Hungry
72,000 words | Magical Realism
Synopsis: Ray, a sleazy lawyer, is sent to get a signature from a woman at a nursing home but ends up befriending a 99-year-old man who claims he ate a car to gain a woman's love.
72,000 words | Magical Realism
Synopsis: Ray, a sleazy lawyer, is sent to get a signature from a woman at a nursing home but ends up befriending a 99-year-old man who claims he ate a car to gain a woman's love.
The boys sometimes used the “N” word in front of Ray without a second thought. Even though Ray was in the club, he used the word in the same way they used it—derogatory, not in the salutary joking way but usually to describe the black people in Atlanta. Ray had gotten so he thought nothing of it. And then one day his girlfriend Denise overheard a telephone conference where the word was passed around the conference call like a bag of potato chips. After the call, she jumped all over Ray and insisted that he quit the firm immediately. He laughed at her and went out to look at new cars because he’d just gotten a raise.
As the men got drunker and Ray listened to more of their jokes, his mind started to reel back to when he was a boy growing up in the Techwood Homes and Clark Howell projects, just to the north of downtown Atlanta near Georgia Tech. They were the poster child for government projects, of a government gone wrong, a government institutionalizing people, black people in particular and throwing them together in concentration camps. Techwood was created to eliminate slum-like conditions and house many of the city’s poor residents. They were the first and oldest housing project built in the U.S., opening in 1936. By the 90s, the violent crime rate at the Techwood Homes stood at 37 times the national average. Good intentions always have unintended consequences. Ask anybody in the projects if there was good intention there, and they’d all tell you the same thing in two words—Fuck No!
Techwood was demolished prior to the 1996 Olympic games so as not to embarrass the U.S., and of course, Atlanta in the eyes of the world. After all, Atlanta had CNN and Coca-Cola. Ted Turner, and of course Jane his wife, couldn’t have other world news outlets pointing their cameras at this gleaming Oz of the New South and telling the dirty truth that was hidden with subdivisions and tree-lined boulevards and freeways. Ray remembered the demolition of Techwood, watching as his mother and his sister moved out with all their belongings in five large suitcases and into the suburbs with the aid of the money he was making at his first job. They loaded up all their stuff and took a MARTA bus to Marietta, one of the northwestern suburbs of Atlanta. MARTA—as the Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority had been corrupted by everyone, black and white in Atlanta, to “Moving Africans Right Through Atlanta.” This time a government entity was actually doing its government mule job and moving Ray and his family out of Techwood, just like George Jefferson and his kin in the seventies TV sitcom got to move into a high-rise in the East Eighties. No matter how bad the projects were, Ray still didn’t lack for anything. His mother loved him and his sister and she would do anything to provide for her babies, but Ray knew something was wrong. All he had to do was stand on Hunnicutt Street and look across the I-85 connector ramp to see that there was another world out there. A white world, all clean and pretty and perfect, moving past at 70 miles per hour in Mercedes Benzes and BMWs and Cadillacs. Moving right on past Techwood like it didn’t exist, like nobody within its cordoned-off perimeter mattered, just like the Germans headed to work, right past the camps that housed thousands of Jews and all the other undesirables of Europe. As a boy, Ray would lie in his bed and listen to the traffic. As he lay there at night, Ray counted those cars driving through downtown Atlanta, north south east and west.
Each car that went past was a dollar, each horn that blew was five dollars, screeching tires were ten dollars, and an actual smashup was a hundred bucks. He was a rich young man living in Techwood, at least in his dreams, lying in his bed listening to the traffic in the nexus of downtown Atlanta freeways. One day he would matter, though, and he would be rich. He promised that to himself and his mother even though he was stuck in Techwood Unit #234-F on Hunnicutt Street with Mr. Rogers and he had free lunch and all the liberal government mule bullshit Washington D.C. could send his way— free cheese and Head Start and all the other social welfare engineering and architecture to get poor black kids into the mainstream. But Ray never bought into it. It was bullshit to him and everybody else he knew. Apologetics from guilty white people trying to get free of the white man’s burden, all the while staying as far away from Techwood as they could. Just more bullshit from whitey to make him feel better. Bullshit from Washington “liberals” who sent their kids to private schools in Virginia and Maryland to keep them away from kids like him in the D.C. projects. Just bullshit from the system. Who did they think they were ever fooling? Who did they think they were fooling now? As a young man in college at the University of Georgia, Ray had gone to a seminar in Atlanta where one of the charlatans was hawking his particular brand of self-help trickery. It was called “Think Right, Do Right, Get Rich.” Ray shook his head thinking about the bullshit the guy spewed out as he pranced around in a three-thousand dollar silk suit on stage. The only one getting rich was the bastard standing on stage in front of ten thousand idiots who’d all paid good money to see the show. Ray realized then and there that to play the game, you had to be a hustler, a trickster, a joker, a con artist, just like the “Think Right, Do Right, Get Rich” fraud. And what better place to be a con artist than in the law. All you had to do was convince 12 people of your particular side of the facts and you won the prize. You didn’t even have to really convince them a lot of times. You just had to introduce ideas such as “doubtful” and “willing” and “intention” and “knowingly” and “negligently” into their minds and you could walk away with the big money. And for whatever shortcomings and lack of opportunity and government mule programs that Ray had been born into, he wasn’t bitter because growing up on the streets taught him how to do two things well, and that was talk and persuade. He could talk his way out of any situation and when the talk didn’t work, the persuasion kicked in and his opponents, whether it was another gang or the police, were usually impressed enough to give Ray another chance. Talk and persuade. Those were the keys to being a personal injury attorney. When you ran out of talk, you persuaded. And when you ran out of persuasion, you talked. It was like a dog chasing its tail. The result of course was confusion. Just like in the hood. Ray learned to talk until the moon turned to green cheese if he had, to never let up, never let the other side get in a word. The more you talked, the more it looked as if you were saying something. Talking bought you time. It was the oldest trick in the lawyering trade. It was the same trick the self-help huckster had used. Squeaky wheels always got the grease and Ray like the sweet smell of that green grease.
Was it all about money? Ray had decided long ago the answer to that question was a quick yes. Money made things simple. It always had. That’s why it had been invented. All you had to do was study history. Money made all the bad deeds that were done in its name seem clean. Of course, anyone who knows anything about money knows that the more you have, the more terrible things you have to do to get it. It’s just a rule of not only economics, but human nature. In Ray's world, though, money was not the root of all evil, or the love of money as the preacher man will tell you. There was no such thing as evil in Ray’s book. Just opportunity.