Bitch Is the New Black (17 page)

“Helena. Helena! Over here.” Yes, these were the right people. My people.

“This is horrendous.” I needed to get that out before my butt hit the seat Rasheed held out for me. I needed to make my dissatisfaction with real life known.

“Shut your face, dick towel,” he said. “I've got someone for you to meet.”

I searched Hillary's face for approval. Finding none, I rolled my eyes and tapped the waitress. “One of those slurpees for lushes, please.” I'd wasted three-inch heels.

This “someone” was a five-foot-four baldhead from New Jersey, but who claimed Brooklyn instead. He had on the jeans
of a much taller/wider man and had mistakenly decided against a belt. Employing his left hand to that end, his right was busy with a highball of Courvoisier. Since neither was free to shake my hand hello, I got a head nod, delivered with all the bravado of a man twice his size. Oversize suit jackets will do that. I gave Rasheed the side eye before he left the two of us alone. Waiting three very polite beats, I excused myself to the ladies' room. Baldhead's eyes dug into the back of my neck as I tried and failed to disappear into the crowd. Was he willing me back, or working out the tools necessary for murder? I took my chance but didn't make it far.

“So you weren't going to say ‘hi,' were you?” I'd recognize that sarcasm and sweater vest anywhere. One was patterned and the other practiced.

Derek was Rasheed's gay husband without the sex or social aptitude. Theirs was a love fashioned around boat shoes (without the socks) and seersucker. Derek and I shared an equally preppy night of the missionary position the year before. It was the first time I'd played shirts and skins in the bedroom. He kept his on. The. Entire. Time. Lifting the front hem over his head only when my eyes were closed (which they clearly weren't) in order to get some flesh on flesh as opposed to boobs on Hanes. The whole thing felt very gyno.

“Heeey, you,” I said in the voice usually reserved for work functions. “What has your life been about?”

While Derek thumbed through his CliffsNotes—working in London, partner track, yachts—I drifted off to wherever bored hearts go.
Argyle probably felt funny against bare breasts, and this top wasn't so slutty I couldn't pull it off on the train tomorrow morning. His man boobs weren't so much bigger than mine that it'd be weird. If we left now…

“See, Helena and I used to be lovers.” I caught him mid-e.g., offering me up as an example on his sex CV to some chick with short hair and a pretty face who'd sidled up to our conversation while I was pipe-dreaming. Grateful that the mood had been murdered, I backed away real slow, pivoting just in time to catch Baldilocks giving me the squinty face from the bar. Again, I didn't know whether to be horny or horrified, so I chose both, but kept moving just in case.

Hillary, always anxious to set people up (for failure, I think), wanted to know what I thought.

“Of Weirdo McFeirdo over there?”

“He's been eyeing you all night.” She was squealing.

“And this is a good thing? Please tell Rasheed that he's an epic failure and should log off of life immediately. What the hell was he thinking?”

“He said that you wanted a dude who, and I'm quoting you here, ‘would punch me in the throat and say let's fuck.' So there you go,” she said, making her arm into a teapot spout, boiling in the direction of Bald, James Bald.

“I can't begin to define sarcasm in a bar. Plus, if this cat wanted to grab my throat he'd have to leap like, I don't know, three feet. Raj could've at least picked someone who can give me a good thrashing on his own hemisphere.”

To take my mind off things, we slurped down more frozen primary colors and talked about the debauchery waiting to happen. Dee was sharing a hotel room with Stu, who was presently getting a lap dance from someone who was not Dee. Apparently, Justine was a “squirter,” which didn't surprise me, since I'd just witnessed her demonstrating what a “scorpion” looks like in cheerleading, gymnastics, and now dive bars. In brief, it is when one reaches behind one's back, grabs a foot, and pulls it up to
one's head. Right. Squirting seemed like just another mundane display of physicality she'd share with the class. At least that's what she told Doug, who, despite his diminutive size, would hook up with three different girls that weekend. Derek? Zero. A fact that supremely vexed him and Courtney, who secretly hated me because she had a none-too-secret thing for Derek. We'd met more than once, and she always introduced herself anew like an amnesiac, thus proving the hatred theory, because I hate when people do that because you know they're just doing it to infuriate you, unless they, in truth, suffer from amnesia. Then it's just sad.

Truly pathetic was the fact that I treated these people like glitches in the system despite being right there with them, fucking up the connection with my supposed awesomeness. And still, I was the one walking to the train alone an hour later, deftly ignoring the “hey shawtays” of men eight feet tall sporting wife beaters that could hardly contain their protruding pecs. I wanted everything, but really only one thing. Sparks! “You just wanna be all up Dex's booty,” was Adrienne's analysis. I had my doubts about the prevalence of sparks in there, but saw her point. It took another year for me to get my head out of his ass and back to where it all started.

Took me a year to remember the truth behind Rasheed's very first note. The list of the reasons why it was hard to be bourgie and black. No. 5: The clusterfuck. “And even more common is the fact that we've often developed platonic relationships with opposite sex folks, who if we were just meeting them, we might pursue amorous intentions with, but because we've been friends for so long, that's off the table. Or we already dated their monkey ass, and it didn't work out.” RBBDA became required source material. If I was going to get a life, or at least get
some
(since everyone else was, even Justine, the high-kicking squirter), I'd need some guidelines.

I reread the old post, “I've Got a Crush on You,” which attempted to spell out the ABCs of turning a homey to a husband. Scrolling through two pages of responses, I was surprised to find my own name among the “experts.” What I had to say was profoundly pointless: “There's a fine line between putting yourself out there and playing yourself.” No shit, Sherlock. Last year's me had nothing but craptastic advice for this year's version, because it never works that way around, except for in
Encino Man
.

I needed advice, because there was this new guy, Jake—an old friend I met through older friends, who after several thousand lines of chat, finally delivered a jewel, “I have two moods: happy and pissed off.” Lust. Ignited. Actually, it was Frances, my mother, who lit the match, describing him twice as having a “nice build,” which obviously grossed me out at first and then at second made me think. Soon I was spending an extra ten minutes in bed every morning, fantasizing about this nice build of his and how it would look erect. I e-mailed a new-boy alert to Adrienne and Gina with the disclaimer that nothing could ever happen because we were in the friends zone—the danger zone.

“So did you tell Jake you want to ride his pony yet?” Adrienne's nicknames for anatomy rival an eight-year-old's.

“I do not. Shut your mouth, monkey breath!”

“Umm-hmmm.”

I hung up on her and immediately got back to my life according to Gchat.

Waiting for pepperoni and black olives never hurt so good. I wore a V-neck with no bra and jeans with no shoes. This was casual. What‘s a slice of pizza and an episode of
Seinfeld
among friends? Then again, isn't this how things always go down in the pornos? Pizza guy, girl with no panties, a six-pack, the TV's on but no one watching, and then bowchickabowbow!

We typed on our laptops for a few hours, me hoping he was messaging someone about the fraught sexual tension between the cushions of my very grown-up couch. And he, redacting top-secret legal mumbo-jumbo, totally unaware of my uptight nipples.
That's when I decided all Ruhbuhduh really was, was just a lot of gibberishishy gobbledygooked hogwash. A bunch of grown-ups trying to grow their own luck. Ruhbuhduh Shmuhbuhduh, might as well be Pig Latin for “Go fuck yourselves, 'cause nobody else is going to.”

Only once in my life have I ever wished for a time machine—or,
lacking the technology, a driver's license.

It was Christmas in Los Angeles, which despite not looking much different than any other time is, indeed, special. I'd spent nearly a decade out on my own—even going so far as to tilt my “west sii-ide” the 90 degrees it took to claim the east—but California was still called “home.” There'd always be one week at the end of December when the weather was in the high eighties and time was frozen in the late nineties. Not only was I back, but
we
were. Gina knew all the old stories I only wanted to hear in L.A., my grown-up lullabies. Like that time Richard Shin threw a “bomb” made of water and single-ply from the second-floor boy's bathroom onto Janet Lalebekeyan's back and then she bitch-slapped him with the same wet toilet paper in front of
everybody
. Everybody was small enough to fit in a carry-on that week. Actually, everybody was just me and Gi.

I think
we
all started after I went away to college. She started calling to talk about the gorgeous eggheads I'd be meeting. Fools that we were. Eventually we became more than each other's sounding boards—we were each other's wailing walls. Whenever I got back into town, there was only one question: “Dude, what are we doing
esta noche
?”

On this particular break “we” now included a new dude named Bilal. She wanted me to meet him, and instead of being envious, I was excited. Too bad he left me wishing for a pimped-out DeLorean capable of turning back time to before the night started.

The three of us were having drinks at the bar/lounge in the Sofitel off Wilshire Boulevard near the Beverly Center. A glass of Riesling was $16, but we weren't college or even graduate students anymore, so fuck it. Gina and Bilal had fallen in love a few months before, after a day spent in bed watching
Clue
—her favorite movie of all time, next to
our
favorite, which is
Teen Witch
. Unable to top his unflinching knowledge of
Clue
's complete working script, Gina gave Bilal a pass on being half African.

A brief note on xenophobia and dating: when you're from Los Angeles, where one is either black or Mexican, not Martian, your opinion of people opposite the globe is formed almost exclusively by the movie
Not Without My Daughter
. Forged in the fires of Lifetime,
NWMD
is a film about race, religion, family, abuse, divorce, escape, and Sally Field's convincing hijab. Basically, she marries a doctor who happens to be Iranian (as played by Alfred Molina) and everything's all lovey-dovey until he takes her and their kid to Tehran and then goes bat shit crazy after praying or something. In the end, Field plus her daughter escape on a magic carpet, kind of. Anyway, the movie also doubles as code word for racism in romance if, finding ourselves in mixed company, we need to express fears over a potential partnering of one with an
other
.

“Ooh, look at Punjabi MC being all sexy at the bar. Hollaaaaaah….” one of us might say in reference to an attractive gentleman of South Asian descent.

Cutting her off after a quick up-and-down, the other might reply, “Dude. Not. Without. My. Daughter.” And the issue would get tabled—indefinitely. Gina's looking past Bilal's African-ness was huge, therefore prompting me to utter the phrase, “I like him for you.”

Third-wheeling it suddenly didn't seem so bad. She was super hyped about a guy, and I wanted to bask in some of the afterglow. Unfortunately, my time in the spotlight was all too brief.

Okay, there was a tranny at the bar who kept eyeing Bilal. Gina pointed her out. When he (Bilal, not the she-man) walked over to chat it up with her (the tranny), we were horrified. The scoop was that the tranny (name unnecessary) was in fact a real live thirty-five-ish woman with whom Bilal had done some things. How we came to find out this information I was never sober enough to know, but once it was revealed, there was no stopping the onslaught. Also I don't think she looked so absolutely mannish—there were some very women-of-the-WWF thighs and a pair of arms that would decimate Angela Bassett's in
What's Love Got to Do with It
—but nothing that would place her last in the LGBT acronym marathon. But Gina said, so I went with it.

“They didn't do it or anything,” Gi reported back after interrogating Bilal over by the men's room. “But they got close. Made out, but didn't do it. I was like, ‘Oh word,' and he was like, ‘It was a bad look. I was drunk.' He admitted the folly of his ways—immediately.”
Fine, can we go back to talking about
my
life now?

We'd been pounding Rieslings for about three hours. The last lick of the scoop was that Bilal and the tranny were only one naked sexy time removed, meaning that this was the chick
delivering the goods before Gina got the job. I won't say she was jealous, but she was definitely something close. My job as the best friend was to deflect. “Dude, look at her.” Knock back. “Puhlease, she's hideola!” Swig. “What the hell are they over there gumming it up about? Prostate cancer?” Chug-a-lug. When it finally came time to pack up our stink eyes and head home, I won't say we were drunk as fuck, but we were definitely close.

There's something that happens at the end of any night when a nondriver has been driven to some far-off locale—Beverly Hills, say—by a driver who has found herself exhausted by drink. Call it the whispering hour. It's when the driver slurs to whomever's closest,
Who's taking [social retard who can't drive] home?

Fortunately, since 1996, Gina and I have never had to suffer through the faked loss of hearing necessary for the nondriver to survive the whispering hour. The term
gas money
was Greek to me, but my lack of language skills never seemed to bother her. Whenever the lights came up, dunking whatever club in vampiric mace, I'd never have to pretend-hail a cab or ask who was heading my way—Gi was
always
heading my way.

With Tranny gone and the lights on, Gina, Bilal, and I waited for the valet to bring The Explorer around front (Gina's Ford Explorer has been around for more than a decade, earning through sheer guts the respect of a direct article). Standing far enough away that I didn't vomit from their cuddling but still close enough to make it obvious I needed a ride, I may have heard the soft grumbling of a quiet riot against taking me all the way across town to my grandma's, but promptly dismissed it.
Where to next, guys?
When I climbed into the backseat, though, the nonsexual tension was thicker than the Tranzilla's thighs, which is to say impossible to ignore.

Me playing dead wasn't working. Through the white noise of passive-aggressive mumbling from the passenger's side (a spot
already molded to my cheek specifications, but whatevs), it was clear that Bilal was pissy about something.
Were we back on the tranny thing? Come on guys, give it a rest.
I thought it best to decrease my surface area and disappear into the leather. While I spent the next couple of lights dissecting deserted sidewalks, attending the beat-up skin around my thumbnails, and knuckle-ironing my club jeans, the game of chicken happening in front reached critical mass.

“Drop me off, then.” His fingers already gripping the trigger.

“Whatever.” Her nerves already shot.

“I'm serious.”

Now, I've been accused by lesser beings of being a touch narcissistic, but this
was
actually about me. Boiled down to the basics, Bilal didn't want Gina driving me home, presumably because she was drunk, but probably because he wanted her naked at his house posthaste. He actually suggested I take a cab. She suggested he shut the hell up.

Then he was all, Drop me off. And she was all, Sure. And he was all, No, really. And she was all, Fine, Bilal. The whole scene was ripped from the pages of our ninth-grade yearbook—the one where Gina wrote, “KIT this summer and don't let these dudes get you down. Keep ya head up
” They were still one-upping each other when Bilal took whatever the opposite of a chill pill was and, hopped up on misguided courage, flung open the car door. While. The Explorer. Was still. In motion.

“What the fuck are you doing?!”

“Let me out,” he yelled, pretty pointless, since technically some of him was already out.

Gina busted a U-ie across four lanes of traffic and screeched up to the nearest stretch of curb. Then Bilal, open car door still in hand, leaped out without saying a word. The silence woke me up.

“Dude, what the—”

“Fuck it,” she said, staring straight ahead like a woman possessed, or one pissed the hell off.

To describe this new turn of events as awkward would not be understatement. It would be criminally negligent. First off, now I'm being chauffeured around like an overscheduled six-year-old on her way to yet another play date, while Gina—now cast as the overextended BlackBerry mom—barrels down Wilshire Boulevard, daydreaming about how different her life might be without the brat in the back. The weightlessness would take some getting used to, but at least she'd be free. More than a cock blocker, I was a relationship millstone. And it only took me a few hours.

We headed in the opposite direction of wherever it was Bilal dared himself out of the car. He was behind us somewhere, getting swallowed up by the L.A. night or propositioned by its employees. Four morphed into five morphed into six on the radio minute hand before either of us said anything.

“Dude, what the—” I felt that that needed some repeating.

“Dude, I can't.” What she couldn't didn't need repeating.

“We can't just leave him back there.” Note here the casual usage of the royal “we,” most often bandied about by those packing a nondriver ID. “How's he getting home?” Equally disingenuous, the nondriver always worries about how others are getting home even though she can do absolutely nothing useful in the situation seeing as how she, in title and definition, is a useless member of society. Even more applicable, the manless best friend always fucks shit up and then wonders aloud how to fix it.

“He said drop him off, so I dropped his ass off.”

“Jesus.”

Staring her down, I compelled her into turning around before we'd driven so far away it'd be a waste to go back—he'd either be
murdered or too mad. We pulled up near the corner and parked where Bilal went all Evel Knievel on us. He was at the bus stop now, lounging on a bench like he belonged there, wanted to be there.

“Go get him,” said Gina to the Helena reflection.

“Fuck!” replied Helena back to the car mirror.

I should also mention that at this moment in time I'd known Bilal for maybe eight hours, give or take however many times we'd exchanged cell phone “hi's” to the other in the background. Now it was my job to convince a known daredevil that although getting back in the car would be less exciting than hanging out on Beverly and Wilshire, it'd probably be more dangerous. Plus, I didn't think the buses even ran that late, and obviously he didn't have money for a cab, or else he'd have given it to me. Before Bilal would get off the bench, he had to say that Gina made bad decisions, and by this point I was inclined to agree. But since I
was
the bad decision, I kept my mouth shut and gave him an “Umm-hmm” instead. I did, however, mention something about him being totally right, Gina being totally drunk, and it being totally 2:00 a.m. Years from now, they'd be telling 2.5 kids this story.
Good thing Helena was there!
On the walk of blame back to The Explorer, I gave Bilal the new rules of engagement: no judging, no whispering, and definitely no leaping from moving vehicles—at least until I was out of the car. Then off to grandmother's house we went.

Everything was pretty normal for a while, if normal's definition is ass-numbing silence. Up front, I'm sure the two of them were busy practicing whatever speech they planned to deliver to the other in the morning. In my head, I was volunteering to take a damn cab or at least sleep on somebody's bumpy couch.
You two kids work it out in the bedroom, I'll be fine right here
. But I knew Gina wouldn't let me. Because by now it was the principle
of the thing. She was going to drive me home no matter the cost—relationship, gas money. I wanted to tell her something, anything, to make all this weirdness disappear, but I left it alone.

Eventually they did get into a debate of stage whispers about what bad decisions Gina made—namely, having me as a friend. Actually, I'm just assuming that last part, since I was playing possum in the back so well I forgot I existed, which was probably for the best.

The universe, or more tangibly the Los Angeles Police Department, has a way of reminding us of such things. The time machine would've come in handy right about now.