Yolanda, however, was more concerned about my writing success.
“Shit, girl, you’re gonna become a legend out here,” she told me. “Do you know how hard it is for a new writer to get a season’s finale? You’re not even a full staff writer yet. That’s unheard of!”
It was a simple business decision to me.
I said, “Yolanda, they only used my script like that because they knew I could pull in more women viewers, and if we could hook them to wait for next season, we would have a better chance at getting picked up for another year.
“And I can tell you right now,” I added, “the head writer, Joseph Keaton, hated the idea, but I have to give credit to Tim, because he was probably the one who fought for it.”
Yolanda asked, “By chance, did you, ah—”
I cut her off and said, “Sleep with him?”
She chuckled like a witch.
I said, “No,” and didn’t have to hesitate. I didn’t get down like that. Business was business and sex was not included, or at least not with me.
It was funny how Yolanda was asking me about my business after not discussing her own, but I didn’t say anything about it. I didn’t ask her anything else about meeting men in LA either, because her vibes were not the kind that I wanted to follow. It seemed to me (and I really didn’t know because she never told me and I had stopped asking) that she fucked people more so for business, and I wanted mine purely for pleasure. The last thing in the world that I wanted was someone to believe that I made my way through Hollywood while on my back, because I was working too hard to come up with solid script ideas to make a name for myself. So I didn’t hang out with Yolanda much, and when Kendra’s mom got sick in Baltimore, Kendra went back home for the summer and I ended up hanging out with Susan Raskin. However, I didn’t expect for Susan to be able to help me in my mission to hook up with a black man, so when push came to shove with meeting brothers, I had to go solo.
I visited Venice Beach with the sole purpose of meeting a chocolate brother to chill with. I still didn’t want to attract any knuckleheads though, so I dressed conservatively with my nose up in the air to avoid the weaklings, because only the strong could survive, and I had no time to waste on underlings.
Venice Beach was jam-packed, but what did I expect on a hot Saturday afternoon? You had the bikers, in-line skaters, skateboarders, T-shirt vendors, fruit stand owners, lovebirds, the wanna-be basketball players, bodybuilders, blacks, Mexicans, stray whites, and plenty of competitive women showing their thighs, stomachs, and shoulders to anyone with their eyes open. Venice Beach may as well have been an outside singles’ club with all of the posturing going on.
I thought, Shit, this may be too much action for me. This place seems like a damn carnival! I can’t hope to meet a serious man out here.
“Watch it!” a skateboarder warned me, zipping past on one of those giant, colorful skateboards.
“You watch it,” I mumbled to myself. He was long gone already.
I began to stroll up the beach while keeping my eyes open for anything that looked like fresh chocolate, but my view was mostly filled with Mexican men. Plenty of them were looking good too, but you know, I wasn’t there for any caramel, I wanted chocolate brown. Every now and then a brother would pop out, but they were usually not my type, and when they were, they were already with a woman. So by the time I began to make my way back toward the basketball courts, I figured that Venice Beach would have been a better place to take a man to have a good time with than to meet one. I stopped at the basketball courts and watched plenty of out-of-shape men trying to run ball.
This looks like the place where Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson filmed White Men Can’t Jump, I told myself. I just stood there and daydreamed for a second trying to remember my favorite scenes in the movie.
“I can’t even play basketball,” someone said to me.
I expected to spot some loser when I turned to match the voice with a face, but I was pleasantly surprised. The brother looked like he had never needed to shave a day in his life. His brown face was baby smooth. He was wearing a gray shorts outfit, with a white wave cap, the kind with the wraparound strings attached, and for what? It didn’t look as if he had much hair under the thing for waves. That turned me off, and I let him know about it.
“Why do you have that thing on your head?” I asked him like his mother.
He smiled and answered, “I don’t want my head to sweat.” He was not flustered by my forwardness. For that I gave him a plus; the brother was confident.
“Do you have a bald head under there?” I asked him.
He nodded. “Yeah.”
He seemed like he was showing off too, a definite California thing, or at least from what I had picked up while over there. Kendra had told me about that from day one; everybody wanted to be a star in California.
I said, “So is that your come-on line, telling women that you can’t play basketball? Because I don’t recall asking.” He looked tall and athletic enough to play. Maybe he was bullshitting.
He shook his head and said, “No, I can’t play. I broke my ankle trying to play when I was a kid, and I haven’t played since.”
“Are you a quitter?” I asked him.
He looked at me and frowned. “I don’t quit, I’m just not a basketball player.”
“Nobody said that you were. That was your line,” I told him with a chuckle. I wonder where he really expected to go with that.
He asked me, “Why are you watching basketball then?”
“Because there’s nothing else to do.”
He looked toward the water and smiled. “We could go swimming, walk on the beach, get something to eat, or whatever you want.”
I smiled back at him. “We?”
“You said you didn’t have anything else to do.”
He caught me slipping. I laughed it off.
“All right, I did say that,” I admitted. I was tempted to ask him how old he was, because he didn’t seem over twenty-five. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to bust his groove with the particulars. I guess I was living out my own television script and being seduced myself because of my yearnings for male attention. If you stare at a dog long enough, they will bark at you.
I thought about that and laughed again.
“What’s so funny?”
“What is your name?” I asked him instead of answering his question.
He said, “Co,” like in cobalt.
I looked at him and frowned. “Co?”
“Short for Colby, but once Kobe Bryant signed with the Lakers, I just started calling myself Co with an e at the end,” he explained.
“So, you let Kobe Bryant make you change your name. What, are you an actor, a model, or something?” I could see if it was a business decision for name recognition.
The baby-faced brother smiled with a mouthful of pearly white teeth and asked, “How’d you guess?”
He was so vain that I just started laughing again. His entire approach was obviously to lead a woman into asking him what he did, so that he could spring the whole model business on you.
“So, what’s your full model name?” I asked him.
“Coe Anawabi.”
“Ah-na-wa-bee,” I pronounced correctly.
“Yes, my father’s from Sierra Leone, Africa.”
That explained his baby face. African skin was the smoothest in the world, and Coe seemed to be bragging about his roots too. I couldn’t blame him, though. I bragged about Philly, and everyone else bragged about where they were from.
I went ahead and teased him. “I guess that I’m supposed to be all over you now, right? Is that how you operate?” I was pumping his head up and having a good time with it whether it went anywhere or not. At least he was interesting.
He laughed and said, “I only want to know if you’ll walk with me.”
I thought about it. “Why not?” I told him, grinning.
“Because you may fall for my charm,” he answered.
I sa
id, “I already have,” and we started walking.
“What is your name?” he asked.
“Tracy Ellison from Philadelphia.”
“Oh, Philly . . .”
“Will Smith’s town,” I added for him.
He smiled and said, “Yeah. So what do you do?”
“I write.” That’s all I told him. I wanted to go question for question just to stretch out the conversation while we walked.
“You write what, articles for a magazine or something?”
I smiled. “No, but that’s a good idea.”
“What do you write then?”
“Poetry, and a couple of scripts.”
“Scripts? For what, television?”
“Yeah, I write for a small-time cable show.”
“What’s the name of the show?”
“You probably never heard of it.”
“What’s the name of it anyway?”
“Conditions of Mentality.”
He looked at me and said, “I watch that show. It comes on the New Millennium Channel, NMC.”
I said, “Yeah, that’s the one.” I knew he was younger than me then. I just didn’t know how young he was.
“You write for that show? That’s one of my favorite shows.”
I was suddenly embarrassed. I wasn’t expecting that. I smiled, nodded, and said nothing. I wanted to change the subject.
“What kind of modeling work have you gotten?” I asked him.
He shrugged his shoulders and blew it off. “You know, basically sports stuff. So, how do you guys pick the actors over there, because you have, like, new actors for every episode, right?”
I could see where he was going. He was beginning to lean away from the personal and get into a business talk. He wanted to act. I cut that shit short, quick!
“I don’t have any control whatsoever over the actors, and most of them have agents who call us up for auditions.”
Coe said, “Oh,” and nodded. “Sometimes, when you model, you want to do more than just sit there and take pictures, you know. That gets boring. You want to do something extra with your energy.”
I said, “I heard that modeling is very tiring, though, like you use up a lot of energy.”
He frowned at the idea. “Yeah, because you get tired of just standing around.”
I noticed that we were just standing around ourselves and had stopped walking. We had walked over to an area where cars were parked.
Coe said, “Wait right here,” as if I had somewhere to go. He beeped off an alarm system for a cream-colored Porsche that was two cars away from us and walked back over with a pager and a cellular phone with him.
I smiled and turned away momentarily to hide it. The boy was going into extra show-off mode, so I played my part for him.
“That’s your car?”
“Yeah.” He attached his pager to his gray shorts, and strapped on a gun holder around his shoulder that fit his cellular phone.
I said, “Let me see what your car looks like.”
He grinned and walked me over to it. He had COLBY on his California license plates.
He saw me looking and said, “I still have to change that.”
Inside of his car he had tan leather interior. Nice. Very nice! I sat inside and started daydreaming about cruising down the highway.
Coe leaned into the driver seat and took his wave cap off. His bald head had the same baby’s-ass smoothness as his face. I had to stop myself from grabbing it right then and there. I shook my head and climbed out of the boy’s car. He was too young for me, and there was nowhere for me to go with that brother but to the bedroom. His entire approach was a set up to get him plenty of California punnany. If you asked me, I would say that he had bent over backward to buy that car, and was probably still paying for it.
He said, “You don’t want to go for a ride?”
“I still have my car here,” I told him.
“We can come back to it.”
I said, “I thought we were walking on the beach.”
He nodded, seeing that I was not budging. “Okay, we can finish our walk.”
Finish our walk, I repeated to myself. I think the young brother was a bit teed off at me. Coe Anawabi was used to getting his damn way; that’s what I read into it, and he didn’t know who the hell he was dealing with. I may not have been a match for Victor, but I could eat most brothers alive, especially young, rookie players like Coe.
“I’m through walking anyway,” I told him. “I came out here to meet a man, and now I’ve met one.”
He just stood there and smiled at me, speechless.
I said, “So give me your number and we’ll just hook up at another time.”
He nodded and said, “All right. I like that; a woman who knows what she wants.”
“Yeah, and I don’t want your damn pager or your cell phone number. I want a house number. And if I call and find out that it’s not a house number, then I’m throwing it away.”
He looked at me to see if I was serious. “Damn, it’s like that?”
“Yes it is. My time is precious, and so are my phone calls.”
“Well, can I have your house number too?”
I said, “When I call you I’ll give it to you then.”
He stared at me for another minute and said, “Man, is that how the sisters are in Philly?” and handed his phone number to me.
I said, “Why don’t you go ask Will Smith? He seems to be the authority on Philadelphia out here. I’m just a pretty face.” I stepped away from him, but that didn’t mean I didn’t like him, nor did it mean that I wouldn’t give him a call. I just had to let his young behind know that if we ever hooked up, it would be on my terms, and my terms alone!
$ $ $
Later on that week, I met a brother at the grocery store who was a dentist with his own office. He was thirty-one and had less reason to show off. However, we didn’t talk too long when we first met, so I set up a weekend dinner with him to find out more about him. He suggested seafood at a place in Marina Del Rey. I told him I’d meet him there at seven. Eight would have been pushing it. Most times you don’t actually eat until an hour after arrival, so I didn’t want to lead the brother on by going too close to midnight on a first date with him. It was just a fact-finding mission.
Susan called me right as I got ready to go out.
“Hey, what’cha doin’?” she asked me.
She was so comfortable with me that she began to break the language down into real girlfriend talk: commonspeak.
I said, “Getting ready for a date.”
“Oh, that must be nice,” she responded.
“What are you doing tonight?” I asked her.
“Sitting here reading your book Flyy Girl.”
I froze on the phone. I still hadn’t talked about it with her, nor had I given her a copy.
She said, “I can’t believe that you didn’t tell me you had a book out. As soon as someone told me, I went right out and bought it.”
I was still speechless. I didn’t know what to say.
I finally said, “Well, I didn’t know that you would be interested in a black book.”
“Really,” Susan responded. She sounded sarcastic.
I said, “Well, you know, they have the black sections in the bookstores for the black readers.” My explanation was so ridiculous that I began to laugh.
Susan said, “So the African-American section is off-limits to me because I’m Jewish, right, and I wouldn’t understand? So I guess that I’m supposed to read in only the Jewish section.”
I stopped laughing and felt like I was in hot water for some reason. Did I offend Susan by not telling her about my book? I had to ask her to make sure.
“You’re not offended that I didn’t tell you about it, are you?”
Susan paused. I took that to mean that she was offended. “I wouldn’t really say that I was offended by it, I just felt distant, like you had a part of you that you wanted to keep to yourself. However, you’ve pub
lished it now, so they’re selling it. It’s no longer private. So I didn’t understand why you wouldn’t tell me about it, that’s all.
“I said, ‘Wow, we’ve been hanging out together and Tracy has told me nothing about it. What else hasn’t she told me?’” she said.
“Well, now that you’re reading it, what do you think?” I asked her.
She started to chuckle. I didn’t take that too well but I had to wait for her to answer before I could jump to conclusions.
“It’s good. I mean, you were quite an adventurous girl, curious and spirited, just like a lot of artists are. You wanted to find everything out on your own.”
“Does it make you think that I’m extra hardcore?” I asked her. I thought back to the night at the beach party in Venice, and my confrontation with Juanita.
“Everyone goes through that stage, Tracy. Punk rock, hip-hop, sports jocks, bad boys, sexuality; you name it, we all have those issues,” she answered. “This is an excellent coming-of-age book for the eighties generation, dealing with the fast life and all of the materialism. I think it’s great that you had the courage to put this out there. It reminds me of Bright Lights, Big City. Have you ever read that?”
I laughed and said, “Not unless I had to read it for school.”
Susan said, “See, so maybe you need to visit the other sections.”
“You mean the rest of the store? Let’s not get it twisted, Susan,” I said. “Just because you picked up my book, basically because you know me, that does not mean that other Jews and whites will. And I’m not mad about it, that’s just the way that America is, just like with movies and television shows.”
“Okay, so what about The Cosby Show?”
“I knew you were going to say that,” I told her. “And that’s typical. You find one black show to relate to, and that’s it. You get one black author to read—Maya Angelou—and that’s it.
“And we can have this discussion all night long, but I have a date to make,” I said. “I’m sorry for not bringing up my book before, but now that you have one, enjoy it, and I’ll sign it for you the next time we see each other.”
Susan laughed and said, “You promise?”