Christopher Paul Curtis (11 page)

French. Ever since she started taking it at the U of M the Sarge liked showing off by dropping one or two French words into her conversation.

I said, “And what if someone borrows the money but can't pay the loan back, what does Darnell Dixon do?”

The Sarge said, “Look, you tell Ms. Exum if she's got anything to say about my business she should call on me, otherwise tell her I'd appreciate it if she'd quit confusing you.

“All you need to know is that you're going to be taken care of in the future. Beyond that everything is a bunch of rah-rah.”

A bunch of rah-rah. As I drove back after giving Bo the papers I thought about that long-ago conversation and I knew that that's what the Sarge would call me stressing out over a second grader's junk.

Moods are funny things. One second I was feeling good knowing that KeeKee was about to get her papers back, and before I could even drive home I'd started thinking about the Sarge and was depressed.

I parked in the driveway, popped in a Busta Rhymes CD and just sat musing.

She just didn't understand me. She just didn't want to understand me.

It wasn't even a month ago that I got up enough nerve to tell her that I was thinking about quitting working at the home and was probably gonna get a job at Mickey D's. That would give me a lot more time to nail this science fair project and get her off my back. I wasn't sure how she was going to react so I told her in my room in front of Chester X. He was all null and void but at least he was some kind of witness.

She said, “You'd think I'd remember, I just made another deposit last week, but what's your education fund up to now? I think the balance was somewhere around ninety thousand dollars.”

I said, “Ninety-two thousand, five hundred and ninety dollars since last week.”

She went, “Hmm, do you think McDonald's is going to allow you to salt away that kind of funding? You're willing to scuttle your plans for university to work for a clown?”

“Well, it's a start…”

She smiled and said, “Exactly. It's a start down the sucker path. Those are distractions and pitfalls specifically made to snare the unenlightened, the uninformed, the unimaginative. Follow that way if you must, but I think your genetic makeup is probably leading you in a different direction.

“I know what so many of your peers' parents tell them, I know the company line where all African American parents are supposed to sit our sons and daughters on our knees, look them deep in the eye and say, ‘Life is unfair, you're a young black person, life is going to be especially unfair to you. For you to do half as well as a white child you'll have to be twice as good.’ Right? Have you ever heard any such words cross my lips?”

She'd told me a lot, but never anything like that.

“And the reason you haven't is because I can't think of a more hateful or hurtful thing to tell a child. How's that supposed to prepare anybody for life? The way I look at it, that's the equivalent of me being your coach and telling you at the beginning of a race, ‘All right, champ, here's the strategy: you train three times as hard as all the other runners, then run four times as fast and if you're really, really lucky and the judges are feeling particularly generous that day they might give you fourth place.’”

Sometimes it's not even worth arguing something, especially when you were hearing it for the thousandth time.

She was like that battery bunny on TV, she was gonna keep going on and on and on….

She said, “How's that supposed to be anything but an incentive to fail? What human being, I don't care how old you are, can't see that there's no way you can win that race? What human being, I don't care how old, can't see that that is a race you have no business even running? That is something you've lost even before you began. That, my boy, is the path set aside for the sucker.”

I wanted to argue with her but what was the point?

She said, “I see either a look of disbelief or befuddlement in your eyes, so let me explain it to you again for the hundredth time.”

I knew what was coming, the sad and touching story of a young girl trying to find herself in the big city.

The Sarge said, “Before you were born, right after I got my degree in teaching, I got a job in New York City at this chichi all-girls' school right in Manhattan. The people were paying twenty-five thousand dollars a year to send their kids to this school, not for room and board, mind you, twenty-five Gs for the tuition alone. Way more than my salary. Mostly the little brats were the kids of
Fortune
500 execs, actors, politicians.

“So I'm interning under a teacher and she's doing an art appreciation class and starts to talk about Pablo Picasso and it turns out that two of the little girls in the class have genuine Picassos hanging on the walls at home. One had two Rembrandts. Not copies. Originals. The real deal.

“I went home that day to my fifth-floor cold-water walk-up, looked at what I had hanging on my wall, a black
velvet painting of Martin Luther King and John Fitzgerald Kennedy walking hand in hand with Jesus, and I asked myself, ‘What's wrong with this picture?’ And I wasn't referring to the rather obvious deficiencies in my taste at the time.

“I asked myself how many generations down the line it would be before any relative of mine would have anything anywhere near fine, original art hanging from the walls of their home. I asked myself how many years it would take me to amass enough wealth so that a school I could afford to send my future kids to would have Jessye Norman sing at their eighth-grade graduation. On a teacher's salary I knew it would take me five or six lifetimes to get enough cash to afford a school where we could get James Brown to come in and scream ‘I Feel Good’ one time.”

She kept going and I kept pretending I was listening.

“I asked myself what these little
Fortune
500 kids had done to deserve so much when my future kids were obviously going to be starting with so little.

“Were they unusually talented or intelligent?

“If so, it was only because any modicum of talent or intelligence they'd shown at an early age had been nurtured and cultivated with the best tutoring and training that money could buy.

“I asked myself if they'd been blessed or preordained to be where they were.

“I realized the only reason it seemed as though they were was because they'd been taught to fervently believe that that was the case. And like I've told you many times before, believing in yourself is half the battle. And like I've
told you even more times than that, the other half of the battle is money.

“So during my year at that school my dreams of changing the world through teaching began falling apart just as inexorably and just as irreversibly as the paint on JFK's face began flaking away off that black velvet painting.

“I asked myself what I'd have to do to be able to send my child, or make it possible for my child to send his child, to a school like that one. I knew none of those kids' parents had started right out of school teaching, or working at Wal-Mart, or working in the Buick. Most of them had their money left to them or they'd lucked up and had hit it big with their own businesses where someone had greased the skids for them. They knew that daily nine-to-five action is purely for the sucker.

“And since I knew no one was going to give me anything, the best way I could get a little start-up capital was to come back to Flint, get hired in skilled trades at the Buick, work double shifts and any other overtime I could pick up and start saving money. I knew the only way my pocket was ever going to have any real weight was to set up my own business, to make the system work for me and follow the same rules they follow.”

I knew we were getting near the halfway point of the Sarge's speech.

“And believe me, young man, they do follow a whole different set of rules. They milk the system for everything it's worth, and I'm trying my best to do the same thing. I'm milking any- and everything that moves. If it's got nipples, I'm going to milk it.”

What kid wants to hear their mother talking about nipples?

She started in with the soulfully deep stare. “Look, I know that may seem harsh, but if you want to learn by experience, go ahead. If you want to go work somewhere other than here you keep in mind that a fast-food worker is three times more likely to be injured on the job than a construction worker and four times more likely to be killed on the job than a cop. Sounds like pure sucker path action to me.

“In the end know that the only thing that's going to earn you the kind of cash, the kind of respect and the kind of life that you can leave to your kids is this business. So when it comes to you working at McDonald's, you tell old Ronald he's going to have to find some other young black child to grind up in his McJob. That's not for you.

“You're too young to remember, but I promised you, right after your father died, that I wasn't falling for the okeydoke anymore, I promised you and myself that just like every big-time exec out there I was going to take care of me and mine first. That's the way of the world, young man, and the quicker you learn it the better off you'll be.”

She was wrong. And I was going to prove it to her.

“Hello?”

“What's up, Luther?”

“Sparky! Where you been? I was starting to think you'd crawled off somewhere and died.”

“Naw, man, everything's tight. I just been off by myself thinking.”

I asked, “You still getting those mystery headaches?”

“Naw, man, they went away right after the doc took them stitches out. Peep this, even though hanging with you has been the death of my social life it has done one good thing, it's got me thinking philosophically.”

“Oh yeah? How's that?”

“Well, you know how you keep saying that everything happens for a reason and that some of the time it seems like life is trying to send a message to you?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I been getting that feeling too, it seems like life or something's trying real hard to get a message through to me.”

“Yeah, it's probably a lawyer from Taco Bell trying to tell you to stay off their property. But that's not the kind of message I've been talking about.”

“See? See what I mean? That's one of the main reasons no one can't stand you. I'm being real here, bruh. I really think I need to check out all these signs I been getting.”

“OK, so who're these signs from and what're they telling you?”

“On Saturday morning I was waiting for the eight-fifteen bus to go to the fire station and it was right on time!”

“It probably wasn't, that was probably the seven-thirty bus being forty-five minutes late.”

“Are you gonna let me finish?”

“Sorry. Go 'head.”

“Like I said, the bus was on time and whose face do you think was all over the side of it?”

“Whose?”

“My boy, Dontay Gaddy!”

“So?”

“Hold on. Then I'm sitting on the bus and got my headphones on listening to 93.7 and who you think the first commercial I hear is from?”

“Let me guess, Mr. 1-800-SUE-EM-ALL.”

“You know it, the big D.O.G. hisself. Then to top it off, when I get to the fire station I'm fixing to cut the lawn but Sergeant Forde calls me back in to play one more game of Ping-Pong. So I'm schooling the old man and talking and
he starts telling me about his cousin's best friend's auntie that sued Bishop Airport for depressurizing her cat on a flight to Cleveland, and guess who her lawyer was?”

“Hmmm, Dontay Gaddy.”

Sparky seemed surprised. “What? Did I already tell you about this?”

“Naw, Sparky, just get to the point.”

“The point is that Sergeant Forde starts telling me how straight-up real this Dontay Gaddy dude is. He says that as soon as his cousin's best friend's auntie got in the office Dontay told her to call him by his first name, and even though my boy is just about a billionaire, Sergeant Forde said he'll see anybody for half a hour for free and let you know if you got a case. And what's the bomb is”—Sparky started whispering—“according to Dontay Gaddy,
every fool and his momma's
got a case!”

“So the message you've been getting is to go see this lawyer and get you your free half hour, right?”

“See? It's so plain that even you picked up on it!”

“But who you gonna sue?”

“That's the thing, Luther, I don't know. I figure if I talk to Dontay Gaddy he can give me a little professional guidance as to who it is what needs to be sued.”

“And you want me to come with you.”

“You know I'd appreciate a ride, my brother, and you know I can't depend on those MTA buses. My appointment is tomorrow right after school so I can't take a chance on being late. Besides, maybe Dontay will have the hookup for you, too.”

“Yeah, like I need the Sarge to hear I went to some
nickel-slick lawyer's office. My picture would be on every milk carton in America five minutes after she found out. But I'll take you, I'll have Little Chicago pick up the Crew and watch them for a while. I got the feeling you meeting Dontay Gaddy might be pretty interesting.”

“Peace out, baby.”

“Peace.”

As soon as me and Sparky walked into Dontay Orlando Gaddy's office I could tell that even though the Sarge would have hated his guts, she'd've also had much respect for this man. She'd say that he was someone who knew how to work it. He was like a male version of the Sarge, he was milking everything and anything that moved. Shoot, Dontay Gaddy's reception room was so hype that you could see that this brother could get milk from something that didn't even have nipples on it!