Bitch Is the New Black

by Helena Andrews

  “Don’t say shit to her. All that other bullshit that happened before—forget about it, for now at least. She’s had handcuffs put on her. She is now a person that has been handcuffed. Her whole life is a shambles.” I was talking fast, hoping he was catching some of it, any of it.

  “All right,” he said, sounding annoyed.

  I wish I could say he’d put down his phone.

  Fourteen

  G.H.E.I.

  File this under G.H.E.I.:

  Cardigans in Mister Rogers red, size smedium, hyper nipple awareness, the flexibility to lift one’s five-foot-long legs over one’s head, squealing, combat boots, jeans with stretch, eurocentricity, K-Swiss sneakers, fat laces, pashmina, limes in Corona, Corona, the phrase “I love modern dance,” exclamation points, squealing, white linen, flip-flops, guy gauchos, cashiering at Barneys CO-OP, sexy face, DSLs, overactive hands, overarched eyebrows, BeDazzling, working on one’s personal relationship with Jesus Christ, light eyes, briefs, boat shoes, the facedown jockey position, a plastic pink butt replica hidden underneath a West Elm bed, Amsterdam, acting classes, sarging, Express Men, eye-rolling, and squealing. One hundred words on why we never win, by Gina Albertson.

  “Dude, I can’t with you and these gay dudes,” she said, frustrated by the exponential growth of the questionably queer database I call the G.H.E.I. file so we can speak about it in public without offending the actual gays. “Seriously.”

  “James is so not gay. He’s just…eurocentric. In France he’d be totally normal, masculine even. Uber. Masculine!” We were a day past Inauguration 2009, and to commemorate, I’d decided that James and I should get married. His dad was from Africa and he grew up in Arkansas, and I was from the south side of California. We were a campaign ad waiting to happen, but for his apparently conspicuous attraction to men as evidenced, according to Gina, Inspector Gayness, by his smedium skintights.

  “Those pants aren’t even that bad. He’s got some way sexier.”

  “Sexy or suspect, dude? But it’s whatever, ’cause I’m uberly familiar with your protocol. Uberly.”

  “I hate you.”

  If she had a point, I couldn’t see it past the pulsating mob of American flags in our future. Not to mention the fact that James didn’t have a gay bone in his entire body. Gay jeans, gay cardigans, and maybe even a slight case of gay face, fine. His bones, however, were anything but—trust. But at my twenty-seventh birthday party, he spent no less than an hour chatting up the two fiercest guys there, my gay husbands Antonio and Ricky. Most recently, Ricky had spent a small fortune at the Co-op in Georgetown just to get a closer look at James, who worked the register in between law school classes. I considered him safe until Antonio tapped me on my shoulder.

  “Who is that?” he asked, doing a bad job of hiding a finger pointed in James’s direction behind his upturned palm.

  “Who? James?” I was buzzed.

  “Yeaaaaaah…is he gay?” he asked, whispering in my ear as if the answer was already understood.

  “Um, no, honey. He’s mine.” We slept together for the first time that night because (1) I needed birthday buns, and (2) I needed proof.

  Somehow, Gina still got a “told you so” out of this. “And there you go,” she said the next morning. Antonio’s suspicion proved everything, and my sluttiness, nothing. What mattered was that James fit the profile, a constantly updated but well-edited list of identifying characteristics that made up the G.H.E.I. file, which started years before with a guy we’ll call Winston.

  Tall and good-looking with an island lilt only detectable when he answered the phone after six—“Good night?” That always threw me off. Another thing sticking with me was the time we went to see Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical. Not the musical part; that was my idea. Taye Diggs was sitting in the row directly in front of us. Fine, no big deal, loved you in Malibu’s Most Wanted. But then afterward, as the porno-theater-goers crowded the sidewalk outside, Winston made a big show of patting his pants pockets. He claimed to have left something inside. Taye Diggs was still inside. I don’t know if it was the way he’d whispered, “Hey, isn’t that Taye Diggs?” or the overcompensating “Who gives a shit” way he acted when I answered, “Yes,” but something in my spirit gave me the sneaking suspicion that Winston wanted to go in to take a closer look at Taye Taye. Maybe even sniff some of the air where he had stood or touch the seat where he had sat. I don’t know; it was just a hunch. One that Gina was too thrilled to jump on. “I mean, dude, he did have on those Mexican Nikes.” That’s what she calls Nike Cortez Basics, which, in her jumbled opinion, are a very gay sneaker.

  Aside from the Taye Diggs incident, there was also the issue of Winston’s favorite position, which involved me lying facedown with my legs squeezed together and his on the outside.

  “Like is he simulating a butt? Rear entry, I mean.”

  “Dude, I know what you mean, and, umm, yes.”

  So when a few months later, Winston told me that he was “uncomfortable being intimate” with me, instead of cursing him out, I considered myself lucky. Seeing as how I’d just been saved from a life of boredom being some hot guy’s beard, I thought, Good riddance.

  But not to the end of my gay phase. Next there was Jean Claude, whose real name was Frank. I noticed him courtside at a Nets game while I was shaking my pom-poms during TV timeouts. Yes, I used to be a professional cheerleader, a personal fact that has awarded me more ass than a lost puppy or a bigger bra size. Anyway, Jean Claude/Frank’s lips were like something out of a racist comic book, and what he did with them was superheroic. But I couldn’t get past how they looked attached to his face—always slightly parted, glistening with a “natural” gloss. So after a few weeks of struggling to explain his lips (“Dude, what’s he supposed to do, cut ’em off?”), I took my own advice. Jean Claude/Frank asked me to “go with” him, and I laughed it off. He left offended.

  Taylor’s challenges were also physiological. Bored of going to the movies alone, I was on the lookout when I spotted a giant with a pointy bald head across a rooftop on a damp night out. Ignoring the likelihood of snow blindness, I stared directly into it as if it were a crystal ball, and like magic he turned around, his light browns bulging right back at me. Adrienne was concerned—“Does he have a hyperthyroid issue?”—and I was encouraged. I skied across the crowded rooftop and said, “You think I’m cute.” Taylor called the next day, and casual dating ensued. High off that new-boy smell, I overlooked the fact that he said “put up” instead of “put away” and wore dress shoes with pressed denim. The squealing, though, was too high-pitched to ignore. “Play with my nipples,” he’d moaned, out of breath on our first conjugal visit. Um, okay, I guess, why not?

  My fingers had barely grazed them when it happened. There is no onomatopoeia in existence capable of sufficiently describing the wild banshee mountain lion siren sounds that followed. I immediately snatched my hands back for fear of killing this man with kinkiness. His head shot up from the throes of passion, “Why’d you stop?” Um, okay, I guess, why not? More ungodly sounds. I was busy deejaying his pecs when he decided to high-kick things up a notch—literally lifting his lanky man gams up to his head, waiting for me to…do something. I was so impressed I forgot to throw up.

  “I don’t believe you.” This was beyond even Gina’s realm of comprehension.

  “Swear to Zeus and CC Allah.”

  “So, what’d you do, dude?”

  “Umm, pretended not to notice and went to sleep scarred but satisfied.”

  “You know you have AIDS now, right?”

  “I hate you.”

  Was I ignoring the obvious or just obviously desperate? Or was it that I was looking for an excuse? A sheet of paper I could give my mother that read, “Listen, it’s not her fault you don’t have grandkids, blame it on the gays, signed Dr. What’s-His-Guts.” If dude was gay, well then obviously it wasn’t going to work out. It wasn’t my fault or anything. I mean it’s not like the G.H.E.I. file was scaffolding meant
to shore up all my issues with men or something. What I’m saying is that I was never the problem. Even I could admit to that, whether or not famous people could.

  “Star Jones finally filed for divorce,” Gina said over IM one day.

  “I saw that, tombout she made a mistake or whatnot by bringing the media into her life. Girl, stop. You made a mistake by marrying a gay man.”

  “Right. That’ll do it. But, dude, that’s what happens when you’re forty and need a wedding…bad.”

  “What?” Gina gets paranoid sometimes, and the best thing to do is wait.

  “That’s why after I turn thirty-five, I’m all for having a wedding with no groom.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “To get the fantasy out.”

  “That’s just a ‘happy to be single’ party. We can do that right now. Or not.”

  “No, it has to have all the trimmings of a wedding, because seriously, how many of these weddings are about anything else but the woman anyway?” This from the same woman who once quoted Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale in a Gchat status message—“If you can’t get a man to propose to you, you might as well be dead.”

  “But you need the man next to you,” was my point. “He’s an invaluable accessory.” This was my attempt at injecting romance into our scenario.

  “So hire one,” Gina said. “That’s probably just as likely to work out as your actual boyfriend, especially if your boyfriend is the gays.”

  We were enjoying this. Making our lives sound like an especially scary episode of Law and Order SVU or New York Undercover, if you want to get old-school. The musical montage at the beginning tells you everything you need to know, and the rest of the show is just filler for product placement. See, there’s the master’s in sociology strategically placed near her mid–twenties, and oh, look, there’s the new condo in Leimert Park right in front of her thirties, and over there is the annual girls’ weekend in Negril, Montego Bay, or somewhere in Mexico. Things had been set into motion since the first note of the theme song (elevator music?). All we had to do was figure out how the pretty brunette ended up dead and alone in her apartment for four days with “Bohemian Rhapsody” blasting on repeat, her dog humping her broken heart and no one noticing.

  There was one snag in the plot, though—none of these guys were, in fact, gay. Gay-ish? Maybe. But ready for a ride on the party bus down to Tangy Town—not so much. Once I traumatized Dexter, who Gina had warned me about after seeing him appear online in a fierce face (c) Zoolander. I told him one day I wished he was gay, because then we could be the black Will and Grace. “Then we could be together forever, no problem!” He said there was just one hitch—the doing the nasty with other dudes part. See? Not gay. Still, we carried on our detective work with associates from Carmen San Diego Community College, memorizing their down-low dossiers for midterms that would never come. Marry you? Please. I know the truth, rootytooty69! James–Taylor–Jean-Claude/Frank–Winston could have been any unsuspecting gentleman willing to bet on my personality while I picked apart his sexuality. My real job was to beat him to the punch before I got outed as an asshole.

  Admitting my own perversion—namely egocentrality—was out of the question. Blaming it on the downpour of down-low hysteria was much easier. Especially since I’ve got this other friend—let’s call her Stella—whose “boyfriend” really is gay. For real.

  “She’s so not familiar with his gayness,” I told Gina on my way back from meeting Stella and her new manfy for brunch. Exhibit A, if you will.

  “Why, what happened? What he do?” Whatever she was doing, she stopped to get the juice on the latest fruit.

  “First off, he had on flip-flops. Then he ordered a cup of tea and drank it with a superflexed pinkie.”

  “Was it flexed, dude?”

  “No, dude—superflexed.”

  I wanted to tell Stella that Eric, the black Canadian she claimed to be in love with, was super gay. Like totally, unquestionably gay. Like “I pair sandals I bought from Armani Exchange with smedium polo shirts” gay. More than a vibe, I got a vision from something bigger than us—a burning bush, let’s say—and it was compelling me to tell Stella to stop, drop, and roll before Eric’s flames got too intense. Despite the fact that she was an Easter Sunday Catholic, I knew she wouldn’t believe me. Who would, besides Gi? Better to keep my mouth shut and my eyes open.

  “Really? I didn’t think Eric was all that gay when I met him.” Adrienne was next on the phone tree.

  “I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.” I sighed, annoyed by how totally in the dark she was. “Everybody knows your gaydar is all out of whack.”

  “Shut your face!”

  “Right.” It’d been a touchy subject—Adrienne’s lack of a homosexual sense—since the Calvin situation. Picture freshman year, a handsome sophomore with hazel contacts, and a fresh-faced co-ed that went by the nickname “little big booty girl.” They dated for just a few months, but in Columbia time, that was long enough to forever brand her as “Oh, who used to date Calvin?” And when he switched from mechanical engineering to modern dance, it became “Ha, who used to date Calvin!” Long after we were formally introduced to his “friend” from the Dance Theatre of Harlem, he’d still leave Adrienne messages on Facebook about how she’d gotten better with age, “like a fine wine.” All that coupled with a protracted “pretty boy” phase had chipped Adrienne’s credibility down to negative gazillion when it came to deciding who was down-low or just too slow.

  Anyway. Stella.

  She called me in the middle of the day and in tears because of some books she’d found of Eric’s. He likes settling down with a good murder mystery? Not sooo gay. No, she said. These books were on something called “sarging.” They’d just moved in together, and Stella was going through discarded boxes, not looking for evidence of his sexuality, mind you, just for the kitchen stuff. We immediately consulted Google. Sarge (verb): to go out for the explicit purpose of either: (1) working on skills to attract the opposite sex; or (2) putting those skills to effect. “Well, that could mean a lot of things,” I said, hoping to sound confident while mentally placing this bit of hard evidence in Eric’s G.H.E.I. file (the lad doth overcompensate too much, methinks). Stella thought he might be cheating. “With who?” I asked in a gentle child predator’s voice, not wanting to sound too menacing as I primed her for my next line: “A man?”

  She said something about a girl from work before I got the chance.

  It was probably better that way, since we’d had trust issues in the past. Stella and I met at the 1998–99 CU cheerleading try-outs. I liked her long, curly hair and told her so. “Thanks, yours are cute too,” she said, already fingering the Poetic Justice–style braids I was wearing then. Stella was from the valley, an auxiliary member of the Chicano Caucus, who for reasons that are still unknown almost exclusively dated black guys—correction, idiotic black guys. I was a virgin then, and she was…not. Once we were dating these two guys on the football team, roommates, and were listening to rap music in their dorm room when someone decided to cut the lights off. I left in a huff and heard about how funny it all was the next day from Stella. Right, hilarious.

  Another time she called me at two in the damn morning crying about this midget with an African name who ran track. According to all the black girls on campus, he had a thing for white girls, and Stella was close enough. This was the same guy who told Stella that I’d called her a “white girl” behind her back. What I said was, “Why is it that you only date white girls?” Anyway, he dumped her for a Persian chick who looked just like her, and she was upset about it. “Crying over some retard is not okay,” I was saying while some cabdriver yelled at her from the curb. “I-heehuh-did-heehuh-’nt-heehuh-have-heehuh-any-heehuh-money-heehuh.” Of course, he’d broken up with her in the middle of the night, after doing it, in Harlem, and she’d made a dramatic, if penniless, exit back to Morningside Heights—a $6 ride. I told her to go upstairs to bed. The cabbie would get tired eventu
ally.

  We’d gotten over “white girl”–gate, but I always had the feeling that she had the feeling that I was secretly hating from the sideline—you know, since she was stealing all of our amazing black men. So I knew to keep certain opinions—the gay ones—to myself, even if the black guys Stella dated were fucking idiots. Take Herb, who firstly is named Herb, and who secondly was hideous, and thirdly lived in Jersey, and fourthly cheated on her with some fat girl. Stella had gone to his apartment—in fucking Jersey—unannounced one day and seen “fat white feet” from under the door. She left without knocking. I wasn’t hating on her; I was trying to help.

  Now there’s Eric. I got this e-mail from her about a week ago: “So anyway, we’ve been going along nicely. Yesterday morning, we planned a date night for the evening. I took off to the library to work. Okay, now hold on to your seat, you are not going to believe this: Around 3:30 p.m., I got a call from him, but for some reason I didn’t answer. I didn’t feel like talking to him. So, I check the message immediately, and this is what he says: ‘Hi Stella, it’s Eric. Ummm…so I’m going to Amsterdam. I’ll be back on July 4th around 5 p.m. I’ll leave you my credit card in case you need anything.’ Ten minutes later he called again, this time ON HIS WAY TO THE AIRPORT.”

  Apparently, his “acting class” had scored a “last-minute deal” to take a “sightseeing trip” to the red-light district of the world. Needless to say, Stella wasn’t happy about this—Eric’s thespian pursuits or his unknown proclivities. My tongue was losing muscle function from all the biting.