The Importance of Being Dangerous

by David Dante Troutt

  Instead of her parents taking care of her when she really needed it, she had Michael, who called while she and Raquel were watching non-cable TV. You could say Michael was her boyfriend. He called a lot like a boyfriend. He wore too much aftershave like a boyfriend. He chewed his food loudly, kept his money in a fat wad of singles, and laughed at his own dim-witted jokes like a boyfriend. But Michael was slow-moving and over fifty, with extra weight he couldn’t carry well, like an old friend, not a boyfriend. Over the telephone, he talked too slowly about his day in the token booth where he worked downtown. She could only hear so much about a day selling tokens to New Yorkers from behind a bulletproof glass.

  But when she interrupted to tell him about how she felt pretty sure that she was either going to be fired or demoted in a reshuffling at the Board of Miseducation, he relaunched a favorite rescue mission that backfired in her ears.

  “You need to give that stuff up, Sidarra. You need to quit grieving so hard and trying so hard all the time and let a man run the show for you and Rock.” That’s what he called Raquel, his Rock. “Why you don’t let me take care of things I know better about, huh? Get you out of that dump, once and for all. The Bronx is not so bad, baby. Beats the hell outta Harlem.”

  His words ran across the screen of her mind like the subtitles on the television while the mute button was on. Michael didn’t get it. She had just turned thirty-eight, and he talked about her like she was old enough to retire down South. He had never known what it was like to want a job because of the work you might achieve. Nobody wants to become a token vendor, you just end up there. And Michael’s often telling her to get over her parents passing so soon after her loss helped nothing. He was just tired of hearing about things he didn’t understand. But she told him she loved him anyway and got off the phone as quickly as she could. “How ’bout some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?” she asked Raquel, who was barely awake at nine o’clock.

  Raquel nodded. They stumbled together to the kitchen in their night clothes and turned on the light.

  “Mommy!” Raquel screamed.

  There, crawling gingerly out of a hole smack in the middle of the kitchen floor, were two of the meanest, fattest water bugs that ever lived. The light didn’t scare them, and they both turned their flying antennae toward mother and daughter as if to say, What? You wanna piece of me?

  Few things scared Sidarra like water bugs. Cockroaches were bad enough, and the old brownstone had enough of them for sure. But water bugs were fearless creatures of wretched filth and pugnacious attitudes who made Sidarra feel poor. She would love to have had the courage and the shoes thick enough to crush them back to where they came from, but she did not. That’s one reason she had a cat. Galore sat not more than three feet away, resting on a kitchen chair looking down calmly at the intruders.

  “Do something!” Sidarra screamed at the cat. But the cat was too fat. She was still full of warm Kentucky Fried Chicken, and she wasn’t leaving that chair for a plate of mice, let alone these things that were known to fight back.

  So they turned off the kitchen light and went to bed hungry that night. Afraid of the giant roaches, they slept together in Sidarra’s bed with the light and the TV on. Raquel had no problem sleeping curled up against her mother’s smell. But not Sidarra, exhausted as she was. Instead, she sat up and read from some papers she’d put on the nightstand, things she had been meaning to get to but had been putting off. She put a lot of things off, especially if they involved money, but this caught her eye. Now, it couldn’t wait any longer. It was an advertisement along with a couple of pages of explanation, something a friend down the block had given her. Not a pyramid scheme, not some expensive seminar to get ripped off at. In fact, the more she read, the less it intimidated her. It was just a no-obligation invitation to come to a meeting and learn about a local investment club that was getting started. Stocks. Portfolio investing. Estate planning. For people like her who knew nothing and had little but a job. While Sidarra still had hers, she decided she was going to have to join this investment club and get serious about herself again. Just the thought of that, or the hope, put her soundly to sleep without tears for the first time in a long time on the night before Good Friday.

  2

  THE LAST TIME Sidarra had been in church, her parents’ caskets lay like bookends before her in a final display of horror and absurdity. Sidarra had never gone to church regularly and swore that day that she’d never be back. Yet she gave in that second Easter Sunday and went because it seemed time that Raquel learn to think of things beyond the world of her days and to know that some things were just right and some just wrong. For herself, Sidarra didn’t expect church to be more than two hours of pain and bad memory, from which she intended to distract herself with thoughts about the first meeting of the Central Harlem investment club.

  Reverend Anderson was up to the task that day, talking about how the people mourned when Christ died and wandered around the rock in grim despair. Try as she could, Sidarra couldn’t really ignore what she heard. She saw herself there all of a sudden, transported, missing the greatest love of all. The choir swayed as they sang softly behind the Reverend’s great, booming voice. He would say this about the feeling of being lost, then that. Between each sentence, the choir would moan melodically on the rise. It grew louder and louder, and everybody in the church, even Raquel, knew Jesus was coming back, that the story ended with love.

  Praise music soon reached a crescendo, sending chills through Sidarra’s body. As it tapered down to a hum again, the invitational began. Reverend Anderson’s warm, deep voice surrounded her as he asked if anyone wanted to join the church today, if anyone wanted to be saved. Sidarra watched as one, then another person rose a little sheepishly from the pews and made their way down the aisle into the Reverend’s outstretched arms. “And He loves you,” the minister boomed. The choir soared with him. “And He loves you.” The choir grew more powerful each time he spoke. “And you and you and you, He loves you.” The voices seemed to lift out of the church. The Reverend looked right at Sidarra. “Listen, sister, you are loved.”

  Aunt Chickie, her mother’s sister, reached over Raquel’s lap and held Sidarra’s hand in hers.

  “Why are you crying, Mommy?” Raquel asked.

  Sidarra couldn’t answer. This was one more thing about her pain, its stubborn silence. She just looked quickly at her daughter, then into her aunt’s face, the one so much like her mother’s, and almost imperceptibly shook her head. No, Sidarra didn’t believe he was right about God.

  THE CENTRAL HARLEM INVESTMENT CLUB meeting was held on a low floor of the Theresa Hotel in the kind of broke-down old room that made it real clear exactly who was probably not going to make a lot of money on stocks. A man named Charles Harrison seemed to be in charge of greeting the dozen or so folks who showed up there that Tuesday evening. He stood near the window of the shabby conference room that belonged to a number of organizations on the floor; apparently not one of them had the responsibility of cleaning it, watering a plant every once in a while, or making sure the seat cushions weren’t falling halfway off the chairs. Sidarra got there on time at six o’clock, brought a pad and a No. 2 pencil as she always had back in school, and sat in one of the chairs closest to the door. The people already there looked like her, probably about her age, shopped for the same reasonable clothes at H&M’s and Lerner’s, and had no idea how to keep a buck, but plenty of reason to try. There was Brenda, her neighbor from down the block who worked for the post office. A man named Dennis whose asthma was bad enough that he kept using his inhaler. Several prim women who might have been West Indian sitting in the front row. A sort of goofy-looking guy wearing a bright orange warm-up suit with matching Pumas and a salt-and-pepper goatee. Sidarra didn’t catch his name when he introduced himself to the group. The others streamed in while Charles Harrison was explaining how an investment club worked and drew a few chicken-scratch diagrams on an erasable marker board he’d propped on a chair.

 
“It’s pretty straightforward what we’re supposed to be doing,” Harrison explained. “You’re going to have to work for your money so your money can start working for you. That means a lot of research into how stocks work and what sectors you’re comfortable with, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “Be more specific,” said a woman who looked Korean, like she was getting impatient. “You keep saying ‘et cetera, et cetera.’”

  Harrison let her have it. He was already in two other clubs, he told her, so this wasn’t really about him. He looked over her face for another moment and directed himself to everybody else. “Look, you all said so when you introduced yourselves, you got people to support. You don’t know how to save. You struggle all the time, can barely get up the courage to balance your checkbook—if you even know how to balance a checkbook. You play Lotto. You probably waste more money on Lotto or the numbers than you would ever lose if you just did some basic research into what’s out there. You could specialize in doing dumb shit with money—excuse me—but you know it’s true. You’ve got your name on a lot of dumb financial decisions you’d like to take back, but you can’t afford to. You were pretty sure it’d be different by now, but it’s not. Nobody in here’s a kid. You know what’s going on out there lately, how people in the nineties are making a damn killing on the market, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But still you wouldn’t touch the Wall Street Journal if it had naked pictures of your favorite whoever on every other page. Plus”—Harrison looked straight at a short Puerto Rican man who was hanging on every word—“you’re aware that people are starting to make money all around you in Harlem, people are moving in and moving other people out, people who own property are bumping out people who don’t in this, this Harlem Renaissance.”

  “C’mon, brother,” sighed a tall bronze man with hazel eyes who had come in late but looked like he already knew everything Harrison had to say. “Please don’t use that term like that,” he added quietly.

  Harrison stopped and looked across the room at the guy. “What’s your name, brother?” he asked, down with the challenge.

  “My name’s Griff.”

  Hearing the man’s name interrupted every channel in Sidarra’s head.

  “What do you do, Mr. Griff?”

  “I’m an attomey. I work in criminal defense.”

  “All right then. What’s wrong with that term?”

  Griff was cool all right, as a matter of principle. But he didn’t want to shake Harrison completely out of his groove. Griff wore a dark brown suit and black leather boots, a manila yellow shirt with no tie, and two gold rings on his incredibly long fingers. “I don’t mean any disrespect, Mr. Harrison—”

  “Charles.”

  “Charles. But I don’t have to tell you that the real Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s was one of the most important times for the development of black arts, letters, business, and intellect. This today ain’t that. Nobody here is worried about being priced out of Harlem by black people. We’re all just trying to keep this thing from running over all of us, that’s all I’m saying. Excuse me for interrupting, brother.”

  Harrison looked across at Griff like he’d reunited with an old war buddy. “Not a problem. Show you’re right, my man.” And he went on to explain how the people who joined the group would have to commit to each other, not in terms of financial trust, but to being part of a reliable research team. Everybody would have to be patient, no matter how much money anybody chose to invest. “And you have to realize that, like everything else in life, asset investment is a game of angles.”

  Sidarra suddenly found herself thinking wildly about other kinds of angles. This man Griff might be reason enough to stay with this particular venture. To her, he was the kind of crazy fine man you have long stopped waiting for—kind of. Not only did she notice that his teeth were perfect and white, and that he had the sculpted cheeks of the African warrior chiefs you used to see on those beer commercial posters in the ’70s, but he spoke in the low and righteous tones of a brother who had a genuine clue about how things worked. If he was down with the Central Harlem investment club with his law degree and concern for the ancestors, well, she was probably down too.

  As Harrison took more and more specific questions from the interested folks trying to get ahead in the financial world, Sidarra stole looks at Griff. He fit a fantasy she’d been keeping to herself for years. It was nothing less than the dream of a passionate marriage to a guy who was at least her equal. Griff had been to school. So had she, though maybe not for as long. She had a master’s degree in education from City College. She could remember herself back when she still felt like one of the most beautiful women in the room and before a long, painful accumulation of very unwise near-misses. She had specifically imagined meeting this man when her body and mind were a little readier: before Raquel, when her parents were there to say “There you go, darling.” Griff resembled the man whose mind contained the unpredictable kindness of radical affection. They would help each other. They would listen endlessly without interrupting or boring each other. For this man, she could rise up with all her energy, and they would pursue each other’s growth and pleasure. This was the dream back in the day when everything was going to be all right. This was the bell before a lot of false alarms that fooled her into standing out in the cold nearly buck naked, her best lingerie making her curves look foolish in the streetlight, while some trifling guy, already dressed and looking around for his next piece of booty, would take off into the night, et cetera, et cetera. No, this guy Griff was her guy.

  “How ya doin’? I’d like to introduce myself,” Griff said, walking up to Sidarra after the meeting was over. “I’m Griff.”

  “Hello. My name is Sidarra.”

  “Sidarra.” His eyes brightened, and he wasn’t too cool to take a flirtatious breath. “That’s a beautiful name. I appreciated the questions you asked.”

  “Well, we’re all trying to be clear about things, I guess. I thought your little history lesson was right on point.”

  He looked away for a momentary blush. “I was just breaking ice, you know.” It occurred to both of them that their bodies were swaying slightly, like kids at a school social deciding if they had the courage to join the dance. “That’s a lot of stuff we’ve got to digest,” he said. “The small-cap funds. The, uh, tax-free shelters. CDs that don’t play music. This is kind of a first for me.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Are you walking somewhere?”

  Of course she was. She was getting ready to walk half a mile home to where Michael would be waiting to tell her what a silly idea this was. “Sure. I’m heading uptown.”

  Griff wanted to take a photograph of that smile, the exact one that followed her last word. He had not seen one so fresh in a long time. It made him feel familiar, not that he’d known Sidarra before, but like he had somehow met a kindred spirit in the middle of something that usually confused him: making money.

  That’s mostly what they talked about as they walked up Lenox Avenue, how each of them had felt a little ashamed hearing news all the time about people taking advantage of the stock market, all the IPOs and Internet millionaires.

  “But you’re a lawyer,” she said at one point. “I wouldn’t expect to find a lawyer at a meeting like this.”

  He smiled brightly and looked down at the sidewalk. “Not all lawyers make a lot of money. I’m a criminal defense lawyer. I try to keep black men out of prison. I probably don’t have to tell you that black men facing time don’t have much to pay a lawyer.”

  “No, you don’t,” she said. And next thing you know, they were having a cup of coffee, talking about black men they knew from their work. Sidarra grew passionate about what happens to poor kids in the New York City public schools, and how she felt like she had done practically nothing to help them in all her years in the system. Griff found that fascinating, so fascinating that he kept asking questions about her work, about exactly what she did all day.

  “Oh, I rea
lly don’t do much,” she answered half seriously. “Perhaps you’ve seen me before. I’m one of those people who was gonna make a difference. I taught junior high for a while. When I felt myself burning out, I went back for an administrator’s degree, which landed me a once-in-a-lifetime position matching ‘disadvantaged teens’”—she made quotation marks with two fingers on each hand—“with shamelessly advantaged corporations. It was a special program.” She paused to see if she’d bored him yet, but Griff seemed to want her to go on. “My kids would spend a few hours a week in midtown corporate offices. They would learn in detail just how little they offered this world and just how much white folks really have. If an executive didn’t have quite everything—like a cup of coffee or a fresh pencil—my kids would go get it.” She stopped and looked off somewhere as if she were still undecided about that part of the story. “I’m not really a liaison anymore—just somebody with a foot in the door, working at the Board but paid by the program. Hanging on. I answer phones a lot. I know change comes slowly, but this is not the best time at work for me right now.” Graciously, she smiled. “So, Griff,” she asked, playfully exaggerating the single syllable of his name, “have you seen things improve for black boys down at the courthouse all the years you’ve been there?”

  “No. I can’t say that I have.” His voice could be so deep. “I’m like you. Just trying to limit the thug multiples they face.”

  Sidarra smiled quizzically at his choice of words. “I’m sorry. Thug multiples?”

  “Oh, that’s what defense lawyers worry about. You have a client, he’s been charged with some stupid thing—it’s small, it was an error of youthful judgment or something. But because of who he is, how people see him, and how he thinks about solving a problem, it’s probably gonna get worse. One bad decision is gonna multiply until he fits the profile of a thug. Other people’s misdemeanors are his felonies. Everybody makes mistakes. But black boys get the multiplier quick—”