Bitch Is the New Black (13 page)

I signed my full name at the bottom and created a file folder entitled “Psycho Darin” for all Abortion Monkey's e-mails. Unable to delete them or look at them every ten minutes when checking my in-box, I told myself I was saving them for when I turned up missing.

It'd been more than three years since the e-mails stopped when the calls started.

“Hello?”

Nothing but static, not even heavy breathing of the pervert variety.

“Heeell-looo-ooo?” I knew someone was on the other end of that line, and despite evidence to the contrary, I wanted that person to admit it to me and to him-or herself.

“HELLO!” I'd yell after waiting another five minutes or more for whomever to say whatever it was he obviously needed to say at two o'clock in the morning.

The number was always “unknown,” tricking me every time into picking up, thinking someone extremely classified was calling to whisk me away to the private island where all the awesome people live unencumbered by random phone calls in the night. “Number Unknown” would ring ten times in a row and then not at all for weeks. I knew it was Darin and wanted to be proved wrong.

“Hello?”

Silence.

“Darin, I know this is you, you effin' psychotic shit bag. Get a fucking life or eat a dick, either way stop calling me, you retarded monkey. How'd you even get this goddamned number? Are you STILL thinking about me every waking minute of your pathetic shit-stained life? I'm serious. Kick rocks!” A boulder-size lump had been forming in my throat the entire time I was talking, but I managed to get through the speech I'd saved up.

Silence.

“Ohmigod, listen, you fa—”

“Nineteen-oh-two Ninth Street Northwest,” he was cackling. Hadn't heard his voice in years, but I knew. “Nineteen-oh-two Ninth Street Northwest. Nineteen-oh-two Ninth Street Northwest. Nineteen-oh-two Ninth Street Northwest. Nineteen-oh-two Ninth Street Nor—”

That boulder in my throat passed like a kidney stone, and I hung up before it got worse. How the hell did he know my address in Washington? I karate-chopped the front curtains and peered out at the empty street for a ninja second. There was no Darin standing on the sidewalk with a cell phone in one hand and a sickle in the other. I was safe—for now. This time, though, I called my mother.

First, she apologized for entertaining the possibility of Darin and me being friends so many years ago. “I'm so sorry I didn't listen to you from the beginning, little brown-eyed girl,” she said in one sigh, a faraway lilt in her voice.

“I know, Ma.” I figured she was somewhere back in the '60s in a house where a violent man ruled absolutely and her “in case of emergency” task was to grab her younger sister, leap out a window, and head down the street to her grandmother's, the safe house. “I know,” I said again.

Turns out it was all MySpace's fault. I'd written a blog about ex-boyfriends, not naming names, of course, but Darin must
have read the part about “crazy-psycho-stalker-jerk face” and recognized his. Naturally, this was reason enough for him to begin a campaign against me. Frances, who'd gotten all this information from Darin's mom, was upset with me.

“Why are you writing about Darin anyway? You need to set all your stuff on these sites to private, Lena. You never know who's reading it.”

“Fine,” I said.

“I'm serious,” she said.

What I didn't tell her was that I wasn't the only person on Abortion Monkey's phone list. My “boyfriend” at the time, a Muslim podiatrist named Abdul, was shocked to hear the whole Darin story, which had been abridged over Duccini's and Netflix.

“So yeah, I'm staying off MySpace for a while, laying low like
I
did something.”

“You know what? Now that you mention it, I think I did get a call from dude not too long ago,” said Abdul without alarm, as if getting a call from a mental patient was normal.

“Umm, what?”

“Yeah. I thought it was weird. Some guy called me. He was like, ‘Hello, this is—'”

“Darin? Did he say his name was Darin?”

“I can't remember what he said his name was. But he was like, ‘Yeah, hello, this is such and such, and I just wanna let you know that Helena Andrews has the best pussy in the world.' Then he hung up.”

If I hadn't already fainted once that year, I would have blacked out from sheer exhaustion like the celebrities do. I didn't know whether to take it as a compliment or curse. I was doing it, sure, but what I really wanted was to find
it
(love, longevity, the meaning of life), and here I was wasting time with a podiatrist
on depression meds who'd told me no less than three times that “this wasn't a relationship.” What
this
was, only he knew, and he wasn't telling.

Darin, on the other hand, was an oversharer. The best pussy in the world? Try the pussy of least resistance.

It has been suggested more than once that I have some type of
problem.

“If you're consciously choosing to do something to the obvious exclusion of your own personal safety, then something's clearly wrong. You need to go to meetings where people sit on folding chairs. Take a friggin' cab!” commanded a concerned friend through my cell phone as I strolled down a dodgy D.C. street, the sun setting on my back. Me not giving a damn about maybe getting mugged for the third time or fainting for the second.

That's my issue: I walk too much.

In the face of my driver's license deficiency and an abhorrence for the close body contact prevalent on most metro systems, I've learned through pluck and circumstance to use the legs God gave me. People, I've walked across state lines—multiple times—without getting winded or wreathed. Never thinking twice about the damage being caused to the thinning skin above my smallest
three toes until it was too late, I average five, maybe even six, miles a day without even trying. Pedometers are for pussies.

When I stop to think about it, which one tends to do a lot of on foot, like all my potentially damning idiosyncrasies the walking is a product of my childhood and therefore can easily be blamed on my mother. Forcing me to “go outside and play,” Frances inadvertently created a pedestrian. On Catalina, where I was an only child with tons of friends but fewer equals, spending time alone was habitual and safe. Why walk all the way across the street to ask if Melissa and Marcy could come out and play when there was an unguarded pomegranate tree just a forty-minute mile from here?

I'd march about for hours, my skinny grade-school gams working like a windup toy possessed, trying to get lost in a town the size of a liberal arts college campus and feeling secure in knowing that was impossible. We lived on an island. Nobody got lost, no matter how many times they went fishing drunk.

Besides, the more time I spent with myself, the more I liked it—or me, rather. Imaginary friends: who needs 'em? Plus, there was a lot of stuff on my mind, stuff I would've never known about if me, myself, and I hadn't begun our long jaunts across the beach, our hikes up beer-bottled hills, and our parades downtown. Like the fact that Justin Ramirez could scarcely contain his passion for me, which is why he'd ignored me during
The Pirates of Penzance
rehearsal. And Amy Dugger's dad hadn't “forgotten” to pick me up for the camping trip on the Isthmus. And getting traded in the middle of the Little League season was not, as Frances would have me believe, the price of being too talented.

I'd come back inside by the time the would-be streetlights came on (on Catalina there was no use for them), feeling rather productive and not at all as if I'd spent five hours wandering aim
lessly while conducting an existential conversation with myself. Frances would inevitably ask, “What you been up to, little brown-eyed girl?” And I'd answer truthfully, “Nothing much. Just walking.” The interview ended there, and we'd begin our Vaudeville dinner theater. Act 1, scene 1:

“Heeey, good looking. Whaaat-cha got cooking,” I'd sing, two-stepping my way through the narrow hallway that moonlit as our kitchen.

“Dooo you wanna shimmy with meee? I said, dooo you wanna shimmy with meee,” Frances chanted back.

“No time for dancing, I wanna eat! What's for dinner, woman?”

She'd holler, “French-fried boogers and cocoa snot,” which was always quite good.

By the time we moved off the island and to Los Angeles, twelve-year-old me thought singing for my dinner was dumb. I was disappointed in my mother's failure to provide two essentials: speech therapy and a student RTD pass. The city's Rapid Transit District buses were strained with the residue of society, a near-impossible clog to shift through with the surfer girl accent I'd picked up. “Omigah, is this me, brah? Du-u-ude, did I just miss my thingy?” Because nobody cared or understood enough to answer, inevitably I'd get off way before or way after my stop, booking it five city blocks to make it to “advanced” math class at Mt. Vernon Middle School. Its mystique vanished with the stress of being lost for real, walking, like college-ruled paper and sensible tennis shoes, had been ruined by necessity. Nobody walks in Los Angeles.

Imagine then what a relief New York was. An entire city filled with the sort of people able to perform the difficult task of getting from one place to the other without a care but with purpose. Talking to themselves along the way. Since everybody was crazy, nobody was crazy. This was me, this was home. Some
days on Columbia's campus, there would be a sighting of this one Asian guy we called “crazy cell phone man.” You heard him before you saw him. He'd be trying to earn Contemporary Civ. participation points by shouting into his palm: “You call that man's
in
humanity to man? What could be more human than suffering and pain? Who causes these things? Aliens?” If there was a cell phone somewhere in there, I never saw it. I followed him from behind once when we were going the same way down College Walk, noting the reactions of folks coming from the opposite direction. “…and if philosophers are to become kings, what then will kings become? Aliens?” Nobody gave him a second glance or even shared with me a knowing smirk—“
this
guy…” I kept straight after he turned toward the library, probably headed to the stacks to make sweet love to whoever was on the other side of that “phone,” or maybe just his palm.

That's the thing that got me so turned on about walking in New York: nobody sees nothing. You could go miles down Amsterdam Avenue, surrounded on every side by papis looking for mamis, tourists looking for safety, worshippers looking for succor at St. John's, and addicts looking for the cover of Morningside Park—but never you. Getting lost in thought was easy when nobody was looking—or so I thought. Apparently, it's also easy to overlook everyone else. Word around campus was that Helena, that light-skinned pretty Delta, didn't know how to speak to anybody. Those in the know knew I needed glasses.

After graduation, I got an internship at
O, The Oprah Magazine
that paid $5 and some change an hour. Our offices were on Fifty-third on the west side, and I lived on East 128th Street. Making minimum wage also meant choosing between a monthly metro card and regular sustenance. Seeing as how I'd never get ahead
with a loud stomach—
So, Helena, do you think you can fact-check October's contributors' page? GROWL!
—I chose the latter. What's a seventy-five-block trek twice a day between professionals?

In Washington three years later, I'd tell people this story as proof of payment for all these alleged “dues” people talk about. “Every fucking day, each way. One time in the rain with high-heeled boots and a two-dollar umbrella.”

By then I had a master's degree
and
a metro card. Neither new development—supposed intelligence or cheap rides—stopped me from walking home after my shift at the
Times
ended around midnight. Yes, I had a shift, which in itself suggests back doors leading to alleys decorated with piss, cigarettes, and bonfires for bums. And also “breaks.” People who have shifts should probably get to take breaks. But it seems that people who have degrees
and
shifts do not. Gallivanting around town on foot and after the freaks come out was my idea of a good break.

I was just getting a handle on the night shift when it happened. Tuesdays were my Fridays, and on Fridays I came in at four and then left around elevenish if nothing “broke.” On one particular balmy Friday night (but not
my
Friday, which would've been Tuesday), I decided it was way too nice outside to be cooped up on the Green Line to Greenbelt and instead decided to walk from our offices on Sixteenth and I streets near the White House to my house on Ninth and T—about twenty-minutes away if I powered through. My usual route went first through Dupont, which I had deemed safe due to the high concentration of gays, and then on to U Street, which because of gentrification was also risk-free. Everything was going according to plan until I got to T and Tenth.

There's always a stretch of one's residential world that one considers either stupid or annoying. A chain-link fence messing
up the order of wrought iron? Annoying. A wooden puppy hunched over in crapping position with “NO!” painted on its back? Stupid. In this case, on the well-lit Ninth Street, there was a stupid abandoned row house two doors down from my newly renovated basement, in front of which a bunch of annoying hooligans held a nightly game of concrete craps. Because walking through this foolishness meant no fewer than five hoots and three hollers, I'd decided months before that walking up the dimly lit and suburbanly silent T Street was the wiser choice.

Just a block away from home, I spotted two teenage boys walking at me. I got brief glimpses of them from under my umbrella. Oh, yeah, it'd started raining. They seemed harmless, although curiously alert given the hour. It was a little past midnight, and the tall one was rapping loudly down the pavement part of the street, while his partner provided the beats from the sidewalk. Too tired to switch sides, I made a note of them and kept it moving.

By the time we met in the middle of the block, our paths crossed without incident. They went their way and I continued on mine, already fingering the front door key in my coat pocket.

You know that feeling you get when someone is staring at you from behind? Evidence that there exists some type of spiritual kinetic energy between all human beings that we're just too primitive to tap into and use to stir coffee with our minds? About two seconds after avoiding whatever situation happens after dark between two men and a woman on a silent street, that feeling hit me like a fist to the face. Thankfully, they didn't use anything that dramatic.

“What the fuck?” They were on me in an instant, the tall one tugging on my purse before I had a chance to process the idea of being robbed. It was ridiculous. Who makes a decent living wage pickpocketing besides nineteenth-century British foundlings? Clearly this was not a mugging but this kid's scary attempt at
flirting.
Sorry, homie, but I'm grown. Move along, please, I've got z'stocatch.

“Gimme the bag,” he said, the growing size of his eyes conveying his seriousness. His rapping partner closed in on the left side, and I was boxed out with basketball-camp-for-inner-city-youth efficiency. This is also around the time I first contemplated screaming “FIRE!” which, according to the self-defense class Frances made me take as a twelve-year-old, is what you yell when someone's either trying to rape or murder you. Nobody wants to muddy up his or her house shoes running after a serial killer. But anybody will vault from naked Twister to watch a neighbor's nest egg go up in flames.

“No!” Now see, this objection flew from my lips totally without my knowledge. In fact none of my subsequent actions were preapproved—yanking my purse strap back onto my shoulder, parking my free hand onto my hip, and assuming what can only be described as a ninja stance. Despite being well aware of the fact that my life was worth more than an XOXO bag circa 1999, I literally couldn't help myself.

“Give. Me. The. Bag.” I finally let go with all the petulance of a preschooler just learning to share.
Fine then! Here
. The shorter one, feeling neglected, kept himself busy with my pockets, patting them down and asking three times for “the cash.” “Where's the cash? Is there cash?”

“There's no money in that bag, sir. Sir? Sir, there's nothing to be had in my pockets,” I said, pleading in the most professional manner I could think of. Maybe I could appeal to their more genteel sides, or at least throw them off with my olde English and run in the other direction while they looked over their shoulders for whoever had on the top hat.

Then it was over. With my “leather” purse in hand and a fist full of lint, these two sixteen-year-old scalawags took off in the
opposite direction like they stole something. With that simile forever ruined, I felt more disappointed than debased.
That was it?
Without a phone with which to call the authorities or my mother, I decided walking another block and a half to the metro wouldn't be tempting fate. Plus, it's not like I had anything left to lose. On the ride down the escalator, I kept looking around to see if people were staring—if I looked like someone who'd just been robbed by children.

I burst into tears only after asking the two officials behind the bulletproof glass if I could please use their official MTA telephone to call the police. One of the station agents, an older black man in a uniform hat, looked me in the eye and asked, “Oh, sweetheart, what's wrong?” It's a surprise they understood anything through all the stuttering and snot. “Someone-heehuh-justheehuh-stole-heehuh-my-heehuh-purse-heehuh.” The waterworks didn't stop until Adrienne drove up with a steel bat. “We gonna ride around till we find these fuckers.”

A few days later, this white guy rang my doorbell, claiming to have found some things that belonged to me. Jumpy but newly armed with pepper spray, I stuck my free hand through the gate. In it he placed my address book, emptied wallet,
Wicked
, and a dog-eared copy of
The Sex Chronicles
that wasn't mine, I swear. Quickly closing the door and thanking him through the window, I figured life didn't suck so hard after all and immediately went back to my walking, which after the night in question provided an even bigger break from work, my head, my life, whatever. Pedestrian meditation was anything but. This time, however, there was the added bonus of it being banned, making my late-night rendezvous with myself all the more irresistible.

In time I had to lie about how I was getting home, since it was now everyone's job to make sure I didn't get murdered along the way.

“I'm just gonna go up to K Street,” I fibbed, waving a bus away while waiting for the light to change. “It's easier to catch a cab from there.”