Madonna and Me (10 page)

 

My babies are a pug (Luke) and a French bulldog (Leia). They are the best little people in the world.

 

Star Wars
dogs as stand-ins for actual human children? Deal breaker. We’re out.

Check this one out! MILESAWAY is a black dude! I knew there were non-Jewish women crawling around the site, but I’d never seen a black guy on J-Date . . . oh, he was a biracial Jew. Like Lenny Kravitz! He had kind of a jazzy, light-radio way of writing, and he used the phrase “my woman” with too much frequency. But on the plus side:

 

My woman is intelligent, insightful, worldly, sexy, playful, mindful, and happy. She’s warm, romantic, emotionally stable, and spiritually evolved. Soft and talented lips are a plus.

 

Madonna always said she was a great kisser! Remember—kissing, thumbs up; hummers, thumbs down?

What about HOLYHUNK212! Total man meat, he looked like that
Italian guy from the first
Sex and the City
movie . . . wait, the picture wasn’t him. HOLYHUNK212 was actually a husky nerd, luring Jewesses in with a fake photo. But I found that hilarious. He wrote:

 

“I AM A FUN LOVING DIVORCED MAN WHO WAS MARRIED FOR TWENTY SIX YEARS AND HAVE HAD A CRAZY TIME MEETING MANY WOMEN BUT AM NOW READY TO SETTLE DOWN AND FIND THE RIGHT WOMEN WHO WILL MAKE ME FEEL WHOLE AND SOMEONE I CAN SETTLE DOWN WITH AND ENJOY THE INTAMACY I HAD WITH MY FIRST WIFE.”

 

Okay, he had a caps issue and a run-on sentence problem, plus he lived in Jersey, but at least HOLYHUNK212 spoke from the heart. Too bad he was looking for a thirty-year old. Oy! Lots of guys available, but where were the sleek and sophisticated professionals? Did they not go on J-Date? Did they have their own boutique site, CEO-Date? Hey, was this one? Nah, he spelled ENTERPRENER wrong, so forget it.

All this made me wonder why hunting down men on J-Date was so much fun when I was doing it for Madonna, but so agonizing when I did it for myself. I guess it’s that strange phenomenon where you can look so ugly to yourself in a picture, but in someone else’s eyes, you’re beautiful. Or how you can fix other people’s problems so easily when your own seem impossible to solve. When it comes to finding true love, everyone can tell you how it’s supposed to be done, but you don’t really know until you get your heart broken yourself.

But . . . one final scan . . . Look! NYCMENSCH! An actual mensch by name! He wrote:

 

“I was the youngest son of nine in a loving, orthodox Moroccan family. I have a master’s of law in economics, I consider myself a businessman with a lawyer’s edge. Several years ago a tragedy struck my life, when I lost the three most important women a man could ever love in a
one-year period: my wife, my mother, and most importantly, my daughter. Nonetheless, I am a very happy person. I have tried to go on with my life, by giving back to the Jewish community and by living life as fully as possible.”

 

Heartbreaking, genuine, and so sweet. We’ve found our man, Madonna: NYCMENSCH. Let me know if you want your password.

“Your sexual identity is so important. The more you pay attention to it, the more you realize that just about everything in the world is centered around sexual attraction and sexual power.”

Tamara Lynch

 

 

 

 

 

MADONNA’S BOOK WAS large and black, with
SEX
embossed on the front. The coffee-table book of all coffee-table books was an enigma to me, sort of like Madonna herself. One day she was telling you to “Open Your Heart” and the next she was telling you to open your legs, but whatever her message, people were listening. To Brad, my new gay friend, Madonna’s book was the Holy Grail. To me, a tough biracial girl from a small town in Pennsylvania, it wasn’t that big of a deal. Hadn’t we seen her naked already? But I stood next to him in his freshman dorm room itching for a glimpse; there were rumors of bestiality and naked pictures of Vanilla Ice. Cradling the book on his forearm, Brad opened it to a random page and the words “I like my pussy. Sometimes I stare at it in the mirror” burned up my retinas. My face got hot and I smoothed a hand over my brittle straightened hair.

Reaching across Brad, I turned the pages for more.

“Dude, this is porn,” I said, transfixed.

“It’s not porn, it’s
art,
” Brad shot back. “I waited in line for hours at the record store downtown to buy it.”

I thought this was extreme for naked pictures and a CD, but Brad loved her, wanted to be her. A magical spell glued us to each lust-filled scene as we flipped through depictions of S&M, prostitution, and orgies. I was about to walk away when he literally squealed.

“Look at this!” He held up the book.

I blinked; then blinked again. There was Big Daddy Kane, one of my favorite rappers, in a threesome with a black woman and a fully naked Madonna. It was a Madonna sandwich, giving new meaning to the word “Oreo.”

“What is
he
doing in there?” I barked.

“
Girrrrl
, you know she likes the chocolate.”

Grabbing the book, I brought it to my chest for a closer look. Kane was cupping Madonna’s vagina and giving her a “I’m gonna fuck the shit out of you” look, while her upper body twisted to give the black goddess behind her some tongue. I went from mortified, to intrigued, to kind of turned-on.

It wasn’t the sex that gripped me, it was the
interracial
sex. I was raised by my white grandmother in a dominantly white town and had endured years of racial taunts for being half-black. The worst of them was being called an “abomination” by my high school humanities teacher, who had preached to my class that mixing races was wrong. My defense was to straighten my curly hair in an attempt to look like everyone else, but my tan skin was like a permanent smudge on the Caucasian canvas of my high school class. The only other kid who was tortured more than me was Reggie Johnson, a black kid adopted by our town’s white reverend. If I had wanted a date, he was my only option, but he was two grades below me, and I didn’t want him. I wanted Jeremy, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed basketball player in my class, but that crush stayed a secret. By the time I was a freshman in college, my hair was fried from straightening it every day, my self-esteem was bruised, and I was ready to go from blending in to being invisible.

Closing the book, I handed it back to Brad.

“I didn’t know Madonna was down with the swirl,” I said.

“The swirl?”

“Yeah, black and white love; like a chocolate and vanilla ice cream cone.”

“Well, then she’s the
Dairy Queen
,” Brad laughed. “You remember ‘Like a Prayer?’”

“Yes, I do,” I said with a sigh. I remembered it well—controversy about Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” video had roared through the halls of my high school. She was kissing a black Jesus. To me this was major—and totally unexpected from a pop star. Although I had appreciated Madonna as an artist and could sing along to several of her songs, I had none of her albums. N.W.A, Janet Jackson, and L.L. Cool J had dominated my boom box. Madonna was blonde, boy crazy, and did everything she could to stand out from the crowd. I was brown, shy, and did my best to blend in.

To catch the video one night, my grandmother and I had assumed our living-room positions: me curled up on the Lazy Boy while she sat knitting in her rocking chair.

“Tsk,” my grandmother sucked her teeth. “Why is she kissing him like that?”

“Like what? It was a peck. You watch simulated sex on
Days of Our Lives
,” I said, thinking it was the kiss she objected to.

“She shouldn’t be kissing a black man.”

My eyebrows shot up.

“Gram, you do realize I’m half black . . . ? Your daughter did more than
kiss
a black man.”

Her knitting needles raced.

“Well, you’re half white too,” she’d said.

Hours after I left Brad and the
SEX
book, I couldn’t get Madonna’s scenes with Big Daddy Kane out of my head. I found myself questioning
what she was trying to say with those pictures. Sure, they were shocking, but I didn’t think it was just about sex. The pictures of her crawling from the ocean with wavy, golden extensions trailing over her breasts made me think of Aphrodite, offering mortals a taste of enchanted love. Could she be healing the gap between black and white through her vagina? She was a pop sensation and an advocate for homosexuals and women’s sexual freedom. He was a lyrical genius and a hip-hop icon. Maybe she was melding not only race, but also cultures. Whatever it was, she was giving herself freely, gender and race be damned.

Later that night at a popular off-campus bar, I spotted Billy, the six-foot-two, 220-pound senior wide receiver I had been hooking up with for a few weeks. We were both mixed, which made me think he was the perfect guy for me, so I stuck around even though he treated me like a booty call. He winked at me as I squeezed through the crowd, but he didn’t talk to me. His arrogance was exasperating. Moving past him, I glimpsed a cute white guy wearing a driver’s cap in the corner. His eyes caught mine and he smiled, but I quickly looked away and found my friends.

With Billy across the room ignoring me, it was hard to enjoy myself, and my beer went down too quickly. I walked to the bar for another.

“Hi,” I heard behind me.

From over my shoulder, I saw the white guy in the driver’s cap leaning toward me. My gaze set on his wide chest before locking onto his green eyes.

“Oh, hi, sorry . . . am I in your way?”

“No, but it would be okay if you were.” He had a deep voice and a nice smile. My skin tingled, but I clamped it down
.
White guys didn’t flirt with me.
He probably has a blonde girlfriend somewhere
, I thought.

I grinned and turned toward the bar.

“I’m Hank,” he said over my shoulder. “I’ve seen you here before.”

“Yeah, I come here sometimes with my friends,” I said, sliding a glance at Billy, who was frowning at Hank and me. I gave Hank a full smile.

“You’re cute.”

“Actually . . . I’m Tamara,” I said nervously.

When my beer appeared on the bar, I grabbed it, waved a goodbye, and ran back to my friends. But as I sipped my beer and snuck glances at Hank, I had a nagging feeling that I had missed out on something.
Could he have been flirting with me? Should I have stayed and talked to him?
My high school hang-ups drowned me. I remembered my constant senior-year daydream of having sex with the blonde basketball captain, Jeremy. I’d wanted him to take me to prom, but he had asked a redheaded cheerleader with milky white skin and freckles instead. As the prom had grown closer with no invitation, I’d started a list of guys to ask.

“Are you going to ask Reggie Johnson?” my best friend Nici had asked me during chemistry lab. Nici had dyed her hair blonde and hair-sprayed her bangs into stiff ringlets. I had straightened my hair that morning and donned a black T-shirt over my black acid wash jeans.

“Ewww. Are you serious?”

Reggie was fifty pounds overweight, wore Coke-bottle glasses, and had a lisp. Contrary to stereotypes about black people’s natural abilities in sports and music, Reggie rode the bench in football and his rendition of Run DMC’s “Walk This Way” during our talent show was God-awful.

“Well, he’s black,” she’d said.

My head snapped up.

“So I can’t ask a white guy, Nici?” I’d tried to study her face, but she wouldn’t look at me. She just shrugged and dipped her litmus paper in a beaker. I didn’t pursue an answer.

As I finished my beer at the bar, Kane and Madonna came to mind, and I imagined Hank and I in the same positions—sans the extra woman. The dream me was a caramel-colored goddess enveloping a
white knight with green eyes.
Madonna would have made that guy her bitch, not run away like a scared rabbit
.