This story comes from my friends Colin and Ryne, and from me. They are responsible for the high quality of the tale. I am responsible for the low quality of the execution. Anyway, Storytime.
Jim Brightest was a natural in social situations. He had practiced his skills getting his father out of trouble with the law.
His mother had left him at a Safe Surrender firehouse and moved back to Austria or Namibia or some other German-speaking country, his father had never been clear. Don Brightest didn’t want a life of foster care for his only son (all three of his previous children, with three different women, had been daughters) and so he bribed the firefighters with a 1963 Cadillac El Dorado Biarritz convertible.
It probably wouldn’t have worked any other place but Southwest Detroit, but Fireman Greg Washington had waited his whole life to buy his father Ron a classic El Dorado. Ron Washington was born to sharecroppers in Arkansas the same day Hitler invaded Poland. He jumped the Illinois Central to Chicago as soon as he was eighteen, met Loralei Jeffries on South State Street and eloped with her to Detroit and the promise of a good job a week later. They had been married thirty-five years, and for each and every one of those Ron had worked as a house painter. He had never come close to sniffing the El Dorado he had seen carrying Mayor Jerry Cavanaugh around Belle Isle one late August weekend, until his son came driving down Dexter Avenue in the same car one April day in 1992. Ron Washington wept for the first time since his daughter’s funeral. It was the only time he would cry of happiness in his life.
For Don Brightest, too, it was a good trade. He got a son, and got rid of a pesky stolen car. His pragmatism usually won out over his racism anyway.
The son he raised, with empathy and compassion, as best he could, was not enthusiastic about a life of crime. Jim Brightest’s talents extended to slam poetry and speechmaking. He had convinced Detroit Police on three occasions that the stolen vehicles his father was driving were actually used cars he was returning to a lot, and on two other occasions that the vast quantity of jewelry his father had somehow managed to produce at the pawn shop belonged to his mother, that she had left it before she fled the country, that his father had finally come to grips with the fact that she was never coming back. None of this was ever true.
He was never going to be a valedictorian, what with math and science being required, but Jim Brightest rode the wave of being from Detroit to admission to Michigan State and Michigan. He didn’t expect to get in to the University of Chicago, Southwestern High School didn’t send students to universities out of state. But when he got the letter, it opened his eyes. Chicago would be a lifeline, a new place, without the risk of getting sucked in to Detroit. More importantly, it would be a place his father’s probation officer forbade him from going.
And so it was that after four years of Mock Trial and Political Science, Jim Brightest was ready to embark on a new adventure, in San Francisco. Jones Hernandez would set him on the path to helping his people. More importantly, after two years of paralegaling, they would pay for his education at Stanford Law.
And so he moved, with his best friend, Devonte Best, into a two bedroom apartment in the Mission District. They both figured it as a steal, $3200 a month in a prime part of San Francisco, on a one-year lease. Jim could take the train downtown for work. Devonte’s company, Boxxr, ran a van to the Mission to pick up their employees there.
So when they crossed the graduation stage together, both of the friends held the entirety of the world in their hands.
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