You Can't Touch My Hair

by Phoebe Robinson

  That’s why, I think, black parents are so hard on their kids. It’s not just about potential bragging rights. While that’s nice, what truly matters is that we be the “yes” to the “no” their parents heard. Hell, black parents want us to be the “yes” to the “no” they received. It’s why when I was being a slacker in high school and would get Cs like my white brethren, my parents would act the way Brenda Baker did at the end of Boyz n the Hood after her son Ricky was shot in a drive-by. My C and a white classmate’s C are not the same. This truth sucks, but it is a truth that we live. It’s why, on some level, all black parents are J. K. Simmons in Whiplash keeping the tempo, and for Octavia and Phillip, me ending this book on butt stuff is not their tempo. I need to keep their tempo. I need to live up to the Robinson name and live up to all the black people who came before me.

  And if you think this sounds like a lot of pressure, it is. But is it? I mean, is it really? Definitely not to the black people that came before me. They were dodging water hoses, whippings, and N-bombs. All I have to do is keep my parents’ tempo because they did not walk miles to work—literally, they did walk miles to work—to put me through a private prep school that would set me on the path of success in life, just so I, Phoebe Lynn Robinson, their only daughter, could end a book with “Girl, don’t do anal unless it’s on a nice Sealy Posturepedic.” And certainly every single black person who has ever died—Sojourner Truth, Nat King Cole, Solomon Northup, black dudes who died peacefully in their sleep, the lady who died because she injected concrete in her behind to make her donk more donk-alicious, all the black people who died first in horror movies—did not perish so I can be the black girl who ends her book with butt stuff. So here I am, not ending this book on butt stuff and thereby keeping the hope alive that I will end up on a Black History Month stamp. You’re welcome, Mom and Dad.

  So if I’m not going to chuck up the deuces on a booty note, then what are going to be my final words? Something inspirational would be pretty rad, right? Sure, but that’s even more pressure than keeping my parents’ tempo, so I think the best that I can do here is offer up my troof. Not truth, but troof because troof is truer than truth. Troof keeps it all the way real. Truth is “Yes, those pants do make your butt look big.” Troof is “Those pants do not make your butt look big. Your butt is big, and that’s fine because those pants will never feel as good on as cake does in your mouth.” So, Livvie, here is my troof about something that I think may inspire you, but most important, it is not about you-know-what stuff, so at least my parents will be happy about that.

  About four and a half years ago, I had an LA-based manager, who is now my ex-manager. Let’s call her Karen because for some reason people just don’t like folks named Karen. Not me. One of my closest friends in life is a Karen, and I love her. She’s fantastic, but she’ll be the first to admit that she’s encountered quite a few garbage Karens. To the world, Karens are fruitcake-bringing, living-in-a-state-of-indignance, time-wasting people whose go-to phrase is This is unacceptable when a very minor customer service affront goes down. This generalization is probably unfair. So break the mold! Don’t have a Karen bias. Be the change I want to see in the world, girl. Except when it comes to my former comedy manager named “Karen.” Fuck. Her.

  So Karen. Let me give you a little background on this woman. Remember when the movie Garden State came out and people were charmed by it? They were like, “Ooooh, Zach Braff’s button-down shirt matches the wallpaper he’s standing in front of! So artsy. And wow, Natalie Portman is wearing braided pigtails and even though she’s soooooooo pretty, she makes ugly, goofy faces to show how much she’s a free spirit. I mean, she can go from looking like a 10 to looking like a 9.378 because she just don’t give a damn!” Then a shift happened, and everyone was like, “Hol’up! This movie is bullshit. All these people are annoying. I now own all these CDs by the Shins. Da. Fuq.” Karen is basically the human equivalent of that, except if you fast-forwarded past all the adoration and got right to “I now own all these CDs by the Shins. Da. Fuq.” Karen was kind of the worst, and I kind of knew this going into our relationship. Her client who suggested me to her kind of knew this, but, as you’ll see, when you’re in your twenties, you spend so much time fighting against your correct instincts because you want to believe in the good of people. Although, if I’m being completely honest, I continued working with her even after getting wind of her suckage because she was the first manager I ever had, and I assumed that she was too good for me. Being a newbie in comedy is basically like an endless loop of Bambi learning how to walk on the ice pond, but instead of being charming while stumbling, we are desperate, eager, and operating on a combo of fear of being a fraud (read: not funny) and $1 pizza slices (because we’re poor). So the fact that Karen seemed somewhat into me made me believe that she was my sole shot toward having a career. I didn’t want to blow it. I wanted it so bad that I was afraid to lose something I didn’t even have yet.

  After I had been working with Karen for two months, she gave me glimpses of her suckage. She’d make plans, then break them last minute. She’d say she was coming to see my stand-up and then not show. Knowing that I was juggling a day job and stand-up at night, she once made a lunch date with me, and when I called her after twenty-five minutes of waiting, she told me she forgot and asked me if I would wait for her. “Uh, no, heaux. I can’t just be gone for two hours from the job that gives me health benefits because you don’t know how to input appointments in your Google calendar. I’m ordering this Swiss chard to go. Robinson out.” I didn’t say that. I wish I did. I just mumbled something about how it’s “totally OK” that she forgot about her client and normally I’d wait another thirty minutes for her to get to me, but I had to get back to work. I hope she understood. I hope she understood. Olivia, what she did was classic “s/he just ain’t that into you” behavior, but I mislabeled it “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” behavior à la the Portster in Garden State because Karen was quirky in the way that she legit wore her short bob in pigtails with elastic hair ties. Beware the pigtails. They will make you overlook things you shouldn’t.

  A few months later, I started a blog called Blaria (aka Black Daria) after I had written a short op-ed for The New York Times and remembered how much fun I had as a writer. After all, I went to school for writing, but sometimes life happens, and you get taken down other paths than the one you dream of in college. Those five hundred words in the NYT, where I got to be funny and smart, renewed my passion for writing and, more specifically, my passion for expressing my opinions uninterrupted by a pesky thing called people. That fire was enough for me to start Blaria. The happiness and warmth that coursed through my body when I was writing it sustained me, and after a few posts, a feeling settled over me. A little voice whispered in my ear, You going to get a book deal out of this. And from that moment, I was dead certain that it was going to happen. I had no idea how I had that much confidence in it. It was just a gut feeling, an instinct like how when I heard “Uptown Funk” for the first time, I started rocking along to the beat like I’d heard it at a thousand Chuck E. Cheese birthday parties. I knew that if I did the work, something good would come of this blog.

  Twelve blog posts later, I had a phone call with Karen to catch her up on what I’d been doing. I was excited. The blog felt like the perfect marriage of my comedy chops I was honing from doing stand-up and my writing skills from my college days. Writing it made me feel alive. More than alive—I felt I had, at last, found my purpose. This blog, sharing unique social commentary and jokes about race, felt so natural to me that it was surprising. It was like I had found my home, a place where all my thoughts (some of which I didn’t even realize I had within me until I had started typing) could live and be shared with other people who may feel similarly but didn’t have the means to express themselves. This blog was what I had been envisioning my whole life. This blog was and is my American dream. Fuck a house, car, picket fence. Blaria was it. And I wanted to share the good news
with Karen.

  “So I started this blog,” I said excitedly.

  She responded with an “I saw . . .” that dangled in the air like a Cirque du Soleil dancer.

  I was undeterred by her lack of enthusiasm. “I don’t know. I’m just having fun, and I’m not sure how this will be a thing . . . but I just have a feeling that I could get a book deal out of this.”

  Without missing a beat, she responded, “Well, you aren’t famous, so . . . maybe you should be doing something else.” And then she carried on with the business she wanted to talk about, completely unaware that on my side of the phone, I felt like someone just pulled a Zack Morris “Time-out!” and rendered me frozen. I felt dumb. Embarrassed. All my friends seemed excited about my blog. Were they just lying? Is she right? Is it already predestined that no one would be interested in a book written by me? These thoughts flooded my brain as she went on about everything I should be doing instead of the blog. I don’t remember much else from that phone call, but I do remember what happened when we hung up.

  No, I thought to myself. “No,” I said to myself as I stood in the living room of a friend’s house where I was staying. No. What she said was bullshit. She is bullshit. I don’t have to be famous to write a book. My friends weren’t lying to me. And how dare she, as a white person, come take a dump on my hopes and then carry on with her day as if nothing just happened? Now, to be clear, I am quite aware that she might’ve had the same reaction if a nonblack client of hers had a blog. I’ll never know, but what I do know is this dismissiveness felt all too familiar to me as a woman and as a black person. The assumption was that I couldn’t do it, which is something I have had to combat my whole life, and when the deliverer of this message is a white person, it knocks the wind out of me.

  Yes, there are doubters of all shapes and sizes and races and sexual orientations, but given the history of this country, when a white person tells a person of color not to try something and to just stay on the bench, it really, deeply hurts. It feels like they know something you don’t, some Wall Street insider-trading information on your life that reads:

  LOL. YOUR DREAMS ARE BULLSHIT. THEY ARE QUIXOTIC. HOW UTTERLY SILLY OF YOU TO DREAM THE WAY YOU DO. JUST STOP, TAKE YOUR BALL, AND GO HOME.

  At that moment, I knew we were done. I didn’t fire her; our working partnership fizzled out a few weeks later because she didn’t think I was viable enough as a client. But before the breakup? I was still naïve enough to think that it’s OK to work with someone who has the balls to tell you flat-out that they don’t believe in you. I tried to make it work and attempted to overlook the troof that it was killing me on the inside that yet another person—yet another white person in this comedy business—was telling me I wasn’t good enough. Add it to the pile of other things they have told me: that I’m too black, not black enough, not pretty enough, not sassy enough, can’t handle pressure, not sure that I can bring it when it counts, that I’m too . . . me. “You know. Just a lot of . . . you.” I think what you mean, sir, is that I’m a black lady. A blackity black black lady, with no diet version of me available. You have to take my high-calorie black ass or not at all.

  Well, look at me now, Karen! I’m talking shit about you in a letter to my niece that is published in a book that you never thought my nonfamous ass would get the chance to write. Sorry, Olivia. It is crass to gloat, but I just couldn’t resist.

  But this story isn’t really about her. She’s just the vessel that I’m using to make my point, which is this: Olivia, you are a Robinson. You are half-black. You are female. The deck is stacked against you. There will be far more people who don’t believe in you than there will be who do simply because you’re #TeamXX with nonwhite skin. There will be plenty of people who will write you off, ignore you, discount you, attempt to break you, and make it incredibly difficult for you to achieve your goals. Tell you that you can’t. Well, you can, despite the onslaught of negativity that will come your way telling you otherwise. Because there’s one thing those negative forces didn’t count on: Phillip Martin Robinson Jr. and Elizabeth Cristina Robinson raising you to be damn near impervious to negativity. So when you encounter your Karen, which you inevitably will, remember that your mom and dad raised you to keep their tempo, which is my parents’, your grandparents’, tempo, which is the tempo of the black people who came before them. Please, please, please keep their tempo, get yourself on a Black History Month stamp, and make Lisa Bonet proud.

  Love always,

  Auntie Phoebe

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I know! When will this book end? Momentarily, I promise. I just have to give some shout-outs to the people I love and like very strongly. Uh, I don’t know you like that, Pheebs, so I’m not going to get a shout-out, am I? Sorry. You won’t, but I’m about to make it worth your while to stick around while I write nice things to other people. . . . OK. I was going to make it worth your while by including a photo of the cast of Magic Mike XXL, but then I realized I would have to pay to have a photo of all those hot dudes licensed for this book and that’s ignorant.

  I have already spent too much money on this movie—I saw it twice in theaters and rented it off iTunes to watch it at home—so if I spent any more money on MMXXL, I’m pretty sure Suze Orman would magically appear and body-slam me for making poor financial decisions. But, please, dear reader, don’t mistake my cheapness as a sign of my lack of devotion to XXL. I, in all sincerity, believe that the film is the answer to the question Judy Blume posed forty-six years ago: “Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret.” God was like, “Sorry for being late, boo. I gotchu,” and then winked and blessed Marg and everyone else’s eyeballs and libidos with Magic Mike XXL. And yes, God, in this scenario is Stanley Tucci’s character from The Devil Wears Prada dipped in chocolate. Anyway, the picture is not in the book, but thanks to Googs, we can all take a few moments to take in the greatness that is Channing Tatum, Matt Bomer, Joe Manganiello, Adam Rodriguez, and for the older peeps, Kevin Nash. Whoo! Mmm! Aaaaaaaaaaaand, we’re back! Now onward with the thank-yous.

  First, to my amazing parents, Phil and Octavia, thank you for everything. I am so lucky that you’re my mom and dad. You made me fearless, smart, funny, and a good citizen of this planet, and you give the best advice and tough love when I need it the most, and you laugh at all my jokes. You also annoy me because you’re right about most things. Let me be right about some of the things. OK, one thing. Anything, I beg of you. I love you.

  Thanks to PJ (Phil Jr.) and Liz or “Phiz and Lil,” as you were affectionately called in college. You remind me to not be such a workaholic because I’m always on the verge of living that Katherine Heigl in 27 Dresses life. You’re also always very excited for everything I accomplish, no matter how small it is, and your enthusiasm is so touching. You guys are very busy and you make time for me and for yourselves. I want to be you when I grow up.

  Olivia, at the writing of this, you had recently gone potty by yourself for the first time and when my dad/your granddad sent me a picture of your boo-boo in the toilet, I went, “Aww, that is the cutest thing.” You have clearly opened my heart bigger than I ever imagined. Thanks for that.

  Thanks to Robert Guinsler for reading a list about funny NYC comedians last year and then shooting me an e-mail with a query, “Do you want to write a book?” That was the e-mail I had been hoping to get for three years. You are a delight. I love talking about boys and Viola Davis with you. And quite frankly, those are the only two things anyone ever needs to talk about.

  Thank you, thank you, thank you to Kate Napolitano, my lovely and badass editor, who is younger than me, has a better phone voice than me, and is a natural redhead (I get my red hair from Vivica A. Fox’s hair line). We began this journey with me saying to you, “I’ve only blogged. I need your help because I’ve never written a book before. I don’t know what I’m doing.” And you have been there every step of the way, offering guidance, putting up with me missing practical
ly every deadline along the way because I work about seven jobs at all times (LOL/UGH), cheering me up, and pushing me to deliver the book that we both knew I had in me. I wouldn’t want anyone else by my side. Can’t wait to do this again with you.

  Chenoa, my manager. I can be moody. I can be flighty. I can be overwhelmed. I can be on top of the world. I can and do send you e-mails at 2 A.M. because I’m constantly working. And you put up with all of it. Thank you. You are amazing. I tell you that all the time, so at least I’m grateful, but I want to tell you again here.

  Thanks to Jessica. You are my work wife. You are my sister from another mister. Thank you for coming into my life and making this stand-up comic—who can, like all comics, resist having a creative partner because I like to control everything—be open to one of the best relationships of my life. I love you. And I will keep harassing you about that “bloop bloop.”

  Thanks to Joanna Solotaroff, Jen Poyant, Paula Schuzman (aka Felicity, season one), Dean Cappello, Daisy Rosario, Rachel Neel (thanks for sharing my love of Bono, boo!), Laura Walker, Delaney Simmons, and everyone at WNYC for being the home of the 2 Dope Queens and Sooo Many White Guys podcasts. You totally and completely get what Jess and I are doing, and you give us free rein to make the art that we wanna make. The amount of trust and faith you have in two black ladies in comedy, as well as your letting me branch off solo for SMWG, does not go unnoticed. Neither does your allowing me to be wildly inappropriate in business meetings.

  Thanks to John Hodgman for writing a guest letter. I know how busy you are. You are so kind.

  Thanks to Mindy Tucker for the kick-ass cover photo and all the pictures of me you have taken over the years. You are a genius and so beloved by everyone you meet. Keep shining, boo!

  Thanks to my comedy family and real-life friends: Jamie Lee (I mean . . .), Baron Vaughn, Ilana Glazer (I love you so much. #YASQUEEN!), Michelle Buteau, Naomi Ekperigin, Rae Sanni, Maeve Higgins, Josh Ruben, David Lee Nelson, Amy Aniobi, Julie Miller, Anu Valia, Nore Davis, Franchesca Ramsey, Kelly Anneken, Chris Lamberth, Merrill Davis, Rose Surnow (Mess Hall is legit the best place ever), White Guy Talk Show crew (we have kept our text message chain going for two years. We are incredible), Marianne Ways for always throwing me up on a show when I need the stage time, Wyatt Cenac, and Beth McGregor (you live all the way in London, so we don’t get to see each other, but you are so sweet to me, and I cherish the e-mails you send me).