For the Love of Money

  The manager looked at me and said, “Well... yeah, I guess so. It isn’t every day that we have an actress in town.”

  I told him, “All right, well, can you make it fast? I have to get home already.”

  He snapped their damn picture and I drove the hell out of there, a happy camper at last!

  $ $ $

  I drove back home with that Infiniti, riding high, windows down, and was loving it! I imagined that my father would love it too, and so would Vanessa. That’s why I couldn’t take her with me. I didn’t want her eyes to get too big. I thought that I could take her shopping on Thursday, but then I would have to buy both of her younger sisters something. That would lead to me treating all of my cousins to gifts, first and second generation, as if it was Christmas. Damn! Money is a pain in the ass! However, since Vanessa was introverted, I thought that maybe she wouldn’t tell anyone.

  I laughed at myself for being so petty. I could afford to buy everyone a gift. As long as they weren’t all forty-thousand-dollar cars. My father deserved it. He had been pampering my mother for the past ten years. I guess he still had a guilty conscience for walking out on us like he did. Once I had made it to college at Hampton, my parents were traveling to the Bahamas, Florida, the Pocono Mountains, Ontario, and just having a good old time!

  I said to myself, Damn, how come that couldn’t happen when I was still at home? I went straight through school during the summertime to finish college early while working year-round as an RA at the dorms. I just wanted to get college over with. Then my girl Raheema started talking about grad school, and my behind did two more years for a master’s degree. Can you believe that? I never said that I didn’t like school. It was better than sitting at home and doing nothing.

  I was so busy thinking about my life that I barely paid attention to traffic. I almost cut off a delivery truck and wrecked my father’s gift in an accident before I could even surprise him with it. I made it back to Germantown on Chelten Avenue and stopped off for a raspberry-flavored iced tea. I climbed back in the Infiniti, buzzed the windows back down, and cruised for home.

  When I stopped at the stop sign of this small, dark street on the way to my parents’ house, two dingy brothers ran up to me from separate sides of the street. The one on the driver’s side stuck a damn gun in my face.

  “Get the fuck out the car and leave the keys in!”

  I’ll be damned! A carjack just five blocks away from home! I thought to myself.

  I sat there like a zombie and said, “This is a brand-new gift for my father.” I couldn’t even move for some reason, and I was saying the wrong thing, but I couldn’t help it. I was in shock.

  “I don’t give a fuck! Just get the fuck out!”

  The gun barrel had me frozen. Would I be shot right there and die over a damn CAR? I decided to open the door slowly to climb out. I was near tears already.

  The brother on the passenger side said, “Wait a minute, man. She look like, um... Tracy Ellison Grant from the movies.”

  “I AM!” I pleaded to him. I sounded like a big baby, but so what if he could get me out of it.

  “Who?” the guy with the gun asked.

  “Tracy Ellison Grant, man, from that movie Led Astray.”

  They just stared at each other for a second.

  “I AM, I AM!” I kept pleading to them.

  The guy with the gun shook it off and said, “She can afford to lose this motherfucka then. Are we gonna do this shit or what, man? We ain’t got all fuckin’ day!”

  “Naw, family, let her go. I ain’t goin’ out like that, man.”

  “Yeah, listen to him,” I said. “Don’t treat your sister like this. I love my people.”

  I actually said that to them.

  “Well, pull over and give me forty fuckin’ dollars before the cops come, and I’ll let you go. A nigga need somethin’ to eat, since you love your people so much.”

  I had running boards on each side of the Infiniti, so they both held on to the car as I pulled over and into the next block. I pulled out exactly forty-three dollars and some change. That was all I had on me. That damn crook had called out the right number. Forty. If I believed in the lottery I would have played it straight, 4-3-0.

  “This all you got?” he asked me.

  “That’s it. That’s all I have on me,” I told him, teary eyed.

  He looked to his friend and frowned. “Come on, man, let’s bounce.”

  The one who saved my car had one last thing to say to me.

  “Hey, sis’, keep this to yourself, aw’ight? Or put it in your next movie or something, ’cause remember, I didn’t have to say nothin’.” He even smiled when he said that, wearing a black and silver FUBU jacket of all things. I heard that FUBU stood for For Us By Us. If it did, then I guess the positive message got lost somewhere.

  Talk about a damn plot! The best ones jump up and smack you right in your face. I could barely hold on to the wheel when I drove home. Once I arrived, I parked in front of the house and calmed myself. My block was much safer and better lit than parts of Chelten Avenue. Germantown was a damn schizophrenic neighborhood!

  I had to get myself together before I walked inside to face my parents. I didn’t want them to panic and bug me all night about it. I just needed time to calm myself down. I came up with the wildest idea to call my agent in California from my cell phone. She usually worked late, and it was only after six in Hollywood, so I called her at her office.

  “Hello,” she answered.

  “Hey, this is Tracy.”

  “Hey, how are things going back in Philly? Did you have a good day? What time is it back there now? It’s dark already, isn’t it?” she teased me. “Remember, you have that radio interview tomorrow morning. So make sure you get plenty of z’s tonight.”

  I took a deep breath to stop myself from breaking down and crying again.

  “I was almost carjacked,” I told her.

  She stopped breathing while waiting for the punch line.

  “Wait, you’re kidding me right?”

  A carjack wasn’t my kind of a joke.

  I said, “I want you to get in contact with Omar Tyree about writing that part two to Flyy Girl. I think it’s time for us to really sit down and talk about it.”

  “Tracy, you’re serious.”

  “Yes, I’m fuckin’ serious!” I shouted at her. We were cool like that. My agent was my girl. I could vent to her when I needed to and she could give it back to me, but this was not the night for it.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll call his agent first thing tomorrow morning. Now in the meantime, tell me what happened. Did you call the police?”

  I said, “Really, I just don’t even feel like talking about it right now. A lot has happened to me today, as well in the past few years, and I just want to put the shit in a book or something and forget about it. I don’t know.” I was babbling, but I was serious too. I had a lot more shit to talk about, and those fucking piss-ass Hollywood interviews were nothing but sound bites: “So how did you make it? What’s it like to finally be a star? What are you working on next? Who is your other half, by the way? Are your parents proud of you?”

  What the fuck did they know?! They didn’t know shit, nor did they care. Another damn interview would follow mine next week, next month, or whatever. After a while, celebrities all sounded the same. I needed a new tell-all book. I thought that maybe I would call it Shit Happens, Good and Bad, and Then You Die.

  My agent was screaming, “;Tracy! Tracy, are you there?! What’s happening?!”

  I’m losing my fucking mind, that’s what’s happening! I was thinking to myself. I heard my girl loud and clear, I just couldn’t respond to her. I was in a daze. It was surreal, like I was on a witch ride, watching myself be tortured and was powerless to stop it. I hovered over the car from the outside and screamed at myself through the windshield, “What are you doing?! Don’t just sit there! Do something! Dooo something!...”

  Black English (Ebonics)

  “Gir
rrl, I be trippin’ on how

  you be complainin’ about

  HIM

  and how he be gettin’ fired

  and be in trouble wit’ ’da damn law.

  And What’sherface?

  She be gettin’ pregnint all ’la time,

  and yet be fussin’ about how

  they be act’din down at the welfare off’fis

  when she don’t even be bringin’ her right papers.

  Then we be all cryin’ about how

  white folks be act’din racists ’n shit

  when it be

  US

  that be playin’ ourselves short in the first place!”

  Copyright © 1992 by Tracy Ellison

  June 1996

  I was turning twenty-five years old in September, and I had just wrapped up my second year of instructing English at East Germantown Middle School. I had no idea what I was waiting for in my life, or why I thought that I could appease myself as a Philadelphia schoolteacher. Nevertheless, that was the career that I had settled on. It was the last week of the 1995–96 school year, and grades were already in, so we were basically babysitting the students for those last few days before sending them off for summer vacation. In walked this crazy mother with a scarf around her head and slippers on her feet (honestly), ranting about her daughter’s failing grade in my English class.

  “You mean to tell me that my daughter could go from a C grade to an F in the last report?” she asked me with foul intent. She even had a crowd of young students gathering for the early Monday morning drama.

  I was caught off guard by it. I had mailed this woman three letters during the final report regarding her daughter’s slippage in my class, her lack of homework completion, and her dropping test scores, and I could never catch the woman at home when I called. I always got one of her teenage children, who either told me that she was not at home, or asked me to hold the line for five minutes at a time while I waited for nothing. I considered the girl’s situation helpless, because I was not going to drive the hell over to her house and knock on her door to look like some maniac schoolteacher. I would probably be cursed out for that anyway, but I guess that’s what some parents need you to do nowadays to get the message about their children.

  Schoolteachers could get to my parents immediately! Was that so damn long ago? Had families become that lackadaisical? Was it an income thing? I couldn’t figure it out, and I didn’t have the patience for it.

  I told the woman, “I’ve been trying to contact you for two months.” I was very civil with her. After all, she was my elder.

  She said, “You expect me to believe that?” as if I was lying to try and cover my ass. The situation was embarrassing.

  “Do you have teenage kids?” I asked her. I planned to take the most logical route to why she hadn’t received any of my phone messages or mail.

  “Yes I do,” she huffed at me.

  “Do you work during the daytime?”

  I hadn’t received a work phone number for the parent.

  “I work at night,” she answered.

  “Are you at home when the mail arrives?”

  “What the hell does that have to do with you failing my damn daughter on the last report?”

  She stressed that last report thing as if she thought her daughter could just cruise on through my class in April, May, and June, and still expect to pass. Maybe that’s why she did it. Her mother seemed to be condoning it.

  I looked at her daughter, LaKeisha Taylor, a lazy, attitudinal type of child, and saw exactly where she got her demeanor from. While her mother poured into me with her attitude, LaKeisha looked as innocent as a flower girl in a wedding.

  “Hold on just a minute,” I said, and walked over to my desk. I had copies of everything. I pulled out three dated letters concerning her daughter’s lack of progress over the last couple of months and showed them to her mother.

  While she looked at those, I pulled out copies of test scores, because LaKeisha had a funny problem of somehow losing failing test papers.

  “Did you see any of these marks?” I asked her mother.

  Suddenly, my innocent student didn’t look so settled anymore.

  Her mother turned to her and said, “Girl, what the hell is this? How come I didn’t see none of these papers?”

  LaKeisha didn’t say a word, so I had to say my piece.

  “Well, she told me that she lost them.”

  “But she still had a C,”her mother continued to argue with me.

  “Those test grades do not include homework assignments,” I reminded her. “LaKeisha has not completed much of anything this last report. I can show you her entire fourth semester.”

  “And she can still fail with a C? I just can’t understand that.”

  I don’t think this woman was interested in seeing her daughter’s marks at all. She just wanted me to pass her that morning like presto magic or something, but I was not planning on being a magician. Her daughter was going to summer school. That’s all there was to it. It wasn’t that I disliked the girl, because I had been there myself when I was young, she just hadn’t done what she was supposed to do to pass. I had only failed seven students out of nearly one hundred and thirty that I taught that year, because I was very tough on them to learn their work.

  “Well, is there anything we can do?” her mother asked me. She had a nerve to try and act civil too, as if that was going to change something. We were four days away from summer vacation. All we were doing was finishing our final paperwork as the students said their last good-byes until September.

  I looked that woman straight in her face and said, “She can make it up in summer school.” I meant that too. It would be a lesson for LaKeisha in the future.

  Her mother returned to sour in a snap of a finger. “Well, who the hell can I talk to about this? Because I don’t believe she needs no damn summer school.”

  I could not believe what I was hearing.

  I asked, “What do you believe she needs?”

  The woman looked puzzled for a second. She responded out of spite, looking me over. “She needs a damn teacher who cares instead of one who’s just working for a paycheck. That’s what she needs. Gon’ tell me she can make it up in summer school.”

  That’s when the kids began to laugh and snicker.

  “Well, you can go to the principal’s office then,” I finally told her. Although that wouldn’t change her daughter’s grade either. I said, “LaKeisha knows the way there,” just to add my own spice to the issue.

  The woman looked ready to jump me so I stepped aside. Elder or not, I wasn’t about to let her kick my ass. I would have broken every nail on my fingers to protect myself.

  She looked me over once more before she left and grumbled, “You think you fuckin’ cute. That’s your damn problem. Come on, girl,” she snapped at her daughter.

  I was through! I didn’t have the skin to be a schoolteacher in the nineties. At least not at a neighborhood school. Maybe I should have tried a private or Catholic school where more parents were serious about education. However, I thought that would have been a sellout. I didn’t go to private or Catholic schools. The inner cities needed qualified teachers, and I was more than qualified. Many of the inner-city teachers were barely passing their teachers exams. They were just slipping into the system based on need. So I thought I had something extra to offer.

  At the end of the day, nearly every teacher in the school had heard about my stand that morning. A few of the older teachers advised me on how to deal with parents, but some of the teachers didn’t particularly care about my master’s degree and my high standards of instruction. Maybe they felt that passing students kept the peace, but I thought that only set students up to fail in the future.

  “I heard what happened this morning,” one of the science teachers said to me as I stepped into the hallway and locked my classroom door. I was heading out to my car in the parking lot.

  Desiree Johnson had been teaching for four year
s. She was twenty-nine and had a degree in chemistry from Maryland. We clicked immediately. We both believed in excellence and we were teaching to try and make a difference. Desiree just had a longer fuse than I had, and she had tougher skin. She was athletic and feisty, with a natural short crop of hair.

  “Yeah, I guess I might as well get used to that, hunh?” I said to her.

  “Unfortunately,” she answered. “But don’t give up on them, Tracy. It’s not the kids’ fault.”

  I smiled and shook my head, thinking about the children of students like LaKeisha. If my assumptions were right, she would definitely be having them. The boys were already eyeing her, and she didn’t have the head strength or the smarts to turn them away. At least I was strong enough to choose who I wanted to be with. That helps you to choose not to get pregnant. Like the saying goes, If you don’t stand for something, you’re liable to fall for anything.

  “So whose fault will it be when her children are failing twenty years from now?” I asked my fellow schoolteacher.

  Desiree chuckled, taking in my glum outlook. “It’s a long cycle that needs to be broken,” she said. She was right. I just wasn’t so sure that I was the one to do the breaking, and with every step we took toward the exit that day, I continued to think, What the hell am I doing trying to teach anyway? I still had this inner desire to be someone special, someone who would shine. I couldn’t shine at East Germantown Middle School.

  We made it out to the parking lot where I was stunned by the broken glass, the graffiti on the walls, and the dullness of the place, as if it was my first time noticing it. I loved Philadelphia, but I realized at that moment that I needed more than a regular job. I would suffocate and die there, spiritually. I just needed ...euphoria, and teaching wouldn’t be able to do that for me. I needed that rush of energy that chasing after fast and dangerous guys gave me. I needed the attention that wearing sexy clothes and having things my way out on the streets gave me. I wanted the whole temptation of going for forbidden fruit again, ignoring my parents and doing something wild and crazy. I was just bored out of my mind as a teacher, and I needed a reckless challenge in my life like I had so much of in my younger years.