Sure, I'll Be Your Black Friend

by Ben Philippe

  I realized I could text her that—these exact words—and absolve myself of any further responsibility. But Not-Dave’s words kept echoing: I did not know this person. We could ride the same subway train, sit right next to each other, and probably not recognize each other. There was admittedly a bit of egotistical curiosity there, too: How long could this person I had never met remain upset at the prospect of not meeting me?

  “She likes you more than she ever would if she’d met you.” My roommate laughed. In a parallel universe, OneMilkTwoSugars and I had been dating for three weeks already.

  To ghost someone is to put them in a no-win scenario: if they seek closure, they are crazy. The more closure they seek, the more annoying they come off. It is a Chinese finger trap right there on your phone where applying pressure only makes it worse. Eventually, both the ghoster and the ghosted convince themselves that they’ve dodged a bullet. That’s the protocol, at least.

  Fourteen unanswered texts/messages later, we’d both dug our heels into this pattern. She would not fade away under fear of being seen as the crazy chick; I would not block her number or provide a reply. Clearly, neither of us was an expert in ghosting protocols.

  “Why do I owe you a breakup if we’ve never met?” I once considered asking, when I got a new text from her in the midst of a busy workday, before thinking better of it. OneMilkTwoSugars was attractive, smart, educated, photogenic, and hadn’t listed “oxygen” among the six things she couldn’t live without: surely, I was not her only prospect. I pictured all the guys she ignored in favor of spending so much effort on me, this would-be fuckboy. Was the sting of rejection that bad for the uninitiated? From dating sites to apps, every facet of dating has been streamlined via new technology; why couldn’t the rejection be as well?

  A few days later, after a few more prompts, I received my last text from her. The preview of her full text was enough:

  Hey!! Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiggg—

  For years, I will go on to tell this story with the altered fact that what OneMilkTwoSugars wrote to me was “Fuuuuuuuuuuu” or “Shiiiiiiiiiitbag.” A harmless punch line that leaves half the dinner table on her side and keeps the conversation on the ethics of dating in the digital age lively and fun. I’ve found that nigger taints the story; makes it ugly in all the wrong ways.

  Even with the twin layers of removal of being told by me and having been delivered to me in written form—on a dating site, no less—people shut down around it. My Black friends want to burn the world, and forget that cow. “They all think that secretly, man,” one says.

  If he’s right, I don’t want to believe it. Meanwhile, my white friends wince uncomfortably and bemoan the hopeless state of the world. Sometimes, I think this is simply a performance for my sake. They feel like it’s what I need to hear. I don’t fully buy the person who plugs his ears and winces. I want to get him drunk, sleep with his wife, sell drugs to his child, devalue his property, and emasculate him in a sauna and see what happens then.

  Anyway, I now choose to always tell the full story. I drop the nigger bowling ball in the middle of the cake and watch what happens.

  And maybe, that’s all that the referendum of that word needs: I cannot use it without the hope that my doing so, in some minuscule way, takes power away from it, and you, white friend, cannot use it without the certainty that it is adding power to it. It’s as simple as that.

  New York City is one of the most densely populated areas and one of the loneliest places on earth. (See: every other song about New York.) You can swipe until your thumb is sore and not run out of singles in your age range. As a result, amazing people who would leave you with butterflies in a social setting are assessed and dismissed like weather app pop-ups.

  I’m still no closer to a better insight for OneMilkTwoSugars, other than maybe the half-real person she had become through all of our texting was less appealing than the blank entry in the spinning wheel of online dating she had been when we first started interacting. The pressure of being rejected by that person was more tangible than the rejection of a hot stranger who amounted to nothing more than a few photos and lines of texts.

  The effort of writing this essay is much, much longer than the three-sentence message and slight awkwardness I could have sent. But, I didn’t owe OneMilkTwoSugars anything, right? That’s the low expectation of “low-expectation dating.” It was a chain of picking and choosing we all opted into with our first swipe, nudge, poke. Dating apps don’t traffic in people; they traffic in distractions existing somewhere between a listicle and an unenthused game of Candy Crush. Was that something worth hearing, something I was obligated to point out so as to manage her expectations, her entitlement, her inexplicable sense of ownership over my person? Screw that. True as it might be, she wasn’t owed this insight. She should know this already. We all should. “The ghoster” was an established role I could easily navigate and again, one that required nothing. There was no uncertainty in performing it. In this new reality, she was the creep for expecting more. It was all safe and familiar ground.

  Ultimately, the main lesson of online dating might be a harsh one for everyone involved, from the dick pic–sending fuckboy to the person with whom you felt meaningful contact: that stranger you find attractive does not owe you anything. Check the contracts you accepted when you registered for your site or app of choice: “satisfactory resolutions” are never guaranteed.

  Twenty-Five

  Sure, I’ll Be Your Black Sidekick

  I’m the ripe-ish age of TWENTY-SIX and I experienced my first “bro” breakup. My (now former) roommate and (equally former) close friend and I parted ways permanently and acrimoniously. Cops were involved. This happened to coincide with my father’s reemergence into my sphere of concern with rumors of a heart attack. Only one of these two events leaves me still reeling.

  Neither I nor my former roommate—let’s call him Mark—looks like the story that follows. We’re soft-bodied plaid wearers and both known to be affable guys, one Black, one Jewish. At our best, we traded offensive jokes that could launch a thousand think pieces. Mark enjoys trivia nights with his other friends; I’m a karaoke guy with mine. We regularly made pots of lentil soup or pasta together, content to be Netflix homebodies in the city that never sleeps. For a while, our biggest argument was debating the awfulness of Girls characters: Marnie vs. Mimi-Rose.

  “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t moved in, Ben,” he once said during a Game of Thrones marathon.

  “You’d have been fine,” I answered with a shrug.

  “No,” he said, eyes uncomfortably fixed on the TV, “I really wouldn’t have been.”

  Our roommateship began when Mark’s fiancée ended their engagement, leaving him an emotional mess halfway through his last semester of graduate school with an empty second bedroom. The result of his heartbreak was an incredibly fast and open friendship. An hour into my moving in with him, he was crying on my shoulder about the trauma.

  Male friendships are typically forged on an anvil of casualness. Laughter, beer, fist bump, repeat. In trying times, a “Dude, that’s rough” may be extended and past instances of vulnerability shared, but rarely more. Real-time vulnerability is an altogether different matter. I’ve lived by this unspoken code and, at times, even inched away from male acquaintances who went against it by wanting to share too much, too quickly. And yet, despite being born out of Manhattan rental necessity, this friendship was different.

  “I miss her so much . . .” “Hey, is this a sore inside my butt crack?” “My family is poor, and I don’t think I’ll be the one to pull them out of it, even with two degrees . . .” “. . . Dude, why is there a sore inside your butt crack?”

  There was no posturing, living with Mark. Codependent, precarious, whatever you might call it; there was something to be said for a space in which the XY chromosomes did not keep these topics at bay, even when at full sobriety.

  “I think I need to pay you,” he says one day after I come back from a
quick evening walk with his dog. “For the dog walks. I feel bad that you’re always walking my dog for me.”

  I’m the better looking of the two parties, I’m told. “You are,” Mark insists. “You have that smile from across the room, man. It’s like a freaking Hyper Beam.” His references match mine, which I like.

  “The smile is fake.” I tell him the story from the Michener Center, lying head to toe on his bed with dimmed lights, a dog between us. I tell him how I practiced smiling again and again in the mirror until my face was Play-Doh that could be summoned the way a chameleon turns into a rock.

  “It’s tiring,” I say and then backtrack, ever so slightly. “My face gets tired doing it, I mean.”

  “Well, it makes my day every morning, man,” he insists. “The end result is dy-no-mite.” He says the word like an old sitcom I recognize from the references but that I’ve never actually watched. I hate these types of jokes from most people but Mark is an absolute nerd, which is one of the things I like about him. These racially charged jokes would raise an eyebrow if I didn’t hear him pantomime dialogue with his dog, giving the poor thing a Tony Soprano accent, and watch him drowning his sushi pieces with a long, agonizing damsel-in-distress wail as he dunks them in soy sauce. The Blackness in dy-no-mite isn’t the punch line.

  The problem with learning to smile a lot is that people imagine a dark threatening cloud over you whenever your face returns to normal. Mine is a Resting Black Face; allegedly intense eyes and sharp cheekbones.

  But I don’t push to explain any of this to Mark. I’m tired, and my mind is elsewhere. Plus, a tiny part of me is very happy to make Mark happy every morning. I’m already broke from moving back to the city. The kind of broke that makes you write essays online for people applying to graduate school who don’t have the time or words to write essays. In my mind, this makes me a working writer. I miss my stipend.

  I refresh Craigslist’s Gigs section and pounce on them when they post, copy-pasting my email and attaching my résumé. I present myself as a TA making ends meet while pursuing a PhD, which is less sad somehow, though I don’t quite remember the logic of how it’s less sad. My bank account grows comfortable in the high two digits. The email notice announcing the critical balance no longer fazes me. I apply for a credit card that’s denied. The Visa representative seems apologetic and cites my lack of income potential until I have a full-time job. A master’s in creative writing and screenwriting isn’t it. After all, I practice in make-believe.

  He gets enough of a gist of the phone call I had that night while I’m accompanying him on a dog walk; he offers to pay me for the times when I walk the dog while he’s at work. I say no: I love the dog already. Money makes things weird. “C’mon, dude. Let me. I feel bad.”

  I’m told it keeps things simpler and come to agree. Friendship over here; canine life assistance over there. The friendship is invaluable in that it has no assigned monetary value. Friendships shouldn’t. The employment amounts to $3 per walk.

  “Oh?” he says, with a frown. “Really? All right, let’s talk about it later, okay?” I nod and grab the leash, heading for a walk with the dog while he prepares an assignment for school.

  It’s no longer an instance, but a haggle. “I’m broke too, y’know,” he explains. His, I point out, is the kind of “broke” that gets $4,000 in the mail from his father in Massachusetts. That’s nothing in Manhattan, he explains. “I’m also trying to get savings up and meet someone. Dates get expensive. Girls expect you to pay every time.”

  We settle on the $3 per walk. Online, dog-walking apps advertise $36–44 per walk or doggy daycare around the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I anonymously ask for feedback on the offer on a Reddit thread—the dog is extremely easy to take care of, after all—and then delete the thread when people say I’m being taken advantage of. They don’t know anything. They are jaded aspiring actors and students being chewed up by the city. This is friendship: the pillar of my new adult life in New York City.

  I take the $27 per week for nine walks and he generously rounds it up to $40 with a shrug. He doesn’t like to talk about money except when he needs to talk about money. Now, it’s him who occasionally accompanies me on my dog walks. He no longer feels guilty, telling me the dog looks bored while turning on the TV.

  He pays me my second week by covering my half of the sushi he’s ordering and the expensive roasted almonds from a specialty store nearby that he stockpiles before an announced snowstorm across New York City—the kind of meteorological event that gets a cute hashtag name trending and that homebodies look forward to—stocking up the fridge, lining up the Netflix and Game of Thrones episodes, and basking in coziness. My cell phone payment doesn’t go through, I think, rewatching season 4 of Game of Thrones, looking ahead to the season 5 premiere in a few weeks.

  “You know Arya is going to wreck shit up in Essos,” he says, gleefully, around a mouthful of sesame-oil nuts. We both approve of the young traumatized girl acquiring faceless ninja assassin skills.

  However exhausting it could occasionally get—to walk his dog every day, to cancel plans with other former friends still in the city when he was feeling lonely, and to write his essays for him when the juggling act of school and heartbreak got to be too much for him—being openly needed fulfilled its own need for me. At Christmas, I received a text from him: You don’t have to say it back but I want u to know ur my best friend.

  This guy would be a fixture in my life, I thought. My future children would call him “uncle” one day. This would last. And then, naturally, it failed: spectacularly as these things tend to. Mark and I will never speak to each other again. “I don’t owe you anything,” he wrote in one of his last communications to me. Mark might have been right. The point of male friendships might be that you never actually owe each other anything. This very essay might be too much analysis by virtue of us both being guys.

  The “bro”-keup was as sudden as it was vicious.

  The night I learned my father, somewhere in Cote-Des-Neiges, had stroked out (dads “have heart attacks”; absentee fathers you don’t particularly like “stroke out”) was the night of a prescheduled man-date with Mark for which I had cleared my calendar. Good, I thought. On the couch with my best friend was a safe space to process the news about my dad. Mark was someone I could speak to without the judgment of relatives or less intimate acquaintances who might expect waterworks for a man I loved but did not particularly like and hadn’t spoken to in years.

  I sipped my beer carefully, waiting for the right lull to broach the topic while a distracted Mark kept checking OkCupid on his phone. He was dating more aggressively now, on the hunt for his next girlfriend.

  A woman had given him a gold star and was up for drinks nearby. “Can I go?” he asked.

  “No,” I snapped, before immediately backtracking to “Sure,” as forcing someone to stay and care about your feelings is unappealing. Mark seemed to consider his options: pushing me to share what was on my mind vs. spending the evening with what I imagined was a brunette holding a mustache on a stick, flanked by two carbon-copy besties. “Well, if you’re upset, I’m going to go,” Mark eventually said.

  “Fine. Go.” A minute later, he was in the bathroom and the smell of nice, expensive cologne filled the apartment as he got ready. Being on the other end of the equation—needing him—was new and overwhelming. I was raised as an only child, and I’m a Sagittarius, which I will assume means something independent and horsemanlike.

  Later that night, I wrote Mark an email. A good platform for open feelings as well as a few jabs. “You’re thoughtless,” it read. “I have to step back a bit. Let’s just be roommates for a while. I have to expect less, dude.”

  “I can’t live like that, Ben,” he wrote back the next day, hurt. His date had been a bust; I existed again. The gist of his reply was a choice: stay and work on the friendship or leave. I was a subletter, and my name wasn’t on the lease; such ultimatums could be made fairly.

  I don’t
like being put in corners. What might have otherwise been solved with a tub of ice cream and two spoons was now a “thing.” I replied that I could be out by the end of the month: a manipulative bluff to call his. The bluff, as it turns out, was a mistake.

  An hour later, 1 a.m. or so, he was pounding on my door, evicting me immediately for “abandoning him.” An abusive parent growing up, three serious breakups, and still this was the nastiest fight of my life. “I don’t give a shit that you’re so fucking poor,” he screamed.

  “You’re going to die alone,” I replied, nonchalantly enough to be vicious, hands shaking as I texted a friend, asking to crash on his couch. These were emotional nut shots and we knew it, based on the vulnerabilities we both knew well.

  Something that had come up during our many late-night chitchats and at the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement was my deep-seated fear of cops. It was a relatively new addition—a harsh reality that had eluded me at Columbia—to the set of anxieties that came with being a foreigner in America on a temporary visa. Mark knew about my Canadian passport, which I always carried in case an officer stopped me on the subway. He knew about my airport TSA voice, and the fact that I used to read lengthy Reddit posts by people describing what a bullet feels like ripping through your insides, trying to imagine it after every gruesome news story.

  Claiming I wasn’t packing fast enough that night, Mark suddenly announced that he’d called the cops on me. Race—my Blackness—which had been a nonissue in all other facets of our friendship—was now being weaponized against me. Years later, I would realize that Mark is actually my first Karen. A few more years of viral videos of white men and women calling, or threatening to call, the police on Black people and I might have been able to recognize this as what it is.