My Infamous Life Track 5 - Prodigy.mp3

[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.