For the Love of Money

by Omar Tyree

  I was spinning like a ballerina for the majority of the night, talking to everyone who wanted to have words with me concerning the film. It was pretty obvious where the marketing emphasis would be. Tracy Ellison Grant: a new star is born!

  After a while, Rich finally got a minute alone with me. He asked, “So, how does it feel? I can’t believe that you actually pulled this off. It seems like yesterday when we had that first date.”

  I smiled and answered, “To tell you the truth, you know that saying, ‘It’s lonely at the top’?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, I seem to be the only one in the crowd with no date tonight.” Even Jonathan Abner showed up with a tall blonde. When they say blondes have more fun, they were not playing, or at least not in Hollywood.

  Rich looked at me and said, “This whole damn audience is your date. You’re the star of the show. Are you kidding me?”

  He didn’t understand what I meant because he had a girlfriend. I was alone in a crowd, and I couldn’t help but think about being with someone special to share the moment with.

  At the end of the night, I ended up right back with my girls, Kendra and Susan and their dates.

  “Well, what do you want to do now? You all want to go out for a late bite to eat?” I asked them. “We can do Kate Mantilini’s.”

  “Sure,” they told me. The night was still pretty young and it was a nice Saturday evening. Before we all left, I noticed Poncho on a pay phone without his entourage of Latin friends, and I got curious.

  “Hold on a minute,” I told my friends as I approached Poncho at the phone booth. When he hung up I asked him, “Hey, super director, what are you doing for the rest of the evening?”

  He looked at me and read me fast, with his sexy, macho self.

  He tossed his hands up and said, “I’m game. Let’s go.”

  I smiled, feeling slightly embarrassed by it.

  “Aren’t you going to at least say bye to your friends?”

  He looked in their direction and immediately shook his head. “They know their way back to my place.”

  “What about your limo driver?”

  He said, “I’ll tell him to show my friends all a good time while we jump in your limo.” Wide Vision Films had given us the full star treatment for the night.

  I nodded to Poncho and said, “All right,” before taking him over to introduce to Kendra and her date, because Susan already knew him. She had agreed to take him on full time as a client. I felt leery about inviting him along with us, but so what? I wasn’t going to be the only one without a date, whether I was doing the star-fucking-the-director thing or not. Poncho and I hadn’t gone there anyway.

  I must admit, however, that as soon as the evening got under way at West Hollywood’s Kate Mantilini’s for a bite to eat and drinks, I couldn’t take my mind off of getting naked with Eduardo “Poncho” Morales. He was talking everyone up about Puerto Rican culture and growing up in Spanish Harlem, and I was impressed with his easygoing personality. Some directors had reputations of being uptight. Nevertheless, I think that the drinks had gotten to Poncho a little bit too, especially when he started bragging about the legend of Latin sexuality. I couldn’t take it anymore. I wanted to try him out, but I had no way of leaving with him smoothly.

  Susan finally looked at her watch at close to one in the morning and said, “Well, it’s getting late, you guys.”

  Kendra responded, “Yes, it is.”

  I thought, Hallelujah! I need my damn privacy anyway!

  We all said our good-byes and went our separate ways, and Poncho’s ass fell asleep in the limo on the way back to my townhouse. It was just my luck to have to carry his ass out of the car and into the house, but the limo driver did it for me.

  He laid Poncho out on my sofa, and I went to get my macho man some orange juice with plenty of ice in it before I showed the limo driver out. I gave him an extra fifty dollars for his help. I had money to throw away by then, but that didn’t mean that I would. Fifty dollars was enough.

  I sat Poncho up and got him to sip the orange juice. I guess he had more drinks that night than I had noticed.

  He finally came around and looked at me. He said, “Tracy, you are beautiful, my sister. Muy bonita!”

  I just broke out laughing. I said, “Poncho, and you’re drunk.”

  He didn’t laugh at all. He said, “That doesn’t affect my good vision.” He shook his head and smiled. “When you shot those sex scenes, man, I had to go back to my place and jerk off.”

  I couldn’t even look at him it was so embarrassing. It made me horny too, and Poncho was not going anywhere.

  I asked him, “Would you like to kiss me?”

  He chuckled. “Does a man have any balls?”

  I laughed again. I had no idea Poncho could be so much fun. I was so concerned with doing the film that I hadn’t paid much attention to anything else.

  I took a sip of the orange juice myself and wet Poncho’s lips with mine before his tongue found its way into my mouth. Puerto Ricans were not white, you know, and I was definitely going to fuck Poncho. He was my lucky pick, and he made it worth my while when he slipped down on me right there on my sofa and opened me up.

  Poncho had me grabbing at the air and pulling at my own hair.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I told him, feeling myself rising too early to where I definitely wanted to go. Poncho wouldn’t stop. He was a man possessed by his tongue, and then the walls came down, and fresh tears rolled freely from my eyes.

  DAMN! I thought to myself. Can he top that? He did. We did, all night long, and in the morning time, I thought of another poem, “Puerto Rican Freakin’,” and laughed.

  Poncho asked me, “What’s so funny?”

  I answered, “You don’t even wanna know,” and I kept it to myself.

  A few days after that, Kendra called me up and told me that she and her man Louis were engaged to be married on Saturday, December 18, 1999, a week before Christmas, back home in Maryland.

  I hung up with her and said, “Damn! I hope she doesn’t ask me to be her maid of honor at the wedding too, because I’m gonna have to turn her behind down. I can’t take two of ’em.” Nevertheless, I was happy for her, just like she was happy for me. I just wish that I had a man to get married to.

  $ $ $

  When we began to travel during the summer and fall of ’99, and enter into the different film festivals with Led Astray, we didn’t win any awards, but everyone sure learned my name. The strikes against us were many. We were apparently up against too many independent, raw-energy films that made our natural shooting seem too smoothly done. With no guns, killings, blood, extra plot twists, drama, or other major stars in the film, I was the only thing that the judges, journalists, and viewers bothered to focus on. So naturally, despite not being able to score with me, Jonathan Abner decided to have Wide Vision market the entire film as Tracy Ellison Grant’s breakout vehicle.

  I was pretty tight with Poncho up until then, and his possessive ways made it much easier for me to be able to turn down so many advances. However, when he seemed to be out-directed by the same camera tricks that I didn’t necessarily care for, and with everyone paying so much attention to me, it was more than Poncho could take. We didn’t have any painful breakup, it was more of a mutual business and artistic thing. He figured that he would have to move on and try something new, and I agreed with him. That was simply Hollywood for you; everyone had to be concerned about their own career or be drowned out in the waves.

  The next thing that happened was the interviews that poured my way. Plenty of them!

  “Your rise to Hollywood stardom has been rocket-ship fast. How does it all feel?”

  I smiled and answered, “I’m not a star yet. We don’t even release the film to the public until February of next year. And hopefully then, my rise to stardom will really happen.”

  However, the hype machine had already started. I was being interviewed by magazines that I had never heard of
before, and they all took on a certain “spin,” as they call it in the journalism field. I was the young ’hood sister that had caught Hollywood off guard with her street sass and sexiness. That was my story. Period! Few of the articles brought up my master’s degree in English, or my three years as a scriptwriter for cable and network television. They had what they wanted to run with, and they all ran with it. I wasn’t media savvy at the time to spin things back to what I wanted to say about myself, as opposed to what they wanted to write about me. I was simply answering questions as I was asked, but I caught on fast enough. Even my parents called me up to complain about it.

  “How come all of these stories only talk about how sexy and street-smart you are?” my mother asked me. “What did you do in this film?” She hadn’t seen it yet. “They don’t know that you went to college and got a master’s degree? What the hell is going on? Did you ask them to write this way about you?”

  I answered, “Of course I didn’t, Mom. They write whatever they want to write evidently.”

  I called up Susan and said, “You know what? I have an idea. I don’t particularly like these interviews I’m getting, so I think I need to write a sequel to my book to let everyone know how I made it out here, because these interviews are getting ridiculous, and the movie hasn’t even come out yet.

  “What are they gonna write about when it does come out?” I asked rhetorically. “I don’t want to become another black version of Madonna. We have enough of that shit going on with these young rap sisters.

  “And by the way,” I added, “the original Madonna was black.” I was slipping into a fight-the-power mood, and the black magazines loved to report from that spin: The Hollywood sister tells of dirty laundry; either that or, The Hollywood sister counts her riches.

  Susan said, “I agree with you, and I feel partially responsible for some of that, because I was the one who sent Jonathan a copy of Flyy Girl. I guess they all went overboard with that. But they do have the rest of your résumé. They know what you’re capable of. They act as if your screenplay was pure luck, and as if you can’t really write.”

  She said, “I don’t like the spin on these interviews either, and I think that a follow-up book idea would be good to set the record straight. The media has a penchant for sensationalizing the women of Hollywood, black, white, or whatever; you’re either the sex symbol or the bimbo that they want you to be, or no one wants to know you.”

  She added, “I warned you of that when we first began to shop the script.”

  I said, “Yeah, but I didn’t know that I would be starring in it at the time,” which was hypocritical of me because I was admitting that I was fully willing to allow another woman use her body in the role. I was having to swallow my own medicine.

  “Would you like me to make contacts to ask about the sequel book idea?” Susan asked.

  I said, “I was thinking about writing this one myself.”

  Susan paused. “Do you have the time to write it? This is a lot more time-consuming than writing poetry.”

  I said, “Not really, but I’ll find time.”

  “I don’t really know about that idea,” Susan responded. “I mean, it would be great to write it yourself, but even better to get a follow-up book with Omar Tyree, since he wrote the first one. That’s who people are connecting your story to as a writer. I mean, you would almost have to reintroduce yourself to the literary world, and many stars have not done too well in the book business. Everyone just assumes that Hollywood stardom will push you straight through the book stores, but it doesn’t always work that way.

  “However, if you had another combined effort introducing the new Tracy Ellison Grant, as told by Omar Tyree, I think it would sell a lot stronger in the literary market,” she told me. “After all, he has built up an audience now, mainly off of your story, and I wouldn’t want to count that connection out.”

  That conversation took place in late November 1999. I nodded, while thinking everything over. I didn’t want to say that I couldn’t write a book myself, but Susan had a point. Bookstores were different from movie theaters and vice versa.

  I finally conceded to it and said, “Okay. Let’s make that deal then,” only to have many of Susan’s phone calls concerning my sequel fall on deaf ears.

  In the meantime, Susan and I had found a steal of a three-bedroom house up on the hills of Marina Del Rey, next to Culver City. Some down-on-his-luck producer was vacating the house, dirt cheap, to pay off outstanding credit bills. I was able to take the place off of his hands for well below what it was worth. Talk about being in the right place at the right time with the right money, I must have landed on the other side of the rainbow. This house was the shit, with a hell of a hillside view! I was screaming about it for days! The neighbors were probably ready to call the cops on me already.

  As far as my Toyota was concerned? I drove that thing back home to Philadelphia to attend my brother’s graduation ceremony in June, and I handed the keys over to him as a graduation present. I replaced the Toyota when I arrived back out in California with a black, 1999 convertible Mercedes, loaded and with a car phone. So, outside of the media’s spin job on my imagery, in late 1999, I had few things to complain about. I guess my girl Raheema was right: I was born to be a star!

  Give the People What They Want!

  Sounds simple

  enough of a quest

  until you find that

  some want more

  and others want less.

  So you settle in the middle;

  in the middle of nowhere

  with nothing of value,

  while beautiful,

  thousand-year-old candles

  are snuffed out

  inside of small, barren closets,

  replaced by electricity;

  electricity to appease the masses,

  who learn to take the flick

  of a switch, or the press

  on a button for granted,

  with no more strikes

  of the match, or rubs

  of the fire wood.

  And then, when the power goes

  on that electricity,

  so simplistically gained,

  we ALL end up in darkness,

  searching,

  searching,

  for those candles

  that the PEOPLE

  ignored.

  Copyright © 1997 by Tracy Ellison

  For the Love of Money,

  The Sequel, 2000

  Road Kill was a much different movie from the independent feel of Led Astray. RK had blockbuster potential if we could market it right and get a good deal of buzz going. The main obstacle was for us to get two thousand theaters or more to premiere the film the following summer.

  By mid June, we were shooting scenes back out in California. I had a bunch of scrapes and bruises from doing a lot of my own stunts, but I wanted to step it up and earn my keep toward making the movie a success. I had even turned Paully into a fan. He kept asking me, “Are you sure you want to do this scene? You really don’t have to.”

  As long as the stunt couldn’t kill me, and I was still making two million dollars before the film ever released to the theaters, I said, “Let’s do it,” and kept going. I had stopped taking interviews for the time being, because all they were doing was throwing off my concentration. I needed to focus more on Alexis and not Tracy. So when Susan visited me unexpectedly on the set, she ended up having to wait several hours before I had a break to sit down and talk to her.

  I stepped inside of my trailer with her. I said, “Well, this must be important, because you’re still smiling even though you just wasted four hours of your day by not calling me first.”

  Susan said, “It doesn’t matter. I took the whole day off just to give you the good news in person.”

  “What good news?” I had nothing on my mind but Road Kill.

  Susan smiled and pulled out a faxed document with Omar Tyree’s signature on it. “He finally agreed to the deal, just as
we wanted it,” she told me. “I told him when you would be finished shooting, and he said he would fly out to California right after you wrap up. He said he’d spend a full week with you to get the sequel all on tape recordings, and then transcribe it to text.”

  I grinned. It was finally going to happen, a sequel to Flyy Girl.

  “And what did he say about the poetry?” I asked.

  Susan hesitated. “Well, he called me back personally, and we actually talked about it for a while. And he made it perfectly clear that without the poetry he wouldn’t have been interested in doing the book.”

  “Why not?” I asked her out of curiosity.

  Susan was still being choosy with her words.

  I said, “Come on, girl, you didn’t come out here to waste my time. You always give it to me straight, that’s why I like you. So let me have it.”

  Susan clasped her hands together and said, “Okay, Tracy. Well, I never even asked you what happened with your relationship with Victor Hinson, because I just figured that you were in college and he was in jail, and to be honest with you, I just didn’t see much of a future there. However, Omar seems to think that the young fans of your book obviously hoped for that, and he said that unless your sequel would reconnect you with Victor in some way, a lot of the Flyy Girl fans that you’ve amassed wouldn’t want to hear about your rise in Hollywood.”

  I did my usual thing and remained calm in the beginning. I said, “In other words, unless I get my man back, they don’t give a fuck about what I’m doing? That doesn’t make any sense,” I snapped.

  “I’m just telling you what he said,” my girl responded. “That’s why we were on the phone for a while. I didn’t particularly agree with that.”

  I sat there and thought about it in silence for a minute. I said, “I had an interview out in Nevada where this young sister from The Black American ranted that she thought I was selling out by coming to Hollywood and not picking the right movie vehicles to star in. She also talked about this Victor situation. Then she asked me to produce Flyy Girl the movie.