For the Love of Money

by Omar Tyree

  “But if what you’re telling me is the case, from Omar’s standpoint, since I’m not getting back with Victor, then my fans wouldn’t be interested in Flyy Girl the movie either, because they would know that it wouldn’t end happily ever after,” I added.

  Susan smiled. “You wouldn’t have to put that in the movie, you just end it exactly the way that the book ended.”

  “By leaving them hanging?” I responded. “But if they read this sequel, then they’ll know what happens with Victor, and that would spoil the movie idea.”

  Susan broke out laughing. The whole situation sounded like some kind of a jigsaw puzzle.

  I shook my head, feeling a headache coming on. I said, “See, this is why I need to concentrate on finishing this movie, because this shit is pissing me off. Mary J. Blige said that we have to wake up from the dream and move on, and they still buy her music.”

  Susan said, “Yeah, but from what I’ve been able to hear, it seems like every one of her songs is about losing another man.” We broke out laughing again, but the shit wasn’t funny.

  Just to be clear on things, I said, “So, Omar is saying that even young sisters are more concerned about their man than they are about their own futures? I thought that was Terry McMillan’s crowd, all strung out over some man. I didn’t know that the young sisters were strung out too. Damn!”

  Susan smiled real calmly and responded, “You were.”

  I took a deep breath and thought about it. I said, “So I can’t grow up, and that means that they can’t grow up.” I was really hurt by that. I shook my head and added, “That’s a damn shame.” I felt like crying for the young sisters all around the country who couldn’t see past their confused passion for a man and get on with their own lives. Not that I still didn’t want a man myself, but I was only twenty-eight years old, and still good-looking. I had time. I still didn’t have any kids or anything.

  I decided to tell Susan the painful truth about myself and Victor.

  I said, “Susan, I wanted Victor so badly that I went back home for my girlfriend’s wedding and tried to sleep with the man, even though I had just met his wife and two sons that same afternoon in their family-owned health food store. And he played me like an absolute fool, just to show me how sick I was.

  “And oh, he’s doing great!”I told her. “He’s into real estate and entrepreneurship; the real grassroots work in the community. Victor has never been a dumb man, he’s just not mine anymore,” I said. I began to tear up again. “But he never was to tell you the truth. You read the book, Susan. I was just his young girl. But I’m not that young girl anymore, and he had to embarrass me that night to make me finally realize that. I had to grow up and face reality.”

  I really didn’t need that shit on my damn mind at the time. I stopped my tears from falling by holding my palms up to my eyes.

  Susan moved to comfort me but I shook it off. “No, I don’t need that shit. I’m trying to shoot a movie here. I’m supposed to be a tough bitch, remember. Alexis, from Chicago. But it hurts. Lost love is always painful. But how long are you gonna allow that pain and that damn dream to control your life, when there’s so many other things that we need to be doing for ourselves?

  “We gotta let these niggas go when they want to go! We can’t hold on to the bullshit anymore!” I yelled. I looked Susan in her face and said, “I’m not even supposed to be saying this to you. This is insider information.”

  Susan stood up and asked, “Would you like me to leave?”

  “No,” I told her. “We’re both human, and we’re both women. And if you can’t feel my pain, then yeah, leave. But if you can feel it, then sit down and listen to me.”

  Susan sat back down with tears in her own eyes, probably because she had never seen me vulnerable before, and it was scary for her. I was the tough, super black girl from the streets of Philly who wasn’t supposed to cry, which was all bullshit!

  I said, “Susan, we’re gonna put this sequel book out anyway. And then I’m going to take all of this money that I make over the next three years, and produce Flyy Girl the movie, because we still haven’t had any sister stories to set us straight. And we need one. So if Tom Cruise can get twenty million dollars to make Mission Impossible, then I’ll just have to get twenty million dollars to make Flyy Girl.”

  “I’m well behind you on that,” my girl told me. “But what are you going to do about the sex scenes in that?” she asked me with a smile.

  I smiled back at her. “We need to grow up from that too. My mother told me that sex was how I got here. Did you get here some other kind of way?”

  Susan said, “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, we have to deal with it then. In the meantime, I’m really interested in how well this sequel will do without Victor as my man. And I’m not doing this for the money; I don’t need it. I’m doing it for the art, and for inspiration to all of the sisters out there who need to learn how to move on.”

  Susan smiled and said, “You go girl!”

  I looked at her and said, “Susan, if Martin Lawrence could collect just five dollars every time someone used that line, he’d be a billionaire. Then we could just go and ask him for the money.”

  When Susan left me and I had another moment alone, I came up with my opening and closing poem for the sequel, “Happily Ever After” and “Prophecy.”

  $ $ $

  “Tracy, your mother phoned the office trailer with a message for you to please call home, ASAP,” one of the production assistants told me when my next break was on.

  I took a deep breath and said, “Now what?”

  I called my mother from the trailer and asked her what was so urgent.

  “Your cousin Vanessa,” she told me.

  I stopped breathing. “What happened to her?” I was thinking any- and everything, a car accident, a drive-by shooting, pregnancy (God forbid), you name it!

  My mother answered, “She got kicked the hell out the house.”

  I exhaled. I could deal with that one. I even chuckled at it. My mother had threatened to kick me out when I was Vanessa’s age. It was just a “girls will be girls” kind of thing, and you get over it.

  “Well, what did she do?” Vanessa was a Goody Two-shoes compared to me.

  “I’ll let you talk to her about that. And I don’t think the shit is funny,” Mom snapped at me. “So when can you fly her out to LA?”

  I stopped smiling and said, “What? Mom I can’t—”

  “Tracy, you gon’ have to,because this ain’t my problem,” she responded, cutting me off. “I told you about instigating shit, but you wanted to be the big, bad boss lady because you’re all grown up now and making Hollywood money. Well, now you’re gonna have to deal with it.”

  “Mom, you can’t call up Trish and work it all out?” I couldn’t fly Vanessa out to LA! I was in the middle of shooting my damn movie!

  “What do you think I’ve been trying to do, Tracy? Vanessa has been here for three days already, and Patricia is acting a damn fool! So you’re just gonna have to deal with your little cousin.”

  I took another deep breath. I can’t believe this! I thought to myself. What am I gonna do now? I can’t baby-sit no teenager.

  “Let me talk to her,” I finally asked my mother.

  She went and put Vanessa on the phone.

  “What happened?” I asked her.

  “My mom is just tripping, that’s all.”

  “How so?”

  “Ever since that night you talked about me going out to LA, she just kept bothering me about little stuff. And then I was reading this magazine, and she just snatches it out of my hand, talking about, ‘You don’t need to be reading this’ and threw my brand-new magazine in the trash. So I went to get it out, and we got in an argument about it.

  “A magazine!”Vanessa told me. “Now you tell me that’s not tripping.”

  “Was it a Hollywood magazine?” I asked her. I could just imagine where my little cousin’s head was.

  Vaness
a paused. “It was Entertainment Weekly.”

  I nodded my head. Her mother had lost it, and it was all because of my meddling. However, I still couldn’t imagine Trish kicking her daughter out because of that.

  I asked, “So, is that it? You got into an argument over a magazine, and she kicked you out for that?”It just sounded too unbelievable. I was doing far more than arguing, and my mother let me stay.

  Vanessa said, “Well, when we started arguing and stuff . . . she hit me, and, you know . . . I hit her back.”

  Oh my God! I thought to myself. I never even thought about hitting my mom back when she whipped my ass up against the refrigerator in my teen years. Vanessa had lost her damn mind!

  I just shook my head. I didn’t know what else to say. That introverted shit was crazy. I knew Vanessa had some craziness in her. The kind of girls who hit their mothers back are usually the ones who get sent the hell away to group homes and shit.

  I asked, “So, what do you plan to do now?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you’d let me stay with you.”

  SHIT! I cursed myself. My mom had jinxed me again. I nodded my head and said, “I have to call you back. Okay? I have to figure this all out.”

  “Okay,” Vanessa whimpered.

  I immediately called my brother Jason at his apartment, praying to God that he would be in.

  “Hello.”

  “Thank God,” I told him. “Jason, this is Tracy. I need a big favor from you.”

  “What, you need another idea for your movie?”

  I ignored him and said, “How do you get along with Vanessa?” I had no time to waste.

  “Our cousin Vanessa?” he asked me to make sure.

  “Yeah.”

  He said, “Oh, she’s aw’ight. She’s kind of quiet, but you know, she’s cool. I guess.”

  No she’s not, I thought.

  “Well, how would you like to come out to LA with her? I’ll get you that Lexus,” I blurted out. I was desperate.

  Jason laughed and said, “It sounds like you’re trying to blackmail me.”

  “I am, I need you,” I admitted to him. “I have a movie to make, and Vanessa got in trouble with her mom.”

  “What she do?” I guess he hadn’t heard yet.

  “I’ll tell you about it later.”

  “Well, you got a job for me out there?”

  “I can get one, for both of y’all.”

  Jason said, “Aw’ight, I’m down with it. You gon’ get me the Lexus too?”

  I had second thoughts already. “Well, we’ll have to talk about that when you get here.”

  “Aw, here we go,” he responded.

  I had solved my problem for at least the summer, but what would I do after that?

  I called Vanessa back at my mom’s house and gave them the news. After that, it was Mom’s turn to laugh.

  “Well, you’ve made your new bed, Boss Lady,” she joked. “And I’m just scared of you.”

  I hung up with her and shook my damn head again. “This is just fucking great!” I told myself out loud. “What the hell else can happen?”

  I went ahead and called my answering machine at home in Marina Del Rey, expecting more bad news. First, I had nothing but the usual business and pleasure calls. Then the bad news came:

  “Hey, Tracy, this is Mercedes, girl, back at home. I thought about writing you a letter about the house thing, but you know I ain’t writin’ no damn letters, girl, so I had to look up your phone number and call you.

  “Well, I just wanted to tell you that I agree to it. You buy the house, and I’ll just pay off the mortgage for it. So call me back and let’s talk about it when you get a chance. All right?

  “And thanks, girl. I love you too. And I mean that. Really.

  “...All right, well, bye. And make sure you call me back.”

  I hung up the phone and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Mercedes actually agreed to my proposal. I had set myself up to have to deal with her once a damn month when mortgage time rolled around. I thought that maybe I should just buy her the entire house and have her out of my hair already.

  “Shit, shit, SHIT!” I ranted to myself.

  Another PA knocked on my trailer door. “Tracy, they’re ready for you on the set.”

  I stood up, took one last deep breath, and stepped out of my trailer. I had to face the facts of the crazy shit that I had just got myself into.

  I took it all in and nodded to myself. I said, “Well, here comes the Boss Lady, Mom,” and I went right back to work.

  Recognition

  I had a big date yesterday

  with King Kong

  on top of the World Trade Center.

  Helicopters swung in,

  news cameras taped it,

  and reporters took notes with flashing light bulbs

  all around me.

  But my King Kong got pissed off, y’all,

  with all of the noisy cock blockers.

  So somebody shot him.

  And he fell waaay

  down.

  BOOM!

  Then I cried

  while the whole world watched me

  in silence.

  But when I awoke,

  I realized that my King Kong

  was only a little brown Teddy Bear

  that my momma gave me.

  And nobody knew me.

  Even worse,

  nobody cared

  to know.

  So I held that

  little brown Teddy Bear

  close to my heart

  and squeezed it.

  Because somebody did

  recognize me.

  And somebody cared.

  And once I realized that,

  I got my King Kong anyway,

  and I was as happy as I could be.

  Copyright © 1996, 2000 by Tracy Ellison Grant

  The Premiere,

  February 2000

  In December of nineteen ninety-nine, I did my girl Kendra’s wedding in Baltimore, and in February of two thousand, after everyone had gotten past the hype of the Y2K bug, Kendra did my movie premiere back in West Hollywood for Led Astray, because the world could not shut down before my movie premiere. No way, no how!

  I spent five thousand dollars to fly my family out for the big event, including Raheema and her family from New Jersey. I rented limos to transport all my entourage to and from the hotel. To where? Mann’s Chinese Theater. I was lucky again. Lucky with hard work, that is, but I didn’t want to arrive with my friends and family. It was my moment in the bright lights to shine alone. So I took a limo ride solo from my home in Marina Del Rey and arrived on Hollywood Boulevard at seven twenty-two, eight minutes before our seven-thirty start time.

  I wanted to make certain that no one would miss my arrival that night. So I wore a red, beaded tank dress that shimmered in the light, with matching elbow-length gloves, all designed by Marvin Pratt. My hair was wrapped in a long bob, and dyed honey brown to the roots, to match my skin and eye color. I wore diamond-studded earrings, carried a small, beaded purse, and stood on high-heeled sandals that finished my knock-out ensemble.

  I took a deep breath and prepared to step out of the limo with my purse in hand. “Well, here goes my dream,” I told myself, as I climbed out with the help of my driver. However, I wasn’t dreaming anymore. It was real, and people were waiting for me with their cameras. So I stood tall and proud and struck my pose as the cameras lit up and illuminated my dress and gloves. Tracy Ellison Grant, the black sister movie star from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, had arrived. And I was as flyyyy as I ever was!

  Prophecy

  Assata

  was revolutionary

  for yesterday.

  Camara

  is revolutionary

  for tomorrow.

  But today

  was wasted

  again

  on more parties

  and bullshit.

  Copyright © 2000 by Tracy Ellison Grant
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br />   About the Author

  Omar Tyree is an author, journalist, lecturer, and poet. His books include Flyy Girl, A Do Right Man, Sweet St. Louis, Single Mom, Capital City, and BattleZone.He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.

  To learn more about Omar Tyree, view his Web site at www.OmarTyree.com.