Unashamed (8 page)

While I was embarrassed of my pajamas, he couldn’t have cared less. His concern was his immediate reaction to the smoke in the room and how it was burning his eyes. His arms flailed in front of his face to fan it, but it caught him off guard and he coughed anyway. Then he forced a few more coughs for dramatic effect. I made some stupid nervous comment about our infamous purple haze room before I opened the window behind my bed for his comfort. As he sat in a chair in the middle of the room unpacking his books, I stared like how a baby stares when they see something sparkling.

He was sexy and it blew my mind as to the reasons Tenesa referred to him as white. Sure, his skin was white, but he was exotic-looking with thick lips, unlike any typical American Ken doll replica I had ever seen.

Observing his hair, eyes, and widened nose, I asked, “What’s your background? Because this skank has been calling you a white boy for weeks.”

His frank reply was, “I’m Mediterranean.” Then, he laughed as he pushed his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose and pulled a notebook and pen from his bag. He balanced the notebook on the arm of the chair and clipped the pen neatly within the coiled binding. He covered his mouth and respectfully excused himself after another cough. Then he proceeded to remove the glasses from his face to clean each lens with the bottom of his shirt. The way he reset them on his face for a second time and pushed them perfectly to the bridge of his nose was slightly pompous.

My mouth was open in disbelief the whole time. “Oh my God, who says that? Are you kidding…Mediterranean?” I looked to Tenesa for confirmation that I wasn’t the only one who thought that it was odd. We both rolled our eyes at each other.

He snickered like this wasn’t the first time he had been berated with questions about his ethnicity. He shot us both a crooked nervous smile before patiently explaining that his mother was Spanish and Italian and his father was Spanish and German, but that it was far easier to say Mediterranean than to explain all that every time someone asked about his heritage.

I placed my pillow against the ledge of the window so I could set against it. He was interesting enough to want to hear more and hot enough to want more in general. “Can’t you just pick two of them like a normal person would?” I mocked with flirtatious undertones.

Tenesa laughed and lifted one of her braids but forgot it was still tight; she sucked in air through her teeth in pain. “Jamacian, American, that’s my two.”

I pressed my index finger to my collarbone. “German–American.”

He pointed his index finger to his right eye, just above the rim of his glasses. His eyes grew wide, and his smile began to take over the bottom half of his face. “Well, I am Medi-fucking-terranean,” he said as he tilted his head in the opposite direction with every syllable.

The three of us laughed, but he laughed so hard he coughed again. When everything calmed down, he finally officially introduced himself with a proper handshake, eye contact, and articulation. I remained in my bed with the covers discretely covering the see-through sheep as I shook his hand. “I’m Douglas, nice to meet you. Since
some
body isn’t a very gracious host.” He shot a glare at Tenesa, who was smiling and shrugging her shoulders. I held his hand longer than what was required. I deduced that his job defiantly did not require serious manual labor.

He returned to the seat in the middle of the room with my twin to his left and Tenesa’s bed on his right. They studied for their exam between storytelling and thunderous bursts of laughter. Eventually, it was nearing an uncomfortably late hour and time for him to leave.

I waited until I couldn’t hear his footsteps anymore before I shrieked, “Tenesa, he’s not white, you asshole! Oh my God, he is so fucking hot! Here I have been thinking this guy is a dork with glasses and pimples all over his face. Jesus!” I lit a cigarette as I remained in my seated position against the window.

She carefully set her books into her bag, awkwardly pushing them to the bottom without moving her head too much. “He’s a white boy to me.” She zipped up the bag and pushed it off of the bed so she didn’t have to bend down.

“And you are not interested in him?” I asked in disbelief as I struggled to crack the window with my free hand.

She grabbed a small bottle of something from her nightstand and squeezed a glob of it into the center of her hand. “I told you I don’t like white boys.” With her other hand she dipped two fingers in the glob, then smeared it on her scalp between each braid. Her body relaxed as she closed her eyes and rubbed the thick liquid in.

I flicked the ashes into an ashtray on my nightstand. “Well, shit, if you don’t want him, I’ll take him. He is totally sexy.” I rambled on about Douglas for another twenty minutes and two cigarettes before she finally told me to shut the hell up so she could sleep.

Well, so she could rest her head against the wall and at least try it.

In the weeks following this initial meeting with the “white boy,” I maintained contact with my fiancé back in Ohio. We continued to talk about things in a practical sense while Tenesa’s braids loosened enough to let her sleep on an actual pillow.

One night Tenesa told me that she wanted to have her new boyfriend spend the night and pressured me to disappear. A favor, she said, for putting up with the creeps that kept coming around.

“Where am I supposed to go?” I asked, feeling obligated to kick rocks and sleep somewhere else for the night.

Miraculously her phone rang as if God himself heard me. It was Douglas, the Mediterranean, calling to see what she was doing. She boldly asked him without hesitation if I could stay at his place just for the night as a favor. He said yes and was on his way to pick me up in fifteen minutes. I ran straight to the showers to shave my legs, just in case.

Douglas’s room was physically cold but warm in the way he decorated it as if he was in some fancy Italian hotel room. I was shocked at the luxurious comforter neatly made up on his bed and lavish-looking tapestries hanging on the shabby barracks walls. This “white boy” had style. Displayed proudly on the desk was a photo of his family at a wedding, which reminded me of aristocratic portrait taken in Spain soon after the invention of the camera when only the wealthy could afford such things.

My family photos consisted of my dad, mom, sister, and me at JC Penny’s where, at five, I was smiling like Mickey Mouse with noticeable dirt behind my ear. My red-headed sister hadn’t gone through major eye surgery yet, so she was unaware of her severe crossed eyes behind Coke bottle glasses, but smiled despite that and her overcrowded teeth. My family, on both sides, had photos like this. They were typical for the decade, quantity over quality. Grandparents on both sides received huge eight-by-tens and wallet-sized pictures. Aunts and uncles had to buy five-by-seven frames and crop the two-by-fours to fit into their purses. Friends were given the credit card photos to pushpin to their bulletin boards at work. Everyone else had to squint to see the dirt behind my ear in the photos glued into cheap quarter-sized pendants.

Douglas’s family photos were beyond JC Penny’s pendants. His were printed on very expensive ribbed canvas and framed in a cherry wood embossed design. I was so impressed I never had time to take in the leather couch he had placed strategically to create space for a living room. The focal point was a large entertainment center holding all the electronics necessary to boom Tori Amos into the room.

He played a techno rendition of a familiar song on repeat just because I mentioned I was a fan of her music. He was a classy guy all right, but I know he was being a smooth operator and really just wanted to taste my rainbow.

He tried to be slick by letting me know that if I were to get too cold on the couch I was more than welcome to sleep with him on his very small twin bed. I smirked through the dark where I lay on the couch with one foot hanging over the edge.

I almost took him up on the offer. I felt that surge of energy needed to push oneself up from the cold leather but remained still, content that I was finally sticking to my proclamation. We didn’t say anything else as we fell to sleep in our own comfortable spaces.

The next morning, when I returned early to my barracks room, Tenesa’s new boyfriend had gone, but his smell remained. And I don’t mean his cologne. She was lying on her bed flipping through a magazine when I walked in. She turned her head when I opened the door, but she never looked over with her eyes. “Didja git lucky?” she said and licked her finger before turning another page.

As I tossed my keys onto my mattress and kicked my shoes off, I said, “I did. I slept on the couch.” The smirk on my face was that of achievement.

Every time I saw Douglas in the week following our sleepover, it was at the chow hall; he made military food taste good to me. I was excited to get up in the morning and be alive another day just to see him.

We sat together in our own booth. My group of guy friends looked on and nudged each other, thinking that this kid was just another conquest. In our gang of eight, I was the only female, so the boys felt like it was their duty to look after me no matter what kind of wild child I had become. In the months of sitting at our regular table three times a day, we all became very close, so with one space empty, we’d know someone was spitting game to get laid. Well, with the exception of one guy. He was getting married and had to undergo taunts and jokes with the occasional punches in the arm, all in the name of brotherly love. The nudges the boys gave each other as we sat sometimes accompanied a thumbs-up hand gesture or the motion of sucking dick with hysterical laughter.

Just because I was the only girl didn’t mean leniency from teasing. I would scrunch my lips with the wide-eyed stare that moms give to their kids at the mall when they are misbehaving. You know, the look that will stop a kid cold through a crowd and somehow by forces unknown draw him back to the mother with a sulk. This is when she would proceed to escort him to the door by the neck and beat his ass at the car. As soon as I knew Douglas was looking at me again, I would smile and seem glorious, much like the mother’s expression would be after returning to the mall to finish her Christmas shopping.

Each time I sat with Douglas and left an empty chair at my usual table, the boys would shrug and point to my seat as if to say,
What the fuck? Are you ever coming back or what? We miss you.
Eventually they didn’t bother us in our little booth, off in our own little world. Maybe I just didn’t notice. I was in la-la land with him, totally smitten, yet reserved because I did not think he would ever give me the time of day. I felt like he was someone who would never date me simply because he was just too good-looking and far too intelligent to be interested in the barracks ho. My self-worth was low.

But then one day, before I turned the corner to leave the lunchroom, he shouted from his booth, “Hey, do you want to go to this club with me and some friends this weekend?”

I turned in shock, my head cocked to the side, and I paused for a moment a complete skeptic. From across the noisy chow hall, I stood in the exit with my jaw to the floor. Even as we smiled at each other, I thought he was joking. I blinked a lot before shouting back, “Sure.”

When I entered the chow hall, I was on foot, but, when I left, I was floating on a cloud.

Impressed with him in every way, I was further awestruck by his car. How cliché, right? It wasn’t some fancy speed racer that caught my eye. It was that he had a top-of-the-line
new
car that still smelled and looked like it had just rolled off of the sales lot. The interior and trunk weren’t just clean; they were immaculate.

Intimidated by this, I wondered how I would fit into his expensive world. But I felt stately as I got in and smiled while introducing myself to the couple seated in the back. Terrance shook my hand first as he said, “Yeah, I know you. What’s up, girl?” Then he squeezed my shoulder in friendly recognition.

“Oh my God, T, you know Douglas?” My eyes shifted from Terrance’s smile in the back to Doug adjusting the rearview mirror in the driver’s seat. Admittedly, I was confused as to how they might know each other because they were so different. Terrance was a hardcore party animal who frequented raves. Not that Douglas couldn’t party, but he just seemed to be in control of things and very responsible. Club kids and studious college students don’t usually hang in the same crowds.

“Yeah, girl, this here is my boy! The pimp!” he said as he shook the headrest on Douglas’s seat, then scuffed the top of his head. Douglas immediately began to fix his hair in the mirror, but he didn’t seem pissed; he was smiling.

I knew Terrance from the club where we had been friendly dance partners a few times. The weekend prior I had given him a lift when he was too drunk to shake his lanky ass anymore. He squeezed his six-foot, three-inch frame into my Geo Metro the best he could without throwing up, and I dropped him off at his barracks. “So what happened after I dropped you off from the bar?” I shifted in my seat to see him more clearly.

Terrance pushed back into his seat and began to buckle his seatbelt. “I went to bed and knocked the fuck out. Didn’t get up ’til about fo-thirty the next day.” He clicked it tight and put his arm around the girl sitting next to him.

Doug interjected to ask me, “You know this fool?”

“Yeah, he got ripped at the bar, so I took him to his barracks last week. He was dancing like a he was having seizures.”

I laughed as Terrance used his free hand to nervously exaggerate his embarrassment. “Please don’t tell these things.” He removed his arm from behind the girl’s neck and folded them over his crotch. Not only was he a tall, skinny black man, but this was the first time I took notice of how fidgety he was. “I’m losing all my cool points and shit. It wasn’t even like that man, it’s all lies!” Terrance nervously giggled, then leaned forward between the seats to change the CD. “Let’s go already. I’m gettin’ a fucking cramp in my black ass back here.”