New Love, Big Lie

His name was Poet, and I met him the way I met men back then – totally randomly, while walking down the street. He carried a tattered spiral notebook with songs and poems scrawled across the lined pages. He was about my age, about my skin tone and about my level of seriously depressed. He instantly, immediately professed his deep love for me.

And I did what I always did. Convinced myself that I was in love. That he was The One, and damn the consequences.

That very night, after a painfully bad performance of Raisin in the Sun, I went home with Poet. He lived in the basement of a fat, frumpy, middle-aged white woman's house. If the way she screamed and cried and kept barging into the room was any indication, his relationship with her was equivalent to my relationship with Conspiracy: unhappy, much younger charge dependent upon crazy, controlling sugar mama.

I lay in the bed with Poet while he masturbated. I didn't have any sympathy for Sugar Mama's tears. And I didn't really consider it cheating, because there was no penetration.

I called Conspiracy at 5 a.m. with a hastily conceived lie: I told him that I had slept over Q's house, one of my castmates in Raisin.

"No you didn't," he spat. "I called Q at two in the morning, and she said that she didn't know where you were."

Wait - what?!? He had already called Q? A woman he didn't know, at two in the morning, to check on me? That was my first realization that Conspiracy watched my every move.

That was more disturbing to me than the fact that I'd been caught in such a blatant, amateurish lie.

I felt bad, of course. I didn't want to hurt Conspiracy. He had been good to me. He was my friend. I didn't know what I'd do without his constant companionship and guidance. But I was no longer in love with him.

I wrote Conspiracy a long letter, spilling out the feelings I'd been suppressing for months.

We had several long, grueling conversations that ended in what I thought was a good solution: We would go back to being just friends. I felt relieved. Yes, I wanted Conspiracy as a friend. No, I didn't want Conspiracy as a lover. Problem solved.

Until a few weeks later, when Poet took the train in to New Haven and we spent a few completely platonic hours together. When I got home and told Conspiracy where I'd been, he went ballistic. He accused me, once again, of chumping him. "You have no human concern for me!" he shouted, eyes rolling wildly in his head.

I was genuinely confused. Hadn't he said we were just friends? Hadn't we both said that?

The tension continued to build.

Poet and I made a date to go out. Conspiracy's counterattack was to plan a night on the town to end all nights on the town ... for the exact same night. He offered to take me to New York City to see Gregory Hines in the Broadway smash, Jelly's Last Jam. My refusal to cancel my date with Poet further enraged Conspiracy, who it turns out, had become co-partners in jiltedness with Poet's landlady/lover.

"Do you know what she told me? He's a heroin addict, and he used to be a hustler before she took him in. Do you even know what you're dealing with?!"

Again, I cared less about the news flash than I did about the fact that Conspiracy was in cahoots with Poet's crazy, white-woman sugar mama.

Conspiracy and I stopped having sex. Poet and I never actually started. In less than two months, the flame between us blew out. Poet simply disappeared, and I heard through the grapevine that he was in jail.

So was I. My prison took the form of the two-bedroom apartment I shared with a man old enough to be my father. I had no idea how to get out.

Conspiracy Diaries Part 15 of 25 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25)
Conspiracy Lessons Learned 1-4 (1 2 3 4)

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