LRC歌词下载
[00:00.144]I never had any racial problems at Woodmere[00:03.278]except one day in the locker room after gym class.[00:07.223]A kid named Max had forty dollars stolen from his locker[00:11.690]and tried to blame me.[00:13.780]Max was the first person I’d ever seen with his own credit card.[00:18.717]Most people I knew had never even heard of credit cards,[00:23.184]but this seven-year-old kid in my school had one.[00:26.788]It was American Express.[00:30.211]“Did you take my money?” Max looked in my direction.[00:35.618]“No!” Max and I had a body-blow fight in the locker room,[00:40.633]punching each other in the stomach, ribs, and chest,[00:43.585]and the teachers broke it up.[00:46.015]He found his money later and apologized.[00:48.548]Why would he accuse me?[00:51.317]The only reason I could think of was because I was black.[00:55.314]The white kids were cool, though,[00:57.744]and a few of the girls had crushes on me.[01:00.356]In my first-grade class there was a pretty white girl named Michelle[01:05.424]with long brownish-blond hair.[01:08.323]After graham crackers and apple juice during snack time one day,[01:13.208]the whole class went outside for recess.[01:16.212]Michelle and I were the last two to leave the classroom.[01:19.242]She told me she liked me and put her leg around my waist[01:23.892]and placed my hand on her ass.[01:26.191]I was a scared punk.[01:29.143]My mind wasn’t as advanced yet[01:32.147]because I was absent from school so often[01:34.420]and didn’t hang out in Lakeview Park[01:36.875]like the other kids my age due to my sickle-cell.[01:39.775]Being hospitalized for weeks and months[01:42.883]caused me to miss out on the birds-and-the-bees activities.[01:46.749]I wasn’t ready for Michelle’s advances,[01:49.858]but she was all over me.[01:52.993]I think it had a lot to do with my grandmother’s car.[01:56.545]Sometimes Grandmoms would drop me off at school[02:00.490]in her brand-spankin’-new black Cadillac[02:02.788]with a burgundy pinstripe on the side and burgundy leather seats.[02:07.386]“Those white kids’ parents drop them off in Mercedes-Benzes and Rolls-Royces,[02:12.454]so we gotta show them that your family has money too,”she said.[02:17.966]Michelle saw me getting out of the car one morning and stared, starry-eyed.[02:23.974]Grandmoms knew how to make a grand entrance.[02:27.448]She lived, breathed, ate, slept, and shit show business.[02:32.516]The world was her stage, and I learned a lot from her flashy actions.[02:36.957]She would tell me about how she came from Southside Jamaica[02:41.215]to become the first black woman with her own building on Merrick Boulevard;[02:45.682]then hers was the first black family in Hempstead, Long Island,[02:49.809]to build their own house.[02:52.473]“T’Chaka, you have to own your home, ”[02:55.347]she said firmly, using my family’s nickname for me, after the Zulu king.[03:00.127]“Black people must own their things.”[03:03.732]She bought her cars with cash, brand-new out of the showroom.[03:09.087]“You should see the look on those white people’s faces[03:12.927]when they ask me how do I plan to pay. I say,‘Cash,’[03:16.584]pull out a bagful of money,[03:17.995]and they start treating me very differently.”[03:21.208]“Never put all of your money in one bank,”[03:24.447]Grandmoms said, showing me bank-deposit booklets,[03:27.713]each from a different bank and adding up to a couple million dollars.[03:31.944]She taught me not to touch my money once I had millions like she did.[03:36.124]“Do you see all this money I have in these little books?[03:40.042]I get thousands of dollars in interest payments every month,”[03:43.438]she explained.[03:44.797]“I can either deposit the interest and increase my accounts every month,[03:49.394]or I can live off the interest and use it to pay my bills.[03:52.999]But I’ll never go broke.”[03:55.298]Grandmoms was very rich at that time;[03:58.197]she wasn’t supporting my mother and father financially.[04:01.855]We were struggling to survive,[04:04.571]but she did make sure her only grandson, me, was well educated.[04:09.352]At Woodmere Academy,[04:11.363]I got the best education that part of Long Island had to offer.[04:15.673]On the bus ride after school,[04:17.842]I was the last one dropped off,[04:20.166]so I’d stare at the spacious mansions that the white kids went home to,[04:24.111]watching the neighborhood become worse and worse the closer we got to my house.[04:29.780]And I’d go home to Lakeview,[04:31.425]back to all the blackness.[04:34.403]I learned a couple of things at that school.[04:37.460]I found out white girls were real aggressive when they liked you,[04:41.953]and little white boys had credit cards.[04:45.819]On weekends at my grandparents’ house in Hempstead,[04:49.397]my grandfather Big Budd worked on sheet music[04:52.611]in his room while watching baseball on his small TV.[04:56.921]The walls of his room were covered with posters from his tours[05:00.395]in Russia,Japan, and all over the world.[05:04.679]Besides baseball and jazz, Grandpops had a passion for golf.[05:09.904]He bought me a mini plastic Playskool golf set[05:12.986]and tried teaching me on the lawn.[05:14.710]He also bought me a small saxophone[05:17.087]and signed me up for the Woodmere Academy band.[05:20.379]But as hard as Grandpops and I tried, I couldn’t even handle[05:24.611]“Mary Had a Little Lamb.”[05:27.353]That year, my whole family came to see me play at a band concert[05:31.768]in the school auditorium.[05:33.988]There were five saxophonists onstage including myself.[05:37.698]“You were so good!” my folks encouraged me after the show.[05:42.870]“You sounded great!” If they only knew I was only pretending to play,[05:47.990]I thought, keeping it to myself.[05:51.020]My horn wasn’t blowing a damn thing.[05:54.390]But I played it off because my grandfather was proud.[05:58.570]My two best friends were Carey,[06:01.992]who lived on the same corner as my grandmother’s Hempstead house,[06:04.865]and Stobo, who was like a brother.[06:08.183]We were two months apart in age and had known each other since birth.[06:13.146]We called each other cousins,[06:15.445]even cut our hands and rubbed our palms together to become blood brothers.[06:20.199]When Carey and Stobo slept over,[06:22.446]Grandpops always came home drunk from his shows and took out his false[06:26.991]teeth,[06:27.540]smiling and chasing us around the house.[06:29.682]It was a scary sight for a kid.[06:32.842]Grandmoms would get pissed at him for being so drunk and loud.[06:36.813]“Go to hell, you jackass!”[06:38.851]she’d yell after him as we scampered by.[06:43.135]My father took me to see my grandfather perform at the Blue Note in Manhattan.[06:48.516]I was the only little kid in the bar,[06:51.520]but it was nothing new[06:52.774]because Pops was a heavy drinker and liked taking me along.[06:56.823]As always, I ordered my favorite drink,[07:00.480]7UP with cherry syrup and a couple of cherries on the rocks.[07:05.940]And my pops would order his,[07:08.186]peach schnapps. People would stare as if to say,[07:12.496]“How you got this little kid in a bar?”[07:15.735]But nobody messed with my pops.[07:18.060]Grandpops played the sax like a madman and the Blue Note crowd loved it.[07:23.703]After Grandpops’s shows or Grandmoms’s dance concerts,[07:27.908]our tradition was to eat a big meal at a swanky restaurant[07:32.271]and for me to order the same dish:lobster tails.[07:37.051]It was usually the most expensive thing on the menu[07:39.585]and I never actually ate it,[07:41.623]just dipped my bread in the butter.[07:44.679]But Grandmoms got a kick out of me ordering it.[07:48.963]My grandparents usually brought one of their famous friends to dine with us,[07:54.240]like Ben Vereen, the dancer-actor from the movie Roots.[07:58.158]He was Grandmoms’s student when he was a kid.[08:00.771]Or Grandpops would bring Dizzy Gillespie and other jazz friends,[08:06.152]and they all enjoyed look on the white waiter’s face when I ordered first[08:10.436]and chose the lobster tail with melted butter.[08:14.041]My grandparents were from an era of vicious racism and poverty,[08:18.116]so my grandmother especially loved to show off[08:20.780]and let white people know she had money.[08:24.307]One dreary winter evening,[08:26.815]my mother, father,and I were at home watching Buck Rogers on TV[08:31.255]when we got a call from the Nassau County emergency room.