Why are you way down south in the ATL in August, when every other New Yorker is in the Hamptons, or on the Vineyard, or slumming in Sag Harbor? Because Ghetto Pass, your idea for a reality show that was supposed to give the network’s Wednesday night Nielsen ratings a boost, is having problems.
Lots of them.
You’re the assistant vice president of programming diversity at RBC Networks, which means it’s your job to keep tabs on all the black themed television shows they produce.
You’ve scheduled an emergency meeting of all your associate producers, a gaggle of fellow Yale alum and ex-frat boys from Harvard who will arrive later in dark shades, their hair gelled, their shirts damp, their skin still jaundiced from all the liquor they’d consumed the night before. Ghetto Pass is like every other reality show – an outrageous premise combined with contestants who are devoid of shame or humility and a truckload of cameras to film the whole thing. Six eighteen, nineteen and twenty year olds from Alpharetta Georgia have agreed to live twenty five miles south of their mini-mansion homes in the squalor of Atlanta’s inner city for nine months, in houses without call waiting, extra toilet paper, dishwashers, or working A/C systems.
Your contestants are a motley crew, grungy, spoiled white kids who existed on the margins of upper middle-class society before they were selected to appear on your show. You secretly hope one of the young male contestants will develop a crack habit, one of the women will end up pregnant, tricking for a gang banger, and one or two of the contestants will go so crazy from the lack of Starbucks and clean, fluffy towels in the linen closet that they will act like the bigoted idiots you think they are and get their asses beat down on camera.
You bark at your administrative assistant. “Greta, when are those knuckleheads going to get here?”
“Ten o’clock.”
“Okay.”
Greta’s nasal brogue goes on. “…And don’t forget about that program tomorrow at that neighborhood school. You’re speaking at…I got it right here…Andrew Young Middle School.”
“I got it.”
“Don’t disturb me until they get here.” You head into your office, close the door, and grab your office stash before heading over to the floor to ceiling window overlooking the Atlanta skyline. Large clumps of green are clustered between the wannabe skyscrapers that rise above the streets of this hick town, their highly polished marble facades glittering in the morning sunlight like giant Crayons. You slide open a capsule from the prescription bottle you keep in your desk and stick the end of a plastic pen cap into the white powder inside, snorting a miniscule quantity up your left nostril. A couple more hits and the green outside intensifies. The marble glows. You become a giant black man, big enough to snap those giant marble Crayons outside your window in two with your bare hands, a mega-sized sasquatch who snatches these towering behemoths up by their foundations, dirt and pipes and rebar falling out of their sheared-off bases from hundreds of feet in the air.
It’s amazing that you’re still in the business after your third rehab stint – any more crazy geek monster shit, though, and you can kiss this job goodbye. But you’ve finally gotten serious, again, about angling your way into position for a shot at running a network. Which means you need a hit show real bad and right now – something like Ghetto Pass that’s cheap to produce and out there enough to make you look like a visionary. Three hundred thousand a year sounds like real money to everybody on the outside of this biz, but what most people can’t understand is how easy it is to fuck a gig like this up. All they ever see is your killer threads, your Benzo with the AMG kit, and Greta’s thirty-eight triple D’s. Greta is upset about her temporary relocation. She hates grits, she can’t stand the heat, and these southern accents are driving her crazy. But she understands how you think so well there’s no way you can do this without her.
The speakerphone on your desk clicks to life. “They’re here.” Brushing flakes both errant and imaginary from your shirt, you put the pill bottle back in the desk drawer. Now you’re looking intently into a small hand mirror, checking for crumbs on your dark upper lip, staring at that narrow strip of flesh so hard you miss how sallow and dry your brown skin looks, how drawn your eyes are, how close the flesh at your temples rides against your skull.
Your four associate producers – Joey Riesman, Gino Martinez, Chad Murray, and Zack Toomey – are at the conference table, an argument already in progress about backup cameramen, when you enter the room.
“You can solve that later,” you say. “My problem is, we’ve been filming for three weeks, and I don’t have shit. What the fuck is going on here?”
They’re all silent.
“Why are all these motherfucking contestants getting along?” you continue. “We gotta have more conflict here, guys! Ghetto realness – that’s what I’m looking for.” Your producers look at you – nails manicured, shoes polished, knife edged creases in the slacks of your Canali suit, with hair that gently squiggles instead of kinking defiantly across the crown of your head – and you know they’re all thinking the same thing. What the hell do you know about ghetto realness? They can’t imagine that a guy like you lived in a housing project for a year and a half after your parents got divorced.
“You’ve got these six fucking marshmallow-assed white kids, all of them still wet behind the ears, and your producers don’t have enough smarts to get them to get them mixed up in some kind of controversy?” You can feel the hairs in your nose move with every breath, each wiry shaft akin to a swale of rippling wheat in a breezy valley. Your nostrils start to go numb from the tip, but you’ve trained yourself over the years to resist rubbing it every few minutes, a dead giveaway, for those who know what to look for, that you’re still using. Greta opens the door and sticks her head in gingerly. “Mr. Coleman is on the line,” she says to you.
Georgie Fucking Coleman. Better known to you as Georgie Baby. Your senior vice president from hell. This can’t be good. You take the call in your office, mostly so your people can’t see the way you wince each time Georgie Baby sticks his metaphorical foot up your ass.
“Georgie Baby” you say, “what can I do for you?”
“What the fuck are you doing down there?” Georgie Baby says to you. “They tell me your contestants think they’re at some kind of ghetto country club. They’re having fun, like they’re on a goddamn vacation!”
By the time you return to the conference room, you find that one of your producers, Joey Riesman, has come up with a pretty good twist. He wants to pick families from the contest neighborhood and film them watching an episode, recording their blow-by-blow account of the events on-screen so these vignettes can be intercut with Ghetto Pass footage.
Joey talks a hundred miles an hour. Your head is pounding so hard “they could be our color commentators” is all you hear clearly. His colleagues raise their eyebrows above their shades. One coughs.
“Color fucking commentary?” You lean over the conference table and glare at Joey before you realize what your pupils must look like. “Why not just call them the Pickaninny Pundits? Huh? Or Nigga Narratives ‘R Us?” You go on, your rant picking up steam, “I imagine you want to go the whole nine yards on this one. Maybe you’re going to deliver some spareribs and chicken wings from the local soul food shack. Then you’ll probably haul in a case of forties and a bottle of cheap cognac to loosen up everybody’s tongues. Was that your next move?”
You have to stop to catch your breath. Gino is glaring at the back of Joey’s neck like he wants to stab him with the pen in his hand.
“And then what?” you continue. “Would you be standing off camera, encouraging your black savage beasts to express their own raw, ethnically flavored take on things? Huh? Lots of fucking bleeping is what you were going for, eh Joey?” He hasn’t moved since you started, his fingers frozen, his back stiff, his eyes the only thing moving as he follows the jerking motion your neck makes every time you get to the end of a sentence. “Fuck you, motherfucker!”
You haven’t had an attack of racial consciousness in years. Did rehab uncover this? Or were the drugs finally short circuiting your system? You might have been inclined, if you were a normal human being, to decry the soullessness of the industry, to excoriate the greedy CEO of the conglomerate that owned the network for his money lust, but you know the game you’re playing. Hell, you admire your CEO, mostly because he has the balls to display an open contempt of the idea that television entertainment needs to strive to be an art form.
“How’s the shooting schedule holding up?” you ask the entire group, in a voice so tender, so concerned, everyone’s eyes pop up to make sure these words actually came out of your mouth. You’ve asked such a simple question, one of your fellow Ivy League geniuses should be able to recognize it for what it really is – a flag of truce.
Georgie Baby thinks the color commentary angle is ingenious when you present it to him – as your own idea, of course. You decide, after getting back in Georgie Baby’s good graces, to assign your most aggravating and obnoxious producer – who else but Gino? – the job of pricking the consciences of the major civil rights organizations across the country. The conservative segments of the black community who people the Urban League and the NAACP will jump at the chance to make noise in front of the cameras about the show. You can only hope that Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam crowd will oblige you and station their menacing foot soldiers outside the network’s headquarters. You can see your star rising as your sinuses twitch.
“Hey guys,” you say as they throw their coffee cups in the trash and round up their notes. “I’m coming down to the set after lunch. I gotta stop by our affiliate office downtown for a minute. Just get me some more conflict, okay? Do whatever the fuck it takes.”
Your nerve endings bristle. You swear you can feel the air currents tickling you while you walk to the elevator, and when the hairs on the back of your neck touch your skin it is all you can do to keep from howling as you steel yourself against the onslaught of the hyper speed impulses racing through your body.
In the lobby, you decide to get your shoes polished. The shoeshine man, a brutha named Carl, has a spot just off the elevator banks. Carl is nowhere to be seen, so you climb up into his elevated chair. The voice of a cable news channel talking head blares from the TV situated to your left.
Carl strides out of the lobby’s convenience store with a Milky Way. “Hey, buddy,” he says to you from across the lobby. “Long time no see.”
“Yeah, I’ve been busy.”
Carl takes a bite out of his candy bar. “Didn’t you just get a shine on Monday?”
“New pair of shoes.”
“So what do you want today?”
“The super special.”
You feel Carl’s fingers as he works the warmed polish into the surface areas of your shoes. He presses the stiff leather down against your toes and up against your sensitive inner soles, jolting your jingly nerves until your heart races and your brow dampens. The snap of the buffing cloth comes out of nowhere, like a firecracker, and your toes start to get hot as Carl vigorously buffs each shoe. You hand him two hundred-dollar bills. He shuffles through his wallet for a minute, then gives you back four fives, folded in half, as change. You stick the folded money in your wallet the way you got them, parting the bills after they are safely tucked inside your billfold only to confirm that the cellophane packet of white powder sandwiched between them is full.
“They look okay?” Carl says. He pats at the new gloss on your shoes while you are gauging the weight of the coke with your eyes.
“Perfect,” you say as you wriggle out a five to drop in his tip bowl.
You drive to the RBC affiliate office in Midtown. You are in and out of the Midtown office in twenty minutes after yelling at the program director about next season’s lineup. The stupid son of a bitch is trying to move his late evening news slot from eleven p.m. to ten p.m., but you need the traction you have in the ATL market to keep your own numbers up. You can’t believe these dumb hicks down here still think people care about the news – the third-rate reporters they’ve got on staff couldn’t find a story in a bookstore.
The profile of the black actors Georgie Baby pushes you to hire is always the same – bruthas and sistahs who grew up wearing sweaty tank tops, drinking watery Kool-Aid and shoplifting juju beads from the corner grocery store. Now these same bruthas and sistas demand ice-cold dressing rooms stocked with French mineral water. Macrobiotic teas fresh brewed on their sets. You watch their chemically whitened teeth smile out of their made-up faces for the cameras six days a week to create the shlocky, shitty shows you have to air with a straight face, but your scruples have been submerged so long they only give an intermittent flutter deep within your gut, a restless stirring easily drowned by the liberal application of an appropriately aged Armagnac.
You tool through midtown, the top back on your Benz, flashing your eyebrows at the fine-looking businesswomen lining the curb around the Colony Square plaza during the end of the lunch rush. It’s the long way to the hood from Buckhead, but why else would you own a car like this? You can smell the decay and mustiness in the air as you approach the on-location set. It’s in a black section of Atlanta about a mile south of downtown, an area the local police count on to help them make their arrest quotas. Unemployed black men stand around the corner stores and bus stops, peering wearily at the gleam of your rims.
You lived in a place like this back when you were nine. You and your mother were both out of place, well dressed and well-groomed and broke as hell after your doctor father was convicted of Medicaid fraud and tax evasion. Your mother had to drop out of Jack and Jill, the black upper middle-class social club. Hosting events for the kids from the snotty social set in your old neighborhood just wasn’t going to happen in a run down two-bedroom apartment.
Insults were the soundtrack of your daily walk from the bus stop to your apartment.
“Bougie niggers had to fall back to the ‘hood when the cheese ran out.”
“I’m gonna fuck yo momma boy.”
“Four eyed motherfucker can’t see shit.”
“If you and yo damn mama so smart why y’all living here with us?”
You got into your first fight in a neighborhood like this with one of the kids who rode your bus. He’d slammed into you from the back one day as you trudged towards your apartment, knocking you off your feet. You were so surprised by the attack you were still trying to figure out why when his fist slammed against the side of your head. “Fake ass nigger!” he’d yelled as you chased him down the block. When your mother got home later that evening and saw the swollen lump on the side of your head, it wasn’t her backhand slap that had shocked you, but the guttural, savage sound of her voice. “Don’t you ever let anybody get the jump on you again!”
All you had in common with the neighborhood kids were the gaps in your smile where your baby teeth had come out. You spent most of your time locked in the apartment, watching old pirate movies on the three UHF channels your rabbit ears could catch, wishing your ex-father was the one walking the plank. It took your mother eighteen months to regain her figure and snag a new husband, a big, black, burly proctologist, the kind of guy who called himself an ass man with a straight face.
The production trailers for the show are on McClendon Street behind a temporary chain link fence. Your producers have come to terms with the neighborhood by hiring some of its numerous vagrants to keep an eye on their cars and pick-up trash around the make-shift parking lot. Driving past the entrance to the lot, you pull around the corner into the driveway of an abandoned home, put the convertible top up and take a couple more hits of coke. Now you’re ready to watch some rough cuts.
You realize as you walk into the tape library trailer that your cell phone has only rung ten times since you left the office. Your stomach tightens. The acid level rises in your gut – no ringee dingee is a bad sign in this biz. Joey and Gino are setting things up, scratching out last minute notes to help them remember which DVR holds what footage and what scenes are cued up.
After forty-five minutes of watching raw footage you are coming down. You can’t figure out if it’s the coke or the the blank faces of your two oldest contestants as they sit on the couch, their arms crossed, both their heads angled towards the floor, but you feel like you are hovering at the edge of a watery abyss, your limp body about to be sucked into a giant whirlpool below. You brace yourself against the edge of the table until your head clears. “Can somebody please tell me what that bullshit was that I just watched? Anybody?”
Joey speaks up. “Bullshit? Dude, that’s some of the best stuff we’ve got for the second episode.”
“What happened to the new story arc we were supposed to instigate between Abby and Olivia? Didn’t you write them a script?”
“It wasn’t really a script, just some ideas on how to play the scene between Abby and Olivia when Olivia caught Abby going through her dresser drawers.”
“Give me a fucking break!” you say. “If you can hold a spark between your fucking ears for sixty seconds, you ought to be able to come up with a better reason than that to explain why this god awful, turd infested, not-worth-a-shit-to-anybody-but-your-mama’s footage is running right now.”
Joey and Gino start looking at the walls.
“What the fuck are we doing here – searching for life on Mars?” you continue. “Is it that hard to get some good TV? Joey, get me all the highlight discs.” In five minutes there is a stack of twenty four DVR discs on the table in front of you, divided into groups according to contestant. “Run ‘em.”
“All of them? There’s over thirty hours of taping here.”
The trailer you’re in is equipped with eight video monitors, each with their own separate DVR feed. You take a disc from each stack and shove them across the table. “I want ‘em all on at once, at one and a half speed with the volume off.”
Joey gets the tapes started.
“Now get the fuck out!” You sit there, aided by coffee and an occasional toot, watching these six DVR discs as the images flicker, your eyes darting from screen to screen while the multiple feeds play, your finger raising the volume with one of the remotes whenever you start to see a little fire in the eyes of your contestants, whenever you start to feel some heat emanating from their arguments over cleaning the refrigerator or cooking dinner.
It feels like you are back in your undergrad days, when you crammed for five or six classes at once at the end of each semester, all of your books splayed open, all of your notes scattered among them as you flitted back and forth between subjects, a narrow joint smoldering in your hand, your feverish mind racing to vacuum the necessary facts and figures from the pages in front of you before daylight.
Georgie Baby calls three times, your girlfriend twice. Greta rings to jog your memory about the book signing at the Margaret Mitchell House later this evening. One of your former stars has written her memoirs at the ripe old age of thirty-five. You anticipate getting a kiss from her later at her book signing, and not one on the cheek. You presume she will invite you to have a drink afterwards with her and her publisher’s rep. You expect the publisher’s rep to put the humongous bar tab that will result on her corporate credit card. You hope that this publisher’s rep will be a pretty and young and smart enough to understand that a brutha away from home needs to be loved, at least until one-thirty in the morning, after which she can go back to her room or to the airport or wherever it is that easy young women go after getting their guts stuffed.
You’ve watched film for over two hours, long enough to know your producers have neglected to develop enough wild and unpredictable breaks in the action to keep your viewers wondering what could happen next. Wandering into the control room, you survey the scene – eight people, watching thirty TV screens and listening to over sixty audio feeds connected to the six camera crews trailing the contestants, mike booms and fill lights hovering around your on-camera participants like they’re already famous. You grab a production assistant. “I’m going over to the shack,” you say.
You enter the run-down house from the rear, through an innocuous double doorway that will look like a closet to the audience when it’s shown on TV. Your staffers have done a masterful job of creating a substance which approximates the musty, greasy, organic stench of rotting wood and rancid animal fat older, poorly maintained houses in the ‘hood often have. They have secreted it underneath the linoleum, behind the wallboards, and in the attic of the shack in a way that renders the incessant cleaning the contestants attempt moot. You are coming down again, but you don’t plan to be here long – you might be able to sneak a toot before you leave in the bathroom back at the production lot, one that should last you until you get back to your corporate apartment uptown.
“Is everything set for the next contest?” you ask the p.a.
“Yes sir,” he says, waving his hair out of his face. “The producers are going over the final details now.”
You watch off-camera while two of your male contestants play chess and drink beer. The female contestants are out at the Goodwill store down the street, looking for clothes for a party. One of the guys has fallen asleep on the couch while watching an old kung-fu movie, his dusty sneakers grinding even more dirt into the ratty old sofa. The card table in front of him is littered with crumpled Steel Reserve cans, empty bags of Doritos, balled up Burger King hamburger wrappers and three well-worn bus schedules.
You end up staying in the shack longer than you’d planned. Telling your p.a. to sit tight, you head to one of the three dead zones in the house that the cameras can’t reach, the one between the kitchen and the back porch. You pull your wallet out, open the plastic packet and quickly snort the trickle of white grains that you capture in the gap between your fingernail and the tip of your pinky finger. You think about it for a second, listening for anyone coming into the kitchen, before deciding to take a hit to the other nostril. You lick your fingers and rub them around the openings of your nose before putting the packet back in your wallet. A quick crumb brush, running your fingers through your mustache and patting down your shirt, and you can begin the trek back to the trailers with your p.a.
The two of you climb the stairs into the main trailer and enter the control room. Everyone here is silent. Gino tries to look as incredulous as the rest of them, but his mouth gives him away – that two-faced bastard seems to be doing everything in his power to keep from smiling at you. Your face is on all thirty monitors, the close-up image of your brown nostril covering half of each screen as you seem to inhale the cocaine in slow motion, hoovering a line of white particles into your nose as if they were in a jet stream. No one dares to look at you.
You remember, too late, the diagram Zack showed you last week about the additional cameras they’d installed.
You are so high you can’t move. Time moves in nanoseconds as you watch yourself dip into the baggie on screen for a second hit. You think of your stepfather and his recurring nightmare of falling into a giant asshole one day at work – right about now you wish you could crawl into your own ass, just stuff your whole being inside of yourself until you disappear.
But leadership in a crisis, you’ve learned, demands that the top dog act quickly – whether you’re going to bribe everybody in the room, threaten them with their jobs, or destroy the tape, you have to decide right now. You march over to the bank of DVR machines, pick out the one running your secret, and snatch the disc from it. “This does not exist,” you say, “and if I hear anything about it, neither will you.” None of them wants your job, and they all hate Georgie Baby, so you think you’ve got a pretty good shot at keeping this under wraps.
Somehow, you make it to the book signing for your former star later. The publisher’s rep does turn out to be young, and savvy enough to understand that the irregular twitch of your nostrils means fresh powder is available back at your place. You remember, when you wake up the next morning, right before you reach for the rest of the coke in your pants pocket, that you’re going to give a short speech at a school in a couple of hours, so you check your messages at the office and turn on the TV instead. An old black and white pirate movie, one of your childhood favorites, is playing. You don’t have to be at the school until eleven a.m, so you get to watch the movie right up until the pirate’s first victims are forced to walk the plank.
The school is a mile and half away from the Ghetto Pass shack, a dull red brick holdover from the sixties retrofitted with air conditioning and dark insulated windows. It looks a lot like the school you attended during your days in the ‘hood, before your stepfather started sending you to boarding school. Your hands clutch the wheel tighter as you recall the way his heavy hands used to caress your mother’s bare arms after he would help you to carry your trunk to your room.
The school receptionist at the front office takes your name and the vice principal comes out to greet you. He walks with you as far as the corridor outside the office. “Go straight down this hall until you see the double doors on your left.”
You haven’t given a speech since the Minorities in Broadcasting conference last fall. Greta has cut out stories from the local newspaper, making a clip file of current events to jazz up your standard “young, black and gifted” speech. When you walk into the gym you don’t remember middle schoolers being this big. Must be something in the water. You wish you’d had just a couple of lines before you left home, but after yesterday’s scene in the control room you need to lay low – your luck seems to be running out down here. Your fingers fidget in your pockets until the principal sidles over. She is a black woman who looks more like a bank vice president than a middle school principal. “Good to see you made it early,” she says. “I know you’re a busy man, but since my students watch so much TV I thought you would be a great speaker for them on Career Day.”
Your cell phone vibrates. You look at the number – it’s Georgie Baby. While you are contemplating calling him back it rings again, and you can swear this ringing is more urgent, more insistent, than the last call. Someone has ratted you out. You put the phone back in your pocket and try to amble coolly across the dais as the students rumble into the gym. Your brief stint in the ghetto was decades ago, but the smell of petroleum based hair grease, no-lye relaxers and under washed armpits is starting to permeate the gymnasium, the same way it did back then.
“…strive to achieve programming diversity – that’s my daily mission at…” You feel hollow, as if something is gutting out your innards. The caffeine rush is waning. You can feel the lines in your face deepening, the bags under your eyes swelling, the scratchiness of your voice increasing with each monotonous sentence. The more you talk, the more disembodied you become, until after ten minutes you have levitated out of your body, imagining that you are sitting in the front row beside the tall, skinny wannabe baller in his new Air Force Ones, watching your own lips move, seeing your own arms wave, wondering how the hell you got to be so old and tired looking at thirty seven.
As a teenager, you were always on the dais at assemblies, introducing speakers, giving invocations, moderating student panelists, all ostensibly because of the timbre of your voice, but mostly, you figured, because you were the only black kid in the tenth grade at your boarding school. Now you’re up here because you’re the only black person on the executive staff at your network, telling these kids some bullshit about how you strive to “achieve programming diversity” when they know as well as you do that this is about appeasement: “Look, you need to be glad you’re on the bus. I don’t know why you’re so worried about sitting in the front – the back is gonna get there the same time.”
“You know, I could go on and on about a whole lot of…well, a whole lot of stuff. You know the drill. Dress for Success. Speak proper English. Be on time.” They are still zombified, still sitting there half dead.
“But do you guys know who I am? I mean, who I really am? I’m the Head Nigga in Charge of the largest block of black TV programming in the country.” The crowd suddenly buzzes, whispers trading back and forth – did he really just say “nigga” up on stage? Miss Black Principal stands up, her pleasant smile evaporating into a nasty grimace.
“I know I’ve got your principal in a tizzy, but that long title your MC read after my name a few minutes ago when I was being introduced – assistant vice president of programming diversity – that’s for show. I’ve got Ivy League graduates working for me – you know, Harvard, Yale, Brown – mostly rich white boys who don’t even know we exist. Well guess what, people? That’s what they call me when they think I can’t hear them.”
A lone voice cries out from the audience – it belongs to the owner of the Air Force Ones. “Why don’t you just fire they asses? Ain’t you they boss man?”
Miss Black Principal knows the power of bad press – your mindless rambling could be the impetus for a demotion, or worse, keep her stuck here forever. She is at the foot of the stage now, glaring at you, her hands on her hips. You’re almost done, though, so you ignore her. “One of the things I remember about being a kid was feeling that the grownups knew all the answers. But a lot of you are smarter than I was at your age, so you’ve probably already figured out that this is not true.”
You are sweating under your arms. “The only answer I can give you about life is to create your own reality. I loved pirate movies as a kid. Watched them every Saturday afternoon. My mother got me books on them – Captain Kidd, Bluebeard, and all the other famous ones. The thing about pirates – they would fly a friendly flag up on their mast when they were on the open sea to lure in the cargo ships. Then when they got within striking distance, they would run up the skull and crossbones flag and start attacking the vessel. So when I say to you ‘create your own reality’, you still need to ‘dress for success’, ‘speak proper English’, ‘and ‘be on time’.
You pause, letting the silence fill the gap, a smile dancing around your lips. “Just keep your pirate flag handy. In case you need to…how do y’all say it…git in dat ass.” The response is so boisterous that Miss Black Principal has to retreat to her original post, shhhushing students as she walks.
“Fake ass nigger!” one of the students from the audience shouts as you step away from the mic, and in a split second it’s like you’re back at that damn bus stop in the ‘hood.
Your cell phone is trembling in your pocket again – it stops and starts, stops and starts, over and over – it must be Georgie Baby himself calling. Was it Gino – slick ass, two faced Gino – who dimed you out?
You sit, looking over the kids in the audience, an unnaturally silent mass of living, breathing brown flesh, and you know right then how the ship captain in the movie you watched earlier felt when he walked the plank.
You march out of the school building after the assembly and plop down into the leather seat in your car. All those young black faces in the school’s auditorium had looked at you as if they were pissed they had to listen to you rattle on about the keys to success – it was the most depressing sight you’d seen in years. There was no doubt in your mind they hated seeing you stand on stage, just another manicured brown mannequin who was supposed to inspire them to do the right thing. You figure all of them, from the bored administrators and the jaded teachers to the cynical students, know that your reverse code switching exercise at the end of your speech was nothing but a big charade, that your earnest claim of solidarity with the bruthas and sistas in the streets does not actually exist.
Maybe you should have told those kids how your business really worked.
Maybe you should have told them that last spring it had taken three lines of blow and a liquid lunch for you just to get up the nerve to make your Ghetto Pass pitch to Georgie Baby, and when you finally laid out the details of the project you’d made up bogus statistics right off the top of your head and quoted fake budget numbers you’d never crunched and never would.
Maybe you should have described how nervous you were as you’d paced around your desk, sweat pouring down your lean torso as you wheedled and cajoled Georgie Baby like the rest of your life had depended on hearing a “Yes” from him come through the perforated grill of the speakerphone on your desk.
Maybe you should have told them that “getting in that ass” of everyone below you on the org chart is the only part of the job you still enjoy.
Taking the rest of the blow from your wallet, you lean your head towards the steering wheel and snort it straight out of the baggie. There is only enough for two or three medium sized lines, but the rush is so strong it snaps your head straight back into the headrest. You swear, as you settle into the sweet burn that shoots from the tip of your nose straight to your brain, that you can actually hear the steel in the hood of your car expanding in the midday sun.
You are alive again.
You’ll call Georgie Baby back in a second.