Power & Beauty (5 page)
“But . . .” I started to say, trying to recover from still another punch to my gut.
“You have to look at it this way, son. It’s an honor to be nominated.”
Bullshit,
I wanted to scream but said nothing. With my head down, I walked out.
Back on my moped, I rode out to Slim’s house. I was glad he wasn’t home ’cause the first thing he’d ask was whether I’d won. Slim looked at my accomplishments like they were his. He’d hate this, and after all he had given me, I didn’t want to tell him what happened. I had no explanations.
I was walking over to my garage apartment when Dre happened to pull up in his Lexus.
“What’s g-g-g-g-good, baby?” he said.
“All good, Dre.”
“You don’t l-l-l-l-look all g-g-g-g-good.”
“Just one of those days.”
Getting out of his car and walking toward me, he asked, “W-w-w-what happened?”
Dre was one of those cats you could talk to. He was never looking to pass judgment or criticize. I started talking. I told him the whole story, how I was 100 percent certain to win, how Barry Tanner was basically a nerd that no one cared about, and how he had creamed me in the election.
Dre stood there listening. When I was through, he came over and put his arm around my shoulder. I could see in his eyes that he was feeling the pain that I was feeling.
“M-m-m-m-m-man,” he said, “that’s some rough sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-shit there, bro. But I understand it.”
“You do?”
“Oh, yeah, Power. I d-d-d-d-do.”
“Tell me.”
“You just now l-l-l-l-learning ’bout haters. You got you some s-s-s-s-serious haters, brother.”
“Hating me for what?”
“Who you are. What you got. Who’s t-t-t-taking care of you.”
“Slim?”
“I saw it when I f-f-f-f-first start working with the man. He got him some h-h-h-h-haters. Folk be envious. Hateful. They don’t l-l-l-l-like seeing you having it easy as y-y-y-y-you have it.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You will. See, when you m-m-m-m-made up your mind to come on over here and a-a-a-a-accept being Slim’s b-b-b-b-boy, you done made a choice.”
“A choice about what?”
“A choice of g-g-g-g-g-going into the l-l-l-l-l . . .” Dre couldn’t get out this last word. Sometimes when that happened, I would complete the word for him. But in this case, I didn’t know what word he was struggling to say. So I asked him again.
“What did I choose to go into, Dre?”
Dre blinked his eyes. Sometimes this helped him get the word out. He took a deep breath and, with a big effort, said, “You done chose this l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-life.” He took a deep breath and repeated the words. “You done chose this l-l-l-l-l-l-l-life, bro. And I’m afraid that it d-d-d-d-d-don’t come ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-cheap.”
If my moms had been alive, this was something I could have talked to her about. She’d have understood. Or Beauty—Beauty would also have understood; I wanted to talk to Beauty, I wanted to talk to my sister. It had been nine months since she had left Atlanta. The last time we spoke was in December. It was the first Christmas without my mother and I was missing Beauty; I was thinking of her all the time. I just had to hear her voice. I wanted to wish her merry Christmas, but Wanda wouldn’t give me Anita’s number. I had to beg to get it. I called, and Beauty answered on the first ring.
“It’s Power.”
“You don’t think I know your voice?”
“I’ve been missing yours,” I said.
I could hear her struggling to figure out what to say or what not to say. I could hear her struggling with her feelings.
“I didn’t mean to catch you by surprise,” I said.
“You okay?” she finally asked.
“I’m good.”
“You still staying at Slim’s?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re not good.”
“I didn’t call to get into that. I just called to wish you merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas, Power.”
“And that’s it?” I asked.
“That’s all I can say, it really is.”
“Then I’ll leave you alone.”
But now, all these months later, I didn’t want to leave her alone. I was hurting, and I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to explain my confusion to her. I wanted her to help me get through this. So I called the number Wanda had given me. The answering machine picked up. The voice of an older woman said, “This is Anita Ward kindly requesting that you leave your name at the beep.” Instead of leaving my name, I hung up.
The election was on a Thursday. I was relieved when Slim didn’t show up that night. Dre said he’d gone to Birmingham on business. Next morning I considered skipping school. I didn’t want to face it. But I knew that eventually I’d have to, so I forced myself to get dressed, climb on the moped, and ride in.
The students acted differently toward me—I could feel that immediately. Most of them looked the other way when they saw me. As much as I didn’t want to face them, they didn’t want to face me either. I couldn’t remember ever feeling more alone in my life. The only dude who stopped me in the hallway was Barry Tanner. He was wearing this big goony smile on his face.
“Hey, Power,” he said, “you ran a good race and I just wanted to tell you I’d like to put you on one of the committees that’s looking to get more money for the chess team to travel out of town for tournaments. What do you say?”
I didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know what to feel.
“Whatever” was the only word that came out of my mouth.
My stomach was hurting. I felt queasy. I went to the bathroom and was in a stall with the door closed when two guys came in. I recognized their voices; it was Anthony and T-Shot, my teammates from basketball.
“He been acting like he’s all that for months now,” said Anthony.
“Living large off a gangsta’s money. He’s got attitude that tries a nigga’s patience. Serves him right to get his ass whipped like that. Who the fuck does he think he is?”
“Far as I’m concerned, he ain’t nobody.”
“His fancy ride, all them parties up in his crib, all that pussy he been getting. Well, he wouldn’t be getting nothing if he wasn’t the golden boy of Charles ‘Slim’ Simmons. Slim Simmons thinks he can buy his boy anything, even make him president of his class.”
“That nigga thinks he owns Atlanta.”
“Fuck him.”
“And fuck Power. Without that old-school thug behind him, Power don’t got no power. Power don’t got shit. Power
ain’t
shit.”
“And now he knows it.”
I just sat there until they left the bathroom. And when they did, I pulled up my pants, washed my hands, dried them, walked out of school, and never went back.
W
hen Slim got back from Birmingham, first thing he wanted to know about was the election. He wanted to congratulate me for being class president. My first reaction was fear. I was scared to tell him that I’d gotten swamped by a nerdy chess player. I knew that Slim was living through me. ’Cause he had done lousy in school, he loved how great I was doing in school. I didn’t want to disappoint him, but there wasn’t any way out of it. I told him outright. I even told him what I had overheard in the bathroom. I guess I told him because I knew it would piss him off and make him understand what I was going through. I wanted Slim as pissed off as I was. I wanted him to see how he and I were joined up in this humiliation—that, in a way, it was as much his fault as mine. He took the bait. He flew into a rage—not at me but at them.
“Fuck them motherfuckers,” he said. “You don’t want them, you don’t need them, and they don’t fuckin’ deserve you. Just fuck ’em. Haters, man. Haters come poppin’ out the woodwork soon as a man goes and does something good. For every one dude who shows he’s got game, a hundred dudes get to hating on him. It’s that jealous demon, boy. That jealous demon wants to fuck up whatever’s good and turn it bad. That’s the way of the world. That’s why I done created my own world, Power. I keep telling you that, son, I keep showing you that the world regular folk think is fair and square is full of shit and twice as nasty as what those fuckin’ squares call the bad life. See, they call it the bad life because it ain’t run by their rules. Their rules are fucked. Their rules say, do something good and we’ll undercut your ass. Achieve something nice, and we’ll start talking about you like a dog. Their rules say, you win, and then we’ll make you lose. Fuck their rules, Power, forget their rules, forget that motherfuckin’ school. I didn’t need no school and neither do you. What you got to learn, boy, no school can teach you. Fact is, school can hurt you the way it hurt me. Made me feel like I wasn’t smart as everyone else. Well, truth is, I was smarter. And so are you.
“Besides, those assholes ain’t giving up no love no how. You too smart for their namby-pamby asses. You too slick. You got too much going on. They don’t like that ’cause they don’t got that. You feel me, son? They out to destroy you just like they was out to destroy me. But I busted a move back then—oh, yes, I did. And you busting a move too. You don’t need those motherfuckers. You want an education? You want teachers? You want to learn what’s happening on the real? Well, I got the real, baby. I got the education and I got the teachers to set your young ass straight. I don’t ever want you going back to that school, not for another goddamn minute, not after what they done to you. One day—and it ain’t gonna be long—we gonna buy the land where that school sits and burn the motherfucker down. That’s what we gonna do. But before that, you
will
go to school, but not to no regular school. I’m talkin’ ’bout a school no one ever seen before. I’m gonna make up this school for you, and I’m gonna pick every one of your teachers, and they gonna teach you shit no one ever learns, they gonna teach you the real deal, baby, and when you graduate you ain’t just gonna be bad, you gonna be the baddest motherfucker this city ever seen. You won’t be bad as me—that ain’t ever gonna happen—but you’ll come awfully goddamn close.”
Slim said just what I wanted to hear. He understood. Most dads would have either ignored my humiliation or told me to go back and face the music. I loved Slim ’cause Slim said fuck the music. Slim said fuck school. He knew that I didn’t belong there. He cosigned my get-out-of-jail-free card. ’Cause that’s what going back would have been. Prison. Once I learned what everyone really thought of me, once I knew that they’d been using me for the parties I’d been throwing and nothing else, I suddenly knew what I thought of them. I hated them. If they were going to shame me and judge me because I was living large and they weren’t, I was going to judge them for being narrow-minded fools.
With Slim’s enthusiastic support, I was glad to leave high school at the end of my junior year. And even though I could hear Moms saying, “Paul, you got to complete your schooling. We’re counting on you to go to college, even to law school, son,” Slim’s voice was louder. Slim made it clear I was doing the right thing.
“If you wanna be a man,” said Slim, “I’ll show you how to be a man. Forget those punk-ass instructors in school. I’ll get you some real-life teachers.”
M
y first teacher lived in Chicago, which is where I moved that summer. Never in my life had I met anyone like him.
“Gruff on the outside,” said Slim, “cream puff on the inside. That’s Irv Wasserman. He’ll teach you about survival, son. See, survival’s the first lesson. Reason you looking at a rich man when you look at me, boy, is that I learned that survival shit. Irv is the cat with nine hundred lives. They ain’t caught up with that motherfucker yet, and they never will.”
I flew to Chicago first-class and stayed at the Hilton hotel on the lake. Slim, who made the arrangements, was always cool that way.
“You go first-class,” he said, “and you feel first-class. You hang with first-class people doing first-class shit. It’s a beautiful way to live.”
I was booked into the Hilton because the night I arrived Irv Wasserman was being honored at a banquet in the grand ballroom. When I checked in I saw his picture on a poster advertising the event. The Center for the Underprivileged had named him man of the year. He had a low forehead, thick curly hair, and a strong nose. In his photo, he didn’t seem happy; his dark eyes looked right at you. When I picked up my key, I saw that he’d left a ticket to the banquet for me. I went upstairs, unpacked, showered, put on a dark suit, and went down to the ballroom. The festivities were just getting under way. There was a cocktail party before the dinner where I didn’t know a soul. I just observed. The crowd was about half white and half black. It was an older group, with most of the men in their fifties or sixties. The women looked a little younger, but there was no one my age. I felt out of place. There was a political atmosphere to the party, and I figured that many of the guys worked for the city or the state. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glance at Wasserman, who was working the room. At six three or four, he towered above everyone. I began to make my way over to introduce myself to him, but just as I got close he reached out to shake the hand of the man standing in front of me and said, “Mr. Mayor, I’m honored you came!” I backed off and gave them space to talk.
The banquet began promptly at eight. I was seated at a table with three couples and a black woman. The woman, probably in her late forties, sat next to me. She had midnight-black skin, a wide sensuous mouth, and a hip, short-cropped wig that gave her the air of a model. Her clothes were fashionable too. Her dress looked like it was made out of thin gray metal. She was tall and leggy and her eyes were on fire. It was almost like she could burn you with her eyes.
She introduced herself as Evelyn Meadows. She wanted to know my connection to Wasserman.
“He’s a friend of my uncle,” I said before asking about her connection.
“Irv managed my late husband, Johnnie Meadows. You’ve heard of him?”
“Sure.”
Johnnie Meadows was an R&B singer who’d died the previous year of a heart attack onstage. He had a big following all over the country.
“I didn’t know Mr. Wasserman managed singers.”
“Oh, Mr. Wasserman does everything,” she said. “Mr. Wasserman is a genius.”
Evelyn Meadows spent the rest of the dinner drinking. She downed two martinis before starting on the wine. Meanwhile, speakers were praising Irv Wasserman to the sky, talking about his generous contributions to every charity you can imagine. A priest spoke, then a rabbi, then a minister, and then, much to my surprise, Bonafide, the same rapper whom Slim had hired to entertain at my sixteenth birthday party. Since then Bonafide had blown up and gone on to national fame. Bonafide seemed completely out of place in this ballroom—what with his baseball cap cocked to the side and his oversized jeans hanging off him—but there he was, talking about how Wasserman’s record label, Complex Music, had taken him to the top and given a whole generation of young people a chance to be heard by the public.
“This here man is a legend,” said Bonafide, “and is about the only cat I know who goes from old school to new school to all schools while graduating first in every class. Yes, sir, he has paid the dues to tell the news, and, baby, this is your night, Irv.”
The mayor, who talked about his long association with Wasserman through good times and bad, presented the award, a sculpture in the form of helping hands. “Irv might look like a giant,” he said, “but he’s for the little man. He’s for the downtrodden. He cares.”
Everyone stood to applaud except for Evelyn Meadows. She was on her third glass of wine. After I sat down, I felt a shoe rubbing up and down the back of my leg. I looked over and caught a wink from Miss Meadows. I didn’t want to respond. After all, I had just gotten to Chicago. I had Wasserman’s telephone number and would call him tomorrow. He had promised he would find a place for me in his organization, and I was eager to learn what that would be. I didn’t need any complications right now. Miss Meadows was a beautiful sexy full-grown woman, but good sense told me to leave her alone.
Wasserman’s acceptance speech was short and not too sweet. He spoke with a gruff tone and never did smile. He sounded sour. His words were correct—“This is a big honor and I wanna thank everyone for putting on this great evening for me”—but he didn’t seem all that pleased to be up there.
When the ceremonies were over, Evelyn Meadows leaned over and, with her tongue seductively brushing my ear, whispered, “Have you met the man yet?”
“Mr. Wasserman? Not yet.”
“Well, let me be the first to introduce you, baby. Let’s hurry before it’s too late.”
We got up from the table and walked across the ballroom. Wasserman was surrounded by all kinds of people wishing him well and wanting to shake his hand. He put up with it, but he looked like he was in a hurry to get out. A couple of beefy guys stood next to him, surveying the room. Evelyn and I stood in the back of a long line to greet him. We waited five, ten, then fifteen minutes. I practiced what I was going to say to him—“I’m Power, Slim’s nephew, and I’m really happy to be here, sir”—but as I got closer, I wondered whether I should use my real name, Paul. Meanwhile, I saw one of his guys go off to get him a drink while the other turned around at the sound of a tray of dishes that a waiter had dropped. At that moment, Evelyn Meadows approached him. Seeing her all decked out in her cool outfit, Irv managed a small smile and opened his arms to hug her. I just happened to look down and saw that, rather than respond to his outstretched arms, she opened her little silver bejeweled purse, grabbed a small pistol that was hidden inside, aimed it at his heart, and fired. Out of instinct, I grabbed her arm and brought it down so that, instead of shooting his chest, the bullet shattered his lower leg. Eyes wide open, Wasserman fell. So did Evelyn’s pistol. As I restrained her with a tight bear hug, she screamed at the fallen man, “You fuckin’ son of a bitch! You killed my husband! You killed him because he was about to blow off the lid! You’d kill anyone who was gonna tell the truth!” By then the bodyguards, not knowing what had happened, had both me and Evelyn in headlocks. She kept screaming, I mean screaming so loud that everyone in the hotel could hear,
“This man is a fuckin’ hypocrite! This man is a murderer! This man stole money from his own mother and murdered his own brother! This man is a no-good rotten filthy piece of shit!”
This was my introduction to Irv Wasserman.
Two days later I was seated on a bench in the hallway of a hospital. Irv had sent for me.
Because his eyes had been wide open, Irv had seen exactly what had happened. He never lost consciousness. The police took Evelyn away. On Irv’s orders, his bodyguards released me, but not before getting my name. In no time, an ambulance rushed him to the emergency room. Next morning, his picture was plastered all over the newspapers. A photographer had actually caught me in the act of diverting Evelyn’s arm. I was simply identified as an “unknown man.”
When I called to tell Slim the news, he had already heard.
“Beautiful,” he said. “Couldn’t have gone better if you had sent up a motherfuckin’ prayer. God is on our side, son. God’s looking out for us on this one. Now there’s nothing to do but wait for the call. It’ll come.”
It came at eight in the morning. A man gave me the name of a hospital, a room, and said to be there at four sharp. When I got off the elevator on the fifth floor, I was greeted by the beefy bodyguard who had turned his back just before the shooting. He wanted to know my name and see my ID. Then he walked down the hallway and pointed to a bench. “Don’t move till we call you,” he said.
An hour passed. I hadn’t brought anything to read. I kept checking and rechecking my iPhone for e-mails. I wondered if there were other patients on this floor, because I heard no noise and saw no other visitors. It was weird. Finally, a door opened and a man came out. It was the other bodyguard I’d seen at the hotel. He pointed at me, indicating I should follow him into the room.
It wasn’t a room. It was a suite. I didn’t know hospitals had suites. I walked into a living room that had polished dark wood floors and fancy overstuffed chairs and a long couch. Irv Wasserman sat in one of the chairs, his long right leg propped up on a small table. The leg was in a cast. In the other chair was a red-haired girl maybe a year or two older than me. She was wearing a black turtleneck top that hugged her chest tight. Her breasts were super-sized and pointing right at me. She had on black slacks but because she was sitting I couldn’t tell anything about her backside. In a rough kind of way, she was pretty in the face. She wore a lot of makeup, especially around her eyes. She had Irv’s eyes. She had to be his daughter.
Irv sat in the other chair. He was in a gold silk robe. I saw his initials, IW, sewn in white over the breast pocket. He wasn’t smiling. He was just looking at me. He was scrutinizing me. I could hear him thinking.
“This here is my Judy,” he finally said. “She doesn’t want to go to college. She says she doesn’t like school. You been to college, kid?”
“No, sir.”
“What about high school?”
“I quit after my junior year.”
“How come?”
“I want to learn business, Mr. Wasserman. I want to learn about the real world.”
“You hear that, Judy?” said Wasserman. “He ain’t in school, but he’s got plans. He knows what the fuck he wants. Do you know what you want?”
“You said when I graduated high school I could decide what I wanted. Well, I graduated, didn’t I?”
“Barely,” said Irv.
“And I want to open a beauty salon.”
“With whose money?” asked the father.
“It would only be a loan,” said the daughter.
“Parents don’t loan money to their kids. They give them money.”
“Okay, then give me the money.”
“And what do I get back?”
“You’ll own the beauty salon.”
“And what makes you think you know shit about running a beauty shop?”
“I got people to help me. Older women I know.”
“Do I know them?” asked Irv.
“I don’t think so. I can introduce you.”
“I don’t like the idea of my daughter introducing women to me.”
“It’s a business thing, Dad.”
“Your mother wouldn’t like that.”
“You divorced her five years ago.”
“That’s beside the point. We’ll ask the kid what he thinks.” Wasserman turned to me and said, “Do I give my daughter money to open some fancy-shmancy beauty shop?”
“I wouldn’t know, Mr. Wasserman. I couldn’t say . . .”
“Why not? You scared of your own opinion? You scared of saying something I don’t want to hear? You one of these kids with a confidence problem?”
“Well, if you put it that way, I’d say, if you can afford it—”
“Shit,” Wasserman interrupted, “you know goddamn well I can afford it.”
“Then I would say if you open up in the right location, it might be a good idea. Women are always worrying about their hair.”
“My daughter, Judy, she wants to open in a black neighborhood. What do you think of that?”
“Black women pay a lot of attention to their hair,” I said.
“My Judy is like me. She likes the blacks. Her mother doesn’t. Her mother always said, ‘Stay away from the blacks. You can’t trust them.’ I trust them. I always have. Take your uncle. I trust him with my life. And then he sends you to me, and then you save my goddamn life. What do you make of that, kid?”
“I really can’t say, Mr. Wasserman . . .”
“What if I say I want you to help me with my Judy? What if I say I want you to help her with her beauty shop?”
“I’d say, well, I want to help you in any way I can. But I gotta be honest, I don’t know much about—”
“You don’t gotta know much, kid, you just gotta watch the money. You know how to watch money, don’t you?”
“I can watch money,” I said.
“Like a hawk—that’s how you watch money. You don’t need a college education to watch money. My brother, Louis. The great Louis Samuel Wasserman. My parents gave him a middle name—that’s how sure they were he’d make good. Me, I got no middle name. By the time Louis was born, fifteen years after me, they’d given up on me. I was in the streets and out of school. But Louis Samuel Wasserman, he was going to school. He was going to college. Then he was going to law school. He was setting the world on fire. Not any college, but Yale University. Not any law school, but Harvard Law School. You ever hear of Louis Samuel Wasserman, kid?”
“Afraid not.”
“If you go back a few years and read the papers you’ll read all about him. You see, after law school he didn’t want to be no lawyer. He wanted to be bigger than that. He wanted to make big money. And naturally he wanted nothing to do with me so he moves to New York City and gets in with some famous financiers, the so-called legit moneymen who buy and sell bonds and commodities and raid corporations for cheap and then sell ’em for high. He wants to play in the major leagues, and he thinks I’m bush-league. That’s what Louis Samuel Wasserman thinks.
“That’s your uncle, Judy. The uncle you never even met ’cause he never wanted nothing to do with me or my family. That’s your uncle who went to jail and died there. His famous financiers were crooked as an old bitch’s back. His famous financiers were frauds. And Louis Samuel Wasserman, with all his education and all his degrees, couldn’t see it coming. He didn’t know chicken salad from chicken shit. He got taken for the ride of his life. When he said he didn’t know about the behind-the-scenes schemes I half believed him because he was too stupid to see it.