I said, “Look, we’ll stay in touch, Vanessa, it’s not like it’s the end of the world or anything. You’re my little cousin, right?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“So stop sounding like your boyfriend dumped you. God! How is that guy doing, anyway? Mr. Nineteen? Have you talked to him lately?”
Vanessa sucked her teeth and said, “He’s mad at me now.”
“Why,you wouldn’t go over to his house this weekend?” I assumed.
“No, he wanted me to let him in my house.”
I chuckled and said, “Oh, so he’s a bold one. And you see how they get, right? Ain’t nothin’ changed, girl. Not a thing,” I broke it down to her.
She said, “I know.”
“So, I’ll give you my address and phone number to call me collect, and we’ll just stay in touch and see what we can work out for the future.”
“Okay then.”
I gave my cousin all of my information over the phone and hung up feeling relieved. Vanessa could prove to be high-maintenance just like I was, whether she was introverted or not. In fact, with her introverted personality it was hard to know all that she really wanted until she made up her mind to verbalize it. So I decided right then and there, that if I had to deal with Vanessa on a daily basis at any time in the near future, I would have to stick it to her ass to get all of the answers right away.
I slid into bed and went right back to relaxing, daydreaming, and thinking about any- and everything that crossed my mind.
“Damn!” I told myself after a while. “I have to call the airport and change my flight plans. Back to Hollywood I go. Hollywood, Hollywood.”
That’s on Everything
My good looks,
I put that on my parents.
Because with Mom,
as pretty as she is,
and Dad,
as handsome as he is,
I just couldn’t miss.
My hard head,
I put that on my father
alone.
Because just like
he wanted to do
his thing,
I wanted to do
mine.
My poise,
I put that on my momma.
Because whenever I got
too hot,
she made sure
to cool my ass
back down.
My determination,
I put that on my race.
Because who else
has struggled
as much as we have,
pushing, striving,
and surviving?
My greediness,
I put that on America.
Because the good, old,
red, white, and blue
damn sure
makes you want it.
My craftiness,
I put that on the streets
of Philadelphia,
slippin’, slidin’, and hidin’
to put my thing down.
My confidence,
I put that on myself.
Because
I just think that
I was
born with it.
And my success,
I put that on everything.
Because everything I’ve done,
seen,
or been through
prepared me for
who I am today
and all that I do
for tomorrow.
Copyright © 1999 by Tracy Ellison
September 1997
I made it through my first full year of Hollywood, and after the summer of 1997, California had grown on me. Before the new television season got under way, I signed with the Writers Guild association, completed my continuation script to the season’s finale of Conditions of Mentality, and I had plenty of other television producers wanting me to write for their shows. I was “the flavor of the month” in hot demand and absolutely loving it! I even had a young stud with his nose wide open for me. However, Yolanda and I had grown farther apart.
In August, when I decided to freelance with my scriptwriting for the new television season instead of signing on full time with Conditions of Mentality, Yolanda snapped at me as if I were her daughter.
“I can’t believe that you didn’t sign on with Conditions so you can write spec scripts for these little black shows,” she said. “Do you understand what you’re about to do? You’re cutting yourself out of the loop with the real players out here.”
I said, “They all offered me the same amount of money, so I would rather have my freedom to write whatever I want, and for whatever show.” It was that simple to me. Besides, Tim Waterman had left as the producer of Conditions, with Joseph Keaton still there as the head writer, and I damn sure didn’t want to deal with that man every day. Tim had hired me and protected me (regardless of whether I gave him some of my pudding or not), and without him there, I didn’t feel comfortable about going back.
Yolanda said, “I keep telling you, Tracy, you want to look at the long term, and not the short term.”
Frankly, I was tired of hearing her mouth. Every time I turned around, Yolanda had something to suggest to me rather strongly. I never denied that she had hooked me up with my first Hollywood job, but I wasn’t indebted to her for that. It wasn’t as if she was my manager or anything, and I always paid her fee to review my contracts, so it wasn’t as if she had given me anything for free.
I said, “Well, I’m moving on,” and that was the end of it.
Yolanda stopped her horses from running and asked me, “Are you still hanging out with Susan Raskin?”
I didn’t like her question because I knew where she was going with it. I was even tempted to lie and tell her no, but I didn’t.
“Yeah, we’re still friends,” I answered.
“Okay, because you’re gonna need some allies, especially if you plan to make your own way instead of establishing yourself somewhere stable.”
“Somewhere stable?” I responded. “Conditions was not stable. We didn’t even know if we would have another season until the last minute.”
“And it was your shows that pushed them over the top, Tracy,” she reminded me. “So if you would have stayed there, you could have increased your name recognition for the bigger shows: dramas on NBC, ABC, and CBS.”
“Well, who said that I wanted to stay in television anyway?” I snapped back at her. “I’m just having fun right now writing these scripts.” My real mission was to write feature films, but I kept that to myself.
Yolanda got real quiet over the phone. She said, “All right. You’re gonna go right ahead and fuck up your career messing around with these little cliques.”
“They’re all cliques out here,” I told her, “and everywhere else. So which one are you connected to?”
I was tempted to ask her if she really went to Howard University in Washington, D.C., because she damn sure wasn’t down with Black Hollywood. I wonder if Kendra knew how anti–black business Yolanda was. I don’t believe that she did know, because they didn’t really talk about business like we did. Kendra wasn’t in the business.
I planned to spend my twenty-sixth birthday hanging out with my two main girls on the West Side, Kendra and Susan. They got along together, too. At first I was a little nervous about mixing a Hollywood Jew with a Baltimore “sistah,” but we all related on a human level, and Susan liked how “real” Kendra and I both were as opposed to the “fake” Hollywood girls (her words, not mine) she grew up with in California. I guess you could say that Susan was “crossing over” to us, but after a while, I began to wonder if she had a man, or was even interested in men, because she never talked about them like Kendra and I. Susan never seemed to have any opposite-sex dates either.
“Hold on, it’s the telephone. Turn the stereo down for a minute,” I told them. We were all at my place getting ready to go out while listening to the Roots, the Philadelphia hip-hop band, on CD.
“Hello,” I answered.
“It?
??s Coe. Happy birthday, Tracy! Do you need me for anything?”
“Not tonight, but I’ll let you know.”
“I know you will,” he said with a chuckle. I hated to admit it, but I had to turn Coe Anawabi into my little sex slave. It was better than sleeping with new men that I didn’t particularly like just to satisfy my intimate needs. The only problem was Coe’s age. The boy turned out to be twenty-one. I found that out in a past photo shoot he had taken for Vibe magazine earlier that year.
Kendra looked toward the phone and got suspicious. She had witnessed my woman power over Coe when she arrived back in California in mid August. Susan met him too, but I don’t know if she suspected anything. I just introduced him as a friend. Maybe Susan did suspect, but I didn’t really care. Coe was still fine, young, and mine, or at least for the meantime, because I couldn’t delude myself into keeping a younger man.
I said, “I’ll be calling you soon. Just stay on standby.”
“On standby?”
“That’s what I said,” I snapped at him. Coe still tried to assert himself every once in a while, but it wasn’t working. I had him firmly under my spell.
When I hung up the phone, Kendra stepped near me and whispered, “What did you do to that boy, Tracy?”
I played innocent and asked her, “What?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
I don’t think Kendra thought that Susan knew from the way that she was talking in code, or maybe it was a black thing to keep the brother talk to ourselves.
“No I don’t know,” I told her.
She looked at me sternly and said, “We’re gonna talk. Later.”
I looked over to Susan and watched her dancing to the Roots. She had this stiff shoulder move with her fingers snapping to the snare drum with no body or leg movement to the bass. I shook my head and started to laugh at her.
“Susan, what’s up with the legs, man, move your body.”
She tried to move her body and legs and it only made the situation worse.
“Oh, my God! I’m gonna have to give you dance lessons,” I joked with her.
Kendra started to laugh too.
Susan said, “Kendra doesn’t move all that much either.”
Kendra stopped and said, “Don’t go there, okay? I can dance when the music is right.”
“No you can’t. You think too much to dance,” I teased her.
“Whatever,” Kendra responded to me. “Who made you the dance expert?”
“The rhythm,” I said to both of them, “I know how to follow it.” I rocked it for them, real smooth and whatnot to show them how it’s done.
“Well, isn’t this a Philadelphia group?” Susan asked. “She has an advantage over us,” she said to Kendra.
“That doesn’t mean anything. I can dance to Dru Hill better than Kendra, and they’re from Baltimore, and I can dance to Snoop Doggy Dogg better than you, Susan, and he’s from Long Beach.”
“I’m not from Long Beach,” Susan responded with a chuckle.
“It’s close enough,” I told her.
“Are we just about ready to go now?” Kendra asked me.
I said, “Yeah.”
“Well, let me use the bathroom before we leave then.”
Kendra went to use the bathroom, and I had this crazy thought on my mind to get the scoop on Susan and her love life.
“Susan, do you have a boyfriend or anything who you never talk about?”
She smiled at me and shook her head as if I had caught her off guard.
“I’m serious,” I told her. “You never even talk about guys. You don’t like girls, do you?”
Sometimes my damn mouth needed a zipper on it, I swear!
Susan looked at me and said, “No, I don’t like women like that! I just keep my personal life to myself. Besides, I’m not serious about anyone right now anyways.”
I tried to joke it off with her.
I said, “Okay, because I know I look good, but I like brothers to tell you the truth, Susan.”
Susan was stunned with this big old smile on her face that she couldn’t seem to erase.
“You can be very vain sometimes, okay, Tracy. Very vain,” she told me.
I smiled and said, “Well, thank you. Do I measure up to the other Hollywood girls you know?” I was referring mainly to white girls with loads of A-list money, and I was still far from it. Even Susan had a BMW to my Toyota, and despite my moderate success in scriptwriting, I had still not gone crazy with my income.
Susan shook her head and answered, “Not quite. You may be vain, but you’re still very practical. The girls who I know, they’re vain and impractical, and those are two very bad combinations to have.”
I said, “Yeah, because I can’t afford to be impractical. Yet,” I added with a grin.
Kendra stepped out of the bathroom, and we all made our way to a club off of Beverly Boulevard in Susan’s midnight blue Beamer. Who the hell wanted to ride in Toyotas? We wanted to show up in style.
The party was jam-packed that night with a mixed crowd and a New York DJ who must have been really popular, because the crowd was loving him!
“Wow!” Kendra said. “I haven’t been to anything like this over here.” She was referring to California parties.
I said, “Me either,” because the whole place was dancing for a change, and that represented the power of the DJ to pick quality songs that made you move. He couldn’t miss with Lauryn Hill and the Fugees.
“Have you been to a party like this before, Susan?” Kendra asked.
Susan smiled and said, “Yeah.”
I looked through the crowd and spotted rappers Yo Yo and Mack 10, with a posse of other West Coast rappers in the house that I didn’t recognize as readily. I wonder what they all thought about the New York DJ playing the New Jersey–based Fugees for a California crowd. I guess it was all love, though. Everybody wasn’t mixed up into the East Coast–West Coast feud.
Kendra spotted Yo Yo and said, “I remember girls at Hampton back in the day who used to love themselves some Yo Yo. That ‘Pass It On’ song was their anthem.”
I laughed and said, “I know just who you’re talking about. Those girls got high like every other day. I wonder if they ever graduated.”
Kendra said, “Yeah, they graduated. It just took them an extra couple of years.”
She asked Susan what school she had attended.
“Stanford.”
Kendra nodded. “Pretty good school, and good sports teams.”
“Yeah,” Susan said with a pumped fist and a smile. “Go Cardinal!”
I smiled myself.
“Hey, you wanna dance?” someone asked Kendra.
She looked and smiled at me before going to get her groove on.
“It’s me and you next, Susan,” I said. “Don’t get nervous now.”
“Hey, Tracy,” someone called me, tapping me from behind. I turned and met eyes with Richard Mack.
“Hey, Rich.”
“Let me talk to you for a minute,” he said.
I looked at Susan. Before I could open my mouth to her, she said, “Go ahead, I’m fine.”
I stepped aside with Rich. He said, “Remember I was telling you about that project in the spring?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Well, I just sold a pilot to UPN for thirteen episodes in mid-season. I was wondering if you wanted to write a couple of the scripts. I wrote four of them myself already. And do you know Juanita Perez?”
I grinned. I didn’t hold a grudge against the sister or anything.
I said, “Yeah, I know her.”
“Well, she’s working on a couple of scripts too.”
“So, what’s the pilot about?” I asked.
“It’s called Brothers and Sisters, about a group of Hollywood blacks all from different walks of life who rent a house in Beverly Hills, while they all try to make it in the business.”
I smiled. “That’s pretty clever. Why didn’t you tell me about that bef
ore, you were afraid that I might steal your idea?”
He chuckled and said, “I trust no one until I have the paperwork signed, and now I have it.”
“So, what is it, three guys and three girls, a black version of Friends?” I was only guessing. Friends and Seinfeld were the talks of television that season. Friends was coming in and Seinfeld was going out.
Rich smiled at me again. “You know how Hollywood works by now, Tracy; copying a successful show is always the bomb.”
I said, “Well, yeah, you can count me in on that.” A few extra dollars and more script credits wouldn’t hurt me at all. That was what I was out there to do, to put my thing down.
“You’re not signed with Conditions for the season?”
I frowned. “No, they have a new producer so I didn’t feel it was comfortable for me. But they’ll still look at my spec scripts, and my continuation from last season kicks off the show, so they’ll be calling me; they just don’t have me under contract.”
“Have you ever thought about developing your own show?”
All of a sudden, the party became secondary. Rich and I were talking business in that place like nothing else mattered.
I said, “I haven’t even thought about a show idea, but thanks for asking me. Maybe I should think about that.”
Rich nodded with a big grin. “It pays well. You become the show creator, and you just sit tight, write a few scripts here and there, and start working on creating another show.”
He said, “I read about writers who make their living that way, whether the shows are successful or not.”
“Black writers too?” I asked him. I couldn’t see that idea working so well for a black writer. The success rate of every show was too important to us.
“If you’re good enough, they’ll pay you to do next to nothing just to keep you away from the competition,” Rich told me with a greedy grin.
Once I thought about it, I didn’t know if I liked the idea of developing shows just to make a quick buck and then dropping everyone who put their hard work and effort into it. That’s what had so many Hollywood types scrambling on their last dollar to make the ends meet as it was, especially in Black Hollywood.
“Do you think that’s right?” I asked Rich candidly. “I mean, we both know how hard it is for black people to keep a show on the air. Developing new shows just for the money seems really irresponsible to me.”