jump to conclusions.

“It's good. I mean, you were quite an adventurous girl, curious and spirited, just like a lot of artists are. You wanted to find everything out on your own.”

“Does it make you think that I'm extra hardcore?” I asked her. I thought back to the night at the beach party in Venice, and my confrontation with Juanita.

“Everyone goes through that stage, Tracy. Punk rock, hip-hop, sports
jocks, bad boys, sexuality; you name it, we all have those issues,” she answered. “This is an excellent coming-of-age book for the eighties generation, dealing with the fast life and all of the materialism. I think it's great that you had the courage to put this out there. It reminds me of
Bright Lights, Big City.
Have you ever read that?”

I laughed and said, “Not unless I had to read it for school.”

Susan said, “See, so maybe you need to visit the
other
sections.”

“You mean the rest of the
store
? Let's not get it twisted, Susan,” I said. “Just because
you
picked up my book, basically because you know me, that does
not
mean that other Jews and whites will. And I'm not mad about it, that's just the way that America is, just like with movies and television shows.”

“Okay, so what about
The Cosby Show
?”

“I
knew
you were going to say that,” I told her. “And that's typical. You find
one
black show to relate to, and that's it. You get
one
black author to read—Maya Angelou—and that's it.

“And we can have this discussion all night long, but I have a date to make,” I said. “I'm sorry for not bringing up my book before, but now that you have one, enjoy it, and I'll sign it for you the next time we see each other.”

Susan laughed and said, “You promise?”

“I promise.”

That girl made me late for my date, and when I arrived at the seafood restaurant in Marina Del Rey, the hostess there was waiting for me.

“Excuse me, are you looking for Mr. Squire?” the college-aged girl asked me, wearing all white. I was wearing a nice burnt orange dress. I felt like dressing sexy for a change.

“Yes, Arturo Squire,” I told the hostess. I wanted to make myself sound professional and not just another hot date.

“He's right this way.”

She led me to a seat in a back corner next to the window. It was a secluded table, a good place to talk privately.

“What is this, your favorite spot?” I joked to Artis. He told me that his friends called him Artis and never Arturo, but since Arturo was his given name, he made people aware of it.

He stood up to pull out my chair. He was dressed in black and tan,
GQ
style. I was impressed.

He said, “How did you guess this was my favorite table?” He was smiling when he asked me, and of course a dentist
would
have perfect teeth, but was he pulling my leg about the table or was he serious?”

I asked, “How often do you come here?”

Artis was bronzed brown like Yolanda with clear Native American blood. I could tell from the dark smallish eyes, the long straight nose, and the thick wavy hair. He had sex appeal oozing all over him. Yet, I was skeptical about his love life. A man so fine with a sure income like the dentistry profession should have been married by age thirty, or at least
I
thought so.

He answered, “I dine at my favorite table here with a new fine woman just about every week.”

I couldn't figure him out just yet, but he didn't appear to be so bold about his “skills” when I first met him. Maybe dark restaurants were his place to get jiggy with it and let it all hang out, so I threw the game back in his lap.

“Well, tell me something then, how do I rate against the other women?” I asked him.

He grinned and said,
“Very
well.”

“Meaning what? Am I at the bottom of the curve, the middle, or at the top?”

He smiled even wider. A real player wouldn't have been flattered so easily.
I know,
I had been with the best. I guess more California men would have to find out who I was, because
obviously
they didn't know.