Bitch Is the New Black (7 page)

Vernell stood up and started beating my mother from above, pushing her fists into her shoulders and the top of her head. Frances, who'd I'd never seen so weak, was shielding her head and surrendering simultaneously.

“Go ahead, beat me. Beat me,” she was whimpering in a voice I'd never heard and never wanted to hear again. Vernell obliged, and Frances sank even lower to the floor. She had no neck, no shoulders, no head, and no arms. The woman who was once so much bigger than me didn't just become smaller in my eyes; she practically disappeared, leaving a puppy or some other defenseless thing in her place.

“Don't you. Hit. My mother,” I managed to force out with a voice half high-pitched and half baritone. I didn't plan to say that. I had planned on just screaming or something, maybe throwing a glass against the wall to get them both to stop and realize how very foolish they looked. But I never planned to defend. I also never called Frances “mother” unless my friends were around. Formality seemed necessary.

I repeated it. Louder this time.

“DON'T YOU DARE HIT MY MOTHER!” I stepped into the ring they'd built—scattered couch cushions and broken picture frames were the ropes—and karate-chopped the air between them. Hopefully cutting off any loose ends. I hadn't meant for it to come out
that
ballsy. She was still my sort-of stepmother. But
I was serious, and I'd surprised all three of us. Vernell, already standing, backed herself into the wall behind us and put her hands to her face, either to check to see if she was bleeding or to see if she was, in fact, all there. If this was really happening.

Pulling my mother from the floor, I put one arm over her shoulder and used the other hand to grip her powerless bicep. Not sure if I was doing it right, I led her naked, limp body to the bathroom, crossing the kitchen and my dry-erase board on the way. Vernell followed us, spitting on my mother's back before I slammed the door in her face. So far being a teenager sucked.

I sat Frances on the toilet like you'd do a child in training and thought of her tin can.

When I was a little kid, I discovered my mother's secrets under her bed, sealed away in a large canister-type thing decorated with nude pictures of women wearing 1970s Afros. In it were love letters she'd written to white girls and journals I think she was writing to me. She talked about “having good romps” with a lady in Argentina and dreams she'd had of a child named “Hellenea.”

I found letters from my father in there. They were the only things I had of his, and I imagined the sound of his voice reading them aloud, like in the movies. In my head it was throaty and scratchy—a real man's. In one he said he loved and missed her. In another he said he hoped she hadn't been “taking too many showers with white girls.” After that, I knew she was more than just wonderfully different. She was “gay.” An invisible man delivered one of the most important headlines of my life.

Well, not entirely invisible. There was a picture of him in there too. He wore a black 'fro, flip-flops, and a sailor's uniform. He had long legs and light skin. This was him.

I imagined he was on the moon, and if I hoped for him enough, thought of him enough, prayed for him enough, he'd
come back down. I didn't need saving, but I needed something. Every night for years I repeated the same line to baby Jesus or grown-up Jesus—whomever was listening: “Dear Lord, please let our paths cross someday.” We didn't even have to talk or even know who the other one was. I just wanted him to see me.

If he could see us in the bathroom—Frances on the toilet wiping up angry tears, and me running hot water over a washcloth—he'd have to be proud.

There was blood on her back. Not in copious amounts or anything 911-worthy, but there was blood. Enough to usher me into puberty without any cramps of my own. Regardless of what I'd told the Nubes at school, I hadn't gotten my period yet, but this, my official blood day, would do. I dabbed it away while she sat alone on the toilet. This used to be the best seat in the house, from which I watched Vernell pluck her eyebrows, apply her lipstick, and correctly insert a tampon. That day it became the headquarters of my adulthood.

 

See, I know a little something about lovers' quarrels and feelings and a whole bunch of other shit. Heavy shit? Yes, my shit is, in fact, heavy. But it's mine! Britanya, Miss “I've put my tongue in places the sun don't shine,” couldn't have it, didn't deserve it, and wouldn't be able to wash it down with her
awaze tibs.

According to my view of the world, the two of us had an appropriate work-friend/actual-friend balance. The only other time we'd hung out for real for real was at the row house next door to mine. I was cool with my neighbors, who liked foreign wine and African drums. Britanya came with. We got super drunk and stumbled back to my bat cave. It was late and the trains had already stopped running. Britanya would have to sleep in a faded
“CU Cheer” T-shirt on a mattress of pillows in my bedroom. She could have just slept on the couch, but she didn't.

In the morning I tiptoed out to the bathroom, careful not to step on her head. I didn't make her breakfast or anything. She didn't say she'd call me. But it was obvious things had changed. We were now work best friends with an infinitesimal dash of sexual tension. With that came the foreseeable bout of verbal diarrhea that wearers of peasant skirts inevitably suffer from. She got comfortable. Then we got Ethiopian.

Obviously I wasn't going to respond in kind. Telling intimate details about my private life to a work wife I was trying to separate from? Um, no. So as to whet her appetite but not her lady parts, I told her that my mom was a lesbian, that my grandmother kidnapped me when I was a kid in order to save us from a life of Spanish crack whoredom, that Frances had been in a crazy abusive relationship when I was in middle school but that we got out of it by escaping to my dead grandfather's house in Compton, and that I commuted two hours a day from there to get to a private school downtown, where I was a super genius who eventually got into the Ivy League, therefore setting in motion my evil plot to set the world ablaze.

“You're just so robotic,” Britanya said.

“What do you even mean by that? You hardly know me.”

“You say stuff like it's nothing. Like you don't even care.” She sounded concerned, but also curious.

“Well, I don't know what to tell you.” I was being honest.

Then we split the bill, and I walked her to the metro station. The next day I translated our heart-to-heart into IM chatter—“then she's all ure so robotic…gtfoh.” “Dude, she just wants your body. She doesn't even know you like that. Ignore.” And I did.

My dog, Miles, is super racist.

He's a self-loathing six-month-old black pug that routinely goes ape-shit whenever the Corner Negroes from our neighborhood come anywhere near his miniature personal space. I found him out just days after deciding to “get a puppy rather than a baby,” in my mother's humble opinion.

It happened when we were walking together—Miles and me—for the first time on W Street over by the Flagler Market, a quaint little “corner store” half a block away from my “luxury” apartment building, which is in the heart of what a friend said used to be “the biggest Jamaican open-air drug market in the mid-Atlantic.” Nowadays there's a bunch of street signs that publicize the neighborhood as a “Drug Free Zone,” which obviously means it's safe for dogs of the non-pit-bull variety. The day before our introductory stroll around the block, I went into Borders to read and reshelve all the books on pets, puppies, pugs, dogs, dog shows, and dog training. According to the experts, “socialization”
is vital; it's everything. The only book I bought,
Pug: A Comprehensive Guide to Owning and Caring for Your Dog
, said, “Lack of socialization can manifest in fear and aggression as the dog grows up. Walk him around the neighborhood, take him on your daily errands, let people pet him….” Fine, then. Off to the market we go.

Now the Flagler Market is a bootleg bodega run by Ethiopians who I'm sure don't call it a bodega in Ethiopian language, but who are running one just the same. The windows are bulletproof and the chicks behind the register refuse to bag anything for you. Instead, they shove something black and plastic through a spinning slot in the indoor drive-thru window; you then shove your dollars in its place and pack that dented can of green beans yourself. One time, I saw a girl with half her hair braided and the other half not, wearing half her ass in cut-off jorts—the other half not. She was there to pick up a “deuce deuce” of St. Ides. The blue kind. I felt nostalgic for freshman year but also deeply saddened for my people. In front of her in line was a house painter (lacking solid evidence of what he actually did for a living, I assumed the overalls slashed in white paint were occupational). He was asking the twins behind the prison pane for a “nutrition bar.” They were still busy pointing at cigarettes and Snickers when he left.

The dregs of LeDroit Park hang around the busted-up concrete slabs that make for a sidewalk outside. I won't assume these men push “product” for a living, but, well, they wear puffy black coats in the summertime. So already they've got on the uniform of a corner-to-corner salesman. A smarter woman—one who wouldn't pay $1,850 a month to live next to a halfway house—would have known that a puppy suspicious of everything save his own balls would feel
uncomfortable
around what Gina calls “the element.” Silly me.

Okay, so we're walking. Me and Miles. Him looking doggy fabulous in a red leather collar and “lead” I bought off the Internet for seventy bucks, and me in skinny jeans and knee boots. It's eight in the morning.

Everything's going as laid out in the books—the dog is investigating various blades of grass and vacant bags of Chili Fritos while I hold his leash as if it were a remote control, like how they do on the dog shows—when a Flagler customer (who shops on the corner, not
in
the corner store) comes shuffling out of the alley to our right, dragging his feet as if treading on top of wet cement and clutching the neck of a half-drunk bottle. I give him the same head-nod I give every black man from around the way. It says two things: (1) I see you, and (2) I'm not afraid because we are all one people—and also, I'm one person with pepper spray.

“Oh, that's a pretty little shiny dog you got,” he says without slurring, and coming increasingly closer to an increasingly frantic Miles with each compliment. By “dog” he's about three feet away with an open palm, dirt in every crease, but friendly.

Miles does not give a shit about friendly.

“Thank you. He's a little shy, though,” I say by way of explaining the poltergeist currently in possession of my dog's body. Miles is having a grand mal seizure. Mr. Flagler, not giving a shit about this, continues on his path of destruction. I'm trying to be an authoritative pack leader (the books said!) by keeping the lead taut even though every muscle in this dog's neck is against me. His eyes are darting from side to side so fast that he might give himself vertigo, which along with the bill for the bald spot on his head is going to cost me. Now he's leaping into the air in an attempt to escape on the wind. Not working. I try dragging him, but he's hit the emergency brake with his front legs stretched out in what looks like a yoga move someone would pay good money to learn. We're parked. Next comes a wiggling technique he
must've learned in his former life as a luchador I mentally name the Utter Mileage.
Be the pack leader. Beeee the pack leader.

“Don't worry, he's not gonna get outta that thing,” observes Mr. Flagler, still determined.

Then it happens. The Utter Mileage works his neck in such a way that his collar just gives up out of admiration. Then he darts into the street faster than these three-inch heels can go, never looking back at what he was running from—a stunned junkie, someone out of 650 bucks. Fuck! Note to self: only walk dog in flats from now on. Note to self: buy flats. “Miles! Come on, baby. Come back. Miles-sies? Mi-iles? Sweetie. Come backsies!”

It's Mr. Flagler who tells me to stop chasing him. Let him come to me.

“Just stand still.”

“But he's in the effing street!” I yell, wearing the inches down on my boots pacing the sidewalk.

“It's no cars out here. Just stand still and call him. He'll come.”

First off, I'm considering the advice of a crack addict who on most days I'd pretend did not exist. If I were religious, which I am not, Mr. Flagler would be my savior-equivalent. Because this whole thing reminded me of that story about Jesus being a smelly bum nobody wanted around until some guy gives him a bath and then Homeless Jesus grants him three wishes via a dead gorilla's hand or whatever. If I were in possession of said magical monkey paw, I'd wish for Miles not to die today.
Just stand still and he'll come
. Pffft! Who are we talking about here? My dog or that elusive
he
I've been waiting for, for like ever? Standing still unfortunately isn't in the black-girl guidebook. So instead I tiptoe across the street, making sure to walk on the balls of my feet so as not to aggravate Miles with the clicking sound of taps on con
crete, and seize him by the bonus skin of his neck before he can make another run for it. His body is flopping about like a dead fish, but thankfully he is neither. Mr. Flagler, prophet you are not.

Every hair on Miles's back has rigor-mortised along with the rest of him. He's too traumatized to walk, so I carry him back home sort of cradled in my arms, his legs sticking straight into the air like an upturned tchotchke. If it weren't for all the heavy panting, his hot breath smelling well past its sell-by date, I'd assume him scared to death.

The point is, since the episode with Mr. Flagler (nee Homeless Jesus), Miles and black men just don't mix. He'll sniff a pair of Timbs maybe, but as soon as one of those construction boots–cum–emblem of ghetto masculinity take one step in his direction, he'll turn tail and run behind my legs faster than you can say
socially awwwk-ward
. I was embarrassed at first—the dog I'd named after a jazz legend would lick a hand, any hand, as long as it didn't have pigment on the flip side. He was making me look bad. The white guy up the street who wore all-weather Crocs? Miles loved him. The boys down the block in down jackets? Hated them. His black-man allergies got so bad I started crossing the street whenever a pack of them appeared on the horizon, and they in turn eyed me with sellout suspicion.
It's not me, I swear! My mom grew up Compton. Compton!
“Ay,” one would point out excitedly, backhanding the shoulder of another. “That's that dog from
Men in Black
!” I'd smile stupidly and offer a jumpy “ha ha” while safely on the opposite side of the street. Of life.

Even more important than Miles's discriminatory licking practices was the issue of finding a mate—for me. This would be problematic—me happening to like black men very much, and Miles, not so much. But then again, me and men haven't been mixing so well lately either.

“Well, dude, it's not like you got any at the house,” said Gina when I told her about what an asshole Miles was.

But she was wrong, for once. Actually, I'd had more than a few. Purchasing another living being, I found out, is a great conversation piece. People want to know his life—weight, height, likes, dislikes, sleeping habits, pooping patterns
: If a tree fell on Miles in the forest, would you hear him?
I figured letting folks come over to see for themselves was the proper thing to do. The book said to socialize him, so I did—lots, and with varying degrees of success.

First there was Cleveland Keith, who liked to answer questions nobody'd asked. For example, we'll be driving in silence—everybody's minding their own business—and then out of nowhere he'll go, “Yeah, so work was good today….” or “Right, yep, the drive down to Atlanta wasn't bad, wasn't bad at all.” Umm, for one, no one asked you how work was, and for two, no one cares how your trip went, and for three, shut it! Plus, he always called me “cutie” and pronounced my Christian name all wrong. Coming from him it was very grassroots, very Uh-leinah.

Way before I even got Miles, I'd tried to cut Cleveland Keith off—changed my number, moved apartments, and never answered his e-mails with more than two sentences. Probably shouldn't've answered them at all. Genius. Also, he didn't know what sushi was, which didn't stop him from buying me restaurant roses on my birthday. Made me feel like an ungrateful tramp who preferred loose change to a ham sandwich, but that didn't stop me from sending all his calls straight to voice mail. Watching another
Whose Wedding Is It Anyway?
marathon seemed more promising and surprisingly nonpathetic than another phone conversation about his flag football team. Tired of scrolling through my contacts list, imagining all the calls I didn't feel
like making, I broke down one horny night and pressed send when his name got highlighted.

“I got a dog,” I said with more pep than planned, nudging a sleeping Miles in the butt with my big toe. Not amused. Cleveland Keith would be right over. I figured meeting him outside on the lawn with a drowsy dog would nonverbally suggest two things: (1) I don't really want you in my house, and (2) this visit will be noncommittal.

Post-sexicles (whatever), I told Cleveland Keith that I wasn't ready for a relationship. He should find a nice girl, I said. A good girl. Someone who'd appreciate his being ordinary and not resent him for it. Someone who didn't love Japanese food. But instead of yanking his cuffed jeans back on and storming out in a “whatever, bitch” huff, he spooned the shit out of me, trapping my arms down to my sides and threatening my neck with his lips. Who sleeps like that? The next morning I gave Miles his second bath in as many days, yelling good-bye to Cleveland Keith through the closed bathroom door. After he left, I got a text: “It was good seeing you again, cutie
.”

Speaking of texts, Tall Thomas has a problem. Another “contact” I normally try to avoid, instead of calling he sends messages, which wouldn't be so annoying if they weren't so annoying. Thom in text:

 

(10/25 10:36 p.m.): Helena, u out 2nite, there's sposed 2 b sumthin @ Posh

(10/25 10:50 p.m.): Yea, I'm on U Street with some folks. Karaoke! Come thru

(10/25 11:31 p.m.): How long u gon b owt.

(10/25 11:55 p.m.): I dunno call me.

(10/25 11:56 p.m.): How much is it? Fun? Who's there?

(10/26 12:45 a.m.): OMG. You don't know them. Either come or not. Jesus.

(10/26 1:00 a.m.): Okay so Jesus is there, who else?

 

If it weren't for unlimited texts, the whole thing would fall apart. I mean, he's six-foot-forever, lives three blocks away, and is especially prompt. After I told Tall Thomas about Miles during an unnecessarily long Gmail convo, his name started popping up in my “available friends” like a banner ad for hemorrhoid cream that suspiciously shows up above your inbox right after you've e-mailed somebody about “up the butt” and “puffy eyes.” Google—God spelled in wingding—had spoken.

We walked the dog around the block together one night—very couple-y and so not my idea. Miles chose ignorance as a means of coping. Never acknowledging Thom's existence, he kept crashing into his ankles and peeing even closer. The next morning, Thom sent me an e-mail, the body of which consisted solely of a giant pug's face grooving in front of a psychedelic backdrop of primary colors spinning like a beach ball. This was probably supposed to be funny on drugs. “Are you sure you want to delete this message?” Yes, please.