Hold Me in Contempt

by Wendy Williams

  The day Ronald was supposed to hook up Kim 2 on a double date with his coworker Alonzo, a Cuban attorney who not only looked like a model but had a brilliant mind, I was held up at the office and Alonzo was stuck at an airport in Miami. Kim 2 and Ronald ended up at the restaurant alone.

  She texted me a picture of them waving from the bar at Ginny’s Supper Club in the basement of the Red Rooster. She captioned it, “borrowing your boo for the evening.” Hope you don’t mind. Thanks for looking out for me, bestie.

  It took me a long time to look back at that moment without quick tears. Other times, I wondered if her joking or their play with each other, sneaking into each other’s lives in front of my face, was just suspicion on my part. But for some reason, when I read that text, I just knew something was starting. That was the beginning. I sat at my desk in my office surrounded by papers I needed to organize by sunup, thinking about my perfect-model best friend cozying up to my boyfriend in the snuggly, twenties-inspired décor at Ginny’s. Men walking by and seeing Ronald with Kim 2 and thinking how lucky he was to have her. Ronald feeling that and leaning in . . .  ​definitely leaning in. Loving it.

  I tried to call him, but there was no answer. I texted that I was on my way, and he said there was no need. Everything was fine.

  Standing outside Wilhelmina with my memories, my back started to hurt and I reached into my purse for my pill bottle. Then I realized there was nothing there. I backed up against the side of the building to try to take some of the pressure away and let something cool touch the pain that had suddenly shot through me like an arrow.

  I hadn’t felt a single pain all evening or morning, and then suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, there it was, so sharp and clear.

  I tried to take deep breaths. My heart began to quicken. Nervous sweat gathered at my hairline.

  My rushed breathing slowed to something so shallow, it scared me. I could hear my heart beat. Literally feel my pulse in my hands. My back felt like someone had stapled my skin to a pole and was ripping me away. I would’ve screamed but I couldn’t find my voice, and it wasn’t until a bent-over, wrinkled woman in a crowd of five or six spoke to me that I remembered I was standing on a street corner in New York City at 9 a.m.

  “Dear, are you all right?” she asked, pointing at me with an index finger supporting the weight of an enormous fake-diamond ring.

  The woman and the crowd flipped in and out of focus.

  I could see that people were talking, but I couldn’t tell if they were speaking to me or one another, and then I thought maybe I was imagining everything—even the people standing right there.

  “Maybe she needs a doctor!” I heard. “Someone call 9-1-1!”

  Inside my body and beneath my pain, some voice of my own begged me to get myself together. The voice pleaded and begged, and then I heard myself say to someone, “No! I’m fine. I’m fine. Just need to get home. Stomach virus. Just a little sick.” The voice told me to smile. To push off the wall and through the crowd. Smile the entire way. “I’m fine. Thank you.”

  “You sure, dear?” The old woman walked beside me. “Someone get her a cab!” she instructed before asking, “You need a cab?”

  “Yes,” I said, feeling new sweat in my palms. My skin vibrating like I was in a steam room. My knees feeling like balls of gelatin connecting toothpicks.

  Three more people confirmed that I didn’t believe I needed a doctor before continuing on their way. Soon, it was just me, the old woman, and a bicycle deliveryman with a huge bag slung over his back standing there as a cab slowed to pick me up.

  I thanked them both for their help, secretly hating them for being witnesses.

  “Hello. My name is Kenton Kind. And I’m a sex addict.” That’s how I expected my twin brother’s speech at the sex addicts’ meeting to begin.

  Three of Kent’s voice mails, each more sad than the one before, had invited me to the meeting. After lying on my couch for two days, surviving frequent bouts of back pain on a calculated mixture of ibuprofen, sleeping pills, and Jameson, I decided to show my face and do what Kenton claimed he needed on the second message: have his “back this one time.” He’d said he wanted someone who knew him to be there when he told his “truth,” and he couldn’t think of anyone else but me. It sounded kind of gross to me—the idea of listening to why my own brother thought he was a sex addict in a tale that would no doubt follow his every filthy encounter blow by blow—but the more I thought about it, the more I really knew that I was the only person my brother could call on to be there. He’d always had a lot of friends—although many of them were now dead or locked up at Rikers—but I’d always been the only person he confided in about personal things. I was probably the only person he’d told about the meeting. Plus, I still thought the whole thing was a sham. A bunch of bullshit Kent maybe believed about himself to explain why he was such an asshole when it came to women and why he’d made an irreversible mess of the only woman who’d ever really loved him. I didn’t think he had a sex addiction. He was just a womanizer experiencing a tragic dilemma caused by his whorish ways. I figured that maybe if he sat through the meeting with me there, he’d realize that and stop focusing on the wrong thing. Get his shit together.

  Kent sat up front, planning to speak, and I sat in the back of the room, looking around at the seemingly healthy people chatting, eating brownies, and sipping cheap coffee and wondered who they all were. I wore a fitted Yankees cap and a high-collared sweater with my jean skirt to be sure no one saw me walking in, and I planned to hide beneath Kent’s arm on the way out. The meeting was in the basement of an old church turned community center, at the back of a hallway of rooms with signs on the doors indicating other evening gatherings in progress—group meetings for everything from drug and alcohol abuse to anger management.

  The meeting began when Jake, who introduced himself only by his first name and as the team leader, went over the rules and read through a pamphlet on addiction.

  “Addicts are defensive,” he said. He peeked out over his expensive-​looking wire-rimmed glasses at us. “We all know what this means. You’re constantly faced with the truth about your addiction, either from recognizing the addictive behavior yourself or through others, and you fend off the confrontation by being defensive. You wonder or you’re asked if maybe you’ve done too much, have had too much or just overindulged, and you fight yourself or someone else about all the reasons the confronted idea is wrong.” Jake’s demeanor was so dignified, his language so articulate, that I wondered if he was a college professor or a doctor. He’d said he was a recovering sex addict, but looking at his pale white skin and thin, girlish arms and legs, I wondered who would actually have sex with him. “You try to ignore it. Tell everyone to focus on something else. You become violent. You hate everyone for thinking they know better than you. Then you start convincing yourself that you know better than you.” Everyone laughed, including Kent, who sat sandwiched between two women I thought he’d be trying to hit on in any other scenario.

  “Right, we laugh,” Jake went on, laughing himself. “But we all know that moment when your addiction makes you start thinking about yourself in the third person. Makes you schizophrenic. Why? Because that same you who became defensive then tries to prove to yourself and everyone else that you don’t have a problem by attempting to regulate your own addiction. You say you won’t do this or that for this amount of time. Maybe forever. But then it comes back. And hard.” A woman in the front stood up like Jake was delivering the gospel at church. Then the woman beside her stood up and they hugged. “It comes back to help you realize that you’re not in control at all. But you remain in denial. And then you get defensive again. And thus begins a whole new cycle of your addiction. Leading back to the beginning. And then back again.”

  Jake went on, but I stayed on that one for a little while. I thought of the sharp pain in my back a few days earlier outside Tamika’s office. The ride to my apartment in the taxi and how it was only a little after ten in mo
rning when I made it upstairs and thought that if I could just have my painkillers and maybe a drink, I’d feel better. Now, I knew I didn’t have an addiction to pills, but looking for the Jameson in the kitchen and feeling my heart sink when I realized I’d just finished the last bottle, I thought maybe something was really going on with me. Then I felt the sharp pain again and I rushed to take ibuprofen, but I knew it wouldn’t be enough to get through. I went downstairs to buy more Jameson and drank only enough to get me right. Just enough to sleep. When I woke up from the nap, I still felt the pain and I needed more, but I made myself wait. Just three more hours. I just needed to wait.

  When Kent got up to speak, I lowered my body in my seat and pulled my cap down on my head. He introduced himself like a thug about to do an Easter speech. Jake had to remind him not to use his last name and to turn off his vibrating cell phone—probably some woman calling him, I thought, laughing to myself.

  “How has my addiction shown itself?” Kent nervously read off of a piece of crumpled paper he was holding. He gave a sad chuckle and looked toward the back of the room where a clock was hanging over my head. “Okay. I promised myself I’d tell the truth, so I’m going to come right out with it, yo. No more hiding. No fucking fear.”

  “That’s right, brother! No fear,” the black man who was dressed like a Fruit of Islam security officer broke in.

  “I can’t remember the last day when I didn’t have sex, yo,” Kent revealed. “And that includes yesterday and even today.”

  I felt myself gawking and closed my mouth. That was just like Kent—talking about having an addiction and then still doing it anyway. I looked at my watch and cursed myself for coming. If he wanted to do this ridiculous routine to feel better about being an asshole, he could do it on his own.

  “I ain’t perfect, but I guess that’s why I’m here,” he went on. “I fuck—I mean, I sleep with a lot of women I don’t know. Shorties I be meeting at the club. No names. No numbers. Wedding rings. Bathrooms. Just sweating. And those ain’t the worst ones. The worst ones be the ones I see more than once. Shorty I met online, this white girl in Staten Island, I was going to the crib two times a week. Fucking—sexing her. Her baby was there. I think she was married. It didn’t matter. I’d get it in the kitchen when I walked in. She ain’t even want me to take my motorcycle helmet off. I didn’t care. We both knew what I was there for. The baby would be crying. Husband calling. I’d hit it and bounce. It’s whatever.”

  He looked down at the paper again and read another question. “My low? That’s easy. It’s how I realized there was a problem. My baby moms, I fucked—had sex with her lover—some chick—you know—that gay shit. The shit was crazy, yo. And I knew it was crazy—kept telling myself that while it was happening, but I wouldn’t stop. I went to her spot to confront her about sleeping with Keish, and I was looking at her—she’s one of those girls that be dressing like boys—and I was like, ‘Yo, what the fuck?’ ” I slid even lower in my seat and covered my face with my hand. “She was talking about how she ain’t never been with no man before and dick ain’t shit. I was like, fuck that. I was so mad. And I kept thinking, I need to get even—even with Keish for fucking this ho and this ho nigga for fucking my girl. You know?” Kent was off in his thoughts and started pacing the front of the room like an actor delivering a soliloquy in a Shakespearean tragedy.

  “Right there, yo, I decided I was going to get shorty to give me head and I was gonna fuck her. I knew everything I needed to say, everything I needed to do to get at her. She was saying she ain’t never want no dick. Ain’t never fuck no nigga. That just made me more excited to do it. And I did. You know, a woman is woman. Even dressed as a nigga, she still a woman. I sat down on her couch and told her what to do and she did. Got down on her knees and did it. And then I tapped that. Made her call out my name—told her, ‘Call this Keish’s dick’—made her scream it. And she did. And I felt like I was high. Not, like, sexually, but in my head. Like I won something. When it was over, she was talking about how we wasn’t gonna tell Keish and let it ride. All this bullshit. Like she ain’t even know at some point it’s gonna get back to Keish—it always do. When I walked out that door, the high left me. I was mad. First I was mad at Keish for fucking that ho, then I was mad at the ho for fucking me. Then I started thinking about me. See, I was mad at the girl for getting ready to lie to my baby moms, but I was doing the same thing. Lying to this girl I know love me. Lying like it’s a fucking sport. Like it’s a joke. And I know it’s gonna hurt her. Bad enough. Real bad. She gonna find out. I’m gonna tell. And I’m gonna have to deal with it. Worse part is, I think I knew all this when I did it.”

  After the speech, I waited in my seat with my cap still down low waiting for Kent to say good-bye to all of the people who’d rushed to his side with well wishes, hugs, and matching stories. A few people tried to talk me up, but I said little enough to make it clear that I wasn’t looking to make new friends.

  When the room had emptied of everyone but Kent and a woman who seemed hell-bent on stuffing into her purse what was left of the Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies, I stood to head out with Kent.

  We coupled up shoulder to shoulder like we’d been attached that way at some point in the womb and walked out of the building without saying a word.

  My thoughts had taken so many turns during his speech. I was angry and then I was ashamed. Then intrigued. Then embarrassed. Then sad. When it was over, this man who was bigger than any man I knew in my life was seriously holding back tears. He was nervous about something. And I knew it wasn’t the crowd. Kent was a showman. No crowd could make him afraid. It was then, just as he started talking about our parents’ addiction, that I finally decided that maybe he was right about his situation. Maybe his sex addiction was real.

  “Go on and laugh,” Kent said, breaking our silence when we’d made it outside.

  “Laugh about what?” I asked.

  “What I said in there. I know I sounded crazy.”

  “No. Not crazy. You’re not crazy.”

  “Really?”

  “I think what you did in there was brave. Now, what you did with that woman—that might have been crazy,” I said. “But you being open about how it made you feel, that wasn’t crazy.”

  “So, you don’t think I’m just doing this because of what’s happening with Keisha, like you said at the house?” he asked.

  I thought in silence as we stepped down the concrete stairs to the sidewalk. It was getting pretty dark outside, and clumps of people looking to enjoy the warm evening strolled past.

  “I honestly don’t know,” I admitted. “You’ve done some fucked-up shit. Does that make you an addict? It might just make you a fucked-up person.”

  Kent shrugged in agreement as other people from other meetings that had let out rushed past us on the sidewalk.

  “But what I saw in there was that you believe you have a problem, so I have to support you,” I said. “Guess that’s why I came. I didn’t want you to be out here by yourself—not if you didn’t want to be. You wouldn’t let me go through this by myself.”

  Kent gave me one of his bear hugs. As he held my head on his chest, I could tell maybe one or two tears had fallen from his eyes, and I also knew they’d be gone by the time he let me go.

  He whispered, “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. But I think if I figure this shit out, I can understand a bunch of other things. That’s all. I’ve gotta start somewhere. We both gotta.”

  And then against everything I thought I knew about Kent, he let me go in time to see one of his tears. One innocent and strange-looking droplet decorated the outside of his left eye. If it had been black, it would have looked like a gang murderer’s tattoo.

  Before I could figure out why he wanted me to see his tears, I asked, “Do you think I drink too much? Is that why you invited me here?”

  “No. This was about me.”

  “Kenton, please! You weren’t really even supposed to have a guest here tonight. I s
aw the sign on the door saying no guests allowed. And who in their right mind would want me there to hear all that crazy shit? Just stop it. Did you invite me here to see all of this stuff because you secretly think I drink too much and you want me to get on the self-help bandwagon, too?”

  “Do you think you drink too much?” he shot back, sounding rehearsed.

  “Don’t answer my question with a question,” I said. “Because there’s a reason I asked. The other night at the house, you said ‘we’ have our drugs of choice. You didn’t say ‘people.’ You said, ‘we.’ You included me.”

  “Fine, Kim. I’m not around you enough to say. But sometimes, when I am around you, the way you drink and the way you act, it reminds me of Dad. Would you say he has a problem with alcohol? That he’s a drunk?”

  I took a few steps away from Kent. Rubbed my palms together.

  “I’m not like him,” I said. “I just asked if you thought I had a problem.”

  “Yes.” Kent’s response was swift. Planned. We weren’t touching, but I felt him exhale.

  I took the hit to the chin and stood firm. “That’s all you had to say,” I said, and then I popped out a smile. “I’m fine. See? I heard you and I’m fine.”

  “You plan to do anything about it?”

  “Well, I’ll push back. I’m a big girl. I can take your criticism,” I said playfully. “I don’t think you mean any harm, so I’ll back up. And you know, to prove to you that I don’t have an addiction to alcohol, I won’t be defensive, as Jake pointed out in there. I’ll just listen and back up.” I grinned.

  “Shit! You got it. That’s some kind of change from how you came at me at the crib. Right?”