Dear Father, Dear Son

by Larry Elder

  “You had to go to court to get it,” he said. “So I filled out the application and went before the judge. He picked up my application and said, ‘There’s too many niggers out there tryin’ to work. Denied.’”

  It turned out that the judge was operating his own jitney service. He had hired black drivers to service black customers—and didn’t want the competition.

  “I didn’t know this until later.”

  “What did you do after you found out?”

  “What could I do? I just knew I had to figure out somethin’ else. No point in givin’ up over somethin’ like this. That’s what they want you to do—give up and just scuffle around complainin’ about what the White Man did to me. Shi-i-i-it, I just had to keep on steppin’ and figure somethin’ else out.”

  He talked about the importance of financial independence.

  “As long as you got money in your pocket and money in the bank, you’re in control.”

  He used to hang out in bars and nightclubs with a couple of guys he thought of as friends.

  “I’d pick up the tabs because I was the one who had money.” One night they wanted to go out for another round of bar-hopping.

  “But I told them not tonight, I was savin’ to buy a car. ‘Oh, that’s all right, Ran,’ they said, ‘as long as you’re with me, your money is no good.’”

  So out he went. One friend paid for the first round of drinks, and then the second round.

  “I’d gotten pretty drunk by then and they wanted to go to somebody’s house where they were makin’ bootleg whiskey.”

  The house was full of people laughing and drinking and dancing.

  “C’mon, Ran, let’s go upstairs,” one of the friends said.

  A bathtub upstairs was almost half full of homemade whiskey.

  “Go ahead, drink up,” his friend said.

  Dad asked for a cup or a ladle or something to scoop up a drink.

  “No, you don’t need nothin.’ Just lean over and drink all you want.”

  “The fumes were so strong I thought my head was gong to explode. I managed, I think, to take a gulp or two. But then I got dizzy and passed out.”

  He didn’t remember how long he was out.

  “When I woke up it was mornin’. Everythin’ was gone—my coat, my watch, my wallet, my cigarette case, my holder, even the change I had in my pockets.”

  He walked to a restaurant whose owner he knew. She’d always been nice to him, eager to wait on him whenever he came in.

  “I told her what happened and asked for money to get a ride home and for somethin’ to eat. She said, ‘I haven’t made any money yet this morning. So there’s nothing I can do right now.’ I said, ‘Okay, I’ll just sit here until you make a couple of sales.’ So I sat and one customer after another came in and ate, paid the bill, and left. After she rang up the cash register a bunch of times, I asked again. This time she said, ‘Sorry, I don’t give no credit.’”

  He said he learned a powerful lesson.

  “A dollar in your pocket is your best friend. I never forgot it, and I have never been on my ass since.”

  He reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet, and carefully unfolded a frail, yellowed piece of paper. He treated it like it was one of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  “Here.” He put it in my hand. “Live by this, and you’ll never be in trouble.”

  It was about three by five inches. How many times had he pulled it out and re-read it?

  A. G. Gaston’s Ten Rules for Success

  1. Save a part of all you earn. Pay yourself first. Take it off the top and bank it. You’ll be surprised how fast the money builds up. If you have two or three thousand dollars in the bank, sooner or later somebody will come along and show you how to double it. Money doesn’t spoil. It keeps.

  2. Establish a reputation at a bank or savings and loan association. Save at an established institution and borrow there. Stay away from loan sharks.

  3. Take no chances with your money. Play the safe number, the good one. A man who can’t afford to lose has no business gambling.

  4. Never borrow anything that, if forced to it, you can’t pay back.

  5. Don’t get bigheaded with the little fellows. That’s where the money is. If you stick with the little fellows, give them your devotion, they’ll make you big.

  6. Don’t have so much pride. Wear the same suit for a year or two. It doesn’t make any difference what kind of suit the pocket is in if there is money in the pocket.

  7. Find a need and fill it. Successful businesses are founded on the needs of the people. Once in business, keep good books. Also, hire the best people you can find.

  8. Stay in your own class. Never run around with people you can’t compete with.

  9. Once you get money or a reputation for having money, people will give you money.

  10. Once you reach a certain bracket, it is very difficult not to make more money.

  I carefully refolded the piece of paper and handed it back to him.

  “No, you keep it, and read it from time to time. It’ll save you a lot of grief.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “Need to go to the restroom?”

  “You first,” I said.

  He got up, turned and stopped.

  “Few more things: Hard work wins. You get out of life what you put in it. You can’t always control the outcome, but you can control the effort. No matter how hard you work or how good you are, sometimes things will go wrong. Character is about how you react when they do.

  “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m goin’ to the restroom.”

  13

  “YOU’RE A LOT LIKE ME”

  Dad’s story about the so-called friends and the bootleg whiskey reminded me of something I hadn’t thought of in years.

  “You were talking about the ‘friends’ who got you drunk and stole your money?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I had a ‘friend’ like that.”

  I told him about Levi, a “friend” I had in the seventh grade. He was one of the cool students, very popular, and therefore had little time for a poot-butt like me. Nowadays, they call them “nerds.”

  One day Levi asked me for a dime. I gave it to him. The next day, he asked for another, and I gave it to him. Pretty soon, he started hanging around with me. The girls liked him, and every now and then one of them would actually notice me and say something to me. Mom bought me a beautiful long coat. We called them “car coats.” They were not cheap, and most of the kids didn’t have one. Levi asked if he could wear it. I let him.

  “Pretty soon we were buddies. And this made me a little more popular.”

  “I bet that didn’t last long.” By now Dad, relaxed, had leaned back against the wall and propped his leg over another stool.

  “One day, I said to myself, ‘Am I that hard-up for companionship, that I actually have to pay for it? And what kind of friend takes advantage of another like that?’ The next day he asked for the dime and the coat. I said, ‘No.’ And the kid started cursing me out. I just laughed at him.”

  “You know somethin’?” Dad said. “When people mistreat you, you put ’em down. You’re a lot like me. Stubborn.”

  “You know, I used you to motivate me.”

  “Really?”

  My high school, Crenshaw High, only taught a few, lower-and intermediate-level Spanish classes. A consortium of schools ran an experimental program called APEX—Area Program Enrichment Exchange—allowing students who had gone as far as they could go in a particular subject to go to other schools for advanced classes.

  I had exhausted the Spanish curriculum offered at Crenshaw, and applied to spend a semester at Fairfax High for morning classes, one of which would be high-level Spanish. Fairfax, at the time, was almost completely Jewish and highly rated academically. Crenshaw was almost all black and did not share Fairfax’s reputation.

  “What did I have to do with that?” Dad asked.

  My first day of Spanish classes at Fairfax,
I was stunned at the level of competence. The teacher spoke only in Spanish, none of this half-in-English/half-in-Spanish like the teachers at Crenshaw. If you wanted to leave to go to the restroom, you asked in Spanish. If you explained to the teacher why your homework was incomplete, you did so in Spanish. So at my level, the kids were fluent. They didn’t speak Spanish in the slow, halting stutter-step we did at Crenshaw. Fairfax demanded more from its students and, in turn, received more.

  So I made, at best, mediocre grades on the tests leading up to the final, a book report on Don Quixote to be memorized and delivered orally—in Spanish, of course—in front of the class. Up to this point, I had fumbled and stumbled my way through, and the students felt sorry for me.

  “By then, I was angry because I knew I was capable—and I realized that everything at Crenshaw was dumbed down. But my first day at Fairfax, I came home and told Mom and started crying.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said that maybe someday I could do something about getting these schools to raise their game. But in the meantime, I needed to get on the stick.”

  “She said the right thing,” Dad said.

  So I went to work on Don Quixote. I never spent more time on any homework assignment. I went over my grammar and made sure it was perfect. I rehearsed it in front of a mirror, and worked on my pronunciation.

  “And I thought of you. I pretended you wanted me to fail. And I wasn’t going to give you the satisfaction. The teacher was tough—like you. When you screwed up, she was brutal. So I imagined you standing up there at that desk with your arms folded when I walked up to give my report.”

  “I wanted you to fail? Why would I—”

  I held up my hand. “Dad, I’m just telling you what I was thinking.”

  The day of the final, one kid after another stood up and delivered their oral report. After each speech, the teacher criticized.

  “Mr. Rudin, you wrongly conjugated the verb, ‘to be.’”

  “Miss Hiller, you used future tense instead of the past tense.”

  Then it was my turn.

  “Don’t tell me,” Dad said. “You went to town.”

  I did. The class got quiet. The contrast was night and day from the Crenshaw kid, who in his first week barely spoke, and the confident, poised young man standing before them. When I finished, the teacher said nothing. She just looked shocked.

  “Well done, Mr. Elder,” she said. “As for the rest of you, that’s the way to do it.”

  In college, I suffered again because of my poor preparation compared to almost all of my classmates, who went to elite prep schools or quality public ones, like Fairfax.

  “Imagine going to a school when everybody else went to schools as good or better than Fairfax—and they went to schools like that from kindergarten on.”

  Dad shook his head.

  I was taking economics and statistics, two courses that required some background in basic calculus. The last math class I took was geometry in the tenth grade and when I decided to stop taking math, no teacher, counselor, or anyone else said anything about my decision being ill-advised. So at college, I took a calculus course at the same time I was taking economics and statistics.

  “I would try to learn enough math at the same time I was learning the other two subjects.”

  On every math test, I scored a D or worse. My professor put a note in my mailbox to come see him.

  “I suggest you drop out of the course,” he told me, “before the semester goes past the time when you can quit without it going on your transcript.”

  I told him I needed it to understand the other classes I was taking.

  “Well, the final counts for most of your grade, and you’ve done nothing to suggest you’re capable of passing this course. I’m meeting with you to protect you. I don’t think you have it.”

  “What do I have to do on the final to pass the class?”

  “You have to get a B. And I honestly don’t see you doing it.”

  “Thank you for your concern,” I said. “But I’m not dropping the class. I’ve never failed any course in my life, and this won’t be the first. I intend to get a B on the final.”

  He sighed. “Up to you.”

  “What did you do?” Dad leaned forward.

  “I wasn’t going to be stopped, I told myself. Not by him, not by you.”

  A third-year math major named Marty lived upstairs in my dorm. We were friendly. I think we played ping-pong at the table in the basement a few times. He told me that he wanted to become a math professor at a “kick-ass” university. He aced every course he took, except one where he got a B. For “revenge,” he took the advanced course in that subject the following semester, and redeemed himself with his customary A.

  “I knocked on his door and told him what I told you, and asked if he would help me. We worked every night for the next couple of months.”

  “Why did he agree to do it?” Dad asked.

  “I asked him that, too. He told me he knew he had a gift, but that his biggest gift was his work ethic. He said he felt obligated to help if he thought he could make a difference.”

  “Well, he was a teacher. Didn’t you say he always wanted to teach?” Dad said. “That was his callin’. And he was usin’ his gift.”

  Marty explained things so well, and in different ways. If one explanation made no sense to me, he’d suggest another way of attacking the same problem.

  “You don’t know how lucky you are to be able to go to school and learn—and to be around people like that,” Dad said. “So, what happened?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Got a B.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Knew it,” he said. “What ever happened to Marty?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You should find out. Wouldn’t hurt to thank him again.”

  “I will.”

  Next came law school.

  The first year was intense. I decided I’d form a study group based on who impressed me most during the first few weeks of the first semester. One guy in particular stuck out. He was always prepared, volunteered answers, and, whenever a professor called on him, he hit it out of the park with his answers. I approached him after class.

  “Jim, I’m forming a study group and I want you in it.”

  He looked down. “Well, I’m—I’m trying to assess, you know, assess my, my needs.”

  “He didn’t want to waste his time with you ’cause he didn’t think you had anythin’ on the ball,” Dad said.

  “Right. And he probably wasn’t wrong, but I was insulted.”

  We had something called Moot Court. Teams go against each other to make arguments before a group of actual appellate judges. It’s pretty intense. You prepare and submit a brief, then present your case before the judges. The other team submits its brief and presents its case, and the judges lay into both sides’ briefs and presentations. You’ve got to be quick on your feet, prepared to refute the other side’s arguments and defend your own. My professor was preparing teams. I went up to him after class.

  “Mr. Jim Hiller and I would like to go up against each other, if that’s possible.”

  “I don’t see why not. Okay, you can oppose him.”

  Jim never knew. I worked my tail off on the brief, tried to anticipate every imaginable argument that Jim would make, and approached it like a boxing match. I pretended I was in training for the championship fight.

  “Let me guess,” Dad laughed. “You kicked the shit out of him.”

  “Damn right. I kicked his ass. He made an argument, I ripped it to shreds. He countered, I ripped his counter. I had him backtracking and looking for the right cases to cite. He got hammered.”

  The judges complimented me on my brief and on the “quality and style of my presentation.”

  “‘Mr. Hiller,’ one judge said, ‘you should have worked harder.’ They ruled in my favor.”

  “What ever happened to Jim?”

  “I told hi
m later what I had done to make sure we were opposite each other. He was impressed. We became friends. We’ve stayed in touch. Sends me a Christmas card every year. He’s with a law firm in Seattle.”

  “Well, I’ll say.”

  It was getting dark outside. The bright indoor fluorescent lights reflected off the glass. I felt surrounded by mirrors.

  It was 5:45.

  14

  “WOULD YOU DO THINGS DIFFERENT?”

  “Were you ever angry with Mom—the way you were with me?” he asked.

  “Once,” I said.

  I stayed upset with Mom, for any length of time, just once—after she took Champ, our cocker spaniel, to the animal shelter.

  He was our first dog. I was seven. We had just moved into our new house on Haas Avenue, and we now had a yard.

  Dad brought home Champ in a cardboard box, a little black puppy with big brown eyes shyly staring up at his new family. Champ was quiet at first. But he broke out of that pretty quickly. We’d mock chase him, and he’d mock run away, cutting and ducking so we couldn’t catch him. When we were exhausted and flung our tired young bodies down on the lawn, Champ would sit next to us, not even out of breath.

  “Is that it? Is that all you got?” his expression said.

  We loved coming home from school and having him run toward us and leap into our arms.

  “He-e-e-re, Champ. He-e-e-re, Champ!”

  But Champ had a problem.

  When Mom hung sheets on the clothesline, Champ leapt up and nipped them to shreds. Mom swatted him.

  “Bad dog! Bad dog!”

  Champ would stop for a while. But soon Mom would find the new sheets torn into strips. Champ also jumped over the fence into our next-door-neighbor’s yard, right into Mr. Lusk’s onion patch, where the dog enthusiastically dug up the onions. Mr. Lusk sprinkled some brown powder with a noxious odor that was designed to keep dogs away. Not Champ. He smelled the stuff once or twice, developed a tolerance, and kept digging away at the onions.

  “If that dog doesn’t straighten up,” Mom said, “I’m going to have to take him to the animal shelter.”

  We didn’t take the threat seriously. But Mom complained about how much the sheets cost and that she “couldn’t afford to run to the department store every week.”