For the Love of Money

  She just laughed, overwhelmed by my excitement for the role.

  “I knew you would like that one,” she said. She was barely awake, I could hear it in her voice, but not by the time I got through with her.

  “So what do you think about our chances?” I asked her. “I don’t want to get my hopes up for nothing.”

  She said, “The producer actually likes you.”

  I said, “But?” She was holding something back from me.

  “The director is a pain in the ass, one of those real creative control freaks,” she told me. “He wrote the script, and he’ll be tough to convince. He wants a blonde.”

  I said, “Do I get a screen test at least?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Well, who the hell do I need to talk to?” I was really desperate for it, and you know how I can get when I really want something.

  My girl laughed and said, “Wow! You just read it, didn’t you?”

  “You know I did,” I told her, laughing along with her.

  “It’s kind of like La Femme Nikita redone with a twist,” she told me.

  “I know, but it’s much smarter than Nikita. And I think that with me in the lead role as Alexis, it would have more of a mass appeal to it, black, white, Latin, Asian; everybody would want to see it.”

  “That’s what the producer is counting on. He says you tested very well with white men in Led Astray.”

  “Definitely!” I yelled. “They want me more than black men do.”

  We broke up laughing again.

  “Well, what’s their time schedule?” I asked. “Do I need to fly back out there for the screen test? Shit, I’ll change my flight plans today.”

  She said, “No, you have time. They still haven’t green-lighted the project yet, but I expect them to shortly, and we’ll make sure that you’re up at the front of the line.”

  “Fuck that!” I snapped. “I don’t even want there to be a line! You tell that producer who’s on our side that I’m willing to test immediately!”

  My mother looked at me and frowned, responding to my tart language.

  My girl said, “Oh, sure, I’ll get right on it,” playing her little servant-girl role again.

  “Whatever,” I told her. “This is a big opportunity and I just don’t want it to slip away from me.”

  “All right, I’ll get right on it for you today.”

  “Thank you. And if I need to fly back out there earlier than planned, then let me know.”

  I hung up the phone still pumped while my mother continued to thumb through the script.

  “This girl is pretty tough, Tracy. You might need to lift some weights to tone up your arms and legs. She has a mouth on her too,” my mother said with a smile. “You don’t need any practice with that,” she joked.

  I smiled and said, “Yeah, but the director wants a blonde. This is just what I needed, a new challenge to get my blood working again. I was just about to get tired.”

  My mother shook her head and said, “Girl, you need to stop. You better learn to appreciate your slow-down moments. You can’t keep running out here chasing these fire trucks to the fire. You’re gonna need to learn how to go fishing every once in a while and just relax.”

  “Yeah, whatever, Mom. When have you ever been fishing? Maybe I’ll slow down when I’m thirty-five.”

  My mother grunted and said, “Forty-five sounds more like it for you.”

  I said, “Well, like they say, the younger you are in spirit, the longer your life lasts.”

  My mother grinned and said, “There’s breakfast downstairs if you want any.”

  “What did you cook?”

  “Eggs, sausage, and pancakes, and I have some English muffins in the refrigerator if you like those. I don’t eat those things myself, but your father seems to like them, so I buy them for him. That and the strawberry jelly.” She grimaced and said, “That strawberry stuff is too darn sweet for me. I’ll take grape jelly any day.”

  I smiled and headed downstairs to grab a bite to eat. My father was sitting on the living-room couch reading the newspaper.

  “Good morning, Daddy.”

  He looked up and said, “Hey,” and went right back to reading his paper.

  I walked into the kitchen and grabbed some sausage. I couldn’t eat cold eggs and pancakes. Sausage tasted better hot too, so I tossed a plate of everything into the microwave.

  While I waited for the food to heat up, I watched the sunlight shine through the kitchen window and shed light on my mother’s plants that hung near the window sill. I began to wonder what my girl Raheema’s house looked like. She and Ernest had only moved into their new home in Plain-field a summer ago, and I had yet to see it. With a new energy boost from my next film possibility, I decided that I would take my girl up on her invitation for a visit, so I went and got my phone book and called her up.

  “Hey, girl, you still want me up there this weekend? It’s Tracy.”

  “Yeah, we’re not doing anything. This is a nice weekend to visit. The sun is out and it’s not too hot and not too cool.”

  “Can I spend the night?” I asked her.

  “Yeah, we have a guest room.”

  “Are you sure you’re not having any more kids? Because I don’t want to wake up at night to use the bathroom and hear you and Ernest in there going at it,” I joked.

  Raheema laughed. “No comment,” she said. “But we’re definitely not planning to make any more kids this weekend. A boy and a girl are enough.”

  “Well, give me some good directions so I can get on my way then,” I told her.

  I got the directions, took a shower, got my things together for a one-night stay, and told my parents that I’d be back sometime on Sunday.

  My mother smiled, looked at my father and then back to me, and said, “Good.”

  I said, “I wasn’t stopping y’all from doing anything, Mom. You damn sure enjoyed Dad’s new Infiniti,” I hinted with a grin.

  My father laughed as I headed for the door.

  “You watch what you say to me, girl,” Mom huffed at me as I walked out. “I’m not your little girlfriend, I’m your mother.”

  I got on my way to New Jersey in my father’s Buick and listened to WDAS-FM, my parents’ favorite oldies station. They played Anita Baker’s “Angel” and took me all the way back to the eighties, when I was a young girl in love. I turned it up as loud as I could and grooved along with it, like I was still in a slow drag. They followed that up with René and Angela’s “My First Love.” After that they played Whitney Houston’s “Saving All My Love.” Boy, I was in heaven while I drove! I arrived at Raheema’s nice, green area in Plain-field, New Jersey, and wanted to tell her all about those oldies, but first I had to comment on their house.

  Raheema and Ernest Neumann lived in a perfect residential area of two-story, brick-built, single-family homes with private driveways, two-car garages, and elaborate walkways from the curb. Some of the houses even had outside sitting rooms for gardens and plants. I was envious all over again. I would trade in my empty house in Marina Del Rey, California, for a husband and family in Plainfield, New Jersey, in a heartbeat! As long as I could still earn my Hollywood paychecks.

  I rang the doorbell and Raheema met me at the door with her daughter, Lauryn, named after the singer Lauryn Hill. Her son, Jordan, named after the basketball legend Michael Jordan, was not far behind them. It was Ernest’s idea to name them that way as a testament of African-American greatness in the era that they were born in. Whatever! What happened to letting your children amass their own greatness instead of following in someone else’s footsteps?

  “Hi, Lauryn. Hi, Jordan,” I said to both of the kids. They seemed happy to see me. I guess Raheema talked about their “Aunt Tracy” a lot.

  “You want to play with my Frisbee?” Jordan asked me. Lauryn nearly lunged into my arms from her mother.

  “They love visitors,” Raheema told me with a smile.

  “I guess so, growing up in t
he suburbs,” I joked.

  I held Lauryn in my arms and checked her out. She had dimples like her father and was honey brown like me.

  “Can you talk yet?” I asked her.

  She nodded her head and smiled, but didn’t say a word.

  Jordan said, “She can say Mommy and Daddy and eat and potty.”

  “She can say potty?” I asked Raheema.

  She nodded. “Yeah. I told you she’s ready to start.”

  “You want to play catch with my Frisbee?” Jordan asked me again.

  Raheema said, “Jordan, she has to bring her things in the house first. Okay?”

  Jordan was slightly lighter than me, but not as light as Raheema. Their house was a melting pot like thousands of others in the black community, ranging from Ernest’s walnut brown to Raheema’s light cream. African America was just filled with beautiful “Flavors of Chocolate,” another poem by yours truly.

  Raheema and the kids walked me back out to the car so I could get my things.

  “Where’s Ernest?” I asked.

  “On his telephone in the study. He should be out soon,” Raheema answered.

  “The study, hunh?” I asked her with a smile. “I guess that this family will spend a whole lot of time in the study, with two college professors as parents.”

  Raheema grinned. “And what’s so wrong with that? That idea beats a family that spends a lot of their time in front of the television. That’s why we only have one, and that’s mainly for educational videos.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes it is. We have a reading family here.”

  “I know you do, you bookworm,” I cracked at her.

  When we made it back inside, Ernest walked up and greeted me with pandemonium.

  “Oh my God,” he said, “we have a celebrity in the house! Honey go get the cameras! Let’s get some pictures of her with our kids! This’ll inspire them to be stars!”

  I grinned it off. I said, “I thought that your children’s names were already supposed to link them to stardom.” I couldn’t help it, I just had to say something about that.

  Raheema looked at me and shook her head.

  Ernest said, “If we have another girl, we’re gonna name her Tracy.”

  That caught me off guard. I started cheesing.

  “Raheema said that you were not having any more kids,” I shot back at him.

  “Oh yeah?”

  Raheema looked at him and said, “Yeah. Don’t let this celebrity get you into trouble with your wife.”

  Ernest just laughed it off. He was nothing like Raheema’s father. He had a great sense of humor but he also knew when to cut the bullshit and respect his wife. They were a good couple. I admired that. Raheema chose well.

  They gave me a tour of their four-bedroom house that had plenty of African-American art, wooden sculptures, and ornaments. Everything was earth-toned with wooden trim and hardwood floors. It looked as if they wanted their house to seem very classic, and it did seem that way, as if it was a century old.

  I helped Raheema to cook a fish and vegetable dinner, and we all sat down at their pine wood dining table by six o’clock to eat. I bet they did everything regulated at their house, like clockwork.

  We all held hands to pray, or at least I thought that was what we were about to do.

  Ernest said, “We want to thank the Creator for giving us the spirit, the hope, and the strength to live each day with a mission for all of humanity, our family, and our dear friends.”

  “Hotep!” they all shouted, meaning peace. Even little Lauryn knew it.

  I smiled. That was very interesting, and cute. I had turned Afrocentric for a second in my late teens, but outside some of my poetic inspiration, my African journey never lasted. It was no more than a phase, like my many other phases. Raheema and Ernest, however, had found a way to incorporate the culture into their daily lives and teach it to their children. I was impressed by that.

  I asked, “Do you say the same thing every night?”

  Raheema answered, “No, of course not.”

  “Do you always end it with Hotep?”

  Ernest answered, “Yes, of course we do.”

  We all began to eat with Raheema feeding Lauryn ground-up baby food, until Jordan stood his fish on his plate and began to sing to it and make it dance.

  “I’m just ah fiiissh. Yes, I’m only ah fiiissh . . .”

  I dropped my fork and broke out laughing. He had the perfect cadence of School House Rock’s “I’m Just a Bill.”

  Raheema and Ernest chuckled at it themselves before Raheema put a stop to it. “Okay, Jordan, stop showing off and eat your food. Would you like your daddy to help you cut the fish?”

  Jordan looked and said, “No, Mom, you can’t cut the fish. He just wants to be a law.”

  I had to stand up and walk away I laughed so hard. I choked on my food and my eyes started to run.

  Ernest was laughing too, but Raheema only smiled at it. She was obviously not as tickled by it as we were.

  “Eat your food, Jordan,” she told him.

  I enjoyed myself for the rest of the night, and by nine o’clock, Ernest was putting both of the kids to bed while Raheema and I sat alone inside of their peaceful living room.

  “How old is Ernest again?” I asked her.

  “Thirty-three.”

  “So he’s four years older than us?”

  “Five. He’s turning thirty-four next month.”

  I nodded. “You two are great together. I’m really happy for you.”

  She smiled. “Thank you. And I’m happy for you.”

  I nodded and thanked her back, reminiscing on our younger days.

  “Remember Bruce?” I asked her with a grin.

  Raheema shook her head and smiled. “I knew you were gonna ask me that. I was just waiting for it.”

  I laughed. “I mean, he was a nice guy, you know. I wonder what he’s up to now.”

  “Hopefully, good things,” she commented.

  I smiled back and asked, “So, was Ernest your first, you know, real boyfriend?”

  Raheema shook her head again. She knew what I was getting at. Sex.

  She said, “Tracy, I’m not like you. Okay? I don’t have a need to express all of my personal business.”

  “Yeah, because you were always in my business,” I told her.

  “Well, you had a lot of business to be in.”

  “Come on, girl, tell me. Was he your first?”

  She smiled and said, “Don’t hold your breath. Tracy. So what did my sister want to talk to you about?” she asked, quickly changing the subject on me.

  I said, “You know what she wanted. Money.”

  “How much?”

  “Twelve thousand dollars to put down on a new house in Yeadon,” I answered. “And she had the nerve to try and say that she saved half of it. I was thinking, ‘She probably doesn’t even have two thousand dollars saved.’”

  “So what did you tell her?”

  “I told her that I would think about it.”

  “Are you?”

  “Hell no!”

  We both laughed.

  Raheema shook her head and said, “Mercedes still hasn’t learned her lesson about using people.”

  “Ain’t it the truth.”

  Raheema looked at me and frowned. “Oh, don’t try to act like you were a saint.”

  “Raheema, I only had about two years of that.”

  “Two years! No, you need to try, six or seven years.”

  “Girl, I was not like that until your sister told me to do it.”

  “Yes you were. You were using boys all the way back in elementary school. ‘This is my boyfriend, y’all,’” she mocked me.

  I chuckled at it. “Raheema, everybody does that.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Bruce.”

  “Okay, that was real brief,” she admitted with a laugh. “But you took it all the way with him, I didn’t. And I never asked him for anything.”

/>   I just smiled, still reminiscing. Ernest popped his head into the room and froze.

  “Yup, it looks like girl talk in here. I’ll just leave you two alone,” he told us and headed back toward the study.

  I smiled and said, “Look how far we’ve come, Raheema, two regular sisters from Philly?”

  She smiled back at me. “Well, I may have been regular, but you sure were not.”

  I laughed and thought about my follow-up book, and a tell-all book for Raheema.

  “You know what?” I asked her.

  “What, Tracy?”

  I said, “Have you ever thought about writing a book about your life? You could call it The Good Girl. Because I want to write a sequel about mine, and all I could say about you in Flyy Girl were just the things that I knew you and Mercedes were going through with your father. I think a lot of good girls would love to have a full story just about you.”

  Raheema laughed as if I had just told the funniest joke in the world.

  “Are you kidding me? Who would want to read it, Tracy? America loves the drama, not the good girls. They want Jerry Springer, not Jan Brady.”

  “But I’m saying though, people do ask me about you.”

  She ignored me and asked, “So, you’re thinking about writing a sequel?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What, Tracy Goes to Hollywood?”

  I frowned at her title and shook my head.

  “No, girl, that sounds like a porno movie: Debbie Does Dallas or something. I don’t know what I want to call it, but it will deal with me going to Hollywood. But I don’t have the time to write it. I’m trying to break my way into a new film deal now.”

  “What’s it called?”

  I smiled again, imagining how she would respond to it. “Road Kill,” I told her.

  “Road Kill?”

  Raheema turned up her nose like something reeked, and I broke out laughing.

  “It’s about this gang of psychos who snatch pretty women off of the highways. I play this Special Units agent named Alexis who goes after them with backup and whatnot.”

  Raheema said, “What in the world? You mean to tell me that they couldn’t come up with something more sane than that?”

  “Yeah, a bunch of sane, boring movies,” I answered. “I want to do something wild and crazy. Those are the kind of movies that make you a star, not those sane movies. I want to go all out.”