For the Love of Money (27 page)

He said, “Well, I'll have to look into it and get back to you on that.”

I gave him my full name, my education, my credentials, my availability,
and
let him understand my
urgency
before we concluded our talk. I wanted to make sure that I made my presence felt.

Tim laughed and said, “Okay, I have it all.”

“I hope you do,” I told him.

When we hung up, I was forced to play the waiting game for a couple of days. The job was officially offered to me on my last day of class at UCLA Extensions. The deal was done for three thousand five hundred dollars per episode. Yolanda overlooked the contract for me to make sure everything was legitimate, and the first thing I planned to do was go out and buy the fastest writing computer I could find, a quality fax machine, and start a new account on the Internet. A science fiction writer had to be well connected in the latest of technology.

That following Monday, I signed all of the paperwork, took a photo for ID and security, and showed up for my first day at the job to meet the staff at the studio trailer. I felt immediately self-conscious about my Toyota as I parked it next to the BMWs, Mercedeses, Jags, Lexuses, Cadillacs, and everything else. However, there was nothing I could do about that until I started making some money. I would just have to live with it for a while.

As soon as I walked in (the only brown face in the place, outside of one cameraman), everyone stared at me. Maybe I could have used an official introduction. Obviously, Tim was too busy or absentminded to let everyone know that I had been hired.

Joseph Keaton, the dark-haired head writer with a tense face and a body filled with too much coffee for his own good, asked me the question that everyone else only wondered.

“Who are you?”

I answered, “I'm Tracy Ellison, the assistant writer for the show, and this is my first day on the job, so please be nice to me.”

I few of them laughed, a couple of them chuckled, and others only grinned at me, but all I wanted to do was break the ice because I was there to stay. So I took a deep breath and told myself,
This here looks like a tough-ass job, but I
know
that I can do it!

To the head games,
to the drama,
to the pettiness,
the peer pressure,
the curiosity,
the rumors,
the liars,
the hustlers,
the players,
the beggars,
the cheaters,
the whiners,
the old girlfriends,
the babies' mommas,
the older men,
the trifling bosses,
the social drugs,
the alcohol,
the cigarettes,
and to all of the fucking bullshit
(excuse my French)!

But without all of that
what would a girl have left
to live for?
Honestly?

Shit happens!
Just don't be controlled by it.
And remember to say YES
to self-respect!

Copyright © 1991 by Tracy Ellison

I
didn't know where to take my cousin Vanessa after picking her up from school because I couldn't really go anywhere without people bothering me. We couldn't just ride around in circles all day either. It was a nice day outside, so I wanted to take a walk and enjoy it. I just didn't know where.

“You want to get something to eat again?” I asked her.

She was wearing a floral wraparound dress that looked sexy and sophisticated. She was even showing off some minor curves.

“I'm not really hungry.”

I looked at her and asked, “Would you like to be a star one day, Vanessa?” I had my reasons for asking. Most people wanted to shine in some way or another, they just didn't realize the cost they would have to pay. I wanted to talk to my little cousin about the
cost
of fame.

She smiled, in her introverted way, and didn't say a thing. I took that as a yes.

“Do you know that I can't even go shopping in Philadelphia now?”

She looked at me and asked, “Why not?”

“Because of what just happened at your school,” I told her.

Vanessa laughed and said, “They always act like that. You should see them at the basketball games.”

“I didn't have to go through that when I used to pick my brother up from that school. But that's when I was still a regular citizen,” I told her. “Would you want people going that crazy over you?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “I would just ignore them.”

“Lesson number one: You
can't
ignore them. You know why? Because
they
are the people who make you shine, and
they
pay for everything that you do,” I told her.

She said, “Well, politicians get our votes, and
they
don't pay us any mind.”

I had to laugh. Her comeback line was clever.

“Yeah, well, that's a whole other issue,” I told her. “You're not old enough to vote yet anyway.”

I headed for Kelly Drive that ran alongside the Schuylkill River. I figured that we could find some peace and quite out there to talk. I was in a talking mood.

I pulled over in a parking area by the river and climbed out of the car.

Vanessa followed me out. “What are we doing?” she asked me.

“Come on, I wanna talk to you.”

There were rowboating teams practicing their strokes, up and down the Schuylkill. I walked over to the edge of the wall that overlooked the river and sat down on it. Vanessa stood there in her pretty dress, watching the boats go by in the sun. She looked beautiful. We both did.

“So, who's your boyfriend?” I decided to ask her. She
had
to have one, unless she was another Raheema, running from boys like a horror movie.

I didn't expect for Vanessa to answer me outright. She did exactly what I thought she would do. She smiled and tried to ignore what I asked.

“Come on, sit down and tell me about him,” I told her.

She looked at the wall, frowned, and shook her head. “Ducks and birds defecate on that wall.
You
should stand up.”

“Defecate?
Oh, I forgot, you go to Engineering and
Science.
A
smart
girl.” I laughed and said, “So, you've been down here before.”

She nodded. “Yeah. I used to ride my bike down here. It's close to my house.”

I had forgotten. I never lived in North Philly.

“Okay, well, let's not get away from the subject. Let's talk about this boyfriend of yours,” I pressed her.

“How do you know I have one?”

She was stalling.

I said, “Look, girl, do I look like I was born yesterday.” I sounded like my own mother. Funny how things change.

Vanessa looked away and paused. She dug into her brown leather purse and pulled out a wallet-sized picture.

She handed it to me facedown. I flipped it over and looked at it.

“Was that so hard to do?” I asked her.

She just smiled at me.

I looked at the picture again. This light brown, confident brother with dark, almond-shaped eyes, and shiny dark hair stared back up at me.

“Mmmph,” I grunted. Little cousin had some
taste!
I said, “He looks like one of Da Youngsta's. What's the youngest one's name? Taj?”

She grinned and said, “Ta
ji,
but they don't call themselves Da Youngsta's anymore.”

“Well, is this him?” I asked her.

She shook her head, “No, they just look alike.”

“Mmm, hmm,” I mumbled. “And how old is this guy?”

“Nineteen.”

“Is he a sophomore in college then? You're a sophomore in high school now, right?”

She nodded. “
I am,
but he doesn't go to college.”

I looked up at her standing in the sunlight with her eyes shaded by her right hand. Vanessa looked like a video girl herself, the one that the singers chase all through the song.

I asked, “Isn't college where
you
want to be?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you protecting yourself?”

She paused, smiled, and shook her head. “I haven't done anything with him. We're just talking. I only met him a couple of weeks ago.”

I looked at the picture again. I wondered if this pretty boy was passing out wallet-sizes to
all
of his prospects.

“Does he have a girlfriend?”

“No.”

She answered way too fast. I started chuckling to myself, knowing better.

I said, “Don't tell me. He told you that he
just
broke up with his old girlfriend, right, and now he's looking to take things slow? And let me guess. He likes
you
a lot.” I knew all of the bullshit games that guys played from A to Z.

“Well, I still haven't done anything with him yet.”

Vanessa was slipping. I said,
“Yet?
So you already have
plans
?”

“No, I mean, I think about it, but . . .”

“Oh, I
know
you
think
about it,” I said, taking another look at the boy. “Shit, I'm
thinking
about it right now, and this boy is too damn young for me,” I joked.

She broke up laughing.

I thought about Staci Madison, who I had just met inside of Springfield Mall that morning, and the boyfriend she had just cut loose.

I said, “Let's look at it this way. This boy is nineteen years old, and he's
not
in college, so what is he doing?”

“Working.”

“Working where?”

She didn't even know. “Somewhere,” she answered.

“Is he in some kind of trade school?”

“I don't think so.”

“And what do you think he's going to be doing in ten years? Hell, in
five
years?”

Vanessa was clueless.

I said, “Now you go to Engineering and Science High School. What's the college enrollment rate at your school, something like ninety-eight percent?”

Germantown High School was probably less than half.

My little cousin smiled, bashfully.

I asked, “Do you know what guys are at age nineteen?
Potential.
That's all they are. Because there's nothing that you can really do at nineteen to raise a family, unless you graduated from high school like Kobe Bryant and went straight to the NBA,
or
you can sing or act or something. And that's
it
! Unless you're a genius who finished college early, and you already have big-time companies calling you to offer you a job.

“Is this guy a genius?” I asked her.

She smiled again. I could tell that she wasn't expecting a lecture from me, and that just made me want to keep going with it. Like I said, I felt like talking that day because I couldn't fucking shop in peace at the malls!

“You know what
you
are at age sixteen?” I asked her.

She just stared at me.

I said,
“Potential,
just like a nineteen-year-old boy. You don't know how to be a homemaker yet, and you can't earn any more than he can. And it's not just a money thing; it's a
family
thing. You have to be ready for it mentally, economically, and everything.”

Vanessa said, “Well,
you
went through
your
stage.”

I guess she was getting fed up with me.

I said, “I know, right? I can't tell you anything because
I
did everything. But I survived it.”

“Are you saying that I won't?”

“I'm saying that you shouldn't
have
to,” I told her. “My girl Raheema is happily married now with two kids. She may not have as many stories to tell as I have, but right now, I don't have the happy marriage or the kids.”

“Well, maybe everybody doesn't need that,” Vanessa responded.

I smiled. “Yeah, that's what we all
say.”
Now I was sounding like my father.

I reminisced on my own teen years in Philly. I said, “I had a nineteen-year-old guy once too, right down here in North Philly.”

Vanessa started to smile again. “I know.”

“And you know what I was to him?”

She went back to staring at me.

“I was a sweet, tight push in between the legs,” I told her. “I was so sweet and tight that he couldn't even control himself when he got me. He was screwing me like a rabbit, two minutes and it was over.”

Vanessa broke out laughing and turned away, embarrassed by my candor.

I said, “But that's all that I was to him, a fancy piece of ass, and I'm just being
real
about that, since that's what your generation talks about so much, being so damn
real.
Because we didn't think about being
real
in my day, we just did shit. But now y'all talk about being
real
as if that's supposed to make it all okay.

“I even wrote a poem about that, ‘Real Verses Fake,' because which one is which now?” I asked hypothetically. “So you know what
you'll
be to this nineteen-year-old
boy?
A sweet, tight push in between the legs, just like I was to mine. Because if you were to turn around and tell this boy, ‘Baby, I love you, I want to have your kids and never leave you,' that motherfucker would run like fire caught to his ass. ‘Aw, girl, I just wasn't ready to be
tied down.
'
I know,
because I've already been through it.”