The day after New Year's Day, I decided it was over between me and Latin Muslim. He stood me up on Christmas, and then again on New Year's.
After one last no-phone-call too many, I got the message.
He didn't love me. Or maybe he did, but he loved cocaine and his ghetto lifestyle more. Or maybe his hatred of himself overpowered his love for me. But whatever the case, I gave up. I decided not to call him anymore.
I discovered to my surprise that I was tougher than I thought. I thought my feelings were so delicate and fragile that if I let someone into my life and they walked out on me, stomping on my heart and trampling on my delicacy, I'd fall apart.
But I didn't. I knew I'd get through it.
Three weeks later, he finally called me.
Collect.
From jail.
Full of remorse and apology.
He told me that he tossed me aside because he knew he was no good for me and because he was afraid of "falling." That he really did love me and that I wasn't a "f*ck flick" – his words, not mine. I was a "nice, honest, loving, understanding, caring woman" and he would always love me and never forget me.
I told him that I forgave him, but he would never get another chance.
"I'm a f*ckup," he confessed. "One day, you're going to have a man that's going to be good to you, and you're going to have a family, kids, and I'll be very happy for you." He said that he couldn't handle trying to live his life "my way, society's way." He said he got frustrated, it hurt, and he couldn't cope. When he got out of jail in a few months, his mother was going to send him to Puerto Rico.
He also mentioned that he ran out on me because he didn't want to get me involved in drugs and crime and stuff. I told him he didn't have to worry about that.
"Why is that?" he asked.
"Because I know what I want, I know what's right from wrong, and 89% of the time, I try to do what's right."
Before he hung up, he asked if we were friends.
"Yes," I said.
"Best friends?"
"No."
"I can't be your best friend?"
"No."
"But you can be mine?"
"Yes."
That was the last time we talked.
I discovered that collect calls from jail were prohibitively expensive, even more expensive than regular collect calls. The next time he dialed my number, I didn't accept the charges.
And that was the end of that.
Showing posts with label Before I Was Slutty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Before I Was Slutty. Show all posts
Friday, September 25, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Shame, Shame, Shame
Entangling myself with Dollar the Psychic wasn't the only thing I did in the days after I lost my virginity. I also fell head over heels in love with Josephine Baker. And I decided to emulate her by answering an ad that was taped to the walls of Yale Station, the Yale post office.
It said that nude models were needed for "artistic photos." And that the pay was $20 an hour.
It was Christmas break, and Yale was a ghost town. I didn't have enough money to go home, plus Latin Muslim had promised that we'd spend Christmas Eve and Christmas together. So I arranged to pay $70 in rent to two of my off-campus actress friends, and I stayed in their roach-infested apartment during the two weeks that my dorm was shut down.
Christmas was spent alone, attempting with 50% success to cook a pot of greens. I didn't burn them, but they didn't taste all that good. I washed them down with ambrosia and a box of chocolate-covered cherries.
And with nothing else to do, I read. Stanislavski. And a book about Josephine, a black girl who ran off to Paris at age 19 and became the biggest star in Europe, the "most photographed girl in the world." And the most consistently naked, best known for dancing topless in a skirt made out of bananas.
Wow. That was some nerve.
Is that what it took to become famous?
My "artistic photo" day dawned a few days after Christmas. I arrived at the shoot with a huge triangle-shaped burn on my face, courtesy of kissing my right temple with my Golden Hot curling iron.
My photographer was a weaselly-faced graduate student, possibly black, possibly Latino. I later learned he had also "artistically photographed" at least two other black actresses I knew, who confirmed my opinion that there was nothing artistic about it.
The "set" was his bed, which had black sheets. The main prop was me. Completely nude except for a tie, artistically draped near, but definitely not covering, my crotch. And his "direction" was probably more Hustler than Playboy, with not a smidge of the coffee-table artiness I expected from his flyer.
At the end of it, I got my big $20/hour payday: a grand total of $60. And a $6-million serving of shame. I had just taken naked pictures. The kind that would come back to haunt me if I ever got rich and famous. And I'd broken my virginity vow. And my boyfriend had abandoned me on Christmas. And according to Dollar, I was cursed with Jealousy.
This was the moment when I really began to think of myself as a slut.
It said that nude models were needed for "artistic photos." And that the pay was $20 an hour.
It was Christmas break, and Yale was a ghost town. I didn't have enough money to go home, plus Latin Muslim had promised that we'd spend Christmas Eve and Christmas together. So I arranged to pay $70 in rent to two of my off-campus actress friends, and I stayed in their roach-infested apartment during the two weeks that my dorm was shut down.
Christmas was spent alone, attempting with 50% success to cook a pot of greens. I didn't burn them, but they didn't taste all that good. I washed them down with ambrosia and a box of chocolate-covered cherries.
And with nothing else to do, I read. Stanislavski. And a book about Josephine, a black girl who ran off to Paris at age 19 and became the biggest star in Europe, the "most photographed girl in the world." And the most consistently naked, best known for dancing topless in a skirt made out of bananas.
Wow. That was some nerve.
Is that what it took to become famous?
My "artistic photo" day dawned a few days after Christmas. I arrived at the shoot with a huge triangle-shaped burn on my face, courtesy of kissing my right temple with my Golden Hot curling iron.
My photographer was a weaselly-faced graduate student, possibly black, possibly Latino. I later learned he had also "artistically photographed" at least two other black actresses I knew, who confirmed my opinion that there was nothing artistic about it.
The "set" was his bed, which had black sheets. The main prop was me. Completely nude except for a tie, artistically draped near, but definitely not covering, my crotch. And his "direction" was probably more Hustler than Playboy, with not a smidge of the coffee-table artiness I expected from his flyer.
At the end of it, I got my big $20/hour payday: a grand total of $60. And a $6-million serving of shame. I had just taken naked pictures. The kind that would come back to haunt me if I ever got rich and famous. And I'd broken my virginity vow. And my boyfriend had abandoned me on Christmas. And according to Dollar, I was cursed with Jealousy.
This was the moment when I really began to think of myself as a slut.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Abusive Relationship
Within days of losing my virginity to Latin Muslim, the abuse began. It lasted nine years. It left thick, traumatic scars. It cost tens of thousands of dollars. And Latin Muslim wasn't the abuser.
The abuser wasn't even a man, and the relationship wasn't even sexual.
My abuser was a psychic.
I was in downtown New Haven, walking past the mall, when I was accosted by a girl selling fake roses. At first, I ignored her.
"You, stop! No, you, stop!" That command, uttered in a thick Brooklyn accent, was issued directly at me.
I turned around and faced a girl in a red coat. She was about my age. Thin. A woman of color, but of indeterminable ethnicity. She had piercing brown eyes and large ears that poked through her thin curtain of straight black hair.
Her name was Dollar, and for $10 she offered to read my palm.
She saw trouble.
But for $70, she would go light seven candles at Church for me, and pray all night for me, and all of my problems would be solved.
When Dollar finished lighting up the Church, she called me with the news. It wasn't the happy ending she'd initially promised. It was something more.
Something called Jealousy.
She interrogated me, with extreme gravity, about my parents. What position in the family was my dad? The oldest child. What position was I? The middle child. What about my mom? The middle child.
"Yes, that's it. It's coming from your mother."
My mother had been a victim of Jealousy, and that's why her life had never worked out right. That certainly rang true. My mom, a brilliant woman, the first of her family to go to college, had ended up marrying my dad and losing her mind. You couldn't get more star-crossed than that.
And now my mother's mysterious hex was being passed down to me because we were both middle children. But for $500, Dollar was going to dig up a graveyard, remove the curse and set everything right.
She referred to her mysterious and outlandish spiritual tasks as The Work, and like a child molester, she was very insistent that The Work must be kept secret. I could not talk to anyone about it – absolutely no one. In fact, I couldn't even write about it, not even in my diary. Because the Bad Spirits were everywhere, and we didn't want them interfering with The Work.
Did I buy it?
Yup.
Dollar knew things about me that she couldn't possibly have known, and she threw me little evidences of her Power.
She told me I'd know she had started The Work because I would dream about her, and sure enough, that night I had a vivid dream about her, laced with serpents and religious imagery. When Yale shut down for the Christmas break and I stayed at a friend's off-campus apartment, she called me there, even though I'd never given her the number. The Spirits had revealed my unlisted, temporary phone number to her.
That's how my long, twisted life with Dollar started. And initially, it wasn't all bad. She became my "friend." We hung out together. I got to know her entire family – mother, father, aunts, uncles, cousins. And some of the "advice" she gave me over the years probably saved my life.
But ultimately, the relationship was about power, and not just the Magic Kind. Dollar terrorized me with veiled threats about all the dire things that would happen if I didn't come through with money for The Church (up to and including that my mom would get sick and die). Dollar verbally abused me, taking credit for everything good that happened in my life and blaming my "negativity" for everything that went wrong.
And I, like a gambler, kept paying and paying and paying because I didn't want to believe that I'd been so thoroughly had. Dollar became the thread that ran through all of my sexual relationships, from Latin Muslim when I was 19, all the way to Brown, when I was 28.
The abuser wasn't even a man, and the relationship wasn't even sexual.
My abuser was a psychic.
I was in downtown New Haven, walking past the mall, when I was accosted by a girl selling fake roses. At first, I ignored her.
"You, stop! No, you, stop!" That command, uttered in a thick Brooklyn accent, was issued directly at me.
I turned around and faced a girl in a red coat. She was about my age. Thin. A woman of color, but of indeterminable ethnicity. She had piercing brown eyes and large ears that poked through her thin curtain of straight black hair.
Her name was Dollar, and for $10 she offered to read my palm.
She saw trouble.
But for $70, she would go light seven candles at Church for me, and pray all night for me, and all of my problems would be solved.
When Dollar finished lighting up the Church, she called me with the news. It wasn't the happy ending she'd initially promised. It was something more.
Something called Jealousy.
She interrogated me, with extreme gravity, about my parents. What position in the family was my dad? The oldest child. What position was I? The middle child. What about my mom? The middle child.
"Yes, that's it. It's coming from your mother."
My mother had been a victim of Jealousy, and that's why her life had never worked out right. That certainly rang true. My mom, a brilliant woman, the first of her family to go to college, had ended up marrying my dad and losing her mind. You couldn't get more star-crossed than that.
And now my mother's mysterious hex was being passed down to me because we were both middle children. But for $500, Dollar was going to dig up a graveyard, remove the curse and set everything right.
She referred to her mysterious and outlandish spiritual tasks as The Work, and like a child molester, she was very insistent that The Work must be kept secret. I could not talk to anyone about it – absolutely no one. In fact, I couldn't even write about it, not even in my diary. Because the Bad Spirits were everywhere, and we didn't want them interfering with The Work.
Did I buy it?
Yup.
Dollar knew things about me that she couldn't possibly have known, and she threw me little evidences of her Power.
She told me I'd know she had started The Work because I would dream about her, and sure enough, that night I had a vivid dream about her, laced with serpents and religious imagery. When Yale shut down for the Christmas break and I stayed at a friend's off-campus apartment, she called me there, even though I'd never given her the number. The Spirits had revealed my unlisted, temporary phone number to her.
That's how my long, twisted life with Dollar started. And initially, it wasn't all bad. She became my "friend." We hung out together. I got to know her entire family – mother, father, aunts, uncles, cousins. And some of the "advice" she gave me over the years probably saved my life.
But ultimately, the relationship was about power, and not just the Magic Kind. Dollar terrorized me with veiled threats about all the dire things that would happen if I didn't come through with money for The Church (up to and including that my mom would get sick and die). Dollar verbally abused me, taking credit for everything good that happened in my life and blaming my "negativity" for everything that went wrong.
And I, like a gambler, kept paying and paying and paying because I didn't want to believe that I'd been so thoroughly had. Dollar became the thread that ran through all of my sexual relationships, from Latin Muslim when I was 19, all the way to Brown, when I was 28.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Father Panic, Blood and a Roach
It was known as the Baby Bronx. Bridgeport, CT. Where Latin Muslim was from. We journeyed there together after our night of painful passion and magic-marker love notes.
If it was the baby, then Mama Bronx must've been a hellified gangsta wench.
As we walked from the train station, I was struck by how bleak and desolate and concrete and cold everything looked. But he'd seen my world, and now it was my turn to see his.
His world was the projects. But not just any projects. Projects that were either aptly or unfortunately named the Father Panic projects.
We passed a light-blue Crown Victoria sedan that I'd never have even noticed. Latin Muslim pointed it out to me with a knowing smirk: "Undercover cop."
The Father Panic projects looked and felt like the third world. Tiny self-contained houses stranded in the middle of "yards" that were all concrete, no grass. Mean, mangy German shepherds. And young men like Latin Muslim, with prison records and no jobs.
His mother's house was neat and clean. She was a nurse, and she was at work.
His brother was home. And his brother was nothing like Latin Muslim. He was thin, while Latin Muslim was stocky. He was quiet and studious, while Latin Muslim was cocky. He seemed like a good guy, on the straight and narrow, and Latin Muslim was anything but.
The brother watched warily and with barely disguised disbelief as Latin Muslim showed me off and bragged about being on the Yale campus. I could tell his brother was wondering what a nice girl like me was doing with a knucklehead like Latin Muslim, and his eyes seemed to be warning me that I was making a big mistake.
Our small talk didn't last long.
Latin Muslim led me to a bedroom with a twin bed and blue-and-white flowered sheets.
Before I knew it, he was on top of me, I felt a sharp pain, and that was it.
There was blood on the sheets.
I was officially no longer a virgin.
There were no tender feelings of love and togetherness. Just the cold, hard reality of my blood on the sheets, and the icky realization that Latin Muslim and I were not alone. A dead roach was also sharing our bed, a few inches away from my head.
I was too polite to mention the roach, and there was no time for pillow talk anyway.
"You'd better get out before my mom gets home."
I felt like I'd been had, and not merely in the Biblical way. Like maybe he'd been playing a game just to get my virginity, and now that he had it, I didn't matter anymore.
We were supposed to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas together the following week, and of course, he didn't call and didn't show.
If it was the baby, then Mama Bronx must've been a hellified gangsta wench.
As we walked from the train station, I was struck by how bleak and desolate and concrete and cold everything looked. But he'd seen my world, and now it was my turn to see his.
His world was the projects. But not just any projects. Projects that were either aptly or unfortunately named the Father Panic projects.
We passed a light-blue Crown Victoria sedan that I'd never have even noticed. Latin Muslim pointed it out to me with a knowing smirk: "Undercover cop."
The Father Panic projects looked and felt like the third world. Tiny self-contained houses stranded in the middle of "yards" that were all concrete, no grass. Mean, mangy German shepherds. And young men like Latin Muslim, with prison records and no jobs.
His mother's house was neat and clean. She was a nurse, and she was at work.
His brother was home. And his brother was nothing like Latin Muslim. He was thin, while Latin Muslim was stocky. He was quiet and studious, while Latin Muslim was cocky. He seemed like a good guy, on the straight and narrow, and Latin Muslim was anything but.
The brother watched warily and with barely disguised disbelief as Latin Muslim showed me off and bragged about being on the Yale campus. I could tell his brother was wondering what a nice girl like me was doing with a knucklehead like Latin Muslim, and his eyes seemed to be warning me that I was making a big mistake.
Our small talk didn't last long.
Latin Muslim led me to a bedroom with a twin bed and blue-and-white flowered sheets.
Before I knew it, he was on top of me, I felt a sharp pain, and that was it.
There was blood on the sheets.
I was officially no longer a virgin.
There were no tender feelings of love and togetherness. Just the cold, hard reality of my blood on the sheets, and the icky realization that Latin Muslim and I were not alone. A dead roach was also sharing our bed, a few inches away from my head.
I was too polite to mention the roach, and there was no time for pillow talk anyway.
"You'd better get out before my mom gets home."
I felt like I'd been had, and not merely in the Biblical way. Like maybe he'd been playing a game just to get my virginity, and now that he had it, I didn't matter anymore.
We were supposed to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas together the following week, and of course, he didn't call and didn't show.
Friday, September 11, 2009
A Violation of Personal Space
In his overnight dorm-room stay, Latin Muslim did more than get into my panties. He violated my mental aerospace and my personal space, in ways that were probably more manipulative than malicious.
Of course, he had been manipulative right from the start. He wanted to talk About Us all the time. He'd been doing that since day one, sprinkling "I love yous" and "I'll never hurt yous" and "we're going to grow old togethers" into every conversation.
Only I didn't find it sweet. I found it alternately threatening and boring.
Latin Muslim was also controlling.
The Monday after our weekend sleepover, he made me dress up and curl my hair, snarling, "You're not a nerd. I'm bringing out the real you."
(In all fairness, he was probably reacting to some low self-esteem comment on my part. "Unattractive nerd" was how I truly saw myself, even though on an intellectual level I did realize that I was physically attractive.)
He was also critical.
"Why don't you listen to black music?"
I was honestly taken aback.
"What are you talking about?" I defensively rattled off my short-list of R&B greats I listened to all the time, starting with Stevie Wonder and Prince.
Latin Muslim was dismissive, pointing derisively at the artwork of my new Terence Trent D'Arby CD. "What is this skull and crossbones sh*t?"
He rattled off a list of "real" black artists – three or four rap artists du jour that I had no interest in whatsoever.
Was a Puerto Rican really trying to tell me how to be black? I thought incredulously. But I said nothing.
He began hinting, more than once, that he wanted to have a kid, while I silently wondered if he really thought I'd actually get pregnant and drop out of school with no money.
But the worse thing he did was write me a love letter, in black magic marker, in a messy, childish scrawl that included a huge heart-shaped happy face ...
... in my Bible, my most deeply private personal possession.
Never mind our unmarried state of presumed fornication (I thought I probably wasn't a virgin anymore, but I just wasn't sure). Never mind my secret belief that I was now going to burn in hell for breaking my secret virginity vow.
What really bothered me was that my Bible already contained a love note in it. It was a note my mother had written in blue ink three months after my birth, gently advising me to read the Bible from time to time. It was proof positive that even though my mom was physically absent for most of my childhood, that she had loved me enough as a baby to write a note to the adult me.
His note felt inappropriate, like he was crowding out my mom's painstaking attempt to document my family tree.
I was offended. And completely shocked.
But I said nothing.
I was used to saying nothing around men.
Of course, he had been manipulative right from the start. He wanted to talk About Us all the time. He'd been doing that since day one, sprinkling "I love yous" and "I'll never hurt yous" and "we're going to grow old togethers" into every conversation.
Only I didn't find it sweet. I found it alternately threatening and boring.
Latin Muslim was also controlling.
The Monday after our weekend sleepover, he made me dress up and curl my hair, snarling, "You're not a nerd. I'm bringing out the real you."
(In all fairness, he was probably reacting to some low self-esteem comment on my part. "Unattractive nerd" was how I truly saw myself, even though on an intellectual level I did realize that I was physically attractive.)
He was also critical.
"Why don't you listen to black music?"
I was honestly taken aback.
"What are you talking about?" I defensively rattled off my short-list of R&B greats I listened to all the time, starting with Stevie Wonder and Prince.
Latin Muslim was dismissive, pointing derisively at the artwork of my new Terence Trent D'Arby CD. "What is this skull and crossbones sh*t?"
He rattled off a list of "real" black artists – three or four rap artists du jour that I had no interest in whatsoever.
Was a Puerto Rican really trying to tell me how to be black? I thought incredulously. But I said nothing.
He began hinting, more than once, that he wanted to have a kid, while I silently wondered if he really thought I'd actually get pregnant and drop out of school with no money.
But the worse thing he did was write me a love letter, in black magic marker, in a messy, childish scrawl that included a huge heart-shaped happy face ...
... in my Bible, my most deeply private personal possession.
Never mind our unmarried state of presumed fornication (I thought I probably wasn't a virgin anymore, but I just wasn't sure). Never mind my secret belief that I was now going to burn in hell for breaking my secret virginity vow.
What really bothered me was that my Bible already contained a love note in it. It was a note my mother had written in blue ink three months after my birth, gently advising me to read the Bible from time to time. It was proof positive that even though my mom was physically absent for most of my childhood, that she had loved me enough as a baby to write a note to the adult me.
His note felt inappropriate, like he was crowding out my mom's painstaking attempt to document my family tree.
I was offended. And completely shocked.
But I said nothing.
I was used to saying nothing around men.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
A Whiff of Violence
Now that I was "half in love" with Latin Muslim, consecrating our union was the logical first step. En route to whisking him into my dorm room on a Friday morning in December, I took him through the Yale Campus.
I'll never forget the wonder in his eyes as he drank in the sights of Yale Commons, the large, majestic main dining hall. He was surprised at all the free cereal, the unlimited second and third helpings, and last but not least, the fact that he – a convicted felon – was actually inside the rich kids' university where he was normally and emphatically not welcome.
In my dorm room, an interesting situation developed. One minute he was kissing me and unloosening my clothes, and then the next he had somehow unzipped his pants and was working on insertion.
Uh uh.
No.
Stop.
He complied without protest.
On the subject of date rape, he was an absolute gentleman.
But there was a whiff, a hint of violence in him that I could just smell. In the back of my mind, I knew it was only a matter of time before he hit me, even though I didn't voice the tiny, persistent suspicion to anyone.
A few days later, Latin Muslim quit the rehab house and pulled his first disappearing act. The next time we talked on the phone, that didn't stop him from berating me "for not trusting him enough to tell him about myself."
But that conversation ended with him saying, "I love you," as he often did. Only this time, instead of just letting it pass, I said, "I love you, too" for the first time.
Soon, he was back in my dorm room for another round of wrestling my panties to the ground. I fought him every step of the way. Not intentionally. It's just that the love-making attempts hurt.
He was an interesting mix of patience and exasperation.
"Anita, stop running from me."
"Anita, don't lock your legs on my legs. You keep doing that."
"Anita, stop using your strength. You control your vagina. When you start fighting me, you tighten up. Then I have to force my way in, and it makes you feel pain."
"Damn, girl, you wear me out. You know you're strong for a motha**ing girl."
I honestly wasn't sure whether or not I was still a virgin. There had been pain, but no blood. Wasn't there supposed to be blood? But how could I still be a virgin if a man had been inside me more than once?
I'll never forget the wonder in his eyes as he drank in the sights of Yale Commons, the large, majestic main dining hall. He was surprised at all the free cereal, the unlimited second and third helpings, and last but not least, the fact that he – a convicted felon – was actually inside the rich kids' university where he was normally and emphatically not welcome.
In my dorm room, an interesting situation developed. One minute he was kissing me and unloosening my clothes, and then the next he had somehow unzipped his pants and was working on insertion.
Uh uh.
No.
Stop.
He complied without protest.
On the subject of date rape, he was an absolute gentleman.
But there was a whiff, a hint of violence in him that I could just smell. In the back of my mind, I knew it was only a matter of time before he hit me, even though I didn't voice the tiny, persistent suspicion to anyone.
A few days later, Latin Muslim quit the rehab house and pulled his first disappearing act. The next time we talked on the phone, that didn't stop him from berating me "for not trusting him enough to tell him about myself."
But that conversation ended with him saying, "I love you," as he often did. Only this time, instead of just letting it pass, I said, "I love you, too" for the first time.
Soon, he was back in my dorm room for another round of wrestling my panties to the ground. I fought him every step of the way. Not intentionally. It's just that the love-making attempts hurt.
He was an interesting mix of patience and exasperation.
"Anita, stop running from me."
"Anita, don't lock your legs on my legs. You keep doing that."
"Anita, stop using your strength. You control your vagina. When you start fighting me, you tighten up. Then I have to force my way in, and it makes you feel pain."
"Damn, girl, you wear me out. You know you're strong for a motha**ing girl."
I honestly wasn't sure whether or not I was still a virgin. There had been pain, but no blood. Wasn't there supposed to be blood? But how could I still be a virgin if a man had been inside me more than once?
Monday, September 7, 2009
Full-Court Press and Half-Hearted Yes
Immediately after our first date, Thanksgiving Break forcibly separated me and Latin Muslim. I crammed three classmates who offered to help pay for gas into my hoopty Ford Escort, and off I went to spend a week with my real mother in South Carolina, dropping each classmate off somewhere along the way.
Latin Muslim was on my mind all break ... but not in the loving, breathless way you might expect.
All I could think about was how to protect myself from him. What I'd say and do if he started acting possessive and jealous, how to tell him to slow down, what I'd do if he ever tried to hit me. Did I mention that I was terrified of, and absolutely didn't trust, men?
I dreaded the thought of his two and three phone calls a day so much, I took my mother's phone off the hook.
His rehab house only allowed him 10 minutes at a time on the phone, but when he finally reached me, he completely laid all my fears to rest in 10 minutes flat. Without me even having to struggle through my tentatively prepared "slow-down" speech, Latin Muslim volunteered that he "was not going to mention 'relationship' for the time being" and that he was going to show some restraint.
So when I got back to New Haven, we picked up where we left off.
We had a Sunday daytime date, where he honeyed my ears with more talk of how I was the one for him. How he didn't care if he had to wait until I was 39 years old, because he knew one day I would wake up and realize that I had a good thing with him. That he'd never hurt me or run out on me. That he'd never stand in the way of my goals. That he'd follow me wherever I chose to go.
He'd even let me fool around if I ever decided that I needed to do that in order to make up my mind.
All because he believed deep in his heart that we'd be together "at 39, 60, and when we go, we'll go together."
It was all so very Catholic. (Except for the freedom to fool around part. That was a sin, Sin, SIN.)
He asked me formally, "Can I be your boyfriend?"
Of course, I said yes.
That night, I wrote in my diary, "I think I'm half in love."
Latin Muslim was on my mind all break ... but not in the loving, breathless way you might expect.
All I could think about was how to protect myself from him. What I'd say and do if he started acting possessive and jealous, how to tell him to slow down, what I'd do if he ever tried to hit me. Did I mention that I was terrified of, and absolutely didn't trust, men?
I dreaded the thought of his two and three phone calls a day so much, I took my mother's phone off the hook.
His rehab house only allowed him 10 minutes at a time on the phone, but when he finally reached me, he completely laid all my fears to rest in 10 minutes flat. Without me even having to struggle through my tentatively prepared "slow-down" speech, Latin Muslim volunteered that he "was not going to mention 'relationship' for the time being" and that he was going to show some restraint.
So when I got back to New Haven, we picked up where we left off.
We had a Sunday daytime date, where he honeyed my ears with more talk of how I was the one for him. How he didn't care if he had to wait until I was 39 years old, because he knew one day I would wake up and realize that I had a good thing with him. That he'd never hurt me or run out on me. That he'd never stand in the way of my goals. That he'd follow me wherever I chose to go.
He'd even let me fool around if I ever decided that I needed to do that in order to make up my mind.
All because he believed deep in his heart that we'd be together "at 39, 60, and when we go, we'll go together."
It was all so very Catholic. (Except for the freedom to fool around part. That was a sin, Sin, SIN.)
He asked me formally, "Can I be your boyfriend?"
Of course, I said yes.
That night, I wrote in my diary, "I think I'm half in love."
Friday, September 4, 2009
First-Date Kisses and Counseling
When I started dating Latin Muslim, the cute Puerto Rican from the train, I didn't give much thought to his criminal past or his drug-addicted present.
I was sufficiently naive and sufficiently nonjudgmental and sufficiently optimistic to believe that he wasn't his rap sheet.
I judged him on how he acted and on how he treated me.
His kisses got an A-. His neediness got a C+.
It was immediately obvious to me that Latin Muslim and I shared several personality traits: stubbornness, unwavering persistence and perseverance, and a tendency to rush headlong into any situation as long as it felt right emotionally.
We met on the New Haven Green at 10:30 a.m., a few days after our chance encounter on the train.
The morning was magical. All the things I'd ever dreamed of doing with a boy that I'd never done because I'd never had a boyfriend.
We walked around New Haven. Stopping to sit on the steps of a university building, where he leaned toward me and kissed me lightly on the mouth ... twice. Then more hand-in-hand strolling, until we paused by the gate of a Secret Society tomb for more kisses. He raised my temperature by running his tongue along the outside of my lips. He sucked on my neck and gave me my first-ever hickey.
And he took a gold chain from around his own neck and put it around mine. A symbol of ownership.
He told me that he had never associated with a "nice, college-attending" girl like me and that he felt feelings for me he'd never felt before. And that he would never take advantage of me. And he wanted our relationship to work out.
My body was melting, my heart was aglow, but my mind was suspicious, distrustful, unsettled, unsure.
I was both attracted and repulsed by him, by his unbelievable persistence.
He was like an earnest little boy, telling me how much I meant to him ... on our first date.
After a few hours, I drove him back to the inpatient rehab facility where he was being treated for a cocaine addiction.
Around 5 p.m., he summoned me to return. He absolutely wouldn't take no for an answer.
So our first date resumed in a most unusual way: in a family-counseling session at a rehab facility.
He and I and a therapist talked about "the relationship" and I had a breakthrough.
I realized that we couldn't put each other on a pedestal, that I couldn't be his fantasy of the good girl who would be good for him and that he couldn't be the fabled strong man who would solve all my problems.
That said, I was more than willing to give the relationship a try. With Latin Muslim, I felt whole.
I was sufficiently naive and sufficiently nonjudgmental and sufficiently optimistic to believe that he wasn't his rap sheet.
I judged him on how he acted and on how he treated me.
His kisses got an A-. His neediness got a C+.
It was immediately obvious to me that Latin Muslim and I shared several personality traits: stubbornness, unwavering persistence and perseverance, and a tendency to rush headlong into any situation as long as it felt right emotionally.
We met on the New Haven Green at 10:30 a.m., a few days after our chance encounter on the train.
The morning was magical. All the things I'd ever dreamed of doing with a boy that I'd never done because I'd never had a boyfriend.
We walked around New Haven. Stopping to sit on the steps of a university building, where he leaned toward me and kissed me lightly on the mouth ... twice. Then more hand-in-hand strolling, until we paused by the gate of a Secret Society tomb for more kisses. He raised my temperature by running his tongue along the outside of my lips. He sucked on my neck and gave me my first-ever hickey.
And he took a gold chain from around his own neck and put it around mine. A symbol of ownership.
He told me that he had never associated with a "nice, college-attending" girl like me and that he felt feelings for me he'd never felt before. And that he would never take advantage of me. And he wanted our relationship to work out.
My body was melting, my heart was aglow, but my mind was suspicious, distrustful, unsettled, unsure.
I was both attracted and repulsed by him, by his unbelievable persistence.
He was like an earnest little boy, telling me how much I meant to him ... on our first date.
After a few hours, I drove him back to the inpatient rehab facility where he was being treated for a cocaine addiction.
Around 5 p.m., he summoned me to return. He absolutely wouldn't take no for an answer.
So our first date resumed in a most unusual way: in a family-counseling session at a rehab facility.
He and I and a therapist talked about "the relationship" and I had a breakthrough.
I realized that we couldn't put each other on a pedestal, that I couldn't be his fantasy of the good girl who would be good for him and that he couldn't be the fabled strong man who would solve all my problems.
That said, I was more than willing to give the relationship a try. With Latin Muslim, I felt whole.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
The Puerto Rican in the Muslim Hat
"Does anybody tell you that you are very beautiful?"
"Not often," I smiled.
And just like that, I met my much-longed-for first real boyfriend, at the late-blooming age of 19, midway through the first semester of my sophomore year at Yale.
I was on the train from New York City back to New Haven, flushed with excitement from my first "professional" audition somewhere "off-off-off-off-off-Broadway."
I'd just done a monologue for a black theater group that was high on anger and self-righteousness and low on quality of writing and acting.
Totally didn't matter.
I was flattered that someone had asked me to audition – in NYC!!! – and dreaming that I'd get the part, become a star and get the hell out of dreary, stressful Yale.
I noticed the Puerto Rican guy for three reasons.
I was having a mild love affair from a safe distance with all things Black Muslim, because the semester before, the Honorable Speaker Mr. Look So Good had given a rousing speech at the Yale Law School which had shocked, horrified, angered and terrified my white roommates, and I'd loved every single minute of it.
I was, in my recently desegregated state, grappling with something I'd only experienced once before in my life, when my family lived in a nearly all-white Pennsylvania town for a few months. Personal prejudice. Which is very different from institutional prejudice.
Institutional prejudice is when you pay higher insurance rates for living in a black neighborhood. Or when there are no grocery stores in your neighborhood. Or when your black public school doesn't even have an auditorium but you find out that some suburban white public schools have professional theaters, with state-of-the-art lighting and video equipment.
Institutional prejudice is impersonal and largely invisible. You know it's there, but you have the luxury of ignoring it 95% of the time.
Personal prejudice is different. It's being surrounded by white people who can't see the real you, who ask stupid questions, who play with your hair. It's when you're the Joint Chief of Staff and some jerk clerk at the airport won't let you into the high-security, VIP area because he can't fathom that you're the Joint Chief of Staff. Or in my case, it's when a gawky white boy knocks at your dorm door, looks past you as if you're the maid and asks if "Anyone's home."
Hand-in-hand with my new adventures in personal prejudice came the rude awakening that America wasn't the place I thought it was. For example, according to Honorable Speaker Mr. Look So Good, Yale was founded with money from slavery and the opium drug trade.
Yale was rocking my sense of patriotism and demolishing my Kumbaya, let's-hold-hands-and-love-each-other naivete.
So seeing a presumed Puerto Rican defiantly wearing a Black Muslim cap was definitely a turn-on.
So much so that no alarm bells went off in my head when he told me that he had learned about Islam during a four-year prison term.
Or that he was currently in a drug-rehab program.
I gave him my phone number without the slightest hesitation.
"Not often," I smiled.
And just like that, I met my much-longed-for first real boyfriend, at the late-blooming age of 19, midway through the first semester of my sophomore year at Yale.
I was on the train from New York City back to New Haven, flushed with excitement from my first "professional" audition somewhere "off-off-off-off-off-Broadway."
I'd just done a monologue for a black theater group that was high on anger and self-righteousness and low on quality of writing and acting.
Totally didn't matter.
I was flattered that someone had asked me to audition – in NYC!!! – and dreaming that I'd get the part, become a star and get the hell out of dreary, stressful Yale.
I noticed the Puerto Rican guy for three reasons.
- He was really cute. He resembled the 70's actor Erik Estrada.
- He was direct. He swaggered down the train aisle with confidence, walked right up to me and made his intentions known.
- He was wearing a Muslim cap that I associated with a famous Black Muslim organization, and it was a bit of a pleasant surprise to see a non-black person wearing it.
I was having a mild love affair from a safe distance with all things Black Muslim, because the semester before, the Honorable Speaker Mr. Look So Good had given a rousing speech at the Yale Law School which had shocked, horrified, angered and terrified my white roommates, and I'd loved every single minute of it.
I was, in my recently desegregated state, grappling with something I'd only experienced once before in my life, when my family lived in a nearly all-white Pennsylvania town for a few months. Personal prejudice. Which is very different from institutional prejudice.
Institutional prejudice is when you pay higher insurance rates for living in a black neighborhood. Or when there are no grocery stores in your neighborhood. Or when your black public school doesn't even have an auditorium but you find out that some suburban white public schools have professional theaters, with state-of-the-art lighting and video equipment.
Institutional prejudice is impersonal and largely invisible. You know it's there, but you have the luxury of ignoring it 95% of the time.
Personal prejudice is different. It's being surrounded by white people who can't see the real you, who ask stupid questions, who play with your hair. It's when you're the Joint Chief of Staff and some jerk clerk at the airport won't let you into the high-security, VIP area because he can't fathom that you're the Joint Chief of Staff. Or in my case, it's when a gawky white boy knocks at your dorm door, looks past you as if you're the maid and asks if "Anyone's home."
Hand-in-hand with my new adventures in personal prejudice came the rude awakening that America wasn't the place I thought it was. For example, according to Honorable Speaker Mr. Look So Good, Yale was founded with money from slavery and the opium drug trade.
Yale was rocking my sense of patriotism and demolishing my Kumbaya, let's-hold-hands-and-love-each-other naivete.
So seeing a presumed Puerto Rican defiantly wearing a Black Muslim cap was definitely a turn-on.
So much so that no alarm bells went off in my head when he told me that he had learned about Islam during a four-year prison term.
Or that he was currently in a drug-rehab program.
I gave him my phone number without the slightest hesitation.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Janitorial Urges and Summer Flings
The person I kinda wanted to give my virginity up to was a janitor at Yale. Janitor was fine. Dark chocolate with luscious, plum-colored lips.
Right before the end of my freshman year, I screwed up every ounce of courage that I had and told him I liked him.
I can't overemphasize how difficult that was for me. I was almost paralyzingly shy around men I was interested in. More like completely shut down. Often, I had a hard time getting anything out of my mouth at all.
I entered the summer aglow with the half-promised notion that when the fall semester started, Janitor might become my first real boyfriend.
I went home to Detroit to stay with Foster Mama, who'd called me up a few weeks earlier and said, "I was afraid you was going to run home to your real mama, so I said, 'Let me call up my child and see what her plans are.'" It meant so much to know that her home was still open to me.
The most eventful happening of the summer was that finally, at age 19, I learned to drive. My dad bought me a $500, six-year-old, stick-shift-hoopty Ford Escort that needed tons of repairs. My dad still purrs with pride at how he made me cut my fingernails, install my own brake pads and change my own oil (all without really knowing what the hell I was doing).
I scared the piss out of both Foster Mama and Daddy with my bad driving. With Foster Mama, I almost hit a light pole. With Daddy, I stalled in the middle of a busy intersection, unable to get the car into first gear. All eclipsed by my ultimate crowning moment – backing my car into Foster Mama's porch, knocking a whole column of bricks askew.
But that's not all that happened.
I started fooling around with a friend's almost ex-boyfriend. My friend claimed she didn't mind, but Foster Mama didn't buy it. She expressed her disapproval, telling me that messing with my friend's boyfriend was a good way to lose my friend.
But initially, I didn't listen, leading to a couple of heavy-petting sessions in the front seat of a car and the dark quiet of a school playground. Sessions that left me with the increasingly familiar feeling of stop-go, no-yes as the pleasure of my body warred with the shame of my mind.
I truly believed that premarital sex would doom me to eternal damnation because it necessitated breaking my third-grade virginity pledge.
A few weeks into my would-be summer fling, I got cold feet. I didn't think I could fool around with him and not get emotionally attached, and what was the point? We were both going back to school the following month.
He agreed and said it would probably be better if we just stayed friends. Then he added, "I've been feeling that what we have had is mostly physical, and it doesn't feel right – it almost feels like a one-night stand."
He was 100% right. But hearing him say that made me feel like I was a soiled garment that was getting him grimy and greasy. I had less sexual morals, apparently, than a guy. What kind of woman was I?
So I went back to school to pick things up where me and Janitor had left them ... only to have things go nowhere. He'd avoid me, stand me up, not return my calls. And then he'd act really happy to see me, kiss me on the forehead and lamely explain that he was going through a lot and was "trying to get himself together."
Eventually I gave up on Janitor and settled for a Puerto Rican drug dealer.
And 12 years and tons of drama later, my friend and Almost Ex-Boyfriend married each other, proving that Foster Mama really did know what the hell she was talking about.
Right before the end of my freshman year, I screwed up every ounce of courage that I had and told him I liked him.
I can't overemphasize how difficult that was for me. I was almost paralyzingly shy around men I was interested in. More like completely shut down. Often, I had a hard time getting anything out of my mouth at all.
I entered the summer aglow with the half-promised notion that when the fall semester started, Janitor might become my first real boyfriend.
I went home to Detroit to stay with Foster Mama, who'd called me up a few weeks earlier and said, "I was afraid you was going to run home to your real mama, so I said, 'Let me call up my child and see what her plans are.'" It meant so much to know that her home was still open to me.
The most eventful happening of the summer was that finally, at age 19, I learned to drive. My dad bought me a $500, six-year-old, stick-shift-hoopty Ford Escort that needed tons of repairs. My dad still purrs with pride at how he made me cut my fingernails, install my own brake pads and change my own oil (all without really knowing what the hell I was doing).
I scared the piss out of both Foster Mama and Daddy with my bad driving. With Foster Mama, I almost hit a light pole. With Daddy, I stalled in the middle of a busy intersection, unable to get the car into first gear. All eclipsed by my ultimate crowning moment – backing my car into Foster Mama's porch, knocking a whole column of bricks askew.
But that's not all that happened.
I started fooling around with a friend's almost ex-boyfriend. My friend claimed she didn't mind, but Foster Mama didn't buy it. She expressed her disapproval, telling me that messing with my friend's boyfriend was a good way to lose my friend.
But initially, I didn't listen, leading to a couple of heavy-petting sessions in the front seat of a car and the dark quiet of a school playground. Sessions that left me with the increasingly familiar feeling of stop-go, no-yes as the pleasure of my body warred with the shame of my mind.
I truly believed that premarital sex would doom me to eternal damnation because it necessitated breaking my third-grade virginity pledge.
A few weeks into my would-be summer fling, I got cold feet. I didn't think I could fool around with him and not get emotionally attached, and what was the point? We were both going back to school the following month.
He agreed and said it would probably be better if we just stayed friends. Then he added, "I've been feeling that what we have had is mostly physical, and it doesn't feel right – it almost feels like a one-night stand."
He was 100% right. But hearing him say that made me feel like I was a soiled garment that was getting him grimy and greasy. I had less sexual morals, apparently, than a guy. What kind of woman was I?
So I went back to school to pick things up where me and Janitor had left them ... only to have things go nowhere. He'd avoid me, stand me up, not return my calls. And then he'd act really happy to see me, kiss me on the forehead and lamely explain that he was going through a lot and was "trying to get himself together."
Eventually I gave up on Janitor and settled for a Puerto Rican drug dealer.
And 12 years and tons of drama later, my friend and Almost Ex-Boyfriend married each other, proving that Foster Mama really did know what the hell she was talking about.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Still a Virgin, But En Route to Slut
On spring break of my freshman year, I had a mild sexual experimentation on a tour bus. I say mild because now, from a grown woman's vantage point, it seems mild and normal. But at the time, it was bewildering. Not normal. Evidence that something was clearly wrong with me.
I had no sexual filter, no sexual context, no sexual education, no sexual role models.
All I had was a deep desire for my first real boyfriend. To my 18-year-old mind, it was a long overdue rite of passage. I was supposed to have a boyfriend. Something was clearly wrong with me that I'd never had one.
I'd been devastated when Valentine's Day had come and gone with no sweetheart to sweeten it up.
I'd confided my feelings to one of my new, few college friends: an equally rare low-income black girl with the smarts to get into Yale – and the unmitigated gall to accept the acceptance letter. She was quirky, quiet, slow-moving ... and deep. Deeply intelligent, but without the type-A competitive fire that animated me and most of our classmates.
Deep had chuckled at my angst. "Maybe you need to stop being in love with love."
Huh?
Of course I was in love with love.
I had a perfect Catholic idea that I would find The Boyfriend who would quickly become The Husband, and together we'd spit out 2-7 kids. On our 50th wedding anniversary, we'd toddle down the main aisle during mass to celebrate our living embodiment of the Sacrament of Marriage.
This dream was absolutely, positively inconsistent with the reality that transpired.
In a desperate, lonely attempt to make friends and fit in, I'd joined the Yale Gospel Choir on its spring-break bus tour. A few days in, I ended up sharing a seat with Med School.
Med School was 8-10 years older than me. A nice guy. From Michigan. Average attractiveness. A future anesthesiologist who'd chosen anesthesiology as his specialty because it paid well enough to offset the gazillions of dollars he now owed in student loans.
My looking-for-my-first-boyfriend mind calculated, "He's nice, he'd probably treat you right, and wow – he's even a doctor."
To my surprise, and probably his, I grabbed his hand underneath the blanket that covered us.
Holding hands gradually led to him stroking my fingers and my wrists. Then stroking my breasts over my sweatshirt, then gradually and tentatively, stroking me under my sweatshirt and over my bra, then inside my bra. Not to mention stroking the Down South place over my jeans.
A soon-to-become-familiar sexual tug-of-war played in my head.
Followed by:
That night, Daddy visited me in a nightmare yelling, "Sin, sin, sin!"
What bothered me was that I didn't know Med School very well and I didn't feel a strong attachment to him, yet I had willingly engaged in a purely physical encounter.
It was time #3. My first sexual experimentation had been with 40-something Johnnie Walker when I was 16. Shortly thereafter, I'd shared my newfound familiarity with oral sex with one of my childhood friends, after dark in a local park. After those two experiences, I'd sworn that the next man who touched my body would be someone I was either madly in love or in lust with.
Med School didn't fall into either category, so I felt a guilty sensation of eww and ick that caused me to self-consciously avoid him for the rest of the tour and the rest of the semester.
I had no sexual filter, no sexual context, no sexual education, no sexual role models.
All I had was a deep desire for my first real boyfriend. To my 18-year-old mind, it was a long overdue rite of passage. I was supposed to have a boyfriend. Something was clearly wrong with me that I'd never had one.
I'd been devastated when Valentine's Day had come and gone with no sweetheart to sweeten it up.
I'd confided my feelings to one of my new, few college friends: an equally rare low-income black girl with the smarts to get into Yale – and the unmitigated gall to accept the acceptance letter. She was quirky, quiet, slow-moving ... and deep. Deeply intelligent, but without the type-A competitive fire that animated me and most of our classmates.
Deep had chuckled at my angst. "Maybe you need to stop being in love with love."
Huh?
Of course I was in love with love.
I had a perfect Catholic idea that I would find The Boyfriend who would quickly become The Husband, and together we'd spit out 2-7 kids. On our 50th wedding anniversary, we'd toddle down the main aisle during mass to celebrate our living embodiment of the Sacrament of Marriage.
This dream was absolutely, positively inconsistent with the reality that transpired.
In a desperate, lonely attempt to make friends and fit in, I'd joined the Yale Gospel Choir on its spring-break bus tour. A few days in, I ended up sharing a seat with Med School.
Med School was 8-10 years older than me. A nice guy. From Michigan. Average attractiveness. A future anesthesiologist who'd chosen anesthesiology as his specialty because it paid well enough to offset the gazillions of dollars he now owed in student loans.
My looking-for-my-first-boyfriend mind calculated, "He's nice, he'd probably treat you right, and wow – he's even a doctor."
To my surprise, and probably his, I grabbed his hand underneath the blanket that covered us.
Holding hands gradually led to him stroking my fingers and my wrists. Then stroking my breasts over my sweatshirt, then gradually and tentatively, stroking me under my sweatshirt and over my bra, then inside my bra. Not to mention stroking the Down South place over my jeans.
A soon-to-become-familiar sexual tug-of-war played in my head.
I deserve to be touched. I shouldn't feel guilty. I'm not doing anything wrong.
Followed by:
What are you doing? Why are you doing this? Why do you seem to have a thing for older men whom you don't find physically attractive?
That night, Daddy visited me in a nightmare yelling, "Sin, sin, sin!"
What bothered me was that I didn't know Med School very well and I didn't feel a strong attachment to him, yet I had willingly engaged in a purely physical encounter.
It was time #3. My first sexual experimentation had been with 40-something Johnnie Walker when I was 16. Shortly thereafter, I'd shared my newfound familiarity with oral sex with one of my childhood friends, after dark in a local park. After those two experiences, I'd sworn that the next man who touched my body would be someone I was either madly in love or in lust with.
Med School didn't fall into either category, so I felt a guilty sensation of eww and ick that caused me to self-consciously avoid him for the rest of the tour and the rest of the semester.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Dark College Years
Academically, I was 100% prepared for college. Emotionally, I was not.
So the first thing that happened when Daddy transported me from my newly ghetto lifestyle with Foster Mama to the hallowed halls of Yale University was that I broke out in fever blisters and sank into a deep depression.
I'd applied to Yale for one very superficial reason: my senior year in high school, U.S. News and World Report ranked it as the #1 undergraduate school in the country. And I wanted to be #1.
Yale was actually my second choice.
My first choice was New York University, Tisch School of the Arts. I was accepted into NYU's playwrighting program ... but I didn't want to spend four years chained to a typewriter. I was given a partial scholarship ... but Yale's package was $1,175 better. I liked the idea of living in New York City ... but the endless concrete and subway piss completely overwhelmed me.
Throw in the fact that Yale's minimum wage was 35 cents an hour higher, their campus was greener and they put on a spring visit geared toward minority students, and the scales tipped in Yale's favor.
I chose Yale, and I pretty much regret that choice even to this day.
I more or less hated everything about it, starting with the gargoyles that leered at me from the top of every building. While my classmates chirped happily about how much they loved the Gothic architecture, I felt like I was living in a horror movie. I was afraid to go into the stacks by myself, because I was convinced that a serial killer would emerge from a dark, musty bookshelf and stab me, or one of the supposedly harmless bats would turn into Dracula and bite my neck.
But my dislike of the gray, stony atmosphere was nothing compared to my barely suppressed hatred of my classmates.
Most of my classmates were well-to-do, and many were filthy rich. That included the black students, most of whom were decidedly middle-class. My welfare-to-Yale mindset didn't know the difference. To me, anyone who hadn't endured welfare cheese, free lunch, ugly hand-me-down clothes and bus tickets was rich. I couldn't relate to my suitemates' tales of European vacations, and they had no concept of what it meant to work 20 hours a week at a crappy on-campus job only to turn over 1/4 of my pitiful check to Yale to pay for the "family contribution" portion of my tuition.
I chafed at the experience of being a "black girl" instead of a "smart girl." In Detroit, a city that was 75% black, I wasn't judged based on race, except when dealing with Arab store owners and the occasional white suburbanite.
I was judged based on my individual personality quirks.
At Yale, my primary personality quirk was my skin tone. My white classmates, and even some of my professors, couldn't tell one black girl from another. They used our names interchangeably and skimmed over us in conversations, but felt threatened and baffled when black students huddled together at "the black table" in the large, dark, dismally ornate dining hall.
I quickly discovered that college wouldn't live up to my fantasy of what I thought it would be.
I thought that college would mean fun, friends, and most importantly, my first real boyfriend.
I hadn't dated in high school, except for my tawdry sexual experimentation with 40-something Johnnie Walker and a brief demonstration of my new-found oral-sex skills on a boy from down the street.
Yale brought no increase in my dating activity. None of the black boys expressed any interest. Few of the white boys registered me as a distinct entity, let alone a potential mate.
So I threw myself into my books, joined a theater group and wondered how I would possibly make it through a full four years.
By the middle of my sophomore year, I was dating local jailbirds and dreaming of dropping out.
So the first thing that happened when Daddy transported me from my newly ghetto lifestyle with Foster Mama to the hallowed halls of Yale University was that I broke out in fever blisters and sank into a deep depression.
I'd applied to Yale for one very superficial reason: my senior year in high school, U.S. News and World Report ranked it as the #1 undergraduate school in the country. And I wanted to be #1.
Yale was actually my second choice.
My first choice was New York University, Tisch School of the Arts. I was accepted into NYU's playwrighting program ... but I didn't want to spend four years chained to a typewriter. I was given a partial scholarship ... but Yale's package was $1,175 better. I liked the idea of living in New York City ... but the endless concrete and subway piss completely overwhelmed me.
Throw in the fact that Yale's minimum wage was 35 cents an hour higher, their campus was greener and they put on a spring visit geared toward minority students, and the scales tipped in Yale's favor.
I chose Yale, and I pretty much regret that choice even to this day.
I more or less hated everything about it, starting with the gargoyles that leered at me from the top of every building. While my classmates chirped happily about how much they loved the Gothic architecture, I felt like I was living in a horror movie. I was afraid to go into the stacks by myself, because I was convinced that a serial killer would emerge from a dark, musty bookshelf and stab me, or one of the supposedly harmless bats would turn into Dracula and bite my neck.
But my dislike of the gray, stony atmosphere was nothing compared to my barely suppressed hatred of my classmates.
Most of my classmates were well-to-do, and many were filthy rich. That included the black students, most of whom were decidedly middle-class. My welfare-to-Yale mindset didn't know the difference. To me, anyone who hadn't endured welfare cheese, free lunch, ugly hand-me-down clothes and bus tickets was rich. I couldn't relate to my suitemates' tales of European vacations, and they had no concept of what it meant to work 20 hours a week at a crappy on-campus job only to turn over 1/4 of my pitiful check to Yale to pay for the "family contribution" portion of my tuition.
I chafed at the experience of being a "black girl" instead of a "smart girl." In Detroit, a city that was 75% black, I wasn't judged based on race, except when dealing with Arab store owners and the occasional white suburbanite.
I was judged based on my individual personality quirks.
At Yale, my primary personality quirk was my skin tone. My white classmates, and even some of my professors, couldn't tell one black girl from another. They used our names interchangeably and skimmed over us in conversations, but felt threatened and baffled when black students huddled together at "the black table" in the large, dark, dismally ornate dining hall.
I quickly discovered that college wouldn't live up to my fantasy of what I thought it would be.
I thought that college would mean fun, friends, and most importantly, my first real boyfriend.
I hadn't dated in high school, except for my tawdry sexual experimentation with 40-something Johnnie Walker and a brief demonstration of my new-found oral-sex skills on a boy from down the street.
Yale brought no increase in my dating activity. None of the black boys expressed any interest. Few of the white boys registered me as a distinct entity, let alone a potential mate.
So I threw myself into my books, joined a theater group and wondered how I would possibly make it through a full four years.
By the middle of my sophomore year, I was dating local jailbirds and dreaming of dropping out.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
The Passing of Foster Mama
I moved in with Foster Mama two months shy of my 18th birthday, and I stayed in touch with her for the rest of her life, which turned out to be only eight more years.
As I mentioned, Foster Mama had a con for every situation ... so it was only a matter of time before she conned me. In my case, a credit-card company was kind enough to issue a credit card in my name, but foolish enough to send it to her address in Detroit while I was off at school.
One of my foster sisters called me on the phone: "Girl, Mama got a hold of one of your credit cards, and she is going to town!"
I dismissed her warning as a jealous lie. Foster Mama wouldn't do that to me.
But sure enough, a few months later, I learned I had bad credit and a delinquent, $1,200 Visa bill. With a few persistent phone calls, I was able to prove to Visa that I was away at school when the card arrived in Detroit, and ultimately I wasn't held responsible for the charges.
The incident damaged, but didn't destroy, my relationship with Foster Mama.
I saw her about a month before she died. I was living with Great Aunt at the time and had temporarily escaped the hell of Los Angeles for a quick Detroit visit. I sat in Foster Mama's basement beauty salon and sang her a sad song about my hard-knock life. Her last act of kindness was to hand me a sorely needed $50 bill.
A few weeks later, I learned that a tornado had touched down in Highland Park, just a few miles from Foster Mama's home. I called to find out how she was doing.
She replied, "I heard they was looting in Highland Park."
Before I could express my disapproval, she added, "Sure coulda used me a new TV set."
That was our last conversation.
I didn't attend her funeral.
Not because I didn't care enough to pay my respects, but because I didn't find out in time.
You see, my foster sister – the same one who'd warned me years earlier about the credit card – didn't have my personal phone number. For whatever reason, she only had my 90-year-old Great Aunt's phone number.
And Great Aunt, bless her heart, would talk to my frantic foster sister, then toddle into my room and say sorrowfully, "I'm so sorry about your mother." This happened two or three times, but since I had no idea what she was talking about, I didn't give Great Aunt's strange words of comfort much thought.
Finally, about a week after the funeral, my foster sister found a letter I'd written to Foster Mama that had my real phone number on it.
That's when I learned Foster Mama was gone.
It was a shock, but not a surprise, even though Foster Mama was only in her early fifties.
Foster Mama was morbidly obese, around 5'5" and a size 26. She smoked, even while wearing the nicotine patch that's supposed to help you quit. She was a diabetic with a two-liter-a-day Pepsi habit. And when her doctor yelled at her for drinking Pepsi, her health-conscious solution was to switch to 7-Up.
Regular 7-Up, not diet.
As I get back to the story of my life as a slut, Foster Mama will make the occasional guest appearance. But before I relegate her to a supporting role in my stories of boyfriends past, I wanted to acknowledge the starring role she will always have in my heart.
As I mentioned, Foster Mama had a con for every situation ... so it was only a matter of time before she conned me. In my case, a credit-card company was kind enough to issue a credit card in my name, but foolish enough to send it to her address in Detroit while I was off at school.
One of my foster sisters called me on the phone: "Girl, Mama got a hold of one of your credit cards, and she is going to town!"
I dismissed her warning as a jealous lie. Foster Mama wouldn't do that to me.
But sure enough, a few months later, I learned I had bad credit and a delinquent, $1,200 Visa bill. With a few persistent phone calls, I was able to prove to Visa that I was away at school when the card arrived in Detroit, and ultimately I wasn't held responsible for the charges.
The incident damaged, but didn't destroy, my relationship with Foster Mama.
I saw her about a month before she died. I was living with Great Aunt at the time and had temporarily escaped the hell of Los Angeles for a quick Detroit visit. I sat in Foster Mama's basement beauty salon and sang her a sad song about my hard-knock life. Her last act of kindness was to hand me a sorely needed $50 bill.
A few weeks later, I learned that a tornado had touched down in Highland Park, just a few miles from Foster Mama's home. I called to find out how she was doing.
She replied, "I heard they was looting in Highland Park."
Before I could express my disapproval, she added, "Sure coulda used me a new TV set."
That was our last conversation.
I didn't attend her funeral.
Not because I didn't care enough to pay my respects, but because I didn't find out in time.
You see, my foster sister – the same one who'd warned me years earlier about the credit card – didn't have my personal phone number. For whatever reason, she only had my 90-year-old Great Aunt's phone number.
And Great Aunt, bless her heart, would talk to my frantic foster sister, then toddle into my room and say sorrowfully, "I'm so sorry about your mother." This happened two or three times, but since I had no idea what she was talking about, I didn't give Great Aunt's strange words of comfort much thought.
Finally, about a week after the funeral, my foster sister found a letter I'd written to Foster Mama that had my real phone number on it.
That's when I learned Foster Mama was gone.
It was a shock, but not a surprise, even though Foster Mama was only in her early fifties.
Foster Mama was morbidly obese, around 5'5" and a size 26. She smoked, even while wearing the nicotine patch that's supposed to help you quit. She was a diabetic with a two-liter-a-day Pepsi habit. And when her doctor yelled at her for drinking Pepsi, her health-conscious solution was to switch to 7-Up.
Regular 7-Up, not diet.
As I get back to the story of my life as a slut, Foster Mama will make the occasional guest appearance. But before I relegate her to a supporting role in my stories of boyfriends past, I wanted to acknowledge the starring role she will always have in my heart.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
At Home With My New Mama
Foster Mama was a straight-up hustler, but she was also a down-home, big-hearted person.
Life with her meant trips to the mall, home-made BBQ dinners, fast food, roadside carnivals, after-hours clubs, summer picnics, camaraderie and cat fights with my new foster sisters, rowdy dancing, drive-in movies, raunchy girl talk, loud laughter and an endless supply of mother wit.
She was the kind of person who had seen it all and done half of it.
She was the one who explained to me that my dad's bow-wow babes were really hookers. I naively protested my dad's innocence. "Hummph!" Foster Mama sniffed. "I saw him last week at a Coney Island with a woman I know is a ho."
Daddy would drive across town to visit me, and talk to Foster Mama at length about how I moved out because I was hard-headed and stubborn and didn't want to do chores.
Not true.
I did more chores at Foster Mama's in a week than I'd done at my dad's house in a year.
Despite her free-wheeling nature, when it came to running her house, Foster Mama had rules. There were dishes to be washed, floors to be mopped, tables to be dusted, beds to be made, dinners to be cooked.
Some of her rules related to hygiene. You were to take a bath or wash up at the sink every single morning without fail.
I honestly didn't know that's what normal people did. I washed my face and brushed my teeth twice a day, but the rest of my body got attention once a week. If that.
"Lord, that girl will take care of that face," I'd hear her remark to the other girls as I performed my nightly Noxzema ritual. Then she'd add that maybe I should wash my ass, too.
Thank God she took me in.
I was starved for order and for maternal affection.
From ages 12 to 16, I hadn't seen my own mother at all. Just before I entered 7th grade, Mommy tried one last time to win custody of us. During our annual summer visit, she took us to see a lawyer. When Daddy arrived, she presented him with court papers that said he couldn't take us back to Detroit.
He responded by bellowing, "Kids, get in the damned car!"
He got arrested for kidnapping ... but the charges were dropped when he proved that Michigan had jurisdiction over our custody case, and that everything my mom had tried to do through her local Pennsylvanian courts was null and void.
I had no more face-to-face contact with my mother until my junior year of high school.
With Foster Mama, suddenly, I had a mom again.
Someone to do my hair. Someone to buy me clothes. Someone to talk to about boys and sex and relationships, not that I had anything to talk about. I was the only virgin in the house, aside from the precocious three-year-old. So I mostly listened to the other girls' tales of love lost and sex had.
Foster Mama had been married once. Now her attitude was, "F*ck a damn husband! Unless he's somebody else's."
She'd never had children of her own, save for one miscarriage.
And she'd been in the foster-care business for over 10 years.
We were part business decision, part labor of love. For each child in her care, the state paid her $200-$300 per month.
So year in and year out, she took in the girls that nobody wanted and dealt with their emotional damage. She taught them how to cook and clean and care for their kids. And she helped set some of her "chirren" up with apartments, cars and furniture after they turned 18.
I loved Foster Mama, and I literally followed her from room to room like a baby chick.
She never once ridiculed me or tried to make me stop.
Life with her meant trips to the mall, home-made BBQ dinners, fast food, roadside carnivals, after-hours clubs, summer picnics, camaraderie and cat fights with my new foster sisters, rowdy dancing, drive-in movies, raunchy girl talk, loud laughter and an endless supply of mother wit.
She was the kind of person who had seen it all and done half of it.
She was the one who explained to me that my dad's bow-wow babes were really hookers. I naively protested my dad's innocence. "Hummph!" Foster Mama sniffed. "I saw him last week at a Coney Island with a woman I know is a ho."
Daddy would drive across town to visit me, and talk to Foster Mama at length about how I moved out because I was hard-headed and stubborn and didn't want to do chores.
Not true.
I did more chores at Foster Mama's in a week than I'd done at my dad's house in a year.
Despite her free-wheeling nature, when it came to running her house, Foster Mama had rules. There were dishes to be washed, floors to be mopped, tables to be dusted, beds to be made, dinners to be cooked.
Some of her rules related to hygiene. You were to take a bath or wash up at the sink every single morning without fail.
I honestly didn't know that's what normal people did. I washed my face and brushed my teeth twice a day, but the rest of my body got attention once a week. If that.
"Lord, that girl will take care of that face," I'd hear her remark to the other girls as I performed my nightly Noxzema ritual. Then she'd add that maybe I should wash my ass, too.
Thank God she took me in.
I was starved for order and for maternal affection.
From ages 12 to 16, I hadn't seen my own mother at all. Just before I entered 7th grade, Mommy tried one last time to win custody of us. During our annual summer visit, she took us to see a lawyer. When Daddy arrived, she presented him with court papers that said he couldn't take us back to Detroit.
He responded by bellowing, "Kids, get in the damned car!"
He got arrested for kidnapping ... but the charges were dropped when he proved that Michigan had jurisdiction over our custody case, and that everything my mom had tried to do through her local Pennsylvanian courts was null and void.
I had no more face-to-face contact with my mother until my junior year of high school.
With Foster Mama, suddenly, I had a mom again.
Someone to do my hair. Someone to buy me clothes. Someone to talk to about boys and sex and relationships, not that I had anything to talk about. I was the only virgin in the house, aside from the precocious three-year-old. So I mostly listened to the other girls' tales of love lost and sex had.
Foster Mama had been married once. Now her attitude was, "F*ck a damn husband! Unless he's somebody else's."
She'd never had children of her own, save for one miscarriage.
And she'd been in the foster-care business for over 10 years.
We were part business decision, part labor of love. For each child in her care, the state paid her $200-$300 per month.
So year in and year out, she took in the girls that nobody wanted and dealt with their emotional damage. She taught them how to cook and clean and care for their kids. And she helped set some of her "chirren" up with apartments, cars and furniture after they turned 18.
I loved Foster Mama, and I literally followed her from room to room like a baby chick.
She never once ridiculed me or tried to make me stop.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Introduction to the Detroit Hustle
Before I moved into the house for unwed teenage moms, I'd lived a pretty sheltered existence. Even though we ate welfare cheese and got free lunch and wore second-hand clothes and lived in a raggedy house, my family was mostly middle class in its values, if not in its outward appearances.
Foster Mama was anything but. She was unabashedly old-school ghetto, the queen of the Detroit hustle:
At least until she eventually hustled me, and until I eventually realized that in all of her hustling, she never, ever came out ahead.
But those realizations came years later.
In the short term, I blossomed under her unorthodox and unethical tutelage in a way that I hadn't under my dad's rule.
Foster Mama was anything but. She was unabashedly old-school ghetto, the queen of the Detroit hustle:
- She had two different names and two different ID cards that she used for different purposes.
- She had a beauty shop in her basement, and you could bet your life she wasn't reporting the income to any government entity in existence.
- She had an arrangement worked out with a cashier at a local supermarket. The cashier would ring up a small portion of Foster Mama's groceries. Foster Mama would slip her $50 as a bribe and take home most of her shopping cart for free.
- She kept in touch with someone who worked at a beauty school. He'd leave a stash of stolen hair supplies in a dumpster, and she'd swing by in the evening to pick it up.
- She knew where to buy food stamps for half their face value from local drug addicts who bought their drugs with their government provisions.
- She had a business relationship with one of Detroit's biggest drug dealers, an unassuming, unattractive seemingly poor guy – until he pulled a four-inch-thick wad of cash from his sock. He was her loan shark. (And he died a particularly bloody death a few years later – 40-something bullet wounds.)
- One of Drug Dealer's many side businesses was running Detroit's illegal lottery, where people would pay a nickel, dime or quarter to play the three-digit or four-digit numbers. For a while, Foster Mama was "the house" where people placed their bets, and I was the accountant who used my straight A's in algebra to keep track of the earnings. But Foster Mama even had a hustle on top of this hustle – every so often, but not often enough that Drug Dealer would get suspicious – she arranged for herself and a friend to hit the winning number for $500 and split it 50-50.
- And my absolute favorite of all her hustles was her booster clothing liquidations. She had a working relationship with boosters, slang for professional shoplifters. They would steal clothes from department stores, and Foster Mama would hold clearance sales in her dining room. The rule was, the consumer paid 1/3 of the ticket price. I went off to college looking real cute in all my 67 percent off stolen outfits.
At least until she eventually hustled me, and until I eventually realized that in all of her hustling, she never, ever came out ahead.
But those realizations came years later.
In the short term, I blossomed under her unorthodox and unethical tutelage in a way that I hadn't under my dad's rule.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
House for Unwed Teenage Moms
When I became an emancipated minor just shy of my 18th birthday, I went straight from my dad's cluttered kingdom to a neat, clean queendom ruled by Foster Mama.
Foster Mama specialized in the least sought-after foster kids imaginable: teenage foster girls who were now mothers themselves.
When I moved in, there was a twenty-year-old mom and her adorable three-year-old daughter. She'd been with Foster Mama since she was 16. And before that, she'd been in a group home, the last-ditch institution for foster kids who couldn't get adopted or placed in private homes. And before that, she'd been severely beaten by her own mother, who was still alive.
The other girl, who was a year younger than me, was very, very pregnant. She'd recently run away to Ohio with her boyfriend, and the cops had just brought her back. Her mother was dead. And she once admitted, with a mixture of embarrassment, sadness and humor, that her mom had tried to "rob a damned D.O.T. bus."
The saddest case was that of little Ingenue. She was 12 when I first moved in. Foster Mama had taken care of Ingenue and her two little brothers back when they were still in preschool. She had pictures of them in their little school clothes and was very close to adopting all three of them, when their biological grandmother stepped in and fought for custody. Not because the grandmother loved them, but because she wanted the welfare check.
Now seven years later, Ingenue lived in a broken-down house on the East Side of Detroit with her grandmother and a host of drug-addicted uncles, while her two juvenile-delinquent brothers ran the streets unsupervised.
I wasn't a high-school dropout with a baby. I was a high-school scholar with a future.
Foster Mama specialized in the least sought-after foster kids imaginable: teenage foster girls who were now mothers themselves.
When I moved in, there was a twenty-year-old mom and her adorable three-year-old daughter. She'd been with Foster Mama since she was 16. And before that, she'd been in a group home, the last-ditch institution for foster kids who couldn't get adopted or placed in private homes. And before that, she'd been severely beaten by her own mother, who was still alive.
The other girl, who was a year younger than me, was very, very pregnant. She'd recently run away to Ohio with her boyfriend, and the cops had just brought her back. Her mother was dead. And she once admitted, with a mixture of embarrassment, sadness and humor, that her mom had tried to "rob a damned D.O.T. bus."
The saddest case was that of little Ingenue. She was 12 when I first moved in. Foster Mama had taken care of Ingenue and her two little brothers back when they were still in preschool. She had pictures of them in their little school clothes and was very close to adopting all three of them, when their biological grandmother stepped in and fought for custody. Not because the grandmother loved them, but because she wanted the welfare check.
Now seven years later, Ingenue lived in a broken-down house on the East Side of Detroit with her grandmother and a host of drug-addicted uncles, while her two juvenile-delinquent brothers ran the streets unsupervised.
(Foster Mama eventually won custody of teenage Ingenue, but the story doesn't have a happy ending. Ingenue, an unwed mother of two, was shot dead by one of her baby's fathers at age 19, in front of one of her toddlers. And Foster Mama died of heartbreak shortly thereafter.)Moving into foster care was my first real inkling that as bad and as sad and as weird as I'd had it, there were a lot of kids who'd had it much, much worse.
I wasn't a high-school dropout with a baby. I was a high-school scholar with a future.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Daddy Blues
My junior year of high school was one of the darkest years of my life. I was so depressed, I couldn't feel anything at all. I was numb.
Somehow or another, I started seeing a shrink at the Lafayette Clinic. Once a week, I'd take the bus downtown, and sit with my male psychologist.
And say nothing.
I'd just stare at the wall until time was up, answering his questions in one syllable or not at all. Then I'd walk to Greektown for a Stroh's ice cream.
It wasn't that I didn't want to talk.
It was just that I'd learned that silence was a powerful protection against Daddy's tirades. If I didn't talk, there was less chance that some innocuous comment would send my dad over the edge and into the school principal's office, where I would surely be embarrassed. Or that I'd mouth off to him and end up getting a backhand slap to the forehead.
So I developed the habits of stony silence and of tuning out my surroundings.
Along with skipping school ... often. Arriving whenever I felt like it, but staying until well after school was out ... because the school hallway was so much better than being home with my dad.
During this period of dark depression, the unthinkable happened. I got a B on my report card. In journalism. From my favorite teacher.
I hadn't seen one of those since the 5th grade, when I'd decided that if I couldn't be pretty, and I couldn't be well-dressed, and I couldn't be well-fed, and I couldn't have a mother, and I couldn't have a normal dad, and I couldn't have a normal life, at least I could be the smartest person in my school, with the report card to prove it.
Now I was out of the running for high-school valedictorian, which had always been my goal.
Things got worse in senior year, when I became a de facto only child. Alone with Daddy, with no siblings to cushion the blows. My older sister was away at college. My younger brother had visited my mom for the summer and decided not to come back. And my Best Friend, who had always lived a few blocks away, was going through her own family turmoil and had just been uprooted to a different neighborhood.
So I was dealing with my dad all by my lonesome, which also meant dealing with his Bow Wow Babes. They would raid my bedroom while I was at school and steal my stuff. Once, my purse went missing, and I eventually found it in my dad's bedroom closet.
Another time, a rash of expensive things disappeared from my room. All of my makeup, plus a $42 necklace-and-earring set I'd bought myself with money from babysitting or pushing shopping carts or shelving library books or doing office work or winning writing contests.
I was livid. My dad said he would get my stuff back, but he didn't. So I wrote him the meanest, rudest, three-page piece-of-my-mind that any angry teenager ever dared to write to her ill-tempered father.
And I asked my journalism teacher, who had a daughter around my age, if I could move in with her. She turned me down flat, but discussed my situation with the vice principal of my school. His wife worked at an agency that placed black foster kids into homes.
And ultimately, that's what I became. Two months shy of my high-school graduation and my 18th birthday, I became an emancipated minor and unofficial foster kid.
Somehow or another, I started seeing a shrink at the Lafayette Clinic. Once a week, I'd take the bus downtown, and sit with my male psychologist.
And say nothing.
I'd just stare at the wall until time was up, answering his questions in one syllable or not at all. Then I'd walk to Greektown for a Stroh's ice cream.
It wasn't that I didn't want to talk.
It was just that I'd learned that silence was a powerful protection against Daddy's tirades. If I didn't talk, there was less chance that some innocuous comment would send my dad over the edge and into the school principal's office, where I would surely be embarrassed. Or that I'd mouth off to him and end up getting a backhand slap to the forehead.
So I developed the habits of stony silence and of tuning out my surroundings.
Along with skipping school ... often. Arriving whenever I felt like it, but staying until well after school was out ... because the school hallway was so much better than being home with my dad.
During this period of dark depression, the unthinkable happened. I got a B on my report card. In journalism. From my favorite teacher.
I hadn't seen one of those since the 5th grade, when I'd decided that if I couldn't be pretty, and I couldn't be well-dressed, and I couldn't be well-fed, and I couldn't have a mother, and I couldn't have a normal dad, and I couldn't have a normal life, at least I could be the smartest person in my school, with the report card to prove it.
Now I was out of the running for high-school valedictorian, which had always been my goal.
Things got worse in senior year, when I became a de facto only child. Alone with Daddy, with no siblings to cushion the blows. My older sister was away at college. My younger brother had visited my mom for the summer and decided not to come back. And my Best Friend, who had always lived a few blocks away, was going through her own family turmoil and had just been uprooted to a different neighborhood.
So I was dealing with my dad all by my lonesome, which also meant dealing with his Bow Wow Babes. They would raid my bedroom while I was at school and steal my stuff. Once, my purse went missing, and I eventually found it in my dad's bedroom closet.
Another time, a rash of expensive things disappeared from my room. All of my makeup, plus a $42 necklace-and-earring set I'd bought myself with money from babysitting or pushing shopping carts or shelving library books or doing office work or winning writing contests.
I was livid. My dad said he would get my stuff back, but he didn't. So I wrote him the meanest, rudest, three-page piece-of-my-mind that any angry teenager ever dared to write to her ill-tempered father.
And I asked my journalism teacher, who had a daughter around my age, if I could move in with her. She turned me down flat, but discussed my situation with the vice principal of my school. His wife worked at an agency that placed black foster kids into homes.
And ultimately, that's what I became. Two months shy of my high-school graduation and my 18th birthday, I became an emancipated minor and unofficial foster kid.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Mixed Messages and Bow Wow Babes
Saying my dad often behaved inappropriately is like saying rain is soggy. Inappropriate and my dad go together like coffee and cream.
Most dads with daughters don't walk around the house in their underwear. But my dad sure did. And still does.
Most dads don't brag about how much poontang they're getting. But my dad sure did. And still does.
Most dads don't make flamboyant statements about how high their IQ is and how long their penis is. But my dad sure did. And still does.
Living with my dad was a study in mixed messages.
My older sister and I were expected to be smart. We were expected to bring home good report cards. We were expected to go to college. And we were even held to a higher academic standard than our younger brother, because "little girls mature faster than little boys."
But back of all that expectation was my dad's constant assertion that every woman who succeeded in business was a dizzy broad who screwed her way into a position of power.
The zenith was when Detroit Mayor Coleman Young got caught with his pants down. A high-ranking employee from the Department of Public Works hit him with a paternity suit – and won. "How the hell does a thirty-something chickiepoo get to run the Department of Public Works?" my dad would grumble aloud at the TV, and then answer his own question.
Talk about mixed messages.
My dad's idea of sex education was to counsel me and my sister to remain virgins because "sex was a powerful, special thing" that we needed to be mature enough to handle.
But then again, one of his favorite phrases was, "Candy's dandy, but liquor's quicker," and we got to see the truth of that statement close up. My dad had casual encounter after casual encounter with some seriously ugly creatures that I nicknamed Bow Wow Babes.
My dad would show up, usually on a Friday or Saturday night, with some tipsy woman. He'd sit her at the kitchen table (along with us kids) and feed her some (usually burnt) dish, accompanied by a glass of his famous juice – generic Kool-Aid mixed with pulpy lemonade mixed with random spices mixed with sugar. Or, if he had some in the house, wine.
After a short, romantic dinner for five, my dad would take said Bow Wow Babe up to his room and close the door. We knew what that meant. We'd better not knock, and we'd better not disturb Daddy.
A half-hour or so later, the door would open and Daddy would whisk said Bow Wow Babe out of the house and into the Detroit night, and we'd never see that particular (toothless, ignorant, incoherent) one again. Often, he'd leave a used condom floating limply in the toilet.
Talk about mixed messages.
He'd urge us to be careful as we walked to school, because it wasn't uncommon for Detroit schoolgirls to get raped, and occasionally killed, by serial rapists who never seemed to get caught.
But his oft-repeated rape-prevention advice was to never "play games with men" by getting them all excited and then telling them no. He explained that it was physically painful for a man to try to stop once aroused, and if a women put herself in that position, she brought it all on herself.
Talk about mixed messages.
Um ... ok, Daddy ... I think I got it.
Most dads with daughters don't walk around the house in their underwear. But my dad sure did. And still does.
Most dads don't brag about how much poontang they're getting. But my dad sure did. And still does.
Most dads don't make flamboyant statements about how high their IQ is and how long their penis is. But my dad sure did. And still does.
Living with my dad was a study in mixed messages.
My older sister and I were expected to be smart. We were expected to bring home good report cards. We were expected to go to college. And we were even held to a higher academic standard than our younger brother, because "little girls mature faster than little boys."
But back of all that expectation was my dad's constant assertion that every woman who succeeded in business was a dizzy broad who screwed her way into a position of power.
The zenith was when Detroit Mayor Coleman Young got caught with his pants down. A high-ranking employee from the Department of Public Works hit him with a paternity suit – and won. "How the hell does a thirty-something chickiepoo get to run the Department of Public Works?" my dad would grumble aloud at the TV, and then answer his own question.
Talk about mixed messages.
My dad's idea of sex education was to counsel me and my sister to remain virgins because "sex was a powerful, special thing" that we needed to be mature enough to handle.
But then again, one of his favorite phrases was, "Candy's dandy, but liquor's quicker," and we got to see the truth of that statement close up. My dad had casual encounter after casual encounter with some seriously ugly creatures that I nicknamed Bow Wow Babes.
My dad would show up, usually on a Friday or Saturday night, with some tipsy woman. He'd sit her at the kitchen table (along with us kids) and feed her some (usually burnt) dish, accompanied by a glass of his famous juice – generic Kool-Aid mixed with pulpy lemonade mixed with random spices mixed with sugar. Or, if he had some in the house, wine.
After a short, romantic dinner for five, my dad would take said Bow Wow Babe up to his room and close the door. We knew what that meant. We'd better not knock, and we'd better not disturb Daddy.
A half-hour or so later, the door would open and Daddy would whisk said Bow Wow Babe out of the house and into the Detroit night, and we'd never see that particular (toothless, ignorant, incoherent) one again. Often, he'd leave a used condom floating limply in the toilet.
Talk about mixed messages.
He'd urge us to be careful as we walked to school, because it wasn't uncommon for Detroit schoolgirls to get raped, and occasionally killed, by serial rapists who never seemed to get caught.
But his oft-repeated rape-prevention advice was to never "play games with men" by getting them all excited and then telling them no. He explained that it was physically painful for a man to try to stop once aroused, and if a women put herself in that position, she brought it all on herself.
Talk about mixed messages.
- Sex was special and sacred, but not so special and sacred that my father didn't have a different Bow Wow Babe every weekend (and sometimes more than one during the same weekend).
- I was supposed to take his advice and be a smart virgin, but if I wanted to get anywhere with my career I really needed to be a dizzy, manipulative broad who slept with the right men.
- And I needed to say yes to all men in all sexual circumstances or they'd be in physical pain and have no choice but to rape me.
Um ... ok, Daddy ... I think I got it.
Friday, June 5, 2009
Meet My Dad
Everyone who knows me asks the same question: Why don't you write about your dad?
They say that because they know he's about 10 billion blog posts waiting to happen. A character so infamous he was lampooned by a Detroit TV station and became a local celebrity against his will. The alpha and omega of all my man issues. And without question the most influential person in my life.
I don't write about him primarily because I don't want to hurt his feelings. He's still alive. And I wouldn't want him to be offended if he happened to stumble across this blog.
But I really can't write the next few chapters without explaining how it is that I came to college completely messed up, an emotional wreck and a relationship disaster waiting to happen.
So you've got to meet Daddy in order to meet 19-year-old me.
In a nutshell, my dad is a bitter, frustrated genius with minimal social skills. He reads voraciously and incessantly. National Geographic. Time. Road & Track. The Detroit News (until some labor dispute pissed him off in the 80's, and he permanently switched to the Detroit Free Press).
He doodles incessantly on yellow legal pads. Not drawings. Calculations. Math formulas. Half-formed dreams of car parts he wants to design.
His house is a wreck of Oprah-esque "clean up your clutter" proportions. Magazines and periodicals stacked to the ceiling. Car parts strewn hither and thither. Nothing ever, ever thrown away. And don't forget the grime. Growing up, we were the only family on the block to have motorcycles in our living room ... and a live mushroom growing under the bathroom sink.
Then there's my dad's personal appearance. He's unkempt, bedraggled, snaggletoothed. He hasn't shaved in more than 30 years, and his sad, little, nappy beard absolutely refuses to grow. It just lays on his face in a curly tangle and hides his drop-dead-gorgeous dimples.
People who don't know him thinks he's a bum, that he's ignorant, that he's just another inner-city casualty. What they don't know is that he came from an uppity, snooty, could-almost-pass-for-white-if-the-hair-was-a-little-bit-straighter family of school teachers and administrators. That he had a somewhat privileged upbringing as the son of a school principal.
And that he basically couldn't keep a job because he knew more than his supervisors and wasn't shy about telling them so in colorful, profanity-laced language.
Growing up, everyone – and I do mean everyone – accused me of looking and acting just like him, which was the easiest way to send me into instant infuriation.
When I was in 5th grade, I wrote a short story called "I live in a madhouse" which basically summed up my take on a colorful and unusual childhood that included the weirdest dad in the entire universe and no mom.
Don't get me wrong. I have a mom. She too is alive and well.
But my dad literally stole me and my two siblings from my mom, obtained the iron-clad blessing of the Michigan Third Circuit Court and raised us as a single parent.
How in the world did that happen?!?
Easy.
My mom has bipolar disorder. And although my dad is clearly as crazy as my mom, he doesn't have the commitment papers to prove it. So he won sole custody and raised us in his cluttered Michigan madhouse, while my mom lived 500 miles away in Pennsylvania with a new husband 30 years her senior.
Life with Daddy was a trip, and it paved the way for all the trippy, sucky, yucky relationships that dotted the landscape of my 20's.
They say that because they know he's about 10 billion blog posts waiting to happen. A character so infamous he was lampooned by a Detroit TV station and became a local celebrity against his will. The alpha and omega of all my man issues. And without question the most influential person in my life.
I don't write about him primarily because I don't want to hurt his feelings. He's still alive. And I wouldn't want him to be offended if he happened to stumble across this blog.
But I really can't write the next few chapters without explaining how it is that I came to college completely messed up, an emotional wreck and a relationship disaster waiting to happen.
So you've got to meet Daddy in order to meet 19-year-old me.
In a nutshell, my dad is a bitter, frustrated genius with minimal social skills. He reads voraciously and incessantly. National Geographic. Time. Road & Track. The Detroit News (until some labor dispute pissed him off in the 80's, and he permanently switched to the Detroit Free Press).
He doodles incessantly on yellow legal pads. Not drawings. Calculations. Math formulas. Half-formed dreams of car parts he wants to design.
His house is a wreck of Oprah-esque "clean up your clutter" proportions. Magazines and periodicals stacked to the ceiling. Car parts strewn hither and thither. Nothing ever, ever thrown away. And don't forget the grime. Growing up, we were the only family on the block to have motorcycles in our living room ... and a live mushroom growing under the bathroom sink.
Then there's my dad's personal appearance. He's unkempt, bedraggled, snaggletoothed. He hasn't shaved in more than 30 years, and his sad, little, nappy beard absolutely refuses to grow. It just lays on his face in a curly tangle and hides his drop-dead-gorgeous dimples.
People who don't know him thinks he's a bum, that he's ignorant, that he's just another inner-city casualty. What they don't know is that he came from an uppity, snooty, could-almost-pass-for-white-if-the-hair-was-a-little-bit-straighter family of school teachers and administrators. That he had a somewhat privileged upbringing as the son of a school principal.
And that he basically couldn't keep a job because he knew more than his supervisors and wasn't shy about telling them so in colorful, profanity-laced language.
Growing up, everyone – and I do mean everyone – accused me of looking and acting just like him, which was the easiest way to send me into instant infuriation.
When I was in 5th grade, I wrote a short story called "I live in a madhouse" which basically summed up my take on a colorful and unusual childhood that included the weirdest dad in the entire universe and no mom.
Don't get me wrong. I have a mom. She too is alive and well.
But my dad literally stole me and my two siblings from my mom, obtained the iron-clad blessing of the Michigan Third Circuit Court and raised us as a single parent.
How in the world did that happen?!?
Easy.
My mom has bipolar disorder. And although my dad is clearly as crazy as my mom, he doesn't have the commitment papers to prove it. So he won sole custody and raised us in his cluttered Michigan madhouse, while my mom lived 500 miles away in Pennsylvania with a new husband 30 years her senior.
Life with Daddy was a trip, and it paved the way for all the trippy, sucky, yucky relationships that dotted the landscape of my 20's.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Once More, Slowly
I've already shared the story of how I lost my virginity at age 19, but it's kinda the Cliff Notes version. It was only my second blog post, and I hadn't quite found my way into the multi-post diary format.
So I crammed the entire episode into 337 words, prompting my friend Chief to gently remind me that I didn't need to race through each story just to get to the punch line.
So now I'm going to take a deep breath, beg your indulgence, and retell the story.
Only this time, I'll tell you more about the guy and more about how it all ended.
But before I even get to him, I'm going to tell you a little bit about my dad, who could single-handedly be the subject of an entire blog. (My sister half-jokingly suggested I start an I-survived-daddy blog called Scarred for Life.)
Just a little bit, so you can understand how a nice girl from Yale gave it up to a small-time drug dealer, then dated a closet-homosexual jailbird, then lived with a 50-something self-proclaimed revolutionary, all before the age of 23.
And you thought my late twenties were dramatic!
So I crammed the entire episode into 337 words, prompting my friend Chief to gently remind me that I didn't need to race through each story just to get to the punch line.
So now I'm going to take a deep breath, beg your indulgence, and retell the story.
Only this time, I'll tell you more about the guy and more about how it all ended.
But before I even get to him, I'm going to tell you a little bit about my dad, who could single-handedly be the subject of an entire blog. (My sister half-jokingly suggested I start an I-survived-daddy blog called Scarred for Life.)
Just a little bit, so you can understand how a nice girl from Yale gave it up to a small-time drug dealer, then dated a closet-homosexual jailbird, then lived with a 50-something self-proclaimed revolutionary, all before the age of 23.
And you thought my late twenties were dramatic!
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