dedication
I dedicate this book to those who have been humiliated and wanted to hide away forever. To those who have been broken and superglue wasn’t enough to help. To those who have felt frozen in fear and shame. To those who have kept smiling as their throats were closing up. To those who thought they had all the answers but realized they were sorely ignorant. I see you. I gotchu. And to my parents, who I never understood until I became an adult who followed her heart . . . I’m sorry and I love you. I get it now.
contents
COVER
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
1: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, MISS PLEASANTON
2: SEX MISEDUCATION
3: BLACK GIRL BLUES
4: THE BALLAD OF NICKIE AND LITTLE SCREW
5: OPEN HOUSE
6: WHO HATES YOU MOST?
7: CODE 261
8: BLACK WOMAN BLUES
9: MISTLETOE GIRL #2 TELLS ALL
10: CRASH-AND-BURN MARRIAGE
11: PRESCRIPTION FOR A BREAKUP
12: ON MEAN WOMEN AND GOOD DOGS
13: WARNING: FAMOUS VAGINAS GET ITCHY, TOO
14: GROWN-ASS-WOMAN BLUES
15: GET OUT OF MY PUSSY
16: AND GABRIELLE UNION AS . . . THE STEPMOTHER
17: MITTENS
18: BIG BANK TAKE LITTLE BANK
19: THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENS
20: A TALE OF TWO MARTINEZES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
INTRODUCTION
This kind of feels like a first date.
I have that same feeling you get five minutes before you meet the other person, when you’re giddy about where things might go. But also wary, because you’ve been on enough bad dates to know exactly how this can go awry. They order the salmon and pronounce the l and you’re like, How the hell has my life come to this?
No pressure, but I have thought of you the whole time I’ve been writing this book. I have never shared these stories outside of a close circle of people, the friends you can tell all your secrets to because you know all of theirs. So I want this to be like one of those nights out with someone you can be real with. We’re sitting across from each other over drinks, and we’re in the middle of this ridiculous, hyperventilating laugh/cry because even I can’t believe I did some of these things, foolishness that made perfect sense at the time but sounds ludicrous now. “Oh no, it gets worse,” I say, taking a sip as everyone in the restaurant looks over at us losing it. These are the stories that require reinforcements. If I’m going to really get into them, we need to flag the waiter and tell him not to be a stranger and to keep pouring, because we’re gonna need more wine tonight.
Thinking of you this past year, I jotted down notes, sent texts to myself, and went back to look at some of the books that meant something to me and left me better for reading them. One of the things I marked to share was a line from James Baldwin.
“The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.”
Baldwin was quoting a spiritual about the strength that comes from survival. I have felt lost plenty, stuck in the dungeons I was thrown into, and some I even locked myself into. I felt the chains of growing up trying to be someone I wasn’t, and then living in Hollywood, a town that rewards pretending. The dungeon represents so many parts of my life and all of our lives. I don’t think I’m special, or that my pain makes me unique. I’ve had a couple of moments—okay, months, maybe years—where the idea of disappearing and never being seen again seemed like an appealing option. I’ve been lucky that someone was always there to give me hope, whether it was a member of my support group at UCLA’s Rape Crisis Center or my dog Bubba crawling under my bed to find me hiding from life after public humiliation. They rescued me from my dungeons, and later I had to do the work to shake off the shackles that I had put on myself. I hemmed myself in with shame, and also with the fear of not being chosen by men. I remember the moment I realized I was free, looking in a mirror and saying, “I choose my motherfucking self.”
We’ll get to that. Right now, I should just tell you at the outset that I have trust issues. I have to wonder if I will pay a consequence for telling my truth. We’re entering a full-on relationship where I have all this hope that my words are going to be interpreted the way I intend. I don’t want you to have to guess about my intentions. I want to make you laugh/cry as we tackle some big stuff. And if you don’t agree with me, I want you to be able to say, “At least that bitch is honest.” Oh, yeah, you should know that I cuss. You never knew that, did you? Having a publicist has served me well. Let’s press on, nothing to see here.
It was terrifying putting myself back into some of the scenes you’ll find here. But it was also the essential work of finding my authentic self. As I retraced the steps and missteps of my life, I began to stop avoiding memories that triggered emotional flashbacks, and I chose to embrace them as revelations. Each revealed a bread crumb that I had dropped along the way, leading me further on my path to understanding who I truly am.
Reading all these stories together, I wondered if I was really brave enough to share all of this. Then I remembered another quote I wrote down. This one comes from Carrie Fisher.
“Stay afraid, but do it anyway.”
So cheers. Here’s to us being afraid and doing it anyway.
one
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, MISS PLEASANTON
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
When I was in the second grade, my parents moved us from Omaha, Nebraska, to Pleasanton, California. My parents had spent a year living in San Francisco just after they got married, and my arts-loving mother had lived for the city’s culture and open spirit. So when my father announced he was getting transferred to go back to the Bay Area, she rejoiced. My mother pushed for Oakland, where we would be around other black families and still close to all that San Francisco had to offer. But my father, obsessed with keeping up with the Joneses, had bigger plans. He had a white work friend who had moved to Pleasanton, a half-hour drive and a world away from Oakland. “If it’s good enough for Dave,” he said, “it’s good enough for us.”
In Omaha, we were part of the largest African American extended family in Nebraska. In Pleasanton, we would be the chocolate chip in the cookie. My mother didn’t want that for her daughters—me, my older sister, Kelly, and my younger sister, Tracy. Well, she lost that battle. Everything she feared came to pass.
The residents of Pleasanton divided themselves into housing developments. And where you lived said everything about who you were. We bought a house in Val Vista, which was working middle class with upper-middle-class goals. Val Vista was considered just below Valley Trails in the Pleasanton development caste system. But neither of those neighborhoods was nearly as good as the Meadows, across town, where they had green belts that connected all the cul-de-sacs and the streets. When you told someone where you lived, it was shorthand for the truth of your family’s economic situation: good, average, or untouchable.
Since birth my family has called me Nickie, from my middle name, Monique. It took a little less than a year in Pleasanton for someone to call me nigger. It was during third-grade
recess at Fairlands Elementary, and it came from Lucas. He was one of the Latino kids bused in from Commodorsky, the low-income housing development. He rode with Carmen, Lori, and Gabriel, or, as everyone called them, the Commodorsky kids. One day, Lucas decided my name made for great racist alliteration.
“Nickie’s a nigger!” he said, pointing at me with a huge smile of revelation, like he’d found me in a game of hide and seek. For one day to my face, and who knows how many days behind my back, “Nigger Nickie” caught on like wildfire. The kids chanted it, trying on the word as a threat (“Nigger!”) and a question (“Nigger?”), and then as singsong: “Nig-ger Nic-kie. Nig-ger Nic-kie.”
I couldn’t afford to stand out like that ever again. So I became obsessed with observing the Commodorsky kids, clocking all the shit they did that everyone—meaning the white ones—made fun of. I wanted to be the exact opposite. And I was clocking the white kids, too, of course. I looked at them and thought, That’s where I’m going to. And when I saw the Commodorsky kids, all I could think was, That’s where I’m running from.
With every single move I made and every word I spoke, I stayed hyperalert to what I called the Black Pitfalls. What were the things that would make me appear blacker? I only ate chicken with a knife and fork, and never in front of white people. Certainly not KFC. And no fruit on a rind. You were not gonna see a toothy-grin-and-watermelon scene from me.
I had been warned, of course. My parents gave me the pep talk when I started school, the same speech all black parents give their kids: You’re gonna have to be bigger, badder, better, just to be considered equal. You’re gonna have to do twice as much work and you’re not going to get any credit for your accomplishments or for overcoming adversity. Most black people grow accustomed to the fact that we have to excel just to be seen as existing, and this is a lesson passed down from generation to generation. You can either be Super Negro or the forgotten Negro.
It’s actually very accurate advice. But the problem with putting it on a kid is that if you’re not as good as—or eight times as good as—you feel like you are less than. Not just in academics or in sports: every kid cares about something and wants to receive love and praise for that particular quality or ability. You are always chasing, always worrying about being exposed as the dumb black kid. The foolish nigger. On one hand, it puts your shoulder to the wheel, so you’re always pushing, working, striving. But one misstep and it’s over. An A minus can feel like Hiroshima. It’s catastrophic because you feel exposed. It’s still an A, but what it feels like is “Dumb nigger.” “You’re a joke.” “Of course you missed it, nigger.” I had that fear as a kid, with every worksheet. Do you remember the timed tests with multiplication? I became psychotic about those. I would see “4 x 16 = _____” and hear my father’s voice: “Bigger, badder, better.” By the way, it’s taking everything I have not to tell you I know the answer is 64. Which leads me to 64 being a perfect square, which leads me down the rabbit hole of listing other perfect squares . . . and who cares?
I did. This insane need to stay beyond reproach by being perfect also applied to getting a bathroom pass. Other kids would ask the teacher for one and she would say, “You’ve got five minutes,” tapping her watch. She never gave me a time because I was the fastest piss in the West. I always timed myself—literally counting each second—because I wanted to come back with so much time left on the five-minute mental clock that she didn’t even need to give me a deadline.
The following year, Tarsha Liburd showed up on the bus from Commodorsky. Her family had moved there from Oakland. She was black—described by everyone as “so black”—and she had these corduroys she wore all the time. Tarsha had a big, grown-up ass as a third grader, and the top of her butt would always be bursting out of those cords.
I didn’t tell my mother there was another black girl at school, but she heard about it. “You better be nice to her,” she said, “because they’re all going to be mean to her.”
Because Tarsha had become a walking, lumbering punch line of people pointing at her crack, I convinced myself that if I just ignored her, I would be doing right by her. I wouldn’t join in on making fun of her—she was simply invisible to me.
At lunchtime, the girls at my table called a meeting. One girl looked right at me. “Are you going to be friends with Tarsha Liburd?”
Tarsha was sitting close by, so I quietly said, “No.” But I made a face showing that the very idea was preposterous. Why would I have anything to do with that girl?
Another girl stared at me and said, loud enough for Tarsha to hear: “If you don’t like Tarsha Liburd, raise your hand.” And everyone put up two hands and looked at me.
I heard my mother’s voice and felt Tarsha’s eyes on me. I raised my hand just to my shoulder, a half-hearted vote against her.
“Well, I don’t know her,” I said. I waved my hand side to side by my shoulder, hoping it would be read as “waffling” to Tarsha and “above it all” to the table.
A day went by. I was in my Gifted and Talented education program, doing calligraphy, thank you very much, when a voice came over the intercom.
“Please send Nickie to the principal’s office.”
I naturally thought I was getting an award. My smug self just paused, elegantly finished my line of calligraphy, and packed my books. I waltzed to the principal’s office, practicing a look of “who, me?” gratitude.
Principal McKinley, a burly Irish man with kind eyes, peered at me, taking my measure. “Nickie, did you raise your hand when asked if you don’t like Tarsha Liburd?”
“No,” I said. “I did this.” I showed my discreet half wave. “Because, I, I, um . . .” I started to cry. Bawl. In my head, I was already four steps ahead, my mom disappointed in me for being mean to the other black girl.
Principal McKinley told me he was putting my name in the Blue Book. Which was, to my third-grade understanding, an unholy text containing the names of bad children. Teachers said it could follow you and you might not get into the college of your choice. The principal then told me that if I behaved for the rest of the year, he would have my name erased from it. But I didn’t believe him. Even years later, when I was applying to colleges, there was a small part of me that wondered, Is my name still in the Blue Book?
I was the only person to get in trouble for this conversation, and it had to have come from Tarsha. I wasn’t mad at her. I was very aware that I had done the wrong thing, but I also knew why I’d done it. It was survival of the fittest—Lord of the Flies in suburbia—and I had to eat.
Tarsha remained invisible to me through elementary school. At the time I told myself she was invisible because she just didn’t have much of a personality. I know now that I was only justifying my refusal to connect with her. I was afraid to take the risk of being black by standing next to her.
FROM SECOND GRADE TO SIXTH GRADE, JODY MANNING AND I WERE NECK and neck when it came to grade point average. Her family lived in the Meadows—one of the richest neighborhoods in Pleasanton—and they just had nice stuff. Their house, in my mind, felt like a museum. It felt rich. When I was little, one of my barometers for wealth was if the family had Welch’s grape juice. I noticed that all the rich kids drank it after school. The Mannings definitely had Welch’s. The Unions had grape drink.
After school and at recess, we started playing Days of Our Lives. Everyone chose a character and we just invented scenarios. Jody Manning was Marlena, Scott Jenkins was Roman Brady, and my friend Katie was Hope. I’d like to tell you that this is where I discovered a love of acting. No. Maybe because I always had to be Abe the policeman. He was the only black guy on Days. Black Lexie didn’t come on for a couple more years. So I was Abe the policeman.
As if it weren’t enough that she got to play Marlena, Jody and her sister also always had coordinating, full Esprit outfits. And it wasn’t from the Esprit outlets where you got like the sweatshirt and paired it with Garanimals trash. They were just perfect, those Mannings, and Jody set a high bar for compet
ition in class. I remember we once did a presentation together in the sixth grade. The job was to come up with an ad campaign for a product, and we were assigned Bumble Bee tuna. I was the talent, thank you. Our catchphrase was just saying “Bumble Bee tuna” emphatically. Everyone was saying it at recess, so we got an A plus.
In case you are not already reaching for the Nerd Alert button, around this time, I started reading three newspapers a day. And that became an obsession, like times tables and square roots. I would figure out exactly down to the minute how long I could be in the shower, how long it would take me to get ready, and still have time to read the newspapers. The first two, the Tri-Valley Herald and the Valley Times, were exactly how they sound. Here’s an actual headline in the Valley Times, which I cut out and laminated for my civics class: MEXICANS ROB THE MALL. Meanwhile, the “Mexicans” were from, like, the next town over, and they probably knocked over a Sunglass Hut.
So those papers didn’t take me that long. But then I would read the Oakland Tribune, which was much more involved. On the rare occasion that I didn’t finish, I would take whatever was left and I would go through it in my first-period class, usually an English class. If I didn’t, I just couldn’t focus. I honestly don’t know what came first—a love of reading the newspapers, or wanting to be Super Negro, the magical special black person who has all the knowledge and is never caught out there looking ignorant. “She is so knowledgeable” is what I lived for. “That black girl is really something.”
My other job was to be popular, which I approached with the same strategy as my studies. Meaning it was everything.
Sleepovers were the thing among the girls, and you had to be there or else you would be “discussed.” I had all the sleepover worries preteens have about pranks and fears that I would smell by morning. But my hair was also a problem. I didn’t want to go through the normal ritual that I did at home, wrapping my hair with a scarf, because it would draw attention to my blackness and therefore my difference. When in Rome, do as the white girls do. So I would put my hair in a ponytail or a bun and try to keep as still as possible all night—as we call it, “sleeping pretty.” But eventually slumber takes over and you become a human being. By the time I woke up in the morning, my hair would be unruly.
We're Going to Need More Wine Page 1
