I never saw Wanda Fonda again, and Jane barely acknowledged me when I would greet her by the pool. I continued to sail with Ted, and time went by. Tutors came and went. My wealth grew, or so I was told by Ted’s accountant, an Indian man named Podgy Patel.
“You have vast money,” he said in his singsong accent. “Vaster this week than last.”
“How much money do I have?” We were sitting in the living room of my quarters.
“How old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
“Let me just say ‘vast.’ The actual figure might frighten you.”
“Tell me.”
“I cannot.” He smiled the smile he always smiled, a smile I imagined he would wear whether he was being tickled, being praised, or being fired. “I can only say that your wealth is … ”
“Vast,” we said together.
“Very good,” he said.
“What if I want some money?” I asked.
“Just ask.”
“What if I want fifty thousand dollars?”
“Just ask.”
“What if I don’t want to ask?”
“Write it down.”
“Can’t I just go to the bank?”
“You are thirteen. They will not give you fifty thousand dollars.”
“But you will,” I said.
“Of course, it is your money.”
“And I can do anything I want with it? I can throw it off a building downtown if I want to?”
“That sounds foolish, but yes.”
“Okay, I want fifty thousand dollars,” I said.
“Do you really? Or are you just saying that?”
“No, I want it.”
“I’ll bring it by this afternoon.”
I felt for some reason defeated, even though this smiling Podgy Patel man was telling me that I was insanely wealthy. “Never mind,” I said. “I guess I don’t want the money.”
“I knew it.”
Like most people I am smarter than some, dumber than others, skinnier than most, and fatter than a few, but none was ever more confused than I was. I flew with confusion always parallel to me, and a whole internal chase at my rear. The one matter that was not confusing to me, but seemed to escape all others, was the fact that the only thing that was certain to become obsolete, would necessarily become wearied and worn, was the truth. I knew this in spite of the truth that I had had little truck with the truth in my life. It was not that I considered myself a resident in a den of lies, but rather that my history was shrouded and diced and soaking wet with hysteria and contradiction. Contradictions or no, my trajectory through life, though different from most, was, nonetheless, a trajectory. The move from my bizarre early childhood in Los Angeles to my strange latter childhood in Atlanta was abrupt, yet somehow seemingly seamless, the sudden death of my mother and my induction into the world of a media icon notwithstanding.
A few years disappeared into wherever time goes and with them my childhood, Claudia, the cook, and my karate instructor. Betty graduated from college and married a Morehouse man from Ohio whom I never met. For a couple of years I received the occasional, uninformative postcard from Akron, usually depicting something called the Soap Box Derby. I lived in my part of the house pretty much alone as the Russian woman who cooked for me spoke no English and the woman who cleaned refused to speak to me. I saw Ted often.
By the time I was in high school, it was common knowledge, or at least it was no secret, that I lived at Ted Turner’s house. To my teachers my name was odd, but to my classmates I was Sidney or Not Sidney or something other than Sidney. My real name became a mystery to be solved for many. Still, I was beaten often, but now in an attempt to have me give up that bit of prized information, namely my name. There was some upside, as some of the looser girls would offer to kiss me if I told them my name. I would gladly agree to the arrangement. I would receive the kiss and then say, “My name is Not Sidney.” Unfortunately, the looser girls often would and could be more violent and fierce than the boys, and so they would offer up an entrée of whup-ass with sides of hair pulling and scratching.
A steady diet of humiliation leads to a kind of immunity or desensitization to abasement and discomfiture and so I found myself caring less and less, and the less I cared the less anyone seemed interested in beating me up. Lack of interest or not, the beatings continued, perhaps because they had become a habit or ritual for a few. Sadly, that journey to pointless and profitless immunity often is completed with a degree of permanent injury, usually to the brain and/or nervous system, but I luckily made it through without any perceptible lasting marks — physical, physiological, or neurological. Psychic damage, however, is far more difficult to assess, though I think I was saved from even that by my sense of irony.
My mother’s insistence on my reading as much as possible made me bored in school. I never imagined that I was terribly bright, but I turned out to be extremely well educated. I made friends with a squat, square-headed, bespectacled white boy named Eddie Eliazar in my American history class. He had an overdeveloped fondness for World War Two — era airplanes and suffered all the ridicule and only a fraction of the beatings I endured. I imagined that his diminutive stature saved him the physical abuse. We shared a crush on and competed for the attention of our history teacher, Miss Hancock, a narrow-shouldered blond woman with pale blue eyes and long legs who was not so much beautiful as perhaps honest looking. Eddie attempted to wow her with plastic models of Messerschmitts, Zeros, and Corsairs while I became obsessed with the concealment of FDR’s disability from the American public, my real interest being the definitions of disability and public. About this interest, Miss Hancock would say, “How fascinating,” a response that I loved then, but would later come to recognize as code for any number of things. There were clearly codes in her employ that fell short of my understanding, but it soon became evident that my emerging resemblance to Sidney Poitier was not lost on her and that an inappropriate and, I must say, welcomed relationship began to surface. The girls of my school were too accustomed to teasing, ignoring, or beating me to observe any maturation or change in my appearance or bearing, but Miss Hancock, unfortunate name and all, did notice and with much zeal, eagerness, and a surprising and confusing amount of enterprise.
The relationship took flight, not unlike one of Eddie’s Messerschmitts, when after school one day Miss Hancock asked me if I would accompany her home and move some bags of topsoil and manure from the trunk of her car to her garden shed. I should have read her signals, as she told me all this while crossing and uncrossing and recrossing her smooth, miniskirted legs and applying dark red lipstick. But I was naïve, dumb, inexperienced, fifteen and, most importantly, stupid. So, I rode with her in her powder blue Mustang convertible, top and tinted windows up, to her modest house at the edge of Decatur. I got out of the car and walked to the back, waiting for her to open the trunk, which she did and all I saw was a spare tire, a jack, and jar of petroleum jelly. I looked at her, I imagine, rather blankly.