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“You stay away from that, son. You’ve got enough heat on you right now. Last thing you need is a white girl with her little pink titties out in the front seat of your car.”
Jamison nodded again. What he wouldn’t tell Emmit—or rather thought he couldn’t tell him—was that just a week before Ras got caught doing ninety-three on 85N, his old roommate had agreed to close a major deal Jamison had been hoping to pull off with the starting five players of the Atlanta Hawks. Before the last mayor shut down the city’s midnight basketball program, Ras had been the director, and for years he’d been talking about getting the NBA players together to sponsor his program. Once the program had been shut down, Ras had continued to finesse the relationships, and when Jamison got into office, he’d shown up at Jamison’s door with his dreadlocks down to his waist and told the new mayor of his plan—the starting five players had committed to donating a million dollars per year each to a scholarship fund for as long as they were contracted with the Hawks. The kick was that the scholarships would pay full college tuition, room, and board for college-bound black males from Atlanta’s poorest neighborhoods. When news of Ras’s arrest got out, the players got skittish about the deal, considering their squeaky-clean NBA images. Jamison hadn’t been able to connect with any of them since.
“That may have been your boy way back when,” Emmit started, leaning into Jamison, “but this is me telling you to stand back. Don’t go around here asking questions about that man.”
“But he just had weed—”
“Eleven pounds. Listen to me, son,” Emmit said. “Don’t make that your cross to bear. Not because he’s your old roommate—who gives a shit about that? And not because he’s some drugged-up community organizer—more will come along. Let it go. That’s for your own good.” Emmit winked and clicked back on his heels. “Now, I believe my brothers are waiting on me at the Rainforest. You coming along?”
“Yeah, I’ll stop by. Just give me a second,” Jamison said.
“Suit yourself.”
Jamison went to say hello and good-bye to a few more familiar faces, but through each of those conversations his mind was still on Ras and Emmit’s advice to stand down for his “own good.” He hadn’t even mentioned to Emmit that he’d intended to do anything, but here the old brother was giving him such solid directives. That wasn’t uncommon coming from Emmit’s ilk. They were always doling out advice, and since Jamison had started out on his campaign trail they’d been whispering in his ear what he could and couldn’t do. And Jamison was no fool. He knew he had to listen most times. Because those men talking to him were listening to someone else. But something about the situation with Ras was picking at his gut. So, with this on his mind, Jamison went along smiling and shaking more hands. He spoke to the chapter president about making an appearance at the fraternity’s annual blood drive and promised to donate a thousand dollars in new furniture for a home they were building for a single father of three who’d lost his house to a fire that had claimed his wife and youngest child. After he had finally made a horseshoe shape through the crowd and had even stopped to take a few pictures with some of the younger brothers, he was heading to his car when he felt a light tap on his shoulder. He thought it was Emmit reminding him about the Rainforest and turned quickly to tell him that he was on his way right behind him, but it was one of the younger brothers he’d just taken a picture with inside the community center.
“I’m ssss-sorry to disturb you, Brother Taylor—I-I-I mean Mayor Taylor,” he said nervously. Jamison noted that he had a slight stutter because he paused between many of his words to refocus his tongue.
“Brother, it’s fine,” Jamison allowed, smiling.
The man stood for a second and just looked Jamison over the way he always thought white people tended to do whenever he traveled to speak in areas outside of the city.
Jamison held his hand out to remind the man to introduce himself.
“Oh,” he said excitedly, taking Jamison’s hand. “I’m Keet Neales . . . Brother Keet Neales.”
“Great to meet you, brother.”
“I wanted—wanted to thank you for taking that picture with me.”
“It’s always an honor.”
“And I wanted to just speak to you f-f-for a second. I’m a police officer,” Keet revealed.
“Okay.” This was no news to Jamison. Keet had been chatting with a group of five fellow officers who’d invited Jamison to join their mentoring program session before the next meeting.
“I’ve been on the force for a few years and I’m—I’m looking to get out.” There was a pause. “I want to—want to go into politics.”
Both Jamison and Keet seemed relieved that Keet had gotten this all out. The tension between his tongue and nerves had his doughy complexion turning a light rose from forehead to chin.
“That’s great. We could always use a few more of our own out there,” Jamison said in his public, media-friendly voice. Really, at that point, his words meant nothing. It was just about pleasantries. His mind was still on Ras. And most every day someone was cornering him to tell him about his or her new venture into politics. It was like writing a book—everyone wanted to do it and had the greatest ideas, but when it came time for the follow-through and people realized they’d have to roll up their nice shirts and get their hands bloody just to make an outline for the thing, they bowed out before they finished the first try.
“Really? You think so?” Keet was beaming like a little boy. His color returned. His eyes drank Jamison in.
“Sure. The more the merrier.” Jamison patted Keet on the back the way the older brothers had done to him. It signified that the conversation was over. He smiled and started toward his car again.
After three steps, he heard, “So—so, can I come work for you, Mayor Taylor?”
Jamison didn’t stop. “Get your resume to my assistant. Let him know you’re my frat brother.”
Keet watched Jamison walk all the way to his car before turning back to return to the community center.
In 1976, Brother Renaldo Lex showed up at his three-bedroom bungalow in East Atlanta with a five foot papier-mâché palm tree one of the students in his art class had made as a final project. His girlfriend, Pearl, with whom he’d had three children but had never married, stood out in the driveway looking confused as he pulled the palm tree out of the back of his van. Pearl didn’t say anything though. Renaldo was a failed painter who’d missed out on so many opportunities to do what he’d loved; questioning him about just anything threatened to send him into a drunken rage. Still, Renaldo was a reasonable man and the house was actually Pearl’s so he told her what the tree was for on his way into the house. “Building me a bar in the basement. A place where my frat brothers can come and drink.” Pearl just smiled at the man she loved, and like most women in love with men like Renaldo, she secretly hoped his plan failed fast enough so that no one got hurt or killed—or hurt and then killed.
When Renaldo set the ugly palm tree in the middle of the floor in the unfinished basement, “Rainforest” was the first word that came to mind, so from there everything else he brought to go into what Pearl was calling his “little lair” had to match that “theme”: the life-sized orangutan from a local arcade that had closed down, str
inged lights decorated with miniature plastic bananas, dingy mosquito nets from the Salvation Army, and so on. Soon, lumpy green couches, hard brown chairs, and tables edged a tacky tiki bar that had WELCOME TO THE RAINFOREST etched into a wooden plate on the front of its overhead glass holder.
Thirty-six years later and no one was hurt or killed and Renaldo’s old basement bar was still serving drinks to frat brothers. It was open twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. No one worked there, but everyone got served, the bar was always stocked, and the little money the Rainforest made paid off Pearl’s mortgage ten years before Renaldo died of a massive heart attack in his classroom, so she was still a happy woman.
