Yolanda was practically pushing me down his throat.
Tim looked at me for the first time. He really looked at me, if you know what I mean. This guy was a big-time flirt, and I didn’t know if I wanted to deal with that on a job. What was the difference between him and Reginald? They both gave me those doggie-style vibes.
Tim opened his mouth and said, “Oh really?”
I opened mine and said, “Don’t let my good looks mislead you. I want to be a real creative professional.”
He nodded his head and said, “Well, great.” He dug into his beige sports jacket and pulled out a business card. “Call me at my office on Monday, and I’ll see what I can do.”
His two friends smiled at me with snake eyes. Fuck you too! I thought. I don’t want your man, I just want a job.
When Yolanda and I walked away I asked her, “Is he a flirt?”
She didn’t miss a beat. “Definitely, but he doesn’t try hard. He has women throwing themselves at him. So just ignore the flirting and press him for the job.”
She said, “He’s soft, you can definitely break him. So you get on the job, get yourself some good writing experience, make the right contacts, and pay your rent. Then I can get you in the Writers Guild association for your protection, rights, and benefits.”
She made it sound as if it was a done deal. I slid the business card in my purse and planned not to disappoint her or myself. Science fiction or not, all I knew was that a writing job was a writing job.
“Mitch,” Yolanda called out. We were moving on again, and she sounded real personal with this one. I could tell by the tone of her voice.
Mitch was the first brown face that Yolanda and I approached that evening. He was a large and handsome black man in a tailored dark suit with a striking gold tie. He smiled easily with perfect white teeth.
“Excuse me for a minute, Tracy,” Yolanda told me, stepping aside with Mitch for privacy. He looked at me, smiled and nodded, and moved on with Yolanda.
I looked and grinned. I was beginning to think that the sister had crossed all the way over until I saw how she acted with Mitch. There was an obvious difference in her closeness to him. Her voice flattened out and her pitch lowered, becoming more humane and less catered. She was definitely still down with the people.
“Tracy Ellison,” someone said.
I turned quickly, wondering who knew my name. I was far from being known out there yet.
“Susan Raskin,” I responded. It was the short, dark-haired girl from the HFI crash course who had snuck a reading of my poetry.
She said, “You know what I was thinking? Are you a relative of the writer Ralph Ellison, who published Invisible Man?” She had this huge smile and large eyes as if she was really onto something.
I laughed, sorry to have to disappoint her. “People asked me that in college too, but as far as I know, we’re not related.”
“Oh, because I was thinking about the whole English department connection and the fact that you wanted to write screenplays to add depth to the African-American story. Then the fact that you are obviously a heck of a poet, who is trying to be modest about it.”
She was flattering me. I smiled and said, “No, I’m just an ordinary girl trying to make it out here in Hollywood.”
“Tell me about it,” she said.
“So what are you doing here, Ms. MBA?” I asked her. She was dressed in a khaki suit. I definitely planned to get her number that night.
She took a big breath and answered, “Well, as they say, I’m putting in my dues.”
“Same here,” I told her. “I’m working my way up from the bottom, and boy do you have to remember to say the right things.”
“Exactly. Meet the right people. Impress the right people. Blah, blah, blah.”
“But do you want to be in the business?” I asked Susan and myself.
In unison we let out a big “Yeah!” and broke up laughing.
“I didn’t know you were into science fiction,” susan commented.
“I didn’t know either,” I joked.
We laughed again like old girlfriends or something. I was really digging this girl. As they said in New York, she was mad cool.
“How old are you, Susan?” I asked her. She couldn’t have been much older than me, and I wasn’t afraid to ask her like I was with Yolanda. I just felt more comfortable around someone who was closer to my age, and who was working her way into the Hollywood arena like I was.
“Twenty-eight,” she answered. “How about you?”
I smiled and said, “Actually, I turned twenty-five on the day you met me at the crash course.”
“Oh yeah, that was your birthday? Friday, September sixth, right?”
“Yup.”
“Mine is August the twelfth.”
I said, “You’re getting close to the big three-oh.”
She shook her head and sighed. “Please don’t remind me of that.”
I nodded and smiled at her. “Okay.”
“Thanks, and let’s make sure we keep in touch.”
“No problem,” I told her. “I was going to ask you that. You beat me to it.”
We both wrote our numbers down in phone books.
Yolanda caught us making the trade and waited for us to break.
“Well, I’ll catch up to you next go round,” Susan said.
“I’ll be here,” I told her.
Yolanda immediately asked me, “Where did you meet her?”
“At the HFI crash course.”
She nodded and didn’t say much else about it.
“So, who is Mitch?” I asked her. I noticed that she failed to introduce me to him.
“He was waiting to meet you, but you were talking and we were talking, and then he had to go, so he left.”
“Are you good friends?”
Yolanda chuckled and said, “You ask a lot of questions, Tracy,” but never answered me.
We left after meeting some of the stars from the movie, and a few more of the Hollywood swingers and players. As we drove back to my townhouse, Yolanda brought up my new friend.
“You know who your friend is, don’t you? I was very impressed with you tonight.”
I didn’t even know who she was talking about at first.
“What friend?”
“Susan.”
“Oh, Susan Raskin. What about her?”
“What about her? She’s the youngest of a very powerful family out here, that’s what.”
“The Raskins?” It didn’t sound like a big-name family to me, but what did I know?
“Not really the Raskins, but the Weisners,” Yolanda answered. “Edward Weisner is her uncle, a big name in Hollywood, with all of his kids and extended family. Edward’s youngest sister, Marla, married into the Raskins, and Susan is her youngest kid.”
It sounded as if Yolanda had done all kinds of research on them. She knew their entire family tree.
I smiled and asked, “So, that’s why you didn’t disturb me to introduce me to Mitch?”
“Yeah. I saw you chatting it up with Susan like you went to high school together, and I just decided to leave that kind of chemistry alone.”
The Raskin name didn’t ring a bell with me, but Weisner definitely sounded Jewish. Excuse me for thinking it, but I had heard enough about Hollywood to expect some things.
I asked, “So, is she Jewish?”
Yolanda looked and smiled at me. “They run the show out here,” she answered. “You stay friends with Susan, and you should be in good shape.” She squeezed my arm and was all gassed up about it.
“Tracy, you work damned fast! Faster than me,” she said.
I didn’t even like the sound of that. I didn’t go out to Hollywood to deliberately use people in order to succeed. You go through that stage in high school, and maybe a little in college, but after you receive a degree and a master’s, you would think that you know enough and are skilled enough to make it on your own merit.
“Is that how the game works out
here?” I asked Yolanda.
I liked Susan as a friend. I didn’t have many white friends. I was rarely ever around them, and I damn sure didn’t want to use anyone to get ahead. I had grown up from that, or at least I liked to think that I had.
Yolanda said, “Tracy, it’s nothing personal. Okay? You can be friends and all of that, but business is business.”
I guess she could read the heaviness on my voice and the frown on my face.
“Well, let’s just put it this way,” I said, “I would rather have not known who she is than to feel how I feel right now. I mean, we were just talking. I wasn’t plotting anything.”
“Nobody told you to. Just be friends with her and stay in touch. I’m sure she’ll stay in touch with you. You should even give her one of your books to read.”
I looked at Yolanda and said, “Hell no! So she can read how fast I was. That wouldn’t look good on my résumé.”
“Aw, girl, would you grow up from that silly stuff. You’ve made it now. You’ve gotten past the teen stage,” Yolanda told me. “If anything, the book will show her how strong you are, because a lot of brown girls don’t make it out of the ’hood.”
I thought about my predicament for the rest of that night. As they say, Real life is stranger than fiction. Who would have thought that I could go out to Hollywood, and the first person I meet and like happens to be a girl whose family is well connected in the business. If I wrote that screenplay, Dreaming Hollywood, I would have been laughed out of the classroom for that one too. It was like an Orphan Annie meets Daddy Warbucks script. What the hell could happen to me next?
$ $ $
I called up Tim Waterman that Monday morning and caught him in his office. I was determined to do my own dirty work and get my own job without thinking about Cinderella stories. In the long run, Cinderella stories never lasted, but good old-fashioned hard work did, and you gained more respect by it.
Tim answered the phone as if he remembered me. “Hey, Tracy, how’s it goin’?” Was he flirting again, or did he realize that I really wanted a job?
“I’ll be doing a lot better as soon as I can latch onto someone who wants to utilize my writing talents.” I was planning to pour it on thicker than gravy.
He said, “Well, fax over some of your work and let me take a look at it.”
I wasn’t planning on him saying that. I would have to drive over to Kinko’s copy store to fax him.
“Give me a half hour,” I told him. I couldn’t back down at that point. It was time to put up or shut up.
Tim gave me the fax number and I grabbed some of my assignments together to fax to him. I knew that my writing was crisp with good dialogue, and that was all that I figured I would need for an assistant position. Lucky for me, I knew how to dot all of my i’s and cross my t’s from grading so many English papers as a middle school teacher. However, for the rest of that morning, I was a nervous wreck.
What if he doesn’t like my writing? I asked myself as I paced through my empty townhouse. What if I really can’t make it out here? I guess I’ll just go back to teaching then, I contemplated. I was set to throw in the towel already. I started to remake my bed, wash dishes, scrub windows, anything that would calm my nerves and release some of my anxiety.
“Shit!” I told myself as the time continued to move forward. I had already called to make sure Tim received my fax, but if he didn’t call me back with a response to my work, I was ready to call him again. I wouldn’t be able to rest otherwise. I had to have a response.
When Tim called me back later on that afternoon, he said, “You have some good stuff here. And your plots are daring. That’s exactly what we emphasize for our scripts, plots with edge. I think you can help us.”
I took a big breath, relieved, and asked myself, Now what? Does this mean I have a job, or am I just being considered?
Tim added, “I looked into our budget, and we could offer you around two thousand.”
I nearly hyperventilated right there while on my kitchen phone. That’s how excited I was.
“Around two thousand?” I asked him. That sounded like plenty!
He chuckled. “Well . . . two thousand,” he answered with a pause. He made it sound as if I would complain about it. I didn’t plan to.
“Two thousand a show?” I asked, just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I would have jumped up and down in the air if I didn’t think that I would faint from it.
He said, “Yeah, but we need you to assist, you know, everyone.”
It sounded as if he was trying to get over on me, and it was pretty obvious. Yolanda was right, he was soft. So even though I was nervous, I wasn’t a fool, and asking for more money had always been my thing.
I said, “That sounds like a lot more work than assisting one or a few writers. Assisting an entire staff sounds more like a five-thousand-dollar job, but if we met somewhere in the middle, just to get my feet wet, I couldn’t complain about that.”
My heart was racing like I stole something. Talking money was what agents were supposed to do, but since I didn’t have one yet, and Tim made it seem so obvious that they had more money available, and that he could use plenty of assistance, I just had to go for broke.
He said, “Well, I’ll have to look into it and get back to you on that.”
I gave him my full name, my education, my credentials, my availability, and let him understand my urgency before we concluded our talk. I wanted to make sure that I made my presence felt.
Tim laughed and said, “Okay, I have it all.”
“I hope you do,” I told him.
When we hung up, I was forced to play the waiting game for a couple of days. The job was officially offered to me on my last day of class at UCLA Extensions. The deal was done for three thousand five hundred dollars per episode. Yolanda overlooked the contract for me to make sure everything was legitimate, and the first thing I planned to do was go out and buy the fastest writing computer I could find, a quality fax machine, and start a new account on the Internet. A science fiction writer had to be well connected in the latest of technology.
That following Monday, I signed all of the paperwork, took a photo for ID and security, and showed up for my first day at the job to meet the staff at the studio trailer. I felt immediately self-conscious about my Toyota as I parked it next to the BMWs, Mercedeses, Jags, Lexuses, Cadillacs, and everything else. However, there was nothing I could do about that until I started making some money. I would just have to live with it for a while.
As soon as I walked in (the only brown face in the place, outside of one cameraman), everyone stared at me. Maybe I could have used an official introduction. Obviously, Tim was too busy or absentminded to let everyone know that I had been hired.
Joseph Keaton, the dark-haired head writer with a tense face and a body filled with too much coffee for his own good, asked me the question that everyone else only wondered.
“Who are you?”
I answered, “I’m Tracy Ellison, the assistant writer for the show, and this is my first day on the job, so please be nice to me.”
I few of them laughed, a couple of them chuckled, and others only grinned at me, but all I wanted to do was break the ice because I was there to stay. So I took a deep breath and told myself, This here looks like a tough-ass job, but I know that I can do it!
Just Say No!
To the head games,
to the drama,
to the pettiness,
the peer pressure,
the curiosity,
the rumors,
the liars,
the hustlers,
the players,
the beggars,
the cheaters,
the whiners,
the old girlfriends,
the babies’ mommas,
the older men,
the trifling bosses,
the social drugs,
the alcohol,
the cigarettes,
and to all of the fucking bullshit
&nb
sp; (excuse my French)!
But without all of that
what would a girl have left
to live for?
Honestly?
Shit happens!
Just don’t be controlled by it.
And remember to say YES
to self-respect!
Copyright © 1991 by Tracy Ellison
April 2000
I didn’t know where to take my cousin Vanessa after picking her up from school because I couldn’t really go anywhere without people bothering me. We couldn’t just ride around in circles all day either. It was a nice day outside, so I wanted to take a walk and enjoy it. I just didn’t know where.
“You want to get something to eat again?” I asked her.
She was wearing a floral wraparound dress that looked sexy and sophisticated. She was even showing off some minor curves.
“I’m not really hungry.”
I looked at her and asked, “Would you like to be a star one day, Vanessa?” I had my reasons for asking. Most people wanted to shine in some way or another, they just didn’t realize the cost they would have to pay. I wanted to talk to my little cousin about the cost of fame.
She smiled, in her introverted way, and didn’t say a thing. I took that as a yes.
“Do you know that I can’t even go shopping in Philadelphia now?”
She looked at me and asked, “Why not?”
“Because of what just happened at your school,” I told her.
Vanessa laughed and said, “They always act like that. You should see them at the basketball games.”
“I didn’t have to go through that when I used to pick my brother up from that school. But that’s when I was still a regular citizen,” I told her. “Would you want people going that crazy over you?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I would just ignore them.”
“Lesson number one: You can’t ignore them. You know why? Because they are the people who make you shine, and they pay for everything that you do,” I told her.
She said, “Well, politicians get our votes, and they don’t pay us any mind.”