Sure, I'll Be Your Black Friend

by Ben Philippe

“Twenty-nine million people in this state and you’re gonna go after a brother, huh?”

  He holds the phone for a few seconds as if considering a rebuttal and then hands it back to you before taking a step back to release you. In turn, you resist the urge to frantically rub your throat. He looks at you, nods, and tells you to take it easy before slinking back into the shadows.

  “Yeah, you too, bro. Take it easy.”

  Or no, actually, you suddenly feel like turning back and screaming, don’t take it easy. In fact, go die in a fire of Klansman anger, you freaking statistic. But you’ve already been stupid enough for one day—no one asked for the time in New York City. No one stops to answer. You think that back there, you would have been smarter than this.

  Don’t make eye contact with the two young Asian women—iPhones and clutch purses in hand—who look like they might be going up the alley just as you’re coming out it. Illogical as it is, don’t you owe him something? Didn’t he just do you a solid? Smile at them, apologetically maybe. They should know that some of us smile and will hopefully remember it, afterward.

  Get angrier with yourself with every step. There was no story here today. Nothing to update, nothing to see. Just two Black guys the exact same shade perpetuating stereotypes. The lawn chair breaks before Watson’s done. Aunt Atalante shakes her head. “Dead businessman,” Watson says and grins, dusting himself off and holding his side.

  I’ve thought a lot about not including this experience here. There’s something reckless about doing so. Why include a traumatic instance of “Black-on-Black violence” as a stern-jawed blond woman on FOX news might call it, while making an argument for Blackness? Why not an essay on John Lewis’s legacy or 2016’s Best Picture–winner Moonlight? Or, the vibrant, unspoken kinship of a Harlem cookout in which I end up cackling with people I did not know until moments prior and who are now my cousins?

  The best answer I can come to is simply because it happened and left an impression. I remember the blade, the fear, and disappointment at the anticlimactic nature of my own death. I remember thinking of my mom and being relieved that I would never have to mourn her if I died here and now.

  I did not know this man. Whether or not he likes jazz, what his family looks like, if he can swim. On that day, he was to me the very image all Black men are weighed against: a criminal in the shadows, ready to pounce and take. There was no room for interiority in our blunt exchange. I did not see the soul in his eyes. I said what I said because I was reckless and afraid, looking for survival: “seduction” instead of “fight” or “flight.”

  It happened to me and it could happen to you, too. A person might gratuitously wrong you, target you, and that person might be Black. You might sit in a chair shaking for a few hours. Nothing about the incident takes away from that man’s humanity. He has not been downgraded to nigger for his sins. He should not be summarily executed should a trigger-happy officer walk by. I am not excusing the crime he possibly commited next or those he committed since. I am no less angry at the mugging or afraid of taking that path home for the remainder of my time in Texas. The slight trauma of having had a knife to my throat in broad daylight lingers for a few days. I may curse out the asshole a few times in the shower and pantomime the karate chop I should have given him in the moment.

  But, I also get to live in constant awareness that obviously all Black men are not like this because I am what he is, something that those two young women may not get. From afar, and without seeing the blade, you may have thought we were two Black guys lurking in the shadows, planning something. Forgive us.

  Twenty-Three

  Sure, I’ll Be Your One That Got Away

  “The airport, please.”

  All things considered, it’s something closer to vindictiveness than politeness that has me jump into the cab at the last minute and fold myself between her and her luggage in the back seat. It’s only when she inches closer to her window in response that I become aware of the true time commitment of this ride-along. Like so many things in my life—Texas, New York—it seemed like a good idea at the time. The promise of a story.

  But the fact was that I really was fine with this—with all of it—and when the cab had pulled up in the middle of our awkward porch-side goodbye, the opportunity to showcase said fineness one last time felt too enticing to pass up. It wasn’t just a story, but a story with a clean ending.

  However, the ride was now proving itself to be an extension of the weekend. There were unrecognizable bouts of dead air, the result of this third thing between us. Something thin, barely perceptible, that nevertheless touched everything. Conversation had to be consciously refueled with specific topics, and every red light and halted lane convergence now seemed like overtime to some game neither team was sure they were playing all that well.

  Even the cabbie seems to notice, eventually turning on the radio to fill the lull.

  I would not end college with a romance right out of a romantic comedy. Rather, I end it with a Mia. She’s the closest ribbon to a sustainable romantic connection I make. We meet in a sociology seminar on the concept of the “Culture Industry” that ends up being a journey into the professor’s obsession with Andy Warhol. The outline of Mia’s face shines in the dark as we sit one row apart in an in-class screening of the 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet. We are of that generation that simply throbs for a good “It’s complicated” on our Facebook profiles.

  She has flown out to see me on a whim. A few emails and she was on her way into Austin citing myriad reasons. Because she misses me. Because I was her first friend to have gotten his life together after graduation, from the looks of it (a very kind interpretation) . And also because she had “some news.” On the phone, it sounded like paperwork that she needed to get out of the way. It should also be noted that Mia is, simply put, rich as hell. Rich as hell in that way that waves it off as “my family’s comfortable” when she opens the door to a hotel suite on Columbus Circle to study for finals because the library is at capacity.

  We both take to our own window and develop a separate appreciation for scenery, feeling it important that our knees not touch. Having never been one for unfilled silences, it is still, of course, me that speaks first.

  “I have you—well, your character—say this line. In this story I’m working on,” I say.

  “Oh?”

  “ ‘Years from now, when you’re old and wrinkled, you’ll regret not having been more reckless.’ That’s what she says.”

  She chuckles, untying her traveling ponytail to rub the sweat at the back of her neck into her hair, still decidedly unaccustomed to the South’s oppressive heat. “Ben, that doesn’t sound like me at all.”

  We take the highway, and I distract myself by trying to read the fine print of passing billboards through the hundred-degree miasma.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t write about me for a while,” Mia eventually adds, still focused on her own brown and cracking side of the landscape. “It’s not all that healthy.”

  “We do healthy now?” I say, motioning between us with a grin.

  She reignites and extends her ring finger with all the decidedness of a middle one. The small but expensive and presumably flawless diamond catches the sun as she clicks her tongue twice. “We sure do, baby!”

  This causes an exhaust-valve fit of laughter between us that seems to lighten the air and loosen our knees.

  I catch the cabbie smiling in the rearview, on the outside of what to him must appear to be a pleasant inside joke between old college lovers. He seems friendly, and I wish his cabbie route extended to Sherbrooke, Quebec, seventeen years prior. I move my knee against hers, relieved when she doesn’t move away. This is how I like the world; at a distance and with someone at my side.

  Out of habit, I carry Mia’s luggage for her. In the unbearable heat, the slight fever I’ve been nursing since our little balcony tryst the night before surges through my body, until I can almost smell it. I had caught a fever senior year as well. My friend D
avid had come to visit New York, and after two days of sightseeing, I had lost my voice and skipped three days of class in the process. Mia had appeared with my favorite clam chowder soup from my favorite Columbia market deli, crackers, and takeout from Olli’s, and detailed notes from the hundred-person lecture we both shared, but where we did not sit together, waiting in my inbox.

  Later, she admits that it had been that night, with me freezing and in sweats shaking in her arms, that she had fallen in love with me. You were like an ice cream cone, dripping down my arm, she’d giggled the next morning. We don’t spend much time together after that. It’s one of those things: senior year is on fast-forward, the future was uncertain, I was going to Austin on a fellowship. Revisiting our old texts, her postcollege anxieties were about where she saw herself living, not what she’d be doing. Her uncle was giving her his condo. Mia is not an amoral wealthy white person. She never was. She just belonged to that tribe of people who sometimes get a condo gifted to them as a college graduation present.

  The airport is, as it turns out, a place of strict emotional detachment. Even in the South. Absent are the overwhelmed sobs at untimely departures and reckless hugging at delayed arrivals that I always remembered. Maybe those memories were simply misplaced scenes from movies. Like the vivid death by cops that I still remember from the end of Save the Last Dance.

  People yawn and sigh, seemingly at random, lost in their personal annoyances. This middle ground of “friends, really close friends” leaves us outsiders in the hustle of families, lovers, and soldiers, unsure of exactly which set to mimic. College was long enough ago for us to fall out of sync. Like a shameful percentage of college friends before us, we’ve lost that unique flow of ours and instead have gotten angular with each other. Passion has ceded to politeness.

  “Seriously,” Mia breathes, fanning herself with a magazine at baggage check-in with her hip out and left leg extended, posing for the passing security officer we both notice leering and abstain to mention. “Is it always this hot here?”

  “I don’t know yet. People say it cools down in November.”

  “It does! This is the worst we’ve had in a long while,” agrees the wide man behind us. “You’ll be pulling out the night blankets soon enough, believe me.” Personal conversations are apparently open guestbooks in this part of the country.

  She smiles warmly and instinctively borrows some of the stranger’s twang. “Well, we’re from the East Coast. Believe me, sixty’s still boiling for us.” The man chuckles and proceeds to share his very serious and not-at-all insane concerns regarding the East Coast.

  “. . . Chinese, Taiwanese, Indian, it’s all over the place! It’s good food, don’t get me wrong, but at the end of the day, it’s all borrowed, you know. You can taste it all you want but you’ll never know it, y’know. Not like a Lone Star steak. A steak here is just home, y’know.” The two of them drift in and out of this exchange as bags are processed and I stand on the sideline of this travelers’ exchange, feeling somewhat superfluous.

  “People are actually really friendly here,” Mia concludes, waving as the man finally walks away, tripping over nothing.

  “You know, not everyone has to fall in love with you,” I say, careful not to enunciate too well.

  “Please. I could be his daughter.”

  “Kind of my point. What’s your gate number again?” I non sequitur before she can reply.

  “Gate Four,” she says, thumbing through her phone. “Flight’s not for another two hours, though. We definitely overshot.” Her tone isn’t entirely free of accusation.

  “Better safe,” I mumble, ignoring the fleeting guilt of having shuffled her out of bed and life so brusquely that morning under the pretense that she might miss her flight. We linger a few feet away from the dreadful security check, which she doesn’t expect to take more than a few minutes without layers, carry-on luggage, or conspicuous ethnicity. I’m suddenly very ready for our second farewell.

  “Are you okay from here? I can’t go past the TSA check.” You can still be a good host while trying to get someone out of your life as soon as possible.

  “Well, we can sit out here for a little while if you want,” she suggests with a shrug, her way of sidestepping the actual request. “Two hours with nothing to do is a long time.”

  I don’t point out the book or headphones peeking out of her bag and follow her lead to a set of plastic benches by the terminal map. Once some privacy is regained, the silence once again becomes noticeable and the third thing reemerges. A part of me enjoys seeing her repeatedly check the time and realize that 120 minutes alone can be very pleasant.

  “Think you’ll stick it out, then? This new southern life of yours?” she finally asks, shifting the bulk of the discomfort back to me. Even during the relationship, inconveniently placed during the last stretch of college, this had been an early point of contention between us. One that had led to that last big fight and Have a nice life, asshole!

  As much as I hated to admit it, her certainty that I was too soft for the heat, isolation—“Not to mention all the football you’ll have to start watching”—and overall dismissal of the idea that I might enjoy life here beyond these graduate studies had given me something to prove.

  Answering now that I didn’t know, that I hated how orange-and-proud-of-it everything in Austin was, wasn’t an option.

  “Of course! Are you kidding?” Choosing writing as a professional career path has already made me a good liar. There’s no point in unraveling all that, not when the clock is ticking.

  A distracted “Hmm . . .” is all she gives, loading the sound to the fullest extent.

  “So where’s the honeymoon going to be?”

  “Tuscany.”

  Everything I’m suppressing must still somehow make it to my face, since she’s already shaking her head with a smirk. “I know, I know.”

  “And how old is this guy again?”

  She laughs. “Twenty-seven.”

  “Testicular cancer starts at twenty-eight.”

  She gives me a variation of the 2011 where-would-you-hide-a-dog-in-a-dorm-room-if-you-got-one-you-maniac look. My reply is a simple shrug. “I’m just saying.”

  She retreats into her phone, and I suddenly hate how strained it all still feels, and begin to fear that this is not fleeting but perhaps our new status quo.

  The rapid-fire sex that had interspersed the visit had only occurred in sudden bursts, always bookended by separate showers. First her, then me, and then a few hours of silence with her on her laptop at the kitchen table while I read in the bedroom. Until the showers themselves eventually overlapped and her improvised bed on the couch remained unfolded for the rest of the visit. That it was such a monumentally bad idea eventually became its own transgressive form of foreplay before falling out of my mind completely—although I noticed that, when she had the choice, she now slept on the right side of the bed, which was noteworthy because of the many nights I was awakened by a body rolling over mine to claim the left side of my dorm room single because that was the only one she could sleep on. I wondered at various points if she felt guilty, but never bothered to ask because the truth was that I didn’t.

  With two hours and nineteen minutes left to go, thanks to some delay in Chicago, I almost wish that this politeness would all suddenly unfurl and send us into a public shouting match granting me an excuse to storm out. Somewhere on her right inner thigh is a hickey, and I wonder if and how the purple bruise will be explained. Then again, she’s a much better liar than him. If the brief exposure to the heat hadn’t knocked so much out of me, I think I might take a poking stick to that bear just to see what happens.

  At some point her feet eventually find their way home, tucking themselves under my thigh when she stretches out on the bench, slow and careful like she thinks she has to get away with it. It’s positioned like this, exactly like this, that we’ve had our longest, most inane conversations, and something releases in my shoulders.

  “So,” I
venture, giving her plenty of time to interrupt, “would I like him?”

  The Massachusetts American man of the hour with bright white teeth in all his photos. Pink shirt on a boat, shirtless with a strapped-on backpack on a hike, leaning in front of the Brooklyn Bridge in sunglasses, good hair. There are 1,500 of this exact model being pumped out of the Tinder factories like Westworld robots every day.

  She smiles, having already considered the question at length, and just as I start to dread another polite answer she begins to shake her head.

  “You guys would hate each other within seconds.”

  She continues with a hint of pride in her voice. “Lola calls him the anti-you.” I frown, unable to read which of the two men this pride is leaning toward.

  I think back to that afternoon the air-conditioning had broken down, the only summer we lived together. We’d been driving each other insane all day in that cramped midtown apartment—too hot to talk, let alone touch each other—when she’d woken me from a nap by jumping on the bed with a tray of melting ice cubes in each hand. We waited for sundown, crushing ice between our teeth until our mouths were good and numb. We could have gone to her dad’s perfectly air-conditioned office suite in midtown. In hindsight, it might just be one of the most amazing things that can happen to a person; to have someone kiss you so long and with so little purpose that your entire system goes haywire: hot and cold, and wet and dry, until it all stops mattering entirely. That had been my second fever in our friendship together.

  “Stop that,” she says, leaning forward and tugging at my earlobe with the bad, bejeweled hand. It’s our first touch since our fingers grazed on the coffee pot handle earlier that day in a false hurry.

  “Stop what?”

  “You’re, like, romanticizing me again. I can tell.”

  “And he doesn’t?”

  “Nope.”

  Eighty-four minutes left to go, and neither of us seems too concerned to continue sidestepping the land-mine topics we’d so diligently avoided till now.