The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (44 page)

“Thursday?” he said. “Wake up, baby.”

So I did, and I found my father in the room with us.

I sat up, feeling like I had been caught with a boy, taking my cues from the stern expression on Rick T’s face. But then I remembered I wasn’t in high school any more, and my dad was no longer my dad, just Rick T, a man I hadn’t seen in person for over a decade before he showed up in Louisiana.

“My dad, your grandfather, tried to convert me on his deathbed,” Rick T said. “Mom called me, said that he was dying, that he wanted to see me. I drove everybody over there. Remember that trip?”

I recalled my paternal grandmother complimenting everything but my dimples and nodded.

“I went in there, expecting some big apology from him, ready to forgive. But before I was even all the way through the door he was on me again, like he’d been holding his breath to make his next point since the last fight we’d had. He said, ‘See what you done to me. All this fiddle-faddle, all this who-shot-Mary you been talking all over the devil box. My heart couldn’t take it.’”

Rick T’s mouth turned up into a bitter half smile at the memory. “I was like you, little girl, a smart-ass from birth. So of course I said, ‘Last time I checked, rapping never gave anybody heart disease. A poor diet on the other hand … ’ Your grandfather got swole. You should’ve seen him hissing about how ungrateful I was, how I needed to turn my talent to God, how if I didn’t, I’d be going to Hell and he wouldn’t even spit on me from heaven. And you know what was crazy? He never listened to any of my albums. Preachers were like that back then. If music wasn’t about Jesus then it belonged to the devil. He didn’t care that I was trying to uplift black people, all he cared about was that I cursed while I did it and I wasn’t using my voice to talk about God. He’d raised me to be Dr. Rick Turner Jr., like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and I’d been all set to walk that path. But then I met your mama and became a rapper instead.”

He set the script down on the coffee table in front of us. “You should put that deathbed scene in there. If you put that in, I’ll approve it.”

There’s this thing all writers get taught in grad school. You can’t have your villain decide on his own that he’s no longer going to keep fighting with the protagonist. Your hero has to earn everything she gets. And if the villain decides to stop being evil, it has to be because of something she did.

So having only recently returned to written words, the magical material that my mother had always assured me was all I needed to move hearts and minds, a sense of wonder crept into my voice when I said to my father, “Are you serious?”

He sounded pained when he said his next words, like this confession cost him something to make. “You know, when I first met your mom, we
were both doing the poetry thing. I told my dad it was a hobby, but I would sweat over my lines for months, trying to get them just right. Same with homework. I thought my essays would be collected like MLK’s speeches someday, so it’d take me weeks to do a five-page paper. But your mom—she didn’t even use the desk in her dorm room. She’d write her essays in bed and get As. The first time we had sex, she turned over and wrote ‘Thirty-Four Minutes’ in fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes …” He shook his head.

“Thirty-Four Minutes” had been the third single off of his debut album—swagger-free, and, according to
Vibe
magazine’s End of the Millennium issue, the sixth-best rap love song of all time.

“People still come up to me talking about how much that song meant to them, and it only took her fifteen minutes to write it. You think I didn’t respect her, like we were always the way we were at the end. But I respected her all right. I wanted to be her so bad. If I could have found a way to make us into one person, I would have. If I had her kind of talent, I’d be rich like Bono now.” He broke off and folded his hands into a tight prayer fist before saying, “Your mom would have been so proud of you, pumpkin.”

I went still, at that moment realizing that more than anything I wanted my dead mother’s approval. “Really?”

“Yeah, I can see the way she raised you all over that script. That’s why I’m going to give it my approval, but … but you can’t keep on hating me,” he said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I did your mother dirty. Sometimes I wonder if my career tanked after she died because she wasn’t there to guide me. Maybe this is my punishment for not having treated her better. Maybe I didn’t appreciate her enough. I try not to think about it too much, because I’m old, and I already have enough problems getting to sleep at night.

“But estrangement—that’s a powerful decision. I know, because I made it with my own father before you were even born. You have to decide that if that person you used to love died tomorrow, you’d be okay with never having forgiven him. After that deathbed conversation, I didn’t even go to your grandfather’s funeral. And yeah, maybe I was right about that. He was
self-righteous, couldn’t see all the good I was trying to do with my music, while these other vultures were eating rap alive with their nonsense. But I’m old now, and the music game forced me into retirement, so I have lots of time to think. I should have gone to his funeral. I was right to go my own way, but I should have forgiven him. I should have found a way to have a relationship with him, to let you and Janine have a relationship with your grandfather.

“Because the truth is that nobody’s all good or all bad. Your mother wasn’t perfect, but she was your mother, and she did good with you and Janine. I didn’t do as good a job as she did, but I’m your father. I’m not all devil. You need to take the good parts of me and hold on to that, because you may not like me, but I’m the only parent you have left. That counts for something, even if you don’t think it does.”

After all of that, he folded his arms and waited for me to say something. And, despite ten years of telling myself that I had what it took to stay estranged from my father, I already knew that I had lost the battle. I didn’t hate him anymore. I couldn’t hate him anymore. It wasn’t even possible to hate him anymore.

His rap was just too damn good.

So I picked up the script and said, “You know what, I will add that deathbed scene. That’s good stuff.” My writer’s brain spun some more. “And the stuff about you going balls-to-the-wall to get a record deal after Mom got pregnant with me. That’s good, too. Nice clock. I’ll put that in.”

And just like that, what had been complicated became simple. Rick T slept in the suite’s second bedroom, and stayed on the next day, keeping me company when Mike went to set. We enjoyed beignets at Café Du Monde, visited a cathedral, studiously ignored the women pulling up their tops when the street turned into a reckless party at night.

I sat in the back seat with him when Mrs. Murphy drove him to the airport the following morning. He talked about Mike and me meeting up with him and Brenda in their Hawaiian condo the next Christmas. He was a snowbird now, and only spent the warm months in Connecticut. I told
him I wasn’t ready for Christmas With The Mistress yet. He told me not to call her that. She had a name. I suggested maybe he could visit Mike and me in California for Thanksgiving, if we were still together by then.

“You think you two won’t be?” Rick T asked.

And I changed the subject, because it didn’t feel appropriate to talk about the driving-off-the-cliff feeling that admitting to my love for Mike gave me.

After Rick T left, I took over the hotel-room office and wrote for the rest of the day. When Mike got home, we ordered room service and made love. And that’s what we did for the next thirty days. Rinse and repeat, more boring than what anyone would imagine Mike Barker to be like. But, I had discovered, sometimes boring was good. Sometimes boring meant that you got your work done and he got his work done and at the end of the day, you were happy to be boring together.

I came to love our setup, and I would have stayed as planned until halfway through May, but on May second, Risa called while I was writing in the hotel suite’s office.

“Hey, Risa, what’s up,” I said.

No answer.

“Risa, are you there?” I asked.

Still no answer. And I was about to check the connection, but then I heard several hitched breaths, and I realized that Risa was there.

She couldn’t talk because she was crying too hard.

“Risa,” I said. “I am going to the airport right now and I will book the first flight I find to L.A. I’m coming, okay? I’m coming.”

“Okay,” Risa said, her voice little more than a whisper. “Okay.”

RISA

N
ot to accuse Thursday of being a bad friend, but she promised to call me back, and then she, like, never did. Meanwhile, I had to clean up Tammy’s living room, throw open all the windows, and Febreze the shit out of it so it didn’t smell like some teenage boy’s nasty room.

When I went back to the bedroom, I found Tammy crumpled on the bed. My heart stopped, but when I put my finger under her nose, I felt air coming out of it. She was just dozing.

I decided to go over there. “There” being James Farrell’s mansion in the Los Feliz Hills. Tammy had lived there when she first came back to L.A. after running away from me to New York. And I’d visited her there a few times in the first stages of trying to be friends. I surprised myself by driving there by memory, finding it easily despite not knowing the address.

“Hello, this be the Farrell residence,” said a voice with a heavy Jamaican accent when I pushed the button on the speaker box outside the gate.

I recognized the voice as that of Paul, her brother’s manservant, and I said that I was a friend of Tammy’s and asked to talk to James. Paul buzzed me in, pushing some button inside the house that sent the metal gates sliding open with quiet efficiency. Not surprisingly, James remembered me.

“How’s it going?” he said, greeting me himself at the door.

I told him that he might want to call his wife down.

“She’s with a client,” he said.

And I felt so bad for him that I decided not to prolong it. I said it straight, no prep. “Tammy’s got terminal stage IV cancer. She’s not in the Maldives. She’s been lying to you since last July, and now she’s in really, really bad shape.”

“That’s the sickest joke I’ve ever heard, and you need help,” he said.

“I wish it was a joke,” I said.

And he shook his head and said, “No.”

Just “no,” like him saying that one word and giving me a stern look would stop Tammy from having cancer.

I met his stern look straight in the eye, unblinking, and he sat down on the foyer bench and started saying it over and over again. “No, no, no. Not my baby sister.”

“Can I borrow your cell phone?” I asked. Doing this shit was even worse than I thought it would be. Like, way worse, and I wanted to get it over with.

I found Veronica in his contact list. She also assumed I was joking. “I don’t see why my sister thinks your antics are so funny,” she said. “You’re not funny at all.” Her slightly Southern voice had such a declarative authority to it, you’d think she was the queen of something.

Again, I explained that I wasn’t joking. I would be offended that so many people thought I could joke about something like this, but the truth was, I probably could have if it weren’t happening to Tammy. I remembered, particularly back in January 2011, wishing out loud to Sharita that David Gall would get butt cancer and die sucking Ipso! Facto!’s collective dick.

That image was not so funny now.

I ended up driving James back to Tammy’s place myself, and we found Veronica waiting for us inside Tammy’s apartment.

She was bigger than I remember, not big like Sharita, but not skinny like me. But then I remembered that she had a kid about a year ago. She had hips now, and her cheekbones didn’t look like they could slice through concrete anymore. It made her look more like Tammy. But then I had to correct myself. She looked like Tammy used to look. Before the cancer.

“She’s not here,” Veronica said when we came in. She looked like she was holding herself back from taking a gun out of her Chanel purse and shooting my ass dead. I, in fact, hoped she didn’t have a gun in her purse.

“Did you look in the bedroom?” I asked.

“Yes, of course, and she wasn’t in there either.”

Oh, Tammy …

I led them back to her bedroom and threw open the walk-in closet’s door. No Tammy.

I turned on the closet light. Still no Tammy. But then I spotted a toe sticking out from a row of evening gowns. Ironically, it was the foot with the full five toes that gave her away.

Whoever had said that all people want to die with their dignity intact had obviously never met Tammy.

“Come out, Tammy,” I said. “I told them. Like you should have done a long time ago.”

She didn’t move, the evening gowns didn’t so much as rustle. “Come on, Tammy,” I said.

Still no movement, and I had to grab her by the foot and full-on drag her emaciated ass out from behind the evening gowns.

She shook her head furiously and put her finger to her mouth, both a demand and a plea. But I did what I had to do, dragging her out, even though she was silently screaming at me to stop.

However, at the end of the day Tammy was someone who has been raised to put her best face forward at all times. And she became all smiles for her brother and sister when I pulled her stumbling out of the closet.