Lamont leaned back in his chair and glanced around my living room. I watched his eyeballs move from my cream-colored lacquer entertainment console with the big-ass speakers, to my white imitation leather sofa with the lime-green throw pillows, and the floor lamp that bent over the sofa like a rainbow.
Lined up neatly against the baseboard were dozens of pairs of sneakers in practically every size for the six kids in the house. And on the wall, I’d hung a framed poster of a muscular black man embracing a black woman dressed in a flowing white gown. Lamont might not like the dinette set, but at least the rest of the place looked good.
“You want my honest opinion?” he asked. “There’s nothing wrong with this table,” he continued, not waiting for a response. “But every clown with a little dope money and a layaway plan has a set exactly like this one. It’s nothing special. It’s nice, but it’s just ghetto nice.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, my face getting hot.
“The thing about money is it gives you choices,” he answered, leaning back in his chair. “You can spend it on bullshit or you can invest in quality. Hood niggas are good for dropping bookoo dollars on bullshit, flashy shit that shines bright but doesn’t last. That’s the ghetto mind-set. You see where I’m coming from?”
I stared at him hard because no, I did not see where he was coming from. All I could see was that he was in my house insulting my dinette set.
I’d been doing business with Lamont for months, but he’d never talked to me like this before. Usually, he’d just ask me questions about why I had so many kids in the apartment and how come I didn’t have anybody helping me take care of them. One time I told him about living in Granddaddy’s liquor house, and the way Mama would fire her pistol in my direction whenever she got mad. “Man,” said Lamont, whistling through his teeth. “That’s some deep-ass shit. Like multigenerational deep-ass shit.”
Usually I felt pretty good talking to Lamont. But I didn’t appreciate this particular lecture. I crossed my arms and glared at him. He looked at me with raised eyebrows, then threw his head back and laughed.
“C’mon now, don’t start tripping,” he said. “I’m just trying to school you. As matter of fact, go get dressed and put something nice on. We’re going window-shopping. I’m gonna show you exactly what I’m talking about.”
I don’t know where I was expecting Lamont to take me, but it certainly wasn’t where we ended up: a high-end strip mall on Peachtree Road. Lamont pulled into the parking lot, opened the passenger door for me, and led me toward the big glass doors of a store called Haverty Furniture. At first I thought it was some kind of joke. I didn’t know anybody who shopped on this side of town. But when I stepped inside the showroom, I almost gasped. It was filled with the most beautiful home decor I’d ever seen. There were five-piece bedroom suites that cost more than a thousand dollars, and dining tables made of chocolate-colored wood. We walked through displays of leather sectionals and tested out the furniture, sinking into a pair of deep armchairs. “This is what I’m talking about,” said Lamont, leaning back and putting his feet up on a matching leather footrest. “This is quality. Remember that.”
Lamont started taking me on all kinds of field trips. We drove through beautiful Buckhead, along quiet streets lined with Hollywood-style mansions and manicured lawns. We went to luxury car dealerships and test-drove Mercedes. One day Lamont drove north on the I-75, out to a newly built subdivision in Peachtree City, where we toured a model home.
“See that?” Lamont asked, pointing to the kitchen’s granite countertops. “That’s some high-end shit.” He showed me “quality” walk-in closets with built-in shelves, and “quality” crown molding in all the rooms. As Lamont guided me around the place, I noticed a white lady gripping the arm of her husband and pointing our way. She had on a cream-colored pantsuit. I was wearing a black off-the-shoulder T-shirt with a neon-green lightning bolt. I stepped to her and opened my mouth to ask, “The fuck you looking at?” but Lamont pulled me away.
One night we went to dinner at LongHorn Steakhouse and Lamont showed me how to use a pepper mill. I sometimes got the feeling that Lamont was treating me like he was Mr. Miyagi and I was the Karate Kid. Only instead of showing me how to do a crane kick, he was on a mission to teach me about life outside the hood. I asked him about it once, when he dropped me back home: “Why you taking me all these places?”
“Each one teach one,” he said, as though that explained everything.
I didn’t understand Lamont taking me out and showing me the high life any more than I knew why Miss Troup cleaned my clothes and did my hair, or why Duck had put up with my shit for so long. All I know is that Lamont opened my eyes to a different way of living. “You gotta look outside the ghetto if you want to get ahead,” he said. “The hood is nothing but a trap.”
Maybe I did feel a little bad about teaching the girls to hustle, because after Lamont started introducing me to his bougie ways, I made it my mission to show the girls everything I learned. I took them to Red Lobster and Myrtle Beach. We sampled all the food at the buffet at Golden Corral and feasted on prime rib at the Sizzler.
One Sunday afternoon, we took a special trip out to Peachtree City so I could show the girls a model home. We wandered from room to room, the kids oohing and ahhhing at the sunken living room with wall-to-wall carpeting and the master bathroom that was big enough to roller-skate in. Afterward, we all piled back into my Cadillac. Before I turned on the ignition, I told the girls to listen up because I had something important to say.
“You see that house with all that beautiful shit?”
“There wasn’t no food in the fridge,” said Nikia.
I ignored him and kept talking: “One day all of you can live in a house just like that, with a big-ass bathroom and carpets everywhere.” They were silent, like maybe they thought I was talking shit. “I’m for real,” I said. “You can do anything and be anything you want in this life. All you have to do is dream.”
I was sixteen years old and I happier than I’d ever been. I had a family, money coming in, a nice car, and someone in my life who cared enough about me to teach me the difference between bullshit and quality. After all those years of going to school hungry and smelling like dirty Goodwill clothes, finally everything was going good.
All I needed was for Derrick to settle down and stop fucking every girl he met, and my life would be 100 percent perfect. Driving away from the model home in my pearl-white Cadillac, bumping Bell Biv DeVoe on my Panasonic sound system with my babies falling asleep in the seat beside me. Tata, Tomeeka, and Cece singing in the back, I couldn’t imagine a better time.
That’s how stupid I was back then. It didn’t even occur to me that if you do illegal shit all day every day, sooner or later you’re gonna get caught.
Chapter 19
Locked Up