Cracker Bling

by Stephen Solomita

  ‘It’s got about fifteen minutes on it,’ Amelia says. ‘After you finish, come into my room. There’s something I want to show you on the computer.’

  Hootie waits until Amelia disappears, then dials his sister’s cell phone. Two years out of law school, Teesha Hootier is the embodiment of everything he’s not, the family success, a living reproach. Hootie loves his sister anyway. All through her teenage years, while their mother worked the night shift at Beth Israel Medical Center, Teesha had been the one to put groceries in the cupboard and meals on the table, to make sure he got his hair cut and that his Catholic school uniforms were clean and pressed for school.

  ‘Yo, Teesha,’ Hootie says when his sister answers. ‘It’s Hootie.’

  ‘Hootie, Momma’s worried sick about you.’

  ‘Say what?’ Hootie feels suddenly hot, as though at the onset of a fever. Damn that woman.

  ‘Momma loves you.’

  ‘Teesha, she threw me out the house. Hear what I’m sayin? She kicked me to the curb and now she’s runnin’ you some bullshit line about how she’s worried sick. Man, that’s cold.’

  Teesha sighs into the phone. ‘Even when we were children, I had to play the role of peacemaker. Tell me, have you found a job yet?’

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘Have you looked?’

  ‘I’m only out a week.’

  ‘Eight days,’ Teesha corrects. ‘So, tell me what you’re doing. Were you on the street last night?’

  Hootie lies without thinking twice. ‘I rode the subway, but I’m at a friend’s house now.’ He lowers his voice to a whisper, though the room is empty. ‘Only the thing about it is I can’t stay here and I don’t wanna go back on the street. I’m afraid I’ll get picked up. I was wonderin’ if I could stay by you?’

  Teesha responds without hesitation, her tone cheerful. ‘Not happening, brother. I’m assisting at a trial two days from now and I’ll be working straight through. You need to go back to Momma’s and make your peace. What got into you anyway? You know that woman has buttons you just can’t push.’

  ‘She told you about the argument?’ Hootie’s growing angrier by the minute. Grind you down was what Bubba said. Just go on home, tell your mother and her asshole husband that you were wrong. Tell ’em you’re a black man, for now and forever. Tell ’em you’ll be whatever they want you to be. And don’t forget to grin.

  ‘Hootie, I don’t care if you grow your hair long enough to cover your ass. But there are things you have to do first, like get a job and find a place to live. Like become independent. You know how Archie gets about his house and his rules. Anyway, baby, you can’t stay here. The couch is covered with briefs.’

  Briefs? Hootie’s talking about his whole life. Because there’s a big fat choice looming on the horizon, and if it’s between Bubba’s scam and returning to his mother’s apartment, he’s pretty sure which way he’s gonna go.

  ‘Awright, Teesha, I’ll be speakin’ to ya.’

  ‘Look, Hootie, I’m also worried about you. I’m thinking that if you can’t live with the rules at Momma’s, what will you do the first time a boss gets up in your face? And bosses will do that, Hootie. They’ll chew you out and expect you to submit. That’s just the way it is.’

  ‘You’re telling me I should know my place?’

  ‘If you don’t, somebody will damn well show it to you. It could be a boss. It could be Archie. It could be a cop or a corrections officer. You choose, baby brother.’

  Hootie’s pretty much blown away by the time he finally hangs up and heads off to join Amelia. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting when he comes through the door, but what he finds does not restore his sobriety. Fluff and flounce everywhere. Ruffled curtains, ruffled bedspread, tasseled pillow cases, shaggy rug, all in shades of blue, from cobalt to baby blue to an armchair upholstered in midnight-blue velvet. This is the perfect room for Amelia. It plays to a self-mockery Hootie’s only beginning to sense. But it’s not her room, of course. The whole apartment is borrowed.

  Amelia’s sitting before a laptop computer. She gets up when he enters and gestures for him to take her chair. Amelia’s wearing cut-off jeans and a Baby Phat top with the company logo, a sitting cat, done in glitter. Designed for an adult, the top droops across her flat chest. But Amelia will never find clothes to fit her, not unless she shops in the little girls’ department.

  ‘My big performance, Hootie. Welcome to the show.’

  Amelia’s big performance is a ten-minute streaming video from a page on myTime, a page supposedly created by a precocious twelve-year-old named Veronica. Amelia’s head and shoulders fill the monitor, a cute girl, though not beautiful, with a pixie haircut, big blue eyes and enough makeup to shame a Hunts Point whore. Instinctively, Hootie recoils, but then he feels Amelia’s hand on his back.

  ‘Don’t freak out,’ she instructs. ‘Just take it in.’

  The makeup is reasonably well applied, but the colors might have been chosen by a narcissistic chimpanzee. Pink lips, green eye shadow, bright red circles of rouge. Amelia’s false eyelashes are preposterously long and her arched brows extend halfway to her hairline.

  The little girl in the video adjusts the camera, then sits back in her chair. She’s wearing a cheerleader’s outfit, pink blouse and short blue skirt. When she crosses her legs, the skirt rides up to mid-thigh.

  Suddenly, she looks to her right and says, ‘Stop it, Melissa.’ This followed by a giggle, followed by a determined sobering.

  ‘Hi, my name is Veronica and I live in New York City.’

  Veronica goes on to recite a laundry list of favorite singers and favorite movies. The singers include Little Kim, Beyonce, Mary J. Blige, Janet Jackson and the elder stateswoman of sexual innuendo, Madonna.

  ‘My ambition,’ she announces, with a straight face, ‘is to be a dancer in music videos.’

  Veronica’s favorite movies are mostly chick flicks. Chick flicks are all about sex, but just in case the casual viewer misses the point, Veronica explains that her favorite thing of all time is Sex in the City, a television series. When the show went off the air, she nearly died, of course, but she’s seen the movie four times.

  Throughout this recitation, Veronica keeps glancing to her right, at a friend hidden off-camera. Lots of giggles. Lots of ‘noooooo!’ and ‘awesome’ and ‘will you please stop’ and ‘shuuuut uuuuuup!’.

  Finally, a serious look, aimed directly at the camera. ‘Melissa wants me to do my cheerleader routine.’ A theatrical sigh, accompanied by a rolling of the eyes. ‘Alright, OK. But don’t blame me if I fall on my face.’

  It’s all there. The leg kicks, the splits, finally the cartwheels. Glimpses galore of slightly oversized cotton panties. White, naturally.

  Hootie can’t take his eyes off the monitor. He’s repulsed and admiring at the same time. Veronica is entirely believable. Sexually curious, but ignorant as well, her makeup so inappropriate it could only have been applied by an innocent hand.

  ‘It’s fucking brilliant,’ Hootie says. ‘And I know what’s coming next.’

  Amelia smiles agreeably. ‘I’ve been exchanging emails with the mark for about a month now and I’ve spoken to him on the phone a couple of times. He’s a civil engineer, lives in Whitestone. Hootie, the man is so hot he’s melting. Here, check this out.’

  Sure-handed, Amelia brings up a folder containing several dozen emails, both sent and received. She clicks on one and the text jumps on to the screen.

  Hootie reads the first line: You say that you let your girlfriend’s brother get to third base …

  That’s enough for Hootie. ‘You’re tellin’ me that you’re just gonna fuck this chicken hawk?’

  ‘Are you upset?’

  ‘Damn right.’

  Amelia shakes her head. ‘Hootie, what happened to me in my life, this is nothing.’ The look in Amelia’s eyes is now positively maternal. ‘Think about it, Hootie. If thirty thousand can become three hundred and fifty thousand, what can three hundred an
d fifty thousand become?’

  ‘That’s Bubba’s song and dance. That’s his fucking bait.’

  ‘Not true. I costed the operation myself. For thirty grand, we can drop into the deep South, where consumer protection laws are non-existent, and market our product to several million consumers. Hootie, we’ve only got seven thousand units to peddle. The math speaks for itself.’

  ‘And what happens when our … our consumers go to the cops? Maybe Alabama doesn’t have consumer protection laws, but this is outright fraud.’

  Amelia grins. ‘First thing, we tell customers, in tiny print of course, that delivery takes four to six weeks. Then we demand they try out the units in their own homes for thirty days before shipping them back for a complete refund. Only problem is that the refund takes up to ten weeks to process. So do the math again. Six weeks plus four weeks plus ten weeks. That’s five months, by which time we’ll be long gone. And the best part is that nobody gets hurt. Yeah, the marks are out fifty-five dollars. But we’re not forcing some granny to sell her house and move into a nursing home.’

  Hootie finally catches his breath. He sees where this is going and when he speaks, his voice is almost wistful. ‘And the cops won’t investigate because the amount is too small.’

  ‘There you are, Hootie. As white-collar crimes go, the money we’re talkin’ about is nothin’ but chump change.’

  They make a stop on the way to the game, at an outdoor ATM on Avenue A. The machine is fastened to the outer wall of a bodega with a pair of thick steel straps bolted to the wall. But while the company that placed the ATM has taken care to protect the machine, it’s ignored the interests of the general public. There’s no surveillance camera.

  The credit card Amelia gives to Hootie has raised numbers on one side and a magnetic strip on the other. Otherwise it’s a blank sheet of white plastic.

  ‘Here’s the PIN number.’ Amelia hands over a Post-it note with a six-digit number written across its face. ‘Take out three hundred. A hundred for me and Bubba – we had to buy the card – and two hundred for you.’

  Hootie accepts the card and the note. ‘And the best part,’ he observes, not without a certain amount of sarcasm, ‘is that nobody gets hurt.’

  ‘That’s right. When the transaction is reported, the banks will credit the account and eat the loss.’

  Hootie inserts the card, enters the PIN number and collects his cash. Now, as he and Amelia stroll uptown, he’s got money in his pocket. And although he tells himself to slow down, he feels stronger for having even this small roll. There’s a voice in his head now, persistent and insinuating. The voice tells him that what Bubba and Amelia plan to do is called blackmail, and that the penalty for blackmail is harsh. Nor, the voice insists, will any judge be likely to show mercy on sentencing day – not when they plan to leave a pedophile free to victimize other children.

  And what about that? Can Hootie live with himself afterward? True, the voice explains, you’re not the most law-abiding person in the world. But there are still lines you don’t cross and the line marked ‘chicken hawk’ is one of them.

  They’re approaching 14th Street, walking past a little mountain of garbage set by the curb. The evening is sultry and oppressive, and Hootie instinctively chokes off a breath as his nostrils are assaulted by the smell of rotting meat. The Lower East Side is home to an army of young professionals come to make it big in the Big Apple. They arrive unattached for the most part, still young enough to work all day and party into the night, to ignore garbage and weather both. The sidewalks are crowded, the chatter bright with promise, the outdoor cafes standing room only.

  Hootie tries to imagine himself among them. Though mostly white, there are a scattering of blacks, Latinos and Asians, so race isn’t really a factor. But these people belong to a different world. His sister, yeah. He can imagine Teesha and her lawyer friends gossiping away over drinks and dinner. But not him.

  ‘When do I find out what you want from me?’ he finally asks.

  ‘I guess right now’s good enough.’ Amelia pauses to take a deep breath. ‘Bubba and me, we’re freaks. We can’t front the operation. But you, Hootie, put you in a pair of Dockers and a polo shirt, maybe a Yankees cap and a pair of worn Nikes, and you could be anyone.’

  Now it makes sense. Hootie out front, his signature on every document, his face before every potential witness, his name on the indictment.

  ‘Lemme see if I have this right. You and Bubba stay in the background, ready to disappear in a minute, while I take the risks.’

  Amelia’s laughter is genuine. ‘Disappear? Bubba? Hootie, when you’re six-ten and weigh two hundred and seventy-five pounds and you’ve been to prison for manslaughter, there’s no disappearing. As for me, there are only about a hundred people in the country who have Kallmann syndrome. Plus, I can’t buy a drink in a restaurant, no matter how much ID I show, can’t rent a car, even with a credit card, or lease an apartment or buy plane tickets unless I buy them online. So there’s no disappearing for me either.’

  On 15th Street, they approach four security guards standing before the side entrance to a school. A trickle of fans enters the school, passing between the guards and through a set of metal detectors. One man sets off an alarm and is quickly frisked.

  ‘Why me?’ Hootie asks. ‘There have to be a thousand people out there who … who could be anyone.’

  ‘This morning, before you got up, I asked Bubba the same question. I told him, “You don’t even know this kid. He could be completely unreliable.”’

  ‘So, what did he say?’

  ‘That you’re young enough to adapt to a new way of thinking. The others, the guys he did time with, are locked into whatever they did to get them convicted in the first place.’ Amelia hesitates for a moment, gathering her thoughts. Finally, she says, ‘Bubba came up hard. His mother was a fall-down drunk and a whore to boot, so he basically raised himself. Now he’s lookin’ for a family, but he’s not stupid enough to think he can have one in the traditional way. Right this minute, I’m his family. If you decide to come in with us, you’ll be his family, too. And something else you should consider. Bubba was in his junior year at St. John’s when he killed that kid, maintaining a three-point-eight average. There was even talk of a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. I know he’s smarter than I am, and he’s probably smarter than you are, too.’

  ‘That,’ Hootie declares as they pass through the metal detectors, ‘is exactly what I’m afraid of.’

  SEVEN

  The gym is packed ten minutes before the opening tip, but no one’s sitting down. The atmosphere is highly charged, the crowd strictly ghetto. There’s enough hip-hop gear to fill a FUBU warehouse, enough gold to excite a conquistador. Everyone’s betting everyone else, as at a dog or cock fight, and the players have the look of seasoned warriors. And they are warriors, Hootie realizes, school-yard warriors, their skills honed by years of play on concrete courts all over the city.

  ‘See that dude in the wheelchair?’ Amelia asks.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s Montague. He sponsors the team. Montague got himself shot a couple of years ago, which is why he’s in the chair. The two men standing next to him are his bodyguards.’

  Montague is a small black man whose muscle-bound guardians would dwarf him even if he could stand. Still, they appear small compared to Bubba, who leans down to speak with their boss.

  Amelia leads Hootie through the crowd, stopping to speak with this man or that woman. Everyone seems to know her, and to treat her with respect, the men especially. And why not? Amelia is simply not forgettable, just as she said. Plus, Bubba’s her guardian.

  The teams wear uniforms purchased at the NBA store, the red and orange of the Knicks and the Kelly-green of the Boston Celtics. Bubba’s a Knick and his uniform bears the name and number of Charles Oakley, power forward in the Patrick Ewing era. This comes as a puzzle to Hootie, since Bubba’s playing center. But when the game begins, Bubba’s reasoning becomes obvious. C
harles Oakley wasn’t the most talented of the Knicks’ players, but he made up for it with stamina and hustle. He dove for every loose ball, fought for every rebound and was likely to crack your skull if you encountered him in the paint. Fouls be damned, that area of the court belonged to him.

  Bubba makes the terms clear on the Celtics’ second possession when their point guard drives to the basket. The collision is hard enough to silence the crowd, the referee’s whistle incredibly sharp in the hushed atmosphere. If Bubba hadn’t gotten a piece of the ball, he’d most likely be called for a flagrant foul. As it is, the Celtics’ guard is awarded a pair of shots. He makes both and never challenges Bubba again.

  Nor do any of the other Celtics, including their center, who’s unable to control Bubba at either end of the court. The first time Bubba handles the ball, he simply backs the man down before slamming the ball through the hoop. This happens again before the Celtics decide to swarm Bubba, a tactic which should free one of his teammates to cut to the basket. None does, settling instead for outside jumpers when Bubba passes out to the free man.

  And so it goes, throughout the first half and the third quarter. The Celtics shoot from outside because they’re afraid to challenge Bubba. The Knicks shoot from outside because … Hootie finally gets to the because part during the half-time break. Bets are being negotiated all around him. This isn’t like the pros or the college ranks, with an official point spread and no betting after the game begins. Here, it’s every man for himself.

  ‘What was the point spread before the game?’ Hootie has to speak directly into Amelia’s ear to make himself heard.

  ‘Nine.’

  Amelia’s quick grin demonstrates a certain amount of pride. The Celtics are up four points and the spread has diminished from nine points to three. Bubba and his boys have been shaving points all along, keeping the game close to bring the point spread down.

  The Celtics are still up six as the Knicks’ guard brings the ball down the court at the opening of the fourth quarter. He wastes no time passing to Bubba, and even less time cutting to the basket. Bubba hits him just as he crosses the foul line. From there, it’s only a step to an easy lay-up.