A Star is Born (5 page)

T
he question I am going to ask you when this film is finished” — Mr. Siegfried pushed his glasses up on his nose — “is how many people, in how many countries, make a profit from this one simple operation of manufacturing chocolate? Yes, you might take out your notebooks and do the calculations, but you will not talk during this short film.”

“Would you mind if I ran out and got some popcorn?” Phat Tony asked.

Mr. Siegfried walked over to Phat Tony's desk. “Mr. Williams, may I share with you two small facts? The first is that you are far less amusing than you imagine you are, and the second is that you are on the very cusp of failing Social Studies. I derive a great deal of pleasure in failing students who overestimate their cleverness. Shall we continue with your supposedly witty remarks or shall we discard our humor for the time being, sir?”

“We can let it go, sir,” Phat Tony said, slumping down into his seat.

The room didn't really get dark but we could see the film all right. First they showed this family sitting around the table having cups of cocoa in the morning and then this voice-over came on asking if anybody wondered how this “delicious cup of goodness” got to their breakfast table.

One boy said that they made it in New Jersey, but I didn't believe that.

Then we saw the woman in the family buying the cocoa in the supermarket, then there was a picture of a black guy driving boxes of the stuff from a warehouse. I put down some tick marks on a sheet of paper. After that there was a ship with huge steel containers of something I assumed was cocoa and then a quick shot of people loading the ship.

“I'm giving this film one and a half stars,” Kambui said.

Then the film showed a farm and trees and stuff. I didn't know cocoa grew on trees, so that was kind of interesting. We watched people gathering the plants and loading them onto trucks. Some of them were looking at the camera and smiling and I liked that.

When the film ended everybody started comparing their number of how many people made money on the cocoa. I had counted five: the guy who ran the supermarket, the guy who brought the cocoa from the warehouse to the supermarket, whoever brought it to the warehouse from the ship, whoever brought it to the ship, and whoever grew it in the first place.

With Mr. Siegfried you were always going to be wrong. He was fair on tests, but in class he had a way of always making you feel off balance.

He started adding in bookkeepers, the people who made the containers, salespeople, and even people who traded in cocoa on the stock exchange. Boring. I could see where Mr. Siegfried was coming from but I really didn't care.

“There were children picking the cocoa,” Bobbi said. “How come they weren't in school? The announcer said it was their winter.”

I thought that Mr. Siegfried was going to say something about kids going to school wasn't our subject, but he didn't. He got right on Bobbi's comments and asked her to look up when the schools were open in Brazil, where the film had been made.

“And I'll give you extra credit if you document your findings, Miss McCall.”

That was swift of Bobbi, but I felt a little bad that I hadn't picked up on it. The thing was that Bobbi picked up on a lot of things that other people didn't.

The afternoon went by and I kind of vegged out. I saw LaShonda across the hall and she signaled a
T
for me to text her.

 

what's up?

wanna come to a tennis game this afternoon?

u playing?

no, Chris is. it's an xhibition at Jackie Robinson Park.

yeah, ok — what time?

3:30

see ya then

 

I didn't know what kind of program it was going to be but I thought I would go just to show LaShonda some support. I had seen handicapped kids play sports before and didn't really dig it. It was good that Chris was getting out more, though.

The thing was I didn't know what was actually wrong with Chris but I knew something wasn't right. Whenever I saw him and LaShonda was around he would put his forehead against her and keep it there unless they needed to walk somewhere. He was a friendly kid, sort of, but he never looked right at you. It was like he was overhearing a conversation rather than you were talking to him.

I went right from school to the park. I asked Kambui to come with me but he had to take his grandmother to the Social Security office. I got to the park just at three-thirty and there weren't many kids there. In the swing section there were some women with small kids and one fat lady with some rabbits and a serious little girl trying to get the rabbits to sit together.

LaShonda was sitting on a bench facing the basketball court and I joined her.

“What's going on?” I asked.

“Just needed somebody to holler at,” she said. “See how the words sound when they come out of my mouth.”

“I know it's hard,” I said.

“Do you?” LaShonda turned and looked at me.

“Yeah.”

“Look, here come the kids to play tennis,” she said. “Watch Chris play.”

I didn't know any of the six kids, all about nine or ten, on the tennis court and I figured they must have all been from St. Francis. A bald-headed dude who was running things separated them into two groups of three and put them on different sides of the two nets. The kids on the right side were setting up a doubles match, and Baldy placed one near the net and the other one farther back. He tossed the ball over the net and the kids on the other side both ran to it and started swinging. They missed the ball, ran and got it, and tossed it back to Baldy. Then they went through the whole process again. They did it three times before the kids even hit the ball once. But after a while they would get the ball and throw it over the net, which seemed okay with them.

Baldy went on one side of the other net, away from Chris, then served the ball to him.

Chris Powell got to the ball in a heartbeat and pounded it over the net. Baldy got to it and lobbed it high. Chris let it bounce and then slammed it over again, past Baldy who was lunging for it.

“Yo, he can play,” I said.

“If he knows I'm here he can play, or do almost anything,” LaShonda said. “If he takes his meds he's right in the game.”

“The tennis game?” I asked. “He's, like, really into tennis?”

LaShonda didn't answer at first and I turned back toward where Baldy was hitting the ball with Chris. Once in a while the ball would come to the other kid who would try to get it over the net, but it was Chris who was the athlete. I kept thinking of when LaShonda played basketball in the gym. She was ferocious and quick and I knew she would have been great on the school's girls' team, but she'd never gone out for it.

Meanwhile on the court, Chris kept getting to the ball and kept hitting it back across the net. But every once in a while he would look over to where me and LaShonda were sitting and I could feel he needed to have her there.

“When we were with my parents, my dad used to beat on my mom all the time,” LaShonda said. “He was so violent she had to go to the hospital at least once a month. He got locked up once or twice but when he got out she would let him back home. Then one day he was beating on her and I tried to get in between them.”

“What happened?”

“I don't even know.” LaShonda smiled for a brief second and let it die. “I guess he hit me and knocked me out. When I came back around there was blood all over the place. She cleaned up everything before she took me to the hospital. I had nerve damage or something, I don't know. I got over it, though. Eventually, he got involved in some street fight and cut a dude and got some prison time. When he got out the last time he didn't even come around, but once in a while he would see my mother on the street and threaten her.

“She got messed around and started drinking and couldn't control that, and they took us out of the house. She got arrested now and then for whatever she was doing in her life and we've been at St. Francis ever since.”

“Your father hit Chris, too?”

“No, he beat my mother up, and sometimes he would slap me around,” LaShonda said. “But he never hit Chris.”

“So, how come … you know?”

“The doctor said that Chris seeing all that violence, and being in the house with it and having it happen to people he was close to, was just about the same as him being hit. That's just the way it is. I'm what he's got, Zander. And he's what I got.”

I watched Chris hit the ball, watched him move around the court and glance over to where LaShonda sat with me. Whenever he looked our way, she smiled.

THE CRUISER

A POEM THAT'S NOT A POEM

By Bobbi McCall and Zander Scott

W
hat happened last Thursday, conversation past.

Four o'clock in the afternoon, which is like one o'clock West Coast time, and things start popping off. First, the home phone rings and that means it's either a bill collector, a junk call, or my father. Mom answers it and collapses into her lotus position. I can't do that but she hits it like it's nothing. Her knees bend out and she goes down in one motion. Very cool.

When her eyes roll up I know it's Donald Scott, famous weatherman and long-distance father. Mom switched the phone to speaker.

“You're public,” she said.

“So, how are things going?”

“Wonderful, I just got the Nobel prize for being sexy.”

“I guess ‘serious' is still not in your repertoire. How's Zander?”

“Zander, how are you?”

“Wonderful.”

“What have you two been up to?”

“I'm up to five foot nine, and Zander's up to six feet.”

“I mean, what have you been doing?”

“We're planning a major robbery. Zander found an abandoned time machine and we're going to use it to steal next weekend and sell it to the Iranians. What do you think?”

“What I think is that your sorry attempts at humor are not at all funny. I am concerned with my son's well-being and I would appreciate it if you would not treat my phone calls lightly!”

“You're not going to rat us out, are you?”

“May I speak to Zander?”

“Zander?”

“Yo!”

“So, how are things going?”

“All right.”

“And school?”

“All right.”

“I wanted to talk to you about an allowance. A boy your age needs to have a sense of responsibility about money. I was reading an article recently suggesting that fiscal stability often starts in one's teenage years.
(Mom is frantically writing a note.)
If you learn how to manage money in your teen years you'll probably retire in good condition.”

“So how much we talking about?”

“I want you to spend a few days thinking about the amount and then call me back with the amount and with a rationalization for that amount. Can you do that?”

“Yeah.”

“Fine, and Zander, I want this to be from you and nobody else. And I want you to be serious. Can I count on you?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, I'll wait to hear from you. And say good-bye to your mother for me.”

“Hey, Dad, can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“You know, I have a friend, LaShonda, who's worried about what's going to happen to her and her brother in a few years. They're living in a group home. You know what that is?”

“Yes, of course. It's one of those places that children who are without parents live.”

“Or their parents can't deal with them. Anyway, she's only fourteen now but she says when she reaches eighteen she could age out. That means they only get funding for kids under eighteen.”

“I've heard about that.”

“Well, that kind of sucks, and I thought that if a lot of people knew about it — you know — if you got it on television then maybe we could get the rules changed so that —”

“It's been done.”

“What?”

“It's been done. There was a program aired about … two, maybe three years ago on the topic. They never repeat the feature story — and that's what that would be, a feature — within a three-year period.”

“What's that mean?”

“It means that if they air a story they won't air the same story again unless there's a dramatic new twist to it. It just won't fly.”

“But it's still happening.”

“So you'll get back to me on the allowance, Zander. And remember, I respect your maturity and I look forward to a man-to-man conversation.”

“Yeah.”

 

All kinds of sadness started going on. Mom was crying, which she does after about half of my father's phone calls, and I was mad, which I am after half his phone calls, and a whole bunch of things weren't making any sense. We were taking Algebra in school and figuring out what
x
was or what
y
was and jumping all over the unknowns like they were lame and we just had to track their little unknown butts down. Once we tracked them down (
x
=
y
+2), the problem was solved. But in real life you could track down whatever
x
or
y
was and nothing was solved. Everybody knew about kids getting aged out, but nobody was going any further. My father even changed the problem from kids aging out to what would make a good television program.

Mom was down with the problem but after the phone call from the Friendly Weatherman she was all about what was bruising her cruising.

“I think that he thinks that if he gives you a fat allowance then you simply won't need me anymore,” she said.

“He's always thinking something” was my lame answer.

I couldn't really feel their fights because I couldn't see a reason for them. Pops had split, moved out to the West Coast, got a new wife and another kid (nasty little girl!), while Mom and me had stayed in Harlem and kept on keeping on. But if there was going to be a fight then I was on Mom's side because she was my heart and he was, like,
in the wind
. Case closed.

“He asked what we were doing and I couldn't think of anything!” she said.

“You don't have to prove anything to him,” I said.

“I still feel bad,” Mom said. “We have to do more things together.”

That smelled like trouble. But it didn't get to be real trouble until Monday.

“I ordered a cassoulet kit,” Mom said, smiling. It was the same smile she used for toothpaste commercials. “Do you know what that is?”

“Something that women use to clean their private parts?”

“Oh! Oh! No!”

Right away I guessed I was wrong.

THE CRUISER

OVERHEARD

By A. Nanny Moose

FOUR MINUTES TO AIRTIME:

ONE MINUTE TO AIRTIME:

FIVE SECONDS TO AIRTIME:

WE'RE ON!