Christopher Paul Curtis Read Free

to Mr. Foster and said, “Go 'head, everyone's buckled.”
    I put the DVD in and the first notes from
The Lion King
echoed around as I pulled out onto Atherton Road.
    Welcome to the life and times of Luther T. Farrell. A lot of unphilosophical minds think just like Sparky, they think I'm sitting fat, but what do they know? Sometimes you don't know the true story until you've lived it. I've lived it. And believe me, some of the time the truth ain't pretty.

The next day the phone rang.
    I checked the caller ID.
    “What's up, Sparky?”
    He said, “You in the dayroom?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Quick, turn them cartoons off and switch over to channel five, that commercial is 'bout to come on!”
    “Hold on.”
    I picked up the remote and changed to channel 5. The credits for one of the stories were just rolling by.
    Mr. Baker said, “Hey!”
    I told him, “Just a minute, Mr. Baker, Sparky's been telling me about this commercial for weeks and after I see it we'll go back.”
    Mr. Baker said, “Well, it better be a quick one.”
    I told Sparky, “I got it.”
    “OK, check him out and see if I was lying,” Sparky said. “This brother is going to be my one-way ticket out of Flint.”
    The commercial started with a shot of this old woman walking in front of a camera shop on a windy, wintry day. She hit a patch of ice, and before you could blink, she was five feet up in the air. She landed, making a cracking noise, and began moaning. Her left leg was twisted up so bad it looked like part of it had broke off. Next you could see some guy in a big old 'fro peek out from the curtains of the camera store right before his hand stuck a Out of Business sign on the window.
    The next shot was of Sparky's “dog,” a brother sitting on the edge of a desk with a shelf full of thick, serious-looking books behind him. I'd seen the suit he was wearing at Sleet-Sterling, it was a Versace with a three-and-a-half-G price tag.
    He said, “Tired of them doing something negligent, then laughing in your face when all you ask is to be treated fairly?”
    The next scene was of a man working in a factory screwing bolts into something with his face all twisted up like he was constipated. He took his gloves off and began rubbing his wrist. Then a white man in a shirt and tie was standing over his shoulder foaming at the mouth and yelling for the brother to get back at the bolts.
    The camera came in close as a tiny tear dripped out of the worker's eye while the boss kept yelling, “You're slowing things down—move! Move! Moooove!”
    Sparky's dog, looking as sad and serious as ever, wasback on. The camera moved a little closer to him as he jabbed a finger at us and said, “Tired of them ignoring your pain and putting unbearable, unfair stress on you?”
    The next shot showed a woman sitting in a restaurant talking to a man while she ate a bowl of soup. The man dropped his fork, bugged his eyes out of his head and pointed at the woman's spoon. There, kicking away like it was doing the backstroke, was the front end of a roach that must've been the size of a paperback novel. It was hard to tell, though, because where the back half of the roach was supposed to have been you couldn't see nothing but the woman's teeth marks.
    The camera moved in closer and closer on the roach while the woman looked like … well, like anyone would look if they just found out they were chewing on a giant cockroach's booty.
    Sparky's dog was back on. He said, “Tired of them not giving you the respect you deserve? Tired of those jackasses having the last laugh when it comes down to justice being served? Well, so am I.”
    He got up off the desk and crossed his arms and stood like he was Superman. He picked up a long black strap and dangled it from his right hand.
    “My name's attorney Dontay Orlando Gaddy and my initials spell ‘D.O.G.’ and you call me and tell me what happened and I promise you I will be on them like an American Staffordshire terrier, which is just a