We're Going to Need More Wine

by Gabrielle Union

  I still wonder who could take up his mantle, and if it’s even possible. Who could be cool enough to bring all these different, interesting people together in the name of art and communion?

  I also have a selfish thought. In all the times I spent with Prince, I wish I’d just once had the balls to ask him, “What is it you see in me? That maybe I am not seeing in myself?”

  twenty

  A TALE OF TWO MARTINEZES

  “Okay, pass your homework to the front.”

  I’m not going to say a wave of panic washed over me, but let’s say it was a splash. I was five minutes into algebra class, the second day of my freshman year of high school. As the guy behind me tapped my shoulder with his paper, I raised my hand.

  “I didn’t know there was homework,” I said, reaching back without looking. I had missed class the day before because there was a mix-up with my schedule. Besides, who gives homework the first day?

  “Then you should have asked a friend, Nickie,” Mr. Fuller said. I’d heard Fuller was a hard-ass, a Vietnam vet prone to outbursts.

  “I didn’t know who was in the class,” I said.

  “You don’t have any friends?” he said. “Well, we need to fix that.”

  Fuller went to his desk and scrawled something on a sheet of paper before taping it to the wall. The sheet had FONU in huge letters.

  “Who wants to join the Friends of Nickie Union club?” he said. “Now she’ll know who to call the next time she blows off class.”

  For a long, long minute there was just a stunned tittering, and no one got up. Finally, the guy behind me walked over to the sheet and wrote his name. Ray Martinez. When he sat down, I turned to him.

  He leaned in to whisper.

  “Do you like Salt-N-Pepa? Have you heard ‘Push It’?”

  Cue the music. Ray Martinez was a sophomore who had just transferred with his little sister Kristen from somewhere in New Jersey. She was a year younger than me, and everyone called her Sookie. They were Puerto Rican, which people not so lovingly referred to as “Mexican.”

  Pretty soon after the FONU incident, Fuller took an extended sabbatical. The big rumor was that he’d had a Vietnam flashback and thought a kid was Vietcong. In any case, we had a slew of substitutes for the rest of the term. None of them were real algebra teachers, so the subs basically just gave everyone a passing grade no matter what. We had it made for the rest of the year.

  Ray was on my track team, and he could already drive any car he could get his hands on. We’d hang out all the time, bonding over our love of dance music. He had a yellow Sony Walkman with him at all times, and we would listen to the TDK and Maxell tapes his cousins made for him off the radio in New York City. We didn’t have BET, and MTV barely played black music by people whose last name wasn’t Jackson, so these tapes were golden. The music of KISS-FM and WBLS, freestyle, house, and hip-hop, exuded so much emotion, and we were there for all of it. We started cutting class together, making a pilgrimage to Rasputin’s, a record shop in Berkeley, to find dance singles. We’d return in time for track practice, having car-danced the whole way back.

  Ray and Sookie’s stepdad, Jim, had an old-fashioned Studebaker, and Ray figured out how to jump-start it without the key. Ray and Sookie would roll over in the Studebaker, playing his cousins’ tapes, and we’d joyride around, transported to New York by the master-mixes of black and Latino DJs. One time we decided to write a rap song of our own. I say song, but it was just a bunch of dirty sexual lines with cuss words written on notebook paper. Ray put it in his pocket and Jim found it in the laundry. Jim declared me a bad influence and forbade me from ever seeing Ray and Sookie again. That lasted two hours.

  Ray started hanging out with all my other girlfriends right away. In his Z. Cavaricci pants, Ray could blend in with the boys, but he took dance class. That was a tell for a lot of the adults around us, who could detect in him what we kids were oblivious to. When it came to Ray, all of our parents were . . . well, there is no nice way to say “homophobic.” Not my mom, but certainly my dad. He and all the dads had nicknames for Ray. Sweet Ray, Sugar Ray, and one even referred to him as Ray-Gay. It’s not surprising. These were the dads who drove us kids into San Francisco to go to Pier 39, saying, “You’re listening to K-F-A-G San Francisco, rocking you from behind.”

  When everyone you meet says, “fag,” it becomes part of your own language. I would use that word to describe a thousand and one things. Saying “You’re a fag” was akin to saying “You’re a dick.” Like “nigger,” it was just a negative word, used widely, and I absolutely used it widely. Even growing up with my very nonhomophobic, openhearted mom, the pull of assimilation overshot my common sense.

  One Christmas Eve, my sisters and I were listening to the cast recording of Dreamgirls and acting out all the parts. The doorbell rang, and it was Ray and Sookie. She was crying, and the side of Ray’s face was swollen. He could barely open his eye. Their stepdad Jim’s family was in town, and an extended family member had punched Ray in the face. My mom tended to Ray with ice in the kitchen, and Sookie just told me that the person had called Ray a bad name. Sookie was a year younger than me, but in that moment we formed a small bond that would flourish. I decided Sookie and I were Ray’s protectors, even if I didn’t know what I was protecting him from.

  Ray and my mom returned to the living room and he just happened to know every word to Deena Jones’s songs. Despite all the obvious signs, I still assumed Ray was straight, because that’s what I thought he was supposed to be as a teenage boy in Pleasanton. He would also go to great lengths to pretend to have crushes on girls, and he even briefly had a girlfriend. There was also a beautiful girl in our class who was desperate to sleep with Ray—and my crew and I pressured him to fuck her. We just wanted him to get some action. We had this same conversation, over and over:

  Me: You better fuck that girl.

  Ray: I’m not ready.

  Chorus: What the hell?!

  Looking back, this is the worst-case scenario of peer pressure for a young gay man, and we just kept right on. At seventeen, we realized you only had to be eighteen to see the live sex shows in the Mission District in San Francisco. We were good bluffers, so we’d head into San Francisco and drag Ray with us, basically forcing him into these clubs. “This is how to be straight. Look, that guy likes it! You will, too.”

  WHEN I WAS A JUNIOR, RAY’S SISTER SOOKIE BECAME MY CUTTING BUDDY. We’d ditch school and go into Oakland, because we had both developed a deep and abiding love of black boys. Every weekend she and I would go to After Dark, an all-ages club twenty miles away in Walnut Creek. After Dark was like Disneyland for brown girls. Every time we went, we found something that never existed in Pleasanton—a whole room of boys who could like us.

  We would be so pumped when it came time to go out, and put so much into coordinating our outfits. Our go-to look was slightly cropped long-sleeve sweaters with jean shorts and high-tech boots. My hair I modeled after Janet Jackson in the “Black Cat” video.

  On the drive over to After Dark, we would always listen to a tape of L’Trimm singing “Cars That Go Boom” to psyche ourselves up. L’Trimm was a hip-hop duo of girls our age. They’d met in high school, just like us. After Dark was in an industrial park, and I remember the walk up to the door was everything. My heart would be thumping, and I would want so much to be a bad bitch and have every head turn when I went in.

  The club felt physically big to me then, but it was just a medium-sized, one-story box. They didn’t serve alcohol, but older guys would come with booze in their cars. The guys were in groups, separated by city and car. There were these Suzuki Samurai guys, each with a small towel draped across the shoulder, which I never understood. Then there were the 5.0 Mustang guys and the guys with the gold Dayton rims. Even their hubcaps had a message. And separately, there were the ones who always wore polka dots and had Gumby haircuts.

  We collected boys’ numbers, talking to them on the phone and then calling each other to deliver i
nstant replays. My relationship with Sookie developed separately from my friendship with Ray. I had two best friends. Ray and I shared a hunger for the culture of music that I only heard when I would go back to Omaha. He represented that slice of heaven. He had bigger aspirations than living in a nice house in Pleasanton and maybe achieving membership in a country club. He wanted to travel the world.

  With Sookie, I had a kindred spirit and a partner in crime—someone interested in the same type of guys as me. I never had to explain what I felt to her, she just got it. And like Ray, we shared a love of being anywhere but Pleasanton. Going to clubs with her, we met more and more people, and my world expanded beyond high school.

  WHEN RAY GRADUATED, HE WORKED AT A MARIE CALLENDER’S RESTAURANT the summer before college. My girlfriends and I would go in for discounted meals and talk about where we’d go after. Ray was always talking about going to San Francisco, to this one place where he really loved the food. He said he’d get an omelet.

  It just became a joke. “Oh, Ray’s going to San Francisco for eggs.” It never occurred to us—or it never occurred to me—that he was going to be with his community.

  That was also the summer of “Ray’s Fake ID.” Ray and Sook had an older brother, Sam, who looked exactly like him, so he’d borrow his license. Anyone throwing a party knew to call Ray to get booze. It was always all love at the beginning of the party, but once people started drinking, the fag jokes would start.

  “Sweet Ray, Ray-Gay . . .”

  One time I was sitting on the curb at a party, wearing overalls and my high-tech boots. I was finishing off a forty of Mickey’s big mouth, and some kids started in calling Ray a faggot. He didn’t say a word, letting it pass. I began to see red.

  I broke my forty on the curb and turned it toward the whole crowd.

  “He’s not a fucking faggot!” I screamed. “He is not a fucking faggot!”

  I was threatening an entire party because I didn’t want Ray to be other. I would have cut somebody. My friends grabbed me and drove away with me still screaming.

  I wish I could say that I was protecting Ray. I was protecting me. I already felt like an outsider, and I had run a shell game on all these people to fit in. I could not allow people to point out another way in which someone close to me was “other.” In trying to control the situation, I was unconsciously trying to control Ray.

  I WENT TO THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA FOR MY FRESHMAN YEAR OF COLLEGE. While I was home for Christmas break we all had a huge party at a girlfriend’s house. We trashed the place, so when we woke up the next morning we set about cleaning up. I was in the living room doing as good a job with a broom as my hangover would allow. I noticed that everyone was acting cagey with me.

  “What is going on?” I asked.

  “Ray, just tell her,” someone finally said. “Just tell her.”

  Ray sat me down on the couch.

  “Nickie, I’m gay,” he said.

  “Really?” I started crying. “Who knows?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Everyone?” I said. “Ray, I am your best friend.”

  Everyone knew but me. He was taking them to gay clubs and opening them up to new worlds. And nobody could have open conversations about this around me, least of all Ray. People just got sick of it.

  He took a deep breath, and his tone became angry.

  “Do you know how many times I have listened to you say ‘faggot’ or ‘fag’? Now, think of all the times you’ve complained to me about people saying ‘nigger’ or talking shit about black people. You were so fucking comfortable using the same language, and you were too selfish to know you were hurting me. You were breaking my heart every time.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, bawling now.

  “Yes, you are my best friend,” he said, beginning to cry, too. “And I felt like I couldn’t share it with you because you were so committed to being ignorant so you could fit in with these motherfuckers. Was it worth it, Nickie?”

  I’ve never been more disappointed in myself. I’d humiliated myself with my ignorance, and in the process hurt one of the people closest to me. It was devastating.

  Again and again, I told him I was sorry, and when he hugged me I melted into him on the couch.

  “You know when would have been a good time to tell me you’re gay?” I said. “That time when I took on the whole party, asshole.”

  We both burst out laughing. About the lengths I had gone to to protect my notion of his heterosexuality. I was too busy protecting our spots on a Jenga tower of assimilationist bullshit to be the friend he needed.

  RAY STUDIED DANCE IN COLLEGE AND THEN GOT A JOB DOING ENTERTAINMENT on cruise ships. He was fully out by then, and he would send me letters from random places. Dusseldorf, Ibiza, Nicaragua. He was wild, living out the adolescence he didn’t have in Pleasanton. When he talked about guys, my know-it-all controlling voice would kick in, lecturing him about safe sex. He told me he met a Canadian guy, and pretty soon he wanted to just settle down in one place with him. He moved to Santa Monica.

  Sookie moved to New York to work for Urban Outfitters. My first-ever trip to New York was to visit her in her little walk-up in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I was twenty-two and got lost on the subway. I remember going into a bodega to ask for directions and thinking I was going to be shot.

  Living on different coasts, Sook and I didn’t see much of each other throughout our twenties, but when we did it was as best friends again. As my career took off, she and Ray would joke about knowing Nickie Union, not Gabrielle. They were very aware of the difference between Nickie and Gabrielle. They appreciated Nickie and went out of their way to say that was who they wanted to be friends with. They wanted to make sure I didn’t get lost.

  There was this magic time when Sookie and I literally ran into each other in Vegas. It was early 2006, and it was like seeing a mirage. Neither of us knew the other would be there, and we glommed onto each other for the whole night.

  She had a secret. The year before, in July, she had felt a lump in her breast. She was thirty, had just started a new position at Urban, and was moving into a new apartment. She didn’t want to admit she had a lump. She made a doctor’s appointment for September, but when the doctor canceled it she never rescheduled. Life, as John Lennon said, is what happens when you’re making other plans. It would be six months before she had a diagnosis: advanced metastatic breast cancer.

  She made Ray call me because she couldn’t talk about it. He was sobbing.

  “Stage four?” I said. “Out of how many?”

  “Four.”

  She was afraid to tell me, the same exact way Ray was afraid to tell me he was gay. And I was angry. “How dare you not prioritize yourself?” I wanted to yell at her. “Because now I am going to be without a friend. How dare you be so selfish?” We always internalize the things that happen to other people in terms of how it will affect us. I had literally just run into Sook in Vegas, and then she goes and gets cancer. I wanted to ask her how she had time to go to Vegas and didn’t have time to go get that lump checked out?

  As time marches on and you look back, you realize how easily this can happen. Like, “Oh, I’ve got this weird twinge in my thigh . . . but I gotta go to work.” When you are busy, you don’t think you have the luxury of taking time off to sit in a doctor’s office.

  We all do it. Nobody wants to even go to the emergency room with a cut. “Okay, I can’t get the bleeding to stop. Fuck. I suppose I have to go.” You knew five hours ago you needed stitches, but you were just hoping. In her case, it turned out to be stage IV metastatic cancer.

  I didn’t have that perspective at the time. I needed to be useful and control the situation I secretly felt she had created by not taking care of things earlier. Initially she didn’t have enough insurance to cover everything, so that gave me the way to go into fix-it mode. “If money is the only thing standing between life and death,” I told her, “we’re gonna get the fucking money.”

  I desperately thought I could
save her life. You want to get into Sloan Kettering? Hold on, let me call my publicist and make sure you get in to see the doctors at Sloan Kettering. The Young Survivor Coalition looked like the best organization connecting young women with resources and a path to life, so we were gonna go all in with the YSC. I would become their best celebrity friend. If we had the right amount of money, the right amount of connections, the right amount of networking, then we could beat it. Why else was I famous?

  I threw myself into advocacy, hosting small seminars to promote the importance of prioritizing your own health. I used the analogy that they use when you’re getting on the plane. “You’ve got to put your mask on before you help anybody else,” I said countless times. “If you prioritize yourself, you’re gonna save yourself.”

  In interviews, I would bring it up constantly.

  “Is Will Smith a good kisser?”

  “You bet he is,” I’d say, “and you know you can bet your life on early detection. Did you know that eleven thousand women under forty are diagnosed with breast cancer every year?”

  Susan G. Komen made me a Circle of Promise Ambassador, then a Global Ambassador. In 2008 they sent me to Kumasi, Ghana, to help dedicate the country’s first breast health facility, one of the only ones in West Africa. I wanted to bring to the world the message that breast cancer is treatable and survivable.

  One of the speakers that day was Dr. Lisa Newman, an African American surgical oncologist out of the University of Michigan. She was talking about what people can expect as far as prognosis.

  When I heard her say the word “metastatic,” my ears perked up. That was Sook’s diagnosis. It’s funny, I thought, I never really knew what “metastatic” meant.