For the Love of Money

by Omar Tyree

  The Queen

  My drummers would beat

  an urgent rhythm

  on golden paved streets,

  while big voices

  attached to little feet

  yell out, “SHE’S COMING!”

  The strong

  armed, brown men keep drumming.

  As I approach, the drums grow

  louder, deafening

  with blaring horns.

  BA-DURRNN!

  BA-DURRNN!

  For miles they hear

  my clearing path, while

  my pounding drums pop ears.

  They fear me,

  the fabulous, BLACK

  and pretty, inner-city

  ’hood girl, with

  ambitions and visions

  to rule the world, while

  my drummers keep drumming

  in loincloths and sweat.

  I announce myself

  to the masses,

  “HEAR ME!”

  and my voice echoes

  in the distance,

  bringing silence

  as I continue, “WHO HERE

  OPPOSES MY RULE?”

  And the silence

  was infinite!

  Copyright © 1989 by Tracy Ellison

  April 2000

  When I was ready to leave Raheema’s beautiful family on Sunday afternoon, they all lined up outside to see me off, Ernest, Raheema, Jordan, and Lauryn, and I hugged each one of them.

  Ernest said, “Whenever you want to wind down with a good family, Tracy, you call on us and we’ll receive you with open arms.”

  I smiled, and I knew that they all meant it. My girl Raheema had done real well. I hated to leave, but that was her life, and I had to go back to my own.

  “Call me when you get in,” Raheema told me.

  “Call me too,”Jordan piped with a chuckle.

  I laughed myself and told them that I would.

  On my way home from Plainfield, I began to think about family and what it meant to me. I wasn’t planning on grabbing onto the first man who presented himself to me, but I figured there was another way for me to stay rooted to family and loved ones.

  I made it back to my parents’ house and immediately called up my little cousin Vanessa with a plan.

  “Vanessa, it’s Tracy,” I said, recognizing her voice.

  She got excited and said, “Hi.”

  “I have a big idea for you,” I told her.

  She hesitated. I guess she figured I had more big-girl advice for her, but I didn’t. Or at least not at that moment.

  She asked me, “What big idea?”

  I said, “How would you like to spend the summer out in California with me?”

  “Oh, yeah, I’ll do that!”

  “First I have to talk to your mother though.”

  She calmed way down and said, “Oh.”

  “Why’d you say it like that?” I asked her.

  “You’ll see. She already says that I think I’m special.”

  “You are special,” I told her.

  “Well, tell her that. She’s not home right now though.”

  “When will she be back in?”

  “Any minute. She only went to the grocery store around the corner, and she could use the exercise too.”

  I chuckled and stopped myself. “Don’t talk about your mother like that, Vanessa, that’s not right.”

  “She doesn’t do anything that’s right. She’s always hollering at somebody, as if she’s all perfect.”

  I didn’t get along with my mother as a teenager myself, but I was still made to show respect. I told Vanessa about my problems coming up, and how it was all behind me now. My mother and I had a solid relationship as two respecting adults, and that’s what Vanessa needed to think about.

  “So, you didn’t hang out with my mother at all?” she asked me.

  “Nope,” I told her. “Patricia was four years older than me, she lived in North Philly, and we hung with totally different crowds, but I heard about when she got pregnant with you though.”

  “Was she in trouble with my Grandmom Marsha?”

  I thought back and said, “Shit, girl, everybody was in trouble with Aunt Marsha. She hated my mom.”

  Vanessa laughed and said, “I know. She’s still mean like that ’til this day.” She sighed and said, “Sometimes I just feel like I was born into the wrong side of the family. Grandmom says that I remind her a lot of your mother.”

  “I can see that. All that red bone,” I told her. “God gave me a little bit of honey in my tone.” I stopped myself and said, “Damn, that sounds like a good line for a poem. Let me write that down.”

  Vanessa broke up laughing and said, “You got a poem for everything.”

  I asked her, “What did you think about my movie Led Astray?” I had never bothered to ask for her opinion on it.

  “I thought it was deep. She was very cunning, the way she set everybody up like that.”

  I laughed and said, “I know. Thanks. So if your grades are still good, I’ll reward you with a trip to California every summer.”

  “If my grades are still good?” She sounded offended. “That’s easy.”

  “Let me see you prove it to me in June. Then I can try and get you in UCLA.”

  “For real?! UCLA?!”

  “For real,” I told her.

  “All right then.”

  “Vanessa!” someone shouted in the background. “Why are you always on that damn telephone? I swear I don’t know how you get good grades, because you’re always running your damn mouth on that phone!”

  “That’s your mother?” I asked Vanessa with a grin.

  “Mmm hmm,” she mumbled. She whispered, “You see what I mean?”

  I figured that if Vanessa didn’t get a chance to express herself, she could very well be a problem soon, especially with her introverted ways. A hyper-active mother pressing her all of the time didn’t make matters any better. Mercedes and Raheema went through hell with that with their father. However, on the flip side, I took my mother through hell.

  I said, “Let me talk to her,” referring to my first cousin.

  “Mom, the phone is for you,” Vanessa told her mother.

  “Who is it?!”

  “It’s your cousin Tracy.”

  “... Oh.” Patricia came to the phone and said, “How are you doing, Tracy?”

  “I’m doing fine. How are you doing?”

  “I’m doing what I’m doing,” she told me.

  I didn’t get into that. I said, “Well, I was wondering if I could give Vanessa a gift for getting good grades all these years.”

  “A gift? A gift like what?”

  “A summer in California.”

  There was a long pause. Patricia said, “I don’t think it’s good for her to separate from her little sisters like that. They may think that she’s getting special treatment.”

  “Well, she is the oldest.”

  “And she thinks that she’s the cutest too,” my cousin snapped. “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Mom—”

  “I’m talking, Vanessa!”

  I didn’t know what else to say, but I had to say something because I had gotten Vanessa’s hopes all up. Shit, I should have asked Patricia about this first! I told myself. What the hell was I thinking?

  I said, “I was thinking about trying to get her into school out here at UCLA.”

  “Temple is good enough for her. That way she can help me out around the house with her younger sisters,” Patricia countered. “Temple’s a good school. Your brother goes there.”

  I said, “Well, maybe she wants to do something for herself.” As soon as those words slipped out of my big mouth, I knew that it was a mistake.

  “You know what, Tracy?” Patricia started, “I didn’t ask you for your fuckin’ money. I didn’t ask you for your fuckin’ time. I didn’t ask you for your advice, and I damn sure didn’t ask you to come around here putting that
Hollywood shit in my daughter’s head either!

  “For what?! So she can be another big-screen hoe?!” my cousin screamed at me. “You better check yourself, Tracy, because you will get wrecked!”

  She went ahead and slammed the phone on my damn ear.

  When I put the phone down, my mother caught me staring into empty space in my old room.

  She said, “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but were you just talking about Vanessa in California or something?” I had my door open the whole time.

  I didn’t even want to talk about it. My brother walked in next, and I guess he had caught the tail end of my mother’s question.

  “You taking Vanessa out to California?” By then, Jason was six foot two (an inch taller than my father), and was sticking his chest out because he had his own apartment at nineteen, a golden number it seemed for men. They even had an antidraft song about being nineteen back in the eighties.

  I shook my head and said, “Vanessa could use a break. I can feel it.”

  “You can feel what, Tracy?” my mother asked me. She had that mother-knows-best look in her eyes again.

  “I can just tell that she needs a change of pace. A getaway.”

  “Oh yeah, well, I could use one of those too,” my brother told me. “I’ll go out to California with you. Can you set me up with a summer job out there?”

  My mom said, “I thought that was what you were trying to do, and it’s wrong.”

  “What’s so wrong about it?” I asked her.

  “Do you have a child, Tracy?” she asked me back. “I didn’t think so. You can’t impose yourself on people’s lives like that. That was wrong.”

  I knew she was right, and I couldn’t really argue with her, but that didn’t change the fact that I had already opened up the can of beans.

  “So, what do I do now?” I asked. “Vanessa was willing to go.”

  “You can take me instead. You can impose yourself on my life all you want,” my brother interrupted again.

  My mother just looked at him and didn’t say a word.

  “What, Mom?” he whined. “I could use a vacation. I didn’t even go away to school.”

  “That’s because you wanted to follow your little friends to Temple,” she shot at him.

  “Her mother’s just going to ruin her life, Mom,” I said, referring to Vanessa and my cousin Trish.

  “Who are you to say that? Are you an authority on parenting all of a sudden? Do you even know how to raise a child?” my mother asked me. “What master’s degree do you have on that?”

  I frowned and said, “Come on, Mom, you know Trish isn’t the best mother to those girls. She was pregnant at sixteen, and she still hasn’t learned her lesson about making the right decisions in her life.”

  “But you have?”

  “Yes, I have,” I snapped.

  My brother read the intensity inside of the room and said, “I think that’s my cue to go,” and walked back out.

  My mother said, “Tracy, regardless of what you, me, or the rest of the world for that matter, thinks about Vanessa’s welfare, it’s only our opinion, because Trish is her mother. Now when the girl turns eighteen and graduates from high school, if she wants to break out and do her own thing, then that’s her prerogative to do so. Until then, she’s still in high school and under her mother’s roof, so you leave her the hell alone.”

  I shook my head defiantly. “I hope nothing happens to her before then.”

  That only made my mother curious. “Why are you so concerned about her all of a sudden. Did you find out something?”

  “No, I’m just saying.”

  “You’re just saying that you want her in California with you for the summer because she’s your little cousin. And what about when you start working on this next movie? Then what?”

  “I take her on the set with me as my assistant and pay her. Vanessa would love that!”

  My mother shook her head and started to walk out from the room. “It sounds like the same old Tracy to me. My daughter, as selfish and conniving as she wants to be.”

  Mother knows best indeed. I was breaking my neck just to have family for company out in California. Just because I knew that I was being selfish, however, didn’t mean that I would stop.

  I left my room and went to find my brother before he disappeared. He was downstairs on the couch with Dad, watching the Los Angeles Lakers play the Minnesota Timberwolves for a late NBC basketball game.

  I looked at my brother and said, “It’s beautiful weather out there in California. We have palm trees, beaches . . .” Pretty girls, I thought to myself but dared not to say in front of my father. I was being terrible, but what was so bad about having family over for the summer?

  Jason asked, “Yeah, so you’re gonna let me stay out there with you this summer?” just like I knew he would.

  I said, “I don’t know. Dad, you think your son’s mature enough to come out to California with me?”

  My father didn’t even look at me. “Don’t get me involved in this,” he commented.

  “Mature enough?” Jason asked me. He was offended, just like I figured he would be. Boy was he easy to pull by the nose!

  I said, “Jason, they have a lot of crazy turf wars out there that I wouldn’t want you to get involved in.”

  “What, Bloods and Crips?”

  “Exactly.”

  “They’re not where you live, are they? I’ll just hang around where you live.”

  He had a point. To my knowledge, there were no Crips or Bloods in the Marina Del Rey area.

  I said, “What do you think, Dad? You think I should invite him?”

  My father smiled, while watching the basketball game. He said, “Tracy, I think you need to stop the bullshit, because you wanted this boy to go to California with you from the minute you walked down those stairs. So stop bothering me while I watch this game in peace.

  “If you want a real argument about it,” he said, “then you go on back upstairs and ask your mother if Jason can go.”

  “Wait a minute, I have to ask for permission?” my brother asked rhetorically. “I’m in college now?”

  “And?” my father asked him.

  Jason looked at me and grimaced. “You see what you started, Tracy? You should have just asked me.”

  I knew that I would have no problem getting my brother out to California with me, but Vanessa’s situation was more tricky and urgent. I brainstormed for the rest of that night how to release her from the imprisonment of her mother, because that was all that it was, imprisonment, just because Patricia had given birth to her.

  However, with the new law banning affirmative action programs at the university level, Vanessa would have to compete academically against thousands of white students who had more facilities than she had. Ain’t that a bitch! I thought to myself. My girl Kendra was right all along; that shit is an outright crime, and nobody fought against it! So if you could not dunk a basketball, run a touchdown, or long jump, and your family didn’t have any money, you would basically have to be a black or Mexican genius, or leave the state of California in order to receive a higher education.

  I went to sleep with that thought on my mind, as pissed off about it as Kendra was years ago. I guess you really have to see how a new law can immediately affect you and your family before you really give a damn.

  Nasty Girl Talk

  Girl,

  I called up my MAN last night

  and told him, “Baby,

  why don’t you take a slow cruise

  downtown for me.

  And once you get there,

  you gon’ come up to this gate

  with bushes in front of it.

  And what you need to do, right,

  is dip down real low

  and push your way through the bushes,

  but not too fast

  because the gate is sensitive

  and you might set off my alarm system.

  But if you slip through the bushes

 
just right,

  and inch your way across the lawn,

  I can let you come up to my room

  inside the house.

  And please,

  when we get good and busy,

  don’t tease me when I moan

  because

  I don’t particularly care for that

  disrespectful, macho shit!

  Jus’ like YOU wouldn’t like it

  if I slipped and got your name

  mixed up

  with the burglar who snuck in here last weekend.”

  Girl,

  my MAN said, “WHAT?!”

  Then I said, “Si-i-i-ke.

  You know you my only playa’,

  Boo.”

  Then

  me and my girl broke up laughing

  on the telephone

  all night,

  talkin’ ’bout guys

  ’n shit.

  Copyright © 1995 by Tracy Ellison

  July 1997

  By the summertime, I just couldn’t take it anymore! I had to have some sex! I had gone nearly a full year out in California without having any. I think the guilt that I felt about new people reading my book and how fast I was back in the day, along with the sleaziness of Hollywood, had really turned me off from getting down and dirty. However, when those California brothers started getting suntans and shit, with the new summertime heat kicking in, I had to have myself some more chocolate, and I was a grown damn woman, so I could have a piece of chocolate if I wanted to, as long as it still came in the wrapper.

  I wrote my second full script for Conditions of Mentality called “Bad Karma,” about a playboy who finds that all of his usual moves with the ladies were going sour on him, so he seeks out a spiritualist for answers. A decision was made to make my script the season’s finale, and the catch was that I had to extend the plot with a part two to begin the next season. I was getting plenty out of my first Hollywood job; I even had a one-page profile in Take 1 magazine, a Hollywood biweekly. I didn’t sweat any of that stuff, though. I really wanted to sweat a man, or sweat with a man, to tell you the truth. I felt how guys did when they craved intimate companionship. Desperate!