I sat down on my bed in panties and bra and pulled out my notepad to write a poem about my feelings of mortality. I had always been special. I used to think of myself as a goddess, but suddenly I wasn’t special anymore. I could not handle my new reality, so when I had finished my poem, I decided to call my girl Raheema in New Jersey for a little pick-me-up.
Raheema was doing a fellowship at Rutgers University after finishing her degree in African-American Studies at Cornell and her master’s at Yale. She was really doing it up! I was proud of her. She was on her way to being one of those big-time scholars who knew something about everything, and I was in luck. I caught her at her office.
“Hey, Ra-Ra. You wanna go to the mall? I hear there’s some cute guys up there,” I joked with her, reminiscing on our teen years.
She broke up laughing and played her part.
“Tracy, I don’t care about that. I have homework to do.”
“Girl, this is Saturday. You can do your homework tomorrow.”
“I’m going to church tomorrow, Tracy. I don’t have time for the mall.”
“Well, how ’bout you go to a party with me tonight?”
“For what?”
“What do you mean, ‘for what?’ So we can meet some guys.”
She let out a long sigh and said, “Tracy, how many times do I have to tell you. I am not interested in boys.”
I broke out of my role-playing and complained, “Raheema, I am just too through with this teaching shit! Do you know I had a parent who came up to the school today and asked me why I failed her child when the damn girl didn’t do anything for the entire fourth quarter? Some of these parents are a pain in the ass! They want their kids to get a damn free ride in life.”
Raheema paused before she said anything. That meant she had a lecture to give me. She was always thinking. That was just her personality.
“Actually, Tracy,” she started up, “when you decided to go for that master’s degree in English at Hampton, I was really surprised. Then when you came back to Philly and took that teaching job, I just did not know what to think. I just knew that you would be married and working on your third or fourth child by now. At least that’s how you were heading when we were still in high school.”
“Yeah, well, you know who fucked that up. Gon’ get out of jail and hook up with some damn house mouse,” I snapped, referring to my teenage sweetheart and his new wife.
“House mouse? How do you know that Victor’s wife doesn’t work?”
“I don’t know. I’m just calling her a house mouse based on what I do know,” I said. “She’s one of those sisters who will do just about anything to satisfy a man’s ego. ‘Oh, I’ll do it, honey. What do you need me to do?’ ”
Raheema laughed and said, “If I remember correctly, Victor had you that way too.”
“Yeah, until I grew up and he couldn’t handle me on equal terms. That’s just how these black men are nowadays. They all want you to be some damned young girl who doesn’t know shit. Well, fuck that! Those days are over with for me and I know too much.”
“So my mother was a house mouse too?” Raheema asked me.
She knew the answer to that, so I was plain honest with her.
“Raheema, your mother was a big-time house mouse, and you know it. But she’s okay now. So I guess you work through it, but I’m not planning to be one at all. But let’s not get into that, because I called you for a pick-me-up, if you have time to chat,” I told her.
She said, “Yeah, I have time. I just finished eating a late lunch.”
“So what do I do about this whole teaching thing?” I asked her flat out. That was what friends were for, honesty.
Raheema started to laugh again. “Here we go. The same old Tracy,” she said. “You want someone else to tell you what to do, so you can go right ahead and do what you want to do anyway.”
She was right. We knew each other’s personalities long before we had our first periods.
“All right, so give me your opinion then,” I said, smiling. I felt better already, but I still needed a solution to my problem. What the heck did I want to do with myself?
Raheema said, “Tracy, we both know that you are not going to be happy until you get whatever it is that you want. So I say, stop wasting your time with everything else and go after whatever scheme you have in your mind to do. And I won’t judge you for it, because that’s who you were born to be, just like I was born to be me.”
“Well, why does it have to be a ‘scheme’?” I asked her. She made it sound like I was still a gold digger.
“Because whatever it is, I’m quite sure that it’s going to be hard to get. That’s just how you are. If it’s too easy, you don’t want it.”
I broke out laughing. Whatever it was that I wanted, it was so hard to get that I couldn’t even figure out what it was.
Raheema asked, “Isn’t your book Flyy Girl being republished this year by a major house?”
Prior to September 1996, my novelized life story was only a local thing on the East Coast.
“Yeah, and I’ll be getting more royalties from it,” I told her. “I already received my part of the advance.”
She said, “That was real cool for Omar Tyree to write your story like that, or should I say our story, but I kind of thought that you would follow up with that and become a writer of some kind yourself.”
“I do write. I still write my poetry,” I said. “I Just finished one before I called you.”
“And how does it make you feel when you write and perform them?”
“Oh, girl, you know my poetry is the shit,” I bragged. “That’s when I really get a chance to sit down and think and bring stuff together.”
“Well, why don’t you go for that?”
I said, “I’ve been told that poetry doesn’t really sell like that unless you get a contract to do music with it or something. Everybody can’t be Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni, you know.”
“Well, there you go. It’s hard to do, so go ahead and do it then. That sounds right up your alley,” Raheema advised me.
I was very hesitant about the poetry thing, even though I knew my stuff was good.
“Or, you could even become a screenwriter or something, because once they put that book out nationally, they might want to take it to film, and that would really make us famous,” she joked. It was a shock to everyone when Flyy Girl came out, especially how people began to like it and talk about it. Most of the people who read it just couldn’t believe how fast I was as a teenager, but it was all the truth. However, I had calmed down a lot since then. I was a mature woman, or trying to be mature.
“Yeah, I daydreamed about all of that,” I admitted. How could I not dream of making a movie about my life story?
“Well, what are you waiting for? You need me to tell you to go for it? Just get busy and do your thing,” Raheema persisted in pushing me. “Once you put your mind to getting what you want, Tracy, nobody can stop you, and that’s the truth!”
I tried to play it off and act reserved about her suggestions, but by the time I hung up the phone with my girl Raheema, I was nervous for some reason. I guess I could feel it deep down in my soul. I really could make it happen. I had the energy, the talent, the passion, and the drive to do whatever the hell I wanted to do. It was all up to me.
I stood up and took a deep breath. My decision was made already. That’s why I was nervous. It was like that single moment before you hit the stage to do your thing. The anxiety. The anticipation. I was filled with it. I wanted to go where the stars were and see just how brightly I could shine, or see if I was only bullshitting myself.
“Well, here goes everything,” I said out loud.
I had a college friend at Hampton who moved out to Los Angeles to teach at the elementary level. She was a Spanish minor, she said, to make more money out there. So if I wanted to try my luck at writing, performing poetry, or even acting out in Hollywood where the stars were, then I wanted to have that back up plan, to
teach on the side. In hindsight, I guess I wasn’t as confident as I thought. I didn’t want to become a damn fool and end up broke and struggling out there for some dream. Maybe that’s what I was waiting for, a final push to give me the courage to go for it. We all need that extra push sometimes.
As for stardom in New York, where my book was being republished, I never even thought of going up there. That place was like an oversized Philadelphia to me. I went there a few times and was not impressed. It wasn’t the kind of place where you could reinvent yourself at a higher level. I needed to go much farther away from home anyway, so that I could feel like I went somewhere. From Philadelphia, New York was only a hop and a skip.
I had never been to Los Angeles, so I didn’t know what to expect. I just had to make sure that I stayed away from red or blue outfits, and that I didn’t talk too much about my East Coast home. That coastal thing, started up by rap music rivalries, was a damn trip. I wanted to make sure that I was better safe than sorry out there. I loved Tupac and Biggie; Death Row Records and Bad Boy, but they all needed to grow up and stop acting like . . . N-I–double G–As. They were too talented and popular for that.
So I pulled out my phone book and dug up my girl’s parents’ phone number in Baltimore, and made the call to get in touch with her. She gave me her parents’ home number in Baltimore because she knew it would take her a while to get settled out in LA, and it was no sense in giving out numbers that could change.
“Hello,” her mother answered the phone in Baltimore. I assumed it was her mother, but just to make sure, I kept my introduction simple.
“Yes, this is Tracy Ellison. I went to Hampton with Kendra Dayton.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s my daughter.”
Good, I thought to myself. “Oh, well, how do you do?” I asked her.
“I’m fine. So, what can I do for you?”
“Well, I’m a middle school teacher in Philadelphia, and Kendra told me that she wanted to teach in the Los Angeles area, and that I could come and visit her whenever I felt up to traveling to the West Coast.”
“Yeah, she is a schoolteacher out there, and she loves it! You need me to give her your number?”
“Would you please, and have her call me as soon as she gets a chance?”
“Okay. Let me get out a pen and a piece of paper and I’ll call her tonight. You know she’s still at school out there right now with the three-hour time difference,” her mother said. “So I usually call her right before I go to bed.”
I wasn’t even thinking about the time change. “Oh, yeah, thanks for reminding me.”
I gave her my number, chatted her up a bit, and hung up the phone with an energy boost. I felt like someone had just poured a five-pound bag of sugar into my veins. I needed to go out jogging, play tennis, run up and down the stairway, have some good sex, or something. I was just burning up with energy!
I couldn’t wait to plan my trip to California. My phone rang right in the middle of my new excitement.
“Hello.”
“Hey, girl. How was your school day?” It was Mike, a muscle-bound weight trainer that I was seeing. I kept real loose ties with him, because I didn’t need no macho shit holding me down. In fact, I only dealt with him because he could give a massage like an Egyptian god or something. He could eat a mean dish of stew (if you know what I mean) at that.
I sighed and said, “Don’t take me back to that place. I was just starting to recuperate.”
He chuckled. “It was that bad, hunh?”
“Yeah, that bad,” I answered.
I thought about asking him what he was doing and inviting him over for an afternoon sweat-out. He had called at just the right time. Mike had the kind of employment, as a weight trainer with Philadelphia sports jocks, where he had money and plenty of time on his hands. He was always bragging about who he worked with, and who played for the Eagles, the Sixers, or the Phillies. I didn’t really pay the shit any mind, myself, because once I grew up and went away to college, I learned to appreciate the power of making my own damn money and not sweating some rich assholes who are mostly out for a pussy chase. Not that all of them were like that, but you know what I mean, and you know the kind of women who chase them. Nevertheless, I was still a woman and sex was sex. It was good for the soul.
I cut straight through the chase. “What are you doing right now? You have any free time?”
“Later on tonight, but not right now,” Mike answered.
I didn’t want to set up anything for later though. What if I didn’t feel like it later on? Or what if I wanted to start planning things for LA. I didn’t need a man in the way of that, especially if he knew that I was going somewhere. Mike tried to play the role like he could be as straight business as I was about our loose relationship, but I knew that he really liked me, and it would all come out as soon as he knew I was planning to relocate. I could already predict his response.
“Well, try and call me later on then,” I told him.
“Why don’t we just set a time?”
“Why don’t we just leave it open?” I asked him instead. “And if we close it, then we close it later on?”
He chuckled again and said, “You’re a hard woman to break, you know that?”
He knew what time it was, and he knew that he couldn’t hold me down.
I said, “I’m as hard as those damn weights you lift,” just to rub it in. I owed that all to Mr. Victor Hinson, or Qadeer Muhammad, as he called himself, for leaving me hanging like he did after getting out of jail and hooking up with someone else.
“You gon’ need to soften up sometime. Like when I put my hands on you, and everything else,” Mike teased me.
What would a man be without a good comeback line, right? I just laughed at him.
“Well, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.”
“Aw’ight then. We’ll play it your way.”
I hung up the phone, and my energy had already settled a bit. I laid back on my bed, still in my bra and panties, and relaxed. Suddenly, I felt kinky. I decided to take my bra and panties off, and turn my oscillating fan on low, and let it blow over my naked body in bed, as I daydreamed of how sweet my future would be out in Hollywood, because Hollywood got swingers.
You want this? I asked a chocolate, baldheaded man in my daydream.
Yes. All of it, he told me.
I spread my legs wider with my right knee up and stroked my stomach with a sexy grin.
Well, come and get it then.
I just relaxed with my daydream and let my fan blow me up and down.
$ $ $
I never did hook up with Mike that night. I went to the movies by myself instead, and began doing research on the whole Hollywood name game, you know, who was doing what and who was successful at it. Mike wanted to accompany me on my poetry night that Thursday, but I never took any men to my readings. I didn’t want to be stuck with him if a deep, deep brother did his thing up onstage and I decided to seduce him right there on the spot. Well, the shit never happened because a lot of poetic brothers, who I came in contact with, either brought their own women to the readings, were too artistically busy to just chill, or were unorganized and full of themselves, so no one ever qualified, and that hunk of a man, Philadelphia’s own Wadud, was happily married already.
I guess I was always fantasizing about something. Hollywood was the perfect place for me.
Right when I grabbed my bag in my seventies-inspired poetry gear—oversized bell-bottom jeans, a rayon shirt, and big shoes (call me a chameleon)—my telephone rang.
I was hesitant to answer it. I had already told Mike no, and I didn’t have time for a chat with anyone else, but I answered it anyway, just in case it was something important.
It was. Kendra Dayton was calling me from California.
She said, “Tracy Ellison. What’s up, girl? My mom called and told me that you were ready to visit California. Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. It’s the end of the school year, and you know how t
hat can get.”
“Girl, don’t even go there,” I told her. “I have so many horror stories.”
“Don’t we all. We need a teachers’ mental clinic, right?” she said.
I begged to differ. I said, “No, we need a parents’ mental clinic.”
“Ay-men to that,” she responded and laughed. “Aaayy-men!”
I said, “Your mother told me that you loved teaching out there.”
“That doesn’t mean that I don’t have any problems.”
I laughed. I could tell that Kendra and I would hit it off well if we lived in the same city. I didn’t even talk to her all that much at Hampton. We just chatted when we saw each other, but as we had ended up in the same teaching profession, it gave us more to relate to.
“So, can I crash at your place for a week, or what? Do you have a kinky boyfriend that I need to know about in advance?” I joked. I don’t know what was wrong with me, but sometimes I just said the first thing that came to mind, particularly when I was pressed, and I was pressed to see Hollywood.
Luckily, Kendra found my joke appealing and laughed.
“They have a different kind of black man out here. They’re more laid back,” she said. “Too laid back sometimes. I dream every now and then of inviting out a few in-your-face Baltimore brothers from home.
“ ‘Hey girl, come here, yo’,” she mocked them.
I smiled. “Do they use ‘yo’ for everything in Baltimore?”
“Yes they do.”
“So, you mean to tell me that guys out in California are not really roughnecks like they show in these movies?” I couldn’t believe that they could lie that much. Were movies that much make-believe?
Kendra said, “Girl, do you think I would waste my time out here with them fools? Yeah, they have those crazy gangbangers out here, but I’m talking about professional and college-educated men, not no ’hood rats, but they do have them out here, and they are just as ignorant as they are in those movies.”