Everyone wanted to help as we began life in our new home—in our Oakland, California, inner-city version of Kansas. The minute I called friends who hadn’t heard from me in a while, the offers started pouring in. There was the card table one friend had in his basement that we could have, a real bed and a mattress that someone else offered, sets of towels and dishes that weren’t being used. As long as I could find a way to go pick the stuff up, it was ours.
My good friend Latrell Hammond insisted that I come get the five pounds of neck bones she had just bought that day. What the hell, I’d never cooked neck bones, but I went and got them just the same, figuring that I’d have some OJT in the kitchen, and then I went out to buy a secondhand freezer. At the grocery store, where the butcher, Ms. Tookie, had the hots for me, I got some helpful hints on the basics. And when the prospect of having to take on another domestic chore got me overwhelmed, I was set straight by the sight of a single mom with bags of groceries and two kids, plus a briefcase. If she could do it, so could I.
Friends from the different neighborhoods and stations in my Bay Area journey came over to help me get rid of the junk in the house and to clean the place, which was immediately improved simply from air and sunlight, which eradicated most of the musty smell. The place looked cool. Hell, it was the Taj Mahal compared to where we’d been staying.
Christopher was my number-one helper, not only with the mammoth undertaking of cleaning the place but also in helping organize our tasks and reminding me of what we had to do. “Poppa,” he asked me before we moved in, “can we fix the backyard?”
I went to check out the three years of jungle growth back there and told him, “Not yet, son. We have to have a machete back here, and I don’t have that yet.” Step by step, though, inside, the place came together quickly.
After our first night in the new place, as we prepared to leave early that next morning so that I could get Christopher to day care and then get myself back on the train in order to get to the office on time, he became very concerned that we didn’t have all our gear with us.
“It’s okay,” I explained and pulled out the single house key to show him why we didn’t have to take everything with us. “We got a key, Christopher, see.”
He looked at the one unassuming key in my opened palm and didn’t get it. “Pop,” he said, pointing to the duffel bag with all our stuff and my hanging bag with my second suit, “we have to carry this.”
“No, son,” I told him, “you don’t have to carry nothing. We got a key. Let’s leave all of this here, all right, and we can just go.”
With a puzzled smile, he made sure that he understood. “We can leave it here?”
Bending down, bringing my face close to his, smiling with my own sense of wonder and relief, I repeated what I’d said. “Yes, we can leave all this stuff here.”
Together we used the key to lock up, almost giggling, and then turned to go to the BART station, practically skipping all the way there.
It was still bizarre to me that we had journeyed in a full circle from the time I first found us a room at The Palms. Why had I never seen this place? The world had changed for us since then, and yet our four-hour round-trip commute every day took us right by the working women around the corner who remembered us from before.
“Hey, little player,” they still called to Christopher, even though he was no longer in the blue stroller, which he’d outgrown, but walking hand in hand with me or playing a little game that the two of us liked to play to pass the time as we went to the BART station and back—taking turns kicking an empty plastic orange juice bottle. “Hey, little pimp,” they’d call and sometimes hand him a $5 bill, just like before.
That was still manna to us. For one thing, it was usually nine o’clock at night when we returned from the city, so cooking wasn’t the first thing I was dying to do, not to mention it wasn’t my expertise yet. For another thing, the money was still tight, even with the modest rent I was paying. So $5 was dinner around the corner at Mossell’s where the jukebox played Christopher’s favorite song, “Rocket Love” by Stevie Wonder. Every time we walked in, somehow it was always playing, cause for Christopher to alert me, “Pop, it’s Stevie. Stevie!” He already had great taste in music and in food.
After I ordered, he got to dig in first, and then I’d eat what was left over. As he and his appetite grew, I made sure to order whatever they served that would stretch the furthest—like red beans and rice with cornbread. We became such regulars that after a while the owners let me go on a payment plan, running us a tab that I’d pay off every two weeks when I got paid. We stuck with ordering the one plate, even then. Survival habits were hard to break, and I continued to look for every opportunity to save money.
But when the rice and beans came, I had to splurge on the jukebox so Little Chris could hear “Rocket Love” again. What a joyful image—my son chowing down as he grooved to his song, singing along and nodding his head. The hunger pangs and the salivating weren’t necessarily joyful, especially one night when I watched him really go to town on that one dinner. He saw me watching, put down his fork, and said, “Why aren’t you eating?”
“Naw, you go ahead and eat, son,” was what I said, but frankly, I was thinking, Damn, you’re going to eat all of the food? At almost two and a half, he could already eat like a little horse. Apparently he had learned at his young age that you eat it when you can get it.
This was also the case during the pizza party seminars hosted by Dean Witter at the recommendation of a consultant named Bill Goode, whose expertise was qualifying individuals as prospective investors on the telephone. I’d gotten pretty good but was always open to learning from the big guys. The concept was that after work a group of six or so of us would stay late and all call every single person in our book and let them know, for example, that there was a new stock offering coming out from companies like Pacific Gas & Electric. Amid the smiling and dialing, we could enjoy pizza on Dean Witter. I was able to go to day care, get Little Chris, and bring him back. As long as he could have some pizza, I was sure that he would be nice and quiet.
“Here, son,” I told him at the first pizza party as I got back to work just in time for pizza to arrive and the dialing to begin, “you sit right here with your pizza. Poppa’s got to talk on the telephone, all right?”
“Poppa, you’re going to talk on the telephone again?”
“Yeah, I’m gonna talk on the telephone again.”
“Pop, you’re going to still talk?”
“Yeah, I’m still talking.”
“Pop, you like to talk?”
“Yeah, son. I like to talk. Have some more of this pizza.”
Pretty soon I was laughing and dialing, and so was the rest of the office.
Since Christopher was so eager to help, no matter what the undertaking was, it occurred to me that I should enlist his assistance in getting him admitted to the Oakland day care center where they had the misspelled “happyness” sign. If we could do that, our long days of leaving at five in the morning and not returning until nine at night would be so much more manageable. The only hitch was potty training. He occasionally told me when he had to go to the john but wouldn’t bother most of the time.
On the train headed back after the pizza party, I made my proposal. “Son, look, you want to help Poppa?”
“Yes!”
“The way to help Poppa,” I said, “is when you think you might want to go to the bathroom, just raise your hand one time. When you think you might want to boo-boo, just raise your hand twice, okay?”
“Okay,” he said, beaming, as though he was happy to have a job that was just his.
We made it a game. Sure enough, he was potty-trained in two weeks and enrolled at the day care center right next to the BART station. Our new routine was about as close as I could imagine at that point to a vacation. In the morning at 7:00 A.M., I dropped him off at day care, grabbed my train, and arrived at work early. In the evening I was back in time to pick him up at 6:00 P.M. so we could get to our soul-food greasy spoon for dinner, and afterward we stopped in to visit TV Joe—who owned a store by the same name that sold and repaired televisions.
A friendly, smart guy, Joe didn’t mind if we just stopped to chat or if we sat down to watch television for a while. Most likely he figured out that we didn’t have a TV set, but he never mentioned it. In fact, when there was a major sporting event being televised, like a Muhammad Ali fight I watched there once, we timed it right so that we happened along to catch whatever broadcast it was.
After dinner, a little television, and a visit with TV Joe, our last stop before heading home was to cruise by The Palms as the ladies of the evening gathered at their posts, several calling to me and my son, “Hey, Chris! Hey, little pimp!”
To Christopher, they were like family now. “Hey!” he waved back, knowing that even if we already had dinner, he might be lucky enough to be given one of those $5 bills he was used to getting.
Then we’d roll on down the street and come up to our house. A block away I had my hand in my pocket, making sure that key was still there. It reminded me of how nervous I was when I flew cross-country with the diamond ring in my pocket for Sherry. But the key was worth ten times the Hope Diamond to me. What I loved about it so much, I don’t know. It wasn’t attached to a key chain or key ring. It was just this bare little key. But it was ours.
And the feeling of elation I got every time I saw the roses blooming in the ghetto in front of our place and when I put my foot on that step, that first step, never diminished. What it meant, every time, to put my foot on the step with the key in my hand and to unlock the door and finally step into the house, is impossible to explain. It was the opposite of powerlessness; it was the antidote to the fear of not knowing what was happening that night, where we would go, how we would manage. The key was like the key to the kingdom, a symbol of having made it this far, all the way from where I had been, at the absolute bottom of the hole, to where I was now—an incredible transition.
Were things still rough? Sure they were. But they were manageable. Now that I could cover us having this home base, day care, transportation, and food, I felt that I could air my head out, just like the house, and then really kick into a higher gear at work. It wasn’t that our worries were all behind us, a reality I faced early on in the new place when I missed a couple of electric bills and the electricity was turned off.
I set up candles, telling Christopher, “C’mon, you get to take a bath by candlelight,” trying not to let him see that I was upset or overly frustrated about what was really only a minor setback in the scheme of things.
Even so, as I scrubbed Little Chris in the tub, I couldn’t help fretting about how I could really accomplish the big vision if I continued to be dragged down by so much daily minutiae. Yes, of course, I saw the progress, but where I wanted to be still seemed too far in the distance. My most distinct thought was, I ain’t superman!
At that very moment, out of nowhere, my son stood up in the bathtub and said to me, with a very serious look on his face, which was illuminated by the light of the candle, “Poppa, you know what? You’re a good poppa.”
Aw, man, I melted, forgot the worries, the minutiae, and knew that I was going to be fine. Coming from that little boy, those words were all I needed. Christopher could always cheer me up or give me whatever spark was missing at the time.
A photograph taken of the two of us not long after he made that comment summed up what this period was all about. I called it the “Picture of Two Lions.” In it, Christopher and I are sitting side by side in front of our house, right on that top step, and I’m looking above the camera lens, as if off into the horizon, with a proud, determined Poppa Lion face and a king-of-the-pride expression that says, Where’s the next meal coming from? And on the face of my son, the lion cub, is a look that says: I’m hungry. I’m hungry.
That framed everything, that Picture of Two Lions, erasing all doubt in my mind that I was doing the right thing. We weren’t looking back. Never. My focus was on that horizon. What was next? How did I pursue it? What did I need to know to make it happen?
My learning curve became activated again when Dean Witter brought in one of the company’s top producers, a super-smart, no-bullshit powerhouse by the name of Gary Abraham from Las Vegas, Nevada. Tasked with visiting different branch offices and helping the greener guys build their business, Gary clicked with me right away.
In person or on the phone, whenever I called up for advice or to touch base, he was down to earth and available, asking, “Hey, how you doing? What’s happening?”
In spite of Gary’s easygoing demeanor, he was razor-sharp, a wizard, chockful of insights about what he was doing and how he had built his business. One of the concepts he helped me begin to understand—something I wouldn’t really master until later—was the idea that rather than telling someone what they should buy and why they should buy it, a much more strategic, productive approach was to find out what my customer wanted to buy. In my understanding of supply and demand, this approach made a lot of sense, although applying it practically was going to take time.
When Gary was starting out in Vegas, where there’s always an influx of new money, always booming, instead of doing the phone thing, he went out to scout locations for new developments, where they were building million-dollar homes in various states of construction.
“You called on them in person?” I asked, trying to see myself doing something like that.
Gary recalled, “You bet. I put on my best blue suit and went and rang the doorbell on each and every one of those houses, without an appointment, and introduced myself.”
Man, I wanted his script, his formula. What he had done and how he had done it.
There was nothing brilliant about it, he insisted. “I just said, ‘Hi, I’m Gary Abraham, I’m with Dean Witter here in Las Vegas, and I’d like to know if there is anything we can do to help you settle in here, and by the way are you involved in the stock market?’”
That kind of maverick approach was exactly what had made me take the long road by building my own book rather than sticking to the company program like most of the guys working around me. I looked at Gary and knew that’s what I wanted to do, how I wanted to play the game.
At the age of twenty-nine, I came to the realization that I was inordinately fortunate to have been mentored—either directly or indirectly—by extraordinary individuals, true role models. What a cast of individuals I had pulling me forward, whether it was the early inspiration of Miles Davis, who first made me want to reach for greatness, or the determination to be on the cutting edge of whatever I did that Dr. Robert Ellis instilled in me, or the ambition to hit the numbers like Bob Russell back when I got my feet wet in business, or the belief and passion for making it on Wall Street that Bob Bridges and his red Ferrari first ignited, or the different styles of Dean Witter stars like Andy Cooper, Dave Terrace, and now Gary Abraham.
There was never a sense in my gut that these role models helped me more or less because I was black or expected more or less because I was black. If they did, I didn’t pick up on it. Later I read a quote from Berry Gordy about how he achieved the big crossover appeal of Motown, why he was certain his records would sell to white kids as well as black kids. His point—that his music business success wasn’t a black thing or a white thing but rather a green thing—resonated with me. In the financial arena that I was in, my mentors and the examples that I was learning from could have come from any background. It happened that most of them were white, but they were Italians, Jews, foreigners, WASPS, from all up and down the socioeconomic ladder. Success in this field wasn’t a white thing or a black thing, it was a green thing. That was the measure—how much green you were moving and how much you were making.
Maybe without trying consciously, Gary Abraham helped me identify which of my strengths were going to help take me to the next level. At the top of that list was probably the ability to handle volatility—experience plucked right out of my life. This fact about myself struck me one day at work when the Dow started going crazy and went over 1,000, sending thrilling shock waves through the market. But one of the older brokers was beside himself. “You see that, son?” he said to one of the new guys. “It’s all over. Sell everything.”
We had been watching it inch up, around 850, then 900, in that vicinity. And when it broke 1,000 that day, he really thought it was the end of the world—which to a stockbroker translates as “Sell everything.”
Volatility and change had been the watchwords of my life. If I had learned anything it was that it’s never the end of the world, no matter how bleak things can be. What this also showed at that time was that hardly anybody around me truly knew anything. Shocking. They had the talk down, as if they knew everything, but ultimately nobody had a clue as to what the market was really going to do. As a matter of fact, very few in the brokerage business have that gift. That wasn’t my gift either, although I was going to be damn sure I knew the best analysts and paid attention to what they were saying. But predicting the market’s ups and downs and permutations wasn’t what I cared about.
What I did know was that the market was going to open. Then it was going to do one of two things: it was going to go up or go down. You could bet money on that. That awareness allowed me to stay steady, to offer assurances to customers that weren’t bogus. Of everything I took away with me from this initiation period in Wall Street, where it was all about writing tickets, the most important principle I adopted was the commitment that if I was going to write a ticket, it had to be an honest ticket.
Gary Abraham said it this way: “Write a ticket that’s going to set up your next ticket. Don’t put somebody into something just to get a piece of business. Because that’ll be the last piece of business you get from them.”
Gary was a phenomenal resource whose advice I not only tried to follow but also never forgot and who never seemed at a loss for information or wisdom when I sought him out. In time I’d look back and was able to see that it was in San Francisco that I learned to sell, while it was New York that would really teach me the business. Little did I know until later that knowing the business and selling are two very different things. Gary Abraham sold the way great singers seem to hit those notes effortlessly. People wanted to work with him, yet he never pushed, he let them sell themselves.
He introduced me to the effectiveness of not trying to sell you what I got but to find out what you want to buy, or what you will buy, what you already own. Boiled down, the question was: What can I show you that is similar to what you already own, that’s going to meet your current objectives?
That was the direction I wanted to pursue, a departure from I’ve got this product and this stuff that I have to move, and I don’t care what you want or already own. Unfortunately, Dean Witter was a wire house like other, similar wire houses—a huge corporation with an agenda that was not always the same as that of its clients.
Nonetheless, even as my paycheck improved somewhat and as Little Chris and I ventured out for more of a social life on weekends, I began to wonder if I should scope out some options.
The thought was on my mind when we hung out in a blues club in our neighborhood where the band, led by Troyce Key, an itty-bitty white boy who went with the finest sister you ever saw, was hot. The food, cooked up for five bucks a plate by Shep, was hotter. Christopher lucked into a musical and culinary education as we sat there all night long, listening to the blues, eventually trying everything on the menu. Shep fried up catfish with rice, beans, greens, and sweet potatoes, did ribs on the barbecue, smothered pork chops and steaks, both drenched with gravy and served with piles of hot-water cornbread. Chicken came every way it could come: fried, smothered, stuffed, barbecued. And I had to break the ban against sugar so Little Chris and I could both have sweetened ice tea. The best.
Afterward, we made our now-familiar stroll past the whore stroll—or the “ho”-stroll—and we waved at the same girls, had our same exchange, and usually headed home.
During the weekend days, when summer came, I’d sit out on the front stoop and bring Little Chris out on our concrete patch of a front yard, letting him know it was fine to play with the other neighborhood kids who came around but to stay close to the house and especially to stay away from the street. With two lanes going each way, it was a very busy thoroughfare, with parking and lots of streets intersecting the main drag. Days passed quickly outside watching the comings and goings.
In one part of my brain I was figuring how could I do more of the Gary Abraham kind of selling, and in the other part of my brain I was here on a summer day in the ghetto, all kinds of music blaring from cars and stereos and boom boxes. Straight-up ghetto with a palm tree down on the corner and one rosebush that happened to be in my front yard.
One of my favorite things to do if we felt like an outing was to put Little Chris in the shopping cart that had come to replace his blue stroller. Since I was nowhere near being able to afford an actual automobile and never would retrieve the one that I shared with Jackie, the cart became our only wheels. Christopher referred to it fondly as our car, inquiring, if we went inside anywhere, “Poppa, where’d you park the car?”
On good weather days, we’d roll on through the neighborhood, straight down Telegraph all the way to Berkeley—one hell of a long walk. Walking along, I’d forget everything and relax into the Zen of it all, feeling the vibrations and the bumps coming up through the wheels of the cart and into my hands. Making totally different sounds from the stroller, the cart made its own ghetto music with a cluclack, cluclack, cluclack as it rolled along the sidewalk. In Berkeley we sometimes stopped by my girl Latrell’s mother’s house, grabbed a bite from off the barbecue, and turned around to walk the long way home.
We were returning from one such excursion in our “car” when the sunny day all of a sudden went cold and blustery, with rain that began to fall in heavy slats.
“Poppa,” Chris said, looking up at me and blinking through the raindrops, “when we gonna get a car with a top on it?”
I must have laughed as loud as thunder. Of all the things he could have asked to improve on our shopping cart, it wasn’t doors, or an engine, or leather seats. No, he wanted a top.
On another summer day I’m pushing the car over to a park in West Oakland and spot an elderly black couple loading food and supplies into a little wagon to take to a family reunion picnic. With all the space in our shopping cart, it’s only right that I offer to help.
Little Chris immediately starts to check out the contents of their bags and serving containers.
“Christopher,” I try to stop him.
The elderly couple think this is so cute and funny, they don’t mind at all. When we arrive at the reunion, I’m helping them take the stuff out of the cart when someone hollers, “That’s Willie’s boy!” I turn around slowly and notice everyone is looking at me.
What can I do? Explain to everyone that I’m not Willie’s boy, or just go along with it and have a bite to eat with all my kin? The smell of the barbecue’s awful good. Taking my best shot, I turn to the guy who’s just hollered and say, “What’s going on? What’s up with you?”
Instantly, we are seated and food is heaped on our plates. Treated as if we’re royalty, we eat like absolute kings as all the while I’m being deluged with questions.
“Well, how Willie doin’?” “He still in jail?” “When he supposed to get out?”
Of course, I don’t know anything about Willie, what he’s done or how long he’s been gone, so all I say is, “Well, you know, Willie, he’s doing all right.”
“That’s right, baby,” says a matronly woman, “now you want some more of this?” as she serves us our third helpings, adding, “You get you some of that ’tato salad over there.”
Please! This is no manna, it’s milk and honey, overflowing. It gets better as the party comes to an end and they start divvying up the food, telling us, “Y’all take some of this, now, and some of this over here, and that cake, just take it.” I’m biting my lip to keep from grinning. We have a week’s worth of food packed up in our shopping cart. Glory be.
Just as we’re starting to say our good-byes, with everybody telling us to give their best to Willie, I find myself standing face-to-face with a pretty young sister and it is on.
For much of the time that my son and I have been on our own, the last thing on my mind is the sexual and romantic void in my life. Not that I quite qualified for the monastery, or that there wasn’t potential around the office or with friends of friends, but until recently, even if there had been a will, there was no way to put it together.
There had been an awkward visit from Jackie once we settled into the new home, when she showed up to visit Christopher. Interestingly enough, even though Little Chris had asked about her on occasion, he didn’t cling to her or react like I had during and after separations from my own momma. Maybe it was because he didn’t know her that well anymore. Or maybe it was just how she related to her child. In any event, my feelings were much more complicated, in part because of the mixed signals she sent me, but mainly because of so much residual anger I’d never expressed to her. Well, she sho nuff got an earful from me this time around. And then we fucked. That’s what it was, not even a sport fuck, for the release of it, but more, from my point of view, a literal fuck-you. If she had any intention of getting back together now that I was moving up—not there yet, but beyond the gates she had been so sure I couldn’t enter—she saw that wasn’t going to happen and split for Los Angeles as suddenly as she had arrived.
Little Chris asked where she’d gone, and I explained, “She’s moving to Los Angeles. You’ll see her again soon.” That was all he needed to know.
Now the slate’s clean, and here I am trying to hook up with this fine beauty at an Oakland park family reunion where I’m fronting that I’m related to someone named Willie.
Just as I’m getting ready to get her phone number, one of the older gentlemen steps over and says, “You know, that’s your cousin.”
I’m nearly busted. Thinking fast, I say, “Oh, wow, I haven’t seen her for so long, I didn’t recognize her.”
His hand on my shoulder, kind of eying me, he nods, saying, “Yeah, I can understand. Plus she got real good-looking, so you probably hoped she wasn’t no kin to you, didn’t you?”
“You got that right, she sure did grow up to be fine!”
“Yeah,” he echoes me and looks at the young sister, who rolls her eyes and turns to walk away. “She sho did grow up to be a pretty little thing.”
A close call. It’s too late to volunteer my true identity to prove that I’m not really related after all. Instead, I turn to him and say, “Thanks for telling me.”
“Don’t mention it,” he says, waving good-bye to me and Little Chris as I hurry us on out of there.
While I was delighted to be pushing a cart heavy from all the leftovers, and amused by how well a case of mistaken identity had turned out, that day marked another turning point for me. We were through the storms, and we had found a place in the ghetto in which to lay anchor long enough for me to get my bearings. And I was inching up toward a couple thousand a month. My next move, whatever it was going to be, was to double that, at least. With that, I could afford to move us back to San Francisco, which was, without a doubt, the Paris of the Pacific.
For the first time in a long time, maybe ever, I didn’t feel like it was all on me, slugging it, pushing against the odds. Still a dreamer, yet more of a realist than ever before, I knew this was my time to sail. On the horizon I saw the shining future, as before. The difference now was that I felt the wind at my back. I was ready.