For the Love of Money

  I laughed again.

  “Ernest takes him in the bathroom with him?” I could see it in my head, Raheema’s husband taking their son into the restroom and suffocating the little boy with funk.

  Raheema caught on and laughed herself.

  “We all have to learn. Lauryn is starting to go now, and she’s only fourteen months. Would you like to talk to your aunt, Tracy?” she asked her son.

  “Yes,” I heard Jordan speak up.

  “Hi, Aunt Tracy.” Actually, Raheema had made me his godmother, but “Aunt Tracy” made us seem a lot closer, and it felt appropriate to me.

  “Hey, Jordan. Did you enjoy your birthday party last week?” I asked him.

  I had just missed it, but Raheema understood. You can’t make too many promises when you have a busy schedule.

  Jordan answered, “Yes. We had balloons, ice cream; I blew out the candles on my cake. I hurt my knee playing outside in the grass. I’m three years old now. I have a new red bike.”

  I laughed even harder. He sounded like your typical smart kid. His little mind just lined the subjects up and spit them out, just like my brother used to do.

  Raheema reclaimed the phone to continue our discussion.

  “The saddest thing about what Kiwana is saying is that it’s true,” she told me. “If you don’t find a black man who basically does the same thing that you do, or something close to it so that they can understand the support that you need and the schedule that you keep, then the courtship can lead to a short, rocky road and a dead end.”

  I guess Raheema lucked up, because her husband Ernest was an associate law professor and moving his way up at Seton Hall, not far from Rutgers. They were both high achievers in education.

  “In other words, you’re saying that I’ll need to marry someone in the entertainment business now, is that it?” I asked her rhetorically.

  “Or at least someone who understands the demands of the business,” she said.

  Thinking of Seton Hall, I asked Raheema, “Have you heard from Jantel lately?” Jantel, another friend from our high school days, was awarded a track scholarship to Seton Hall.

  “Last I heard, she was still trying out for the Summer Olympics in the quarter mile.”

  “I wonder if she’ll be in this year’s Olympics then,” I said out loud.

  “Maybe. They say that women peak later than men. Twenty-nine is a perfect age for the Olympics.”

  “Not if she’s up against Marion Jones. That girl can outright fly, and she’s still in her early twenties,” I commented.

  Raheema said, “It’s just good to know that all of us are doing well.”

  I nodded. My mind strayed to Raheema’s older sister Mercedes, and my fast-behind friend Carmen from grade school.

  “You know your sister wants to sit down and chat with me,” I told Raheema.

  “You thought that she wouldn’t? She always talks about you. You’re her idol now,” Raheema said with a chuckle. She remembered the times when Mercedes was my idol as well as I did.

  “You have any idea what she may want to talk to me about?” I was still curious and skeptical about what Mercedes had planned for me.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Raheema responded, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had some kind of a monetary concern behind it. You know she still wants to make more money than what she makes now at the Nice-town drug clinic.”

  “I know, right? But I’ve been trying to tell myself to stop thinking that way.”

  “I wouldn’t stop thinking that way. I mean, she’s my sister and I love her and all, but... To each her own,” Raheema concluded. You could hear the frustration in her voice. Sometimes you just have to let people go their own way.

  “Well, I hate to cut this conversation short, Tracy, but I have a ton of things to do. If you’re free this weekend, how about you drive up here to Plainfield to visit us. It’s only an hour and change away.”

  I chuckled. If I said yes to everything while I was at home, I would nearly kill myself. However, maybe a ride up to New Jersey to visit my happily married friend and spend time with her family would do the trick to ease my mind, because nothing else had.

  I said, “I’ll have to think about that. It will depend on how tired I am after Friday.”

  “Okay, well, take your time and don’t exert yourself, because I know how much energy you can burn up trying to do too many things, Tracy. So just slow down. Okay?”

  “I hear you, girl. Just take a chill pill.”

  When I hung up the phone, I looked out of my parents’ front window and saw my father pulling up right behind his Infiniti SUV. I parked it right where he usually parks his Buick in front of the house. I grabbed the keys and rushed outside before he could start on his way in. It was a perfect sunny day for a surprise.

  “Happy birthday, Daddy!” I shouted to him, standing in front of the Infiniti with the keys in hand.

  He smiled, stroked his trimmed beard, and acted all cool about it.

  “You get a good deal on it?” he asked me.

  “I paid for it in cash. I needed to get a good deal on it.”

  “How much?”

  I couldn’t believe he was asking me that. I said, “What difference does it make, Daddy? Just get in and drive it!” I was beginning to lose my patience with everything. Why was everyone making it so hard for me to come home and enjoy myself?

  My father took the keys and said, “This is just a high-model Pathfinder. Nissan makes them both. I like that new Cadillac Escalade myself.”

  I couldn’t believe my damn ears! I had nearly gotten carjacked in that Infiniti after working out a good damn deal for it, and after all of that, my father was telling me that he would rather have a Cadillac! I was just too through!

  I said, “Well, Daddy, why don’t you go trade this in and buy yourself a damn Cadillac then.”

  Right as I said that, my mother pulled up from work in her car and parked behind my father’s Buick, all lined up in the street in front of our house and the neighbor’s next door.

  I was so pissed off that I turned away and began to walk back to the house.

  “Where are you going?” my father asked me.

  I said, “I’m going up to my old room to lay down.”

  “What did you say to her?” my mother asked him. I guess she could hear the irritation in my voice and see it on my twisted-up face, because I was pissed!

  “I didn’t say anything to her,” my father lied.

  I stopped in my tracks and turned around to glare at him.

  “Oh no you didn’t, Dad,” I told him. “You are not gonna sit here and lie right in my face like that.” I turned to my mother and said, “He told me that this Infiniti is nothing but a high-model Pathfinder, and that he’d rather have a Cadillac Escalade, and then had the nerve to ask me how much I paid for it. Talk about being ungrateful!”

  “Ungrateful?” my father asked. He was still grinning. I guess it was all a joke to him. “Do you want me to sit here and add up how much it cost me to raise Ms. Tracy Ellison Grant, send her behind away to college for four years, and then help her out while she finishes grad school for two more years?”

  “To correct your mis-information, Dad, I finished college in three years,” I snapped at him.

  My mother began to laugh out loud. “This sounds like a father-daughter conversation here, so let me go inside the house and mind my own business.”

  “You don’t want to ride in my new SUV?” my father asked her.

  My mother stopped and looked at both of us.

  “I thought you wanted the Cadillac?” she asked him.

  He frowned at her as if Mom was busting his groove.

  “Come on, Patti, I was just pulling her long legs, that’s all.”

  “No you were not either. You meant what you said,” I huffed at him. I saw Mercedes drive up in her car, a dark blue Honda Civic. She made a U-turn and parked across the street.

  “Well, have a nice drive,” I told my
parents. I decided right then and there to go out with Mercedes, get something to eat, and see what she wanted to talk to me about.

  She stepped out of her car wearing a red velvet dress, as if she had a new important boyfriend, but I had to erase that thought from my mind. Maybe she just decided to splurge with some of her own money for a change.

  “Nice dress,” I told her.

  “Thank you,” she said, smiling. “It’s just a li’l somethin’ somethin’.”

  “You wanna go out and get a bite to eat?” I asked.

  Mercedes looked puzzled. I hadn’t even allowed her a chance to cross the street yet.

  “Right now?” she asked me.

  “You have something you have to do with your parents?”

  “Well, not really,” she answered. “I’m driving?”

  “Yup,” I told her, heading over to the passenger side to get in. I was ready to go immediately because I was beginning to feel the emptiness in my stomach from not being able to eat at the mall with Kiwana.

  When my father looked over at us in the car, I stuck my tongue out at him and made him laugh. Mercedes chuckled at that herself, and then she commented on her father.

  “It’s like night and day how my father was when we were growing up compared to how he is now,” she told me. “He’s all mellowed out and shit now.”

  She was surely right about that. Mr. Keith was a major reason why Mercedes had lost so much faith in people. She began sneaking around with roughneck boyfriends and having sex, while hanging out late, being flyy, and eventually she slipped into taking drugs because of all of her wantonness and feelings of despair. In the meantime, she had me following right in her footsteps, but I never had as much baggage in my life as Mercedes had in hers. I never did any drugs either. I just missed the discipline and love of a father figure until my dad came back home to us.

  And what about you now? I wanted to ask Mercedes. How had she changed over the years? She still seemed jaded to me, but I decided to get around to all of that later on.

  “So, where are we driving to anyway?” she asked me.

  “Let’s go to Bennigan’s on City Line Avenue,” I told her.

  “Oh, that’s a bet. Their food is bangin’.”

  Mercedes still had that slick-ass talk and street appeal. My character in Led Astray stole a lot from her flair. I began to smile, just thinking about that.

  “What?” Mercedes asked me. She had to be up on everything, eagle-eyed. I bet that her probing into everything could be very tiring.

  I asked, “Mercedes, do you ever put your guard down?”

  “Hmmph,” she grunted with a smirk. “I wish. Put my guard down for what? So somebody can stab me in the back? I already have too many stitches in my back for that shit.”

  She looked at me and said, “Put it this way. You’re all out there in Hollywood now, right? Do you trust those wheelers and dealers out there?”

  She had a point. I didn’t trust many people in Hollywood, but I did have people who had my back out there. You have to have faith in someone.

  I asked, “Do you still smoke?”

  She looked at me puzzled again, still trying to read everything.

  “I don’t smoke all like that. I’ll light up an occasional cigarette here and there, but I don’t smoke anything else, if that’s what you mean.

  “Do you smoke now?” she asked me back.

  I shook my head. “Never did, never have, never will.”

  Mercedes paused and started to chuckle. “You smoked in that movie.”

  “That was just a character,” I responded tartly. I wondered if Mercedes actually realized that I had used her as a model for my character. I wouldn’t put it past her.

  “Still strong-headed, Tracy,” she commented. She looked the other way as we made it onto Lincoln Drive.

  “You know you left me hangin’, right?” she said out of the blue.

  Left you hangin’? What is she talking about? I asked myself.

  “What do you mean?” I asked her.

  She said, “In your book, you had it all mapped out like you were gonna wait for Victor to get out of jail and marry him. What happened to that?”

  “Oh,” I responded in relief. I didn’t know what she was talking about. That was an easy question to answer.

  “Like you said from day one, Mercedes, Victor was too fast for me, right? Remember you told me that. You sized that relationship up way back when. So it was time to wake up from the dream. I’ve done that already.”

  “You know he owns a bunch of stores now,” she told me.

  I was trying my best to keep my mind off of the man, while staying away from areas where he owned stores. “He has a health food store, a barbershop, and a hair supply store, all on Wayne Avenue. I know all about it,” I said, “including the real estate that he owns down at Temple. And I’m happy for him, him and his wife.” Nevertheless, I damn sure didn’t feel like bumping back into him.

  Mercedes looked at me and started laughing. “Are you really happy about his wife?” I guess she could sense my irritation. I hated talking about Victor, I really did. It was like discussing a third-degree burn to your face.

  “Are you happy?” I asked her back. She was beginning to get under my skin.

  “As happy as I expect to be right now,” she answered.

  I shook my head and looked away. Mercedes had to be the most doubtful person in the world, and the thing that got to me was that she had so much potential. It was as if she had no desire to reach for anything important in life. She had gotten too used to mud fighting, and I didn’t have time for that, so I planned to keep to myself until I received a chance to stuff my face at Bennigan’s.

  “By the way,” she said, before we could reach City Line Avenue, “I wouldn’t worry about that lesbian shit that Wendy Williams was talking on the radio this morning. You know good and well you’re not some damn lesbo, and so does everyone else. They just do that crazy shit for the ratings.”

  I laughed to myself and didn’t comment on it. Mercedes didn’t miss a damn thing!

  After we arrived at Bennigan’s, ordered our food and drinks, and began to dig in, I had to flat-out ask Mercedes what she wanted to talk to me so urgently about, because up to that point we had only done a bunch of small talk.

  Mercedes looked deep into my eyes and asked, “Do you own a house out there in Hollywood?”

  I shook my head. “Not in Hollywood. I have a place in Marina Del Rey. That’s south of Hollywood.”

  “But you do own a house out there, right?”

  “It’s not like the houses you see on the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, but yes, it’s mine, it’s nice, and I earned it,” I told her. “Why?”

  “Does it feel good to own your own house without landlords fucking with you all the time and not doing what they’re supposed to do?”

  I thought about how positive Mercedes seemed after she came back home to her family and asked for help to make it through her drug problem years ago, and I guess that the angelic recovery period was long gone.

  I asked, “So you want to buy a house?”

  “In Yeadon,” she told me. “I already saved up half of what I need for a down payment—”

  “And you need the other half,” I concluded, cutting her off.

  She stopped talking and stabbed her cheesecake with strawberry topping with her fork.

  “How much is half?” I asked her. I sat there and wondered how much it would take to get Mercedes out of my hair. On second thought, I could have been setting myself up to become her next pusherman, giving her access to something she would crave again and again, my money.

  She swallowed her mouthful and said, “Actually, I’m thinking it would be better if you could give me the whole thing. That way I could use my money to furnish it and tighten it up with a new paint job and all that.”

  Typical, I thought to myself. Mercedes had some nerve!

  “And what about your mortgage payments?” I asked her.
>
  “Shit, Tracy, mortgage payments are like rent. I can do that. It’s the damn down payment that stops most people from being able to buy houses, not the mortgage payments.”

  “You still have to qualify for the bank loan to get the mortgage,” I told her.

  “And how hard is that to do? It’s plenty of people walking around out here with three-hundred-thousand-dollar houses and terrible credit.”

  “Yeah, but they have higher-rated credit because they have the income, whether their credit is good or not. And most people with money are going to pay their mortgage, first. Or at least those who have any sense.”

  Mercedes went back to eating her cheesecake while I shook my head again. It was just too obvious of a scam.

  “What?” she mumbled through her food. “You think I’m trying to get over on you? We go back too far for that shit, Tracy.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” I told her. “You’re thinking that I can’t turn you down because we’re cool like that.” But are we? I asked myself.

  “Tracy, nobody’s holding a damn gun to your head, so you can do what you want to do.”

  “And what if I choose to say no?”

  She paused. “You just say no then.”

  I knew better than that, but what could I do? I felt like I was being blackmailed through our supposed friendship, but Mercedes was no friend like Kiwana was. Mercedes had only influenced me to do the wrong things, and never the right things. If you can get somethin’ without doing anything with him, then do it. But if you can’t, then make sure you play with his mind real good before you do, she told me when I was young and very impressionable. ’Cause see, a lot of guys are stingy until you give them some pussy. But once you do, they start actin’ dumb, all in love ’n shit.

  What kind of shit was that to tell a young teenager who looked up to you? Was that the kind of friendship that I felt committed to protect? Hell no! However, I had used many of Mercedes’ emotions, her reciprocal sexuality, and her turmoil of drug addiction to play out some of my role in Led Astray. So in a sense, I owed Mercedes.

  I asked, “So how much do you need?” I just wanted to hear a number. I was curious to see how much our “friendship” was worth.