“That’s a nice car.”
“Looks new, but it’s not. I know that’s a long way from the fifty. You can have it.”
“You’d do that for me?”
“You’re my daughter.”
“I disappointed you.”
“And I still love you. What belongs to me belongs to you.”
She went to the side and talked to her boyfriend. I didn’t like Kevin. He was a good boy, but he was weak. I didn’t think he was good enough for her. I knew he wasn’t. He’d never be able to defend her. And there was irony in that. But Kevin loved her and she adored him, so I’d never tell him that he wasn’t good enough, and I’d never tell her she had made a bad choice, because I never knew what a good choice looked like. She had to figure that out, and I could always be wrong. I was good at being wrong. As long as Kevin treated her right, or just stepped away like a man if shit got too hot for him, I’d never show up on his doorstep and beat him half to death.
I didn’t want to have to make another trip to Home Depot.
Margaux came back. “Your car is nice. It looks good and smells new.”
“Low miles. I keep it clean and maintained.”
She clacked her tongue, nervous to ask. “Can I just have your car?”
“Is that what Kevin told you to do?”
“It’s my idea. I really, really like your car.”
“You need money, right?”
“We’re hurting. But we need a better car too. If we show up at a meeting and we’re in a raggedy car, especially in Hollywood, people think you are a loser. Your car is your calling card out here. People see us rocking that car, top down, their perspectives will change about us.”
“This Hollywood thing. That movie about slaves.”
“Movie about the enslaved and the karma they bring.”
“You’re trying to do this together.”
“We’re a team.”
I took a breath. “No problem.”
“Is that a yes?”
I nodded. “I’ll sign it over to you as soon as we get back upstairs.”
“Serious?”
“Yeah. I can take my things out and you can drive it home. I will sign the pink slip over to you, but you have to take care of the insurance and have it in your name in forty-eight hours.”
Her smile lessened, suddenly concerned. “How will you get around?”
“Overground railroad is coming. Between the train, Uber, and Lyft, I’m good.”
“Thank you so much.”
“And I repeat, you have to put the BMW in your name and on your insurance. I will fill it up with gas, but after that, I will not be responsible for one scratch, one dent, no accidents.”
“Okay. I can do that tomorrow.”
“Your insurance will go up?”
“We will figure that out. We have a dark cloud moved from over our heads.”
I hesitated. “You in any other trouble, Margaux?”
“He’s deleted.”
“That’s all you need to know.”
“I made one bad decision.”
“Is there anything else?”
“This was it. If I don’t have to pay the fifty thousand dollars, if that is over, then I can manage to save again. Just needed money. Was too much at one time. Baby coming. Want to be married.”
“And this is Kevin’s baby.”
“Kevin will be the only father my child knows.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“But please, Dad, for now, today, let that be the answer.”
She called me Dad, softened me up with one word, so I nodded. “You need to move to a less expensive place.”
“We know.”
“Cheaper on this side of town. Eight miles from Hollywood. Parking for the metro is down Crenshaw at the lot next to West Angeles Church of God in Christ. You can get to work at JPL from there.”
“How many trains?”
“It’s a three-train ride. Maybe an hour one way on a good day.”
“Faster than taking the freeway.”
“Much.”
“Lots of real nice apartments.” She stared at my world. “Any vacancies around here?”
“Has to be. But I know one that might be happening pretty soon.”
She fidgeted, thinking, but not committing. “Maybe I’ll sell my car.”
“You’ll get less than a thousand dollars and a bag of curly fries for your bucket.”
“I know.”
“Why sell it? It’s probably cheaper to keep it as a second car.”
“We can get an inexpensive engagement ring.”
As I had been all my life, I was being practical, logical. “Kevin doesn’t have a car?”
“He sold his Jeep two months ago. That’s part of the reason I want us to be able to keep yours. He had a Rubicon, but he was trying to save me. He used that money to pay Dawit—”
“Never say his name. Never again. We don’t mention him. Ever.”
“Or Florida.”
“We don’t mention that.”
After seconds of silence she said, “We have secrets.”
“We float together, or we drown together.”
“We have secrets that bind us.”
“Every relationship, every family, has secrets.”
“No journaling about this.”
“No journaling.”
She nodded, clacking that metal against her teeth.
I inhaled. “Your boyfriend’s car?”
“Kevin sold his car and paid . . . my blackmailer. That week we needed food really bad. We needed the money so we could pretend we had money. Most of that money was gone in a day.”
“Your ex took you for a lot of money. More than folks make in a year.”
“He bankrupted me, more or less.”
“He made you his slave.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were his financial slave.”
“And I’m still enslaved to the system.”
“We all are.”
“Debt makes us slaves. Does this ever end?”
“No, it never ends. You have to pay to be born, and you pay an exit fee to the mortuary and IRS at the end. Death and taxes.”
She clacked that tongue ring again. “I need money, but I also need a dependable car.”
“With Bluetooth. And a navigation system.”
“Well, yeah.”
I said, “You drive my car and you let him drive yours.”
“Why not the other way?”
“You’re the girl. I’m your father.”
“You’re my dad.”
“In that case, end of discussion.”
She ran her hand over her colorful Mohawk, clacked that tongue ring, thinking as she rocked from side to side, still stressed, but not as much. “We will work the money part out.”
“I can give you about five thousand in cash.”
“You’ve done enough.”
“I can give you that.”
“What about you?”
I took a breath. I had money, cash from the Garrett job, plus about ten more. I’d never be broke. I’d never be rich, but I’d never be broke. That was the money I had been trying to save up to eventually buy a house. Maybe next year. Or the year after. But not anytime soon.
I told her, “I can manage.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Come see me even if you don’t need help. When you have time. Up to you.”
“Okay.”
“And if you’re in trouble with people, I’m the guy you need to talk to. If your guy is in trouble, he needs to sit down with me and come clean and see what I can do to make it right.”
“People owe him money over a movie deal.”
>
“He signed a contract?”
“Yeah. Some guy made all these promises, got him to sign, and now he’s screwed.”
“Then it’s legal. Unless I did like people say Suge Knight did Vanilla Ice, unless I dangled whoever ripped your boy off like Death Row dangled Vanilla Ice over a balcony, unless I threatened to drop him and was ready to make good on that threat, you have to suck it up.”
“It’s a bad deal.”
“How bad?”
“They paid him next to nothing and he will get no residuals for replays.”
“Then he’s fucked. That’s the long line to the left in Hollywood, that one that leads to that midnight train to Georgia.”
“It’s not fair. He’s artistic, talented, just not good with the legal part of Hollywood.”
“He will have to learn from that and do better next time.”
“Did Suge Knight really do that?”
“So goes the legend.”
“Urban legend.”
“Scares Vanilla Ice whenever it’s mentioned. Say Suge Knight, and Ice shits his pants.”
“Have you done stuff like that?”
“This is where this conversation ends.”
She smiled a nervous smile. “You’re easy to talk to. I can’t talk to my stepfather about any of this. I messed up in a big way, and you talk to me like . . . like . . . this too shall pass.”
“You’re a grown woman. I will respect that. I have to respect your choices.”
“Why are you so nice to me?”
“We’re related.”
“I am related to other people; none are nice to me, not like this.”
“This is who I am with the people I care about.”
“Were you like this with my mother?”
“Tried to be. In my mind, I was.”
“Did you love her?”
“I loved her. But I was twenty-one then. I was twenty-one and a man in a world where we still expected women, no matter how smart, no matter how black, African, intelligent, or freethinking, to pat their Afros three times when we walked in a room and be our subordinates, to do what we said. I don’t think I was that kind of a man, but I was raised around those types of men. Being unintentionally misogynistic is still being misogynistic, same as being unintentionally racist is still being racist. So, based on what you said your mother wrote in her journals, based on her feelings, maybe to her I was nothing more than her zookeeper. I was just her zookeeper.”
“She wrote other stuff, most of it over ten, maybe fifteen years ago.”
“Probably made me sound like a monster.”
“There was some romantic stuff. Said your kisses were like nourishment. She was poetic at times. Corny too. Real corny. But some of it was cute. Said she was famished for you the night after she had met you. She loved you. The best she could. She loved you. Just not enough.”
“She came back to see me.”
“I know. You told me.”
“I mean two days ago. She came back here. To this apartment. To talk.”
“Wow. What did she have to say?”
“I guess she told me the truth.”
“That she still cared about you.”
“More or less. In Amharic. But her primary concern was you.”
My daughter said, “Yesterday was horrible, and so was the day before, but today has been a good day. One of the best. I feel that things will be much better for me now.”
“For me too.”
“You’re a good cook. You’re not as bad a person as I thought you were.”
I nodded. “Now walk up the street with me.”
“What’s up there?”
“Gentrification.”
“Besides that?”
“Good people. Hardworking people of all nationalities. And your godfather.”
“I have a godfather?”
“The guy who came over when we were having breakfast yesterday.”
“I have a Nigerian godfather?”
“Ghanaian.”
“Wow, that’s so . . . cool.”
My daughter’s boyfriend saw our chat had ended, then came over to where we were. He was scared of me. He would always be scared of me. But he respected me too.
We started the walk toward Audubon Middle School. Dozens were heading that way. Big meeting to protest gentrification was about to pop off. My neighbor Bernice Nesbitt was half a block in front of us, walking hand in hand with her new guy, another fireman.
As we strolled, I asked my daughter’s boyfriend, “Where are your folks?”
“My mom lives in Encino.”
“Your dad?”
“I didn’t grow up with a dad. He died in . . . he was incarcerated. Was killed in jail.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Truth came out years later that he didn’t commit the crime. They put him in the system and made him a modern-day slave when I was six. He never saw freedom again.”
I nodded, understood his passion, and understood his movie. It was personal. Incarceration was enslavement. He needed to pen away his anger, give his father revenge, if only just on the big screen. We’d have a long talk, man-to-man, about his pain, some other day.
I said, “I like your idea for that movie.”
He smiled a little, maybe sensing I felt the connection. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. But you might have to add in the Holocaust, have them come back for the Germans. Hollywood would probably be more open to Jews killing Germans than blacks doing all the killing of the whites, but you can work it, make them happy, have a good movie, and get paid.”
He nodded. “Will give that some thought. That would change the movie to a miniseries.”
“But you can still have your Harriet Tubmans, your Bussas, your Nat Turners, could have the enslaved Africans come back and have a Haitian-style victory on part of North American soil.”
“And at the same time, the Holocaust victims, even Native Americans, do their thing.”
I shrugged. “It’s a thought.”
“Yeah. It’s a very good thought. Third act would be like Spartacus and the Third Servile War meets Nat Turner’s Rebellion meets the Zanj Rebellion meets the Haitian Revolution meets the 1733 St. John Insurrection meets the Baptist War meets Gaspar Yanga’s Rebellion.”
My daughter countered, “Maybe we should go back to the original idea and work on the script about Empress Taytu of Ethiopia.”
I said, “I read about her. She ran Ethiopia awhile. I think the emperor died, had a stroke or something, and she took over. I read about her when I was married to your mother.”
Margaux said, “Yes, Taytu was the one running it all. She was a boss. She needs a Hollywood film.”
They argued. That was the most Kevin had said since I had met him.
He had a lot of Spike Lee in his blood. She was stubborn, like her mother.
I showed my daughter where she had lived as a baby, walked the streets where I had carried her in my arms or her mother had pushed her in a stroller; then as we browsed books at Eso Won, I gave her the history, told her about what used to be here; the twins who had run Lucy Florence, 5th Street Dick’s coffee shop playing jazz until four in the morning, slamming poetry at World Stage, the African drummers in the park on Sundays, the African American Museum.
Then with them at my side, I joined the looky-loos, saw Jake Ellis’s car being towed away on a flatbed. Heard rumors that this was definitely the work of neo-Nazis or the KKK from Simi Valley.
Jake Ellis had gone into the scorched car and pried the box with my .38 out of the damage. The gun was no good, but that was off the table, so all was good in the land of Oz.
A blackmailer was dead.
So was the man who had tried to kill me and Jake Ellis.
My daughter said, “I want t
o find my godmother one day.”
“Why?”
“I’ve found my godfather. It only makes sense.”
“She’s Ethiopian.”
“Barely remember her. But her name is in my mother’s journals a lot.”
I nodded. “You said you remembered her name?”
“Gelila. Everyone called her Lila.”
“Yeah, they did.”
“I know Auntie Lila drove a red Corvette.”
“She did.”
“And lived in Malibu.”
“She did.”
“She sounds awesome.”
I inhaled, exhaled my own memories. “She was your mom’s best friend. They would have started university around the same time.”
“I want to know why she and my mother stopped being friends.”
“Life does that. Your mother was busy trying to figure out how to be a wife and mother at eighteen. Lila went to university. Pepperdine.”
“Any idea where Auntie Lila is now?”
“Years have gone by.” I shrugged, shook my head. “She might be married with three or four kids and living in another land by now.”
“I don’t get it. My mother and Auntie Lila were best friends.”
“Then they went down different roads, had separate lives.”
“I still want to meet her.”
“Why?”
“To know my mother. Only way I learn about her is by reading her hidden thoughts. I want to know what she was like before me.”
“Your mother has always been closed off like that.”
“It’s the African in her blood.”
“She’s from a family of proud people.”
“Strict people.”
“Probably no stricter than mine. Mississippians don’t spare the rod.”
“Mom writes her feelings in so much detail. Heartbreaking and poetic at the same time. I didn’t read them all. But it sounds like she used to party in Hollywood like she was out of her mind.”
“Oh yeah.”
“She was pretty wild.”
“Oh yeah.”
“So were you.”
“I still know how to throw down a mean Cabbage Patch.”
“Dad. Don’t. Don’t ever. Never.”
We laughed.
It was a hot summer day, half of Southern California was in a brush fire, but my daughter was at my side. No amount of smog or smoke could make me think this wasn’t the freshest air I’d inhaled in more than ten years. My beautiful daughter, who was now white, covered in colorful tats, and violated by body piercings. No matter what mask she wore, no matter the hue, she was my child.
Bad Men and Wicked Women Page 35