The Importance of Being Dangerous

by David Dante Troutt

  There were none. So such were the new rules of Whiteboy. As if on cue, Yakoob fired up a monster spliff, the Ohio Players grooved from the stereo, and the game was on.

  “Nominate, Griff. It’s on you, dog,” Yakoob told him.

  Now for the argument: “I’ve been thinking about something Sid said to me on the way to Koob’s comedy act,” Griff started, toothpick in his mouth. He walked over to her with his stick in his hands. “She said that life may be too short to ever sacrifice your voice.”

  “I said that?”

  “Something like that. I don’t remember it exactly, but it was very powerful. It got me thinking about getting some real power and a booming fucking voice.”

  “I’m hip,” Koob nodded.

  Griff was excited to find a taker and stepped toward Yakoob. “Did you know that Solutions, Inc. is a Fortune 500 company already?” From their expressions it was clear they did not. “Well, I think we have to get in on this Solutions, Inc. IPO. We gotta own a big piece of that slave ship right now, on the cheap, just before it goes public. So I nominate the whole fuckin’ company.”

  He stood before the break, settled his eyes on the fat rack, and lowered his body down into the kitchen like a crane. Griff had the best break of them all, but he usually scratched. Scratch on a break, you just sweeten life for the next up. Pop! The stick punched whitey, and Griff’s whole body snapped out of its sockets like a bad bone. The thirteen, four, eight, and eleven balls all dropped on the break in that order, and Griff didn’t scratch. Sidarra was still skeptical. Now he had to declare his point.

  “One point two million kids in the New York City public schools, about half black. That alone makes those bastards eligible.” Griff’s eyes never left the Amistad. The balls spread virgin across the table, loose change looking for a pocket. He was ready to run them all down. Griff had too-good power yet bang-bang aim, and he preferred the real long balls on a line. He could hit ’em so hard they got dizzy for holes. Bam! Four in the corner, sets up the six opposite side. Griff’s body did a James Brown spin.

  “This is only their sixth year in business,” he declared next. “They already remastered a dozen school districts in cities across the country—thanks to Sid’s boss, Eagleton, the star director on their board. Six, cross corner, whitey splits the nurse, ten in the side.” He stroked, jerked English underneath, and the cue ball dropped the six, spun back between two balls touching, and sent the ten right where he said he would. By rule, Griff needed only one more ball for persuasion.

  Yakoob had been deep in thought, studying the balls arrayed before them like a poker hand. “This one ain’t gonna be easy, brother, gettin’ hold of private company stock,” he said. “Shit,” Koob laughed, “it’d be quicker to place a bet online, kill the fucking schools chancellor, and collect.”

  Griff looked over at him and grinned. “I thought you were a badass.”

  “Nah. Raul’s the badass. I’m just good,” Yakoob answered.

  The air was too thick with testosterone, and it was time for Sidarra to cut through the nonsense. “Hold up,” she snapped impatiently. “There’s no way for us to buy Solution shares before the IPO, Griff. And the price will be too high afterward. You know that. You’re either in already or you’re invited to buy in at the offer price. But we’re strangers. Koob can’t just hack our offshore funds into a purchase. C’mon.”

  Yakoob immediately deflated, but she was right. Until then they had managed to gain as Solutions gained by following its portfolio and buying stock in the companies it owned stock in. If they could have bought Solutions stock before, they would have done it outright. Sidarra seemed to intolerate without having to take a single shot.

  “No, baby, but he doesn’t have to. We can do it all together.”

  “How so?” she said, sliding back on her stool and folding her arms across her chest.

  Griff let his cue rest against a velvet wall, walked closer to them, and leaned back on the Amistad. “This is the angel round of financing for Solutions.”

  “The angel round?” she repeated skeptically.

  “Yeah, the last one before the IPO. This is when preferred venture capital and affiliated investors get invited to pump them up before they go public. I even know one of the vice presidents who handles the deals there.”

  “You know him?” she asked incredulously.

  “I don’t know him personally, but I know who he is. Apparently a real dick named Goldman. My wife’s investment house is one of the banks doing the offering.”

  The mention of his wife, even if not by name, broke an unwritten rule in her head, and Sidarra’s skepticism got a jolt of bitterness. “It sounds convoluted, too many steps,” she said. The look on his face as she spoke indicated for the first time that maybe Griff had a problem with people disagreeing with him. So she pushed it. “I don’t think it’s worth doing. I think we probably leave it alone.”

  But Griff was not angry. He leaned his fingers on the table and searched for words. All the dance of body English was done for now, and he reached for another type of persuasion. “You’re right that it’s not easy. And it’s probably risky. We would have to be angels. This is how they do it. This is how the ones who know each other make each other richer and more powerful. So we’d have to become one of them—or come off to Goldman like one of them.”

  “How do you do that, homes?” Koob asked, not sure whose side of the argument he wanted.

  “We have to create an entity that sounds like one of their affiliated investors, their angels. That entity buys in as if it should have been in all along.”

  “How’re they not gonna know we’re not who they don’t know?” Koob asked, twisting up his lips. “We don’t even know who they know, and that shit’s probably locked up in company files. I can’t just go online and learn that.”

  Griff took a deep breath, stood up, and held his cue with both hands in front of his chest. “Well, we’re gonna need to get some inside knowledge about that somehow, because Belinda’s taken all that stuff back to her office. And then we’re gonna have to get a little lucky. One of us is gonna have to catch Goldman at his desk when he’s in the right mood to fuck up. From what I hear, he’s either flustered or half drunk by late afternoon. If we sound like money he knows, the phone call should be quick. Then I’ll follow up with the paperwork and we wait for the day to come.”

  Sidarra’s doubts relaxed just slightly. “How much are you thinking about buying?”

  Griff smiled. “As much as we can. At least two hundred thousand dollars. We’ll stand out at less than that.”

  “Nah, sweetie,” she said. “That’s most of what’s there.”

  “It’s a risk, no doubt,” he quickly responded. “Bu, it’s not our money anyway. And the payoff will be enough to turn all of us white, even Koob.”

  “Yeah?” Koob said, ignoring the joke. “How much?”

  This time Sidarra answered. “I would think it’s on the order of eight, maybe ten times the purchase value, depending on when and if we sold.”

  “Then finish the game,” Koob declared.

  “Don’t blink now,” Griff said. His best shot coming up was a high-line diagonal, two in the downtown corner, with a slight kill so he could smoke the company joint with the five off the cushion.

  “The percentage of black male children under fourteen diagnosed with special ed needs, learning disabilities, or pharmacologically treated conditions is, like…” Bam! Whitey came rushing, crushed the two across the table, dropping it with a thwack. Griff jumped out, straightened up, and spun. He especially liked to spin.

  “Sixty-four,” Sidarra said suddenly, smiling now with butt-naked approval. “Sixty-four percent.”

  “Okay then,” Griff exhaled gently.

  There was a pause. “You sure you wanna do some Securities Exchange Commission federal-style shit?” Koob asked a little nervously.

  “Practically every single one of my clients in a holding pen today came through Chancellor Eagleton�
�s watch,” Griff declared. “That’s one dangerous motherfucker.” There’d be no more intolerance this time. The game was done. They all looked at each other for a minute. A song ended. A brief moment of silence ensued. “Koob, you better let your boy back in here.”

  Koob went to fetch Raul from the bar. Sidarra smiled all the way over to where Griff was standing to say: “You pretty damned pleased with your fine self, huh?”

  His grin took on a little mischief. “Yup.” He couldn’t hold back the giggle. “What’d the man say a while back? Let no one fuck asunder.”

  “How’s Raul gonna work on this?”

  Griff turned away from her. “We’ll see. Koob’s always got ideas about how to use him. The guy can find things we don’t want to be around. Maybe he finds some executive’s briefcase in a cab. Surveillance. You know.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Okay then. Please be right.” She leaned up on tiptoes and kissed the side of his lips. “And thank you, sugar.”

  Yakoob came back through the curtain with Raul behind him. They sat down on one of the velvet couches to finish a drink.

  It was now time not to let all Griff’s body jive and gyrations go to waste. Sidarra promptly challenged him and him alone to a round of straight pool. And though his body was just as magnificent doing its theatrics after every shot, Sidarra just as promptly beat him three games in a row. Because she appreciated how to play the balls gently and the value of a slow roll.

  11

  MONEY CAN BUY HAPPINESS, but it can’t aim at hurts. Money’s joys distract from old pains, but cannot cure them. Happiness, or money, just seems to work that way, which may be why drug addicts wake up from nights of euphoria only to hate their lives all over again. Sidarra did not hate her life. At times now it even seemed to hold a little promise. Like Raquel. Like a roomful of men, not her brothers, who worked for her survival and a little more. What she hated in a deep, unspoken place was not being able to share any of that promise with her mother or her father. A little bit of grief always lingered behind every accomplishment that went unshared with them. She also hated that she was nearing forty and had not found the love who would share the limelight she once imagined singing under. She hated not really knowing for sure if she was desirable to a special man. Sometimes she hated her brothers for not protecting her from bad men. She hated that, other than herself, her daughter had only Mrs. Thomas to rely on, sometimes Aunt Chickie, and some occasional fast-food laughter with Michael, a good but inadequate older man. She hated the bad decisions that seemed so right at the time. Money couldn’t answer those “whys” or buy out the regrets.

  The Full Count was nice, almost perfect, except that Sidarra always thought she saw men like Raquel’s father sitting at the bar there. It had the look of the places men run to. Her mother’s mirror in the storage room brought these unkind thoughts alive one afternoon. Sidarra had taken a personal day from work and planned to catch up on paying bills that had accrued to her real name, not her alias. That didn’t last long before dresses in boxes and hats on hooks distracted her. She put on her favorite Anita Baker album and joined every note. Anita Baker’s band would fit a place like Q’s well, she thought. But it didn’t take long for all those “sweet surrender”-type lyrics to bring back Sidarra’s regrets. Like the image of Raymond, Raquel’s father. Ray was not a postman or a pimp. He was a camcorder man she’d met one day at a hot dog stand outside of City College where she was a senior. He was a sophomore, he said. The conversation should have ended there, since Raymond was not in fact anybody’s sophomore. He was just a hungry guy with thick black curls, the right lines, and a frankfurter jones. Sidarra was already twenty-nine. He was like fourteen, or so he later seemed. She had missed out on a straight run of college; she got interrupted by career misguidance, course credits that didn’t add up to anything, debt that did, and the substitute teaching jobs she had to take in order to stop asking her parents for money. Her brothers had cost them enough. Along came Ray.

  Ooh. He has green eyes, she thought, almost aroused already. Green eyes. Long, pretty lashes.

  “It’s better without the bun,” Raymond told her. She knew it was a stupid line, but he didn’t seem to mean it that way. There was no furtive look, no ridiculous tongue action. He was either very young or kind of mysterious. “I mean, you split it open, you mix mustard and ketchup in the slit, and the juices sort of come alive in your mouth. Why am I telling you this?” he asked.

  Because he really was stupid. Raymond was what Aunt Chickie later declared “a stupid fool.” Yet there had been so few of them in Sidarra’s life until that point. Everyone needs at least one completely stupid fool. They make life fun and interesting. They talk about what little they know as if it’s the only thing in the world, which conveys a kind of sincerity, and sincerity can be sexy if it’s attached to green eyes and long lashes. Sidarra already knew that she was boring. Men might whistle at her ass on the street, but it was certifiable fact by the time she was about twenty-seven: she was nobody’s lounge singer. She was dull. A substitute teacher. Someone who loved children. Someone who suffered from poor advice. So this time, when Raymond asked her if she wanted to actually share a naked hot dog and see if he was right, she ignored all good sense and said yes.

  They were in bed together three hours later. The size of his dick alone told her she was right to act on impulse. He wouldn’t stop slapping her with it. He waved it all over her body like a metal detector wand. He wanted her to hold it, cup its pulse, squeeze it, slide Vaseline on it, and put it inside her the way she liked it. And he said these things sincerely, things that had been said in other ways before but were clearly lies. These were not so clear. It would take months before she admitted what lies they were. Instead, she just wanted to feel good. Raymond could grope her for hours. He was the first man to hold her vagina in his mouth. He sucked her nipples like a wild infant. It didn’t matter if he was a boy. She was a girl in more ways than she cared to confess. In her room on lower Morningside Avenue, she played catch-up on fun with him. She had never thought through her pussy before. She had never had orgasm with a man. She had never masturbated after lovemaking. Clearly she was in love. In love at that age meant admitting the part about masturbating; it even meant allowing him to see her do it. Which led to the whole thing getting out of control, his filming her with a camcorder he produced somehow, and Sidarra drinking too much cheap wine from a box a few times so he could record more sex. If you could string together onto one film all the hours Sidarra backslid with Raymond, it would not seem like a lot for one life. Yet the tape would always contain those precious few moments when one afternoon Raquel was conceived.

  The aborted engagement, like the end of a fond dream, remained a burning moment in Sidarra’s life. Like the videotapes Raymond disappeared with soon after he learned she was pregnant. His attentions were not love after all. He was only twenty-one, it turned out. Had maybe one job. Might have been bisexual, she heard from a friend of his she bumped into on Christopher Street. Whatever Raymond was, he was wrong and he was gone. And after Sidarra went on to finish her final graduate credits with Raquel showing under her shirt, her parents helped her see the truth of it all: she had been a stupid fool (but would not stay that way) and she would be a mother (forever).

  The cat was staring up at her now, sensing something was not right. Sidarra turned off Anita Baker, folded up the dress she was wearing, and went shopping. Her alias credit card had not yet visited Saks Fifth Avenue.

  IT’S NOT EVERY DAY you find yourself inviting a twenty-two-year-old murderer over to your house to sit on your couch and look at your stuff, but money can bring that too. Raul had never been to Yakoob’s apartment before and sat, quiet as dull pain, in his pinstriped suit, suppressing his awkwardness. Yakoob had a lot of things—several computers on a wraparound desk, stacks of manuals, hundreds of music CDs, clean rugs, nice plants, some artwork, soft, deep furniture—and everything was neat. H
e watched a little nervously as Raul’s tiny eyes scanned what would be nice to rob. It was good that Marilyn was at work, that she knew nothing of this part of investing, because out of all of it she would hate this guy the most.

  “How’s your moms?” Koob asked. Raul just nodded. Koob poured a little gin into two glasses sitting on the coffee table between them. He raised his and said, “To your pops, man.” Raul smiled, reached over, and touched his glass.

  Koob sat with his hands on his knees and tried to figure out how to have this meeting. “Okay then, nigga, as you know, you owe.” Raul nodded again. “I mean, that Philadelphia shit for four months was cheap, but not free. There’s some heavy stuff in the works, and you gotta do your part for us.” Again Raul just nodded. “You gonna have to leave that thug shit behind, ’cause this ain’t that kind of game, son.”

  Raul reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a fat, cigar-sized blunt. “Yo, can I smoke in here?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Do your thing. Now,” Koob continued, “there’s things you gotta know and things you don’t ever need to know. We need you to get some information.” Raul’s eyes perked up in the middle of a long toke, followed by three very abrupt gasps, which Koob waited for. “You ever been inside an office building in midtown?”