For the Love of Money

  She had that right. A ghetto was a ghetto, and it was never pretty.

  “So this is where Ice Cube and John Singleton are from?” We were on Broadway, still heading north.

  “Or where they claim to be from. But South Central is a large area. Some parts of it don’t look this bad, but some parts look worse.”

  I asked, “You notice how ghettos are always gated up or closed in somehow? Even in Hampton, Virginia, they have those housing complexes where it’s only one way in—”

  “And one way out,” Kendra finished for me. “Ain’t it a shame? They make sure that you can’t run and hide anywhere to escape poverty. They throw it right up in your face.”

  We turned off of Broadway and onto another main street heading north again.

  “This is Figueroa. Ice Cube rapped about this street too. The prostitution and stuff, but it’s not like they say it used to be. I think they started cracking down on things after the riots hit.”

  We drove a few miles up, then Kendra pointed out where the LA Clippers play.

  “A lot of people go to the Clippers games when a good team like Chicago, New York, Orlando, or Houston come to play. It’s a lot cheaper and more practical than going to see the Lakers at the Forum. I even went to a couple of Clippers games out here, but I’ve never been to a Lakers game.”

  When we made it downtown, the place looked pretty empty to me.

  “This is downtown?” I asked. It looked like a ghost town compared to downtown Philadelphia.

  “Not much goes on in downtown LA, as you can see. Hollywood runs the show out here, not downtown.”

  We headed farther north on Western Avenue. I was paying attention to every street sign. I had Kendra to thank for that.

  “As you can see, we’re now in Chinatown. Or ‘Little Asia,’ as I like to call it, because there’s Koreans and Japanese here too. A lot of Filipinos and Samoans also live out here in California.

  “Over to your right is Dodger Stadium and plenty of Mexicans,” she said. She smiled and added, “That’s East LA, Tracy. Oscar De La Hoya town.”

  I said, “But I thought they didn’t like Oscar De La Hoya in East LA, or at least that’s what I hear every time he fights on HBO.” I liked to watch the fights with my father and his friends.

  Kendra nodded. “Yeah, a lot of them don’t, because, you know, the white man loves Oscar, and Mexicans can be like us sometimes. The more acceptable you are to white people, the less your people want to identify with you, as if Oscar sold out by being too clean-cut and popular.”

  “Until Oscar dies, right?” I cracked, sarcastically. “Then they’ll all want to claim him. ‘He was the best boxer that East LA ever had.’”

  Kendra laughed. “You know it, girl. Just like we do.”

  Finally, we made it up to Hollywood Avenue, but it wasn’t two hours like I had thought. It was more like forty minutes. Kendra pointed out everything.

  “This is where the stars put their hands in the sidewalk. That’s Mann’s Chinese Theater. They have a lot of movie premiere events there.”

  I said, “That place really does look Chinese.” It had Chinese architecture and everything.

  Kendra laughed. “Well, that’s why they call it what they call it.”

  “I wonder what the Chinese people think about that,” I said.

  Kendra laughed at me again. “Girl, you sound like a writer. You’re curious about everything.”

  “And you’re not? You’re the one who brought the map.”

  We drove up another few blocks.

  “Okay, now, this is Sunset Boulevard. This is my favorite.”

  I could easily see why. Sunset Boulevard was the most attractive street, with gigantic billboards for upcoming films, neon lights for shops, stores, and attractions, and plenty of fancy cars driven by unknown producers, directors, studio people, and stars. I couldn’t name any of them. I had no idea who was who.

  “This is West Hollywood, by the way,” Kendra told me. “East Hollywood looks like any other rundown city.”

  When we reached East Hollywood, I could see that she was right.

  “Damn, you’re not lying,” I said. “We went right from star town to slum town.”

  Kendra laughed and stopped herself short. “Hey,” she said with a hand up, “real people live here, and I don’t think they would appreciate where they live being called a slum.”

  “Okay, I take it back then,” I told her with a grin.

  “Now let me take you through Beverly Hills,” she said.

  We turned right onto Beverly Boulevard and headed back west.

  “Have you spent much time up here?” I asked her.

  “For what? I didn’t come out here to be involved in this.”

  I chuckled. Hollywood didn’t look all that spectacular to me either.

  “Well, where’s the big Hollywood sign?” I asked.

  She looked to the right past my passenger seat again.

  “You can actually see it from some streets, but I’ll show it to you. I’ll take you up to Griffith Park and let you look out over everything.”

  When we hit Beverly Hills you knew it! Everything changed to loveliness, and real money.

  “Damn, is that a used car lot,” I commented.

  They had a car lot with Bentleys, Rolls-Royces, Lamborghinis, Benzes, Beamers, and other fancy rides that were not new, but definitely still shiny and beautiful.

  “Yeah, used for eighty-thousand dollars,” Kendra joked. “And you see these stores around here. I wouldn’t even walk in these places.”

  The stores didn’t look all that fancy, but the names Gucci, Prada, Fendi, Chanel, Armani, Boss—like in Hugo—and many more, told you everything you needed to know. DO NOT ENTER UNLESS YOU ARE FILTHY RICH!

  I said, “Kendra, you never just walked in and asked what the prices were?” I was only joking of course. It was a black thing to joke about how underprivileged we were. Bill Cosby was famous for it, the “We were sooo poor” jokes.

  Kendra said, “Heck no. They have those buzz-in door things, and if you don’t look like you can afford anything, they’ll just ignore you, or buzz you in and make you feel stupid. ‘And what would you like to look at today?’”

  We broke out laughing.

  Kendra said, “Okay, now, let me show you these houses up here.”

  We drove a few blocks up and it looked as if we had just driven into a rich man’s movie. There were beautiful earth-tone colors, palm trees, grass, glass structures, brick, stone, new-world architecture, shapes, sizes... everything! Heaven on earth was the only way that I could describe it, or maybe I was exaggerating, especially coming from my blue-collar, Philadelphian roots.

  Kendra said, “Okay, now let’s drive deeper into it.”

  The blocks began to stretch into more greenery where most of the elegant, larger homes were out of view.

  “You see the difference? The richer you are, the more you can hide your house. They even have star maps up here where people actually ride around looking for people’s houses to take pictures.”

  “Did you buy one?” I asked her.

  She smiled, looking guilty. “Yeah, but just as a collector’s item.”

  “So you never looked at any of these houses?”

  “Yeah, I looked at them, but not because of who lives there. I looked at them because they were slamming. Now let me show you UCLA’s campus up here,” she said.

  “UCLA’s campus is in Beverly Hills?”

  Kendra looked at me with a grin that said a thousand words.

  “Girl, when you talk about a campus, this is it! And you know how people would always say that our campus at Hampton was nice. Well, wait until you see this.”

  We got back on Sunset Boulevard and headed farther west for UCLA. When we arrived, the campus was five times as large as Hampton’s. It was just as green, and twice as fancy. Hampton’s campus in Virginia may have been small, and it was definitely nicer than most, but next to UCLA there was little comparison.
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  It took me a while to even speak. When I finally did, I said, “Now this ain’t even fair.” That’s all that I could say.

  “Girl, this is about the biggest jock school in the world. They get all kinds of athletes,” Kendra added.

  “Yeah, I would imagine so. All they have to say is, ‘Let me invite you to see our campus.’ I mean, this is higher learning like a bitch. John Singleton had it right again.”

  Kendra laughed and said, “Remember the character that Ice Cube played in the movie? He was on campus for like, eight years, right? Just chilling.”

  “Yeah, I would chill too, but would you give up Hampton for this?”

  Kendra was stuck for a minute. “Maybe on the weekends, but not all the way.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said, doubting it.

  “I mean, you know, a black education and a black campus meant a lot to me. And we were hardly poor at Hampton.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” I admitted as we drove away from the Beverly Hills campus.

  “They don’t even have black schools out here, and they have a bill coming up this fall that will try and do away with affirmative action scholarships in education. In the entire state of California,” she told me. “And I’ll tell you right now, we won’t have enough people to back us to keep it.

  “They wouldn’t even try anything like that on the East Coast, because we have far too many educated blacks and higher institutions that would not allow it,” she said. “But in California, I think they can get away with it. The only person we have over here fighting for anything is Congresswoman Maxine Waters. That sister is all by herself out here.”

  “Sounds like you’re ready to run for office in a couple of years yourself,” I teased.

  “Maybe I will,” Kendra responded.

  The next thing I knew, we were on La Brea Avenue, heading south. I guessed that our Hollywood sightseeing was over.

  “Where are we going now?” I asked.

  “I’m going to take you down Crenshaw. That’s a major avenue out here.”

  “Didn’t they talk about that street in Boyz N the Hood?”

  Kendra smiled. “Of course they did.”

  Once we reached Rodeo, we made a left turn and headed east for Crenshaw. I was loving what I saw on Rodeo. The area looked close-knit, green, clean, and was filled with black people. The closeness of the houses there reminded me of home.

  “What neighborhood is this?” I asked.

  “Oh, this is Baldwin Hills. It’s close to Culver City, where they have a lot of the television studios, and right up from Inglewood, where I used to live when I first moved out here,” she answered. “This area and Inglewood remind me the most of home.”

  “That’s just what I was thinking,” I told her.

  “Yeah, Baldwin Hills has their own mall out here too. That’s where we’re heading to now. Are you hungry?” she asked me. “They have this soul food spot I want to take you to, and right across the street is the mall, and Magic Johnson’s movie theater.”

  I nodded to her. “Yeah, I heard about that. Is it nice?”

  “Yeah, it’s nice. He has like nine or ten different shows and a black wall of fame with actors, singers, and of course, athletes on it. We’ll make sure that we go to a couple of movies there before you leave, and maybe we’ll check out Mann’s Chinese Theater too.”

  “So where is this soul food place?” I asked her. “I’m starving.”

  We made a right turn onto Crenshaw and pulled right into a small parking lot at M & M Soul Food restaurant.

  “This is it,” Kendra told me.

  As soon as we walked into the restaurant, I noticed more of the long braided hairstyles. It was obvious that they weren’t much into fiddling with their hair out in LA. They just tossed in some braids for a couple of months and ran the town with them.

  “How long have you had your hair in braids?” I asked Kendra.

  She chuckled. “So I guess you noticed that about LA by now, right? I’ve had my hair in braids for a year now. At first, I just wouldn’t do it. I was sticking to my Baltimore roots, you know, but once I got tired of dealing with my hair, I said, ‘That’s it. I’m gonna do what everyone else out here does, slap in some braids.’”

  There were a few old-school brothers in there with Jherri-curls and perms, looking like they wanted parts in the revival of Superfly, but I didn’t comment on that. As long as they didn’t try to talk to me their hairstyles was their business.

  We ordered from the menu of various styles of chicken, fried fish, meat-loaf, liver, collard greens, macaroni and cheese, corn, rice, red beans, stuffing, gravy, cornbread and biscuits, with lemonade or soda. Neither one of us could finish our order, and when we stood up to leave, we could barely walk.

  “Yup, soul food does it every time,” I joked, rubbing my belly. “Now we’ll both have to find a sanitized toilet in a few hours.”

  Kendra laughed as hard as she could with a stomach filled with fattening food, which was not hard at all. We drove across the street to check out Baldwin Hills Mall. It was a two-level mall with nothing spectacular, anchored by a Sears at one end and a Macy’s at the other.

  “Excuse me, are you a model?” this guy asked me before we could even get inside of the mall good. After all, I was five foot eight and gorgeous with cat-shaped, hazel eyes. I considered myself sexier than Tyra Banks too.

  I smiled and decided to play along with him. “Something like that,” I answered.

  “An actress?” The short, stocky, and bald brother, wearing one of those blue muscle shirts that clung to his body like extra skin, was full of it. His pants didn’t give him much air to breath down low either. He had no idea who he was dealing with.

  “I’ve been known to play a role or two,” I told him. “You want an autograph?”

  Kendra held in her laugh.

  “How about you sign my card and I leave one with you?”

  “What do you do?” I asked him.

  “I’m a personal trainer. A lot of my clients are Hollywood types.”

  He handed me his card. It read “Body Work: The right build for the right you.”

  I started laughing.

  “Body Work. The name works, right?” he asked me, grinning with perfect white teeth.

  His name on the card was Derrick Conner.

  “I guess so,” I told him, still laughing as I handed it to Kendra.

  He gave me another one that I signed for him. Kendra was still holding in her laugh, waiting for us to step away from him so we could laugh out loud together.

  He looked at my signature and read it. “Marva Patterson? Where do I know that name from?”

  By that time, I had to look away before I killed myself trying to hold it all in.

  “You think about that on your way out, and I’ll keep this card handy. Do you do massages?” I asked him.

  “The best in Hollywood,” he bragged.

  Well, what’s your ass doing down here in Baldwin Hills instead of up in Beverly? I wanted to say, but I kept it to myself.

  “All right, well, maybe I’ll give you a call then,” I said as Kendra and I walked away.

  “Yeah, you do that.”

  Kendra looked at me and said, “Girl, do not play with these guys out here. Okay? Some of these guys are stone crazy. I mean, they take themselves to heart out here.”

  I was still laughing, but Kendra was not.

  She said, “I’m serious, Tracy. Don’t do that. This is not Philly, Virginia, or Baltimore. These guys have loose marbles out here.”

  “In other words, you have a couple of horror stories to tell me about,” I assumed.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Before Kendra could open her mouth to tell me about them, another brother stopped me in the mall. He looked tall enough to play basketball.

  He looked me right into my face and said, “Those contact lenses look perfect on you.”

  I don’t know if that was supposed to be his pick-up line or what. I said, “And
you know the best thing about it? I don’t even have to take them out at night,” and I kept walking. I don’t even think the brother got it.

  Kendra shook her head. “I can see it now. You’re gonna get yourself in a bunch of trouble out here.”

  I laughed it off and told myself to cut it out. I wasn’t a teenager anymore. However, all work and no play makes for a dull woman, and I was far from being dull.

  $ $ $

  By my fourth day in California, Kendra and I had visited several of the beaches, saw a few movies, visited Griffith Park, and I even checked out three different places to live for when I moved out there. One was a town-house complex in Baldwin Hills off of Rodeo. The other two were apartments in Inglewood, but I liked the Baldwin Hills townhouse more, which of course, cost more money to rent.

  “All I have to do is put down the security deposit and the first couple of months of rent in September when it’s available, and hopefully I’ll be set with something in the business by the time Christmas rolls around. In the meantime, I might need you to hook me up with a teaching position,” I hinted to Kendra, “just in case I don’t have what it takes to write in Hollywood.”

  “A substitute position?”

  We were chilling in the breeze of her backyard, as the sun went down at close to nine o’clock.

  “Yeah, just keep an eye open for me and tell me if I need to send in a résumé before I get back out here in late August.”

  The plan was to fly some of my things out to LA to leave at Kendra’s house a week before I moved, and then figure out the most sane way to transport my car and the rest of my things, which would not be cheap.

  Kendra bought most of her things out in LA, a smart idea. It was probably the smartest.

  I said, “Maybe I can sell my stuff back in Philly, and then start all over again out here like you did.”

  “Yeah, but I never had to sell anything. I moved out here right after finishing at Hampton. You might lose a lot of money doing that,” she said.

  I didn’t have any cheap, disposable furniture in Philly either. That was just my expensive luck.

  “I’ll just have to get what I can get for it,” I told her.

  “Okay, here she comes now,” Kendra said. We were waiting to talk to her “Hollywood connection,” a sister attorney who worked for the Writers Guild of America. How did Kendra know her? The woman’s sister lived right next door to her. Kendra just happened to live in the right place at the right time.