For the Love of Money (34 page)

“Well, you had a lot of
business
to be in.”

“Come on, girl, tell me. Was he your first?”

She smiled and said, “Don't hold your breath. Tracy. So what did my sister want to talk to you about?” she asked, quickly changing the subject on me.

I said, “You know what she wanted. Money.”

“How much?”

“Twelve thousand dollars to put down on a new house in Yeadon,” I answered.
“And she had the nerve to try and say that she
saved
half of it. I was thinking, ‘She probably doesn't even have
two
thousand dollars saved.'”

“So what did you tell her?”

“I told her that I would think about it.”

“Are you?”

“Hell no!”

We both laughed.

Raheema shook her head and said, “Mercedes still hasn't learned her lesson about using people.”

“Ain't it the truth.”

Raheema looked at me and frowned. “Oh, don't try to act like
you
were a saint.”

“Raheema, I only had about
two
years of that.”

“Two years!
No, you need to try,
six
or
seven
years.”

“Girl, I was
not
like that until your
sister
told me to do it.”

“Yes you were. You were using boys all the way back in elementary school. ‘This is my
boyfriend,
y'all,'” she mocked me.

I chuckled at it. “Raheema, everybody does that.”

“
I
didn't.”

“Bruce.”

“Okay, that was real brief,” she admitted with a laugh. “But you took it all the way with him,
I
didn't. And I never asked him for anything.”

I just smiled, still reminiscing. Ernest popped his head into the room and froze.

“Yup, it looks like girl talk in here. I'll just leave you two alone,” he told us and headed back toward the study.

I smiled and said, “Look how far we've come, Raheema, two regular sisters from Philly?”

She smiled back at me. “Well,
I
may have been regular, but
you
sure were not.”

I laughed and thought about my follow-up book, and a tell-all book for Raheema.

“You know what?” I asked her.

“What, Tracy?”

I said, “Have you ever thought about writing a book about
your
life? You could call it
The Good Girl.
Because I want to write a sequel about mine, and all I could say about you in
Flyy Girl
were just the things that I knew you and Mercedes were going through with your father. I think a lot of good girls would love to have a full story just about you.”

Raheema laughed as if I had just told the funniest joke in the world.

“Are you kidding me? Who would want to read it, Tracy? America loves the drama, not the
good girls.
They want Jerry Springer, not Jan Brady.”

“But I'm saying though, people
do
ask me about you.”

She ignored me and asked, “So, you're thinking about writing a sequel?”

“Yeah.”

“What,
Tracy Goes to Hollywood
?”

I frowned at her title and shook my head.

“No, girl, that sounds like a porno movie:
Debbie Does Dallas
or something. I don't know what I want to call it, but it
will
deal with me going to Hollywood. But I don't have the time to write it. I'm trying to break my way into a new film deal now.”

“What's it called?”

I smiled again, imagining how she would respond to it. “
Road Kill,
” I told her.

“Road Kill?”

Raheema turned up her nose like something reeked, and I broke out laughing.

“It's about this gang of psychos who snatch pretty women off of the highways. I play this Special Units agent named Alexis who goes after them with backup and whatnot.”

Raheema said, “What in the world? You mean to tell me that they couldn't come up with something more
sane
than that?”

“Yeah, a bunch of sane,
boring
movies,” I answered. “I want to do something wild and crazy. Those are the kind of movies that make you a star, not those
sane
movies. I want to go all out.”

“Oh, you're gonna go
all out
all right,” Raheema joked with me.

I laughed, and we talked and talked and talked about everything under the sun until we forgot about the time and ended up falling asleep on the couch together. That was me and my girl, just like old times, friends forever.

Yeah, that's me,
T-r-a-c-y,
and I USED to be
flyy,
but now I levitate
mentally.

You can't get
into me.
What you get is
NOT
what you see.

Roll your eyes
and cook your lies
if you want,
but you'll need ketchup
'cause I'll be
GONE in the wind.

Now let me be blunt.
Are you my lifetime FOE,
or can you be my friend?
Because where I come from
WE
DON'T
FRONT!

Copyright © 1989 by Tracy Ellison

T
he Seduction” was about a sister who invites a mysterious and sexy brother into her life because of her yearnings for a special kind of love. This guy wines her, dines her, loves her like a god, and disappears from the face of the earth. My theme was that deep down inside, a lot of women want to be controlled by an uncontrollable man. It's almost as if we are looking for God in a man, but as we all know, God cannot be negotiated with, nor can these playboy men. So sure, we may talk about a sharing, caring, and equal relationship, but in our guts, if a man is not in control (like God), then he is not desirable to us.

I'm sorry for my betrayal, sisters, but I guess I wrote “The Seduction” in my state of depression with Victor, and of course, all of the males at
Conditions of Mentality
jumped up and down at the chance to produce it as my first full script for the show. However, they changed my original brown characters into your apple-pie white couple. At first I was teed off about it, but once I thought it over, I figured it was better to get my point across to America as a whole than to have my script stereotyped as just a black thing. As much as we may like to
think
that humans are humans, and we all go through the same kinds of things in life, white Americans like to throw covers over their minds whenever they see brown faces, because they are so damned used to seeing their
own
faces up on the silver screen. The more Hollywood continued to spoil them, the more they continued to ignore anything with brown faces in it, and that cause and effect became an unbreakable cycle. Nevertheless, I was happy as hell to see my first produced script,
and
be paid the big cheese for it.

Kendra called me up as soon as the show went off of the air. She had taped it, along with ten to twenty of my other friends and relatives that I had informed about my first script. I never told anyone where I got the inspiration to write it though.

“So how do you feel about it?” Kendra asked me. She wasn't excited or anything, just curious. That told me that we had a long conversation on the way.

I said, “It was directed well. They got everything right.”

If Kendra wanted an argument over feminism, then I was going to let
her
start it. However, I admit that I
did
feel defensive about the script, especially after the show aired with my name on it.

Kendra asked, “You know why I haven't been out on many dates lately? I don't trust myself to choose the right men. I came right out here to California and got myself involved with some real losers, but you couldn't tell that they were losers from the outside.”

I was pleasantly surprised. Kendra wasn't calling me to rant and rave about protecting the sisterhood, she was calling me up to discuss her own truths. I admired her for that, because some sisters let their egos go to their heads sometimes, as if they have never been heartbroken before.

I said, “Yeah, it would be easier for
all of us
if the losers walked around wearing signs around their necks that said ‘I'm a loser, don't fuck with me!'”

Kendra laughed. She asked me, “Where did the inspiration come from? Because it seemed to come from the heart.”

I paused. Did I really want to tell Kendra about my night in that hotel room with Victor? No, so I passed on it.

“It's a little bit of everything,” I told her. “But the only reason they accepted the script is because the guys wanted to see it. They say it reminded them of a movie called
Thief of Hearts
?”

“It reminded
me
of a lot of these black relationship books,” Kendra commented. “Except that it starred a white girl.”

“Yeah, it reminded me of that too. But is life imitating art, or is art imitating life?”

Kendra didn't miss a beat. “Art is imitating life. No question.”

“That's what's so sad about it,” I said. “All of these damn broken-heart stories are real. We live them every day.”

“Yeah, and now
I'm
afraid to create another one by choosing another
loser,”
Kendra reiterated.

“So, what do we do, just say ‘Fuck men!' period, and move on?” I asked her.

She chuckled and said, “Move on to what, your career? I've already done that. Does it make you feel better about things? No, it just messes up your
groove for your next date, like a basketball player who hasn't played in a while. You're just rusty, but you still want to play.”

“In that case, you make it sound like we're supposed to keep going through the garbage anyway,” I responded.

She laughed again. “Are you
sure
you haven't been through something recently, because you seem very jaded right now. Usually you have a lot of optimistic energy about you.”

“Oh, I still do, just not about guys,” I told her. “I'm all about my work now. I'm brainstorming for my next script as we speak.”

“Oh yeah, you have any new ideas?”

“A few, but none of them are really developed yet. I mainly wanted to write something about the consequences of being a player. You know, like, a rubber pops, and the woman tells the man she has AIDS, and then she fakes her own death while he goes crazy thinking he's going to die.
That
would be fun,” I said with a laugh.

“So, you all can write a bunch of crazy stuff on that show?”

“That's why it's called
Conditions of Mentality,
” I told her. “At first I wasn't really interested, it was just a job, but now I like it. You can do a lot more with your imagination.”

“I guess so,” she said. “Well, you're on your way to stardom, Tracy. You have your first script produced, and you haven't even been out here for a year yet. I'm impressed!”

I smiled and said, “Thank you. You just have to be willing to work for it, and that's what I'm out here to do. Express myself.”

“Well, go 'head, girl! You got
my
vote!” Kendra said excitedly.

When we hung up, I answered phone calls that night from Yolanda, Raheema, Mom, Mercedes, and my little brother Jason. They all called to congratulate me, even Richard Mack from the HFI crash course. We had stayed in touch off and on, but it was nothing continuous.

He said, “That was some good work. I liked it.”

“Thank you, but I'm not finished yet. That was just a start,” I told him.

He laughed. “Good, because I have a project that I'm working on right now that I might want to hire you for.”

“Oh yeah.” I was just listening. It could have been just a game, but listening didn't hurt anything.

“Well, I'll stay in touch with you and let you know once I know something definite, because I'm still working out all of the details with the studio and my agent.”

I was tempted to ask him what studio he was working with, but I declined.
I didn't want to show too much interest in case it was all bullshit. I still needed an agent to represent my own work. However, Yolanda was still in my camp as a good lawyer who knew the ropes, so at least I was safe.

I said, “Okay, well, stay in touch, and I'll see what's what when it all happens.”

“You got it. And keep up the good work.”

Later on in the week, I got a call from Juanita's man, Reginald. He caught me at home for a change, because I had been avoiding the guy. I was sitting in bed eating coffee ice cream of all things—Yolanda had turned me on to it—when he called me.

“I saw your work, Tracy. People are buzzing all over about it.”

“Really? There are a hundred new shows a week. I didn't know that writers could get that popular,” I told him.