His gum, which he’d spat out the last time he was over, had blackened and stuck to my hardwood floor instead of to the bag in the garbage he was aiming for. Nickels and dimes were scattered everywhere. My room was lit only by amber Christmas lights; outside, the snow was still. His phone vibrated furiously with missed calls from his girlfriend.
“Can I smoke here?”
“No.”
He lit a cigarette anyway, knowing I hated it. He frowned as he inhaled.
“Well, that was fun,” he said, rolling onto his side.
I nursed the sinking feeling in my stomach that I had come to know well.
“Yep. Lots of fun.”
After our first night together, Anthony still smelled like Adidas cologne and spearmint, but he was different. He went from calling every day to calling me every weekend, until it was just on Saturday nights to ask what I was doing later. Every time I deleted his number, he’d call me and I answered. There was no redeeming myself.
I wanted to cut him off completely, and in those moments, I hated him as much as I hated myself for the excuses I made. Sober, he’d ask me to tell him all about my life, sitting patiently by my feet, telling me that he wished he could be like me—creative, kind, fearless. But then he’d ask me if buying a $300 ring was a nice Christmas gift for his girlfriend, and I’d lose the bit of confidence I had just pathetically built up. He would sit beside me, stroke my hair, keep my fingers warm with his lips, tell me how he liked me so much. A minute later, he’d be laughing in my face, pushing me away, staring at me without even blinking.
“What?” I’d challenge him back with my eyes, but he wouldn’t look away.
“Nothing,” he’d say after a long pause. But then he’d frown.
“Goddammit.” He’d frown and sigh again, piercing the heavy, provoking silence. He’d shake his head frantically, flailing around the room, throwing things on the ground as though trying to shut off his brain, laughing that wicked laugh. All the while, his eyes darted about, eyebrows always arched as if up to no good.
He was kind and then he was cruel, vulnerable and then abrupt, and I couldn’t reconcile the two. How he could gently kiss me goodbye every time he left and then ignore me for days. Through all of it, he still held me like I would break, unaware that he had already crushed me into pieces.
Act Four
CHORUS: The circus called. It’s accepting applications for CLOWNS.
On a frigid Saturday night at the end of November, Anthony called to invite me and Taz to Cobra. I declined; it was too cold to even fathom going out.
“Come on, E, don’t be an old lady,” he whined, already tipsy. “We have bottle service and VIP line bypass until 11:30. Be a Gemini, E. Be a fucking Gemini.”
The last thing any Gemini wants to hear is that they’re a party pooper. I looked at the time: 10:40. I was putting my zodiac sign to shame.
I told Taz to get dressed and I hopped in the shower, shaved my legs as fast as I could, and applied thick layers of grey and gold eyeshadow. We ran out—shoes half on, my jacket stuck in my skirt, Taz not even wearing a coat—and caught the bus by mere seconds, as usual.
We got to Cobra and went straight to the bouncer, passing the large line of complaining people. “It’s for Eternity, plus one,” I said.
The bouncer looked at the list, looked at me, looked at my plus-one, then back at the list. Finally, he let us through.
“E!” Anthony waved a hand at me. “That’s our booth over there.” He pointed towards the back-left corner of the club. “I’ll meet you guys in a second.”
There were a dozen Italians sitting in the booth. Behind them a glass case of decorative ceramic skulls with red lights flashed like a warning.
“Should we go over there?” Taz asked reluctantly.
“Well, yeah!” I said, confidently, so that Taz wouldn’t sense my fear. “I mean, we did come all this way.”
We walked up to the booth and said hello to everyone; only two people acknowledged us. The others stared at us and then at each other, perplexed. Then a miniature man with dark hair appeared out of nowhere and gave us two glasses.
“I’m Fabio, Anthony’s friend,” he said with a goofy smile. “Like the romance novels.” He winked at Taz and told us to have a drink.
I was in the process of pouring us a heavy-handed measure of vodka when I noticed some women and their boyfriends staring and whispering.
A girl with blunt bangs and dark lip liner got up and approached us
“Um, sorry, but that’s our alcohol and this is our booth.” Her face twitched as she tried to hold in her smirk. Her girlfriends giggled like hyenas behind her.
I grinned as I kept pouring. “Oh, I know that. We’re with Anthony—he invited us.”
Her heavily lined lips dropped into a scowl, and she retreated back to her seat. I poured some orange juice into my cup, took a long, refreshing gulp, then topped us up so we could get drunk and dance on her boyfriend’s bottle service–contribution money.
Around 1:00 a.m., when all I was seeing were flashing lights and those ceramic skulls that illuminated the faces of the glaring mean girls, Anthony grabbed me to him and whispered in my ear, “Come over to my place. Right now.”
Panic killed my buzz. We always went to my house; he lived farther away from downtown, in a middle-class area of west London that I wasn’t familiar with. “Can we go to my house instead?”
“No,” he growled. “My place or forget it.”
“How will I get home?”
“I’ll drive you home in the morning when Fabio returns my car.”
He was really good at that—being a Gemini. It was his way or nothing at all. I was getting curious about what his place looked like, anyway. I reluctantly agreed, and found Taz to let her know we were leaving.
On the street outside, the harsh wind lashed our bare legs as we tried to hail a cab for Taz. In her little black minidress, she crouched over and hugged herself, trying to get warm, cursing herself for not bringing her jacket.
“Here, take mine, I’ll have a ride in the morning.” I removed it and handed it to her, unable to feel the bitter winter wind with all the vodka burning through me, despite only wearing a hot pink miniskirt, a V-cut black tank top, and knee-high tan heeled boots.
Once the cab had arrived for Taz, we waved goodbye and got in our own. As we headed down to Anthony’s condo, I watched the meter increase—$13, $22, $30. I looked outside at the unfamiliar buildings, the area sparse except for a few abandoned strip plazas and beige high-rises. With each quarter on the meter, I regretted my choice a little more.
“So you’re sure you’ll drive me home in the morning?” I confirmed.
“I’m sure—I’ll call Fabio right now and remind him.” Anthony pulled out his phone and dialed Fabio’s number. I heard the phone ring several times. “He probably can’t hear it right now. But the car will be at my place by 8 a.m.”
My gut was telling me to take my ass back home, but I convinced myself that it was harder to explain tucking and rolling out of this cab fifteen minutes into the ride than to just go with it.
We went home and ravished each other.
The next morning, the sun peeked through the dark-brown wooden blinds, brightening up a bedroom I had only seen at night. It was the ultimate bachelor’s pad, with dark brown furniture and beige carpet; everything tucked away nicely in the closet behind frosted glass sliding doors. I shuffled towards the bathroom and saw a scary, frizzy-haired monster staring back at me in the mirror. Black flakes of what had once been mascara were littered across my cheeks. My hair had turned into a mini-fro, and my lipstick was all over my chin like a bad rash. I tried to fix the frizz with water, but it only made it worse. I tried to wash my face with wet toilet paper so I didn’t get makeup on his white towels, but that just added soggy white specks to my disaster of a dehydrated face.
“Bacon?” he asked, lifting the tongs towards me, a juicy piece dangling in the air.
“No thanks.” I quickly wiped the drool from the corner of my mouth and looked away. “Um, is your car back?”
“Uh…no. Fabio hasn’t returned any of my phone calls. He must be hungover.”
I thought about the cab meter. The tuck and roll sounded real good right now.
“Don’t worry, he should be here soon.” Anthony waved his hand dismissively while shoving the bacon in his mouth. “I’ll keep trying him.”
He offered me one of his T-shirts to wear. An hour and a half and seven phone calls later, I was feeling like a kid whose parents had forgotten to pick her up from school as I heard Anthony leave voicemail after voicemail until Fabio’s inbox was full.
“I don’t think the car is coming back anytime soon.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Maybe you should call a cab now.”
I blinked as far as the crust in my eyes would allow.
“Oh—right,” I stuttered. “For sure. Okay.”
I quickly gathered my belongings from his bedroom. He followed me in. I stuffed my phone into my pocket-sized clutch, picked my skirt off the carpet, and cleared my throat, waiting for him to give me some privacy. He didn’t move.
“Do you mind?”
“Yeah, no worries,” he said, as he turned to leave. “But make sure to give me back my T-shirt. My girlfriend got it for me.”
This was next-level pettiness. This jerk makes breakfast in his bougie name-brand cotton-blend pyjama set, offering me bacon that I can’t eat because we both know girls don’t chomp on greasy foods in front of fuck buddies. Then he kicks me out while I’m in a shirt that his girlfriend bought him—all because he didn’t hold up his end of the agreement to take me home.
All I had was my last thread of self-esteem, and all I wanted to do was go home and eat a five-egg omelette to soothe my grumbling stomach—but I had to walk out of his condo first.
I finished dressing, then put my knee-high boots back on in silence. Anthony suggested that I wait in the lobby.
“Do you want me to wait downstairs with you?”
“No, it’s okay,” I said, thinking maybe he did have a heart.
He smirked. “Good, because I wasn’t going to.”
For a moment I thought about trashing his place and eating all his bacon. Instead, I click-clacked my way down the hall, into the elevator, and down to the lobby. As the elevator dinged, signalling that I had reached the ground floor with its pristine marble and gold-accented decor, I shivered. I remembered that I had given my jacket to Taz.
My stomach sunk with each new revelation: Black girl with no jacket. Exposed in her 2 a.m. bar outfit at 9:45 on a late-fall morning. In a middle-class white-people building. Far from home. Oh. My. God.
I reluctantly stepped out of the elevator in my high boots, looking around for any sign of life and hoping it would die immediately instead of anyone seeing me like this. The lobby was surrounded by huge glass windows and the sun was pelting my body, which I took as a sign that God was either trying desperately to redeem me or testing me to see if I would burst into flames. I apologized to Him for my un-Catholic, premarital frolics, promising I’d make better choices next time if he just turned me into ash.
I walked slowly towards an expensive beige sofa, trying to silence the clicking from my heels, and plopped down. I looked straight up, right into the security camera pointed towards me. Behind me was the open door where the guard was probably watching. I quickly pulled out my phone and called my favourite cab company.
“Yes, hi. I need a cab,” I whispered as I gave him the address.
“We’re having a bit of a delay this morning, your cab will arrive in approximately thirty minutes.”
“WHAT?”
“Thirty minutes, ma’am.”
“Okay, fine. Just please tell him to hurry up.”
“Will do, ma’am.”
“Like, really hurry—”
Click.
To ease my racing thoughts, I tried to focus on something else, choosing the vase full of fake flowers and beige pebbles. I figured this low and desperate moment in my life would somehow make me eligible for Matilda-like superpowers, so I practised on the vase, chanting at it to tip over, hoping this would be enough to distract any cougars, trophy wives, or soccer moms who came through the lobby.
Ten minutes had passed and no one had come by. Just as I began thinking I could get through this, I heard the elevator doors open.
No.
A woman and her two young daughters emerged, talking cheerfully. I tried to hide myself, make myself compact, but I quickly learned it’s quite hard to hide a hoe in an empty lobby. Then another tidbit of knowledge came back to me: Anthony was one of the very few young guys in the building, making this encounter even more painful. Well, would you look at that, Joanne! Anthony has a mild case of Jungle Fever!
Their talking died down as soon as they saw me. I looked over and the youngest girl, no more than seven, was staring at me blankly with her finger in her mouth. I felt bad, thinking that I may have just afforded this child her first traumatic memory. The mother looked at me for a moment, wide-eyed, mouth open, clearly disturbed, so I smiled at her.
What else was I supposed to do? I hoped she’d take pity on me, or at least feel nostalgic about her university days. Instead, she put a hand on each of her daughters’ shoulders, her eyes still on me.
“Honey, take the keys and meet me by the car,” she whispered to the eldest, and pushed them towards the door.
I was mortified. It was more than just being caught in last night’s sexy outfit. The look on their faces had shrunk me into nothing. I was out of place on the creaseless beige couch, between the cream walls, among the white people with their perfect clothes in their expensive condos.
Where men have the privilege of fucking without repercussions, women are always crucified for wanting sex. For women of colour, this relationship is complicated by deeply entrenched stereotypes about our sexuality. For centuries, Black women have been called Jezebels, freaks, and Hottentots; we’ve been labelled primitive, always ready for sex, and always willing to give it.
White women have long been expected to adhere and aspire to the cult of domesticity, the ultimate “true” womanhood—piety, submission, and purity—whereas Black women are considered inherently and irredeemably incapable of possessing these qualities. Instead, Black women face what Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins calls “controlling images”: stereotypes and tropes that contribute to the sexual objectification that seeks to keep us oppressed.
In her 1990 holy grail, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, Collins says these controlling images are always changing and adapting, each becoming a new starting point for a cultural moment that creates new forms of oppression and commercialization. In other words, the names may change as we evolve—Ratchet, Thots, Bad Bitches—but they are still rooted in the same oppressive, damaging narratives about Black women’s sexuality.
As casual-sex and hookup culture becomes more prevalent—and the images associated with Black women change in name but continue to be reinforced—it becomes harder for Black women to reclaim their sexuality. Women are demonized for wanting sex; for a Black woman, who is already dealing with stereotypes about her animalistic, insatiable sexuality, it is almost impossible for her to say she likes sex without facing judgement and slut-shaming.
These damaging images have become normalized in our culture and are commonplace: Is it true that Black women are good in bed? I’ve never had sex with a Black woman—can you be my first? Once you go Black, you never go back! It can make it hard to find and have a respectful sexual relationship—or an
y relationship at all—that isn’t tainted by the idea of a Black woman’s uncontrollable sexuality and how someone can benefit.
To be a Black woman today means to live in constant hyperawareness of your body. There are voyeuristic eyes on us at all times, objectifying us into parts—ass, pussy, breasts. When we date non-Black people, we know that we, not our partners, are sexualized. We know the sexual connotations of the word interracial. We battle with the myth that our bodies are dirty, raunchy, deviant, animalistic, ungodly.
I used to see girls walk home barefoot on London’s main road at 8 a.m., holding their vodka-covered stilettos in one hand and using the other to keep their dress from riding up. Guys wandered the streets with dishevelled hair and undone dress shirts and no clue where they were. Walk-of-shamers were as common as morning joggers.
Students—old enough in the public psyche to be sexually active, yet young enough to be messy, hedonistic wrongdoers—get a pass to publicly express sexuality for four years. And this has afforded young women more freedom to take charge of their sex lives. Running back home at dawn with a ripped shirt or a broken stiletto heel is a time-restricted, socially accepted norm for white students.
To do the walk of shame as a Black woman is to confront stereotypes about our sexuality head on, using the same tools and words that oppress us. It’s reclaiming the right to celebrate our sexuality in public. It’s releasing ourselves from the bonds that have kept us shackled and oppressed in our communities, in society, and within ourselves.
In recent years, young women have used the power of collective walking to take back their right to have consensual sex—and celebrate it. Take Back the Night, which started in the 1970s, has grown into an international event on a mission to end sexual and partner violence. SlutWalk began in 2011 after a Toronto police officer told female students at a safety forum at York University that they shouldn’t dress like sluts if they wanted to avoid sexual assault. It is now a global movement in over two hundred cities and over forty countries.
For years, Black feminists in the U.S. have argued that SlutWalk excludes Black women. Amber Rose started her own SlutWalk several years ago as a response to slut-shaming from both tabloids and her exes, Wiz Khalifa and Kanye West. Rose’s movement has made space for Black women to condemn sexual injustice and victim-blaming, while also promoting sex positivity and highlighting the unique challenges that we face.
They Said This Would Be Fun Page 14
