The Importance of Being Dangerous

by David Dante Troutt

  And that is when Griff made his decision: that till now he had had too much respect for a game that could never respect him, or Robert Billingsley, or four little schoolgirls trying to take a test designed to show their ignorance. For years he had wrapped himself in earnestness and legal rectitude while being seen as nothing more than some sandtrap on the government’s favorite golf course and a mere bitch at home. Now, maybe he could play a little. A sumptuous sister and a round-the-way sidekick had shown Griff how to play again. They too could play people like pawns. They too could invent their own rules as they went along. And, in honor of the people who had brought Griff to these conclusions at last, he named the game Whiteboy.

  On the Tuesday next, Cicero Dean’s Investment Club was about to be born.

  7

  “SO FIRST WE’RE PLAYING POOR,” Raquel started as they stood in line at a checkout. “Now we’re playing rich, Mommy?”

  “Not rich,” she answered. “Comfortable.”

  It turns out there are many different kinds of emergencies. There are the emergencies that come by phone, like the one Sidarra got about three years before when her parents were killed on a city street by a driver who had jumped the curb while trying to avoid a cab that had cut him off. Then there are some that different people would define differently depending on how they’re affected by them, like money problems. For instance, a landlord’s money problem is a very different money problem from a tenant’s, yet both tend to call them emergencies and both do what they have to do to get through them. Sidarra had been living in a black-and-white world, one in which an emergency wasn’t an emergency unless a siren was involved. But ever since the day she decided she had to join the Central Harlem investment club, she started living in the gray. Her emergencies were not subject to the approval of anyone else, and she wasn’t waiting for sirens anymore. That’s why she decided to take Yakoob up on his offer of a fake credit card.

  But nothing would let her go back to that Payless ShoeSource on 125th Street—or any other Payless. Raquel got her shoes all right. Sidarra discovered that, just as she had thought, the shoes they had picked out there were not real leather anyway. How could they be for six bucks? So Sidarra took her daughter down to Herald Square, where they finally did some real shoe shopping, the leather kind. One pair had buckles, but not the kind that change color after a couple of rains. And they had good arch support, so the saleswoman said, which justified the price—fifty-five dollars a pair. They bought three different color pairs. And some real Timberlands, and several pairs of socks. Then they went over to Macy’s, where they bought Raquel some tights, a few dresses, and new underwear for both of them—Sidarra bought lingerie, nothing too exotic, but sexier replacements than she had allowed herself in years. By the time they were done, Raquel would be the best-dressed girl in her class.

  Even at eight and a half years old, Raquel let very few things get past her. This could be a worry for Sidarra. Like other school administrators, Sidarra knew which schools—even which teachers—a person expecting to send their kid to a good college would want to attend. There weren’t that many of them, and most of those were nowhere near where they lived in Harlem. In fact, Raquel’s school was not known for stimulating young minds at all. But it was safe. At that point, safety was about the only thing Sidarra felt she could assure her child, and P.S. 27 did that well enough. Raquel might not learn to write full sentences anytime soon, but she’d more than likely live long enough to try.

  So Sidarra protected Raquel from news of a little new money in their lives. When she could, she’d shop alone after work and bring the clothes home for Raquel to try on.

  “What is ‘comfortable,’ Mommy?” Raquel asked. They were still on the checkout line, and Sidarra waited until they were outside the store before she answered that one.

  “Well, comfortable means just enough and maybe a little more.”

  “What’s a little more than just enough?”

  “It could be something a little extra, just in case. It could be something special, like a treat. That’s about it.”

  And for several months, that’s all it was. The $3,000 credit limit on her alias charge card bought the comfort of a new wool pantsuit gracing her skin as she slipped into it. Comfortable meant not being afraid to get help and attention at Bergdorf’s or Bloomingdale’s. And good shoes, not great shoes, not fabulous, but good shoes, more than one pair. And boots for the winter, with strong high heels that lifted her a little taller over her female colleagues and put male colleagues closer to eye level so that no one talked down to her. For many months, that’s what comfortable meant to Sidarra. Comfortable also meant something she could never thank Yakoob enough for: cash advances.

  One Tuesday out of Griff’s earshot she mentioned to Yakoob that she was afraid to shop at the same place twice.

  “That’s probably a good idea,” he said.

  “I have a brother, Kenny,” she explained. “Kenny took chances. He’s the only one of us who does. Well, Kenny has spent most of his adult life in prison. He’s a thief. Was a petty thief,” she added nervously. Yakoob just nodded in understanding. “I’m not a thief,” she giggled. “But I’m not trying to get busted.”

  “That’s never gonna happen, Sid.”

  “Right.”

  “But you could use a little cash on occasion is what you’re saying.”

  “Right.”

  So Yakoob got her a personal identification number for the card, which enabled her to take a cash advance at ATMs—though never the same one twice. Cash advances meant another kind of comfort. It brought Aunt Chickie closer when she needed to be because Sidarra would call up a car service and send for her. It was only ten dollars here and ten dollars there, but it was cash she could never spare so easily before. She and Raquel would have to go get her, or wait for Michael to come down from the Bronx and drive them. It wasn’t even a mile away. The cash advances closed that distance in a hurry.

  With a little more courage, a cash advance could do more wonder than that. The Board of Miseducation had great health benefits for its regular administrators, but Sidarra was irregular; the small staff of Special Programs received the cost-cutting minimum. Sidarra’s health plan got her and Raquel regular checkups at a clinic within walking distance from their home, and the wait was never more than two hours. But there was no dental coverage. By the time Sidarra got through taking care of Raquel’s teeth, her own were left to the team of Dr. Crest, Dr. Colgate, and Trident the hygienist. None of them could fill a cavity or replace a broken filling. Sidarra had two of one and three of the other, which for years she would quietly nurse with Tylenol, finger massages, and true grit. All until cash advances went to work on her smile.

  Just enough and maybe a little more, that’s what comfort felt like. The paint on the walls of her brownstone apartment still cracked and chipped to the floor under the winter’s steam heat. It faded ugly with the sunlight of spring. The gold lamé dress still hung on deposit at the store on 125th Street, but dollar by dollar, the deposit inched upward. Sidarra took care of some things and left others for later. She kept Raquel’s questions to a manageable minimum. She even found a way to take some of that cash advance into a bank and put a little bit of Raquel’s college fund back into a money market account.

  “The rate will change eventually, but right now it’s almost two percent,” said the little man with the blue suit and the uneven shave.

  “Is it safe?” Sidarra asked.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Can I lose it?”

  “No, no,” he smiled, surrounded by the strong marble walls of the bank behind him. “There’s no way you can lose any of this. And you can make deposits as you go, ma’am.”

  She could have done without the “ma’am” part. Her thirty-ninth birthday was approaching soon enough. Her teeth no longer hurt. Her stockings had no rips or tears hiding under her pantsuit. She did not need to be called “ma’am” yet. But she was glad this modest contribution t
o Raquel’s future was safe from the ups and downs of the stock market.

  “Okay then,” she said.

  It wasn’t until she was back at her desk that day that Sidarra started to feel like a player again—maybe not a lounge diva, but nevertheless a player. She had taken care of a certain amount of business. She was in the game even if she didn’t completely understand it yet. When she sat with the bank officer and opened the money market account, she knew most of what he was going to say before he said it. That had never happened before. The investment club had done something for her. And when a report crossed her desk about test scores and dropout rates at New York City high schools, Sidarra did not tremble as she used to or take a moment in the bathroom stall to curse in private. She just read the numbers with the cool of a poker player—or a pool shark. She checked the statements against data in the appendix. Discrepancies she might have missed before stood out now like they were written in red magic marker.

  GRIFF AND YAKOOB SAT IN KOOB’S CAR parked on a side street and waited for Sidarra to come out of the meeting. Griff was too pissed off about the trial of Robert Billingsley to attend, and Yakoob was steadily losing interest in Charles Harrison’s pep talks. Months of playing and scheming together had forged a cynical bond between them that Sidarra—who still had some faith in the Central Harlem investment club—could not join yet. Griff actually listened to Yakoob’s discovery of an online betting operation that paid out when certain terrible things happened to famous people. Sidarra probably wouldn’t hear that. Besides, Griff was brewing his own ideas that he wasn’t quite ready to share with the one woman whose voice alone had opened his nose.

  “Everybody’s listed somewhere,” Koob said, drawing on a joint. The smoke whipped in a circle near the cracked window, then was sucked out into the night air.

  “That’s good to know, but the issue is how they’re connected,” said Griff. “Two hundred and seventy-five million free-floating motherfuckers does you no good unless you can see who’s connected to whom, right?”

  “I hear you.”

  “Here’s what I’m talking about.” Griff pulled a folded piece of yellow legal paper from his coat pocket and handed it to Yakoob. It contained stock symbols attached to full names of companies attached to various financial indicators and dates, all in his own hand. Griff’s demeanor seemed to lock into a different seriousness than ever before. “You wanted knowledge. That’s knowledge. You check it out, see what else you can do in twenty-four hours. Roll this piece of paper around some cheeba, smoke it, and bring me back the ashes and the odds.”

  Yakoob studied the paper, squinting in the streetlight. Griff watched his mouth slowly open as he worked down the page. An “ooh” turned to a full-toothed smile real quick. “What’s this?”

  “This is a guy’s address and a couple of background facts about him I got from a directory. His name’s Jeffrey Geiger, but I’m not writing that down,” Griff said. “Some things belong to oral history.” Yakoob smiled and slapped Griff’s hand.

  Griff heard her footsteps as she turned the corner and adjusted the rearview mirror so that he could study Sidarra’s form as she approached the car.

  “She back?” asked Koob.

  “Like sweetness,” Griff mumbled, fixed his collar, and jumped out of the car to let her in the back door. Like that, his demeanor unlocked into something easier again. “Hey, baby,” he said, and wrapped his arms around Sidarra. She peered up out of a hug she didn’t really want to leave and smiled into his face.

  “Hi,” she purred, “sugar.” And she kissed him gently on the mouth. He squeezed her a little closer to him, and she could feel him jump beneath his long winter coat.

  Yakoob tapped the horn, and the two got into the car.

  At the pool hall downtown, it was all business. For this night, they chose an upscale billiard parlor with a crowded top floor and a downstairs that remained empty on Tuesdays. They put their coats on hooks beside a secluded back corner table and removed their cue sticks from their cases. They racked the balls, paid the waitress, and washed back the first tastes of alcohol.

  “I’d like to propose a little game,” Griff announced.

  “If there’s money in the motherfucker, the table’s all yours, dog,” said Koob. “’Cause this nigga’s trying to get paid.”

  Sidarra nodded approvingly at Griff. He drained his sniff of Hennessy and chalked his cue before breaking. “All right then. It’s called Whiteboy. It’s my turn to persuade. If I don’t lie, I don’t die. If I’m alive, you all come with me.”

  With that introduction, Griff tore up the break. The three of them watched as the balls went spinning in every direction. Four balls dropped and the others spread out magnificently. Before he began to pick them off, Griff described a group of black folks from a book he’d once read. In it, they form a secret society of seven assassins who avenge the lynchings of black people depending on whichever day of the week the victim died.

  “Oh yeah,” Koob said. “That’s by that dude Toni Morrison.”

  “She’s not a dude, my brother,” Sidarra gently corrected. “I know the book.”

  Whiteboy was a billiards game of selective reprisal and secretly just desserts. Griff invented it over the course of the day that began with his wife calling him a bitch and ending with the young D.A. trying to unload the weight of New York State on Robert Billingsley. The shooter had to reach “persuasion.” You nominated somebody who had excelled in the business of humiliating black people. That was it. You named the target on the break and you tried to run the table without letting another player get a single shot in. When that happened, plans would be made and the victim would soon find himself very short of cash. Yet winning wasn’t just about skill at pool; Whiteboy was also a game of talk. For each ball you sank, you had to state a reason, something from the victim’s résumé that made him deserving of his fate. If you missed and another player disagreed with your nominee or one of your reasons, they could “intolerate” by sinking enough balls to keep you out of the game. But if you made your eleven straight, that was a “joint,” or persuasion, and nobody could change it. The victim would get hit at some unspecified time in the future, and the crew would take the spoils.

  The problem was, before anybody could nominate Whiteboy’s first victim, they had to find suitable investments in which to grow the booty. Griff first had to persuade his friends about where their new money was going—and why.

  “Okay, so here we go,” Griff continued. His expression started to lock up again. “I owe you a reason and at least one ball in a pocket every time I step to the slate.” Sidarra and Yakoob grinned at each other and waited for Griff to start. He had eleven balls to go. “The first is, there’s a new bonus structure in the D.A.’s office downtown. They give Christmas money to the ones who can put the most brothers in jail by New Year’s.” Bang! Griff shot with authority. Two balls went into opposite corner pockets. “Second, there’s a Southern company, Great Walls, it’s public, that does new prison construction. They had profits last year of seven billion dollars, but most people never heard of ’em. They specialize in high-tech solitary confinement units. Lockdown—that’s where the money is. Twenty-three-hour days inside, no inmate contact, workouts in a cage, electronic monitors watching you all the time. Drives sane brothers mad, makes mad brothers kill themselves, but it cuts manpower needs by about sixty percent.” Spank! Griff let go and dropped another ball in the side. “Thirdly, they have two wardens on their board of directors, I found out, one from the largest penitentiary in Georgia, the other from Texas. Each of their prisons has already broken ground on a combined total of twelve hundred new solitary units.” Bop! He aced again.

  “Here’s the really sick shit. The governors of both states once sat on Great Walls’ board. Each state legislature appropriated the money for the construction projects as a discretionary item in recent crime bills. Really can’t be reviewed or challenged in court.” Spop! Another ball dropped in the far corner. “Just so happens,
with heavy lobbying from political action committees from these same two states, Congress just passed a federal statute changing the designation of certain felonies—particularly those connected in any way to crack cocaine—to fall in line with tough mandatory sentences.” Pop! Two balls dropped cold. The cue ball spun on the edge of a pocket, but would not fall.

  Griff waited until the ball stopped spinning before he continued. He had now given five reasons and dropped at least as many balls. “The states are gonna use that federal law as a model. By next year, half of them will have the equivalent penalties under their own laws.” Bang! Other than the cue ball, there were just two colored balls left on the table. He’d shot so efficiently he had to pause to align his reasons with the few remaining targets. “But check this out: The statute also comes with a special designation for certain kinds of prisoners. If they exhibit one of like three behavioral signs or commit any prison infractions, they’re now eligible for solitary.” Griff looked up to make sure they followed him on the point. “Solitary used to be considered cruel and unusual, reserved for the baddest of the bad. But with Congress making it ordinary well, now an inmate could get it for pissing on the toilet seat.” Spop! One ball left. “If they had toilet seats in prison.”