Sure, I'll Be Your Black Friend

by Ben Philippe

  I meet friends for drinks now. Individually, mostly. I don’t have a cohort and have given up on looking for one. Single-strand acquaintances work best for me.

  I imagine—as one does—that if I were to get shot by a cop on the way home (it’s very cute you think there would need to be a reason) that I’d earn a full obituary. Local professor, published author, beloved something or other . . . Look at how cute his dog was! That’s worthy of a hashtag. My reveries are sudden and violent like that: morbidity that slips into a kind of sentimental snapshotting of my life as it might appear on the front page (of the Post, not the Times: I’m not an egomaniac) in past tense.

  Marty is the first friend I pitch this book to. Well, friend by proxy. Marty is Canadian and moved to New York City after a stint in San Francisco, working for a rideshare company whose app you most likely have on your phone.

  I like Marty. Marty is the same age as me, with a thicker French-Canadian accent, blond, good-looking, and short. I like my very good-looking white friends to have noticeable flaws. At five-feet-nine myself, the two- to three-inch height difference I share with most friends leaves me with the literal short end of the stick. That said, Marty has very square shoulders. I slouch and slump while he manages to stand tall, despite being five-feet-six.

  At our second bar of the night, what I’m working on as a writer becomes a natural lily pad for our conversation.

  So, I go through it; through this. I tell Marty about the chapter headings you will find in this book, in their ill-formed stage. The notes written on my phone, the self-sent texts. Loose threads of experiences that shared a commonality (me: Black; world: white) but no thesis and with enough embarrassment and awkwardness along the way that an editor—and eventually a reader (Hi!)—might see something worthwhile in it.

  “It sounds interesting,” Marty says politely afterward.

  “Write what you know, right?” I shrug, because self-deprecation is how I’ve learned to deal with this author thing (see also: Ivy League thing; see also: graduate school thing).

  Marty nods, and our conversation moves on.

  Despite his slacks, stock market sheen, and grade-A posture, there’s a reckless side to Marty that I admire. He doesn’t like to go home early. He casually makes plans to meet around 10 p.m. on Saturdays, and the third bar isn’t automatically the end of an evening to him. Marty likes his pub crawls. He tells stories—barroom legends that get better with each telling—of nights that turned into mornings and of backseat bodily fluids encountered as a driver in San Francisco. Some of them might even be true.

  In truth, I’m not sure how much I like Marty. I’m also not sure how much he likes me, to be honest. Stick us in a dungeon with electrodes applied to our nipples and interrogate us, and we might rank each other a four on a ten-point scale. “Yeah, he’s cool” might be something we say about the other person to some third party that we one day learn we have in common.

  Guys don’t need to like each other to hang out in this loose way. We can be amicable without being tight. Hang out for drinks, then go weeks, months, without texting before hanging out for drinks again, never getting closer.

  I’ve come to realize that liking someone—truly delighting in seeing their face, hearing their voice—is not a given in adult friendships. Adults have ritualistic catch-ups that involve Google Calendars and an internal downgrade of what it means to be friends. No one is spitting into their palms and giving each other high fives within five weeks, know what I mean?

  Adulthood cedes passion to banality, ushering in “Let’s have dinner and catch up” rituals of going through the motions. Young friends love each other. It’s why I enjoy writing them in young adult books. They tattoo each other’s names on their wrists, and sleep in the same bed, and dislocate shoulders pulling each other onto trains.

  The tragedy of a guy like Marty in a city like New York is that he moved here too late. The reckless twentysomethings who could have been his tribe have settled. Marty moved in just late enough to be lonely. It’s a common problem in New York, at least for naturally social people. Marty would be most at home with a bunch of bros around a big barbecue, alternating between tank tops and shirtlessness, but he’s yet to find that kind of friendship here.

  Hang out with him, our mutual friend Georgie messaged me over Facebook. Stop cancelling, you hermit! Georgie likes to joke that I’m gay in a way that felt loving in high school but feels actively problematic now that she’s a thirty-year-old married well-to-do Montreal lawyer and I’m a Manhattan bachelor staring down the barrel of my thirties.

  Admittedly, I am a bit of a hermit. Despite the gasps that my rent may draw from non-Manhattanites, it’s a steal for my apartment’s interior and this rapidly gentrifying corner of West Harlem. I like to enjoy it. I’ve finally reached the age group that matches my indoor low-key interests: TV, writing, trying a recipe out of nowhere. I fill up my social tank by hanging out with Marty once in a blue moon, sometimes once a season.

  It takes effort to hang out with Marty. Marty wants a ride-or-die bro: someone to forge more barroom legends with. Unfortunately for us both, I’m not as good of a wacky sidekick as I used to be these days. Marty smells like recreational cocaine—sweat and gasoline—without having ever talked about recreational cocaine near me.

  So, instead, Marty and I intermittently hang like this. We talk a lot about his dating life. Which app, what girl. Marty likes Asian women, which he attributes to his time in San Francisco.

  In another world, we might be closer friends. Or, we might dislike each other in some sharp, noticeable way. But we haven’t hung out enough for that to be the case. We’re stuck in the middle ground of near-thirty-year-old men looking for something. Really, our closest point might be that we would both feel bad being at home at 9 p.m. on a Saturday, single and living in Manhattan, albeit for different reasons.

  At our third bar, after a game of ordering pickleback shots at every stop, Marty looks at me, a bit glassy but still holding his alcohol leagues better than I hold my own. The booze has started to peel away some of the veneers of polite restraint from our conversation: it feels easier.

  “About your book,” he says, a good two hours after first landing on the appropriate lily pad and shouting out of necessity because, well, loud West Village bar on a Saturday night. “Aren’t you afraid people will think you hate white people?” he repeats after a failed first attempt.

  “Nah,” I shout back.

  It’s a ridiculous thought, and I can’t help but think he’s completely missed the point. I haven’t even started writing more than just notes, I explain. This is just a seed. Books are extremely long processes. I say this with the expertise of someone who has now written two young adult novels. He stares at me, a half-smile on his face.

  “I don’t hate white people!” This could become exasperating.

  Someone hears me, and it’s a silly enough thing to say out loud that Marty and I both laugh.

  “It sounds like you hate white people. A little.”

  “How?” We’re both talking seriously but through bursts of laughter, which is how we’re able to talk seriously in the first place. Picklebacks are truly disgusting.

  “You’re writing about all the white friends who think you like them . . .”

  “Not all of the people I write about are my friends.”

  “Right, right, but some of them are. Some of them think you like them.”

  “I do like my friends,” I defend, trying to keep my tone light.

  “Right, okay,” Marty says with a dismissive wave. Marty doesn’t always like snarky Ben. “But you’re not just like, ‘I like Jean-Martin, Jean-Martin is so great’ for three hundred pages.”

  My default language has become English over time and exposure, but Marty’s brain still fully operates in French, hence why his hypothetical names are thoroughly French Canadian. How Bilingual Are You? had been one of our first conversational lily pads, back when we only had Georgie in common.

  “Yo
u’re going to criticize these friends,” he continues.

  “But you actually consider that racist? How is that racist?”

  “Did you talk to them? These white friends you are going to write about? Are you going to ask them before you trash them?”

  I shrug. I hadn’t planned on it.

  “See?” he concludes.

  Despite his lack of an actual argument, I detect a touch of smugness. That might be unfair. He might just be a good-looking white guy smiling and happy to have been heard. It’s sometimes hard to invent a difference there. He does not sound concerned that he will be included—zoink!—but rather offended on behalf of people who look like him and might be.

  “Well, I don’t consider writing about them racist,” I say, feeling cornered, though still unclear as to his whiskeyed objections. “I’m just, I don’t know, sharing my experiences. I . . .”

  I have something to say, I want to answer. Something that was born in Haiti, raised as the only Black guy at Saint-Esprit Elementary, the Black Ivy League student, the Black professor, the Black Airbnb user, the Black writer.

  But Marty might be right. I might just be looking for an outlet through which to make cheap jokes at the expense of a class that cannot be wounded or marginalized. It wouldn’t stop me, mind you, but I really should know my own intentions.

  “. . . I just want to write it,” I say instead.

  Writing is selfish and I never feel as powerful as I do when doing it. Even if all these labels are fragments of different chips on my shoulder, I get to milk that sucker, don’t I? My ancestors were goddamn fractions.

  “It’s not fun, you know?” Marty says, conceding, but not backtracking, while we stay on the same conversational lily pad for a beat longer than I’d want.

  “What’s not fun?”

  “Being the white guy in all those stories. The default bad guy every time.”

  Maybe we’re both a bit drunker than expected. Maybe Coors Light would have been preferable given our level of nonintimacy.

  He shrugs, wanting to have fun again, and I’m there with him. “I guess I just don’t think about race as much as you do.”

  It should be said that I’m known to have an expressive face. Flip to the back cover. It’s a very Play-Doh–like situation. Unless I’m actively smiling through it, you’re likely to know what I’m thinking. Once again, my face betrays me.

  “No, see!” he says loudly, trying to be heard above “Californi-cation,” which someone has apparently paid their life savings into playing on the wall-mounted jukebox. “That face! That’s what I mean. It’s like we have to be the villain of every story.”

  A vaguely snarky reply forms in the back of my mind. Picklebacks are disgusting but not that strong. Instead, I sublimate the urge, making a mental note to write about this later: the writer’s talent for literary revenge. The villain of every story?

  Come on—how was I not going to put a chapter on Marty in this thing after a line like that? Because now, there would definitely, definitely be a book.

  “I’m not telling you not to write it,” he says, shoulders uncharacteristically sagging. “It sounds interesting.”

  “Then what are you saying?” I say. Something about my voice must sound angry or challenging. I realize that I am suddenly angry. Angrier than is warranted in the moment, or than I fully understand. I recognize my tone before my words slip, and it pains me to have been drawn into this picklebacked outburst. Like a stovetop going from cold black stone to bright red too quickly.

  “Sharing my experience.” He smiles. If he was smug before, now he’s a little uneasy, having sensed my discomfort. One of us has to give the other an exit, but I’m tired of being put on the defensive.

  “Of it not being easy to be a white man? With dual citizenship, a six-figure salary, and a freaking motorcycle in storage somewhere in Brooklyn?”

  “Correct. It’s a burden.” He smiles, and we both laugh. That’s the exit, and we take it.

  The evening doesn’t descend any further into hostility. We hang out as usual. He takes me through his dating profile, explaining his logic in photographs. As it turns out, there’s a very sound White Man logic to all these boat photos, but that is not my story to tell. In the back of my mind, a weirdly defiant voice decides to write my first entry about my friend Marty.

  This is a stove I want to touch.

  THINGS YOU PROBABLY SHOULD NOT SAY TO YOUR BLACK FRIEND

  We should begin by setting some boundaries—y’know, for the uninitiated who normally don’t think about race too much. To paraphrase an old significant other who would not tell me who they were texting and giggling with in the middle of the night, right next to me: “Boundaries are good!” Our friendship, after all, is newly minted. Consider this a preventative chapter. An abridged catalog of things not to do. If we were to meet in person, we might go through these as flashcards with a stack of books over your head and a pencil in your teeth. Yes, there will be a quiz, and yes, as you will see, I’ve heard variations of all these things before.

  “Can I touch your hair?”

  Situation in which this might arise:

  I’ve been rocking the same haircut since I was twelve, and at some point, while standing in line at the movie theater, you might find yourself drawn to my plumage. It’s inexplicable. A slight twinge in your hand. Is it a Brillo pad? Is it soft or coarse?

  Why not?

  We already know the answer to that one, don’t we?

  If respecting the personhood of others isn’t enough for you, how is the fact that I’m now bravely in my thirties and that a breeze could jump-start my receding hairline? I feel it receding at night. Who knows where your sticky little hands have been or what hair-receding toxins they carry? Six feet away, please.

  And if you must know: I condition every other day. It’s softer than a Pikachu’s underbelly. Not that you’ll ever know.

  How your new Black friend might respond:

  “Can I play with yours? I want to do a whole ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ number under the dandruff.”

  “Did you see that? That couple was looking at us. They’re mad because we’re interracial.”

  Situation in which this might arise:

  At a restaurant with your Black soon-to-be significant other. Or almost-significant other. It’s that delicate week where labels haven’t been applied yet, but they’ve been purchased, and you’re not on Tinder anymore because if one of their friends saw you, it would be an unspoken betrayal.

  Why is it wrong to point this out to your Black friend, date, or lover?

  Well, as the Black person in that scenario, what are you expecting from me here? What do you want me to do? Do I go over there? Do I tip you back and French you in the middle of a restaurant? Do I pull my shirt off in one motion, oil up my belly, and motion for said couple to throw down, right here and now? I’m just left wondering how often you’re scoping the room for intolerance while I’m making a case for my being a romantically and sexually viable human being, which is already an intricate dance with lots of arabesques.

  “Why, I don’t care if you’re blue, green, red, black, or yellow! It’s all the same to me.”

  Situation in which this might arise:

  Um, the roomier corners of a very simple mind?

  Why is it wrong to say this to your Black friend?

  “Why, I don’t care if you’re Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, or Tim Tebow, it’s all the same opening act to the halftime show to me.”

  Cool story, and I see what you’re going for here, but, um, yeah . . . I’m Black. Dark-skinned Black, if you want to go there. You should see that. In America, a “race-blind” world simply amounts to a white world in which the rest of us are quiet with pursed lips, not making a fuss. As your friend, I will go to that lame work party where I don’t know a single soul with you so you have “someone to talk to”—you should likewise be willing to occasionally be discomforted by the racialized reality of our world for me.

  “I’m
just not attracted to Black features when I swipe on the apps. You get it, right? It’s not racist; you and I are friends.”

  Situation in which this might arise:

  You generally being a bit of a douche, slightly tipsy, and a lot single.

  Why not?

  Congratulations: you’ve just voiced a preference no one asked for followed by three inaccurate things in a row! My smiling in those moments does not make us friends. Sometimes a smile is the safest way to briefly show fangs.

  “I just really don’t think about race.”

  Situation in which this might arise:

  In the middle of a conversation about some instance of racism as we watch TV. I’m upset. You shake your head from side to side, confused and angered at the state of the world. How can anyone be so racist? you might say. People should be judged by their character, not the color of their skin. And then you drop the above platitude with a look meant to reassure me that you are a good person . . . only to look worried as I turn toward you like a velociraptor who just heard a pin drop in the other room.

  Why not?

  I understand what you’re trying to do, and I know you mean well, but race, that pesky ole thing, exists independently from you, regardless of whether or not you exercise the privilege afforded by not having to think about it.