Samaritan (24 page)

“You know, I think maybe I did see that one,” Nerese said, thinking maybe she actually had.

“Believe me, even if you didn’t, you did. Anyways, the actor who plays Mr. Montone, he had gone AWOL, you know?” Ray mimed upending a bottle. “Nowhere to be found. This ex-student of mine, the producer? He looks at me, says, ‘Fuck it, the character’s only been on twice, nobody’ll remember. You’re Mr. Montone. Go get fitted for a bow tie.’ And I’m like,
Me?
Shaker says the same thing he said about the writing, you’ll learn by doing. Next thing I know someone slaps a SAG card in my hand and I’m wearing makeup.”

“Are you kidding me?” Nerese encouraging him, letting out a little more line.

“The episode centered around two big scenes. One, I confront this kid about the paper. He’s all full of himself, ‘Yo man, I was touring colleges, playing in the McDonald’s All-Star tournament. I din’t have time to write no paper.’ You know, and then I say, ‘Well, you better
make
time, Mr. Jefferson’—I’m always calling my students Mr. and Miss—‘because if you don’t, you won’t graduate.’

“He’s like, ‘Aw man, that Gatsby book, it ain’t got nothing to do with around here. Why you stressing me? Why you standing in the way of my education?’

“And I’m, these aren’t the exact words, but, I’m like . . .” Ray drew himself up again and went all stern for her, tap-dancing for his life. “‘Mr. Jefferson? I don’t give a damn about basketball, I am not impressed by athletes, I am not impressed by celebrity. I
am
impressed by accountability, by personal integrity and by personal initiative, none of which you are exhibiting to me at this moment. And as far as getting in the
way
of your education? Unlike many a faculty member in this school, I absolutely refuse to turn a blind eye when it comes to your obligations in my classroom.’

“‘And let me tell you, those colleges that are so, so ardently wooing you? For the most part, they could care less about your education. You’re simply an athlete to them, a source of income and prestige, and mark my words, Mr. Jefferson’—I think I actually used that expression, ‘mark my words.’ Anyways, ‘Mark my words, Mr. Jefferson, once you leave this building for the last time, I seriously doubt that anyone will ever make an academic or intellectual demand on you again beyond memorizing a playbook, which at your age, as far as I’m concerned, at your tender and unformed age, is both borderline criminal and a crying shame. And believe me, if you allow this, this,
pampering
to continue, you will suffer for it. So hand in that paper, Mr. Jefferson, and then, if you choose to cruise through the next four years, there’ll be no one and nothing to stop you. Certainly not me.’”

“Damn, Ray, you’re good.” Nerese, despite her awareness of the underpinning here, was starting to enjoy the show for its own sake.

“Why thank you,” he said. “Anyways, the kid Jefferson, he’s storming out and I call to him, ‘Mr. Jefferson, four years from now when your athletic career most likely comes to an end, what do you envision doing with the rest of your life? What will you be prepared for?’

“And he hesitates just a tick, like I had laid some serious food for thought on him, then he storms out.

“I mean, the reality of it is, is the kid could do a million things after four years of college ball—go into coaching, go into construction, be a cop, I mean what is
any
college idiot prepared for after four years? At least this kid would have some glamour, some prestige to his name, right? Give him a job in the alumni office, whatever . . .

“Anyways, so word goes out that Mr. Montone is flunking Hammurabi Jefferson—big-ass hue and cry. Everyone’s calling for his head, he’s a racist, he’s this, he’s that.

“So the second big scene is this huge meeting two days before graduation, demanded by the PTA and half the faculty. What’s this dinosaur still doing teaching in this school. He doesn’t like it here, he’s contemptuous of our children, he doesn’t understand the day-to-day reality of life around here, he doesn’t know what it means for one of our kids to get a four-year scholarship. Off with his head, off with his head . . .

“And I’m standing up there on the auditorium stage in front of this mob, I’m not saying shit. Just taking it in, got a face like a rock, I shall not be moved, racial politics be damned. You want my resignation? You got it, but this kid is not passing English. I mean, this is all said without, you know, just by my expression, thank God, because I’m an actor like you’re a ballerina,” Ray immediately flinching after he said that, but Nerese just shrugged it off: Tell me something I don’t know.

“So anyways, everyone’s going all bughouse on me and just as everything is reaching like this crescendo of outrage? I look up over the heads of all my detractors, my eyes, the camera goes to the back of the auditorium and like slowly everybody turns to see what I see and there’s the kid, Hammurabi Jefferson, just standing there and when it’s all silent? He starts walking down the center aisle to the podium and, oh shit . . . He’s got some paper in his hand and he comes right up to me, says, ‘Here,’ and hands me his report on
The Great Gatsby.
I’m all like thunderstruck, the crowd is wobba-wobba, you know, milling and murmuring, this kid says to me, and this actor, Tariq Howard, was a lot better than he had to be, he says, ‘Yo, I been thinking about what you
said,
Mr. Montone, and I realized that you was demanding stuff of me that I should have been demanding of myself all along, man. You were demanding that I be responsible, that I have respect for myself and that I have standards for myself. Man, I been skating through this school since day one, but that’s gonna stop. Next year at college? Wherever I go, I don’t care
how
much slack they’re ready to cut me, man, I’m gonna get me the best education I can. I’m telling you, the next four years? I’m gonna make you proud of me.’ Then he turns and faces the PTA, his parents, the other faculty. ‘I’m gonna make you
all
proud of me, and I ain’t talking about basketball.’

“And then, right back at me, he says, ‘I tell you, Mr. Montone, whatever you think of that paper I wrote? Far’s I’m concerned, you’re the best damned teacher in this school.’

“At which point I’m just supposed to give this terse nod of, I don’t know, communion, vindication, but what I do instead is, I just burst into tears on the set. I couldn’t help it. I was so, this actor kid, the scene, it just
got
to me, and I started to fucking sob and everybody’s like, stunned, all the extras, the PTA people, the director, the cameraman, the script supervisor’s flipping pages like crazy, but they keep shooting because I guess my crying is so, so gut-wrenching. I even heard somebody say, ‘Fucking
great.
’ I guess it looked like here’s this die-hard teacher Montone who’s been bucking the social winds for years refusing to give in, he’s on the verge of annihilation and he finally gets validation at his darkest loneliest hour or who the fuck knows, I just can’t stop crying. Finally the kid, the actor playing the kid, he wings it, takes it on himself to come on up to where I am and hug me, and the show fades on that image.

“And Tweetie, it freaked me out like you can’t believe. I was so scared at how I lost control. I . . . And the reason I’m
telling
all this to you instead of showing it to you on video is that I never watched it. I never wanted to watch it. I don’t own it, I never saw it when it ran, nothing. And I had offers to act after that. No way. I’d just as soon be a rodeo clown.

“And, oh! You want to know about actors? After we wrapped, I was still so shaken and I wanted to connect with the kid who played Hammurabi Jefferson, somehow keep the communion going but like in real life? You know, find out what
he
thought happened between us? So I go to him and I say, ‘Jeez, Tariq, I’m sorry I lost control like that. It was so powerful. What do you think . . .’

“And he looks at me, big grin, says to me, ‘Yeah, thanks, I
thought
I nailed it,’ turns and goes off with one of his honeys. And to this day I don’t know what happened to me, I swear to God.”

But Nerese got it, was starting to get it. The guy fell apart because the moment was about gratitude; he had manufactured a situation that was to the heart of him and then personally, physically played it out like it was the real thing.

Video arcades and football instead of libraries and Shakespeare, coming out of the blue to pay for Reggie Powell’s funeral, volunteer teaching in that shithole of a school, playing some kind of mentor-muse-patron of the arts with Salim El-Amin . . . And taking up with the jailbird’s wife. The constant white-black casting made her uncomfortable—no, made her angry; but that anger was tempered by the intuition that this compulsion in him wasn’t really about race; that the element of race, the chronic hard times and neediness of poor blacks and Latinos was primarily a convenience here, the schools and housing projects of Dempsy and other places like a stocked pond in which he could act out his selfish selflessness over and over whenever and wherever the opportunity presented itself, and that he was so driven by this need, so swept away by it, that he would heedlessly, helplessly risk his life to see it played out each and every time until he finally drew the ace of spades, or swords, and got the obituary that would vindicate him, bring tears to his eyes; key word, “beloved,” if only he could figure out some way to come back from the dead long enough to read it.

Agitated both by his own dramatic reenactment and fighting off the mounting terror of being back here, Ray paced the room blindly. From her seat on the couch, Nerese took in his small yearning gestures, the language of fluttering fingers, of tightening mouth and twitching eye, and she had to remind herself why she was here, why she was voluntarily putting out for this man; but for the first time in her life, the childhood memory of Ray coming to her aid with that blood- and sweat-sopped T-shirt made her feel hollow and enraged. Had that been all about this? Had he been working his shit out on her too?

But then and with great relief, she brought back—she made herself bring back—the frightened, disoriented expression on Ray’s face as they sat rib to rib on that filthy curb, the great exhalation of deliverance that came out of him when Dub’s father, Eddie Paris, showed up and took over the show.

And that was the problem she had with passing judgment on Ray: at heart he was a decent individual, an “honorable person,” to use his own words, or at least he consciously tried to be . . .

She had no doubt that it honestly thrilled him, for whatever reason, to truly come through for people even if only in the short run—which was fine, unless in the euphoria of the moment he was in the habit of making long-term promises he had no intention of keeping, or unless he chronically confused, as his ex-wife had said, making a dent with making a splash.

But on the other hand, what the hell: a cash crisis was a cash crisis, poor people needed to bury their dead too, Paulus Hook kids were desperate for passionate teachers, no matter where their true motivations lay. And who in this life wasn’t carrying around a suitcase of hidden agendas?

The mug shot of Freddy Martinez was still lying face up on the coffee table. Nerese mused on the fact that even though twenty years as a cop told her that this was the guy who had laid open Ray’s head for him, she was sure that if this murderous sonofabitch were to call up Ray tonight and ask for—well, maybe not a loan, but a job reference, or some advice on how to be a better husband to Danielle, Ray, his heart swelling like a balloon, would instantly and unhesitatingly come through for the guy. And feel like a million bucks for doing so.

“So, Tweetie.” Knitting a ladder of fingertips, Ray tilted tremulously into the windowsill. “How’d you become police. You were going to tell me.”

“No, I got to go,” she said tersely, finally jerking the line.

“Aw c’mon, don’t be like that . . .”

“Next time.” She began gathering herself up, wondering if in addition to springing the trap she wasn’t also throwing a little payback his way for the discomfort of some of her perceptions.

“C’mon, hang in a bit,” Ray forcing some cheer through the panic in his throat. “It’s kind of freaky around here.”

“See, what you’re scrambling to do right now,” Nerese said with one hand on the doorknob, “is to figure out how to make me stay without giving me what I want. The thing is? You can’t.”

“I’ll tell you why I left the show,” Ray blurted.

“Some other time.”

“You don’t want to hear about my,
racial
incident?” Dangling it like a bracelet.

“OK . . . By the way, I have no idea why that episode was nominated for writing. We used just about every cliché in the manual, but I guess . . . I just don’t know . . . I just don’t.” Ray stood before her again as if onstage, Nerese back down on the couch, grudgingly giving him her eyes, telling herself a few more minutes to finally scratch an itch wouldn’t make any difference here one way or the other.

“Anyways, about two weeks after I go all blubbery in front of the cameras, there’s a birthday party for one of the actors. Guy plays the gay black art teacher, so you can imagine the tolerance punch lines whenever
he’s
center stage, right?

“And the actor who plays this character, Tony Raymond? He got his start in the blaxploitation flicks,
Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold, Blacula, The Mack,
and everybody loved this guy, great guy, one of those feast-or-famine actors, nothing doing for fifteen years, and now he’s working again and just, in general, happy to be alive practicing his craft, joy to the world. And for his birthday, it was going to be a surprise costume party with a seventies theme, you know, everybody dressing like popcorn pimps, disco ducks, dashikis, bell-bottoms, Afro wigs, medallions, marshmallow heels, muttonchops, miniskirts.

“But me, I don’t want to do the matching vest and pants
Saturday Night Fever
thing. Me, I have to have a fucking brainstorm. Me, I’m going as Curtis Mayfield, you know, ‘Superfly,’ ‘Pusherman,’ ‘Freddy’s Dead’ . . . Me, White Ray Mitchell, as Curtis Mayfield, OK? Not offensive enough? How about this. Mayfield’s died since then, but at that time he was a quadriplegic. So how about in addition to wearing an Afro-trimmed bald wig, jawline beard and big pink tinted shades, I go in a fucking,
wheel
chair.