My Infamous Life_bounce_005

I never had any racial problems at Woodmere
except one day in the locker room after gym class.
A kid named Max had forty dollars stolen from his locker
and tried to blame me.
Max was the first person I’d ever seen with his own credit card.
Most people I knew had never even heard of credit cards,
but this seven-year-old kid in my school had one.
It was American Express.
“Did you take my money?” Max looked in my direction.
“No!” Max and I had a body-blow fight in the locker room,
punching each other in the stomach, ribs, and chest,
and the teachers broke it up.
He found his money later and apologized.
Why would he accuse me?
The only reason I could think of was because I was black.
The white kids were cool, though,
and a few of the girls had crushes on me.
In my first-grade class there was a pretty white girl named Michelle
with long brownish-blond hair.
After graham crackers and apple juice during snack time one day,
the whole class went outside for recess.
Michelle and I were the last two to leave the classroom.
She told me she liked me and put her leg around my waist
and placed my hand on her ass.
I was a scared punk.
My mind wasn’t as advanced yet
because I was absent from school so often
and didn’t hang out in Lakeview Park
like the other kids my age due to my sickle-cell.
Being hospitalized for weeks and months
caused me to miss out on the birds-and-the-bees activities.
I wasn’t ready for Michelle’s advances,
but she was all over me.
I think it had a lot to do with my grandmother’s car.
Sometimes Grandmoms would drop me off at school
in her brand-spankin’-new black Cadillac
with a burgundy pinstripe on the side and burgundy leather seats.
“Those white kids’ parents drop them off in Mercedes-Benzes and Rolls-Royces,
so we gotta show them that your family has money too,”she said.
Michelle saw me getting out of the car one morning and stared, starry-eyed.
Grandmoms knew how to make a grand entrance.
She lived, breathed, ate, slept, and shit show business.
The world was her stage, and I learned a lot from her flashy actions.
She would tell me about how she came from Southside Jamaica
to become the first black woman with her own building on Merrick Boulevard;
then hers was the first black family in Hempstead, Long Island,
to build their own house.
“T’Chaka, you have to own your home, ”
she said firmly, using my family’s nickname for me, after the Zulu king.
“Black people must own their things.”
She bought her cars with cash, brand-new out of the showroom.
“You should see the look on those white people’s faces
when they ask me how do I plan to pay. I say,‘Cash,’
pull out a bagful of money,
and they start treating me very differently.”
“Never put all of your money in one bank,”
Grandmoms said, showing me bank-deposit booklets,
each from a different bank and adding up to a couple million dollars.
She taught me not to touch my money once I had millions like she did.
“Do you see all this money I have in these little books?
I get thousands of dollars in interest payments every month,”
she explained.
“I can either deposit the interest and increase my accounts every month,
or I can live off the interest and use it to pay my bills.
But I’ll never go broke.”
Grandmoms was very rich at that time;
she wasn’t supporting my mother and father financially.
We were struggling to survive,
but she did make sure her only grandson, me, was well educated.
At Woodmere Academy,
I got the best education that part of Long Island had to offer.
On the bus ride after school,
I was the last one dropped off,
so I’d stare at the spacious mansions that the white kids went home to,
watching the neighborhood become worse and worse the closer we got to my house.
And I’d go home to Lakeview,
back to all the blackness.
I learned a couple of things at that school.
I found out white girls were real aggressive when they liked you,
and little white boys had credit cards.
On weekends at my grandparents’ house in Hempstead,
my grandfather Big Budd worked on sheet music
in his room while watching baseball on his small TV.
The walls of his room were covered with posters from his tours
in Russia,Japan, and all over the world.
Besides baseball and jazz, Grandpops had a passion for golf.
He bought me a mini plastic Playskool golf set
and tried teaching me on the lawn.
He also bought me a small saxophone
and signed me up for the Woodmere Academy band.
But as hard as Grandpops and I tried, I couldn’t even handle
“Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
That year, my whole family came to see me play at a band concert
in the school auditorium.
There were five saxophonists onstage including myself.
“You were so good!” my folks encouraged me after the show.
“You sounded great!” If they only knew I was only pretending to play,
I thought, keeping it to myself.
My horn wasn’t blowing a damn thing.
But I played it off because my grandfather was proud.
My two best friends were Carey,
who lived on the same corner as my grandmother’s Hempstead house,
and Stobo, who was like a brother.
We were two months apart in age and had known each other since birth.
We called each other cousins,
even cut our hands and rubbed our palms together to become blood brothers.
When Carey and Stobo slept over,
Grandpops always came home drunk from his shows and took out his false
teeth,
smiling and chasing us around the house.
It was a scary sight for a kid.
Grandmoms would get pissed at him for being so drunk and loud.
“Go to hell, you jackass!”
she’d yell after him as we scampered by.
My father took me to see my grandfather perform at the Blue Note in Manhattan.
I was the only little kid in the bar,
but it was nothing new
because Pops was a heavy drinker and liked taking me along.
As always, I ordered my favorite drink,
7UP with cherry syrup and a couple of cherries on the rocks.
And my pops would order his,
peach schnapps. People would stare as if to say,
“How you got this little kid in a bar?”
But nobody messed with my pops.
Grandpops played the sax like a madman and the Blue Note crowd loved it.
After Grandpops’s shows or Grandmoms’s dance concerts,
our tradition was to eat a big meal at a swanky restaurant
and for me to order the same dish:lobster tails.
It was usually the most expensive thing on the menu
and I never actually ate it,
just dipped my bread in the butter.
But Grandmoms got a kick out of me ordering it.
My grandparents usually brought one of their famous friends to dine with us,
like Ben Vereen, the dancer-actor from the movie Roots.
He was Grandmoms’s student when he was a kid.
Or Grandpops would bring Dizzy Gillespie and other jazz friends,
and they all enjoyed look on the white waiter’s face when I ordered first
and chose the lobster tail with melted butter.
My grandparents were from an era of vicious racism and poverty,
so my grandmother especially loved to show off
and let white people know she had money.
One dreary winter evening,
my mother, father,and I were at home watching Buck Rogers on TV
when we got a call from the Nassau County emergency room.