by Larry Elder
Dad shook his head. “Well, he still could have made the best of his situation. And didn’t. What’s he doin’ now?”
“Lives in the back room in his mom’s house. Same bedroom since the second grade.”
“Hm-m-m, as bad as his situation was with his mom and dad, there’s always somebody who has it worse off. It still comes down to you—how you deal with it.”
We sat in silence for a little while. It was oddly comfortable.
“How’s your other friend doin’, the one you went all the way through school with?”
“Frank has a problem.”
“What do you mean?”
Frank’s father worked construction, and one day came home and announced that he simply couldn’t take work anymore. At first, the family assumed he’d just had a bad day. But it quickly became obvious that there was something seriously wrong.
He refused to leave the house, started speaking to himself, and became increasingly detached.
“What do you mean, ‘detached’?”
The family might be eating dinner, and suddenly Frank’s dad would start talking about a car he owned years ago. Several therapists examined him, and could not come up with anything physically wrong with him. He had a breakdown from which he never recovered.
Despite his father’s illness, Frank became a lawyer, one of his brothers an engineer, another a veterinarian. But then Frank started doing drugs.
“He’s lost jobs and I don’t know what will happen to him. Frank, I think, could never deal with his father’s condition.”
“He has two brothers, right?”
“That’s true.”
“Same household? Same mother, right?”
“Yes.”
“His brothers turned out all right. At some point, you have to take responsibility. There’s a sayin’: If you want your prayers answered, you’d better get up off your knees and do somethin’ about it. So, no, I’m not buyin’ it. No matter how bad things are, you have a responsibility to try. Don’t mean you will. If people see that you’re tryin’, you’ll be surprised at how much help you’ll get.”
I thought about what Dad just said. “Do you know why I ended up going to an Ivy League school?” I asked him.
“No. Don’t think you ever said.”
“Two reasons. Mr. Katzman. And Mrs. Workman.”
My high school government teacher, Howard Katzman, praised me as the only student in his career to make A’s on all his tests. One day, walking down the classroom aisles passing out material, he asked me what I was reading.
“A college guide,” I said.
“What schools are you looking at?”
I had been focusing on a Midwest school with “rolling admissions.” This meant that January high school graduates could start that school in February, rather than wait until the fall, the policy of most four-year colleges and universities.
“That’s a dumb reason to pick a school,” he said. “Besides, you can do much better than that one. Why not the Ivys?”
I didn’t know Ivy League from bush league. I would be the first college grad in my family, and had only one uncle with a four-year degree. I had no clue how it worked. Mr. Katzman insisted that I think more seriously about where I should go and why.
I stayed late at school one evening. The school counselor, Mrs. Workman, was walking down the hall.
“Larry, have you signed up to take the SAT?” she asked.
“What’s that?”
“It’s an aptitude test that colleges use. Do well and your name goes on a list that schools use to recruit good students.”
“How much does the test cost?”
“It’s free. They’re giving it to certain inner-city schools. Ours is one.”
I took it, got placed on some list, and started receiving college catalogues almost everyday in the mail for months. Yale, Harvard, Stanford, UCLA ….
One catalogue was from Brown. I decided to apply there for early decision, and was accepted. The school gave me a generous financial aid package.
“No Mr. Katzman, no Mrs. Workman, who knows?” I told Dad. “I completely lucked out.”
“Wait a second. You know, the harder you work, the luckier you get. If you hadn’t been about somethin’, none of that would have happened. Someone can open a door, but you have to have sense enough to jump through.”
It was 7:05.
16
GOOD FRIENDS
“Why don’t you have friends?”
How can someone have no one to go places with, no one to talk to, no one to help work out problems, no one to share ideas, no one just to relax around and do nothing. How is that possible? How could he be happy?
“I’ve always been a loner,” he said.
“I know, but why?”
“Only child, I guess. Always been on my own. And it’s hard to find a good friend. A real one. You’re lucky if you can find one or two. If you think you have more than that, your judgment’s bad.”
“So, Mom has bad judgment?”
“You said that,” he laughed. “I didn’t.”
My mother’s friends were interesting and positive, full of “piss and vinegar” as Mom said. Each one had something special. Along with friends, she had loads of relatives—uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews—more than enough to make up for Dad’s none.
“I think you’re wrong about that one, Dad.”
When Mom found a friend, she kept her. But she didn’t make friends easily. That was certainly the case with Mrs. Jeffries.
When I went away to college, only one other kid from my high school also went, Frank Jeffries. I didn’t know him well in high school. We had a couple of mutual friends, but that was about it. I’d heard he got accepted to my college, and I was hoping he would go somewhere else.
“Why?” Dad asked, “Wouldn’t you want someone from your same high school goin’ to your college? Goin’ off to a new place—you’d be there with somebody you know.”
No, part of the point in going to school far away is to reinvent yourself. It took a while to learn that everybody feels that way. In my case, I was shy—too shy. College provided me a chance to start over in a new school and transform myself into someone more confident and assertive. But with Frank there, he’d know “the new me” was a performance.
Frank and I did become friends. He always encouraged me when I hit a tough spot in the classroom. He predicted greater things for me than I did.
“You got the talent,” he’d say.
I insisted that he had more. We even debated the issue.
“This is a pretty stupid thing to debate don’t you think?” I said in the middle of it. “What happens if I win?”
He taught me about jazz, Impressionist painters, and saltwater fish. He had studied math, chemistry, biology, and French. I called him “The Renaissance Man” and said he was born in the wrong century and the wrong country.
We debated politics and, when he took a course in economics, I started losing more arguments than usual. So I took economics to try to even things up.
I learned about the damage done by minimum-wage laws, the cost of unnecessary regulations on business, and that competition results in better-quality and lower-priced goods—the same things my Dad had always said, in his simpler fashion.
“And I never took no economics,” Dad said, laughing.
“No, you just practiced it.”
One evening, Frank and I were sitting on the floor of his dorm room listening to music.
“Frank, do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“Yes, I have two brothers.”
“So do I. Where do you fit—oldest, youngest?”
“I’m in the middle,” he said.
“So am I.”
“What’s your birthday?” he asked.
“April 27. Yours?”
“April 24.”
We just looked at each other. “Wow.” I don’t know why we’d never asked each other these questions.
His younge
r brother was only a couple of months older than Dennis, and his older brother was born in the same year as Kirk.
“Where are you parents from?” I asked.
“Alabama.”
“My mother is from Alabama, my Dad from Georgia.”
“What town in Alabama?” Frank asked.
“Huntsville.”
“Mine are from Selma.”
Frank’s parents relocated to California the same year mine did.
“Did either of your parents go to college?” I asked.
“My mother did. She spent two years in a small black college, but I doubt you’ve ever heard of it.”
“What’s it called?
“Talladega.”
“Frank, Frank … my mom went to Talladega.”
We found that our mothers were there at the same time, but didn’t know each other.
When we came home for the summers and for Christmas vacation, I got to know Frank’s mother. She was smart, curious, and pleasant. When I first met her, she was sitting on the couch reading a large photo book.
“What are you reading, Mrs. Jeffries?”
“A book on Egypt.”
“Oh, are you going?”
“No,” she said, “Egypt just fascinates me.”
I knew Mom would like her, and for almost two years Frank and I tried get them to meet each other.
“Oh, no, Larry, I don’t really feel like having her over,” Mom said.
“Oh, Frank, I don’t know that I have time for company,” Frank’s mom told him.
Finally I bought two tickets for The Godfather. I knew my mother would like it. It was about a man who kicks ass. Her kind of guy.
“Here. These are for you and Mrs. Jeffries. They are not refundable. You two figure out the arrangements.”
From that point on, they became close friends. They went out together, worried about their boys together, and consoled each other when things went wrong.
“I didn’t know how your mother and Ruth met,” Dad said. “All those things you and Frank have in common. Well, I’ll say.”
“And Mrs. Jeffries always asked about you, what you were up to, questions about the café.”
“Really? I had no idea. I thought Mom’s friends were against me.”
It wasn’t true. Mom’s friends respected Dad perhaps more than Mom did.
“You didn’t play around. You came home like clockwork. No drinking, no gambling. Careful with your money. That’s a lot. I heard her friends talking about it.”
“I had no idea,” he said. “No idea.”
When the phone rang—before my brothers and I had social lives—it was always for Mom. Not one time did anyone call and ask for my father. No one ever visited him.
“Don’t you get lonely?” I asked Dad.
“Sometimes. Sometimes. My friends are right here, right here at this place.” He tapped on the counter, “Right here.”
My mother’s friends were so colorful, each one uniquely different. But with all the people in our neighborhood, including the parents of our friends, she rarely befriended any of them. So if my mother liked someone enough for her to drop by—especially without calling first—she had to be special.
“Hello, is Vi there?”
I never had to ask who was calling—I could tell Mom’s friends apart by their distinctive voices.
“Mom, Cee is on the phone.”
Cee was one of my favorites. She walked with a hop, always upbeat and seemingly eager to see us. Cee was “light-skinned,” about the color of my mother. She chewed gum, the only adult I ever saw who did. She wore colorful dresses and talked about the things she and her husband did. She talked about her husband as if they were friends. They traveled. She cared about what he thought. She loved the things he said that made her laugh. It was such a contrast with how my mother talked about my father. Cee, my mother told me, had no children.
“Larry,” she’d ask, “how is school? What are you learning? What’s your favorite subject?”
She always brought Doublemint gum.
“Cee,” we’d ask, “do you have any gum?” As she spoke to Mom, she’d reach into her purse without pausing, and pull some out. She never came unprepared. Kirk and Dennis would come in, say a few things so they wouldn’t appear rude, grab their stick of gum and leave. I would stay. I enjoyed watching Cee and my mother talk because Mom acted so differently around her. Mom loosened up around her.
Cee, like Mom, had a big, honest laugh and she made my mother laugh, even on the phone. They both sewed much of their own clothing, and they talked about fabrics, how much they cost, where to get what on sale, what Jackie Kennedy was wearing, and their favorite Dodger, Duke Snider.
They talked about “home.” They were from the same “part of the country”—Huntsville, Alabama—and always said that “some day, when the time was right,” they were going back home.
Mom once heard me playing a song about a man who missed the South. She stopped in the doorway to listen.
“Who’s singing that song?”
“Jr. Walker and the All-Stars,” I said. “It’s called ‘Way Back Home.’”
Oh, there’s good ‘n bad things
About the South, boy
Oh, and some leave a bitter taste
In my mouth, now
Like the black man livin’ across the track
White man were on the other side
Holdin’ him back
Way back home, now
Oh, but we won’t talk about that
‘Cause it’s understood
Ev’rybody sees the bad
But what about the good?
Ooh, I’d give anything
Just to smell that scent
Of honeysuckle growin’
On a backyard fence
Way back home, now
I’d love to smell the wetness
Of grass and trees
And see ground kissed
By honey bees
Like way back home, now
Oh, but childhood days
Are dead ‘n gone
Well, but the memories
Still linger on
Oh, have you ever gone swimmin’
In a muddy creek
With nothin’ on your body
From head to feet?
Way back home, yeah
How you play for the game
Like hide an seek
Yeah!
And snake through the weeds
Overhear the streams
Well, I know some kids
Still play those games
But when they play
It just ain’t the same
Like way back home
Oh, I really miss those things
That have faded away
I remember them
Like it was yesterday
Now, way back home
“It sure reminds me of home,” Mom said.
“I didn’t feel that way at all about the country,” Dad said. “I hated it. Couldn’t wait to get out. No-o-o-o-o desire to go back.”
But Mom and Cee always talked about cousin so-and-so or aunt so-and-so “down in the country.” I used to think that Cee and Mom were cousins. I liked thinking that I was related to Cee and I was afraid, if I asked Mom about it, she would say “no.” So I never asked. But I decided on my own that she “was family.”
“Cee always asked about you, Dad.”
“Really? I didn’t think she cared about me one way or the other.”
No, Cee always asked about my father, “Ran,” she called him. My mother would grunt a response and turn the conversation back to people they knew “down home.” I never knew what Cee or her husband did for a living. I came to learn that my mother rarely discussed what people did if they had “regular ol’ jobs,” as my mother put it—meaning hands-on jobs like housekeeping, valet, janitor work, or bus driving.
My favorite friend of my mother’s was “Aunt” Dorothy. Dad couldn’t stand her. Whenever he spo
ke of her, he called her “Jones,” her last name. That irritated Mom.
I adored her and would sometimes tell her things I wouldn’t dream about telling Mom. Dorothy always encouraged me and told me how special I was. She even went to our Little League games and told me that I had ability.
Dorothy was funny and loving—all three hundred pounds of her.
“I like to eat,” she said. Her doctor warned her, and she vowed to watch her weight, but never stuck to it.
She was incredibly smart and well read. She was the first person I ever heard use the word “echelon,” and she was interested in national and international politics. She and Mom would talk about the latest Time magazine cover story.
She worked at a place that made mannequins, and said she liked her job. She once took Dennis and me to her workplace, and we watched her assemble arms, heads, and torsos. As she finished each mannequin, Dennis and I gave the freakishly rigid, naked, bald, life-sized dolls names. I couldn’t imagine that someone as bright as Dorothy could attach limbs and bodies all day without going crazy.
“I’m just doing this while I work my way through med school,” she said.
Dorothy always knew what was going on, even when Mom was a couple of steps behind. Once, when I was in high school, Dorothy and Mom were talking in the back room.
“Mom, could I borrow the car keys? I asked.
“Where are you going?” Dorothy wanted to know.
“A date.”
Where?” she asked.
“Bowling alley.”
“Then stop by the drug store,” she said.
“It’s not that kind of date,” I said.
“Stop by the drug store anyway,” said Dorothy, “you never know.”
“Dorothy, I’m going bowling.”
“You never know.”
“I don’t have that kind of luck.”
“Tonight might be the night.”
“Okay,” I said.
“The drug store?” said Mom. “Why would he stop by the drug store? He’s going to the bowling alley.”
“Jesus, Mom.”
In 1965, Mom, Kirk, Dennis, Dorothy, and I took a trip up California’s Highway One in the old Rambler. The Watts riots had started, and it was surreal heading up north and watching military trucks in green camouflage heading south on the other side of the highway. I guess it was a good time to be out of the city. We went to Sacramento, San Francisco, Yosemite National Park, and Hearst Castle. Mom told me about William Randolph Hearst and yellow journalism, and that the movie Citizen Kane was based on his life.
