All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, (19 page)

"Well, why did you let me go on and on, wasting my voice like this?" she asked. "I shouldn't be wasting my voice like this. Speaking tires out my voice and I should be resting my voice."

"Sorry," I said. "I'll go get my stuff."

I got up, raced down the steps, grabbed my bag, and headed back to the room. When I returned, Mariah was in front of the monitors again. She didn't look at me as I walked over to the couch and waited in silence.

About thirty minutes later, her personal assistant, a meek, white-haired woman, came over and told me that Mariah needed to go to a studio in midtown and that she would talk to me on the ride over.

"Cool," I said.

Not long afterward, I followed her small entourage outside to the street, where a black stretch limo and two black SUVs waited.

"You'll ride with Mariah in the limo," the assistant instructed.

I waited as the driver opened the door for the singer and then I followed her in.

"People always criticize me for riding in a limo," she said as I sat across from her, "but it's just that I have so much stuff to carry around and it's easiest to just throw it in the limo."

I made no mention of the fact that the only things in the limo were me, her, and my bag. At this point, I was just trying to regain my ground so that she'd believe I was an established journalist and not some guy who'd gotten to interview her as a fluke of fate, which actually was closer to the truth. I took out my tape recorder and notebook. I was about to speak when, out of nowhere, she blurted out, "Can I ask you a question just because I'm, like, obsessed with this? What nationality are you?"

"What?" I thought. I was familiar with Mariah's story— the daughter of an Irish mother and a father who was part black/part Venezuelan; when her parents married, Mariah's mother was disowned by her family; drama ensued. But my mind went back to all the times in the clubs when a customer would ask my race, and depending on my response would decide whether or not to keep tipping me. It was admittedly a sore spot, and I answered, "I'm black," with perhaps more attitude than I intended.

"Oh, I was just asking because you look like you might be biracial."

"Well, I'm not," I said. "I'm black. Both of my parents are black."

I looked at her and could tell that I had made yet another mistake. It was as if we were two kids on the elementary school playground. She had asked to be my friend and I had pushed her face-first into the sandbox.

Fuck! I was new at this so I didn't know the best way to develop rapport with a celebrity, but I was sure this wasn't it. I was screwing up. What should I do? I glanced over at my questions.

"Are you still going in a hip-hop direction with this album?" I asked.

"People just bring me down when they ask questions like that," she answered. "As a songwriter, I'm capable of writing more mainstream stuff or making a hip-hop record or a house record or probably a country song. Or even, like, no one knows this, but I've written some alternative things. I'm just pretty much 'whatever.'"

I looked back at my questions and they all seemed to suck: "What are you trying to accomplish with the new album?" "Which producers did you work with?" I couldn't ask her these questions. They just didn't go with the mood. I wasn't dealing with somebody who was in cool professional mode. This was a woman who was all over the place, jumping from mood to mood, thought to thought.

I wondered how I would've dealt with it if she had been a guy coming up to me at the bar. How would I have made a connection? I put my questions away.

"So, it seems like you're kind of having a long day," I said.

She sighed deeply, her whole body heaving up and down.

"I'm sorry," she said, explaining the sigh. "I'm relaxing. This is my way of relaxing."

I didn't say anything.

"I'm just explaining to you where I was then," she said. "That's one zone. But now I'm going into the Craig

zone."

"OK," I said, thinking this is getting weirder by the second. "So, it's been a long day?"

She sighed again.

"I am so hungry," she said.

"Why don't you get something to eat?"

"Oh, they're getting me something," she said, referring to, I assumed, the group of about five people who were constantly scurrying around her at the editing studio. "But I'm just sick of it. I eat at the same places almost every night."

"Why are you working so hard?" I asked. After all, she had sold millions of albums and had more number one pop singles than any woman in history.

She was quiet for a few moments. Then she said, "It's just something I feel like I have to do. It's something I've always felt like I had to do. I have an overblown insecure streak that runs through me, and sometimes it manifests itself as me being a workaholic. I just work, and I think it's because in the early part of my life, I felt like I had to always scramble. I didn't have any stability. And I didn't know what was going on in my life. So I feel like I have to keep going, probably because I'm insecure and I feel like I have to maintain how far I've come."

"So, it really has to do with how you grew up?"

"My reality is that I grew up as an interracial child. My reality is that I grew up with a lot of disturbing imagery around me, a lot of stuff that most lads in suburbia did not see. I grew up very fast in terms of my perception of the world and my understanding of what it's like to be mixed and to hear how white people speak about black people when they're not in the room and vice versa."

"And this affected how you thought about yourself?"

"I felt like, if my mother's family disowned my mom because of this, what does that make me?"

This became the theme of our whole talk. I wasn't getting Mariah the ultra-demanding diva, but an insecure person with something to prove. I could relate.

When I turned in my article to the
Post,
I presented a picture of a pop diva who was out of touch with her own success, who was working herself nutty because she still felt that after all she'd accomplished, it could be taken away at any moment. The
Post
editor hated it. She had a hard time believing that this pampered pop star was really dealing with demons. "No, really, you wouldn't believe how messed-up she seems," I argued. The editor remained unconvinced, but the piece ran anyway. One year later, Mariah was hospitalized for exhaustion.

This Mariah story led to other assignments and I started trusting my instincts more. One day I got the call from
Spin
magazine asking me to write a piece on Mary J. Blige, the hip-hop soul Cinderella who rose from the Yonkers projects to the top of the charts. The
Spin
editors had chosen Blige's 1994 effort,
My Life
—a searing confessional chronicling her tumultuous relationship with K-Ci Hailey, front man for the bad-boy R&B quartet Jodeci—as one of its "Top 100 Albums of the 90s." I was all for it because I had loved Blige's music since her 1992 debut,
What's the 411?

Right after that album came out, I saw Blige in concert and, at the show, I bought a baseball hat that had her signature running across the top. I wore the hat everywhere, and one day, as I walked into the Martin Luther King Jr. Library to do research, a young black woman stopped me, looked at my hat, twisted up her face, and said, "Dag, you like her
that
much?" Well, yes, I did, and my feelings hadn't changed.

Nevertheless, I was a little worried about the interview. Mary had a reputation for being a difficult subject. Sometimes she would shut down completely; other times she could be downright combative, once even challenging supermodel/journalist Veronica Webb to a fistfight. I figured that I'd be physically safe since our interview was taking place by phone. As far as I knew, you couldn't tirelessly transmit a bitch slap. But still, I worried about getting the information I needed.

The interview started awkwardly. My job was to get Mary to talk about the making of the album, so after introducing myself and exchanging "How you doin's," I asked, "So, do you need any special things in the studio when you record, like candles or anything?"

"No, I don't need some strange atmosphere with incense and candles and all of that shit," she snapped. "It's not about a candle and making an atmosphere because the atmosphere is in me."

OK, I thought, not sure what to make of Mary's inner atmosphere. Although I couldn't see her face, I felt from her tone that something was on her mind—something bigger and deeper than any album. And rather than take her prickliness personally, I decided to change direction and just ask about what was going on in her life. Maybe then she'd warm up and feel comfortable discussing the album.

"Do you ever feel like you're misunderstood? It seems like people always have negative stuff to say about you."

"Yes," she said. I could hear her take a breath. "People look at my past and say, 'Well, she's from a grimy element so she's gotta be grimy, too.' But you never judge a book by its cover or people by the company they're around, you know, because Jesus was around bad company but he was one of the lambs/'

"Were you dealing with people thinking bad things about you when you were making
My Life?"

"My Life
was one of the most hard times of my career. That album was written out of tears. I was just going through it and wondering why I'm not being treated the right way. Most of the times I wrote, I was at home. And I would just sit there writing my feelings down because the paper was all I had to talk to."

"You were writing down things you felt you couldn't say?"

"Like in the song 'Be With You,' in so many words, I was talking to my little cousin. I was telling him that I don't understand why every time I come around, everybody's angry, nobody wants me around, and everybody treats me so bad and everybody's so jealous and mad because God's blessing me."

"And were you also writing about problems in a romantic relationship? Was that inspired by real life, too?"

"It's all real, man. There's no bullshit on the album. Because I was really hurt. I'm not an opportunist. I don't take the bad times and use that as an opportunity to look like a hero. I was really suffering.
My Life
is straight heartache and pain. Listening to the album, you definitely hear that Mary was a troubled young woman. I just didn't know a lot of the things I know now. It was a hurtful time for me because I was trying to find me. All of my troubles and all of my fears were because of me. But all the abuse and all the rest of that stuff was so unnecessary. Why would you just do somebody like me like that? Because I don't hurt people unless they hurt me.

"But," she continued, "I think that first relationship taught me to see what kind of people are after me—users, opportunists, men that just want to use you and abuse you and shoot you down in your career. They gotta make you feel lesser than them so that they can feel strong."

"So, you feel like you learned some lessons from the experiences you sang about on
My Life?"
I asked, a bit shocked that she was being so forthcoming.

"No, I made a mistake and here I am again. You can be with somebody and you think they love you, but all along they're really jealous and mad and they really hate you. So, I've been used up again because somebody just didn't care enough to treat me like somebody and understand my struggle, saying, 'Let me give this girl the happiness she deserves and make her feel really good and treat her like somebody, let me trust her, let me love her, let me not third-degree her, let me give her what she wants.' I got none of that. All I got was bullshit, being cheated on, being lied to, shut down, being told that I wasn't shit but a ho, being looked at as a ho, always women being compared to me."

She paused for a few seconds. I wasn't sure whether to ask another question or wait.

"It sounds like you're going through the same struggle again—"

"I know we're doing an interview right now," she said.

"But I'm really fucking hurt right now, really messed up
today.
It's the same shit, just a different nigga with a different way of bringing it."

We talked for several more minutes, as Mary chronicled in detail many of the issues that she was having with her current boyfriend. As the conversation continued, I was struck by how hurt she was by these guys who had taken her for granted and cheated on her. Then, all of a sudden, a thought hit me. "Oh, fuck, am I one of those guys? Am I that type of asshole?"

As soon as the interview was over, and I thanked Mary for her openness and wished her the best, I popped open my cell phone again and phoned Seth. He had recently moved into a new apartment, a place that was decidedly more bachelor-homo chic than my dorm-room-like abode.

"Everything is cool between us, right?" I asked as soon as he answered.

"What? What do you mean?"

"I mean, like, everything. Like us. We're cool, right?"

"What is this all about?"

"Nothing. I mean, you know how much I care about you, right?"

"I know," he said, giving me his usual indulgent sigh.

"And you know that I never meant to hurt you and would never intentionally try to hurt you, like, ever?"

"I know."

"I just wanted to make sure .. ."

"We're fine. But I have someone over for dinner. Let me call you later. OK?"

"Is it a date?"

"Let me call you later."

"OK," I said, snapping the cover closed on my cell phone.

I sat in silence for a few minutes. I was really jealous about Seth's date. But at the same time, I was happy for him. That was the way things often felt in my relationship with Seth—good, but all mixed up. I figured this was just the way it was to have a complicated history with somebody. And I imagined that this was the way things would always be.

By the time the
Spin
article came out, I was starting to get noticed as a writer, and pretty soon I landed my dream job working at
Entertainment Weekly.
I was hired as a correspondent for the website, but I also got to write pieces for the magazine. Taking this job meant leaving D.C. for New York, a move that felt weird because, save for my brief stint living in New York before college, I'd never really thought about permanently moving from D.C. again. I just figured I would always live there. After all, the city had allowed me to be so many different things: juvenile TV personality, grad student, stripper, AIDS educator. But in order to play in the entertainment journalism major leagues, I had to leave home.