For the Love of Money (2 page)

The next question came from a short girl wearing glasses.

“Do you still write your poetry?”

“Yes I do,” I answered. “I used to perform a lot of my poetry right here in Philadelphia before I moved out to Los Angeles.”

“Are you thinking about publishing any of it?” she asked. She looked like an aspiring poet herself, studious and introspective.

“Yes I am. So keep your eyes open for it in the future,” I told her. “I just don't know what I want to call it yet. I thought about calling it
Griot Sistah,
but I haven't decided on it,” I added with a smile.

The first guy in line asked me, “How hard was it to break into Hollywood?” He even had a tape recorder in his hand.

I grinned at him. “Why, are you planning to be the next Spike Lee or Robert Townsend?” He looked like a do-it-yourselfer, too strong-willed to wait. Hollywood would make you wait until you couldn't stand it anymore, but everyone wanted to be lucky, “Lucky Like Me,” another one of my many poems. Poetry was what kept me sane, during my insane years of dreaming about fame and fortune.

The young brother said, “Yeah, I want to make movies one day,” and cracked a smile. He was being modest. You
had
to be modest in a predominately black high school in Philadelphia. They
forced
you to be modest: the snickering, the eye-rolling, and the doubting. It was what made me so nervous about returning that morning, and so hard headed when
I
was a teenager.
To hell with the crowd! I'm going to be me!
This young guy was smarter than that, and his modesty protected him from the wolves.

I said, “It
can
be hard to make it in Hollywood if you're not prepared for it.
Very
hard. But that's with anything that you do. You have to learn as much as you can, always ask questions, and keep your dream alive until you make it,” I advised him. “Some people get their break early, some people get their break late. And I was just fortunate because I never stopped working.”

Another guy was ready to ask me a question, and he could not even stand at the microphone without acting silly. I could tell that he wasn't about anything before he even opened his mouth. He had that slick-ass, I-know-it-all look, the kind of guy I learned to curse out in a heartbeat.

“In your movie
Led Astray,
when you were naked, was that
your
body, or was that a body double?”

That was just the kind of question those immature guys were waiting for. A roar of laughter launched through the entire auditorium while the teachers shouted and scrambled to maintain order. The girls hissed at the boys for acting stupid, just like
I
would have done, but that only added to the noise. Mrs. Let motioned to have the student removed from the auditorium, but I stopped her.

“No, he has a legitimate question,” I responded. “I'll answer him.” First I had to wait for everyone to settle back down.

I composed myself and asked, “Has anyone seen Spike Lee's movie
Girl 6
?” A few hands went up, but far less than I expected. Philadelphia teenagers were mostly too damned cool to raise their hands unless you spoke to an advanced class, or at an advanced school. Some students needed extra motivation for everything.

“Well, in the movie
Girl 6,
the main character was repetitively asked to take her clothes off, and she wouldn't do it, and so she didn't get the role.
But the moral of the story was that there are many immature and oversexed
men
who run Hollywood, who have never grown up. And actresses end up having to cater to that immaturity,” I said. “Just like with these rap videos; they just
have
to see some ass and some tit, even though it's not in the song. So I'm
glad
that he asked me that question, because now I can tell everybody here that
men
need to grow the hell up!

“Why does the woman have to get butt naked and raw just for you to like the damn movie?”

The crowd went wild behind my frank explanation. I turned and had to apologize to Mrs. Let for my candor. She waved it off and told me to keep going. However, it wasn't as if all of the girls in the audience agreed with me. When the crowd settled down, a girl wearing a Muslim head wrap begged to differ. She stepped to the microphone and said, “I'm saying though, you could have told them no. We have to learn to respect
ourselves
like that. We can't just tell guys to grow up and mature if we're still gonna shake our behinds and whatnot in front of the camera, and
be
the hoochie mommas in the videos and movies.
We
have to start saying
no
to that!”

“THAT'S RIGHT! TELL HER!” a number of the guys shouted in her support.

I couldn't really argue with the sister, but I was embarrassed and my ego made me argue my point anyway.

“You know what? The irony is that if we
don't
get in the film at all, and someone else does the role who may not necessarily
care
about voicing their concerns, then we never get to change anything. So we have to learn to transform the imagery into something more than just naked sex.”

I guess my argument sounded weak because the Muslim girl jumped all over it.

She frowned, shook her head, and said, “No! You change the imagery by walking off of the stage and not doing it.” She walked away from the microphone and left me steaming.

I said, “That was the same argument we had in the thirties and forties about playing maids and Aunt Jemimas. But you know what? We
were
maids and Aunt Jemimas in real life, and we didn't make a
tenth
of what they did portraying one in a movie. So don't just focus on the image, try to change the reality. That's what
real
art is supposed to inspire us to do: change our realities.”

That ruined the entire event for me. I was on the defensive for the rest of the lecture. There were a few questions about my friends Raheema and Mercedes, which they had read about, and I gave them half-assed answers without
much feeling. I was a damn wreck. All of my doubts that morning were consuming me.

I couldn't wait to get the hell out of Germantown High School that morning. I felt so damned small! A mouse hole was too big for me. I knew better before I ever agreed to do the sex scenes in the movie, and it was
my
original screenplay. Artists have to be brave and stand up for their work. Maybe I wasn't as brave as I
thought
I was. Was I still the too-fast Tracy of my younger years, chasing Hollywood fame for my own personal high and fortunes? Or was I really the artist that I claimed to be, with something original to offer to the people? I was still confused about that. Was I doing it for the love of the art, or for the high of the money?

When the lecture was finally over, after signing autographs, Mrs. Let walked me out the door and tried her best to console me. “We all have our crosses to bear, young sister. The more you try to do, the heavier your cross becomes. That's why so many people decide to do so little, but that doesn't change the size of your cross. God will find ways to test you anyway.”

Ain't it the truth,
I thought to myself. I thanked Mrs. Let for having me and thought about how hard I fought to get to the big screen. I wondered if it was all worth it. I walked off by myself to climb into my rental car and slip away before anyone else could notice me.

$   $   $

My mother told me how much my young cousin Vanessa admired me. She was a sophomore at Engineering & Science High School in North Philadelphia, where my brother Jason graduated a year earlier. She had read my book
Flyy Girl
six times and memorized it. She was my first cousin Patricia's oldest daughter. Trish and I had never been close, going all the way back to my sixth birthday party, but can you believe she named her first daughter Vanessa Tracy Smith? The girl even had the nerve to look like me, subtract my light eyes. Vanessa had brown eyes so dark they looked black. She was a shade or two lighter than me, with dyed light hair to accentuate her allure. The family had all been telling her for years how much she favored me. I was flattered and looking forward to seeing Vanessa again, but the visit to my old high school had dulled my excitement a bit. I was no longer in a good mood. To make matters worse, since North Philadelphia was not exactly my cup of tea, I got lost trying to find E&S High School and ended up running late.

When I arrived, Vanessa was still waiting for me out on the front steps of the school with two friends in tow, just like I would have been. I smiled
and wondered how long she would have made her friends wait had I run even later.

“Oh my God!” one of her friends shouted. The other girl was more reserved, but they were both ready with their notepads and pens in hand for my autograph. I signed them immediately and told them to stay smart.

Vanessa played it cool. She cracked a smile and asked me if I had gotten lost again. I had told her previously that I could not find E&S to save my life, even when my brother was there.

“Well, I'll see y'all in school tomorrow,” Vanessa told her two friends. They looked like your typical girl power clique, all pretty and knowing it. They were various shades of brown like a box of chocolates, but they were nowhere near as flyy as
my
crew would have been back in the eighties. They were just... plain. The nineties generation was more flyy in attitude, and were much more reserved about it, like in a secretly snobbish sort of way. In the eighties, we were flyy physically, mentally,
and
with our attitudes. We were all out in the open with it, wearing all of our gold, designer glasses, silk shirts, Gucci gear, expensive coats, and plenty of fancy hairdos. We rubbed it all in people's faces:
I'm flyy, and you're not!
Which of course resulted in many of us getting flat-out robbed by the jealous haters.

I was figuring on giving Vanessa's friends a ride home before she quickly dismissed them. However, since E&S was an academic high school, many of the students who went there lived nowhere near North Philadelphia, but Vanessa did. She lived right off of Girard Avenue, across the bridge from the Philadelphia Zoo. Although, I didn't imagine that she hung around there much. Vanessa was more of a traveler.

She followed me over to my rented Ford in the parking lot and looked around as if I was driving something else. I was used to that. Hollywood was
full
of car watchers.

“It's a rental car,” I told my cousin. “All I need to do is get around in it. I'd rather not have all of the extra attention of driving a nice car while I'm home anyway.”

Vanessa smiled off her disappointment and shrugged. “I guess you can get tired of so many people watching you,” she said.

I nodded and opened the car doors. “You know I don't have to answer that.”

She said, “But you got a lot of attention
before
you moved to Hollywood.”

“And
you
don't?” I asked her as we climbed inside.

She shrugged again. “I have
other
things to do.”

Like what?
I thought of asking, but we had plenty of time for that. I would be in town visiting for two weeks.

“What kind of car do you drive out in Los Angeles?” she asked me.

I was afraid to even answer, but I answered her anyway. “A Mercedes.”

Vanessa grinned. “What color?”

“Black.”

She nodded. “I like the dark blue ones.”

Have you been in one?
I thought. Why was I holding back with her? I forced myself to ask her anyway. “Are you into cars or something?”

She nodded. “I'm into a little bit of everything.”

How about teenage sex and fast men? Are you into
that
?

I was assuming everything and I couldn't help myself. I just started to laugh.

“You're not trying to play out all of the things I did in
my
life are you? Because that's
not
the way to succeed,” I told her. I felt hypocritical as soon as the sentence left my mouth.

“No, I haven't done any of
those
things,” she said. “But I
do
want to live nice.”

She
did
live in North Philadelphia. I was a Germantown girl in
my
days. That made a big difference in perception
and
in lifestyle.

I was hungry so I decided to stop off at a steak shop for that nationally known Philadelphian treat: a cheese steak with fried onions, salt, pepper, and ketchup. Vanessa ordered a fish sandwich with cheese fries.

“You don't eat steaks?” I asked her.

She frowned. “Mmm, sometimes, but not a whole one.”

I looked over her body size. She was not my five foot eight height. Vanessa was closer to five foot six, and she did not have a body like I did at her age.

“How much do you weigh?” I asked her.

She grinned. “Why, I look skinny? I weigh a hundred and ten.”

At five foot five
and a half,
one hundred and ten pounds
was
thin.

“You better eat some of this steak, girl,” I teased her. “You're not Calista Flockhart.”

“Who?”

“The girl who plays Ally McBeal,” I told her.

“Oh. I'm not
that
skinny. I just don't want to be like my mom.”

I didn't know how to respond to that. Her grandmother, my Aunt Marsha, was big, and my cousin Trish had followed in
her
mother's footsteps. They both chose men who didn't stick around. Vanessa had every reason in the world to want more. I just didn't want to encourage her in the wrong way.

“Well, just don't overdo it,” I told her. “Good exercise will take care of any extra pounds before you even let it get that far.”

By the time we finished our food, it was close to four o'clock. I had an appointment in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, at six. I didn't want to be caught in rush-hour traffic trying to make it, but I couldn't take Vanessa, and I didn't want to rush away from her either.