We're Going to Need More Wine

by Gabrielle Union

  I would tear the photos into pieces, scattering images of myself in different garbage cans to eliminate even the chance of piecing my ugliness together. “No,” I said to myself, “you’re not gonna document this fuckery.”

  BECAUSE I’VE DONE SO MANY BLACK FILM PRODUCTIONS, HAIR HAS NOT always been the focal point of my performance. But on white productions, it is like another actor on set with me. A problem actor. First of all, they never want to hire anyone black in hair and makeup on a white film. Hair and makeup people hire their friends, and they naturally want to believe their friend who says they can do anything. “Oh yeah, I can do black hair,” they say. Then you show up, and you see immediately that they don’t have any of the proper tools, the proper products, and you look crazy. If you ever see a black person on-screen looking nuts? I guarantee they didn’t have a black person in hair and makeup.

  I figured this out right away on one of my very first modeling jobs, when I was about twenty-two. It was for a big teen magazine, and they said, “Come with your hair clean.”

  I actually washed my hair. Now, if you ask any black performer who has been around in Hollywood for more than a minute, “Come in clean” means you come in with your hair already done. That way, they can’t screw you up. You come in pressed, blown out, or flat-ironed. Otherwise, you’re just asking for trouble.

  I didn’t know that. My dumb novice ass showed up for my first big modeling shoot fresh from the shower. This white woman was literally trying to round brush my hair and then use just a curling iron to get the edges straight.

  “You don’t look like how you looked in your modeling photos,” the hairdresser said. She hair-sprayed my hair and then put heat on it. My eyes got wide. She was going to break my hair right off of my head. I said nothing and did anything but look in the mirror. I didn’t have enough confidence to say, “You don’t know what you’re doing. Step away from my hair.”

  She did her damage, then leaned back to take in her efforts. “You look beautiful!” In fact, I looked nuts. Then I had to do the shoot, and proceeded to be documented for life looking like a crazy person. It was the bad school photos all over again—but I couldn’t tear up all those magazines.

  When I started acting, my hairstyle determined how people saw and cast me. I played a teenager for a hundred years, so I kept a flip. That flip said “All-American Nice Girl from the Right Side of the Tracks.” As I was booking more jobs and meeting more and more hair and makeup people who didn’t know what they were doing, I made a choice to grow out my relaxer. Now, the trope in African American hair-story narratives is that this is when I became “woke.” It’s not. I grew out my relaxer because my hair was so badly damaged, it was split to the scalp. If you’re on a production that does not believe in diversity in the hair and makeup trailer, it’s a lot easier to let them style a weave than let them touch your real hair. I was also then getting a lot of attention from the type of black men that every black woman is supposed to covet, and a good number of those particular men had been conditioned to love long hair. These two things went hand in hand—I was being chosen and validated.

  I stopped using my own hair probably after 7th Heaven, in the nineties. I have always had very good weaves, so when I cut my weave for Daddy’s Little Girls and Breakin’ All the Rules, people thought I was just “crazy experimental with my hair.” No, I am just crazy experimental with hair that I can purchase. After a certain point, when my natural hair was long and healthy, I just put it up in a bun. I didn’t politicize my choice. It was another option, that’s it.

  Then, because of work, wigs became so much easier to use and offered me more flexibility. My hair is braided down underneath, and every night I pop the wig off. Sometimes I leave the set rocking my own braids like Cleo from Set It Off. I still wash my hair and rebraid it. Then I can pop that wig back on and go to work. The less time I have to be in hair and makeup, the better.

  Still, I struggle with the questions: Does this wig mean I’m not comfortable in my blackness? If I wear my hair natural, do I somehow become more enlightened? It is interesting to see the qualities ascribed to women who wear their hair in braids or in natural hairstyles, even among black people. We have so internalized the self-hatred and the demands of assimilation that we ourselves don’t know how to feel about what naturally grows out of our head.

  Being in an all-black production is no guarantee that your hair won’t be a source of drama. Recently, I was in one and there was pushback about getting a natural no-heat hairstyle. I thought it would be an interesting option for my character.

  “Well, we want her to be like, really pretty . . .”

  “Honey, my face is where the action is,” I said. “Natural hair is pretty, but my face is the moneymaker.”

  When I did Top Five with Chris Rock, the character needed to have her hair blond. I knew that if there were paparazzi photos from the set posted online, it would start an avalanche of “Gabrielle Wants to Be White” blog posts. So I got in front of it and posted a selfie on Instagram captioned, “New day, new job . . . new do.” I thought the message was clear: This is for a role. Don’t come at me with your @’s. I pressed Share and that was that.

  Well, that didn’t work. “Why did you do this?” was written over and over again. I felt judged. A person I never met wrote, “What happened to my baby?” I felt completely outside myself in a way that was not comfortable at all. There is an idea that if you choose to have blond hair as a black woman, you are morally deficient. I didn’t just have to read it on social media, I could feel it in interactions I had away from the set.

  It would be naïve of me to say that hair is just an accessory. I recognize that black hair has been politicized, and not by us. We have since reclaimed that politicization. We have ascribed certain characteristics to people who rock a natural look versus weaves and wigs. If you choose to have natural hair, or even to promote the idea of natural hair, you are somehow a better black person than someone with a weave or someone who straightens their hair. You have transcended pettiness and escaped the bonds of self-esteem issues. But I have traveled around the world and I know this to be true: there are assholes who wear natural hair, and assholes who wear weaves. Your hair is not going to determine or even influence what kind of person you are.

  GROWING UP, I WAS ALSO OBSESSED WITH MY NOSE—AND NOSE JOBS. I still kind of am. I first became aware of rhinoplasty when people started making fun of Michael Jackson getting his first big one. I was on the playground and a kid asked, “How does Michael Jackson pick his nose?”

  He didn’t wait for me to answer. “From a catalog!” he yelled.

  I paused. “Wait, that’s a thing? I don’t have to live with this nose if I don’t want it?” It wasn’t just Michael. Growing up, it felt like every black star, people who you thought were beyond perfect the way they were, changed their nose. The successful people, who used to have noses like you, suddenly didn’t. It only made me more self-conscious. I would stare into the mirror, thinking about how as soon as these people got the chance to fix their mess of a nose, they did.

  Like them, I wanted a finer, more European nose. I used to call my nose the Berenstain Bear nose, because I thought it looked exactly like the noses on that family of cartoon bears. As a kid I tried the old clothespin trick. I would walk around my house with my nose pinched in a clothespin, hoping it would miraculously reshape my nose. I had a method, attaching it just so and mouth-breathing while I did my homework. It didn’t work.

  There was a whole period of time in high school where I would do this weird thing with my face to create the illusion that my nose was thinner. I’d curl my upper lip under itself and do a creepy smile to pull down my nasal folds. I thought I was a nasal illusionist, but I ended up looking like Jim Carrey’s Fire Marshall Bill on In Living Color.

  The reality is that growing up in Pleasanton and coming up in Hollywood, nobody ever said one word about my nose. I imagined people talking about my nose, but it was really just noise that originated in
my own mind. People have since accused me of having a nose job, however, which made me even more convinced that people thought that I had a nose I should want to fix.

  So here is the truth: I have never had a nose job. I am, in fact, the Fugitive of nose jobs. Like Dr. Richard Kimble, blamed for killing his wife, I too stand accused of a crime I didn’t commit. It’s a constant on social media. Catch me in the right light, or after a contouring makeup session some might deem aggressive, and the comments section lights up. “Nose job.” “Fillers.” “She fucked up her face.” The next day I’ll post another shot with my nose fully present and accounted for and people will literally say, “She let the fillers wear off.” It takes everything I have not to write these people and say, “Do you have any idea how fillers work?”

  Okay, I will admit I have researched. I have even fantasized about putting myself in the able hands of Dr. Raj Kanodia, Beverly Hills sculptor to the stars. A white friend went to Dr. Raj, and afterward I took her chin in my hand, literally holding her face to the light like it was a beautiful work of art. We actresses talk and share secrets, so I know people who feel they owe their careers to his work. But that won’t be me. I can’t even get the slightest tweak, because I will be slammed. I am stuck getting all the flack for a nose job without any of the benefits.

  Maybe one day, when I’m a real grown-up, I will wear my hair natural and I won’t contour my nose. Hell, I’ll just be me. And hopefully people will accept me the way I am.

  four

  THE BALLAD OF NICKIE AND LITTLE SCREW

  Here I am, three decades later, and it is as if I am seeing him for the first time. He just suddenly appeared, striding across the massive fields at Sports Park. It was the summer before ninth grade, and those of us who played sports year-round hung out at the park constantly.

  He wore a yellow polo shirt that matched a stripe in the plaid of his Bermuda shorts. And of course he had his baseball hat on, with sandy blond-brown hair sticking out from underneath. Now, that wouldn’t be a color anyone would want. You would sit in the salon chair, take in its dullness, and say, “Get rid of this.” His teeth weren’t at all straight, with gaps dotting his crooked smile. Everyone else in Pleasanton got braces in elementary school—I was considered late to the game in fifth grade—so his gappy grin made him special. He walked bowlegged, a Marky Mark swagger to every watched step.

  Lucy laid claim to him first. She was “the Mexican” in our group of friends. As he walked, she told us everything she knew about Billy Morrison. Everyone called him Little Screw because his older brother’s nickname was Screw. Screw looked like someone had put a palm on his face and turned it counterclockwise, ever so slightly. The rumor was he’d gotten hold of a bad batch of drugs when he was a kid, and as a teenager his face just grew that way, but that was probably just a stupid rumor. Screw and Little Screw’s parents had a tire store franchise and had just moved from Fremont. They were flush enough to move into the Meadows development, but saying “Fremont” in Pleasanton was an insult, so they had baggage. You heard the imaginary organ play a sudden “dunh dunnnnh” behind that phrase. There were a lot of Mexicans in Fremont, people said, and maybe even Filipinos. And poor white people. Little Screw had gone to a private Christian school before his family moved up and moved out. And over and over this is what I heard about him:

  “You know . . . he had a black girlfriend . . .”

  It was always whispered with an air of “this is how wild this guy is.” I had stopped being black to these folks years ago, so it was said sotto voce for the shock of it, certainly not for my benefit. But it meant I had a chance with Billy. Little Screw might be able to like me.

  As brown people, Lucy and I had heretofore been ineligible for the dating dramas of middle school. We were always “the friend.” The town was made up of Mormons and Catholics, and to this day remains deeply conservative. Lucy, at least briefly, had luck with Jeremy Morley of the Mormon Morleys, which seemed like this unbelievable coup. But mostly we were always “the friend.” At the school dances, I would always have to ask somebody to dance, blurting out “JUSTASFRIENDS” before they thought I had some twisted idea. And certainly no one ever asked me. When we danced as a group and a slow dance came on, the unlucky one would end up with me. During Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” or whatever slow dance, I’d look wistfully over the guy’s shoulder, suspecting he was looking at everyone else and rolling his eyes. Dancing with me was an act of charity, a Make-A-Wish mercy dance.

  I didn’t have a model for what I was feeling until I saw the black eunuchs from Mel Brooks’s History of the World, Part 1. In the movie there is an extended boner joke with Gregory Hines hiding among the sexless, castrated guards allowed to be in the maidens’ chambers. He fails the eunuch test while the real ones pass with flaccid colors. In my heart, I was Gregory Hines with a hard-on, but to everyone else I was the eunuch. You can be the trusted confidante or witty sidekick, there and in the mix. But remember, you don’t appeal to anybody. Not to the whites, but also not to the very few people of color, either. The two African American boys in my grade wanted nothing to do with me. And the other two black girls steered clear of me and each other, to avoid amplifying our blackness. Because anyone brown would say, “Well, if I hang with you, then we’ll become superbrown.” So I was a eunuch. A social eunuch.

  For all of freshman year, Billy was an electric current moving through my group of friends. We would trade Billy sightings. Someone would say they spotted him at lunch or in the hall. “What did he have on?” we would ask in response. “Was he wearing his hat?” He wasn’t in any AP or honors classes, so I would only see him at sporting events. He played baseball—because of course he didn’t play soccer like every other Ken doll in Pleasanton—so we made sure to go to every game. When he played basketball, we admired the muscles of his arms and his tic of pulling his shirt away from his chest after he scored. He never looked around, never held up his arms in victory if he sank a basket. He just continued on as if he’d wandered into a pickup game that he might leave at any time.

  When I would run into Billy, it was usually at the Sports Park between games. I would have my bag of softball equipment and he would be lugging his baseball equipment.

  “Did you win?” he’d ask.

  “Yeah,” I’d say. “You?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cool,” I’d say.

  “Yeah, cool.”

  Walking away, I would feel high just from that brief encounter.

  Billy hung out with all the athletes, but he was close friends with Mike, whose dad was the basketball coach. Mike’s whole family was made up of great athletes—the sports dynasty of Pleasanton. To run afoul of any of them was social death. Billy’s friendship with Mike ended abruptly one night at basketball practice, when Billy got into it with Mike’s dad and told him, “Suck my balls.”

  And that was that.

  But Billy seemed exempt from the social hierarchy. The incident just added to the legend of Little Screw. Billy was two years older than us and already driving. His car was the only freshman’s car in the parking lot. He had a GMC truck. It was black with gold trim, with BILLY emblazoned on the back in tan paint. I wanted it to read BILLY AND NICKIE so badly. He was such a badass in that ride. His parents were always away, either taking an RV trip or busy with their store in Fremont, so he and his brother had more freedom than most kids. They threw huge parties, and my friends and I always went. Our parents all worked long hours, so they never really had a line on where we were or what we were doing. I routinely used the “I’m staying at so-and-so’s house” line when I was really out partying. There was only one parent who cared where we really were: Alisa’s mom, Trudy. You never name-dropped Alisa in any of these schemes because Trudy would go looking for her and ruin everything.

  It was Lucy who lost her virginity to Billy first. I was so jealous, but I masked it. “Tell me everything,” I said, as if I was happy for her. I wanted to be the one so much that I didn’t eve
n hear her describing what had gone down. I was too busy thinking, He had a black girlfriend, Lucy is Mexican . . . I have a shot. The door is clearly open.

  Little Screw and Lucy didn’t go out or even have sex again. He just moved on to Alice, another Mexican girl. Billy claimed her. He called Alice “my girlfriend.” I had to figure out what secret pull she had. She lived near me in Val Vista, considered next-to-last in the Pleasanton development caste system. Alice was on the traveling soccer team, and she was big on wearing her warm-up pants to school, along with slides or Birkenstocks with socks. She always had a scrunchie to match her socks, usually neon pink. She would wear part of her hair up, the rest falling in curls.

  A rumor went around that she was a freak in bed. “You know, she rides guys,” someone told me, “and then leans back and plays with their balls.” If you’ve never had sex, that sounds like some acrobatic Cirque du Soleil–level shit.

  Everyone was having sex by this point except me. Freshman year ended and I went to Omaha, where I at least had a chance with boys. The real test that summer was when I went to a co-ed basketball camp. The black guys there had a thing for me, though I was too focused on basketball to do anything. “You’re like a white girl without the hassle,” one guy told me. He meant it as a compliment, and on some level, I probably took it as one. Nonetheless, they saw me. I was a viable option.

  Being the eunuch in Pleasanton, I was still in the middle of the long, long process of being Friend to Billy. I wish I could say it was strategic. The rare times he would go to some kid’s bonfire, I would slide on over to him as casually as I could. Southern rock was massive then, so there was always a lot of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Allman Brothers to be heard. At every party, Steve Miller’s “The Joker” was played at least twice. You’d find young Nickie, standing next to a fire, talking to a white boy in a Skynyrd T-shirt emblazoned with the Confederate flag. These young bucks, scions of upper-middle-class families, wishing they were back in Dixie. Away, away. And then there was Billy, looking as out of place as me. He was more into driving around playing Sir Mix-a-Lot. I’d hang on to every word he said. He would complain about Alice, and I would chime in, coaching from the sidelines as only a friend could do.