Sweet St. Louis

by Omar Tyree

  Stamina, for many men, was definitely a problem. Or at least it seemed that way if you happened to know all the wrong kind of men and the women who mixed with them. They could all make it seem as if the sky was really falling, and that the old-world concept of man and woman forming a bond to make children and maintain a family was extinct. However, there were old relics of strong bonding still left out there. There were people who actually knew how to hold things together for thirty and forty years, on old-school principles of community purpose. But the youth, stressing too much individualism, had created chaos for themselves in the absence of community. And they found themselves constantly running out of breath.

  Me, myself, and I, as a philosophy, led to nothing but harder work and longer periods of loneliness. And rarely could a stable home, family, and community be built on such individual methods. No wonder relationships were so hard to work out in the 1990s. Me, myself, and I was in order. But life was about sharing responsibility, and so was love. Only then could home, family, and community become meaningful. But some people failed to comprehend, while wondering out loud, why they lacked the stamina to attain what they wanted in life. People like Anthony “Tone” Wallace.

  “Man, you should see some of these houses that we clean, dawg. I’m starting to think that seven dollars ain’t good enough,” Tone commented to Ant on their way to the barbershop. Ant liked to keep his hair cut to a smooth, low height, and Tone decided to tag along with him and get himself a needed haircut.

  “I could say the same thing about some of the cars I work on,” Ant responded from behind the wheel of his Chevy. They headed north on Grand Boulevard to their usual barber.

  “Oh no you can’t, either,” Tone argued. “Because even if you worked on a car that costs eighty thousand dollars, that car got nothin’ on these half a million dollar houses.”

  Ant smiled and nodded. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

  Tone thought about it and said, “It makes you wonder how it is that some people have so much, when others don’t have shit. Especially black people.”

  “That’s America, man. Get used to it. A lot of white people don’t have shit either.”

  Once they made it to the barbershop, Ant parked his car on a side street, and they walked around the corner and into the rusty shop for immediate entertainment from lively black male chatter, just like in every other barbershop in black neighborhoods all across America.

  “That’s Eriq La Salle, ain’t it? The brother from ER?” someone asked, watching a public service announcement on the 13-inch color television set that sat on a tall stand. After work hours, there was always a wait for the better barbers. Only the older men and young kids who didn’t know any better sat in the chairs of the less respected barbers. That’s just the way it was. If you couldn’t cut respectfully, you found yourself at the lower end of the pecking order. So Ant and Tone waited and listened to the black male talk, sometimes joining in if they had anything to add. Usually they only laughed, agreeing and disagreeing with the many opinions that were thrown around.

  “Yeah, that Eriq La Salle is married to a white girl, ain’t he? A model or something, right?” a thirty-something brother said from the barber’s chair.

  “Naw, he ain’t married to her is he? She was just his main squeeze,” a barber answered. That’s usually how it started. The conversations would expand from one barber to another, and then to the customers in the shop.

  “All I know is that she’s a fine white girl,” another barber added. “So at least he didn’t sell himself short.”

  “Wesley Snipes got a white girl, too, don’t he?” someone else started.

  “Naw, he got himself an Asian girl.”

  “So does Russell Simmons from Def Jam,” a younger customer put in. The conversation spread around the shop.

  “We must not like the sisters no more, hunh?” one of the older barbers concluded.

  “That ain’t the case here. I’ve been in love with my wife now for twelve years and countin’, with three kids,” a reserved customer added. He felt he had to. He was joined by a few others who agreed with him.

  “Yeah, I gotta have me a black woman. I wouldn’t be able to bring anything else home to my momma,” one of the younger barbers added for a more humorous approach.

  Ant and Tone looked at each other and laughed.

  The young barber continued: “Usually, the kind of brothers who marry white women got a whole different approach to themselves, like they above other blacks. Even Wilt Chamberlain said it. He said ah, ‘White women knew more about the finer things in life,’ and that he could relate to them more.”

  “Hmmph,” another barber grunted. “I wonder what his ass related to when he was poor and black in Philadelphia. They call it the ‘City of Brotherly Love’ don’t they?”

  “Wait a minute now, just because he grew up black and in Philadelphia didn’t necessarily mean that he was poor. Let’s not jump to stereotypical conclusions,” someone else spoke up.

  “Look, most of them brothers who go for white women don’t even associate with real black folks like they need to. That’s all I’m sayin’. They got a different way about them.”

  “What’s so different about them?” a customer in a blue Nike sweat suit asked.

  “They just got different ways, different looks, and different hangouts, man.”

  The young barber was really putting himself out there with assumptions.

  The customer in the Nike sweat suit went on to drop a bomb on the entire barbershop. He said real casually, “I have a white wife, and we got two kids, a boy and a girl. Now would you know that if I didn’t tell you?”

  All eyes were on him. And most of the brothers in the shop would have never guessed. He looked like any other brother from the St. Louis ’hood.

  “You bullshittin’ me just to make a point, ain’t you?” the young barber asked him.

  “No I’m not either. My wife is straight from Germany. I met her while I was stationed over there in the reserves.”

  After that, the barber was able to relax a bit.

  “Oh, well, that’s different,” he said. “You probably ain’t have enough sisters over there to choose from.”

  “That wasn’t why I married my wife. I dated plenty of sisters,” the brother refuted. “But when you get with a woman, and she looks out for you and does things for you that other women wouldn’t, then you gotta respect that, man. Then I messed around and fell in love with her. And when I got her pregnant, I did the right thing and married her,” he said.

  “But I like to throw that out there to people, man, because you don’t break the respect for your family for no color. And this is my family now, whether my wife is white, black, green, orange, or whatever.

  “Because you got a lot of brothers who walk around and talk more black shit than Malcolm X, and they got three and four kids by three and four different women, and ain’t did the right thing with one of them,” he added. “So I stand strong with my wife and family. If anybody got a problem with that, they fixin’ to get hurt. And you can talk all the bullshit you want, as long as you don’t fuck with me and mine,” he ended with a smile. And every black man inside of that barbershop took him seriously.

  Tone looked over to his partner Ant and smiled, thinking about Ant’s father, his older brothers, his own father, Ant’s cousin Rico, and too many other black men who left the sisters hanging with a bag of brown kids, not only in St. Louis, Missouri, but all over America.

  “So now, are we saying that black men have lost their love for the sisters and for black family or what? Because we still have some brothers who are married to black women who do go out of their way for their man,” the shop owner mused out loud. Danny was in his early fifties and had been around for a while. He was married to his wife of over thirty years, but he had surely witnessed the changes in how black men and women were mistreating each other over the past two decades.

  Ant felt compelled to speak on it, as if confessing his
sins to the world. And it was all because of his relationship with Sharron.

  “A lot of it is really on us, man,” he commented to Tone’s surprise. Ant, after all, was a player who could rationalize just about anything.

  He went on and said, “There’s a whole lot of sisters out there who are willing to go to the edge of the world and back for us, man, and we just don’t seem to care about them. We’re too busy thinking about ourselves. I know I was.”

  “Man, that’s bullshit. They too busy thinking about themselves, too,” another young customer snapped. “They know good and well who they’re dealing with. They go out and choose who they want to choose, and then they get up and cry about it.”

  Tone laughed and nodded his head. “Yeah, that’s true,” he agreed. Women had chosen him knowing he was only out to score. That went quadruple for his partner Ant.

  “It still don’t change the fact that we in control of that situation,” Ant argued his point. “I mean, we can choose to be with any one of the women on our list any time we get ready.”

  “Yeah, and then as soon as you get ready to choose, that’s when all of a sudden you can’t find that same girl who was crying her eyes out when you had them three other women on the side,” the other customer countered. “Then she’ll start talking about she ain’t ready for no real commitment on your ass.”

  The barbers all laughed at it.

  “Sound like you talkin’ from personal experience,” one of them commented to him.

  “Yeah, I’m talking from personal experience. I had that happen to me before. Twice! And as soon as I stopped being a player, they ain’t love me no more. So after that, I told myself, ‘Aw’ight then. If that’s the way they want it, I’ma be a player for life.’”

  Tone started laughing so hard he could hardly compose himself. Those same thoughts had run through his mind recently.

  Danny jumped back in and said, “What it sounds like to me, is that we have a lot of hurt and confused men and women. And you’re all scared to death of each other. So as soon as the rocky roads start up, you both jump out of the car and let the thing roll off of a cliff. But if you both learned to hang in there, you could steer the damn thing clear back to safety and keep on rolling. That’s what I think the problem is.”

  “Yeah, and there’s a whole lot more guys afraid than women,” Ant agreed. “And I know because I was one of ’em. I just didn’t want to give up my player’s card.” Then he laughed, joined by the other customers and barbers in the shop. They all knew the feeling. Women just couldn’t understand. Then again, some of them could. Women who were players themselves, and just couldn’t imagine living without the roller-coaster ride of a man of mystery who was there only for a few hours at a time and had no strings attached. Women like Celena Myers.

  “This girl Sharron is really gettin’ to you now,” Tone said as he and his partner rode back down Grand Boulevard after their haircuts.

  Ant smiled and said, “You called that shit before it happened, didn’t you?”

  Tone smiled back at him. “I could just feel it, the way she was reachin’ for you.”

  “But all of ’em ride me like that when I get ’em good,” Ant responded.

  “Naw, man, you know when you gon’ get the girl. You know how it’s gon’ be and everything. But with this one, you didn’t know,” Tone explained.

  Ant thought about it and tried to put it into perspective.

  “There were some girls that I didn’t get. I mean, I don’t get everybody, man,” he admitted. “I’m not the mack like that,” he added with a laugh.

  “Yeah, but I don’t hear you talkin’ about them girls you didn’t get. I think you would have talked about Sharron. In fact, I know it. Just by the shit that she was askin’ when I was on the phone with her. And the way you went and hung up on me for her,” Tone reminded him with a grin.

  Ant fell silent, missing Sharron as Tone continued to talk about her.

  “You thinkin’ about her right now, ain’t you?” Tone asked.

  Ant broke out grinning.

  “Yeah, she got ya’ ass aw’ight. She-e-e gotcha,” Tone teased.

  Ant said, “Why are you jealous about it then?”

  Tone paused for a second. Then he answered, “Because I wanna be got, too, man. I want some ho to turn me out so bad I don’t know what to do.”

  Ant chuckled and asked, “But do you want her to be a ho?”

  Tone said, “Naw. I want a virgin.”

  They broke out laughing again. Men wanted so badly to be the first and only to every virtuous woman who ever walked the planet, while never being quite as virtuous themselves. So when Ant got back in that night and called up Sharron, he actually asked her what she felt about that.

  “Would you talk to me if I was a virgin?”

  Sharron laughed herself. “What?”

  “Would you talk to me if I was a virgin? You heard me.”

  “How would I know?” she asked.

  “What if I just told you I was?”

  “I wouldn’t believe you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just wouldn’t.”

  “Because it seems like I’ve been with women before?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what if it didn’t seem that way?”

  Sharron thought about it and went blank. “I don’t know.”

  “Would you still ask me so many questions?”

  She smiled again. “Probably not.”

  “Because I wouldn’t have shit to talk about, right?”

  “No, I didn’t say that.”

  “You don’t have to say it. It’s already in the things that you do say.”

  “Like what?”

  “All the things you say to me just to see how I’ll respond to them. If I had nothing to be curious about, you wouldn’t even be saying all of that stuff.”

  “Why are you even asking me this, late at night?”

  “Me and Tone were at the barbershop tonight, talking about relationships and whatnot, and this one guy said that women know exactly what they’re getting into before they do it, and then they cry about it as soon as things don’t go their way.”

  “And it’s not the same for guys who chase after women like my roommate?” Sharron asked. “It’s the same thing. Celena and I were just talkin’ about that the other night.”

  “So when do we all stop the bullshit and just hook up with each other?” Ant commented.

  “Hmmph,” Sharron grunted. “I don’t know. You tell me. I’ve been tired of it.”

  “Why you choose me then?”

  Hypocritical. Sharron just laughed at it.

  “Okay, I guess I’m not tired,” she admitted. “But you just made me curious about you, so I went for it. So why did you stick with me? Or at least so far?” she questioned.

  Because I’m in a slowdown period right now, he thought. But he held that thought to himself.

  “Why not?” he asked instead.

  “Because you can have five other girls, howling at the moon,” she mocked him.

  “Yeah, well, some of them don’t howl the way I want them to.”

  Good answer.

  She laughed again. “I don’t howl at all,” she commented.

  “You don’t have to. I feel you anyway.”

  Another good answer. Ant was on a roll. But when wasn’t he?

  “That’s why I chose you,” Sharron told him, seemingly out of the blue.

  Ant failed to connect the dots. “Hunh?”

  “That’s why I chose you, because you’re smooth like that. And women like smoothness,” she answered.

  “Not all of them,” he countered, remembering those women who never trusted him.

  Sharron said, “I’ll take a smooth guy over one who doesn’t know what he wants to say.”

  “But that guy who doesn’t know what he wants to say may actually be better for you.”

  Sharron thought quickly of Sean Love and Omar Tyree’s novel A Do Right Man.

>   “Well, in that case, they need to learn,” she stated. “And sometimes it takes a while. But it’s not my fault.”

  Ant chuckled and said, “Oh, it’s like that.”

  “Yeah, it’s like that,” she told him.

  “Well, at least you’re honest,” he mocked her. “I guess that some parts of being a player ain’t bad, hunh?”

  Sharron answered, “As long as you know when to stop playing and start being serious.”

  “Oohhh,” Ant moaned. He didn’t know what else to say. It was the truth. He had been telling himself the same thing. Then they were stuck on the phone, not knowing what move to make, or what to say, and the awkwardness made them laugh.

  “Is there something you want to say to me?” Sharron asked, beating Ant to the punch.

  “Is there something you want to say to me?” he asked her back.

  They laughed again, as silly as teenagers.

  “I don’t know,” she answered.

  “I don’t know either,” he countered.

  “I thought you would know everything.”

  “Why would I still be curious about you, if I knew everything? I would move on with my life then, right?”

  “Because you don’t have all of the pieces of me yet,” she countered.

  Ant grinned. She always caught him off guard with that.

  “Like I said, I’ll never forget you said that to me,” she told him.

  “And you’ll pass it down to our kids,” he added.

  “That’s right.”

  It all sounded good to him. Good and natural. As if it was normal behavior for them to talk about their future so matter-of-factly.

  “Have you ever talked to another guy about kids and stuff before?” Ant asked her.

  “No. I just thought about it.”

  “Yeah, me too. Wondering what they would look like.”

  Sharron laughed and said, “Conan O’Brien does that on his late show. He takes celebrity couples and puts their features together for the looks of their kids. It’s hilarious.”

  “I saw him do that before. They trip out on that show.”