He talked for a moment, rubbed the bridge of his nose the whole time, then killed the call.
I said, “San Bernardino has us on a tight leash. Been that way all week.”
“We need to get to the next meeting spot so we can wrap this day up.”
“Sounded like I heard some screaming. The boss never screams.”
“Garrett got everybody in a fucked-up mood.”
“Think he’ll pay by midnight?”
“If not, there will be a war by 12:01.”
I walked side by side with Jake Ellis, the weight of my .38 on my right side.
I said, “Get those plates on that boy’s German hoopty run. See what you can find out.”
Jake Ellis took out his personal phone, sent a text message to one of his contacts.
He said, “Will be done by morning. No later than tomorrow afternoon.”
“Why so long?”
“Not everybody is working today.”
“We are.”
“Not everybody jumps for us like they do San Bernardino.”
“Must be nice.”
“San Bernardino scares you.”
“San Bernardino scares everyone.”
“I know. Scares the hell out of me. Makes me want to go back to Africa.”
CHAPTER 10
* * *
—
WE LEFT THE Grove like Batman and Robin, hit Third Street, mixed with the pandemonium in the Fairfax District, fought to get to La Brea, then mixed with slow-moving madness, went south. Jake Ellis put on something by Nigerian singer and songwriter Mr Eazi. “Leg Over.”
I said, “West African artists are killing the game right now.”
He wasn’t ready to let go of whatever was brewing inside.
We let that sweet vibe try to alleviate a sour mood. The song ended and a nasty look returned to his face, and with residual anger, his hands strangling his steering wheel, he barked out his thoughts, said, “Garrett’s colorless people crawled out of ice caves in Europe.”
Garrett was no longer on my radar. My concentration remained on Margaux.
I wanted to know whom she had been arguing with.
My mind tuned Jake out, and I went back to my issues, my life, my new trouble. Not that I wanted to talk about it over and over, but Jake Ellis was driving like a maniac, in a foul mood.
I diverted him from Garrett and pulled him into my world.
I said, “I failed as a husband and now I see I failed as a father. I won’t get over that shit.”
He made an exasperated sound. “Bruv, you were twenty-one. Marriage is for grown folks, not children with raging hormones. Both of you needed time to grow up. Jimi Lee was nineteen.”
“She was nineteen, a child gone wild, using fake ID, drinking and dancing on Sunset.”
“Most marriages are henna.”
“I wanted mine to be a tattoo.”
“Lot of money being made in tattoo removal.”
“That severe depression some women get after they have a baby. She had that.”
“Might have been part of it, but it was more than that with Jimi Lee, and you know that. She had scholarships to Ivy League schools and gave it all up when she got knocked up.”
I nodded. “Man, when we were twenty-one.”
“Before you met Jimi Lee, bruv, we was on Sunset three-peating every weekend. We probably made the stock in Trojans double.”
“Magnum should have at least sent us a thank-you card.”
“Or we should have sent them one.”
“You ain’t never lied.”
“The eighties started off nice. Lakers were killing it. We had the Rams and the Raiders. Pretty women were everywhere. Westwood was the place to hang out, until the Rolling 60s shot at that Mansfield Hustlers Crip, missed, and killed that girl. After that, your police chief Daryl Gates had the LAPD down there by UCLA busting as many black and brown heads as they could. They did all they could to run blacks out of Westwood and keep them corralled on the dark side of town.”
I nodded. “One life in Westwood had more value than all the black lives in South Central.”
“If I remember it right, they called 1988 ‘The Year of the Gang.’”
“Should have been called the decade of the gang. Crack sales were at an all-time high. White man brought the drugs into the community and everyone fought to sell dope to get rich.”
“Bruv, the nineties were rough. That teenage girl Latasha Harlins was gunned down by that Korean lady, and the white-lady judge didn’t give a damn about that fifteen-year-old black girl, let the Korean walk. People think the Rodney King verdict caused the LA riots, but it was the one-two punch of Harlins and King. City on fire for days. Koreans were on roofs with guns shooting at black folks. The riots did a billion dollars in damage to LA. Surprised we made it out alive.”
“I think that was when I first decided I wanted to escape America. That shit was too much. As soon as a black man turned off La Cienega and hit Wilshire toward Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills cops were pulling you over and had you on the curb until they made up a reason to charge you.”
“Dirty cops were planting drugs left and right. Clean cops said nothing. So all were dirty.”
“Imagine if we had had social media back then. Twitter would have been on fire.”
“Bruv, you have it now and they still doing the same thing as they did back then.”
“In the nineties, I wanted to get on a plane and get away from this madness. Away from gangs. I was scared of the cops, and the Crips and Bloods had me scared to wear blue or red. Gangs were insane and people were getting killed over the color of their shoestrings.”
“All you had to do was get a one-way ticket and follow me across the ocean.”
I nodded. “You have a house in Ghana. You have your degrees. You’re a culinary king.”
“You spent your money on Jimi Lee. I used my stash to go to uni, to build a home, and vacation in Brazil. I chilled in Belgium. France. Smoked weed with models in Amsterdam.”
“I was twenty-two, married to a nineteen-year-old, and we had a newborn to feed.”
“That lasted how long?”
“Five years.”
“Once you were divorced, you could’ve traveled around the world with me.”
“Time flies. Margaux was nine or ten the last time I saw her.”
“You could’ve been gone ten years ago. I told you about the Senegalese girl.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“I had her waiting on you. Girl was beautiful as beautiful gets. Like you like them. ‘As dark as the tents of Kedar.’”
“You went to Song of Solomon and got biblical on me.”
“She would’ve been biblical and taken you to heaven every night.”
“I missed out on a religious experience.”
“She was nineteen then. Had been in university since she was fifteen. Smart and sexy. If you’d gone over, you’d have had a loyal inamorata the moment you stepped off the plane. She was ready for you. She was excited. I thought you’d eventually come over, and I talked you up to her big-time, almost every day. She got her degree in nursing but was a singer and dancer too.”
“I didn’t want to miss my daughter growing up. I stood next to Jimi Lee while she was in labor for those fourteen hours, then saw Margaux being born. I saw my daughter move from being inside Jimi Lee’s belly and welcomed her to the world. I held her first. Best day of my life.”
“How’d that work out? Tell me, remind me, how did that work out?”
“Compatriot, kick me while I’m down.”
“It’s easier on the knees that way.”
“Shut up.”
“Did you ever take a DNA test? Are you sure Sammy Sosa isn’t her real daddy?”
“Shut up.”
“Mi
chael Jackson? Put on ‘Billie Jean’ and see if she yells ‘he, he, he’ and moonwalks.”
I laughed at my friend as he ranked on me. “Stop it, bro.”
“You better laugh at all of my jokes.”
“She went to those private schools. Black schools weren’t good enough for her mother. Margaux is Mississippi and Ethiopia. And now I have lived to see identity was sold to my daughter through a lens of people who don’t understand her. I mean, you don’t see a lot of white people shipping their kids to black charter schools to get educated. But my people here in LA are not happy unless their kids are at an expensive private school. Then they can put that bumper sticker on their cars as a message to others that they are the right kind of black. My daughter has bleached her identity, bro. I wasn’t there to stop that shit. My job would have been to shut it down. Not everybody can take being teased or have someone insulting your natural hair day and night.”
“Bruv, it is not your fault. Jimi Lee kept her from you.”
I snapped, “Bro, I fucking know that. I didn’t fight hard enough to keep my daughter.”
Jake Ellis was unmoved by my outburst. He smiled because he knew my buttons. “All you did was fight. Lot more to it than just that. You had to deal with her family. With her father. With her mother. The way they treated you, how they came at you, bruv, that was war.”
“I know that. I was there. I had to live . . . suffer through that day and night.”
“Bruv. I’m trying to keep it light. But I get you. Assimilation is strong here. But your daughter is right. Higher value is placed upon being light-skinned here, and it is the same way in Africa. They still raise the colonialist there. They say if you are going to church and you see a white man on the way, you better go back home because you’ve just seen God.”
“Is that a joke?”
“Not a joke. They say on church day, if you see a white person, you’ve seen God.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Walking on water. Men living in whales. Most beliefs are ridiculous.”
“So some Africans think their god is a white man walking down the road on Sunday.”
“Some believe that being white, or as white as you can get, means you’re highly favored.”
“Jesus. Always considered Africans black and proud.”
“The white man influences all. Will pick apart a culture until nothing is left but the bones.”
I took a breath. Redid my past in my mind, imagined different choices, found a better life than this one. “You’re right. Staying here after my divorce was a waste of time. All I did was work and pay alimony and child support. I worked on taking care of others and did nothing for myself.”
“You could’ve been crying on the soft, nurturing breasts of a Senegalese woman.”
“And you say she was real pretty?”
“Gorgeous. Like the French actress Aïssa Maïga.”
“I was on the rebound and didn’t need to be under another woman’s spell.”
“Women make you weak.”
“Never weak, bro. Just wasn’t raised to be a player.”
“Why didn’t you go to the islands and meet one of those soca queens?”
“Bro, the way they can do isolations and only move their asses is some voodoo shit.”
“Nothing moving but that booty whining and popping. They make God cry tears.”
“That African blood still runs hot in those island girls.”
He asked, “Ever?”
I shook my head. “Never.”
“Bruv, you ain’t lived until you’ve ridden the waves an island girl makes at midnight.”
“All those Sandals commercials show dark-skinned black people skinning and grinning and serving drinks to way too many smiling white Brits. They just show dark skin entertaining and smiling and massaging suntanned pink skin. Euros are having fun while dark-skinned people tend to their every concern with a smile. Nah, bro. Slavery is over down there, right?”
“You know when they advertise California, they show Beverly Hills, not Leimert Park.”
“Black people not allowed at those hotels?”
“Same black people that are allowed in Beverly Hills. Blacks with money.”
“Black people like massages too. We like to have fun. We like food. We like dark-skinned black people to oil us up and rub us down. We love black people. We have some in our families.”
“Why not just get a gorgeous American girl?”
“Was burned out on America and trying to get back home to Africa any way I could.”
“Africans from most nations are trying to get to Atlanta, New York, LA, and Miami.”
“Wanted to be where I saw billboards with black faces. Magazine covers with black faces. African movies. A nation with a black ruler. That’s where my head was back then.”
“You could’ve traveled the world with me and met all kinds of pretty girls. I could have taken you places where the moment they see black men, they treat you like royalty. Or you could’ve finished university abroad, had five degrees, three masters, and four PhDs by now.”
“Five degrees?”
“I know Africans who speak ten languages and have more degrees than that.”
“And still broke.”
“Education is about more than profit. A man should never leave from learning.”
“You’re right. I never should have dropped out of UCLA. I was so fucking close to my dream I could taste it. One year away. But that summer. I met her. That summer was so hot, was so hot it scorched all my dreams.” I paused. “My life was better before I met Margaux’s mom.”
“You’d drop that Eskimo Rachel Redman if Jimi Lee showed up and flashed a nipple.”
“Not even if she showed a whole titty. They should be sagging by now anyway.”
“That long black wavy hair down her back. Petite with a nice shape. Perfect skin.”
“Shut up.”
Jake Ellis laughed. “Sagging or not, you’d fall for her and be glad you did.”
That truth silenced me, sent me back to old memories and bad thoughts. The way I felt with Jimi Lee at the start, how I would get inside of her and she made me want to weep and moan, how we would rock and roll until there was no jazz left for the jazzing, I remembered. She was a small woman but that little red rooster rocked me in slow motion like she was a big woman, got on top and worked me and made my orgasm feel like it weighed three hundred pounds. I remembered the melody; I remembered the harmony. I remembered being in a bad love.
Jake Ellis asked, “You ever hear from Margaux’s godmother out in Malibu?”
I shifted, broke away from my erotic daydream. “What?”
“Gelila. Lila. Margaux’s godmother. What happened to her?”
A guilt-laced memory from a heated night came to me in flashes. Jake Ellis knew all of my crimes, but not all of my sins. “I have no idea. After the fight, everyone broke contact with me.”
“Lila was a Jessica Rabbit. Rich girl was a hot number. Living in Malibu and rocking that little red Corvette. Bet that sex was good. I should’ve tried to get that just to say I got that.”
I cleared my throat, glad that the walls in my apartment couldn’t talk. “She was the only woman I ever saw you shy away from.”
“Bruv, I didn’t shy away. She’s Ethiopian. I’m Ghanaian. I’m superior by a long shot.”
“She said the same about you.”
“She lied. Ethiopia has a smaller GDP. They are landlocked. Our literacy rate is higher.”
That made me chuckle. “East Africa and West Africa can be like Crips and Bloods.”
“More like USC against UCLA. Nigeria and Ghana are like Crips and Bloods.”
“I’ve never understood the rivalry between African nations. Most of it seems childish.”
“Some folks in her cou
ntry look down on the rest of Africa.”
“Because they were never colonized. None are the descendants of African slaves. But, hell, everybody in the world looks down on everybody. Mississippi looks down on New York as much as New Yorkers look down on Mississippi. Stuff like that never mattered to me.”
“Lila was beautiful. Sharply bridged nose, eyes that make you think she had some Chinese in her background, high cheekbones, long face, narrow, high forehead, broad brows, long legs, sweet bottom, always well dressed, always smelled good, articulate, brilliant, and everything about her went together, made her look amazing. She was Jimi Lee’s best friend, and your daughter’s godmother, so I never tried to dig her out. She would’ve wanted to get serious. Lila would look at Jimi Lee, see her married with a kid, then try and achieve the same status.”
“If you can pass on a woman like Lila, then you’ll never get married.”
“Not without a sharp blade threatening my nuts.”
“What if she makes the best Jollof rice ever?”
“Ethiopians don’t make Jollof. If they did, I wouldn’t touch it.”
“But what if she learned and made Jollof twice as good as yours?”
“She can do that, we could marry, but we have to live in separate houses.”
“That’s not a marriage.”
“Neither is living with a nagging wife who refuses to have sex with you.”
“Been there, done that.”
“But as pretty as Lila was, if she made good Jollof, she could make a man give up polygamy. But that Jollof would have to be so good that God himself would give up his powers.”
“Africans are passionate about their Jollof rice.”
Jake Ellis told me, “West African women have had fights in the streets about who makes the best Jollof. Ghanaians, Nigerians, Senegalese, people from Sierra Leone and Liberia, have fought and had Jollof cook-offs, have had contests over Jollof that way your country cousins in the 901 argue over who has made the best barbecue ribs during Memphis in May.”
Bad Men and Wicked Women Page 10