For the Love of Money (4 page)

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!...”

“Girrrl, 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

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.”