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The story is below. I should warn you that the short story I workshopped was quite a bit longer and was structured as a story within a story. In other words, the narrator recalls hearing the character, George, tell his own story and the narrator's comments and recollections frame George's story. But the event at which I read was something of a "slam" in which we read within a limited amount of time, so I basically took the inner story out to let it stand mostly on its own. If you want to read the full story, let me know.
George’s Grandmother’s Meal-Ticket
So, this is how George explained to Trevor and me how he came to live with his grandmother during his college years, and why you should not live with a grandmother.
“When I was in my first year at City, I didn’t get along with my parents,” George began to explain. “I was just a knucklehead little shit. I wanted to go out and party all the time. I wanted to hang with my boys, drinkin’, smokin’ weed, you know what I’m sayin’? I flunked my first semester. My Dad was like, ‘you know how much we’re paying for your tuition?’ And I was like, ‘not much, it’s only City College.’
“Whack! My Dad didn’t take that shit. He had that West Indian temper and he threw me out of the house for a night, and I slept on a bench in the Atlantic Avenue train station. Next day, they let me back home and my Moms says, ‘Your father and I have talked. We’ve been discussing your, your – problem – and we’ve decided you’re gonna go live with your Granma.’ She meant her mother, the one from North Carolina, who had a two bedroom on Bainbridge Street. At that point, what was I gonna do? My boys, who I’d been partying with at their apartment, they wouldn’t take me in, so I had no choice. I packed up my shit, my few things, and my Dad drove me over to my Granma’s place.
“Don’t get me wrong. I loved my Granma. She was always so nice to me when I was a kid, so indulgent. So I’m thinking I’m gonna get over big time.
“First thing my Granma decides is, I am definitely gonna be paying rent – $400 a month, which was pretty high back then for a room on fuckin’ Bainbridge Street. I knew this was more than half her rent – way more. I mean, sure, I knew Granma had just a little pension, some social security. I knew she was struggling, but come on, I thought me paying her rent was kind of a joke.
“My first month – this was the winter of what was supposed to be my freshman year, but because I had flunked out of City I was taking a few courses in that bullshit community college – I don’t have the rent. I didn’t even have a damned job, so how I’m gonna have rent? So you know what? First of February, my Granma asks for the rent. I say I don’t have it, and second of February my Granma deadbolts the apartment, locks me out. I come home from class and I’m trying my key and I’m knocking on the door, begging, Granma? Granma? Can you let me in? Please? And she’s like, ‘you got four hundred dollars?’
“Second time I slept at the Atlantic Avenue station.
“Next morning, I remember it was a Saturday, I walked all the way back to Bainbridge Street – I had used my last token – and I had called my Moms and my Dad, and they’re just like, ‘you need to talk to your Granma,’ and ‘That’s between you and your Granma.’ I know they ain’t taking me back, so I’m back outside Granma??s door, and I’m begging again, ‘OK Granma, I promise I’ll find the money. I promise, I’m always gonna pay rent on time, but can I at least come in and take a shower?’
“So she let me in. That day, I promised her I’d find a job. That week, I learned that a college kid with one flunked semester wasn’t gonna get a job in an office, no matter how hard I tried, but in the middle of that week, I found a job as a dishwasher in a fancy restaurant in Park Slope. A fuckin’ dishwasher, working next to Salvadorans and Mexicans. But I saved every penny except for token money, and by the first of the next month, I had just over four hundred dollars. Granma let me slide on the month I missed, but I never missed a months’ rent again. She never let me.
“Another thing about my Granma. After a few months into the fall semester, she gave me a curfew. I hadn’t had a curfew since I was like fifteen, and now I’m eighteen, nineteen, and Granma was telling me I had to be home for dinner, unless I could prove I was studying in the library or was at work – and she would call my job or the library to check up on me. I thought it was a joke. First time I missed a curfew on a Friday night, guess what? Deadbolt. Third time I slept in the Atlantic Avenue train station.
“She had this thing about dinner. We had to sit down to dinner every night at seven o’clock and eat like – she called it – eat like civilized people. No fast food. No take out. Nothing. Two plates on opposite sides of the dinner table. She cooked every single night and we sat down and had dinner.
“The only time I could stay out late was if I went to the library or if I stayed with my parents on the weekend.
“So that was my routine. School, library, work, dinner with Granma. I really became housebound. But sometimes I would sit at dinner with Granma and not say a word, because the longer this went on, the madder I was getting, especially when rent day was coming.
“Then I started noticing little things. Little things that ticked me off. Like, she started going to Atlantic City on those bus tours. She and her old friends – they were like this posse of elderly widows and widowers – and they’d take these bus trips, come back, and laugh and joke about how they played the slots all day. I began to think of my hard earned rent money disappearing down Donald Trump’s slot machines – and for what?
“Next thing I know, she bought a new bedroom set. Well, basically just a new mattress and box-spring, a chest of drawers. But still! I felt like it was my hard earned money.
“I started to really resent my Granma. She wasn’t the kindly old saint I used to think she was, you know what I mean? I started to think while I was at the restaurant, standing on my feet for hours, serving people, trying to earn a few dollars, I’m nothing but my Granma’s meal ticket. She would be real nice to me just like she’d always been, but around rent time, I used to wonder, ‘Why she gotta be so hard on me when it comes to the rent money?’
“I knew I was missing things, you know? College was flying by and my life was school, work, library, dinner with Granma. School, work, library, dinner. I knew that the other kids were sitting around, well, talking – about things. Experiencing things. Exploring the city. Downtown, the Village.”
George took a cigarette out of the packet in his pocket, lit it and took a long angry drag.
“I mean it’s part of college, isn’t it?” he asked. “I was missing it, you know? I knew that even the damned engineering students were getting a chance to talk about other things – I don’t know, art? Politics? Books?
“One Saturday night I was having dinner with Granma. She had cooked something really nice, and she’s trying to talk to me about school and work, and I just snapped on her. I think I said something like, ‘what do you care, as long as you get your rent?’
“And she got up slowly, silently, cleared the dishes, and went to her room without saying a word, without saying goodnight. That’s how I knew how upset she was. But I didn’t care that I hurt her feelings. It was a Saturday night, and I was stuck there and I was missing out on my whole college life. I was steaming mad and the thought just popped into my head: I hate Granma. There – I said it. I had that thought: I hate Granma. I hate living with her. I hate paying rent to her.
“But then, it kind of hit me, what I had just thought. And I said to myself, George, you can’t think like that. Think of it as a gift. If you had more money, wouldn’t you gladly pay for her to go to Atlantic City, wouldn’t you do it for your Granma? If you could buy her a new bed and it wasn’t by paying rent money, wouldn’t you do it anyway, George?
“And I just decided right then and there that she had won. I wouldn’t fight it any more. I was like, I give up, Granma! Like I accepted my fate, that this was what college was going to be like for me, for my life.”
George flicked his cigarette to the curb and nervously lit another one, taking a long drag, slowly exhaling, relaxing.
“I lived with my Granma four and a half years – the semester in community college and four years at City. I guess you could say Granma made me the man I am today.
“When I finally graduated, I couldn’t wait to get out of Granma’s house. I remember how happy I was graduation day. I already had a job lined up on Wall Street, but as I remember it, as I was standing outside the auditorium in my cap and gown, the main thing I was worrying about was where I was gonna get the money to buy a couple of suits to start work with, ‘cause once again, I had given my last dime to Granma for rent. Where was I gonna get a rent deposit and a broker’s fee?
“So, I’m standing out there with my cap and gown with my Moms, my Dad and my Granma, taking pictures, getting ready to go to our graduation party, and Granma pulls out this envelope and says, ‘Son, I couldn’t wait for the party to give you my present.’
“So, I take the envelope. I open it. And it’s a card with a check in it. And I’m thinking, as cheap as she is, it must be about twenty, maybe thirty dollars – and probably out of my own rent money. And sure enough, I open it and glance at it and see the number twenty and read the card and say, ‘thanks Granma.’
“She says, ‘Son, did you read it?’
“So I look at the card again, and it’s some corny Hallmark poem, and she didn’t even write anything special on it, so I said, ‘It’s a very nice card, Granma ...’
“‘Did you read the check?’ she says.
“And as I’m saying, sure Granma, I read it, and I’m looking at it, and I realize it’s not twenty, it’s twenty grand. Just over twenty thousand dollars.
“She says, ‘That’s every penny of rent you paid – plus interest. Opened the account for you with your first rent check.’
“My mouth just fell open. I couldn’t say a damned thing for once in my life.
“‘Learned ya to save, dinctha?’ she says.
“All I could say was, ‘Granma, oh Granma, Granma, oh Granma ...
“‘A smart young man like you, he need a grub stake, don’t he?’ she says.
“And I was still just ... ‘Granma, oh Granma ...’”
George stopped talking, mid-word, and seemed suddenly unable to say anything more – he was as unable to speak now, as he was telling us he had been unable to speak then, and he had the helpless look of a child, overwhelmed by one of those occasional eruptions – rare, mysterious and oceanic – into the routine, often dreary, business of day to day family life.
Trevor broke the awkward silence, “Damn Georgie, what a did wit’ da money?”
“I bought two suits,” George said, quietly.
“Dem some mighty expensive suits, eh?” Trevor joked.
“I bought two cheap, off the rack suits. I paid some debts. I had my rent deposit and broker’s fee. And I put a down payment on a condo in Cobble Hill, and I went over to Bainbridge Street and I told her, ‘you’re never gonna pay rent again, Granma.’ And I moved her over there, and I’ve been paying her mortgage and my rent and paying for these crumb snatchers in there, ever since.”
George turned his back to us and called out, “Cece? Tamika? Belinda? Will you hurry up?” But he kept his back to us and was silent.
“She died about two months ago and ...”
“Oh, George I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
“It was a very nice funeral,” Trevor said, “Didn’t ya know?”
“And we’ve been breaking down her apartment since then and the first of the month, that’s where we’re moving,” George said, “It was a good investment, wasn’t it? Don’t you think it was a good investment?” George asked.
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