“What?” I was still confused.
“I’m telling you. You’re special. You’re gonna be famous, girl! Like Oprah! I do psychic readings for a living. I have a shop around the corner. I’d love to give you a reading. I’ll do it for you for free.” She started to write the address and her number down on a piece of paper. This was exciting but also kind of sketchy. Even then I knew that if something was free I should be suspicious of it. She handed me her information and urged me to come in. I never did. Seemed crazy. I was at the worst stage of my eating disorder, depressed, and pretherapy. In other words, having a pretty bad time in life that year. At that point, I was contemplating not having a future at all. So hearing that something good was going to happen was important. Not that I really believed that psychic. Or Tola, either. Years had gone by since my cowry-shell reading, but there was that word again: famous. Let’s be clear. I actually don’t see any personal value in fame. Life is life, and being famous doesn’t make it any easier. When I was a young kid, I thought it might be fun and amazing to be famous because I assumed that fame resulted in a better life. But as a teenager, I realized that Amy Fisher was famous. There are several movies and books about her, and she even has a cool celebrity nickname, the Long Island Lolita. She’s totally famous, but not for a good reason: she slept with a married man and then attempted to kill his wife. Monica Lewinsky is someone else whose life was kind of ruined by the bad kind of fame.
Mom is a little famous, with her pretty large following from singing in the subway, and has been for years. This is not the bad kind of fame, to her way of thinking, but it caused me nothing but trouble. When I was out with Mom, people would recognize her and tell her how much they appreciated her voice. Then they would often ask me if I sang like my mom. I hated this question. It felt like pressure to be as amazing as Mom was. I would often say, “I sing better than my mom!” in order to seem . . . precocious? (No points for precocious, but many points for being an awkward yet manipulative weirdo.) Anyway, Mom’s always been pretty good at taking a compliment when (and sometimes before) she hears one. I, on the other hand, would panic simply because a stranger was looking and talking to us. “What the fuck, stranger? Can we live? Who even are you? Stop talking to us! She’s MY mom!” was my inner dialogue. As I grew, so did my panic. I look a lot like Mom, and by the time I was a teenager, I was almost as tall as she was (I’m still not taller. At this point, I’m just waiting for her to shrink. Then I’ll be the boss!) and we shared the same body type, so when I was on the train or bus by myself, people would sometimes ask me where I was going to perform. They thought I was Mom. Rude, right? She’s a smooth thirty years older than I am! I know that black don’t crack, but COME ON! So I had to explain to a stranger that I wasn’t Mom, and then they’d ask me if I sang, too, and how old I was, and all of a sudden I was trapped in my worst nightmare: SMALL TALK WITH A STRANGER! AHHHHHH!!!! This is what I thought fame would be like and I preferred not to be famous. Just rich, please and thank you!
Later in the same year that the psychic stopped me on the street, Mom told me that she had met a director who wanted to work with her. A film director named Susan Batson. Ms. Batson happens to also be an actress and a famous acting coach, but Mom had never heard of her. Ms. Batson was at the beginning of adapting the novel Push by Sapphire to film, and she wanted Mom to play the role of Mary, a poverty-stricken mother living on welfare. Mary has a daughter, Precious, who she molests and abuses. (I know what you’re thinking, Wait, isn’t that your role? and you’re right. Just chill. We’ll get there, babe.) Mom’s a singer, not an actor. Ms. Batson wanted her anyway. She thought Mom would be able to play Mary as a woman with dreams and talent whose life was derailed by the birth of her daughter and who takes her frustrations out on the girl through physical and sexual abuse. Mom hated that idea. She explained to Ms. Batson that she’d been an educator and didn’t want the parents of her students to see the movie and think she was capable of doing such a terrible thing. Ms. Batson asked her to read the book first before making up her mind. “So you’re going to be a movie star!?” I asked excitedly that day.
“NO! I’m not doing this movie! You know people are crazy! I don’t want people to think I’m really like that.”
“Are you serious?! It’s a movie! No one’s going to think you’re down with child sexual abuse!”
“No. I don’t think I can do this. I’m gonna read the book, but I’m almost sure I won’t do this movie.”
Dammit, Mom! Didn’t she realize that she could be a real-life star? The star she was always meant to be? A day or two later, Mom left for a tour of Spain. She was singing with a choir. Mom read the book while traveling, and when she got back, she came to my room to tell me that she had officially decided to pass on the role. I thought she was insane and I told her so. She handed me the book, and said, “Here. When you read it, you’ll see why I don’t want to do it.”
“Ugh! Fine. You’re still crazy though.”
“I shouldn’t play this role. No one knows me. People might think I’m really like this. I don’t need someone trying to fight me in the street for what I do in a movie. It should go to a known actress. Mo’Nique should play this role. People know she’s not really like this.”
“People aren’t that crazy, Mom!”
“Just read it. And if you want, I can see if they’ve cast the daughter yet. Maybe I can get you an audition.”
“Pass.”